Part 15

Johannes Bosboom was born at the Hague in 1817. He died in 1891, aged seventy-four, and in the artistic world of Holland he had by that time long enjoyed complete and cordial recognition; to painters and to the best critics--above all, perhaps, to that rich painter, M. Mesdag, collector as well as artist--belong the majority of the best of his works. The art of Bosboom is displayed to some extent in oil pictures, but more finely, on the whole, in the great series of his water-colours. He is a painter essentially of the succession of Rembrandt--a master of the arrangement of light and shade--holding his own honourably in the presentation of landscape, but known chiefly, and known on the whole most to his advantage, as a painter of church interiors. His earlier work is in method drier and smaller than his later. The maturity of his genius finds him as broad as Cotman or Dewint. He has the restfulness and dignity of these men when they are at their best. He has not Cotman’s gift of colour, and in those very church interiors to which Cotman would have given a colourist’s charm--as his kindred work in the possession of Mr. James Reeve and the late Mr. J. J. Colman assures us--Bosboom’s preoccupation is with tone, and with sense of space; though, of course, in his colour he is never inharmonious. Each is great in his own way, and the one is almost as profoundly poetic as the other, though Bosboom, if anything, excels Cotman in the restful picturesqueness of his vision. With him, invariably, as in the great artist we have mentioned by the side of him, the detail is nothing but a part of the whole. It is never aggressive; it is never importunate; it is even for the most part effaced. Bosboom, dealing with church interiors, is not, like Sir Wyke Bayliss, a painter of great scenes as well as of great architecture. For him the pageant has no attraction, and in the painting of a ceremonial or a service, such as the ‘Taking the Sacrament in Utrecht Cathedral,’ he is not really at his best. He is best when his church is quiet, and all its spaciousness ‘tells.’ See, for instance, the admirable ‘Church at Trier’--immense, velvety, solemn--and, likewise, the not less masterly water-colour, the ‘St. Joris Church at Amersfoort.’ An architectural draughtsman, in the technical or narrow sense, he is never, from beginning to end--a fact that is partly due to the broader and more poetic bent of his genius, and partly, too, no doubt, to his observation having been chiefly exercised and his imagination chiefly stirred by interiors quaint rather than elegant, massive and large rather than exquisite in detail, picturesque rather than perfect. The book of Mr. Max Rooses’ editing, will, in England, have not been without its service, if it, or even our own comments on it, should secure wider attention to the work of a master as eminently human and sympathetic as he is austere and sterling. But, for the fuller comprehension of Bosboom here, in England, there should be gathered together in a single place a fair array of his work; and we commend to the enlightened _dilettanti_ of the Burlington Fine Arts Club this appropriate and honourable enterprise.

(_Literature_, 3rd December 1898.)

HENNER

The first thing to remember of the painter Henner is that he is above all a poet. Has he then created stories or narrated them pathetically? Has he made it the business of painting to do literary work? He has done nothing of the kind. Even where he has used classical mythology and Biblical tradition as the excuse for his canvases, the derived subject seems to have taken hold of him but lightly; he has been dramatic to the extent to which--well, shall I say?--to the extent to which a reciter in a drawing-room is permissibly dramatic--gracefully indicating action and character, never violently insisting on them. Henner’s poetry--his gift of creating, of idealising, in restrained and refined ways--is never shown by the usurpation of another’s functions. It is shown in part by his choice of beautiful, artistic themes; by the exceptional fulness of his appreciation of lovely form and hue; by the combinations of faultless and harmonious colour which occur upon his canvases; by the associations these somehow evoke; by the high pleasure they bestow. To define it much further is impossible. I feel myself, in describing his art, to be ineffective and faltering; but the analyst does not exist who could account completely for his charm.

Henner, it will be allowed by those who are most qualified to notice, is a great painter of the Nude. The Nude, according as you treat it, can rise to poetic heights and address itself to the refined, or can sink to more than prosaic depths. There is the high and there is the low, and there are many levels for the painter to stay at and live upon between them; and to the real artistic instinct, to the real fineness of taste, in looking at the Nude, there is permitted that immediate ease of judgment and decision by which the work is classed at once, and its motive appraised. When the true judges appraise the Nude of Monsieur Henner, the decision is a happy one. He is refinement to the finger-tips--as refined as Burne-Jones, yet not sexless. Painters whom only the Puritanic could accuse of vulgarity--Benner, say, in France, with his ‘Dormeuse’ of Amiens; Ingres, a generation ago, with his ‘Source’ and her ‘_âme végétale_’; Etty, say, in England, with his daylight flesh-colour, which the sunshine suffers to be neither creamy nor grey, but rose and opal--they, and how many others, may be named with praise. But Monsieur Henner’s work has somehow, in this matter, a reticence and a distinction--a part of his Alsatian Poetry--which one is apt to think unique. And it is worthy of notice--it throws a little light on the undramatic, the simply painter-like method of Henner’s work--that the undraped figure is there, not seldom, as a necessary note of colour, and nothing besides: a note of ivory, telling, in some picture of evening, against that olive green of the embrowned woodland which rises, massed and darkening, against the last turquoise of the sky.

