Where Art Begins
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Title: Where Art Begins
Author: Hume Nisbet
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WHERE ART BEGINS
_Crown 8vo. cloth extra, 2s. 6d._
LESSONS IN ART.
By HUME NISBET.
_With 22 Illustrations by the Author._
'A book which merits prompt and hearty recognition.... Mr. Nisbet
is himself an accomplished artist, and the book is the outcome of
long years spent in the attempt to teach others the principles and
laws of painting and drawing.... Mr. Nisbet possesses such an
enviable faculty of clear and attractive exposition that this
little book is sure to make its own welcome.'--LEEDS MERCURY.
'A readable little volume.... The author has endeavoured to write
out some of the strictly necessary rules and laws of drawing and
painting for the use of students, so that they may be able to work
at home, and spare their masters a number of questions if they are
at art schools. The book deals with drawing and painting in water
and oil colour, and concludes with "Hints on General Art."... Art
students will, no doubt, find the little work helpful, and the
general reader may dip into it with pleasure.'--PALL MALL GAZETTE.
'A very useful book for young students.... Mr. Nisbet has a knack
of explanation so clear and pointed that few can fail to understand
the many practical hints with which the little book abounds.... The
book may be cordially commended.'--SCOTSMAN.
'A most entertaining as well as instructive book, that will commend
itself to young and old alike. To the author's experience as an art
teacher is doubtless due the lucid manner in which he writes. The
completeness and range of the lessons are remarkable.'--MANCHESTER
EXAMINER.
'The advice given will certainly succeed in its aim of enabling art
students to work at home and "spare their masters a number of
questions." Equally helpful will be the examples of drawing and
painting with which the letterpress is relieved, and which is
invariably of a high order of merit.'--SCOTTISH LEADER.
'Quite one of the best books of the kind which we have recently
encountered is Mr. Nisbet's "Lessons in Art"; a little volume
filled with sound and practical advice, and charmingly
illustrated.... This little book possesses distinct merit, and that
of a kind which is never too common in popular manuals.'--SPEAKER.
'With this book at hand no one need be at a loss, and may, by
attending to the valuable instructions given, become not only
proficient, but attain to a meritorious position as an
artist.'--STIRLING JOURNAL.
'The first part of the book treats of drawing, and is in the main
practical in aim and useful as guidance.'--SATURDAY REVIEW.
'A very useful handbook for beginners.'--GRAPHIC.
'A book written by a teacher who is an artist, and who fortunately
remembers that he has been a student, and doubtless this is why the
sympathies of his readers are promptly enlisted.'--DAILY CHRONICLE.
'"Lessons in Art" should prove of use to both pupils and
teachers.'--MORNING POST.
'As a teacher in the old School of Arts, Edinburgh, Mr. Nisbet may
be credited with knowing the kind of questions which students are
likely to ask, and he has here answered them in theoretical and
practical detail.'--GLASGOW HERALD.
London: CHATTO & WINDUS, 214 Piccadilly, W.
[Illustration: A NEW ZEALAND FERN-TREE GULLY [_p._ 129]]
WHERE ART BEGINS
BY
HUME NISBET
AUTHOR OF
'LESSONS IN ART', 'LIFE AND NATURE STUDIES' ETC.
[Illustration]
_WITH 27 ILLUSTRATIONS_
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1892
DEDICATED
WITH AFFECTIONATE REGARDS
TO MY DEAR FRIEND AND WELL-WISHER
EDMUND J. BAILLIE, F.L.S.
OF CHESTER
[Illustration]
INTRODUCTION
When a few really congenial spirits meet together, it is astonishing how
quickly the subject which perhaps one of the party starts will grow, and
how many branches it will shoot out before its vitality can be
considered exhausted.
My present subject has grown up in a very congenial atmosphere. A number
of sympathetic students, who learnt to appreciate my practical work,
continued to draw from me some ideas partly practical, partly
theoretical, on the subject which has always been a part religion with
me, whether in my working or my dreaming moments--Art and its
all-permeating influence over humanity in the social and spiritual
conditions. I take it that Art permeates the entire body of humanity,
from the flesh-devouring savage to the asphodel-adoring æsthetic, in a
greater or lesser degree, according to the sanitary conditions of their
lives; and as it permeates, so it brings us closer to what we regard as
human perfection.
In this spirit I have written out the following reflections, blending
the practical with the theoretical and personal, as a pendant to my
'Lessons in Art' and 'Life and Nature Studies.' In the first book I have
attempted to give the Alpha of Art; in the second I have given the
Omega, as far as I myself know about Art; and in the present I have
sought to give something of what lies between.
Whether I have been lucid enough to enable the reader to follow me, or
sympathetic enough to interest him in my subject, I must leave to his
own judgment. I can only say that my views are the reflections of one
item appealing to other items in the big sum of humanity, written out
honestly as the outcome of his own personal experience of the subject
which interests him most deeply, and with the hope that he may find some
readers who have had similar thoughts upon Art and Mankind, although
they may not have been tempted to write them down. With this hope I
leave my book to the consideration and judgment of each reader.
HUME NISBET.
HOGARTH CLUB: _June 1892_.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
A WORD BEFORE 1
I. WHERE ART BEGINS 5
II. A STUDY IN LIGHT AND SHADOW 26
III. THE PRIMARIES: YELLOW, RED, AND BLUE 56
IV. ART IN ITS RELATIONSHIP TO EVERYDAY LIFE 97
V. ON PICTURE LIGHTING 119
VI. SHIPS: ANCIENT AND MODERN 132
VII. ILLUSTRATIVE ART: PAST AND PRESENT 150
VIII. ART IN MINOR DIRECTIONS 176
IX. DRESS AND DECORATION 196
X. SOME OF THE OLD MASTERS 229
XI. THE SACRED AND THE COMIC SIDES OF ART 250
XII. ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH ART 272
XIII. NATURE WORSHIP 297
INDEX 317
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
A NEW ZEALAND FERN-TREE GULLY. _Frontispiece_
REPOSE. _Vignette for title-page_
GROUP OF FISHER-FOLK. _From a photograph by
John Foster of Coldstream_ 5
A GROUP OF WORKING HORSES. _From a photograph by John Foster of
Coldstream_ 26
ANCIENT ASSYRIAN HALL: THE FEAST OF SARDANAPALUS. _From a
sepia sketch by the Author_ 56
AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CORRIDOR. _From a sepia sketch
by the Author_ 61
ON THE ESK RIVER, TASMANIA. _From a photograph by Major
Aikenhead, Launceston_ 97
A NEW GUINEA VILLAGE. _A study of lighting from behind_ 125
NOAH'S ARK. _A process paper drawing_ 132
SHIP-OF-THE-LINE, 1815. _Pen and ink_ 134
A VIKING BOAT. _Process paper_ 138
FISHING BOATS. _Pen and ink_ 142
HOMEWARD BOUND. _Process paper_ 143
THE STORM. _Pen and ink_ 147
AT REST. _Pen and ink_ 148
FROM BREYDENBACH'S TRAVELS 150
ST. CHRISTOPHER. _From 'A Treatise on Wood-Engraving,'
page 46_ 153
HISTORY OF THE VIRGIN MARY. _From 'A Treatise on Wood-Engraving,'
page 72_ 154
ALBERT DÜRER'S APOCALYPSE 156
BY CHRISTOPHER JEGHER, AFTER RUBENS 158
A PANEL OF BLACK AND GOLD 176
INITIAL LETTER O, AND MOONLIGHT 196
THE AVENUE--HOBBEMA 229
HARMONY. _A night effect_ 250
ART SUBJECTS 272
A GARDEN SCENE 297
THE ANCIENT NILE 300
_Note A._--John Foster, of Coldstream, is one of the most
accomplished of photographic artists, who has made a specialty of
cattle groups, and whose studies are nearly always perfect in their
grouping and effect.
_Note B._--Major W. Aikenhead, of the Launceston Rifle Regiment,
Tasmania, favoured me with some of his finest specimens, with
permission to reproduce them. His aerial effects are wonderful and
delicate, too tender in most instances for reproduction by process:
therefore I have been compelled to give one of his most positive
pictures as a specimen of his art and the beauties of the country
in which he works.
[Illustration]
WHERE ART BEGINS
_A WORD BEFORE_
[Illustration: I]N the first flush of youth our imaginative faculties
are very active. In childhood we rove through Fairyland and play with
the little elves; in youth the tiny elves have grown up to be nymphs of
our own size and age, and from the summer moonlight we step into the
rosy dawn, all fragrant and lightsome, with a glamour over everything
which is delicious to our senses. By-and-by, as youth falls from us, we
step out from the glades and meadows into the dry and dusty highway of
life, our bags upon our backs and our rakes in our hands, with a long
stretch of uninteresting country before us and a shadeless sky above us;
we go out to gather specimens and dissect everything which we cannot
understand. Then comes the twilight, when we sit down to rest upon the
cliffs at the end of the road, with a limitless ocean in front of us,
and what we have left behind.
In childhood, youth, and manhood we are for ever looking forward; in age
we are apt to look behind.
In childhood, youth, and manhood we have very little room in our hearts
for pity or charity, but when we sit down calmly to rest and look back,
if the angels of divine pity and universal charity are not near to us to
counsel and condone, our case is hopeless in the extreme.
The world has lost its childhood, and so there are no longer fairies in
it; it is quickly losing its youth, and Love does not now flutter
through the sky, a living cherub, but lies on the ground motionless,
denuded of its wings, waiting shiveringly for the sharp knife of the
vivisector.
Everything sacred or emotional is put to the test of reason, and we are
growing so hard and matter-of-fact, that what might have made us weep
before only affords matter for discussion now.
Yet misery and poverty and suffering are with us still, as they were
always; perhaps more so now, when the few are becoming richer and the
many poorer and less able to fight.
Still, one softening relic of the past remains to us, although it is
taking on the garments of the age--Art, which, however much it may
strive to imitate the emotionless present, no more can exist without
emotion than could the rainbow without colour.
True art is like what religion ought to be--all-sufficing and
all-embracing. Within its magic circle live the virtues and the vices,
so that when the student approaches he may take his choice with which to
walk through life.
If he takes the virtues as his guides, he paints and understands only
beauty, and thus raises himself and his audience towards faith, love,
and charity.
If he takes the vices, he becomes brutishly realistic and degraded,
inspiring his audience with unbelief, passion, and hopeless selfishness.
And therefore, as charity is the greatest of all the virtues, I take my
art as the direct inspiration towards charity; feeling that if this
angel follows me along the dry highway, and shelters me with her
spreading wings, when I come to the cliffs and sit down to rest I may
look behind and see the sins I have left covered with white flowers and
that limitless ocean bathed in the golden glory of the setting day--a
day not all mis-spent or profitless.
How to do the best for art, since art can do so much for us, is the
intention I have had in the writing of these chapters. How to live so
that we may be in the best condition to fulfil our obligations without
losing a moment of the time at our disposal, this is the motive of these
self-reflections.
Looking round upon nature, I find that the animals nearest perfection
are graminivorous--that is, nearest to that state of peace and purity
which we believe Heaven to be--whilst the carnivora represent the vices
of unrest, passion, cruelty, and ambition.
Reasoning out this observation further, I think that if man could live
naturally, without excitement and haste or the voracious desire for
place and fortune, he would become more poetic, more art-loving, and
charitable; therefore, nearer to a state of perfection by imitating the
graminivora than he will by following the habits of the carnivora.
Still, I must admit that before this can be accomplished society must be
altogether changed. From experience as a vegetarian and a
non-vegetarian, I have come to the conclusion that unless man can afford
to step aside from the rushing stream of competition, and the thousand
excitements which hurry us along in a mad race with every nerve on the
strain, he cannot possibly be a vegetarian, or, in its highest sense, a
true artist.
I think that climate has nothing whatever to do with this question, but
that the false conditions of life have everything to do with it. The
most God-like man is the one who can abnegate without feeling the
sacrifice. This is the ideal man, and he will be a vegetarian.
But he who is forced into the arena of life by circumstances, and who is
compelled to fight, must live as the fighting animals live, and be
carnivorous.
This is the choice in life which some of us have before us at the start,
and to those who can choose I mainly address these chapters. For the
rest, who, like myself, must run at breakneck pace until we fall down
and die, I can only pray for indulgence from the angels of pity and
charity.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: GROUP OF FISHER-FOLK
(_From a photograph by John Foster of Coldstream_)]
CHAPTER I
_WHERE ART BEGINS_
[Illustration: S]TANDING, as I do at present, in front of the partly
opened gateway to that land of wonders--photographic discovery--I should
like to begin my remarks, before looking through the narrow aperture,
with a glance backwards, say twenty years, to what the science and art
were then, and what they have since become, before we surmise what
it--photography--may be twenty years hereafter.
I mean to take up photography only where it joins hands with my own
work--painting--in the broad sense of the word, which, I may safely
assert, is taking it nearly all round.
When I look back twenty years to the time at which I first began to mix
with the professors of the sun-craft--'Brothers of the Light,' to use an
occult term--and compare the work of those days with the results of this
day, and think upon all it may yet be, it is with a feeling of profound
astonishment, not unmixed with admiring envy, that I regard the young
scientist beginning a career so filled with possibilities and future
discoveries. It seems as if I, the painter, walked upon a highway
tramped down by countless travellers, leading to an end definite and
unavoidable, while he has before him only a little distance marked out,
with a vast country to explore, as his mind and genius may best
determine.
Many years ago my father took it into his head to begin a photographic
business. He did not know much about it himself, although he had a good
knowledge of chemistry; but he was an enthusiast in experiments and a
credulous believer in the honesty of mankind. Therefore, through the
advice of a friend, he built a glass-house, bought some cameras and
chemicals (it was in the wet-plate days), laid in a stock of
handsomely-designed mounts, &c., and advertised for an operator.
I dare say a great number of photographers have gone through a similar
experience, thinking, as he did, that this was about the whole which was
required to start a future flourishing business, and that the operator,
like the cameras, would be equally easy to procure, provided the money
was there to pay for them.
He bought cameras and hired operators. I think he got through about a
dozen of the one, and about half a hundred of the other, before he woke
up to the knowledge that something else was required before the business
could be built up on a firm basis or the public satisfied with the
efforts made to please them.
In those days backgrounds and accessories were not greatly considered as
the means towards an artistic end. One plain background and one a little
complicated were all that the operator considered needful, with a carved
chair or fluted pilaster; and thus the multitude were turned out with a
set, fixed stare, full front, bolt upright. If male, a lenient
photographer might permit one leg to cross the other by way of ease. The
female portion generally sat with hands meekly crossed over the lap and
a curtain falling gracefully on one side, like the heroic portraits of
the times of Sir Benjamin West.
When I had painted the fancy background--a room with a bay-window partly
open, revealing an Italian lake with a 'palace lifting to eternal
summer' its (half concealed) 'marble walls'--and got a house painter to
do the plain subject, we were ready to begin work, and to turn out your
Dick and Harry by the rose-tinted dozen, all as visitors to that
wire-work painted Italian lake. I had not then learned the value of
suggestive mystery, nor did I do justice to the imagination of our
public. I considered then that a fact could not be too plainly told--a
mistake often committed by ardent youth.
We changed our operators rapidly. Some had been old positive men, who
had no sympathy with the negative system, therefore, out of principle,
spoilt all the negatives they took; some had a weakness for ardent
spirits and strong tobacco while at work, and, in consequence, made
mistakes with their solutions; others, again, developed such an
extraordinary appetite for gold and silver, that the most profitable
business in the world could never have supplied the baths they required
to go on with. We tried a number of wandering workers, who, having
pawned their own stock-in-trade, came with arms out at elbow, and stayed
with us just long enough to do away with most of our stock as well as
with the feebly growing trade; yet my father held out, tried another and
another, and sunk a lot of money in that glass-house, before he
eventually came to the conclusion that it would be much more
satisfactory and less expensive to devote it entirely to plants and the
growing of grape-vines.
While those experiments were going on, I was picking up some stray
crumbs of knowledge. My artistic instincts and a fair education made me
revolt against that instrument of torture, the head-rest, and I tried to
pose the sitters a little more naturally than by the rigid regimental
rule. Of course, the time required for the sitter to remain steady in
those wet-plate days necessitated a rest of some sort, so, considering
all things, I suppose they took portraits then passably well; one point
to be specially regarded with regret being, that the young photographer
had more chance of learning the details of his trade thoroughly than he
has now, with all the facilities for ease and comfort in the prepared
dry-plate processes, for I contend that in all trades and professions a
man to be thorough ought to learn the way to prepare his materials from
the very foundation, as well as to be able to work with them after they
are ready for his hand, as the old Masters did with their canvases and
colours, and the old positive men with their collodion and other
chemicals. We must look back with the same admiration on these men
fighting so manfully with difficulties, now all smoothed away by our
instantaneous plate manufacturers, as a modern tourist crossing the
Atlantic (saloon fashion) may recall the same passage made by
Christopher Columbus in his fishing-boat of a Spanish galley.
Of the many experimentalists migrating through that glass-house during
their earthly pilgrimages and its photographic existence, I can recall
two who stand out most prominently; one an Italian pantomimist and
Jack-of-all-trades, who did the most damage in the shortest space of
time, and the other a German atheistic disciple of Voltaire, scouter of
Providence and blind believer in chance, who stayed the longest, and
taught me, as the serpent of old did Mother Eve, the greatest amount of
good and evil.
The pantomimist brought with him a wife and a large family, squatted
upon the premises _en masse_, and cleared it out as completely as a
cloud of locusts are said to demolish the track of country they settle
upon; he was an ingratiating man, who could do almost anything from
pitch-and-toss down to swallowing a camera, stand and all; and his
fascinating family were equally handy in the art of stowing away. If the
grocer's and butcher's bills had not, after their hasty departure, come
in to be settled by my father, I should have been convinced that they
devoured nitrate of silver for their dinner, aiding the digestion by a
dessert of chloride of gold, so much of those two articles was consumed
during that brief visit to the paternal roof of these interesting and
noble refugees.
The little German could work, but objected strongly to my introducing
any novelties in the way of pose or accessories. He had been brought up
to regard a fluted pilaster as a necessity of life, likewise a
cushioned, carved easy chair with the marble palace, whether the sitter
was a clerk or a clodhopper; there they stood, full front, fixed at
attention, with an excruciating and ghastly grin distorting each face,
flooded with light; the pilaster on the right, easy chair on the left,
and the smiling lake with its startling detail all in the foreground,
and brought out regardless of consistency or sentiment. I used to argue
the point, and strive to surround a sitter with the accessories to which
his daily occupations entitled him, but without avail; the operator
would turn me off with a piece of Voltairean philosophy, or, what was
harder to endure, a smack on the ear, the artist and the photographer
standing then as distinctly apart as now they are so closely united.
But, with all his faults, he was a good chemist and a reader of books;
had he been less of an investigator he might have been more of an
artist, but so long as he could overcome the chemical changes in his
baths and emulsions, conquer fogs and frillings, and produce a clear,
undeniable likeness, he rested on his laurels, saved his money, and
blasphemed creation. Twice a year he took a week's leave of absence,
during which time I posed sitters to my entire satisfaction, and ruined
plates innumerable. These holidays he invariably devoted to the
racecourse; ridiculing a God, he worshipped Dame Fortune; put his entire
half-year's savings, without fail, on the wrong horse, got kicked about
by the welshers, and returned to his duty ornamented with a pair of
blackened eyes and bruised frontispiece, a sadder but never a wiser man;
his faith in his particular crotchets being as pathetic and unbounded as
was his utter disbelief in a future state.
