Part 14

The beginner must not be discouraged if the colors seem to be drying not as he intended. Some colors take a longer time than others, and it is well to have a little patience. The old masters generally retouched defective parts with what was called _fresco secco_ (dry fresco), but which was simply some compound of white of egg, vinegar, and garlic; but it is much better to cut the defective portions out, to have fresh intonaco laid on, and to repaint them. If once you begin to retouch, the whole work seems to require it, and you never know where to stop.

The second method of painting fresco is totally different. I very much prefer it, as the work is done more rapidly, and the colors hardly change at all in drying. Besides (as far as my experience goes), the result is more durable.

As soon as the fresh intonaco for the day’s work is sufficiently set, you mix some lime with water very fluid, something like milk (good milk, I mean, and not milk and water).

You float this over the intonaco, and in about ten minutes you may give it a second coating of lime-water. This ought to smooth the surface, and remove any little grains of sand.

You now trace your outline as before with the tracing paper and the bag of charcoal. You have no palette, but half-a-dozen small tumblers.

Into one of these you put a small lump of raw umber and about the same quantity of oxide of chromium. You add water, and mix them well together. The result is of course a brownish olive green.[3] You pour half the mixture into another tumbler, and add water, thus getting a weaker solution of the same mixture. You repeat the process into a third tumbler, and get a still weaker tint.

With these three or more tints you begin to model your head, beginning with the dark parts and working up to the light. You must bear in mind that no rubbing out is possible; you cannot wash or sponge out as in water-color drawing.

You must therefore be very careful in approaching the light parts, and copy the cartoon as carefully as possible.

You continue thus to draw and model with your green color until the head looks like a finished drawing. This operation will take from two to four hours, according to the nature of the head.

You now take three clean tumblers and put a small lump of light red or terra rossa into one of them, add water, and mix as before; you make weaker solutions, just as you did with the green. If the head is that of an old man or a bronzed warrior, you ought to add raw sienna to the light red, but for ordinary complexions the light red is quite sufficient. You apply this flesh tint in washes with a very broad and soft brush, using the stronger solution for the lips and cheeks, the medium for the intermediate parts, and the weakest for the high lights. No modelling is required; the modelling has already been done, and this tinting is very soon accomplished.

You now take either burnt sienna pure, or burnt sienna and umber, and with a fine sable give strength and precision to the darkest parts, such as the nostrils, the division of the lips, the inside of the ears, etc. If a little black is necessary for the eyebrow or eyelashes, you now give these little finishing touches, and your head is complete.

You have not used one grain of lime or of any solid color; the wall is stained rather than painted, and you have none of those strange and capricious changes of color to fear which are so constantly occurring in the solid method, where lime is used freely as a pigment.

* * * * *

I have now gone through the whole process of fresco-painting as far as I know it. I shall conclude with a few general observations.

The fresco-painter ought to be of a nature capable of continued exertion. Whatever the work is, whether head, torso, or drapery, it must be finished in a day. He must not, on the plea of headache or seediness, give himself a half-holiday. He may of course abstain from work for a whole day, or for a week if he likes, but those little snatches of rest, involving a game at lawn-tennis, a good lunch, or a look at the papers, to which many artists are rather partial, are denied him.

He is always working against time, and although this is trying at first, he soon gets accustomed to it.

Secondly, he must be a man of fixed purpose. He has got his cartoon and his colored-sketch, and he must turn a deaf ear to all suggestions of alterations when once these preliminaries are settled.

An alteration in the turn or size of a head, or a change in the action of a figure, are very easily carried out in an oil picture, but in a fresco it is a very serious matter to begin alterations.

Thirdly, he must not mind a bit what the workmen and people about the building think of him. I believe that the upper ten thousand (at least the æsthetically inclined amongst them) do not hold mural decoration in contempt, but the working class invariably take the fresco-painter in his blouse and on his scaffold to be one of their own fraternity.

If they were to see the same artist in a handsome studio painting somebody’s portrait in a gilt frame, they would at once suppose he was a gentleman, but coloring a wall is a very ungentlemanly occupation.

When I was painting a large monochrome work at University Hall, there were some plumbers and glaziers employed in repairing gas-pipes and mending windows. One of them came down into the hall where I was at work, and began to look about for something amongst the pots and colors on my table. Apparently he did not find what he wanted, so he turned round and called to me, “I say, governor, you don’t happen to have a bit of putty in your pocket?”

Fourthly and finally, the mural painter ought to be satisfied with moderate pay.

At the Tercentenary Rubens Festival celebrated at Antwerp, last year, an Art Congress was held, at which I assisted.

