Modern Painting

by George Moore

Looking at this picture, the ordinary man will say, "If such ugliness as that exists, I don't want to see it. Why paint such subjects?" And at least the first part of this criticism seems to me to be quite incontrovertible. I can imagine no valid reason for the portrayal of so much ugliness; and, what is more important, I can find among the unquestioned masters no slightest precedent for the blank realism of this picture. The ordinary man's aversion to such ugliness seems to me to be entirely right, and I only join issue with him when he says, "Why paint such subjects?" Why not? For all subjects contain elements of beauty; ugliness does not exist for the eye that sees beautifully, and meanness vanishes if the sensation is a noble one. Have not the very subjects which Mr. Clausen sees so meanly, and which he degrades below the level even of the photograph, been seen nobly, and have they not been rendered incomparably touching, even august, by——Well, the whole world knows by whom. But it will be said that Mr, Clausen painted these people as he saw them. I dare say he did; but if he could not see these field-folk differently, he should have abstained from painting them.

The mission of art is not truth, but beauty; and I know of no great work—I will go even further, I know no even tolerable work—in literature or in painting in which the element of beauty does not inform the intention. Art is surely but a series of conventions which enable us to express our special sense of beauty—for beauty is everywhere, and abounds in subtle manifestations. Things ugly in themselves become beautiful by association; or perhaps I should say that they become picturesque. The slightest insistance in a line will redeem and make artistically interesting the ugliest face. Look at Degas' ballet-girls, and say if, artistically, they are not beautiful. I defy you to say that they are mean. Again, an alteration in the light and shade will create beautiful pictures among the meanest brick buildings that ever were run up by the jerry-builder. See the violet suburb stretching into the golden sunset. How exquisite it has become! how full of suggestion and fairy tale! A picturesque shadow will redeem the squalor of the meanest garret, and the subdued light of the little kitchen where the red-petticoated housewife is sweeping must contrast so delicately with the white glare of the brick yard where the neighbour stands in parley, leaning against the doorpost, that the humble life of the place is transformed and poetised. This was the ABC of Dutch art; it was the Dutchmen who first found out that with the poetising aid of light and shade the meanest and most commonplace incidents of every-day life could be made the subjects of pictures.

There are no merits in painting except technical merits; and though my criticism of Mr. Clausen's picture may at first sight seem to be a literary criticism, it is in truth a strictly technical criticism. For Mr. Clausen has neglected the admirable lessons which our Dutch cousins taught us two hundred years ago; he has neglected to avail himself of those principles of chiaroscuro which they perfected, and which would have enabled him to redeem the grossness, the ugliness, the meanness inherent in his subject. I said that he had gone further, in abject realism, than a photograph. I do not think I have exaggerated. It is not probable that those peasants would look so ugly in a photograph as they do in his picture. For had they been photographed, the chances are that some shadow would have clothed, would have hid, something, and a chance gleam might have concentrated the attention on some particular spot. Nine times out of ten the exposure of the plate would not have taken place in a moment of flat grey light.

But it is the theory of Mr. Clausen and his school that it is right and proper to take a six-foot canvas into the open, and paint the entire picture from Nature. But when the sun is shining, it is not possible to paint for more than an hour—an hour and a half at most. At the end of that time the shadows have moved so much that the effect is wholly different. But on a grey day it is possible to paint on the same picture for four or five hours. Hence the preference shown by this school for grey days. Then the whole subject is seen clearly, like a newspaper; and the artist, if he is a realist, copies every patch on the trousers, and does not omit to tell us how many nails have fallen from the great clay-stained boots. Pre-Raphaelitism is only possible among august and beautiful things, when the subjects of the pictures are Virgins and angels, and the accessories are marbles, agate columns, Persian carpets, gold enwoven robes and vestments, ivories, engraven metals, pearls, velvets and silks, and when the object of the painter is to convey a sensation of the beauty of these materials by the luxury and beauty of the workmanship. The common workaday world, with accessories of tin pots and pans, corduroy breeches and clay-pipes, can be only depicted by a series of ellipses through a mystery of light and shade.

