ART STUDY IN ENGLAND
Arrived at Euston Station in the small hours of the morning, I bought
a penny loaf and walked the streets eating it and carrying my valise
until the day was sufficiently advanced for me to go to present a
letter of introduction given me by G.P. Putnam, the publisher, to his
agent in England, Mr. Delf, who at once took me to a lodging-house
in Bouverie Street, in which I got a room for six shillings a week,
service included, and an honest, kindly landlady to whom I still feel
indebted for the affectionate interest she took in me. I had letters
to Mr. S.C. Hall, editor of the "Art Journal," and the Rev. William
Black, pastor of the little Seventh Day Baptist Church at Millyard
in Goodmansfields, Leman Street, a very ancient and well-endowed
foundation, made by some Sabbatarian of centuries ago, with a
parsonage and provision for two sermons every Saturday; and under Mr.
Black's preaching I sat all the time I was in London. He was a man of
archaeological tastes whose researches had led him to the conviction
that the Seventh Day was the true Christian Sabbath, and to fellowship
with the congregation of Millyard. I was admitted to honorary
membership in the church, and the listening to the two dry-as-dust
sermons was compensated for by the cordial friendship of the pastor,
an invitation to dinner every Saturday, and the motherly interest of
his wife and daughters. My childhood's faith and my mother's creed
still hung so closely to me that the observances of our ancient church
were to me sacred, and the Sabbath day at Millyard still held me to
the simple ways of home. In that secluded nook, out of all the rush
and noise of London, we lived as we might have lived in an English
village; it was an _impasse_, and one who entered from the narrow and
squalid alleys which led to it was surprised to find the little square
of the old and disused graveyard, with its huge hawthorn trees and its
inclosure of the parsonage appendages, as peaceful and as far from the
world as if it had been in distant Devon.
My letter to Mr. Hall led to introductions to Leslie, Harding,
Creswick, and several minor painters, all of whom found me attentive
to the lessons they gave me on their own excellences and led me no
farther, but it also brought me into contact with a painter of a
higher and more serious order, J.B. Pyne, one of the few thinkers and
impartial critics I found amongst the English painters. Every Sunday I
went out to Pyne's house in Fulham, walking the six or seven miles
in the morning and spending the day there. Kitchen-gardens and green
fields then lay between Kensington and Fulham where are now the
museums, and there the larks sang and the hawthorn bloomed. After an
early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne
was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very
great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but
in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he
was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in
his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, for
an artist, of putting everything he did under the protection and
direction of a theory--a course which invariably checks the fertility
of technical resource, and which in his case had the unfortunate
effect of causing him to be regarded as a mere theorist, whose work
was done by line and rule. But I had good reason to know that Turner
thought more highly of him than the English public, and I am convinced
that as time goes on and his pictures acquire the mellowness of
tone for which he carefully calculated in his method and choice of
material, he will be more highly esteemed than in his own time, and
that the careful and systematic technique which characterized his
work, and which is so opposed to the random and hypothetically
inspired methods that are the admiration of a half-educated public,
will find its true appreciation in the future.
Of all the English artists of that day with whom I became acquainted,
Pyne impressed me as by a considerable measure the broadest thinker,
and, except Turner in his water-color, the ablest landscape painter;
old John Linnell in this respect standing nearest him in technical
power, with a more complete devotion to nature and her sentiment. In
Harding's work I took no interest; his conventions and tricks of
the brush repelled me, and generally his work left me cold and
discouraged, for this is the effect of wasted cleverness, that it
disheartens a man who, knowing that his abilities are less, finds the
achievement of cleverer men so poor in what satisfies the artist
of feeling. In it I saw an exaggeration of Pyne's defects and the
caricature of his good qualities. Creswick had a better feeling for
nature, but convention in his methods gave place to trick, and I
remember his showing me the way in which he produced detail in a
pebbly brookside, by making the surface of his canvas tacky and then
dragging over it a brush loaded with pigment which caught only on
the prominences, and did in a moment the work of an hour of faithful
painting.
