The painting of George Butler has the interest of all art that is
not manifestly the product of the influences of the moment, but owes
its quality to the personality of the painter. Such is the interest
of Whistler's, Winslow Homer's, the late Homer Martin's, LaFarge's,
Vedder's. It is art that has a direct rather than an illustrative
interest—a real rather than a historical value. It does not contribute
much to the race, the moment, and the _milieu_ theory. And, of course,
it suffers some neglect at the present time, which apparently belongs
to the theoreticians, and when, accordingly, the illustrative and
historical interest of all data that can contribute to the construction
of formulary is felt so universally and so nearly exclusively. But the
play of those forces that are so highly differentiated as to escape
classification—the forces that make up personality—rewards contemplation
in quite a different way. It eludes the pursuit of philosophy, but it
repays the æsthetic attention quite as much, quite as legitimately, as
the study of that impersonal and rather mechanical result of current
habits of mind and points of view, the art of the schools. Butler
was a pupil—long ago—of Couture, and one may still see evidences of
the fact in his portraits now and then. But compare his relation to
Couture with that of Sargent to Carolus Duran, for example, in order
to see how wholly personal his painting is and how little he owes to
any mere source of acquisition, except in certain means of technical
expression, early adopted and perhaps rather lazily adhered to.
Power and distinction such as Sargent's, even when exhibited almost
solely within the range of technical expression, have certainly an
individuality of their own that is most striking and admirable. But it
is an individuality of accomplishment rather than of quality, marked
more by its eminence of excellence than by its native idiosyncrasy.
Of course, any intimate association of the two painters would be more
misleading than illuminating, and in contrasting them in this single
but fundamental respect I only have in mind the radical difference
thus illustrated between a painter who has achieved fame by distancing
competition in following traditional lines and expressing current
tendencies, and a painter who has a controlling personal bent and has
followed that.
Butler has, at all events, always done just what he wanted to do,
and in the strictest sense. His temperament has always dictated his
expression, and in thoroughly imperious fashion. It may be said,
indeed, to have dominated his intelligence to the extent, at least, of
eliminating, as objects of curiosity, interest, or effort, everything
not strictly in accord with itself. But the result has been the
felicity of extreme concentration. If in doing what he wanted to do
his wants have been few, he has, on the other hand, wanted them with
an intensity proportionate to its singleness. Beauty exhibited in the
human face and form has absorbed his artistic attention and activity.
I remember not only no landscapes, but nothing really to be called
a composition among his works. A few Barye-like animal fragments, of
heroic mould—a tiger's head, a dog's head and shoulders, the foreparts
of an extremely leonine lion, some very feline cats—are, I fancy, the
only diversion of his devotion to the single figure and the portrait,
and they are but examples of the instinctive exercise of his remarkable
gift of representation, and show a fine faculty at play rather than
at work. They do not illustrate the "discipline of genius" as some
writer has defined art to be, but are merely "artistic" in the sense
in which artists use the word, _i.e._, born of the impulse to create
or reproduce an "effect" of some kind. In the portrait and the single
figure, however, he has expressed himself with freedom, with zest, and
with completeness.
* * * * *
Portraiture is a branch of art in which artistic aptitudes exhibit
themselves in as individual a way as in any other perhaps, despite
the preponderance usually assigned to the "likeness." And neither
_à priori_ nor historically can it be asserted that the imagination
itself plays in portraiture an inferior part. The material is possibly
less varied than that of landscape or decorative art; but that is
nothing. A painter shows his quality quite as much within a limited as
within a wider range. And the material of portraiture is at least as
highly differentiated as it is limited. The interest of the "Lesson in
Anatomy" resides in many of its various pictorial elements no doubt,
but also and in the supreme degree in what Burger calls "the working of
intellect," as seen in the countenances of the listening circle around
the demonstrator. A painter who exhibits himself in portraying human
intellect, emotions, character, personality, and with these highly
complicated and maturely developed phenomena shows us his point of view
and way of looking at things—which are what art and genius mainly are,
according to Mr. Henry James—has an opportunity certainly of doing so
on a very high plane. And on such a plane Butler is, I think, very much
at home. The quality that all his portraits show in common is displayed
with perfect freedom and the effect only to be attained by the easy
exercise of a native gift.
