I leave to a biographer in the Future the task of recording Mr. Francis
James’s birthplace and of settling the number of his years; of saying,
too, where he chiefly lived and chiefly practised. I am concerned with
his drawings, and not with the man, except in so far as his drawings
must reveal him; and the real man, and not the outside facts about him,
a man’s work does always to some extent reveal. In the case of Francis
James, his work is his water-colours. I know no oil painting by him. I
remember no pencil studies. I know no etchings by him, no lithographs
by him. And, moreover, modern man though he is, he seems to be able to
express himself without the assistance of silver point--the interesting
and difficult medium, the employment of which threatens to become a
label of the cultivated. His own work in water-colour is as direct,
immediate, uncorrectable as that; but colour is of the very essence of
it. Whatever he tackles, whatever he elects to let alone, Francis James
is essentially a colourist.
One thing about his life and circumstances I shall here--taking breath
in a parenthesis--venture to record. As a youth he was never compelled
to prepare for a profession. Being a country gentleman who gradually
became an artist, Mr. Francis James had a little comfortable means,
one may suppose. Is he to be cursed, then, on that account, with the
name of amateur? Certainly not. No more than Méryon, who was brought
up in the French Navy; no more than W. W. May, the charming marine
artist, in early life a sailor, and in late life Keeper of the Painted
Hall at Greenwich; no more than Robert Goff, who was in the Coldstream
Guards; or Seymour Haden, President of his own Academy, and once
such a successful surgeon that he might have been President of the
College of Surgeons to boot. In art of any kind--in Painting, Writing,
Modelling--the spirit in which a man does his work, and not the means
that he possesses, or the family that he belongs to, constitutes him
professional or amateur. Is his art his chief interest? If so, whatever
may be his status upon other grounds, professional artist, serious
professional artist, he is, with his books or his pictures. To the
serious artist a little money is of endless usefulness, even if it be
only a very scanty portion--three hundred a year and an umbrella--for
that scanty portion, which has caused the fool to eat the bread of
idleness, has caused the wise man to work with a will. It has gone some
little way towards securing him that deepest boon for the artistic
nature, _la liberté du travail_.
I suppose it was his exquisite enjoyment of flowers, as he had lived
amongst them, at all seasons of the year, in their natural place, that
gave the first impulse to Francis James to render flowers in Art.
Then, as to method in Water-colour painting, there came the influence
of Dewint, and then the influence of some, at least, of modern French
practice, and then the influence of his neighbour, down in Sussex--that
sensitive Impressionist, H. B. Brabazon, with his mature thought
upon the matter, and his delightful practice, his ‘blobs’ upon the
drawing-paper--‘blobs’ which are so very few, and are so admirably
right. James has become, of late years at all events, less purely an
Impressionist than Brabazon. In his work, whatever be its theme, there
is always more of positive and yet refined draughtsmanship. But the
influence of Brabazon is there all the same; or, at least, is there
from the first. An immense sensitiveness as to colour, a refinement
of colour which does not preclude boldness, the cultivation of an
alertness as to the most delicate gradations of colour--these things
characterise Francis James. They are of assistance to him, even of
incalculable assistance to him, in all the things that he depicts, in
all the visions he realises. But I think they are of most use to him of
all when it is flowers he is looking at; composing with grace, painting
with ineffable charm.
And, so far as I understand, flowers were the subject with which he
chose to begin.
