Chapter 13

About Mr. Schmalz's picture I have really no particular opinion. I do not think it worse than any picture of the same kind by the late Mr. Long. Nor do I think that it can be said to be very much inferior to the religious works with which Mr. Goodall has achieved so wide a reputation. On the whole I think I prefer Mr. Goodall, though I am not certain. Here is the picture:--At the top of a flight of steps and about two-thirds of the way across the picture, to the left, so as not to interfere with the view of Jerusalem, are three figures--as Sir Augustus Harris might have set them were he attempting a theatrical representation of the scene. There is a dark man, this is St. John, and over him a woman draped in white is weeping, and behind her a woman with golden hair--the Magdalen--is likewise weeping. Two other figures are ascending the steps, but as they are low down in the picture they interfere hardly at all with the splendid view. The dark sky is streaked with Naples yellow, and the pale colour serves to render distinct the three crosses planted upon Calvary in the extreme distance.

In this world all is a question of temperament. To the aesthetic temperament Mr. Schmalz's picture will seem hardly more beautiful or attractive than a Salvationist hymn-book; the unaesthetic temperament will, on the other hand, be profoundly moved, the subject stands out clear and distinct, and that class of mind, overlooking all artistic shortcomings, will lose itself in emotional consideration of the grandest of all the world's tragedies. That Mr. Schmalz's picture is capable of exercising a profound effect on the uneducated mind there can be no doubt. While I was there a lady walked with stately tread into the next room, and seeing there nothing more exciting than rural scenes drawn in water-colour, exclaimed, "Trees, mere trees! what are trees after having had one's soul elevated?"

That great artist Henri Monnier devoted a long life to the study and the collection of the finest examples of human stupidity, and marvellous as are some of the specimens preserved by him in his dialogues, I hardly think that he succeeded in discovering a finer gem than the phrase overheard by me in the Dowdeswell Galleries. To appreciate the sublime height, must we not know something of the miserable depth? And the study of human stupidity is refreshing and salutary; it helps us to understand ourselves, to estimate ourselves, and to force ourselves to look below the surface, and so raise our ideas out of that mire of casual thought in which we are all too prone to lie. For perfect culture, the lady I met at the Dowdeswell Galleries is as necessary as Shakespeare. Is she not equally an exhortation to be wise?

THE CAMERA IN ART.

It is certain that the introduction of Japaneseries into this country has permanently increased our sense of colour; is it therefore improbable that the invention of photography has modified, if it has not occasioned any very definite alteration in our general perception of the external world? It would be interesting to inquire into such recondite and illusive phenomena; and I am surprised that no paper on so interesting a question has appeared in any of our art journals. True, so many papers are printed in our weekly and monthly press that it is impossible for any one to know all that has been written on any one subject; but, so far as I am aware, no such paper has appeared, and the absence of such a paper is, I think, a serious deficiency in our critical literature.

It is, however, no part of my present purpose to attempt to supply this want. I pass on to consider rapidly a matter less abstruse and of more practical interest, a growing habit among artists to avail themselves of the assistance of photographs in their work. It will not be questioned that many artists of repute do use photographs to--well, to put it briefly, to save themselves trouble, expense, and, in some cases, to supplant defective education. But the influence of photography on art is so vast a subject, so multiple, so intricate, that I may do no more here than lift the very outer fringe.

It is, however, clear to almost everybody who has thought about art at all, that the ever-changing colour and form of clouds, the complex variety (definite in its very indefiniteness) of every populous street, the evanescent delicacy of line and aërial effect that the most common and prosaic suburb presents in certain lights, are the very enchantment and despair of the artist; and likewise every one who has for any short while reflected seriously on the problem of artistic work must know that the success of every evocative rendering of the exquisite externality of crowded or empty street, of tumult or calm in cloud-land, is the fruit of daily and hourly observation--observation filtered through years of thought, and then fortified again in observation of Nature.

But such observation is the labour of a life; and he who undertakes it must be prepared to see his skin brown and blister in the shine, and feel his flesh pain him with icy chills in the biting north wind. The great landscape painters suffered for the intolerable desire of Art; they were content to forego the life of drawing-rooms and clubs, and live solitary lives in unceasing communion with Art and Nature. But artists in these days are afraid of catching cold, and impatient of long and protracted studentship. Everything must be made easy, comfortable, and expeditious; and so it comes to pass that many an artist seeks assistance from the camera. A moment, and it is done: no wet feet; no tiresome sojourn in the country when town is full of merry festivities; and, above all, hardly any failure--that is to say, no failure that the ordinary public can detect, nor, indeed, any failure that the artist's conscience will not get used to in time.

