Part 2

But to some extent it is to the example of these specialists that must also be ascribed the skill in sea painting that, as time went on, was attained by many of their contemporaries who did not deal systematically with this class of subject. The habitual landscape painter, accustomed to fixed forms and effects that followed more or less regular rules, might easily have drifted into a conventional representation of the sea if he had not been shown the way to look at it by the men who knew it intimately, and if works by these men had not existed to provide him with the means of testing his own achievement. For his own credit, however, he had to strive to compete with them in knowledge of the sea, and had to measure an understanding of it acquired by deliberate and conscious effort against theirs which had been obtained by prolonged and personal contact; and to uphold his reputation as a painter of capacity he had to prove that he could grasp the essentials of whatever type of material he might elect to handle. Therefore, the adoption of a convention, the inadequacy of which could have easily been demonstrated, would have been a confession either of want of conscience or of deficient intelligence, and would have reflected upon his claim to rank as an artist of distinction.

That is why at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth the number of men who, without specializing in the subject, painted the sea with undeniable ability, had become considerable. By that time artists were moving about much more freely in search of motives, and many of them made frequent visits to the coast with the particular intention of mastering the problems of sea painting, and of studying at first hand phases of nature which were to them comparatively new. Moreover, the interest taken by the public in sea pictures had grown in a marked degree, and there was a demand which the popular artist was called upon to satisfy. So most of the landscape men alternated regularly between inland views and coast scenes, and painted both with the same sincerity and the same strength of purpose. Constable, David Cox, De Wint, Copley Fielding, Edward Duncan, J. S. Cotman--to quote a few of the more notable names--added important records of sea and coast subjects to the list of their more memorable productions; and there was, of course, Turner, who might with justice be claimed as the greatest of all marine painters despite the fact that his sea pictures make up only a small proportion of his total achievement.

Turner was supreme because he, and he only, estimated at its full value the poetry and the majesty of the sea; because he alone could grasp its immensity and its tragic strength and yet be exquisitely in sympathy with its smiling serenity and placid calm. Turner saw and understood the drama of the sea, and by the largeness of his vision and the depth of his understanding he was enabled to present this drama in all its varieties of action. But then, Turner had not only “the eye of an eagle”--as Ruskin said of him--he had, too, the gift of imagination by which realities are transmuted into poetic suggestion. Accuracy of detail and plain statement of fact were the foundations on which his art was built (and no one made more sure of his facts or looked more closely into details), but the superstructure he erected was designed and arranged to express his own large conception of his motive as a whole, and to illustrate the workings of his own emotion. Therefore, when he painted the sea it was the appeal that his subjects made to his imagination that directed and established the final result; and how strong this appeal was can be judged from the amazing beauty and power of his accomplishment as a marine painter. Although it has been given to no other artist to rival or approach Turner in mastery of accomplishment, although it is difficult to believe that there can ever be another painter who will be able to claim equality with him in the same sphere of art, the stimulus of Turner’s example must always be vividly felt by every true student of nature, and especially by every one who aspires to paint marine subjects in the right manner. For, certainly, the poetry of the sea and the drama of the sea are among the most salient of its characteristics, and there is surrounding it an atmosphere of sentiment that must be sympathetically perceived. A commonplace and matter-of-fact statement of wave forms would be about as worthless artistically as an architectural elevation of a mountain range, and the more coldly and scientifically correct it was the less would it convey of the spirit of the sea. The frame of mind in which the painter must assume his task must be akin to that of Thomson when he wrote:

“Thou, majestic main A secret world of wonders in thyself!”

and in this world of wonders he must be prepared always to find some new secret which will deepen his sense of the mystery of the sea and make him feel that with all his striving he has touched only the fringe of its romance. At no stage in his study will he be in a position to say that he has learned enough and that his subject has no more to reveal; every fresh discovery will open up to him new matters for investigation, and suggest other lines of thought.

