Part 9 (1/2)
The aestheticisow school, of which we have heard so lish Art Club, and the two societies are in a ow school are rettable that they do not unite and give us an exhibition that would fairly stare the Acadeow painters the most prominent and valid talent is Mr Guthrie's His achievements are more considerable and more personal; and he seems to approach very near to a full expression of the pictorial aspirations of his generation Years ago his naular beauty; an oasis it was in a barren and bitter desert of Salon pictures Since then he has adopted a different and better ; and an excellent example of his present style is his portrait of Miss Spencer, a lady in a ainst the picture; it is nodecoration faintly flushed with life But in his ement of the mauve Mr Guthrie achieved quite a little triurey passed over a dark ground, is delicious, and the placing of the signature is in the right place Most artists sign their pictures in the sanature should take a different place in every picture, for in every picture there is one and only one right place for the signature; and the true artist never fails to find the place which his work has chosen and consecrated for his name
I confess myself to be a natural and instinctive admirer of Mr
Guthrie's talent His picture, ”Midsu to arden in the summer's very reen, here and there interwoven with red flowers And three ladies are there with their tiny japanese tea-table One dress--that on the left--is white, like a lily, drenched with green shadows; the dress on the right is a purple, beautiful as the depth of foxglove bells, A delicate and yet a full sensation of the beauty of rossness has been oood word to say” In the same exhibition there was a pastel by Mr Guthrie, which quite enchantedtolines: ”A lady seated on a light chair, her body in profile, her face turned towards the spectator; she wears a dress with red stripes One hand hanging by her side, the other hand holding open a flame-coloured fan; and it is this that makes the picture The feet laid one over the other The face, a mere indication; and for the hair, charcoal, rubbed and then heightened by two or three touches of the rich black of pastel-chalk A delicate, a precious thing, rich in memories of Watteau and Whistler, of boudoir inspiration, and whose destination is clearly the sitting-room of a dilettante bachelor”
Mr Henry, another proow school, exhibited a portrait of a lady in a straw hat--a rich and beautiful piece of painting, so that one would like to possess Mr Hornell's celebrated ”Midsuine the picture cards, the ten of diaht of hearts shuffled rapidly upon a table covered with a Persian tablecloth To ignore what are known as values seeow school Hence a crude and discordant coloration without depth or richness Hence an absence of light and the mystery of aerial perspective But I have spoken very fully on this subject elsewhere
Fifteen years ago it was custoht that their mistakes could be easily rectified Their dark skies and black foregrounds hold their own against all Monet's cleverness, and it has begun to be suspected that even if nature be industriously and accurately copied in the fields, the result is not always a picture The palette gives the value of the grass and of the trees, but, alas, not of the sky-the sky is higher in tone than the palette can go; the painter therefore gets a false value Hence the tendency a the _plein airists_ to leave out the sky or to do with as little sky as possible A little reef is sufficient to bring about a great shi+pwreck; a generation has wasted half its life, and the Old Masters are again beco the fashi+on Mr
Furse seems to be deeply impressed with the truth of the _new_ aestheticism And he has succeeded within the li intention ”The Great Cloud” rolls over a strip of lowland, lowering in a vast iue and shadowy as sleep or death Ruysdael would have stopped for a moment to watch it But its lyrical lilt would trouble a mind that could only think in prose; Shelley would like it better, and most certainly it would not fail to recall to his hter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky; I pass through the pores of ocean and shores, I change, but I cannot die”
What will beco artists and their aspirations is a tale that tier part of its surprises we shall have to wait ten years In ten years many of these aesthetes will have beco for the villas and perambulators of numerous families Many will have disappeared for ever, soenerations hence, may be raised from the dead like Mr Brabazon, our modern Lazarus--
”Lazare allait mourir une seconds fois,”--
or perchance to sleep for ever in Sir Joshua's bosom That a place will be found there for Mr Brabazon is one of the articles of faith of the younger generation Mr Brabazon is described as an amateur, and the epithet is reatlife is in those water-colours--they are all love; out of love they have grown, in its light they have flourished, and they have been made lovely with love
In a tiely his own Even then he saw Nature hardly explained at all--fil colour transparent as rose-leaves, the lake's blue, and the white clouds curling above the line of hills--a sense of colour and a sense of distance, that was all, and he had the genius to remain within the lienius, Mr Brabazon painted, with a flowing brush, rose-leaf water-colours, unenerations, until it happened that the present generation, with its love of slight things, caenius It has hailed hied him into the popularity of a special exhibition of his work at the Goupil Galleries And it was inevitable that the present younghi themselves--his art is no more than a curious anticipation of the artistic ideal of to-day
The sketch he exhibits at the New English Art Club is a singularly beautiful tint of rose, spread with delicate grace over the paper A little less, and there would be nothing; but a little beauty has always seeliness And what is true about one is true about nearly all his drawings We find in them always an har radations of colour which are the lordshi+p and signature of the colourist, and when _le ton local_ is carried through the picture, through the deepest shadows as through the highest lights, e find it persisting everywhere, as we do in No 19, ”Lake Maggiore”, we feel in our souls the joy that comes of perfect beauty But too frequently Mr Brabazon's colour is restricted to an effective contrast; he often skips a greatthe extrerace
