ART.
A REPLY TO MR. RICHMOND.
TliE examination-paper set by Mr. W. B. Richmond, and printed in the correspondence of the Spectator of April 1st, may be thought to call for some notice in this column ; it will, in any case, give occasion for adding another proposition to the somewhat obvious statement that it challenges. The letter appeared previously in the Westminster Gazette, and there is a word to say, in the first place, on certain remarks by which it was there accompanied. I do not refer to the complaint that I had misquoted a phrase from a previous communication of Mr. Richmond's to that journal; for that inadvertence I apologised at once in a letter which the editor did not see his way to insert ; and I should have regretted it still more if I thought that the substitution (" temperance tract" for "treatise on drink ") made an appreciable difference in the writer's meaning. Nor do I refer to the ludicrous turn given to various expressions of mine,.—that is within the rules of the game. But Mr. Richmond, with what I will call haste, added certain remarks which I think, on consideration, he would admit are of a kind to em- barrass discussion by diverting it into personal altercation. Thus be questions the " honesty " of my assertion that the pitch of " finish " in the work of Degas is comparable to that of Holbein, and an admirable quality in both. That is surely an awkward way of putting his idea that I am incon- sistent in this matter of "finish" because I do not praise all minute technique. It is convenient, to say the least, to argue on the supposition that an opponent is not pretending to mean what he says ; and Mr. Richmond is, therefore, bound by the rules of polite controversy to assume that I mean what I say about the finish of Degas, as I am bound to believe, against all the probabilities of the case, that an artist like Mr. Richmond does not see it. Again, to suggest that my criticism is " mere fooling, mere playing with serious matters to make copy," is impertinent in both senses of the word. If the question at issue were, not my criticism, but Mr. Richmond's painting, I should not consider it relevant or effective to suggest, even if I thought it true, that the painting was "mere fooling, mere Playing with serious things to make copy." The fact that Mr. Richmond is paid for a picture cannot be turned into a valid criticism on its art, and it would be avoiding and obscuring the real issue to hint at unworthy motives.
So much for personalities. Mr. Richmond's examination- paper may be as briefly dismissed, for it rests on some sort of misunderstanding. The platitude I ventured on was to this effect : That people are in all ages divided up into those who, being painters or not, appreciate painting, and those who do not appreciate painting ; and that the admiration conventionally expressed for the Masters by the latter is an affair of imposed opinion. The artistic people I called "experts," the inartistic "the populace," the process of imposition" coercion." " Popu- lace " may have been a misleading word, but it happened to come over from a previous debate, and I was careful to explain that it did not mean "the People" in a political or social sense,—it meant the people to whom the average cheap painter in the Academy or elsewhere appeals ; crowned heads are not excluded from it, nor even costermongers. " Coer- cion " may have been an impolitic word, for the sway of the Masters over the multitude is at the best an uneasy and hollow dominion, and the tables are apt to be turned, the coercion to be repaid with interest, the Puritan to have his way with the pictures. Therefore let us say "persuasion" within earshot of Leviathan, or feign that these things were settled long ago by voting, and that of his own good taste he elected his own Old Masters, for he is an awkward beast when
roused, and a bigger beast in these times than he ever was. before.
Now, with these simple truths, I do not imagine that Mr. Richmond has any quarrel; and when I scan the questions which, as "a humble student of history," he sets forth, not with any proud pretension to answering them, but rather with an eye to what he expects me to assert or deny, and is, for all his guileless air, ready to confute with documents, I think I see a possible glimmer. For instance, I feel that that way Cimabue lies. In other words, that there have been times. when an artist is recorded to have been generally appreciated and acclaimed. The acclamation is proved ; the appreciation
is more doubtful. If the generous historian can make out a case for times when the populace was less and the experts more, my argument suffers nothing, and I will rejoice with him ; as a bumble student of human nature, I will rejoice with trembling ; and if he swears that there are records to prove that once upon a time everybody was an expert and there waa no populace at all, I will say it is a beautiful idea, and that I hope it is true.
Here, in default of a knowledge of documents, is the kind of doubt that intrudes. We find a painter popular,—at one time a good, at another a bad ; Cimabue, let us say, at one time ; IL Jan Van Beers at another. But popularity, when we reflect, has so many accidental and external elements..
