number of sketches, two or three inches square, of parts of his
picture, which he put together and arranged into a harmonious whole.
Herkomer says that he "used the burin in finishing his bitten work
with marvellous skill. No better combination can be found of the
harmonious combination of the two." Burty declared that "Meryon
preserves the characteristic detail of architecture... Without
modifying the aspect of the monument he causes it to express its
hidden meaning, and gives it a broader significance by associating it
with his own thought." His employment of a dull green paper at times
showed his intimate feeling for tonalities. He is, more so than
Piranesi, the Rembrandt of architecture. Hamerton admits that the
French etcher was "one of the greatest and most original artists who
have appeared in Europe," and berates the public of the '60s for not
discovering this. Then this writer, copying in an astonishingly
wretched manner several of Meryon's etchings, analysing their defects
as he proceeds, asserts that there is false tonality in Le Stryge.
"The intense black in the street under the tower of St. Jacques
destroys the impression of atmosphere, though at a considerable
distance it is as dark as the nearest raven's wing, which cannot
relieve itself against it. This may have been done in order to obtain
a certain arrangement of black and white patches," etc. This was done
for the sheer purpose of oppositional effects. Did Hamerton see a fine
plate? The shadow is heavy; the street is in demi, not total,
obscurity; the values of the flying ravens and the shadow are clearly
enunciated. The passage is powerful, even sensational, and in the
Romantic, Hugoesque key. Hamerton is wrong. Meryon seldom erred. His
was a temperament of steel and fire.
JOHN MARTIN, MEZZOTINTER
The sitting-room was long and narrow. A haircloth sofa of
uncompromising rectitude was pushed so close to the wall that the
imprints of at least two generations of heads might be discerned upon
the flowered wall-paper--flowers and grapes of monstrous size from
some country akin to that visited by the Israelitish spies as related
in the Good Book. A mahogany sideboard stood at the upper end of the
room; in one window hung a cage which contained a feeble canary. As
you entered your eyes fell upon an ornamental wax fruit piece under a
conical glass. A stuffed bird, a robin redbreast, perched on a frosted
tree in the midst of these pale tropical offerings, glared at you with
beady eyes. Antimacassars and other things of horror were in the room.
Also a centre table upon which might have been found Cowper's poems,
the Bible, Beecher's sermons, and an illustrated book about the Holy
Land by some hardworking reverend. It was Aunt Jane's living-room; in
it she had rocked and knitted for more than half a century. There were
a few pictures on the wall, a crayon of her brother, a bank president
with a shaved upper lip, a high, pious forehead, and in his eyes a
stern expression of percentage. Over the dull white marble mantelpiece
hung a huge mezzotint, of violent contrast in black and white, a
picture whose subject had without doubt given it the place of honour
in this old-fashioned, tasteless, homely, comfortable room. It bore
for a title The Fall of Nineveh, and it was designed and mezzotinted
by John Martin.
Let us look at this picture. It depicts the downfall of the great city
upon which the wrath of God is visited. There are ghastly gleams of
lightning above the doomed vicinity. A fierce tempest is in progress
as the invading hosts break down the great waterways and enter
dry-shod into the vast and immemorial temples and palaces. The
tragedy, the human quality of the design, is summed up by the agitated
groups in the foreground; the king, surrounded by his harem, makes a
gesture of despair; the women, with loose-flowing draperies, surround
him like frightened swans. A high priest raises his hand to the stormy
heavens, upon which he is evidently invoking as stormy maledictions. A
warrior swings his blade; to his neck clings a fair helpless one, half
nude. There are other groups. Men in armour rush to meet the foe in
futile agitation. On temple tops, on marble terraces and balconies, on
the efflorescent capitals of vast columns that pierce the sky, swarms
affrighted humanity. The impression is grandiose and terrific. Exotic
architecture, ebon night, an event that has echoed down the dusty
corridors of legend or history--these and a hundred other details are
enclosed within the frame of this composition. Another picture which
hangs hard by, the Destruction of Jerusalem, after Kaulbach, is
colourless in comparison. The Englishman had greater imagination than
the German, though he lacked the latter's anatomical science. To-day
in the Pinakothek, Munich, Kaulbach holds a place of honour. You may
search in vain at the London National Gallery for the paintings of a
man who once was on the crest of popularity in England, whose Biblical
subjects attracted multitudes, whose mezzotints and engravings were
sold wherever the English Bible was read. John Martin, painter,
mezzotinter, man of gorgeous imagination, second to De Quincey or the
author of Vathek, is to-day more forgotten than Beckford himself.
