In the picture “Necessity knows no Law” a poor woman with a child in her arms has entered a pawnshop to borrow money on her wedding-ring; in another, women of the poorer class are to be seen walking along with their soldier sons and husbands, who have been called out on active service. One of them clasps tightly to her breast her little child, the only one still remaining to her in life, whilst an aged widow presses the hand of her son with the sad presentiment that, even if he comes back to her, she will probably not have long to live after his return. Not only did Frank Holl paint stories for his countrymen, but he also painted them big in majuscule characters which were legible without spectacles, and he partially owed his splendid successes to this cheap sentimentality.
Almost everywhere the interest of subject still plays the first part, and this slightly lachrymose trait bordering ongenre, this lyrically tender or allegorically subtle element, which runs through English figure pictures, would easily degenerate into vaporous enervation in another country. In England portrait painting, which now, as in the days of Reynolds, is the greatest title to honour possessed by English art, invariably maintains its union with direct reality. By acknowledgment portrait painting in the present day is exceedingly earnest: it admits of no decorative luxuriousness, no sport with hangings and draperies, no pose; and English likenesses have this severe actuality in the highest degree. Stiff-necked obstinacy, sanguine resolution, and muscular force of will are often spoken of as an Englishman’s national characteristics, and a trace of these qualities is also betrayed in English portrait painting. The self-reliance of the English is far too great to suffer or demand any servile habit of flattery: everything is free from pose, plain and simple. Let the subject be the weather-beaten figure of an old sailor or the dazzling freshness of English youth, there is a remarkable energy and force of life in all their works, even in the pictures of children with their broad open brow, finely chiselled nose, and assured and penetrative glance. And as portrait painting in England, to its own advantage and the benefit of all art, has never been considered as an isolated province, such pictures may be specified among the works of the most frigid academician as well as amongst those of the most vigorous naturalist. Frank Holl, who had such a Düsseldorfian tinge in his more elaborate pictures, showed at the close of his life, in his likenesses of the engraver Samuel Cousins, Lord Dufferin, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Wolseley, Mr. Gladstone, the Duke of Cleveland,Sir George Trevelyan, and Lord Spencer, a simple virility altogether wanting in his earlier works. They had a trenchant characterisation and an unforced pose which were striking even in England. It is scarcely possible to exhibit people more naturally, or more completely to banish from their expression that concentrated air of attentiveness which suggests photography and so easily intrudes into a portrait. Even Leighton, so devoid of temperament, so entirely devoted to the measured art of the ancients, became at once nervous and almost brutal in his power when he painted a portrait in place of ideal Grecian figures. His vivid and forcible portrait of Sir Richard Burton, the celebrated African traveller, would do honour to the greatest portrait painter of the Continent.
Amongst portrait painters by professionWalter Oulesswill probably merit the place of honour immediately after Watts as an impressive exponent of character. He has assimilated much from his master Millais—not merely the heaviness of colour, which often has a disturbing effect in the latter, but also Millais’ powerful flight of style, always so free from false rhetoric. The chemical expert Pochin, as Ouless painted him in 1865, does not pose in thepicture nor allow himself to be disturbed in his researches. It is a thoroughly contemporary portrait, one of those brilliant successes which later occurred in France also. The Recorder of London, Mr. Russell Gurney, he likewise painted in his professional character and in his robes of office. In its inflexible graveness and earnest dignity the likeness is almost more than the portrait of an individual; it seems the embodiment of the proud English Bench resting upon the most ancient traditions. His portrait of Cardinal Manning had the same convincing power of observation, the same large and sure technique. The soft light plays upon the ermine and the red stole, and falls full upon the fine, austere, and noble face.
Besides Ouless mention may be made from among the great number of portrait painters ofJ. J. Shannon, with his powerful and firmly painted likenesses; ofJames Sant, with his sincere and energetic portraits of women; ofMouat Loudan, with his pretty pictures of children, and of the many-sidedCharles W. Furse. Hubert Herkomer was the most celebrated in Germany, and is probably the most skilful of the young men whomThe Graphicbrought into eminence in the seventies.