In those early days photographers did not trouble themselves much about
light and shadow--_i.e._ the subtleties and refinements of light and
shadow. To me, an artist, the sight of a good daguerreotype, with its
silver lustre, soft light, and indefinite masses of shadow, is
infinitely superior to the crude attempts at _carte_-printing in its
early stages; the finest studio work of to-day harks back to those
chance effects of imperfect knowledge, or time-workings, as the great
painter strives to cultivate the freshness of early attempts, or the
mellowing upon the canvases of the old painters. I have seen effects hit
by chance from young pupils, who regarded them as failures through want
of experience, which I would give a great deal to have been able to
imitate; and so, the longer a man lives, thinks, and works, the more
eagerly he watches immature attempts, and the more he can learn from
seeming failures; for when a man is struggling with all his might to get
at an object, he is wrestling with an angel, as Jacob did, and though he
may be lamed, as Jacob was lamed, yet the failure is so illuminated with
a divine light that success may be read between the lines. He thinks he
has failed, and that the ground is strewn only with the shattered pieces
of his frail armour, whereas it is covered with the jewels which he has
torn from his mighty antagonist; as he lies back panting and oblivious
from exhaustion, he can see nothing of all this, but to the onlooker it
seems a triumph, to the after-gleaners it means success.
You all know from experience how photography has grown, what giant
strides it has made year after year, and how it is marching on. First a
shadow on a metal plate; an impression upon glass, when all that art
attempted was a little coloured powder to give it a life-like look; a
staring print upon paper, where art sometimes stepped in and painted
over. Then the modelling upon the negative, where art must reign
supreme, where anatomy must be studied and mind dominate, and which, as
far as I can see, has no ending in the way of possibilities. There is no
need for a man to use paints and canvases to write artist, in the
fullest sense of the term, after his name, if he is master of the art of
manipulating a negative; here art begins, after the posing, and has a
delicate and very great mission to fulfil.
When I think upon the vastness of this field where an artist may wander
at will, and how little really has yet been done in comparison to what
may be done, I could almost wish that this had been my lot in life
rather than what it is. Ambition! why, a man may have the desires of a
Napoleon, and yet find relief for them all in the great art of
remodelling: but of that anon.
POSING
It is a very difficult matter to take a point in the career of a
photograph--from the moment the sitter enters the studio until the
_carte_ is packed up--where art does not occupy the principal share. To
begin when the sitter enters, and the artist looks upon him or her, as
the case may be, as a subject upon which to expend all his skill,
imagination, and brain force--in somewhat the same sense as a subject
painter regards his model, so the photographic artist ought to regard
his sitter; yet in somewhat of a reverse sense also; for whereas the
painter suits his model to his subject, and therefore has the easier
task, that of working out a preconceived idea, the photographic artist
must be an impromptu man--he must improvise his subject to suit his
sitter. To a true artist the strain upon the reflective and imaginative
faculties must be tremendous, for he needs to vary and strike subjects
for every sitter who enters; and yet this is his imperative duty if he
is an enthusiast in his art, which all great photographers must be.
It has amused me often to hear painters attempt to sneer at the
photographer who called himself an artist: painters who are content with
one or two subject ideas for twelve months, resting with an air of
infinite superiority upon this painfully conceived and, in many cases,
rather stale idea, and gazing down from the stucco pedestal of their own
arrogance upon the photographic artist with his ten and often twenty
ideas per day! Of course I understand that they, the single-idea men, do
this through ignorance and want of due reflection, and that the more
barren they are themselves, the more they are likely to sneer at the
fertility of others; this I take to be one of the natural laws of
nature.
A sitter enters--a lady, young, good-looking, and handsomely dressed, to
meet another young, good-looking lady just going out. Fashion rules both
fair subjects much in the same way as regards costume; a change of
colour perhaps, but cut in much the same tyrannical style. The colour
may make a slight difference in the two photographs, yet not sufficient
to redeem the artist, who has only light and shadow to work with, if he
cannot strike out something in the posing and accessories to
individualise the different subjects or sitters. But the photographic
artist, perhaps, has had six or seven young ladies, similarly dressed,
one after another, during that forenoon, each sitter with her own ideas
how she ought to be taken--ideas gleaned from someone else's pose, or
something she has seen in a shop window or an album--ideas which the
original instincts of the artist rebel against. The same may be said of
the portrait painter, only that he has days, sometimes weeks, to study
his subject, whereas the photographer is only allowed moments to collect
his well-nigh scattered faculties. Again, the painter has variety of
colour with which to cover over a repetition of design; but with black
and white, a repetition will be at once discovered. This I mention as
one only of many difficulties besetting the studio of a photographic
artist from the moment the sitter enters, which renders his task all the
more harassing, and which cannot trouble the layer-on of colours.
A true photographer seems to me to rank with, and resemble, the
troubadours of the middle ages, poets who poured out their impromptu
verses to the call of the audience. He ought to be a reader of faces--a
close scrutiniser of the inner workings of the subject before him; catch
with an eagle glance the peculiarities of gait, the tricks of motion;
and be gifted with the rare discrimination which can separate the
natural habits from the society affectations. I think a photographer
ought never to be in the studio when the sitter first enters. He or she
ought to be left a little time alone, or rather, a special chamber ought
to be set apart where the sitter may enter, with artistic objects to
attract the attention placed about the room, while the artist, for a few
moments, from an unseen point, may watch and study his subjects when
they think themselves unobserved; afterwards let an employé enter and
address the sitter while the photographer still watches from his point
of observation, by which means he may judge and learn what is the
difference between the sitter when alone and when in society. And so he
may wait, after the instantaneous plate is in the camera, for the moment
when the sitter unconsciously looks natural, to flash the light upon her
or him; indeed, I have thought if the studios could be so constructed
that the operator need never enter the room at all, but have the camera
so adjusted from an outside room that the sitters might not know the
moment they were taken, it would be best--for, to me, naturalism is
always before even a first-class sighted likeness. However, if the
photographer knows the peculiarities of his sitter, and these be comely
peculiarities, he will pose so as to bring them sufficiently out for his
purpose.
There are many rules laid down by Rubens, Titian, Reynolds, and other
masters for the composition and arrangement of pictures; but of all the
stiff, conventional laws laid down, I incline to the jerky, spirited,
and contradictory sentences of the American painter, William Hunt, in
his 'Talks about Art,' for I never yet knew a law in art which ought not
to be ruled by circumstances and the good taste of the artist. The
moment a man allows a law to govern him, independent of the great law of
reason, he becomes a feeble imitator, and no longer dares launch out
into the unknown regions of originality.
Of course, it is strictly necessary to learn all about rules before we
dare infringe upon them, for our own convenience and the good of our
object, the first and great consideration of the artist, whether of the
brush or of the lens. We must learn the laws of lines and directions--we
must know exactly how far we dare intrude the angles or blend the orders
without being accused of barbarism; yet, to me, there is nothing so
delightful as to fling a defiance in the face of time-worn laws, if my
art knowledge and common sense acquits me of sin in the matter of
taste--_i.e._ my own ideal of what taste ought to be, not Michael
Angelo's, or Titian's, or Reynolds'. Knowing their habits by heart, I
would not hesitate to turn my back upon them if they did not lie in the
lines of my own observations of the multitudinous and ever-crossing laws
of nature.
Still, I would have the artist learn all those laws. As the doctor
studies botany, so would I have the photographer learn thoroughly the
laws of chemistry, physiognomy, and face anatomy, which alone can make
him master of his great profession; for no man can defy a law who only
knows the half of its capabilities and powers. The object in art
justifies the means always; but we must not use illegitimate if
legitimate means will answer the same end.
In arranging a sitter or model, both painters and photographers are apt
to do just a little too much--adjusting this fold and planting that
accessory so as to get them within the form they have determined. I like
purity of style as well as anyone, yet it is very disgusting to hear all
the twaddle talked about fine lines of direction, ellipses, pyramids,
and serpentine lines. The painter or photographer who cannot thank God
for a lucky chance or an accidental fold is at the best only a smart
mechanic, and no artist.
My advice in posing would be:--Try to arrange as little as possible.
Leave well as much alone as you can, for, depend upon it, all your
adjusting will never better what chance and nature have arranged between
them for your use, but will only tire out the subject and render the
picture artificial. If not according to your preconceived ideas, accept
the change as something better, and work your best upon it as a servant
who has got a new task set by a great and unquestionable mistress.
LIGHTING
After posing comes the lighting up of your picture. This portion of the
art of photography has become so very far advanced, and there are still
so many difficulties in the way of perfect control, that I feel a
little timid about suggesting any improvement, lest I should be met by
the scientific reply that the thing is not possible; and yet I have such
faith in the future of photography that I do not consider anything
impossible to the operator who flings his whole soul into the discovery
of nature's secrets. Light to be manipulated at will, lenses to grasp
objects in and out of the present focus with equal intensity and
proportion: as a painter places objects upon his canvas at what distance
and under what shadow he pleases, so I think the photographer will yet
do, and that before long, as he will, I am sure, yet be able to
reproduce by the camera and his chemicals all the colours in the object
set up before him, as he sees it reflected upon his ground-glass
focussing plate.
In painting, for instance, the great duty of the worker is to have one
pure light as small as possible as a focussing point for the eye to go
out to first, with a point of darkness to balance that light, as the
light is more striking than the dark. A very small spot of white will
serve as a balance to a larger proportion of black, so the wise painter
is very chary of his pure white.
In landscape this rule is exactly the same, grey predominating in its
various degrees over all. Of course I am aware that in landscape
photography we have _as yet_ no means of controlling the lens, that
objects must just be reproduced as they stand, and that the utmost the
artist can do is to choose a good stand-point with a favourable light,
and make the best of it. Yet I foresee the time when the operator shall
have instruments so constructed that he will be able to leave out what
is objectionable by means of shades and blinds for the plate, so that
he may do as the painter does--alter and transfer his foreground as he
pleases.
Inside, the operator has the light more at his control, with his
shutters, blinds, tissue-paper fans, and other contrivances to throw the
shadow over what portion of the picture he wishes; and yet, with all the
softening of harsh lines and gentle mergings of shadows, he has not
nearly reached the inner circle of light and shade yet. There are lenses
still to be manufactured which will penetrate to a deeper shadow than he
has yet attained, deep although he may have gone in that direction;
lenses which will wait and not over expose the highest lights until the
deepest depth has been gained. With remodelling, it is now easy to make
light; and what the photographer ought to aim at are the greys, or
half-tones, and the blacks, leaving all dead lights and subtle
gradations towards light for the remodeller.
Grey is a very precious as well as a plentiful quality in nature; beyond
the point where light streams from, we seldom, in fact never, see white,
and even the point of light is blended with gradations of prismatic
flashes. There are also throughout nature great spaces; in spite of the
multiplicity of detail, to me nature seems to delight in isolation. Take
what you please, as an example,--a street scene crowded with
people,--what is it to the looker out of a window? Simply dark masses
(black always predominates in an English crowd), with here and there
intersections of space; if you look for it, you will find detail enough,
but you must look for it. The general appearances are simple masses of
shadow under you, drifting out to the grey, with gradations of grey
isolation all round. Take landscape, the ocean in turmoil--grey
stretches, gradating from deeper to lighter tones. A mountain and lake
scene: the sea-gull coming inland from the stormy North Sea is the only
speck of white we trace throughout it, with the vulture or crow looking
jet-black as it intercepts the mellow light.
Space and half-tones seem to me the two great qualities to be sought
after by the artist; in focussing, avoid sharp or high lights, but seek
to pierce and collect as large and full masses of shadow as your tricks
and appliances can give you. A clear and sunless day outside for
landscape work, that sort of lustre which drifts soft shadows under
trees, and causes the distance to float away indefinitely, where detail
is brought out by under-tones, and high lights are left to the
remodeller.
So with figures; as the subject sits or stands, pour all your light upon
the obstruction, so as to give depth in the shadow, blend in accessories
with the figure and background with reflected lights, just enough to
redeem blackness, then soften over the high lights, so that in the
negative there is not a single white, all grey, even to the cambric
handkerchief carelessly left out of the pocket--although I trust no
operator of to-day ever will permit his subject to exhibit such a speck
of vulgarity. I would have all such objects as white flowers, lace, or
handkerchief changed, or a dye kept on the premises to stain them brown
before the negative was taken, so that nothing could be lighter than the
hands or face, unless, like Rubens' work, the subject was to be seen
dark against white, in which case the white ought to surround the
object, never to cut it in two.
In portraits, as yet, the art of beauty seems to be the ruling idea of
the operator; court favourites such as those of Sir Thomas Lawrence and
Sir Joshua Reynolds are the examples set before the photographer. To
flatter the subject is what both subject and worker seem to strive
after; when they look to Rembrandt it is for a shadow picture, which,
by the way, is no more Rembrandtesque than it is Rubenesque. Rembrandt
did not make shadows like the shadow portraits, so called; look at his
etchings and works and you will see what I mean. Rembrandt's lights were
not shiny whites, but tender tones, as his shadows were not blots of
dark, but gradations of depth.
There is a portrait of Thomas Carlyle by James McNeill Whistler, where
the old sage is sitting against a grey background with a perfect
simplicity of space, which is nearer to the work of Rembrandt than
anything I have seen since that grand old Dutchman passed to glory.
RETOUCHING
Before concluding my remarks on the negative, I feel the necessity of
devoting a few moments to the great art of retouching--the portion of
photography at present too much entrusted to the charge of young ladies;
but, if the photographer in any department of the science deserves the
name of artist, it is here, when with his pencil he begins to create.
I thought when I began to write that I had little to say on photography,
but now that I have got into the spirit of the subject, the
possibilities, utilities, and various uses of photography start out
before me from the chaos of unthought creation, all importuning me to
take them up, one after the other, like a legion of undressed skeletons:
photography as connected with etching, wood-engraving, lithography,
zincography, typography, and a dozen other uses where photography is not
only united in marriage to art, but must be regarded as the
husband--_i.e._ the leading spirit, rather than the wife, in the
indissoluble bond; but these for the present I must push back into their
vague home, until I can at a future time take them up by themselves,
which I trust to do, as they are far too important to tack on as a fag
end to this chapter; yet before I close I must speak of the negative
after it has been developed.
It is the misfortune of all large and prosperous businesses that, as in
the making of a pin, the establishment has to be divided into
departments--the poser, not the operator--and so the plate has to go
through different hands. It is a pity, but I see no way to avoid the
evil, except in special cases, where the artist can afford time to
follow up his work personally from the first to the last stage. Were
time and money no object, I would have each man or woman assistant in
the photographic studio qualified to pose, focus, develop, retouch,
print, and mount, with a complete knowledge of all the branches, and a
thorough artistic knowledge besides. I would also have them all consider
nothing too trivial for their talents in the progress of the photograph,
but each to take alternately their turn at the different departments
with their own plates; without this I cannot see how the art enthusiasm,
which a really good photograph requires, can be kindled and kept up. I
think modest photographers in country places, loving their profession,
and not troubled with too many commissions, have a better chance, if
possessed of equal talents, of reaching perfection than their bustled
and prosperous town brethren; in the same sense that I consider the
painter, who has genius, to paint better pictures when he is selling for
twenty pounds than when he is hunted after and getting two thousand
pounds--but this is a matter of opinion.
I know also that it was long considered by some professional men to be
false art to touch a plate after developing, as it is sometimes still
regarded as wrong for an artist to use the compasses or straight-edge to
save time with a drawing, but I consider these as silly prejudices, to
laugh at. Personally, I would not hesitate for a moment to use either a
pair of compasses, a straight-edge, or a photograph, if the so doing
served me better than my eye, or my sketch, in the making of my picture;
neither would I hesitate to call the man a fool who objected to me doing
so on the ground that it was not legitimate art.
Retouching is exactly the same work on the negative as if the artist sat
down before any other material. Upon it, if he has the genius, he can do
almost anything, so that he has shadow enough as a basis. Here he
becomes, as I have said, the creator, and of all the different
operations of a negative, this is the portion where the artist stands
out most prominently and proves what stuff he or she is made of. There
is no end to the variety of work they may introduce as they work
on--grains to look like engravings, hatchings, stippling, brush work. It
is not enough to be able to remove spots and blemishes, or soften off
harsh contrasts; girls mostly get up to this mark of excellence, and
produce those smooth, meaningless, pleasant portraits of everyday life.
The retoucher must learn to keep an expression of the negative, or make
one if not there, and this is the lofty calling of a true retoucher. He
must put a soul into his model, else he cannot call himself an artist
any more than the painter can claim the title who only daubs potboilers.
But if the retoucher can do this, and has art enough in himself to
prefer soul to beauty or beautifying, then he has as much claim to call
himself a painter or an artist (if he prefers that title) as any R.A. in
the clique divine.
Expression, or soul, is what photographers are as yet deficient in, and
that is the province of the retoucher. I want to see a photographer rise
above the prejudice of the flattery-loving public, and lead them by
intensity: give to the public faces ugly as Rembrandt's portraits, yet
pregnant with character. I want to see seams, and wrinkles, and warts,
as the Great Creator left them--indexes to the wearer's character--and
not doll faces, which simper and mean nothing. I want noses in all their
varieties, with their own individuality intensified; cheek-bones
standing out as they may be in the originals. I want men and women sent
down to posterity as they are and not as they would like to be; for I
never yet saw a face in its natural state that I could call ugly,
although I have seen faces made hideous by rouge, and cosmetics, and
false eyebrows, and also by the retouching which they were themselves so
delighted about.
Vice and crime darken the souls which sit behind the eyes--make chins
hard, and lips thin or coarse--destroy curves which are upon all lips
when innocent; yet, to me, the most demoniac face that ever peered out
upon a haunting world is better in its sombre gloom than that same face
smoothed by a bad or mechanical retoucher. Beauty is expression, not
chiselled features. A baby is not beautiful until it can notice its
mother; then the meaningless bit of flesh is lighted up with a ray from
heaven. That God-beam the photographer must catch; yet it is not a
smooth surface, but a light breaking through torn-up cloud mists.
The other day I saw the photograph of a child, supposed to be a city
waif. She was bare-footed and bare-armed, with a rent in her
_pinafore_--a city waif with a pinafore! The photographer had studied
his lines, and posed his model according to the rules he had learnt;
everything was in its right place about that picture, but, like the
mountains about Borrowdale, just a little too exactly as they ought to
be. He had taken the trouble of dirtying the hands and face and legs,
but I saw at a glance that, although it was all right according to art,
it was not all right according to nature. She was not a real city waif,
and to me, who had seen the real article, very far from it.
In Edinburgh, one winter morning, I saw a picture that needed no
adjusting, only the camera, to render it immortal--a man out of work,
saying good-bye to his wife and child before he went on the tramp. Where
the Old Cross of Edinburgh used to stand (before the new malformation
was put up), at its base in the High Street they stood--that group of
two, with the speck of humanity in her arms; the man, in shirt sleeves,
leaning against the railings, snow-laden, with his shoeless feet
blue-black against the mud-coloured snow on the pavement. In his left
hand he held a very small bundle, roughly bound in a red spotted rag of
a handkerchief, while with the tattered sleeves of his dirty shirt he
was attempting to wipe the eyes of the child, that poor little pinched
and smeared-faced baby, who was crying with hunger and cold. The mother
who held it in her thin arms had turned her face from her husband to
where I could see it as I passed by. She was oblivious to spectators in
the silent abandonment of her own woe. A wisp of fair hair fell down
from the old bashed hat upon her head, and hung against her
clay-coloured cheek. Two tears, half congealed, lay just above the
quivering lips. But there were no words of parting passing between those
two.
