On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

I suppose it was his exquisite enjoyment of flowers, as he had lived amongst them, at all seasons of the year, in their natural place, that gave the first impulse to Francis James to render flowers in Art. Then, as to method in Water-colour painting, there came the influence of Dewint, and then the influence of some, at least, of modern French practice, and then the influence of his neighbour, down in Sussex—that sensitive Impressionist, H. B. Brabazon, with his mature thought upon the matter, and his delightful practice, his ‘blobs’ upon the drawing-paper—‘blobs’ which are so very few, and are so admirably right. James has become, of late years at all events, less purely an Impressionist than Brabazon. In his work, whatever be its theme, there is always more of positive and yet refined draughtsmanship. But the influence of Brabazon is there all the same; or, at least, is there from the first. An immense sensitiveness as to colour, a refinement of colour which does not preclude boldness, the cultivation of an alertness as to the most delicate gradations of colour—these things characterise Francis James. They are of assistance to him, even of incalculable assistance to him, in all the things that he depicts, in all the visions he realises. But I think they are of most use to him of all when it is flowers he is looking at; composing with grace, painting with ineffable charm.

And, so far as I understand, flowers were the subject with which he chose to begin.

It would, however, be now thoroughly unfair to Francis James to consider him only as a flower painter. Outside flowers altogether, there is a class of effect which he has made his own, and which is his by reason of his habitual command of colour—fearless, original, and gay. I am talking of the church interiors, beheld in keen, clear light; and interesting less it may be by their architecture—as to which, while John Fulleylove, and Albert Goodwin, and Wyke Bayliss, speak, who is there that shall speak with equal authority to-day?—interesting less by their architecture than by their hues and their illuminations, and their accidents and accessories; the ornaments about the altar, the wreath of flowers that encircle the figure of a saint, the bit of heraldic glass that recalls Nuremberg, the sacred piece hoisted above the altar; the banner, it may be, or perhaps only the pink cushion of the altar rail, or the little green curtain that gives privacy to the box of the confessional. At Rothenburg, as well as Nuremberg itself, Mr. James went in for very serious draughtsman’s study of statues in their niches, of the traceried wall, of plate upon the altar, of this and that little detail, of which the treatment remained broad while it became finished. At Nuremberg—to name two, that for excellent reasons I remember—admirable is the broad and luminous picturesqueness of his interiors of the Kaiser Kapelle and St. Sebald. At Rothenburg, as far as simple architecture is concerned, what a variety lay before him! And yet from all its richness and variety he turned now and then, to paint the humble window of the little bourgeois or little tradesman’s house; the window-sill with its few pots of green-leaved and blossoming flowers, seen, some of them, against the brown-red shutter; fragile fuchsia, and healthy geranium.

But whether Francis James is occupied with flower painting, or with church interiors of Germany or the Eastern Riviera, or with landscape pieces, or with studies of the village shop, it is always the same spirit of broad interpretation that dominates his work. Its business is to recall an impression—artistic always, whether beautiful or quaint—it is not generally its business to be imitative, strictly imitative, of actual object or scene. Quite an infinity of detail is pleasantly suggested by a drawing of the grocer’s shop at Bewdley—the Post Office of the country town—and just as much by ‘Shop Front, Bewdley,’ which shows us the deep bow-window of Mr. Bryan, the bookseller; a background before which some quiet figure out of Jane Austen might conceivably have passed. But the detail is not obtruded. If you peer closely into the paper, it is not dryly made out. In a sense, ‘il n’y a rien.’ Stand away a little, and then again, ‘il y a tout.’

But, of course, Mr. James’s preoccupation with a quaint little world of the provinces, whose combinations of colour, as he here shows us them, are curious rather than lovely—that preoccupation of his is occasional rather than constant; and we shall never therefore take his measure by an inspection of work like this. Some quaint line it possesses, and to the interest of quaint as well as of lovely combinations of line, Francis James is quite alive. But it is where the combinations of line may be lovely—where they may have their highest quality herein—and yet more where with beautiful lines there must (to do justice to the theme) be associated beautiful colour; it is here that Mr. James is most characteristic. ‘Autumn, Asolo,’ shows this to some extent; and so do other landscapes in which the world to which he has addressed himself, whether of Lombard or Venetian plateau, or of Alpine height, is dealt with with intrepidity. But it is to churches and flowers—or sometimes to the interiors of drawing-rooms or bedrooms lived in by tasteful people, and full therefore of objects that should gratify the eye in their happy, well-arranged union—it is to churches and flowers in the main, and most of all flowers, that we must come back, to find Francis James quite at his most exquisite, quite at his most characteristic.

