Coasting Bohemia

by J. Comyns Carr

JAMES M‘NEIL WHISTLER

The many pleasant hours I spent in Whistler’s studio in Cheyne Walk are dominated in recollection by the striking personality of the artist. In physical no less than in mental equipment, he stood apart from his generation, and the characteristic peculiarities of his appearance, joined to the marked idiosyncrasy of his temperament, must remain unforgettable to all who knew him. It is easy indeed to recall the tones of the sometimes strident voice as he let slip some barbed shaft in ruthless characterisation of one or other of his contemporaries: easier still to summon again, as though he stood before me now, the oddly fashioned figure, lithe and muscular, yet finely delicate in its outline, as he skipped to and fro in front of his canvas, now with brush poised in the air between those long slender fingers, seeming, as he gazed at the model, to challenge the supremacy of nature, now passing swiftly to the easel to lay on that single touch of colour that was to record his victory. It is not so easy, however, to convey in words the intellectual impression left by the agile movement of his mind, as it leaped in sudden transition from the graver utterance of some pregnant thought concerning the immutable laws of his art, to those lighter sallies of wit and humour that found their readiest and most congenial exercise in the half-playful, half-malicious portraiture of men we both knew.

So notable indeed and so notorious became the sayings of Whistler, uttered in such moods of laughing irony, that the more deeply serious side of his nature was apt in his own time to be ignored or even denied. And for this he himself was partly to blame. His own manifest enjoyment in the free play of a ready and relentless wit was apt sometimes to obscure that deeper insight into the essential principles of the art he practised, to which no one on occasion could give a finer or more subtle expression.

No one, surely, perceived more clearly that there is in every art an essential quality born of its material and resting with instinctive security upon its special resources and limitations, without which it can make no lasting claim to recognition. He never forgot that the painter or the poet who ventures to take upon himself added burthens of the spirit which he is unable to subdue to the conditions of the medium in which he works, can find no just defence for the violation of any of the conditions the chosen vehicle imposes, by an appeal to the intellectual or emotional value of the ideas he has sought to express. He looked perhaps with even excessive suspicion upon the interpretation through painting of subjects that suggested any sort of reliance upon the modes appropriate to other arts, with the result that the effects he achieved bear sometimes too strongly the stamp of calculated effort. Science was a word he was very fond of employing with regard to painting, and though it implied a just rebuke to those who were wont to make a merely sentimental appeal, it sometimes fettered his own processes and left upon some of the work he produced rather the sense of a protest against the false ideals of others than of the free and spontaneous enjoyment of the beauty in nature that he intended to convey.

But an artist, after all, is either something better or something worse than his theories, and Whistler was infinitely better. His instinct was sure, and within the limits he assigned to himself he moved with faultless security of taste. If the realm he conquered was not over richly furnished it was at any rate kept jealously free from the intrusion of inappropriate elements. Whatever was admitted there had an indisputable right to its artistic existence, and while he excluded much that other men, differently gifted, might equally have subdued to the conditions he was so careful to obey, such beauty as he found in nature was at least always of a kind that painting alone could fitly render.

To watch Whistler at work in his studio was quickly to forget that he had any theories at all. Nothing certainly could less resemble the assured processes of science than his own tentative and sometimes even timid practice; for although the result, when it received the final stamp of his approval, seemed often slight and was always free from the evidence of labour, labour most surely had not been absent, for the ultimate shape given to his design, though it may have represented in itself only a brief period employed in its execution, had in many cases been preceded by unwearying experiment and by many a misdirected adventure that never reached completion at all.

Whistler’s talk in the studio was not often concerned with the subject of Art, and even when Art was the topic it was nearly always his own. His admiration of the genius he unquestionably possessed was unstinted and sincere, and if he avoided any prolonged discussion of the competing claims of his contemporaries, it was, I think, in the unfeigned belief that they deserved no larger consideration. He had his chosen heroes among the masters of the past, but they were few, and their superior pretensions, in his judgment, were so manifest that it seemed sufficient to him to announce their supremacy without further parley as to the inferior claims of their fellows. The position they occupied in his regard was as little open to argument as the place of incontestable superiority he was wont to assign to himself in his own generation. I remember once, when a friend in his presence rashly ventured to accuse him of a lack of catholicity in taste, Whistler in swift response admitted the justice of the charge and excused himself on the ground that he only liked what was good.

But there were causes, apart from the convinced egotism of his nature, which led him by preference towards other topics of conversation. He has written in his lectures and in his letters both wisely and wittily of the proper mission of painting; so wittily, indeed, that his humour and satire are apt sometimes to obscure the sound and serious thought which, on this subject, coloured even his most playful utterances. For, underlying all he said or wrote, was a conviction he took no pains to conceal—that the principles of Art, together with its aims and ideals, were the proper concern only of artists and could scarcely be debated without impropriety by that larger and profaner circle whose praise and appreciation, however, he was by no means disposed to resent. At times he was even greedy of applause, and provided it was full and emphatic enough, showed no inclination to question its source or authority. There were moments, indeed, when, if it appeared to lack volume or vehemence, he was ready himself to supply what was deficient.