In London one night, in the East-end, about the month of May, I saw
another picture. It was down by the side of a hoarding covered over with
gay-coloured placards, and over which a lamp shone. A man, a woman, and
a little girl all huddled in a confused mass together. I could not see
the faces, for they were hidden on their breasts, but I saw limp hands
lying on the pavement, and the light night wind fluttered shreds of rags
about. Presently I beheld amongst the passers a woman stop to look at
them--one of those outcasts, all the more pathetic for the furs and
silks that enveloped her. She stooped down to put a sixpence into the
crouching figure's open hand, and for a moment bistre rags and cardinal
silk flounce fluttered together; then she passed on to her sin, leaving
them in their misery. The hand closed on the coin instinctively, but the
brain was too apathetic to take in the significance of the gift all at
once. A moment or two passed as I watched, then I saw the hand slowly
lifted and the head listlessly raised; there was a dazed look into the
palm, then a start into life, and, woman-like, a clutch at the arm of
her husband. Then both heads were lifted to the light, and I caught an
expression of wolfish joy on the faces, which I thought must have
condoned for a deal of vice on the part of that unreclaimed Magdalen, as
the pair staggered to their feet and dragged off the little one to where
they could buy sixpence-worth of oblivion.
These were two pictures which required no arranging of lines or
alteration of lighting up, although faulty according to art, perhaps.
The humanity about them redeemed them; and it is pictures like these, to
be found every hour, which the artist--be he painter or
photographer--only requires to go out and secure, to make art immortal.
[Illustration: A GROUP OF WORKING HORSES
(_From a photograph by John Foster of Coldstream_)]
CHAPTER II
_A STUDY IN LIGHT AND SHADOW_
[Illustration: M]Y subject--the Union of Painting and Photography--is
not so short as you or I might wish it to be, yet I have tried to make
it as terse as a subject so crammed with incident, and so exhaustless in
matter, could be made. If you will try to endure it to the end, I trust
you may not be disappointed.
Photographers, as far as I have seen them, are a jealous-minded race.
They don't think enough of their art, or of themselves. They are too apt
to think that painters despise them, while in reality the painters of
to-day hang on to them as a drunken husband is apt to hang on to his
good-templar wife during the festive New Year season, or, to be more
poetic in simile, as a half-drowned sailor will clutch on, teeth and
nails, to the hard rock, which may have broken up his rotten old boat,
but now keeps him alive in the midst of the surf.
The painters of to-day have become realists, and photography is realism,
or nothing.
A photographer, to be able to produce a good picture, must be a true
painter in the highest sense of the word; therefore, a painter ought to
know the right qualities about a good photograph, whether he knows the
mixing of the chemicals, or length of exposure, or process of focussing,
&c., or not; although, to be able to compete, the tricks of the trade
have to be learned. Witness Sarony, Mora, and such men, with their fancy
dodges and splendid effects, and Seavey with his unapproachable
backgrounds.
Thus my title is almost superfluous, for painting and photography,
requiring the same direction of talent, are already united; only it may
be of a little service to hear a painter publicly avow the marriage
which is so constantly being consummated on the quiet.
It is in your work, as in ours, the doom to be often annoyed with
talented triflers who dip a finger into all the sciences, and are for
ever ready to dispute the point with the originators--buyers of brains,
who imagine that their cash gives them full liberty to find all sorts of
faults, or suggest improvements upon the worker's designs; who will not
buy unless their idiotic improvements are executed to the last letter,
and who afterwards lay the whole blame of the spoiling of the pie upon
the baker, when the guests condemn.
Having a direct object in view, I need not trouble you about chemicals
or lenses, aurora lights, or secrets that you all now know much better
than I could for years unborn, but come direct to what is of vital
interest to us both in our wedded state-viz. the seeking how we may put
as much as possible of the soul of nature, with her innate force of
feeling and motion, into our pictures; the men, modern and ancient, who
may best aid us by the examples and teachings they have left as a legacy
to us; a quiet consideration of what they really have done for us; a
right straight look at the men themselves, unbiassed by veneration or
prejudice, with a consideration as to how much we have taken advantage
of the legacies left to us.
The first aim of our investigation is therefore The Exact Imitation of
Nature--_i.e._ the outward form and appearances of nature, the body, in
fact, of that mystic Deity whom all men worship, no matter what is their
dogma, whether they have a creed or whether they be creedless.
Secondly, The Feeling, Sentiment, or Sensations of Nature--how her
appearance touches us, as we look upon her in the wealth and loveliness
of her colouring; also how we may keep that sentiment alive in our light
and shade.
Here the painter, with his colours, gets a better hand and a long start
ahead of the photographer, engraver, and etcher; and it is here that, if
those workers in light and shade can keep the sentiment as well as the
painter in colours, they gain a double and richer triumph--the triumph
of a racer who has been heavily and unfairly handicapped at the
beginning of the race.
Thirdly, The Motions, Actions, Passages, Expressions, and Impressions of
Nature. There both in photographer and painter the man himself is
brought out, whether he is a trained mechanic or a born genius.
Lastly, The Perfect Image, the whole innate force, which is the spirit
and soul of that matchless creation toward which we must all constantly
turn (as the sun-flower turns or the daisy opens to the glance of day)
for the life and light of our artistic beings.
Let us drop the weak word artist out of our consideration altogether.
Personally I abhor it, as denoting nigger minstrel, sword-swallower, or
that undefinable member of society who plays with foils and sable hairs
inside a studio enriched with Turkey ruggery, old armour, and marble
busts. Let us, who are workers, be plain painters and photographers,
never heeding the comforts of our surroundings, having only to do with
objects as accessories to our work, thinking only upon the _utility_ of
every nick-nack we may have, aiming only at the result without
considering the trouble or the inconvenience to the animal who is
bringing it all about; every conception or experiment being an
undiscovered country which we mean to find out and make our
own--Stanleys or Thompsons with our Africas; Pizzaros conquering and
annexing our Mexicos; plain, hardworking, earnest painters and
photographers; brothers in one grand service--Art.
I think, at the present day, painters recognise this fraternal stand
even more than photographers give them credit for doing; they know how
much they are indebted to the camera for making matters lucid which were
before obscure. Witness the galloping horses done by instantaneous
process, the shape of waves in full action, the rushing of waterfalls,
and the contortions of muscles in moments of great excitement. How many
of the old masters knew what a horse at full speed was like! and what
eye-openers to battle painters those photographs have been! None of the
sea painters were able to draw a wave in all its subtleties and froth
accessories as painters nowadays may do if they study the imprint of a
flying second; we may also have clouds in their strata, as they actually
are, with shadows perfect, in those artistic studies which, like the
institution of Christmas cards, are coming more and more into vogue
every year that we live.
And painters do use them constantly, whether they admit the fact or,
induced by a false pride, pretend that they do not. I see in every
exhibition glaring evidences of hay carts and field horses, yachts and
ships of all degrees, blankly copied, with hardly any disguise, from the
photographic studies suspended in the shop windows: clear photographic
studies, faithfully drawn out, and in the painting knocked about a
little, sometimes not so true as the original to nature, blurred and
mystified into that obscurity which does for feeling with the crowd; the
most original bit of painting being the man's signature who sells it,
that being strictly his own, and not the copyright of either the
photographer or the horse.
And why not? Clouds will not wait on our pencils and palettes being set;
horses will not stand until we draw out a faithful enough study of their
forms, nor ships pause until we get in all the rigging. The winds are
against it, and the waves. The hours flying along and tearing down the
sun-shadows before we have fixed one line of them on our paper or canvas
join in the protest, jeering at our deliberation, and mocking us as
slow-coaches, in these steam-engine days, for trying to crawl on at six
miles an hour, and dreaming that we can enter into competition with the
mile-a-minute express.
The pride which keeps the artist silent, or makes him deny the charge of
photo-borrowing, is an utterly false pride, and the sooner it is knocked
out of sight the better for all parties. Why should we not correct our
sketches--done for the sake of the colour and feeling, and not for the
form--from faithful photographs? It does not hinder us from being
original in the after-treatment, although it may save us much time in
the elaboration of sketch-details. Why not save our precious time for
something so much more worthy of it--the picture?[1]
Hitherto I have wanted so much to be original that, from conscientious
scruples, I would not use the photographic studies which some of my
friends had sent me. I looked upon them longingly, and put them out of
sight reluctantly, and so went down to sea-boards and meadows, catching
rheumatics and toothache, and wasting hours upon hours, and many
valuable sheets of Whatman's hand-made paper, trying to draw out all the
riggings of ships, and the shapes of cows, losing the effect often in my
endeavours to get the manipulation, and in reality not getting a
hundredth part of what I might have got with half-an-hour's rapid
dashing on of colour effects and a moment's focussing.
At present I know just a little about the art of photography, but I
intend to make it my duty to learn a great deal more--enough to be able
to sight a picture correctly; take and develop a dry plate, and
afterwards fix a print; for I can perceive plainly that Time is coming
on with rapid strides to the point when, along with his present utensils
of colour-boxes and sketching block, the painter will require to carry
his camera and stand, box of dry plates, and head covering.
And how proper it is that it should be so, a little experience will
prove to every one. An old castle or abbey, or the view of a town, or
even the markings upon the trees, would take us days to outline--the
buildings of the town, the fret-work about the abbey and castle, or the
knots and gnarling of the woodland--and even then they would be
incomplete. To illustrate my meaning, look at even the most careful
outline pencil drawings of Turner, one of the most delicate of outline
draughtsmen _when he liked_, or the scrupulous and untiring delicacy of
his admirer, Professor John Ruskin, with his pencil, and compare those
efforts with the lines about even the most commonplace photograph of a
building or tree-trunk, and I need say no more on that point. The
painter has lost the half, and distorted the rest; and although the
drawing may appear more attractive at first sight, the photograph will
be the better, for it embodies the first grand principle of a painter's
training--faithful imitation of the object which he desires to
represent.
Photographers are apt to labour under the mistaken notion that we do not
recognise this plain fact of artistic necessity; but we do, and if we
have not the manliness to own it, that is our cowardice and not our
blindness.
Be content, therefore, when you go into exhibitions and see the misty
result of your photographic studies in the realism of to-day hanging
all round, that this is recognition enough of the obligations Palette
owes to Camera.
To consider the first of our united art aims--viz., '_The Exact
Imitation of Nature_,' as she appears to us and as she appears to
others.
The eye is the organ to which we all appeal, and I do not know a more
fickle umpire--except perhaps the ear.
Many people are colour-blind, yet not entirely so, and more is the pity,
but just on one point, _like the sun-stroke of Sir Roger Tichborne_; and
the worst is, they are not aware of the particular point, and feel quite
put out if it is explained to them. They will think the man a fool who
tries to prove them wrong, for if they are strong upon any point, it is
upon that particular point. I have proved it dozens of times in cases of
partial sun-stroke and colour-blindness. I mean, just a slight wipe-out
of the mental slate, a blurring, or, as it were, a Dutch effect, in the
case of sun-stroke; or a delicacy of perception a-wanting in the
colour-blindness, a gauze veil dropped over, not nearly so apparent as
the blue glasses, or the lack of distinction between red and green, for
Daltonism like this ought to be palpable both to the sufferer and his
suffering friends.
There is also a distortion of vision apart from nearness or longness of
sight, which is a very troublesome agent to fight against for the
producer of pictures: a little nerve gone aglee, through partial
paralysis or an accident before birth, and everything is different to
him from what it is to anyone else; or it may be that it is spasmodic
and occasional in its effects, and then woe to the picture that comes
under his lash (if a critic) at the moment when the twisted fit is on
him.
Ten artists sit down to one landscape and make ten different pictures,
and the camera drops in and makes the eleventh, like none of the ten,
but wonderfully like the original, as those ten different pairs of eyes
must testify, in spite of their varied distortions.
Ten different critics look at a picture and find out different faults,
each praising as virtues the faults of the nine others.
Ten women will look upon one man, and ten chances to one they will all
find different uglinesses about him, with the exception of the tenth,
_whom he may have chosen_, and yet they will all unite in agreeing that
she wasn't worthy of him; which clearly proves, I think, that this
form-distortion of vision is only partial.
Realism is the passion of the day, both in writers and painters; and
this passion photography is only too well qualified to gratify. To note
down a scene, or describe an emotion, by the aid of its most minute
outer symbolism, as faithfully and as free from complexity as possible,
seems to be the greatest virtue and highest aim of the modern school.
The names which I would select as samples of this style of work will be
those names which, by engravings and etchings, are best known to us, and
so likely to be of most use in our search after excellent examples.
Amongst the old masters I would quote Albert Dürer, for stern realism,
combining a symbolism and spirituality so refined that it is no wonder
his qualities have been so long unseen by critics such as Pilkington,
who says of him, 'He was a man of extreme ingenuity, without being a
genius--in composition copious without taste; anxiously precise in
parts, but unmindful of the whole, he has rather shown us what to avoid
than what to follow.'
Rembrandt I would take next, as we all know about him and his powers,
also because he seems to be the model chosen, but in few cases followed
out correctly, by photographers who desire to produce striking effects.
David Teniers I would point out next, as a type of naturalism without
much straining after force or effect, no elevating force or symbolic
influence.
I take these three great names as samples, because their manners are
distinctly separate, because their systems and tricks for reaching
effect are easily penetrated, and because, while I am describing
characteristic works by them, and explaining as well as I can how they
may be followed out with original force by photographers, you will be
able, I dare say, to recall some specimens of their brush-work, and so
follow me more easily.
All good original work is got from copying and following those who have
gone before. I could quote scores of painters since the days of Dürer,
Rembrandt, and Teniers, down to the present hour, who gain fame only
through being Dürerites, Rembrandtists, or Tenierians, with a little of
their own personalities thrown in, to make them masters. Dürer flung in
and mixed up a part of himself (which he could not keep out) along with
the training of Michael Wohlgemuth. Rembrandt hashed up Zwanenburg,
Lastman, Pinas, with a host of others, along with the son of his own
mother, to produce the mightiest giant of the art race, whom we all try
to copy whenever we want to feel free from the feeding-bottle.
It is the fate of all great men to copy. Blake says, 'The difference
between a bad artist and a good is that the bad artist _seems_ to copy a
great deal, and the good one _does_ copy a great deal.'
Spending lots of time drawing after the antique and winning gold medals
and certificates; fiddling over false niceties; trying _to finish_, when
there is no such thing as finish in creation, far less in art; being so
careful that they lose all freedom of action, freedom of thought, and
produce _nothing_;--that is the rubbish they are turning out of the
Government schools nowadays; students who labour five years at freehand
outline, ten years at antique casts, and niggle the rest of their useful
years amongst nude models in life schools, while the real active
copyists are vaulting over their silly heads, and digging out niches to
enshrine themselves in, down Time.
William Hunt, the Yankee, in his 'Talks about Art,' tells us about Dürer
and copying in his own terse way thus: 'Albert Dürer, with an outline,
knew how to make an outline look like a firm, full figure. He began with
firmness, and finished with delicacy.... But he didn't get it in a day.
Hercules may have strangled a serpent when he was a baby, but there was
a time when he couldn't. "Dürer worked in his own way!" No! nor did
anybody else at first. They all worked in the manner of someone else, in
the way they were shown: Raphael after Perugino, Vandyke after Rubens.
If Albert Dürer had lived in Venice he would have been a Venetian
painter. As it was, he worked as the old German artists had worked.'
'The Lord and his Lady,' 'Melancholy,' and 'The Virgin and Child' are
the engravings by Albert Dürer which represent his clear, concise style
as well as any others of his works for our present purpose.
In the first picture, 'The Lord and his Lady,' we have a simple
arrangement of straight perpendicular lines--the lady seen profile, with
sloping unbroken lines of drapery; the lord almost full-face, looking
upon her, a straight sword hung in front and slanting in unison with the
folds of the lady's drapery; a plant at right side with split top,
growing straight so far, yet inclining towards the direction of dress,
sword, and figures; a tree-trunk at left wing with gnarling, repeating
the folds of dress, with the figure of Death behind the tree holding up
his hour-glass:--they are passing from Death's corner, yet by the
hour-glass he knows that, as the shadows travel round, so surely will
they both return.
The light and shade are simple as the arrangement, directly falling from
above and to the left; the light divides the direct half of tree, dress,
clock, and flower, and the other half is in broad shadow, a light
foreground and light distance and a clear sky; all the shade relief
rests about the central objects of interest. As a sample of unaffected
masterly ease of management and restraint I do not know its equal; nor
have I yet seen a photograph treated (although it might easily be so) in
the same possessed way, except perhaps the first efforts of the amateur
before he had learned how to manage his lighting up. If experienced men
would only learn to come back to the effects of their days of ignorance,
bringing their gained knowledge to rectify the defects _outside_ the
accidental effects; if old painters would only take lessons from the
natural attempts of their little sons and daughters--how great we might
all become, and how original!
'Melancholy.' This is a more complex composition, an arrangement of
crowded shadow, worth studying for the effect of dying light, trailing
from the folds of a woman's skirt. It is too much filled with symbolic
objects to describe just now, and the great point of interest is the
glitter upon the folds, the broken lines which make up these folds, and
the universal gloom over the rest. It is not like the obscurity of
Rembrandt, for every object is distinctly manipulated, yet from it
Rembrandt may have got the first idea for the development of his style.
'The Virgin and the Child' I like for its extreme delicacy and
lightness, and also for the power of reflections which it contains. The
old house on the other side of the river is a useless disturbance, and
mainly useful in its historical architectural evidence, and also to
prove that even the most astute self-critic may make mistakes and just
work too much. How suggestive is that monkey at her side, chained
prisoner like the struggling dove in the grasp of the mischievous Baby
Christ--the dove, symbol of captured truth, and the infant with his
humanity only as yet made manifest! I wish we could have a photograph
with this subtlety of realism, this absence of shadow, this clear depth
of transparency. It seems to me as if photographers could do it if they
liked, and were not afraid of the public. That pale white subtlety,
stealing gently upon us, not much to look upon at first sight, almost a
blank, yet growing gaze by gaze, until we cannot let it out of our
thoughts, like a white rose against a whitewashed wall, with the green
leaves and the crimson stalk bleached vert-grey with the midday
sun-blaze, and the shadow under it of the softest of purple greys.
I would like to linger over Albert Dürer and his influence, not only on
art as regards painting, but on art as regards literature: Goethe
working up his Faust; tales of mediæval chivalry; of demons and spirits,
solemn, truth-loving souls beset by false decoys; knights sore tempted
and yielding just for a moment, to fill out long years of repentance;
honour ever rising up and choking love; love shadowed over by despair;
death ever present and ever sweet as the surcease from labour and years.
But it would tire you, for we have it going on still, only much of the
honour is forgotten and the tenderness of the love is brutalised; but we
have the work, and the want, and the woe unutterable, with us ever, and
for ever, and we who can will rush from it as the steam-engine rushes on
iron lines, drowning the sounds of the wailing behind us in our own loud
puffing, hiding the sight of the weeping behind us in the dense smoke of
our own importance.
I turn from Dürer to Rembrandt, as from a nature refined and gentle to a
nature rugged and strong, as from a woman to a man, whose firm hand I
like to grasp even better than the tender clasp of the other.
Rembrandt, the master of painting--even more than Rubens--of etching and
photography, who when better understood will benefit us all more than
any one of the others, with one exception, which I shall name presently.
'The Painter's Mother,' a head with white cap, ruffle, and black dress,
one of many which either he or his disciples painted often, strongly
marked, a study in the modelling of wrinkles and reflections.
'Interior, with Woman plucking a Fowl.' The figure sits fronting us with
face down-turned, a black cap casting deep shadows over the whole
features, with the exception of a half-light playing upon the under-side
of the cheek, and portion of the back of the neck seen from the white
ruffled collar, open at the neck. Satin-textured body, with dull red
sleeves, and amber lining on the upturned skirt; this is very dark green
or black. She holds the fowl with one hand, plucking with the other,
while between her feet rests the basket to catch the feathers. At the
left corner lies a bunch of carrots, breaking up the copper Dutch pan
behind; farther back is a basket supporting a board with flat fish upon
it. Still deeper in shadow is a large boiler with earthenware jars and a
chain hanging over; behind those again, a very dark background.