Mr. Gregory is the most celebrated artist who is said to make habitual use of photography. Mr. Gregory has no warmer admirer than myself. His picture of "Dawn" is the most fairly famous picture of our time. But since that picture his art has declined. It has lost all the noble synthetical life which comes of long observation and gradual assimilation of Nature. His picture of a yachtsman in this year's Academy was as paltry, as "realistic" as may be.

Professor Herkomer is another well-known artist who is said to use photography. It is even said that he has his sitter photographed on to the canvas, and the photographic foundation he then covers up with those dreadful browns and ochres which seem to constitute his palette. Report credits him with this method, which it is possible he believes to be an advance on the laborious process of drawing from Nature, to which, in the absence of the ingenious instrument, the Old Masters were perforce obliged to resort. It will be said that what matter how the artists work--that it is with the result, not the method, with which we are concerned. Dismissing report from our ears, surely we must recognise all the cheap realism of the camera in Professor Herkomer's portraits; and this is certainly their characteristic, although photography may have had nothing to do with their manufacture.

Mr. Bartlett is another artist who, it is said, makes habitual use of photographs; and surely in some of his boys bathing the photographic effects are visible enough. But although very far from possessing the accomplishments of Mr. Gregory, Mr. Bartlett has acquired some education, and can draw, when occasion requires, very well indeed from life.

Mr. Mortimer Menpes is the third artist of any notoriety that rumour has declared to be a disciple of the camera. His case is the most flagrant, for it is said that he rarely, if ever, draws from Nature, and that his entire work is done from photographs. Be this as it may, his friends have stated a hundred times in the Press that he uses photography, and it would seem that his work shows the mechanical aid more and more every day. Some years ago he went to Japan, and brought home a number of pictures which suited drawing-rooms, and were soon sold. I did not see the exhibition, but I saw some pictures done by him at that time--one, an especially good one, I happened upon in the Grosvenor Gallery. This picture, although superficial and betraying when you looked into it a radical want of knowledge, was not lacking in charm. In French studios there is a slang phrase which expresses the meretricious charm of this picture--_c'est du chic_; and the meaning of this very expressive term is ignorance affecting airs of capacity. Now the whole of Mr. Menpes' picture was comprised in this term. The manner of the master who, certain of the shape and value of the shadow under an eye, will let his hand run, was reproduced; but the exact shape and value of the shadows were not to be gathered from the photograph, and the result was a charming but a hollow mockery.

And then the "colour-notes"; with what assurance they were dashed into the little pictures from Japan, and how dexterously the touch of the master who knows exactly what he wants was parodied! At the first glance you were deceived; at the second you saw that it was only such cursive taste and knowledge as a skilful photographer who had been allowed the run of a painter's studio for a few months might display. Nowhere was there any definite intention; it was something that had been well committed to memory, that had been well remembered, but only half-understood. Everything floated--drawing, values, colours--for there was not sufficient knowledge to hold and determine the place of any one.

Since those days Mr. Menpes has continued to draw from photographs, and--the base of his artistic education being deficient from the first--the result of his long abstention from Nature is apparent, even to the least critical, in the some hundred and seventy paintings, etchings, and what he calls diamond-points on ivory, on exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's. Diamond-points on ivory may astonish the unthinking public, but artists are interested in the drawing, and not what the drawing is done upon. Besides the diamond-points, there is quite sufficient matter in this exhibition to astonish visitors from Peckham, Pentonville, Islington, and perhaps Clapham, but not Bayswater--no, not Bayswater. There are frames in every sort of pattern--some are even adorned with gold tassels--and the walls have been especially prepared to receive them.

These pictures and etchings purport to be representations of India, Burma, and Cashmire. The diamond-points, I believe, purport to be diamond-points. In some of the etchings there is the same ingenious touch of hand, but anything more woful than the oil pictures cannot easily be imagined. In truth, they do not call for any serious criticism; and were it not for the fact that they afforded an opportunity of making some remarks--which seemed to me to be worth making--about the influence of photography in modern art, I should have left the public to find for itself the value of this attempt, in the grandiloquent words of the catalogue, "to bring before my countrymen the aesthetic and artistic capabilities, and the beauty in various forms, that are to be found in our great Indian Empire." To criticise the pictures in detail is impossible; but I will try to give an impression of the exhibition as a whole. Imagine a room hung with ordinary school slates, imagine that all these slates have been gilt, and that some have been adorned with gold tassels instead of the usual sponge, and into each let there be introduced a dome, a camel, a palm-tree, or any other conventional sign of the East.