Perhaps it is hardly possible nowadays to paint flowers without submitting to some extent to the influence of the Japanese. From them, whatever else you learn, you learn freedom of treatment and a conception based upon essentials. The limitations of Japanese Art it does not happen just now to be the fashion to recognise; though every one who is really educated—every one who understands the Classics of Art, the immense achievements of Europe from Holbein to Turner—must know of these limitations, and must feel them. That does not prevent the perception of the value of those things which Japanese art (among the arts of other peoples indeed) has had some capacity for teaching us. And when Francis James makes his pink and white roses trail over the paper, with tints so pale and delicate, I think sometimes of the Japanese. I think of them much less when he sets a whole posy—a whole group, at least—in a tumbler, and has his massive colour, his rich, great colour, his fearless juxtapositions. And then, perhaps, with the Japanese influence not lost altogether, but still mainly subdued—not displayed at all, and scarcely even insinuated—do I rejoice in Francis James at his best.

Among painters, water-colour painters, Francis James is the poet of flowers, as Van Huysum, it may be—two hundred years ago—was their prose chronicler. The public knows Van Huysum best by his work in oils. The rare amateur of noble prints knows him best by Earlom’s two splendid translations of him into the medium of mezzotint. But the not less rare connoisseur of the fine drawings of a past period, knows him by water-colour sketches, such as those possessed by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. And as there are moments, moods, opportunities, when men apparently far apart get nearer together, so, just now and again by Van Huysum’s practice in water-colour—by his pure sketching in that medium—the gulf that separates him from Francis James, is, not bridged indeed, but narrowed. The moment Van Huysum passes beyond the pure sketch, the perhaps even rapid study, something that is of the nature of the artificial, of intentional and obvious intricacy, begins to assert itself. Now, with the delightful artist of the day whose eulogium I am slowly making, that is never the case.

Francis James’s fondness for flowers is, in some sense, akin to a woman’s instinctive fondness for everybody’s children. He has joy in their mere life. And it is their life that he paints. And he paints them in their own atmosphere—the sunlight heightening so the key of their colour, or a little rain perhaps has fallen and their life is refreshed. Had the rain fallen when Van Huysum painted them, the drop would have glistened on the petal; the perfection of the imitation of it is what we might have been asked, first of all, to see and admire. But it is not their accidental condition that Francis James imitates. It is their splendid vigour or exquisite freshness—see, for instance, this noble primula with its deep glowing, slightly mauveish reds and its enriched green leaves; in its condition, a very bridegroom coming out of his chamber.

Amongst flowers, Francis James, I find, is universal in his loves. He does not swear fidelity to the rose—or he does not swear the particular fidelity which is only exclusiveness. In every garden, every greenhouse, every season of the year, he has (to use the sailor simile) ‘a wife in every port.’ He is as various in his appreciations of the beloved and the admirable as is a young man by Mr. Thomas Hardy. Primula, tulip, rose, pelargonium, and then the hundred orchids—having thanked one of them for its beauty, and profited by it, he turns with happy expectation to another. Nor does disappointment await him.

One little confidence—made to me long ago, I recollect—I propose, before I finish this article, ruthlessly to break. James destroys many drawings. He strangles the ill-begotten. He pronounces, with severity, judgment upon his creations. He assists the fittest to survive. Three or four years back he was wrestling manfully with the treatment of the orchid. No one, I think, had really treated the orchid before then. Since then, in oils, Mr. William Gale, in a group of works too little known, has treated it with unequal, of course, yet often with remarkable, skill. But when Francis James had drawn, at Sanders’ nursery—during several months’ sojourn at St. Albans, to that end—orchids of every kind, great was the massacre of the innocents. We were permitted afterwards to see the successes; the failures had been done away with.