The career ofHubert Herkomeris amongst those adventurous ones which become less and less frequent in the nineteenth century; there are not many who have risen so rapidly to fame and fortune from such modest circumstances. His father was a carver of sacred images in the little Bavarian village of Waal, where Hubert was born in 1849. In 1851 the enterprising Bavarian tried his fortune in the New World. But there he did not succeed in making progress, and in 1857 the family appeared in England, at Southampton. Here he fought his way honestly at the bench where he carved, and as a journeyman worker, whilst his wife gave lessons in music. A commission to carve Peter Vischer’s four evangelists in wood brought him with his son to Munich, where they occupied room in the back buildings ofa master-carpenter’s house, in which they slept, cooked, and worked. In the preparatory class of the Munich Academy the younger Herkomer received his first teaching, and began to draw from the nude, the antique serving as model. At a frame-maker’s in Southampton he gave his first exhibition, and drew illustrations for a comic paper. With the few pence which he saved from these earnings he went to London, where he lived from hand to mouth with a companion as poor as himself. He cooked, and his friend scoured the pans; meanwhile he worked as a mason on the frieze of the South Kensington Museum, and hired himself out for the evenings as a zither-player. ThenThe Graphicbecame his salvation, and after his drawings had made him known he soon had success with his paintings. “After the Toil of the Day,” a picture which he exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1873—a thoughtful scene from the village life of Bavaria, carried out after the manner of Fred Walker—found a purchaser immediately. He was then able to make a home for his parents in the village of Bushey, which he afterwards glorified in the picture “Our Village,” and he began his masterpiece “The Last Muster,” which obtained in 1878 the great medal at the World Exhibition in Paris. Since then he found the eyes of the English public fixed upon him. There followed at first a series of pictures in which he proceeded upon the lines of Fred Walker’s poetic realism: “Eventide,” a scene in the WestminsterUnion; “The Gloom of Idwal,” a romantic mountain picture from North Wales; “God’s Shrine,” a lonely Bavarian hillside path, with peasants praying at a shrine; “Der Bittgang,” a group of country people praying for harvest; “Contrasts,” a picture of English ladies surrounded by school-children in the Bavarian mountains. At the same time he became celebrated as a portrait painter, his first successes in this field being the likenesses of Wagner and Tennyson, Archibald Forbes, his own father, John Ruskin, Stanley, and the conductor Hans Richter. And he reached the summit of his international fame when his portrait of Miss Grant, “The Lady in White,” appeared in 1886; all Europe spoke of it at the time, and it called forth entire bundles of poems, anecdotes, biographies, and romances. From that time he advanced in his career with rapid strides.
The University of Oxford appointed him Professor of the Fine Arts. He opened a School of Art, and had etchings, copper engravings, and engravings in mezzotint produced by his pupils under his guidance. He wrote articles in the London papers upon social questions, and political economy, and all manner of subjects, an article signed with Herkomer’s name being always capable of creating interest. He has his own theatre, and produces in it operas of which he writes the text and the music, and manages the rehearsals and the scenery, besides playing the leading parts.
Yet it is just his portraits of women, the foundations of his fame, which do not seem in general to justify entirely the painter’s great reputation. Miss Grant was certainly a captivating woman, and she broke men’s hearts wherever she made her appearance. People gazed again and again into the brilliant brown eyes with which she looked so composedly before her; they were overwhelmed by her austere and lofty virginal beauty. “The Lady in Black (An American Lady)” made yet a more piquant and spiritualisedeffect. There was the unopened bud, and here the woman who has had experience of the delights and disappointments of life. There was unapproachable pride, and here a trait of distinction and of suffering, an almost weary carriage of the body. There would certainly be an interesting gallery of beauty if Herkomer unite these “types of women” in a series. But even in the first picture how much of all the admiration excited was due to the painter and how much to the model? The portrait of Miss Grant was such a success primarily because Miss Grant herself was so beautiful. The arrangement of white against white was nothing new: Whistler, a far greater artist, had already painted a “White Girl” in 1863, and it was a much greater work of art, though, on account of the attractiveness of the model being less powerful, it triumphed only in the narrower circle of artists. Bastien-Lepage, who set himself the same problem in his “Sara Bernhardt,” had also run through the scale of white with greater sureness. And Herkomer’s later pictures of women—“The Lady in Yellow,” Lady Helen Fergusson, and others—are even less alluring, considered as works of art. The reserve and evenness of the execution give his portraits a somewhat clotted and stiff appearance. Good modelling and exceedingly vigorous drawing may perhaps ensure greatcorrectness in the counterfeit of the originals, but the life of the picture vanishes beneath the greasy technique, the soapy painting through which materials of drapery and flesh-tints assume quite the same values. There is nothing in it of the transparency, the rosy delicacy, freshness, and flower-like bloom of Gainsborough’s women and girls. Herkomer appears in these pictures as a salon painter in whom a tame but tastefully cultivated temperament is expressed with charm. Even his landscapes with their trim peasants’ cottages and their soft moods of sunset have not enriched with new notes the scale executed by Walker.