It would, however, be now thoroughly unfair to Francis James to
consider him only as a flower painter. Outside flowers altogether,
there is a class of effect which he has made his own, and which is his
by reason of his habitual command of colour--fearless, original, and
gay. I am talking of the church interiors, beheld in keen, clear light;
and interesting less it may be by their architecture--as to which,
while John Fulleylove, and Albert Goodwin, and Wyke Bayliss, speak, who
is there that shall speak with equal authority to-day?--interesting
less by their architecture than by their hues and their illuminations,
and their accidents and accessories; the ornaments about the altar,
the wreath of flowers that encircle the figure of a saint, the bit of
heraldic glass that recalls Nuremberg, the sacred piece hoisted above
the altar; the banner, it may be, or perhaps only the pink cushion of
the altar rail, or the little green curtain that gives privacy to the
box of the confessional. At Rothenburg, as well as Nuremberg itself,
Mr. James went in for very serious draughtsman’s study of statues in
their niches, of the traceried wall, of plate upon the altar, of this
and that little detail, of which the treatment remained broad while it
became finished. At Nuremberg--to name two, that for excellent reasons
I remember--admirable is the broad and luminous picturesqueness of his
interiors of the Kaiser Kapelle and St. Sebald. At Rothenburg, as far
as simple architecture is concerned, what a variety lay before him!
And yet from all its richness and variety he turned now and then, to
paint the humble window of the little _bourgeois_ or little tradesman’s
house; the window-sill with its few pots of green-leaved and blossoming
flowers, seen, some of them, against the brown-red shutter; fragile
fuchsia, and healthy geranium.
But whether Francis James is occupied with flower painting, or with
church interiors of Germany or the Eastern Riviera, or with landscape
pieces, or with studies of the village shop, it is always the same
spirit of broad interpretation that dominates his work. Its business
is to recall an impression--artistic always, whether beautiful or
quaint--it is not generally its business to be imitative, strictly
imitative, of actual object or scene. Quite an infinity of detail is
pleasantly suggested by a drawing of the grocer’s shop at Bewdley--the
Post Office of the country town--and just as much by ‘Shop Front,
Bewdley,’ which shows us the deep bow-window of Mr. Bryan, the
bookseller; a background before which some quiet figure out of Jane
Austen might conceivably have passed. But the detail is not obtruded.
If you peer closely into the paper, it is not dryly made out. In a
sense, ‘_il n’y a rien_.’ Stand away a little, and then again, ‘_il y a
tout_.’
But, of course, Mr. James’s preoccupation with a quaint little world of
the provinces, whose combinations of colour, as he here shows us them,
are curious rather than lovely--that preoccupation of his is occasional
rather than constant; and we shall never therefore take his measure by
an inspection of work like this. Some quaint line it possesses, and
to the interest of quaint as well as of lovely combinations of line,
Francis James is quite alive. But it is where the combinations of line
may be lovely--where they may have their highest quality herein--and
yet more where with beautiful lines there must (to do justice to the
theme) be associated beautiful colour; it is here that Mr. James is
most characteristic. ‘Autumn, Asolo,’ shows this to some extent; and
so do other landscapes in which the world to which he has addressed
himself, whether of Lombard or Venetian plateau, or of Alpine height,
is dealt with with intrepidity. But it is to churches and flowers--or
sometimes to the interiors of drawing-rooms or bedrooms lived in by
tasteful people, and full therefore of objects that should gratify
the eye in their happy, well-arranged union--it is to churches and
flowers in the main, and most of all flowers, that we must come back,
to find Francis James quite at his most exquisite, quite at his most
characteristic.
Perhaps it is hardly possible nowadays to paint flowers without
submitting to some extent to the influence of the Japanese. From
them, whatever else you learn, you learn freedom of treatment and a
conception based upon essentials. The limitations of Japanese Art it
does not happen just now to be the fashion to recognise; though every
one who is really educated--every one who understands the Classics of
Art, the immense achievements of Europe from Holbein to Turner--must
know of these limitations, and must feel them. That does not prevent
the perception of the value of those things which Japanese art (among
the arts of other peoples indeed) has had some capacity for teaching
us. And when Francis James makes his pink and white roses trail over
the paper, with tints so pale and delicate, I think sometimes of the
Japanese. I think of them much less when he sets a whole posy--a whole
group, at least--in a tumbler, and has his massive colour, his rich,
great colour, his fearless juxtapositions. And then, perhaps, with the
Japanese influence not lost altogether, but still mainly subdued--not
displayed at all, and scarcely even insinuated--do I rejoice in Francis
James at his best.
