CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Gift of 
 
 Professor 
 i\filliam a., Hammond 
 
 FINE ARTS 
 
Cornell University Library 
 ND 190.P56 
 
 Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to 
 
 3 1924 015 229 788 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924015229788 
 
FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
I'OK'l lw-\l 1' 0^ MRS. MA'llIIAS 
 
 JUHN b. SAKGEiXT 
 
FIFTY YEARS 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN PAINTING 
 
 COROT TO SARGENT 
 
 BY 
 
 J. E. PHYTHIAN 
 
 AUTUO- or '' G. F". watts: a BIOGRAFHY AND AN ESTIMATE 
 "Tr...tS IN >M : URE, r.^ TH AND A\n ,'' t^^C 
 
 IvrTH EIGHT ILLtTSTKATIONS IN' COLOUR AND 
 TinllTV-TWO IN HAI,--;' '.li 
 
 NEv^' YORK 
 E, P. BUTTON AND W<li'^AS\ 
 
 \qoii 
 
FIFTY YEARS 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN PAINTING 
 
 COROT TO SARGENT 
 
 BY 
 
 J. E. fHYTHIAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF " G. F. WATTS : A BIOGRAPHY AND AN ESTIMATE ' 
 " TREES IN NATURE, MYTH AND ART,'' ETC. 
 
 WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR AND 
 THIRTV-TWO IN HALF-TONE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 [CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Introductory . ... 1 
 
 II. The Pre-Eaphablitb Brotherhood . . 16 
 
 III. The Impressionists and their Allies . 52 
 
 IV. The Course op Pre-Eaphaelitism . .129 
 V. Painting in France . . .190 
 
 VI. Painting in Other Countries . .236 
 
 VII. Painting in Great Britain . . . 278 
 
 iTEII. Painting in Great Britain {continued) . 355 
 
 Index . . ... 385 
 
 erratum.— Page 71, line 19, for The Bainbow read Spring. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 IN COLOUR 
 
 Portrait of Mrs. Mathias . 
 
 By permission of Mrs. Matliias. 
 
 Waterloo Bridge .... 
 
 Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modem 
 
 C!ONCEKT ATJX TulLERIES 
 Lane Collection. 
 
 Danseuses en ScteNE 
 
 By permission of Madame Marchesi. 
 
 Beata Beatrix .... 
 
 The Boyhood of Raleigh 
 
 Don Quixote and Sancho Panza . 
 Lane Collection. 
 
 Portrait op the Artist in his 
 Studio 
 
 Lane Collection. 
 
 John S. Sargent Frontispiece 
 
 Claude Monet 
 Art. 
 
 Edouard Manet 
 
 Edgard Degas 
 
 Dante Gabriel Bossetti 
 J. E. Millais 
 Honori Daumier . 
 
 J. McNeill Whistler 
 
 PAGE 
 
 84 
 
 116 
 
 122 
 
 172 
 184 
 226 
 
 358 
 
 IN BLACK AND WHITE 
 The Oath 
 
 Photograph : W. A. Mansell. 
 
 The Hireling Shepherd 
 
 Manchester Corporation Art Gallery. 
 
 The Abduction .... 
 
 Collection Durand-Euel. 
 
 jA Source 
 
 Photograph: W. A. Mansell. 
 
 3ull and Heifer .... 
 
 Collection Durand-Ruel. 
 
 ?he Hay- Wain .... 
 Photograph : W. A. Mansell. 
 
 j' Amour Vaincjueur 
 
 By permission of Messrs. Wallis & Son, The French Gallery. 
 Photograph : The Studio. 
 
 Jacques Louis David 
 
 . 10 
 
 Eolman Hunt 
 
 . 26 
 
 Eugene Delacroix . 
 
 . 54 
 
 J. D. Ingres . 
 
 . 56 
 
 Gustave Courhet . 
 
 . 58 
 
 John Constable 
 
 . 62 
 
 J. F. Millet . 
 
 . 66 
 
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Avignon : View of the Palace op 
 
 THE Popes .... 
 
 Lane CoUeotion. 
 
 The Fokd 
 
 Collection Durand-Buel. 
 
 The Haeboue of Trotjville 
 Photograph : W. A. Mansell. 
 
 Kain, Steam and Speed 
 
 Photograph : "W. A. Mansell. 
 
 View in Vincennes, Speing. 
 
 Lane Collection. 
 
 La Looe 
 
 Collection Durand-Euel. 
 
 Mlle. Eva Gonzales 
 
 Lane Collection. 
 
 The Last of England . 
 
 Photograph : W. A. Mansell. 
 
 Le Ohant d'Amoue 
 
 Photograph : F. Hollyer. 
 
 L'Enfant atix Oonfituees . 
 
 By permission of Madame Marchesi, 
 
 La CHiMi;EE Oustave Moreav, 
 
 Photograph : Giraudon. 
 
 The Reapee Fuvis de Chavannes 
 
 Collection Durand-Euel. 
 
 The Late Houe .... Josef Israels 
 By permission of J. C. Drucker, Esq. 
 
 On the Heath, Laren . . .A. Maiiw 
 
 By permission of J. C. Drucker, Esq. 
 Photograph ; Boussod Valadon & Co. 
 
 Fantasy Matthew Maris 
 
 By permission of B. J. Van Wisselingh, Esq. 
 Photograph : The Studio. 
 
 The Present Alfred Stevens 
 
 Lane Collection. 
 
 Camille Corot 
 Camille Corot 
 Eugine Boudin 
 J. M. jr. Turner 
 Camille Pissarro 
 A. Renoir . 
 Edouard Manet 
 Ford Madox Brown 
 E, Burne-Jones 
 Eugene Carriire 
 
 Max Lieiermann 
 
 The Woman with the Goats 
 
 By permission of the artist. 
 Photograph : F, Bruckmann. 
 
 The Balcony Ignaeio Zuloaga 
 
 Collection Durand-Ruel. 
 
 The Bath of Psyche . . . Leighton 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Love and Life 
 
 Photogiaph : F. HoUyer. 
 
 
 G. F. Watts . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 . 304 
 
 Alfkbd Loed Tennyson 
 
 Photograph : P. HoUyer. 
 
 • 
 
 G. F. Walts . 
 
 . 306 
 
 The Building of the Rick . 
 
 By permission of C. T. Harris, 
 Photograph : H. Dixon & Son. 
 
 Esq. 
 
 G. Clatisen . 
 
 . 332 
 
 Lake Bouroet from Mont Eevaed 
 
 By permission of the artist. 
 
 Alfred East . 
 
 . 348 
 
 Spring 
 
 By permission of tlie artist. 
 
 • 
 
 John Lavery . 
 
 . 364 
 
 View of Chepstow Oastle . 
 
 
 Wilson Steer 
 
 . 372 
 
 By permission of Sir Cliarles Darling. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 THE period in .the history of painting, chosen for con- 
 sideration in this hook, is the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century; and the choice might he taken to imply the writer's 
 belief that conspicuous changes or developments in art keep 
 even pace with the passing of half-centuries and centuries. 
 He does not, however, hold so crude a theory. We do 
 indeed map out history, and art also, by centuries ; but we 
 understand, or at least we ought to understand, that such 
 a measure, equally with that of the reigns of kings and 
 queens, is only a rough one. We might as well expect to 
 find charming prospects at every mUe-post along a high road, 
 as changes of great moment exactly at each new century's 
 beginning. It is true that a hundred, or even fifty years, 
 are sufiicient for important developments in many depart- 
 ments of human activity. This is certainly true for art. 
 Only we shall find that the crucial dates or periods in art 
 are by no means to be given exactly in round numbers. 
 But it did happen that the years immediately around 1850 
 saw changes of the utmost importance for modern painting ; 
 that a new period in the history of the art did then actually 
 begin. Let us first test the truth of this statement with 
 regard to the art of our own country. 
 
a FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 In the year 1821, Constable prophesied that within thirty 
 years English art would have ceased to exist; he feared 
 that within that time all the life would be crashed out of 
 it by the heavy weight of tradition. After a brilliant 
 career of only about a hundred years, it did indeed seem as 
 if such a fate might, temporarily at least, befall our national 
 art. 
 
 Constable's fear might well have been occasioned by his 
 own experience of the tyrannous power of tradition. Of 
 all our landscape painters up to his own time he was the 
 most single-eyed in his outlook on nature. He loved, quite 
 simply, for their own sake, the Suffolk stream-sides and 
 woodlands, the reaches of level country, the prospects from 
 gently-sloping hill-sides, and the alternation of sun and 
 shade and shower over aU. He painted them so that we are 
 hardly conscious of the art by which they are agreeably 
 composed within the stiff boundaries where frame and 
 canvas meet. "We get from his pictures the same kind of 
 pleasure as we get from nature itself; and our enjoyment 
 of nature is quickened if we be familiar with his works. It 
 is one function of the artist to teach others to see. Of 
 course, there is much more to see in nature than Constable 
 saw, and infinitely more to see than he recorded. But he 
 went to nature, and has taught others to go to nature, 
 mainly to take pleasure in its various aspects, and not, as 
 other painters had chiefly done, to find material that could 
 be wrought in the studio into elaborate works of art. I am 
 far from suggesting that work of the latter kind is unprofit- 
 able. If any one will say that it is the more profitable of 
 the two, I will not say him nay. Turner, whose art was of 
 the latter kind, shall, at the moment, be greater than 
 Constable, or Constable greater than Turner, as any one will, 
 
INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 I am not concerned just now to argue the point. I will 
 only express my gratitude to both. 
 
 But Constable's frank enjoyment of nature gave great 
 offence to his contemporaries. He painted the sparkle of 
 sunshine on wet leaves, and it was derisively called " Con- 
 stable's snow.'' Chantrey, one varnishing-day, took a brush 
 and passed a brown glaze over it all ! Sir George Beaumont 
 took offence because Constable, who loved the spring and 
 the summer, painted the woodlands green, as he saw them 
 in those seasons, and did not put in the brown tree of the 
 conventional recipe. The painter who suiFered thus from 
 tradition might well fear that it would soon have a fatally 
 deadening effect on art. 
 
 A general comparison of past and present would help to 
 confirm his fear. The great race of portrait painters had 
 passed away, leaving a much feebler succession. Reynolds 
 and Gainsborough were long dead ; Eomney only more 
 recently; Hoppner died in 1810; Raeburn in 1823; 
 Lawrence had still several years to live ; but he does not 
 rank with those who have already been mentioned. Only 
 the student easily calls to mind the next generation of por- 
 trait painters. Howard, Hilton, and Haydon, the painters of 
 historical subjects, however we may estimate their success, 
 were stiU. seeking to emulate the great Italian masters of the 
 late Renaissance. This is true also of Etty, though he ranks 
 high as a colourist, and was an enthusiastic painter of flesh. 
 The painters of genre subjects, Wilkie, Mulready, Leslie, 
 and others, worked according to academic rule ; and one 
 need not be hostile to the subject in art to weary of their 
 generally commonplace treatment of trivial subjects. By the 
 great majority of the painters of this period, neither nature, 
 Qor living men and women, nor contemporary life, nor 
 
4 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTIJSU 
 
 legend, history and literature, were intensely, passionately,' 
 interpreted. Learned dnlness or triviality was the rule, 
 This, of course, means no denial either of great ability or of 
 inspiration here and there; but this is not sufficient. A 
 national school of art should interpret what is best in the 
 many-sided life of a nation, and react upon the national life 
 and outlook as a quickening, enlightening force. Constable's 
 fear for the art of his own country, it must be admitted, 
 was not an unreasonable one. But only three years before 
 the exact end of the term that Constable fixed for the fulfil- 
 ment of his prophecy — that is, towards the close of 1848, 
 almost at the mid-century — was formed the Pre-Eaphaelite 
 Brotherhood, which had the avowed purpose of throwing 
 off the weight of tradition and of bringing art into closer 
 relation with life and nature ; and this it succeeded in 
 doing. During the next few years the Brotherhood did a 
 strenuous work, and then lapsed as a formal body; its 
 influence upon art, however, by no means ending with its 
 own dissolution. The Pre-Eaphaelite movement, and its 
 influence upon art, will find material for many pages in 
 this book. 
 
 If we cross over into France we shall find that there, also, 
 important changes in art, destined to have great and mde- 
 spreading results, were taking place just about the middle of 
 the nineteenth century. It was then that Corot came to his 
 later manner ; Jongkind and Boudin were then carrying the 
 realisation of atmospheric efiects past the point to which 
 Corot and his contemporaries had taken it. In 1856 
 Boudin founded the " Ecole Saint Simeon," of which moie 
 will be said hereafter, and inaugurated a movement that has 
 been to painting in France even more important than the 
 Pre-Eaphaelite movement has been to painting in England; 
 
INTRODUCTORY S 
 
 that has, indeed, spread far beyond the borders and the 
 shores of France, even into our own country, to the dis- 
 pleasure — nay, to the righteous indignation — of many 
 English painters and critics. It has not therefore been a 
 mere toss of the coin, or a crude periodical theory, that 
 has led to the selection of the middle of the nineteenth 
 century as the beginning of an epoch in the history of 
 modern painting. 
 
 We have chosen our starting-point, then, for reasons thus 
 briefly stated. But we may compare ourselves to mountain 
 climbers, who, having reached a level place, and rested for a 
 while, recommence their ascent. The climb that lies before 
 them is a continuation, not a fresh start. More adequately, 
 perhaps, we may compare art to life as a whole, of which it 
 is a part. Art, like life, is at any time only to be under- 
 stood by reference to what has already happened. The recent 
 art - movements that are our immediate subject can only 
 be \mderstood by reference to the antecedent history of art. 
 It may be assumed, however, that the reader has a general 
 knowledge of the history of art; and that we need only 
 indicate here, so that we may have them freshly before us, 
 the leading characteristics of art in the periods that imme- 
 diately led up to the one we are specially to study. 
 
 In the Middle Ages art had been almost entirely sub- 
 ordinated to the purposes of religion as then understood by 
 the Christian Church. This world, according to the then 
 prevailing belief, was of no importance except as a pre- 
 paratory stage for a world to come. This life was a prelude 
 to eternity, not an integral part of it. The Church alone 
 had the secret of eternal well-being. This was the theory. 
 But life is more than all theories of life, and could not be 
 for long — was in reality never entirely — confined within 
 
i FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 the limits of this one. "When life broke loose from the 
 
 medieeval theory, art, the interpreter of life, broke loose 
 
 with it. Men said to themselves and to each other that life 
 
 ■was not wholly bad ; they looked at the world and found 
 
 that it was fair. They did not entirely throw over the old 
 
 beliefs. Some held closely to them ; others held them in a 
 
 modified form. There were some who bound the bonds— or 
 
 tried to bind them — even more tightly than before. But 
 
 the old iTnanimity was gone ; and with it went the forcible 
 
 control of men by the Church. We of these days shall 
 
 probably be seen in the future not to have wholly emerged 
 
 from the Middle Ages. In an eclipse of the sun the earth 
 
 only passes gradually beyond the shadow cast by the moon, 
 
 Matthew Arnold found himself, and he was but one among 
 
 many. 
 
 Wandering between two woi-Hs, one dead 
 The other powerless to be born. 
 
 Art has reflected, and stUl reflects, the confused state of 
 mind from which we have not yet passed ; and there has 
 been a further complication : the rediscovery and steadily 
 growing understanding of the art and thought and life of 
 the earlier, pre-Christian world. "VVe are indeed the heirs of 
 the ages, and our intellectual inheritance is by no means 
 easy to see in its true proportions. 
 
 Let us take, not exactly at random, but still without rigid 
 insistence on arrangement, some examples of the variety of 
 influence and impulse under which modern artists have 
 come. Sir Joshua Eeynolds painted his portraits of the 
 men, women, and children of the England of the eighteenth 
 century, thinking, not only of his sitters, but of Michael 
 Angelo and Eaphael, of the colour of Titian, and of what 
 constituted the grand style. Richard Wilson began land- 
 
INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 scape painting amid the ruins of the Roman Campagna, 
 because in his day all good things were supposed to come 
 from Italy, and most if not all eyes were turned to Eome as 
 summing up Italy. Gainsborough, as he painted his por- 
 traits, thought of Vandyck, the pupil of Rubens, whose 
 northern freedom had yielded in part only to the domination 
 of Italy. Turner painted landscapes thinking of Wilson, 
 of Claude, from whom also WUson had learned, and of the 
 Dutch landscape painters, who had courageously looked at 
 nature with their own eyes. John Crome, and his friends 
 of the Norwich school, painted English landscape in a 
 modified Dutch manner. John Constable, on the other 
 hand, as we have already seen, painted English landscape 
 as it looked to him and as it gave him pleasure ; and, as we 
 shall see hereafter, this independence of his had widely 
 important results for art. Etty painted historical and 
 legendary subjects, thinking of, and trying to rival, the 
 flesh painting and colour of the Venetians. G. F. Watts 
 came under the influence of Etty. He also studied the 
 Greek sculpture preserved in the British Museum. He 
 went to Italy, and his work shows the influence both of 
 Florence and Venice. He went out with Sir Charles Newton 
 to Halicarnassus, and was present when the ruins of one of 
 the most famous monuments of ancient Greece, the tomb of 
 Mausolus, were unearthed. 
 
 Much the same story has to be told of other countries. 
 In France, tradition was stronger than in England. Hogarth, 
 who stands at the head of the English school of painting, 
 waged war against the tyranny of tradition. For good or 
 for evil, or partly for both, a comparatively independent 
 spirit has possessed English art. French writers make it a 
 boast that, as Napoleon overran the whole of Europe except 
 
8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 this country, so lias French art overrun Europe with the 
 like exception. Thus M. de la Sizeranne says, that in any 
 international exhibition of fine arts, the galleries set apart 
 for any nation except England bear witness to the French 
 influences under which its artists have come. The assaults 
 of realism and of impressionism are broken on the sestheti- 
 cism of English painters, "like the squadrons of Key on 
 the squares of Wellington. There are German, Hungarian, 
 Belgian, Spanish, Scandinavian painters, but there is an 
 English school of painting." 
 
 Not that the French writer maintains this widely prevail- 
 ing tradition of art to have been entirely a creation of 
 French genius. He speaks of the Latin point of view, 
 That is, we are taken back to Italy once more ; and, it has 
 to be said, to a particular period in Italian art, the sixteenth 
 century, when, at the end of a long period of technical 
 development, less importance was attached to what was said 
 than to the manner of utterance. 
 
 Of French painters in the seventeenth century, M. Bayet 
 says, in his Precis d'Histoire de I' Art, that Michel Fr^minet, 
 the court pamter of Henri IV, produced bad Michael 
 Angelo, that Simon Vouet, the chief painter of Louis XIII, 
 French by birth, was wholly Italian by education. Le Sueur 
 never went to Italy, but Nicholas Poussin lived there for a 
 time, and with him, in Eome, there was quite a colony of 
 Frenchmen — Gaspar Poussin, Jacques Stella, Claude Lorrain, 
 Charles Le Brun, and others. French art in the seventeenth 
 century, this same writer tells us — it is common knowledge, 
 but we may as well let a Frenchman say it — " breaks with 
 the past of France, unjustly despises its worth, admires 
 nothing but antiquity and Italy. These tendencies, which 
 had gradually developed in the sixteenth century, now 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 iimpli completely. A sojourn on the other side of the 
 ps is almost an absolute necessity for every young artist. 
 
 1666, Louis XIV founds the French Academy at Rome, 
 snceforth the young men judged worthy of the favour are 
 fcertained in Rome for several years at the royal expense, 
 r others a mere stay in Italy is not sufficient ; they spend 
 sir life there, in the company of antiquities, and the 
 irks of the masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 aturies." 
 
 In the eighteenth century French art came under the in- 
 lence of the Netherlands. Watteau was a Fleming ; and 
 and Boucher and Fragonard translated the heavy jollity of 
 e art of the Low Countries into terms of graceful French 
 iety, frivolity, and, it has to be said, vice — not that we 
 ast fall into the error, to be mentioned hereafter, of 
 suming vice to be peculiarly French ; Hogarth in the 
 me century, with his pictorial attacks on English vice, may 
 i our witness that this is not so. Greuze, rather later than 
 e three French jpainters just named, may almost be called, 
 
 to his art, a French Dutchman, with a moralising ten- 
 incy ; Chardin was a French Jan Steen, who differed from 
 reuze in that he did not obviously moralise ; he painted 
 lite exemplary people, chiefly women and children, as he 
 w them in daily life. Art gets into closer touch with life 
 lan in the seventeenth century, even though it be often life 
 ' a frivolous kind. Yet, even so, tradition weighed more 
 ;avily upon art in France than in England. It was thus, 
 so, with landscape painting, which was in France much 
 ore a thing of artificial compositions than in this country, 
 iriving from the Poussins and Claude, and only distantly 
 lated to nature. Such painters as Bidault and Michel, 
 LOUgh they show an advance on the landscape painting of 
 
10 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 the previous century, are far behind the contemporary art of 
 England. 
 
 Before the end of the eighteenth century, French art 
 returned to its allegiance to Rome and the Italian art of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; even, indeed, as it was 
 supposed, to the art of ancient Rome. The leader of this 
 movement was Jacques Louis David, who was horn in 1748 
 and died in 1825. It was the tyranny reimposed by him 
 that was thrown off by the revolutionists of the middle of 
 the nineteenth century. The very titles of such of his 
 principal pictures as TM Oath of the Horatii and The Rap 
 of the Sahines are eloquent of the effect upon his outlook of 
 study in the French Academy at Rome. We shall have 
 more to say about him when we come to consider, in order 
 to lead up to the changes in Freirch art at the beginning of 
 our special period, the character of the art of the period 
 immediately preceding it. 
 
 We need not give examples from the art of other coun- 
 tries of the action and reaction upon each other of contem- 
 porary life and nature on the one hand, and tradition on the 
 other. Enough has been said to show that there is in ait 
 abundant material for orthodoxies and heresies, for tyrannies 
 and revolutions. 
 
 The purpose of this book, it may be said here, is not 
 to pass judgment on the various developments and ten- 
 dencies, the orthodoxies and the heresies, of art during the 
 last fifty years; nor to hold a brief for any particular 
 school. Idealism, Realism, Impressionism, all have theii 
 value, and therefore ought to have their place. And in 
 using such terms we ought to bear in mind that the 
 quahties for which they respectively stand are not the 
 absolutely peculiar, possession of any particular school. B 
 
INTRODVCTOHy li 
 
 5 only that one or other of them occupies a larger place 
 lere than there. 
 
 And no one of them has any right always to claim the 
 irst place. "We who are not artists do not want our pleasure 
 he limited by what any particular school has to give us ; 
 r, if we do so restrict our pleasure, it is to our own loss, 
 btists are not unfrequently good critics only in the particular 
 Leld of art in which they themselves are working. How 
 autious one has sometimes to be in conversation with them 
 f one does not wish suddenly to have one's head almost 
 )lown off ! The dyer's hand is subdued to what it works in. 
 ?here are critics also who violently take sides. Perhaps 
 here are occasions on whicli sides ought violently to be 
 aken. Still, it has been said that new constitutions are 
 )uilt up out of the wisdom of those whose heads have been 
 ut off in revolutions. In the following pages, if preference 
 )e shown and sides taken, it will not be by intention that 
 his is done violently. Whistler shall not be charged with 
 hrowing pots of paint in the face of the public; Burne- 
 Tones shall not be called a degenerate ; Holman Hunt shall 
 lot be dismissed as near-sightedly inquisitive, though, at the 
 ame time, we will not go with him in saying that Impres- 
 ionism had its origin in the profligacy of Parisian student 
 ife. "Whatever may be the value of such judgments, they 
 ire too bold for us. 
 
