ART.

THE OLD MASTERS —IT.

DIRECTION, 11.10vEMENT, ACTION.

IF I had to choose one out of all this splendid collection of pictures, I think it must be Tintoretto's Diana (No. 99). The magnificent vigour of its lines, emphasised by the unfinished state of the picture, the sure design that locks the goddess and her dogs into their absolute place on the canvas, the grandeur of colour, the supreme skill of modelling in the breast, the vivid energy of the painting, all these qualities blind me for the time to the merits of many estimable works. I might hesitate when I strayed as far as Titian's solemn lands::ape (No. 106), or his portrait of Franceschini (No. 103),—(a second figure added later and in a different lighting ruins the arrangement, but cannot destroy the tender history on the face). I might linger long on my way before Rousseau's Bridge or Delacroix's Paganini, and make excursions to many others; but if it were a case of fire and a picture to be saved, I think it must be this Tintoretto.

It is one of his quieter pieces. Another is more agitated (No. 103) and less satisfying. Its author himself felt doubtful about it, and had tried the doge in three positions, and re- painted the principal group on an entirely different scheme. lu the Diana he has been contented for once with that quality of stillness of which painting does well to make a virtue. Usnally he is not arnung the serene gods of the art, but among the giants, like S4,enorelli and Michael Angelo, whose restless energy battles on the frontiers of their province. Of a;1 unsettled boundary disputes, there is none more tempting to the adventurer and the casuist than that between the realms of painting and drama.. Flourishing settlements have been made by painters who would subdue motion and action among their subjects, and the swamps are fall of commercial busybodies who have sought for gold in the illustration of small incident. One notable and restless chercheur is repre- sented in this exhibition,—J. F. Millet, the painter of the Wood Sawyers (No. 64). It may be not uninteresting to attempt to define the actual means of suggestion employed by painters who press their art in this direction.

A distinction should be made, first of all, between the movement of a picture and the movement of a figure within it. The governing lines of a composition can be so managed as to carry the eye in one direction or another, and may be endowed in their form with all the qualities of a moving thing,—spring, rhythm, agitation, recoil, reluctance. The eye following a line acts as if on the path of a moving thing, and will attribute to figures stationed on its course something of movement beyond themselves if, in a general way, their direction and gesture consent to such a reading. In early painting, however, this power of direction in line was fre- quently occupied in centreing attention on the dramatic focus of the painting, since means of doing this by light and shade, atmosphere, or altering definition had not been developed. Painting also followed its more natural bent \,y representing figures, stationary or in quiet action, grouped about a centre of interest within the picture. Occasionally the length of the picture-field, as on a cassone panel, led to the choice of frieze subjects, such as a procession passing across the field. But as art becomes master of its powers, elements that at first are only explanatory and decorative set up an emotional interest of their own. The direction of movement in a picture is one of these features, and a romantic turn is given to this when the direction is to a point outside of the picture. geld, when the composition is not self-contained within the frame, but drifts or drives across and beyond. The painting of landscape brings many of these motives into play ; the road that winds out of sight, the river that runs, the wind that bends boughs and blows clouds across the sky, or ships across the sea ; all these entice the mind to a goal outside the picture, and touch the instincts of adventure or reverie belong- ing to the open road, the river, or the sea, with their long stretch and invisible destination. The Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian, and the Household Heath of Crouse, are alike in exciting this romantic impulse,—for what the first does by the passage and pursuit of its wandering band, the second does no less by its line of road, making for the distance like a desire, and the gesture of its solitary figure.

In classical work, then, movement, when suggested, may be enforced by the general controlling lines of direction, and by the repetibion within them of figures giving one or another moment of a common action. The eye passing along the troop of Bacchus lends to each figure something of the action of that in front and of that behind, and is prepared to read into the swoop of Bacchus an accumulated impetus. Nor is it only in the figures that the action is reduplicated; " is echoed in lines of drapery as well.

By a further extension of this idea accessories outside the moving forms are enlisted in the same service,—that of persuading the mind to read movement into objects obstinately fixed. In Tintoretto's St. George and the Dragon, the trees bend in sympathy with the onset of the horseman ; in Con- stable's Jumping Horse (No. 124) they do more, they mimic the horse's action. It is interesting to watch Constable beating out the law of this kind of suggestion, for he was no heaven - born composer. He had not the sure instinct for the right place on the picture. field that makes Cotman's work (as in No. 26) so classical. But as he dwelt on his material, his eye led him on. In his horse he was forced to yield to the picture-demand for a certain massiveness and repose even in an energetically active form. In this he arrived at something like the solution of Velazquez in his equestrian portraits. Therefore, he had to cast about for assistance to the sense of movement from the rest of the picture. At first, he had put the willow that is now behind the horse in front of him. Then it dawned upon him that he lost energy, broke the impulse of movement, by putting this bigger statement of the profile of his moving form in front of it, that the proper arrangement was to let this and the mass of trees behind swell out from the origin of movement like a growing, gigantic wake behind a ship. Thus he arrived at his grand composition, but he seems first to have set his taree further back, and drowned it among the others, only finally to have set it boldly between. Notice how everything in the treatment of this trunk is handled to accord with a meta- phoric enh.4tcing of the original image, the muscular and.