Heinrich Heine in his essay, The Romantic School, said that "the
history of literature is a great morgue, wherein each seeks the dead
who are near or dear to him." Into what morgue fell John Martin before
his death? How account for the violent changes in popular taste?
Martin suffered from too great early success. The star of Turner was
in the ascendant. John Ruskin denied merit to the mezzotinter, and so
it is to-day that if you go to our print-shops you will seldom find
one of his big or little plates. He has gone out of fashion--fatal
phrase!--and only in the cabinets of old collectors can you get a peep
at his archaic and astounding productions. William Blake is in vogue;
perhaps Martin--? And then those who have garnered his plates will
reap a harvest.
Facts concerning him or his work are slight. Bryan's dictionary
accords him a few paragraphs. When at the British Museum, a few years
ago, I asked Mr. Sidney Colvin about the Martins in his print-room.
There are not many, not so many as in a certain private collection
here. But Mr. Colvin told me of the article written by Cosmo Monkhouse
in the Dictionary of National Biography, and from it we are enabled to
present a few items about the man's career. He was born at Hayden
Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland, July 19, 1789. His father,
Fenwick Martin, a fencing-master, held classes at the Chancellor's
Head, Newcastle. His brothers, Jonathan (1782-1838) and William
(1772-1851), have some claim on our notice, for the first was an
insane prophet and incendiary, having set fire to York Minster in
1829; William was a natural philosopher and poet who published many
works to prove the theory of perpetual motion. "After having convinced
himself by means of thirty-six experiments of the impossibility of
demonstrating it scientifically, it was revealed to him in a dream
that God had chosen him to discover the great cause of all things, and
this he made the subject of many works" (Jasnot, Vérités positives,
1854). Verily, as Lombroso hath it, "A hundred fanatics are found for
a theological or metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric
problem."
The Martin stock was, without doubt, neurasthenic. John was
apprenticed when fourteen to Wilson, a Newcastle coach painter, but
ran away after a dispute over wages. He met Bonifacio Musso, an
Italian china painter, and in 1806 went with him to London. There he
supported himself painting china and glass while he studied
perspective and architecture. At nineteen he married and in 1812 lived
in High Street, Marylebone, and from there sent to the Academy his
first picture, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (from Tales
of the Genii). The figure of Sadak was so small that the framers
disputed as to the top of the picture. It sold to Mr. Manning for
fifty guineas. Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy,
encouraged Martin, and next year he painted Adam's First Sight of Eve,
which he sold for seventy guineas. In 1814 his Clytis was shown in an
ante-room of the exhibition, and he bitterly complained of his
treatment. Joshua, in 1816, was as indifferently hung, and he never
forgave the Academy the insult, though he did not withdraw from its
annual functions. In 1817 he was appointed historical painter to
Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold. He etched about this time
Character of Trees (seven plates) and the Bard at the Academy. In 1818
he removed to Allsop Terrace, New (Marylebone road). In 1819 came The
Fall of Babylon, Macbeth (1820), Belshazzar's Feast (1821), which,
"excluded" from the Academy, yet won the £200 prize. A poem by T.S.
Hughes started Martin on this picture. It was a national success and
was exhibited in the Strand behind a glass transparency. It went the
round of the provinces and large cities and attracted thousands.
Martin joined the Society of British Artists at its foundation and
exhibited with them from 1824 to 1831, and also in 1837 and 1838,
after which he sent his important pictures to the Royal Academy.
In 1833 The Fall of Nineveh went to Brussels, where it was bought by
the Government. Martin was elected member of the Belgian Academy and
the Order of Leopold was conferred on him. His old quarrels with the
Academy broke out in 1836, and he testified before a committee as to
favouritism. Then followed The Death of Moses, The Deluge, The Eve of
the Deluge, The Assuaging of the Waters, Pandemonium. He painted
landscapes and water-colours, scenes on the Thames, Brent, Wandle,
Wey, Stillingbourne, and the hills and eminences about London. About
this time he began scheming for a method of supplying London with
water and one that would improve the docks and sewers. He engraved
many of his own works, Belshazzar, Joshua, Nineveh, Fall of Babylon.