 There is another much debated matter as to which a 
 Qoderate and wholly unexciting attitude will be taken up 
 lere. It wiU not be maintained that a painting, to be good 
 xt, must have nothing of any particular moment in the way 
 f subject. On the other hand, it is at once admitted that 
 rtists may well apply to their work an old-time injunction, 
 :iven in regard to other, but still human concerns, that 
 
12 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 nothing should be accounted common or unclean. We 
 ought to be grateful to any one who will open our eyes to 
 any beauty that may be about us in our daily life. And if 
 a painter; or a whole school of painters, should do nothing 
 more than this, should imagine for us no angels or saints, 
 should symbolise no virtues, nor represent any virtuous 
 deeds, we ought to be grateful for what they do give to us, 
 and look elsewhere for what else we need. Art we want 
 often for art's sake : beauty for the sake of beauty, as sweet- 
 ness for the sake of sweetness. But we need not rule out 
 expression for the sake of expression, or strength for the 
 sake of strength. And art has not done all it can do, or 
 the best it can do, and ought to do, when it has produced 
 something that is sensuously beautiful and nothing more. 
 If we are to have any quarrel here — and quarrels do at 
 least relieve life and books of tameness — ^it will be with 
 those who will not have one thing because it is not another, 
 and will not let other people enjoy themselves in their own 
 way. We are like Eussell Lowell, who would not have his 
 pleasure limited by people who said that if a thing were 
 Gothic and not Greek, it could not be good. 
 
 Also we will try to avoid a narrow patriotism in art as in 
 other things. "We will not sing " Kule, Britannia ! " We 
 will gladly sing " God bless our native land," if immediately 
 afterwards, or previously, we may ask that the native land of 
 other people shall be blessed also. Herbert Spencer advo- 
 cated a just balance of egoism and altruism as being in the 
 end the best for everybody. Is it a solitary experience to 
 have been accused by an English artist of want of patriotism 
 in promoting in this country the exhibition of works by 
 foreign artists ? One has been told that foreigners will not buy 
 English pictures, and that therefore English people ought not 
 
^1\ i IW^MJ U^ J UJ\ JC 
 
 .0 buy foreign pictures. The protectionist gospel — or heresy 
 —is preached in art as well as in commerce. This book will 
 idopt the free trade position; although it is not so much 
 Durohases that will concern us as methods and ideas. Our 
 irt, at any period of our history, would have been a sorry 
 ihing but for foreign example and influence. Neither men 
 [lor nations can profitably live unto themselves, and of 
 aothing is this truer than of art. 
 
 It might be thought that this was so obvious as to be in 
 ao danger of being overlooked, much less denied. But it is 
 not so. M. de la Si2eranne says that Madox Brown, one of 
 the first English painters with whom we shall be concerned 
 here, expected to gratify his countrjrmen by offering them 
 something " anti-French, anti-continental, absolutely original 
 and autonomous," and quotes him as saying, " In Paris I first 
 formed the idea of making pictures realistic because no 
 Frenchman did so.'' This saying notwithstanding, I doubt 
 if Madox Brown was really the Chauvinist that the French 
 writer alleges him to have been. Certainly, in one place, 
 he finds fault with French art, not because it is French, but 
 on account of certain specified deficiencies. " The Parisian 
 ateliers," he says, "I always entertained the greatest aversion 
 for. Cold pedantic drawing and heavy opaque colour are 
 impartially dispensed to all in those huge manufactories of 
 artists, from which, however, every now and then a man of 
 feeling or genius surges up and disentangles himself." We 
 shall see later that it was against precisely this state of 
 things that some of the French painters of the mid- 
 nineteenth century revolted. But if we hesitate to endorse 
 an accusation of crude insular prejudice against Ford Madox 
 Brown, born in Calais and spending the early part of his life 
 abroad, must not the charge of Chauvinism be transferred 
 
14 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 to liis accuser, a Frenchman who apparently can only think 
 of an adverse criticism of French art by an Englishman as 
 being dictated by prejudice % 
 
 Whatever we may think of Madox Brown, however, we 
 can hardly free Mr. Holman Hunt from such a charge. In 
 the course of his reminiscences, in Pre-Raphaelitism and th 
 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he says: "All manly in their 
 vindication of virtue, although some spoke in an over- 
 feminine tone, our exemplars in letters had all been in 
 accord to prune English imagination of unwholesome foreign 
 precedent, tawdry glitter, and theatrical pomposity, corrup- 
 tions which had descended from the attitudinisers of the 
 two earlier reigns. The literary reformers, stiU declaiming 
 in our day, had already revived the robust interest in 
 humanity exercised by British men of genius in past 
 centuries." This is coming very near to saying that all 
 the virtues are British and all the vices foreign; and Mr. 
 Hunt writes about art in the same strain. "Hogarth, 
 Reynolds, Raeburn, Gainsborough, and Eomney," lie says, 
 " were too strong to be suppressed, and they produced an 
 art that was pre-eminently altogether in unison with the 
 spirit of British poetry, healthy, robust, and superior to 
 maudlin sentimentality and vice glamoured over with fevered 
 tears"; and he further dilates on "the glory which, since 
 Hogarth, English painters have wrested from the maws of 
 ignorance, indifference, and shallow self-confidenoe." It was 
 perhaps not wholly unnecessary for me to say that I was 
 not going to invite the reader to sing "Rule, Britannia!" If 
 prejudice so vehemently expressed do not carry with it its 
 own condemnation, the reader wiU find that a quiet con- 
 sideration of facts, which is the main purpose of this hook, 
 will make us wish, incidentally, that so earnest a man as 
 
Mr. Holman Hunt had not been misled into a great in- 
 justice. We gain nothing, and lose much, by indiscriminate 
 gloriiication of ourselves and depreciation of others. We 
 shall find an entente cordiale useful in art as well as in 
 politics. It is in this spirit that the subsequent pages have 
 been written. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 
 
 TT has already been said that one of the reasons for tiegin- 
 -*- ning at the middle of the nineteenth century the study 
 of painting undertaken in this book is that the Pre-Eaphael- 
 ite movement arose at that time. The movement was a 
 revolt, though not purposely so at the outset. Perhaps no 
 revolts ever are; revolutionaries begin simply by wanting 
 more of their own way. The powers that be will not let 
 them have it. They insist ; and this means that the powers 
 that be have to be opposed. In art the established authori- 
 ties at any time are the artists who are wedded to a particular 
 style, and the public that has come to thinli that this style 
 is the only right one. They are the " grave copiers of 
 copies," and the admirers of such copies. The revolution- 
 aries are the artists who, somehow or other, manage to throw 
 aside the spectacles of tradition, look at nature and life with 
 their own eyesight, and then seek to paint what they 
 see. This does not mean that tradition is wholly cast aside, 
 or that the artist becomes a mere machine for recording 
 facts. It means that he is to be free to modify tradition 
 and to interpret nature and life in accordance with his own 
 experience and temperament. Any one who did not know 
 much about art and its history might think that such free- 
 dom would readily be granted. The fact is that it is i 
 
 i6 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD T} 
 
 invariably 'bitterly resented and opposed. The battles of the 
 orthodoxies and heresies of art are only less fierce than 
 those of the orthodoxies and heresies of religion. And 
 there is in both spheres the same tendency to go to absurd 
 extremes. 
 
 The name Pre-Kaphaelite appears to have been suggested 
 by Madox Brown, who was familiar with the German 
 Pre-Eaphaelite movement, having met the leaders of it, 
 Cornelius and Overbeck, in Eome, and having been much 
 impressed by the men and their work. The name itself 
 suggests revolt when we think of the high estimation in 
 which Raphael and his contemporaries and chief followers 
 were then held. Mr. Holman Hunt has drawn a distinction 
 between Pre-Eaphaelitism and Pre-Eaphaelism. He and his 
 companions, he says, had no lack of admiration for Eaphael, 
 at least in part of his work, or for Michael Angelo ; it was 
 from admiration of the work of the Eaphaelites, the fol- 
 lowers and imitators of Raphael, that they wished to disso- 
 ciate themselves. 
 
 Really, if we were to accept as entirely satisfactory Mr. 
 Holman Hunt's interpretation of the movement, the name 
 by which it has come to be known could not be considered 
 an appropriate one. But his interpretation is too narrow, 
 and it is difficult to accept what he says about the meaning 
 put upon the name. According to him, he and Millais were 
 the only true Pre-Raphaelites in the Brotherhood ; and he 
 almost seems to ask us to think of himself as being, in a few 
 years, the only one deserving the name. He finds fault with 
 Madox Brown's early work because it really is in the manner 
 of the predecessors of Raphael ; Rossetti's Girlhood of Mary 
 Virgin he describes as being OverbecMan in manner, but 
 " completed and realised with that Pre-Raphaelite thorough- 
 
i8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 ness which it could not have reached under Brown's 
 medisBval supervision." That is to say, Pre-Eaphaelitism did 
 not mean medisevalism, according to Mr. Hunt, but only 
 thoroughness, elaboration of detail, and that of a kind not 
 to be found in the v^orks of Eaphael's predecessors. 
 
 The truth is that the revolutionaries were only united in 
 revolt. They could not have agreed upon a new constitution 
 for art. They did not so agree, and soon went each Ms 
 several way. The movement was away from the current 
 theories of art, but it was not towards a single, clearly 
 defined, alternative theory. If its chief promoters — Hunt, 
 MiUais, and Rossetti— started out together in one direction, 
 thoiigh this can hardly be maintained, Rossetti was soon off 
 in another direction ; and it was not long before thorougli- 
 ness ceased to be a mark of MUlais' work. The cry of Mr. 
 Holman Hunt's book, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre- 
 Baphaelite Brotherhood, is, " I, even I, am left alone.'' 
 
 It must not be assumed that there was no re-awakening 
 in EngUsh art outside the Brotherhood and its circle. It 
 wiU be convenient for us, however, to confine ourselves at 
 the moment to the organised movement and the work of 
 those who were closely associated with it, if not formally 
 members of the Brotherhood. 
 
 The first of the innovators, in priority of date, was Ford 
 Madox Brown. The real leadership of the movement has 
 often been attributed to him. There was, however, no 
 single leader, because, as already said, there was no single 
 leading idea, or clearly defined and limited group of ideas. 
 The importance of Madox Brown's influence on the move- 
 ment is, however, indisputable. EngHsh by parentage, he 
 was born in 1821 at Calais, and spent most of his early life 
 abroad. Life and work in Belgium, France, and Italy, with 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 19 
 
 occasional sojourns in England, is the record until, after the 
 death of his wife in Paris, he settled permanently in this 
 country. His art-training was received under Gregorovius at 
 Bruges, and Baron Wappers at Antwerp, and, as we have 
 already seen, he studied in France and Italy. It would 
 have been impossible for him simply to fall into line with 
 the conventions and traditions then in vogue in England. 
 He was an Englishman who approached the art of his 
 country from the outside. The master who most influenced 
 him was Baron "Wappers, whose style M. de la Sizeranne 
 calls Gothic, which means not Latin, or not the late Latin 
 of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It did not sub- 
 ordinate forcible expression to beauty. Madox Brown's 
 style is nothing if not forcible. It was too forcible for 
 Holman Hunt's liking, at least more so than he thought 
 likely to be acceptable to the British public. He thought it 
 "grimly grotesque," and on this account, amongst others, 
 was opposed to Madox Brown's being invited to become a 
 member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
 
 Among the earliest of Madox Brown's works to attract the 
 attention of the future members of the Brotherhood were 
 the cartoons he executed in connexion with the competitions 
 for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament. One of 
 these cartoons, executed in Paris in 1843, and exhibited at 
 Westminster in the following year, represented the body of 
 Harold being brought before William the Conqueror after 
 the battle of Hastings — an incident, it should be said, that 
 has no historical foundation. It is quite to our purpose to 
 quote his own description of this cartoon. " Excessive and 
 exuberant joy," he says, " is described by the old chronicles 
 as possessing the Norman host after the victory. This is 
 shown variously in the demeanour and expressions of the 
 
20 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 conquerors. Harold was a more than usually large and 
 athletic man, even among Saxon heroes. Three men bear 
 his body to the victorious Duke. All that are left alive on 
 the scene are Normans — no prisoners were taken. Quartet 
 was neither expected nor given. One ancient knight, some- 
 what of the Polonius kind, with raised hand, seems to say, 
 'Here indeed was a man. In my young days,' etc, etc. 
 Others seem of the same mind. One of William's atten- 
 dants, of the waggish sort, catches a silly camp-boy by the 
 fist and exhibits its puny proportions alongside of the dead 
 Harold's hand, still with the broken battle-axe in its iron 
 grasp, drawing a grim smile from the Conqueror. A fair- 
 haired Norman officer, regardless of the fact that his body is 
 gashed pretty freely with wounds, twists about to get a siglit 
 of Harold. The monk who is dressing his wounds, tired 
 out with much of such work, surlily bids him to be quiet, 
 Friends join hands, glad to meet again after such a day. A 
 father supports his wounded son. In one corner, embraced 
 in death-grapple, lie the bodies of a Norman and Saxon; 
 one has stabbed the other in the back, while he in turn has 
 bitten his adversary's throat like a dog. Beachy Head, 
 which is just perceptible from the scene of the battle, 
 appears across the bay in the extreme distance. The effect 
 is after sunset." 
 
 It is evident from this description that Madox Brown- 
 and this is true of all his works— vividly imagined the scene 
 to be represented, even to small details, and entered— the 
 dramatist's privilege — into the thoughts and emotions of 
 those who took part in it. Then, what he had thus seen he 
 set forth with unflinching fidelity. The close of a battle 
 must be a horrible scene, and here, after sundown on this 
 English hill-side, at the end of one of the most memorable 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 21 
 
 fights in our history, one of its great turning-points, we sup 
 full with horrors. 
 
 When Holman Hunt saw this cartoon, he thought the 
 drawing robust and nervous, the costume treated with manly 
 taste, giving actuality to the historic scene, and the colour 
 honest and acceptable, and although without mysterious 
 charm of hue, altogether appropriate and sound. He 
 thought that the painter was glaringly unreasonable in 
 making William wear round his neck the saints' bones over 
 which Harold had made his renunciation of the crown; 
 and he did not like the biting and dagger incident. Here 
 came in the grimly grotesque. 
 
 I have dwelt at length on the treatment by Madox Brown 
 of an historical subject, because, in his zeal for vivid and 
 detailed dramatic representation, he shows himself clearly 
 of the same race as Hogarth; yet, as his grandson, Mr. 
 Ford Hueffer, says, " He was then to all intents and pur- 
 poses a foreigner, and as such he regarded himself during 
 the short stay in England whilst he was actually executing 
 his cartoons and before his journey to Italy." 
 
 The journey to Italy, which was made in 1845, had for 
 one result, as we have already seen, an awakening of in- 
 terest in the painters who preceded Eaphael and their 
 modern followers, the Germans, Overbeck and Cornelius. - 
 He returned to England ambitious of jDainting, in honour 
 of English poets, pictures which should be as inspired and 
 inspiring as those of the Italian masters ; and the first two 
 pictures he painted after his return — Chaucer at the Court 
 of Edward III and Wycliffe reading his Translation of the 
 Bible to John of Gaunt — were not only done in pursuance 
 of this desire, but were early Italian in manner, groups of 
 figures being symmetrically balanced, one by another, and 
 
22 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 enclosed within Gothic arches. The pictures were architec- 
 tonic in design. According to Holman Hunt, this Pre- 
 Eaphaelitisni was not Pre-Kaphaelite in the modern sense ; 
 it did not eschew tlie conventional in contemporary art; 
 there was nothing in it indicative of a child-like reversion 
 from existing schools to nature herself. 
 
 Let us leave Madox Brown for a time and turn to 
 Holman Hunt, who was his junior by seven years, having 
 been born, the son of a London warehouseman, in 1827, 
 The story has often been told how, against his father's wish, 
 he persisted in his determination to become a painter. 
 Then, at a third attempt, at the age of seventeen, he was 
 admitted as a probationer in the Eoyal Academy Schools, 
 
 A clue to much that is distinctive in his art, and in liis 
 theories of art, is to be found in the fact that, until quite 
 recently, he has always had unusually keen eyesight. On 
 one occasion he astonished a friend in Jerusalem by proving 
 to him that he could see the satellites of Jupiter with the 
 naked eye. The friend doubted his statement that he could 
 thus see them ; so, after he had noted down their positions 
 on a piece of paper, they went to the house of another 
 friend who had a telescope ; and the moons were found to 
 be exactly in the positions in which he had noted them, 
 He has seen the world as perhaps few other artists have 
 seen it, in minute detail ; and it has always, he has said, 
 been a isleasure to him to represent it as he has seen it 
 I have already quoted a critic who spoke of his near-sighted 
 inquisitiveness. He says himself that on one occasion 
 Madox Brown indulged in "playful ii'ony upon what he 
 termed my ' microscopic detail.' " "Was it any more play- 
 ful irony than Hunt's description of Brown's work as grimly 
 grotesque ? Probably he was not aware how exceptional his 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 23 
 
 eyesight was — I have heard him say that he did not know 
 if it were exceptional — and he would not know, therefore, 
 that he represented things quite otherwise than they would 
 look to the majority of people. 
 
 Knowing of this phj^sical peculiarity, we can understand 
 his saying of himself as a student that " without any idea 
 of ' forming a school ' but for his own development alone, 
 he began to study with exceptional care and frankness those 
 features of nature which were generally slurred over as un- 
 worthy attention; and for this purpose he found most 
 timely encouragement in the enthusiastic outburst of 
 Euskin's appeal to nature in aU vital qualities of art criti- 
 cism as expressed by him in ' Modern Painters.' " Were 
 the details slurred over, or were they simply not seen by 
 painters who had not his " microscopic eye " ? If one of us 
 knows exactly how others see the world. Has Holman 
 Hunt's whole practice and theory of art been adapted only 
 for the needs of himself and a few other exceptional 
 people 1 Certainly many people, the present writer and 
 every one with whom he has discussed the matter included, 
 do not see things as it is evident from his paintings Mr. 
 Hunt has seen them. 
 
 Whether or not we attribute Holman Hunt's theory of 
 the relation of art to nature to his exceptional eyesight, or 
 merely think that his keen vision led to an extreme applica- 
 tion of an independently adopted theory, the theory and the 
 keen vision together, by occasioning an unusual interest in 
 minute detail, have resulted in his paintings, less, perhaps, 
 than those of almost any other artist, making allowance for 
 the stereoscopic action of our eyesight. We have two eyes ; 
 we see from two distinct though not widely separate points 
 of view. Upon anything at which we particularly wish to 
 
24 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN FAlJMTll'^U 
 
 look the eyes focus themselves so that we get only one pic- 
 ture of it. Of all other things not in the same plane we 
 get two pictures, or, we may say, a blurred picture. Holman 
 Hunt has painted his pictures as if we could see all objects, 
 both near and distant, with equal and remarkable clearness 
 at any given moment. Hence the unreally hard look of his 
 work that is so often commented upon. 
 
 It will be found by experiment that this hardness is 
 greatly diminished if the pictures be looked at with one 
 eye only. This holds good for any representation on a flat 
 surface of objects at different distances from the eye. In- 
 stinctively, when looking with both eyes, we expect the 
 blurring of aU objects except those on the same plane as 
 the one at which we are particularly looking ; and we miss 
 this effect in a picture in which all objects are distinctly 
 painted. Using one eye only, we instinctively do not ex- 
 pect this effect, do not miss it in the picture ; and differences 
 of size and tone then convey to us a much stronger impres- 
 sion of varying distance. If such pictures of Holman 
 Hunt's as Rienzi, May Morning, and Magdalen Tower be 
 looked at with both eyes, the sky, painted as it is seen when 
 the eyes are focussed upon it, looks hard, and but little if 
 at all beyond buildings, trees, or figures. Use one eye only, 
 and it at once gets away far beyond them. So in his water- 
 colour drawings of the Holy Land, the confusion of planes 
 disappears entirely if they are looked at with only one eye. 
 The opposite of all this is true. If we look at actual 
 objects with only one eye, there is at once a confusion of 
 planes ; we miss the stereoscopic — in plain English, " solid- 
 looking " effect, to which we are accustomed. 
 
 The hard effect of Mr. Holman Hunt's pictures has often 
 been attributed to his painting with equal definition the 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 25 
 
 objects in every part of them. In looking at actual objects 
 we do not see clearly those to right and left of, and above 
 and below, the one upon which our eyes are fixed. But this 
 is at least almost equally true, as experiment can at once 
 show, with regard to the objects in even a small picture or 
 photograph held comparatively close to the eyes. It is the 
 equal clearness of objects on different planes, not of those 
 on the same plane, which, with the elaboration of detail due 
 to his extraordinary clearness of vision, produces in his 
 pictures an effect such as we never see in looking at things 
 themselves. 
 
 Wliat are we to say about this % First, that if the con- 
 veying of information about objects as they are were the 
 end of painting, Mr. Holman Hunt's pictures would have to 
 take their place in the very front rank of art. In the works 
 of no other painter can we learn so much about what is 
 represented in them. It is really quite interesting to ex- 
 amine his pictures closely, bit by bit ; and it is difficult to 
 see why we should not have this pleasure, if it be obtained 
 at the sacrifice of nothing else. But truth of appearance is 
 sacrificed ? Then we get one kind of truth from Mr. 
 Holman Hunt, and can look to other painters for other 
 kinds. Is there not sacrifice of beauty 1 Not necessarily. 
 A stained-glass window, containing representations of figures 
 and landscape, takes no note of stereoscopic vision, of planes 
 and values, and yet may be exquisitely beautiful. So with 
 Mr. Holman Hunt's pictures : they may be beautiful in 
 design and colour ; they may be even more beautiful than 
 those that seek to represent the mere appearance of things 
 more accurately than he does. The questions we have been 
 discussing are, in fact, scientific, not aesthetic. 
 
 The reader may, however, be of those who do feel the 
 
26 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Pre-Eaphaelite leader's pictures to be wanting in beauty; 
 and it may be that such feeling is not always — though 
 assuredly it often is — due to pre-occupation with beauty of 
 one kind. "We shall, perhaps, find the explanation in Mr. 
 Hunt's theory of the relation of art to nature. We have 
 seen him approving of Ruskin's " appeal to nature in all 
 vital questions of art criticism." He says that he himself 
 was an earnest young student "who, already feeling his 
 way as a practical painter, was led by circumstances to study 
 in exceptional degree the works of the greatest old masters, 
 and he perceived that in every school progress ended when 
 the pupils derived their manner through dogmas evolved 
 from artists' systems rather than from principles of design 
 taught by nature herself. He determined, therefore, for his 
 own part, to disregard all the arbitrary rules in vogue in ex- 
 isting schools, and to seek his own road in art by that patient 
 study of nature on which the great masters had founded 
 their sweetness and strength of style." How he set himself 
 to work out this theory we may learn from a statement of 
 his own regarding his picture The Hireling Shepherd. In 
 a letter to the present writer, he said : " My first object as an 
 artist was to paint, not Dresden china bergers, but a real 
 shepherd, and a real shepherdess, and a landscape in full 
 sunlight, with all the colour of luscious summer, without 
 the faintest fear of any landscape painters who had rendered 
 nature before.'' 
 
