It has been said that every good woman has in her marching outfit a supply of adaptability which, in sum total, accounts for most of the happiness enjoyed by the human race at large. If so, it may be added that in its superior manifestations the affair is sub-conscious, artistic, most natural and not at all one of the commonplaces of life. It perhaps explains, or rather is illustrated by, the number of painters in the very first rank among women who have shown in their work the influence of some near relative. In any case, Lady Alma-Tadema for one has produced work so extraordinarily good in itself that it is easy to believe the similarity of her technique to that of Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema to be merely one of the happy chances of her life. A very similar thought arises in connection with the work of the late Miss Margaret Dicksee. It is easy to influence technique, but first causes are not set in action by human hands. If one who did not know her may say so, there is written on the canvases that Miss Dicksee has left behind the evidence of a most lovable nature.
Mrs. Stanhope Forbes, Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch and Lady Granby are isolated examples whose work has no connection in itself and shows very little affinity, beneath the surface, with the special influences of their time. The strong brushwork of Mrs. Stanhope Forbes, it is true, may be said to have arrived by way of Newlyn, but the fanciful sentiment underlying her work has an arrival quite of its own. Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch has made, and deserved, a place for herself the last few years, and she stands alone among women as an animal painter of power. Lady Granby, who is an amateur, is also an artist. Magna est ars et prevalet. Ave!
Miss Mary Gow, the late Alice Havers, Miss Jessie Macgregor, Miss Anna Alma-Tadema, Miss Lily Blatherwick, Miss Amy Sawyer, and Louisa Starr (Madame Canziana) also make a special appeal, each in her own way.
Mrs. Swynnerton is a lady who has given us a great deal of work of a very high order indeed. In the first place she has always something to say that is worth saying. Her work is exuberant with the joy of life, the joy of colour. Her very brush is surcharged with a high and lavish spirit. Blue eyes look out, so blue, from happy sunburnt faces, so sunburnt, that take their places on her canvases as in a drama to tell us something of her thoughts and of themselves. Mrs. Swynnerton, plus her faults, is genuine through and through. The work of another painter, Mrs. De Morgan, naturally comes into consideration when we turn to symbolism. More tenaciously in earnest and more austere in every way than Mrs. Swynnerton, her work is as the poles apart. The one romps, if the term be allowed, in a flower-spangled meadow, the other's province is the study; and, as is the way with students, her mind is often on the thought of the past rather than with affairs of the present. Before one of Mrs. De Morgan's pictures one thinks through, by way of Burne-Jones, to Botticelli and the great ancestors of art, and it is saying a very great deal for Mrs. De Morgan that in such case one can bless the passive hand that gives and the hand that receives.
Her work may very well lead us to a small band of artists, not definitely connected in themselves, but allied with each other in the sense that they work for somewhat similar ends: Mrs. Marianne Stokes, Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale and Mrs. Young Hunter. To these, perhaps, may one day be added a name very little known at present, Miss Milicent E. Gray. It is not unusual in speaking of the work of either of these first three artists, and more especially of Miss Eleanor Brickdale, to refer to the pre-Raphaelite influence in art. It is, however, extremely probable that the influence takes direct effect in these days more as a method than as a conviction. The great conviction itself has leavened Art, and the individualities of these painters are so strong that it becomes in their case a nearer interest to ignore all potters and regard the clay. Mrs. Young Hunter has a quaint flitting fancy that wanders over hill and dale and seizes from life subtle little touches that are full of the elusiveness of tales told after school hours.
Mrs. Marianne Stokes is made of sterner stuff. She has worked of late in that most stern and stubborn medium, tempera, and small things of hers in various exhibitions attract one always with the desire to know more of her most attractive work. Miss Eleanor Brickdale works, or plays, always with an idea. And the idea she is not satisfied to leave until it has taken on for other eyes a most cunning and beautiful bodily shape, in line, in form, in colour—above all in line. She is probably, without knowing it, as good an antithesis as may be found of the Impressionist, so-called. The Impressionist is the incarnation of the abstract in terms of paint, the Symbolist uses the material to convey definite abstractions in thought. It is, by contrast with music, the motive of symphony as compared to the motive of Oratorio or opera, and the apposite methods may be equally well, or badly, used or abused. Abuse may lead the militant Impressionist to an impasse of assertive agnosticism as pedantic in its way as the lucubrations of the most literary pedant in paint. On the other side of the lantern you may have Watts, and the painted canvases of a Whistler. So be it.
Art is a long lane with many turnings, and down each there may be found a little house with a fireside and human hearts thereby.
RALPH PEACOCK.