A painter who taught me more than any other at that time was Edward
Wehnert, mainly known then as an illustrator, and hardly remembered
now even in that capacity. Attracted by one of his water-colors, I
went to him for lessons, which he declined to give, while really
giving me instructions informally and in the most kindly and generous
way, during the entire stay I made in London. Among all the artists I
have known, Wehnert's life was, with the exception of Sexton's, the
most pathetic. His native abilities were of a very high order, and
his education far above that which the British artist of that day
possessed. He was a pupil of Paul Delaroche, and the German blood
he had from his father gave him an imaginative element which the
Englishman in him liberated entirely from the German prescriptive
limitations, while there was just enough of the German poet in him to
give his design a sentiment which was entirely lacking in the English
figure painting of that day. He painted in both oil and water-color,
with a facility of design I have never known surpassed, making at a
single sitting, and without a model, a drawing with many figures. He
was at the moment I knew him engaged in illustrating Grimm's stories,
for a paltry compensation, but, as it seemed to me, in a spirit the
most completely concordant with the stories of all the illustrations I
have ever seen of that folk-lore.
Wehnert had several sisters, who had been accustomed to a certain ease
in life, and to maintain this all his efforts and those of a bachelor
brother were devoted, to the sacrifice of his legitimate ambitions;
he was overworked with the veriest hack-work of his profession, and
I never knew him but as a jaded man. He was a graduate of Göttingen,
widely read and well taught in all that related to his art as well as
in literature, and I used to sit much with him while he worked, and
most of my evenings were passed in the family. The sisters were women
who had been of the world, clever, accomplished, and with a restricted
and most interesting circle of friends; but over the whole family
there rested an air of tragic gravity, as if of some past which could
never be spoken of and into which I never felt inclined to inquire.
Among the memories of my first stay in London the Wehnerts awaken the
tenderest, for through many years they proved the dearest and kindest
of friends. And the hospitality of London, wherever I found access to
it, was unmeasured--the kindly feeling which showed itself to a young
and unknown student without recommendation or achievement made on me
an indelible impression. I now and then found people who asked me
where I had learned to speak English, or if all the people in the
section from which I came were as white as I was; but except in a
single case, that of a lady who proposed to make me responsible for
slavery in the United States, I never found anything but friendship
and courtesy, and generally the friendliness took the form of active
interest.
Most of my time was passed in hunting up pictures by Turner, and
of course I made the early acquaintance of Griffiths, a dealer in
pictures, who was Turner's special agent, and at whose gallery were to
be seen such of his pictures as he wished to sell,--for no inducement
could be offered which would make him dispose of some of them.
Griffiths told me that in his presence an American collector, James
Lenox, of New York, after offering Turner £5000, which was refused,
for the Old "Téméraire," offered him a blank check, which was also
rejected. Griffiths's place became one of my most common resorts,
for Griffiths was less a picture dealer than a passionate admirer of
Turner, and seemed to have drifted into his business through his love
for the artist's pictures; and to share in his admiration for Turner
was to gain his cordial friendship.
Here I first saw Ruskin and was introduced to him. I was looking at
some little early drawings of Turner, when a gentleman entered the
gallery, and, after a conversation between them, Griffiths came to
me and asked if I should not like to be presented to the author of
"Modern Painters," to which I naturally replied in the affirmative. I
could hardly believe my eyes, expecting to find in him something of
the fire, enthusiasm, and dogmatism of his book, and seeing only a
gentleman of the most gentle type, blonde, refined, and with as little
self-assertion or dogmatic tone as was possible consistently with the
holding of his own opinions; suggesting views rather than asserting
them, and as if he had not himself come to a conclusion on the subject
of conversation. A delightful and to me instructive conversation ended
in an invitation to visit his father's collection of drawings and
pictures at Denmark Hill, and later to spend the evening at his own
house in Grosvenor Street. After the lapse of forty-eight years, it
is difficult to distinguish between the incidents which took place in
this first visit to England in 1850 and those belonging to another a
little later, but my impression is very strong that it was during the
former that I spent the evening at the Grosvenor Street residence, at
which I met several artists of Ruskin's intimacy, and amongst them
G.F. Watts. I then saw Mrs. Ruskin, and I have a very vivid impression
of her personal beauty. I remember saying to a friend, to whom I spoke
of the visit just after, that she was the most beautiful woman I
had seen in England. As I approached the house there was a bagpiper
playing near it, and the pipes entered into the conversation in the
drawing-room. On my making some very disparaging opinion of their
music, which I heard for the first time, Mrs. Ruskin flamed up with
indignation, but, after an annihilating look, she said mildly, "I
suppose no Southerner can understand the pipes," and we discussed them
calmly, she telling some stories to illustrate their power and the
special range of their effect.
