I have no doubt that if one were to go to Spain and visit the studios of the resident artists, one would find very little of the Fortuny element. Probably the pictures would be more like Portuguese work, which of all European schools is the most backward. Setting aside, however, the question as to how far the Fortuny style can be called national, I will hazard a few remarks about its merits and faults.
In the first place, I think we ought to welcome any novelty in art, provided the novelty is not downright absurd, and a man who like Fortuny revolutionized modern art (at any rate in the south of Europe), certainly deserves consideration.
His pictures are characterized by a wonderful delicacy of execution and brilliancy of color. His drawing is firm and masterly. With all these good qualities I cannot consider him to have been a great artist. In the first place, the subjects he affected were of the most frivolous and meretricious description. Secondly, the general effect in his pictures is not sufficiently attended to. I have heard them compared to those sheets one sometimes sees composed of a jumble of small photographs. Each individual figure or gaudy bit of stuff is perfect by itself, but the whole picture is deficient in effect.
Finally, the execution wants that breadth and manliness which are so conspicuous in the best works of Meissonier. Much as I admire any man of genius who departs from the beaten track and creates a style of his own, I cannot help thinking that Fortuny has been much over-rated.
Many of his followers’ works resemble the crude wall-papers and chintzes which used to be common before South Kensington was in existence.
Pinks, light blues, and coal-tar dyes of the most violent hues (colors which would drive our æsthetic amateurs mad) here run riot. The execution is always clever, but the offence against good taste in color is not to be got over. I do not recollect any landscape work in the Spanish gallery except as backgrounds to the figure pictures. If I were a Spanish artist I should leave the fripperies of the boudoir, and turn my attention to the grand forms of rock and forest which abound in the Asturias, or to the sierras of Andalusia, with their semitropical vegetation.
Of Russia and the United States as picture-producing countries but little can be said. There are a few Russians scattered over Germany, France, and Italy, who paint and exhibit pictures which pass muster more or less creditably.
Some give a Russian flavor to their work by painting Muscovite peasants, sledges, wolves and bears, but even these national pictures might have been done by French or German artists as far as the execution goes. The eye was not impressed in the Russian gallery, as it was in the English, Austrian, or Spanish departments, by some national peculiarity.
The large picture which obtained one of the medals of honor was painted in Rome. It represented one of the most barbarous episodes of Nero’s persecution of the Christians.
I thought it clever as a decorative work, but very weak in drawing.