The principal question proposed for discussion was an eminently practical one. It was; “How can monumental and decorative painting be best encouraged and revived at the present time?”

In answer to this practical question I gave what I thought a practical answer. After passing in review various difficulties with which modern artists had to contend, I summed up by saying that the real impediment to the development of mural painting was its enormous cost, and I pointed out that it was only by the artist accepting very moderate pay, and having at his command a staff of efficient pupils who would be willing to work under him for little or no remuneration, that such works as were executed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could again become common. I said a good deal respecting the costliness of large mural paintings done by modern artists of any repute, and on the other hand gave examples of modern work, which, with the help of efficient assistants, had been done not only well but at a moderate cost.

At the conclusion of my paper, up jumped a gifted orator, who knew no more about painting than a cobbler, and in a torrent of eloquence swept away the few grains of common-sense I had ventured to import into the congress.

It was a sacrilege (according to him) to profane the temple of high art with a dirty question of pounds, shillings, and pence.

Art was a subtle essence, a delicate perfume. Art was a religion. Art appealed to all our higher sympathies, and it was only by educating people up to a kind of art-millennium pitch that we could hope to see our public buildings decorated with historical paintings. He sat down and mopped himself amidst loud applause, and I felt considerably humiliated. We had a great deal more of this sort of thing at the congress. The few artists who were present sat dumb, and the high æsthetic gentlemen had it all their own way, so that the congress, which might have served some practical end, finished in vapor and smoke.

In spite, however, of this termination of the discussion, I am still convinced that until mural painters have sufficient love for their art to accept a small remuneration, decorative work of a high class will languish.

For the mural painter’s work, Manchester millionnaires do not vie with each other. No spirited and enterprising dealers beset his studio, eager to secure whatever he has on the easel. All of what Dr. Johnson called the “Potentiality of becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice” is denied him. Pay of course he must have, but his patrons are generally committees or corporate bodies of some kind, who seldom give fancy prices.

Let him therefore console himself with the thought that his is the highest and noblest branch of the profession, and that whilst high-priced easel pictures are relegated to private galleries and dining-rooms, only to reappear at intervals at Christie’s salerooms, _his_ work is a fixture, and can always be seen by the public.

With the hope that it may be admired as well as seen I shall conclude my lecture.

LECTURE IX.

ON FINISH.

It has always been a disputed point, both amongst artists and writers on art, how near an approach to absolute truth is desirable in painting; some insisting on photographic accuracy, whilst others go to the opposite extreme, and consider mere suggestiveness to be the great desideratum in painting.

Much may be argued in favor of both sides of the question, but a medium course is certainly the best.

Imitation of nature is no doubt the foundation-stone of all sound painting, and the natural inference would be, that the closer the imitation the better the picture. But, on the other hand, a picture which is not an exact counterpart of the object portrayed, but leaves something to be imagined, is generally more interesting than a more perfect copy would be.

This fact is particularly noticeable in pictures of flowers, fruit, and still life generally.

A picture which at a little distance gives thoroughly the character of the fish, game, or flowers it is intended to represent, will be much more masterly and artistic if the scales of the fish, the feathers of the birds, and the petals of the flowers are not individually studied with microscopic care, but treated in a broad, suggestive manner.

In a painting so handled the loss of a few minute details is more than compensated by greater freshness of color, and the charm inseparable from a rapid and dexterous execution.

If it were possible to combine the two qualities, if we could get breadth and brilliancy united with minute finish, it would even then be doubtful whether the picture would be any the better for the additional pains bestowed upon it.

In looking at pictures, we require to be deceived only up to a certain point, and the whole question depends on where to fix that point. In to-night’s lecture I intend to investigate this subject, and to extend my remarks to other kindred questions connected with the finish of a work of art.

All writers and lecturers on art are pretty well agreed that excessive finish is undesirable. I mean such finish as one sees in Bellini’s portrait of the Doge, where each individual hair is painted, and where every wrinkle or pimple is studied as though it were of the utmost importance.

There is, however, a kind of finish of an infinitely more objectionable kind than Bellini’s.

If Bellini elaborated small details to an extensive extent, they were at any rate thoroughly and honestly studied. His minute, delicate work always had a laudable object, whether it were the exact rendering of a stray hair or the microscopic modelling of the wrinkles about the eyes. But the finisher of whom I am now speaking has no object, beyond smoothness.

Bad proportions and gross errors in drawing are nothing to him provided he gets a smooth, uniform surface. Like the old-fashioned provincial drawing-master, who taught oils, water-colors, and Poonah painting, smoothness and finish are with him synonymous terms.