There is not much in this subject--a fowl half plucked and a
harsh-featured woman plucking; the most commonplace incident, without
moral, except the moral that life is very uncertain and mortality
sure--in a hen-coop particularly. Without any pathos, save the pathetic
tracing of those hard scorings of care on that matron's face; not much
to make sentiment out of in an ordinary hand; what we may see any hour
if we live where such acts are continued from day to day. Yet in the
hands which have made it what it is, what may we, the lookers-on, not
make out of it?
The secret of Rembrandt lies here exposed, if we can only read him
aright. It is not the mass of shadow and isolated light which stamp the
power and individuality of the man. These are only his tricks of trade,
repeated when he saw how well they took with the public. It is the
vigour and command of this master which strike us as we probe the
breadth and extreme simplicity of his accessories. He is content with a
bunch of carrots when they serve his purpose. The gigantic copper
stew-pan would have been enough if he could have hidden a part of the
exact circle; but he wanted the woman to stand out alone; the other
objects were put in to support a blankness, as a little by-play, an
incident by the way: the working woman is the aim of his setting up that
large canvas. He got it all in an afternoon, the time she was plucking
the fowl--that is, the master touches; the rest might be done by
anyone.
To imitate Rembrandt properly, get hold of the first East-end
basket-woman that you chance to meet--a herring or orange vendor will
do; take her as she sits, without arranging a single fold, adding to or
removing one iota about her; take her in the street or in the close, or
as she squats down inside the half-darkened doorway of her own little
shop. She can neither have too little nor too much about her if she
struck you distinctly while you passed as being picturesque. Never mind
the lighting, and don't think to be original; as she stands, or sits, or
squats, she is the woman for your camera; out with it, and secure her
before she can wink or know what you are up to, and you have caught the
whole secret of Rembrandt's power and realistic talent.
In hatching and touching your plate, which to me seems to represent the
second working, think upon all the dodges of the etchers, Haydon,
Hamerton, Herkomer, Whistler, &c. If you have a chemical to eat down
certain parts of it broadly, leaving the prominent parts (be sparing of
prominent parts) standing out dense, do not niggle with your
pencil-point over-much, except it is to blur out an accessory which may
be too distinct. I do not know much about printing photographs, yet I am
inclined to think that it is here where the genius of the photographer
may be brought out. If I were a photographer I'd never for a second
leave a plate while it was printing. I'd try all sorts of dodges upon
the sun with pieces of paper having little eccentric holes torn out
where I wanted an artificial shadow to fall across my plate, by exposing
the print altogether at times, so as to mellow any extreme lights,
painting touches of white on it to bar out the sun altogether where I
wanted a mysterious gleam, whether it was on my picture or not, and
never rest until I had made it my own. I may be wrong, of course, in
all this; but it is the idea which now strikes me; or all this may have
been done already, or considered _infra dig._ or illegitimate; yet here,
I think, as in the treating of a painted picture, the photographer can
liberate himself entirely from the trammels of custom, and never be at a
loss for fresh tracks.
In landscape photography I constantly observe good pictures rendered
imperfect through the fatal power of the camera, which must print every
object before it, and yet in the printing even more than in the sorting
of the plate I think much, if not all, of this might be obviated by a
careful study and following up of the tricks of Rembrandt; if it is the
foreground which is too plainly marked, why not take another foreground
plate, and, clearing off all not required, place it over the other
plate, and so let the sun strike through both and blurr that corner?[2]
or make a dark shower cloud as in the engraving 'The Three Trees,' by
covering boldly portions of the plate with paper and allow the rest to
print darker; or by adroit covering and exposing, simplify the whole
arrangement and create divisions where you want them; a ray of light, or
a part blackened, or any device that occurs to you, which is what we
call inspiration?
The magic of Rembrandt rests in this--that he seldom creates, _but he
takes advantage of circumstances and local incidents_ to intensify the
story he is telling you.
To illustrate my meaning by three short quotations from celebrated
authors, whose tragedies are intensified and minutely expressed by the
working up of the commonest accessories, as we see in every tragedy of
daily life--a clock striking at the tensioned second; or a mouse
peering out of its hole; or the crack of a distant whip; the rumbling of
a cart; a laugh or a careless oath heard outside; something unimportant
seen or heard that fixes it all into its compact run or place; the
sledge bells of Mathias in the Polish Jew; or the ragged stick of Eugène
Aram.
My intention in giving these quotations is to prove to you how writers
know the value of common objects, and how few of them are wanted for the
purpose, so that in choosing our accessories we may so choose that the
link is carried on, yet nothing uselessly put in to distract the
attention; the object being to draw the eyes and thoughts, _for a
moment_, from the main act, so that we may return again better prepared
for the tragedy.
Zola, that Rembrandt of modern French literature, in one of his novels,
'La Belle Lisa,' describes the return to Paris of an escaped political
martyr called Florent.
Florent, having passed through fearful sufferings, is picked up
exhausted by one of the Paris market women and taken to Paris in her
cart. He is in a starving condition, but, being proud, will not tell the
woman about his wants, and, leaving her, gets into company with a
hard-up artist called Claude, who, although also hungry and _sou_-less,
yet is carried away by the artistic glow of light and shade and wealth
of colour about a coffee and soup stall which they pause to admire.
'I tell you,' says Claude, 'a man should paint what he sees, and as he
sees it. Now, look there. Is this not a better picture than
their--consumptive saints?'
'Women were selling coffee and soup. A small crowd of customers had
gathered round a large kettle of cabbage soup which smoked on a tiny
brazier. The woman, armed with a long ladle, first put into a yellow
bowl thin slices of bread, which she took from a basket covered with a
napkin, and then filled up the bowl with soup. There were clean
market-gardeners in blouses; dirty porters with their shoulders soiled
by the burdens they had carried; poor devils in rags--in short, all
sorts of people--eating their breakfast, and scalding themselves with
the hot soup. The painter was delighted, and half shut his eyes to
compose his picture. But the smell of the cabbage soup was terribly
strong. Florent turned away his head--the sight made him dizzy.'
Here we have a Rembrandtesque study of hunger and endurance, with all
the accessories put into quiet order.
The second sketch which I take is from an essay by Walt Whitman on the
death of President Lincoln. We all know how he (Abraham Lincoln) was
shot in the theatre, and in those few jerky commonplace sentences Walt
Whitman, the American Michael Angelo of words, presents to us as grim
and gruesome a picture as I know anywhere. It has more of the loose but
massive work of our English realist, Millais, about it than the
compacter work of Rembrandt. It has a day-light or surrounding gas-light
effect about it also, and little shadow or mystery, but it is to me
blood-curdling in its startling distinctness.[3]
You have here a scene as filled out with detail in the light as Albert
Dürer's 'Melancholy' in the shadow. Walt Whitman has not omitted a
single object which impressed him at the time--in fact, he tells us the
whole dire tragedy by the aid of animate or inanimate objects not at all
connected, except by association, with the murder; and this I wish you
to remember strictly--how, by the placing and building up of objects,
chairs, tables, flags, as here, all leading out from the centre of
sight, which is the tale, you may suggest a deed without showing the
main actors of it at all. Witness here that the principal figure,
Abraham Lincoln, is never seen.
The third illustration which I take is from that well-known poem by Bell
on Mary Queen of Scots. I choose the closing act, her execution, as it
embraces within the lines leading up to the climax the incidents of the
verses going before, and because it is here that you see distinctly
surrounding the principal character (our unfortunate Queen) trivial and
more important items, all leading up to the loneliness of the victim and
the fickleness of fortune.
In the centre of the hall is placed the block and the masked headsman,
axe in hand. The scene is decidedly Rembrandtesque in its light and
shade; to be treated as Rembrandt has treated his 'Descent from the
Cross.' A strong light falls upon block, axe, and headsman; the rest is
in shadow, the carved woodwork and tapestry hangings of the hall fading
off towards the distant door; as the royal victim and her dog near, she
comes from the shadow which covers her attendants and other witnesses
into the full glare which falls upon that empty foreground; and, as it
streams over her pale face and grey hair and becomes muffled in the
thick folds of her velvet dress, the picture is complete.[4]
The third picture of Rembrandt's is of little use to us, so it is
needless going into detail with it. It has been misnamed 'A Jewish
Bride,' as, from the general outline of the figure, loosely holding a
bunch of flowers in the left hand and the symbolic vine-twisted staff
in the right, we must conclude that the honeymoon has been for a
considerable time passed, and that another joy awaits the expectant
husband. It is a portrait of the painter's second wife, and a very
lovely second wife she must have been, with her soft fair tresses, rich
dark eyes, creamy complexion, and seductive chin--a much nicer Dutch
frau than a Jewish bride.
But before leaving this master I would like to call your attention
particularly to, and ask you to remember, 'An Old Woman.'
This is more in the distinct manner of Rembrandt than his 'Jewish
Bride,' who might have any other name attached to it as well as that of
Van Ryn.
Here the old tanned face is seen in profile; the square-cut nose and
harsh mouth, subdued by toil, sullenised by hardship, with early hours
when the frost-breath hardened that parchment skin: a pitiful face,
without one ennobling trace upon it.
Just such an air of patient suffering as we have seen of a winter
morning on the stooping, shawl-bound head of the aged hag raking amongst
the cinders and offal of the street. It is thankless toil which does
this sort of painting and carving--a spring-time of labour and lust, a
summer-time of labour and curses, an autumn-time of labour and
treachery, and a winter-time of labour, starvation, and neglect. Is it
not all equally pitiful in its progression as we watch the stages?
The girl with her load making merchandise of her love; the woman with
her load toiling on for the thankless male; the mother with her load
selfishly laying as much of it as she can upon the delicate shoulders of
her young offspring; and that toothless old hag stooping down amongst
the shadows, square, gaunt, hopeless, resting from her load alone in her
tenth hour, crouching amidst the shadows with the ashes of her wasted
past crowning that hoary, honourless, neglected age.
This is passing realism and getting into the sublime, and this is what
the gross, coarse, miserly old master has done, with his innate force
and living soul, while his strong, bold brush, with its low, sad tones,
has painted an obscure interior and an old woman sitting brooding in the
cold and dark, clad in a dirty white-grey cloak, with a dirty grey skirt
faded to grim black-grey with newer black, patched sleeves, a few jars
on a darkened shelf overhead, all dark and hopeless except where the one
ray starts out that gaunt profile and what is seen of the shrivelled
neck.
TENIERS.--I take David Teniers after Rembrandt as an instance and
example of successful and easy grouping; I take him as the type of a
school embracing a long list of painters ancient and modern--Wilkie,
Faed, Orchardson, Cameron, Pettie, &c. &c.; and why I prefer him to our
own Sir David Wilkie is not so much that Teniers was before Wilkie,
because Teniers was by no means the first in that line of business. If
you can recall the delicate and silvery half-tones and open composition
of 'La Tourneuse,' and compare this with the hot colouring, slushy
handling, and forced composition of 'The Penny Wedding' and 'Blind Man's
Buff,' we must agree that here Teniers has the best of it. Yet I would
by no means decry Sir David Wilkie, except where comparison is forced,
as in this case; for I consider Sir David Wilkie, Tom Faed, and
Orchardson to be the very best models a painter or a photographer can
have for the composition of groups.
I am not at all prejudiced in favour of old masters or of old things, or
big names, or advertised brains or dry bones; rather the reverse. I like
young flesh and fresh blood, quick-beating pulses, and impetuous
motions. I would rather have a living mistake than a dead perfection any
day; yet, when I see the old ones far ahead of the young ones, it is
both a duty and a joy to bend the knee and adore the vanished past.
Orchardson and Hugh Cameron have come up the truest to the silver and
opals of Teniers, and for chaste deliberation and simplicity I can
commend no one before Orchardson: he always stops painting just at the
point where people should stop eating and drinking--the point this side
of repletion. Study his best-known examples--Christopher Sly, from
'Taming of the Shrew,' some articles of clothing and a pair of shoes in
the left-hand corner, to continue the slanting line of feet of the
servants waiting on Christopher; a walking-stick lying in the same line
as the feet of the negro, and people behind the screen; a sheet of paper
on the floor farther in takes exactly the same line of direction, and
the eye is no more troubled with details; we can all laugh without let.
In the 'Queen of Swords,' a more crowded composition, the ground lines
are the same, with the queen forming the point of the angle and a clear
foreground, with the exception of a fan that carries on the same lines.
In that scene from 'Henry IV.,' Part I., Prince Henry, Poins, and
Falstaff, we have one of the simplest, openest, and most refined
specimens of humorous composition on record. A straight, horizontal line
of tapestry, broken up at the exact limit by the burly hind-part view of
Sir John, the buffoonery expressed in that capacious broad waist-belt,
and the rounded folds of the doublet below it, is worthy of the mighty
creator of that inflated sponge, Falstaff. A table and chair behind it
keep the horizontal line, while relieving the emptiness of the floor
between Falstaff and his companions. The wall starts out towards us at
an angle, while, along with a chair, the Prince and Poins keep within
the vanishing lines from the point of sight, which is exactly in the
centre of the back view of Falstaff's waist, so that we must look
(whether we like or not) first and last at him, even although, with
Orchardson's usual love of refinement, he is modestly cast into
half-shadow.
They say Thackeray could draw a gentleman and Dickens could not. I deny
this sweeping assertion in the existence of Mr. Chester of 'Barnaby
Rudge'; but one thing I do think, which is, that Orchardson is the
painter who gives us the nearest approach to the easy insolence and
_bonhomie_ of a well-bred man of the world.
To return to Teniers (for a moment in passing), I cannot bring to mind
one of his pictures which I have seen that could in any way be improved
in the composition, added to, or taken from; every accessory tells its
own portion of the general story, and this I would once more point out
to the composer of a picture, along with a few simple laws which occur
to me as I write. The principal object is the first object which rises
up before the mind's eye, and fixes the composition when the story is
heard or read, therefore the main object to be considered and first set
up or drawn in--as the figure of the queen in Orchardson's 'Queen of
Swords'; the philosopher nearest us in 'Bacchanalian Philosophers,' by
Teniers; the two front figures in Rembrandt's 'Night Watch,' one dark,
one light, the dark one put in by Rembrandt first; and the child with
its cart even before the lighted-up woman and child who come before
'The Blind Fiddler,' by Wilkie. There is too much in this composition,
particularly that group of foreground objects, which bear such evident
traces of having been so carefully selected and placed in such a variety
of artificial carelessness--watering-pan, cabbage, box and utensils,
basin, stool, with little bat, and knife, placed so exactly as they
ought to be, like the hills of Borrowdale--all being, after
consideration, painty improvements, never dropped upon accidentally and
not at all required. You will find nothing of this sort in Rembrandt's
pictures, or in Rubens' (lavish though he is), or in Teniers', and
seldom in Pettie's or Orchardson's. In Vandyke's you may, or in
Wilkie's, because both Vandyke and Wilkie, being Court favourites,
permitted their own individuality and good taste to be oftener biassed
by the buzzing of the gartered insects about them; yielding to make this
or that improvement to suit a foolish patron, until their own gifts
became obscured, and their taste perverted to the level of a pair of
Court breeches. Rembrandt and Rubens were strong enough men always to
lead the fashion, and too strong ever to be led. But the times are
changed with us now, so that I do not think there is any danger of
Orchardson getting spoilt by good fortune; he is not in any way hurt by
it yet, at all events.
After we get the first object set up, the others all fall into place to
suit that central or main object, and this rule holds with the arranging
of light and shadow, as well as form--one minute centre of light round
which the half-lights range, and the deepest shadow where you can best
afford it. The central form, the central light, is of paramount
importance--all the rest are matters of convenience, chance, and
discretion.
Think less about what you may put in to help your picture than upon
what you may keep out, to give it importance and repose.
Every sitter has a fine point about him, or her: find it out--the best
side of the face, a nice arm, or good hand; they will reveal it to you
unconsciously before you have sighted them--and make that your first
object, and all the rest subordinate and to help that out.
Don't seize two points in one model; decide which is the most useful,
and take that; without regret, discarding all the others.
It may be that the only good bit is a hat, or a feather, or a pair of
gloves, or a brooch. The point that first attracts your eye pleasantly
is the point upon which to make your centre of vision, and around which
you will arrange the rest. If it is an article of dress, of jewellery,
then bring the light to bear upon it, and make all the rest in
half-shades.
Study nature for ever, if you would have any photographs you take
different from the last photograph. Never take a sitter at once; leave
them alone to knock about your studio while you pretend to be sorting
something else, but watch them unawares: you will see a natural touch
before long, a peculiar habit which they are not aware of, but by which
many of their friends know them. Fix on that as your character keynote,
and work up features, position, and accessories, so as not to lose sight
of this peculiarity; and with this borne always in mind and a good
knowledge of face and neck anatomy, without which I cannot see how
anyone can touch up a negative properly, I know of no reason wherefore a
photographer should not give us as complete a character study as any
painter, ancient or modern, from Millais back to Albert Dürer.
Yet before that state of perfection can be acquired, permit me, as one
of the public and also as a frequent sufferer, to enter my protest
against head-rests and long-sighting, to those who still practise these
abominations. No natural expression or easy posture can ever be gained
until instantaneous plates are used for everyone. Before they can well
settle in their self-chosen places and posture, have them down and risk
it--the chance of a spoilt picture is better than a conventional
position.
Also this debasing system of smoothing away wrinkles, and blotches, and
character traces. I never can see a real harsh, wrinkled face nowadays,
except in some of the tintypes.
Of course I know the cry is raised that the public will have those wax
productions; but as one of the public I have not yet had my own likeness
taken quite right. For instance, in repose, I hang my head on one side,
and I have always been made to hold it straight up, like a soldier at
'attention.' Again, my nose is neither of a Greek nor Roman caste, and
yet I never do get that nose put in as I see it in a mirror, or as its
humpy shadow is cast upon the wall; or, as a gentleman once closed up a
wordy, if not very convincing number of reasons against my having the
qualities to make a poet, painter, or passable labourer, by exclaiming,
'Why, just look at your nose; did you ever know a clever man with a nose
like that?'
This photographed nose of mine has afforded me and others some
amusement; sometimes it has been so refined that I fell to reviling
nature for being so far inferior to the artist who finished it off so
well. Once it came home a splendid Roman, with the light upon it so
intensified by pencil-work that it stood out in bold enough relief to
have won a Waterloo, if big noses could have done that. I have one
portrait, which I am keeping to leave to posterity: it is so Byronic and
spiritual that future young ladies will no longer wonder why my wife
married me. This refined likeness and my love-songs together ought to do
the trick.
Yet I have some photographs very near perfection: one representing my
two little daughters, done by Tunny. Professor John Ruskin writes: 'The
face of the child on the spectator's right hand is the loveliest in
expression I ever saw in a photograph.' Also some by my friend Mr. John
Foster[5] of Coldstream cattle-pieces, and landscapes breathing of balmy
atmospheric effect. He gets up to work outside at three o'clock on
summer mornings, the hour when nature is like a blushing virgin, all
dewy loveliness and purity.
In France and England there is a school rising, who with the brush are
trying to compete with the camera--_the Impressionists_, who, along with
the camera, are yet fated to produce a great revolution in art. They aim
at giving the impression, effect, or sensation of an instantaneous
action or emotion or phase; not the phase exactly, but the swift
impression which it leaves upon the mind of the spectator, with form, as
it were--that is, with paints and brushes striving to embody the soul of
nature, and when the two are joined the result will be _perfection_.
To finish by bringing up the name which I have hitherto kept back, the
exception, about which some time ago I promised to tell you: the
sweetest, tenderest, mightiest art soul that ever was chained inside a
mortal body, and prompted the fingers to move as it wanted; the purest,
saddest mind that ever writhed neglected and found its reward so late,
the soul now free and stirring up a crowd with its pathetic activity, to
be like it pure and true--I mean _Jean-Francois Millet, the French
peasant painter_. Mr. Hunt says of him, 'For years Millet painted
beautiful things, and nobody looked at them. They fascinated me, and I
would go to Barbizon and spend all the money I could get in buying his
pictures. I brought them to Boston. _"What is that horrid thing?" "Oh,
its a sketch by a friend of mine!"_ Now he is the greatest painter in
Europe.'