 There are probably few people sufficiently interested in 
 the subject to give it serious thought who do not think that 
 this picture would have been more beautiful had Mr. 
 Holman Hunt paid more regard to precedent. Nature may 
 teach design, but she only carries the teaching part way; 
 the pupil must go to a finishing school — perhaps he had 
 
Q 
 
 CA 
 W 
 X 
 a, 
 H 
 X 
 
 'SI 
 
 O 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 27 
 
 better have other teachers as well as nature all the time — if 
 his education is to be complete. And if and when Mr. 
 Holman Hunt's pictures are wanting in beauty, it is chiefly 
 because he has trusted too much to nature as a teacher of 
 design. Not that he could wholly escape from precedent. 
 His art is better than his creed. In this very picture it is 
 where he abandons his creed that design enters, as in 
 the determination of the positions of the sheep and of the 
 trees so as to form lines that will lead up to the figures and 
 harmonise with their bounding lines. If and when Mr. 
 Holman Hunt's pictures fail in beauty, it is because more or 
 less of the recorded fact escaj^es from his design : the pic- 
 ture is not an aesthetic whole. To adapt what the curate 
 said about his egg, the picture is only good in parts. This 
 is especially true with regard to colour; there is often much 
 beautiful harmonising of coloiu' as well as loveliness of indi- 
 vidual tints ; but often no colour-scheme runs through the 
 whole picture. He says of Millais and himself : " "VVe dis- 
 tinctly enforced our aesthetic aims in the themes we treated, 
 selecting beautiful objects for fastidious discrimination in 
 their portrayal." We may accept this statement and yet 
 see that such a course would not necessarily result in the 
 production of a beautiful work of art. The various beauti- 
 ful objects must not only be fastidiously portrayed, they 
 must be brought into beautiful relation with each other, 
 and to this end they must be carefully selected ; and even 
 then the individual character of some of them may have to 
 be modified if the total result is to be beautiful. 
 
 Again, Mr. Hunt says : " Pre-Raphaelitism in its purity 
 was the frank worship of nature, kept in check by selection 
 and directed by the spirit of imaginative purpose." Yes ; 
 but the question has still to be asked, In what proportion 
 
28 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 were these elements mixed ? There have been many schools 
 of art, by no means Pre-Raphaelite, in Mr. Hunt's use of 
 the term, to which this definition would apply. Mr. Hunt 
 mixed the elements to his own liking. He seems to have 
 got Millais to like the same mixture, though MUlais' taste 
 changed before very long. Dante Eossetti, the third work- 
 ing member of the Brotherhood, adopted different propor- 
 tions from the first. Madox Brown, whom we have left for 
 a time, had his own prescription for a while, tried Holman 
 Hunt's afterwards, and then varied it again. Mr. Hunt 
 says in his book : "It is stultifying in writing a history of 
 Pre-Eaphaelitism to be compelled to avow that our impul- 
 sively-formed Brotherhood was a tragic failure almost from 
 the beginning, and that we became the victims of the indis- 
 cretions of our allies." The members of the Brotherhood 
 were Holman Hunt, Millais, Dante Rossetti, James CoUin- 
 son, F. G. Stephens — these five were painters ; Thomas 
 "Woolner, a sculptor, and William Michael Eossetti, a writer, 
 When Mr. Hunt says " we " he means Millais and himself. 
 ' Our allies " were the other five. Collinson soon left the 
 Brotherhood ; Stephens did little actual work. The mem- 
 bers were never agreed in theory. The very epithet Pre- 
 Raphaelite was a misnomer for the work of Holman Hunt 
 and Millais. Mr. Hunt says that there was nothing anti- 
 quarian or quattrocentist about the movement. Why, then, 
 call it Pre-Eaphaelite ? Raphael and his predecessors cer- 
 tainly never made a sudden breach with precedent and a 
 return to Nature spelt with a capital N. There was some- 
 thing antiquarian and quattrocentist in the work of Madox 
 Brown and Dante Rossetti, and in the theories of Stephens 
 and William Eossetti ; and they are certainly more entitled 
 to use the term Pre-Raphaelite than the other two, whose 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 29 
 
 work would have been better described simply as Naturalist. 
 This is not a mere wrangling about terms. These differ- 
 ences are important with reference to the after history of 
 English painting. Each of the parties in the Brotherhood 
 had its allies, and afterwards its followers ; and the influence 
 of each persists to the present day. Also, entirely outside 
 the Brotherhood and its circle, there were painters from 
 whom the Pre-Eaphaelites themselves might have learned 
 valuable lessons. Of all this hereafter. 
 
 It wUl, perhaps, be well now to say something about 
 Euskin's theories of art, which, as we have seen, entirely 
 fell in with those that Holman Hunt was working out for 
 himself, and confirmed him in his determination to adopt 
 them in practice. Nature was in the forefront of all Euskin 
 had to say about art. His first nom de plume was Kata 
 Phusin, " according to nature." On the title-page of each 
 volume of Modern Painters are Wordsworth's lines : 
 
 Accuse me not 
 
 Of arrogance 
 
 If, having walked with Nature, 
 
 And oifei-ed, far as frailty would allow, 
 
 Lly heart a daily sacrifice to Truth, 
 
 I now affirm of Nature and of Truth, 
 
 Whom I have served, that their Divinity 
 
 Revolts, offended at the ways of men. 
 
 Philosophers, who, though the human soul 
 
 Be of a thousand faculties composed. 
 
 And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize 
 
 This soul, and the transcendent universe. 
 
 No more than as a mirror that reflects 
 
 To proud Self-love her own Intelligence. 
 
 It is instructive to note here that Eossetti said of Words- 
 worth that he was too much the high-priest of nature to be 
 her lover. It may also be said that whether or not Nature 
 and Truth have revolted at the ways of men, men have 
 
30 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 often felt inclined, at least, to revolt against the ways of 
 nature ; and man has only risen above the brute by making 
 aU kinds of improvements upon the things with which 
 nature has provided him. Of course, we may say that 
 nature is made better by no means that nature herself does 
 not provide ; only, if we do say this, we must also say that 
 the widest departures from nature, by which art creates a 
 beauty of its own, are themselves natural. 
 
 "Why did Euskin put this quotation from Wordsworth 
 in the forefront of each volume of his great apology for 
 Turner? Because he himself had humbly walked with 
 nature as a geologist and botanist. His earliest writing of 
 any moment was on these subjects ; and his interest in art 
 was largely scientific — that is to say, he strongly emphasised 
 the importance of fidelity to facts. What was his appeal to 
 nature in all vital questions of art criticism, in tyhich 
 Holman Hunt found such timely encouragement? We 
 shall find it in the first volume of Modern Painters; and 
 I venture to quote once more an oft-quoted passage. Before 
 doing so, however, let me remind the reader that the first 
 volume of Modern Painters was published in 1843, when 
 the author had only reached the age of twenty-four; 
 that he was not himself strictly an artist, as, although he 
 was an exquisite draughtsman, he never showed any faculty 
 for design; just as, though he wrote magnificent prose, his 
 verse was never more than respectable. This is the oft- 
 quoted passage : — 
 
 " From young artists nothing ought to be tolerated hut 
 simple hona fide imitation of nature. They have no busi- 
 ness to ape the execution of masters; to utter weak and 
 disjointed repetitions of other men's words, and mimic the 
 gestures of the preacher without understanding his meaning 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHEJiHOOD 31 
 
 or sharing in his emotions. We do not want their crude 
 ideas of composition, their unformed conceptions of the 
 Beautiful, their unsystematised experiments upon the Sub- 
 lime. "We scorn their velocity, for it is without direction ; 
 we reject their decision, for it is without grounds ; we re- 
 probate their choice, for it is without comparison. Their 
 duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor 
 experimentalise ; but to be humble and earnest in following 
 the steps of nature, and tracing the finger of God. No- 
 thing is so bad a symptom in the work of young artists as 
 too much dexterity of handling, for it is a sign that they 
 are satisfied with their work and have tried to do nothing 
 more than they were able to do. Their work should be full 
 of failures, for these are the signs of efforts. They should 
 keep to quiet colours, greys and browns; and making the 
 early works of Turner their example, as his latest are to be 
 their object of emulation, should go to nature in all single- 
 ness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, 
 having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her 
 meaning, and remember her instruction — rejecting nothing, 
 selecting nothing, and scorning nothing ; believing all things 
 to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth." 
 
 We halt here, but will finish the passage shortly. It will 
 be observed that if the young artist take Ruskin's advice, he 
 will begin as a mere imitator of nature. That is to say, 
 he will begin by not practising art, for mere imitation is not 
 art. Is it not likely, then, that he will end more or less as 
 he has begun 1 Hamerton took Ruskin's advice and came to 
 the conclusion that it was bad ; that mere imitation of nature 
 was not at all the right way to learn the practice of art. 
 Holman Hunt took the advice ; but his case is not a com- 
 plete test, for he had already painted pictures in accordance 
 
32 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 with the accepted theories of design. Still, he probably 
 never afterwards designed so well ; and having adopted a 
 restrained handling, part of Euskin's advice, he has retained 
 it, on his own admission, to the end of his career. 
 
 But Euskin's advice is hardly consistent with itself. The 
 young artist is to go to nature, but, at the same time, he is 
 to make the early works of Turner his example, and use 
 only quiet colours — greys and browns. Does nature use only 
 greys and browns % Holman Hunt did not take this part of 
 the advice. He forthwith tried to adopt nature's most bril- 
 liant colour. Also, from the first, Turner selected, com- 
 posed, and designed, and did not merely imitate nature. 
 He never lost sight of both art and nature ; and, except in 
 mere studies and sketches, he always translated nature into 
 terms of art. It would be rather odd, if Turner's latest 
 works were to be the artist's emulation, for him to begin, as 
 Turner did not begin, with mere imitation of nature, leaving- 
 out selection and design, which are of the essence of art, 
 and were never absent in some degree from Turner's work, 
 and were not the least wonderful things in it when his 
 art had reached maturity. 
 
 The reader may be inclined to quote Lady Macbeth, ex- 
 claiming, " Thou'rt mad to say it," if I suggest that Euskin 
 did not fully understand Turner, and therefore did not say 
 the last word about him. Not that I am going to try to 
 say it. But on Euskin's own high estimate of Turner, not, 
 perhaps, an unduly exalted one, it might well be that even 
 a Euskin could not fully take his measure, especially as he 
 arrived at his conclusions while yet a mere youth, and 
 with certain rather narrow theories about art as his critical 
 equipment. It is all a question of degree. Did Euskm 
 rightly assess how much that is beautiful, impressive, and 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 33 
 
 in any other way valuable in Turner's work was due to 
 nature, and how much of it was due to Turner himself? 
 Did he sufficiently realise that though Turner indeed 
 walked with nature, he afterwards went into his studio 
 and, in his art, varied nature very much as he pleased % If 
 this be heresy, it is not uttered for the first time. In 
 A Century of Painters of the English School, Kedgrave 
 seems almost to quiver in his contemptuous comment on 
 Euskin's statement that Turner was the first and greatest of 
 the Pre-Eaphaelites. " Turner a Pre-Raphaelite ! " he says ; 
 " Turner who passed his life in studying nature under her 
 varied aspects that his memory of her might be sure ; who 
 left us thousands of his studies, yet repudiated the practice 
 of painting his pictures at all out of doors, and would have 
 laughed at the ' one principle, the uncompromising truth of 
 working everything from nature and from nature only, paint- 
 ing to the last touch in the open air from the thing itself.' 
 Turner a Pre-Raphaelite ! he who repudiated topographic 
 imitation when it had served his purpose and made selection 
 of the beautiful and characteristic in nature his principle ; 
 idealizing the commonplace of every-day nature, which the 
 laborious idler, painting from ' the thing itself,' can never 
 do ; and adding to it, from the ample stores of his well- 
 filled memory, every evanescent beauty arising from sim. and 
 shade, and the thousand changes with which they glorify 
 the common aspect of things ! " Similarly, Philip Gilbert 
 Hamerton, who, after trial, rejected Euskin's advice about 
 learning art from nature, says : "In the case of Turner, not- 
 withstanding a profound knowledge of the natural world, 
 there was such a strong art faculty, and such a disposition 
 to refer to preceding art, that he was never enslaved to 
 nature. The mere fact that, having the choice of town or 
 
34 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 country, he could live in London, is in itself sufficient evi- 
 dence that his mind had never been overwhelmed by nature 
 to the point of sacrificing its human liberty and indivi- 
 duality." Hamerton says also that Wordsworth was saved 
 by his interest in humanity from being wholly conquered by 
 natural landscape, but that his emancipation would have 
 been more complete if he had understood the art of painting. 
 There is no need for me to attempt to decide between 
 these different points of view. I have no desire to give 
 a recipe : so much nature to so much art. I have merely to 
 show that art, in its development during the last fifty years, 
 has refused to be limited to the Pre-Eaphaelite recipe as un- 
 derstood by Euskin and Holman Hunt ; at the same time, 
 I am far from saying that their recipe had not its value, 
 only it was not an exclusively valuable one. 
 
 I only quoted part of the passage in Modern Painters 
 that contains Ruskin's advice to young painters. The con- 
 clusion of it is as follows : — " Then " — after going to nature 
 in all singleness of heart, and walking with her laboriously 
 and trustingly — " when their memories are stored, and their 
 imaginations fed, and their hands firm, let them take up the 
 scarlet and the gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show 
 us what their heads are made of. "We wUl follow them 
 wherever they choose to lead ; we wUl check at nothing ; 
 they are then our masters, and are fit to be so. They have 
 placed themselves above our criticism, and we will listen to 
 their words in all faith and humility ; but not unless they 
 themselves have before bowed, in the same submission, to 
 a higher Authority and Master." If any young painter ever 
 took Euskin's advice with regard to fidelity to nature, it was 
 Millais ; yet we shaU find hereafter that when, in later 
 years, Millais began to paint in a manner that Euskin did 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 35 
 
 not like, Euskin by no means thought him above criticism 
 because of his earlier bowing to a higher Authority and 
 Master. Still, of course, MUlais may have become a fallen 
 angel of art \ Euskin said, indeed, that his change was not 
 mere fall, but catastrophe. 
 
 We shall have to consider this change in a later chapter. 
 Here, in connexion with the Pre-Eaphaelite Brotherhood, 
 we are concerned with Millais as, for the time, agreeing in 
 theory and practice with Holman Hunt. They adopted the 
 same principle, painting the landscape and other surround- 
 ings of their figures on the spot, with great elaboration of 
 detail, and with little or no allowance for the blurring 
 of objects on other planes than that of the object tipon 
 which the eyes were focussed. 
 
 The third working member of the Brotherhood was Dante 
 Eossetti, who had Italian blood in his veins, was poet as 
 well as painter, and of whom the last thing that can be 
 said is that he walked humbly with nature. If the success 
 of the Brotherhood depended upon his adopting the methods 
 of Holman Hunt and Millais, there can be no wonder that 
 it was a failure, even a tragic one. He had been a pupU of 
 Madox Brown's, to whom he had been attracted by the 
 Westminster cartoons, and had been set to paint pickle-jars 
 by way of discipline in art. Such humble drudgery as this 
 was not to his liking, and he soon chose another master — 
 Holman Hunt — who set him to work on the stQl-life objects 
 in a subject-picture, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. This 
 picture, Mr. Holman Hunt says, "was of Overbeck revivaUst 
 character, which no superintendence of mine as to the man- 
 ner of painting could much affect " ; and of Eossetti's next 
 picture. The Annunciation, generally known as Ecce Andlla 
 Domini, he says that it '' still reflected Brown's early Chris- 
 
36 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 tian phase " ; aiid lie says generally, " Kossetti treated the 
 Gospel history simply as a storehouse of interesting situa- 
 tions and beautiful personages for the artist's pencil, just as 
 the Arthurian legends afterwards were to him, and in due 
 course to his younger proselytes at Oxford." This is by no 
 means accurate, but it serves to show that there was an ini- 
 tial difference between Holman Hunt and MUIais on the one 
 hand and Kossetti on the other as to the relation of art to 
 nature — a difference that became greater, not less, as time 
 went on. Holman Hunt dwells upon Rossetti's entire lack 
 of interest in natural science and theories of evolution, 
 saying, quite truly, that he regarded such questions as 
 foreign to poetry and irrelevant to art ; " for when men were 
 different from the cultured of mediaeval days they were not 
 poetic in his eyes ; they had no right to be different from the 
 people of Dante's time." This last passage is not quite fair, 
 and does not come well from a painter most of whose work is 
 marked by a scrupulous avoidance of the difficulties imposed 
 on the artist by the ordinary modern costume of Western 
 Europe. 
 
 Before proceeding to see how the Pre-RaphaeUtes fared 
 when they submitted their pictures to pubhc criticism, we 
 shall do well to consider another question, much debated in 
 these days — the place of the subject in painting. 
 
 According to one school of criticism the subject should 
 never be of more than secondary interest in a picture. A 
 picture, when first we see it, ought never to suggest the ques- 
 tion " What is it all about % " but only the exclamation 
 " How beautiful it is ! " Mr. George Moore thinks that art 
 faUed in the nineteenth century because the subject was put 
 first and beauty second. He attributes the beginning of 
 this error, which he compares with the potato blight or 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 37 
 
 phylloxera, to the painted domestic dramas of Greuze, and 
 says that for the last hundred years painters seem to have 
 lived in libraries rather than in studios, and that painting 
 has acted as a sort of handmaiden to literature. One pic- 
 ture that he selects to Ulustrate his contention is Holman 
 Hunt's The Shadow of Death, which, he says, is barren of 
 artistic interest, but rejoices the heart of middle-class 
 England by showing dress, tools, a carpenter's shop, and 
 landscape, that are either identical with or closely resemble 
 the surroundings of Christ two thousand years ago. It is 
 interesting to note in connexion with what Mr. Moore says 
 about this picture, that Holman Hunt maintained, when 
 defending his purpose of goiag to the Holy Land, that in 
 pursuing the aim of making more tangible Jesus Christ's 
 history and teaching he ought not surely to serve art less 
 perfectly. Doubtless Mr. Moore would say that he coidd 
 not have taken a course more sure to prevent him from 
 serving art at all. We have just quoted Mr. Holman Hunt 
 as saying of Eossetti that he treated the Gospel history 
 simply as a storehouse of interesting situations and beautiful 
 personages for the artist's pencU. This is an exaggeration ; 
 but Mr. George Moore would have applauded Eossetti had 
 he taken such a position. He says that to Leonardo, 
 Eaphael, and Andrea del Sarto, " Biblical subjects were 
 a mere pretext for representing man in all his attributes ; 
 and when the same subjects were treated by the Venetians 
 they were transformed in a pomp of colour, and by an ab- 
 sence of all true colour and by contempt for history and 
 chronology became epical and fantastical. It is only neces- 
 sary to examine any one of the works of the great Venetians 
 to see that they bestowed hardly a thought on the subject of 
 their pictures." This, agaiu, is an exaggeration. And Mr. 
 
38 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Moore is not quite consistent, for in another place he says, 
 '' Sentimentality pollutes, the anecdote degrades, wit alto- 
 gether ruins ; only great thought enters into art " ; and he 
 praises Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini because in it, though 
 " it is destitute of all technical accomplishment," the painter 
 has " revealed the essence of an intensely human story" ; " he 
 has looked deep into the legend, and revealed its true and 
 human significance.'' Surely this is to give the subject a very 
 high place in art ! And if Mr. Moore be right about this 
 picture, it is clear that Mr. Holman Hunt is wrong in what 
 he says as to Eossetti's attitude towards the Gospel history. 
 Mr. Moore says that in the masterpieces of the Dutch 
 painters of the seventeenth century " we find no suspicion 
 of anything that might be called a subject; the absence of 
 subject is even more conspicuous in the Dutchmen than in 
 the Italians." The Italians would surely have wondered to 
 be told that there was no subject in their paintings ; and in 
 Dutch paintings we find subject in plenty, even in the form 
 of anecdote, which, Mr. Moore says, degrades. Jan Steen 
 pictures the visit of a doctor to a young lady who looks as 
 if she had taken a chUl after a dance ; Gerard Dou and 
 Willem Van Mieris show the chaffering of seller and buyer 
 in poultry shops, and enter with great zest into such subjects 
 as the discussion of the merits and demerits of hares and 
 vegetables ; Pieter de Hooch shows a housewife going to the 
 door to look out for her husband, while the maid brings her 
 child after her ; and again, he paints the husband commg 
 along the garden-path, while his wife is scolding the servant- 
 maid because the dinner is not ready. But why debate the 
 question ? As far back as art can be traced, right away to 
 pre-historic bone-scratchings, the subject has taken a promi- 
 nent place in it. 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 39 
 
 Mr. George Moore and M. de la Sizeranne both take the 
 same view of the proper place of the subject in art. Only 
 the former blames French art for first giving the subject too 
 much prominence, and the latter blames English art ! The 
 error begins, says the former, with the domestic dramas of 
 Greuze, "and ever since the subject has taken first place in 
 the art of France, England, and Germany, and in like mea- 
 sure as the subject made itself felt, so did art decline." 
 M. de la Sizeranne says : " The anecdotic puzzle of Hogarth 
 on the one hand, the psychological puzzle of Burne-Jones on 
 the other, all English painting oscillates between these two 
 extremes, which meet, however, when it is considered how 
 far apart they are from the normal point of view in which 
 an artistic subject ought to be treated." 
 
 What is the really normal point of view % Painting is an 
 art in which subjects of many kinds can be adequately 
 treated. Such critics as those who have just been quoted 
 do not deny this. But they say that in a work of art 
 beauty should have the first place and the subject be sub- 
 ordinate to it. They beg the whole question by calling 
 pictures works of art, using art in the purely aesthetic sense 
 of the word. Pictures often are, and often ought to be, 
 more than works of art in this narrow acceptation. A tea- 
 pot may have beauty, it ought certainly to be useful — 
 handle in the right place for holding ; spout placed so that 
 the tea will come out of it, and not first out of the opening 
 at the top. A tea-pot, if of the very best, is "a work of 
 art," and something more. A painting, if of the very best 
 — most complete — ^kind, will combine {esthetic value with 
 intellectual or emotional value. It is incomplete, in the 
 sense of not doing all that a painting can do, if either the 
 sesthetic appeal or the intellectual or emotional appeal be 
 
40 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 wanting. A school of art — of painting — in which the sub- 
 ject is always of less interest than the aesthetic treatment of 
 the subject, is an imperfect school of painting ; and if our 
 two critics be right, the Italian, Dutch, and other earlier 
 schools were imperfect. It has, indeed, been maintained, 
 and with much reason, that in the Italy of the Renaissance 
 sestheticism was in excess, with evil results for art, literature, 
 and life as a whole. To-day it is said, with equal reason, 
 that science is in excess and sestheticism neglected ; and not 
 only the walls of the Academy, but the things we make and 
 use are evidence of it. The swing of the pendulum, the 
 action and re-action in all these things, is extremely complex 
 and difficult to follow. See to what different conclusions 
 the two critics just quoted arrive as to one point — the origin 
 of what they hold to be the over-prominence of the subject 
 in painting ! English Pre-Eaphaelitism, on one side of it, 
 was a protest against a pedantic mimicry of the aesthetic 
 excess of the Italian Renaissance ; and if the protest itself 
 was temporarily excessive, that is only what most protests 
 must be if they are eventually to accomplish their object. 
 
