Part 11

With an origin perhaps as ancient as the other arts, its true home is in Italy. We find it at Pompeii, with its relatives, stucco and plaster-work, in association with architecture, which also are seen in such choice forms in the decoration of the ceilings and walls of Roman tombs, such as the famous examples of the Via Latina. We find gesso work also in direct association with painting in the devotional pictures of the early Italian schools, used for the diapered backgrounds and nimbi of saints, and raised emblems and ornaments. It reappears in our own country in the painted rood-screens of Norfolk and Suffolk. At Southwold, for instance, there is a notable screen with panels, painted with figures of the apostles, the backgrounds consisting of diapers in raised gesso.

The revival of classical taste and love of classical lore and ornamental detail at the time of the renascence in Italy led to later and highly ornate development of gesso and stucco, of which we may see elaborate examples in the ceilings of the Doria palace at Genoa, for instance; and in the fine decorative scheme of Pinturicchio in the Appartamenti Borgia in the Vatican, gilded gesso is used for caskets, weapons, and other details in the frescoes painted on the walls, gilded relief work and blue grounds being carried out on the vaulted ceilings above, in arabesques and medallions.

A beautiful model of part of the Appartamenti, by Signor Mariani, may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where also choice examples of gesso work may be found in picture and mirror frames, and gilded coffers or cassones. There are several of these from Florence with figures in relief on flat backgrounds, punctured or stamped with patterns on the paste, and afterwards gilded with rich ornamental effect.

Then again we find gesso used underneath the burnished gold letters and leaf work of the mediaeval illuminators.

The Italian craftsman’s skill in gesso seems to survive in the Italian confectioner with his freehand decorations squeezed out in the form of raised ornaments of plaster and sugar on birthday cakes and such like; and Italian workmen are still the masters of the craft and mystery of all manner of plaster-work, including moulding and casting.

Now there are various kinds of gesso and recipes for making it, and it can be worked in different ways, and on different scales, and in different degrees of relief.

For fine work on a small scale, such as might be used for caskets or small panels in cabinets, and the decoration of furniture generally, Gesso Duro is the best.

It is a mixture of whitening soaked in cold water till quite soft, glue or gelatine, boiled linseed oil, and a little resin, mixed well together to the consistency of cream. There is also a gesso used by frame-makers composed of whitening and parchment size.

Supposing it is desired to work a design on a panel of wood, the wood had best have a coat of shellac or varnish first. Then having determined your design lay on the paste with the point of a long-pointed sable brush--the kind known as a “rigger,” or small water-colour brush will answer--lightly dropping the gesso from the point of the brush or slowly dragging it, so that the gesso may flow from its point, as the design may require, and adding more of the paste where greater relief is required.

Gesso Duro takes some days to dry, but dries, as its name implies, very hard. It can then be scraped down if necessary, and worked on again or touched on to any extent; and the peculiar quality of the relief given by brush work is, perhaps, best left untouched, or at least only added to, and not taken away from by scraping down, although a very fine finish could be obtained in this way, giving the work almost the look of ivory, though, I think, in that case, departing from its true character.

The frame margin given was worked in Gesso Duro, from a design of mine, by Harold Weeks.

The design for a bell-pull was modelled in gesso by Osmund Weeks, for reproduction in electro silver, the sea-horse being in copper.

I have also used for work of about this scale simply a mixture of plaster of paris or thin glue, which answered fairly well if done with directness, as the mixture dries very quickly, and is apt to crack off the ground when dry.

The device for the Art Workers’ Guild is an example of this method, also worked with a brush, and afterwards tinted with lacquers reduced to pale tints by methylated spirit. The lacquer, of course, hardens the surface.

For bolder work and higher relief I have used plaster of paris with thin glue or gelatine. In this, in proceeding to model the design, you dip small pieces of cotton-wool pulled out finely, and having saturated them in the mixture, you build up your design on the panel, which may be of fibrous plaster, and suited for insertion in wall, frieze, or ceiling, or fireplace. It is important to wet the ground or shellac it to stop the suction, before laying on the gesso. It will dry slowly enough to be modelled with the fingers or tools, and added to when dry, or finished with brush work. It dries very fast, and the fibre of the cotton-wool makes it cling to the panel.

I have worked figures on a frieze with a brush on a fibrous plaster panel, and had them cast afterwards, since plaster and glue on large surfaces without fibre is apt to crack off. “The Dance” was a frieze panel worked in this way.