That is a painter's verdict about a painter.
One of his pictures is vivid in my mind just now. There is a print of it
in that wonderful illustrated magazine, 'Scribner's Monthly,' where
engravings look like paintings or idealised photographs.
It is called 'The Sower,' the dim figure of a labourer scattering seed
over a ploughed field with one hand, and holding his apron filled with
embryo life in the other. In the distance, and lighted up by the sun, a
team of bullocks are dragging the plough, and a flight of birds over
beyond the seed. That is the whole composition put into bald words.
But as it has been rendered by this painter, it is an embodiment of all
which I have tried to explain, the spirit and body of living, working,
suffering nature.
What would I not give (if I had it) to see a photograph done like that!
and it can be done if you labour enough, know enough, and feel enough.
'The Sower!' As I look upon it I am drawn into it, mesmerised and
rendered clairvoyant. I am _en rapport_ with the freed spirit which has
left along with the delicate aroma of its departing wings a portion of
its own personality, its own immortality--vague and tender--greater than
Raphael, or Rembrandt, or Albert Dürer, for it has taken the deepest
root within humanity.
Tenderly I look upon it, not too boldly, for it seems vibrating with a
sensuous existence; it clutches at my heart--sinews as it reveals the
parables of Christ, accompanied by sobbing notes of melancholy
spirit-music; the far-off strikings of angel harp-strings, indefinite
but ravishing.
And the painter's body, that St. John face, with its misty development
of hair, lies under the earth. A maddened stag was driven by the hunters
and the hounds over the garden fence into the snow-covered garden on
that January morning of 1875[6], past the dying man's window, and
ruthlessly slaughtered under the eyes of the dying man--yielding up its
noble life for a bit of sport; the hot-red blood sinking through the
cold, white snow, and soaking into the covered hearts of the green
plants beneath. One up-turned glance of the glazing eyes met the
down-turned glance of the glazing eyes, and so, filled with despair and
pity, two souls--the soul of a stag and the soul of a painter--drifted
out into the morning light.
[Illustration: ANCIENT ASSYRIAN HALL: THE FEAST OF SARDANAPALUS
(_From a sepia sketch by the Author_)]
CHAPTER III
_THE PRIMARIES: YELLOW, RED, AND BLUE_
I. AN APOLOGY TO THE AUTHOR OF 'MODERN PAINTERS,' ETC.
[Illustration: W]E may love a man for himself, and admire his gifts, and
yet differ altogether from his beliefs. We may go fifteen miles out of
twenty with a guide, and turn off our own way the remaining five.
Surely it cannot be called inconsistency to go the fifteen miles and
break off at the five; to revere the genius of John Ruskin and love his
character, and yet take a stand against him when he directs painting! to
coincide with his abstract theories of art, and oppose his practical
hints! to praise him in the preface and blame him in the pamphlet!
This is a paradox which the student of man may easily comprehend. The
exhibition of vanity, or meanness, or pettiness which last year may have
filled me with just indignation or contempt, this year may be met in my
mind with over-balancing excuses and reasons. I was close upon it when
it loomed up, and it looked a mountain, hiding with its black shadow all
the rest; but my distance of to-day has reduced it to its correct size,
a dirty mud-heap at the foot of the mountain of nobility,--or the wisdom
of the ages has added another year to my growing mind.
Yet I do not regret what I have said, for if we cannot pick the beam
from our own eyes, is it not something that we are able to point out the
mote in the eye of our brother? It is a compliment which we expect him
to return by helping us to clear the more ponderous encumbrances from
our sense of vision.
John Ruskin I regard as a master at whose feet no man, however strong,
need be ashamed to sit: one as nearly the ideal man as we may expect
frail humanity to be--self-sacrificing, devoted, single in the pursuit
of his object; microscopic in his vision (herein lies his fault as a
general teacher--_he cannot stand far enough back from his picture_),
seeking to the core before he will be satisfied, becoming the disciple
of the man he would criticise, never trusting to a casual glance of the
subject he would describe, going patiently all round it, getting into it
if he can. A word to trust as you might the Spirit of Truth--_as far as
he can see it_.
He is a bigot, being in deep earnest, as all reformers must be, _having
only one right road which they are treading_, but (I put my finger on
the weak spot) he has disciples who are too completely satisfied with
him, who, having fallen in love, have become blind, and he has the
weakness to be satisfied with their satisfaction. The gold is pure which
he has refined, the armour is bright which Faith has clasped upon
him--but there is a red rust that will get upon the brightest armour if
the damp breath of adulation be allowed to rest upon its surface, the
arrogant vanity which eats into the soul.
As a philanthropist and moral leader, as a poet and beautiful example,
set up John Ruskin.
If the world could follow it, the shepherds more than the sheep, then
would it be nearer the standard set up by the Founder of Christianity,
further from forms, falsehoods, luxuries. But the world has its own
standards of morality, as he fixes his about art; only, John Ruskin is
sincere: but, alas for the others!
He is wrong from my point of sight as regards painting, therefore I say
so; he is not all gold, but so great is my love of the gold that it
forces me to hate in proportion the clay; but would that I could walk in
his footsteps for all the rest!
II. THE PRIMARIES: YELLOW, RED, AND BLUE
I dare say you have all stood at times to look at a street showman
throwing up three balls in the air, and spinning them about from one
hand to the other.
I wish that I could demonstrate this feat, but unfortunately I am not
clever enough, neither have I been able to find any friend who could do
it, else it would have been a great pleasure to me, and I doubt not also
to you, if I could have aided my symbol by introducing to you at this
point the model of some long-haired gentleman, with his symmetrical
person glittering with spangles and bright textures, who, tossing up the
yellow, red, and blue balls, would thus have added amusement to
instruction. However, since I have not this artifice to help me, I must
trust to your memories of such a sight as I go on.
Yellow, red, and blue: these are the three colours that I wish to begin
the game, and with which you are likely also to end it.
The showman pitches up the coloured balls, and as they slowly cross one
another we can trace their course and local tints perfectly, even while
we are soothed with the harmony they produce all together. Red passes
yellow, and an image of orange flashes in front of us, even while we see
both red and yellow quite distinctly apart; red passes blue, and purple
at once dashes between the blue and the red; yellow passes blue, and
green is the result.
Yellow, red, and blue are the primary colours; orange, purple, and green
are the direct mixtures of the primary colours, or secondary tints.
The showman gets animated, and the three balls are sent spinning rapidly
from hand to hand: they seem all to be in the air at once, blending and
dashing about each other until there is no red, or yellow, or blue, no
distinct orange, purple, or green, but a thousand indefinite shafts and
ripples of colour. Is it red, blue, green, orange, purple, yellow, or
gems and sparkles of fire? They are only three, three that are a host,
three that have become brown, grey, black, all sorts of browns, every
description of that subtle and endless grey.
Can the painter do any better than imitate the street showman with the
three colours? Start fair, mix slowly and decidedly, get animated, and
dash along, with his entire heart in his work, some thought in his head,
and his eye steadfastly fixed on nature, and nature only, while his
fingers run over the keyboard to the music she sets before him. He will
not require to trouble himself about much else, for it will all come out
of the mist in very good time, when he has learned the trick of keeping
the three in unity and motion.
The child, when he gets a paint-box, as a rule, begins quite right,
although he does it unconsciously. He will paint his picture-book with a
red face, yellow coat, and blue decorations. Most likely you will find
him disdain all mixtures, except perhaps green, which impresses him as
nice--no doubt from its association with the fields, where he likes to
run about and play.
The savage, with his tattooing and war-paints, does the same exactly,
with the superior significance of his symbols: every twist of the
ornament meaning a grade or a power, every streak a motive or a threat.
His gods are reverenced only as the mementoes or symbols of the unseen
or divine, not because they are stones or sticks, as we so often
misunderstand heathenism.
Old Egypt stands to-day, mighty monument of the grandeur of simplicity:
with its solid works that defy time, its glaring colours that defy
criticism.
Assyria comes after, with her purples, her gold, and her greater
refinements. 'White, green, and blue hangings, fastened with cords of
fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble: the beds
were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white,
and black marble.'[7]
[Illustration: AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CORRIDOR
(_From a sepia sketch by the Author_)]
These are ladybird wings that send us fluttering back nearly three
thousand years, to the hanging gardens by the Tigris, the broad walls
and the open streets where the war-chariots jostled and the broad moon
hung like a golden lamp between heaven and earth, and mingled her silver
shafts with the ruddy sparkles of the perfumed torches, as they shivered
and vanished into the darkness of the shadows of the painted boats, down
by the porphyry steps that led from the old palace of the king.
Is it the sound of the instruments we are listening to? the voices of
the singers? the tinkle of the silver ornaments round the ankles of the
dancers? the laughter of the drinking guests of Ahasuerus?--or the
snapping and snarling of the jackals over the few spare bones that the
last caravan for Baghdad has left on that earth-mound by the river at
Mosul?
Egypt stands the queen, with her ageless pyramids and her sphinxes,
because Egypt came up first with her first principles in art and
science, to which, as we gain knowledge and confidence in ourselves, we
must return.
The youth grows out of his pinafores and his first paint-boxes, he gains
a _partial_ knowledge of art, and like us all when only half educated on
our subject, grows arrogant and developes into a very fierce critic.
He also becomes a fine customer to the art-colour merchants, fills his
boxes and palette with every conceivable colour that is made,
particularly the more expensive sort; cadmiums and rose madders are his
delight; he wallows in paint.
He has become so very knowing that where poetry may have been able to
fire his fancy before, only paint can now content him. If pre-Raphaelism
is the fashion, he will lay in a set of sables and pick away at little
threads like a weaver until he is half blind; if it is the low-toned
school he affects, then daylight becomes obnoxious, sunlight abhorrent
to him; he riots in November fogs and dismal rainy weather, grovels in
shapeless symphonies, and the dingy harmonies of the Dutch.
I have tried to like the pre-Raphaelite school, because the man whose
word is considered law beyond dispute has said it is the right thing in
true art. I have seen Holman Hunt's great picture, the 'Shadow of the
Cross,' and could see in it nothing but hard lines and forced symbols as
hard as the lines. In Millais' picture of 'Effie Deans' I saw a fair
young girl with a world of hopeless woe in her face that brought tears
to my eyes. In Hunt's 'Boy Christ' I saw nothing but china-blue eyes and
hard little touches, hair like bits of wire, and all devotion worked out
of it by the multitude of its pitiful details: I saw time and drawing
and infinite work on it, but nothing else. I never saw the original of
the 'Light of the World,' but I have seen engravings from it, and
although five hundred greater men than John Ruskin were to write that it
is 'the most perfect instance of expressional purpose with technical
power which the world has yet produced,' I would hold to my own
idea--that, if it is painted as the 'Shadow of the Cross' is painted, it
is no more than a man dressed in Eastern costume standing at a door with
a lamp in his hand, a few creepers beside him, and all worked to death
with hard little lines, without anything exalted about it or wonderful
in its composition.[8]
There is a world of false humility and gross want of self--assertion in
this weakness of bending down to the opinions of acknowledged
authorities or time-honoured superstitions, particularly in matters to
be seen, as pictures or statuary. The old masters are regarded as
infallible, yet in the exhibition of autotypes from the Queen's drawings
from old masters, at one time exhibited at the Museum of Science and
Art, Edinburgh, I saw many samples of bad drawing, weak handling,
timidity, slow-dragging invention--all that marked the draughtsmen as
faulty mortals in spite of their great names, and nothing in the whole
collection to prove them any greater, but rather less, than our modern
men, even although it does approach blasphemy to say this.
Speaking of low tones, I must confess to a fondness for this fascinating
affectation. Jozef Israels is more than nice, although I require the
mist which gets into my eyes when I try on a pair of spectacles before I
can see outlines so soft and hazy, and colours so undecided and sombre,
as his are. Corot I cannot see to be the prince of landscape painters,
although the critics did call him so, if the pictures which they were
then lauding to the skies are samples of his princely style, for I could
see nothing more in them than a lot of dirty scrubbing about with his
hog hair--and not too much paint wasted either.
To a certain extent this low-toned school seems to have reason on its
side, for when we compare our scale of colours with the scale of nature,
we find how limited we are, how boundless she is.
White is our only semblance to light, and what a leaden symbol it is
when we regard the brightness of our example!
Black is our deepest dark, and how shallow it is when we try to look
into the depth of the shadows about us!
And so it seems but right that, being so utterly unable to reach the
heights or the depths of what we wish to depict, we ought to send back
and keep down every step or key of our board in the same proportion as
our lights and our darks are--make our picture, in fact, not so much the
imitation as the dim reflection that we see in a window sometimes when
there is a dark cloth hung behind it, or in the camera obscura.
Were I comparing styles, I would say that Turner struck a high note in
his scale, and rippling up lost himself in white.
Rembrandt struck a low key, and went out of sight in his blacks.
The low-toned school strike a faint half-note, and playing falsetto,
lose themselves in dingy obscurity at both ends, never venturing very
high or very low.
All are right from their own standpoint, but the Turner and the
Rembrandt schools are nearest truth, because they look straight at
nature and not on her reflections; and because, as our whites are
already so far below nature's light, the sooner we strike our nearest
approach, the sooner we shall arrive at our imitation, and _vice versâ_.
To return, though, to our paint: I would fain ask you to regard all
beauty as so much mixed colour, something in the same way that the
youthful anatomist sees only a lovely dissection in the arm or face that
may be sending some other sentimental youth into poetic fits.
I here quote a little from John Ruskin--a man noble and
self-sacrificing, whom I can admire, not blindly, like a reasonless
lover, but with the qualified reverence of a sensible helpmate. I like
to fall in with the fashion when I can. In writing on colour as the test
of a painter he says:
'If he can colour, he is a painter, though he can do nothing else....
The man who can see all the greys, and reds, and purples in a peach will
paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether; but the man who
has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and greys, and if
he does not, will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power
over colour is always a sign of large art intellect: every other gift
may be erroneously cultivated, but this will guide to all healthy,
natural, and forcible truth. The student may be led into folly by
philosophers' (the worthy Professor here holds up unconsciously the red
light against his own dangers), 'and into falsehoods by purists, but he
is always safe when he holds the hand of a colourist.' ('Modern
Painters,' vol. iv. part v. chap. iii.)
The young man is perfectly right to revel in his many colours as long as
he can, to dabble about with them to his heart's content, send his
shafts of madder and cobalt, terre verte and siennas, and all that he
can range out in battle-order, across his canvas. Time mellows painters
as it does paint, and where the colour offended them in their lavish
youth, in their riper manhood they see, beyond this, many qualities
which they never thought of looking for before.
I think a painter is about the very worst critic we can set before a
picture; perhaps this may serve as some sort of excuse for the faults of
Ruskin. He will be able to dissect the picture, tell you how this part
has been worked, and with what, but he can hardly stand on impartial
ground, the only position for a judge or critic.
If his forte is colour, he must stop dead at this, and because his
sensitive and cultivated taste is offended by some flaw in his
particular hobby and firmly fixed habits, he will get no further, and
see nothing else; just as a sensitive ear will be offended by a jar in
the playing, and lose in the irritation the whole of the composition and
thought.
You say, But a picture ought to be perfect. True; so ought the man who
has painted it, and perhaps would have been had Eve not eaten the apple.
I never saw a perfect action in my life, far less a perfect picture.
And so also with the pre-Raphaelite; he condemns the bold and broad
style, and the rugged painter sees only paltry crotchet work in the
pre-Raphaelite. They are all right, and so of course it stands to reason
that they must be all wrong to each other.[9]
However, to return to our picture on hand. We have gone over it with our
chalk, charcoal, or pencil, and in doing so we must try to be very
particular in drawing it thoroughly. First, we will block in our subject
roughly and slightly, as a sculptor would begin to hack out his stone or
shape his clay. It does not make any difference whether it is a
landscape or a figure we are aiming at; we must begin it first with a
few marks of distance, put it into squares, divide it with straight
lines, measure it with our eye in its broadest sense, box it up, and put
rigidly from us all temptations at this stage to enter into details.
Leave all the fine curves until we are sure that we have room for them
with our square lines; a rough touch for a nose, a mouth, a branch, or a
house, it is all the same, and all that we require for the present; more
will only distract our attention from the duty before us, which is the
exact proportions of the masses, and the position they hold towards each
other.
Second stage--go over it carefully bit by bit, use our mental point,
measure it all again with our eye, compare very minutely this part with
some other part, the breadth of this window or nose with their length,
and the breadth and length of something else; look at the relative
position of two parts, the angles of imaginary lines that you mentally
pass between them, and so on, and so on; in fact, be our own harshest
critics, and leave not the smallest space unmeasured or unthought of,
previous to our filling it in.
Next we go into details, and by degrees walk carefully over our clumsy
outsides, cutting gradually in farther and farther, until we have lost
the square angles without losing the firmness which they have given to
us, and with perfect assurance and ease dash in our beautiful quivers
and curves, not with the harsh, hard, clear lines of a copy-book, but
with the soft, broad, breathing lines of nervous talent.
We are now ready for paint, so we will begin to set our palette. We
start with white, and put it nearest to the thumb-hole, as it is what we
shall use most; next we take the yellows, being nearest the light in
colour--the brightest first, our lemons and chromes, Naples yellows,
ochres, cadmiums, and raw siennas. You will not need the half of these
unless you like. Next follow the reds--vermilion, crimsons, roses, light
and Indian reds, or whatever else you please, in decreasing scale of
brightness to our browns, and our blues, cobalts, ultramarine or
permanent, Prussian, indigo, &c., and so wind up with the darks and
blacks.
You can paint a picture with three colours, and you can use all that are
in the colour list; only have a method and reason for everything you do,
and if a good reason, it will be the proper thing to do. We set our
palette thus, because our tints are thus in harmonious gradations from
us; and also, if by mistake our brush comes into contact with two
colours at once, it will not do so much damage as it otherwise would if
such colours as yellow and blue were placed side by side; both in such a
case would be dirtied past any further service.
In setting your palette, you may use your own discretion, as I have
said, and cram it with all the high-sounding, high-priced range to be
found in the many-leaved colour list-books, but one thing time and
experience alone can teach you--that the greater your art knowledge, the
more limited will be your range of colours and implements. You may begin
with the rainbow, but you will return eventually to your earths; for
what I hold to be the great secret in painting, poetry, and literature
is--simplicity. Fine words, dear colours, only mystify the student and
prove the weakness of the worker.
For brushes, in oils try to acquire the use of hog-hair brushes if you
would make effective and vigorous work; sables and soft brushes are sure
to tempt you, being so much pleasanter to a beginner. But if it is not
miniature, pre-Raphaelite, or tea-tray painting which you aspire to,
keep from them as long as you can. Do not use softeners either, but
rather place your colours firmly, and separately, and purely, so as to
produce the effect you desire by knowledge and skill, and not by
trickery.
Make your lines rather suggestively than literally, and the larger your
brushes the finer your work will be; for if we look at nature we cannot
find lines, or if there seem lines they are formed by many
cross-divisions so minute and filled with gradations that the finest
sable-hair is like rope-work beside them.
We cannot copy the delicacy of nature, for we cannot trace it, therefore
we must content ourselves with attempting to give a little of the effect
and feeling that we from our distance can trace. This is why, _from my
point of view_, pre-Raphaelitism is a clumsy, abortive imitation of the
upper surface, and not so true a translation of the whole as the
painting of the broad and suggestive worker.
In water-colour we require to use sables for our washes--that is, if it
is water-colour and not opaque painting we are attempting.