 Probably the reader has by this tune had enough of this 
 discussion of some of the first principles of art ; but unless 
 we have them in mind, when we are looking at pictures or 
 thinking about them, or hearing or reading what other 
 people think about them, mere bewilderment will be the 
 result. Anyhow, we have done with them for the present, 
 and can now turn to more entertaining matter — the forma- 
 tion and history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
 
 Holman Hunt and Millais, fellow-students in the Academy 
 Schools, to which the latter, though the younger of the two, 
 had earlier obtained admission, had been working together 
 for some time when Eossetti, in 1847, sought Holman 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 41 
 
 Hunt's guidance after tiring of his pickle-jar work under 
 Madox Brown. They had ah-eady determined on a return 
 to nature, and were no longer to be mere imitators of Etty, 
 Dyce, Maclise, or any others of the accredited art leaders of 
 the time. It seemed as if Eossetti would join them in this 
 venture, and with enthusiasm. Probably they were too en- 
 thusiastic to give adequate attention to signs that this could 
 never be. The three seemed to be united. Eossetti sug- 
 gested that others should join them. All the additions to 
 the little company, save one, were proposed by him. All 
 who joined them were to be or to become working artists, 
 and Hunt and Millais expected that they would adopt the 
 methods they themselves had decided to adopt. Thomas 
 Woolner, a sculptor, who held that closer touch with nature 
 was essential to the improvement of the art he practised, 
 was the first addition. William Eossetti, the brother of 
 Dante Eossetti, who thought he might give up an appoint- 
 ment at the Inland Eevenue Ofi&ce and become a painter, 
 and James Collinson, a painter who declared his conversion 
 to the new views, were next introduced by Eossetti. Hol- 
 man Hunt, in his reminiscences, gives us delightful pictures 
 of his and Millais' somewhat anxious hope that all this 
 would work out for good. The one addition to the group 
 not introduced by Eossetti — F. G. Stephens — was a friend 
 of Holman Hunt's, who thought that he would be caught 
 up in the whirl of enthusiasm and become an active artist. 
 Eossetti would have had Madox Brown invited to join 
 them, but Holman Hunt had already formed the opinion, 
 previously mentioned, that the " grim grotesqueness " and 
 " Overbeckian " character of his work made it undesirable 
 that he, who was also a considerably older man than any of 
 the Brethren, should be of their number. 
 
42 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 It -was arranged that they should all meet in conference 
 at Millais' studio. There they discussed the outlines done 
 hy Fiihrich in the Eetzsch manner, and then turned to a 
 book of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at 
 Pisa, which had been lent to Millais ; and, says Mr. Hobnan 
 Hunt, " we insisted that the naive traits of frank expression 
 and unaffected grace were what had made Italian art so 
 essentially vigorous and progressive, untU. the showy fol- 
 lowers of Michelangelo had grafted their Dead Sea fruit 
 on to the vital tree just when it was bearing its choicest 
 autumnal ripeness for the reawakened world." It was the 
 spirit, however, not the form — recognised as crude and im- 
 mature — of this earlier art that was to be followed, says 
 Mr. Hunt ; who also states that when Rossetti used Madox 
 Brown's term " Early Christian " for the new principles of 
 art, he himself insisted that " Pre-RaphaeHte " was more 
 radically exact. 
 
 However this may be, they came to call themselves the 
 Pre-Eaphaelite Brotherhood — a designation which, as I have 
 already said, suited the art of Eossetti much better than it 
 suited that of Holman Hunt and MiUais. According to 
 Mr. William Rossetti, the Brethren were all agreed that 
 to be a Pre-RaphaeHte it was necessary — "(1) to have 
 genuine ideas to express ; (2) to study nature attentively, so 
 as to know how to exjDress them ; (3) to sympathise with 
 what is direct and heartfelt in previous art to the exclusion 
 of what is conventional and self -parading and learned by rote; 
 and (4) most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly 
 good pictures and statues." Close fidelity to nature does 
 not here find a place— another evidence of initial differences 
 in the views of the Brethren; and Mr. William Rossetti 
 states further that Mr. F. G. Stephens is wrong in saying 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 43 
 
 that one of their principles " was to the effect that when a 
 member found a model whose aspect answered his idea of 
 the subject required, that model should be painted exactly, 
 so to say, hair for hair." 
 
 It is apart from our present purpose to say anything here 
 about The Germ, the short-lived literary organ of the 
 Brotherhood, itself hardly longer-lived. We have only to 
 see what was the actual outcome of the movement in the 
 way of painting; and in this regard only the work of 
 Holman Hmit, MiUais, and Kossetti, among the original 
 members of the Brotherhood, is of any importance. 
 
 The Brotherhood was formed towards the end of 1848, 
 and by the early summer of the following year three pic- 
 tures were ready for exhibition — Holman Hunt's Rienzi 
 Swearing Revenge over his Brother's Corpse, Millais' Lorenzo 
 and Isabella, and Eossetti's The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. 
 After each paiater's signature were placed the letters P.E.B. ; 
 but their significance was not understood, and the pictures 
 were well received. In fact, each of them found a purchaser. 
 Holman Hunt and Millais had sent their pictures to the 
 Eoyal Academy; Eossetti's was shown at an independent 
 exhibition in Hyde Park. 
 
 The next year — 1850 — Holman Hunt sent to the Academy 
 A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Mis- 
 sionary from the Persecution of the Druids; and Millais 
 sent Christ in the House of His Parents and Ferdinand 
 lured by Ariel. Eossetti's picture this year was the Eece 
 Ancilla Domini. The meaning of the letters P.E.B. had 
 leaked out ; it was now known that what was strange in the 
 work of the young painters was due, not to immaturity, 
 but to a revolt against the accepted canons of art ; and there 
 was a furious outburst of adverse criticism. The condemna- 
 
44 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 tion was piactically unanimous. Only the Spectator had a 
 good woid to say for the innovators ; hut, alas ! William 
 Eossetti wrote the art critiques for that paper ! Charles 
 Dickens, in Household Words, made a virulent attack on 
 Millais' Christ in the House of His Parents. " In the fore- 
 ground of that carpenter's shop," he wrote, " is a hideous, 
 wry-necked, blubbering red-haired boy in a night-gown who 
 appears to have received a poke in the hand from the stick 
 of another boy with whom ho has been playing in an ad- 
 jacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation 
 of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness that (sup- 
 posing it were possible for any human creature to exist for 
 a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out 
 from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest 
 cabaret in France or the lowest gin-shop in England." 
 
 This is magnificent, but it is not true. Millais' mother 
 said it was wicked, and there was much excuse for her so 
 saying. Other critiques were little if any less violently 
 abusive. There is nothing in the picture, as we look at it 
 to-day, to justify the language then used about it. But we 
 must remember that it was a new thing then to be asked to 
 think of the early life and surroundings of Christ as they 
 actually must have been — the same as those of any other 
 workman's child. Even the nerves of Charles Dickens 
 could not stand such a sudden douche of the cold water of 
 fact. Even now it is not possible to regard the picture as 
 a wholly satisfactory treatment of its theme. The boy has 
 slightly hurt his hand — caught it on a nail; and at once 
 there is consternation. His father holds the hand to look 
 at the wound ; his mother goes down on her knees to kiss 
 him. John the Baptist brings water to wash the wound, 
 and has a troubled look out of aU proportion to the mis- 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 45 
 
 chance that has happened. Tlie. Spoiled Child would be 
 the most appropriate title for the picture, and we are not 
 helped by having the boy Christ represented in such a light. 
 As a matter of fact, the only title given to the picture by 
 Millais himself was a quotation from the Book of Zechar- 
 aiah, " And one shall say unto Him, What are these wounds 
 in Thine hands ? Then He shall answer. Those with which 
 I was wounded in the house of my friends." The quota- 
 tion was entirely inappropriate to the picture. The boy 
 Christ has only met with a trivial accident; the wounds 
 mentioned by the prophet were deliberately inflicted upon 
 false teachers. The aim of the picture to suggest that the 
 surroundings of Christ in His early days were quite simple 
 and humble might have been accomplished without anything 
 namby-pamby, and also without the commonplace idea of a 
 trivial hurt being a prophecy of the crucifixion. 
 
 Mr. Hohnan Hunt can hardly have had this picture in 
 mind when he said that Millais and he enforced their 
 aesthetic aims in the themes they treated, " selecting beauti- 
 ful objects for fastidious discrimination in their portrayal " ; 
 for although we cannot find in this picture the absolute 
 hideousness that Dickens and his contemporaries found in 
 it, it must be said that there is but little beauty either 
 in the figures or in their surroundings. Eealistic truth, not 
 beauty, is the note of the picture. On the whole, we can 
 hardly be surprised, even now, at the violent outburst of 
 censure that greeted this and the other Pre-Eaphaelite 
 pictures. 
 
 The picture just discussed at length had been commis- 
 sioned by a dealer, and it was long before he could find 
 a purchaser for it. None of the other pictures was sold. 
 Millais' Ferdinand lured by Ariel had also been commis- 
 
46 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 sioned by a dealer, who, when he had seen it, simply wei 
 off his bargain. Millais used to tell a story that showed tl 
 straits to which the young painters were now reduced. Tli 
 hundred guineas promised for this picture had been 63 
 pended in advance on household necessaries. There ha 
 often been talk of adding to a precarious income by takin 
 in lodgers, and his parents now decided that this woul 
 have to be done. Millais was in his studio, in a state t 
 utter dejection, when a friend — Mr. Frankum — brought i 
 Mr. Richard Ellison, a well-known connoisseur. M 
 Frankum could see from MiUais' manner that somethin 
 had gone wrong, and, on questioning him, was told of th 
 picture-dealer's refusal of the picture, and the straits \ 
 which the family was consequently reduced. Before leavinj 
 Mr. Ellison told Millais that he had written a pamphlt 
 about water-colour painting, and asked if he might give hii 
 a copy of it, and write his name in it. Millais assentec 
 out of mere complaisance, and the pamphlet was left, wit 
 the expression of a hope that he would look at it, as, in il 
 author's opinion, he would find in it that which would ii 
 terest him. Millais relapsed into his depressed mood ; thai 
 looking round, caught sight of the pamphlet and took it uj 
 Two papers fell out of it. One was a note to say that Mi 
 Ellison wished to become the purchaser of the Ferdimn 
 picture for £150; the other was a cheque for that amoun 
 Millais rushed with the cheque into the room where hi 
 father and mother were, waving it in his hand, so elate 
 that they thought he must have gone mad. The first thii 
 that caught his eye was a notice fixed to the window, adve 
 tising lodgings. He at once tore this down. The wafei 
 vath which it had been fastened to the glass were sti 
 sticky, and whenever in after years he recalled the inciden 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 47 
 
 the feeling of stickiness came back to his finger-ends. There 
 is a less complete version of this story in his biography. I 
 repeat it in the form in which an old friend of Millais' has 
 told me he had it from MUlais himself. 
 
 Probably the critics hoped that the severe castigation the 
 young revolutionaries had received would induce them to 
 retire from the apparently utterly unequal contest. This, 
 indeed, was what happened in Rossetti's case. He did not 
 exhibit again. But Holman Hunt and MiUais were un- 
 dismayed. The former sent to the Academy the following 
 year Valentine, rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, and the latter, 
 Mariana in the Moated Ch-ange, The Return of the Dove to 
 the Arlt, and The Woodman's Daughter. The attack on these 
 pictures was even more determined than that upon those of 
 the previous year. It was seriously asked that they should 
 be removed from the exhibition. But help was now forth- 
 coming, and of a kind that was sure to be eifective. Euskin 
 contributed to the Times two letters in defence of the pic- 
 tures that were so vehemently condemned by almost all other 
 critics. This was enough at once to save the revolution 
 from being crushed out. He continued the defence in 
 lectures and articles; and if the young painters did not 
 carry everything before them, they were at least permitted 
 to hold on their way, and reassured art lovers purchased 
 their pictures. 
 
 As might be expected. Buskin's main line of defence 
 was that the pictures were true to nature. Some of the 
 adverse critics had rashly attacked them as untrue. Euskin 
 had no difi&culty in showing their superiority in this respect 
 to much of the accepted, academic work. It was the imita- 
 tive ability shown by these works that impressed him. " I 
 have adduced them only," he said, "as examples of the 
 
48 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for 
 that of our modern schools, and of singular success in cer- 
 tain characters, finish of detail, and brilliancy of colour. 
 AVhat faculties, higher than imitative, may be in these men 
 I do not yet venture to say ; but I do say that, if they 
 exist, such faculties wiU manifest themselves in due time 
 all the more forcibly because they have received training so 
 severe." This is the doctrine of the passage in Modem 
 Painters already quoted, part of which appeared in the 
 preface to the essay, " Pre-Eaphaelitism," from which the 
 above quotation is taken. 
 
 In the same essay he denied the accusation that the 
 young painters had imitated the errors of early painters, 
 "A falsehood of this kind," he said, "could not have ob- 
 tained credence anywhere but in England, few English 
 people, comparatively, having ever seen a picture of early 
 Italian masters. If they had they would have known that 
 the Pre-Eaphaelite pictures are just as superior to the early 
 Italian in skill of manipulation, power of drawing, and 
 knowledge of effect, as inferior to them in grace of design; 
 and that, in a word, there is not a shadow of resemblance 
 between the two styles. The Pre-Kaphaelites imitate no 
 pictures : they paint from nature only." On Hohnan 
 Hunt's own showing, as we have already seen, this was not 
 true of Kossetti, nor, up to this time, of Madox Brown, of 
 whom, we may note here, Euskin never had a word to say, 
 good or bad. And it is not possible now to look at the 
 early Pre-Eaphaelite work of both Holman Hunt and 
 Millais without suspecting that some of the obvious man- 
 nerisms in it were due to their study of the early Italian 
 painters. Euskin's admission of the inferiority of then 
 pictures in point of grace of design is important. That 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 49 
 
 grace their works never did come sufficiently to possess ; a 
 fact that goes far to support the contention that minute 
 imitation of nature is by no means the one essential, even 
 if it be an essential, in the early training of an artist. 
 
 To the charge that the Pre-Eaphaelites had no system of 
 light and shade, Ruskin replied that their system was ex- 
 actly the same as the Sun's, " which is, I believe, likely to 
 outlast that of the Eenaissance, however brilliant." This is 
 a mere identification of art with the imitation of nature, 
 and the defence is only a good one if the identification be 
 accepted. 
 
 So far, then, Ruskin praised the Pre-Eaphaelites for their 
 truth of imitation, for their faithful record of facts. What 
 further they could do remained to be seen. " If they 
 adhere to their principles," he said, "and paint nature as it 
 is around them, with the help of modern science, with the 
 earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 centuries, they will found a new and noble school in 
 England. If their sympathies with the early artists lead 
 them into medisevalism or Romanism, they will, of course, 
 come to nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this 
 — at least for the strongest of them. There may be some 
 weak ones whom the Tractarian heresies may touch, but, if 
 so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong 
 stem. I hope all things from the school." Earnestness, 
 then, was the one thing in which the Pre-Raphaelites, or at 
 least those of them whom Ruskin at this time held to be 
 reaUy strong, resembled the painters who preceded Raphael ; 
 and their artistic salvation was to be found in the scientific 
 presentment of nature. Meanwhile, Rossetti was painting ; 
 Burne-Jones was to come ; and both of them were to win 
 high praise from Ruskin. 
 
50 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Eossetti's -withdrawal from exhibition in 1851 was the 
 beginning of the end of the Brotherhood, with which alone 
 this chapter is concerned. We shall consider hereafter the 
 later work of the members of the Brotherhood, and follow 
 the course of the Pre-Eaphaelite influence in our art. But 
 before leaving the Brotherhood it is important to note that 
 although its working members went to nature, they looked 
 but little for the subjects of their pictures to the life of 
 their own time. In this respect, as we shall iind in the 
 next chapter, they differed widely from the painters who led 
 the almost contemporary movement in France. The Pre- 
 Raphaelites painted chiefly subjects from the Bible, from 
 history, from poetry. To a large extent their works were 
 glorified book-illustrations ; and one is puzzled at times to 
 account for their choice of subject, as, for example, in the 
 case of Holman Hunt's Rienzi vowing Vengeance over Ms 
 Brother's Corpse. This seems curious material with which 
 to begin a return to nature ; and here, and in other pictures 
 modern English people, amid obviously modem English 
 landscape, yet dressed in mediaeval costume and supposed to 
 be Italians, bring the whole very near at least to the region 
 of tableau. The actors play their parts with great earnest- 
 ness, but it is often acting, not life, that faces us, and 
 conviction does not come because the accessories and the 
 surroundings are painted with minute truthfulness. Even 
 the Pre-Raphaelites could not at once escape from the artistic 
 environment amid which they had been brought up. They 
 went to nature, one repeats, but they did not yet go to 
 contemporary life. They were less in touch with it, indeed, 
 than were some of the orthodox painters, who, however 
 treated it too often in a trivial manner. The highest his- 
 torical painting — that which interprets passing events in 
 
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 51 
 
 the light of the centuries — was yet to come. And here we 
 shall find that Madox Brown led the way. But it will be 
 instructive, before pursuing further the course of English 
 painting, to consider the French movement to which refer- 
 ence has repeatedly been made. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 
 
 1"^HE movement in French art which, as already said, was 
 - almost contemporaneous with the Pre-Raphaelite move- 
 ment in England, was, like the latter, a revolt against tradi- 
 tion — indeed, against an almost identical tradition, though 
 the French movement took a very different course from the 
 English one, and has since reacted strongly on English art 
 and on that of other countries. 
 
 We have seen that the English movement was not a 
 simple one — not homogeneous, if the reader do not object (o 
 a long word. Art can no more be simple than is our whole 
 intellectual and emotional life, of which it is one of the 
 chief modes of expression. There has been complexity in 
 modern French painting, much the same as that of con- 
 temporary English painting ; for although there are always 
 peculiarities clearly marking off the art of different nations, 
 there are also many general resemblances. It is hardly too 
 much to say that we can find the French equivalents of our 
 Holman Hunt, Millais, Eossetti, Watts, Burne-Jones, and 
 others ; yet not the mere equivalents, be it emphasised, but 
 the French equivalents. 
 
 As many if not most of those who read these pages will 
 necessarily be less familiar with French than with English 
 painting, it may be well to discuss at greater length than 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES S3 
 
 was done with reference to English art, the work of the 
 artists who led up to the new departure of the middle of 
 the nineteenth century. 
 
 The observant English traveller in France can hardly fail 
 to notice, hefore he has gone very far on his journey from 
 one of the northern seaports, how much more symmetrical 
 are the French country-houses than those in our own 
 country. The door is exactly in the centre of the main 
 front; there is the same number of windows at each side 
 of it \ and then there are often two identical, turret-crowned 
 projections, one at each end. We may trace this formal 
 style to the Italian Eenaissance ; we are familiar with it in 
 our large Elizabethan mansions ; but it found in France a 
 more congenial soil than in England. Do we not inevitably 
 think of logic, lucidity, ordered beauty, in connexion with 
 both French art and French literature, whereas in our art 
 and literature expression tends to break down form ? The 
 contrast between the rules with which the classical French 
 drama was hedged about, and the freedom of our Eliza- 
 bethan drama, is too well known to require more than men- 
 tion. In art we find this difference so early as in mediaeval 
 architecture. French Gothic was more severely logical than 
 English Gothic ; and its ornamental sculpture was held 
 more in architectural restraint. And, to take the most 
 obvious modern instance, compare the formal, calculated 
 beauty of Paris with the haphazard picturesqueness of 
 London. 
 
 The difference between the art of the two nations is 
 rooted in differences in national character and tradition. 
 The Latin tradition, which we have found M. de la Sizeranne 
 desirous of upholding, affects more things than art. Roman 
 imperialism has had more lasting results in France than in 
 
54 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 England. The basis for the rules of practical conduct in 
 France is the civil law of Eome ; in our country it is the 
 common law, the tradition of a people who and whose 
 ancestors on the Continent never thoroughly took the im- 
 press of the Koman stamp, and who have always revealed 
 a strong instinct for individual freedom. In the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries we did indeed put ourselves under 
 the Roman yoke in architecture, and in the latter part of 
 the period there was a strong desire to do the same thing ia 
 painting — just as we have had our classical literature also, 
 our Dryden and our Pope — and duU things have looked, 
 and stiU look, very dull under our so often duU skies ; but 
 there has ever been a spirit of revolt, and we shall win our 
 perfect freedom yet ; not, it may be hoped, to abuse it ; but 
 at the same time not to sacrifice expression and individuality 
 to conventional beauty. 
 
 We have already briefly considered the strength of the 
 Latin tradition in French art, and have seen that Jacques 
 Louis David revived classical art in France towards the end 
 of the eighteenth century. He had begun his career as a 
 follower of Watteau and Boucher, but he obtained the Frk 
 de Rome, and, following the usual routine, went to Eome to 
 study in the French Academy. He painted in the most 
 severely classical manner such subjects as the Horatii taking 
 the oath, Brutus looking at the bodies of his sons after the 
 death-sentence had been executed upon them, and the rape 
 of the Sabines. The Parisians of the Eevolution linked 
 these subjects, taken from the early history of Eome, with 
 their own struggle for freedom ; it was, indeed, the painters 
 intention that this should be so. A revolutionist himself, 
 he sought to make not only his own art, but every phase of 
 art, expressive of the great upheaval of his day. Even his 
 
I^»S' 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 55 
 
 portraiture had something of Roman severity, and his 
 Madame Recamier wears a simple, classical dress, has her 
 hair bound in a fillet, and reclines on a couch of classical de- 
 sign, with a classical candelabrum by it. An art that while 
 leaning upon the past, took for its subject the Romans 
 breaking with their past, just suited the mood of a people 
 that was breaking with its own past ; and the painter be- 
 came a popular hero. 
 
 Regnault, Yincent, Guerin, Girodet, Gerard, followed 
 more or less closely in the path marked out by David ; and 
 learned draughtsmanship, formal composition, and colour in- 
 evitably dry and cold in such companionship, or, rather, in 
 such service, became universal. Subjects, also, were almost 
 invariably taken from ancient history and mythology, 
 treated with little or no imagination. Only in portraiture 
 was art at all in touch with life. Prudhon, who in Italy 
 had been chiefly attracted by the northern painters, became 
 the French Correggio. Baron Gros wavered between in- 
 terest in contemporary events and the ancient history 
 imposed upon him by his master David. Then GMcault 
 took the plunge into modern life, but retained much of the 
 classical manner. His military pictures and his Raft of the 
 Medusa show him to be near the parting of the ways. 
 Delacroix carried natural action and expression still further, 
 and, more than this, based his art on colour more than on 
 draughtsmanship. The parting of the ways was reached, 
 and it is interesting to us to note that English art was not 
 without influence in this change of direction of French art. 
 G^ricault had praised the colour and effect of English 
 painting, and Delacroix admired so much the fresh and 
 luminous colour of Constable's pictures as actually to alter 
 his own work after seeing them. 
 
S6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 The painting of the Classical school was based on an im- 
 perfect understanding of Greek and Eoman art. WhUe the 
 permanence of the material in which it was ^vrought has 
 preserved to us a quite considerable amount of ancient 
 sculpture, the perishableness of the material upon which 
 paintings were executed has resulted in the destruction of 
 all but a few examples, and those mostly fragmentary. Of 
 Greek painting we know hardly anything, except through 
 contemporary description, and what we may trust ourselves 
 to learn from the vases. Of Graeco-Roman painting we 
 have learned most of what we know from the remains at 
 .Pompeii ; and Pompeii was almost unexplored in David's 
 time. It was from the architecture and the sculpture of 
 Rome that he derived his ideas of ancient art. Had he, as 
 a young man, seen the Pompeian mosaic, representing the 
 flight of Darius at the battle of Issus, and understood its 
 significance, his art could not have become what it did. 
 Could he have had the mosaic in his mind when, near the 
 end of his life, he stood before Delacroix's Dante's Bark, he 
 would have known that picture to be more in the spirit, 
 and even according to the letter, of Eoman painting than 
 his own Horatii or Rape of the Sabines. Delacroix knew 
 this : at least, as a protest against David's cold, sculptur- 
 esque treatment of subjects taken from ancient history, he 
 painted them himself with more realistic truth of action 
 and expression, remembering that the people of classical 
 days did once really live. The classical movement was in a 
 great degree ignorant superstition — one might almost call it 
 grovelling superstition. We call to mind that in England- 
 it had not been without protest against his so doing- 
 Sir Benjamin West had given to the soldiery in his Death of 
 General Wolfe their actual English uniforms, and not the 
 
LA SOURCE 
 
 J. D. IXCRKS 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES S7 
 
 military costume of the Eomans. In architecture and 
 sculpture, as well as in painting, what have we not had to 
 suffer, what do we not still suffer, through our artists for- 
 getting that if art is to be living it must chiefly live in the 
 present ; and, if it deal with the past, must deal with it in 
 a living way, must make it live again ! 
 