In the first place they are extremely human. They are in no degree
portraits _à la mode_ and do not exploit the painter's virtuosity.
They show, on the contrary, his respect for, and interest in, his
model. One establishes relations through them with their originals.
They have character in the moral and intellectual, as well as in the
artistic sense. They acquire in this way a typical value. The Century
Club's portrait of General Greene is also a portrait of the American
soldier, as many another, easily mentioned, is that of the American
lady. They are intellectually generalized, that is to say, endowed with
a wider than merely individual interest. In the second place they are
extremely pictorial. The most intractable subject is made agreeable
by being handled with a touch directed by an instinctive preference
for, and delight in, the beautiful. The sitter receives the benefit
of a translation into a heightened and poetized medium without loss
of anything essentially characteristic. In both these respects—their
humanity and their pictorial quality—Butler's portraits are decidedly
exceptional in current art.
Current art is certainly concentrated upon physical character rather
than upon beauty, and current appreciation of it is in harmonious
accord with its realistic effort and aim. One may refine speculation
to the point of asserting that there is no opposition, essentially
considered, between the two; that Rembrandt is as distinguished for
his beauty as Raphael, and that on the other hand there is as much
character in "The School of Athens" as in the "Lesson in Anatomy."
But in matters of this kind terms are approximate only, and the fact
that definition is a difficult matter does not obscure the plain truth
that a marked difference exists between the work of a painter in whose
mind an agreeable conception of an object mirrors itself, and that
of one mainly anxious to be exact. Technic has spread prodigiously
(quite as much perhaps as it has developed) in the present epoch, and
has become rather arrogant in its aggrandizement. Criticism, too, in
becoming largely technical has assisted the tendency, so far as it
exerts an influence on practice. It has grown tired, no doubt, of its
own commonplaces and generalities, its easy habit of estimating aims
rather than accomplishment, its routine insensitiveness to aspect and
perfunctory absorption in significance. But in assuming the painter's
point of view—not a very esoteric one, certainly—it has not been quite
self-respectfully discriminating enough to avoid the purely professional
attitude. And it is perhaps time for the pendulum to swing back again
a little, so that both in estimating and in enjoying the painter's art
we may once more think of its intellectual rather than so wholly of
its mechanical side, which latter we may also be sure, nowadays, will
be quite carefully, and in many cases competently, attended to by the
painters themselves.
In this way, at any rate, having in mind Butler's portraits, we shall
be able, whether or no they have the accent and relief requisite for
a portrait of the striking or "stunning" order—in this way we shall be
able to appreciate what a fine talent it predicates to say of a painter
that he sees the finest side of his subject. This is often understood
as lightly as it is said, and taken to indicate merely a preference
for the agreeable to the more markedly characteristic. And this is no
doubt especially true in the field of portraiture. But certainly, and
especially in portraiture, very little reflection is needed to show
one that the great peril to be avoided, and the most constant menace,
is caricature of one sort or another. It may be the caricature that
comes from imperfectly seizing and imperfectly rendering the traits
of the subject, the caricature that inadequacy is. Or it may be that
which comes from undue and disproportionate accentuation of what is
perceived too exclusively. Success depends upon avoiding both by forming
a correspondent conception of the subject—a conception that is clear and
consistent and positive—and painting that. The painter then copies his
conception, not his model, and the representative value of his portrait
will have precisely the interest of his conception—in so far, of course,
as he is able to convey it. In a sense, to be sure, it may be said that
it is impossible to paint a portrait without proceeding in this way,
without first forming a conception of the sitter plastically, if not
morally; that the result is necessarily the product of some preliminary
conception. But that is metaphysical fine-spinning. Empirically we all
know that unconscious caricature—which is the caricature here referred
to—is due to either a defective or a distorted conception, in other
words, to a mental image either so faint or so little correspondent to
the original as to be practically no conception at all. Of a very large
number of portraits, assuredly, it may be asserted that they embody
no more developed and complete an antecedent image in the mind of the
painter than a mere mechanical impression, barely distinct enough to
direct the muscular movements requisite to register it upon canvas.
