Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art.

by P. H. Emerson

We now come to a great and deservedly well-known name—that of Thomas Bewick, the engraver on wood. Here we have a man working in a humble way, humble that is as compared with painting or sculpture, yet loving and studying nature in every detail, and following her in all her mystery and charm, only daring now and then to add some quiet fancy of his own, and yet he lives and his name grows greater every day. A true naturalist and a real artist was he, and his fame will be lasting. When Wilson is archaic, Bewick will be held up for admiration, so powerful is the effect of the honest study of nature in his work. His birds and quadrupeds we all know; but if any reader should not know them, he should at once get a copy and study the cuts in it. Mr. Quaritch has, we believe, recently issued a reprint of the book.

Wood-engraving.

Wood-cutting has degenerated. Men of little training and no artistic feeling took it up, and slowly but surely the art decayed until it became purely mechanical, and so it has remained in England. Now it bids fair to be superseded by photo-mechanical processes, as it will undoubtedly be entirely superseded directly a really artistic process of reproduction is discovered for printing with the type. In the United States, however, wood-engraving took a fresh start, and brought photography to its aid, and our opinion is that the effect obtained in photographs printed on albumenized paper became the effect which the wood-cutters aimed for, and the result is a print of wonderful detail and beauty, but for our taste it is too polished and neat, the effect of overlaying is far too visible, and, in short, it does not render nature truly, and though far surpassing anything of the kind done in England, it is, as a work of art, altogether eclipsed by Bewick’s work, the reason being that Bewick only took wood-engraving as a medium for the expression of the beauties of nature, every line in his blocks being full of meaning. But the hydra head of commercialism showed itself, and wood-engravers with little or no feeling for or knowledge of nature set to work turning out blocks like machines. Photography will keep these artisans from falling utterly away from nature, yet such work is harmful and of no artistic good to us, though it may please the public. Had there been no constant returns to nature (as there must always be in some measure when a photograph is used) decay would be sharp and speedy, but photography bolsters up the dying art. Lately several woodblocks have been produced cut from photographs, wherein all the beauty of the photographs has been utterly lost by the engraver, and the results are bastard slips of trade; but we shall have more to say on this point later on. One thing at any rate photography can claim: that is so long as it can be practised, art can never slip back to the crude work done in some eras of its decadence. Photography has helped many of these feeble wood-cutters immensely, and the épicier-critic calls these works “precious.” It is extraordinary how men will deceive themselves.

Water-colours.

Now we come to a branch of art which is essentially English, namely, painting in water-colours. It is not meant by this that water-colour is a new medium, or that the English water-colourists were the first to use the medium, for the tempera paintings were but water-colours, and Albert Durer and others used it considerably; but what is implied is that the English were the first to adopt it largely and develop it, though it was reserved for the modern Dutchmen and Frenchmen to show its full capabilities. The painter in water-colour has not, of course, the same control over his medium as he has in using oils, and the work when finished even by the best artists, has an artificial look that belies nature. But to see really true water-colours the reader must not look for them in English galleries. No Englishman ever came so near to nature—to the subtleties of nature—in water-colour as do the modern Dutch and French painters. The reader would do well to go to Goupil’s exhibitions of modern Dutch and French painters, which are held from time to time, and keep a look-out for water-colours, and he should carefully study them at the Paris Salon. Prophecy is always risky and of little count, but we would like to venture a prophecy that water-colours will never take a very prominent place in art, because no great genius will ever be content with the medium. Of the bulk of English water-colours of to-day there is not one word of praise to be said, and the student in art matters will do well to avoid all exhibitions of this work until he has carefully studied the best work in art, and until he has a greater insight into nature; and then let him go to the various water-colour exhibitions, and if he does not receive a mental shock, we shall be greatly surprised. There is but little nature in them, indeed but little anything except pounds, shillings, and pence. The best of them are nauseous imitations of Turner, and the whole of them show an entire ignorance of the simplest phenomena of nature, which would be startling did we not remember that most of them are painted from “notes” and “memory.” These remarks do not of course apply to such work as is done by a few modern painters, such as Mr. Whistler, but these paint in oils first and water-colour afterwards. |Girtin.| The first man worth considering in this branch of art is Girtin, who was naturalistic as far as he could be, and had he not died at such an early age (under thirty) the probability is that Turner would have been eclipsed by him. Of Turner we shall speak later on. |D. Cox.| The name of David Cox rises above the men of his time; but, after all, his is not the name of an immortal. He aimed well, however, for he tried to paint the life and landscape of his time. |De Wint.| Much has been written about De Wint; but if we go to the basement of the National Gallery and study De Wint, and then go to Norfolk and study the landscape there, we shall find Mr. De Wint is but a sorry painter. One thing, however, may be said in his praise. He painted out of doors—not in his studio—and was no doubt a lover of nature. His peasants are not the fearful travesties of Hill, Barret, and Collins. Lewis and Cotman and Vincent have, however, done some better things than De Wint.

Returning to oil painting, we must pass over the long list of names, including Presidents of the Royal Academy, whose names are now all but if not quite forgotten, for their peasantry of the Opera Bouffe, their landscapes after Claude, their works of the imagination can now interest no one, and never did interest any but the painters themselves and an uneducated public.

Turner.

