ART.

THE OLD MASTERS.—I.

REALISM AND DECORATION.

AN exhibition containing Rousseau and Corot, Delacroix and Millet, Turner and Constable, Watteau and Gainsborougb, Tintoretto and Titian, Holbein and Leonardo, and so on through the schools, displays picture-making ideas in a very extended view. If the gradual growth of the full expression of visual reality and its flower in the conception of impres- sionistic vision is illustrated, so also, through all its trans- formations, is the eternal decorative check upon natural vision,—the laws that make a picture not any kind of look at nature, however interesting and impressive, but a picture.

A picture represents an act of vision, but it is also a piece of furniture. Gentlemen, it is true, who cultivate the arts of furniture, are wont to allude with scorn to " the easel picture." They appear not to observe how much, at its point of greatest absorption in the vision rendered, and of least attachment to a useful fabric, the picture retains of purely decorative origin and warrant. A moment's attention directed to the con- sideration of the frame brings this out convincingly. A picture is a framed vision. Moreover, the frame is almost invariably rectangular. What is the reason of this F A square or rectangle is not the natural shape of the field of vision. That field takes an irregular shape according to our interest in the objects looked at; but the normal shape of our disinterested view of nature is a rough oval more than twice as long horizontally as it is vertically. But picture- frames, instead of habitually approaching this shape, or altering with the irregularities of this field caused by interest, remain obstinately rigid, and such variations as they have undergone in history are due to reasons outside of the natural action of the eye when simply enjoying the look of things.

The reason, of course, for this rectangular shape is archi- tectural. A picture is the decoration either of a panel or of a page; the character of the plan and elevations of a building make the panels of a room usually rectangular, and con- venience shapes the page of a book in like fashion. If we find circular pictures, it is probably because circular panels were used in the spandrils of architecture with round-topped archer, as in the Hospital of the Innocents at Florence, or in other parts of the same kind of architecture. This at once, it may be noted, raised problems that react upon vision, because in a kind of painting that is strongly dependent on line, vertical figures, architecture, the level horizon were sympathetic with a rectangular shape in the frame ; but in those "tondos," or round frames, Raphael and Botti- celli had to put forth a wealth of cunning to accom- modate their figures to the bounding circle. In Gothic architecture, the top of the panel was frequently arched, and the pointed arch always made a difficulty for the designer, because it is a " left " shape,—that is to say, the fun for the Gothic designer lay in developing his arch-form rather than in considering the space it left to be filled. Then, again, we find occasional oval frames, but these, I take it derive from miniature frames, because for a brooch or locket an oval goes more gently with the lines of the body, and has no painfully sharp corners. Invented for this reason, the oval was enlarged to picture size, and we find Murillo, Hogarth, Gainsborough, and others inclosing portraits in a painted oval, while the canvas and outer frame remain square. Now, in these artists there was probably a half-sense that for the visual boundary of a bust portrait an oval shape was not unreasonable in itself, that it vaguely corresponded with an impression of the eye. They therefore filled in the architectural corners of the frame mechanically, a not very satisfactory device.

But the same device, more cunningly disguised, is to be found in the work of other painters—landscape painters as one might expect ;—for the painter of interiors and of por- traits is ruled a good deal by the structural verticals and horizontals of a room. A landscape painter, unless his trees are very vertical and his horizon very flat, is less.

naturally induced, while his eye is freely ranging, to accept the square frame. He must become aware of this when he makes sketches, because their shape is a direct statement of the spot of his chief interest in the scene. But there are still the corners of his paper or his canvas to fill in, and he does this, if he is a Claude, by framing in his subject with masses of foliage, of shadow, of buildings, drowned in tone so that the eye leaps from them at the focus of the picture.

This nascent impressionism is illustrated without disguise in what we call vignettes. Here we have the spot, of irregular but roughly round or oval shape, stating merely the amount and shape of the eye's chief interest in the picture field. The white page keeps its normal shape, and the exact position and scale of the drawing on this field, mean a great deal to the designer, because, properly adjusted, the page stands for the whole size of the picture-field. Moreover, unlike the " tondo designer, the vignette maker can still design freely in the. vertical and horizontal sense, because the limits of the page remain. But take it all in all, the vignette is the most extreme step taken by the designer's art in upsetting the architectural shape of our pictures. A Rembrandt vignettes the light upon his sitter within the frame, and of the great masters departs most from architectural feeling. Velazquez had several devices. The Surrender of Breda proves by the design of its lances how he enjoyed reinforcing the upright sense of the frame, and his method here of focussing the dramatic interest was to contrast the stooping gestures of the two principal figures with the prevailing verticals, and also by the extra finish and silvery tone of Spinola's face, to differentiate him from his browner companions. In Las

ht-eninas there is a trace of the same method, since the rouge

and powder of the central figures is handled so as to single them out. But also the subtle method, so well described by Mr. Stevenson, is employed of modelling the surroundings of the central group in such a way that the eye skims and slips till it reaches them. The modern who has developed this proceeding with most subtlety is Degas. Over a foreground occupied by large near figures, he will lead the gaze by the blurred definition proper to objects out of focus, till it reaches the spot of keenest interest. It is the impressionist, in a word, who solves this long covert quarrel between a con- centred interest and an architectural frame, by following the natural procedure of the eye when it looks at a field inclosed by a rectangular frame,—as, for example, at a view out of a window.

