Ingres
One cannot help feeling that, to this aristocrat of French artists, a display of emotions in a drawing would have been a most unclassic and plebeian sign of weakness. And one seems to know that in Ingres’ art of pure unemotional drawing—his eye measured, his brain commanded, his hand obeyed and the pencil glided from one position to the next by the most direct path, a curve so slight as to be almost straight; leaving its grey immaculate line to prove its absolute obedience to the draughtsman’s will ... and so the drawing would grow without an unnecessary stroke or a correction; simply the unfoldment of a preconception carried out according to plan and justly recording his penetrating analysis of a subject.
The guiding star and strength of Ingres’ genius was his conviction that he could not err.
M. Anatole France tells a characteristic story of an encounter with Ingres in his own youth:—he was at the opera one evening, the house was full and not an empty seat was to be seen. Suddenly an impressive looking stranger stepped up to him and said “Young man, give me your seat—I am Monsieur Ingres.”
How consistent the great man was! From his earliest youth he appears to have never doubted himself or his work; there was calm assurance in everything he did.
Elsewhere in these notes I have referred to the fact that artists often do their finest drawings early in life, and here we happen on one of the young men of whom I wrote: Ingres did some of his finest drawings twenty or thirty years before he painted his most famous pictures. That marvellous drawing—The Stamaty Family—is dated 1818, and the Lady with Sunshade—as perfect a portrait drawing as could well be imagined—was done in 1813; and many fine drawings earlier still; whereas his famous picture La Source was painted in 1856, and many of his best known pictures were done in the period between 1840 and 1866.
Cotman
Cotman is another man of whom one feels tempted to say—in studying his work—that one cannot see any signs in it that he ever mistrusted the rightness of his aims and methods. It is customary to write of Cotman’s life as both unhappy and unsuccessful, but instead it should be borne in mind that he did have success of the best kind—he was immensely successful in painting what he wanted to paint; and no artist can have a success more dear to him than that. His methods were most consistent, and so it is probable that—disgusted with a world that only required his services as a drawing-master—he pursued his own way and managed to be as happy as any other genius in the practice of his art.
Until very recently his name was generally mentioned with three or four of his contemporary water-colour painters—as though there were not much to choose between the batch; but gradually the weight of public opinion is proclaiming the conviction that Cotman was a head and shoulders above the group with which he has been catalogued; and year by year the appreciation of his work grows in volume. His position, however, is still not recognized as, I am convinced, it will be in a few years time. His method of painting was so widely different to Turner’s that the public and the critics—dazzled by the sunsets of “our greatest painter”—have been slow indeed to recognize the originality and distinction of Cotman’s genius. As a draughtsman of landscapes he excelled in lyrical beauty and perfection of technical accomplishment; but his paintings should be studied with his drawings, for it is in these that he showed his real originality—producing paintings that are comparable, as decorations, with the prints of the greater Japanese wood-engravers; and at a time, it should be remembered, when these prints were unknown in Europe.