It was partly therefore upon principle that he forbore to discuss at any length subjects with which he deemed the layman had no proper concern; partly also because in intimate conversation his innate and powerful sense of humour so loved to assert itself that he wandered, by preference, into fields where it found unfettered play. And so it happened in the long and intimate talks in the studio, while he was at his work, he loved to speak of things that belonged to the outer world, and to let his wit play vividly, sometimes mischievously and even maliciously, upon the qualities and foibles of his friends. Here he was never reticent, and so relentless were his raillery and his sarcasm that one was sometimes tempted to think that his acquaintances, and even his friends, only existed for the purpose of displaying his powers of attack and annihilation. I remember very well, when he was decorating what afterwards became known as the “Peacock Room” in Mr. Leyland’s house, that I used often to visit him at his work, and sometimes shared with him the picnic meals which a devoted satellite would prepare for him in the empty mansion. He was certainly very proud of the elaborate scheme of blue and gold ornament he had devised, but I believe this unalloyed admiration of his own achievement was scarcely so great or so keen as his delighted anticipation of the owner’s shock of surprise when he should return to discover that the handsome and costly stamped leather, which originally adorned the walls of the apartment, had been completely effaced to make room for the newly fashioned pattern of decoration. He already scented the joy of the battle that impended, and this added a peculiar zest to his labours in the accomplishment of a purely artistic task. As he had hoped so indeed it happened, and in the long controversy and conflict that ensued, he found, I believe, the most perfect and unalloyed satisfaction.

His nature, in short, at every stage of his career was impishly militant, and whereas other men are so constituted as to desire peace at any price, there was with Whistler scarcely any cost he deemed too great to secure a hostile encounter. To baulk him of a controversy was to rob him of his peace of mind, and so deeply implanted in him was the fighting spirit that he was sometimes only half-conscious of the wounds he inflicted. Certain it is that, the lists once entered, he was relentless in attack, and availed himself without scruple of any weapon that came to his hand. And yet even in his most saturnine sallies there was an underlying sense of humour that yielded to the onlooker at least a part of the enjoyment that he himself drew from the encounter; while his after recital of the tortuous ingenuity with which he had whipped a harmless misunderstanding into a grave estrangement was always irresistible in its appeal.

But though pitiless in combat, Whistler was not without a chivalrous side to his nature. He was fond enough, to use his own expression, of “collecting scalps,” but his tomahawk was never employed against members of the gentler sex. His manner towards women was unfailingly courteous and even deferential. In their company he laid aside the weapons of war, exhibiting towards them on all occasions a delicacy of sympathy and perception which they instinctively recognised and appreciated. It set them at their ease. They felt they could listen with interest and amusement to his recital of those fearless and sometimes savage contests with the male, in complete security from any danger of the war being carried into their own country. They were conscious, in his presence, of an enduring truce between the sexes: a truce so artfully established and so chivalrously conceded as to arouse no suspicion that they were being treated with the indulgence due to inferiors. There was, indeed, in his own character and personality something of the charm, something also of the weakness, that is commonly supposed to be exclusively feminine. The alertness of his temperament betrayed an intuitive quickness in identifying himself with the mood of the moment that found in them a ready response; and his natural vanity, though it might sometimes seem overpowering to members of his own sex, was so exercised as to leave no doubt that he still held in reserve a full measure of the admiration which was due to theirs.

Even as a craftsman there was something delicately feminine in Whistler’s modes of work. I have often watched him at his own printing-press when he was preparing a plate of one of his etchings, and it was always fascinating to follow the deft and agile movements of his hands as he inked the surface of the copper and then, with successive touches, graduated the varying force of the impression to be taken. Here, as I used to think, his method seemed more assured, his alliance with the mechanical resources of his art more confident, than when he was struggling with the subtler and more complex problems of colour.

I have already spoken of those physical peculiarities with which he had been liberally endowed by nature. They were such as to make him a marked figure in any company in which he appeared, and, so far from being a source of embarrassment to himself, he regarded them as a substantial asset to be carefully cultivated and artfully obtruded upon public notice. He even went so far as to enforce and emphasise what there was of inherited eccentricity in his personal appearance. The single tuft of white hair which lay embedded in the coiling black locks adorning his brow, he regarded with a special complacency and pride; and I was amused one evening in Cheyne Walk, while I watched him dressing for dinner, to observe the infinite pains he bestowed upon this particular item of his toilet. It was already past the hour when we should both have been seated at our friend’s table, but this fact in no way abbreviated the care with which he cultivated and arranged this unique feature in his appearance.

And yet it would be wrong, perhaps, to ascribe the delay only to vanity, because to be late for dinner was with Whistler almost a religion. Certain it was, however, that he took a childish delight in any little studied departures from the rules of ordinary costume. At one time he ostentatiously abandoned the white neck-tie which was the accepted accompaniment of evening dress; at another, a delicate wand-like cane was deemed to be a necessary ornament to be carried in his walks abroad; and yet again he would announce an approved change in fashion by appearing in a pair of spotless white ducks beneath his long black frock-coat. These calculated eccentricities induced in the minds of the crowd the conviction that Whistler deliberately sought a cheap notoriety, and it must be conceded, even by those who recognised the serious side of his nature, that he exhibited at times a strange blend of the man of genius and the showman. And yet this admission might easily be made to convey a false impression. He was in a sense both the one and the other, but their separate functions were never merged or confused. Till his task as an artist was completed no man was more serious in his purpose or more exacting or fastidious in the demands he made upon himself. There was nothing of the charlatan in that part of him which he dedicated to his work; and it was not until the artist was satisfied that he availed himself of such antics as attracted, and perhaps were designed to attract, the astonished attention of the public.

