There are pretty girls (even in France) amongst the peasant class, although they are certainly rare. There are plenty of fête days when every woman makes herself as smart as she can; but Millet knew better than to paint pretty girls and smart dresses. Instead of this, he depicted the true types of French peasantry, gaunt, hard-featured women, dressed in the coarsest garments, and shod with wooden sabots. The novelty of truth was unwelcome at first to the Parisian public. They had so long been accustomed to Opera Comique peasants that they had lost relish for the genuine article; but by degrees they began to perceive that these uncouth figures were very like the Jeannes and the Victoires they knew à la campagne. Moreover, they did not fail to observe that the subjects chosen by the artist were of that homely, agricultural kind peculiar to the French peasantry. They smelt of the village dunghill, and this was the great secret of their success.
I am often told by people who don’t know much about art, that they have thought of “such a capital subject for a picture,” and it generally turns out to be something odd or incongruous, and not at all fitted for painting. For several years we have had pictures sent in for exhibition, representing children playing at judge and jury, police-courts, auctions, etc. In these pictures the children are all dressed up to represent policemen, barristers, plaintiffs, and defendants. Moreover, they have so thoroughly learned their parts that their action is no longer childlike. Some of these pictures are very well painted, but the principle is so wrong and false that we now invariably refuse them admission.
Children should, in a picture, be engaged on something childlike. Thus it would be perfectly natural for children to play at being wild beasts, making use of any bear or wolf skin which happened to be handy. Coach-and-horses, hen-and-chickens, are again legitimate games for children, and therefore proper for painting; but in the arts we don’t want elaborately got-up burlesque.
A group of young children on the sea-sands, at work with their wooden shovels, would by some be thought a stupid kind of subject, hardly worthy of being painted at all; but make the same children overtaken by the tide, with a steep cliff behind them, and probably you will have a great success, especially if you make your little figures expressing their fear or courage in a theatrical and unchildlike manner.
The first group would be a typical one—typical of the seaside and childhood; the second would not be absolutely impossible (like the bewigged and behelmeted youngsters above mentioned), but it would be somewhat exceptional, and therefore, in my opinion, not so suitable for painting as the first group.
In the same way with landscape, the spot you select for pitching your umbrella should not be mean and ugly, neither should it be overpoweringly grand and beautiful. Pictures representing the Falls of Niagara or the gorges of the Rocky Mountains are generally failures. I have in a former lecture praised the Belgian landscape-painters, and I think that a good deal of their merit lies in the happy choice of subjects. They are certainly not classical, like the old school of French landscape-painters, nor do they affect the dreariest commonplace, like some of the moderns. They neither paint precipices and snowy mountains, nor dull stretches of poplar-skirted high-road. Their pictures are to me most interesting, not only on account of their technical excellence, but from the good taste shown in the selection of the subjects.
Incidents which are out of harmony with the character of the persons engaged, form capital materials for caricature. The late John Leech showed the nicest discrimination in his selection of subjects. When he gave us pictures of character, nothing could be better than his sporting scenes, or his bits from the mining districts. When he wanted to raise a laugh at something paradoxical, he would give us a lot of mutes making merry after a respectable funeral, or a used-up swell eating periwinkles with a pin on the top of a ’bus. In both these cases it was the sharp contrast between the usual habits of the persons and their exceptional occupation at the time which made the fun, and very good fun it was too; but in an oil picture which takes some months to paint, the humor ought to be of a more delicate kind. I know of no better example of the kind of humor I mean than Wilkie’s “Blind Fiddler.”
Before closing my lecture I should wish to notice a certain kind of pictures which do not fit in well with any of the classes I have mentioned. The pictures I mean are those which are painted expressly to teach some lesson, or to inculcate some moral precept. The great originator of this kind of art was Hogarth. Before him nothing of the sort had ever been done, and since his death no artist has equalled him in this particular line. Much, however, as I admire Hogarth as a painter, I cannot coincide with all the praise that has been showered on him as a great moral teacher. He has often been compared to Molière, but the great Frenchman attacked the vices and follies of his day with a sharp rapier, whereas Hogarth wielded a heavy bludgeon. Indeed, I think it very doubtful whether our art can be converted into an active agent in the cause of morality. The touches of ridicule which a clever writer uses with so much effect are very apt to become ponderous when embedded in oil paint. Hogarth’s reputation may well be allowed to rest on his numerous technical excellences without hoisting him upon a pedestal as a great apostle of morality. In like manner the name of Cruickshank will be preserved as the clever draughtsman and caricaturist, and not as the champion of teetotalism.
In mitigation, however, of Hogarth’s sledge-hammer style of belaboring vice, we must bear in mind that the age in which he lived was a very gross and brutal one, and that his “Rake’s Progress,” his “Marriage à la Mode,” and similar works, which to us appear exaggerated or caricatured, were considered by his contemporaries to be very true to nature.
To return to the proper business this evening, which is not to criticise painters and their work, but to discuss subjects for painting, I cannot say I particularly delight in the class under notice.