ART.
THE SOCIETY OF BRITISH ARTISTS IN SUFFOLK STREET.
THE Society of British Artists has undergone considerable alterations of late, one of which is so vital as to affect the whole character of the institution. It used to be, perhaps, of all the exhibitions in London, one of the most conservative, one of the most steady-going, and, we fear it mast be admitted, one of the least interesting. But an artist whose career has been as pro- gressive and as interesting as that of any living painter—Mr. Whistler, to wit—has been elected President of the Society, and has made many changes in the appearance of the galleries, the hanging, and the character of the works of art exhibited. He has to a great extent excluded pictures of the accustomed style, and has introduced a mass of works which embody to a con- siderable degree his own views, or at least such of his own views as his followers and admirers can reproduce. One result of this President's energetic action is the prodnotion and exhibition of pictures which present in as sharp contrast as possible the most old-fashioned methods of English painters, and those of their youngest and most opposed rivals. Two-thirds of the Gallery no doubt still consists of the former class, the dully painted and laboriously finished compositions for which Suffolk Street has long been famous, both the subject and treat- ment of these being highly conventional, and their average artistic merit but inconsiderable. The remaining third of the Gallery is filled with pictures which are nothing if not bizarre, extravagant, and revolutionary. The aim of the two sections is entirely opposed, the conventions of the one being not only shunned, but absolutely trampled under foot by the other. The elaborate finish has given way to compositions in which a blot and a smudge are the chief details.
The decorous feeling and narrow track of subject of the old Suffolk Street artists are here thrust aside by fancies which disregard all the received limitations of what is attractive in Art, and apparently estimate the attractiveness of their subject, by its opposition to the laws of decorum and all the ordinary experiences of life; and there must be added to this description, to render it a jest one, this additional fact, that in the work which is produced by the younger school of artists who have adopted Mr. Whistler as their leader, though it absurdly over-exaggerates its theory, there is nevertheless at the bottom of its vagaries a substratum of right theories.
The eye has its conventionalities as well as the mind, and folks are very apt to look at pictures less with the impression which they have actually received from Nature, than with the acquired knowledge which they possess of the forms and colour of the objects represented, or with the impression derived from the manner in which they have seen such objects reproduced on former occasions. And besides this, there is no doubt that in England we have, as a rule, a strange, half-prurient shrink. ing from any subject which is unusual, from any treatment which has not been sanctioned by the slow process of time ; and that we consequently limit the field of what is beautiful in Art by this poor parochialism, which refuses to acknowledge as attractive anything which has not been duly approved by "the squire, or parson of the parish, or the attorney."
People who go to the Suffolk Street Gallery will be tempted by the contrast to which we have alluded at least to ask them- selves the following questions :—Which is right of these very different methods of regarding the world P Which is the one which approaches most nearly to the actual facts P Which is the one that possesses the moat truth and beauty, and is therefore chiefly desirable in Art P And though they may perhaps come to the conclusion—which is, indeed, our own—that neither the elaborate and somewhat spiritless prettiness of the old, nor the adventurous smudging of the new school, is the right road to artistic salvation, they will have to see and confess that there are in this latest manifestation of the modern spirit, some hints of troth and beauty which we cannot afford to lose for the future, though we shall and must desire to have them co-ordinated and brought into their proper relation with the traditions of great art.
We are not going in any age of the world's history to substitute a composition which gives us only the flash on a lobster's back for a picture like Titian's " Bacchus and Ariadne ;" nor are we going in the present to accept Mr. Whistler's shadowy, spectral forms as satisfactory portraits of living people. But if there is to be an Art of the future at all, it must tales up this problem of visual impressionism, and work it out, as were worked out in earlier days the problems of composition and chiaroscuro and perspective.