So much for the decorative check on the shape of im- pressions. Architecture, affecting even the moveable panel, requires the rectangular frame, and the sensitive designer finds his interior shapes as well controlled down to their smallest constituents. No less exacting in range of tone and modelling is this kind of furniture. It overhauls the natural vision as strictly in these respects. A panel is not only square, but flat ; it is part of a wall ; the representation of depth by overmodelling and too great gradation of tone will not only destroy this sense by pretending to substitute an illusion, but will destroy the decorative effect of colour by breaking it up too much, and by putting in the place of colour patches side by side, the idea of this here, and that away behinl it. With masters of strong decorative feeling, therefore, modelling is not carried out to an extreme ; with Velazquez: Manet, and Mr. Whistler, modelling is to some extent a feint of the sculpturesque solidity of real modelling; it is kept within picture limits.

I must not stop to develop this, because I wish to reach a third point suggested by the exhibition at Burlington House. The colour of a picture, a somewhat different thing from the colours in a picture, and also its pitch of tone, are dictated by the furniture company. In their earlier phase; ruled a good deal by illuminations on one hand, by painted

reliefs on the other, pictures exhibit a somewhat barbaric apprehension of colour. The idea is to give to each colour an extreme separate brilliance and richness, like jewels. There is an art of jewel arrangement, but this kind of colour differs from the more organised notion of variations within Dne prevailing colour or envelope,—blue and red within yellow, for instance. The growth of this idea is accompanied by a technical change. To give extreme brilliance, a white ground is useful that will shine through, and the white page of the missal was well represented by a white plaster or priming for the painting. A soberer notion of harmony by subordination :s aided by procedure from a general ground of one colour and lower tone. This method is also less antagonistic to vision while the picture is being made, since a white ground falsifies the value of colours so long as it is uncovered. Then the question, not perhaps directly asked, but instinctively answered, arises,—Shall this ground be warm or cold, or, to put it roughly, brown or blue ? The painter of flesh will lean to a brown foundation, so as to get a pervading warmth in his colour, and if he does not start from brown will unite his picture in a warm tonality by surface glazings. When pictures are associated with warm marbles and stuffs, and still more when they hang against resonant dark wood, the decorative sense of keeping will reinforce this ten- lency. Hence we find the golden Venetian tonality passing into the more absolute brown of Rembrandt and his aumerons followers to our own time. These even banish the blue variation within brown from their pictures ; Velaz- Inez himself minimises it. By the time of Reynolds and Gainaborough it becomes a question whether blue may take a central place in a composition, and Grainsborough's carefully toned and warmed blue is a hedging answer in the Blue Boy ;No. 129). It is only in modern painting, chiefly landscapes, that the blue tonality, which has quite as strong a justifica- tion in nature, has been introduced. The blue picture is the most startling modern innovation, and reveals at once the strength of the previous mahogany polish convention. One master, Puvis de Chavannee, has seen its suitability for the decoration of the chill gray stone of public buildings. Beside his panel in the Pantheon the pictures of other painters on a brown foundation betray the fact that they belong, as furni- ture, to another setting.

If we glance round the walls of the present show we find Turner conspicuously departing from the decorative furniture tradition of tone around him. Constable, whatever they may say, retained the " brown tree," if not the brown tree of Sir George Beaumont. Turner, influenced by his experience of transparent water-colour on white paper, reverted to some- thing like an earlier procedure in his strain of colour over a ground of white paint. The Preraphaelites did the same, but reverted also to the jewel treatment of colour without tonality. With Turner there was a deeper game on hand. He aimed at approaching nearer by this means to the dazzling pitch of real light, and for this gave up the magnificent orthodox manner of his earlier style, fairly represented here by Conway Castle (No. 33). A landscape painter is always faced by the difficulty of the break in tone between the mass of sky and the mass of land cutting his picture in two. In Conway Castle the brown masses of land and building prevail, and as in the Shipwreck and Calais Pier the sky is subdued and broken by balancing masses of heavy cloud. When, as in the two Roman pictures (No. 8 and No. 12), he fastened on the bright sky, he felt that all the land must key up in tone to accord with this. What he did not do, and what makes these pictures so disagreeable in colour, was to carry

one or the other tonality throughout. He brings in patches of a terrible siena-brown in his foreground, and is capable of combining this with an ill-tempered blue in his sky. Fall of beauties as they are, such pictures are incoherent in themselves, and doubly so among neighbours carried out on the ancient principle. It may be noted that during the heyday of transparent water-colour, by a true enough decora- tive instinct, water-colour drawings painted and mounted in white were allotted to drawing-rooms whose papers and hangings were light in tone. They were to that extent appropriate furniture; while the brown oil-picture was hung in the dining-room with its dark paper that approached panel- ling in tone. The cool, light-toned picture of many moderns calls for a corresponding setting, and the too prevalent con- fusion of tonalities with intrusions of raw white, for which Turner's unlucky ventures gave precedent, will fit into no setting at all. The painter of pictures, even of "easel pictures," must bear in mind the kind of room on whose walls they are to hang.

D. S. M.