A Kensington Museum student would have drawn that flower carefully with a lead pencil; it would be washed with colour and stippled until it reached the quality of wool, which is so much admired in that art training-school; and whenever the young lady was not satisfied with the turn her work was taking, she would wash the displeasing portion out and start afresh. The difference—there are other differences —but the difference we are concerned with between this hypothetical young person of Kensington education and Mr. James, is that the drawing which Mr. James exhibits is not a faithful record of all the difficulties that are met with in painting an orchid. A hundred orchids preceded the orchid on the wall—some were good in colour and failed in drawing, and vice versâ. Others were excellent in drawing and colour, but the backgrounds did not come out right. All these were destroyed. That mauve and grey orchid was probably not even sketched in with a lead pencil. Mr. James desired an uninterrupted expression of its beauty: to first sketch it with a pencil would be to lose something of his first vividness of impression. It must flow straight out of the brush. But to attain such fluency it was necessary to paint that orchid a hundred times before its form and colour were learnt sufficiently to admit of the expression of all the flower's beauty in one painting. It is not that Mr. James has laboured less but ten times more than the Kensington student. But all the preliminary labour having been discarded, it seems as simple and as slight a thing as may be—a flower in a glass, the flower drawn only in its essentials, the glass faintly indicated, a flowing tint of mauve dissolving to grey, the red heart of the flower for the centre of interest. A decoration for where? I imagine it in a boudoir whose walls are stretched and whose windows are curtained with grey silk. From the ceiling hangs a chandelier, cut glass—pure Louis XV. The furniture that I see is modern; but here and there a tabouret, a guéridon, or a delicate étagère, filled with tiny volumes of Musset and two or three rare modern writers, recall the eighteenth century. And who sits in this delicate boudoir perfumed with a faint scent, a sachet-scented pocket-handkerchief? Surely one of Sargent's ladies. Perhaps the lady in the shot-silk dress who sat on an eighteenth-century French sofa two years ago in the Academy, her tiny, plump, curved white hand, drawn as well in its interior as in exterior limits, hanging over the gilt arm of the sofa. But she sits now, in the boudoir I have imagined, in a low arm-chair covered with grey silk; her feet lie one over the other on the long-haired rug; the fire burns low in the grate, and the soft spring sunlight laps through the lace curtains, filling the room with a bland, moody, retrospective atmosphere. She sits facing Mr. James's water-colour. She is looking at it, she does not see it; her thoughts are far away, and their importance is slight.
THE WHISTLER ALBUM.
The photograph of the portrait of Miss Alexander is as suggestive of the colour as a pianoforte arrangement of Tristan is of the orchestration. The sounds of the different instruments come through the thin tinkle of the piano just as the colour of the blond hair, the delicate passages of green-grey and green, come through the black and white of the photograph. Truly a beautiful thing! But "Before the Mirror" reflects perhaps a deeper beauty. The influence of that strange man, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is sufficiently plain in this picture. He who could execute hardly at all in paint, and whose verse is Italian, though the author wrote and spoke no language but English, foisted the character of his genius upon all the poetry and painting of his generation. It is as present in this picture as it is in Swinburne's first volume of Poems and Ballads. Mr. Whistler took the type of woman and the sentiment of the picture from Rossetti; he saw that even in painting Rossetti had something to say, and, lest an artistic thought should be lost to the world through inadequate expression, he painted this picture. He did not go on painting pictures in the Rossetti sentiment, because he thought he had exhausted Rossetti in one picture. In this he was possibly mistaken, but the large, white, indolent shoulders, misshapen, almost grotesque in original Rossettis, are here in beautiful prime and plenitude; the line of the head and neck, the hair falling over the stooped shoulder —a sensuous dream it is; all her body's beauty, to borrow a phrase from Rossetti, is in that white dress; and the beauty of the arm in its full white sleeve lies along the white chimney-piece, the fingers languidly open: two fallen over the edge, two touching the blue vase. Note how beautiful is the placing of this figure in the picture; how the golden head shines, high up in the right-hand corner, and the white dress and white-sleeved arms fill the picture with an exquisite music of proportion. The dress cuts against the black grate, and the angle of black is the very happiest; it is brightened with pink sprays of azaleas, and they seem to whisper the very enchanted bloom of their life into the picture. Never did Dutch or Japanese artist paint flowers like these. And the fluent music of the painting seems only to enforce the languor and reverie which this canvas exhales: the languor of white dress and gold hair; languor and golden reverie float in the mirror like a sunset in placid waters. The profile in full light is thrilled with grief of present hours; the full face half lost in shadow, far away—a ghost of a dead self—is dreaming with half-closed eyes, unmindful of what may be. By her mirror, gowned in white as if for dreams, she watches life flowing past her, and she knows of no use to make of it.
INGRES.