Whatever be true as to the blindness of justice, there can be no doubt that the Art Muse must be essentially open-eyed. She can afford to disregard no scientific truth, of however startling a kind, however inconsistent such truth appease at first sight to be with the manner in which works of art have been previously executed. It is worth while to consider this point a little, since the question must inevitably become very soon a crucial one in the world of Art. It is a little difficult to settle the matter accurately, since probably no two painters would exactly describe the difference between the schools in quite the same way ; but essentially the ground of difference is this,—that the younger school claims to give exclusively a reproduction of a visual effect exactly as it appears on the retina. The painters of this class maintain that the picture on the retina is the only thing with which the artist is concerned, and if this is not adhered to rigidly, the work must be false; and maintaining this, they think that the way to get at the picture most truly is to paint just what could be seen if the artist were to open and shut his eyes as quickly as possible. The impression received in that fleeting second should, they say, be the picture. The fascination of the theory will be readily perceived,—it as nearly as possible realises in Art the aspirations of the Socialists. Every man may not be absolutely equal thereby, it is true ; some will always have a greater power in repeating this fleeting image than others; but it dose away to an extraordinary degree with the necessity for any mental or spiritual equipment on the part of the painter. The merest ploughboy would—given the truth of this theory and the necessary amount of technical skill—be a better artist than if he had the spiritual and intellectual power of a Michael Angelo.
Now, it seems to us that the fallacy of the above assumption is a very simple one, and can readily be explained ; for there- is no such thing as a picture on the retina—an intelligible picture, that is—apart from the mental prepossessions, the acquired mental knowledge of the person who sees it. Not until we have laboriously built up within ourselves by experi- ence of sight and touch, our little pictures of the world round us, do we really see them at all. A child will run his head against a table which he thinks is distant from him, or stretch out his hands to grasp an object beyond his reach, till be learns by experience to construe the picture which his retina repre- sents. The mere blurred impression which a rapid opening and shutting of the eye produces—an impression in which two or three striking details chiefly present themselves for inspection —is, after all, only an imperfect mental, as well as an imperfect visual reproduction of the scene with which it is concerned- Why is it any more true to paint what the eye and the mind see in one moment, than what tiiseye and the mind see in ten P The reason, say the impression , is that the eye can only be focussed for a moment on one pc int in the scene on which the attention is fixed ; and in order to see any other point clearly, an alteration of this focus must be made, and therefore a fresh picture on the retina has to be produced. But the whole thing is a matter of degree, and logical adherence to the doctrine above enunciated would reduce every part of the picture to a nullity, save one minute point. The adjustment of the focus necessitated in the observance of different details, takes place in every impressionist's picture also, though in a slightly lesser degree, for without it no difference of form or colour could be discerned; therefore, the claim of the impressionists to absolute rightness is as logically untenable as that of any other school' of painting. The questions arise,—If this be so, at what point should we draw the line P at what point should- we force our mind to leave off reporting on the subject before the eye P at what point should we cease to seek for further information from our eye concerning the subject of our picture ? In other words, what amount of mental and visual interrogation is required to make the picture upon our retina as perfect as possible P And it is in the answer to this question that the strength of the new school will manifest itself, —that the truth which lies at the foundation of all these theories will become evident.
Though there is no such thing as a single visual impression which is not made up of a series practically infinite of smaller ones, there is undoubtedly a point at which the introduction of further visual impressions is inconsistent with the best possible
rendering of any selected scene or person,—we say the best possible rendering, but should perhaps rather say the most truth- . ful natural rendering, for it may be, and frequently we think it is tree, that the additional details which are, strictly speaking, inconsistent with the above-mentioned impression, cause a picture to gain more in significance than it loses in mere visual truth. This has hitherto been disregarded by artists, and especially by our English school. They have lost sight of the unity of impression which is essentially at the root of all visual perception ; and of the fact that, though it is impossible to call the picture on the retina a purely visual picture, made up as it is of association and experience as well as sight, yet you cannot have in one and the same picture, a variety of these mental and visual impressions, with- out weakening the force of the special one. As the focus of the eye is shifted, all surrounding objects group themselves round the one to which its attention is directed, though sur- rendering for its sake some portion of prominency; and con- sequently, the artist has to choose between these two opposing courses,—he may select some subject so simple, that it will as nearly as possible approach to a single visual impression, in which case he will be able to give it a degree of prominence in strict proportion to its simplicity; or he may select a subject made up of many visual impressions, and trust to building up an impression of unity from the effect of all the various details. The eye, as a matter of fact, rarely perceives a picture as a whole, any more than it perceives any natural scene or object, unless the picture is painted with the express object that the eye should so perceive it; and though we may fairly demand that the picture as a whole should present a pleasing unity in which no discordant detail is manifest, we must not run away with the idea that at any one moment which can be seized by the artist, the image of which he is conscious actually represents what his eye perceives apart from his mind. The whole of eight, in so far as it is connected with pictures, is an infinite series of gradations, from the moment when an eye is opened to note some one prominent flash of colour which is seen in the midst of a misty chaos, to that when the mental and visual picture is completed by the perception of every fullest detail, which latter may truly be said to be an operation which is unending as long as we keep our eyes open and look at what is before us.