Yes, it is a purely painter-like quality, the poetry of colours in that more than blameless juxtaposition which is a rare achievement of Art--the poetry of gleaming form, of discreet light, of restful and mysterious shadow--that Henner will live by. The story he illustrates gains nothing in dramatic interest by his treatment of it. His business, even when he paints an ‘Hérodiade,’ is to solace and charm rather than to excite; and the refinement and suavity of his vision may accomplish for us of the Nineteenth Century what David’s music did for the troubled soul of King Saul. Like Puvis de Chavannes--in work more grandly decorative, in conception vast and suave--he administers to men the refreshment of a pure and high beauty. In such a subject as his ‘Prayer,’ it is his function but to vary things delicately: to escape the commonplace, nothing more. But, as regards his figure painting, in the refinement of his models we are never suffered to lose sight of what is familiar, homely, intimate, personal. Nature has been suggested with reticence, but nature has been constantly referred to. Of his landscape, the materials are simple and few; breadth and simplicity are of the very essence of his treatment. His selection is arbitrary; a certain noble conventionality reigns in his canvases. Give him a tranquil sky, a pool, a square stone fountain, a nymph, a solemn cypress, a tangle of woodland--what more! Petty imitation, fussy realisation of a hundred objects, he will hold to be valueless. But his work must have Unity: it must have Style.

An artist with these preoccupations is not, one may say with safety, likely to be a very popular portrait painter. Yet Henner has painted a fair share of portraits. And no ‘hard and fast’ line can divide such portraiture as he produces from his ideal work. When the touches on his canvas are no longer dictated by what is obviously imagination, it is not likely that a striking realism succeeds to the control, that _modernité_ speaks from every corner of the picture, that the poet has become the fashionable portrait painter. Reticence is still remembered. Henner can perceive character, but it must be conveyed without emphasis. With the palette set as of old, and the schemes of colour such as the ideal work has already accustomed us to, Henner must pursue his task. Perhaps it is the pallor of a thoughtful face of middle age, to be framed in black hair, with an olive background. Perhaps, as in the ‘Créole,’ it is the old Venetian tresses that are to fall richly on the bust that is shining marble, that is gleaming ivory. A likeness, no doubt; but before all things, a picture.

(_Magazine of Art_, May 1888.)

FRANCIS JAMES

I leave to a biographer in the Future the task of recording Mr. Francis James’s birthplace and of settling the number of his years; of saying, too, where he chiefly lived and chiefly practised. I am concerned with his drawings, and not with the man, except in so far as his drawings must reveal him; and the real man, and not the outside facts about him, a man’s work does always to some extent reveal. In the case of Francis James, his work is his water-colours. I know no oil painting by him. I remember no pencil studies. I know no etchings by him, no lithographs by him. And, moreover, modern man though he is, he seems to be able to express himself without the assistance of silver point--the interesting and difficult medium, the employment of which threatens to become a label of the cultivated. His own work in water-colour is as direct, immediate, uncorrectable as that; but colour is of the very essence of it. Whatever he tackles, whatever he elects to let alone, Francis James is essentially a colourist.

One thing about his life and circumstances I shall here--taking breath in a parenthesis--venture to record. As a youth he was never compelled to prepare for a profession. Being a country gentleman who gradually became an artist, Mr. Francis James had a little comfortable means, one may suppose. Is he to be cursed, then, on that account, with the name of amateur? Certainly not. No more than Méryon, who was brought up in the French Navy; no more than W. W. May, the charming marine artist, in early life a sailor, and in late life Keeper of the Painted Hall at Greenwich; no more than Robert Goff, who was in the Coldstream Guards; or Seymour Haden, President of his own Academy, and once such a successful surgeon that he might have been President of the College of Surgeons to boot. In art of any kind--in Painting, Writing, Modelling--the spirit in which a man does his work, and not the means that he possesses, or the family that he belongs to, constitutes him professional or amateur. Is his art his chief interest? If so, whatever may be his status upon other grounds, professional artist, serious professional artist, he is, with his books or his pictures. To the serious artist a little money is of endless usefulness, even if it be only a very scanty portion--three hundred a year and an umbrella--for that scanty portion, which has caused the fool to eat the bread of idleness, has caused the wise man to work with a will. It has gone some little way towards securing him that deepest boon for the artistic nature, _la liberté du travail_.