Now for the subject. There are two ways of approaching it: one with fear
and trembling, thinking of all the poetry that is in it, or rather the
sham sentiment that we fancy is in ourselves, and would fain make other
people believe to be our own outpourings, while in reality it is the
effect left on our dazzled mind after reading the matchless
cloud-and-water poetry to be found in the pages of 'Modern Painters' and
other works by the same author. How fondly we are apt to imagine, as we
quote, that we have seen countless miles of transparent cloud beyond
cloud, vistas opening up as we gaze, and think so it ought to be
painted, as if mortal hand or manufactured paint could do it, while all
the time we are only miserable waiters serving up in a flashy way the
utterly impossible dishes Ruskin has so finely spiced in his own private
kitchen!
Do you think that Turner painted half the beauties Ruskin _sees_ in his
pictures, thought out half the mountains of thought his admirer makes
him think, had a quarter of the intentions the Professor fathers him
with?
No! Turner was a poet, and painted, as Shakespeare wrote, on the spur of
the moment, with the same glorious knack of being able to leave alone
'_happy flukes_', which chance and accident gave them, and this knack,
if not the spirit of genius, is a very good substitute for it.
I do not mean to say that Turner painted from impulse only. I have not
the slightest doubt that he had intentions, and most carefully planned
out all his conceptions, as Shakespeare planned out the fabric, or
bones, of his plays; but the great bits of detail, the compact word, the
chance touch, the sparkle of wit, the sweep of the hog-hair that made
the veins upon the little shell by the sea-shore, the twist of the
palette knife that broke the colours into prismatic ripples on the
rounded wave--all that his admirer writes as forethought I do not
believe. He must have thought on the clouds and waves and sands which he
so often watched, the varying shapes and tints they took, the mixture of
all he had seen sweeping into shore, and thinking of all this while his
deft hand laboured hard to produce the semblance, so it took shape and
grew into being; or else he worked away and tried other methods and
experiments until the results came, and more wondrous results do come
thus by chance than the forced and mechanical labour of mere industry.
We spoil a good deal of good work through overwork. If we could but let
well alone we should not suffer the bitter reflections and heartburn of
a remembered chance cast away. We go on polishing and working, rounding
off this energetic sentence, touching over that harsh brush-mark, until
we have refined all spirit out of our work, and finish it off with a
smooth surface and nothing else.
To quote once more from Ruskin when he is for a moment sensible; he
speaks of the value of finish in the 'Stones of Venice' thus: 'Never
demand an exact finish when it does not lead to a noble end. If you
have the thought of a rough or untaught man, you must have it in a rough
and untaught way; but from an educated man, who can without effort
express his thoughts in an educated way, take the graceful expression
and be thankful, only get the thought and do not silence the peasant
because he cannot speak good grammar, or until you have taught him his
grammar. Grammar and refinement are good things both, only be sure of
the better things first.... Always look for invention first, and after
that for such execution as will help the invention and as the inventor
is capable of, without painful effort, and _no more_; above all, demand
no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is
slaves' work unredeemed. Rather choose rough work than smooth work, so
that the practical purpose is answered, and never imagine there is
reason to be proud of anything that may be accomplished by patience and
sand-paper!'
We can desire to read nothing broader or finer than this from any man,
for the man must write or paint roughly who cannot do better through his
want of education; but if the thoughts are there, it must be well. The
man also must write and paint roughly, no matter what his education has
been, when his thoughts are quicker and fuller than his power of
execution, and it is better to have the rough work and the full thought
than the finished work and something lost. But, no matter whether it be
science or art that the man is treating, I would reverse the advice
Ruskin gives in his introduction to 'Proserpina,' and tell the man to
write it in the language that he and his neighbours are most familiar
with, and not waste his time locking it up in a dead language that only
a few can understand. As to taking a month to each page, if heaven has
gifted him with ideas, he will find this as impossible to do as it will
be for the man or woman who have the spirit of men or women, and not the
essence of fools and apes, to cut the acquaintance who may be in reduced
circumstances, or engaged in honest, therefore holy, labour.
The other way of coming before nature is the tersely realistic, that
regards the changing glories of the sunset or moonrise with a callous,
critical, investigating glance, indulging in no idle visions or fancy
images, but dividing the glories into degrees of colour and gradation.
The school of Shelley sings--
When sunset may breathe
From the lit sea beneath
Its ardours of rest and of love.
This cool hand cuts down all the ardours, and dots them lemon, orange,
chrome, rose madder, vermilion, raw umber, and cobalt.
And yet we must approach nature with a certain amount of awe and
veneration, if we would be painters and not painting-machines. If we
have any sentiment in our composition at all, we can no more gaze upon
the beautiful or grand without a responsive something being stirred
within us than we can hope to eat pork chops the last thing at night and
escape the nightmare.
The dash of the waterfall must produce in us more than the _dry_
estimate of its sparkling colours, or we are not far removed from the
fern that draggles by its edge. A lovely face or graceful form must
teach us more than carnation and ochre, or we deserve to be the hero of
Campbell's melancholy poem 'The Last Man.' If we do not feel the spirit
of the whole while we watch the form, the colour, and lights and shades,
we are worse off than the shadowless man, for we have pawned our souls
without redeeming that faithful follower.
It may be the spirit and beauty of peachy golden youth, or the spirit
and beauty of gnarled silver age, that we are watching. We see the
lights and the shadows playing about, the greens, the purples, the
browns, the reds, the yellows, the whites, but we _feel_ that there is
more than this. We dissect hair, we see in the dark the rich brown
madder shadows with the purple half-lights and blue gleams, and we know
this makes the raven's plume from the right standpoint; or the golden
tress, with its mixtures of ochre, green, and red, and we thrill at the
dusky loveliness that is crouching in the silky masses, or the angel
glory that is hovering round the fair, and so we drink in all the poetry
that we must have to refine and gild our realistic common sense before
we can appreciate it enough to paint it.
Once with a friend I watched a glorious sunset, and as I stood setting
my two palettes--one, imagery, where I was spreading out all my mental
stock of jewels, pearls, and opals for the greys, rubies, and
cairngorms, and a great many other precious stones from my castle in
Spain; with the other palette seeking to snatch from the weak little
tubes that intense dun and purple rolling about through the
thunder-drift,--seeking to bring down the waves of variation, the orange
and the gold and the green and burning flames subdivided ten
thousandfold, to my rule of three, seeking to draw down heaven and shut
it inside my paint-box,--I was somewhat amused by hearing my
colour-blind friend murmur pensively, 'Red-lead and lamp-black.'
That settled the whole conundrum, and I passed on.
How to paint a picture, that is the question. Although imagination ought
to be brought with us when we come to nature, it should be as our own
bicycle under us, and not like our neighbour's bicycle, riding over us.
We must give the spirit of what we see, and no more; for we shall commit
a hundred errors if we vainly attempt to give the spirit of the oak
while we are painting its bark. Of course we know what the oak has done,
we recall all that we have read of Nelson, Collingwood, and other hearts
of oak who have spilt good blood to prove that 'Britons never shall be
slaves'; and although, perhaps, it ought to give an oak-tree an air of
all this as it stands before us, yet there it stands before us, full of
knots and wrinkles, with its gnarled limbs flung about it, and its green
moss, silver lichen, and amber and purple darting between; and I take
it, this is what our painter has to get into his head and imitate. We
cannot see past its bark unless it is torn open, and then we may not see
the bark, and we must never think of painting what we cannot see. If, by
the help of our poetic taste, we can convey to the spectator the
sentiment we do see about it, of a hardy, sturdy, rugged sentinel that
has done duty there before our grandfathers were born, which goes on in
the same impassive way while we lie dead in sleep, and may go on ever
the same when perhaps we make up part of the earth and fungus about its
roots, unless God's swift telegram, the mighty lightning-flash, or man's
paltry axe, gives it its furlough,--if we can do this, as well as give
an image of the reality, we have done all we can do--made a noble work
and created a poem.
Never mind what anyone else sees in the subject, stick resolutely to
what your own eyes tell you, and you must be right. Say someone tells
you there is a man coming along the road; you think it does look like a
man, but you only see a splash of mixed colours with a _certain_ sweep
about it; put that in, and someone else looking at your picture will
say, 'You have made a man.'
This is the grand trick of landscape figure painting, for if anyone can
see a single line of detail about your figure more than the tree, or
stone, or hedge beside him, your figure is a failure and should come
out, for it is spoiling the unity of your picture.
So with clouds, water, mountains, trees, everything created above us,
beneath us, about us. My harp has only three strings, and were I to
finger it for a thousand hours, to a thousand different tunes, it would
be with the same variations. What paints sunset, paints sunrise, midday,
moonlight; the same colours that sparkle in the bright patch sparkle in
the deep shadow, and the variations of yellow, red, and blue are as
pronounced and apart in each blade of grass as they are in the white
clouds rolling above it, and as distinct in the dazzling snowdrift as in
the burning sunset skies,--there is not an inch without its variety, but
only a variety of three.
Return as soon as you can to the child with his first paint-box, the
savage in his woods, grand old Egypt that must stand for ever; but bring
back all your knowledge, so that you may know _why_ you painted as you
did when you began. Thus will you learn humility, which is only taught
by true and great wisdom, and the charity that has a hundred eyes.
We should begin our subject as we first see it. As we enter a room, the
first thing that strikes us is the great masses of light and shadows
before us; objects are all divided thus, and so we should paint our
first stage or working. This is the effect we are securing.
Afterwards objects proclaim themselves: they start out of the
masses--chairs, tables, pictures, people. That is our second stage or
working--the broadest fact of the individuals.
Thirdly, we see the details, ornaments, patterns, textures.
Lastly, as we get to look more closely, we see in each shadow a world of
colour, all the sparkles and gems, and the same in every light. This is
our finishing stage, and may be prolonged as far as we like and can go.
With landscape also it is the same. We would paint a tree: the first
thing that strikes us is its general shape--first working. Next its
great divisions of light and shadow, when some masses come out and other
masses go back, also a general idea of its prevailing tone. Second
working--Then, as we work and watch, come indications of branches, the
large limbs first, then the less, and so on, until we lose the lines of
the smallest branches and can only guess where they have gone to.
There are also suggestions of leaves which we know are leaves, although,
as they lie about in all directions, they get mixed up into all sorts of
shapes, and come gradually upon us: and this is the third stage of
working.
If we paint in the leaves as we know they are shaped, we must get a
stiff and unnatural picture, because we are not painting what we see,
but what we think should be there; and if we paint each individual leaf
as we would copy one set before us, or as we see them in Christmas
cards, we must paint in an abortive, unnatural, and exaggerated manner,
because, as our tree is so greatly smaller than the tree before us, if
each leaf was also in proportion less we could not make them out with
the naked eye.
How, then, ought we to do it? Not like a pre-Raphaelite or teatray
painter, but as we see it--broadly and in masses, doing what we can with
our own clumsy fingers and clumsier tools; and since we cannot get all
the details of nature, best leave them alone with true humility as
beyond us, and do what we can, and as nearly in proportion as we can.
To do this use hog-hair brushes, stand well back from your picture, and
try to keep the spectator back also. Tell him, like Salvator Rosa, that
the smell of paint is not good for him, or say he will never be able to
see the landscape if he pushes himself so amongst the branches and
leaves of the tree, or that it is rude to get so close to a lady's
face--anything, only keep him back the proper distance. If shortsighted,
let him be content with the description of other people about it, and
deplore his own misfortune, for a picture that is painted to be looked
at two inches from the eyes can never be a 'thing of joy.'
When before nature, it is strictly proper to adhere as closely to facts
as we can, put into our sketch everything that we can see before us, and
even at our closest following up we shall not get in a hundredth part.
True, the student is none the worse for a little fancy to help him out
of the road with any very ungainly object in front of him, but I doubt
if he will find a much better substitute than the objection he wishes
away.
The telegraph-post does its part in the composition of the picture as
conscientiously as the lovely silver birch, and at a place where the
birch would be too much.
We are searching after the picturesque, and stop, caught by something
that is fine, and yet when we dissect it we may find it full of the
objections and faults which we have been taught to reverence. Shall we
alter what nature has done so well, introduce our poor little rules, and
tailorise the picture until it stands reproachless?
Rules! nothing seems to me so forced, so curbing as this word. We ought
not to draw this as it is, because some of the lines are running counter
to what they ought to be. It is a sin against precedent if we put that
wall or fence as it at present stands. Good taste and the example of the
old masters forbid us to put on this colour, to do that. At every turn
we are met by a ticket marked 'Trespassers will be prosecuted to the
utmost rigour of the law.' Keep on the beaten track, or else you must
expect to suffer the consequences.
I hate all precedents and rules in art, and my advice would be, 'Put in
all that looks well in nature, and it will be your own bad work if it
does not look well in your picture.'
As to this veneration for the old masters, were they infallible, were
they more gifted than we are, had they more advantages for learning art
than we have? Yes, one great advantage over us--they had no old masters
to annoy them, only the spirit that God gave them to struggle on with,
as we should also have did the world not bid us bow down and worship
these time-stained old idols. They were great, and so may we become when
we are dust and ashes, and time has deified us and stained our pictures
to the golden duskiness that is fashionable, and tradition has distorted
our sayings and exalted our prolonged labours into sudden flashes of
genius.
It is very good practice to copy some pictures when there is something
in them that we wish to learn, yet cannot see how to do from nature. For
instance, you may learn how to glaze and scumble better from a picture
than from nature, because the glazings and scumblings of nature are too
subtle for us to follow always so directly.
You will also learn how painters of repute managed a certain phase or
effect of colour, subject, or composition. Rubens will liberate you from
many a stiffness, and give you in his own buoyant style the liberty and
joyful colouring you may be deficient in. Vandyke will teach you
refinement and dignity; Tintoretto, richness; Michael Angelo, the
boldness and firmness of handling and drawing, the severity and
squareness needful for majestic grandeur.
Amongst our own men, I quote John Pettie for a strength and richness
that have never been surpassed, bring what master of long-ago you like
to the competition; Orchardson for pure and delicate texture; Sir
Frederick Leighton for finish; Millais for realism in its best sense;
Alma-Tadema for imitation and learning; and a host of other men, both
good and true, who must improve the mind, the eye, and the hand.
Millais has said that an artist ought to begin as he did,
pre-Raphaelite, if only to learn the quality of Job. Nature eventually
must make him, as she has made that great realistic master, broad and
strong, if it is to be, though a whole world of critics were to chorus
against it.
Speaking of critics, I think we may divide them into two classes--the
psychological and the destroying, or vermin, species. The first class
look at a painting or a book as we ought to look at everything--with the
bee spirit, to suck out all the honey there is in it. They are of equal
use to the public and to the worker; for, leaving one to see the errors
that all man's work has, they lay the good before the other, benefiting
equally themselves in the instruction they have gained. As for the other
class, do they help the work done, or that has to be done? do they add
to the pleasure of the spectator, or instruct the worker by their
pertness or sneers? Do moths add to the value of clothes? does mildew
improve walls? does rust assist the brightness of polished steel? or do
white ants strengthen the rafters they bed in?
True, these are all works of nature and creatures of God. The decay must
be as useful as the life, or it would not be. But what made critics of
this class? From what? For what?
Discreet copying, as I have said, is very good; but there is only one
other practice as pernicious as indiscriminate and constant copying, and
that I will speak of presently.
What is glazing and scumbling?
Scumbling is going over distance with white or grey, rubbing it hard and
dry, so as to obscure the parts that stand too prominently out; it
softens harshnesses, sends back portions, and does its part in aiding
the general harmony of the distance and middle distance.
Glazing is the use of transparent colours with some sort of medium, such
as madders, siennas, browns, to give richness to the depths, lower the
tone in places needful, as foregrounds and such like, that come direct
with all their local hues about them; it brings things forward, as
scumbling sends objects back.
Tone is the cast of your scale of colour, the setting of your key, the
tuning of the pitchfork, to be determined on before you begin your
picture, and remembered all through it; and it is the forgetting of
this at times which stamps the amateur.
Style.--Of course everyone has his own taste to consult in this, and
what you admire you will, consciously or not, imitate, until nature
rectifies it and gives you a style of your own. The artist must
fluctuate among several styles, always following and trying to
understand nature, even while he admires other painters, until at last
the scales fall from his eyes, and he relies only on the powers given
him when he least expected it. A spark of what is to be will show out
here and there until the _to be_ has come.
That is, unless when, in their frantic efforts to be original, painters
hunt heaven and earth for the most startling effect, subject, or
treatment; then they become like French cooks--continually stirring
their minds for new mixtures to catch and astonish the public taste,
spending all their foolish energies in the spicing of old stale
thoughts.
It may be we admire Sam Bough, with his versatile fancy and vigorous
touch; or Lockhart, Macdonald, Fildes, &c., with their strong, healthy
'go'; or Herdman, Faed, &c., with their sweet touch and poetic minds; or
Sir Noel Paton, with his exquisite drawing, radiant colouring, and
originality of conception; or Waller Paton, with his purple and gold; or
the late lamented Paul Chalmers, who flung everything into the scale
against colour and made it weigh them down; or Harvey, who chose the
moral thought; or Gustave Doré, who revels in the image. I could go on
naming hosts who have styles distinct by power or affectation, for it is
in the style that we show our affectation, as we do it in our walking
and our talking; but I would only say that if you wish to be natural and
great, think very little upon the style you would take, and more upon
the thought you wish to express; be earnest in your work, and by
earnestness you will forget your delivery, and so be both natural and
original. And, after all, what does it matter whether people say we are
like So-and-so or not, if we are doing our very best? We must find the
true _peace with honour_, and the repose that ever follows honest,
earnest exertions.
It is also good practice to draw with the point, pencil, or pen as
rapidly as possible all that partakes of motion--ships sailing, engines
puffing out the volumes of steam and smoke, clouds, water, waving trees,
and reeds. Fill up your books and scraps of paper with all sorts of
shorthand notes; very likely you will not be able to decipher the wild
scratchings again, but they have done their duty while you were
scribbling them in by fixing something in your mind.
Watch closely as you sketch, and after you get home think it all out and
write down as nearly as possible all about it--the colours you think
should be used for it, the shape of it, the comparative size, and also,
_if you can_, the poetry and emotions it awoke in you.
Books on painting, as a rule, are only confusing to the mind of the
novice--filled with words difficult to comprehend, and of very little
use when the conundrum is solved. Like recipe and cookery books, they
serve, after you know your subject without them, to warn you against
what they advise, also to advertise the many colours you are to flounder
amongst for a season. But nature is the best recipe-book: her problems
are as easy to unravel, and when read, serve your lifetime.
Sir Joshua Reynolds is very good and sensible on painting, although I
cannot answer for his remarks on pictures.
John Ruskin's books are entertaining, splendidly and carefully prepared
inside and outside, even to the colour of the morocco and calf-skin; the
language as select and carefully weighed as the shade of the edges, and
the title as maturely considered as the material on which it has to be
printed. It is a great pleasure to handle one of his books, or even to
see one of the backs on our shelves; they are like greyhounds amongst
rough tykes; in fact, I have often felt sorry to open them, the bindings
are such masterpieces of thought.
When opened the pleasure is not diminished, although mystification may
set in at times. We sail smoothly over page after page, soothed with the
harmony, exalted with the poetry, thralled with the exquisite grace,
diction, and finish; we can hardly think of stopping to inquire what it
is all about, it is all so delightful, so ethereal--the work of a great
master of the pen.
Read and moralise, if you will, upon such beautiful touches as this:
'Morning breaks as I write along those Coniston Fells, and the level
mists, motionless and grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the
lower woods, and the sleeping village, and the long lawns by the
lake--shore.'
This passage is only one of many that remind me of splinters from the
big diamond that was supposed in olden times to flash out of the head of
the toad. Copy it if you can with your brush, for it is very perfect in
its word-painting, and true to mornings I have seen in Cumberland.