At that time Ruskin held very strong Calvinistic notions, and as I
kept my Puritanism unshaken we had as many conversations on religion
as on art, the two being then to me almost identical and to him
closely related. I remember his saying once, in speaking of the
doctrine of foreordination (to me a dreadful bugbear), as I was
drinking a glass of sherry, that he "believed that it had been
ordained from all eternity whether I should set that glass down empty
or without finishing the wine." This was to me the most perplexing
problem of all that Ruskin put before me, for it was the first time
that the doctrine of Calvin had come before me in a concrete form.
Another incident gave me a serious perplexity as to the accuracy of
Ruskin's perceptions of nature. Leslie had given me a card to see Mr.
Holford's collection of pictures, in which was one of Turner's, the
balcony scene in Venice, called, I think, "Juliet and her Nurse." It
was a moonlight, with the most wonderful rendering of a certain effect
seen with the moon at the spectator's back, and I noted in speaking to
Ruskin, later on, that no other picture I had ever seen of moonlight
had succeeded so fully in realizing it, to which he replied that he
had never noticed that it was a moonlight picture; but when I called
his attention to the display of fireworks on the Grand Canal, he
admitted that it was not customary to let off fireworks by day, and
that it must be a night scene.
My acquaintance with Ruskin lasted with varying degrees of intimacy,
and some interruptions due to his sympathy with the South during the
civil war and bitterness against our government, till 1870, when it
was terminated by a trivial personal incident to which his morbid
state of mind at that time gave a false color. We separated more and
more widely in our opinions on art in later years, and the differences
came to me reluctantly, for my reverence for the man was never to be
shaken, while my study of art showed me finally that, however correct
his views of the ethics of art might be, from the point of view of
pure art he was entirely mistaken, and all that his influence had done
for me had to be undone before any true progress could be made. What
little I had learned from the artists I knew had been in the main
correct, and had aided to show me the true road, but the teaching of
"Modern Painters," and of Ruskin himself later, was in the end fatal
to the career to which I was then devoted, for I was unable to get
back to the dividing of the ways.
But the first mistake was my own. What I needed was practical study,
the training of the hand, for my head had already gone so far beyond
my technical attainment that I had entered into the fatal condition of
having theories beyond my practice. My execution was so far in arrear
of my perceptions of what should be in the result, that instead of
the delight with which I had, untaught, and in my stolen hours, given
myself to painting, I felt the weight of my technical shortcomings so
heavily as to make my work full of distress instead of that content
with which the artist should always work. Everything became conscious
effort and the going was too much uphill. I had always been groping my
own way, scarcely as much assisted by the fragmentary good advice I
received as laid under heavier disabilities by the better knowledge of
what should be done. In art education the training of the hand should,
I am persuaded, always be kept in advance of the thinking powers, so
that the young student should feel that his ideal is just before him
if not at his finger's end. That this is so rarely the case with
art students in our day is, I am convinced, the chief reason of the
technical inferiority of our modern painters and the root of the
inferiority of modern art. The artist does not begin early enough.
I was already belated, and every advance I made in the study of the
theory of art put me farther behind, practically.
