Butler has, at all events, always done just what he wanted to do, and in the strictest sense. His temperament has always dictated his expression, and in thoroughly imperious fashion. It may be said, indeed, to have dominated his intelligence to the extent, at least, of eliminating, as objects of curiosity, interest, or effort, everything not strictly in accord with itself. But the result has been the felicity of extreme concentration. If in doing what he wanted to do his wants have been few, he has, on the other hand, wanted them with an intensity proportionate to its singleness. Beauty exhibited in the human face and form has absorbed his artistic attention and activity. I remember not only no landscapes, but nothing really to be called a composition among his works. A few Barye-like animal fragments, of heroic mould—a tiger's head, a dog's head and shoulders, the foreparts of an extremely leonine lion, some very feline cats—are, I fancy, the only diversion of his devotion to the single figure and the portrait, and they are but examples of the instinctive exercise of his remarkable gift of representation, and show a fine faculty at play rather than at work. They do not illustrate the "discipline of genius" as some writer has defined art to be, but are merely "artistic" in the sense in which artists use the word, i.e., born of the impulse to create or reproduce an "effect" of some kind. In the portrait and the single figure, however, he has expressed himself with freedom, with zest, and with completeness.
Portraiture is a branch of art in which artistic aptitudes exhibit themselves in as individual a way as in any other perhaps, despite the preponderance usually assigned to the "likeness." And neither à priori nor historically can it be asserted that the imagination itself plays in portraiture an inferior part. The material is possibly less varied than that of landscape or decorative art; but that is nothing. A painter shows his quality quite as much within a limited as within a wider range. And the material of portraiture is at least as highly differentiated as it is limited. The interest of the "Lesson in Anatomy" resides in many of its various pictorial elements no doubt, but also and in the supreme degree in what Burger calls "the working of intellect," as seen in the countenances of the listening circle around the demonstrator. A painter who exhibits himself in portraying human intellect, emotions, character, personality, and with these highly complicated and maturely developed phenomena shows us his point of view and way of looking at things—which are what art and genius mainly are, according to Mr. Henry James—has an opportunity certainly of doing so on a very high plane. And on such a plane Butler is, I think, very much at home. The quality that all his portraits show in common is displayed with perfect freedom and the effect only to be attained by the easy exercise of a native gift.
In the first place they are extremely human. They are in no degree portraits à la mode and do not exploit the painter's virtuosity. They show, on the contrary, his respect for, and interest in, his model. One establishes relations through them with their originals. They have character in the moral and intellectual, as well as in the artistic sense. They acquire in this way a typical value. The Century Club's portrait of General Greene is also a portrait of the American soldier, as many another, easily mentioned, is that of the American lady. They are intellectually generalized, that is to say, endowed with a wider than merely individual interest. In the second place they are extremely pictorial. The most intractable subject is made agreeable by being handled with a touch directed by an instinctive preference for, and delight in, the beautiful. The sitter receives the benefit of a translation into a heightened and poetized medium without loss of anything essentially characteristic. In both these respects—their humanity and their pictorial quality—Butler's portraits are decidedly exceptional in current art.
Current art is certainly concentrated upon physical character rather than upon beauty, and current appreciation of it is in harmonious accord with its realistic effort and aim. One may refine speculation to the point of asserting that there is no opposition, essentially considered, between the two; that Rembrandt is as distinguished for his beauty as Raphael, and that on the other hand there is as much character in "The School of Athens" as in the "Lesson in Anatomy." But in matters of this kind terms are approximate only, and the fact that definition is a difficult matter does not obscure the plain truth that a marked difference exists between the work of a painter in whose mind an agreeable conception of an object mirrors itself, and that of one mainly anxious to be exact. Technic has spread prodigiously (quite as much perhaps as it has developed) in the present epoch, and has become rather arrogant in its aggrandizement. Criticism, too, in becoming largely technical has assisted the tendency, so far as it exerts an influence on practice. It has grown tired, no doubt, of its own commonplaces and generalities, its easy habit of estimating aims rather than accomplishment, its routine insensitiveness to aspect and perfunctory absorption in significance. But in assuming the painter's point of view—not a very esoteric one, certainly—it has not been quite self-respectfully discriminating enough to avoid the purely professional attitude. And it is perhaps time for the pendulum to swing back again a little, so that both in estimating and in enjoying the painter's art we may once more think of its intellectual rather than so wholly of its mechanical side, which latter we may also be sure, nowadays, will be quite carefully, and in many cases competently, attended to by the painters themselves.