Then we come to Turner, that competitor in painting. To use a colloquialism—“There is a great man gone wrong.” Had he but lived to-day, he might have been an immortal; but he does not live, and his lease of fame is not for so long a time as is generally imagined. It has had an artificial afflatus through the writings of a “splendidly false” critic, and, curiously enough, the critic, like the artist, has had insight enough to see the true purpose of art, namely, that the artist should be true to nature, and should be an interpreter of the life and landscape of his own time; and, curiously enough, the critic, like the artist, does not know what nature is. The critic has taken Turner as nature unalloyed, and hence the whole of that gigantic work of his is built on sand. The critic never had much, if any, weight with the best artists. Even Turner himself was amused with the reasonings of his eulogistic logic! and gave it out as much as a man can give out about his eulogist, that all the tall talk about his pictures was rubbish. But Turner was sincere according to his lights. To say of his earlier pictures that he painted in rivalry or imitation, if you like, of Wilson, Poussin, and Claude, is to say they are bad, as they undoubtedly are. This spirit of rivalry never seems to have deserted Turner, for in his will he left directions bequeathing one of his pictures to the Academy, on condition it should be hung side by side with a Claude. The spirit of this is, of course, patent. He thinks he has beaten Claude, and that is enough. No great genius would have descended to that. Art was to him an unending competition, and the result was that nature was neglected; and though he revelled in the life and landscape of his own times, yet the small spirit of competition was his ruin. Had he humbly, like Constable, had faith in his tenets, and lovingly and modestly clung to nature, his fame might have been immense and everlasting. His later pictures are, of course, the eccentricities of senility, and the false colourings seen by a diseased eye, as has been lately shown, and are as unlike nature as one could expect such work to be. But let us take his “Frosty Morning” at the National Gallery. Look well at it, and what do you find? Falsity everywhere, and most of the essence and poetry of a frosty morning completely missed. The truest picture by Turner that we know is a little aquarelle at South Kensington—“A View on the Thames.” Here, then, when we get Turner true to the truth which he felt in himself, and not competing (that we know of), what do we find? We find him immensely behind De Hooghe in a truthful and poetic expression of nature, as is well possible for so great a man. The Liber Studiorum should also be carefully studied, noting the falsities; trees drawn by rule, figures not drawn at all, the total disregard of the phenomena of nature, sometimes even the evidence of several suns in one picture. There is no truth of tone; no atmosphere; the values are all wrong; all the charm and subtlety of nature completely missed. |De Hooghe and Clays.| Go to De Hooghe or Clays after this, and what a difference! Here are no meretricious adornments, but more nature and less of erring, feeble man and his mannerisms. Turner is not the man to study, and if you cannot “understand him” well and good. Many artists cannot and do not wish to, for there is nothing to understand, and many French painters of great ability jeer at his very name. |Constable and Crome.| With what relief we turn from Turner to Constable and Crome. These two East Anglians are giants in the history of English painting. All should study Constable’s works at the National Gallery and South Kensington; and his life by Leslie is well worth reading, as showing how much of a naturalist in theory he was. The best example of his work that we know is a little river scene, with some willows, which we saw at South Kensington Museum. His work is not, however, perfect. You feel that there is no atmosphere in his pictures. This is due to their being out of tone. He had not the knowledge of nature that characterized De Hooghe, and was not always faithful to his creed: hence his failings. For though we read in his life such passages as these:—“In such an age as this, painting should be understood, not looked on with blind wonder, nor considered only as poetic inspiration, but as a pursuit—legitimate, scientific, and mechanical.”... “The old rubbish of art, the musty, commonplace, wretched pictures which gentlemen collect, hang up, and display to their friends, may be compared to Shakspeare’s ‘Beggarly Account of Empty Boxes.’ Nature is anything but this, either in poetry, painting, or in the fields.”... “Observe that thy best director, thy perfect guide is nature. Copy from her. In her paths is thy triumphal arch. She is above all other teachers.”... “Is it not folly, said Mr. Northcote to me in the Exhibition, as we were standing before ——’s picture, for a man to paint what he can never see? Is it not sufficiently difficult to paint what he does see? This delightful lesson leads me to ask, what is painting but an imitative art—an art that is to realize, not to feign. Then some dream that every man who will not submit to long toil in the imitation of nature, flies up, becomes a phantom, and produces dreams of nonsense and abortions. He thinks to save himself under a fine imagination, which is generally, and almost always in young men, the scapegoat of folly and idleness.”... “There has never been a lay painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.”... “My pictures will never be popular,” he said, “for they have no handling. But I see no handling in nature.”... Blake once, on looking through Constable’s sketch-books, said of a drawing of fir-trees, “Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration!” and Constable replied, “I never knew it before; I meant it for drawing.”... “If the mannerists had never existed, painting would have been easily understood.”... “I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific, as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand a comparison with realities.”... “The deterioration of art has everywhere proceeded from similar causes, the imitation of preceding styles, with little reference to nature.”... “It appears to me that pictures have been overvalued, held up by a blind admiration as ideal things, and almost as standards by which nature is to be judged, rather than the reverse.”... “The young painter, who, regardless of present popularity, would leave a name behind him, must become the patient pupil of Nature”—yet Constable was not always true to himself.

Crome.

Crome, who was, in our opinion, a better painter than Constable, was like him a naturalist, and true to his faith. There is an amusing scene in his life, which we will quote. “A brother of the art met Crome in a remote spot of healthy verdure, with a troop of young persons. Not knowing the particular object of the assembly, he ventured to address the Norwich painter thus: ‘Why, I thought I had left you in the city engaged in your school.’ ‘I am in my school,’ replied Crome, ‘and teaching my scholars from the only true examples. Do you think,’ pointing to a lovely distance, ‘either you or I can do better than that?’”