The hope of getting much technical instruction from competent masters
in England was speedily dispelled. Lessons in water-color I could get
at a guinea an hour, and to enter as a pupil with one of the better
painters was impossible. Pyne received from his pupils £100 a month. I
had calculated how far I could mate my fifty pounds go and put it at
six months. By the advice of Wehnert, I applied to Charles Davidson, a
member of the New Water-Color Society, for instruction, and went down
into Surrey, where he lived, to be able to follow him in his work
from nature. He lived at Red Hill, and in the immediate vicinity John
Linnell had built his then new home. In the few weeks I lived there I
saw a great deal of the old man, one of the most remarkable examples
of the old English type I have ever known, and to me as interesting a
problem from the religious point of view as from the artistic. Barring
differences of the creed, of which I knew and cared nothing (for my
own religious horizon had always included all "good-willing men," and
I had no conception of the distinctions of creed which would send on
one side of the line of safety an Established Churchman and on the
other a Nonconformist), we agreed very well, and in the general
impression I set Linnell down as a devout Christian of the Cromwellian
type, and he certainly was a man of remarkable intellectual powers,
both in art and in theology. His Christianity might have taken a form
of less domestic sternness, but I remembered my own father too well
to find it inconsistent with genuine piety, though not even my mother
ever inspired the awe Linnell and his religious severity excited in
me.
Linnell's landscape seemed to me the full expression of a healthy
love of nature, possible only to a moral sanity in the man--a cheery
Wordsworthian enjoyment of her, which as a rule I have never found
in perfection out of the English school and its derivatives; the
outpouring of a robust nature which prefers to see the outer world
with the spectacles of no school, and through the memory of no other
man; not self-taught in the sense of owing nothing to another mind,
but in the sense that what he had learned he had digested and
forgotten except as a chance word in the universal gospel of art;
technically weak, slovenly in style, but eminently successful in
telling the story he had to tell. Even then, with my limited knowledge
of painting, he seemed to me to furnish the antithesis to Pyne,--one
too careful of style and running to excessive precision, the other too
negligent and running into indecision; and this judgment still holds.
Of Davidson, my immediate teacher, there was only to be got certain
ways of doing certain things, limited to the elements of landscape;
how to wash in the sky, to treat foliage in masses, and those tricks
of the brush in which the English water-color school abounds; but no
larger views, or more individual, of art itself. What he taught was,
perhaps, what I most needed to learn, but I was already too far on the
way to learn it easily.
I made a visit of ten days to Paris and saw with great profit the work
of the landscape painters and of Delacroix, the other figure painters
in general not interesting me much. I carried a letter of introduction
from the Wehnerts to Mademoiselle Didot, the daughter of Firmin Didot,
the famous publisher, then an old blind man, but one of the most
interesting Frenchmen I ever knew, as Mademoiselle Didot was the most
brilliant Frenchwoman. The old man was much interested in what I had
to say of America, and he paid us the national compliment of saying
that we spoke English more intelligibly than Englishmen in general. As
I spoke no French, our conversation was in English, and he understood
me perfectly, though he said he rarely could follow without difficulty
the conversation of an Englishman, while Americans in general he
understood readily. To accomplish all that I did with my fifty pounds
it may be easily understood that I had to cut my corners close, and
in fact they were so closely cut in my Continental excursion that I
landed at Newhaven on my return with one shilling in my pocket,
and when, at the end of my stay in England, I took the train for
Liverpool, I had only sixpence (my passage being provided for), and my
good friend Delf, who saw me off, on finding the state of my purse,
insisted at the railway station on my taking a sovereign for
contingencies.
This habit of making no provision for accidents had been a part of my
moral training, the faith in the overruling Providence never forsaking
me for an instant, so that, whatever I set about to do, I made no
provision for accidents. To go ahead and do what I thought I ought to
do, and let the consequences take care of themselves, has been the
habit of mind in which I have always worked and probably still work.