 Delacroix did not easily carry the day against classicism. 
 It found a fresh and vigorous recruit in Ingres, a pupil of 
 -David, who again put draughtsmanship before colour and 
 movement. He was eighteen years older than Delacroix, 
 but was a man of much stronger physique, and outlived the 
 younger painter by four years. Born in 1780, he lived 
 until 1867, thus reaching the long count of eighty-seven 
 years. He was strenuously, bitterly opposed to Delacroix, 
 whose election to the Institute drew from him the remark, 
 " l&air the wolf is in the sheepfold." Truly, it is hardly 
 a less unpleasant thing to introduce new art than new 
 theology ! While such a man ruled, art had little chance of 
 becoming an interpreter of life and nature. The hold of 
 the dead hand of Eome was only gradually weakened, 
 though, more and more, art turned to modern themes for 
 its subjects. Thus Paul Delaroche, who was almost the 
 same age as Delacroix, is best known by such works as The 
 Princes in the Tower, The Death of Queen Elizabeth, Straf- 
 ford on the Way to Execution, Oliver Oromioell, and The 
 Assassination of the Duke of Guise. It is true that these 
 were little more than academic exercises, with the pathetic 
 or tragic interest of subject that would make them popular; 
 but there was life iu them, if not the passionate life of the 
 works of Delacroix ; and in one instance, at least — the head 
 of the dying Elizabeth — Delaroche showed great dramatic 
 power. 
 
S8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Thomas Couture, again, was at the parting of the ways. 
 He could not wholly escape from classicism in his painting, 
 though as a teacher — ^he was in great request after the ex- 
 hibition of his Orgie Romaine in 1847, and Manet was one of 
 his pupils — he strongly opposed himself to it. About the 
 art of Gustave Courbet, however, there was no hesitation; 
 it was, in its own time, nothing less than provocatively, 
 defiantly realistic. When we see to-day, hung probably in 
 the same gallery, paintings differing widely in method and 
 intention, and which we quietly value, each for the worth 
 it possesses, it requires an effort of the imagination to 
 realise the storms that raged about them when first they 
 were painted and exhibited. Courbet was born in 1819 at 
 Ornans, near Besanjon ; and though trained in the school 
 of David, he early repudiated, both in work and speech, its 
 methods and aims. He made no pause, either, at the half- 
 way house of Delacroix ; but declared, and maintained the 
 declaration in practice, that the painter's proper work was 
 to paint what he could see about him. Among the old 
 masters his heroes were such men as Holbein, Eibera, 
 Zurbaran, Velasquez, and Ostade, who had painted the 
 things and the people they could see. Of Eaphael he 
 admired only the portraits ; the great compositions of sacred 
 and historical subjects were nothing to him. For the imita- 
 tors of Eaphael he had only contempt. To him the ideal 
 was the empty. In life a republican and a socialist, he 
 chose nature and the ordinary people of his own time as the 
 themes of his art. Eailway stations, mines, and manufac- 
 tories, he said, were the miracles of the modern time ; and 
 the great among living men were its saints. When this 
 programme for art failed to find favour, and his pictures 
 were refused at the international exhibition in Paris m 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 59 
 
 1855, he opened an independent exhibition of his own 
 works in a wooden hut, and enforced their purpose with the 
 aid of a pamphlet. The objections raised to his work were 
 of the same kind as those our Pre-Raphaelite painters had 
 to face. Eyes that had grown used to a vapid idealism 
 could see only malicious caricature in the plain rendering of 
 people as they actually were. Because he painted a funeral 
 at his native village at Ornans with a real, commonplace 
 parish priest officiating, and country-folk that would be 
 recognisable as such in any garb, standing round the grave, 
 he was accused of ridiculing a religious fmiction. To-day 
 we cannot read this into the picture any more than we can 
 read into MiUais' Christ in the House of His Parents what 
 Dickens and his contemporaries saw in that picture. Cour- 
 bet's picture is an historical document. Such were the 
 French peasantry of the middle of the nineteenth century. 
 Courbet painted other village scenes at Ornans. His peasants 
 returning from market may amuse the townsman, not be- 
 cause they are untrue to life, but because they are un- 
 sophisticated, are fearlessly living their own life, not one 
 imposed upon them by the arbiters of fashion. His stone- 
 breakers anticipate the sculpture of Meunier ; the picture is 
 one that authority might well have suppressed, as work by 
 the Belgian sculptor has been suppressed, because it might 
 incite to socialism. His grisettes lying on the river-bank 
 are typical Parisian shop-girls enjoying their dolcefar niente, 
 careless of appearances so long as they are physically com- 
 fortable ; his nude figures are creatures of flesh and blood. 
 His deer in the forest are wild creatures amid wild sur- 
 roundings. His picture The Wave shows that he has 
 stood upon the shore and deeply felt the immensity of sea 
 and sky. In all his work we see that a virile jjower has 
 
6o FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 been handling actual things. He was wrong, of course, in 
 so far as he maintained that nothing but this was included 
 in the mission of art. But his theory was the outcome of 
 a conviction that produced a remarkable life-work. More 
 catholic in criticism, his work would have been of less value. 
 He is the very antithesis of David ; reaching him, we have 
 passed from one extreme of theory and practice to another ; 
 and, with reference to our present purpose, we have said 
 now all that is needful about the subject painters who were 
 the immediate predecessors of the French painters whose 
 work we have more particularly to study. We have next to 
 turn for a brief space to the landscape paiaters, with whom, 
 conveniently, if not quite logically, we shall link Jean 
 Franjois Millet. 
 
 We have seen landscape painting in classical bondage, 
 yet, in modern painting, it has been one of the liberators of 
 art. Face to face with nature, and with the labour by 
 means of which men wiu their subsistence from nature, 
 artificiality is at a discount ; and history is of little moment, 
 for here are the great elemental facts of life that, iii their 
 main features, antedate history. This large, living work 
 inevitably reacts upon that of the subject painters in the 
 towns. And it may also be noted here that portraiture, 
 which has not merely men and women but mankind for its 
 subject, is often intensely alive, when there is little or no 
 life in subject-pictures. How stale and unprofitable, to take 
 but one example, Eeynolds became when he attempted his- 
 torical and sacred subjects ! Along with these two branches 
 of art — though this is rather a parenthesis — may be placed 
 the work of the caricaturist. Nobody expects from a Eow- 
 landson, a Gavarni, a Daumier, a Charles Keene, or a 
 Du Maurier, the grand style and pre-occupation with gods 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 6i 
 
 and goddesses, with saints and heroes long dead. What he 
 is likelier to do is to bring dead gods and heroes down from 
 their pedestals; and, with regard to contemporary life, he 
 makes easier a frank and nobly realistic treatment of it, 
 because, in order to make his own work tell, he must depict, 
 even if in the way of exaggeration, the realities of life. 
 But our immediate concern is with the landscape painters. 
 
 Probably those who are least willing that English 
 artists should seek to learn something in the schools of 
 France will not be unwilling to believe that French land- 
 scape painting in the second quarter of the nineteenth 
 century owed much to Constable and his contemporaries in 
 this country. Even if there were but slight evidence that 
 this was the fact, one would be glad to believe it, not 
 merely as ground for national pride, but as justification for 
 a wise internationalism. The evidence, however, is not 
 slight, but strong ; and the fact is willingly admitted on 
 the other side of the Channel, as, quite recently, to the 
 present writer, by the distinguished French critic, M. 
 Thfodore Duret. 
 
 In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, French 
 landscape painting, as represented by such men as Bidault 
 and Watelet, was still in the bonds of classicism ; and 
 though Georges Michel, in such paintings as Aux Environs 
 de Montmartre, came nearer to English naturalism, a revela- 
 tion was needed, either from inside or outside, before the 
 art could be freed from the old dispensation. The revela- 
 tion came from outside, from England, where if art had not 
 been generally set free, yet some artists had freed them- 
 selves. 
 
 At the Salon of 1822, English water-colour painting was 
 represented by Bonington, Copley Fielding, Eobson, and John 
 
62 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Varley; in 1824, Constable exhibited The Hay Wain and 
 two other pictures ; and the water-colourists were again in 
 evidence. For Constable, on this occasion, the old saying 
 about the prophet and his honour held good ; he who had 
 seen one of his pictures rejected by his fellow-members of 
 the hanging committee at the Eoyal Academy in London 
 received a gold medal in Paris ; and he continued to send 
 his pictures there until 1827, in which year the first picture 
 by Corot accepted at the Salon was hung between a Con- 
 stable and a Bonington. A few years later a group of 
 French landscape painters went to nature in a sense in which 
 the English Pre-Eaphaelites twenty years afterwards did not 
 go to her. They went to live with her, to make her their 
 all-absorbing subject, not merely to find a setting for figure- 
 subjects. On the outskirts of the forest of Fontainebleau, 
 in the viUage of Barbizon, Corot, Eousseau, Diaz, and 
 others lived the simple life from spring until the winter 
 came, painting amid the immemorial oaks and chestnuts and 
 beeches of the forest, and each of them interpreting nature 
 in his own way. 
 
 Of the Barbizon group Corot and MiUet — the latter did 
 not join it until 1849 — have exercised the deepest influence 
 on the after course of art ; but it will be well for us to glance 
 at the work of several of its most important members ; for 
 though it is with later generations of painters that we are 
 chiefly concerned here, not merely the influence, but much 
 of the work, of the Barbizon school, comes within our special 
 period. 
 
 Were there no external evidence for the influence of 
 Constable upon these painters, the internal evidence of 
 some of the early work of Rousseau, in the Thomy-Thi^ry 
 collection at the Louvre, would be sufficiently convincing; 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 63 
 
 and all through his work, at any time of his career, it is 
 difficult not to think of the vigorous naturalism of the 
 Suffolk painter. Eousseau, like Constable, painted nature 
 as he saw itj not merely as he saw it with the physical 
 sight, giving a mere objective record, but as he saw it ; as 
 his temperament, his thought about nature, necessitated his 
 seeing it. But it was nature that he painted. He did not 
 go out to find material for pictures. He went out to be in 
 communion with nature; and his pictures tell us what 
 nature was to him. It is not of nature, whether as a great 
 evolutionary epic, or in her lyrical moods, that we think, 
 when looking at the works of the classical landscape 
 painters. They present to us a wholly unreal world, not 
 the real one, too rough and untidy for ladies and gentlemen 
 to walk through on fine days without injury to tender feet 
 and dainty costumes. Rousseau's world is the forest and 
 the plain, and if there be people about, they are simple 
 toilers ; if there be buildings, they are cottages and farm- 
 steads, so rude as to seem themselves almost a part of 
 nature. 
 
 Eousseau, indeed, was more alone with nature than was 
 Constable, whose Suffolk was a cultivated country. The 
 work of man is oftener than not in evidence in Constable's 
 pictures. Their titles alone show it — The Hay Wain, The 
 Valley Farm, The Glebe Farm, The Cornfield, The Lock, 
 The Vale of Dedham. Oftener, perhaps, than not in 
 Eousseau's pictures there is no sign of the presence of 
 man, unless the cattle must be taken to imply that he is 
 near ; and the cattle do not obtrude themselves as they do 
 in the pictures of another of the group, Troyon. The 
 forest of Fontainebleau and its surroundings were almost 
 untamed nature ; and it is to ancient trees, forest-ponds, and 
 
64 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 the varying effects of morning, noon, and evening, that 
 Rousseau's titles chiefly draw our attention. 
 
 It was not the lyrical beauty of nature that appealed to 
 Rousseau, but the living energy, the power, and the splendour. 
 His forest-trees are battered veterans that have survived the 
 early struggle for existence, and then, with stern endurance, 
 have braved the lightning and the gale, not without grievous 
 loss. And death has befallen some, as in the end it must 
 come to all. Such things as these were what Rousseau 
 went out to see and to paint. In his portrait he looks as if 
 he might himself taken part in the struggle. He did, 
 indeed, have his own struggle, veritably for existence. From 
 1835 to 1848 his work was rejected at the Salon, and his 
 condition was little above poverty. 
 
 Of more importance than Rousseau, or any other of his 
 companions, in preparing the way for Impressioriism, was 
 Corot ; and for this very reason we will glance at the other 
 chief members of the Barbizon group before referring to 
 him and his work. 
 
 Diaz, Dupre, and Harpignies were three other artistic 
 denizens of the field and the forest ; and while all of them 
 painted face to face with nature, each of them interpreted 
 her in accordance with his own temperament. Diaz, of 
 Spanish origin, loved the beauty and brightness of the sun- 
 light as it played among the trees ; Dupr^ loved the move- 
 ment of nature, the alternations of light and gloom, the 
 wind and the rain. The sky almost, if not wholly, rivals 
 the landscape in his pictures. Ruskin complained that 
 Constable was content with light when it was " flickering, 
 glistening, restless, and feeble." In the works of Dupr^, 
 who not only came under Constable's influence, but actually 
 met him in this country, there is certainly more sense of 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 65 
 
 the power of nature than in those of the English master. 
 Harpignies delighted in breadth of irradiating light. Such 
 brief comments as these cannot sum up an artist's work, 
 but they serve to hint at the varied ways in which this 
 group of painters interpreted nature. With Troyon, another 
 of the group, nature, though sympathetically rendered, be- 
 came a secondary thing, the home of the cattle and sheep 
 that clearly held the first place in his affection. All these 
 men were born in the early years of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, and their outlook was determined before the century 
 had half run its course. 
 
 Jean Fran9ois Millet also belongs to their generation ; but 
 in his art, not nature, nor, as with Troyon, its humbler deni- 
 zens, but the men and women who work in the fields, and 
 who tend the cattle and sheep, claim the first place. He 
 was born in 1814, at Gruchy, on the coast of Normandy, 
 where his father was a farmer. There, as boy and youth, 
 he worked as a farm-hand ; but all the time he lost no 
 chance of drawing, and his skill was so manifest, even to 
 the simple folk about him, that at last, when he was twenty 
 years old, there was obtained for him some teaching at 
 Cherbourg, and three years later he became the pupil of 
 Delaroche in Paris. But Millet was not at home in the 
 great city, nor was it in him to paint pictures in either 
 the classical or the romantic style. Art meant to him o ne 
 t hing : power to interpret the life of such people as those 
 amon^ whom he was born : and, in 1848. he found his w av 
 t o Earbiz on. there, as the event showed, fuUy to accomplish 
 the task that was rather determined for him by inward 
 necessity than merely chosen. "Man goeth forth to his 
 labour until the evening " ; this was the subject of all 
 Millet's work. "My critics," he said, "are men of learning 
 
66 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 and taste, but I cannot put myself in their skin; and 
 having seen nothing all my life but the fields, I try to say 
 as best I can what I experienced when I worked in them." 
 How well he said it ! The life of the fields is not an easy 
 one. For those who have its simplest work to do it is hard 
 and it is monotonous. Millet painted it in all its stern 
 simplicity. Under his hand it is seen as a great epic. I 
 have already made a comparison between Millet's country- 
 man and contemporary Courbet, and the Belgian sculptor 
 Meunier. What Meunier has done for the mine and 
 foundry-workers of Belgium, Millet did before him for the 
 peasantry of France — and, through them, for some at least 
 among the peasantry of all times and countries hitherto, 
 He had no need to idealise, but only to give the simple 
 truth, in order to make his men and women heroic; for 
 assuredly there is in the labour with which man wins his 
 food from the soO. a patient heroism that expresses itself in 
 form and action. Euskin found fault with Millet because 
 he did not show the faces of his toilers. This seems like 
 the objection of one who wished to object, for again and 
 again we see the face, and always it tells the same story ; 
 of patient fulfilment of the daily task, made possible by 
 human affection and — as we know, andJIillet's Angelus 
 suggests it — the hope of heaven. 
 
 It has been said that Millet's rendering of the life of the 
 peasant was a pessimistic one. We need not discuss the 
 point at length. Always and everywhere it has not been as 
 he painted it. But it has been and it still is so ; and more 
 than this, it has been and still is in many a place some- 
 thing far harder than it was even as he knew it. 
 
 His own lot was but little better than that of the 
 peasantry around him. He could barely live and support his 
 
L'AMOUR VAIXyUEUK 
 
 :■ F. .MI1.I,I"I- 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALIIES 67 
 
 family, even iii a life of the utmost simplicity, by the sale 
 of pictures for which to-day the wealthiest compete — 27ie 
 Winnower^ The Soioer, The Gleaners, The Wood Sawyers, 
 The Angelvs. There is little need to name or to describe 
 his pictures now, some of which, by reproduction, have 
 become familiar in many a household. The painter of them 
 knew at one time what it was for neither himself nor his 
 wife to taste food for a whole day, thankful if only their 
 children did not want. Such a price as this paid for a 
 return to nature and actual life makes the brief hardships 
 of our Pre-Raphaelites seem by comparison little more 
 than such inconveniences as are gaily borne by a picnic- 
 party. But Millet lived long enough to meet with both 
 recognition and material success. 
 
 We come now to Corot, for with those whom we may call 
 the second generation of the Barbizon group we are not at 
 the moment concerned. 
 
 Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796, twenty years 
 later than Constable ; and it is not uninteresting to note 
 that, Hke Turner, he was the son of a hairdresser. His 
 father, taking up his wife's business, subsequently became 
 Court modiste, and a man of means able to give his son an 
 allowance of twelve hundred francs, when, after much parental 
 opposition, it had been decided that he should become a 
 painter. His early training was inevitably in the academic 
 tradition of his time. Almost inevitably also, he went to 
 Italy. This was in 1825, when he was twenty-eight years 
 old : and he spent two and a half years in and about Rome 
 and Naples, producing formally composed landscapes with 
 ruins, of the approved pattern. He returned to Italy in 
 1835 and 1843; and it was not until after his return from 
 the third visit that he found the landscape of his own 
 
68 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 country to be worth the devotion of his life. That is to 
 say, he was nearly fifty years old before he fully realised 
 that nature was beautiful apart from the glamour that his- 
 tory threw over particular scenes and places. Nothing is 
 more instructive than to compare his work before 1850, or 
 thereabouts, with his later work. His earlier landscapes, 
 often little more than " views " of places, are hard and dry, 
 and the sky is a mere background to the scene ; yet they 
 are broad and simple in treatment, show much sensibility 
 to the play of light, and, towards the end of his first period, 
 the intimate character of the scene is not destroyed by over- 
 much elaborately formal composition. The later work, by 
 which he is best known, is widely different from this. 
 
 We have seen that the inspiration of the English Pre- 
 Raphaelite painters was drawn from literature, and that 
 when they went into the country to find appropriate scenes 
 in which to place their Lorenzos, Ophelias, and other charac- 
 ters taken from history or poetry, they painted the land- 
 scape with hardly less than scientific exactness and 
 elaboration of detail. In their biographies and reminis- 
 cences we read little or nothing of music, but much about 
 history and legend. It was quite otherwise with Corot. 
 Music was little if at all less dear to him than painting. 
 He sang as he painted, he anticipated Whistler in making 
 comparisons between the two arts, was regularly to be seen 
 at concerts, and himself played the violin. Tradition could 
 not for ever blind him to the visible music of nature, and 
 when at last he saw it, the rest of his life was passed in the 
 translation of nature's harmonies into art. 
 
 He inevitably selected that which was nearest akin to 
 what was dominant in his own temperament. Not the 
 rugged strength of nature, but her delicate, fleeting beauty; 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 69 
 
 not the insistently obvious splendour of autumn, but the 
 tranquil harmonies of spring and summer — in brief, all that 
 was lyrical in nature found a response in him. 
 
 He came to know well, or, better, to feel deeply how 
 large a share the atmosphere had in the playing of this 
 music. In it all things — the fields, the flowers and the 
 trees, and the streams that flowed and the lakes that lay 
 tranquil amidst them, and the people who moved about or 
 laboured there^had their being. The sky came to be no 
 longer to his sight and feeling a mere background, a vast 
 overhanging firmament ; it was close at hand, around, 
 amid, the nearest objects, and thence passed away into the 
 illimitable distance. What need was there of a subject, or 
 of unusual effects of nature, or of exceptionally beautiful 
 places, to one to whom nature spake thus? As to the 
 prophet of old, to him also God was present, not in the 
 tempest, the fire or the earthquake, but in the still, small 
 voice. 
 
 By what means did Corot express the emotions that 
 nature awakened in him 1 It was the tranquil moods, the 
 subtle harmonies of nature that moved him. Bright and 
 varied colour clearly had no place here. Sober greens and 
 silvery greys were colour enough for him, with a touch of 
 red — in a cap, usually — to be felt rather than seen, giving 
 value to the quieter colours by contrast. And he showed 
 his sense of colour-music by subtly varying this red note as 
 the greys and greens were warmer or cooler. Any one of 
 us almost could say also, from our own enjoyment of the 
 moods of nature, that he would not need to emphasise form ; 
 on the contrary, he would, and did, reduce all forms to 
 vagueness. We need not go close up to a Corot hoping by 
 minute inspection to obtain more' detailed information. By 
 
70 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 such inspection of the natural scene, by clear definition in 
 painting, the mood would be lost. We say that Corot anti- 
 cipated the Impressionists. It is a paradox, but it is true : 
 he did so by being an Impressionist ; only the name had not 
 then been coined, and those who became known by the 
 name carried impressionism much further than he did. 
 Lastly, and of utmost importance to his aim, he observed 
 closely and subtly rendered the varying strength of light 
 and shade at greater or less distances from the eye — in 
 technical phrase, he paid close attention to values. We 
 might say that he composed in distances ; into his pictures 
 there enters the charm, the poetry, of the near and the far- 
 away, with the myriad gradations between them. Abso- 
 lutely, of course, this was no new thing ; what Corot did 
 was to put these subtle variations in the first place, and to 
 subordinate colour, form, and detail to them. So he played 
 his visible music, and it was a music both beautiful and 
 new. 
 
 We may even better appreciate its peculiar quahty by 
 further contrasting his aim with that which Holman Hunt 
 and Millais were pursuing at the same time on this side of 
 the Channel. They, as we found in the preceding chapter, 
 by painting aU the detail they could see as they looked at 
 what lay before them bit by bit, made no allowance for the 
 stereoscopic action of the human eyes. To them, as painters, 
 sight meant scrutiny, intelligent scrutiny, recognition of the 
 detailed character of objects. To Corot, as painter, sight 
 was emotional rather than intelligent ; it was feeling rather 
 than perception. He looked closely at nothing, and so 
 obtained the effect of the whole; and on reflection the 
 reader will find that, consciously or unconsciously, though 
 he may be neither artist nor critic, he obtains much pleasure, 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 71 
 
 indoors and out of doors, in exactly the same way. Corot's 
 pictures are beautiful in themselves ; they have also enabled 
 us consciously, and therefore more fully, to enjoy the same 
 beauty when we see it in nature. 
 
 Though Corot was born before the close of the eighteenth 
 century, his awakening came so late that all of his work 
 that most is the revelation of himself was done in the years 
 which those of us who are not yet old count their own time. 
 He was over seventy-eight years of age when he died in Paris 
 on the 23rd of February, 1875. Millet, eighteen years younger 
 than he, died a month earlier at Barbizon. The child of the 
 city died in the city ; the child of the country died in the 
 country. Corot went to the country, and found there a 
 beautiful idyl. Millet was native to the country, knew its 
 life from the inside ; and to him that life was a great epic 
 of labour. What each saw and felt was there to be seen 
 and felt. Millet, indeed, was by no means blind to the 
 idyllic beauty of nature, as we can see from many of his 
 pictures — Tlie Rainbow, for example. Nor was Corot un- 
 heedful of that which most occupied Millet's thought and 
 feeling. But each emphasised what most strongly moved 
 him ; and the two men were complementary to each other. 
 From the one we get grace and subtle charm; from the 
 other elemental simplicity and strength. In point of crafts- 
 manship, of skill and beauty in painters' work, it must 
 be said that Corot far excelled Millet, who, less thoroughly 
 trained, used his tools and material with much less skill; 
 and reached his end more laboriously, so that his work, in 
 and for itself, is less pleasant to the eye. 
 