In this way, at any rate, having in mind Butler's portraits, we shall be able, whether or no they have the accent and relief requisite for a portrait of the striking or "stunning" order—in this way we shall be able to appreciate what a fine talent it predicates to say of a painter that he sees the finest side of his subject. This is often understood as lightly as it is said, and taken to indicate merely a preference for the agreeable to the more markedly characteristic. And this is no doubt especially true in the field of portraiture. But certainly, and especially in portraiture, very little reflection is needed to show one that the great peril to be avoided, and the most constant menace, is caricature of one sort or another. It may be the caricature that comes from imperfectly seizing and imperfectly rendering the traits of the subject, the caricature that inadequacy is. Or it may be that which comes from undue and disproportionate accentuation of what is perceived too exclusively. Success depends upon avoiding both by forming a correspondent conception of the subject—a conception that is clear and consistent and positive—and painting that. The painter then copies his conception, not his model, and the representative value of his portrait will have precisely the interest of his conception—in so far, of course, as he is able to convey it. In a sense, to be sure, it may be said that it is impossible to paint a portrait without proceeding in this way, without first forming a conception of the sitter plastically, if not morally; that the result is necessarily the product of some preliminary conception. But that is metaphysical fine-spinning. Empirically we all know that unconscious caricature—which is the caricature here referred to—is due to either a defective or a distorted conception, in other words, to a mental image either so faint or so little correspondent to the original as to be practically no conception at all. Of a very large number of portraits, assuredly, it may be asserted that they embody no more developed and complete an antecedent image in the mind of the painter than a mere mechanical impression, barely distinct enough to direct the muscular movements requisite to register it upon canvas.
Butler's conception is, as I have intimated, always very sympathetically formed. It seems to indicate that he likes the sitter. His own cordiality enters into it. It is a result of harmonious relations between his imagination and the sitter's nature—the qualities, as well as the appearance, of the subject. Landscape painting, says Eugène Véron, is "the painting of one's emotions in the presence of nature." Butler's portraits, similarly, seem the painting of his idea of the subject in its suggestive, stimulating, rectifying presence. His conception implies a certain slowness of formation—the time to become acquainted, at least. That of such a painter as Sargent is so rapid as to seem quite impersonal, in comparison. It is apparently formed so quickly as to be really an impression rather than a conception at all. Though occasionally plainly transitory, it is often wonderfully vivid and searching, but rarely does it attest that assimilation which is a necessary preliminary of synthesis of such complexity as the conception of an active personality is entitled to. Its qualities are fundamentally "artistic." Butler's is at the same time more mature and less objective. Sargent's grandes dames, for example, are always fine ladies, but Butler's portraits of women have, all of them, whatever the sitter's type, the patrician look. Yet they are noble rather than elegant, and simple in their refinement. Their graciousness is native, and there is something ample in the ease with which they carry themselves. Add to this a poetic strain that characterizes very intimately their unaffected naturalness and gives them a universal as well as a specific interest, making of them abiding works of art.