All the more astonishing is the earnest certainty of touch and the robust energy which are visible in his other works. His portraits of men, especially the one of his father, that kingly old man with the long, white beard and the furrowed brow, take their place beside the best productions of English portraiture, which are chiselled, as it were, in stone. In “The Last Muster” he showed that it is possible to be simple and yet strike a profound note and even attain greatness. For there is something great in these old warriors, who at the end of their days are praying, having never troubled themselves over prayer during all their lives, who have travelled so far and staked their lives dozens of times, and are now drawing their last breath softly upon the seats of a church. Even his more recent groups—“The Assemblage of the Curators of the Charterhouse” and “The Session of the Magistrates of Landsberg”—are magnificent examples of realistic art, full of imposing strength and soundness. In the representation of these citizens the genius of the master who in his “Chelsea Pensioners” created one of the “Doelen pieces” of the nineteenth century, revealed itself afresh in all its greatness.
Beside portrait painting the painting of landscape stands now as ever in full bloom amongst the English; not that the artists of to-day are more consistently faithful to truth than their predecessors, or that they seem more modern in the study of light. In the province of landscape as in that of figure painting, far more weight is laid upon subject than on the moods of atmosphere. If one compares the modern English painters with Crome and Constable, one finds them wanting in boldness and creative force; and placed beside Monet, they seem to be diffident altogether. But a touching reverence for nature gives almost all their pictures a singularly chaste and fragrant charm.
Of course, all the influences which have affected English art in other respects are likewise reflected in landscape painting. The epoch-making activity of the pre-Raphaelites, the passionate earnestness of Ruskin’s love for nature, as well as the influence of foreign art, have all left their traces. In his own manner Constable had spoken the last word. The principal thing in him, as in Cox, was the study of atmospheric effects and of the dramatic life of air. They neither of them troubled themselves about local colour, but sought to render the tones which are formed under atmospheric and meteorological influences; they altogether sacrificed the completion of the details of subject to seizing the momentary impression. In Turner, generally speaking, it was only the air that lived. Trees and buildings, rocks and water, are merelyrepoussoirsfor the atmosphere; they are exclusively ordained to lead the eye through the mysterious depths of light and shadow. The intangible absorbed what could be touched and handled. As a natural reaction there came this pre-Raphaelite landscape, and by a curious irony of chance the writer who had done most for Turner’s fame was also he who first welcomed this pre-Raphaelite landscape school. Everything which the old school had neglected now became the essential object of painting. The landscape painters fell in love with the earth, with the woods and the fields; and the more autumn resolved the wide green harmony of nature into a sport of colours multiplied a thousand times, the more did they love it. Thousands of things were there to be seen. First, how the foliage turned yellow and red and brown, and then how it fell away: how it was scattered upon a windy day, whirling in a yellow drift of leaves; how in still weather leaf after leaf lightly rustled to the ground from between the wavering brown boughs. And then when the foliage fell from the trees and bushes the most inviolate secrets of summer came to light; there lay around quantities of bright seeds and berries rich in colour, brown nuts, smooth acorns, black and glossy sloes, and scarlet haws. In the leafless beeches there clustered pointed beechmast, the mugwort bent beneath its heavy red bunches, late blackberries lay black and brown amid the damp foliage upon the road, bilberries grew amid the heather, and wild raspberries bore their dull red fruit once again. The dying ferns took a hundred colours; the moss shot up like the ears of a miniature cornfield. Eager as children the landscapepainters roamed here and there across the woodland, to discover its treasures and its curiosities. They understood how to paint a bundle of hay with such exactness that a botanist could decide upon the species of every blade. One of them lived for three months under canvas, so as thoroughly to know a landscape of heath. Confused through detail, they lost their view of the whole, and only made a return to modernity when they came to study the Parisian landscape painters. Thus English art in this matter made a curious circuit, giving and taking. First, the English fertilised French art; but at the time when French artists stood under the influence of the English, the latter swerved in the opposite direction, until they ultimately received from France the impulse which led them back into the old way.