One charge that was often urged against him by his enemies, arose out of the singular choice of titles for his pictures. But it was not, I think, in any spirit of affectation that he elected to describe some of his works in terms only strictly appropriate to music. His “Harmonies” and his “Nocturnes,” though they seemed at the time to indicate a certain wilful perversity, had in reality a true relation to principles in Art which he was earnestly seeking to establish. It has been rightly held of music that, in its detachment from the things of the intellect and its independence of defined human emotion, it stands as a model to all other modes of expression by its jealous guardianship of those indefinable qualities which are of the essence of Art itself. And in a sense it may be said of Whistler that he discharged a like function in the realm of painting. For all appeal made through other means than those strictly belonging to the chosen medium he had neither sympathy nor pity. It was for the incommunicable element in painting, incommunicable save through the unassisted resources of painting itself, that he was constantly striving, and it was his revolt against all alien pretensions that led him to seek and to adopt the analogy of music wherein the saving efficacy of such elements is never questioned.

THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING
AT THE ROMAN EXHIBITION[1]

The British Section of the International Fine Arts Exhibition, to the study of which these pages are designed to serve as introduction, may claim to possess one or two features of exceptional interest. It is the first time that in any exhibition held outside the British Isles a serious endeavour has been made to illustrate the progressive movement of the English school of painting. The works of English painters have time and again been shown in the different capitals of Europe, and it is no longer possible to allege that the masters whose achievements we prize are unknown beyond the limits of our own shores. But the present occasion is the first wherein a serious and successful experiment has been made to render the chosen examples of the art of the past truly representative of the birth and growth of modern art in England and of the distinctive developments of style which have marked its history. And it is peculiarly fitting that this connected panorama of English art should be offered in the capital of a kingdom to whose example the art of every land has at some time owned its indebtedness. If it be true that every road leads to Rome, it is no less true that, since the dawn of the Renaissance, the footsteps of the artists of all northern lands have worn the several ways that make for Italy; and it will be seen, as we come to trace the story of painting in England, that, not only in its earlier appeal but again and again in the successive revolutions of style and method that have marked its progress, it has found renewed encouragement and fresh inspiration in the splendid and varied achievements of the great Italian masters, from Giotto to Michael Angelo, from Bellini to Tintoretto.

The history of painting in England precedes by more than a century the history of English painting. The force of the Reformation had unquestionably the effect of suddenly snapping the artistic tradition. At an earlier time England could boast of a race of artists who, as the illuminated manuscripts of the period clearly show, were able to hold their own with the most perfect masters in that kind that Europe could show; but with the advent of the Reformation the imaginative impulse of our people found a different channel. The strength of our Renaissance sought expression in our literature, and for a considerable period we became and remained indebted for all expression of pictorial design to a race of foreign artists who enjoyed the hospitality of our land. Even before the Reformation was complete Holbein had found a home at the English Court, and at a later period Rubens and his great pupil Van Dyck were invited to our shores. They brought with them to England the great tradition in portraiture that may be traced back to Italy—a tradition having its spring in the style and practice of the masters of Venice, whose devotion to Nature survived as an inheritance to Northern Europe when the more imaginative design of the school of Florence had fallen into decay.

It may be said of all modern art in whatever land we follow its story, that its master currents flow in the direction of portrait and landscape, and it was in these twin streams that the English school, when a century later it came into being, was destined to prove its acknowledged supremacy. But the realistic spirit which from the first had stamped itself upon the great Venetians, even at a period when they seemed to be labouring wholly or mainly in the service of religion, had gathered in its passage towards our shores yet another impulse, which found its first expression in the art of the Low Countries.

Of the painting of genre—that art which dwells lovingly upon the illustration of the social manners of the time—there is already a hint even in Venice itself; but it was in Holland that it first claimed a separate and secure existence; and it was to the examples in this kind, perfected by the Dutch masters, that we owe the achievement of the great painter who may be claimed as the founder of the modern English school. That school may be said, indeed, to date from the birth of William Hogarth. English painters—not a few—had practised before his time, but their work only followed, without rivalling, that of foreign contemporaries under whose influence they laboured. Hogarth was the first who by the independence of his genius gave the seal and stamp of national character to the pictorial illustration of the manners of his age. It was the fashion at one time to dwell almost exclusively upon Hogarth’s qualities as a satirist, to the neglect of those more enduring claims which are now conceded to him as a great master of the art he professed; but the criticism of a later time has repaired that injustice, and Hogarth takes his place now not merely in virtue of the social message he sought to convey, but even more by reason of his great qualities as a colourist and a master of tone. Not that we need underrate or ignore those dramatic elements by which he still makes so strong an appeal to our admiration. It is rare enough, even among the supreme painters of genre, to find so faithful, so penetrating an insight into character. Of all the great Dutchmen whom he succeeded Jan Steen alone can, in this particular, claim to be his rival; and although the English school is specially rich in the class of composition which his genius and invention had initiated, there are none of all those who have practised in a later day who would not still own him as their master.

The two examples secured for the present exhibition show Hogarth at his best, both as a painter and as an inventor. “The Lady’s Last Stake”—contributed by Mr. Pierpont Morgan—even when our admiration has been glutted by the rich evidence it affords of Hogarth’s unrivalled control of a kind of truth that might have found expression in an art other than the art of the painter, still draws from us the unstinted homage due to a great colourist whose chosen tints are submitted with unfailing skill to every delicate and subtle gradation of tone; while in “The Card Party,” lent by Sir Frederick Cook, where these qualities are not less clearly announced, we are left at leisure to follow and appreciate the unflagging observation which registers every detail that serves for the dramatic presentation of the chosen theme.