 Both of them, in the work by which they live and will 
 live, belong to the latter half of the nineteenth century; 
 and, as we shall see hereafter, each of them has greatly 
 
72 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 influenced the after course of art. Corot's influence, indeed, 
 we have almost immediately to begin to trace. 
 
 Even if we are in doubt whether Corot should he regarded 
 as the first, or the only forerunner, of the Impressionists, we 
 may surely at once put aside Mr. Holman Hunt's assertion 
 that Impressionism comes to us from Paris, and is tainted 
 with the profligacy of Parisian life. If we decide that 
 Corot was only a forerunner, still, as we proceed, we shall 
 find that Impressionism originated with and therefore, in 
 any adequate sense of the words, comes to us from men, 
 several of whom had little or nothing to do with Paris, and 
 whose work only with difficulty found acceptance there, and 
 that in the course of its development it was iniluenced 
 both by English landscape and by English art. Traomg it 
 back, there is no break through the work of Corot right 
 away to Constable, and as we follow its development we 
 shall come, I think, to the conclusion that it was inevitable, 
 and that it has been and is a valuable addition to the' re- 
 sources of art. This may be admitted even by those who 
 cannot endorse the praise of its most enthusiastic admirers, 
 of whom it is not necessary to be one in order to find in it 
 something very different from what Mr. Holman Hunt and 
 others chiefly see in it : incompetence endeavouring to cover 
 itself under fine names and theories. The Impressionists 
 saw, and eagerly endeavoured to reproduce, beautiful effects 
 of light and atmosphere, which, up to their time, had been 
 either wholly overlooked or quite inadequately interpreted. 
 
 A small oil-painting by Corot, in the Moreau collection at 
 the Louvre, of ships in the harbour of La RocTielle, painted 
 in 1851, carries the painting of atmosphere to the point 
 at which those who are called Impressionists took it up. 
 The ships, the harbour-towers, the quays, the lighthouse, 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 73 
 
 the reflections in the water, are all painted with but little 
 definition. Detail there is none, but atmosphere is all-per- 
 vading. If we turn from this painting to works by Jong- 
 kind and Boudin, who belong to the next generation after 
 that of Corot, and, like him, were Impressionists before the 
 name was coined, we see at once that they came under his 
 influence. In fact, at a first glance one could, without 
 incurring much blame, attribute the picture to one of 
 the younger painters. It is more like what we usually 
 associate with them than what we usually associate with 
 Corot. 
 
 Johann Barthold Jongkind was a Dutchman, born at 
 Lathrop, near Rotterdam, in 1819 ; but most of his life was 
 spent in France. Though he received a medal of the first 
 class at the Salon of 1852, he never met with any monetary 
 success, suffered great privation, and in 1891 died utterly 
 neglected and a victim to alcoholic excess. It is the old 
 story. Works he sold for a few francs now fetch thou- 
 sands. Men's eyes were blind then to the subtle efiects of 
 light he saw and recorded; and landscapes and harbour- 
 scenes, of little interest except for such efi'ects, had no 
 attraction for the picture-buying public, or even for the 
 critics. Louis Eugfene Boudin, his close companion, was 
 born at Honfleur in 1824, his father being a Havre pilot and 
 his mother a stewardess on her husband's boat. He himself 
 began life as a cabin-boy ; but he was a born artist, made 
 many sketches while at sea ; and when his father settled 
 down on shore and became a stationer at Havre, the boy 
 found more opportunities of following his bent. He was 
 fortunate enough to attract the attention of both Troyon 
 and Millet, who were then painting for a bare livelihood ; 
 and Courbet also found him out. No dissuasion of friends 
 
74 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 who urged upon him the non-success of men of great ability 
 availed to turn him from the purpose of devoting his life to 
 painting. An allowance from the Havre Town Council 
 enabled him to go to Paris, but before long, when the 
 allowance was exhausted, he was struggling with poverty. 
 As with Jongkind, so with him : pictures that he then sold 
 for tens of francs to pay for the bare necessaries of living, 
 now sell for thousands. In 1857, having returned to Hawe, 
 he could not raise sufficient money by a sale of his pictures 
 to enable him to return to Paris. It was by such struggles 
 as these that Impressionism became possible ; not by disso- 
 lute student-life in Paris. 
 
 Disappointed in his hope of returning to Paris, Boudin 
 started an academy of painting at the country inn of St. 
 Simeon between Honfleur and Villerville, overlooking the 
 estuary of the Seine, and the place became a famous 
 rendezvous for artists who broke with the old traditions. 
 But neither here, nor later at Trouville, at Havre, and in 
 Paris, could he meet with success. Such men as Courbet, 
 Corot, and Alexandre Dumas might laud him as the master 
 of the skies, but the public would not buy his pictures. In 
 1870, when the war broke out, he found refuge in Brussels. 
 Even in 1888, one hundred of his pictures were sold by 
 auction in Paris for £280, a sum no dealer would now 
 accept for a single good example of his work. At last he 
 was recognised. His Rade de Villefrmclie was purchased 
 for the Luxembourg in 1896, and he was made a member 
 of the Legion of Honour. Two years later he died. Not 
 wild student-life in Paris, but hard privation, had told on 
 his strengtli ; yet he passed threescore years and ten, and 
 was at his easel at the last. 
 
 The open air was Boudin's subject, as also it was Jong- 
 
r 
 
 ^-tr 
 
 o 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 75 
 
 kind's. Grey was the prevailing colour in his pictures, 
 wrought in well-nigh an infinity of subtle variations, and 
 relieved by many touches of warmer colour. His Le Port 
 de Bordeaux at the Luxembourg, for example, is silvery 
 grey in its general effect, but the funnels of steamers and 
 the merchandise on the quay furnish notes of green and 
 red and gold that give quality to the greys and vibration to 
 the picture as a whole. 
 
 A comparison may be usefully made between Boudin and 
 Constable. The latter painted in oil in the open air 
 on canvases as large in size as those he intended to use for 
 finished pictures. "When he had realised the desired effect, 
 he used to put these canvases aside, and begin on fresh 
 ones in the studio. The incomplete pictures he called com- 
 mencements. Any one who will compare the commence- 
 ments with the finished pictures in such instances as The 
 Glebe Farm, of which both versions are in the National 
 Gallery, and The Hay Wain and The Valley Farm, of 
 which the commencements are at South Kensington and the 
 finished pictures in the National Gallery, will find that with 
 elaboration of detail there has invariably gone loss of fresh- 
 ness and atmospheric vibration. Much of Constable's best 
 work is in his small sketches. One is reminded of Midler's 
 Eel Bucks at Goring, with the note on the back of the 
 canvas : " Left for some fool to finish — and ruin," or words 
 to that effect. This is no nevv' thing, of course. Every 
 amateur knows how much better are his sketches than the 
 compositions he works up from them. Even Claude's Liber 
 Veritatis will tell the same tale. Turner's sketches have 
 something that his elaborately finished drav/ings have lost. 
 So in a recent exhibition of Boudin's work at the Leicester 
 Galleries, in London, where in two instances there were 
 
76 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 open-air studies and also studio versions of the same sub- 
 jects, the latter had lost in atmospheric quality hy just so 
 much as they had gained in added detail. 
 
 When I said recently to M. Theodore Duret, one of the 
 chief apologists of Impressionism, that I preferred the un- 
 finished to the finished work of Constahle, his comment 
 was : " Exactly ; but thirty years ago you would have been 
 laughed at for saying so.'' An English landscape painter, 
 trained in the Pre-Eaphaelite school, and for many years 
 past safely in the haven of the Eoyal Academy, could not 
 understand this preference when we stood together before 
 The Glebe Farm ; and he disputed the suggestion that the 
 less finished version was a preliminary study. Evidently 
 he was not acquainted with Constable's method of work. 
 Elaboration of detail may increase the number of individual 
 truths, but too often it diminishes truthfulness of effect. 
 What the picture gains in parts it loses as a whole. Did 
 not even Kuskin realise this when he said of " the loose and 
 blotted handling " of David Cox, " There is no other means 
 by which his object could be attained ; the looseness, cool- 
 ness, and moisture of his herbage, the rusthng crumpled 
 freshness of his broad-leaved weeds, the play of pleasant 
 light across his deep heathered moor or plashing sand, the 
 melting of fragments of white mist into the dropping blue 
 above ; all this has not been fully recorded except by him, 
 and what there is of accidental in his mode of reaching it, 
 answers gracefully to the accidental part of nature herself"! 
 The aims of the Impressionist school could hardly be more 
 felicitously described. "The play of pleasant light" has 
 been pre-eminently what they have sought to record. 
 
 Before proceeding to discuss severally the work of the 
 painters who formed the Impressionist group, it is desirable 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 77 
 
 to say something more, though, as yet, in general terms, 
 ahout the point of view that imited them, and also dis- 
 tinguished them from other artists who were their friends 
 and allies, and also from those who were their irreconcilable 
 opponents. 
 
 They carried still further the study of atmospheric 
 effects that gave its charm to the later work of Corot. He 
 limited himself to such of those effects as enabled him to 
 interpret the pensive moods of nature that most appealed 
 to him. The Impressionists made them an end in them- 
 selves, subordinating aU other considerations to them. Like 
 the work of the Barbizon school, like part of the work of 
 the English Pre-Raphaelites, theirs also was a return to 
 nature. It had nothing in common, however, with the 
 reahsm of Holman Hunt and Millais. AVhen Monet and 
 Pissarro were in London in 1870, they were attracted by 
 the work of such painters as Constable, Turner, Old Crome, 
 and G. F. Watts ; of the Pre-Eaphaelites they say nothing. 
 They were attracted, that is to say, by work which their 
 own already resembled ; only they were already singling out 
 for special emphasis, almost, indeed, for exclusive attention, 
 certain aspects of nature as seen by the human eye, which 
 the English painters they admired had not thus particularly 
 distinguished, and which the Pre-Eaphaelites almost ignored. 
 
 The central fact upon which they seized was that which 
 Corot placed in the forefront of his art : that everything we 
 see is swathed in atmosphere ; but they went further than 
 Corot in observing how greatly the appearance of things 
 varies with changing atmosjDheric conditions. It is through 
 these changes that we get some of the most beautiful natural 
 effects of light, colour, and tone. Nature, by means of 
 them, plays the most varied visible music. The vibrations 
 
78 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 that beat upon the eye please or displease through the sense 
 of sight, as those that heat upon the ear please or displease 
 through the sense of hearing. What v/e see in nature is 
 nearer to art than what we hear. Many a natural scene 
 approximates closely to a picture. Natural sounds do not in 
 the same way approximate to music. A musician does not 
 go into the open air to listen for suggestions for music ; but 
 a painter does go into the open air to see suggestions for 
 pictures. And by this I do not mean merely that he goes 
 in order to paint the portraits of scenes and objects the 
 recognition of which will give pleasure to those who see his 
 picture. This, of course, is a part of art ; but the visible 
 music referred to above is, as Corot discovered, independent 
 of such interest ; indeed, it is independent of any particular 
 beauty or grandeur of scene in the common acceptation of 
 the words. There are exquisitely subtle variations of light, 
 colour, and tone in the most ordinary scenes. This was the 
 truth and the beauty that the Impressionists singled out 
 and piirsued with zeal born of feeling, against the immediate 
 authority of which the scorn of those who did not see what 
 they saw and feel what they felt was powerless. They had 
 received a revelation, to which they could not but bear witness. 
 And because they persisted in testifying to what they had 
 seen, they, like Corot and Jongkind and Boudin, had to 
 suffer the neglect, and even the contempt and derision, of 
 those who could not see it. 
 
 Some who do not merely hurl hard words at Impression- 
 ism maintain, none the less, that its contribution to the 
 resources of art has been of little importance. Bui-ne- 
 Jones, for example, who seems to have been really distressed 
 by its increasing influence, said of the Impressionist pamters : 
 " They do make atmosphere, but they don't make anything 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 79 
 
 else ; they don't make beauty, they don't make design, they 
 don't make idea, they don't make anything else but atmo- 
 sphere — and I don't think that's enough — I don't thmk it's 
 very much." Still it is something ; and even if it had to 
 be admitted that Impressionism had done nothing more than 
 quicken our feeling for the beauty with which the changes 
 in the atmosphere clothe the world, we might say not merely 
 that this is something, but that it is much, and be grateful 
 to those who have done it for us. We must say also that it 
 is not exactly good criticism to complain that artists who 
 have set themselves to solve a particular problem have not 
 at the same time paid equal attention to other sides of art. 
 As well might we complain because the navvies who have 
 dug railway cuttings and raised embankments have not also 
 laid the lines. 
 
 The Impressionists have opened the eyes of many to a 
 beauty, and therefore to a source of joy, to which they had 
 previously been blind. The v/orld had never been seen 
 before just as they have seen it. And, even if they have 
 neglected ideas, design, beauty, and much else that is of the 
 first importance in art — this will have to be discussed later 
 on — that which they have given to art is not incompatible 
 with these other things ; and, the pioneer work of its dis- 
 covery being accomplished, it can be, it is being, perhaps, in 
 a measure, it has always been, ptirsued along with these 
 other ends of art. 
 
 One of the oldest of the group of painters who became 
 definitely known as Impressionists was not merely in- 
 fluenced by Corot, but became his pupil. This was CamiUe 
 Pissarro, who was born in 1830, at St. Thomas, in the 
 Antilles, his parents being French Jews. At an early age 
 he was sent to France to be educated. At the age of seven- 
 
8o FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 teen he returned to St. Thomas, having -while at school 
 received sufficient instruction in drawing to enahle him to 
 continue his own art education. His father intended for 
 him a commercial career; he wished to hecome an artist, 
 The usual contest between business and art ended in favour 
 of the latter. In 1855 he returned to France, and, attracted 
 by the work of Corot, he sought that painter's advice and 
 help. He had already accustomed himself to paint direct 
 from nature, and Corot confirmed Imn in this practice- 
 indeed, they painted together. Corot, at this time, was 
 passing from his earlier to his later style, and had not yet 
 become famous. It was not because he had a great reputa- 
 tion, then, that Pissarro sought him, but because he was 
 ahead on the way that Pissarro himself wished to go. 
 Pissarro devoted himself to landscape painting strongly, in 
 sober greens and greys. He had varying fortune at the 
 Salon, but was oftener accepted than refused. In 1866 he 
 became acquainted with Manet, and passed into the circle of 
 the cafe Guerbois, which included Monet, and others who 
 were to become known as Impressionist painters. His land- 
 scapes became steadily, almost rapidly, more conspicuous for 
 truth of atmosphere and light. 
 
 Claude Oscar Monet, who has just been mentioned, was 
 born in Paris in 1840, and, like Pissarro, was the son of a 
 merchant, whose head-quarters were at Havre ; and at that 
 great seaport the future painter spent his youth. He early 
 showed a strong inclination towards art, and by the time he 
 was fifteen years of age he had struck up a friendship with 
 Boudin, who had then settled in Havre. Again there was 
 the usual struggle between business and art, and the young 
 Monet showed the strength of his determination by re- 
 fusing the offer of his parents to purchase his exemption 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 8i 
 
 from military service on condition that he would renounce 
 art as a profession. Service in Algeria injured his health, 
 whereupon his parents bought him out, and consented to his 
 becoming a painter ; and, in order that he might go through 
 a regular training, they sent him to Paris to become the 
 pupil of Gleyre. 
 
 This was in 1862. A year of academic study was more 
 than enough for him, and the following year saw him leave 
 the studio of Gleyre and come under the influence of Manet, 
 an exhibition of whose works he then saw. Painting that, 
 in tone, and colour, and light and shade, was closer to 
 nature, appealed to him more strongly than the traditional 
 methods of the schools. After painting, for a time, figure- 
 subjects and figures in landscape, he devoted himself wholly 
 to pure landscape. M. Duret notes that even in his figure- 
 subjects it was the costume, rather than the face, upon 
 which he spent his force ; so that the transition to landscape 
 was an easy one. 
 
 His pictures have always been painted entirely in the 
 open air, face to face with the subject ; and of any scene he 
 has given, not a literal rendering of the permanent facts of 
 it, but the efiect of light and colour under which he saw it 
 when he set himself to paint it. As soon as the transitory 
 effect had passed he ceased to paint, beginning again only 
 when the necessary atmospheric conditions repeated them- 
 selves. Landscape, to him, has meant not picturesque 
 objects, but beautiful effects of light and colour; and he 
 has realised the permanent facts only so far as was necessary 
 to a record of the fleeting charm. " Under these condi- 
 tions," says M. Duret, " Monet became able to fix on the 
 canvas those fleeting appearances which had escaped the 
 older landscape painters working in the studio. He pur- 
 
82 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 sued so closely the varied effects and changes that take 
 place in the open air that he could communicate the sensa- 
 tions that they evoked. His sunshine vrarms; his snow 
 makes us shiver." 
 
 For several years he lived at Argenteuil, on the Seine, 
 painting the river-scenery there and the shrubberies and the 
 flowers in his garden. The siege of Paris by the Germans 
 drove him to Holland, and from Holland he passed to 
 England. Here, with Pissarro for companion, he studied 
 the English masters — Turner, Constable, Old Crome, and 
 others — and painted in the London parks and suburbs and 
 on the Thames. Thus, a second time, French landscape 
 painting, through two of its most original exponents, came 
 under English influence. Just before writing these Imes 
 I received from M. Durand-Ruel, who was among the first 
 supporters of the Impressionists, a copy of an article in 
 Le Gaulois, the writer of which says: "Deriving from 
 Claude Lorrain, the great master of landscape, Impression- 
 ism has learned the great lesson of truth that was so bril- 
 liantly taught by the masters of 1830, and, benefiting by 
 the researches of a Turner, a Constable, a Bonington, it has 
 completed the earnest and noble work of the landscape 
 painters of 1830 by fixing on the canvas the subtle and 
 radiant splendours of the atmosphere." Impressionism, 
 clearly, is not an outcome of Parisian studio-life. 
 
 Not only the English landscape painters, but also EngUsh 
 landscape itself, had its influence on these temporary exiles 
 from sunny France. They found even the smoky haze and 
 fog of London a pictorial asset. The article from which I 
 have just quoted praises Monet's rendering of the trans- 
 parent beauties of the Thames mists. The damp of our 
 island climate, the varied colour of the London buildings 
 
w- 
 
 
 m 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 83 
 
 and their variety and irregularity, and the frequent fitful- 
 ness of the sunshine, provide the artist with a wealth of 
 subject compared with which the cold, formal beauty of 
 Paris, in its clearer atmosphere, is poverty itself. So the 
 French painters returned to their own country with more 
 sensitive vision than they had previously enjoyed. 
 
 Like Pissarro, Monet had a chequered experience at the 
 Salon. He first exhibited there in 1865. Manet, who saw 
 the two marine subjects that were his contribution, sug- 
 gested that the similarity of name enabled Monet to profit by 
 his reputation. Then came alternations of acceptance and 
 rejection, followed, as his individuality of style developed, 
 by certainty of rejection. After 1880 he did not again send 
 to the Salon. In France as in England — everywhere, in- 
 deed — art, like religion, has its Protestants, its Noncon- 
 formists, and, but for them, would perhaps not wholly die, 
 but at the best would linger on, like one who in his dotage 
 repeats ever the same things in the same monotonous way. 
 And as the Nonconformists of religion have built for them- 
 selves places where they could worship as seemed to them 
 best, so the Nonconformists of art refused admission to the 
 exhibitions controlled by those who obey the academic law, 
 have held their own exhibitions, and, after experiencing, for 
 longer or shorter periods, derision or contemptuous neglect, 
 have won recognition for whatever was vital and of en- 
 during worth in their art. This was the course adopted by 
 Monet and his feUow-Impressionists. They held separate 
 exhibitions in 1874, 1876, 1877, and 1879; and eight exhi- 
 bitions in all were held between 1874 and 1886. 
 
 It was as one consequence of the exhibition of 1874, 
 held at the galleries of M. Nadar, in the Boulevard des 
 Capucines, that the term Impressionism came into use. The 
 
84 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 thirty exliiljitors called themselves La SodMe anonijme dm 
 artistes, peintres, sculpieurs et (iraveurs. This was too loii" 
 and too tame for one of their critics, who coined a more 
 pithy title with the help of a picture exhibited by Monet, 
 This was a view in a harhour, with lightly indicated boats 
 becoming visible through a transparent haze through which 
 gleamed the red hued sun. To tliis picture Monet gave the 
 title : Impression, soJcil Jerant. Thus unwittingly led by 
 one of the exhibitors, visitors to tlie exhibition came to use 
 tlie term Tmpressiomste, and within a few days a contemp- 
 tuously unfavourable notice of the exhibition appeared in 
 Le Charivari under tlie heading. Exposition des Impm- 
 sioniste^. It was not until after the lapse of several years 
 that the name came into general use. The painters to 
 ■whom it was applied disowned it at first because it was used 
 only in a depreciatory sense. Eventually, however, unable 
 themselves to find a Ijetter one, they adopted it. 
 
 By common consent Monet stands at the head of tlie 
 Impressionist group. He is purely a landscape painter, and 
 it has been therefore easier for him than for those who were 
 also figure painters to devote himself exclusively to the inter- 
 pretation of effects of light. I say interpretation, not record, 
 because the work of the Impressionists has never been 
 merely realistic, as was the Pre-Eaphaelitism of Holman 
 Hunt and Millais. Not only have they sought to register, 
 not the mere fact, but the impression made by the fact; 
 they have also stated the impression itself in terms of art. 
 Their works are not lacking in design ; neither form nor 
 colour has been accepted just as nature, which by no means 
 provides us with ready-made works of art, has set before the 
 painter. The art may set aside the old conventions ; but it 
 is there, none the less. 
 
^■. 
 
 <bi;i'ak.._ 
 
THE IMPkESStONlSTS AMD THEIR ALLIES 85 
 
 "We have seen Monet taking refuge first in Holland and 
 then in England during the G erman invasion of France, and 
 returning to his own country strengthened in his artistic 
 faith. Tliough a native of Paris he did not settle down 
 there, but lived in the country, first at one place and then 
 at another, in the valley of the Seine. From Argenteuil he 
 passed to Vctheuil; and then, in 1886, he took up what 
 proved to be a permanent abode at Giverny, near Vernon, 
 in the meadows where the poplar-lined Epte is near to 
 mingling its waters with those of the Seine. It is the kind 
 of country that the traveller, with lakes and mountains in 
 mind, calls tame ; to Monet, with his subtle feeling for light 
 and colour, it is full of beauty. When the poplars in the 
 Seine vaUey were being cut down by thousands to make 
 palisading for a Paris exhibition, Monet bought those near 
 his own house to save them from threatened destruction. 
 His chief recreation has been gardening, and his own garden 
 has provided the subject of many a picture. His art is 
 based on an intimate knowledge and love of nature. When 
 he has left the Seine valley, it has been, in addition to the 
 visits to Holland and England, to find change of scene and 
 of mood of nature on the northern shores of France, on the 
 Mediterranean coast, and in Norway. 
 
