This is passing realism and getting into the sublime, and this is what the gross, coarse, miserly old master has done, with his innate force and living soul, while his strong, bold brush, with its low, sad tones, has painted an obscure interior and an old woman sitting brooding in the cold and dark, clad in a dirty white-grey cloak, with a dirty grey skirt faded to grim black-grey with newer black, patched sleeves, a few jars on a darkened shelf overhead, all dark and hopeless except where the one ray starts out that gaunt profile and what is seen of the shrivelled neck.
Teniers.—I take David Teniers after Rembrandt as an instance and example of successful and easy grouping; I take him as the type of a school embracing a long list of painters ancient and modern—Wilkie, Faed, Orchardson, Cameron, Pettie, &c. &c.; and why I prefer him to our own Sir David Wilkie is not so much that Teniers was before Wilkie, because Teniers was by no means the first in that line of business. If you can recall the delicate and silvery half-tones and open composition of ‘La Tourneuse,’ and compare this with the hot colouring, slushy handling, and forced composition of ‘The Penny Wedding’ and ‘Blind Man’s Buff,’ we must agree that here Teniers has the best of it. Yet I would by no means decry Sir David Wilkie, except where comparison is forced, as in this case; for I consider Sir David Wilkie, Tom Faed, and Orchardson to be the very best models a painter or a photographer can have for the composition of groups.
I am not at all prejudiced in favour of old masters or of old things, or big names, or advertised brains or dry bones; rather the reverse. I like young flesh and fresh blood, quick-beating pulses, and impetuous motions. I would rather have a living mistake than a dead perfection any day; yet, when I see the old ones far ahead of the young ones, it is both a duty and a joy to bend the knee and adore the vanished past.
Orchardson and Hugh Cameron have come up the truest to the silver and opals of Teniers, and for chaste deliberation and simplicity I can commend no one before Orchardson: he always stops painting just at the point where people should stop eating and drinking—the point this side of repletion. Study his best-known examples—Christopher Sly, from ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ some articles of clothing and a pair of shoes in the left-hand corner, to continue the slanting line of feet of the servants waiting on Christopher; a walking-stick lying in the same line as the feet of the negro, and people behind the screen; a sheet of paper on the floor farther in takes exactly the same line of direction, and the eye is no more troubled with details; we can all laugh without let. In the ‘Queen of Swords,’ a more crowded composition, the ground lines are the same, with the queen forming the point of the angle and a clear foreground, with the exception of a fan that carries on the same lines. In that scene from ‘Henry IV.,’ Part I., Prince Henry, Poins, and Falstaff, we have one of the simplest, openest, and most refined specimens of humorous composition on record. A straight, horizontal line of tapestry, broken up at the exact limit by the burly hind-part view of Sir John, the buffoonery expressed in that capacious broad waist-belt, and the rounded folds of the doublet below it, is worthy of the mighty creator of that inflated sponge, Falstaff. A table and chair behind it keep the horizontal line, while relieving the emptiness of the floor between Falstaff and his companions. The wall starts out towards us at an angle, while, along with a chair, the Prince and Poins keep within the vanishing lines from the point of sight, which is exactly in the centre of the back view of Falstaff’s waist, so that we must look (whether we like or not) first and last at him, even although, with Orchardson’s usual love of refinement, he is modestly cast into half-shadow.
They say Thackeray could draw a gentleman and Dickens could not. I deny this sweeping assertion in the existence of Mr. Chester of ‘Barnaby Rudge’; but one thing I do think, which is, that Orchardson is the painter who gives us the nearest approach to the easy insolence and bonhomie of a well-bred man of the world.
To return to Teniers (for a moment in passing), I cannot bring to mind one of his pictures which I have seen that could in any way be improved in the composition, added to, or taken from; every accessory tells its own portion of the general story, and this I would once more point out to the composer of a picture, along with a few simple laws which occur to me as I write. The principal object is the first object which rises up before the mind’s eye, and fixes the composition when the story is heard or read, therefore the main object to be considered and first set up or drawn in—as the figure of the queen in Orchardson’s ‘Queen of Swords’; the philosopher nearest us in ‘Bacchanalian Philosophers,’ by Teniers; the two front figures in Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch,’ one dark, one light, the dark one put in by Rembrandt first; and the child with its cart even before the lighted-up woman and child who come before ‘The Blind Fiddler,’ by Wilkie. There is too much in this composition, particularly that group of foreground objects, which bear such evident traces of having been so carefully selected and placed in such a variety of artificial carelessness—watering-pan, cabbage, box and utensils, basin, stool, with little bat, and knife, placed so exactly as they ought to be, like the hills of Borrowdale—all being, after consideration, painty improvements, never dropped upon accidentally and not at all required. You will find nothing of this sort in Rembrandt’s pictures, or in Rubens’ (lavish though he is), or in Teniers’, and seldom in Pettie’s or Orchardson’s. In Vandyke’s you may, or in Wilkie’s, because both Vandyke and Wilkie, being Court favourites, permitted their own individuality and good taste to be oftener biassed by the buzzing of the gartered insects about them; yielding to make this or that improvement to suit a foolish patron, until their own gifts became obscured, and their taste perverted to the level of a pair of Court breeches. Rembrandt and Rubens were strong enough men always to lead the fashion, and too strong ever to be led. But the times are changed with us now, so that I do not think there is any danger of Orchardson getting spoilt by good fortune; he is not in any way hurt by it yet, at all events.
After we get the first object set up, the others all fall into place to suit that central or main object, and this rule holds with the arranging of light and shadow, as well as form—one minute centre of light round which the half-lights range, and the deepest shadow where you can best afford it. The central form, the central light, is of paramount importance—all the rest are matters of convenience, chance, and discretion.
Think less about what you may put in to help your picture than upon what you may keep out, to give it importance and repose.
Every sitter has a fine point about him, or her: find it out—the best side of the face, a nice arm, or good hand; they will reveal it to you unconsciously before you have sighted them—and make that your first object, and all the rest subordinate and to help that out.
Don’t seize two points in one model; decide which is the most useful, and take that; without regret, discarding all the others.