The years bring round very quickly the old familiar events. Yesterday
was Show Sunday. It scarcely seems a year since last the painters
received their friends, and perhaps a few of their enemies. These visits
to studios are very exciting to ladies who have read about studios in
novels, and believe that they will find everywhere tawny tiger-skins,
Venetian girls, chrysanthemum and hawthorn patterned porcelain, suits of
armour, old plate, swords, and guns, and bows, and all the other
"properties" of the painter of romance. Some of these delightful things,
no doubt, the visitors of yesterday saw, and probably some painters still
wear velvet coats and red neckties, and long hair and pointed beards. But
the typical artist is not what he was. He has become domesticated.
Sometimes he is nearly as rich and "apolaustic" as a successful stock-
broker, and much more fashionable. Then he dwells in marble halls, with
pleasing fountains, by whose falls all sorts of birds sing madrigals. He
has an entirely new house, in short, fitted up in the early Basque style,
or after the fashion of an Inca's palace, or like the Royal dwelling of a
Rajah, including, of course, all modern improvements. This is a very
desirable kind of artist to know at home; but, after all, it is not easy
to distinguish him from a highly-cultivated and successful merchant
prince, with a taste for _bric-a-brac_. He is not in the least like the
painter of romance; perhaps he is better--he is certainly more fortunate;
but he is not the real old thing, the Bohemian of Ouida and Miss Braddon.
One might as well expect a banker to be a Bohemian.
Another class of modern painter is even more disappointing. He is
extremely neat and smooth in his appearance, and dresses in the height of
the most quiet fashion. His voice is low and soft, and he never (like
the artist of fiction) employs that English word whereby the Royalist
sailor was recognized when, attired as a Portuguee, he tried to blow up
one of the ships of Admiral Blake. This new kind of artist avoids studio
slang as much as he does long hair and red waistcoats. He might be a
young barrister, only he is more polished; or a young doctor, only he is
more urbane. No doubt there exist men of the ancient species--rough-and-
ready men as strong as bargees, given to much tobacco, amateurs of porter
or shandygaff, great hunters of the picturesque, such wild folk as
Thackeray knew and Mr. Charles Keene occasionally caricatures. These are
the artists whom young ladies want to see, but they are not in great
force on Show Sunday. They rather look on that festival as a day of
national mourning and humiliation and woe. They do not care to have all
Belgravia or South Kensington let loose in their places. They do not
wish the public to gaze and simper at pieces which will probably be
enskied or rejected, or hung at a dangerous corner next a popular
picture.
No painter who is not of the most secure eminence can, perhaps, quite
enjoy Show Sunday. Many of his visitors know as much about Art as the
Fuegians do of white neckties. They come and gaze, and say, "How soft,
how sweet!" like Rosey Mackenzie, and have tea, and go away. Other
people offer amazing suggestions, and no one who thinks the pictures
failures quite manages to conceal his opinion. Poets are said to be fond
of reading their own poems aloud, which seems amazing; but then as they
read they cannot see their audience, nor guess how they are boring those
sufferers. The poet, like the domestic fowl which did not scream when
plucked, is "too much absorbed." But while his friends look at his
pictures, the painter looks at their faces, and must make many sad
discoveries. Like other artists, he does not care nearly so much for the
praise as he is dashed and discomfited by the slightest hint of blame. It
is a wonder that irascible painters do not run amuck among their own
canvases and their visitors on Show Sunday. That, at least, in Mr.
Browning's phrase, is "how it strikes a contemporary." Were the artists
to yield to the promptings of their lower nature, were they to hearken to
the Old Man within them, fearful massacres would occur in St. John's
Wood, and Campden Hill, and round Holland House. An alarmed public and a
powerless police would behold vast ladies of wealth, and maidens fair,
and wild critics with eye-glasses speeding, at a furious pace, along
certain roads, pursued by painters armed to the teeth with palette knives
and mahlsticks.
This is what would occur if academicians and others gave way to the
natural passions provoked by criticism and general demeanour on Show
Sunday. But it is a proof of the triumph of civilization that nothing of
this kind occurs. Peace prevails in the street and studio, and at the
end of the day the artist must feel much as the critic does after the
private view at the Royal Academy. The artist has been having a private
view of the public on its good behaviour, and that wild contempt of the
bourgeois which burns in every artist's breast must reach its highest
temperature. However, the holidays are beginning, the working season is
over, and that reflection, doubtless, helps the weary painter through his
ordeal. But his friends also have to bear a good deal if they happen not
to like his performances. They must feign admiration as well as they
may, and the sun of Show Sunday goes down on a world rather glad that it
is well over.
Lord Beaconsfield once said at an Academy dinner that originality was the
great characteristic of English art. So little was he supposed to have
spoken seriously that another, of whose ceasing to perorate there is no
prospect, characterized his criticism in language so strong that it
cannot well be repeated. Let us admit that Lord Beaconsfield was either
mistaken, or that, like the Consul Aulus, "he spake a bitter jest." Our
artists, when they have found their vein, go on working it. They do not
wander off in search of new veins, as a general rule. It would be unkind
to draw attention to personal proofs of this truism. He who has done
well with babies in fancy dresses will go on doing well with infants in
masquerade. There are moments when the arrival of Cronus to swallow the
whole family of painted babes, as he did his own, would be not unwelcome;
when an artistic Herod would be applauded for a general massacre of the
Burlington House innocents. But this may be only the jaundiced theory of
a jaded critic. The mothers of England are a much more important set of
judges, and they like the babies. Then the bishops, though a little
monotonous, must be agreeable to their flocks; while the hunting dogs,
and pugs, and kittens, and monks, and Venetian girls--_la blonde et la
brune_--and the Highland rivers of the colour of porter "with a head on
it," and the mackerel-hued sea, and the marble, and the martyrs, and the
Mediterranean--they are all dear to various classes of our teeming
population. The critic may say he has seen them all before, he knows
them off by heart; but then so does he know Raphael's infants, and
Botticelli's madonnas, and Fra Angelico's angel trumpeters, and Vecelli's
blue hills, and Robusti's doges, and Lionardo's smiling, enigmatic
ladies. He does not say he is tired of these, but that is only his
eternal affectation. He is afraid, perhaps, to say that the old masters
bore him--that is a compliment reserved for contemporaries. Let it be
admitted that in all ages artists have had their grooves, like other men,
and have reproduced themselves and their own best effects. But, as this
is inevitably true, how careful they should be that the effects are
really of permanent value and beauty! Realistic hansom cabs, and babies
in strange raiment, and schoolgirls of the last century, and Masters of
Hounds, are scarcely of so much permanent value as the favourite types
and characters which Lionardo and Carpaccio repeat again and again. We
no more think Claude monotonous than we think "the quiet coloured end of
evening" flat and stale. But we may, and must, tire of certain modern
combinations too often rehearsed, after the trick has become a habit, and
the method an open mystery.