There are various patents and materials in the market for working in gesso. One of the best I have met with is called “Denoline.” It consists of a fine powder, sold in tins, which only requires to be mixed with cold water to convert it into a paste of any consistency required. Flour appears to be an ingredient, and wheat flour, I believe, was used by the old Italian gesso workers.

The frame border was worked in this material, the gesso mixed as stiffly as possible, laid on and modelled with an ordinary modelling tool. It dries slowly and can be retouched. It is a little too sticky, and no doubt requires, like all the different varieties of gesso, its own peculiar treatment.

It might seem at first sight that such a material had no particular limitations or natural laws which in all art are so serviceable in evolving what we call style. Yet elastic as it appears to be, and possessing such considerable range of effect, experience soon teaches us that it has its own most fitting characteristics and tendencies in ornament. The artist, so far from desiring to disguise the real conditions of the work, would rather emphasize their peculiar characteristics. For instance, in laying on and modelling any design in gesso with a brush, he will find the brush and the paste conspire together to favour the production of certain forms of ornament, delicate branch and leaf and scroll work, for instance, and dotted borderings.

Such forms as these the brush, charged with gesso, almost naturally takes, and the leaf shapes may be considered almost as the reflection of the form of the brush itself.

The modelling of the more raised smooth parts is produced by gradually and lightly adding--superimposing while moist fresh gesso, on the system of _pâte sur pâte_, which amalgamates with that underneath. The artist, in modelling the limbs of figures, would emphasize the main muscular masses, allowing for the natural tendency of the paste to soften its own edges in running together: so that a limb would be built up somewhat in the way indicated in the drawing by successive layers of the material floated over each other while moist. Of course, the success of the result depends upon not only the nicety of touch but also on the proper consistency of the gesso, which, if mixed too thin, would be likely to lose form and run out of bounds. Gesso, therefore, for brush work should be mixed like the valetudinarian’s gruel in one of Miss Austen’s novels--“Thin, but not _too_ thin.”

It is of little use giving exact quantities, since satisfactory working depends upon all sorts of variable conditions, almost in the nature of accidents, such as temperature, quality of the materials, and nature of tools, none of which behaves exactly in the same way on all occasions, and this variability must necessarily lead to different results in different hands.

It is only personal experience of the subtle mechanical and material conditions which are inseparable parts of the production of all work of the nature of art, which can really determine their fitness to each individual worker, who must sooner or later, if his work is alive, make certain variations to suit his own particular idiosyncrasies.

It is perfectly hopeless to attempt to pursue any form of art on purely mechanical precepts and principles. A few plain and practical directions, as to a traveller seeking his road in an unknown land, may be given, and the rest must be learnt step by step in experience, and as much as can be gathered from opportunities of seeing the work done by skilled hands, from which, indeed, everything learnable can be learnt.

Even complete mastery over materials is, after all, not everything. In fact, from the artistic (or inventive) point of view, work only begins there, as expression comes after or with speech.

Design has much analogy to poetry. Unless the motive is real and organic, unless the thought and form have something individual in them, unless the feeling is true, it fails to interest us. Herein lies the whole question of artistic production.

Yet is it worth while to learn what can be learnt about any form of art, if only it enables one to realize its true nature and something of the laws of its expression, which knowledge, at least, if it does not confer creative power, greatly increases the intelligent pleasure of its appreciation.

THE RELATION OF THE EASEL PICTURE TO DECORATIVE ART

Despite the invention of oil painting (which Cennino considered only fit for lazy painters) and the fact that many easel pictures now produced appear to have a very remote relation to decorative art as generally understood, I am still of the opinion that the easel picture, properly considered and placed in its right relationship to its surroundings, by judicious treatment and hanging, and above all by a certain mural feeling, may be _the acme of decoration_. Its relation to a scheme of decoration may be like that of a jewel in a dress.

Of course, everything depends upon the point of view of the painter, in the first place, and in the present age the easel picture has been a favourite medium not only for the display, strange to say, of that individualism and experimentalism which are supposed to be special modern characteristics, but also for the merging of individuality in schools, types, and modes of painting, or frank imitation of fashionable masters.

