ART.
MR. W. B. RICHMOND ON PORTRAIT.
"Portrait-painting has nothing to do with real Art, What is portrait-
painting but copying what you see, Art is not what you copy, but
what you create I use no models at all. All I paint from is what I draw on the back of an envelope Think of Volasquez's portraits.
Why are they so much admired by the present perverse generation P Because they are so thoroughly realistic. Masques painted what ho saw with his out. ward eves, and he painted It exactly, But as for imagination, he had none ; and from the truly artistic point of view he is, therefore, not one of the greatest painters at all."
THESE phrases are quoted from an account of an interview with Mr. Richmond in a recent number of the Pall Mall Gazette, and represent a theory of Art so astonishing, so little fitting the facts, so successfully excluding half its masters, that though it might have seemed natural from behind the spectacles of a Professor or an art-critic, it is con- founding from a painter, and a painter of portraits. It is a 'temptation to quote, and to combat, more at length, and in particular the view given of the relation of Religion to Art ; but comment must be limited to this one position, that portrait-painting, painting from the real, has nothing to do with Art. Velasquez is the perfect testing case. He Istands for all the characteristically modern painting that Mr. Richmond disallows ; his work, it seems, is portrait, but not picture. As an example of the true picture-painter, and as "the greatest English artist of the present time, so far as creative power goes," Mr. Burne-Jones is cited. -" If he paints a casket of jewels, he does not get a casket and copy it, but he conceives one in his own mind, and -according to that conception he paints it." With this esti- mate of Mr. Burne-Jones's rank there shall be no quarrel here ; he is not only the greatest English designer of the time, he is one of the greatest that Nature, so parsimonious in this matter, has produced. But that order of glory needs no 'heightening at the cost of another; the province of a different art begins where that leaves off, and its quality is as fine, -consisting as it does in a sensibility to novel relations of beauty in things, beside which the perception and the painting of Raphael are elementary. Mr. Richmond speaks as if the ques- tion were one of technique, as if the performance of Velasquez in a portrait were a kind of mechanical copy. Now technique, the part of the hands, it is hardly necessary to say, is a side of Art that can be more or less taught, taught to the ordinary English (or French) portrait-painter or house-painter. Tech- nique only gains artistic value through something else, by the possession of . which Velasquez differs in kind from the -ordinary portrait-painter ; and that something else is vision. And this faculty of fine vision, if it cannot be said to invent, may be said to discover ; if it does not create an image out of its head, it re-creates one out of the surfeit of gross matter by the refinements of its choice, the justice of its omissions, the -emphasis of its presentation. And between this image- making power, this imagination, that can see pictures in things, that grapples with matter in immediate presence, and that ,other imagination that combines from it in absence, who shall prove a difference in rank ? Is a greater fallacy possible than to speak of the former process as the copying of a determined object. Set twenty painters of equal tech- nical skill to paint a portrait of what is by courtesy -called the same subject, and you have twenty representa- tions of twenty subjects. And who is to count the images that each of them rejected before he fixed on one, since -every colour he looks at is a complex, that he may attack by its red or blue or yellow side, as his picture instinct tells him; and every form a kaleidoscopic series in which now one pattern, now another, asserts itself? Of two men, one will labour all the irrelevant dross of the thing before b im that advertises it a nuisance ; the other will so adjust his angle, so admit his atmosphere into the plot, so waylay his light, that he catches some moment of the brute object when it is trans- figured into a design and a radiance. This is the secret of Velasquez in portrait, of Corot in landscape. This is the new quest, and conquest of Art. And the supremacy of Velasquez lies, first, in this, that by repeated experiment on one Royal sitter, he signally showed how, with a prescribed model, and that not of the finest, it was possible to give a record of the fact, but to compel from it as well,—a picture, a discovery of silver in flesh ; lies, secondly, in the absolute character of his vision, so that if it is not what another painter sees, it is what he might wish to see (" What we are till trying to do, he does at once "); and thirdly, in the sanity of his method, so that mannerism is rebuked by its quiet and inimitable mastery.
For the old art, these transformations in light and air do not count ; an object is an object, and there is an end of it. Euphronios or Chachryllion the Greek, studies his man's anatomy from the model, whether on an envelope or not, till he has got a pattern of it well into his head. There his reference to Nature ceases. He fits his mannikin into his place on the dish, squeezing him inventively, but also with a recollection of some pantomime attitude from a dramatised myth, whereby he meets the subject convention of his own time, and occupies the Hellenic society in ours. The rest is conventional, decorative colour. When we jump from Greece to Mr. Borne-Jones, we find that the reference to Nature has become immensely more complex, and the choice of subject a free one ; but there is the same feature of a limit to the draft made on the natural look of things. When a casket is con- ceived only, it cannot be made subject, by any strain of invention, to the play of light and air, to all that magic that is given away with a ready-made object; the painter must re- nounce all this field of the art of Velasquez, and the sacrifice is no doubt a deliberate and natural one to the painter of dream and decorative invention.