If the thing to be done was right, I never thought of what might come
after, or even whether I had the means to carry a resolution into
effect, taking it for granted that the means would be provided because
the thing was to be done. I retain the distinct recollection of an
expression of my mother while I was making preparations for this first
voyage to Europe, and she was packing my clothes for the voyage and
her lips were silently moving and the slow tears running down her
cheeks. She said in her low and murmuring voice as if in comment on
her prayer, "Oh! no, he is too pure-hearted," and I knew that the
prayer was for my protection from the temptations of that world of
which she only knew the terrors and dangers from her Bible, and
that she was so wrapt in her spiritual yearnings that she had quite
forgotten my presence. Poor mother! I never deserved the great trust
she had in me, but the memory of that moment has served me in many
devious moments to keep me in the path. But if I had no such virtues
as those which she attributed to me, I had what was perhaps more
potent, the intuitions which I inherited from her, and such as often
take a man out of temptation before he is aware of its strength,
and before it becomes a real danger; nor can any man remember such
confidence on the part of his mother without, from very shame, if no
sterner motive should exist, maintaining a higher tone of life.
I did not leave London without a sight of Turner himself, due to the
friendly forethought of Griffiths, who so appreciated my enthusiasm
for the old man that he lost no opportunity to satisfy it. Turner was
taken ill while I was on this visit, with an attack of the malady
which later killed him, and I had begged Griffiths to ask him to let
me come and nurse him. He declined the offer, but was not, Griffiths
told me, quite unmoved by it. One day, after his recovery, I received
a message from Griffiths to say that Turner was coming to the gallery
at a certain hour on a business appointment, and if I would happen in
just before the time fixed for it I might see him.
At the appointed hour Turner came and found me in an earnest study
of the pictures in the farther end of the gallery, where I remained,
unnoticing and unnoticed, until a sign from Griffiths called me up.
He then introduced me as a young American artist who had a great
admiration for his work, and who, being about to return home, would
be glad to take him by the hand. It was difficult to reconcile my
conception of the great artist with this little, and, to casual
observation, insignificant old man with a nose like an eagle's beak,
though a second sight showed that his eye, too, was like an eagle's,
bright, restless, and penetrating. Half awed and half surprised, I
held out my hand. He put his behind him, regarding me with a humorous,
malicious look, saying nothing. Confused, and not a little mortified,
I turned away, and, walking down the gallery, went to studying the
pictures again. When I looked his way again, a few minutes later, he
held out his hand to me, and we entered into a conversation which
lasted until Griffiths gave me a hint that Turner had business to
transact which I must leave him to. He gave me a hearty handshake,
and in his oracular way said, "Hmph--(nod) if you come to England
again--hmph (nod)--hmph (nod)," and another hand-shake with more
cordiality and a nod for good-by. I never saw a keener eye than his,
and the way that he held himself up, so straight that he seemed almost
to lean backwards, with his forehead thrown forward, and the piercing
eyes looking out from under their heavy brows, and his diminutive
stature coupled with the imposing bearing, combined to make a very
peculiar and vivid impression on me. Griffiths afterwards translated
his laconism for me as an invitation to come to see him if I ever came
back to England, and added that though he was in the worst of tempers
when he came in, and made him expect that I should be insulted, he
was in fact unusually cordial, and he had never seen him receive a
stranger with such friendliness except in the case of Cattermole, for
whom he had a strong liking. In the conversation we had during the
interview, I alluded to our good fortune in having already in America
one of the pictures of his best period, a seacoast sunset in the
possession of Mr. Lenox, and Turner exclaimed, "I wish they were all
put in a blunderbuss and shot off!" but he looked pleased at the
simultaneous outburst of protest on the part of Griffiths and myself.
When I went back to England for another visit he was dead.
I may frankly say as to Turner's art, that I enjoyed most the
water-colors of the middle period, though the latest gave me another
kind of delight,--that of the reading of a fairy-story, of the
building of glorious castles in the air in my younger days, that of
something to desire and despair of. The drawings of the England and
Wales series in the possession of Ruskin seemed to my critical
faculty the _ne plus ultra_ of water-color painting,--especially the
"Llanthony Abbey," of which I recall those early impressions with the
greatest distinctness[1]. I saw in the Academy Exhibition the last
pictures he ever exhibited, some whaling subjects, fresh from his
retouching of two days before, gorgeous dreams of color art, but only
dreams--the actuality had all gone out. I saw them years after when
they had become mere wrecks, hardly recognizable.
[Footnote 1: I saw it again in the Guildhall Exhibition of 1899.]