From the time of Hogarth to our own day this particular style, which he may claim to have originated, has never lacked professors. As it passed into the hands of Wilkie satire is softened by sympathy, the foibles of character are touched with a gentler and more tender spirit, and the adroitly ordered groups, with which he sometimes loves to crowd his canvas, tell, in their final impression, of the presence of a kind of sentiment, sometimes perhaps even of a measure of sentimentalism, which scarcely came within the range of Hogarth’s fiercer survey of life. And, again, in the later work of Orchardson sentiment and satire have both yielded to another ambition that was content to render with unfailing sympathy and distinction of style the finer graces of social life. In the superb picture of “The Young Duke” we may note how clearly the gifts of the painter dominate the scene, his eye ever on the alert for the opportunities of rich and delicate harmonies supplied by every chosen accessory of costume and furniture; and no less eager to exhibit and to record by means of the subtle resources of his art those finer shades of social breeding that the subject suggests. In this power of granting a nameless dignity to the art of genre—a dignity resident in the painter which by some strange magic he contrives to confer upon the people of his creation—Sir William Orchardson sometimes recalls the art of Watteau, who indeed remains unrivalled in his power to perceive and his ability to register those slighter realities of gesture and bearing which give to the rendering of trivial things a distinction which only style can bestow.

It is interesting to turn from this characteristic example of Sir William Orchardson’s style to the work of an elder contemporary in the person of Frith. The two artists—though both may be said to be engaged in the same task—make a widely contrasted appeal. With the former, whatever other message he may intend to convey, the claims of the painter stand foremost. We are conscious of the controlling influence of the colourist and the master of pictorial composition before we are permitted to study or to enjoy the human realities that he has chosen to depict. With Frith, on the other hand, it is the human element in the design that first arrests our attention. Gifts of a purely artistic kind he undoubtedly possessed, as the example here exhibited sufficiently proves—gifts which at one time criticism tended to ignore or to undervalue; but it remains finally true nevertheless that it is as a student of manners, presented in a form sometimes recalling the arts of the theatre, that Frith makes his first appeal to our attention. In this respect he claims kinship with Hogarth himself, whose influence, I doubt not, he would have been proud to acknowledge.

“Coming of Age in the Olden Time,” necessitating, by the choice of its subject, the employment of historic costume, illustrates only one aspect of Frith’s varied talent, and he will perhaps be best remembered by such works as “The Railway Station” and “Ramsgate Sands,” where he is called upon to render with unflinching fidelity those facts of contemporary dress in which painters differently gifted find no picturesque opportunity; and whatever may be Time’s final judgment upon Frith’s claim in the region of pure art, it cannot be questioned that such richly peopled canvases must for ever remain an invaluable record of the outward realities of the generation for which he labored.

The historic side of genre painting is further illustrated in the present collection in the person of Maclise, who, like his great forerunner, William Hogarth, was attracted again and again by the art of the theatre. But Maclise brought to his task certain larger qualities of design and composition which he had won from the study of the great masters of style; and although he never achieved the highest triumphs in the region of the ideal his efforts in that direction left an impress upon his painting that served to distinguish it from the achievements of those who laboured in obedience to a more modest tradition.

The English theatre has attracted the talent of a long line of artists, some of whom, like Clint, are little known in any other sphere. Perhaps the greatest of them all (if we except the name of Hogarth himself) was Johann Zoffany, whose paintings, admirable in the rendering of incident and character, are even more remarkable for his great qualities as a colourist and his perfect mastery over the secrets of tone. As a student of the theatre he may perhaps be seen to best advantage in the several fine examples in the possession of the Garrick Club; but Lord O’Hagan’s picture of Charles Townley the collector, presented in his library with his marbles, asserts with convincing force his right to rank among the great painters of his time.

Among other pictures in this category whose high claims deserve a fulness of consideration which the exigencies of space alone forbid me to grant, I may mention the Eastern study by Lewis, the “Dawn” by E. J. Gregory, and the group of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle by John Pettie.

I have hinted already that in the brief story of our national school of painting we are constantly reminded of the abiding splendours of the art of Italy, and even in the work of men whose genuine victories were won in another sphere there are constant echoes of the larger language moulded by the great masters of the south. For although, at the first, it is only in the allied departments of portrait and landscape that the art of England claims and owns unquestioned supremacy, yet in the career of the gifted painter who may be said to have first firmly established our claim to rank among the schools of Europe we are not allowed to forget the glorious victories of the Italian Renaissance.

It has been sometimes alleged of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s occasional experiments in the grand style that their failure to rival the masters he most admired proves how futile were his studies in that branch of art in which he could never hope to excel. But this, I think, is to take only a shallow and superficial view of the factors that make for excellence in any chosen field of artistic endeavour; for if Sir Joshua’s essays in ideal design now fade into insignificance by comparison with the solid and enduring work he achieved in portraiture, it remains none the less true that the study of those great models towards which his ambition led him has served to grant to his interpretation of individual face and form a measure of added dignity and power that could have been won from no other source. His sketch-book—preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum—while it forms an interesting record of his sojourn in Italy is no less instructive as illustrating his untiring devotion to those great masters who laboured in a realm of art that his own genius was never destined to inhabit; and there is something infinitely touching in the concluding sentences of his valedictory address to the students of the Royal Academy wherein, while frankly confessing his own failure, he reiterates his undiminished admiration of the greatest of the great Florentines. “It will not,” he says, “I hope, be thought presumptuous in me to appear in the train, I cannot say of his imitators, but of his admirers. I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities and to the tastes of the time in which I live. Yet, however unequal I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again I would tread in the steps of that great master. To kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man. I feel a self-congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite. I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man; and I desire that the last words I should pronounce in this academy and from this place might be the name of Michael Angelo.”

