ART.
SPANISH ART AT THE NEW GALLERY.—IL
REALISM AND CARICATURE.
A "VERY youthful, an untrained, or a matured bad taste, will find pleasure in the work of Vaamonde, R. de Madrazo, and Pradilla, displayed as examples of modern Spanish painting in the South Gallery. The more complete the machinery employed by an art, the more complex is the vulgarity possible to its misuse; it is well, perhaps, that the degrada- tion of a method, when placed at the service of common eyes, should be displayed beside its triumphs. A background, to these painters, is not a new resource of modesty, a means for withholding a part so as to give the rest more pertinently and graciously; it is something from which the figure shall make every effort to detach itself flashily ; the laws of modelling and projection are used not to withdraw a portrait within the
world of its frame, but to bounce it out into the world of the gallery. Vulgar impressionism is clearly the most disagree- able kind of painting, because it has all the means of emphasis at its command.
This is true enough; but to confound the realism of an artist with this photograph-inspired painting involves a curious misunderstanding. One would suppose, to listen to some people, that realism was the offender, and that realism in painting cause in with Velazquez. But if a superstitious repugnance to the word is overcome, it will be discovered that realism is no such new thing, that the spirit and inten. tion of a John Bellini, a Leonardo, and a Holbein, are equally realistic with those of the Spaniard. Their instrument is a simpler and more limited instrument, mainly the line; his includes natural tone, colour, atmo- sphere, and focus ; but they employ the line to follow nature with a like close pressure, they strive to understand and know the fact, not to coerce and contradict. To handle all the elements of visible reality, as Velazquez did, requires a greater and rarer effort of comprehension, a fuller nervous and mental range than merely to follow a true and expressive line; we must not be surprised if the result of the more complex art meets with rarer appreciation than the simpler realism; in music, too, the single line of melody is more widely comprehensible than the complex of modern harmony with its losing and finding of that line ; but we must not fall into the blunder of supposing an art less realistic in spirit because more abstract in means, because it expresses, its realism in the only terms as yet developed. The true dis- tinction at all times is not between realist and ideali,t, butt between interpreter and caricaturist. The one works iu terms, of natural fact, the other coerces and distorts the fact in the interest of a personal fancy. It is true that the desire to make a point at the expense of fact is accompanied by very different degrees of knowledge, and springs from very various impulses of spirit ; but the caricaturists, always the most immediately attractive of artists, are one and all, whether moved by the charm of fancy or the sting of savage irony, removed from that grave ideal of beauty in the terms of truth which inspires the strongest imaginations. They desire a more hasty and piquant comment upon life, and will do more or less violence to reach it.
It would be easy from both ancient and modern times to col- lect examples of caricature. Botticelli is no flagrant distorter, and his fancy is full of charm ; but it imposes a wistful patterning upon a world imperfectly seen. In a Rossetti the mood is more intense and passionate; in a Burne- Jones it is once more remote and wistful; in all three a preordained sentiment is illustrated and propped by a loose observation, the emotion has not been born of a strenuous marriage of the eye with fact. The range of intention in more obvious cases is wide, from mystic emphasis, through wit, satire, playful fun, to irresponsible grotesque, and in distance from fact a Blake, a Hokusai, a Lautrec, a Walter Crane, and a Beardsley differ considerably, but the caricature impulse is at work in all. The danger of this slighter hold upon fact, or of a shutter let down before the eyes, is that, as time goes on, such grain of life as was originally present may be exhausted, the feint of reality worn oat. If concurrently the spirit flags, or the fan dries up, all that remains is the fact of distortion bereft of significance, whose formal decorative consistency is the nearest approach possible to that paradoxical conception, "mere technique."
It is the commoner history of painters to set out from illustration or irresponsible decoration. They go to nature in youth with some ready-made pattern to be imposed on her, some pet sentiment to be illustrated from her,: But nature seems to conspire to defeat attempts to rush her intimacy or clap a mask on her infinitely changing features. She receives the hothead with an air of studied dis- array, of brutal spikiness, refuses to fit into any ready-made frame, and will only yield to the patient and flexible ima- gination that is content to learn her first. One of two things happens to the would-be painter. The enthusiast with no strong natural eye is chilled by his reception, and shuts his eyes thenceforward, taking up only so much of fact as will serve to back and pass off his preconception, and taking these scaffoldings by preference out of pictures. He is in a better case than the other whose dream dissolves at the rude shock of fact, and whose eye, honest but incapable of constructive vision, finds itself a prey to disjected matter which yields it no compensating emotion. There is nothing for him but to copy haphazard observations under an impulse no higher than the sentiment of honest labour.
