Besides Ouless mention may be made from among the great number of portrait painters of J. J. Shannon, with his powerful and firmly painted likenesses; of James Sant, with his sincere and energetic portraits of women; of Mouat Loudan, with his pretty pictures of children, and of the many-sided Charles W. Furse. Hubert Herkomer was the most celebrated in Germany, and is probably the most skilful of the young men whom The Graphic brought into eminence in the seventies.

Cassell & Co.
HERKOMER.CHARTERHOUSE CHAPEL.
Art Annual.
HERKOMER.   PORTRAIT OF HIS FATHER.
(By permission of the Artist.)

The career of Hubert Herkomer is amongst those adventurous ones which become less and less frequent in the nineteenth century; there are not many who have risen so rapidly to fame and fortune from such modest circumstances. His father was a carver of sacred images in the little Bavarian village of Waal, where Hubert was born in 1849. In 1851 the enterprising Bavarian tried his fortune in the New World. But there he did not succeed in making progress, and in 1857 the family appeared in England, at Southampton. Here he fought his way honestly at the bench where he carved, and as a journeyman worker, whilst his wife gave lessons in music. A commission to carve Peter Vischer’s four evangelists in wood brought him with his son to Munich, where they occupied room in the back buildings of a master-carpenter’s house, in which they slept, cooked, and worked. In the preparatory class of the Munich Academy the younger Herkomer received his first teaching, and began to draw from the nude, the antique serving as model. At a frame-maker’s in Southampton he gave his first exhibition, and drew illustrations for a comic paper. With the few pence which he saved from these earnings he went to London, where he lived from hand to mouth with a companion as poor as himself. He cooked, and his friend scoured the pans; meanwhile he worked as a mason on the frieze of the South Kensington Museum, and hired himself out for the evenings as a zither-player. Then The Graphic became his salvation, and after his drawings had made him known he soon had success with his paintings. “After the Toil of the Day,” a picture which he exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1873—a thoughtful scene from the village life of Bavaria, carried out after the manner of Fred Walker—found a purchaser immediately. He was then able to make a home for his parents in the village of Bushey, which he afterwards glorified in the picture “Our Village,” and he began his masterpiece “The Last Muster,” which obtained in 1878 the great medal at the World Exhibition in Paris. Since then he found the eyes of the English public fixed upon him. There followed at first a series of pictures in which he proceeded upon the lines of Fred Walker’s poetic realism: “Eventide,” a scene in the Westminster Union; “The Gloom of Idwal,” a romantic mountain picture from North Wales; “God’s Shrine,” a lonely Bavarian hillside path, with peasants praying at a shrine; “Der Bittgang,” a group of country people praying for harvest; “Contrasts,” a picture of English ladies surrounded by school-children in the Bavarian mountains. At the same time he became celebrated as a portrait painter, his first successes in this field being the likenesses of Wagner and Tennyson, Archibald Forbes, his own father, John Ruskin, Stanley, and the conductor Hans Richter. And he reached the summit of his international fame when his portrait of Miss Grant, “The Lady in White,” appeared in 1886; all Europe spoke of it at the time, and it called forth entire bundles of poems, anecdotes, biographies, and romances. From that time he advanced in his career with rapid strides.

The University of Oxford appointed him Professor of the Fine Arts. He opened a School of Art, and had etchings, copper engravings, and engravings in mezzotint produced by his pupils under his guidance. He wrote articles in the London papers upon social questions, and political economy, and all manner of subjects, an article signed with Herkomer’s name being always capable of creating interest. He has his own theatre, and produces in it operas of which he writes the text and the music, and manages the rehearsals and the scenery, besides playing the leading parts.

HERKOMER.Brothers, photo.
HARD TIMES.
(By permission of the Manchester Art Gallery, the owners of the picture.)

Yet it is just his portraits of women, the foundations of his fame, which do not seem in general to justify entirely the painter’s great reputation. Miss Grant was certainly a captivating woman, and she broke men’s hearts wherever she made her appearance. People gazed again and again into the brilliant brown eyes with which she looked so composedly before her; they were overwhelmed by her austere and lofty virginal beauty. “The Lady in Black (An American Lady)” made yet a more piquant and spiritualised effect. There was the unopened bud, and here the woman who has had experience of the delights and disappointments of life. There was unapproachable pride, and here a trait of distinction and of suffering, an almost weary carriage of the body. There would certainly be an interesting gallery of beauty if Herkomer unite these “types of women” in a series. But even in the first picture how much of all the admiration excited was due to the painter and how much to the model? The portrait of Miss Grant was such a success primarily because Miss Grant herself was so beautiful. The arrangement of white against white was nothing new: Whistler, a far greater artist, had already painted a “White Girl” in 1863, and it was a much greater work of art, though, on account of the attractiveness of the model being less powerful, it triumphed only in the narrower circle of artists. Bastien-Lepage, who set himself the same problem in his “Sara Bernhardt,” had also run through the scale of white with greater sureness. And Herkomer’s later pictures of women—“The Lady in Yellow,” Lady Helen Fergusson, and others—are even less alluring, considered as works of art. The reserve and evenness of the execution give his portraits a somewhat clotted and stiff appearance. Good modelling and exceedingly vigorous drawing may perhaps ensure great correctness in the counterfeit of the originals, but the life of the picture vanishes beneath the greasy technique, the soapy painting through which materials of drapery and flesh-tints assume quite the same values. There is nothing in it of the transparency, the rosy delicacy, freshness, and flower-like bloom of Gainsborough’s women and girls. Herkomer appears in these pictures as a salon painter in whom a tame but tastefully cultivated temperament is expressed with charm. Even his landscapes with their trim peasants’ cottages and their soft moods of sunset have not enriched with new notes the scale executed by Walker.

All the more astonishing is the earnest certainty of touch and the robust energy which are visible in his other works. His portraits of men, especially the one of his father, that kingly old man with the long, white beard and the furrowed brow, take their place beside the best productions of English portraiture, which are chiselled, as it were, in stone. In “The Last Muster” he showed that it is possible to be simple and yet strike a profound note and even attain greatness. For there is something great in these old warriors, who at the end of their days are praying, having never troubled themselves over prayer during all their lives, who have travelled so far and staked their lives dozens of times, and are now drawing their last breath softly upon the seats of a church. Even his more recent groups—“The Assemblage of the Curators of the Charterhouse” and “The Session of the Magistrates of Landsberg”—are magnificent examples of realistic art, full of imposing strength and soundness. In the representation of these citizens the genius of the master who in his “Chelsea Pensioners” created one of the “Doelen pieces” of the nineteenth century, revealed itself afresh in all its greatness.

Beside portrait painting the painting of landscape stands now as ever in full bloom amongst the English; not that the artists of to-day are more consistently faithful to truth than their predecessors, or that they seem more modern in the study of light. In the province of landscape as in that of figure painting, far more weight is laid upon subject than on the moods of atmosphere. If one compares the modern English painters with Crome and Constable, one finds them wanting in boldness and creative force; and placed beside Monet, they seem to be diffident altogether. But a touching reverence for nature gives almost all their pictures a singularly chaste and fragrant charm.