In the same year in which these words were uttered there is yet another reference to his earlier ambitions which is scarcely less pathetic. Writing to Sheridan, who desired to purchase the beautiful picture of St. Cecilia, for which Mrs. Sheridan had served as the model, he says:

“It is with great regret that I part with the best picture I ever painted; for though I have every year hoped to paint better and better, and may truly say ‘Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendum,’ it has not been always the case. However, there is now an end of the pursuit; the race is over, whether it is won or lost.”

The judgment of Time has left the land that owned him in no doubt that the race had been worthily won. The prize awarded to him by the acclaim of subsequent generations was not perhaps the prize he coveted the most; and yet if the goal towards which he set his feet was never reached, the time spent in the study of the great masters of the past affords no story of wasted ambition. For without the example of those great masters he loved to study, his own achievement would have been shorn of certain elements of greatness which have served to place him foremost in the ranks of the portrait painters of his time.

In certain styles of painting we are rightly modest in asserting the claims of the English school, but in that goodly list of artists at whose head stands the name of Sir Joshua we may boast a national possession which the art of the time could scarcely rival and most assuredly could not surpass. Europe was then in no mood to take over the rich inheritance of the great Florentines; the successful study of the principles they had expounded had to wait the coming of a later day; but in those departments wherein the art of Europe was still vital England certainly was, at that time, not lagging behind her rivals. Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Hoppner, Raeburn—what names in the contemporary art of the Continent can be cited as their superiors in those branches of painting which they cultivated? Disparagement is no part of the business of criticism, and the victories of one land assuredly take nothing from the triumphs justly won in another. France, too, at that epoch could boast gifted artists greatly distinguished in various fields; but when it is remembered that Watteau, the most distinguished of French colourists, had died two years before Reynolds was born, the outburst of artistic activity, which the men whose names I have cited heralded to the world, may well be viewed as a phenomenon almost unparalleled in the modern history of painting. For it is as colourists, in the truest and highest sense of the term, that the English school at this period of revival makes its claim to supremacy; and it was here that the teaching of Italy—not as expounded through the work of the Florentines, but rather as it travelled northwards, carrying with it the surviving splendours of the Venetians—found a full and worthy response from these gifted exponents of our native art.

The present collection is rich in finely chosen examples of the masters I have named. Reynolds boasted to Malone that he had painted two generations of the beauties of England, and as we turn from the “Kitty Fisher,” lent by the Earl of Crewe, to the portrait of “Anne Dashwood,” or to that of the “Marchioness of Thomond,” from Sir Carl Meyer’s collection, we may well own that no man was more rightly equipped for the task that had fallen upon him. No man save perhaps his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, who, in the alertness and delicacy of his observation as well as by a natural affinity with the gentler sex that was born of a sweet and gracious disposition, seemed specially destined to interpret with loving fidelity the lightest no less than the most characteristic realities of feminine beauty. In weight and dignity of style, the outcome, as I have already hinted, of a diligent study of the great models of the past, in masculine grip and gravity of interpretation, displayed more especially in the portraiture of the most distinguished men of his time, Reynolds, it must be conceded, remains even to this day without a rival in our school. But in the native gifts of a painter Gainsborough owned no superior, and it would be difficult to trace to any individual master of the past, or indeed to any other source than his inborn love of nature, those peculiar qualities of sweetness and grace which set the finest achievements of his brush in a category of their own. A measure of kinship with the great Dutchmen may be discerned in his earlier essays in landscape—a branch of art which he may be said almost to have founded in England; and the final words with which he took leave of the world, “We are all going to heaven and Van Dyck is of the company,” give warrant for the belief that even in portraiture he would willingly have owned his allegiance to the famous pupil of Rubens; but in his actual practice as a portrait painter his own modest and yet commanding personality quickly effaced all record of indebtedness to any other influence than his own inspiration.

It would be easy, if space permitted, to institute an interesting comparison between his own accomplishment and that of his contemporary Sir Joshua. The same personalities sometimes figure upon the canvases of both. The winning beauty of Miss Linley’s face, employed by Sir Joshua in his picture of St. Cecilia, had no less strongly attracted the genius of Gainsborough; and here, as well as in the rendering of the features of Mrs. Siddons, we may note the divergent gifts which these painters separately brought to their task and the varying and matchless qualities which nature surrendered ungrudgingly to both. Speaking generally, it may, I think, be conceded that Gainsborough’s art registered with greater felicity those fleeting graces of gesture and expression that would sometimes escape his more serious rival; while Reynolds, constantly preoccupied by the intellectual appeal made by his sitter, was perhaps more apt to dwell in the features he portrayed upon those deeper and more permanent truths that would serve to mirror mind and character.

That Gainsborough’s vision was not, however, limited to forms of female beauty is shown clearly enough by the several notable examples here exhibited. His portraits of John Eld and Dr. William Pearce, no less than the head of the artist himself, prove that he could acquit himself nobly even when he was not engaged in the more sympathetic task of presenting with faultless grace the lovely women of his time; while Lord Jersey’s “Landscape and Cattle” affords sufficient evidence of what the school of English landscape owes to his initiative.

