On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

BURNE-JONES

Unexpectedly and suddenly, from an attack of angina pectoris, following upon the pest of influenza, Sir Edward Burne-Jones died yesterday morning. He was sixty-five years old, and he looked worn for his age—a man of delicate appearance, and certainly of great sensitiveness; yet, as it had seemed already, of much staying power,—a ‘creaking gate,’ as his friends thought, not so very regretfully, since destined, in all probability, to ‘hang long.’ But now his work and life have been arrested; the laborious days which he had lived for forty years of manhood are for ever over, and the wan face of the untiring craftsman, which bent eagerly over his task, and brightened with quick sensibility in the relaxation of the social hour, is for ever still. ‘Finis’ is written to the volume of achievement of one of the greater practitioners in what we may call the second generation of the English Pre-Raphaelites.

Of the first Pre-Raphaelites—of those of the first generation—more than one changed his ways, his work, his whole conception of Art, obviously, as time went on, and the most illustrious of them all—Millais—was far enough removed from a Pre-Raphaelite in the end. But of that distinguished and untiring practitioner of the second generation, whose hold, of late years at least, upon the English and to some extent upon the French public has become phenomenal, though it will not be constant, it is certainly to be noted that although there was, at different times, an unequal capacity, there was at no time visible change in the direction of his tastes or in the method of his work. Of the human figure Burne-Jones was not at the first an excellent, and was never, at any time, an absolutely faultless draughtsman. Yet the poetry of his figure-drawing, the almost feminine tenderness with which he followed the lines of dainty human movement, the dreamy grace that was in the place of strength, the elegant diffuseness, so to say, which was characteristic of his style—never even by accident tense and terse—these things are noticeable in his earlier water-colours and in the very latest of his performances in this year’s New Gallery. It was as a water-colour painter that he first began to be known. A pupil of Rossetti, as far as he was a pupil of any one, Burne-Jones was from the beginning romantic, and he was affluent in colour.

But what, it may be asked, are the especial characteristics of Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s art, as it has been revealed not only in the designs for painted glass, mosaic, tapestry, in numberless pages decorated with beautiful ornament—such as the Morris translation of Virgil, and later, the great Chaucer—but likewise in the series of large pictures, the adequate display of which was, so to say, one of the raisons d’être of the old Grosvenor Gallery? He had indeed extraordinary individuality. He was amenable to influence, for all that; and the influence he felt the most—that of his true fellows—was exercised by the Italians of the earlier Renaissance: a period scarcely primitive, scarcely accomplished. Those early Italians, though engaging, were not really great draughtsmen of the human figure—not great draughtsmen in the sense of the Greek sculptors, or Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Ingres, or Leighton, or Bouguereau. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, lacking the peculiar education which fitted the temperament and brought out the qualities of the men we have named last of all, not unnaturally sympathised with those in whom intention counted sometimes for more than execution. But it must not be thought that because the ever-inventive artist did not possess the Academic qualities, he was not, therefore, in certain respects, very remarkable in draughtsmanship. He drew with the ease of conversation; and, though never a master of accurate gesture—seldom dramatic in the representation of the particular hour or scene—he was a master of quaint and simple, and sometimes of elaborate, grace; and for the untiring record of the particular type of maidenhood, seen best perhaps in the ‘Golden Staircase,’ or in ‘Venus’s Looking-Glass,’ he stands alone. We name those pictures rather than, for instance, the ‘Days of Creation,’ or any of his various ‘Seasons,’ because in them he is at his happiest—his girls, though in the work of the suave decorator they are never essentially various, can be radiant as well as doleful. His men have plenty of wistfulness, but they have rarely energy, strength, decision. They are even, in a measure, sexless. And of childhood, Burne-Jones has never been an inspired, or even, it would seem, a particularly interested chronicler.

