On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

(Literature, 3rd December 1898.)

HENNER

The first thing to remember of the painter Henner is that he is above all a poet. Has he then created stories or narrated them pathetically? Has he made it the business of painting to do literary work? He has done nothing of the kind. Even where he has used classical mythology and Biblical tradition as the excuse for his canvases, the derived subject seems to have taken hold of him but lightly; he has been dramatic to the extent to which—well, shall I say?—to the extent to which a reciter in a drawing-room is permissibly dramatic—gracefully indicating action and character, never violently insisting on them. Henner’s poetry—his gift of creating, of idealising, in restrained and refined ways—is never shown by the usurpation of another’s functions. It is shown in part by his choice of beautiful, artistic themes; by the exceptional fulness of his appreciation of lovely form and hue; by the combinations of faultless and harmonious colour which occur upon his canvases; by the associations these somehow evoke; by the high pleasure they bestow. To define it much further is impossible. I feel myself, in describing his art, to be ineffective and faltering; but the analyst does not exist who could account completely for his charm.

Henner, it will be allowed by those who are most qualified to notice, is a great painter of the Nude. The Nude, according as you treat it, can rise to poetic heights and address itself to the refined, or can sink to more than prosaic depths. There is the high and there is the low, and there are many levels for the painter to stay at and live upon between them; and to the real artistic instinct, to the real fineness of taste, in looking at the Nude, there is permitted that immediate ease of judgment and decision by which the work is classed at once, and its motive appraised. When the true judges appraise the Nude of Monsieur Henner, the decision is a happy one. He is refinement to the finger-tips—as refined as Burne-Jones, yet not sexless. Painters whom only the Puritanic could accuse of vulgarity—Benner, say, in France, with his ‘Dormeuse’ of Amiens; Ingres, a generation ago, with his ‘Source’ and her ‘âme végétale’; Etty, say, in England, with his daylight flesh-colour, which the sunshine suffers to be neither creamy nor grey, but rose and opal—they, and how many others, may be named with praise. But Monsieur Henner’s work has somehow, in this matter, a reticence and a distinction—a part of his Alsatian Poetry—which one is apt to think unique. And it is worthy of notice—it throws a little light on the undramatic, the simply painter-like method of Henner’s work—that the undraped figure is there, not seldom, as a necessary note of colour, and nothing besides: a note of ivory, telling, in some picture of evening, against that olive green of the embrowned woodland which rises, massed and darkening, against the last turquoise of the sky.

Yes, it is a purely painter-like quality, the poetry of colours in that more than blameless juxtaposition which is a rare achievement of Art—the poetry of gleaming form, of discreet light, of restful and mysterious shadow—that Henner will live by. The story he illustrates gains nothing in dramatic interest by his treatment of it. His business, even when he paints an ‘Hérodiade,’ is to solace and charm rather than to excite; and the refinement and suavity of his vision may accomplish for us of the Nineteenth Century what David’s music did for the troubled soul of King Saul. Like Puvis de Chavannes—in work more grandly decorative, in conception vast and suave—he administers to men the refreshment of a pure and high beauty. In such a subject as his ‘Prayer,’ it is his function but to vary things delicately: to escape the commonplace, nothing more. But, as regards his figure painting, in the refinement of his models we are never suffered to lose sight of what is familiar, homely, intimate, personal. Nature has been suggested with reticence, but nature has been constantly referred to. Of his landscape, the materials are simple and few; breadth and simplicity are of the very essence of his treatment. His selection is arbitrary; a certain noble conventionality reigns in his canvases. Give him a tranquil sky, a pool, a square stone fountain, a nymph, a solemn cypress, a tangle of woodland—what more! Petty imitation, fussy realisation of a hundred objects, he will hold to be valueless. But his work must have Unity: it must have Style.

An artist with these preoccupations is not, one may say with safety, likely to be a very popular portrait painter. Yet Henner has painted a fair share of portraits. And no ‘hard and fast’ line can divide such portraiture as he produces from his ideal work. When the touches on his canvas are no longer dictated by what is obviously imagination, it is not likely that a striking realism succeeds to the control, that modernité speaks from every corner of the picture, that the poet has become the fashionable portrait painter. Reticence is still remembered. Henner can perceive character, but it must be conveyed without emphasis. With the palette set as of old, and the schemes of colour such as the ideal work has already accustomed us to, Henner must pursue his task. Perhaps it is the pallor of a thoughtful face of middle age, to be framed in black hair, with an olive background. Perhaps, as in the ‘Créole,’ it is the old Venetian tresses that are to fall richly on the bust that is shining marble, that is gleaming ivory. A likeness, no doubt; but before all things, a picture.

(Magazine of Art, May 1888.)

FRANCIS JAMES

I leave to a biographer in the Future the task of recording Mr. Francis James’s birthplace and of settling the number of his years; of saying, too, where he chiefly lived and chiefly practised. I am concerned with his drawings, and not with the man, except in so far as his drawings must reveal him; and the real man, and not the outside facts about him, a man’s work does always to some extent reveal. In the case of Francis James, his work is his water-colours. I know no oil painting by him. I remember no pencil studies. I know no etchings by him, no lithographs by him. And, moreover, modern man though he is, he seems to be able to express himself without the assistance of silver point—the interesting and difficult medium, the employment of which threatens to become a label of the cultivated. His own work in water-colour is as direct, immediate, uncorrectable as that; but colour is of the very essence of it. Whatever he tackles, whatever he elects to let alone, Francis James is essentially a colourist.

One thing about his life and circumstances I shall here—taking breath in a parenthesis—venture to record. As a youth he was never compelled to prepare for a profession. Being a country gentleman who gradually became an artist, Mr. Francis James had a little comfortable means, one may suppose. Is he to be cursed, then, on that account, with the name of amateur? Certainly not. No more than Méryon, who was brought up in the French Navy; no more than W. W. May, the charming marine artist, in early life a sailor, and in late life Keeper of the Painted Hall at Greenwich; no more than Robert Goff, who was in the Coldstream Guards; or Seymour Haden, President of his own Academy, and once such a successful surgeon that he might have been President of the College of Surgeons to boot. In art of any kind—in Painting, Writing, Modelling—the spirit in which a man does his work, and not the means that he possesses, or the family that he belongs to, constitutes him professional or amateur. Is his art his chief interest? If so, whatever may be his status upon other grounds, professional artist, serious professional artist, he is, with his books or his pictures. To the serious artist a little money is of endless usefulness, even if it be only a very scanty portion—three hundred a year and an umbrella—for that scanty portion, which has caused the fool to eat the bread of idleness, has caused the wise man to work with a will. It has gone some little way towards securing him that deepest boon for the artistic nature, la liberté du travail.