Of the other distinguished masters of portrait in the century in which these two great names stand pre-eminent we find here adequate representation. Romney is not always faultless as a colourist, nor does his draughtsmanship yield the searching penetration displayed by Reynolds or the more delicate apprehension of the finer facts of expression which constitutes so large a part of Gainsborough’s ineffable charm; but judged at his best, and art may justly appeal against any less generous verdict, he takes his rightful place by the side of both. How good was his best may be seen in Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s fine full-length of Mrs. Scott Jackson, as well as in the group of Mrs. Clay and her child, lent by Mrs. Fleischmann. But Romney had one sitter whose beauty overpowered all others in the appeal it made to the artist, and it is therefore fortunate that the collection includes a portrait of Lady Hamilton, whose fame may be said to be inseparably linked with his own. She, too, in her own person awakens echoes from Italy, for it was at Rome she won the admiration of Goethe in those dramatic assumptions of classical character that are preserved for succeeding generations in Romney’s constantly repeated studies of the face he worshipped.

From these three commanding personalities, which yield brightness to the dawn of our English school of portraiture, we advance by no inglorious progression to the masters who, though now deceased, belong of right to our own day. Hoppner, the younger contemporary of the men I have named, whose career carries us into the next century, is here superbly represented in the contributions from Mrs. Fleischmann and Lord Darnley. Raeburn also, whose masculine and sometimes rugged genius speaks to us with the accent of the north—Raeburn, who at the instigation of Sir Joshua journeyed to Italy to study the great Italian masters—is here seen at his best in the splendid portrait of “The MacNab,” lent by Mrs. Baillie-Hamilton; while near by we find characteristic examples of the art of his fellow-countrymen, Allan Ramsay and Andrew Geddes. Sir Thomas Lawrence may be said to have brought to a close the tradition established by Reynolds, and his practice may therefore be held to form a link with the more modern school. His claims here receive justice in the two portraits lent by Lord Bathurst and Lord Plymouth; nor is the collection without worthy specimens of the art of Opie, whose practice frankly confesses the example and influence of Sir Joshua himself. Among the portrait painters of the younger day, in whose ranks may be counted Frank Holl and Frederick Sandys, Brough, and Furse, two names stand pre-eminent. Watts and Millais in their different appeal register the high-water mark of portraiture during what may be called the Victorian era. The former owned in common with Sir Joshua an unswerving devotion to the great traditions of Italian painting, and may claim equally with Sir Joshua to have won for his work in this kind an imaginative quality legitimately imported from the study of ideal design. Millais stands alone. Of both I shall have to speak again in respect of other claims which their art puts forward, but the position of Millais as a painter of portrait is as independent in its appeal as that of Gainsborough himself.

The incursions into the realm of ideal and decorative art made by English painters of the eighteenth century may not be reckoned among the accepted triumphs of our school. Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, all alike inspired by high ambition and capable, as was shown by their untiring devotion and sacrifice in the cause they had espoused, lacked the means and the endowment to appear with any solid measure of success to an age that was in itself unfitted to receive the message they sought to convey. The untutored and undisciplined genius of William Blake affords an isolated example in his time of a true and deeper understanding of the secrets of the kind of art which these men vainly pursued; but even if Blake had possessed more ample resources as a painter he would none the less have spoken in a language that was strange to the temper of his time; and it was reserved for a later day to forge the means which would secure a genuine revival of the forgotten glories of imaginative design.

