British Marine Painting

by Unknown

Turner, at all events, never came to the conclusion that his knowledge of the sea was complete, for to the end of his life he maintained the freshness and variety of his interpretation. He gave to it, year by year, a deeper note of sentiment, responding always more directly to the impression he received, and eliminating everything that did not help in the attainment of his pictorial purpose. Detail at the last he almost entirely disregarded, concentrating the whole of his attention upon the main effect by which temperamentally he was inspired; but the things essential for the construction of his picture and for making clear the meaning of his motive he observed with the most scrupulous care. Even in his slightest and, seemingly, most casual notes of the sea there was the subtlest accuracy of vision, and there was the truest summing up of the story that was told by the particular phase of the subject he had chosen for the exercise or his powers as an interpreter of nature’s message. Never did he descend to a formula or use a set convention to gain his dramatic result. It was partly for this reason that he stood so sublimely apart from his contemporaries; he did not repeat himself, while they were too often content to follow rules and to do over again things that they had discovered to be attractive to the public. Yet many of the artists of Turner’s period were men of distinction and their sea paintings had satisfying merit and no small measure of inspiration. Stanfield suggested well the movement and action of the sea and was sensitive to its atmosphere; Copley Fielding saw and took the opportunities that the sea offered him for arranging graceful compositions and charming studies of light and shade, and he, too, had a sound understanding of wave movement; De Wint and David Cox, both masterly students of nature, painted the misty subtleties of the coast with masculine power and with the knowledge that comes only from prolonged and thoughtful observation; and others not less observant showed that the pictorial possibilities of the sea had by no means escaped them. But none of them arrived at Turner’s magnificent disregard of limitations or approached him in dramatic strength, and certainly none of them had the courage to abandon, as he did, detailed reality for the sake of presenting a higher and more impressive truth.

Indeed, that is one of the mysteries of Turner’s genius—that he could distort facts and leave out apparently essential details and yet make his realization of nature perfect in its truth—and what is still more mysterious is that this system of distortion and elimination was not a matter of convention but a universally applicable principle of practice and one which in his hands was capable of infinite variation. By an infallible instinct he grasped instantly the meaning of his subject as a whole and decided what he should accentuate or omit to make that meaning clear, and all his devices of technical treatment were as infallibly directed by an exact understanding of the way in which they could best be made to serve his end. Paradoxically, he left things out to gain a greater completeness of result, and he departed from strict correctness to secure more absolute reality. But all this he did by the aid of an extraordinary insight into nature’s facts and under the guidance of a judgment which was never at fault.

That is why Turner’s manner of representing the sea cannot be applied by lesser men. Without any disparagement of the many able marine painters who have practised since his time it can safely be said that on none of them his mantle has fallen. Certainly to none of them has been granted his rare endowment of intimate vision and profound imagination; certainly none has possessed that combination of exhaustive knowledge and perfect confidence which made him so consummately a master of his craft. There have been in the recent past, there are at work to-day, artists who have studied the sea in the most sympathetic spirit and whose seriousness of effort deserves the highest praise, artists whose accomplishment would be wholly satisfying if Turner had not shown so brilliantly the greater possibilities of sea painting; but theirs is a limited and specialized view beside that of their great predecessor. It is as well, however, that they do not try to do too much. To paint the abstract drama of the sea in the only way that can be made convincing, the possession of a temperament is absolutely essential, but this temperament must be schooled and disciplined by lifelong study or the drama will degenerate into incredible fantasy. Turner was temperamentally fitted to attempt the highest flights, and with his perfect technical equipment nothing was beyond his reach. Other artists must be content to admire his poetic power without aspiring to rival it. But, after all, honest, well-educated, serious prose is better than incoherent poetry, no matter how well-intentioned that may be; and certainly the prose of many of our modern sea painters is very good indeed—clear, logical, and distinguished by a true sense of style—and into much of it comes that touch of poetic feeling that gives charm and picturesqueness to the descriptive statement.

To illustrate the difference between these two types of sea painting the work of Henry Moore can appropriately be instanced. He was, next to Turner, the most learned and accomplished student of marine motives and the finest exponent of the facts of the sea whom any school has produced. But beside the dramatic poetry of Turner his art was prose, fine prose, persuasive and dignified, but never rising into inspired fancy. In other words, he saw nobly and beautifully, but Turner saw and imagined as well, and the more he saw the more splendidly did he use his imagination.

Yet Henry Moore has indisputably his place among the masters because his art, though not profoundly imaginative, was as able in achievement as it was accurate in observation. Moreover, he was acutely responsive to the sentiment of nature, and interpreted her in her many moods with exquisite discretion. Frank and straightforward as his work always was, it never lacked the direction of a sympathetic mind; its strength was controlled by a singularly correct sense of artistic propriety and was never allowed to degenerate into mere display of executive cleverness. Certainly Henry Moore was a fine craftsman, and was not hampered by technical difficulties in the practice of his art; indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of his pictures, as we see them to-day, is the confidence of the handling by which they are distinguished.

