You may begin with Wincklemann or Goethe--we refer entirely to critics
of paint and painters--or run down the line to Diderot, Blanc,
Gautier, Baudelaire, Zola, Goncourt, who introduced to Europe Japanese
art; Roger Marx, Geoffroy, Huysmans, Camille Mauclair, Charles Morice,
and Octave Mirbeau. Zola was not a painter, but he praised Edouard
Manet. These are a few names hastily selected. In England, Ruskin too
long ruled the critical roast; full of thunder-words like Isaiah, his
vaticinations led a generation astray. He was a prophet, not a critic,
and he was a victim to his own abhorred "pathetic fallacy." Henley was
right in declaring that until R.A.M. Stevenson appeared there was no
great art criticism in England or English. The "Velasquez" is a
marking stone in critical literature. It is the one big book by a big
temperament that may be opposed page by page to Fromentin's critical
masterpiece. Shall we further adduce the names of Morelli, Sturge
Moore, Roger Fry, Perkins, Cortissoz, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Van
Dyke, Mather, Berenson, Brownell, and George Moore--who said of Ruskin
that his uncritical blindness regarding Whistler will constitute his
passport to fame, "the lot of critics is to be remembered by what they
have failed to understand." Walter Pater wrote criticism that is
beautiful literature. If Ruskin missed Whistler, he is in good
company, for Sainte-Beuve, the prince of critics, missed Balzac,
Stendhal, Flaubert, and to Victor Hugo was unfair. Yet, consider the
Osrics embalmed in the amber of Sainte-Beuve's style. He, like many
another critic, was superior to his subject. And that is always fatal
to the water-flies.
George III once asked in wonderment how the apples get inside the
dumplings. How can a critic criticise a creator? The man who looks on
writing things about the man who does things. But he criticises and
artists owe him much. Neither in "ink-horn terms" nor in an "upstart
Asiatic style" need the critic voice his opinions. He must be an
artist in temperament and he must have a _credo_. He need not be a
painter to write of painting, for his primary appeal is to the public.
He is the middle-man, the interpreter, the vulgariser. The
psycho-physiological processes need not concern us. One thing is
certain--a man writing in terms of literature about painting, an art
in two dimensions, cannot interpret fully the meanings of the canvas,
nor can he be sure that his opinion, such as it is, when it reaches
the reader, will truthfully express either painter or critic. Such are
the limitations of one art when it comes to deal with the ideas or
material of another. Criticism is at two removes from its theme.
Therefore criticism is a makeshift. Therefore, let critics be modest
and allow criticism to become an amiable art.
But where now is the painter critic and the professional critic?
"Stands Ulster where it did?" Yes, the written and reported words of
artists are precious alike to layman and critic. That they prefer
painting to writing is only natural; so would the critic if he had the
pictorial gift. However, as art is art and not nature, criticism is
criticism and not art. It professes to interpret the artist's work,
and at best it mirrors his art mingled with the personal temperament
of the critic. At the worst the critic lacks temperament (artistic
training is, of course, an understood requisite), and when this is the
case, God help the artist! As the greater includes the lesser, the
artist should permit the critic to enter, with all due reverence, his
sacred domain. Without vanity the one, sympathetic the other. Then the
ideal collaboration ensues. Sainte-Beuve says that "criticism by
itself can do nothing. The best of it can act only in concert with
public feeling ... we never find more than half the article in
print--the other half was written only in the reader's mind." And
Professor Walter Raleigh would further limit the "gentle art."
"Criticism, after all, is not to legislate, nor to classify, but to
raise the dead." The relations between the critic and his public open
another vista of the everlasting discussion. Let it be a negligible
one now. That painters can get along without professional criticism we
know from history, but that they will themselves play the critic is
doubtful. And are they any fairer to young talent than official
critics? It is an inquiry fraught with significance. Great and small
artists have sent forth into the world their pupils. Have they
always--as befits honest critics--recognised the pupils of other men,
pupils and men both at the opposite pole of their own theories? Recall
what Velasquez is reported to have said to Salvator Rosa, according to
Boschini and Carl Justi. Salvator had asked the incomparable Spaniard
whether he did not think Raphael the best of all the painters he had
seen in Italy. Velasquez answered: "Raphael, to be plain with you, for
I like to be candid and outspoken, does not please me at all." This
purely temperamental judgment does not make of Velasquez either a good
or a bad critic. It is interesting as showing us that even a master
cannot always render justice to another. Difference engenders hatred,
as Stendhal would say.