But when he tells you how to paint, beware! for here he is a perfect
will-o'-the-wisp, sparkling out with his lovely lights, and luring you
on, now over dry land, now over marsh; giving at times good advice,
following it up by bad; telling you practical truths or ethical
fallacies.
If he was a consistent wrecker, we should get to know his fires and
steer clear of them in time; if he was all theory, we should enjoy him
as we do other poets; but he is like a man who has built a fine house
with chaste design and perfect decoration: it looks all that one can
desire, and has only one fault, but that is a grave one--the rafters and
supports are _rotten_.
He may be justly praising the old muddy Venetian glass, with its
ever-varied though clumsily-finished designs, as compared with the
sameness of our superior quality and finish; and putting absurdly silly
questions into the mouth of his supposed audience, as if a scavenger who
does his work honestly and comports himself uprightly could not be as
good a gentleman as the aristocrat who paces by him; and making out what
is done for economy, and justly so, to be the result of a false shame,
forgetting the parable of the talents, or the utility of working the one
as well as the five.
He may speak of the sanctity of colour, and go on abusing the coarseness
of Rubens, or the sensuality of Titian and Correggio, to be perhaps
followed up by the information that Titian and Tintoretto, when they
looked at a human being, saw the whole of its nature inside and out, and
painted it so.
He may abuse low tones, and tell us that all which is vile, and deadly,
and evil is sombre in colour, although in the same breath he will admit
that the tiger-skin is rather pretty, and that some bright flowers and
berries are poisonous, and also that there have been lovely women not
quite all honey, past and present.
He is abusing Salvator Rosa, although comparing him with painters of his
time--I don't know why; or in his own graceful way changing his tune,
and telling us that all good colour is pensive, and that it is blasphemy
to be gay.
He may abuse the past painters of storms and gloom, to turn with
gloating rapture to the tempests and gloom of Turner.
He may remorselessly plunge Teniers into the bottomless abyss for his
degrading subjects, yet praise Turner for his wallowing and grovelling
amongst the litter of Covent Garden; advocating his slanting steeples as
if that were the proper way for steeples to stand, or reviling some one
else for the same thing. How he raves throughout his books on the great
man! and how the great man, like old Samuel Johnson with his Boswell,
must have laughed, when not too much mystified or aggravated, at the
high-flown discoveries of his ardent admirer!
He may tell us that the chief power of Rembrandt was his character
drawing, and that he knew nothing of light and shade; or indulge in such
weak and heartless exhibitions of the fop wit as when he replies to
Constable's remark about chiaroscuro: 'The sacrifice was accepted by the
Fates, but the prayer denied. His pictures had nothing else, but they
had not chiaroscuro.'
I think I see this great critic leaning back after polishing off this
pert, unfeeling, and untrue bit of little smartness, with all the
complacence of having written a clever thing; it is on a par with his
dress-coat retort to the _Blackwood_ critic of October, 1843, about the
silver spoon and the orange; on a par with his intolerable remarks on
the pictures of Whistler--who, however, did not improve matters by his
pamphlet.
He may write about the utter meanness and humiliation of the imitators
of woods and marbles, as if a bit of wood or marble was not of as much
importance to the art student and as much a part of nature's graining as
the bark outside, or the blade of grass that engrossed his microscopic
eye so completely that he could not see the majesty of the Alps above
him. I can grain a little, and I feel as proud of this accomplishment as
I do when I paint a tree or a mountain something like, and never felt
degradation either in one or the other.
He may assume the lofty, and retire to his immaculate shell when asked
his advice on art, disdaining to give an opinion to a people who dare to
tolerate Frith's 'Derby Day,' and live there with his saints and kings,
or come forth with mighty condescension and tell the nations to hurry up
and avail themselves of his priceless services while yet there is time.
I admit all his greatness with true humility, yet I think we must allow
that before he was born good works were done in art, and even after the
lustre of his presence is withdrawn from amongst us I do not despair.
I know it is the fashion to quote Ruskin and Carlyle. I like them
both--Carlyle, because he is cut out of bigger stuff, and, like all
colossal work, rougher in his finish; but it is jarring to hear at every
turn in life, 'as Ruskin says,' 'as Carlyle remarks,' when Solomon has
said it all before, and perhaps many wise sages before him. God has
given minds to us as well as to Carlyle or Ruskin, and surely it is
better to say in our own way the old truths than recite from books that
other people can read as well as ourselves, if they like, merely to show
how clever, how ethical, or how well read we are. Read as much as you
can, but think out truths for yourselves.
Modesty sometimes compels us to state our authority when we dread to be
called the author of something not our own; also there may be times
when, like the use of a foreign word, it is inevitable--but the less the
better, both for our own selves and our listeners.
It is good at times to do a little wholesome penance, compare our work
with that of others, to try, for instance, how our picture looks in
comparison with some other picture of the same or a similar subject.
Modesty will perhaps point out many faults and shortcomings that we
could not find out in any other way; but the most vicious habit in young
painters is the perpetual running about each other's studios. To quote
the words of Solomon with a slight alteration, I would say, 'Put not
your feet too often into your neighbour's studio, lest individuality be
left outside.'
We see the effects of this practice in many of the pictures around us
every day: all good work in themselves, but with so little difference of
style that the only surprise is, the one name is not at the corner of
the lot.
It is good to exchange ideas at times, but only at times. On the whole,
I am of opinion that originality and individuality are more precious
than good workmanship, but both are best.
It is good to be able to copy a tree, or a stone, or a wall faithfully
and well, bring out all its variations and time-scars with fidelity; but
it is better to paint a moral and a thought, even although it is only
half expressed, for the spectators may fill out of their own mines of
thought all that you have left unsaid, although it is best to be able to
express it to the last letter.
All have different minds, as they have different tastes and habits. Some
are literal, and content with the fairness of the earth; they are poets
and painters of the real. Wordsworth is a realistic poet, Millais a
realistic painter; others are purely imaginative, and paint and write
about visions and the unseen, steadfast and serene dreamers of the
ideal. Shelley and Coleridge are imaginative poets, William Blake and
David Scott imaginative painters. Fancy sways others, and flings them
about, half on earth, half in air; excitement like that of the
footlights or champagne others, such as Byron and Gustave Doré.
All are to be admired, and are admired, and it becomes a question
impossible to answer, which have the five talents and which have the
three.
Imagination seems to me a very sublime quality, without much joy or
mirth in its composition; it does not require images to suggest
creation--'out of nothing it creates'; yet I dare not say that it is a
quality more to be desired than the merry fancy that builds its domes
and castles out of the clouds, or from the rocks and surroundings draws
images of other creations; neither would I say that there was less of
power or poetry in the mind that keeps strictly to reality and renders
the spirit and the being of all about them. They are all great gifts, to
be honoured one as much as another, but none partaking in that fantastic
unfinish and impotency called Mystery.
Goethe writes:--
Pure intellect and earnest thought
Express themselves with little art.
And I think him right, for, though mystery may be in vogue and
considered fine, I hold to my theory of Egypt, the child, and simplicity
in all things.
It is good at times to yield to the inner promptings, and attempt to
illustrate our thoughts, imaginings, dreams, and embody the images
raised in our minds when we read a story or listen to a description.
The scene rises before us quite distinctly, vague but vivid in its
colouring. We try to seize something special, and the whole vanishes;
that is our first experience, but by practice and perseverance you will
find the characters come to be less shy, and at last range themselves to
method, and stay while you are drawing their arms and legs with
exemplary patience.
It is good to be orthodox when we can in all that we do, to follow out
as far as is consistent with our own sense of manliness the fashions of
the day; but it is not good to enslave ourselves either for fashion,
popularity, or money. If we cannot do our work consistently, let us do
what we can.
If a certain mode of painting is termed proper and 'good colour,' or an
affectation of uncertainty or mystery that may look like unfinish, but
in reality requires more work than the apparent finish, and we desire to
please the artists and picture-dealers, and live as it were for the
hour, we may acquire this affectation, if it does not cost too much
_thought_; _that_ must ever rank above all technicality. But it is a
matter of choice which ought to be studied most--ourselves, the public,
or the professors. When a line can be drawn without offence to either,
it is policy to draw it.
Public opinion is fashion, and not much to be depended upon. What is
abused to-day may be lauded another day. It may be led by one man who
constitutes himself the leader, and he will be followed if enduring
enough to place himself in the front, and brave enough not to be crushed
by the sneering and the growling that must assail him for a time.
Titian's flesh tints were called chalky by the critics of his day. David
Cox could not please anyone, not even the children; his pictures got
turned out or skied in exhibitions, he was glad to sell a sketch for a
tube of paint; and we have seen what David Cox's little water-colour
daubs sell at now.
As with painting, so with poetry. Did Milton look the poet to Cromwell
that he is to us? The relations of Robert Burns thought the kindest
action towards him would be to burn his ungodly rubbish.
Is Whistler wrong in his mode of expressing himself? is the natural
question that comes up here. I do not know, although I have seen much of
his work; but _it_ seemed to me all right, only Ruskin says it is wrong,
and I do know that Ruskin is not always right.
But, whether right or wrong--and he will be both, as we all are to our
different critics with their different tastes--the opinion of one man,
or of ten thousand men, can neither make him wrong nor right.
No man ought to buy a name and grumble afterwards if the picture becomes
of less value.
Even such names as Raphael ought to weigh as nothing when before their
pictures. If the thing is bad in Raphael, it is bad in Whistler; if it
is good in Raphael, it could not be bad if it was Whistler.
If a picture is worth 200_l._ to the man who paid that sum for it, it
can never be worth a farthing less to him afterwards.
If a man buy a coat, a house, a horse, or a picture, he ought to know
_why_ he is buying it; and if it is value in his eyes, it cannot, or
ought not to, be made valueless by all the newspapers or critics in the
world. And if he has no knowledge on the matter, no likings, no
opinions, he ought to depend on some one whom he can trust who has
knowledge, and never alter afterwards; or he ought to spend his money
only on what he has fixed ideas about, or give it away in the cause of
charity, about which we all, as human beings, even the weakest, have
surely some sentiment clinging about us as a forecast of heaven. If he
spends his money only for fashion's sake, he deserves not only to lose
it, but to lose also the respect of every man of sense and purpose, for
he is a fool incurable.
We cannot all be educated on every subject, but we can all tell what
pleases us, and it is our duty to manhood to say so, and not take the
opinion of others against our feelings. For instance, if we are eating
something nice, is it no longer nice if our neighbour says it is not? or
ought we weakly to take the fashionable dish that we abhor, and pay ever
so much more for it, with our mouth watering after the cheap dish that
we can understand and relish?
Water-colour painting is the use of transparent colours with the ground
or paper serving as our white. The treatment may either be by wash or
stippling and hatching.
Stippling and hatching is the going over our work with dots or crossed
lines. Like engraving, its chief merit is the vast labour it costs, if
that is a merit; yet at times it has to be done where washes fail to
bring the effect.
Opaque or body colour, like fresco painting, is the mixing of Chinese or
zinc white with the colours. A little chemistry should be studied in
this work, as some of the other metals do not agree with zinc.
The farther we keep two systems apart, the better and the purer both
will be, although the effect is the main object, and all other
considerations of less consequence. The more we glaze in water-colour,
the more subtle will be our work; the less we glaze in oil, the more
satisfactory and firmer will be the result. Yet, obey no arbitrary laws;
do whatever brings the conclusion quickest, and it must be legitimate.
If your knife does better than your brush, use it; if your fingers, use
them. Scratch, scrape, rub, cut, polish, shave, do whatever you think
will succeed, and if it does not, try some other experiment until it
does come up to your wishes. If the colour you have put on is not the
one you need, put its complementary tint beside it and change its
character, or dash it over or about it. Have only your object firmly
fixed in your mind, and scruple at nothing in the way of experiment. The
more methods you employ, the nearer you will be to the ever-changing
method of nature.
I have not touched upon half my points, and only _touched_ those I have
gone over. I could go into details about the manner of mixing up the
colours, and how to treat some of the special effects of nature, but
that I have already done.[10] I am tempted to draw a sunset, or a storm,
or a calm, with all their different objects in the background, middle
distance, and foreground, dissect them into paint as I pass down, tell
you what is sitting in the flank of one cloud and the total change of
shadow in the next, also why it is so, and must be so according to this
rule of three.
I should like also to show you the same sportive three nestling in the
sun-kissed breast of the same air-billow; quivering in the blue-grey
haze of the far distance; floating on the glittering ocean, or diving
amongst the deep reflections of the lake; peeping out of the froth and
the heavy curl of the advancing wave; dashed into pieces on the dulsy
sands; darting about the broad masses of the middle distance; playing at
hide-and-seek amongst the branches, leaves, and weeds and rocks of the
foreground.
The three are everywhere, and infinite in their sport--two ever
subordinate and obedient, advising, enhancing, leading; one ever acting
the monarch, yet ever being dethroned and supplanted by one of the two
counsellors, to join the other in obedience and then conspiracy, to leap
up, take the reins, sink down vanquished, and all this for ever and for
ever.
And on Perspective; for although Gainsborough has said that the
painter's eye is the best guide, we must have rules here, if only that
we may forget them discreetly.
We must draw our horizontal line, and be guided by it; also know where
to fix and keep in mind our points of sight, stand-point, and dots of
distance; be able to place our vanishing lines, know where they are
going, and why they are so going. We must also know where to drift our
shadows, and when to trail them; how long our reflections ought to be,
and why at one time we make them longer than the object, and why at
another time so much shorter. This is all imperative to the art student,
although it may be overdone. The rules are not so hard as some imagine,
and, like painting, are best demonstrated in nature. Sit down to draw
part of a city with two or three streets slanting different directions,
pass lines about from your horizontal line, until you fix on the right
slope, and you have gleaned all that there is to get practically out of
Perspective.
Many a good picture is spoiled by the painter 'showing off' his
knowledge in this line, where a little deviation from the stiff law
would have redeemed the whole; just as many a clever speech is often
spoiled by the speaker weighing it down with complex and ornate words.
And on Anatomy; for, although the classic Greeks are supposed to be all
ignorant on this subject, it is no excuse for our ignorance; the science
is now established, and it is our duty to learn it if we would be
perfect draughtsmen of the human body and its exertions.
Gustave Doré, through his great knowledge of anatomy, can take the
liberties he does with his figures, and yet be to a certain extent
natural. Look at his thousands of figures, with their countless twists
and contortions, if you desire to know the ease and power the study of
anatomy gives to a man.
The Greeks had perfect models. Their customs, exercises, abstinence and
games gave them this advantage over us; but times have changed: our
climate, our costumes, our habits are all against us, and without the
knowledge of bones and muscles we should never discern between the
natural and the deformed, and just picture Venus rising from the salt
foam with a corset-curbed waist or the traces of a badly-set joint!
And how should we know what ought to be, and what ought not to be, in
our model, if we are ignorant of his or her construction?
True, the Greek statues are there, to copy and educate our eyes to the
true and lovely; but how are we to know whether the Greek statues are
perfect, if we do not know why that lump starts out when the arm or leg
is planted so? The study of the Greek statues is about as long as the
study of anatomy, and not so satisfactory, but both are best.
And now one word on Exhibitions and Academies.
_Exhibitions._--It is good for ourselves to get pictures hung in
exhibitions, independent of the good it does to our pockets, that is,
when we can. Although I think the intelligent public do not pay so much
heed as to whether your name is in the catalogue or not, yet the great
mass who get all their ideas from the morning news, and read all the
criticism as gospel, lay a stress upon it.
But to see your picture alongside of many, is to see many of your
faults; and yet only to a certain extent, for the best pictures for
rooms are not always the pictures that look best in exhibitions. They
may have qualities too original, or striking, or fine for the glare, and
the distance, and the surroundings.
The qualities for exhibition purposes are soberness, not too much
individuality or variety, qualities that dovetail their single part with
other single-part pictures, so as to make a pleasing harmony of the
whole. It is the student's own choice whether he will, therefore,
sacrifice his idea for a place in the catalogue, or run the chance of
missing that and keeping his ideas.
Of course when he is famous he may do as he likes, and the world will
say all is perfect that his hand touches.
_Academies_ must be good when they foster the art youth, encourage
originality, train his eye and his hand, and keep active his mind to the
true principles of art and the animation of thought; bad if, while they
train the hand, they crush out spirit, originality and thought.
[Illustration: ON THE ESK RIVER, TASMANIA
(_From a photograph by Major Aikenhead, Launceston_)]
CHAPTER IV
_ART IN ITS RELATIONSHIP TO EVERYDAY LIFE_
[Illustration: I] DO not suppose many, amongst even observant people
(unless they take the trouble to investigate the matter specially), can
realise what an important factor art has become to the most trivial
object of everyday life, or how impossible it is for us to do without
its aid at every turn.
By art I mean the embellishment or beautifying of articles of utility
or necessity, and the imitation of nature as far as it is possible for
us to copy or translate the beautiful and perfect so lavishly spread
about us, and bring it within the scope of our hourly necessities.
As an instinct, this craving after the beautiful is developed very early
in man and woman. The first instinct of the child, of course, is for
food, but the second will be for ornament; it cries for its mother's
milk first, and when satisfied with this craving, next becomes attracted
towards the fringes and buttons of its mother's dress, or the pendant
dangling from the end of its father's watch-chain.
To gratify this early taste, the baby becomes possessor of a gum-stick;
but I very much doubt if the baby has yet been born who would be
satisfied with a plain, unadorned bit of stiff indiarubber, if it can
have its choice between this and the attractive carved coral, with its
ornaments of glittering bells.
Amongst early nations--our own for instance, which I put upon the same
level as the aboriginals of Australia or the natives of New Guinea--we
find the same instinct for art and observation of nature: there is no
nation so low or primitive that it does not indulge in ornament.
It is also a curious point in natives, that, the more primitive they
are, the more refined they are in their taste, the nearer they are to
nature and each other; it is the half-civilised only who depart from the
imitation of what they see about them, and indulge in eccentricities and
extravagances.
This directness and simplicity stamp each effort of the child and the
savage when they attempt to express their ideas--ideas which are
prompted by what they see; and the same directness and simplicity are
the sign-marks on all the most perfect work of the finished artist,
whether he is the designer of pictures, churches, pleasure-grounds, or
the costumier who strives to cover the defects of his wealthy patron.
Talking about clothes and the near affinity between nature and art--even
in this minor department I remember once the great Parisian autocrat of
costumes, Mr. Worth, coming to Melrose especially to study the ruins of
that fine abbey to get ideas for future designs in ladies' dresses. His
system is to look at the woman who comes to him for advice in this
all-important matter, see how she walks backwards and forwards, studying
as she does so all her good points and defects; then, being a poet in
his own line, he imagines her as the ideal woman, and, without troubling
himself about her own tastes or inclinations, he creates a dress in
shape and colour which will make her as nearly approaching to his ideal
woman as she can be made. This is his great secret and the cause of his
success and popularity: he always strives to work up to his ideal of
beauty and the perfection of nature in the most direct and easiest way
possible.
As proof of this, a friend of mine once went to him to get a costume.
This lady could never get any dress to suit her; something was for ever
amiss with either the tone or shape. Nature had not been over kind to
her either in form or colour, and her dressmakers, as she did herself,
always attired her according to the fashion of the hour, which, of
course, not being originated for her specially, could not be expected to
suit her.
Worth was at last caught in a moment of leisure by this applicant, who
had lingered about the threshold of his palace of fashion for some weary
weeks before she could gain her point.
The great man looked her over critically, as one might examine a horse
for sale at a fair; then he made her walk before him twice, and, telling
her 'that would do,' consigned her to an assistant, who took her
measurements, her name and address, and gave her a receipt for her fee
of one hundred guineas.
A week or so passed, and then the dreamt-about costume came to hand. As
the lady remarked, 'It was the plainest and shabbiest-looking frock that
ever I saw, _but when I tried it on I looked better than ever I had done
in my life_.'