I saw also that year a picture by Rossetti and one by Millais, and the
latter impressed me very strongly; in fact it determined me in the
manner in which I should follow art on my return home. I did not and
could not put it on the same plane as the "Llanthony Abbey," but the
straight thrust for the truth was evidently the shortest way to
a certain excellence, and this of the kind most akin to my own
faculties, and I said to Delf, who was with me at the exhibition
of the Academy, that if ever English figure painting rose out of
mediocrity it would be through the work of the P.R.B. My impression is
that the picture was the "Christ in the Carpenter's Shop," but of this
I cannot be sure, though I am certain that it was in the exhibition of
1850. The Rossetti was in the old "National Society," and was either
the "Childhood of the Virgin Mary" or the "White Lady." Beautiful as
it was, it did not impress me as did the temper of Millais's work,
the scrupulous conscientiousness of which chimed with my Puritan
education. I left England with a fermentation of art ideas in my
brain, in which the influence of Turner and Pyne, the teachings
of Wehnert, and the work of the Pre-Raphaelites mingled with the
influence of Ruskin, and especially the preconception of art work
derived from the descriptions, often strangely misleading, of the
"Modern Painters."
I received from my brother, as I had anticipated, the order for a
passage on the Atlantic, one of the Collins line of steamers, and one
of my fellow-passengers was Jenny Lind, on her way for her first visit
to America under the guidance of Barnum. She gave a concert on board
for the benefit of the firemen and sailors, and to this the half of
Delf's sovereign contributed, the other half going for a bottle of
Rhine wine, to return the compliment of my next neighbor at the table,
who had invited me to take a glass of wine one day. Thus, as usual, I
landed penniless from my venture, but fortunately found my brother on
the wharf expecting the arrival of the steamer, her trips having
been made with such precision that the hour of arrival was generally
anticipated correctly. In those days the steamers were rarely driven,
and a voyage of fourteen days was not considered a bad one. A day's
run of 336 knots was a triumph of steaming and rarely attained. But
we were at the beginning of the contest between the Collins and the
Cunard steamers, and up to that time the American line had generally a
little the better of it.
The rest of that year and the year following were given to hard and
monotonous painting from nature while the weather permitted, and in
the winter to working out clumsily the mysteries of picture-making, a
work which, as I was without direction or any correct appreciation of
what I had it in me to do, became a drudgery which I went through as
an indispensable duty, but with no satisfaction. My larger studies
from nature (25x30 inches) had attracted attention and had been hung
on the line, getting for me the election to the Associateship of
Design, and the appellation of the "American Pre-Raphaelite,"--all
which for a man so lately embarked in the profession was considered a
high honor, as it really was. But the success only confirmed me in my
incorrect views of art and carried me farther from the true path. As
studies from nature, the fidelity and completeness of them, even
in comparison with Durand's, was something which the conventional
landscape known then and there had never approached, and to the
respectable amateurs of that day they were puzzles. In one of them,
a study of a wood scene with a spring of water overshadowed by a
beech-tree, all painted at close quarters, I had transplanted a violet
which I wanted in the near foreground, so as to be sure that it was in
correct light and proportion. This was in the spirit of the Ruskinian
doctrine, of which I made myself the apostle. On that study I spent
such hours of the day as the light served, for three months, and then
the coming of autumn stopped me. Any difficulty in literal rendering
of a subject was incomprehensible to me, and in fact in that kind of
work there is little difference, for it is but copying, and requires
only a correct eye and infinite patience, both of which I had; and it
was a puzzle to me rather than a compliment when the veteran Durand
said to me of one of my studies, that it was a subject he would not
have dared attack on account of the difficulty of the effect of light,
for to me it was simply a question of time and sticking to it. It was
not art, but the public did not know it any more than I did, and I was
admitted to a place which I believe was one of the highest amongst
my contemporaries at home in a way that led to little even in its
complete success. I influenced some of my contemporaries and gave a
jog to the landscape painting of the day, and there it ended, through
a diversion of my ambition to another sphere, but there it must have
ended; even if I had never been so diverted.