Turner, at all events, never came to the conclusion that his knowledge of the sea was complete, for to the end of his life he maintained the freshness and variety of his interpretation. He gave to it, year by year, a deeper note of sentiment, responding always more directly to the impression he received, and eliminating everything that did not help in the attainment of his pictorial purpose. Detail at the last he almost entirely disregarded, concentrating the whole of his attention upon the main effect by which temperamentally he was inspired; but the things essential for the construction of his picture and for making clear the meaning of his motive he observed with the most scrupulous care. Even in his slightest and, seemingly, most casual notes of the sea there was the subtlest accuracy of vision, and there was the truest summing up of the story that was told by the particular phase of the subject he had chosen for the exercise or his powers as an interpreter of nature’s message. Never did he descend to a formula or use a set convention to gain his dramatic result. It was partly for this reason that he stood so sublimely apart from his contemporaries; he did not repeat himself, while they were too often content to follow rules and to do over again things that they had discovered to be attractive to the public. Yet many of the artists of Turner’s period were men of distinction and their sea paintings had satisfying merit and no small measure of inspiration. Stanfield suggested well the movement and action of the sea and was sensitive to its atmosphere; Copley Fielding saw and took the opportunities that the sea offered him for arranging graceful compositions and charming studies of light and shade, and he, too, had a sound understanding of wave movement; De Wint and David Cox, both masterly students of nature, painted the misty subtleties of the coast with masculine power and with the knowledge that comes only from prolonged and thoughtful observation; and others not less observant showed that the pictorial possibilities of the sea had by no means escaped them. But none of them arrived at Turner’s magnificent disregard of limitations or approached him in dramatic strength, and certainly none of them had the courage to abandon, as he did, detailed reality for the sake of presenting a higher and more impressive truth.

Indeed, that is one of the mysteries of Turner’s genius--that he could distort facts and leave out apparently essential details and yet make his realization of nature perfect in its truth--and what is still more mysterious is that this system of distortion and elimination was not a matter of convention but a universally applicable principle of practice and one which in his hands was capable of infinite variation. By an infallible instinct he grasped instantly the meaning of his subject as a whole and decided what he should accentuate or omit to make that meaning clear, and all his devices of technical treatment were as infallibly directed by an exact understanding of the way in which they could best be made to serve his end. Paradoxically, he left things out to gain a greater completeness of result, and he departed from strict correctness to secure more absolute reality. But all this he did by the aid of an extraordinary insight into nature’s facts and under the guidance of a judgment which was never at fault.

That is why Turner’s manner of representing the sea cannot be applied by lesser men. Without any disparagement of the many able marine painters who have practised since his time it can safely be said that on none of them his mantle has fallen. Certainly to none of them has been granted his rare endowment of intimate vision and profound imagination; certainly none has possessed that combination of exhaustive knowledge and perfect confidence which made him so consummately a master of his craft. There have been in the recent past, there are at work to-day, artists who have studied the sea in the most sympathetic spirit and whose seriousness of effort deserves the highest praise, artists whose accomplishment would be wholly satisfying if Turner had not shown so brilliantly the greater possibilities of sea painting; but theirs is a limited and specialized view beside that of their great predecessor. It is as well, however, that they do not try to do too much. To paint the abstract drama of the sea in the only way that can be made convincing, the possession of a temperament is absolutely essential, but this temperament must be schooled and disciplined by lifelong study or the drama will degenerate into incredible fantasy. Turner was temperamentally fitted to attempt the highest flights, and with his perfect technical equipment nothing was beyond his reach. Other artists must be content to admire his poetic power without aspiring to rival it. But, after all, honest, well-educated, serious prose is better than incoherent poetry, no matter how well-intentioned that may be; and certainly the prose of many of our modern sea painters is very good indeed--clear, logical, and distinguished by a true sense of style--and into much of it comes that touch of poetic feeling that gives charm and picturesqueness to the descriptive statement.

To illustrate the difference between these two types of sea painting the work of Henry Moore can appropriately be instanced. He was, next to Turner, the most learned and accomplished student of marine motives and the finest exponent of the facts of the sea whom any school has produced. But beside the dramatic poetry of Turner his art was prose, fine prose, persuasive and dignified, but never rising into inspired fancy. In other words, he saw nobly and beautifully, but Turner saw and imagined as well, and the more he saw the more splendidly did he use his imagination.

Yet Henry Moore has indisputably his place among the masters because his art, though not profoundly imaginative, was as able in achievement as it was accurate in observation. Moreover, he was acutely responsive to the sentiment of nature, and interpreted her in her many moods with exquisite discretion. Frank and straightforward as his work always was, it never lacked the direction of a sympathetic mind; its strength was controlled by a singularly correct sense of artistic propriety and was never allowed to degenerate into mere display of executive cleverness. Certainly Henry Moore was a fine craftsman, and was not hampered by technical difficulties in the practice of his art; indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of his pictures, as we see them to-day, is the confidence of the handling by which they are distinguished.

