ART.
THE SLADE SCHOOL.
PROFESSOR LEGROS is resigning his charge of the Slade School. The Slade School is, outside of the Academy and Kensington schools, the best known and best equipped in London. It is, therefore, a matter of public concern that the successor of Monsieur Legros should be worthy to succeed him, and to use the very great advantages of endowment, buildings, material, and reputation that the School enjoys. The names of candidates for the chair have not been made public, so it would be improper to discuss them here ; but the occasion is a fitting one for the consideration of the general question of schools of art, a subject on which not a little con- fusion of thought and vagueness of ideal exists.
In Professor Legros the Slade has had a most distinguished artist at its head. The electors showed commendable courage in their choice of an artist, and a foreign artist, and it must have been stimulating for pupils to study under a master whose own work in conception and execution is so deserving of respect. Yet the question arises whether this incitement by example is altogether an advantage in the teacher of a public school, when certain drawbacks are considered. For it is to be remembered that distinction, except in artistic natures of uncommon width and variety, carries with it a certain narrowness ; that an art, admirable in the master, may be unfitted to the temper and power of the scholar ; and that if the scholar attempts to take on a style which runs against his natural grain, the result can only be failure, or that kind of success which is worse, the making-down of a style into a mannerism. Now, Professor Legros is not a various artist, his excellence is of a narrow range, his spirit is intense, but strictly limited. He is a severe and expressive draughtsman in line, whose best work lies in etching. Given a pupil like Mr. William Strang, whose bent was the same, whose spirit was congenial, the effect of inspiration was obvious. But what became of the colourists among the pupils, of those who had a feeling for the blending of objects with a background for atmosphere ? They gained something, perhaps, by discipline in line, but they had to throw off, if they ever did throw off, after they left the School, the black colouring, the cut-out rendering of forms, that are the defects of Professor Legros' art. Examples of that art, as taught in the School, are public property. The painting of those heads, which were done as a time-exercise before the class, and which are now in the Kensington Museum, is really monochrome disguised. The drawing and handling are of remarkable quality, the sense for character is evident, but the colour is practically black and white, and atmosphere is left out of account. It is, pro- bably, only by such large omissions that a teacher can perform, with any assurance, such a feat before a class. It may seem natural to expect that he who teaches painting should "show how it is done ; " but to do this without hesita- tion, without trying back, without absolute failure at times, can be the work only of a painter of the very first rank, or of a man who has reduced painting to a cheap formula or trick, or of an artist like Professor Legros, whose natural limits lead him to concentrate himself on one-half of the painter's task at the expense of the other half.
The balance of advantage, then, seems to be against having a very original but biassed artist as the teacher of a large school. It is desirable that such an artist should attract and direct those who are his natural followers ; but the others, the nine out of ten, he is not unlikely to thwart or mislead.
But there is a much greater danger than having an original artist at the head of a Public School, and that is having a formalist of the academic type. By "academic" is not meant the teaching of the Royal Academy schools, because a type there can hardly be said to exist. In the matter of painting, the pupils are exposed to the teaching of the Academicians in turn ; in the matter of drawing, the type made notorious there and at Kensington is the stippled crayon after the antique, a type which has every vice of method and aim possible to drawing. Initially wrong in drawing, as such an exercise is almost bound to be, untrue to the main facts of character and form, it cannot readily, because of the material used, be obliterated and corrected in those essen- tials, and the pupil is encouraged to elaborate a stupid and inexpressive finish of surface in a drawing wrong from the first,—to " finish " what was never begun. By academicism is meant not this, but the accomplished type of teaching to be found in Paris, the drawing and painting that are a formula, a receipt, a machine-like procedure which the industrious student readily learns, and if he be also an artist, has, with pains, to unlearn afterwards. It has the same relation to good drawing and painting that the singing and acting of the ordinary well-drilled Conservatoire pupil have to good singing and acting. But it has the obvious advantage for the teacher that it is something that can be taught, it is the same alike for all,—in a word, a substitute for seeing. It is a method for making the blind man pass for a man with eyes.
This seems to land us in a terrifying paradox. If the objection to the academic type of drawing is that it can be taught, what is to become of drawing-schools ? Is drawing something that cannot be taught? Certainly, it cannot be taught. You cannot teach any one to compose music, to be a poet, or to be a painter. The art of drawing, like those other creative arts, is of grace ; no works will secure it for the non- elect. But a drawing-school is a very good thing, for all that, —a drawing-school in which there is as little teaching in the ordinary sense as possible, and where the visits of the teacher are but occasional. If it were only that the student gets a model cheap, and a place to work in ; that he sees the technical devices of paint, canvases, easels, and so forth, in use, and so has not to lose time in inventing such devices over again, he would already be the gainer. And when he comes to his real business of learning to see, and to contrive means for expressing what he sees, it will be a great help to
him if he comes among other students painting in different ways. The comparison of those different ways will help
him to define his own talent, because he can adopt the most congenial. Every beginner must imitate some one, and that drawing-school is in a wholesome state whose students are imitating different masters. The student goes to picture galleries, ancient and modern. There he picks out the master who most appeals to him, and takes that master, so to speak, to school with him. One will have a feeling for the pure, expressive line of Holbein, another for the colour and glow of Titian ; or, to take nearer models, the different excellences of Mr. Orchardson and Mr. Sargent may well inspire imitators in the same school. Now we begin to see the part that the actual drawing-master may usefully play. He will not impress a private taste and manner of his own on all his class, for that is to reduce the school to a morbid condition, to make his pupils into pale echoes of himself for the time being A pupil thus formed against the grain is either spoiled for always as an artist, or, on leaving the school, must shake off the unnatural mould, and with toil begin all over again. The teacher will rather, if he is wise, repress himself, and if he is critic enough to see and appreciate, watch for evidences of different temperaments and tastes among his pupils, and encourage and nurture their development on their own line. With such self-restraint, with such a liberal tem- per, he can do much, because every pupil begins on his own line by seeing things small, by being pleased with successes in parts. It is the teacher's opportunity to point this out to him, to insist, from a wider grasp of vision, on the necessity for connecting parts and subordinating them ; to tell him, what he knows himself but does not acknowledge to himself, that he is too soon satisfied; to define with him the obstacles in the way of his own ideal. The office, so conceived, demands great modesty, great insight, infinite tact, a patience and curiosity that few artists, with an insistent ideal of their own, are likely to possess and exercise. A liberal-minded visitor is wanted, who has tried many things, and can see good even in what he has not tried.
The results of such teaching are not of the immediately flattering and glaring kind. That school is successful in popular esteem which is successful with the average pupil, which imposes on the pupil with small natural gift a show of being able to draw. Nothing is commoner among pupils than a kind of Chinese imitativeness, a power of reproducing a set copy, of catching a mannerism, that has no relation to their own perceptions. But this show of drawing, however imposing to the student's friends, is without future ; the prize student can make a prize-study, but can frequently make nothing else. It is the student who has been disciplined not to copy, but to see, who will have a future when he leaves his classes ; and the average pupil, too, will be in a better case if his small gift has been really exercised, than if he has had.
an advanced technique mechanically attached to him. Almost all children can draw ; it is the photograph and the drawing. master between them that stamp out the gift by substituting an ideal of mediocre copying for expression and decorative fancy. The Slade School will be fortunate indeed if it secures a teacher who will encourage its scholars to use
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