typically German, and reveals the old German spirit at its best--as it
was in its romantic age before Luther. To study Dürer’s drawings is to
become convinced of the truth of mediæval legend: mystical symbology--in
passing through the crucible of his mind--issues thence established as
historic fact; and it would be as true to say of him that historic
fact--passing through the same crucible--becomes mystically symbolic. In
everything he did one feels that the primary interest of each drawing
for him lay always in a metaphysical, religious or philosophical idea.
In all of them there is what Whistler condemned as out of place, in a
picture, and called, “the literary quality.” If Taine, the Frenchman, be
right, he puts Whistler’s argument out of court; for Taine is convinced
that the artist’s whole _raison d’être_ and mission is to present and
interpret to the people _in a simple language that they can understand_
the philosophical and other ideas they desire but cannot formulate for
themselves. Under the old spirit of art the artist undoubtedly did
recognize this as his mission, whereas to-day he often contents
himself--like the modern playwright--by presenting the people with
problems, in the hope perhaps that they will supply him with the
solutions at which he has not yet himself arrived; and by believing that
the intellectual exercise involved may be as educative for them as were
the methods of the earlier masters. At any rate Dürer’s works stand as a
formidable monument to the rightness of Taine’s theory. Certainly in the
art of illustrating ideas it would be difficult to find anyone to
surpass Dürer; or to surpass him in his fine sense of how to decorate a
page. But throughout his work one feels a lack of any sense of humour;
and also, perhaps of spontaneity. If genius is an infinite capacity for
taking pains--then Dürer was a genius. In all his work there is an
immense sincerity; and this carries him to great heights in some of his
religious drawings--for instance in that superb wood-cut of his of
Christ praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.
[Sidenote: _Leonardo da Vinci_]
It would be misleading to say that there was much in common in the
outlook of Dürer and Leonardo and yet I am tempted to point out that
there was a certain similarity, in spite of the fact that the vision of
the latter was infinitely more gracious; at any rate they both included
caricature and architectural draughtsmanship among their arts; and both
were interested in mathematics and science.
* * * * *
What a strange race of supermen might be evolved if science and art
could combine to give birth to a progeny in which the essence of both
were equally mingled. Once upon a time by some miracle of the Gods and
Muses such essences were so mingled, and a son was brought to birth
whose doings were an astonishment and delight to his contemporaries and
whose work was a record and proof of the success of the experiment. But
the experiment was not repeated, and one may hazard a guess which Muse
it was said “A most successful and unexpected result; add the data to
the sum of human knowledge and let us proceed to the next experiment on
our schedule!”
And the most artistic of scholars and the most scholastic of artists
remains a lonely figure, for whom we can find no comparison: a
fascinating enigma for the race.
He not only astounded and delighted his contemporaries but each
succeeding generation; nor have we yet measured the extent of the
knowledge materialized in the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
The _creative_ artist is not satisfied with an intellectual grasp of a
truth, for his aim must always be to translate abstract ideas into form;
to clothe his thought in a visible or aural body. To the mind of the
scholar, though, he must appear a most practical, almost utilitarian
being--one who does not regard the acquirement of knowledge as an end
sufficient in itself! Leonardo da Vinci combined in his personality the
genius of both types. His scientific drawings are full of the finest
æsthetic feeling; his æsthetic drawings are a marvel to the scientist.
He had a passionate love of research, and the fact that he left so few
completed paintings must be attributed to his having devoted so much of
his energy to research. He did, however, leave great numbers of drawings
that, by common consent, are ranked among the greatest achievements in
art. They are the unique records of one of the noblest minds the race
has produced--that of a supreme master of creative art.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Daumier_]
I always think of Daumier as of a man going through the dark and crowded
streets of a city holding a lighted lamp and thrusting it into dusty
corners. And of him shaking with Gargantuan laughter--while he watches
the antics of the strange people he discovers--and penetrating with a
glance to the very depths of their pathetic and ridiculous souls. But
while his pencil mocks them his great heart loves them!
