Modern Painting

by George Moore

To go one better than this, I should have to say the picture was as good as Velasquez, and to simply endorse Mr. MacColl's words would be a second-hand sort of criticism to which I am not accustomed. Besides, to do so would be to express nothing of my own personal sensations in regard to this picture. So I will say at once that I do not understand the introduction of Romney's name into the argument. If comparison there must be, surely Mr. Watts would furnish one more appropriate. Both in the seeing and in the execution the portrait seems nearer to Mr. Watts than to Romney. Of Romney's gaiety there is no trace in Mr. Steer's picture.

The girl sits in a light wooden arm-chair—her arm stretched in front of her, the hands held between her knees—looking out of the picture somewhat stolidly. The Lady Hamilton mood was an exaggerated mood, but there is something of it in every portrait at all characteristic of our great eighteenth-century artist. The portrait exhibited in this year's show of Old Masters in the Academy will do—the lady who walks forward, her hands held in front of her bosom, the fingers pressed together, the white dress floating from the hips, the white brought down with a yellow glaze. I do not think that we find either that gaiety or those glazes in Mr. Steer. From many a Romney the cleaner has removed an outer skin, but I am not speaking of those pictures.

But if I see very little Romney in Steer's picture, I am thankful that I see at least very rare distinction in the figuration of a beautiful and decorative ideal—a girl in blue sitting with her back to an open window, full of the blue night, and on the other side the grey blind, yellowing slightly under the glare of the lamp. I appreciate the very remarkable and beautiful compromise between portrait-painting and decoration. I see rare distinction (we must not be afraid of the word distinction in speaking of Mr. Steer) in his choice of what to draw. The colour scheme is well maintained, somewhat in the manner of Mr. Watts, but neither the blue of the dress nor the blue of the night is intrinsically beautiful, and we have only to think of the blues that Whistler or Manet would have found to understand how deficient they are.

The drawing of the face is neither a synthesis, nor is it intimately characteristic of the model: it is simply rudimentary. A round girlish face with a curled mouth and an ugly shadow which does not express the nose. The shoulders are there, that we are told, but the anatomies are wanting, and the body is without its natural thickness. Nor is the drawing more explicit in its exterior lines than it is in its inner. There is hardly an arm in that sleeve; the elbow would be difficult to find, and the construction of the waist and hips is uncertain; the drawing does not speak like Mr. Sargent's. Look across the room at his portrait of a lady in white satin and you will see there a shadow, so exact, so precise, so well understood, that the width of the body is placed beyond doubt.

But the most radical fault in the portrait I have yet to point out; it is lacking in atmosphere. There is none between us and the girl, hardly any between the girl's head and the wall. The lamp-light effect is conveyed by what Mr. MacColl would perhaps call a symbol, by the shadow of the girl's head. We look in vain for transparent darknesses, lights surrounded by shadows, transposition of tones, and the aspect of things; the girl sits in a full diffused light, and were it not for the shadow on the wall and the shadow cast by the nose, she might be sitting in a conservatory. Speaking of another picture by Mr. Steer, "Boulogne Sands", Mr. MacColl says: "The children playing, the holiday encampment of the bathers' tents, the glint of people flaunting themselves like flags, the dazzle of sand and sea, and over and through it all the chattering lights of noon." I seize upon the phrase, "The people flaunting themselves like flags." The simile is a pretty one, and what suggested it to the writer is the detached colour in the picture; and the colours are detached because there is no atmosphere to bind them together; there are no attenuations, transpositions of tone—in a word, none of those combinations of light and shade which make une atmosphère de tableau.

And Mr. Steer's picture is merely an instance of a general tendency which for the last twenty years has widened the gulf between modern and ancient painting. It was Manet who first suggested la peinture claire, and his suggestion has been developed by Roll, Monet, and others, until oil-painting has become little more than a sheet of white paper slightly tinted. Values have been diverted from their original mission, which was to build up une atmosphère de tableau, and now every value and colour finely observed seem to have for mission the abolition of chiaroscuro. Without atmosphere painting becomes a mosaic, and Mr. MacColl seems prepared to defend this return to archaic formulas. This is what he says: "The sky of the sea-beach, for example, if it be taken as representing form and texture, is ridiculous; it is like something rough and chippy, and if the suggestion gets too much in the way the method has overshot its mark. Its mark is to express by a symbol the vivid life in the sky-colour, the sea-colour, and the sand-colour, and it is doubtful if the richness and subtlety of those colours can be conveyed in any other way." Here I fail altogether to understand. If the sky's beauty can be expressed by a symbol, why cannot the beauty of men and women be expressed in the same way? How the infinities of aërial perspective can be expressed by a symbol, I have no slightest notion; nor do I think that Mr. MacColl has. In striving to excuse deficiencies in a painter whose very real and loyal talent we both admire, he has allowed his pen to run into dangerous sophistries. "The matter of handling," he continues, "is then a moot point—a question of temperament." Is this so?