But the other art is the art not of invention so much as of recognition, not of design but of accident,—it is the art of the accident of light. Its object, again, is quite frankly to render a sensation, not to express an idea,—an object which will appear culpable only to those who have a prejudice against sensations as such. It considers that its business is to paint, not its own soul, but other people's bodies. Hence a shifting in the centre of gravity habitually ascribed to the art of painting, and naturaly enough to - the older art. To the spectator who has no habit of eye for the charm of visible matter, such painting must appear unmeaning (as it is). He will see that it can do no good (as it will not) ; he will seek for an idea, and be vainly offered a sensation ; he is accustomed to find his interest in causes, and is put off with an effect- But to any one with an eye for the visible, with the habit of seeing pictures where they are, and that is everywhere, how curious sounds the talk of realism as a name of scorn, of materialist as of something base, of the mere outward eye as of something best employed when shut ! In realism lies his business ; matter, the last refinements of matter, are his goal and his despair. He trades in the extreme film of beauty where flesh gives up and air begins. He leaves it to another department to consider how the soul is engaged behind all this web of colour and shadow, and that other department may notoriously be trusted to give the fullest and most various accounts of the case. And lost in his contemplation, he hears men talking of how he ought to be inventing, he, the explorer of undiscovered countries that lie within two moments in the pitch of light, a thought this way or that of colour, and that no man before him has seen, or will after. So might one turn a cold ear to offers of a post in Cloud-cuckoo-town, who had just sighted the palaces and throne of El Dorado.
The greater includes the less, and since any object, however humble, may become the pretext for a picture, so may some outer human being's face. And, after all, one is sometimes astonished at the happy thoughts of Nature in faces, however much we hug a private pattern, an unpublished design. "The conception in the artist's mind," says Mr. Richmond, "is always infinitely more beautiful than what he actually pro- duces; he conceives the ideal, but he never can reach it on canvas." No; but he sometimes meets a better in the street. There is an inventiveness in Nature that, strange to say, goes beyond our own, an attention to detail and construction that our dreams refuse, a play of feature of which the ideal is incapable. To the sincere Platonist in Art, indeed, Mrs. Todgers's idea of a leg must remain a nobler thing than one copied from the mortal and walking fact ; and yet a real leg, for all its shiftiness, is a pretty piece of design. And pretend as we may to believe that an artist of the inventive temper makes all his faces out of his head, or never borrows more than an envelope will carry, really a doubt intrudes. What proportions come from memory, what from a preference that perverts every face it sees into one kind of beauty in a Bottieelli or a Raphael or a Burne-Jones, it were hard, per- haps, for the artist himself to say; but there must have
been relentings of nature somewhere towards his dream, or else the dream compromised with a portrait. The only other way out o£ it is to suppose an imagination such as Goethe's friend ascribed to him, saying that if he had been consulted before it was decided what colour to make the grass and trees, he would have answered, "Oh, make them green I" It would be unfair, perhaps, to press a personal point. But if one confesses to preferring a portrait of a Pope by Raphael to his idea of an Apostle, may one also hint that a picture of a lady by Mr. Richmond has more of the stuff of art than his imagination of a goddess ? Is it, after all, that he is blasé by all the grace and beauty that have defiled before his easel, not in vain ? And whatever he thinks, will posterity decide that there is no art in the Portrait of Mr. Andrew Lang ?
One reflection more. Mr. Richmond gives strenuous praise to the work of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. He promises a book on that extraordinary work, in which he detects a whole system of thought. Now, it is well to worship before one of the gods of Art ; but it is no edifying spectacle to see the artist-worshipper arise and use his deity to batter him of another province about the head. Think how in revenge the Florentine will be:thumped anon by the devout of Spain I There will be:wild:talk of a mere commentator on the Bible in paint, of a literary talent gone astray, of an abstract, symbolic art ; and the interpreter will be warned, that what a great ventriloquist has done through Turner and Tintoretto, himself will do by this commodious vehicle of prophets and oracles,—Teste2David cum, Sibyl/a. How easy this, and how futile I Art is justified of all her children, motley family as they are ; and while words of abuse, " real " and "ideal," hurtle through the schools, the inheritance quietly descends on him to whom it belongs,—from Michael Angelo to all such as handle myth and dream and passion in picture form ; now to the illustrator of j Job, now to the artist of the Days of Creation ; but also from the subtle eyes of Velasquez, to all who discover images of light and air, to Reynolds in one century, in another to Whistler. D. S. MACCOLL.
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