This confidence, this directness of method, was the outcome of a not less confident understanding of the material with which he was accustomed to deal. The things he knew were to him matters of such complete knowledge that he was able to concentrate himself entirely upon the pictorial realization of them without having to make experiments or calculations to prove whether or not his assumptions were correct. Wisely, too (not having the Turner temperament), he did not aim at possibilities which he honestly recognized as being beyond his reach. Facts and realities he could grasp, subtle shades of fact and delicate variations of reality he could express with discriminating subtlety and sensitive delicacy, but to conceive a vision in which actual nature would be turned into a gloriously fanciful abstraction was outside the range of his personality. So he kept to the path which it was right that he should tread, and made no excursions into strange places in the domain of art, proving himself thereby a master of himself as well as of his art.

We have every reason to be grateful to him for his solid and well-balanced common sense. Henry Moore as an imitator of Turner, following in the wake of a leader whom he could never overtake, would have been a wasted force in art. Henry Moore as a painter true to his own convictions, striving earnestly to set before us his extraordinarily intimate view of the sea, has established a standard against which the achievements of our modern sea painters can be measured most instructively, and has pointed out the principles on which these painters must work if they are to justify their effort. Knowledge such as Turner possessed is by its very vastness incomprehensible to the ordinary man; but knowledge like that which Henry Moore gathered is possible to other artists, though to few of them is given his capacity to express it, and to fewer still his sureness of touch and his command of executive method.

What is particularly to be learned from Henry Moore’s pictures is the wide variety of matters which have to be studied by the men who aspire to paint the sea with a sufficient measure of artistic fitness. There are, of course, many ways of representing the sea pictorially--as a background or setting to some nautical incident; as an accessory in a scene which has humanity for its main interest; as a generalized scheme of colour or tone; as a decorative motive with conventionalized forms; or as a poetically indefinite fantasy in which nearly everything is left to the imagination of the beholder. But the most scholarly and serious way--Henry Moore’s way--is to analyse and dissect; to account for every variation in form and every changing gleam of colour; to find the reasons for each of the many kinds of wave movement; to learn the connexion between certain conditions of the weather and certain states of the sea; to know how to produce a sea picture which will be logical throughout and without contradictions of atmospheric effect which are calculated to excite the protests of the marine expert who knows his subject and is not inclined to take artistic licence into consideration. Henry Moore spared himself none of these exhaustive preparations and had the technical skill to make the outcome of them wholly attractive in artistic quality; that is why he ranks as a master at whose feet it is good for the would-be sea painter to sit in all humility.

If a series of his pictures is examined it will be seen at once that in each one some special problem is dealt with and some definite phase of the sea is taken as the motive. Unthinking people are apt to say that sea paintings are monotonous because they lack incident and variety of subject, because they are nothing but waves and sky, but this objection implies an unobservant habit of mind. Henry Moore did not repeat himself, and among the most personal characteristics of his work was its breadth of outlook, a breadth of outlook which was developed by his constant search for fresh impressions. Although he had not had, like Stanfield or Chambers, a professional connexion with the sea, he was frequently afloat and always trying to enlarge his experience of his subject. He had, too, the gift of very rapid technical expression which enabled him to set down what he saw while the impression was vividly in his mind, so that his first clear conviction was not modified or obscured by mechanical causes--by that prolongation of effort which leads to an ill-assorted mixing of ideas and an indecisive manner of statement.

This combination of instantaneous apprehension and unhesitating expression is, indeed, a necessity for the artist who wishes to avoid a merely conventional rendering of the sea and who is anxious to suggest properly its really infinite variety. There is so much that must be done quickly, there are such incessant changes of effect and condition, that the deliberate worker, thinking slowly and using his appliances unreadily, is always in danger of being left with his intention unrealized. He sees something that appeals to him as a good subject and he begins to study it in all seriousness; but before he has grasped its meaning, and before he has more than the first few careful touches on his canvas, the effect that stirred him has gone, and in its place there is something else that is surprisingly different. No wonder if unable to keep pace with nature’s elusive tricks he becomes after a while hopelessly bewildered and gives up the struggle in despair. Possibly, being a conscientious person, he decides to paint one aspect only of the sea and to specialize in one type of subject which he can master by long and laborious practice; or, being less particular, he builds up a pretty convention which will help him to turn out superficially attractive things that will please a none too critical public. But in neither way is the great sea painter made, the painter who can tell the story of the sea and convey to us its sentiment and its character.