Probably most of you are happily ignorant of the lost art of Poonah painting and drawing, and I certainly do not mean to waste our time in describing it. It will be sufficient to say that the process was almost entirely mechanical, and that the results exhibited the maximum of smoothness combined with the minimum of art.

It used often to be taught in young ladies’ schools. It would be both invidious and unjust to compare the work of any Academy student with these inane productions, but I wish to warn you, as I have often warned you before, against confounding “finishing” with mere polishing.

Intelligent finishing consists in correcting small faults of detail, in revising the relative values of the shades and half-tones, in giving definite form to the fingers and toes, or any portion of the figure which may have been neglected. Unintelligent finishing, or what I call polishing, consists in getting a nice even grain for all the modelling of the figure. This polishing process may not in itself be objectionable, but it becomes objectionable when it interferes (as it too often does) with necessary alterations and modifications.

You probably all know that I am no advocate of _sketching_ in the schools. However much I may admire the nude studies of the great masters, I do not wish to see the same kind of work attempted by the students. I am decidedly for “finish,” “_high finish_” even, but by the term _I_ mean accuracy of drawing and modelling, and not neatness or evenness of execution.

To return to the Doge’s portrait, which I have taken as a thoroughly good specimen of minute finishing.

It is perfectly true that if you go close up to it and examine it with a lens, you will find it much more like nature than would be a head by Titian or Rembrandt if subjected to the same microscopic investigation; but pictures are not meant to be microscopic objects any more than human beings.

If in some foreign town I meet unexpectedly my old friend Smith, I should probably recognize him some fifty yards off. I should say: “That must be Smith, it is so like his figure and general appearance.” As I approach him I begin to distinguish his features, and I become more and more certain, until finally I grasp his hand and all doubt as to his identity vanishes. It is Smith all over, and, as I remark, not a bit changed since I last saw him.

I do not pull out a pocket lens and count the number of gray hairs in his whiskers, or the small warts about his eyes.

It appears to me that a life-size portrait should be treated in the same way. Viewed from the end of the gallery, it should resemble the person it represents, and the likeness should become more and more striking the nearer we approach, until we get within a very short distance.

If we approach still nearer, the brush-work of the artist begins to appear, and finally, if we examine the features with a lens, we can discover but very little left of the resemblance which was so striking at a reasonable distance.

The whole question is, What _is_ a reasonable distance? In portraits by the minute finishers, the point at which the work looks its best is evidently too near, and I think that in a good deal of modern painting it is too far off.

A life-size head should look its best at from about six to ten feet distance. Nearer than six feet the impasto and brush touches of the painter would be too apparent, and beyond ten feet the delicate modelling of details would begin to be lost.

Artists and the art-loving portion of the public delight no doubt in going close up to a fine Titian, Rembrandt, or Vandyck, but this is to see how the marvellously life-like effect has been produced (to learn a lesson in short), but not to view the work from the most favorable standpoint. I think it will be found that, generally speaking, the old masterpieces of portraiture are best seen within the distances I have mentioned.

There are, no doubt, exceptions. Thus the portraits of Holbein gain by being studied closely, and those of Velasquez are best appreciated at a considerable distance, whilst the figures of Van der Helst are so admirably painted that they will bear a very close scrutiny as well as a distant view.

If an artist has the precision of a Holbein or the consummate execution of a Van der Helst, there is no harm in his following finish in portraiture almost to its extreme limit; but if not, he had better rest and be satisfied with less literal work.

In spite of a few honorable exceptions, the tendency of modern artists is, however, not toward the finish of Holbein, but rather in the opposite direction.

No one can walk through a Paris exhibition without being struck by the enormous amount of sketchy, imperfect work; the best specimens of which have, at a great distance, a look, a reminiscence of nature, but when viewed nearer, resolve themselves into smears of paint, generally plastered on with the knife.

Now it is this kind of work which is so attractive to the modern connoisseur. The peasant, the workman, the soldier pass it by with a laugh, or sometimes with an expression of bewilderment. The cultured artist shrugs his shoulders, but tries to view it leniently, as he would the work of a savage; but the _dilettanti_ and those who have a smattering of art-knowledge delight in it. It flatters their vanity to supplement out of their inner consciousness the artist’s short-comings.

These pictures get talked about in the salons and praised in the newspapers, whilst good, honest, sober work is comparatively ignored. Public taste having thus declared itself, it is not surprising that an ever-increasing crop of these young “impressionists” should be forthcoming to minister unto it.

There is another kind of departure from truth in connection with finish, which is, I think, almost as much to be deprecated. I mean where the heads are painted in a different style to the rest of the picture.