Can the record of criticism made by plastic artists show a generous
Robert Schumann? Schumann discovered many composers from Chopin to
Brahms and made their fortunes by his enthusiastic writing about them.
In Wagner he met his Waterloo, but every critic has his limitations.
There is no Schumann, let the fact be emphasised, among the
painter-critics, though quite as much discrimination, ardour of
discovery, and acumen may be found among the writings of the men whose
names rank high in professional criticism. And this hedge, we humbly
submit, is a rather stiff one to vault for the adherents of criticism
written by artists only. Nevertheless, every day of his humble career
must the critic pen his _apologia pro vita sua_.
II - ART IN FICTION
Fiction about art and artists is rare--that is, good fiction, not the
stuff ground out daily by the publishing mills for the gallery-gods.
It is to France that we must look for the classic novel dealing with
painters and their painting, Manette Salomon, by Goncourt. Henry James
has written several delightful tales, such as The Liar, The Real
Thing, The Tragic Muse, in which artists appear. But it is the
particular psychological problem involved rather than theories of art
or personalities that steer Mr. James's cunning pen. We all remember
the woman who destroyed a portrait of her husband which seemed to
reveal his moral secret. John S. Sargeant has been credited with being
the psychologist of the brush in this story. There is a nice, fresh
young fellow in The Tragic Muse, who, weak-spined as he is, prefers at
the last his painting to Julia Dallow and a political career. In The
Real Thing we recognise one of those unerring strokes that prove James
to be the master psychologist among English writers. Any discerning
painter realises the value of a model who can take the pose that will
give him the pictorial idea, the suggestiveness of the pose, not an
attempt at crude naturalism. With this thesis the novelist has built
up an amusing, semi-pathetic, and striking fable.
There are painters scattered through English fiction--can we ever
forget Thackeray! Ouida has not missed weaving her Tyrian purples into
the exalted pattern of her romantic painters. And George Eliot. And
Disraeli. And Bernard Shaw--there is a painting creature in Love Among
the Artists. George Moore, however, has devoted more of his pages to
paint and painters than any other of the latter-day writers. The
reason is this: George Moore went to Paris to study art and he drifted
into the Julian atelier like any other likely young fellow with hazy
notions about art and a well-filled purse. But these early experiences
were not lost. They cropped up in many of his stories and studies. He
became the critical pioneer of the impressionistic movement and first
told London about Manet, Monet, Degas. He even--in an article
remarkable for critical acumen--declared that if Jimmy Whistler had
been a heavier man, a man of beef, brawn, and beer, like Rubens, he
would have been as great a painter as Velasquez. To the weighing
scales, fellow-artists! retorted Whistler; yet the bolt did not miss
the mark. Whistler's remarks about Mr. Moore, especially after the
Eden lawsuit, were, so it is reported, not fit to print.
In Mr. Moore's first volume of the half-forgotten trilogy, Spring
Days, we see a young painter who, it may be said, thinks more of
petticoats than paint. There is paint talk in Mike Fletcher, Moore's
most virile book. In A Modern Lover the hero is an artist who succeeds
in the fashionable world by painting pretty, artificial portraits and
faded classical allegories, thereby winning the love of women, much
wealth, popular applause, and the stamp of official approbation. This
Lewis Seymour still lives and paints modish London in rose-colour.
Moore's irony would have entered the soul of a hundred "celebrated"
artists if they had had any soul to flesh it in. When he wrote this
novel, one that shocked Mrs. Grundy, Moore was under the influence of
Paris. However, that masterpiece of description and analysis, Mildred
Lawson in Celibates--very Balzacian title, by the way--deals with
hardly anything else but art. Mildred, who is an English girl without
soul, heart, or talent, studies in the Julian atelier and goes to
Fontainebleau during the summer. No one, naturally, will ever describe
Fontainebleau better than Flaubert, in whose L'Education Sentimentale
there are marvellous pictures; also a semi-burlesque painter,
Pellerin, who reads all the works on æsthetics before he draws a line,
and not forgetting that imperishable portrait of Jacques Arnoux, art
dealer. Goncourt, too, has excelled in his impression of the forest
and its painters, Millet in particular. Nevertheless, let us say in
passing that you cannot find Mildred Lawson in Flaubert or Goncourt;
no, not even in Balzac, whose work is the matrix of modern fiction.