Beauty of some sort there must be in a work of art, and the very conditions under which Mr. Clausen painted precluded any beauty from entering into his picture. But this year Mr. Clausen seems to have shaken himself free from his early education, and he exhibits a picture, conceived in an entirely different spirit, in this Academy. Turning to my notes I find it thus described: "A small canvas containing three mowers in a flowering meadow. Two are mowing; the third, a little to the left, sharpens his scythe. The sky is deep and lowering—a sultry summer day, a little unpleasant in colour, but true. At the end of the meadow the trees gleam. The earth is wrapped in a hot mist, the result of the heat, and through it the sun sheds a somewhat diffused and oven-like heat. There are heavy clouds overhead, for the gleam that passes over the three white shirts is transitory and uncertain. The handling is woolly and unpleasant, but handling can be overlooked when a canvas exhales a deep sensation of life. The movement of mowing—I should have said movements, for the men mow differently; one is older than the other—is admirably expressed. And the principal figure, though placed in the immediate foreground, is in and not out of the atmosphere. The difficulty of the trousers has been overcome by generalisation; the garment has not been copied patch by patch. The distribution of light is admirable; nowhere does it escape from the frame. J. F. Millet has painted many a worse picture."

Mr. Solomon and Mr. Hacker have both turned to mythology for the subjects of their pictures. And the beautiful and touching legends of Orpheus, and the Annunciation, have been treated by them with the indifference of "our special artist", who places the firemen on the right, the pump on the left, and the blazing house in the middle of the picture. These pictures are therefore typical of a great deal of historical painting of our time; and I speak of them because they give me an opportunity of pointing out that before deciding to treat a page of history or legend, the painter should come to conclusions with himself regarding the goal which he desires to obtain. There are but two.

Either the legend passes unperceived in pomp of colour and wealth of design, or the picture is a visible interpretation of the legend. The Venetians were able to disregard the legend, but in centuries less richly endowed with pictorial genius painters are inclined to support their failing art with the psychological interest their imaginations draw from it. But imaginative interpretation should not be confused with bald illustration. The Academicians cannot understand why, if we praise "Dante seeing Beatrice in a Dream", we should vilify Mr. Fildes' "Doctor". In both cases a story is told, in neither case is the execution excellent. Why then should one be a picture and the other no more than a bald illustration? The question is a vexed one, and the only conclusion that we can draw seems to be that sentimentality pollutes, the anecdote degrades, wit altogether ruins; only great thought may enter into art. Rossetti is a painter we admire, and we place him above Mr. Fildes, because his interpretations are more imaginative. We condone his lack of pictorial power, because he could think, and we appreciate his Annunciation—the "Ecce Ancilla Domini!" in the National Gallery, principally because he has looked deep into the legend, and revealed its true and human significance.

It is a small picture, about three feet by two, and is destitute of all technical accomplishment, or even habit. It is painted in white and blue, and the streak of red in the foreground, the red of a screen on which is embroidered the lily—emblem of purity—adds to the chill and coldness. Drawn up upon her white bed the Virgin crouches, silent with expectation, listening to the mystic dream that has come upon her in the dim hush of dawn. The large blue eyes gleam with some strange joy that is quickening in her. The mouth and chin tell no tale, but the eyes are deep pools of light, and mirror the soul that is on fire within. The red hair falls about her, a symbol of the soul. In the drawn-up knees, faintly outlined beneath the white sheet, the painter hints at her body's beauty. One arm is cast forward, the hand not clenched but stricken. Behind her a blue curtain hangs straight from iron rods set on either side of the bed. Above the curtain a lamp is burning dimly, blighted by the pallor of the dawn. A dead, faint sky—the faint ashen sky which precedes the first rose tint; the circular window is filled with it, and the paling blue of the sky's colour contrasts with the deep blue of the bed's curtain, on which the Virgin's red hair is painted.

The angel stands by the side of the white bed—I should say floats, his fair feet hanging out of a few pale flames. White raiment clothes him, falling in long folds, leaving the arms and feet bare; in the right hand he holds a lily all in blossom; the left hand is extended in rigid gesture of warning. Brown-gold hair grows thick about the angel's neck; the shadowed profile is outlined against the hard, sad sky; the expression of the face is deep and sphinx-like; he has come, it is clear, from vast realms of light, where uncertainty and doubt are unknown. The Dove passes by him towards the Virgin. Look upon her again, crouching in her white bed, her knees drawn to her bosom, her deep blue eyes—her dawn-tinted eyes—filled with ache, dream, and expectation. The shadows of dawn are on wall and floor—strange, blue shadows!—the Virgin's shadow lies on the wall, the angel's shadow falls across the coverlet.

Here, at least, there is drama, and the highest form of drama—spiritual drama; here, at least, there is story, and the highest form of story—symbol and suggestion. Rossetti has revealed the essence of this intensely human story—a story that, whenever we look below the surface, which is mediaeval and religious, we recognise as a story of to-day, of yesterday, of all time. A girl thralled by the mystery of conception awakes at morn in palpitations, seeing visions.