The rewards of the successful artist are many and varied, but the most coveted, surely—and the least often secured—is the reward of international fame. The list is not long of the English artists who have achieved it—indeed it is unjustly short. The English are, themselves, always generous in their acceptance of foreign artists—even to the neglect of their own; in this they are unlike other nations, particularly the French who, though slow to acclaim foreign artists, are loud-voiced in praise of their own home-grown products. But Mr. Brangwyn’s name, in spite of this, stands high in Europe. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that his work stands for English contemporary painting half the world over.
An artist who is painting for an international public distributed in all parts of the world is not likely to bother himself with artistic party-politics, and it is noticeable that Mr. Brangwyn does not move with the ebb and flow of opinion in London. He is not a fashionable painter and is not ever likely to be. In another age his art might have produced a new school.
There have, it might be said, been two Rubens in the history of European art. The first was Peter Paul and the second—Brangwyn.
Rubens (Peter Paul) has been out of fashion since Mr. Sickert made Tottenham Court Road delightful by teaching us how they paint in Paris, but Venice seems more interested in how Mr. Brangwyn paints in London.
Fine draughtsman as Mr. Brangwyn is, his drawings always remind us that he is a painter, and a decorative painter. Curiously enough though, they scarcely suggest a reserve of strength, in fact on the contrary, for everything that Mr. Brangwyn has to say is stated—whether in painting or drawing—with the utmost energy and vigour of his capacity. He gives generously, freely, without stint from a full brush—he draws from the shoulder as it were; and that his aim is the decoration of large spaces in architectural settings is always apparent in his work; and that this is its usual destiny should be remembered when his drawings are being studied. It is through the medium of his drawings and sketches that we have, in these days, to study Mr. Brangwyn’s art, for the large decorations—destined for public buildings in other countries—on which he is constantly engaged, leave England (as a rule) without being exhibited. Doubtless we can add this loss to our list of grudges against the officials of the painting world, for the public have long ago realized the importance of Mr. Brangwyn’s position and are justly proud of him. The psychological interest of his figures is of a basic and standard kind and generally full of suggestion of forms personal to his own art.
Bateman
The difficulty with Mr. Bateman is to take him seriously. Really he is a most serious phenomenon—and yet the bare mention of his name sets us chuckling in happy reminiscence and digging each other in the ribs in cheery anticipation of jokes yet unborn.
It would be doing him but scant justice, really, if we were to give him some honorary degree—called him Dr. Bateman and sat him in a “chair” at one of the Universities as Professor of human psychology. Instead we just go on buying any paper that he happens to be drawing for—and laughing. But the day may come when he might turn round on us, wearied of our interminable cackling, and say “Cry you devils, cry!” and then we shall be sorry—but we shall cry all right: a few little adjustments of that subtle line of his and the humour we value so highly would become tragedy.
In England there seems to be a curious tradition that a drawing becomes funny if it has a funny story printed underneath it; that the expression on one face in a group of persons if slightly ludicrous makes a drawing humorous. In a Bateman drawing the drawing is the humour and the humour is the drawing. Everything is in the same terms throughout. His very line seems to have a risible ripple in it, for his humour is the real thing—not irony or satire but the essential spiritual faculty of perceiving the incongruous wherever it occurs. He has a host of imitators, abroad as well as in this home circle of islands, but they are sheep in wolves’ clothing and the joke is not in them—they satirise the already ridiculous.