The history of first-rate powers of vision would appear to be very different, of a Holbein among the delineators, of a -Velazquez or Rembrandt among painters. These men do not rush upon nature with a clamorous parti pris, and, rebutted in a first assault, retire to cherish far away from her inspiration their private dream or grudge. Instead of beginning with a clean-cut design upon her, romantic, ironic, or decorative, they appear to be possessed by that simpler, that central emotion for the painter, the emotion of vision, the pleasure of looking at things. It is a feeling easily stirred and gratified everywhere, and capable of rising, by a natural development, to an issue not expressible in terms of thought, incidental speculation, witticism or judgment, but rather a deep motion of the mind proper to the stimulus of vision,—a rapt and solemn contem- plation. In its beginnings this impulse sets a man staring at things wherever he may be, at first in stupid delight, then looking, trying, looking till they form up into a picture by a living logic of their own. A man who falls into this magical dream, whatever his eyes rest upon, will find it needless to prod the natural poetry of aspect into the expression of a sentiment shallower than itself. He will not perpetually dig his subject in the ribs to extort a grin, or perk it into nervous significance. He is no fussy would-be patron of beauty, he is the minister who studies her shy and secret ways. It is the honour of -Velazquez to have pursued this secret so near the fact, where the pitfalls multiply, but also the revelations. It is not to be expected of hasty perusers of pictures that they should recognise and relish this procedure, any more than in the ease of books. Pointed sarcasm, facile sentiment, will tickle many a reader, who will only be repelled by the near and profound sense of reality in a great dramatist or romancer, by the acute and terrible beauty of bare life. We must not then be surprised to be told that some hairdresser's block of a face garnished with a fanciful title, is a proof for its painter of a nobler mind than that of the man who looked into the eyes of Innocent X., understood them, and could not draw them. Still less shall we be surprised when we find that the hero of that encounter can vanquish the idols of his critics on their own ground. If monumental incident and dramatic expression are demanded of him, be stands supreme with the magnificent courtesy of the victorious General in Las Lanzas. Or does the critic say, ' It is all very well to study Nature, but I am for decorators, designers.' Have these ever, in their freedom from nature, contrived a design to match the portrait of Mariana of Austria ? Or do those who can only apprehend beauty in its most obvious forms, grumble at being sent to the countenances of melancholy Kings and frowning hidalgos? What then of the wistful childhood of Las Meninas?
It was by a long culture that the painter brought such rare blossoms out of the stubborn stock of reality. You see him first a tenacious student, intent but puzzled, setting down notes of still-life figures into a half-mechanical leather colour, a kind of decorative glue to bind them together. Then he arrives at a more single composition and a modelling broader, almost too empty, and a colour clearer but still clogged by clay. Then the decorative splendour of previous masters bursts upon him, and he turns upon it critically with his knowledge of real effect to reduce it to a silvery possibility. His drawing all the time grows more closely sympathetic with form, till it leaves off in that kind of thrilled interpretation on the very verge of life with which the hand of a Gabriel St. Anbin, and a Gainsborough also trembles in another century, and that of a Degas in our own.
The path of a man with real eyes is no easy one. He can- not embroider everything he touches with one equable success. -Velazquez had his limits and his failures. In the Crucifixion and the Coronation of the Virgin he attempted subjects alien to his mode of feeling. He is the mere student in pictures like the Apollo at the Forge. He was not moved by all emotions, nor by very many. He had not the voluptuous poetic strain of Giorgione or Titian, the torrent passion of Tintoretto, the trumpet pomp of Veronese, nor the mysterious romance of Rembrandt. His prevailing sentiment is rather serene reserve and princely dignity. If you compare his paint- ings of children with these of the only English painter of our time who can be named with him for sentiment of reality, Sir John Millais, the painter of Bubbles will seem to look at children through the eyes of a nursery-maid, the Spaniard regards them like a king. One figure only can be profitably measured' against his in the history of painting. Rembrandt had the same hold upon character and truth ; he was certainly the profounder spirit,—the profoundest spirit that ever expressed itself in paint. He was perhaps the lesser artist, sacrificing something of the decorative aspect of his canvas to the pur- suit of an emotional effect of light.
Space fails to deal with lesser painters. Murillo is well represented, but is perhaps sufficiently appreciated to pass without notice. Zurbaran's name is given to the magnificent portrait of a girl last seen at the Grafton, to a monk in a familiar style, and to a remarkable figure in the gallery silhouetted against the sky. Greco, the Blake-like pupil of Tintoretto, is indicated in hie earlier and madder styles. To see him fully it is necessary to go to Toledo. Ribera has nothing like justice done him. The Martyrdo»z of St. Laurence at Madrid, the Good Samaritan at Rouen, give a more adequate notion of this superb painter. Goya is seen in one or two portraits, but not enough in the amazing gro- tesques of his black and white. Fortuny is more adequately sampled. The fine heraldic weedy fling of decorative art in Spain is well illustrated in pottery and other wares ; and the entrance-hall presents a noble effect, clothed in tapestry, and. furnished with silver canopies and plate, rich cabinets and
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