What the impressionists are teaching no and learning them- selves is, that the degree of attention which is called for by the chief object in a picture, does necessitate a certain withdrawal of interest from its surrounding details ; that this is the method of Nature, and as the method of Nature, must come in the end to have a vital bearing upon the theory and practice of Art; that if we attempt to contravene this fact, we give to our pictures, in direct ratio to our contravention, a literary rather than an artistic truth and interest ; and that each contravention is, in fact, a distinct surrender which we must acknowledge, and be prepared to defend, by the gain of some more desirable truth or bedaty.
Perhaps a few words might well be said, in conclusion, as to the special dangers likely to beset work founded on such a theory, especially if it be held in the exaggerated form in which young reformers would be likely to believe it. In the first place, it would be likely to induce an overweening confidence in the new method, and a contemptuous disregard of the great work of earlier times. This is, indeed, the effect it notoriously does produce. It is quite common nowadays to hear young men talking of Titian and Raphael with almost contemptuous toleration, maintaining that they were wholly conventional and untrue to Nature. This spirit is a fatally bad one for artists, as great art lives chiefly by the inherited tradition of beautiful things, and by our admiration and love for those who have executed them. For all our perception of beauty, like our peculiarities of habit, is bequeathed to us, and we can no more substitute an entirely new conception of the beautiful, to that which has been built up slowly during the world's history, than we could make all people write like Shakespeare or be seven feet high. But perhaps a greater drawback is one which is especially manifest in these first reforming days,—the drawback, that is, of practically doing away with the subject and the poetical motive of painting, in order to substitute a rendering of an isolated patch of effect, and to think that that must be a picture because the attention is therein concentrated upon some little precisely rendered visual impression. This is Mr. Whistler's fallacy,—this is the secret of his white women against a white background, of his black women against a
black background, and of his red women against a red back- ground, and all his other harmonies, nocturnes, &c. And this is the fallacy which all his imitators fall into more or less. They do not in the least mind whether their pictures are beautiful, as long as they can produce in them one of these so-called visual effects. The best work in the Suffolk Street Gallery is a large picture by William Stott, of Oldham, of a group of naked boys standing by a pool of water in the midst of a broad expanse of sand. It is simply a marvellous tour de force, as a representation of outdoor life on a warm, sunny day. The artist has made the three figures of his boys so woefully ugly, and in places out of proportion, that it would be a contradiction of terms to say that this was a beautiful picture; and in a far greater degree the same words apply to nearly all the work in this Gallery.
After all, what a picture is meant to be is something pleasant to look at,—that is the old truth to which we have got to come back, all fresh scientific truths notwithstanding. People do not want pictures unless they want them to look at, and they do not want to look at them unless they are beautiful. All ugly objects are not subject-matter for presenting, when re- produced, beautiful results. Poetry is not eccentricity or extravagance ; unexpectedness has only a passing pictorial interest ; the meretricious and the bizarre are not the founda- tions of good art, and never have been since the world began, and never will be till it shall cease to exist. Aa the spirit of the old Greek art lingered still even in the ignorant formalities of Byzantine work, as there were visible even in the crudest pre-Raphaelite paintings the same aspirations after the same kind of beauty that was afterwards perfected in the great Venetian and Florentine schools of the Renaissance, as all good painting of later years, whether in Spain, France, Holland, or England, has sought for the old qualities of beautiful form, and beautiful colour, and beautiful meaning which animated the works of earlier days, so in all possible reforms of Art that are still to come, there will have to be the same groundwork, the same aspirations, no matter how different the methods by which these qualities are sought to be produced. For impressionism is at the present only on its trial ; it has yet got to prove its adaptability to the service of Art. And it is quite certain that, whatever else happens, if one of the two has to give way, it will be the new scientific theory, and not the old artistic tradition.
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