 Of the greatest significance for understanding the relation 
 of the art of Monet to the nature with which he has lived in 
 constant intercourse, are several series of paintings executed 
 during his later years. For each series he had only one 
 subject. Thus he painted twenty pictures of two haystacks 
 in a neighbour's field, each from the same point of view. 
 A second series had the fajade of Eouen Cathedral for 
 subject ; a third, seven of his Giverny poplars ; other sub- 
 jects have been a morning on the Seine, water-lilies^ views 
 
86 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 on the Thames, and effects on the water of his garden- 
 pond. In all these series — in fact, in all his pictures — the 
 permanent objects were not the only, in fact not the main 
 subject; they were rather its base or framework only. They 
 may be compared to the fountain upon which are artificially 
 thrown various combinations of coloured light. Monet's 
 real subject in all these series was the varying effects, on 
 the same objects, of the light and colour of nature. The 
 haystack series showed seasonal as well as hourly changes ; 
 the poplars were studied through the changes of a day, from 
 dawn till dusk. In each case the form was only sufficiently 
 realised to support the light and colour, and was more than 
 ever subordinated in the later series. Movement, vibration, 
 shimmer, sparkle, gleam, glow — such fleeting things were 
 Monet's true subject. With hard insistence on truth of 
 form he could not have realised them. Nor to this end was 
 formal composition essential, the composition that is indis- 
 pensable when the painter does not make us forget the 
 plane of canvas or paper upon which his picture is painted. 
 How little of such composition there was in much of the 
 best work of Uavid Cox, whose central aim was closely 
 akin to that of the Impressionists. We entirely forget the 
 canvas in Monet's pictures. I shall have more to say ahout 
 this shortly. 
 
 /With the traditional composition went also the traditional 
 ^chiaroscuro : so much light to so much shade ; and the prin- 
 cipal lights in such and such conventional positions. Away, 
 also, went conventional colour and artificial half-tones, 
 Monet's palette is, in brightness, as near as he can make it, 
 the palette of nature, though he does not use it merely to 
 imitate the actual, non-pictorial happening of colour in 
 nature. 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 87 
 
 Let us now look more closely into Monet's impressionist 
 methods. If the reader who is ignorant of the methods of 
 modern process-reproduction will examine with a magnifying 
 glass the illustrations in this book, he will find, probably not a 
 little to his surprise, that they are impressionist pictures. 
 Wlien an ordinary photography is magnified more detail can 
 be seen in it than can be seen with the naked eye. A mag- 
 nified process-reproduction becomes meaningless ; it is com- 
 posed of mechanically placed black or coloured dots, which 
 to ordinary sight become buildings, people, trees, clouds, or 
 what else is to be represented, but to the aided sight are 
 merely dots. An impressionist picture consists of dabs of 
 paint which, at a given distance, look like buUdings, people, 
 etc., but when seen quite close look only like what they 
 are — dabs of paint. The realistic Pre-Raphaelite painter's 
 brush-strokes follow the actual forms of various objects as 
 closely as possible. The nearer we go to the picture the 
 more detail we can see. When we go close up to an im- 
 pressionist picture the brush-strokes are so unlike the object 
 they serve quite well to represent when seen from a dis- 
 tance that it is quite easy to feel provoked, as if we ' had 
 been made the victims of a trick. I never closely examine 
 an impressionist picture without this feeling arising, along 
 with admiration of the knowledge and skill implied in these 
 meaningless marks becoming so fuU of meaning when seen 
 from farther away. There are, of course, plenty of prece- 
 dents for such a method outside the Impressionist school. 
 Velasquez used it. "We are told," says Redgrave, "that 
 Gainsborough got far from his canvas while painting his 
 portraits, and that he used brushes with very long handles. 
 There is no doubt that he so placed the canvas and the 
 sitter that, by retiring, he could view both at an equal dis- 
 
88 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 tance, and then, by means of the long-handled tools, he was 
 enabled to give the general truth of tint and form without 
 descending into minute details.'' Let these two precedents 
 suffice by way of illustration. Monet only bettered the in- 
 struction of some of his most distinguished predecessors. 
 
 But why not give more detail and definition ] Because, 
 as we have already seen, in discussing the work of Constable 
 and Boudin, the general effect cannot so well be obtained 
 along with them. When we get the general effect of any- 
 thing that is actually before us, particularly of objects at 
 different distances, we do not, as has already been observed, 
 see form clearly, but confusedly, owing to the stereoscopic 
 character of our eyesight. This would be so even if all 
 objects were perfectly motionless ; but this they rarely if 
 ever are, Oftener than not most of the things we see are 
 in motion ; and even if they are not, there is usually play 
 of light and shade upon them. Oftener than not, also, we 
 ourselves are moving, and then, relatively to us, everything 
 we see is in motion, and therefore not seen distinctly. Even 
 if we are standing still we glance from point to point, and 
 this is sufficient to make fixed objects have some appearance 
 of movement. I was standing recently with a painter in a 
 busy London street. "We were discussing the Impressionist 
 School. He ridiculed what he considered to be their ex- 
 cessive zeal for representing movement. "Look at those 
 buildings," he said, " they are not moving. Yet the Impres- 
 sionists would blur them as they would the vehicles and the 
 passers-by." And quite rightly so. One does not usually 
 stand in the street ; the upward and downward movement 
 of walking, in addition to actual constant change of posi- 
 tion, communicates to buildings the appearance of motion. 
 Things are not as they seem; they seem not as they are; 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 89 
 
 and to paint them as they are, actually and momentarily, is 
 not to paint them as they seem. I was once in the studio 
 of the painter just referred to — he is a landscape painter — 
 
 with another landscape painter, who said to him, " A , 
 
 the one thing your pictures lack is movement." The one 
 thing this painter-critic seeks in his work is movement, 
 though sought in Constable's way, not in that of Monet 
 and his fellows ; the other painter holds strongly to design. 
 Perhaps we may be allowed to enjoy both these phases of 
 art. 
 
 Monet, then, obtains the general effect of landscape by 
 brush-work that ignores detailed truth of form. Not un- 
 seldom the touches, when seen even from the requisite 
 distance to get the general effect, are obviously hardly even 
 approximations to truth of form. Still, as we regard the 
 picture as a whole, not examining it bit by bit, we do get 
 the sense of movement, of vibration, of life. I am writing 
 with a small, black-and-white reproduction of his La Oren- 
 ouilUre — a river bathing-scene — before me. The water, the 
 boats, the trees, the people, are none of them truthfully 
 drawn ; I can see this, looking carefully, when several yards 
 away from what is intended to be held in the hand ; yet 
 even when so held, the reproduction almost produces the 
 illusion of one's actually standing upon the river-bank with 
 the scene before one. 
 
 Again, Monet lays side by side touches of different colours 
 that cannot be seen individually when the picture is looked 
 at from the intended distance. They reach the eye as a 
 single hue. This, also, is no new thing ; but Monet made 
 a new, or at least greater, use of it, through which his pic- 
 tures obtain the effect of vibrating light that distinguishes 
 them. We may put it that, in this case, the eye sees what 
 
90 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 it cannot distinguish. It may be argued that there is no 
 warrant for this in nature. But we are concerned here with 
 effects, not with facts. All that we want to know is whether 
 or not this method enables the painter to give on canvas or 
 paper the impression of vibrating light. There can be no 
 doubt that it does so, and this is sufficient justification when 
 it is this effect that is sought. 
 
 In another respect, also, he and his companions and fol- 
 lowers have departed from literal truth in order to achieve 
 their end ; they have exaggerated the violet in shadows, 
 Mr. George Moore says that he once asked Manet, who 
 adopted this method towards the end of his life, why he 
 did so, and that the reply was, " One year one paints violet 
 and people scream, and the following year every one paints 
 a great deal more violet." People scream because they 
 cannot see the violet shadows in nature. They are, in fact, 
 not there. Why, then, put them on the canvas? Because 
 the appearance to the eye of natural shadows does, by con- 
 trast, tend towards violet; and the exaggeration of this 
 appearance on the canvas does increase the illusion of sun- 
 light and shade there. Has not the reader seen in the 
 shop-windows those provoking statuettes, coloured violet in 
 some parts and bright red in others, which present com- 
 pletely the illusion of being illuminated from one side hy a 
 ruddy light ] This is a vulgar trick. But the Impression- 
 ists have made use of this same means to obtain beautiful 
 effects of light. We may say, paradoxically, that they 
 attain to truth by the way of untruth. 
 
 I am reminded here of an essay on art written in 1874 
 by James Hinton, who was philosopher as well as man of 
 science, surgeon, and philanthropist, and who, though num- 
 bered neither among the artists nor the critics, worked out 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 91 
 
 in this essay a theory of Impressionism, actually using the 
 name, though in all probability without any knowledge of 
 the work of the French painters — at least, the essay gives no 
 evidence of such knowledge. 
 
 He says that in looking at pictures he has observed that 
 they can be divided into three kinds — one, atrociously bad 
 because the drawing has not an accurate resemblance to the 
 objects intended to be delineated ; another, in which the 
 objects are accurately delineated; and a third, in which 
 they are, as in the first kind, inaccurately delineated, and 
 yet the general impression is true. To the first two he 
 refuses the name of art. Of the third he says : " It is the 
 art of doing right and doing wrong together ; that is the 
 thing in which the emotional faculties of men find their 
 truest delight, so far as painting goes — -I do not mean to 
 speak of other arts. Now I believe, as to the inexplicable 
 charm of a true painting upon us, which it produces quite 
 independently of its subject or of any ideas Avliich it is 
 designed to express, which we feel almost more purely 
 when there is nothing in the painting at all, and when un- 
 romantic, unsublime subjects are sought out, because then 
 we get this peculiar charm of art alone, and feel it by itself 
 there is a magic in it, a Tightness and a wrongness that 
 fascinates us — we don't know why, but we know this, that 
 it is true to nature." Then he goes on to say that we know 
 nature to be infinitely complex, "and that if a person puts 
 down on a piece of canvas simply just so much of what 
 presses upon his eye as he can reproduce upon a plain con- 
 tracted surface with extremely gross fingers, as compared 
 with the delicacy of Nature's, he does not represent Nature ; 
 he chooses out certain parts of her, and gives them all that 
 belongs to them as far as he is able, but an innumerable 
 
92 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 number of other things he totallj^ leaves out. He says : 
 ' These things liave certain rights and I have given them.' 
 But in giving them these rights he has left out an immense 
 number of things which he could not put upon his canvas. 
 If he delineates accurately a few objects, he does this at the 
 expense of others." 
 
 And there is more than this. " But further," says 
 Hinton, " nature does not consist merely of objects, even 
 supposing he [the painter] was able to put them all on to 
 his canvas, but it consists of objects bathed in light, and 
 the painter has to paint this light as existing, this atmo- 
 sphere which bathes them." Yet again, Hinton says that 
 science represents nature, not as a mere aggregation of sepa- 
 rate things, but " as a constant flux of forces, a constant 
 process and series of changes, in which it can recognise 
 action but knows nothing of substance. Now if art could 
 be true to nature by representing a destined nmnher of 
 things side by side, there would be a conflicting representa- 
 tion. ... As it is, it so happens there is really no fight, 
 because Art has simply outstripped Science, making before 
 her her own affirmations. For Art, whenever it becomes 
 art at all, denies all things, and treats things with the 
 utmost imaginable unconcern, making them to be anything 
 which suits some other truth of nature. . . . Art repre- 
 sents nature as a process. The only pictures which your 
 eye can regard with true complacency or judge as being true 
 to nature show that photographic representation of objects 
 is not the secret of art." 
 
 This analysis of art principles by one of the most pene- 
 trating of modern thinkers is surely of great value in 
 relation to our immediate subject. It is all the more signi- 
 ficant as coming from one who, as already said, was a 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 93 
 
 specialist neibher in art nor in art-criticism. It seems to me 
 not merely to justify the work of the Impressionists, and, 
 indeed, much other work the same in general motive if not 
 in particular method, but also to suggest a wide and fertile 
 field for art-work in the future. I venture to quote one 
 more passage from the essay : " I have looked at pictures a 
 good deal, in order to make them tell me what were the 
 rules and what the limits hy which and up to which the 
 painter might deviate from accuracy in his drawing, and I 
 came to this conclusion — that there were no rules and no 
 limits ; that he might deviate in any way and to any ex- 
 tent ; that there need be no shadow of resemblance between 
 the patch of colour and the object it is supposed to stand 
 for. The painter seems to act with absolute license, yet we 
 know, of course, that he obeys an absolute law. "What is 
 the law % It evidently has no relation to the thing. The 
 only law laid upon a painter is — that his sacrifice of the 
 object shall be one that nature gives him a right to make ; 
 that he shall make it for her sake and not for his own ; the 
 sacrifice shall not be wanton", but for the sake of something 
 else. The departure from accuracy must be a sacrifice of 
 one claim to another." 
 
 How thin and superficial beside this deep and far-reaching 
 analysis is the following saying of Burne-Joiies, apropos of 
 the Impressionists : " I think that nothing short of perfect 
 finish ought to be allowed by artists ; if unfinished pictures 
 become common we shall arrive at a stage of mere manufac- 
 ture, and the art of the country will be degraded." May 
 we not say that the term manufacture is much more appli- 
 cable to the picture finished to the last detail than to the 
 picture, not reaUy unfinished, but sufficiently finished for 
 the end that the artist has in view % 
 
92 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 number of other things he totally leaA^es out. He says : 
 ' These things have certain rights and I have given them.' 
 But in giving them these rights he has left out an immense 
 number of things which he could not put upon his canvas. 
 If he delineates accurately a few objects, he does this at the 
 expense of others." 
 
 And there is more than this. " But further," says 
 Hinton, " nature does not consist merely of objects, even 
 supposing he [the painter] was able to put them all on to 
 his canvas, but it consists of objects bathed in light, and 
 the painter has to paint this light as existing, this atmo- 
 sphere which bathes them." Yet again, Hinton says that 
 science represents nature, not as a mere aggregation of sepa- 
 rate things, but " as a constant flux of forces, a constant 
 process and series of changes, in which it can recognise 
 action but knows nothing of substance. Now if art could 
 be true to nature by representing a destined number of 
 things side by side, there would be a conflicting representa- 
 tion. ... As it is, it so happens there is really no fight, 
 because Art has simply outstripped Science, making before 
 her her own affirmations. For Art, whenever it becomes 
 art at all, denies all things, and treats things with the 
 utmost imaginable unconcern, making them to be anything 
 which suits some other truth of nature. . . . Art repre- 
 sents nature as a process. The only pictures which your 
 eye can regard with true complacency or judge as being true 
 to nature show that photographic representation of objects 
 is not the secret of art." 
 
 This analysis of art princiisles by one of the most pene- 
 trating of modern thinkers is surely of great value in 
 relation to our immediate subject. It is all the more signi- 
 ficant as coming from one who, as already said, was a 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 93 
 
 specialist neither in art nor in art-criticism. It seems to me 
 not merely to justify the ^york of the Impressionists, and, 
 indeed, much other work the same in general motive if not 
 in particular method, but also to suggest a wide and fertile 
 field for art-work in the future. I venture to quote one 
 more passage from the essay : "I have looked at pictures a 
 good deal, in order to make them tell me what were the 
 rules and what the limits by which and up to which the 
 painter might deviate from accuracy in his drawing, and I 
 came to this conclusion — that there were no rules and no 
 limits ; that he might deviate in any way and to any ex- 
 tent ; that there need be no shadow of resemblance between 
 the patch of colour and the object it is supposed to stand 
 for. The painter seems to act with absolute license, yet we 
 know, of course, that he obeys an absolute law. What is 
 the law % It evidently has no relation to the thing. The 
 only law laid upon a painter is — that his sacrifice of the 
 object shall be one that nature gives him a right to make ; 
 that he shall make it for her sake and not for his own ; the 
 sacrifice shaU not be wanton, but for the sake of something 
 else. The departure from accuracy must be a sacrifice of 
 one claim to another." 
 
 How thin and superficial beside this deep and far-reaching 
 analysis is the following saying of Burne-Jones, apropos of 
 the Impressionists : " I think that nothing short of perfect 
 finish ought to be allowed by artists ; if unfinished pictures 
 become common we shall arrive at a stage of mere manufac- 
 ture, and the art of the country wiU be degraded." May 
 we not say that the term manufacture is much more appli- 
 cable to the picture finished to the last detail than to the 
 picture, not really unfinished, but sufficiently finished for 
 the end that the artist has in view % 
 
94 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Another saying of Burne-Jones's, already quoted, may be 
 tested with reference to Monet's work. He said that 
 though the Impressionists made atmosphere, they did not 
 make beauty, design, or idea. Now Monet's work is beauti- 
 ful to me, not merely because atmospheric eifects are in 
 themselves beautiful, but precisely because he did " make 
 design." His pictures are no mere collections of badly- 
 drawn objects placed just where he happened to see them. 
 Though he has worked face to face with nature, it is easy 
 to see that he has arranged to suit his own purpose what 
 has been before him. Where there has been no reason to 
 the contrary his pictures are as beautifully designed as those 
 of the classical landscape painters, and in the same way. 
 What reason could there be to the contrary % The very 
 cogent one that, whereas the classical designer is thinking 
 chiefly of the plane of his canvas, Monet has sought to 
 forget it and to suggest the infinity of planes, reaching to 
 the utmost bound of vision, in the scene before him. His 
 design goes into the picture, not across it. Yet even then, 
 lateral design, if I may so call it, is not excluded, it is 
 merely subordinated to the main purpose of the picture. In 
 the picture already referred to. La Grenouillere, the boats, 
 and a little landing-platform, are so arranged as to draw the 
 eye towards a little island with people on it almost in the 
 centre of the picture ; they do this as well as aid in pro- 
 ducing the illusion of space. In his pictures of poplars, to 
 be mentioned again hereafter, the trees on the bank of the 
 winding river form a beautiful rhythm of lines. And ex- 
 amples might be multiplied. The existence of design has 
 been denied merely because it has not been of the conven- 
 tional kind. 
 
 Again, Monet has designed in colour. Here also painting 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 95 
 
 in the open air has not meant mere acceptance of what 
 patches of colour were in the scene before him. Perhaps 
 even Holman Hunt and MUlais did not quite make this 
 mistake ; but they went nearly all the way to it, with the 
 result, as I have already said, that much in their pictures 
 escapes from the design in them. In Manet's pictures there 
 is a harmonious play of colour from which it is no exaggera- 
 tion to say that no particle escapes. I find in my note-book 
 this entry with reference to his Le Dejeuner at the Luxem- 
 bourg : " Purple greys and blues and grey-greens, running up 
 into warm greens and yellows, and on, through the quiet 
 red of the wall in shade, to the scarlet of geraniums and 
 fuchsias." This is a prose record of colour the beauty of 
 which it is a pleasure even to call up again before one. Of 
 the same picture I have another note : " The black band 
 and ribbons of the straw hat, hung in the tree, and the 
 dark hue of the tray on which the coffee-pot stands, with 
 the strong green of the basket, give the necessary foil to 
 the delicate play of light and colour in the rest of the pic- 
 ture." I might quote similar notes of other pictures, but it 
 is needless. Such things, of course, are the commonplaces 
 of art. And it is to show that Monet has not overlooked 
 these commonplaces that I have mentioned them. 
 
 We find, then, design, and therefore beauty, in Monet's 
 pictures. "What about ideas, which Burne-Jones also denies 
 to the Impressionists ? Here, of course, we have to recollect 
 that Monet is purely a landscape painter ; and we need not 
 look for ideas unless we give the word a wide interpretation. 
 If we do so interpret it we shall perhaps conclude that he 
 does not fail in this respect, having felt deeply, and subtly 
 painted, the air and the light without which there could be 
 nor life nor beauty in the world. His pictures are so many 
 
96 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 lyrics in praise of the wonder and beauty of what is not 
 least wonderful and beautiful in nature. 
 
 One word more before we end these general remarks on 
 his work. It may be said that even in effect Monet's work 
 does not always resemble what we actually see ; and in this 
 particular, that the atmosphere is more in evidence in his 
 pictures than it is actually to our sight. We may say that 
 he represents it as a less subtle, a less transparent fluid than 
 it actually is. Understanding that art is not nature, is 
 there nothing to be said for rhetorical statement in art? 
 Especially, surely, this is so with regard to the atmosphere, 
 as, while the painter can only appeal to the sense of sight, 
 we do actually both see — as in the blue of the sky and in 
 haze and mist — and also feel the atmosphere ; we feel it as 
 the wind plays upon us, and as we, passing through it, meet 
 with its resistance. "We may say that in this, again, Monet 
 fulfils Hinton's condition of being untrue only in order to be 
 more true. 
 
 Monet has lived to win recognition for his art, and, with 
 it, pecuniary reward ; but for years the struggle was a hard 
 one. " One must have the strength for such a fight," he 
 has said. He has known what it is to be penniless, and 
 hardly to earn a mere subsistence by selling his pictures for 
 four pounds each. Now their value has increased a hun- 
 dredfold, and in recent years his income has risen to 
 thousands not a few, which the reader must take, as he wUl, 
 either as evidence of a change of fashion only, or of some 
 among the picture-purchasing public having learned to see 
 the truth and the beauty of Monet's art. And still he 
 paints and gardens at his home in the Seine valley. 
 
 We have seen Pissarro as the pupil of Corot and after- 
 wards as the fellow-exile of Monet in England during the 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 07 
 
 German invasion of France in 1870. When he returned to 
 his own country he settled in the little, but historic town of 
 Pontoise, having as neighbours, in the village of Auvers, 
 only four miles away, two other painters — Cezanne and 
 Vignon. The three often worked together and exchanged 
 ideas about art. Pissarro became, in one respect, almost a 
 blend of Corot and Millet. He had Corot's sense of the 
 charm of simple landscape, though he came to treat it less 
 ideally ; and his interest in the life and work of the pea- 
 santry approached that of Millet, though remaining subordi- 
 nate to his interest in. the landscape. 
 
 M. Duret says : " To deiine him by his characteristic trait, 
 it may be said that he was the painter of rural nature and 
 of rural life. He never sought for rare motives in nature, 
 he did not think that the painter ought to seek out excep- 
 tional prospects. The places that went straight to his heart, 
 where he found the most intimate charm, were such as can 
 best be called familiar : the sloping ground planted with 
 fruit-trees, the field ploughed or bearing the harvest, pas- 
 ture-land, the vUlage with its old houses, and surrounded 
 with garden plots. This rural side of nature was as much 
 to him as were to others the exceptional beauties that they 
 discovered, and which they set themselves further to com- 
 pose and to improve. He wished to improve nothing, 
 restraining himself to the faithful portrayal of scenes 
 previously held to be the most common, and as such 
 despised and neglected. To him they seemed in nowise 
 despicable ; and he believed that art was latent in them and 
 could be drawn from them." 
 
 But we have to say again of Pissarro as of Monet, that 
 though he never idealised his landscapes so as to deprive 
 them of the intimacy of affectionate portraiture, yet they 
 
98 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 are not lacking in design. Our illustration shows this. And 
 it shows also, as might be expected in the case of one who 
 lived with nature as he did, that any neglect of form was no 
 slight to nature, but that sacrifice of one truth for a truth 
 believed to be higher, which we have already discussed, 
 The summary treatment of the trees on the right in our 
 illustration not only aids the atmospheric eflect, but also 
 serves to take the attention away to the left side of the 
 picture, to which, indeed, the retiring jjerspective of the 
 road, the figures, the more vigorous contrasts of light and 
 dark, and the building above the trees, inevitably attract 
 us ; and here, where the eye is likely to rest, though there 
 is no close rendering of detail, there is more suggestion of it. 
 
 The public and the critics cared nothing for PissaiTo's 
 intimate treatment of ordiarary scenes ; they saw no poetry 
 in them, nothing worthy of so grand a thing as art ; even 
 when the country-side was seen, as he saw it, and showed it, 
 suff'used with vibratmg light. 
 