There is, let us say, in the one case, the patronage of the Church ; in the other, the patronage of the Westminster Gazette;. since a procession, as a mark of public favour, allowing for a difference of times and manners, may be taken faintly to foreshadow the interview. The cases, at the first blush, seem alike. Bat though both painters have the popular acclaim, one is a good artist (measured by his predecessors), the other a bad. Is it not the solution that, in the former case, the experts had contrived to impose their view on the Church, and the Church on the crowd ; in the other, the crowd has imposed its sincere love for bad art on the paper So much for my old proposition. I add a second, one perhaps more important because less obvious. It is, that a new master has to fight his way not only against the outsiders', but against artists as well. Cimabue himself, perhaps, had to make good his timid departures from a stiff tradition against shakings of the head. and solemn warnings from those who held by a Byzantine formula (a supposition in support of which I produce no documents). It is certainly the case that every great modern painter who has applied hie art to new matter or effects has had to encounter a bitter opposition from fellow-artists whose sympathies were engaged by the ideal of another school. But this limitation in the matter of the new, is apt to betray itself also in the matter of the Old Masters. If, therefore, it appear surprising and discouraging to any one that an artist of Mr. Richmond's sensibility should frown upon Degas, he may reflect that Degas is in very good company. Mr. Richmond, to his credit, is an admirer of Michael Angelo and Raphael; but his view of Velasquez stamps him with a limitation. That estimate, expressed in an inter- view, and challenged in these columns at the time without repudiation from llfr. Richmond, is as follows Think of Velazquez's portraits. Why are they so much admired by the present perverse generation P Because they are so thoroughly realistic. Velazquez painted what he saw with his outward eyes, 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."
The Institute of Painters in Water-Colours illustrates, as I have said before, the fallacy of finish very largely. There are many cases of the match-box carried a great deal further than the head, many of a mechanical finish applied to a head that is not begun because the biggest truths of its relations of form and tone and colour have not been perceived. Let me choose one work to illustrate what I mean, because in respect of composition and colour it shows an advance on the painter's previous pictures, and therefore deserves criticism. Mr. Robert Fowler's Sleep seems to me to illustrate both the fallacy of Imagination and the fallacy of Finish. By the fallacy of Imagination I mean the idea that pictorial imagination employs itself necessarily on the representation of a subject which has received poetical treatment in literature, or else on an abstract treatment of a subject. Thus Raphael's admirable feeling for maternity and his eye for the traits at once tender and devout in a mother's face, expressed themselves in an illustration of sacred literature. But the same imaginative power is at work in M. Carri?re's picture of a mother and child in the Grafton that does not make reference to literary associations at all, but depends just as Raphael's really does, on the poetry of the thing seen. So in the matter of Abstraction, Michael Angelo's art is a highly abstract art : but the imagina- tion in it is an effect, not of the degree of the abstraction, but of the appositeness of the things abstracted. He could abstract and yet convince the imagination, because of his command and knowledge of visible fact, and his imagination lay in seeing and seizing the essential and expressive trait. Without observation and knowledge there is no virtue in abstraction. Now, Mr. Fowler's figure is surrounded by the emblems of sleep ; but he has not noted and conveyed in the drawing of the figure itself those traits which would convince us of a beautiful sleeping figure, and which it is the business of the painter to seize. I think he might have had a better chance of doing so, if he had not aimed at a grandiose abstraction before he had observed enough to abstract upon ; an actual sleeping figure rendered with fine observation would disengage the poetry of sleep ; this badly observed and conventional figure only testifies to a poetic intention. The fallacy of finish is illustrated by the elaboration of the paint, which is out of all relation to the facts expressed or the effect obtained; indeed, to execute a water-colour on this huge scale is to forego all the advantages of the material. And here comes in a third fallacy perhaps, which may be called the Fallacy of Decoration. A large glazed water-colour can hardly form an effective part of an architectural whole; a convention in the treatment therefore, whose origin is architectural, cannot be justified on decorative grounds. Let me draw attention to a work which is a possible architectural decoration, and which is in the right sense imaginative. I refer to a little panel in .coloured plaster by Mr. R. A. Bell, at the Society of British Artists. It is called Pas de Trois, and represents three figures of dancing-girls, with the head and hands of the conductor of the orchestra showing above the footlights. The conven- tion is strict enough, the abstraction from nature very great. But the work has the charm of a design contrived out of a pretty thing observed; and its material and its limited colour make it a possible adjunct to architecture. Mr. Austen Brown at the Institute and Miss Flora Reid at the British Artists also deserve notice; and Mr. Wetherbee's pastorals at the Fine Art Society, are the work of a painter of poetic feeling, who promises to become stronger in drawing and
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