I have heard it asserted that Daumier drew like a sculptor, but I think
it would be nearer the truth to say that in his finest drawings he is
concerned first and last and all the time with _light_. For him this was
scarcely a limitation: the light rays are gathered by the point of his
pencil and fixed--by some alchemic process of his will on the paper--to
glow there for our satisfaction as long as his drawings endure. Whereas,
in a sculptor’s drawings, light is but a means to an end (he would carve
the paper if he could!) he throws lines like measuring cords round the
form--each a statement of some measurement of contour--and having
established in this way a mass, he is able to take from it the elevation
of all subsidiary and related forms with, one might say, his mental
calipers. A process of drawing widely different from that practised by
Daumier.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Ingres_]
One cannot help feeling that, to this aristocrat of French artists, a
display of emotions in a drawing would have been a most unclassic and
plebeian sign of weakness. And one seems to know that in Ingres’ art of
pure unemotional drawing--his eye measured, his brain commanded, his
hand obeyed and the pencil glided from one position to the next by the
most direct path, a curve so slight as to be almost straight; leaving
its grey immaculate line to prove its absolute obedience to the
draughtsman’s will ... and so the drawing would grow without an
unnecessary stroke or a correction; simply the unfoldment of a
preconception carried out according to plan and justly recording his
penetrating analysis of a subject.
The guiding star and strength of Ingres’ genius was his conviction that
he could not err.
M. Anatole France tells a characteristic story of an encounter with
Ingres in his own youth:--he was at the opera one evening, the house was
full and not an empty seat was to be seen. Suddenly an impressive
looking stranger stepped up to him and said “Young man, give me your
seat--I am Monsieur Ingres.”
How consistent the great man was! From his earliest youth he appears to
have never doubted himself or his work; there was calm assurance in
everything he did.
Elsewhere in these notes I have referred to the fact that artists often
do their finest drawings early in life, and here we happen on one of the
young men of whom I wrote: Ingres did some of his finest drawings twenty
or thirty years before he painted his most famous pictures. That
marvellous drawing--_The Stamaty Family_--is dated 1818, and the _Lady
with Sunshade_--as perfect a portrait drawing as could well be
imagined--was done in 1813; and many fine drawings earlier still;
whereas his famous picture _La Source_ was painted in 1856, and many of
his best known pictures were done in the period between 1840 and 1866.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Cotman_]
Cotman is another man of whom one feels tempted to say--in studying his
work--that one cannot see any signs in it that he ever mistrusted the
rightness of his aims and methods. It is customary to write of Cotman’s
life as both unhappy and unsuccessful, but instead it should be borne in
mind that he did have success of the best kind--he was immensely
successful in painting what he wanted to paint; and no artist can have a
success more dear to him than that. His methods were most consistent,
and so it is probable that--disgusted with a world that only required
his services as a drawing-master--he pursued his own way and managed to
be as happy as any other genius in the practice of his art.
Until very recently his name was generally mentioned with three or four
of his contemporary water-colour painters--as though there were not much
to choose between the batch; but gradually the weight of public opinion
is proclaiming the conviction that Cotman was a head and shoulders above
the group with which he has been catalogued; and year by year the
appreciation of his work grows in volume. His position, however, is
still not recognized as, I am convinced, it will be in a few years time.
His method of painting was so widely different to Turner’s that the
public and the critics--dazzled by the sunsets of “our greatest
painter”--have been slow indeed to recognize the originality and
distinction of Cotman’s genius. As a draughtsman of landscapes he
excelled in lyrical beauty and perfection of technical accomplishment;
but his paintings should be studied with his drawings, for it is in
these that he showed his real originality--producing paintings that are
comparable, _as decorations_, with the prints of the greater Japanese
wood-engravers; and at a time, it should be remembered, when these
prints were unknown in Europe.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Beardsley_]
“He became a sort of household word”--so wrote Mr. Robert Ross in his
readable little book on Beardsley.