Worth's idea suited this lady because it was fashioned only for her, but
ten chances to one it would not have suited anyone else. Why?--because
there are no replicas in nature.
This is where a ruling fashion is so ridiculous; it may answer the one
who is important enough to bring it into vogue, but it cannot possibly,
for the reason I have stated, answer anyone else.
Look along the street at the faces and figures which are constantly
hurrying past, each one different in nose, eyes, mouth, expression, and
gait; it is wonderful how it can be, but so it is! Look at any park, you
cannot find two oak trees alike, nor even two blades of grass.
It is this variety which makes the world so charming, and the world's
Maker so worthy of our profoundest adoration; it is all the perfection
of art and limitless design, before which we may abase ourselves with
proud humility as being a portion of this great originality, and try to
imitate some of it with confidence: for, depend upon it, this infinite
variety does not stop with outside objects, but is carried on within to
our minds, thoughts, and observations. As there are no two objects
alike, so no two onlookers can see the same object exactly in the same
way, or reflect exactly alike; therefore we must stand apart from all
others and be original, whether we wish to be or not.
This is the consolation which I would give to young artists who may
imagine, because they are born in the nineteenth century, that they are
born a few centuries too late to make their mark in the world. We are
never too late for anything unless we make ourselves too late through
sloth or timidity; as long as we work with an intention we must always
move on, as we were intended to move on. Remember this when your hearts
are inclined to grow weak, and you fancy that you are going along too
slowly.
King Solomon thought that he knew everything and had been born too late
when he wrote 'There is nothing new under the sun,' yet after Solomon
came many others who discovered fresh objects to admire--Shakespeare and
Milton, and after them Carlyle and Ruskin; and still the busy minds keep
turning up fresh and new, fitting exactly to the day which has been made
for them. In Solomon's day the countless daisies opened their petals to
greet the sunbeam and closed them again at nightfall, each daisy
different from all other daisies, while the sparrows hopped about in all
their subtle varieties, as the daisies and sparrows have continued to
come and go down the ages, and as they must continue while this
ever-renovating world lasts, as fresh, as perfect, and as startlingly
new as when man first opened his eyes and beheld that wonderful nature
of which he was part and portion.
I hold that we have all original ideas, as much as Solomon or
Shakespeare had, if we like to use our own minds and our own eyes as
they did. We have all our limit, as they had theirs, for Solomon proved
that he had reached his limit, else he would never have written that
sentence; he had seen all that he could comprehend, and so gave the rest
up as vanity and vexation of spirit.
Job saw more than Solomon, for sorrow had opened his eyes and expanded
his senses, drawing him into the heart of nature, therefore he became a
wiser and, at the end, a happier man, dying while still a student of the
wonders all around him; and this is the religion which we must all seek
to embrace if we would advance in wisdom. We must begin, continue, and
end as students, with our comprehensions growing as we grow older, never
resting in our work or investigations, ever trying to grasp the lessons
set before us, and to express as far as we are able what we have learnt.
These lessons in art are constantly about us in our everyday life. We
walk through the forest in summer time, under the canopy of green
arches, with the upstanding boughs of trees spreading away until they
become indistinct in the shadowy distance. What does this suggest, if
not the grand cathedrals with their pillars and arched domes? and this
is what the early Fathers saw and tried to reproduce in their churches
and abbeys. We look up and see the clouds floating above us, sometimes
with shapes like cherubs and angels, at other times like demons and evil
spirits: so the old painters and poets watched, and got their ideas of
heaven and hell.
It is now more than twenty years since I first went amongst those people
whom we call savages. I mixed amongst the tribes of Australia, the South
Sea Islanders, and the Maoris. I had no better reason for going at first
than a boy's wish to see the world, when I began my wanderings, but I
was not long before I got a definite purpose, which has moved me ever
since.
I had taken lessons in drawing and painting before I left home,
otherwise I do not think my travels would have been of much service to
me. I also had a habit of not only sketching what struck me as peculiar
or useful, but of writing down carefully the descriptions of what I saw
as I went along.
At first I wrote down the observations at random, such as, if I saw a
sunset I would write something like this: 'Sun half only seen, vermilion
growing to glaze of lake, lower half purple spreading out to dun, upper
space ochre to orange with lemon; light edges of clouds near the sun,
and shadow sides of warm purple grey; above, green back space growing to
pearly grey, with rays shooting up cream-tinted, and filmy feathery
clouds creamy and flesh-coloured.'
This for the colours; then I would describe the shapes of the
cloud-masses from their likeness to something else. Sometimes they would
look like trees; then I thought what kind of tree they resembled, or it
might be a flying figure, with a distorted hunchback rushing after it.
As I followed these fancies it was wonderful what a tragic story that
sunset sometimes told me before I was done with it.
Once I was staying with a gentleman who added phrenology to his other
accomplishments. He asked me if I never tried to write poetry, and I
said, 'I had not'; to which he replied, 'Then try it, for I think you
have the gift.'
I sat down that night and attempted to make rhyme, but as I did not know
much about the rules, and had no subject, I cudgelled my brains for
words and rhymes without considering what was my theme, and therefore I
failed because I had nothing definite to write about.
As far as I can now remember, I think that my first attempt was a
love-poem; but as I had never been in love, and had no woman to stand
before me as a model, and no experience to serve me for the emotional
part, it was all vague, and the result was exactly what might have been
expected--meaningless words.
Had I contented myself with writing about what I saw and knew, I might
have made something.
And this was what I learnt afterwards, after many failures: never to
take up my brush or pen unless I had something definite to do--that is,
never to depend altogether upon inspirations; have the object first
vividly before me, and then it is not difficult to describe it, so long
as one does not try to improve upon the model, or go out of the way to
write or paint too finely.
I discovered, after a great many failures, that nature cannot be
improved upon, or even approached very near, and that the utmost my
imagination could do was to put into recognisable, if faulty, shape
whatever stood before my eyes, or the feelings which I myself
experienced--in fact, I learnt that what we call imagination is not the
gift of creating things out of chaos, but rather the remembering of
emotions and scenes and real personages, and that the more vividly I
could remember, the better work I did.
Then I knew that Shakespeare's mighty genius lay in his vast powers of
observation and in his direct simplicity of expression, and that the
great charm of his characters lay in their reality, for they were people
whom he had met and studied.
But I did not learn this all at once, as I have said. I had to go
through the preliminary stages of vanity and vexation of spirit, stages
when I wallowed in paint and ink, fancying myself heaven-inspired, and
beyond the necessity of using my eyes if I desired to do anything fine.
It was all very well for sketches to look somewhat like nature and to be
particular with them, but for finished work much more than this must be
accomplished. So I struggled on spoiling canvases and good paper, before
the age of common sense arrived, and never valuing the best works of
all, which were my direct notes and sketches from nature.
It was the aboriginals of Australia who put me first upon the right
track; a miserable, low-caste race they appear to those who see them
hanging about the white settlements, clad in fantastic rags, the
cast-off garments of the white fellow, and taking, with the rags, all
the debasing vices of the conquerors, but a very different race when in
their native wilds, with their mystic institutions and hereditary laws.
We are so apt to despise these black fellows, and to classify them all
as savages and benighted heathens, particularly if we know nothing about
them--as we did with the Indians and Peruvians, Chinese and Japanese,
before our eyes became opened to their wonderful arts and ancient
mysteries, their sciences, philosophies, and spiritualisms. Nowadays,
like all people who take extreme views, we are rushing into the opposite
direction, and adopting, with blind credulity, all which we formerly as
blindly despised.
Our markets are crowded with Eastern and Japanese wares; our apartments
are becoming Oriental, and crammed with those artistic realisations of
nightmare monstrosities which the opium-smoking children of the sun
delight in. Fortunately, we can purchase specimens of these eccentric
artists cheaply, and, for the money, marvellously well done; yet,
graceful or quaint as these designs may be, to the art mind they are as
dangerous as the opium habit from which they are generated.
They are all morbid outcomes of an unwholesome and unnatural taste,
suggestive only of that refinement which is _blasé_ of tenderness,
humanity, or morality, and which is nearly past all excitements except
such as are monstrous and beastly, the demoralising refinement of decay.
Artistic?--yes; we must grant to them the praise of artistic execution;
but this is the whole length which we can go in the matter of praise,
and this is not enough for art to be of real utility to daily life and
its hourly obligations.
Oriental art is pitiless and cruel as a reasonless monster in the lesson
which it inculcates--cruel, fatalistic, and emotionless, therefore to us
Westerns enervating and demoralising. The real philosophers and
humanitarians of the East are contemplators of nature direct, and they
only represent the objects of their veneration by obscure symbols, never
by blasphemous caricatures; it is the unbelievers of the East and the
demon-worshippers who give us these nightmare creations, and who have
gone beyond the dreams of Paradise. No flower-land opens up to them in
their periods of opium-stupor; it is a land of gloomy shadows and dank,
dead leaves, through which crawl reptiles and noxious insects, or ghouls
loom up grotesque and horrible, and these weird remembrances they embody
in artistic shapes on bronzes, rare lacquer-work and tapestry, and send
out broadcast to demoralise the world of modern culture.
And now let us consider the result of all this siren false art upon our
daily lives. Insensibly the deadly poison is imbibed in small doses,
until the strength and clearness of daylight look garish to us, the
direct colouring of nature appears too raw, and we can no longer inhale
a full breath of life as it is given to us, unfettered, into our
vitiated lungs.
The faith which was all-sufficient for our ancestors is discarded, not
for atheism, but for a mysticism infinitely more childish and
superstitious than the religion which we superciliously term
superstitious. Witness such pitiful exhibitions as those impostors,
so-called 'Aissouas,' who recently disgraced London with their
disgusting and fraudulent tricks--such-like flimsy performances as we
have been accustomed to see at penny shows at country fairs since our
boyhood, only in the case of these Eastern shams not half so cleverly
executed as the feats done by the ordinary country showman.
This is where art has such a resistless influence upon our daily lives,
and why we should be careful to discriminate between the true and the
false.
False art will make us cruel and remorseless--that is, the personating
and choosing of monstrosities; and the more artfully they are designed,
the more degraded and callous we must become, and the more deeply we
must sink in our moral perception of what is good and noble in humanity.
And while we sink step by step, the more morbidly vivisecting must we
become, and as we have grown accustomed to the study and contemplation
of distortion, the more distorted will be our views of everyday life:
humanity will represent only a field for the investigation of developed
or undeveloped vices and ignoble desires; there can be no possible room
for virtue or lofty aspirations in the life which we take up to
vivisect; in fact, before we have got half-way through with our
cold-blooded, one-sided investigation, it is no longer life which we are
cutting about, but a putrid corpse.
So much for those who are artistic or literary under these distorted
circumstances. The others, who are not so gifted in intellectual
qualities--but who have the same aspirations, and develop in action as
the others do in thought--become by unnatural progression such epicures
in horrors as the White-chapel monster whom we have come to know as
'Jack the Ripper.'
True or healthy art is content with the directness of the example which
nature sets before it, the result of which is faith in beauty, faith in
virtue, and a hopeful toleration of vice.
Vice to these students is no more the natural aspect of humanity than
blight is the natural state of the leaves upon the trees or flowers; it
is a diseased state, which must be endured, but may be eradicated. By
constantly watching the healthy life they come to comprehend the causes
for the unhealthy more quickly than do those who morbidly brood upon the
blighted portions only--i.e. their comprehensions become more vivid, and
their minds more robust, for our health depends entirely upon the food
we feed upon. People may accustom themselves to feed upon poisons, but
if they do, it is utterly impossible for them ever to live upon anything
else or to be able to exist without their daily dose.
To come back to my own experience in my search after nature. When mixing
among the natives of Australia I got the first revelation of what I
ought to do. I saw that they had many wise laws, blending with much that
was ugly, gross, and superstitious. Some of their rites appeared
contemptible, but even these rites perhaps appeared so owing to my own
imperfect knowledge of their origin and the secretiveness of the natives
themselves regarding them; yet some of their laws were clear enough and
good enough to be adopted by the most civilised races with advantage.
Their marriage laws and stern strictness regarding consanguinity stand,
with singular force of natural wisdom, out from a mass of apparently
reasonless rites and mysteries.
In their wild state the Australian tribes are a muscular and well-formed
race, considering the privations from want of food and water which they
have to undergo at times. This scarcity of food and long intervals
between rains have forced them to become nomadic in their habits, and
account naturally for the want of homes or villages and the rudeness of
their places of shelter. Where people are compelled to shift often, they
do not care to adorn their temporary homes--a few shards of gum-tree
bark are good enough to keep the dew from them at nights, and the
sun-rays are never too strong for them during the day. They are
accustomed to take long marches and endure hunger and thirst on the way,
so that they have no place for weakly members. If such are born, they
are promptly killed as soon as the fact is discovered. If they become
weakly afterwards, then such are doomed to a life of celibacy, so that
the tribe may not deteriorate.
I noticed that their ideas never went beyond what they were accustomed
to see constantly about them; that the origin of their characteristic
weapon, the boomerang, was the eucalyptus leaf, that long leaf which
turns its thin edge to the light, and when it falls from the tree
circles in its descent as do those formidable implements of defence;
that in their songs and dances they told a tale of nature as they saw
it; and then I began to understand that where their strength lay I
might find mine also, and so I became a realist, and learnt never to
begin a sentence or paint a sketch unless I had a definite object, with
its shape, size, colouring, and character vividly before me.
Then I advanced another step in this primitive school of nature. I
learnt that these people never wasted words when they wished to express
themselves, and so I began to see how much stronger brevity is than
ornate and laboured phraseology, and how much finer an ornament is when
standing isolated and in no way disguised by superfluous flourishes; and
then I think my education was complete as far as the Australian
aboriginal could instruct me.
I very soon found plenty to do, and never afterwards wanted a subject. I
studied the gum-tree, with its perfect flower, where the male and female
are united from birth, and those medicinal leaves which look so sparse,
but are so closely put together, the density of which can only be seen
when the hurricane blows them about until they are like our willow-trees
at home. I watched the sturdy, twisted, gleaming branches, like great
white snakes, so different from any other branches of trees, until I
grew to love them.
(I remember how an all-wise art editor once objected to one of my
representations of a gum-tree because he said that the branches were so
_serpentine_, and therefore not like the trees which he had been
accustomed to see. I might have overlooked his ignorant remark, but I
found it difficult to forgive his sending my drawing to another artist,
who took the _serpentine_ appearance out of the branches, and so made
them appear like the trees to which he had been accustomed, before it
was allowed to be seen in print, and I have often wondered what the
people accustomed to real gum-trees have said about this
London-manufactured gum-tree.)
Those wonderful gum-trunks, with the bark hanging in long strips from
them like fluttering rags of brown sails! Mighty trees, some of them
rising four hundred feet into the blue-grey sky, and large enough in
girth to make good-sized houses, yet appearing beside their giant
brethren just like ordinary trees, until we began to measure their
circumference--size is so deceptive in this strange and vast sun-bathed
land, Australia.
What a deal I have written already about this one tree of Australia, in
all its many varieties, and yet I feel so much more than I can ever
express, either with brush or pen; it has grown so much a part of
myself.
What poetry may yet be written over its glory, as it has been felt and
written about the grand old oak of England! The gum-tree of Australia,
with its twisted limbs and tough heart, as broad-spreading as the
glorified tree of the Druids, as mighty as the gigantic pine of
California, with a character all its own and stamping it alone as a king
of trees; an iron monarch against which the axes of the woodmen break
their edges and turn aside; a beneficent ruler, for at its foot lie
wells of water to quench the thirsty, and in its leaves the most potent
medicine to cure disease.[11]
How I have studied it in the rosy dawn when the hidden sun changed the
upper branches to vermilion, and the crowds of paroquets and cockatoos
which it had sheltered all night woke up at the welcome sight of day;
how I have watched it in the sun-glare, with each outline sharply
defined, while the strong-beaked laughing jackass bent, over a bare,
snowy limb, and watched keenly amongst the underwood for its victim, the
venomous snake; and I have been often startled by the bird's uncanny
burst of mockery, when, after darting down and grabbing the snake, it
swiftly soared high in air, and from a great height dropped the
wriggling reptile: it was then the bird, misnamed a jackass, laughed
wildly as it watched the snake fall prone to earth and break its back.
I have seen it too in the afterglow, when the gaunt limbs became
salmon-tinted with a ghostly gleam over the forest, where deep shadows
were gathering fast; and in the dazzling moonlight, when they stood out
like great pillars, row upon row, mile after mile, as I rode along,
without seemingly a termination, some with the leaves drooping in black
masses, while in other parts great tracts of country were covered with
dead wood, where the forest fires had passed and shrivelled up their
lives, or the squatter had destroyed them for the sake of his herds; but
dead or alive, they stand year after year majestic and assertive of
their rank as lords, like solemn sentinels keeping guard over a silent
land.
What I mastered in Australia I carried with me to other lands, trying to
learn what the tattoo markings and tapu laws meant amongst the Maoris of
New Zealand, the punctilios and ceremonies of the South Sea Islanders,
and always getting my attention turned back to nature direct when I was
inclined to wander from this purpose or grow at all self-sufficient or
inclined to lean upon my own resources.
It was my failures which ever and again proved to me that I had no
resources of my own to fall back upon, and that I was only wasting my
talents when I tried to take my eyes from the face of nature; she had
proved herself all-sufficient for every imagination which I could ever
hope to conceive, no matter how long I lived, her school the best
college, and herself the only instructress which I needed at this
advanced stage.
It is a glorious experience this spread-out nature college, which I
recommend to everyone desirous of being regarded as original; an
ever-varied series of lessons, the chief charm of which is that each
student can only take away a little to call his own, leaving a full
treasury for whoever cares to come after him.
Copy great masters and read the best authorities; you will see what they
were able to take out of this treasury without diminishing its riches;
but do not borrow or try to wear their jewelry, for on you they will be
second-hand adornments; besides, to do so will be as foolish an act on
your part as if you were to put on a suit of clothes made for and worn
by someone else, instead of taking the clothes which have been measured
and made expressly for yourself.
Of course you must learn to understand how to choose what is best suited
for you, and for this purpose you must go into strict training, so as to
learn the laws and rules which these masters all had to learn first, and
improve upon as they progressed through the preliminary stages towards
that wider school in which no earthly master could guide them.
Like 'Johnny Ducks' in my story of 'Eight Bells,' I left home pretty
early to begin my wanderings, but before I left home I had gone through
a stiff training with different masters; in fact, I cannot remember the
time when I began to study drawing and painting, but it must have been
long before I began the alphabet, for I can recollect that event very
clearly, with a few of the ordinary incidents connected with it.
Both my parents were artistic and lovers of literature and art. The love
for books had been in both families for generations, as well as the
taste for travelling; many of my ancestors had been great travellers,
while not a few of them had paid the penalty of their lives for their
curiosity to see the world.
My father painted mostly in oil-colours, landscape and figure, and he
had gone through a very careful training under some of the best masters;
my mother painted in water-colours, and her _forte_ was flowers and
fruit; so that I had the benefit of watching them, and getting trained
almost insensibly to myself. I painted my first landscape in oils when I
was six years old, a copy of a picture lent to me by my first outside
master, before he sent his own to the exhibition, and which he allowed
me to sell afterwards for two guineas--to me at the time a very large
sum.
I can remember this picture most vividly, for the reason that I had to
do it twice over before my father was satisfied. The first canvas was so
badly done and enraged him so much that he broke it over my head as a
warning to me to be more careful; the second attempt must have been
better, for, although he did not praise it (he never praised anything I
did), yet he did not condemn it, while one day, as I was sitting under
the table unseen, he brought in a gentleman to look at it, who said 'it
was wonderful.'
My next master was a German designer from Munich, who taught me
ornamental drawing; he would not let me touch my paint-box at all while
he was present, b
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