The movement associated with the name of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood stands as a landmark in the modern history of our school, nor has it been without lasting influence upon the art of Europe. In the year 1848, which gave it birth, the outlook for painting which aimed at the presentation of any imaginative ideal was not encouraging. Etty, a painter of genuine endowment, still survived, and his unquestioned gifts as a colourist are plainly asserted in the single example included in the present exhibition; but the practice of his later years, as Holman Hunt has justly observed, scarcely offered the most fitting model to a young artist of serious ambition. On the other hand, the waning accomplishment of men who had passed their prime cried aloud for the need of a new return to nature; and the accepted conventions of style, either in themselves outworn or else imperfectly revealed by hands enfeebled and grown old, left the hour ripe for the advent of that small but greatly gifted group of young men whose rebel practice was destined to leave so strong an imprint upon their own and succeeding generations. It would perhaps be difficult to find three painters of equal power whose art was so differently inspired and whose achievement was destined to take such separate and widely divergent forms as Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who stand as the acknowledged heads in this new movement; but their efforts, at the time of which I am speaking, were bound together by a common purpose which prevailed then and has since continued to keep their names linked together in the modern history of our English school. In protest against the fetters imposed upon painting by the tradition of the past—fetters that were by common consent only to be removed by a renewed return to the facts of nature—they trod, in the season of their youth, the same road, although the ultimate development of their separate personalities led them, before many years passed, into paths widely divergent from one another. To judge Rossetti’s talent justly from works collected on the present occasion we must group together the examples in oil and water-colour. The religious phase in his career is indicated by “The Annunciation of the Virgin,” lent by Mrs. Boyce; while the freedom with which his imagination afterwards roamed over those great legends already made memorable in literature is shown by the “Mariana” and the “Dante meeting Beatrice” among the paintings in oil, and perhaps even more conclusively in the exquisite water-colour drawing of “Paolo and Francesca,” lent by Mr. Davis, which may be accepted as a capital instance of his unrivalled power to render the truths of human passion without violating the laws inherent in the art he professed. In his water-colours even more decisively than in his paintings in oil Rossetti clearly announces his great claims as a colourist; and his paintings bear this distinctive mark in their invention of colour that the ordered harmonies he can command are not only beautiful in themselves but that their beauty stands in clear and direct response to the nature of the chosen subject. In this regard assuredly neither of the two men who stand associated with him in the Pre-Raphaelite movement can claim to be his superior. It is perhaps unfortunate for purposes of comparison that the range of Millais’s talent is here not completely represented. “Sir Isumbras at the Ford” is indeed a characteristic example of his earlier period, though it hardly shows the qualities he could then command in the same degree of perfection as would be rendered by the presence of “Lorenzo and Isabella” or of “Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop.” We have, on the other hand, in the “Black Brunswicker” a notable example of that transitional period in Millais’s art wherein the claims of fancy and invention and the overmastering gifts of the realist—gifts that afterwards availed to set him as the greatest portrait painter of his time—are held in momentary balance; and we may find herein expressed an element of Millais’s painting which had already received supreme embodiment in the famous picture of “The Huguenot.” No artist of his time—perhaps no artist of any time—has ever excelled him in the rendering of certain phases of human emotion that transfigure without disturbing the permanent beauty of feminine character. This power remained to him to the end of his career, and it was the perception of it which caused Watts to write to him in 1878, in regard to “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which had received deserved decoration in Paris: “Lucy Ashton’s mouth is worthy of any number of medals.” It is impossible to say in the presence of work of this kind how much has been contributed by the model, how much conferred by the artist; but that the artist’s share in the result is predominant is proved by the fact that nobody else has combined in the same fashion the portraiture of individual features with the most delicate suggestion of the emotion that moves them. In the art of Holman Hunt, always masculine in its character and marked by the signs of indefatigable industry, emphasis is so evenly laid upon all the confluent qualities that contribute to the result that it is hard to signalise or to describe the dominating characteristics of his personality. In his treatment of religious subjects he showed a constant reverence that nevertheless scarcely touched the confines of worship; for the same earnestness of purpose, the same reverent research of truth, asserts itself no less in whatever subject engages his brush. Rare qualities of a purely pictorial kind nearly all his work may claim, and yet it is not always possible to concede to the result, however astonishing in its power, that final seal of beauty without which Art’s victory can never be deemed absolutely complete. “The Scapegoat,” here exhibited, was fiercely disputed at the date of his first appearance, and it is even now not difficult to understand that its appeal must have seemed strange to the temper of the time; but there can be no barrier at any rate to the generous appreciation of the noble qualities displayed in the “Finding of the Saviour in the Temple” or the austere simplicity and sincerity of “Morning Prayer.”

Around these three men who bravely heralded the new movement in English art are grouped the names of others who in different degrees were equally inspired by the principles the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to enforce. For although their earlier efforts encountered bitter attack from the accredited organs of public opinion, they met at the outset with warm response from within the ranks of art itself. The company of their followers at first, indeed, was small; but the quickened spirit of the time had already been in part prepared for the reception of the message they bore. The writings of John Ruskin, in whatever degree his particular judgments upon art matters may be disputed, had already availed to stir the conscience of his generation and to restore to art its rightful place in life. Henceforth it was not possible to think of painting as a thing of mere dilettantism, serving only to minister to the trivial demands of the taste of the hour. He proved to the world that at every season when art has held a dominating place its spirit has been fast linked with the heart and life of the people; and the deep earnestness which in Modern Painters he brought to the task of historical criticism found a ready reflex in the more serious and concentrated intensity of feeling which coloured the work of men of the younger school.

William Dyce, by his declared devotion to the painters of the Quattrocento, had already in part anticipated the practice of the Pre-Raphaelites; and Ford Madox Brown, here represented both as a painter of portrait and as a master of design, though never formally enrolled in the brotherhood, claims by the inherent qualities of his work a prominent place in the revolution that was then in progress. He had been Rossetti’s first master, and to the end of his life, as I can testify, Rossetti retained for him the warmest affection, and Holman Hunt’s somewhat ungracious protest that the direction of his art would have clashed with the aims the Pre-Raphaelites had then in view must be surely deemed unconvincing in the presence of his great picture entitled “Work,” wherein an unflinching reliance upon nature is the dominant characteristic. Frederick Sandys, here admirably represented by the portrait of Mrs. Clabburn and by “Medea,” showed even more conclusively in his varied work in design his right to be reckoned side by side with the leaders I have named; while Burne-Jones, who always generously acknowledged his indebtedness to Rossetti, displayed as his powers developed a kindred attachment to the kind of beauty in painting which finds its well-spring in the art of Florence. The water-colours in the present collection represent him at a time when Rossetti’s example and influence were still dominant, but “Love among the Ruins,” lent by Mrs. Michie, and “The Mirror of Venus,” from the collection of Mr. Goldman, reveal to us the painter in the plenitude of his powers, when with full mastery of resource he revelled in the interpretation of themes of imaginative significance. A great colourist in the sense in which the Florentines use colour—a great designer, gifted from the outset with the power of striking into symbol forms of beauty that might equally serve to fire the fancy of a poet, Burne-Jones holds a unique position in our school; nor are his claims to admiration likely to suffer from the fact that the principles he professed have sometimes been adopted by imitators not sufficiently endowed for so high an endeavour.