On examining the paintings thus sumptuously encased you will notice that the painter has not been able to affect with the brush any slight air of capacity; the material betrays him at every point The etchings are _du chic_; but the paintings are merely abortive. The handling consists in scrubbing the colour into the canvas, attaining in this manner a texture which sometimes reminds you of wool, sometimes of sand, sometimes of both. The poor little bits of blue sky stick to the houses; there is nowhere a breath of air, a ray of light, not even a conventionally graduated sky or distance; there is not an angle, or a pillar, or a stairway finely observed; there is not even any such eagerness in the delineation of an object as would show that the painter felt interest in his work; every sketch tells the tale of a burden taken up and thankfully relinquished. Here we have white wall, but it has neither depth nor consistency; behind it a bit of sandy sky; the ground is yellow, and there is a violet shadow upon it. But the colour of the ground does not show through the shadow. Look, for example, at No. 36. Is it possible to believe that that red-brick sky was painted from Nature, or that unhappy palm in a picture close by was copied as it raised its head over that wall? The real scene would have stirred an emotion in the heart of the dullest member of the Stock Exchange, and, however unskilful the brushwork, if the man could hold a brush at all, there would have been something to show that the man had been in the presence of Nature. There is no art so indiscreet as painting, and the story of the painter's mind may be read in every picture.

But another word regarding these pictures would be waste of space and time. Let Mr. Menpes put away his camera, let him go out into the streets or the fields, and there let him lose himself in the vastness and beauty of Nature. Let him study humbly the hang of a branch or the surface of a wall, striving to give to each their character. Let him try to render the mystery of a perspective in the blue evening or its harshness and violence in the early dawn. There is no need to go to Burma, there is mystery and poetry wherever there is atmosphere. In certain moments a backyard, with its pump and a child leaning to drink, will furnish sufficient motive for an exquisite picture; the atmosphere of the evening hour will endow it with melancholy and tenderness. But the insinuating poetry of chiaroscuro the camera is powerless to reproduce, and it cannot be imagined; Nature is parsimonious of this her greatest gift, surrendering it slowly, and only to those who love her best, and whose hearts are pure of mercenary thought.

THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.

This, the ninth season of the New English Art Club, has been marked by a decisive step. The club has rejected two portraits of Mr. Shannon. So that the public may understand and appreciate the importance of this step, I will sketch, _à coups de crayon peu fondus_, the portrait of a lady as I imagine Mr. Shannon might have painted her. A woman of thirty, an oval face, and a long white brow; pale brown hair, tastefully arranged with flowers and a small plume. The eyes large and tender, expressive of a soul that yearns and has been misunderstood. The nose straight, the nostrils well-defined, slightly dilated; the mouth curled, and very red. The shoulders large, white, and over-modelled, with cream tints; the arms soft and rounded; diamond bracelets on the wrists; diamonds on the emotional neck. Her dress is of the finest duchesse satin, and it falls in heavy folds. She holds a bouquet in her hands; a pale green garden is behind her; swans are moving gracefully through shadowy water, whereon the moon shines peacefully. Add to this conception the marvellous square brushwork of the French studio, and you have the man born to paint English duchesses--to paint them as they see themselves, as they would be seen by posterity; and through Mr. Shannon our duchesses realise all their aspirations, present and posthumous. The popularity of these pictures is undoubted; wherever they hang, and they hang everywhere, except in the New English Art Club, couples linger. "How charming, how beautifully dressed, how refined she looks!" and the wife who has not married a man _à la hauteur de ses sentiments_ casts on him a withering glance, which says, "Why can't you afford to let me be painted by Mr. Shannon?"

We are here to realise our ideals, and far is it from my desire to thwart any lady in her aspirations, be they in white or violet satin, with or without green gardens. If I were on the hanging committee of the Royal Academy, all the duchesses in the kingdom should be realised, and then--I would create more duchesses, and they, too, should be realised by Messrs. Shannon, Hacker, and Solomon _les chefs de rayon de la peinture_. And when these painters arrived, each with a van filled with new satin duchesses, I would say, "Go to Mr. Agnew, ask him what space he requires, and anything over and above they shall have it." I would convert the Chantrey Fund into white satin duchesses, and build a museum opposite Mr. Tate's for the blue. I would do anything for these painters and their duchesses except hang them in the New English Art Club.

For it is entirely necessary that the public should never be left for a moment in doubt as to the intention of this club. It is open to those who paint for the joy of painting; and it is entirely disassociated from all commercialism. Muslin ballet-girl or satin duchess it matters no jot, nothing counts with the jury but _l'idée plastique_: comradeship, money gain or loss, are waived. The rejection of Mr. Shannon's portraits will probably cost the club four guineas a year, the amount of his subscription, and it will certainly lose to the club the visits of his numerous drawing-room following. This is to be regretted--in a way. The club must pay its expenses, but it were better that the club should cease than that its guiding principle should be infringed.