Of course, it must be remembered that Burne-Jones is judged unjustly when judged by the rules of even the least narrow realism. He painted, not the world of our own day, or of any day—least of all the Kensington in which he lived, and slept, and had his studio—but a world he had imagined and created; a world his conception of which was fed, no doubt, by the earlier and graver of mid-Italian art. Imagination, now stimulated by legend, now supported by classic lore, and now the product of the brooding of an isolated mind—that is really the genesis, the raison d’être, the Alpha and the Omega of his art. Burne-Jones had, at his best, and especially in his middle period—the days of the ‘Chant d’Amour,’ with its fitly welcomed splendours of crimson and blue and golden brown—a wonderful gift of colour; and, even where the draughtsmanship of the human figure left something to be wished for, he was a marvellous, a loving, and a patient draughtsman of flower and of herb. The backgrounds of some of his inventions, in landscape and the architecture of towns, were of strange and mystic quaintness. Sometimes, in these, he recalled almost the spirit, the mystery, almost the charm, of the backgrounds of the prints by Albert Dürer. The great Dürer!—well, that is saying much. But we have left to the last what was perhaps Burne-Jones’s most essential characteristic, certainly his greatest accomplishment. We mean his gift of composition of line, his power of precisely and perfectly filling, and never overcrowding, the space it was his business to occupy. His composition of light and shade was less remarkable. He was a master of agreeable outline, of flowing and spontaneous tracery. But if it is not his imagination which is to keep his memory green, in the minds of the students of Art—and we doubt whether, with all his very individual merits, it really is—then it is that in which, in all our generation, and perhaps in all our English School, he may be accounted to have most possessed—the humbler faculty of patterning, of weaving faultless webs of subtle line over the surface, large or small, which was devoted to the exposition of whatever chanced to be his theme.

(Standard, 18th June 1898.)

BOSBOOM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

The English cognoscenti of the modern type have now for some time recognised that in Dutch Art there is more than one great period that has to be reckoned with—that the great Seventeenth Century does not exhaust the achievements of this people. It may not be quite true to say of Dutch painting, as of French sculpture, that the traditions have been invariably preserved, and that there has been little break in the school; for the last century in Holland was a barren one—just as barren there as in France and England it was brilliant. The revival has been for later generations, and of those who did most to accomplish it some are yet living, in an old age not so very advanced, and others are lately dead. A history of this revival would be a great and worthy subject: it may yet, one hopes, be undertaken by some one writer qualified to treat it. Such a writer could not possibly be a person who had lived wholly within its influence. He would have to bring with him something better and wiser than the ungoverned admirations of the modern studio. A knowledge of the Past must be his. Meanwhile, we receive, and experience a certain satisfaction in receiving, even that fragmentary contribution to the subject which is made in the volume called Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century. Max Rooses—the keeper of the Musée Plantin-Moretus at Antwerp—furnishes a general introduction, which is readable and fairly comprehensive, if not particularly critical. And many writers, whose collaboration is of necessity destructive of unity of idea, but whose individual opportunities of personal knowledge give the book something it might yet have lacked had it been written by one serious and capable critic, contribute biographical notes, authentic and amiable. The painters have been caressed, not analysed. That is exactly what the least instructed and least studious portion of the public is supposed to like, in the ‘text’ of its big Christmas picture-books—which, of course, is why that text is written so seldom by the serious professional writers who, if they chose to do it at all, could do it best.