A description of Beardsley’s reputation more wide of the mark I cannot
imagine. Beardsley is really one of England’s “skeletons in the
cupboard.” The average Englishman is somewhat ashamed of Beardsley as a
fellow countryman, he feels there has been some mistake--the fellow
ought to have been a Czecho-Slovac! To think that the year 1872 (a most
respectable year!) should have brought to light this utterly un-English
phenomenon is not pleasing to him. I have seen more than one young
English student embarrassed and somewhat annoyed when an enthusiastic
Frenchman has congratulated him on being a compatriot of that “great
genius Aubrey Beardsley.” All the world over Beardsley is still “caviare
to the general” and particularly to the English general. He is
acceptable enough when his ideas are popularized by other artists:
throughout France and America whole schools of present day illustrators
are founded on his work; and he is rightly acknowledged as the “old
master” of mechanical line engraving. He was the first artist to
understand really and utilize to the full the possibilities of this
process of reproduction; and--as so often happens with the first man to
use a process intelligently--he carried it further and found it less
restricting than any who have followed him.
Beardsley had an immense power of technical invention--like Hokusai, he
was able to bring any subject of his choice within the scope of his
convention, and to render it in a way that was perfect for the process
by which his work was to be reproduced.
There is an ironical beauty in everything he ever did, and his
compositions--regarded as an adjustment of spaces--are more
consistently original and daring than those of any other Western artist,
old or modern; only in the East can we find his equal in this particular
expression of creative art.
The shock that Beardsley gave to British feelings was, I fancy, due far
more to the intrinsic originality of his compositions than to the
“nautiness,” imagined or real, in his drawings, about which we have
heard so much. It is surely a case of _honi soit qui mal y pense_, for
there is nothing in the books of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley that are
published in this country that could offend a school miss.
Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s _Father Brown_ says in one of his adventures “Its
the wrong shape in the abstract. Don’t you ever feel that about Eastern
art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the shapes are mean and
bad--deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked things in a Turkey
carpet.” Well, _Father Brown’s_ remark is illuminating, for not only are
there wicked shapes in Turkey carpets but, however “beautifully seen”
the rest of a Beardsley drawing is, the drawing _of the faces_ in it is
often _deliberately mean and bad_. But I think, also, that it would have
been more just of _Father Brown_ to have completed his remark with the
“finish” that “is an added truth” by saying that he had never seen a
wicked shape in a Persian carpet. This generalization about Eastern art
and “the wrong shape in the abstract” makes one fear that perhaps the
champion of Mr. Bateman might be no friend to Beardsley; and I regret to
think that Mr. Chesterton might not champion Eastern shapes; or
Beardsley--though I can understand his not doing so: I venerate him as
the British lion and therefore it seems but natural that he should wage
perpetual war against the unicorn--and doubtless he might regard
Beardsley as a fabulous beast. The British feeling is strong about
shapes--an Englishman likes to recognize a shape instantly; should he
fail to do so he really is extremely uncomfortable and affronted and
will, as often as not, turn on the creator of the “wrong shape” and
accuse him of ungentlemanly conduct.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Phil May_]
At any rate the British public has always accepted as final _Mr.
Punch’s_ opinion on matters of humour. He has given it an almost
unbroken tradition--which is more than can be said of any other
institution of English art--and it is grateful. When he imported from
Australia the brilliant draughtsman Phil May it took the newcomer to its
bosom without any hesitation--and he has nestled there ever since. But
the artworld--so-called--though on quite good terms with _Mr. Punch_
does not always accept his opinion unquestioned: it has been known to
make invidious comparisons between his paper and _Jugend_ or _Le Rire_,
and has even gone so far as to attempt wit at his expense; as in the
case of the gentleman who said _Punch_ is “written by Mr. Pickwick, for
Mr. Pickwick about Mr. Pickwick”--which was rude and surely lacking in
the deference due to our elderly purveyor of humour! However, in the
matter of Phil May, _Mr. Punch_ scored handsomely, and persons, even
with the highest brows, have accepted his drawings _con amore_.
Phil May’s drawings look the most spontaneous things imaginable--and no
doubt this is true of their humour--but his method of drawing was an
elaborate process of elimination. The execution of a rather finished
pencil drawing was the first stage of his work--in this he elaborated
all the characteristics that his keen eye and ready humour had
observed--and the final stage was calligraphic in character and
displayed his genius for simplification. With a few deft strokes of the
pen--disposed with an almost uncanny knowledge of essentials--he made
what appeared to be--when the careful pencil work was rubbed out--a most
spontaneous sketch. In truth, it was no such thing, but an intellectual
exercise in the eclectic art of elimination arrived at by means exactly
opposite to those usually employed by artists who seek spontaneity in
their work. Phil May understood the English people and they understood
Phil May. His humour synchronized with the public of his day--as did the
work of Rowlandson in another age and probably, like his, it will be
prized as a record of a period, as well as for its intrinsic value as
the work of a most original draughtsman.