Either we may or we may not have a gallery from which popular painting is excluded. I think that we should; but I know that Academicians and dealers are in favour of enforced prostitution in art. That men should practise painting for the mere love of paint is wholly repugnant to every healthy-minded Philistine. The critic of the Daily Telegraph described the pictures in the present exhibition as things that no one would wish to possess; he then pointed out that a great many were excellently well painted. Quite so. I have always maintained that there is nothing that the average Englishman--the reader of the _Daily Telegraph_--dislikes so much as good painting. He regards it in the light of an offence, and what makes it peculiarly irritating in his eyes is the difficulty of declaring it to be an immoral action; he instinctively feels that it is immoral, but somehow the crime seems to elude definition.

The Independent Theatre was another humble endeavour which sorely tried the conscience of the average Englishman. That any one should wish to write plays that were not intended to please the public--that did not pay--was an unheard-of desire, morbid and unwholesome as could well be, and meriting the severest rebuke. But the Independent Theatre has somehow managed to struggle into a third year of life, and the New English Art Club has opened its ninth exhibition; so I suppose that the _Daily Telegraph_ will have to make up its mind, sorrowfully, of course, and with regret, that there are folk still in London who are not always ready to sell their talents to the highest bidder.

For painters and those who like painting, the exhibitions at the New English Art Club are the most interesting in London. We find there no anecdotes, sentimental, religious, or historical, nor the conventional measuring and modelling which the Academy delights to honour in the name of Art. At the New English Art Club, from the first picture to the last, we find artistic effort; very often the effort is feeble, but nowhere, try as persistently as you please, will you find the loud stupidity of ordinary exhibitions of contemporary painting. This is a plain statement of a plain truth--plain to artists and those few who possess the slightest knowledge of the art of painting, or even any faint love of it. But to the uncultivated, to the ignorant, and to the stupid the New English Art Club is the very place where all the absurd and abortive attempts done in painting in the course of the year are exposed on view. If I wished to test a man's taste and knowledge in the art of painting I would take him to the English Art Club and listen for one or two minutes to what he had got to say.

Immediately on entering the room, before we see the pictures, we know that they are good. For a pleasant soft colour, delicate and insinuating as an odour of flowers, pervades the room. So we are glad to loiter in this vague sensation of delicate colour, and we talk to our friends, avoiding the pictures, until gradually a pale-faced woman with arched eyebrows draws our eyes and fixes our thoughts. It is a portrait by Mr. Sargent, one of the best he has painted. By the side of a fine Hals it might look small and thin, but nothing short of a fine Hals would affect its real beauty. My admiration for Mr. Sargent has often hesitated, but this picture completely wins me. It has all the qualities of Mr. Sargent's best work; and it has something more: it is painted with that measure of calculation and reserve which is present in all work of the first order of merit. I find the picture described with sufficient succinctness in my notes: "A half-length portrait of a woman, in a dress of shot-silk--a sort of red violet, the colour known as puce. The face is pale, the chin is prominent and pointed. There were some Japanese characteristics in the model, and these have been selected. The eyes are long, and their look is aslant; the eyebrows are high and marked; the dark hair grows round the pale forehead with wig-like abruptness, and the painter has attempted no attenuation. The carnations are wanting in depth of colour--they are somewhat chalky; but what I admire so much is the exquisite selection, besides the points mentioned--the shadowed outline, so full of the form of her face, and the markings about the eyes, so like her; and the rendering is full of the beauty of incomparable skill. The neck, how well placed beneath the pointed chin! How exact in width, in length, and how it corresponds with the ear; and the jawbone is under the skin; and the anatomies are all explicit--the collar-bone, the hollow of the arm-pit, and the muscle of the arm, the placing of the bosom, its shape, its size, its weight. Mr. Sargent's drawing speaks without hesitation, a beautiful, decisive eloquence, the meaning never in excess of the expression, nor is the expression ever redundant."

I said that we find in this portrait reserve not frequently to be met with in Mr. Sargent's work. What I first noticed in the picture was the admirable treatment of the hands. They are upon her hips, the palms turned out, and so reduced is the tone that they are hardly distinguishable from the dress. As the model sat the light must have often fallen on her hands, and five years ago Mr. Sargent might have painted them in the light. But the portrait tells us that he has learnt the last and most difficult lesson--how to omit. Any touch of light on those hands would rupture the totality and jeopardise the colour-harmony, rare without suspicion of exaggeration or affectation. In the background a beautiful chocolate balances and enforces the various shades of the shot-silk, and with severity that is fortunate. By aid of two red poppies, worn in the bodice, a final note in the chord is reached--a resonant and closing consonance; a beautiful work, certainly: I should call it a perfect work were it not that the drawing is a little too obvious: in places we can detect the manner; it does not _coule de source_ like the drawing of the very great masters.