This confidence, this directness of method, was the outcome of a not less confident understanding of the material with which he was accustomed to deal. The things he knew were to him matters of such complete knowledge that he was able to concentrate himself entirely upon the pictorial realization of them without having to make experiments or calculations to prove whether or not his assumptions were correct. Wisely, too (not having the Turner temperament), he did not aim at possibilities which he honestly recognized as being beyond his reach. Facts and realities he could grasp, subtle shades of fact and delicate variations of reality he could express with discriminating subtlety and sensitive delicacy, but to conceive a vision in which actual nature would be turned into a gloriously fanciful abstraction was outside the range of his personality. So he kept to the path which it was right that he should tread, and made no excursions into strange places in the domain of art, proving himself thereby a master of himself as well as of his art.

We have every reason to be grateful to him for his solid and well-balanced common sense. Henry Moore as an imitator of Turner, following in the wake of a leader whom he could never overtake, would have been a wasted force in art. Henry Moore as a painter true to his own convictions, striving earnestly to set before us his extraordinarily intimate view of the sea, has established a standard against which the achievements of our modern sea painters can be measured most instructively, and has pointed out the principles on which these painters must work if they are to justify their effort. Knowledge such as Turner possessed is by its very vastness incomprehensible to the ordinary man; but knowledge like that which Henry Moore gathered is possible to other artists, though to few of them is given his capacity to express it, and to fewer still his sureness of touch and his command of executive method.

What is particularly to be learned from Henry Moore’s pictures is the wide variety of matters which have to be studied by the men who aspire to paint the sea with a sufficient measure of artistic fitness. There are, of course, many ways of representing the sea pictorially—as a background or setting to some nautical incident; as an accessory in a scene which has humanity for its main interest; as a generalized scheme of colour or tone; as a decorative motive with conventionalized forms; or as a poetically indefinite fantasy in which nearly everything is left to the imagination of the beholder. But the most scholarly and serious way—Henry Moore’s way—is to analyse and dissect; to account for every variation in form and every changing gleam of colour; to find the reasons for each of the many kinds of wave movement; to learn the connexion between certain conditions of the weather and certain states of the sea; to know how to produce a sea picture which will be logical throughout and without contradictions of atmospheric effect which are calculated to excite the protests of the marine expert who knows his subject and is not inclined to take artistic licence into consideration. Henry Moore spared himself none of these exhaustive preparations and had the technical skill to make the outcome of them wholly attractive in artistic quality; that is why he ranks as a master at whose feet it is good for the would-be sea painter to sit in all humility.

If a series of his pictures is examined it will be seen at once that in each one some special problem is dealt with and some definite phase of the sea is taken as the motive. Unthinking people are apt to say that sea paintings are monotonous because they lack incident and variety of subject, because they are nothing but waves and sky, but this objection implies an unobservant habit of mind. Henry Moore did not repeat himself, and among the most personal characteristics of his work was its breadth of outlook, a breadth of outlook which was developed by his constant search for fresh impressions. Although he had not had, like Stanfield or Chambers, a professional connexion with the sea, he was frequently afloat and always trying to enlarge his experience of his subject. He had, too, the gift of very rapid technical expression which enabled him to set down what he saw while the impression was vividly in his mind, so that his first clear conviction was not modified or obscured by mechanical causes—by that prolongation of effort which leads to an ill-assorted mixing of ideas and an indecisive manner of statement.

This combination of instantaneous apprehension and unhesitating expression is, indeed, a necessity for the artist who wishes to avoid a merely conventional rendering of the sea and who is anxious to suggest properly its really infinite variety. There is so much that must be done quickly, there are such incessant changes of effect and condition, that the deliberate worker, thinking slowly and using his appliances unreadily, is always in danger of being left with his intention unrealized. He sees something that appeals to him as a good subject and he begins to study it in all seriousness; but before he has grasped its meaning, and before he has more than the first few careful touches on his canvas, the effect that stirred him has gone, and in its place there is something else that is surprisingly different. No wonder if unable to keep pace with nature’s elusive tricks he becomes after a while hopelessly bewildered and gives up the struggle in despair. Possibly, being a conscientious person, he decides to paint one aspect only of the sea and to specialize in one type of subject which he can master by long and laborious practice; or, being less particular, he builds up a pretty convention which will help him to turn out superficially attractive things that will please a none too critical public. But in neither way is the great sea painter made, the painter who can tell the story of the sea and convey to us its sentiment and its character.