Only a dozen painters are represented in Mr. Max Rooses’ volume, and the selection of this dozen is extremely arbitrary, or would be if it were not, as we understand, the intention of the publishers to follow up the present with at least one other volume. Two women figure amongst the twelve. Miss Jacoba van der Sande Backhuysen, the aged flower-painter, who died three years ago, and then was seventy-one, deserved probably to be included. She is included. Some of her work is of freedom and vigour, if some also tends to be precise and impersonal. You cannot find in every generation or in every land a Fantin-Latour or a Francis James; and the flowers of Jacoba van der Sande Backhuysen are generally welcome. But the introduction of Henriette Ronner, a popular and quite delightful lady, with the narrow speciality of painting cats, was surely scarcely merited. As for the men, the choice is hardly less arbitrary. Israels, of course, is in his place, with his grey record of the homely and the sad; and, though Alma-Tadema is a naturalised Englishman, it is not surprising that the Dutch should be reluctant to forget what at least was his origin. But if Alma-Tadema is to be included, why is Van Haanen—a Dutchman still, probably, and the truest and subtlest of all living painters of Venetian life and character—why is Van Haanen to be left out? We receive gladly what is given us of Bisschop, Weissenbruch, and Gabriel. But the omission of such gifted Dutchmen as Mauve and Mesdag and Artz and Mathieu Maris—even in a first volume—is memorable. Further, the omission of the great name of Jacob Maris—certainly one of the most potent of all contemporary masters—would be fatal to any pretensions that the volume might make to completeness, or, if the phrase may be accorded us, to even a temporary finality. But if it becomes the duty of any qualified observer to note important omissions, compelling further instalments of the history, it must be satisfactory to him to chronicle such inclusions as those we have already cited as welcome and reasonable, and it is nothing less than a pleasure to find, not only contained, but placed in the forefront of the volume, the name and work of Johannes Bosboom. To Bosboom, and his right of place there, we will devote our remaining comments, and partly because the large English public is still strangely deficient in the appreciation of his work.

Johannes Bosboom was born at the Hague in 1817. He died in 1891, aged seventy-four, and in the artistic world of Holland he had by that time long enjoyed complete and cordial recognition; to painters and to the best critics—above all, perhaps, to that rich painter, M. Mesdag, collector as well as artist—belong the majority of the best of his works. The art of Bosboom is displayed to some extent in oil pictures, but more finely, on the whole, in the great series of his water-colours. He is a painter essentially of the succession of Rembrandt—a master of the arrangement of light and shade—holding his own honourably in the presentation of landscape, but known chiefly, and known on the whole most to his advantage, as a painter of church interiors. His earlier work is in method drier and smaller than his later. The maturity of his genius finds him as broad as Cotman or Dewint. He has the restfulness and dignity of these men when they are at their best. He has not Cotman’s gift of colour, and in those very church interiors to which Cotman would have given a colourist’s charm—as his kindred work in the possession of Mr. James Reeve and the late Mr. J. J. Colman assures us—Bosboom’s preoccupation is with tone, and with sense of space; though, of course, in his colour he is never inharmonious. Each is great in his own way, and the one is almost as profoundly poetic as the other, though Bosboom, if anything, excels Cotman in the restful picturesqueness of his vision. With him, invariably, as in the great artist we have mentioned by the side of him, the detail is nothing but a part of the whole. It is never aggressive; it is never importunate; it is even for the most part effaced. Bosboom, dealing with church interiors, is not, like Sir Wyke Bayliss, a painter of great scenes as well as of great architecture. For him the pageant has no attraction, and in the painting of a ceremonial or a service, such as the ‘Taking the Sacrament in Utrecht Cathedral,’ he is not really at his best. He is best when his church is quiet, and all its spaciousness ‘tells.’ See, for instance, the admirable ‘Church at Trier’—immense, velvety, solemn—and, likewise, the not less masterly water-colour, the ‘St. Joris Church at Amersfoort.’ An architectural draughtsman, in the technical or narrow sense, he is never, from beginning to end—a fact that is partly due to the broader and more poetic bent of his genius, and partly, too, no doubt, to his observation having been chiefly exercised and his imagination chiefly stirred by interiors quaint rather than elegant, massive and large rather than exquisite in detail, picturesque rather than perfect. The book of Mr. Max Rooses’ editing, will, in England, have not been without its service, if it, or even our own comments on it, should secure wider attention to the work of a master as eminently human and sympathetic as he is austere and sterling. But, for the fuller comprehension of Bosboom here, in England, there should be gathered together in a single place a fair array of his work; and we commend to the enlightened dilettanti of the Burlington Fine Arts Club this appropriate and honourable enterprise.