The witty line is most often the brief line, but though Phil May’s line
was not always a brief one it never failed to be a witty one.
* * * * *
The Englishman has probably the finest collection of drawings that has
ever been brought together in one place. It is housed in an excellent
museum built for its accommodation and placed in charge of the finest
experts that can be found. It is further ordained that if the Englishman
wishes to inspect his treasures he shall do so in the greatest possible
comfort. No guest of a Sultan could look at his host’s collection of,
let us say, Persian miniatures, in more luxury than can
the-man-in-the-street look at his own collection of drawings in the
_Print Room_ of the British Museum; patient and courteous persons wait
on his every whim; and expert opinion, should he require it, is imparted
to him without a smile or hint of impatience at his ignorance. In short,
everything is done to coax him to a study of his collections except one
thing--and that is to inform him that he possesses these treasures.
I think the attention of the Trustees of the British and other Museums
might be drawn to the fact that the-man-in-the-street cannot know about
his priceless possessions unless someone informs him. The assumption
that the information is imparted to him in early youth by his parents is
erroneous. He may well live and die, and frequently does, without
knowing what the words _Print Room_ stand for. The question of how to
inform him if he does not know might be left in the hands of one who is
an expert in the art of reaching his intelligence. True, the notice
boards of our Museums might then assume a somewhat jaunty air, offensive
to the grave habitués--this is what might greet them and what they might
not like: “Come where it’s always bright! Free! Now showing all day in
the _Print Room_. The finest collection of drawings in the world:
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, supported by an allstar company of
draughtsmen! Central heating! Perfect ventilation!” But the habitués
would doubtless come back to their haunts after a few days’
disgusted abstention from their habits and--what is more
important--the-man-in-the-street would now be the-man-in-the-Print-Room.
I am aware that the subject I am required to write about is _Pen and
Pencil Drawings_, and I have faith that I shall come to it but--being
filled with a desire to write about chalk drawings, charcoal drawings,
paintings, the-man-in-the-street, and all manner of things relevant and
irrelevant--I need to remind myself of it. Even then I may come to my
subject by a route not unlike that taken by Mr. William Caine in his
essay on _Cats_: he began, he continued and he went on to the end in an
unbroken eulogy on dogs and their admirable qualities viewed from all
angles, and then summed up and dismissed his subject for ever with this
line: “Cats have none of these characteristics.”
I shall, then, continue my aberrant course with the remark that I am
constantly struck by the fact, in most exhibitions, that in half the
pictures there either the subject is too small to deserve a picture or
the picture is too large for its subject. The first is an error of taste
and the second an error of _scale_.
The pleasure we derive from a sense of the fitness and rightness of the
scale of a picture may be only common-sense but it is certainly lacking
in many painters, especially in the average painter of modern
“exhibition pictures.” In these so often there are great spaces of
merely tinted canvas which serve no really useful or legitimate purpose;
and do not even contribute to the scheme of the picture as a decoration.
Sometimes, possibly, this coloured canvas may suggest a sense of space
and bigness but it is a rather obvious expedient and it fails to be
impressive if one compares it with the sense of spaciousness that has
been conveyed to one often by a few square inches of paper in a drawing.
Fortunately, as a rule, big pictures nowadays are generally painted for
exhibitions--just as fat-stock is reared to be shown at a particular
agricultural show: the show over--the fat-stock is hastily conveyed to
the nearest butcher. But the fate of the big picture is rather
mysterious and I will not suggest what I think really happens to it, for
after all I may be quite wrong. Certainly in France though, where the
output of big pictures is double or treble that of this country, their
post-exhibition fate is fairly obvious: the great majority of French
houses are incapable of accommodating these Salon triumphs, and it is
the rarest thing to find one of these huge canvases in the houses of
the rich and ostentatious _bourgeois_. Happily for the draughtsman he is
not tempted to work on the heroic scale so that--when the swing of the
pendulum may have placed his work temporarily or permanently out of
fashion--his work can usually be accommodated in a portfolio; for the
size of a drawing is generally regulated by the medium employed.