Among painters, water-colour painters, Francis James is the poet of
flowers, as Van Huysum, it may be--two hundred years ago--was their
prose chronicler. The public knows Van Huysum best by his work in
oils. The rare amateur of noble prints knows him best by Earlom’s
two splendid translations of him into the medium of mezzotint. But
the not less rare connoisseur of the fine drawings of a past period,
knows him by water-colour sketches, such as those possessed by the
Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. And as there
are moments, moods, opportunities, when men apparently far apart get
nearer together, so, just now and again by Van Huysum’s practice in
water-colour--by his pure sketching in that medium--the gulf that
separates him from Francis James, is, not bridged indeed, but narrowed.
The moment Van Huysum passes beyond the pure sketch, the perhaps even
rapid study, something that is of the nature of the artificial, of
intentional and obvious intricacy, begins to assert itself. Now, with
the delightful artist of the day whose eulogium I am slowly making,
that is never the case.
Francis James’s fondness for flowers is, in some sense, akin to a
woman’s instinctive fondness for everybody’s children. He has joy in
their mere life. And it is their life that he paints. And he paints
them in their own atmosphere--the sunlight heightening so the key of
their colour, or a little rain perhaps has fallen and their life is
refreshed. Had the rain fallen when Van Huysum painted them, the drop
would have glistened on the petal; the perfection of the imitation of
it is what we might have been asked, first of all, to see and admire.
But it is not their accidental condition that Francis James imitates.
It is their splendid vigour or exquisite freshness--see, for instance,
this noble primula with its deep glowing, slightly mauveish reds and
its enriched green leaves; in its condition, a very bridegroom coming
out of his chamber.
Amongst flowers, Francis James, I find, is universal in his loves.
He does not swear fidelity to the rose--or he does not swear the
particular fidelity which is only exclusiveness. In every garden,
every greenhouse, every season of the year, he has (to use the sailor
simile) ‘a wife in every port.’ He is as various in his appreciations
of the beloved and the admirable as is a young man by Mr. Thomas Hardy.
Primula, tulip, rose, pelargonium, and then the hundred orchids--having
thanked one of them for its beauty, and profited by it, he turns with
happy expectation to another. Nor does disappointment await him.
One little confidence--made to me long ago, I recollect--I propose,
before I finish this article, ruthlessly to break. James destroys
many drawings. He strangles the ill-begotten. He pronounces, with
severity, judgment upon his creations. He assists the fittest to
survive. Three or four years back he was wrestling manfully with the
treatment of the orchid. No one, I think, had really treated the orchid
before then. Since then, in oils, Mr. William Gale, in a group of
works too little known, has treated it with unequal, of course, yet
often with remarkable, skill. But when Francis James had drawn, at
Sanders’ nursery--during several months’ sojourn at St. Albans, to that
end--orchids of every kind, great was the massacre of the innocents. We
were permitted afterwards to see the successes; the failures had been
done away with.
This is characteristic, and that is why I record it. People who
observe flowers, and do not only buy them, will not be astonished
that when this happened most--this severe review and condemnation--it
was orchids, orchids only, that were in question. And this for
several reasons. Some are beautiful, but some are ugly, almost morbid
indeed--things for the delectation of Des Esseintes, the too neurotic
hero of M. Huysman’s _À Rebours_; scarcely for healthy folk, whom
mere strangeness may not fascinate. And then again, the extreme
intricacy of the forms of some of them, tells in two ways against
their employment as subjects for a painter. It is not only--it is not
so much--that their intricacy adds to the difficulty of correctness;
it is rather that it adds to the difficulty of their comprehension by
the spectator of the draughtsman’s drawing. The public knows the rose
and the geranium--it knows, besides, two score of flowers of English
garden and hedgerow. But the intricacy of the orchid is as yet an
unfamiliar intricacy, and it is infinitely various; and therefore,
though the painting of the orchid in Francis James’s water-colours
was an experiment interesting and courageous, and within reasonable
limits successful, that work was but one phase--far from the most
important--of a career and of a talent full already of individuality,
distinction, charm.
(_Studio_, January 1898.)