The only excuse for artists of any description being at the front is their capacity for reproducing true and vivid impressions of what they have seen.
This is where the importance of the new school is at once apparent, and as long as the men practising this art are honest and do not attempt to foist "faked" work on the public, their efforts are bound to be acceptable and of artistic value.
In speaking of camera work as an art and the individuals adopting it as artists, I do not include the persons who simply press a button and expose yards of film, regardless of subject, but the few who make pictures intelligently and pay as much attention to composition and lighting as a painter would when commencing a fresh canvas. The camera is not going to destroy the painter—and I say painter advisedly—as no black and white artist is any good unless he is a painter, and has a keen appreciation of colour value. Nature is teeming with colour, and unless this is felt how can it be suggested in line?
Why does Rembrandt stand out as the greatest master of etchings? Simply because his etched works suggest colour, and it is this power of suggesting colour that placed Charles Keene head and shoulders above all other black and white men. The power of selection of subject is not developed in all artists to an equal extent, but there is always room for such men as Melton Prior, W. B. Wollen, Lester Ralph, and a few others, whose work will always be looked for as representing actuality.
If the two schools of artists mentioned work with the full knowledge of the limitations of their mediums, there will always be a place for both.
The mechanical draughtsman is dead. He has been killed by the camera.
How would it be possible in Fleet Street or De Aar, quietly sitting in a little room with a north light, to give a true impression of Cronje's surrender, or of that wonderful sight, the approach of the captured army, like a cloud of locusts, over the expanse of veldt at Klip Drift?
If ever the surrender at Paardeberg is painted, it must be done by a man who saw it.
I shall never forget the defeated General's arrival, or the solemnity of it: this giant, broken sulky, his career finished. Everything was shown in the man, and shown in a way no imagination could possibly conceive.
I was privileged to view a sketch of Cronje leaving our camp, the work of Mortimer Menpes. It was a vivid slight impression. True, yet the economy of means—a few lines wonderfully placed—was wonderful, showing the artist a great master of technique. Now, talented as he undoubtedly is, he could not have imparted such a feeling of actuality to his work if he had not been present and studied his subject with the greatest attention. The long-haired, velvet-coated gentleman of Bond Street is not the man to depict the incidents of war, or to put up with the hardships of a great march, and I am perfectly sure that the success of a war artist depends on physique. He is required to tackle his subject quickly and vigorously. Trickery does not help actuality, straightforward manly work being absolutely necessary to the war artist of to-day.