I am not disputing the power, in their day, nor the charm they still have—for the very few who understand—of Cimabue, of Giotto, of the painters of the Campo Santo at Pisa, when they painted the subjects I have mentioned, nor of Pintoricchio—he put work in the background of his paintings, as Dürer did in his prints. And there is a wonderful building of a cathedral by Van Eyck in Antwerp. There are compositions by Bellini and Carpaccio which show they studied work. It is strange, so far as I know, that Leonardo ignored work—in his pictures—he who was such a great workman, yet vowed he could paint with any one, amongst his other accomplishments. But, with all these artists, either work was a detail or imaginative; it was never the dominant motive, never a study of work for work's sake. There are a few records in sculpture, most notable amongst them being the Assyrian Reliefs at the British Museum. Curiously, I am unable to find, though they must exist, any sculptures, reliefs or paintings of the great architectural work of the Egyptians—or those of the Greeks either. In the Bayeux tapestries there is the work of the shipbuilder and porter.
The first artist I know of—though I am not an art historian—to see the pictorial possibility of work, the Wonder of Work for Work's Sake, was Rembrandt.
Rembrandt saw that his father's mill was beautiful, and by his renderings of the windmills and the dykes of Holland proved them the great works of his little country, and showed they were pictorial. And he drew, etched and painted them because he loved their big powerful forms, their splendid sails, the way they lorded the land and kept out the sea. They were for him the Wonder of Work, the wondrous works of his time, the works that were all about him. So strong and so powerful were these Dutch works that they have lasted till to-day, and so well were they designed that all windmills and watermills have kept their form till now. The working parts have possibly been improved, but the design has not been changed, and Rembrandt's etchings—so accurately drawn they would serve as working models—prove it. And yet Rembrandt has made a perfect artistic composition as well as a true mechanical rendering of these mills and dykes. And as Whistler said in the "Ten O'clock," the Bible of Art, Rembrandt regretted not that the Jews of the Ghetto were not Greeks, nor—may I add?—did he regret the windmills were not temples.
Then came Claude and found the Wonder of Work in commercial harbours, dominated by necessary lighthouses, and in the hustling cities of Civita Vecchia and Genoa—for it is amid the work, the life of one's own time, that the Wonder of Work is to be found.
Canaletto followed, and saw in the building of Venice the same inspiration that Tintoret found in her history, Titian in her great men. And Piranesi discovered the prisons, the Carceri, to be as enthralling as the ruins of Rome.
Turner imitated Claude. Claude saw his subjects about him; Turner used Claude's motives and tried to rival his predecessor. Claude painted what he saw in his own time; Turner tried to reconstruct his unconscious rival's facts out of his head, and failed even in his rendering of work about him, signally in Steam, Rain, Speed, where an impossible engine conducts itself in an incredible fashion in a magnificent landscape. Turner was not here trying to carry on tradition—the only thing worth doing in art—but to embêter les bourgeois—and Ruskin!
Turner's Carthage would not stand up, if built—Claude's palaces do. Turner, too, defying Ruskin—Ruskin anathematising workaday England—was a spectacle. But Turner was sometimes in the right, with Constable and Crome, and they, and not Ruskin, have triumphed. Turner had magnificent ideas, wonderful colour sense, grand composition. But when he came to fact he was often ridiculous or pitiful, simply because he had not observed work, noted facts—and to paint work one must study work. And lately I was given a print from a Book of Beauty by Allom of a coke furnace, while Mr. Joseph Jackson has discovered a painting of a forge by Bass Otis in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts—surprisingly well done, both are, too.
It is far easier to paint a heavenly host or a dream city in one's studio than to make a decoration out of a group of miners, or to draw a rolling mill in full blast. Yet one of these subjects can be as noble as the other, as Whistler proved, when he showed for the first time how in London "the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us." That is the Gospel of the Wonder of Work.
Though I never studied under Whistler—never was his pupil—he is and always will be my master—the master of the modern world, the master who will endure. Because he glorified the things about him, the things he knew, by "The Science of the Beautiful." What are the Thames etchings—"Wapping," "The Last of Old Westminster," "The Nocturnes"—but records of work? A fact most critics have never realised. But Whistler was a many-sided—a so many-sided—genius that his many essays in many fields are only just becoming known, and this study of work—the most difficult study in the world, under the most trying conditions—was never abandoned by him till he said what he wanted, in the ways he wanted, not till he had made a series of masterpieces which live and will live forever.
But there was a man—all the great have gone from us in the last few years, which accounts for the momentary popularity of the little—there was a man who gave his later life to the Wonder of Work—Constantin Meunier.