Painters are said to be extreme individualists as a rule, and while, no doubt, the economic conditions of the day tend to encourage this, and to make painting more and more a matter of personal expression or impression, yet, I think, the individuality of modern artists is more apparent than real, and that it would not be difficult to classify them in types, or to trace the main influences in their work to some well-known artistic source either in the present or the past, or both. This, however, would be in no way to their discredit, but it shows how art, even in its most individualistic forms, is essentially a social product, and that each artist benefits enormously by the work of his contemporaries and his predecessors.
Our mixed picture exhibition also discloses another prominent characteristic of our time—the domination of money, and the influence of the possessing classes and material wealth. This appears in the preponderance of portraits and the comparative absence of imaginative works.
We may see the monarch and the political, financial, or commercial magnate in all their glory; generals and admirals, slayers and destroyers, in scarlet and blue and gold; the fashionable dame in purple and fine linen; the motorist in his career; national pride or imperialism is appealed to by pictures of battle and triumph over inferior races; and sports and pastimes, especially those involving the pursuit and death of birds and animals.
Nor is the reverse of the medal unrepresented, for we may see side by side with brilliant ballroom scenes and banquets in marble halls, as a picturesque contrast or foil perhaps, various aspects of poverty and rags, sometimes sincere, sometimes sentimental, and occasionally flashes of insight reveal the pathos of the toiler's lot in the field, the factory, or on the treacherous ocean.
The genuine modern love of wild nature and landscape, and the roaming spirit of travel is generally catered for by our painters; in these directions, perhaps, may be detected the suppressed sigh of super-civilized man for primitive freedom and natural conditions of life, or,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
With such mixed elements we may find some false sentiment, and also sensationalism, not infrequently connected with Christian sentimentality, and amid a fair allowance of military exploits, and flag-waving imperialism, there may be a few well-staged masquerades of past history, some grim and stark realism, perhaps, or gloomy pictorial pessimism, and for the rest, decorative or amatory posings, painted anecdotes and domesticities, flowers, babies, and bric-à-brac.
Thus, in pictorial form, with more or less completeness, the mixed drama of our age is presented, its very discords even, and the absence of any prevailing idea or unity of sentiment (except bourgeois) and artistic aim is characteristic, as the pictures jostle one another in a competitive crowd, each struggling for a share of attention.