I suppose it was his exquisite enjoyment of flowers, as he had lived amongst them, at all seasons of the year, in their natural place, that gave the first impulse to Francis James to render flowers in Art. Then, as to method in Water-colour painting, there came the influence of Dewint, and then the influence of some, at least, of modern French practice, and then the influence of his neighbour, down in Sussex--that sensitive Impressionist, H. B. Brabazon, with his mature thought upon the matter, and his delightful practice, his ‘blobs’ upon the drawing-paper--‘blobs’ which are so very few, and are so admirably right. James has become, of late years at all events, less purely an Impressionist than Brabazon. In his work, whatever be its theme, there is always more of positive and yet refined draughtsmanship. But the influence of Brabazon is there all the same; or, at least, is there from the first. An immense sensitiveness as to colour, a refinement of colour which does not preclude boldness, the cultivation of an alertness as to the most delicate gradations of colour--these things characterise Francis James. They are of assistance to him, even of incalculable assistance to him, in all the things that he depicts, in all the visions he realises. But I think they are of most use to him of all when it is flowers he is looking at; composing with grace, painting with ineffable charm.

And, so far as I understand, flowers were the subject with which he chose to begin.

It would, however, be now thoroughly unfair to Francis James to consider him only as a flower painter. Outside flowers altogether, there is a class of effect which he has made his own, and which is his by reason of his habitual command of colour--fearless, original, and gay. I am talking of the church interiors, beheld in keen, clear light; and interesting less it may be by their architecture--as to which, while John Fulleylove, and Albert Goodwin, and Wyke Bayliss, speak, who is there that shall speak with equal authority to-day?--interesting less by their architecture than by their hues and their illuminations, and their accidents and accessories; the ornaments about the altar, the wreath of flowers that encircle the figure of a saint, the bit of heraldic glass that recalls Nuremberg, the sacred piece hoisted above the altar; the banner, it may be, or perhaps only the pink cushion of the altar rail, or the little green curtain that gives privacy to the box of the confessional. At Rothenburg, as well as Nuremberg itself, Mr. James went in for very serious draughtsman’s study of statues in their niches, of the traceried wall, of plate upon the altar, of this and that little detail, of which the treatment remained broad while it became finished. At Nuremberg--to name two, that for excellent reasons I remember--admirable is the broad and luminous picturesqueness of his interiors of the Kaiser Kapelle and St. Sebald. At Rothenburg, as far as simple architecture is concerned, what a variety lay before him! And yet from all its richness and variety he turned now and then, to paint the humble window of the little _bourgeois_ or little tradesman’s house; the window-sill with its few pots of green-leaved and blossoming flowers, seen, some of them, against the brown-red shutter; fragile fuchsia, and healthy geranium.

But whether Francis James is occupied with flower painting, or with church interiors of Germany or the Eastern Riviera, or with landscape pieces, or with studies of the village shop, it is always the same spirit of broad interpretation that dominates his work. Its business is to recall an impression--artistic always, whether beautiful or quaint--it is not generally its business to be imitative, strictly imitative, of actual object or scene. Quite an infinity of detail is pleasantly suggested by a drawing of the grocer’s shop at Bewdley--the Post Office of the country town--and just as much by ‘Shop Front, Bewdley,’ which shows us the deep bow-window of Mr. Bryan, the bookseller; a background before which some quiet figure out of Jane Austen might conceivably have passed. But the detail is not obtruded. If you peer closely into the paper, it is not dryly made out. In a sense, ‘_il n’y a rien_.’ Stand away a little, and then again, ‘_il y a tout_.’

But, of course, Mr. James’s preoccupation with a quaint little world of the provinces, whose combinations of colour, as he here shows us them, are curious rather than lovely--that preoccupation of his is occasional rather than constant; and we shall never therefore take his measure by an inspection of work like this. Some quaint line it possesses, and to the interest of quaint as well as of lovely combinations of line, Francis James is quite alive. But it is where the combinations of line may be lovely--where they may have their highest quality herein--and yet more where with beautiful lines there must (to do justice to the theme) be associated beautiful colour; it is here that Mr. James is most characteristic. ‘Autumn, Asolo,’ shows this to some extent; and so do other landscapes in which the world to which he has addressed himself, whether of Lombard or Venetian plateau, or of Alpine height, is dealt with with intrepidity. But it is to churches and flowers--or sometimes to the interiors of drawing-rooms or bedrooms lived in by tasteful people, and full therefore of objects that should gratify the eye in their happy, well-arranged union--it is to churches and flowers in the main, and most of all flowers, that we must come back, to find Francis James quite at his most exquisite, quite at his most characteristic.