She is her own perverse, cruel Mooresque self, and she lives in New
York as well as London.
In both Daudet and Maupassant--Strong as Death is the latter's
contribution to painter-psychology--there are stories clustered about
the guild. Daudet has described a Salon on varnishing day with his
accustomed facile, febrile skill; you feel that it comes from Goncourt
and Zola. It is not within our scope to go back as far as Balzac,
whose Frenhofer in The Unknown Masterpiece has been a model for the
younger man. Poe, Hawthorne, Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson have
dealt with the theme pictorial. Zola's The Masterpiece (L'Oeuvre) is
one of the better written books of Zola. It was a favourite of his.
The much-read and belauded fifth chapter is a faithful transcription
of the first Salon of the Rejected Painters (Salon des Refusés) at
Paris, 1863. Napoleon III, after pressure had been brought to bear
upon him, consented to a special salon within the official Salon, at
the Palais de l'Industrie, which would harbour the work of the young
lunatics who wished to paint purple turkeys, green water, red grass,
and black sunsets. (Lie down, ivory hallucinations, and don't wag your
carmilion tail on the chrome-yellow carpet!) It is an enormously
clever book, this, deriving in the main as it does from Manette
Salomon and Balzac's Frenhofer. The fight for artistic veracity by
Claude Lantier is a replica of what occurred in Manet's lifetime. The
Breakfast on the Grass, described by Zola, was actually the title and
the subject of a Manet picture that scandalised Paris about this
epoch. The fantastic idea of a nude female stretched on the grass,
while the other figures were clothed and in their right minds, was too
much for public and critic, and unquestionably Manet did paint the
affair to create notoriety. Like Richard Wagner, he knew the value of
advertising.
All the then novel theories of _plein air_ impressionism are discussed
in the Zola novel, yet the work seems clumsy after Goncourt's Manette
Salomon, that breviary for painters which so far back as 1867
anticipated--in print, of course--the discoveries, the experiments,
the practice of the naturalistic-impressionistic groups from Courbet
to Cézanne, Monet to Maufra, Manet to Paul Gauguin. There are verbal
pictures of student life, of salons, of atelier and open air. No such
psychologic manual of the painter's art has ever appeared before or
since Manette Salomon. It was the Goncourts who introduced Japanese
art to European literature--they were friends of the late M. Bing, a
pioneer collector in Paris. And they foresaw the future of painting as
well as of fiction.
XV. MUSEUM PROMENADES
PICTURES AT THE HAGUE
There are two new Rembrandts in the galleries of the Mauritshuis, lent
by Prof. A. Bredius, director of the Royal Picture Gallery at The
Hague. Neither is an "important" picture in the professional sense of
that word, but they are Rembrandts--at least one is indubitable--and
that suffices. The more credible of the pair is a small canvas
depicting Andromeda manacled to the rocks. Her figure is draped to the
waist; it is a solid Dutch figure, ugly as the one of Potiphar's wife
(in an etching by Rembrandt), and no deliverer is in sight. The flesh
tones are rather cold, a cadaverous white, but it is a Rembrandt
white. The picture as a whole is sketchy and without charm or mystery.
Nevertheless, the lion's paws are there. The other shows us a woman
reading at a table. The colouring is warm and the still-life
accessories are richly and minutely painted. Not a likely Rembrandt,
either in theme or notably so in treatment. We must bow, however, to
the judgment of the learned Bredius who made the ascription. These two
works are not as yet in the catalogue. It is a pity the catalogue to
this gallery is not as complete as those of the Rijks Museum. To
visitors they offer an abridged one, dated 1904. There are since then
many new pictures, notably a sterling Chardin, marvellously painted,
and an excellent landscape by Van Cuyp, both loans of Dr. Bredius.
Otherwise this little collection is as choice and as entertaining as
ever. The usual tourist makes at once for the overrated Young Bull by
Paul Potter and never looks at the magnificent Weenix across the room,
the Dead Swan, with its velvety tones. The head of a young girl by
Vermeer, with its blue turban and buff coat, its pearl earrings, is
charming. And the View of Delft seems as fresh as the day it was
painted. The long façade of the houses and warehouses and the churches
and towers facing the river are rendered with a vivacity of colour, a
solidity in drawing, and an absence of too marked literalism which
prove that this gifted artist had more than one style. The envelope is
rich; there is air, though it be stagnant. Down-stairs is an
allegorical subject, The New Testament, which is not very convincing
as a composition, but warm in tint. The Diana and Her Companions must
have inspired Diaz and many other painters. But the real Vermeer, the
Vermeer of the enamelled surfaces and soft pervasive lighting, is at
Amsterdam.
