[From “The Times,” January 20, 1876.]
THE FREDERICK WALKER EXHIBITION.
Dear Mr. Marks:[119] You ask me to say what I feel of Frederick Walker’s work, now seen in some collective mass, as far as anything can be seen in black-veiled London. You have long known my admiration of his genius, my delight in many passages of his art. These, while he lived, were all I cared to express. If you will have me speak of him now, I will speak the whole truth of what I feel—namely, that every soul in London interested in art ought to go to see that Exhibition, and, amid all the beauty and the sadness of it, very diligently to try and examine themselves as to the share they have had, in their own busy modern life, in arresting the power of this man at the point where it stayed. Very chief share they have had, assuredly. But he himself, in the liberal and radical temper of modern youth, has had his own part in casting down his strength, following wantonly or obstinately his own fancies wherever they led him. For instance, it being Nature’s opinion that sky should usually be blue, and it being Mr. Walker’s opinion that it should be the color of buff plaster, he resolutely makes it so, for his own isolated satisfaction, partly in affectation also, buff skies being considered by the public more sentimental than blue ones. Again, the laws of all good painting having been long ago determined by absolute masters, whose work cannot be bettered nor departed from—Titian having determined forever what oil-painting is, Angelico what tempera-painting is, Perugino what fresco-painting is, two hundred years of noble miniature-painting what minutest work on ivory is, and, in modern times, a score of entirely skillful and disciplined draughtsmen what pure water-color and pure body-color painting on paper are (Turner’s Yorkshire drawing of Hornby Castle, now at Kensington, and John Lewis’s “Encampment under Sinai,”[120] being nameable at once as unsurpassable standards), here is Mr. Walker refusing to learn anything from any of those schools or masters, but inventing a semi-miniature, quarter fresco, quarter wash manner of his own—exquisitely clever, and reaching, under such clever management, delightfullest results here and there, but which betrays his genius into perpetual experiment instead of achievement, and his life into woeful vacillation between the good, old, quiet room of the Water-Color Society, and your labyrinthine magnificence at Burlington House.
Lastly, and in worst error, the libraries of England being full of true and noble books—her annals of true and noble history, and her traditions of beautiful and noble—in these scientific times I must say, I suppose, “mythology”—not religion—from all these elements of mental education and subjects of serviceable art, he turns recklessly away to enrich the advertisements of the circulating library, to sketch whatever pleases his fancy, barefooted, or in dainty boots, of modern beggary and fashion, and enforce, with laboriously symbolical pathos, his adherence to Justice Shallow’s sublime theology that “all shall die.”
That theology has indeed been preached by stronger men, again and again, from Horace’s days to our own, but never to so little purpose. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” said wisely in his way, the Latin farmer: ate his beans and bacon in comfort, had his suppers of the gods on the fair earth, with his servants jesting round the table, and left eternal monuments of earthly wisdom and of cricket-song. “Let us labor and be just, for to-morrow we die, and after death the Judgment,” said Holbein and Durer, and left eternal monuments of upright human toil and honorable gloom of godly fear. “Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, for to-morrow we die, and shall be with God,” said Angelico and Giotto, and left eternal monuments of divinely-blazoned heraldry of Heaven. “Let us smoke pipes, make money, read bad novels, walk in bad air, and say sentimentally how sick we are in the afternoon, for to-morrow we die, and shall be made ourselves clay pipes,” says the modern world, and drags this poor bright painter down into the abyss with it, vainly clutching at a handful or two of scent and flowers in the May gardens.
Under which sorrowful terms, being told also by your grand Academicians that he should paint the nude, and, accordingly, wasting a year or two of his life in trying to paint schoolboys’ backs and legs without their shirts or breeches, and with such other magazine material as he can pick up of sick gypsies, faded gentlewomen, pretty girls disguised as paupers, and the red-roofed or gray remnants of old English villages and manor-house, last wrecks of the country’s peace and honor, remaining yet visible among the black ravages of its ruin, he supplies the demands of his temporary public, scarcely patient, even now that he has gone, to pause beside his delicate tulips or under his sharp-leaved willows, and repent for the passing tints and fallen petals of the life that might have been so precious, and, perhaps, in better days, prolonged.
That is the main moral of the Exhibition. Of the beauty of the drawings, accepting them for what they aim at being, there is little need that I should add anything to what has been already said rightly by the chief organs of the London Press. Nothing can go beyond them in subtlety of exhibited touch (to be distinguished, however, observe always from the serene completion of master’s work, disdaining the applause to be gained by its manifestation); their harmonies of amber-color and purple are full of exquisite beauty in their chosen key; their composition always graceful, often admirable, and the sympathy they express with all conditions of human life most kind and true; not without power of rendering character which would have been more recognized in an inferior artist, because it would have been less restrained by the love of beauty.
I might, perhaps, in my days of youth and good fortune, have written what the public would have called “eloquent passages” on the subjects of the Almshouse and the Old Gate;[121] being now myself old and decrepit (besides being much bothered with beggars, and in perpetual feud with parish officers), and having seen every building I cared for in the world ruined, I pass these two pictures somewhat hastily by, and try to enjoy myself a little in the cottage gardens. Only one of them, however,—No. 71,—has right sunshine in it, and that is a sort of walled paddock where I begin directly to feel uncomfortable about the lamb, lest, perchance, some front shop in the cottages belong to a butcher. If only it and I could get away to a bit of thymy hill-side, we should be so much happier, leaving the luminous—perhaps too ideally luminous—child to adorn the pathetic paddock. I am too shy to speak to either of those two beautiful ladies among the lilies (37, 67), and take refuge among the shy children before the “Chaplain’s Daughter” (20)—delightfullest, it seems to me, of the minor designs, and a piece of most true and wise satire. The sketches of the “Daughter of Heth” go far to tempt me to read the novel; and, ashamed of this weakness, I retreat resolutely to the side of the exemplary young girl knitting in the “Old Farm Garden” (33), and would instantly pick up her ball of worsted for her, but that I wouldn’t for the world disappoint the cat. No drawing in the room is more delicately completed than this unpretending subject, and the flower-painting in it, for instantaneous grace of creative touch, cannot be rivalled; it is worth all the Dutch flower-pieces in the world.
Much instructed, and more humiliated, by passage after passage of its rapidly-grouped color, I get finally away into the comfortable corner beside the salmon-fishers and the mushrooms; and the last-named drawing, despise me who may, keeps me till I’ve no more time to stay, for it entirely beats my dear old William Hunt in the simplicity of its execution, and rivals him in the subtlest truth.
I say nothing of the “Fishmonger’s Stalls” (952), though there are qualities of the same kind in these also, for they somewhat provoke me by their waste of time—the labor spent on one of them would have painted twenty instructive studies of fish of their real size. And it is well for artists in general to observe that when they do condescend to paint still life carefully—whether fruit, fungi, or fish—it must at least be of the real size. The portrait of a man or woman is only justifiably made small that it may be portable, and nobody wants to carry about the miniature of a cod; and if the reader will waste five minutes of his season in London in the National Gallery, he may see in the hand of Perugino’s Tobias a fish worth all these on the boards together.
Some blame of the same kind attaches to the marvellous drawing No. 68. It is all very well for a young artist to show how much work he can put into an inch, but very painful for an old gentleman of fifty-seven to have to make out all the groups through a magnifying-glass. I could say something malicious about the boat, in consequence of the effect of this exertion on my temper, but will not, and leave with unqualified praise the remainder of the lesser drawings to the attention which each will variously reward.