Butler's conception is, as I have intimated, always very sympathetically
formed. It seems to indicate that he likes the sitter. His own
cordiality enters into it. It is a result of harmonious relations
between his imagination and the sitter's nature—the qualities, as well
as the appearance, of the subject. Landscape painting, says Eugène
Véron, is "the painting of one's emotions in the presence of nature."
Butler's portraits, similarly, seem the painting of his idea of the
subject in its suggestive, stimulating, rectifying presence. His
conception implies a certain slowness of formation—the time to become
acquainted, at least. That of such a painter as Sargent is so rapid
as to seem quite impersonal, in comparison. It is apparently formed so
quickly as to be really an impression rather than a conception at all.
Though occasionally plainly transitory, it is often wonderfully vivid
and searching, but rarely does it attest that assimilation which is a
necessary preliminary of synthesis of such complexity as the conception
of an active personality is entitled to. Its qualities are fundamentally
"artistic." Butler's is at the same time more mature and less objective.
Sargent's _grandes dames_, for example, are always fine ladies, but
Butler's portraits of women have, all of them, whatever the sitter's
type, the patrician look. Yet they are noble rather than elegant, and
simple in their refinement. Their graciousness is native, and there is
something ample in the ease with which they carry themselves. Add to
this a poetic strain that characterizes very intimately their unaffected
naturalness and gives them a universal as well as a specific interest,
making of them abiding works of art.
* * * * *
The Italian type, which almost all his single figures illustrate, has
had a particular charm for Butler—as the accompanying illustrations
attest. And to its interpretation he has brought a remarkable and
an instinctive sympathy. Stendhal would have liked his Italian
figures—Stendhal, who better than any other writer, perhaps, has
understood the Italian national character in its nobility as well as
its finesse. Its finesse has not interested Butler, as indeed it could
hardly interest a painter of his frank nature, and it is not, of course,
a particularly paintable quality, though it must be confessed that
Velasquez made something of it in his Innocent X. of the Doria Gallery.
But its nobility, its largeness, its elemental and untormented quality,
its freedom from pettiness and perplexities, its naturalness, its frank
following of the dictates of will and passion, unsophisticated by the
restraints and complications of vanity or self-consciousness in any of
its myriad forms—can be read in Butler's Capri peasants as in a book.
Health and vigor, an animation that is not feverish or hardly alert,
the charm of pensiveness without sadness, of repose without revery, of
work without strain, and existence without effort, they show in every
expression of their large lines and simple, graceful attitudes. Now and
then from the face shines a beautiful soul, its innocence untouched by
experience and acquiring an almost pathetic quality from its unworldly,
yet by no means spiritual serenity. They win your admiration and
your heart. They have infinite capacities of feeling, of loving, of
wilfulness, of self-sacrifice. They have been refined but not corrupted
by their not too close or too reciprocal contact with civilization.
They are all of a piece, and one comprehends the tragedy that excess
would mean for them. In their way they are the acme of poetry and
beauty expressed in character that has a wonderful correspondence to
the envelope of its plastic manifestation. "I would rather," exclaimed
once a friend of mine—a lady, naturally—"I would rather know one Jew
than forty Gentiles, they have so much more _character_." Character in
this sense the Italians possess in effusion, so to speak, and Butler's
Capriotes and Venetians exhibit it with a native dignity and charm that
one has only to think of such contrasts as Bastien-Lepage's, or even
Millet's, peasants (far more interesting in many other respects, of
course) to appreciate.