No place is better than The Hague for the study of the earlier
Rembrandt. Dr. Tulp's Anatomical Lecture is, after the Potter bull,
the most gazed-at canvas in the Mauritshuis. It is not in a good
condition. There are evidences of over-varnishing and cobbling; nor is
it a very inspiring canvas. The head of Dr. Tulp is superb in
characterisation, and there is one other head, that of a man with
inquiring eyes, aquiline profile, the head strained forward (his name
is given in the critical works on Rembrandt), which arrests the
attention. An early composition, we are far from the perfection of The
Syndics. The self-portrait of the painter (1629) is a favourite,
though the much-vaunted feather in the head-gear is stiff; perhaps
feathers in Holland were stiff in those days. But the painters flock
to this portrait and never tire of copying its noble silhouette. The
two little studies of the painter's father and mother are
characteristic. One, of the man, is lent by Dr. Bredius. Rembrandt's
brother (study of an old man's head) shows a large old chap with a
nose of richest vintage. The portrait is brown in tone and without
charm. The Susanna Bathing is famous, but it is not as attractive as
Simeon in the Temple, with its masterly lighting, old gold in the
gloom. The Homer never fails to warm the cockles of the imagination.
What bulk! What a wealth of smothered fire in the apparel! The big
Saul listening to the playing of David is still mystifying. Is Saul
smiling or crying behind the uplifted cloak? Is he contemplating in
his neurasthenia an attempt on David's life with a whizzing lance? His
sunken cheeks, vague yet sinister eye, his turban marvellous in its
iridescence, form an ensemble not to be forgotten. David is not so
striking. From afar the large canvas glows. And the chiaroscuro is
miraculous.
The portrait of Rembrandt's sister, the Flight Into Egypt, the small,
laughing man, the negroes, and the study of an old woman, the latter
wearing a white head-dress, are a mine of joy for the student. The
sister's head is lent by Dr. C. Hofstede de Groot, the art expert.
There are only thirty-odd Rembrandts in Holland out of the five
hundred and fifty he painted. Of this number eighteen are in the
Mauritshuis. Holland was not very solicitous formerly of her masters.
Nowadays sentiment has changed and there is a gratifying outcry
whenever a stranger secures a genuine old master. As for the copies,
they, like the poor, are always with us. America is flooded every year
with forged pictures, especially of the minor Dutch masters, and
excellent are these imitations, it must be confessed.
There are only four specimens of Frans Hals here; portraits of Jacob
Pieterez, Aletta Hanemans, his wife; of William Croes, and the head of
a man, a small picture in The Jolly Toper style. The lace collar is
genuine Hals.
Let us close our catalogue and wander about the galleries. German and
English are the tongues one hears, Dutch seldom, French occasionally.
The Potter bull with the wooden legs is stared at by hundreds. As a
picture painted by a very young man it is noteworthy. The head of the
beast is nobly depicted. But what of the remainder of this
insignificant composition with its toad and cows, its meaningless
landscape? The Weenix swan is richer in paint texture. The Holbeins
are--two anyhow--of splendid quality. Of the Rubenses it is better to
defer mention until Antwerp is reached. They are of unequal value. The
same may be said of the Van Dycks. Look at that baby girl standing by
a chair. A Govert Flinck. How truthful! The De Heems are excellent
fruit and flower pieces. Excellent, too, the Huysums, Hondecoeters,
and Weenixes. There is a dead baby of the Dutch school (1661) which is
as realistic as a Courbet. We admired the small Memlic, or Memling,
and, naturally, the Metsus, Mierevelts, and Mierises. The Holy Virgin
and Infant Christ, by Murillo, is tender and sleek in colour. It hangs
near the solitary Velasquez of the museum, a portrait of
Charles-Baltasar, son of King Philip IV of Spain. It is not a
remarkable Velasquez.