The Italian type, which almost all his single figures illustrate, has had a particular charm for Butler—as the accompanying illustrations attest. And to its interpretation he has brought a remarkable and an instinctive sympathy. Stendhal would have liked his Italian figures—Stendhal, who better than any other writer, perhaps, has understood the Italian national character in its nobility as well as its finesse. Its finesse has not interested Butler, as indeed it could hardly interest a painter of his frank nature, and it is not, of course, a particularly paintable quality, though it must be confessed that Velasquez made something of it in his Innocent X. of the Doria Gallery. But its nobility, its largeness, its elemental and untormented quality, its freedom from pettiness and perplexities, its naturalness, its frank following of the dictates of will and passion, unsophisticated by the restraints and complications of vanity or self-consciousness in any of its myriad forms—can be read in Butler's Capri peasants as in a book. Health and vigor, an animation that is not feverish or hardly alert, the charm of pensiveness without sadness, of repose without revery, of work without strain, and existence without effort, they show in every expression of their large lines and simple, graceful attitudes. Now and then from the face shines a beautiful soul, its innocence untouched by experience and acquiring an almost pathetic quality from its unworldly, yet by no means spiritual serenity. They win your admiration and your heart. They have infinite capacities of feeling, of loving, of wilfulness, of self-sacrifice. They have been refined but not corrupted by their not too close or too reciprocal contact with civilization. They are all of a piece, and one comprehends the tragedy that excess would mean for them. In their way they are the acme of poetry and beauty expressed in character that has a wonderful correspondence to the envelope of its plastic manifestation. "I would rather," exclaimed once a friend of mine—a lady, naturally—"I would rather know one Jew than forty Gentiles, they have so much more character." Character in this sense the Italians possess in effusion, so to speak, and Butler's Capriotes and Venetians exhibit it with a native dignity and charm that one has only to think of such contrasts as Bastien-Lepage's, or even Millet's, peasants (far more interesting in many other respects, of course) to appreciate.
Some of them are beautifully painted, as all are sympathetically understood. The elder of the two boys here reproduced is an especially lovely bit of handling, of quality, of clarity in the gently gradated tones. A Capri woman seated in a straight-backed chair upon a homespun carpet making lace, is very nearly a marvel in the same way—a figure that painters themselves are particularly pleased with. The blue dress, the white bodice, the dark face and hands, the blue-black hair, the greenish background, and the gray and red carpet compose largely in masses of importance, and are painted with a liquid and luisant effect that is nevertheless as far as possible from a blended and effeminate one. The touch is firmer, perhaps, more positive and vigorous, certainly, in the Venetian water-carrier here engraved, though it is equally distant from anything brutal, and the brush is restrained by refinement within the lines of true distinction, with the result that the reader may discern even in black and white. Is she not a majestic creature—for pictorial purposes, at all events? Pictorially, at least, she is superb. This is what a painter of genuine temperament and an instinct for character can make out of a bare-headed girl lugging a jar of water. One perceives at once the vitality and completeness of Butler's purely plastic impressions.
So vital and complete indeed are his plastic impressions that they explain, I think, his fondness for the single figure, his carelessness for composition. It may be argued from this fondness that his talent is an impressionable rather than an imaginative one; that his plastic exceeds his architectonic faculty. But to argue this is to miss an important side of his art. He does not, it is true, see things in their relations so much as in their essence. The genius for image-making, for originating conceptions of complex and interdependent interest, for composition, in a word, he certainly does not possess in any marked degree, or we should have had from him at least some experimentation in this sort. But it is remarkable how little, in looking at one of his noble figures, one feels this as a limitation, how close an equivalent he gives us for it. He has comprehended his model so thoroughly, and realized it so perfectly; he has conveyed the character itself so essentially, so subtly, and so intimately, merely in presenting its plastic phenomena, that he has amply suggested its characteristic environment and everything related to it that, in an elaborate composition of which it should be the centre, might contribute to its completer expression and relief. It does not look in the least like the study for a figure in some picture or other. It is a picture in itself. We do not get the pleasure that the pictorial presentation of this contributory environment would give us; we forego the sensuous delight that composition is capable of affording; but the striking thing about Butler's single figures is that they themselves so impress the imagination as to make us forget that they are unaided by accessories. One may add, by the way, the not impertinent corollary that it would be difficult to find among contemporary painters one who could satisfactorily supply this omission on the same plane of conception and workmanship.