In accordance with these different influences, several currents which cross and mingle with each other are to be found flowing side by side in English landscape painting: upon one side a spirit of prosaic reasonableness, a striving after clearness and precision, which does not know how to sacrifice detail, and is therefore wanting in pictorial totality of effect; on the other side an artistic pantheism which rises at times to high lyrical poetry in spite of many dissonances.
The pictures ofCecil Lawsonlead to the point where the pre-Raphaelites begin. The elder painters, with their powerful treatment and the freedom and boldness of their execution, still keep altogether on the lines of Constable, whereas in later painters, with their minute elaboration of all particularities, the influence of the pre-Raphaelites becomes more and more apparent.
Where Cecil Lawson ended,James Clarke Hookbegan, the great master-spirit who opened the eyes of the world fifty years ago to the depth of colouring and the enchanting life of nature, even in its individual details. His pictures, especially those sunsets which he paints with such delight, have something devout and religious in them; they have the effect of a prayer or a hymn, and often possess a solemnity which is entirely biblical, in spite of their brusque, pungent colours. In his later period he principally devoted himself to sea-pieces, and in doing so receded from the pre-Raphaelite painting of detail, which is characteristic of his youthful period. His pictures give one the breath of the sea, and his sailors are old sea-wolves. All that remains from his pre-Raphaelite period is that, as a rule, they carry a certain burden of ideas.
Vicat Cole, likewise one of the older school, is unequal and less important. From many of his pictures one receives the impression that he has directly copied Constable, and others are bathed in dull yellow tones; nevertheless he has sometimes painted autumn pictures, felicitous and noble landscapes, in which there is really a reflection of the sun of Claude Lorrain.
With much greater freedom doesColin Hunterapproach nature, and he has the secret of seizing her boldly in her most impressive moments. The twilight, with its mysterious, interpenetrating tremor of colours of a thousand shades, its shine and glimmer of water, with the sky brooding heavily above, is what fascinates him most of all. Sometimes he represents the dawn, as in “The Herring Market at Sea”; sometimes the pale tawny sunset, as in “The Gatherers of Seaweed,” in the South Kensington Museum. His men are always in a state of restless activity, whether they are making the most of the last moments of light or facing the daybreak with renewed energies.
Although resident in London, he and Hook are the true standard-bearers of the forcible Scotch school of landscape.MacCallum,MacWhirter, andJames Macbeth, with whomJohn Brett, the landscape painter of Cornwall, may be associated, are all gnarled, Northern personalities. Their strong, dark tones stand often beside each other with a little hardness, but they sum up the great glimpses of nature admirably. Their brush has no tenderness, their spirit does not lightly yield to dreaminess, but they stand with both feet firmly planted on the earth, and they clasp reality in a sound and manly fashion with both arms. Their deep-toned pictures, with red wooden houses, darkly painted vessels, veiled skies, and rude fishermen with all their heart in their work, waken strong and intimate emotions. The difference between these Scots and the tentative spirits of the younger generation of the following of Walker and Mason is like that between Rousseau and Dupré as opposed to Chintreuil and Daubigny. The Scotch painters are sombre and virile; they have an accent of depth and truth, and a dark, ascetic harmony of colour. Even as landscape painters the English love what is delicate in nature, what is refined and tender, familiar and modest: blossoming apple-trees and budding birches, the odour of the cowshed and the scent of hay, the chime of sheep-bellsand the hum of gnats. They seek no great emotions, but are merely amiable and kindly, and their pictures give one the feeling of standing at the window upon a country excursion, and looking out at the laughing and budding spring. In her novelNorth and SouthMrs. Gaskell has given charming expression to the glow of this feeling of having fled from the smoke and dirt of industrial towns to breathe the fresh air and see the sun go down in the prosperous country, where the meadows are fresh and well-kept, and where the flowers are fragrant and the leaves glisten in the sunshine. In the pictures of the Scotch artists toiling men are moving busily; for the English, nature merely exists that man may have his pleasure in her. Not only is everything which renders her the prosaic handmaiden of mankind scrupulously avoided, but all abruptnesses of landscape, all the chance incidents of mountain scenery; and, indeed, they are not of frequent occurrence in nature as she is in England. A familiar corner of the country is preferred to wide prospects, and some quiet phase to nature in agitation. Soft, undulating valleys, gently spreading hills conforming to the Hogarthian line of beauty, are especially favoured. And should the rainbow, the biblical symbol of atonement, stand in the sky, the landscape is for English eyes in the zenith of its beauty.