But it is right that we should h this work is slight, it is an acco, however little that so waters of civilisation, we may catch at straws Beyond colour--and even in colour his lio He entered St Mark's, and of the delicacy of orna; neither the tracery of carven coluroined arches It was his genius not to see these things--to leave out the drawing is better than to fuh weleft out is a very slight thing, we cannot fail to perceive that these sketches, though less than sonnets or ballades, or even rondeaus or rondels--at most they are triolets--are akin to the masters, however distant the relationshi+p
I have not told you about the very serious progress that Mr George Thompson has made since the last exhibition; I have not described his two admirable pictures; nor ht's ”Hay Meadows”, nor Mr Christie's pretty picture ”A May's Frolic,” nor Mr MacColl's ”Donkey Race” I have omitted much that it would have been a pleasure to praise; for uide to the exhibition, but to interpret soeneration
The New English Art Club is very typical of this end of the century
It is young, it is interesting, it is intelligent, it is emotional, it is cosmopolitan--not the Bouillon Duval cosreeable assio Art has fallen in France, and the New English seearden It has caught English root, and already English colour and fragrance are in the flower A frail flower; but, frail or strong, it is all we have of art in the present generation It is slight, and so ht in its art as ours? As the century runs on it becoent
A sheet of Whatman's faintly flushed with a rose-tint, a few stray verses characterised with a few i accent, are sufficient foundation for two considerable reputations The education of the younger generation isin nothing except guts As education spreads guts disappear, and that is theof those great tiiddiness and the exultation of a constant creation--when a day was sufficient for Rubens to paint the ”Kerht to paint the ”Co from our mind the fabulous production of Tintoretto and Veronese, let us o Millais painted a beautiful picture every year until ht his art to a sudden close One year it was ”Autunes' Eve”, and behind these pictures there were at least ten masterpieces--”The Orchard”, ”The Rainbow”, ”Mariana in the Moated Grange”, ”Ophelia”, etc Millais is far behind Veronese and Tintoretto in nificent excellence and extraordinary rapidity of production; but is not the New English Art Club even as far behind the excellence and fertility of production of thirty years ago?
A GREAT ARTIST
We have heard the words ”great artist” used so often and so carelessly that their trenificance escapes The present is a ti, latent and manifest, of the words, for we are about to look on the drawings of the late Charles Keene
In e canvases in which historical incidents are depicted, conquerors on black horses covered with gold trappings, or else figures of Christ, or else the agonies of els is considered by the populace to be especially iinative, and all who affect such subjects are at least in their day terar interpretation To the select few the great artist is he who is most racy of his native soil, he who has most persistently cultivated his talent in one direction, and in one direction only, he who has repeated himself most often, he who has lived upon himself the most avidly In art, eclecticis in art I do not mean by character personal idiosyncrasies; I mean racial and territorial characteristics Of personal idiosyncrasy we have enough and to spare Indeed, it has come to be accepted almost as an axiom that it does not matter much how badly you paint, provided you do not paint badly like anybody else But instead of noisy idiosyncrasy ant the calm of national character in our art A national character can only be acquired by re ourselves in the spirit of our land until it oozes frohtest touch Our lives should be one long sacrifice for this one thing--national character Foreign travel should be eschee should turn our eyes from Paris and Rome and fix thenorant,only in our own parish soil There are no universities in art, but there are village schools; each of us should choose histo continue the tradition And while labouring thus humbly, rather as handicraftsin to appear in our work, not the weak febrile idiosyncrasy which lights a few hours of the artist's youth, but a steady flame nourished by the rich oil of excellent lessons If the work is good, very little personality is required Are the individual tely exhibited in their pictures?
The paragraph I have just written will seeression to the careless reader, but he who has read carefully, or will take the trouble to glance back, will not fail to see, that although in appearance digressive, it is a strict and accurate comment on Charles Keene, and the circumstances in which his art was produced Charles Keene never sought after originality; on the contrary, he began by hu John Leech, the inventor of the s (few if any of theuishable froinality stole upon hiht of very little except his own talent and the various aspects of English life which he had the power of depicting; but he knew thoroughly well the capacities of his talent, the direction in which it could be developed, and his whole life was devoted to its cultivation He affected neither a knowledge of literature nor of Continental art; he lived in England and for England, content to tell the story of his own country and the age he lived in; in a word, he worked and lived as did the Dutchn influence; no reat Dutchlish, and the result is often hardly less surprising To look at sos and not think of the Dutchlish we are s are Dutch in the strange simplicity and directness of intention; they are Dutch in their oblivion to all interests except those of good drawing; they are Dutch in the beautiful quality of the work coat or the side of that cab, and say if there is not so is sie of seventeenth-century prose; and in Keene there is the same deep, rich, classic si is the saht, of course, say Jan Steen; and is it not certain that both Terburg and Steen, working under the sas very like Keene's? And now, looking through the , is it a paradox to say that No 221 is in feeling and quality of workmanshi+p a Dutch picture of the best ti wife sits by an openfull of sunlight, and the curtains likewise are drenched in the pure white light How tranquil she is, how passive in her beautiful animal life! No complex passion stirs in that flesh; instinct drowses in her just as in an animal With what animal passivity she looks up in her husband's face!
Look at that peaceful face, that high forehead, how clearly conceived and how coht the ht floods the sweet face so exquisitively stupid, and her soul, and the room, and the very conditions of life of these people are revealed to us
And now, in a very rough and frag more than a hurried transcription of s which especially arrested my attention