The first two named, with The Deluge, were presented by the French
Academy to Louis Philippe, for which courtesy a medal was struck off
in Martin's honour. The Ascent of Elijah, Christ Tempted in the
Wilderness, and Martin's illustrations (with Westall's) to Milton's
Paradise Lost were all completed at this period. For the latter Martin
received £2,000. He removed to Lindsey House, Chelsea, in 1848 or
1849, and was living there in 1852, when he sent to the Academy his
last contribution, Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. November 12,
1853, while engaged upon his last large canvases, The Last Judgment,
The Great Day of Wrath, and The Plains of Heaven, he was paralysed on
his right side. He was removed to the Isle of Man, and obstinately
refusing proper nourishment, died at Douglas February 17, 1854. After
his death three pictures, scenes from the Apocalypse, were exhibited
at the Hall of Commerce. His portrait by Wangemann appeared in the
_Magazine of Fine Arts_. A second son, Leopold Charles, writer, and
godson of Leopold, King of Belgium, was an authority on costumes and
numismatics (1817-89). His wife was a sister of Sir John Tenniel of
_Punch_.
John Martin was slightly cracked; at least he was so considered by his
contemporaries. He was easily affronted, yet he was a very generous
man. He bought Etty's picture, The Combat, in 1825 for two or three
hundred guineas. There are at the South Kensington Museum three
Martins, watercolours, and one oil; at Newcastle, an oil. At the time
of his decease his principal works were in the collections of Lord de
Tabley, Dukes of Buckingham and Sutherland, Messrs. Hope and
Scarisbruck, Earl Grey and Prince Albert. The Leyland family of
Nantchvyd, North Wales, owns the Joshua and several typical works of
Martin. Wilkie, in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, describes
Belshazzar's Feast as a "phenomenon." Bulwer declared that Martin was
"more original and self-dependent than Raphael or Michael Angelo." In
the Last Essays of Elia there is one by Charles Lamb entitled
Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of Modern Art.
The name of Martin is not mentioned, but several of his works are
unmistakably described. "His towered architecture [Lamb is writing of
Belshazzar's Feast] are of the highest order of the material sublime.
Whether they were dreams or transcripts of some elder
workmanship--Assyrian ruins old--restored by this mighty artist, they
satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of
the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled."
"Literary" art critic as he was, Lamb put his finger on Martin's
weakest spot--his figure painting. The entire essay should be read,
for it contains a study of the Joshua in which this most delicious of
English prose writers speaks of the "wise falsifications" of the great
masters. Before his death the critics, tiring of him sooner than the
public, called Martin tricky, meretricious, mechanical. To be sure,
his drawing is faulty, his colour hot and smoky; nevertheless, he was
not a charlatan. As David Wilkie wrote: "Weak in all these points in
which he can be compared to other artists," he had the compensating
quality of an imposing, if at times operatic, imagination. Monkhouse
justly says that in Martin's illustrations to Milton the smallness of
scale and absence of colour enable us to appreciate the grandeur of
his conceptions with a minimum of his defects.
In sooth he lacked variety. His pictures are sooty and apocalyptic. We
have seen the Mountain Landscape, at South Kensington, The Destruction
of Herculaneum, at Manchester, another at Newcastle whose subject
escapes us, and we confess that we prefer the mezzotints of Martin,
particularly those engraved by Le Keux--whose fine line and keen sense
of balance corrected the incoherence of Martin's too blackened shadows
and harsh explosions of whites. One looks in vain for the velvety tone
of Earlom, or the vivid freshness of Valentine Green, in Martin. He
was not a colourist; his mastery consisted in transferring to his huge
cartoons a sense of the awful, of the catastrophic. He excelled in the
delineation of massive architecture, and if Piranesi was his superior
in exactitude, he equalled the Italian in majesty and fantasy of
design. No such cataclysmic pictures were ever before painted, nor
since, though Gustave Doré, who without doubt made a study of Martin,
has incorporated in his Biblical illustrations many of Martin's
overwhelming ideas--the Deluge, for example. James Ensor, the Belgian
illustrator, is an artist of fecund fancy who, alone among the new
men, has betrayed a feeling for the strange architecture, dream
architecture, we encounter in Martin. Coleridge in Kubla Khan, De
Quincey in opium reveries, Poe and Baudelaire are among the writers
who seem nearest to the English mezzotinter. William Beckford's
Vathek, that most Oriental of tales, first written in French by a
millionaire of genius, should have inspired Martin. Perhaps its mad
fantasy did, for all we know--there is no authentic compilation of his
compositions. Heine has spoken of Martin, as has Théophile Gautier;
and his name, by some kink of destiny, is best known to the present
generation because of Macaulay's mention of it in an essay.