In the story of a movement that limitations of space must needs leave inadequate it would be impossible to ignore or to omit the names of two men who worthily occupied a distinguished place in the art of their time. G. F. Watts and Lord Leighton may both be said to stand apart from the particular current of artistic revolution associated with the names I have already cited. The former was already deeply imbued with the spirit of the great Venetians even before the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had come into being, but the poetic impulse, which he owned in common with his younger contemporaries, sets much of his work in clear alliance with theirs. His “Love and Death” illustrates in a form of unquestioned beauty the attempt to combine the sometimes divergent qualities of the two great schools of Italy; and the example set by both reappears in a union that is entirely satisfying when Watts turns to the task of portraiture. Nor could any better examples of his accomplishment have been procured than the figure of Lord Tennyson or the head of Mr. Walter Crane.

Lord Leighton’s finely cultivated talent, though his early sojourn at Florence had coloured the work of his youth, reveals at the hour of its maturity an undivided allegiance to classic ideals. His mediaevalism was a garb quickly discarded. “By degrees,” he once wrote to me, “my growing love for form made me intolerant of the restraints and exigencies of costume and led me more and more, and finally, to a class of subjects, or more accurately to a state of conditions, in which supreme scope is left to pure artistic qualities, in which no form is imposed upon the artist by the tailor, but in which every form is made obedient to the conception of the design he has in hand. These conditions classic subjects afford, and as vehicles therefore of abstract form, which is a thing not of one time but of all time, these subjects can never be obsolete, and though to many they are a dead letter, they can never be an anachronism.” With this confession of faith before us we may measure how far the unceasing labours of a long career availed to satisfy the noble purpose of his youth. A certain lack of virility, an imperfect sense of energy and movement which is needed to give the final sense of vitality to all art, however directed, may perhaps be alleged even against the most complete of his achievements; but the saving sense of grace, revealed in forms often finely proportioned and justly selected, remains as an abiding element in his constant pursuit of classic perfection, and is clearly enough illustrated in such works as the “Summer Moon” and the “Return of Persephone,” which the committee have secured for the present exhibition.

We must return now for a while to the earlier experiments of our school in order to trace the growth of the art of landscape, a department wherein by the consent of Europe our painters hold a place of indisputable supremacy. Gainsborough, as I have already hinted, had found in the surroundings of his Suffolk home the material he needed for the display of his deeply seated love of outward nature; and his achievements in this kind rest as the first foundation of what is most enduringly characteristic in English landscape painting. But as early as the year 1749, when Gainsborough was only a youth of twenty-two, Richard Wilson was already resident in Italy, and had begun that exquisite series of studies from Italian scenery which won so small a meed of praise from his own generation. The special direction of his art was not, indeed, destined to inspire many of those who came after him, for the new spirit of naturalism sought and captured certain qualities of dramatic expressions in the rendering of nature that were not of his seeking; nor was the ordered beauty of his compositions, or the serene charm which characterises his gift as a colourist, likely to be heeded by a race of painters who were already on the alert to seize and record those fleeting effects of changing light and tone which found such splendid embodiment in the vigorous painting of Constable. Constable’s frank reliance upon light and shade as constituting the final element of beauty in landscape could never have been accepted without reserve by Richard Wilson, but the pursuit which Constable initiated has owned an overpowering attraction for nearly all students of nature since his time; and his example, transported to France through the art of Michel, may be allowed to have powerfully inspired that distinguished group of French artists whose work was a part of the outcome of the modern romantic movement. It would be impossible here to distinguish in detail the separate work of English painters who have worthily carried forward the tradition established by Constable; nor is it needful now to vindicate the claims of men like Cotman, Cox, and Crome in an earlier time, or of Hook and Cecil Lawson, Sam Bough, Mason, and Frederick Walker, whose more recent work brings the story of this branch of art down to our own day. Of English landscapists, indeed, the name is legion, and at the head of them all, if we may judge by the extent of the fame he has won, stands the name of Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose genius, heralded to the world by the eloquent advocacy of Ruskin, is here fully illustrated in superb examples from the collections of Mr. Chapman, Lord Strathcona, Mr. Beecham, and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Turner, in his youth, while he was still under the influence of Girtin, might well have owned kinship with Richard Wilson, as both in turn might have confessed their indebtedness to the great Frenchman, Claude Lorraine; but Turner’s talent, as it passed onward in steady development, parted completely with the shackles imposed by earlier authority and left him at the close of a brilliant career in a position of complete isolation and independence. There will always be those—and I may count myself among the number—who will turn with increasing love to the more restrained beauty of his earlier work, and who will seek rather in his water-colours than in his paintings in oil for the finer expression of those more individual qualities which marked the practice of his prime. But personal preference need count for little in the acknowledgment which all alike must freely render, that his genius has conferred a lasting glory upon the English school.

With this brief survey of the work of deceased British artists the mission of the critic may here fitly end. The purpose of such an introduction as I have attempted is sufficiently served if, in sketching the growth of our school from its foundation in the middle of the eighteenth century, I have succeeded in indicating the several diverse currents which have contributed to its development, and have left so rich a heritage in achievement and example to the men of a younger day. Of the varied quality of that later work the exhibition must be left to speak for itself. That the product of our time lacks nothing of vitality is sufficiently shown in the spirit of restless and untiring experiment which marks the varied output of our younger school; and that it still preserves among many of its exponents a loyal adherence to the imperishable traditions of the past is no less clearly asserted in the work of men who are now labouring with undiminished faith in the ideals established by an earlier generation. Of Subject and Portrait, in the art that leans for its support upon qualities of decorative design and in the direct and searching questionings of nature, noticeable in every direction and manifest specially in the treatment of landscape, there is a rich and abundant harvest in the present collection.