The Pieter Lastman, a Resurrection of Lazarus, is of interest because
this painter was a preceptor of Rembrandt. William Kalf's still-life
is admirable, and the Aert Van den Neer moonlight scene (purchased
1903) is a lovely example of this artist. Indeed, all the minor
Dutchmen are well represented. Potter's much-praised Cow in the Water
is faded, and the style is of the sort we smile over at our own
Academy exhibitions. The Van Goyen waterscapes are not all of prime
quality, but there are two that are masterpieces. Amsterdam excels in
both Van Goyens and Jacob Ruisdaels. The Distant View of Haarlem of
the latter proved a disappointment. The colour is vanished quite, the
general effect flat. The Bol portrait of Admiral de Ruyter is a
sterling specimen. The Van de Veldes and Wouvermans are excellent. The
Good Housekeeper of Dou, a much-prized picture, with its tricky light
and dark. The Teniers and Ostades no longer interest us as they did.
Perhaps one tires soon of genre pictures. The inevitable toper, the
perambulating musician, the old woman standing in a doorway, the
gossips, the children, and the dog not house-broken may stand for the
eternal Ostade, while the merry-makings of David Teniers are too much
alike. However, this touch of spleen is the outcome of seeing so many
bituminous canvases.
Probably in no other painter's name have so many sins been committed
as in Rembrandt's. His _chiaroscuro_ is to blame for thousands of
pictures executed in the tone of tobacco juice. All the muddy browns
of the studio, with the yellow smear that passes for Rembrandtish
light, are but the monkey tricks of lesser men. His pupils often made
a mess of it, and they were renowned. Terburg's Despatch is an
interesting anecdote; so too Metsu's Amateur Musicians. There are the
average number of Dutch Italianate painters, Jan Both and the rest,
men who employed southern backgrounds and improvised bastard Italian
figures. Schalcken's candlelight scenes are not missing, though Dou
leads in this rather artificial genre. And every tourist led by a
guide hears that Wouvermans always introduced a white horse somewhere
in his picture. You leave Holland obsessed by that white animal.
Naturally the above notes hardly scratch the surface of the artistic
attractions in this Hague gallery. Not the least of them is to look
out on the Vyver lake and watch the swans placidly swimming around the
emerald islet in the middle. The Mauritshuis is a cabinet of gems, and
months could not stale its variety. There are important omissions, and
some of the names in the catalogue are not represented at top-notch.
But the Rembrandts are there, and there are the Potters, the Rubenses,
the Van Dycks, the Jan Steens--his Oyster Feast is here--the landscape
and marine painters, not to mention the portraiture, the Murillo,
Palma Vecchio, and the Titian. The single Roger van der Weyden, an
attribution, is a Crucifixion, and hangs near the Memlig. It is an
interesting picture. Of the sculpture there is not much to write.
Houdon, Hendrick de Keyser, Verhulst, Falconet, Blommendael, and
Xavery make up a meagre list.
At Baron Steengracht's house--admission by personal card--on the
Vyverberg there is a wonderful Rembrandt, Bathsheba After Her Bath, a
golden-toned canvas, not unlike the Susanna over at the Mauritshuis.
It was painted in 1643, about a year after he had finished The Night
Watch, a jewel of a Rembrandt and the clou of this collection. There
are some weak modern pictures and examples by Terburg, Metsu, Flinck,
Jordaens, Cuyp, Potter, Brouwer--the smoker, a fine work; a Hobbema
mill and others. In the Municipal Museum, full of curiosities in
furniture, armour, and costumes, there is a gallery of modern
paintings--Israel, David Bles, Mesdag, Neuhuys, Bisschop, J. Maris,
Weissenbruch, Bosboom, Blommers, and Mauve. There are also Mierevelts,
Jan Ravensteyns, Honthorst, Van Goyen, Van Ceulen, and a lot of
shooting-gallery (Doelen) and guild panoramas; there are miles of them
in Holland, and unless painted by Hals, Van der Heist, Elias, and a
few others are shining things of horror, full of staring eyes, and a
jumble of hands, weapons, and dry colours. But they are viewed with
religious awe by the Dutch, whose master passion is patriotic
sentiment.
There is the Huis ten Bosch (The House in the Wood), the royal villa,
a little over a mile from The Hague, in which De Wit's grisailles may
be seen. The Japanese and orange rooms are charming; the portraits by
Everdingen, Honthorst, Jordaens, and others are of historic interest.
THE MESDAG MUSEUM