A Scotchman, born in Aberdeen, John Phillip was the vigorous abettor of the pre-Raphaelites in these realistic endeavours. He, too, was a painter in the full meaning of the word, and he has therefore left works with which the future will have to reckon. Velasquez had opened his eyes as he had opened those of Millais. When Phillip went to Spain in 1851, he was not the first who had trod the Museo del Prado. Wilkie had painted in Spain before him, and Ansdell had been busy there at the same time. But no one had been able to grasp in any degree the impressive majesty of the old Spanish painters. John Phillip alone gained something of the verve of Velasquez, a broad, virile technique which distinguishes him from all his English contemporaries. The impression received from his pictures is one of opulence, depth, and weight; they unite something of the strength of Velasquez to a more Venetian splendour of colour. The streets of Seville, the Spanish port on the Guadalquivir, the town where Velasquez and Murillo were born, were his chief field of study. Here he saw those market-women, black as mulattoes and sturdy as grenadiers, who sit in front of their fruit-baskets under a great umbrella, and those water-carriers with sunburnt visages, strongly built chests, and athletic arms.
After he had returned to Scotland he occasionally painted pictures of ceremonies, “The House of Commons,” “The Wedding of the Princess Royal,” and so forth, but he soon returned to subjects from Spanish life. Gipsy-looking, cigarette-smoking women, with sparkling eyes and jet-black hair, young folks dancing to the castanets, bull-fighters with glittering silver-grey costume and flashing glances, dark-brown peasants in citron-yellow petticoats, hollow-eyed manufactory girls, potters, and glass-blowers.—such are the materials of Phillip’s pictures. They give no scope to anecdote; but they always reveal a fragment of reality which emits a world of impressions and an opulence of artistic ability. As painter par excellence, John Phillip stands in opposition to older English genre painters. Whilst they were, in the first place, at pains to tell a story intelligibly, Phillip was a colourist, a maître peintre, whose figures were developed from the colours, and whose creations are so full of character that they will always assert their place with the best that has ever been painted. Even in England, the country of literary and narrative painting, art was no longer an instrument for expressing ideas; it had become an end in itself, and had discovered colour as its prime and most essential medium of expression.
CHAPTER XXIX
REALISM IN GERMANY
In Germany the realistic movement was carried out in much the same way as in France, though it came into action two decades after its French original. Here also it was recognised that the well-meant but badly painted anecdote must give way to the well-painted picture: and if we inquire who it was that gave to Germany the first serious paintings inspired by the modern spirit the reply, without hesitation, must be Adolf Menzel. The pioneering work of this great little man, who for fifty years had embodied in their typical perfection all phases of German art, is something fabulous: the greatest and, one might almost say, the only historical painter of bygone epochs, the only one who knew a previous period so intimately that he could venture on painting it, was also the leader of the great movement which, in the seventies, aimed at the representation of our own life. His first appearance was in the time when the proud Titan Cornelius sought to take heaven by storm. Little Menzel was no Titan in those days; he seems in that generation like one bound to the earth, yet he belonged to the Cyclopean race. He was a mighty architect with the powers of a giant; and this uncouth Cyclops rough-hewed and chiselled the blocks, and, fitting each in its place, raised an edifice to as lofty a height as the Romanticists had reached on the perilous wings of Icarus. Having been first the draughtsman and then the painter of Frederick the Great, he gave up history after finishing the picture of the Battle of Hochkirch: his talent was too modern, too much set upon what was concrete, to admit of its being given full scope to the end by constructive work from a milieu that was not his own. Until his fortieth year he had celebrated the glorious past of his country. When, with the death of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, a great and decisive turn was given to the politics of the Prussian state—one which put an end to the stagnation of civil life in Prussia and Germany, and ushered in a new and brilliant period for the realm and the heirs of Friedrich—the painter of Friedrich the Great became the painter of the new realm. After he had already, in the first half of the century, placed reality on the throne of art in the place of rhetoric and a vague ideal, he went one step further in the direction of keen and direct observation, and now painted what he saw around him—the stream of palpitating life.
“The Coronation of King Wilhelm at Königsberg” is the great and triumphant title-page to this section of his art. The effects of light, the red tones of the uniforms, the shimmering white silk dresses, the surging of the mass of people, the perfect ease with which all the personages are individualised, the princes, the ministers, the ambassadors, the men of learning, the instantaneousness in the movement of the figures, the absolutely unforced and yet subtle and pictorial composition, render this painting no picture of ceremonies, in the traditional sense of the phrase, but a work of art at once intimate and august in the impression which it makes. In the picture “King Wilhelm setting out to join the Army”—the representation of the thrilling moment, on the afternoon of 31st July 1870, when the King drove along the linden avenue to the railway station—this phase, which he began with the Coronation picture, was brought to a close. Everything surges and moves, speaks and breathes, and glows with the palpitating life which vibrates through all in this moment of patriotic excitement. But the painter’s course led him further.
| ADOLF MENZEL. |
He first became entirely Menzel when he made the discovery of toiling humanity. In 1867, in the year of the World Exhibition, he came to Paris and became acquainted with Meissonier and Stevens. With Meissonier in particular—whose portrait he painted—he entered into a close friendship, and it was curious afterwards to see the two together at exhibitions—the little figure of Menzel with his gigantic bald forehead and the little figure of Meissonier with his gigantic beard, a Cyclops and a Gnome, two kings in the realm of Liliput, of whom one was unable to speak a word of German and the other unable to speak a word of French, although they had need merely of a look, a shrug, or a movement of the hand to understand each other entirely. He also came into the society of Courbet, who had just made the famous separate exhibition of his works, at the Café Lamartine, in the company of Heilbuth, Meyerheim, Knaus, and others. Here in Paris he produced his first pictures of popular contemporary life, and if as an historical painter he had already been a leader in the struggle against theatrical art, he became a pioneer in these works also. Everywhere he let in air and made free movement possible for those who pressed forward in his steps. In the course of years he painted and drew everything which excited in him artistic impulse upon any ground whatever, and not one of these endeavours was work thrown away. A universal genius amongst the painters of real life, he combined all the qualities of which other men of excellent talent merely possessed fragments separately apportioned amongst them: the sharpest eye for every detail of form, the most penetrative discrimination for the life of the spirit, and at times a glistening play of colour possessed by none of his German predecessors.