If we go back to the old masters, we shall never find this fault. Examine any of their works. Recall to mind the Raffaelles, the Titians, the Correggios, or the Poussins of the National Gallery, and observe that the draperies, accessories, and backgrounds are all in keeping with the heads. If, as in Perugino’s and Raffaelle’s early works, the painting of the flesh is delicate and smooth, though dry and hard, you will find the same qualities and defects in the whole picture.

If, on the other hand, as in Titian and Paul Veronese, the flesh-painting is rich and free, the draperies will be equally so. Take Rubens, again; how homogeneous is _his_ work! Let us suppose that a picture by this master were unexpectedly discovered, and that by some accident all the flesh-painting in it had been destroyed, would any one hesitate, on inspection of what remained, in attributing it to Rubens? Would not the good and bad qualities of the master be apparent in every part?

As the opposite extreme to the slapdash Rubens, take the careful Gerard Dow, and observe how the delicate and minute finish of the heads is carried out into every detail of his pictures. If we examine any genuine work of Rembrandt or of David Teniers, we shall always find the same homogeneous qualities. The heads may (as is often the case in Rembrandt) be more carefully painted than the unimportant parts of the picture; or contrariwise, as in David Teniers, we may sometimes find a stoneware flagon more elaborated than the hand of the boor who is holding it, but we recognize everywhere the touch of the master.

I know of no example amongst the old masters where the kind of disparity in style which I am deprecating is observable.

In certain modern pictures, however, this homogeneous quality in painting is sadly wanting. In the so-called Spanish school (by which I mean the school of Fortuny), the background, draperies, and accessories are painted with a crisp dexterity which is quite marvellous, whilst the heads are labored like colored photographs.

The contrast is sometimes so great that it is difficult to believe that the picture is not the work of two artists. This fault has become apparent in certain pictures of the Austrian school; but the contagion does not appear to have extended to us, at least not to our oil-painters.

I have, however, noticed a tendency amongst a few of our water-color figure-painters toward this singular modern peculiarity.

The difficulties of giving color, form, and expression to a head, and at the same time preserving a free style of painting, are no doubt much greater in water-color than in oil, but I think it so desirable that a work should be homogeneous that I would sacrifice a good deal in the way of finish and even of expression in the faces, to obtain that quality.

If a man has great versatility with his brush and wishes to display it, let him paint one picture in the style of Holbein or Memling, and another in the style of Velasquez, but he should not in the same picture (and _à fortiori_ in the same figure) attempt to unite two dissimilar styles of painting.

One of the principal difficulties young artists have to encounter in finishing a figure-picture is the management of their drapery.

If they are painstaking and make an intelligent use of their models they will succeed with their heads, hands, and all their flesh-painting; or if they do not succeed, the way to success is so obvious that I need say but little about it.

I assume that our young artist has gone through a course of study, and is able to paint a nude figure or a head from nature tolerably correctly. His difficulty will be, not in copying his models, but in making use of them without copying them.

He should form an ideal in his mind of the personage he means to represent, and take care to select either from professional models or from his friends those who approach nearest to this ideal. He will probably have to make use of casts. The small heads of the warriors on the Trajan Column are admirable in character and very suggestive. Casts from the mediæval heads of Pisano, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia are also very useful.

All these and other means toward his end will suggest themselves to him, but his course is not so clear when he comes to tackle his draperies.

Every student must be aware that draperies adjusted on the lay figure and carefully copied, have always an unnatural and trivial look about them. The form underneath, if expressed at all, is the form of the lay figure, and not that of nature. It will not do therefore in a picture to adjust the drapery on a lay figure and copy the result.

This _may_ be done with advantage for those folds which hang altogether independent of the figure, but for all those which are in the slightest degree connected with the form underneath, some other method must be adopted.

No doubt the best method of all (were it possible) would be to dress up the living model and paint direct on to the picture, but this is seldom practicable.

Long before the artist has had time to study the folds, the model moves, and all has to be done over again.

If an artist has great experience with drapery, and the attitude is a very easy one, he may make a charcoal study which will serve him for the picture without having subsequently to readjust his drapery on the lay figure, but no young hand would be able to do this in a satisfactory way. He must go more systematically to work. He must first get a characteristic study of the nude figure. I mean such a study as the old masters used to make, giving the exact attitude and the form of the salient parts. He must then make a replica in charcoal of this study and adjust the drapery on his living model. On this replica he will now, as far as he can, reproduce the arrangement of the folds he has before him. There are plenty of studies by Raffaelle and the old masters which explain better than words can, the process I am trying to describe.