Some of them are beautifully painted, as all are sympathetically
understood. The elder of the two boys here reproduced is an especially
lovely bit of handling, of quality, of clarity in the gently gradated
tones. A Capri woman seated in a straight-backed chair upon a homespun
carpet making lace, is very nearly a marvel in the same way—a figure
that painters themselves are particularly pleased with. The blue dress,
the white bodice, the dark face and hands, the blue-black hair, the
greenish background, and the gray and red carpet compose largely in
masses of importance, and are painted with a liquid and _luisant_ effect
that is nevertheless as far as possible from a blended and effeminate
one. The touch is firmer, perhaps, more positive and vigorous,
certainly, in the Venetian water-carrier here engraved, though it is
equally distant from anything brutal, and the brush is restrained by
refinement within the lines of true distinction, with the result that
the reader may discern even in black and white. Is she not a majestic
creature—for pictorial purposes, at all events? Pictorially, at least,
she is superb. This is what a painter of genuine temperament and an
instinct for character can make out of a bare-headed girl lugging a
jar of water. One perceives at once the vitality and completeness of
Butler's purely plastic impressions.
So vital and complete indeed are his plastic impressions that they
explain, I think, his fondness for the single figure, his carelessness
for composition. It may be argued from this fondness that his talent
is an impressionable rather than an imaginative one; that his plastic
exceeds his architectonic faculty. But to argue this is to miss an
important side of his art. He does not, it is true, see things in their
relations so much as in their essence. The genius for image-making, for
originating conceptions of complex and interdependent interest, for
composition, in a word, he certainly does not possess in any marked
degree, or we should have had from him at least some experimentation
in this sort. But it is remarkable how little, in looking at one of his
noble figures, one feels this as a limitation, how close an equivalent
he gives us for it. He has comprehended his model so thoroughly, and
realized it so perfectly; he has conveyed the character itself so
essentially, so subtly, and so intimately, merely in presenting its
plastic phenomena, that he has amply _suggested_ its characteristic
environment and everything related to it that, in an elaborate
composition of which it should be the centre, might contribute to its
completer expression and relief. It does not look in the least like
the study for a figure in some picture or other. It is a picture in
itself. We do not get the pleasure that the pictorial presentation of
this contributory environment would give us; we forego the sensuous
delight that composition is capable of affording; but the striking thing
about Butler's single figures is that they themselves so impress the
imagination as to make us forget that they are unaided by accessories.
One may add, by the way, the not impertinent corollary that it
would be difficult to find among contemporary painters one who could
satisfactorily supply this omission on the same plane of conception and
workmanship.
[Illustration: Portrait.]
* * * * *
Butler's color is one of the prominent qualities of his painting. It is
extremely full and rich, at the same time that it is quiet and grave.
Color as color interests him, plainly, and he does not leave it to
take care of itself, as is a frequent practice at the present time,
when painters seem largely to have given over the illustration of its
decorative possibilities and to be devoting themselves either to the
value or the vibration, instead of the quality, of their color. On the
one hand, the prevailing middle tint that is _obviously_ middle tint,
and, on the other, the high key of luminosity that is obviously mere
pitch instead of melody, make such canvases as Butler's seem, perhaps,
a trifle old-fashioned. How long is it since Titian was mentioned in a
modern studio except as a subject of interest to the antiquarian? The
practitioner who, twenty-five years ago, was endeavoring to divine his
"secret," perhaps abandoning the quest as hopeless, has exchanged his
atmosphere for one more rarefied, where, if the prospect is considerably
more arid, there is correspondingly less demand on the vital forces.
The lack in Butler's work of the current display of machinery—which
is what an exclusive devotion to values or vibration may not unfairly
be called—the lack of this inversion of the normal relations between
means and ends, is not felt particularly, I fancy, by anyone but
the professional practitioner. His low key and his unconcern for
illustrating the potentialities of pure technic _à propos de bottes_,
enable him to exhibit, very charmingly, his feeling for color in and
for itself.
[Illustration: Roman Boy.]