What makes the problems of marine painting so complex is, first of all, the fact that the sea is never in absolute repose, and therefore its surface forms are constantly undergoing some degree of change. Another difficulty is that the sea-water seems to vary in composition and consistency according to the conditions under which it is viewed; at one time it is solid, opaque, ponderous, and sombre in colour, and at another it is light, transparent and full of delicate tints. As it is a reflecting substance as well as one through which light can pass it alters in appearance in the most surprising manner under the incidence of sunlight or in response to the variations in atmospheric effect; and as it is a moving body it appears to be subject to no laws of construction and to have no sort of method in its restlessness. Most people, indeed, would hold that the cynical comment on womankind, “Toujours femme varie, souvent elle est folle,” could be applied with particular appropriateness to the sea, so feminine is it in its charming irresponsibility.

Yet the student of the sea can, if he sets to work in the right way, discover the sources of its irresponsibility and the reasons for its lapses into insanity. He can dissect its forms and learn its anatomical construction, and he can find out what regulates and determines its movements. He can establish a direct agreement between the apparent texture of the sea and the bottom over which it flows, as well as between its surface character and the nature of the weather. And having dissected and analysed, having investigated and arranged his discoveries in the proper order, he can solve pictorial problems which ordinary men would count as puzzles to which there was no key. With this knowledge at his disposal he would be able, too, to paint pictures which would show the sea as it is and as it can be, not as an erratic and unaccountable phenomenon acting contrary to all natural laws, which is the view given of it by the artists who are incautious enough to paint it without having learned its ways.

For instance, the painter properly equipped would make the right distinction, both in colour and wave form, between the deep sea and that in shallow places; between the transparency of waves breaking on a rocky coast and those on a sandy beach; between the wave action in a tidal current moving with or against the wind; or between the seas that are penned in a narrow channel and those that are running free in wide spaces. These are elementary matters, perhaps, in the study of marine painting, but elementary or not they are only too often misapprehended by the careless observer; and they are typical of a host of others which are not less likely to become pitfalls for the unwary. Neglect of them leads to slovenly and unsatisfactory production and to a kind of work that may be cheaply effective but that has actually no justification for existence.

One mistake very often made by men who have not carried their studies far enough is to miss the necessary connexion between the state of the sea and the accompanying condition of the atmosphere; another is to paint in a sea picture a sky that is in wrong relation to the wave movement. Both these errors arise from the failure of the painter to study his subject as a whole, from his inexperience of what may be called the technical peculiarities of his material. He has by him a sea note that seems worth treating on a more ambitious scale, and he finds in his portfolio a sketch of a sky that composes nicely and is quite attractive in its general character; so he mixes the two together and calls the compilation a marine painting. But, really, unless by some lucky chance the two sketches happened to have been done under similar weather conditions the picture would be no more true to nature than the laboured effort of the “art” photographer who prints his sky from one negative and his landscape from another; or who grafts a studio-lighted figure on to a background photographed out of doors.

The sea painter must, for the credit of art, keep clear of such silly tricks and mechanical devices. He must be logical both in his observations and in the use he makes of them, and he must be consistent in his statement of the facts before him. A picture in which the sea suggests half a gale while the sky is one which would be seen only in a dead calm is an obvious absurdity, and it would be not less ridiculous to paint the full colours of sunlight in an atmosphere of mist and driving rain; yet these things are done by artists from whom more regard for truth is to be expected. Lapses of this sort cannot be forgiven; they imply a shirking of responsibility that is beyond excuse, and a failure to grasp the first principles of nature study. They would never occur if the men who paint the sea would regard it as a living reality which responds to the influence of its surroundings and varies its appearance as circumstances dictate, and if they would recognize that it has its own anatomical structure by which its movements are controlled. There is a reason for everything it does and there is a way of accounting for every aspect it assumes, but the reason has to be sought for, and the way to necessary knowledge must be pursued with painstaking effort. There is no place in marine painting for the man who wants to take things easily.