That some men are born with a special aptitude for handling colour as other men are born with a special sense of proportions is undeniable; but Mr. MacColl's thought goes further than this barren platitude, and if he means, as I think he does, that the faculty of handling is more instinctive than that of drawing, I should like to point out to him that handling did not become a merely personal caprice until the present century. A collection of ancient pictures does not present such endless experimentation with the material as a collection of modern pictures. Rubens, Hals, Velasquez, and Gainsborough do not contradict each other so violently regarding their use of the material as do Watts, Leighton, Millais, and Orchardson.

In the nineteenth century no one has made such beautiful use of the material as Manet and Whistler, and we find these two painters using it respectively exactly like Hals and Velasquez. It would therefore seem that those who excel in the use of paint are agreed as to the handling of it, just as all good dancers are agreed as to the step. But, though all good dancers dance the same step, each brings into his practice of it an individuality of movement and sense of rhythm sufficient to prevent it from becoming mechanical. The ancient painters relied on differences of feeling and seeing for originality rather than on eccentric handling of colour; and all these extraordinary executions which we meet in every exhibition of modern pictures are in truth no more than frantic efforts either to escape from the thraldom of a bad primary education, or attempts to disguise ignorance in fantastic formulas. That which cannot be referred back to the classics is not right, and I at least know not where to look among the acknowledged masters for justification for Mr. Steer's jagged brushwork.

Mr. Walter Sickert, whose temperament is more irresponsible, is nevertheless content within the traditions of oil-painting. He exhibits two portraits, both very clever and neither satisfactory, for neither are carried beyond the salient lines of character. Nature has gifted Mr. Sickert with a keen hatred of the commonplace; his vision of life is at once complex and fragmentary, his command on drawing slow and uncertain, his rendering therefore as spasmodic as a poem by Browning. He picks up the connecting links with difficulty, and even his most complete work is full of omissions. The defect—for it is a defect—is by no means so fatal in the art-value of a painting as the futile explanations so dearly beloved by the ignorant. Manet was to the end the victim of man's natural dislike of ellipses, and Mr. Walter Sickert is suffering the same fate. Still, even the most remote intelligence should be able to gather something of the merit of the portrait of Miss Minnie Cunningham. How well she is in that long red frock—a vermilion silhouette on a rich brown background! I should be still more pleased if the vermilion had been slightly broken with yellow ochre; but then, at heart, I am no more than un vieux classique. The edges of the vermilion hat are lightened where it receives the glare of the foot-lights; and the face does not suffer from the red. It is as light, as pretty, as suggestive as may be. The thinness of the hand and wrist is well insisted upon, and the trip of the legs, just before she turns, realises, and in a manner I have not seen elsewhere, the enigma of the artificial life of the stage.

The aestheticism of the Glasgow school, of which we have heard so much lately, is identical with that of the New English Art Club, and the two societies are in a measure affiliated. Nearly all the members of the Glasgow school are members of the New English Art Club, and it is regrettable that they do not unite and give us an exhibition that would fairly stare the Academy out of countenance. Among the Glasgow painters the most prominent and valid talent is Mr. Guthrie's. His achievements are more considerable and more personal; and he seems to approach very near to a full expression of the pictorial aspirations of his generation. Years ago his name was made known to me by a portrait of singular beauty; an oasis it was in a barren and bitter desert of Salon pictures. Since then he has adopted a different and better method of painting; and an excellent example of his present style is his portrait of Miss Spencer, a lady in a mauve gown. The slightness of the intention may be urged against the picture; it is no more than a charming decoration faintly flushed with life. But in his management of the mauve Mr. Guthrie achieved quite a little triumph: and the foreground, which is a very thin grey passed over a dark ground, is delicious, and the placing of the signature is in the right place. Most artists sign their pictures in the same place. But the signature should take a different place in every picture, for in every picture there is one and only one right place for the signature; and the true artist never fails to find the place which his work has chosen and consecrated for his name.