This gives his work an agreeable element of contrast to that most
in vogue. One of his canvases is a welcome sight in a contemporary
exhibition for this reason alone. A disproportionate devotion to color
means the loss of many admirable sources of pleasure in art, beyond
any doubt. And in the main these are especially admirable, because they
are intellectual sources rather than sensuous. But the content of art
is beauty, and beauty implies sensuousness, and in painting there is
no such source of sensuous impression as color. A feeling for it is
shared alike by the savage and the civilized man, and no doubt there is
something barbarous in the delight which certain of its manifestations
inspire. But this fact in itself shows the elemental and universal
quality of this feeling and exhibits it as a mark of temperament. An
acute or profound sense of its intimate appeal has characterized all
epochs of expansion in the history of art, and its neglect has been
the invariable accompaniment of that petrifaction by system which has
assailed art at its every apogee. It is so sensitive as well as so
elemental that it has suffered neglect as well in the development as in
the decay of art; in the admirable evolution of Florentine line and mass
following the lovely harmonies of Giottesque color, as well as in the
sterilities succeeding the high Renaissance. It is the sign-manual of
the spirit of invention, of imagination, of novelty, of free exercise of
the faculties; and it individualizes the painter more sharply, perhaps,
than any other characteristic. Color is his short-cut to sentiment, his
most eloquent expression, his readiest means of communicating emotion.
More than his style one may say that his color is the man.
[Illustration: Match Seller.
Painted by George Butler.]
[Illustration: Portrait.]
Butler's feeling for color is not feeling for its subtleties. It is a
broad and tranquil delight in its simpler effects. He is not fond of
hues and tints, of gradations and oppositions, of jewel-like harmonies
and delicate flushes, of iridescence and sheen and sparkle. His color
is the suave and sweet vibration of tone, now rich and deep, now clear
and soft, but vibrating mainly near the primaries. Its distinction is
that it is always _color_; that one of his canvases nowhere loses its
music, so to say, and becomes mere sound. Locally, it is always treated
in large masses, giving the eye repose rather than stimulus, and the
general harmony is correspondingly large. He sees things in color,
evidently, which is very different from seeing color in things, as also
from not seeing color at all. It is through their color that his figures
acquire their solidity and firmness—a greater relief than they would
have, perhaps, if wholly dependent on justness of value. Their color
is so pervasive and penetrating, it characterizes and expresses them
so forcibly, it is so emphatically the instrument of their realization,
that without it they would lose identity.
It is difficult, for instance, to judge of the "Girl with Tambourine"
minus the rich glow that pervades the orange background, warms the
olive of the soft, smiling countenance, the plump neck, the slender
arm and hand, and mellows the brown and red of the _contadina_ costume.
Reduced to black and white, with its values as carefully preserved as
has been essayed in the accompanying reproduction, it unfailingly loses,
in some measure, its reality, its roundness, its "tactile values"—to
employ Mr. Berenson's favorite term. Scientifically speaking, this
perhaps involves a contradiction since, speaking thus, "tactile values"
depend upon the light and dark relations of color, and not upon its
kind or quality. But the kind and quality of color have such power
over the emotions, and leave such a lively impress on the retina that,
practically and concretely, they serve to increase wonderfully the sense
of a picture's substantiality at the same time that, and in virtue of
the fact that, they increase the vivacity of the beholder's interest. Is
it not possible that this consideration has been somewhat lost sight of
in the logic that dictates the practice of much current painting? The
old masters are there to show what a loss in mere substantiality, in
weight and force, the neglect of color involves. Indeed, the "valueless"
coach-panel painting of the English pre-Raphaelites points a similar
moral, and perhaps accounts for the revival of interest in it. As to
color as a vehicle for the communication of poetry, there is, of course,
nowhere any dispute. Poetry implies personal feeling, and in no way
can feeling be expressed more personally than in color. And if Butler's
color, as well as his sympathetic interpretation of character, makes his
canvases contrast, in a way that may be stigmatized as "old-fashioned,"
with the colorlessness and the brutality that abound, one may properly
retort that the limitedness of the _laudator temporis acti_ is
clairvoyance itself compared with the partisanship of the pedant of the
present.