Raphael was a great designer, but there are a purity and a passion in Ingres' line for the like of which we have to go back to the Greeks. Apelles could not have realised more exquisite simplifications, could not have dreamed into any of his lost works a purer soul of beauty than Ingres did into the head, arms, and torso of "La Source". The line that floats about the muscles of an arm is illusive, evanescent, as an evening-tinted sky; and none except the Greeks and Ingres have attained such mystery of line: not Raphael, not even Michael Angelo in the romantic anatomies of his stupendous creations. Ingres was a Frenchman animated by the soul of an ancient Greek, an ancient Greek who lost himself in Japan. There is as much mystery in Ingres' line as in Rembrandt's light and shade. The arms and wrists and hands of the lady seated among the blue cushions in the Louvre are as illusive as any one of Mr. Whistler's "Nocturnes". The beautiful "Andromeda", head and throat leaned back almost out of nature, wild eyes and mass of heavy hair, long white arms uplifted, chained to the basalt,—how rare the simplifications, those arms, that body, the straight flanks and slender leg advancing,—are made of lines simple and beautiful as those which in the Venus of Milo realise the architectural beauty of woman. We shrink from such comparison, for perforce we see that the grandeur of the Venus is not in the Andromeda: but in both is the same quality of beauty. In the drawing for the odalisque, in her long back, wonderful as a stem of woodbine, there is the very same love of form which a Greek expressed with the benign ease of a god speaking his creation through the harmonious universe.
But the pure, unconscious love of form, inherited from the Greeks, sometimes turned to passion in Ingres: not in "La Source", she is wholly Greek; but in the beautiful sinuous back of the odalisque we perceive some of the exasperation of nerves which betrays our century. If Phidias' sketches had come down to us, the margin filled with his hesitations, we should know more of his intimate personality. You notice, my dear reader, how intolerant I am of criticism of my idol, how I repudiate any slight suggestion of imperfection, how I turn upon myself and defend my god. Before going to bed, I often stand, candle in hand, before the Roman lady and enumerate the adorable perfections of the drawing. I am aware of my weakness, I have pleaded guilty to an idolatrous worship, but, if I have expressed myself as I intended, my great love will seem neither vain nor unreasonable. For surely for quality of beautiful line this man stands nearer to the Greeks than any other.
SOME JAPANESE PRINTS.
"Ladies Under Trees". Not Japanese ladies walking under Japanese trees—that is to say, trees peculiar to Japan, planted and fashioned according to the mode of Japan—but merely ladies walking under trees. True that the costumes are Japanese, the writing on the wall is in Japanese characters, the umbrellas and the idol on the tray are Japanese; universality is not attained by the simple device of dressing the model in a sheet and eliminating all accessories that might betray time and country; the great artist accepts the costume of his time and all the special signs of his time, and merely by the lovely exercise of genius the mere accidents of a generation become the symbolic expression of universal sensation and lasting truths. Do not ask me how this transformation is effected; it is the secret of every great artist, a secret which he exercises unconsciously, and which no critic has explained.
Looking at this yard of coloured print, I ask myself how it is that ever since art began no such admirable result has been obtained with means so slight. A few outlines drawn with pen and ink or pencil, and the interspaces filled in with two flat tints-a dark green, and a grey verging on mauve.
The drawing of the figures is marvellously beautiful. But why is it beautiful? Is it because of the individual character represented in the faces? The faces are expressed by means of a formula, and are as like one another as a row of eggs. Are the proportions of the figure correctly measured, and are the anatomies well understood? The figures are in the usual proportions so far as the number of heads is concerned: they are all from six and a half to seven heads high; but no motion of limbs happens under the draperies, and the hands and feet, like the faces, are expressed by a set of arbitrary conventions. It is not even easy to determine whether the posture of the woman on the right is intended for sitting or kneeling. She holds a tray, on which is an idol, and to provide sufficient balance for the composition the artist has placed a yellow umbrella in the idol's hand. Examine this design from end to end, and nowhere will you find any desire to imitate nature. With a line Utamaro expresses all that he deems it necessary to express of a face's contour. Three or four conventional markings stand for eyes, mouth, and ears; no desire to convey the illusion of a rounded surface disturbed his mind for a moment; the intention of the Japanese artists was merely to decorate a surface with line and colour. It was no part of their scheme to compete with nature, so it could not occur to them to cover one side of a face with shadow. The Japanese artists never thought to deceive; the art of deception they left to their conjurers. The Japanese artist thought of harmony, not of accuracy of line, and of harmony, not of truth of colour; it was therefore impossible for him to entertain the idea of shading his drawings, and had some one whispered the idea to him he would have answered: "The frame will always tell people that they are not looking at nature. You would have it all heavy and black, but I want something light, and bright, and full of beauty. See these lines, are they not in themselves beautiful? are they not sharp, clear, and flowing, according to the necessity of the composition? Are not the grey and the dark green sufficiently contrasted? do they not bring to your eyes a sense of repose and unity? Look at the embroideries on the dresses, are they not delicate? do not the star-flowers come in the right place? is not the yellow in harmony with the grey and the green? And the blossoms on the trees, are they not touched in with the lightness of hand and delicacy of tone that you desire? Step back and see if the spots of colour and the effects of line become confused, or if they still hold their places from a distance as well as close…."