The easel picture differs from any conscious piece of decoration by not being necessarily associated with, or consciously related to, any other piece or scheme of design. Yet, practically, it _must_ be related to something. It is related, in the first place, if a sincere work, to something in the painter’s mind. Most painters are impressionable and sensitive to the effect of their surroundings. It is a common saying how much better a picture looks in the studio in the light in which it was painted, but probably it is not only the lighting but the surroundings also, and the picture has been perhaps unconsciously painted in harmony with its surroundings, its colour scheme affected by the colour of the studio walls, draperies, and furniture. Certain it is that, as a rule, painters are known by a favourite scheme and key of colour, quite apart from the fact that commercial considerations often encourage them to repeat themselves.

The modern picture-exhibitions--I mean big shows like that of the Royal Academy--have perhaps done more to destroy the decorative relationship of the easel pictures than anything. An analogous effect is produced on the mind by the sight of so many pictures of so many different sorts, subjects, and scales, and treatments crowded together, to that produced by a surfeit of ornament, and pattern on pattern, in internal decoration. This seems to point to the fact that true decoration lies rather in the sense of proportion and arrangement or distribution than in the use of particular units of ornament, styles, colours, or materials, and that one may destroy decorative effect by the very means of decoration--but we have only to remember the meaning of the word.

I have spoken of _mural feeling_ in a picture being important to its decorative quality or relationship, and it is the most obvious and necessary relationship, since it establishes a relationship with the destined place of the picture--_the wall_. Its frame, which separates a picture from its surroundings, also helps to unite it again to its original home, where it becomes a movable instead of a fixed panel enclosed by a moulding. No word is perhaps oftener on the pen of the prattler about pictures (or art critic) than the word “decorative,” which seems very variously understood and applied to all sorts and conditions of painting. What is really comprehended by the phrase is appropriate treatment, or _mural feeling_. A satisfactory definition of mural feeling would be difficult, since it is a quality composed of many elements, but I think most artists know what they mean by it. To my mind it includes a certain flatness of treatment with choice of simple planes, and pure and low-toned colours, together with a certain ornamental dignity or architectural feeling in the structure of forms and lines of composition, and is generally antithetic to accidental or superficial characteristics or what might be called landscape effects. Does this then exclude landscapes from the decorative relation, it might be asked?

Vast distances, large sky spaces, wind-tossed trees, turbulent seas and flying shadows certainly do not tend to the repose of a wall--but it is precisely to “give interest” (to people not interested in “mere patterns”) that pictures are hung upon it, and to some tastes there cannot be too much drama going on. Others would rather keep it bound up in another form in their libraries and only let it loose occasionally.

But I am far from saying that even the sky-landscape has no decorative place. But you must not mix it or have too much of it. A window may be an important decorative element in the scheme of an interior, and a landscape three parts sky may have something of the value of a window in a room. But it might be possible to decorate with landscapes alone, though one would prefer tapestry landscapes without sky, or with very high horizons, at least for the lower walls; certainly there never ought to be sky below the eye level on a wall. The Turner room has a certain unity and splendour of its own, regarded simply from a particular decorative point of view, and Turner would be pronounced I suppose the least decorative in feeling of modern artists--rather the epic poet in paint. Every age, too, has its own notions of decoration--indeed one might say even every decade now, or even a less period, we live so fast! No rules or canons of taste in art are of universal application or acceptable to all periods. As decoration is primarily fitness and harmony, with this central idea one may produce decorative effects with very different materials, and we have only to glance back to our historic periods to see how it was accomplished.

The standard of the Beautiful undoubtedly shifts, or perhaps changes hands in the unceasing struggle to win it, and what is worshipped at one epoch or in one century is cast out and trodden under foot in the next. Perhaps we have (during the past century) gained a little historic balance or toleration, and all of us are not prepared to make a clean sweep of the work of the other centuries in favour of the favoured one.

But a harmonious effect is always more difficult with mixed materials (which may account in some degree for the marked success of “the tulip and the bird” in modern decorative patterns).

Certain material conditions, too, favour the growth of a higher type of art at one period than another. We can never elude the economic basis which necessarily affects our forms of art as of other things.

“Pictures, furniture, and effects” is the auctioneer’s favourite phrase in describing the property of a gentleman. He might be describing pictures alone. We have heard of “furniture pictures”--but remove the reproach, is it not in the fitness of things that pictures should be furniture, and their highest destiny to decorate a room?