There isBirket Forster, one of the first and most energetic followers of Walker—Birket Forster, whose charming woodcuts became known in Germany likewise;Inchbold, who with a light hand combines the tender green of the grasses upon the dunes and the bright blue of the sea into a whole pervaded with light, and of great refinement;Leader, whose bright evening landscapes,andCorbet, whose delicate moods of morning, are so beautiful.Mark Fisher, who in the matter of tones closely follows the French landscape school, though he remains entirely English in sentiment, has painted with great artistic power the dreamy peace of solitary regions as well as the noisy and busy life of the purlieus of the town.John White, in 1882, signalised himself with a landscape, “Gold and Silver,” which was bathed in light and air. The gold was a waving cornfield threaded by a sandy little yellow path; the silver was the sea glittering and sparkling in the background. Moved by Birket Forster,Ernest Partonseeks to combine refinement of tone with incisiveness in the painting of detail. His motives are usually quite simple—a stream and a birch wood in the dusk, a range of poplars stretching dreamily along the side of a ditch.Marshallpainted gloomy London streets enveloped in mist;Dochartyblossoming hawthorn bushes and autumn evening with russet-leaved oaks; whileAlfred Eastbecame the painter of spring in all its fragrance, when the meadows are resplendent in their earliest verdure, and the leaves of the trees which have just unfolded stand out against the firmament in light green patches of colour, when the limes are blossoming and the crops begin to sprout.M. J. Aumonierappears in the harmony of colouring, and in the softness of his fine, light-hued tones, as the true heir of Walker and Mason. A discreet and intimate sense of poetry pervades his valleys with their veiled and golden light, a fertile odour of the earth streams from his rich meadows, and from all the luxuriant, cultivated, and peacefully idyllic tracts which he has painted so lovingly and so well.Gregory,Knight,Alfred Parsons,David Fulton,A. R. Brown, andSt. Clair Simmonshave all something personal in their work, a bashful tenderness beneath what is seemingly arid. The study of water-colour would alone claim a chapter for itself. Since water-colourallows of more breadth and unity than oil-painting, it is precisely here that there may be found exceedingly charming and discreet concords, softly chiming tones of delicate blue, greenish, and rosy light, giving the most refined sensations produced by English colouring.
Of course, England has a great part to play in the painting of the sea. It is not for nothing that a nation occupies an insular and maritime position, above all with such a sea and upon such coasts, and the English painter knows well how to give an heroic and poetic cast to the weather-beaten features of the sailor. For thirty yearsHenry Moore, the elder brother of Albert Moore, was the undisputed monarch of this province of art. Moore began as a landscape painter. From 1853 to 1857 he painted the glistening cliffs and secluded nooks of Cumberland, and then the green valleys of Switzerland flooded with the summer air and the clear morning light—quiet scenes of rustic life, the toil of the wood-cutter and the haymaker, somewhat as Julien Dupré handles such matters at the present time in Paris. From 1858 he began his conquest of the sea, and in the succeeding interval he painted it in all the phases of its changing life,—at times in grey and sombre morning, at other times when the sun stands high; at times in quietude, at other times when the wind sweeps heavily across the waves, when the storm rises or subsides, when the sky is clouded or when it brightens. It is a joy to follow him in all quarters of the world, to see how he constantly studies the waves of every zone on fair or stormy days, amid the clearness and brilliancy of the mirror of the sea, as amid the strife of the elements; as a painter he is, at the same time, always a student of nature, and treats the sea as though he had to paint its portrait. In the presence of his sea-pieces one has the impression of a window opening suddenly upon the ocean. Henry Moore measures the boundless expanse quite calmly, like a captain calculating thechances of being able to make a crossing. Nowhere else does there live any painter who regards the sea so much with the eyes of a sailor, and who combines such eminent qualities with this objective and cool, attentive observation, which seems to behold in the sea merely its navigable capacity.