The Vale of Tempe is one of Martin's larger plates seldom seen in the
collector's catalogue. We have viewed it and other rare prints in the
choice collection referred to already. Satan holding council, after
Milton, is a striking conception. The Prince of Eblis sits on a vast
globe of ebony. About him are tier upon tier of faces, the faces of
devils. Infernal chandeliers depend from remote ceilings. Light gashes
the globe and the face and figure of Satan; both are of supernal
beauty. Could this mezzotint, so small in size, so vast in its shadowy
suggestiveness, have stirred Baudelaire to lines that shine with a
metallic poisonous lustre?
And there is that tiny mezzotint in which we find ourselves at the
base of a rude little hill. The shock of the quaking earth, the silent
passing of the sheeted dead and the rush of the affrighted multitudes
tell us that a cosmic tragedy is at hand. In a flare of lightning we
see silhouetted against an angry sky three crosses at the top of a sad
little hill. It is a crucifixion infinitely more real, more intense
than Doré's. Another scene--also engraved by Le Keux: On a stony
platform, vast and crowded, the people kneel in sackcloth and ashes;
the heavens thunder over the weeping millions of Nineveh, and the Lord
of Hosts will not be appeased. Stretching to the clouds are black
basaltic battlements, and above rear white-terraced palaces as swans
that strain their throats to the sky. The mighty East is in penitence.
Or, Elijah is rapt to heaven in a fiery whirlwind; or God creates
light. This latter is one of the most extraordinary conceptions of a
great visionary and worthy of William Blake. Or Sadak searching for
the waters of oblivion. Alas, poor humanity! is here the allegory. A
man, a midget amid the terrifying altitudes of barren stone, lifts
himself painfully over a ledge of rock. Above him are vertiginous
heights; below him, deadly precipices. Nothing helps him but
himself--a page torn from Max Stirner is this parable. Light streams
upon the struggling egoist as he toils to the summit of consciousness.
Among the designs of nineteenth-century artists we can recall none so
touching, so powerful, so modern as this picture. Martin was not
equally successful in portraying celestial episodes, though his
paradises are enormous panoramas replete with architectural beauties.
His figures, as exemplified in Miltonic illustrations, are more
conventional than Fuseli's and never naively original as are Blake's.
Indeed, of Blake's mystic poetry and divination Martin betrays no
trace. He is not so much the seer as the inventor of infernal
harmonies. Satan reviewing his army of devils is truly magnificent in
its depiction of the serried host armed for battle; behind glistens
burning Tophet in all its smoky splendour. Satan in shining armour
must be a thousand feet high; he is sadly out of scale. So, too, in
the quarrel of Michael and Satan over the sleeping Adam and Eve. Blake
is here recalled in the rhythms of the monstrous figures. Bathos is in
the design of Lucifer swimming in deepest hell upon waves of fire and
filth; yet the lugubrious arches of the caverns in the perspective
reveal Blake's fantasy, so quick to respond to external stimuli.
Martin saw the earth as in an apocalyptic swoon, its forms distorted,
its meanings inverted; a mad world, the world of an older theogony.
But if there was little human in his visions, he is enormously
impersonal; if he assailed heaven's gates on wings of melting wax, or
dived deep into the pool of iniquity, he none the less caught glimpses
in his breathless flights of strange countries across whose sill no
human being ever passes. There is genuine hallucination. He must have
seen his ghosts so often that in the end they petrified him, as did
the Statue Don Giovanni. Martin was a species of reversed Turner. He
spied the good that was in evil, the beauty in bituminous blacks. He
is the painter of black music, the deifier of Beelzebub, and also one
who caught the surge and thunder of the Old Testament, its majesty and
its savagery. As an illustrator of sacred history, the world may one
day return to John Martin.
ZORN
Anders Zorn--what's in a name? Possibly the learned and amiable father
of Tristram Shandy or that formidable pedant Professor Slawkenbergius
might find much to arouse his interest in the patronymic of the great
Swedish painter and etcher. What Zorn means in his native tongue we do
not profess to know; but in German it signifies anger, wrath, rage.
Now, the Zorn in life is not an enraged person--unless some lady
sitter asks him to paint her as she is not. He is, as all will testify
who have met him, a man of rare personal charm and sprightly humour.