But when pictures become counters in the game of speculation, your decorative relations along with your social relations may take care of themselves. They become, in fact, very _poor relations_.

The portability of the easel picture may have something to do with its unrelatable character in some cases. Destined for nowhere in particular as a rule, it goes on tour--a member of a performing and often very diverse company, to all the provincial towns, and even on the continent. Yet there were portable and even folding pictures in classical and mediaeval times, and certainly there was no want of decorative relationship in the latter period when, as we know, they were often most beautiful pieces of furniture and wall decorations, as well as pictures. Even the gold-framed oil picture was frankly treated by the Venetians as a decoration--and a ceiling decoration--as witness the Tintorettos in the Ducal palace.

It would not be difficult to select pictures from the National Gallery from the Italian, Flemish, and even the Dutch and Spanish schools, which would not only be admirable pieces of decoration but also furnish the decorator with beautiful decorative schemes of colour.

An easel picture might be made the central point of its own scheme of colour and tone, and led up to, as it were, by everything in the room.

There may be, as I have said already, room for the open sky in decoration, too, if you “sky” it enough, or put it in a frieze, and this touches a rather important point of decorative relationship, too often ignored by the hanger of easel pictures, that is the placing of the picture so that its horizon or vanishing point shall be on a level with the eye of the spectator.

Checked by such considerations, and due selection of scale and tone in placing pictures, I would not say that decorative effects are not possible with the most easel of easel pictures--only you must add the decorator to the painter to bring them off.

Some facetious friends of William Morris once proposed to send him a circular asking subscriptions to an association for the protection of the poor easel-picture painter, since he was being frozen out by designers of wall-papers and hangings of such mere ornamental interest that people did not want anything else on their walls.

It was a joke, but there was meaning in it, and, thrown as we are on the world-market, the floating of one man or one kind of art is too often at the expense of the sinking of another. Pictures, like other things, should, in an ideal state, be produced for use and pleasure not for profit, and there would then be less doubt of their decorative relationship; and, although, if this method were adopted generally, it would greatly reduce the output, I cannot help feeling the Japanese show a true instinct for the decorative relation of pictures when they only show _one_ kakimono at a time; but, after, all that would only mean that we could keep the rest of our collection--as so many masterpieces have been kept--rolled up or with their faces to the wall.

A GREAT ARTIST IN A LITERARY SEARCHLIGHT[2]

Our late veteran idealist-sculptor-painter so often sat in the chair of the literary operator, whether journalistic critic, interviewer, or more serious biographical appraiser, that one imagines that in his life-time he must long have ceased to wonder what manner of man--or artist--he might be, and, like enough, vexed not himself when vivisected to make a British holiday.

[2] “G. F. Watts,” by G. K. Chesterton. London, Duckworth and Co.

The necessity for a more or less complete “sizing up” of a famous artist, of classifying him and affixing a descriptive label, or brand, seems to answer to some requirement of the age, despite the chance of the label becoming out of date, owing, perchance, to the unexpected versatility or longevity of the labelled.

It accords with the habits of a commercial people to have “all goods marked in plain figures;” curiosity, too, must be satisfied, and art, not always at once clearly speaking out for itself in the vernacular, the literary interpreter and critical labeller find their opportunity.

It is, however, difficult enough to attempt to sum up the quality and range of an artist in his lifetime, and in the short perspective of the present assign to him his proper relative position for all time; but, as it may be still more difficult after he has gone, there may be some excuse for the attempt--which has at least the excitement of daring--to make a true estimate of his powers and position while he yet liveth, and while his works change their character under different impulses and influences under our very eyes.

Not that such a brilliant and sympathetic little study as this by Mr. Chesterton needs any excuse. He is always such good reading, and has such a bright epigrammatic way of putting things, that even if he were less penetrating he could not fail to be amusing and stimulating. The rapid flash of his searchlight, as it were, touches so airily on so many interesting objects in its sweep that, as one might say of a painter, his background, with its wealth of subsidiary and illustrative detail, is often more fascinating than the treatment of his main subject or principal figure.

The book for one thing is remarkable for the attitude the author takes up in regard to the nineteenth century--in endeavouring to account for Mr. Watts--and, as it appears to be a not altogether uncommon view with men of the present generation--although mostly born in that mythical century--one may take his view as more or less typical. But, really, from the way in which the century just closed is regarded one might suppose it was as distant almost as the thirteenth.