The painter of the river-port of London and the arm of the Thames isWilliam L. Wyllie, whose pictures unite so much bizarre grandeur with so much precision. One knows the port life of the Thames, with its accumulation of work, which has not its like upon the whole planet. Everything is colossal. From Greenwich up to London both sides of the river are a continuous quay: everywhere there are goods being piled, sacks being raised on pulleys, ships being laid at anchor; everywhere are fresh storehouses for copper, beer, sails, tar, and chemicals. The river is of great width, and is like a street populated with ships, a workshop winding again and again. The steamers and sailing vessels move up and down stream, or lie in masses, close beside one another, at anchor. Upon the bank the docks lie athwart like so many streets of water, sending out ships or taking them in. The ranks of masts and the slender rigging form a spider’s web spreading across the whole horizon; and a vaporous haze, penetrated by the sun, envelops it with a reddish veil. Every dock is like a town, filled with huge vats and populated with a swarm of human beings, that move hither and thither amid fluttering shadows. This vast panorama, veiled with smoke and mist, only now and then broken by a ray of sunlight, is the theme of Wyllie’s pictures. Even as a child he ran about in the port of London, clambered on to the ships, noted the play of the waves, and wandered about the docks; and so he painted his pictures afterwards with all the technical knowledge of a sailor. There is no one who knows so well how ships stand in the water; no one has such an understanding of their details: the heavy sailing vessels and the great steamers, which lie in the brown water of the port like mighty monsters, the sailors and the movements of the dock labourers, the dizzy tide of men, the confusion of cabs and drays upon the bridges spanning the arm of the Thames; only Vollon in Paris is to be compared with him as painter of a river-port.
Apart from him,Clara Montalbaspecially has painted the London port in delicate water-colours. Yet she is almost more at home in Venice, the Venice of Francesco Guardi, with its magic gleam, its canals, regattas, and palaces, the Oriental and dazzling splendour of San Marco, the austere grace of San Giorgio Maggiore, the spirited and fantasticdécadenceof Santa Maria della Salute. Elsewhere English water-colour often enters into a fruitless rivalry with oil-painting, but Clara Montalba cleaves to the old form which in other days under Bonington, David Cox, and Turner was the chief glory of the English school. She throws lightly upon paper notes and effects which have struck her, and the memory of which she wishes to retain.
For the English painters of the day, so far as they do not remain in the country, Venice has become what the East was for the earlier generations. They no longer study the romantic Venice which Turner painted and Byron sang inChilde Harold, they do not paint the noble beauty of Venetian architecture or its canals glowing in the sun, but the Venice of the day, with its narrow alleys and pretty girls, Venice with its marvellous effects of light and the picturesque figures of its streets. Nor are they at pains to discover “ideal” traits in the character of the Italian people. They paint true, everyday scenes from popular life, but these are glorified by the magic of light. After Zezzos, Ludwig Passini, Cecil van Haanen, Tito, and Eugène Blaas, the Englishmen Luke Fildes, W. Logsdail, and Henry Woods are the most skilful painters of Venetian street scenes. In the pictures ofLuke FildesandW. Logsdailthere are usually to be seen in the foreground beautiful women, painted life-size, washing linen in the canal or seated knitting at the house door; the heads are bright and animated, the colours almost glaringly vivid.Henry Woods, the brother-in-law of Luke Fildes, rather followed the paths prescribed by Favretto in such pictures as “Venetian Trade in the Streets,” “The Sale of an Old Master,” “Preparation or the First Communion,” “Back from the Rialto,” and the like; of all the English he has carried out the study of bright daylight most consistently. The little glass house which he built in 1879 at the back of the Palazzo Vendramin became the model of all the glass studios now disseminated over the city of the lagunes.
And these labours in Venice contributed in no unessential manner to lead English painting, in general, away from its one-sided æsthetics and rather more into the mud of the streets, caused it to break with its finely accorded tones, and brought it to a more earnest study of light. Beside his idealised Venetian women, Luke Fildes also painted large pictures from the life of the English people, such as “The Return of the Lost One,” “The Widower,” and the like, which struck tones more earnest than English painting does elsewhere; and in his picture of 1878, “The Poor of London,” he even recalled certain sketches which Gavarni drew during his rambles throughthe poverty-stricken quarter of London. The poor starving figures in this work were rendered quite realistically and without embellishment; the general tone was a greenish-grey, making a forcible change from the customary light blue of English pictures.Dudley Hardy’shuge picture “Homeless,” where a crowd of human beings are sleeping at night in the open air at the foot of a monument in London, andJacomb Hood’splain scenes from London street life, are other works which in recent years were striking, from having a character rather French than English.Stott of Oldham, by his pretty pictures of the dunes with children playing, powerful portraits, and delicate, vaporous moonlight landscapes, has won many admirers on the Continent also.Stanhope Forbespainted “A Philharmonic Society in the Country,” a representation of an auction, and scenes from the career of the Salvation Army, in which he restrained himself from all subordinate ideas of a poetic turn.