knotted forms of the bark echoing those of the horse's legs. The execution too of this latest part has reached au. intensity of vigour that contrasts with the lees excited state- ment of quiet parts like the church-tower. The movement.

repeated in the tree is carried farther back and taken up in the barge. The eye indeed, as it sweeps across the picture,

seems to pursue, hardly knowing it, a flying form, which it explains by reference to the most striking object, the horse.. A little doubt on the painter's part, as to whether horse or barge was the key to the picture, mars slightly an excellent. corn position.

This, then, is what we may call the classical treatment of movement,—a procedure by which, to use a musical analogy,.

a figure given out by the voice is repeated fugally on the strings, on the brass, on the woodwind. Let us now follow the adventurers who tamper with the moving form itself in search of means of suggestion. We shall find them taking up one or another side of the act of vision directed to movement.

Let us dismiss at the outset the methods of the camera. These are statements of what the eye does not see. Except in the swiftest movement, as of the spokes of a wheel, we do not see a mere blur, still less the absolutely arrested moment that the camera can shoot for us. Our apprehension is rather- of a succession of sharp definitions of the whole figure, or parts of it, changing one into another by a series of jerks of attention, and co-existing for a short time, so that we are- fixed on one, but aware of another. An approaching engine, a bird in flight, a waving arm are examples.

We shall not expect to find in painting more than a hint of these aspects; for the defined, stationary figure cannot be sacrificed so far ; we do find, however, suggestions of this kind. of apprehension.

1. In sketching rapidly a man will often make shots at his outline, and his final decision leaves a number of faint con- tours this side and that. Such a sketch is always felt to give a sense of life and movement that the finished painting loses. However charming such a method is in sketch procedure, it. would be intolerable if formalised.

2. Tiutoretto relies not on this co-existence of impreseions„ bat on a suddenness of impression produced by the centreing of

attention on the moving forms. His great engine for this is a play of light and darkness from which they rush, a tone that drowns the background of the action, and a light that flies along the edges of action, rendering them precise and. emphatic. This, with a science of contorted limbs and.

draperies, and a corresponding vigour of handling, is his main instrument. The paintings in the school of San Rocco are the great examples.

3. But a third means, also employed by Tintoretto, and indeed by Michael Angelo, is more conveniently illustrated from J. F. Millet. This is the caricaturing of forms to render the intense impression of action. The stretched arm is drawn out longer, the bent leg is bent farther, the distended muscle knotted, the gripping hand magnified. Millet, by prolonged study of a man in rhythmic action, sifted out the points of attack most characteristic for the eye, and thus arrived at a.

deliberate caricature as definite for his own purpose as a caricature intended to bring out the fun or ugliness of a. subject. In each case some kind of over-expression is neces- sary in an art whose means are being forced. It was perhaps from Goya that he learned this kind of drawing. We find it again in Daumier, and in the admirable little portrait of Paganini, by Delacroix (No. 48). How the oddity of the man's leg is impressed upon us ! Millet was in every direction_ a chercheur. He could handle paint if he liked with the easy after-dinner oratory of a Tiepolo, the style that glides,.

punctuated by approval, round well-worn shapes of thought, complimentary and flattering statements of things. He broke

this up for a somewhat ugly but very real study and research.. His colour too was partly wrecked by his curiosity. In two. things, the concentrated sentiment of figures and their right proportion and definition in a picture-field, he was unerring; these were the points where his sincerity reached its goal.

I have mentioned the ease of Millet's handling because, in opposition to the lazy view that dismisses handling as

"mere technique," an affair with which not the spectator of a picture, but the painter only has to do, this evolution of Millet's style shows that handling, like every other element of painting, is a wrestle in which significance is at grips with decoration. It is not necessarily eccentricity that leads to unusual handlings; it is as often the attempt to express more, sometimes too much. In one of Gainsborough's pictures in the exhibition, the effort to express action in a horse carries itself down to the very touches by which it is drawn, so that they all are anxiously hatched in the direction of the movement. Constable's palette-knife trowelling is the natural expression of an eye that sees nature splashy. Tintoretto's eager spirit is written in his touch. My assertion of the existence of "symbolic" or "metaphoric" elements in technique has been abundantly scoffed at ; but I do not despair of convincing reasonable people of their presence. They stare us in the face in those attempts of painters in the more outlying parts of their art to express or suggest what cannot, by the conditions of painting, be directly represented.

D. S. M.