However, as genius may ignore custom, habit and even existing rules of
good taste, someone--with a right to the title--may come along and do
silverpoint drawings on ten-foot sheets of paper--just as a famous
modern etcher is doing plates of a size absolutely forbidden by the
professors, and yet everyone--except a few contemporary etchers--admits
them to be masterly.
The _official_ picture could and should be a human document, but this it
can hardly be if all humorous side-lights are rigidly excluded in
it--however serious the affairs it purports to present. The old masters
knew human nature, therefore in their paintings of ceremonial affairs
they did not forget to touch delicately on its weaknesses, even
sometimes accenting these as comic-relief. Though I would not be so rash
as to suggest the desirability of comic-relief in our _official_
pictures, I am tempted to think that relief of some kind would be well
received.
Another point about the _official_ picture is that it is generally very
large and is, as a rule, about the dullest product of the brush; for the
average modern painter when called upon to perform in this way generally
becomes simply overwhelmed with deep seriousness. He designs his picture
in the most pompous and formal manner and produces results either boring
or unintentionally funny, which latter is perhaps the more tolerable.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _William Orpen_]
Not so with Sir William Orpen--his keen sense of humour is apparent in
all his work, whether he is painting tone studies of mirrors at
Versailles or drawing his friends on the rocky coasts of Ireland. It is
one of the many charms that delight us in his work and does not detract
an iota from its distinction and importance. Some of his exquisite
drawings are reproduced here, and though the full purity of the line
cannot be retained in reproduction they are some of the perfect things
in this book.
It is a relief to find oneself thinking in terms of “perfection” about
the work of any man so modern as Sir William Orpen. Because, of course,
where the modern draughtsman and painter--as is so commonly the
case--despises his materials and scorns technique it is impossible for
one to do so. The mind--which is so much the product of the senses--must
know distaste where the senses are repelled. One may forgive him because
of other merits in his work, but the merits have to be rather splendid
to cover sufficiently such sins. To Whistler and the stylists who have
followed him much of their inspiration must have come from the materials
of their craft. One is grateful that they grasped this truth that
[Sidenote: _Glyn Philpot_]
the English Pre-Raphaelites also missed--that _rare and delicious
qualities in the handling of a medium best present to the mind rare and
beautiful qualities in nature_. In this sense Mr. Philpot is essentially
a stylist--one feels that to him the intrinsic beauties of his medium
form an appreciable amount of his inspiration: that--quite
literally--common oils and varnishes can be blended to a golden elixir
for his use. For the materials of his craft are for the artist what he
chooses to make them: a piece of red chalk in one man’s hand is a lump
of hardened mud, conveniently sharpened to a point for making marks on
paper, while, to another, it is a precious substance mined from the
earth in some distant country and prepared with infinite care, and he
knows that one touch of it on a paper--most carefully chosen--can be the
basis of a delicious colour-harmony; that ink can flow from a reed pen
in a line straight and true or run its course with subtle
modulations--as a little stream flows from the hills.
A lead pencil after all can be only the bitten stump on the office boy’s
desk--an instrument for unseemly writings or obscene scrawlings; or it
can be a cunningly wrought stick of plumbago encased in a scented
cylinder of cedar--such a thing as Leonardo would have loved. Is not the
artist capable of an alchemy that can change dross to gold!
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Brangwyn_]
The rewards of the successful artist are many and varied, but the most
coveted, surely--and the least often secured--is the reward of
international fame. The list is not long of the English artists who have
achieved it--indeed it is unjustly short. The English are, themselves,
always generous in their acceptance of foreign artists--even to the
neglect of their own; in this they are unlike other nations,
particularly the French who, though slow to acclaim foreign artists, are
loud-voiced in praise of their own home-grown products. But Mr.
Brangwyn’s name, in spite of this, stands high in Europe. It would
scarcely be an exaggeration to say that his work stands for English
contemporary painting half the world over.