In the same way those artists are important who work according to the demands of decorative painting. A picture in a room should be like a jewel in its setting, in harmony. It should fit agreeably into the scheme of decoration, its colour in unison, its lines melodious, its general effect toning well with the general design.
These principles, taught by Morris, have had a formative influence on the work of a large number of artists. There arose a tendency which, by borrowing characteristic effects from woodwork, carpets, and stained-glass, and by the application of style to line as well as to colour, went one step further than Burne-Jones.
The pictures ofJohn W. Waterhouse, for instance, are not only conceived in literary vein, but seen with the eye of a painter. By smooth, thick lines, by the discordant harmony of blues, greens, and violet, he gets a carpet-like effect which is highly decorative.
Byam Shaw, still a young man, is just such another master of decorative lines. At the age of twenty-five he painted the picture “Love’s Baubles,” which now hangs in the art gallery in Liverpool. The subject he took from a poem in Rossetti’s “House of Life.” Beautiful women snatch after the fruit which a boy carries along on a salver. The whole is a harmony of melodious lines and rich, quiet colours.
In his next picture, “Truth,” he ranges himself with Boutet de Monoel or Ludwig von Zumbusch: he strives after the monumental effect that the figures of old Brueghel have.
Next to Byam Shaw,G. E. Moirais the chief representative of this decorative school. His picture of Pelleas and Melisande is a work quite out of the ordinary, original in arrangement, incisive, almost bitter in colour, dull-green, black, lilac, and yellow; fine in the atmosphere of Maeterlinck that pervades the whole. But he does his best work as a decorator, not as a painter of pictures that can be taken away from their setting. In the frieze with which he decorated the Trocadéro Restaurant in London he, for the first time, made use of polychrome relief, that since has played such an important part in the art of decoration, and sought to enhance the colour effect still more by the use of metal. In the Paris Exhibition he attracted considerable attention by the pictures with which he decorated the pavilion of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company—simple lines and fantasies of colour which with their delicate, flowing harmony had an effect like music. His designs for stained-glass windows have the same qualities, and in his position as professor in the National College of Art at South Kensington he is bound to exert a great influence over the younger generation.
Anning Bell, well known by his design for the cover of theStudio, has also done excellent work in coloured relief, especially in his frieze “Music and Dancing.”
Maurice Greiffenhagensurprises one by the ardour of his imagination, his strong emphatic line, and the tapestry-like beauty of his colour. He reminds one of Aman-Jean, such a wonderful “old-master-like” beauty is suffused through the picture “The Sons of God looked upon the Daughters of Men.” No less effective is the “gourmandise” with which he gives his interpretation the appearance of an old picture. The colours, though full of sound and movement, are at the same time so etiolated and faint that one would think the picture had hung for centuries in a dusty corner of an old church, or that spiders had spun their webs across it; the frame too is in keeping, and enhances the general effect of solemnity.
The same style is found in the later work ofFrank Brangwyn, who began by painting out-of-door pictures in the spirit of the French Impressionists,and afterwards, thanks to a visit to the East, was brought into touch with Nature saturated in colour and massive in feature.
All his works are imposing through the decisive way in which he builds up his masses, and the wonderful, rhythmical articulation of forms and colours combined. The picture “Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh” which has been given a place in the Luxembourg, and the large mural painting “Commerce and Navigation” in the Royal Exchange in London, are up to now his strongest work.
F. Cayley Robinson, who arrests one’s attention with his austere, almost heraldic arrangement of line, and his gloomy acerbity of colour;Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, who awoke high hopes with her picture “The Deceitfulness of Riches”; and that spirited draughtsman, W. Nicholson, whose drawings lead the eye to and fro, backwards and forwards, along heavy decided lines, noting every expressive turn and movement. Almost all these masters have come to us from the applied arts. It was the idea of attaining to unity of effect in decorative ornament that impelled these artists to work in the spirit of to-day, not that each should bring forward his own work of art and let it stand by itself, but that the scheme of decorativearchitecture, modelling, and painting should work together hand in hand in a homogeneous scheme of decoration.
With all these artists one cannot help noticing that they owe much in the way of light and leading to one who in England, the land of poems-in-paint, proclaimed more outspokenly than anyone else the principle of “Art for art’s sake,”—to the great American, James M‘Neill Whistler.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER XXVIII