Perhaps it is hardly possible nowadays to paint flowers without submitting to some extent to the influence of the Japanese. From them, whatever else you learn, you learn freedom of treatment and a conception based upon essentials. The limitations of Japanese Art it does not happen just now to be the fashion to recognise; though every one who is really educated--every one who understands the Classics of Art, the immense achievements of Europe from Holbein to Turner--must know of these limitations, and must feel them. That does not prevent the perception of the value of those things which Japanese art (among the arts of other peoples indeed) has had some capacity for teaching us. And when Francis James makes his pink and white roses trail over the paper, with tints so pale and delicate, I think sometimes of the Japanese. I think of them much less when he sets a whole posy--a whole group, at least--in a tumbler, and has his massive colour, his rich, great colour, his fearless juxtapositions. And then, perhaps, with the Japanese influence not lost altogether, but still mainly subdued--not displayed at all, and scarcely even insinuated--do I rejoice in Francis James at his best.

Among painters, water-colour painters, Francis James is the poet of flowers, as Van Huysum, it may be--two hundred years ago--was their prose chronicler. The public knows Van Huysum best by his work in oils. The rare amateur of noble prints knows him best by Earlom’s two splendid translations of him into the medium of mezzotint. But the not less rare connoisseur of the fine drawings of a past period, knows him by water-colour sketches, such as those possessed by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. And as there are moments, moods, opportunities, when men apparently far apart get nearer together, so, just now and again by Van Huysum’s practice in water-colour--by his pure sketching in that medium--the gulf that separates him from Francis James, is, not bridged indeed, but narrowed. The moment Van Huysum passes beyond the pure sketch, the perhaps even rapid study, something that is of the nature of the artificial, of intentional and obvious intricacy, begins to assert itself. Now, with the delightful artist of the day whose eulogium I am slowly making, that is never the case.

Francis James’s fondness for flowers is, in some sense, akin to a woman’s instinctive fondness for everybody’s children. He has joy in their mere life. And it is their life that he paints. And he paints them in their own atmosphere--the sunlight heightening so the key of their colour, or a little rain perhaps has fallen and their life is refreshed. Had the rain fallen when Van Huysum painted them, the drop would have glistened on the petal; the perfection of the imitation of it is what we might have been asked, first of all, to see and admire. But it is not their accidental condition that Francis James imitates. It is their splendid vigour or exquisite freshness--see, for instance, this noble primula with its deep glowing, slightly mauveish reds and its enriched green leaves; in its condition, a very bridegroom coming out of his chamber.

Amongst flowers, Francis James, I find, is universal in his loves. He does not swear fidelity to the rose--or he does not swear the particular fidelity which is only exclusiveness. In every garden, every greenhouse, every season of the year, he has (to use the sailor simile) ‘a wife in every port.’ He is as various in his appreciations of the beloved and the admirable as is a young man by Mr. Thomas Hardy. Primula, tulip, rose, pelargonium, and then the hundred orchids--having thanked one of them for its beauty, and profited by it, he turns with happy expectation to another. Nor does disappointment await him.

One little confidence--made to me long ago, I recollect--I propose, before I finish this article, ruthlessly to break. James destroys many drawings. He strangles the ill-begotten. He pronounces, with severity, judgment upon his creations. He assists the fittest to survive. Three or four years back he was wrestling manfully with the treatment of the orchid. No one, I think, had really treated the orchid before then. Since then, in oils, Mr. William Gale, in a group of works too little known, has treated it with unequal, of course, yet often with remarkable, skill. But when Francis James had drawn, at Sanders’ nursery--during several months’ sojourn at St. Albans, to that end--orchids of every kind, great was the massacre of the innocents. We were permitted afterwards to see the successes; the failures had been done away with.

This is characteristic, and that is why I record it. People who observe flowers, and do not only buy them, will not be astonished that when this happened most--this severe review and condemnation--it was orchids, orchids only, that were in question. And this for several reasons. Some are beautiful, but some are ugly, almost morbid indeed--things for the delectation of Des Esseintes, the too neurotic hero of M. Huysman’s _À Rebours_; scarcely for healthy folk, whom mere strangeness may not fascinate. And then again, the extreme intricacy of the forms of some of them, tells in two ways against their employment as subjects for a painter. It is not only--it is not so much--that their intricacy adds to the difficulty of correctness; it is rather that it adds to the difficulty of their comprehension by the spectator of the draughtsman’s drawing. The public knows the rose and the geranium--it knows, besides, two score of flowers of English garden and hedgerow. But the intricacy of the orchid is as yet an unfamiliar intricacy, and it is infinitely various; and therefore, though the painting of the orchid in Francis James’s water-colours was an experiment interesting and courageous, and within reasonable limits successful, that work was but one phase--far from the most important--of a career and of a talent full already of individuality, distinction, charm.

(_Studio_, January 1898.)

THE END

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