He, it may be added, calls yellow yellow, and he never paints a
policeman like a poet. In a word, a man of robust, normal vision, a
realist and an artist. False realism with its hectic, Zola-like
romanticism is distasteful to Zorn. He is near Degas among the
Frenchmen and Zuloaga among the new Spaniards; near them in a certain
forthright quality of depicting life, though unlike them in technical
and individual methods.
Yes, Zorn, that crisp, bold, short name, which begins with a letter
that abruptly cuts both eye and ear, quite fits the painter's
personality, fits his art. He is often ironic. Some fanciful theorist
has said that the letters Z and K are important factors in the career
of the men who possess them in their names. Camille Saint-Saëns has
spoken of Franz Liszt and his lucky letter. It is a very pretty idea,
especially when one stakes on zero at Monte Carlo; but no doubt Anders
Zorn would be the first to laugh the idea out of doors.
We recall an exhibition a few years ago at Venice in the art gallery
of the Giardino Reale. Zorn had a place of honour among the boiling
and bubbling Secessionists; indeed, his work filled a large room. And
what work! Such a giant's revel of energy. Such landscapes, riotous,
sinister, and lovely. Such women! Here we pause for breath. Zorn's
conception of womanhood has given offence to many idealists, who do
not realise that once upon a time our forebears were furry and
indulged in arboreal habits. Zorn can paint a lady; he has signed many
gentle and aristocratic canvases.
But Zorn is also too sincere not to paint what he sees. Some of his
models are of the earth, earthy; others step toward you with the
candid majesty of a Brunhilda, naked, unashamed, and regal. They are
all vital. We recall, too, the expressions, shocked, amazed, even
dazed, of some American art students who, fresh from their golden
Venetian dreams, faced the uncompromising pictures of a man who had
faced the everyday life of his day. For these belated visionaries,
whose ideal in art is to painfully imitate Giorgione, Titian, or
Tiepolo, this modern, with his rude assault upon the nerves, must seem
a very iconoclast. Yet Zorn only attempts to reproduce the life
encircling him. He is a child of his age. He, too, has a perception of
beauty, but it is the beauty that may be found by the artist with an
ardent, unspoiled gaze, the curious, disquieting beauty of our time.
Whistler saw it in old Venetian doorways as well as down Chelsea way
or at Rotherhithe. Zorn sees it in some corner of a wood, in some
sudden flex of muscle or intimate firelit interior. And he loves to
depict the glistening curves of his big model as she stands in the
sunlight, a solid reproach to physical and moral anæmia. A pagan, by
Apollo!
As an etcher the delicacy of his sheathed lion's paw is the principal
quality that meets the eye, notwithstanding the broad execution.
Etching is essentially an impressionistic art. Zorn is an
impressionist among etchers. He seems to attack his plate not with the
finesse of a meticulous fencing-master but like a Viking, with a broad
Berserker blade. He hews, he hacks, he gashes. There is blood in his
veins, and he does not spare the ink. But examine closely these little
prints--some of them miracles of printing--and you may discern their
delicate sureness, subtlety, and economy of gesture. Fitzroy
Carrington quotes the Parisian critic Henri Marcel, who among other
things wrote of the Zorn etchings: "Let us only say that these
etchings--paradoxical in their coarseness of means and fineness of
effect--manifest the master at his best."
Coarseness of means and fineness of effect--the phrase is a happy one.
Coarse is sometimes the needle-work of Zorn, but the end justifies the
means. He is often cruel, more cruel than Sargent. His portraits prove
it. He has etched all his friends, some of whom must have felt
honoured and amused--or else offended. The late Paul Verlaine, for
example, would not have been pleased with the story of his life as
etched by the Swede. It is as biting a commentary--one is tempted to
say as acid--as a page from Strindberg. Yes, without a touch of
Strindberg's mad fantasy, Zorn is kin to him in his ironic, witty way
of saying things about his friends and in front of their faces.
Consider that large plate of Renan. Has any one so told the truth
concerning the ex-seminarian, casuist, and marvellous prose writer of
France? The large, loosely modelled head with its fleshy curves, its
super-subtle mouth of orator, the gaze veiled, the bland, pontifical
expression, the expression of the man who spoke of "the mania of
certitude"--here is Ernest Renan, voluptuous disdainer of democracies,
and planner of a phalanstery of superior men years before Nietzsche's
superman appeared. Zorn in no unkindly spirit shows us the thinker;
also the author of L'Abbesse de Jouarre. It is something, is it not,
to evoke with needle, acid, paper, and ink the dualism of such a brain
and temperament as was Renan's?