 He devoted himself thus to painting direct from nature, 
 seeking to record more and more subtly effects of light, 
 going, indeed, at one time to the very extreme of technical 
 experiment to accomplish this end, until he had reached the 
 age of seventy years. Then an affection of the eyes, while 
 not interfering with his sight, forbade him longer to paint 
 in the open air. But he was not to be driven into retire- 
 ment. He simply went to Kouen, and there from house 
 windows painted the streets, the cathedral, the bridges, the 
 quays. Then he went to Paris and worked similarly there, 
 and lastly to Dieppe and Havre. 
 
 It is to such men as he that we owe the revelation of the 
 
 beauty in our modern towns. They are often not beautiful 
 
 rchitecturally, they are not beautiful as a whole and in 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 99 
 
 themselves. But there is beauty to be drawn from them, 
 even though, for the most part, they be commouplace, dull, 
 or even ugly and dirty. Monet and Pissarro had discovered 
 the artistic possibilities of London, and when he could no 
 longer work in the fields, Pissarro did not forget the lesson. 
 His town-scenes vibrate with light and movement ; detail is 
 sacrificed to general effect; but even in Paris — one might 
 say, rather, in Paris especially — it is the general effect, the 
 movement, the sparkle, the vivacity, that count. Looked 
 at closely, most of the buildings are, in essential features 
 and even in detail, mechanical — even if well-designed — re- 
 petitions of each other ; and to study them closely is soon 
 to grow weary. In seaporttowns it is eminently the general 
 picturesqueness of houses and shipping, ixnder varying con- 
 ditions of light, that we enjoy ; and in going to Dieppe and 
 Havre to paint such things there, Pissarro was obeying a 
 common human impulse, as weU as a sure artistic instinct ; 
 and he was proving himself a follower, though one who had 
 also learned mixch in the meantime, of Corot, of Jongkind, 
 and of Boudin. 
 
 It must suffice merely to mention that he worked also as 
 an engraver and lithographer. He was preparing, when 
 over seventy-three years old, to paint another series of views 
 of Paris, when a chill, succeeded by internal complications, 
 ended fatally. 
 
 A third member of the group, Alfred Sisley, though of 
 EngUsh parentage, was born, in 1839, in Paris, where his 
 father carried on business. A business career was intended 
 for him, but he declared for art, became a pupil of Gleyre, 
 and counted among his fellow-students Monet and Eenoir. 
 Like so many of his contemporaries he modelled his art, to 
 begin with, on that of Corot and Courbet. The war of 
 
100 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 1870 ruined his father's business, and death soon following 
 disaster, the young painter, already married and having 
 children, found himself dependent upon his art for the sub- 
 sistence of his family and himself. His chances of success 
 were by no means increased by his adoption of the Im- 
 pressionist methods of his friend Monet ; and, in fact, he 
 remained a poor man to the end of his days. In 1 875 he 
 offered twenty of his pictures for sale by auction, and they 
 fetched the average price of a little over £4 each. A 
 similar result followed the offer of eleven pictures in 1877. 
 Sisley and Renoir used to get meals at a confectioner's — so 
 many meals for a picture ! Not long after his death, which 
 took place in 1899, one of his pictures sold for over seven- 
 teen hundred pounds. 
 
 In France he painted chiefly in the country of the Seine 
 and the Loing. During a visit to England in 1874 he 
 painted on the Thames, at Hampton Court, and from May 
 to October of 1897 he stayed in South "Wales, painting 
 there coast scenes and tlie sea. Notwithstanding his ill- 
 success, it was the joyous side of nature that attracted him, 
 the fresh beauty of the springtime, the opulence of summer. 
 The brightness of his colour was one of the hindrances to 
 his finding favour with the public of his day. His tech- 
 nique was modelled on that of Monet. Whereas, however, 
 Monet and Pissarro devoted themselves in at least the 
 greater part of their work to the country, Sisley chose the 
 suburbs of Paris, and showed the pictorial content of the 
 places where town and country seem to be battling for pre- 
 eminence. A view up a quite commonplace suburban lane 
 becomes beautiful when he expresses it in terms of sun and 
 shade ; so does a highway when it becomes un effet de Neige. 
 Ford Madox Brown, one recollects, made a picture of a 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES loi 
 
 Manchester suburban lane. The thing is common enough 
 now ; and even those who do not make pictures of everyday 
 town and suburban scenes still, in increasing numbers, see 
 them as they pursue their daily work. How much of this 
 added pleasure in life do we not owe to the Impressionists 1 
 
 Paul Cezanne, already mentioned in connexion mth 
 Pissarro, was bom at Aix, in Provence, in 1839. He was 
 a fellow-student of EmUe Zola ; his father was a wealthy 
 banker, and it was intended that he himself should become 
 a lawyer ; but he wearied of his legal studies, abandoned 
 them, and determined to become a painter. In Paris he 
 came under the influence first of Delacroix and then of 
 Courbet. From Courbet he passed to Manet, and then, in 
 1873, he went to live at Auvers, there, as we have seen, 
 came into close companionship with Pissarro, whom he had 
 already met in Paris, and became a.plein air painter. Up 
 to this time all his pictures, even his landscapes, had been 
 painted in the studio. He had vainly presented his pictures 
 at the door of the Salon, and it was largely on chis account 
 that he joined the Impressionists, and was an exhibitor at 
 their first exhibition in 1874. 
 
 He had never gone through a regular course of training, 
 was unskilled as a draughtsman, and his works, by consent 
 even of his admirers, depend for their value on their colour. 
 Yet some of those who can accept the other Impressionists, 
 and even some of those who work in the same spirit and 
 manner, shake their heads when they come to Cezanne. 
 M. Duret tells an amusing story, illustrating the difficulties 
 of his admirers who, he says, became a growing nucleus, 
 composed of artists, connoisseurs, and collectors, forming a 
 kind of sect, penetrated by a sort of fanaticism, in which he 
 was placed in the very front rank. Herr von Tschudi, 
 
102 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Director of the National Gallery at Berlin, purchased, in 
 1899, for the Gallery, pictures by Manet, Degas, Pissarro, 
 Monet, Sisley, and Cezanne. AVhereupon there was much 
 heated discussion. The Emperor William heard the noise, 
 wished to know what it was all about, and announced his 
 intention of visiting the Gallery to see the much-debated 
 pictures. The Director thought — and M. Duret supports 
 him — that the Cezanne was the weakest part of a case 
 which the Emperor was not likely to think very strong at 
 the best; so he removed it. The Emperor did not think 
 much of the Impressionist works, and ordered them up to 
 the second floor. When he had gone, the Director replaced 
 the Cezanne with its companions ! M. Duret says that 
 when, on one occasion, he told this story in Paris, an 
 auditor said that an emperor could not be expected to feel 
 anything but horror at such anarchist painting as that of 
 Cezanne. He was called a Communard when first he exhi- 
 bited in 1874. Such epithets almost excuse me from an 
 attempt to describe his work. I might almost do so, how- 
 ever, in language that could be held applicable to com- 
 munism — they are formless and manifest a passion for 
 light. In his private life, says il. Duret, Cezanne " is a 
 wealthy citizen, conservative, Catholic, who could not 
 think of himself as suspected of being an insurgent, and 
 who has given all his time to art, leading the most regular 
 life, and entirely worthy of esteem ! " Eeally it seems as if 
 one of Mr. George Moore's aldermen had strayed into, not 
 merely the criticism, but the practice of art, and sho'ivn that 
 his kind was capable of reaching the very antipodes of 
 Philistinism ! 
 
 The Impressionists spoken of hitherto have been 
 chiefly or whoUy landscape painters. Pierre-Augioste 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 103 
 
 Eenoir lias applied the new methods almost entirely to 
 figure subjects. 
 
 He was born in 1841 at Limoges, where his father was a 
 tailor in a small way of business, but parental desire of an 
 increase of fortune was the occasion of the future painter's 
 being taken to Paris when he was about four years old- 
 The better fortune did not come. Each of the tailor's five 
 children had, as soon as possible, to begin to earn money, 
 and between the ages of thirteen and eighteen the young 
 Auguste worked as a painter on porcelain, and hoped to get 
 employment in the manufactory at Sfevres. But machinery 
 was invented to do the painting that hitherto had been 
 done by hand, and he had to find another occupation. He 
 became a painter of blinds, and in three or four years had 
 saved sufficient money to enable him to enter the studio of 
 Gleyre, there, as we have seen, to make the acquaintance of 
 Monet and Sisley. From 1864 to 1870 he was regularly 
 accepted at the Salon, but in 1872 and 1873 he met with 
 the fate that came to all the Impressionist group as their 
 individuahty in treatment of light and colour developed, 
 and in 1874 he joined them in the first separate exhibition 
 in the Boulevard des Capucines. Here his La Danseuse 
 and La Lor/e came in for their full share of the general 
 ridicule with which the exhibition as a whole was received. 
 To the exhibition of 1876 he sent eighteen works, and in 
 1877 he exhibited, amongst other pictures. The Swing, and 
 The Danse at Montinartre, or Moulin de la Galette, both of 
 which now form part of the CaiUebotte collection in the 
 Luxembourg Galleries. 
 
 Financially, as well as in repute, Eenoir fared no better 
 than his companions. Like them he had hard work to 
 make both ends meet. Sales by auction brought him about 
 
104 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 the same return as they brought to the others — an average 
 price of ahout four pounds a picture. He resorted to por- 
 trait painting, and this both kept the pot boiling and, as it 
 happened, obtained for him admission to the Salon. He 
 received, through the instrumentality of a friend, commis- 
 sions to paint the portraits of Madame Charpentier, a lady 
 with much influence in literary and artistic circles, and of 
 Mademoiselle Jeamie Samary, a member of the Oomedie- 
 Frangaise, and a public favourite. Refusal of these por- 
 traits was impossible, and they were well hung in the Salon 
 of 1879. Thereafter he was generally accepted at the 
 Salon, and he contributed also to most of the separate 
 Impressionist exhibitions. 
 
 Though Renoir has painted landscapes, he has been above 
 all a figure painter, and it is ehieily his pictures of women 
 and children that dwell in the mind. To this work he 
 brought the landscape methods of Impressionism ; his 
 people live amid light and air, which, we might almost say, 
 are as living as the people. Sunlight, sometimes clear, 
 sometimes broken with shadows, plays upon face and form, 
 and when tlie light is merely diffused, we feel the presence 
 of the air ; his people must be breathing it ; as they walk 
 or dance, it will eddy and swirl about them. He is also a 
 colourist, or one might better say a painter of variously, 
 brilliantly coloured light. His colour may not please; it 
 does not please all who admire his work ; but he is certainly 
 sensitive to colour, and uses it fearlessly, not shirking the 
 difficulty of combining harmony with brilliance and variety. 
 His use of purple for shadows was one great offence in the 
 eyes of the orthodox thirty years ago. He has sought to 
 express tlie infinitely varied brOliancc of nature in terms of 
 art. The colour plays upon us ; when we analyse it, when 
 
LA I.OGE 
 
 A. KEXOIR 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 105 
 
 we note how the prevailing colours are relieved and intensi- 
 fied hy sparing use of their complementaries, we realise that 
 he composes in colour instinctively, as a poet finds rhythm 
 and a musician harmonies of sound. 
 
 But though he is thus sensitive to light and colour, his 
 people are not mere screens upon which effects are thrown. 
 They live, and live individually. The choice of subjects for 
 portrait painting, especially portraits of women and children, 
 is usually too much governed by ability to pay long prices 
 both for the portraits and for dress. Kenoir loves to paint 
 women and children of what we call the middle, the lower 
 middle, and the working classes. He shows us the ordinary 
 people of Paris as they are ordinarily to be seen at home 
 and in the places of public resort. In the houses, at the 
 theatre, in the streets, in the gardens of the Luxembourg, 
 in the Champs Elys^es, we are constantly seeing Renoirs in 
 a natural state. He paiiits no problem-pictures ; he does not 
 look at the dark side of Hfe. His people are in a normal 
 condition, if to be normal is to be contentedly happy. 
 Madame Charpentier is happy to be with her two daughters, 
 and they to be with their mother, with each other, and with 
 the big dog that one of them uses as a seat. The young 
 mussel-gatherers are happy to be gathering mussels. Dancers 
 are happy, whether in outdoor dress at Bougival or in even- 
 ing dress in Paris. The boating people, who are talking 
 after their meal at a table under an awning, are — as we find, 
 when we can take our eyes away from the subtle play of 
 light and. colour and look at thsm individually — enjoying 
 themselves just as we all enjoy a day on the river when we 
 get the chance of it ; and the individuality of attitude and 
 expression is almost startlingly true. We envy the happy 
 unconsciousness of the girl who has fallen asleep with her 
 
io6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 cat on lier knee ; the relaxed muscles tell of sleep. We 
 envy the painter who can show so marvellously how the 
 direct and the reflected light plays on her flesh, and on her 
 dress, the cat, and the chair, and the floor, emphasising in 
 everything its peculiar texture. How happy, also, are the 
 two girls, one of whom tries a piece of music on the piano, 
 while the other stands by her, and how unaffectedly natm'al 
 they are in attitude and expression. Renoir takes us into 
 the company of Parisians who are not "gay," but happy; 
 and we feel the happier for having been with them. 
 
 Several women-painters have to be uicluded either in the 
 Impressionist group or amongst its allies. Of these, Berthe 
 Morisot comes certainly within the group, and was not the 
 least interesting member of it, not merely on account of her 
 sex, but of the high merit of her work. She was born at 
 Bourges in 1841, and belonged to a family in which the 
 pursuit of art was a tradition. Her grandfather was an 
 architect ; her father was an enthusiastic amateur who 
 studied in the Ecole des Beaux Arts and travelled in Italy 
 and other classical lands of art. Both Berthe and one of 
 her sisters, Edma, received an art training. In 1862 they 
 made the acquaintance of Corot, and by him they were re- 
 commended as pupils to Oudinot, a painter who worked in 
 his manner, and by 1864 they were both exhibitors at the 
 Salon. Edma, who was the elder of the two sisters, aban- 
 doned painting on her marriage in 1868 ; Berthe, who, as 
 well as her sister, had made the acquaintance of Manet, 
 continued to paint, and also sat to Manet for several of his 
 pictures. Under his influence she began figure painting, all 
 her earlier work having been landscape. After 1873 she 
 ceased to exhibit at the Salon, and joined the independents 
 in their first exhibition of 1874, in which year also she was 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 107 
 
 married to Manet's brother, Eugene. At a later date she 
 adopted the methods of Monet and Kenoir, sacrificing detail 
 and firnniess of outline in order to place her figures and her 
 landscape within the atmosphere and to irradiate them with 
 light. There is singular — womanly, it may be frankly said 
 — charm and grace in her work. Her landscapes worthily 
 carry the Corot influence mto the new time and manner, 
 and in her figure painting her young girls are particularly 
 delightful. One might search the world of art through and 
 not find young life more sympathetically interpreted. As 
 we look at her pictures we wish to meet these children, to 
 draw them out, to have life made better for us by their 
 freshness and simplicity, and, at times, to find why they 
 look, as children will look, so gravely earnest. 
 
 Her draughtsmanship was accomplished, and she had a 
 fine sense of colour. Both for the technical quality of her 
 work and her feeling for the beauty of nature and her 
 subtle interpretation of character, she well deserves the 
 equal place she holds with the male members of the group. 
 Frail and of a nervous temperament, she died in 1895 at the 
 early age of forty-four. 
 
 It does not come within the scope of such a general 
 sketch as this book obviously must be to attempt an ex- 
 haustive list of the painters of any school or country. I do 
 not, therefore, curiously inquire whether or not I am 
 naming all those who in a full enumeration should be in- 
 cluded in the Impressionist group. The name of Guillaumin, 
 another of the landscape painters, should be mentioned. 
 For the rest, it must be enough if I have succeeded in show- 
 ing what were the aims and the achievement of those who 
 were most prominent in the movement. Of others who 
 have variously adopted its principles there wiU be something 
 
io8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 to be said hereafter. I have now to turn to those who, 
 working and exhibiting along with the Impressionists, and 
 influencing them and being influenced by them, are still not 
 strictly to be counted as of their number. 
 
 First among these must come Manet, who has been named 
 already more than once or twice, and who and whose work, 
 it may bo said, ought to have been discussed earlier. My 
 reason for leaving him so long is that I wished to trace the 
 Impressionist movement without confusing it with other 
 considerations. 
 
 Edouard Manet was born in Paris in the year 1832. His 
 father was a judge ; the family was legal by tradition. He 
 passed through a regular educational course, and took a 
 degree in letters. An uncle who was a colonel in the 
 artillery taught him to draw. He showed marked ability ; 
 but his father would not hear of his becoming an artist. 
 He was sent on a voyage to Rio de Janeiro as a distraction 
 from art, but to no purpose. He sketched on board ship. 
 Further resistance was seen to be useless, and in 1850, at 
 the age of eighteen, he became, as we have already seen, a 
 pupil of Couture. Manet must have felt his instruction to 
 be valuable, for he stayed with him six years, acquiring a 
 strong bent towards realism. 
 
 This apprenticeship over, he set out on his travels. In 
 Holland he was influenced by Franz Hals — permanently, as 
 the event proved. He passed to Germany, visiting Cassel, 
 Dresden, and Munich, and also Prague and Vienna. At 
 Munich he copied Eembrandt. Then he went on into 
 Italy, to Venice, Florence, and Eome ; and was especially 
 impressed bj'" the great Venetians, particularly by Titian 
 and Tintoretto, whose paintings in the Louvre he copied 
 after his return to Paris, He also, with more important 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 109 
 
 results, copied Velasquez, and the great Spanish master's 
 influence on his work became very marked, and was streng- 
 thened by a visit to Spain in 1865. Couture had taught 
 him to test tradition by reference to nature; realism was 
 impressed upon him by another contemporary master, 
 Courbet ; of all the old masters whom he studied, Franz 
 Hals and Velasquez influenced him most. Each of these 
 men was a great master of the brush ; Velasquez, by com- 
 mon consent, the very greatest. Each was a colourist, in 
 the sense not of brilliance, but of deep harmony; Velas- 
 quez, again, of the greatest. Each set men and women 
 upon the canvas with convincing truth — Hals with the 
 truth of external appearance and passing mood, Velasquez 
 so that what life's experience has added to what came by 
 birth and breeding seems to be revealed, and the finally 
 formed character to stand naked before us as if for judg- 
 ment. Such were the men from whom Manet assimilated 
 all of them of which he was capable. 
 
 Those who were in authority soon pronounced against the 
 art of Manet as revolutionary. Indeed, it must have 
 seemed to them anarchic, threatening the ruin of art in a 
 welter of license. The tradition derived from the Italian 
 Eenaissance then held sway over artists, critics, and the 
 general public. Long use had made the artificial seem 
 natural. Contact with life and nature was regarded as an 
 uuholy thing. The art practised, taught, and admired in 
 Paris concerned itself with anything rather than the 
 country around Paris, the look of the city, and the look and 
 the life of the people in it. Delacroix, who treated his- 
 torical subjects with an approach to realism, was regarded 
 as a dangerous innovator. Courbet, who carried realism 
 stiU further, and pictured the life of his own time, was 
 
no FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 accursed ; he knew not the classical law — nay, worse, he 
 deliberately broke it. Corot's idyllic interpretation appealed 
 in vain to those who could see and yet were blind. 
 
 At the Salon of 1859 Manet's Absinthe Drinker was 
 rejected; but, in 1861, two pictures by him, a double jjor- 
 trait of his father and mother and a vivacious study of a 
 Spanish guitar player, were accepted, and for the latter he 
 actually received honourable mention. This did not prevent 
 the picture he sent to the next biennial exhibition from 
 being rejected. It was the Dejeuner siir I'Herhe, which now 
 hangs in the Moreau collection at the Louvre. The Salon 
 of 1863 is remarkable in the history of French art, because 
 the large number of rejections, which included works by 
 such men as Harpignies, Jongkind, Cazin, J. P. Laurens, 
 Pissarro, Fantin-Latour, Legros, Manet, and Whistler, led 
 Napoleon III to grant permission for the op)ening of another 
 exhibition, which received the name of Salon des Refuses. In 
 1865 the authorities of the Old Salon, warned by the conse- 
 quences of their wholesale rejections in 1863, were more 
 catholic ; and they admitted Manet's Olympia, which now 
 hangs in a prominent place in one of the large galleries of 
 the Louvre. 
 
 It is necessary to say something about the subjects of 
 these pictures. The Dejeuner sur I'Herhe represents two 
 men, in modern dress, seated on the grass near a river-side. 
 By them is also seated a woman entirely nude, her clothuig 
 lying on the ground with the basket of bread and fruit of 
 which the picnic-lunch consists. Beyond this group another 
 woman, only partially dressed, is standing up to her knees in 
 the river. The two men are eagerly engaged in conversa- 
 tion. In the Olympia, an anaemic-looking woman, com- 
 pletely nude, is lying on a couch facing the spectator; a 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES in 
 
 iiegress has entered the room, bringing her mistress a 
 bouquet of flowers ; a black cat which has come in with 
 her stands at the foot of the couch. 
 
 It is commonly said that -to Manet himself these pictures 
 were but technical experiments ; he merely wished to ob- 
 serve and render human flesh under various conditions of 
 light. This can be done without giving offence or causing 
 discomfort to the most sensitive. But even enthusiastic 
 admirers of Manet's art find it necessary to mention these 
 pictures more or less apologetically. They were more than 
 an experiment ; they were a challenge. Manet knew they 
 would give offence. To think otherwise is to think him a 
 fool. The Italian masters had painted similar subjects ; 
 every one admired such things when they had come from 
 the hand of Titian or Giorgione. Manet's contemporaries 
 painted the nude, but in a conventional way, minimising if 
 not wholly avoiding offence. His Dejeuner sur VHerhe is 
 his uncompromising modern equivalent for Giorgione's Govr 
 ceii Ohampetre, his Olympia is his equivalent for Titian's 
 reclining Venus. There is no need to discuss the signifi- 
 cance of the challenge. Perhaps it lacked even more than 
 good taste and wisdom. So did others of Manet's works, 
 thus making possible such charges as have often been made 
 indiscriminately against the French realistic painters. AU 
 that need be said further is that such pictures become his- 
 torical documents, and though Mr. George Moore says that 
 Manet banished the subject from art, the subjects of such 
 pictures as these are likely to find material for future essay- 
 ists on the social and ethical problems of the nineteenth 
 century, and not of that century alone. One may add, 
 also, that it is not a little hard on art, somewhat selfish of 
 the average sensual man and the apologist of art for art's 
 
112 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 sake, to grant it the treatment of such subjects, and to deny 
 it the treatment of others which may certainly be called 
 higher, and are not incompatible with technical experiment 
 and accomplishment. 
 
 Manet did, indeed, paint a picture of angels supporting 
 the body of the dead Christ, which, ^gain, we find appre- 
 ciated as technique, and also, by implication, as making no 
 appeal to religious feeling. There is a famous Entombment 
 by Titian in the Louvre, of which Mr. George Moore says 
 that all Titian saw when he painted it was " a contrast — 
 a white body, livid and dead, carried by full-blooded, red- 
 haired Italians, who wept, and whose sorrow only served to 
 make them more beautiful." Perhaps, then, Manet, in his 
 picture, was explaining how the Italians of the full Renais- 
 sance regarded sacred subjects, and maintaining that they 
 ought always to be regarded thus. If so, one rewats it was 
 not kind to art. 
 
 None of these pictures, of course, had for subject any- 
 thing that Manet could not study and paint from model and 
 object — his dead Christ is only a model. Much later in hfe 
 he painted an historical subject — the execution of the 
 Emperor Maximilian ; but this was an exception. He did 
 some illustrations for Mallarme's translation of Edgar 
 Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee''; but the illustration of "A 
 Kingdom by the Sea " showed an ordinary watering-place, 
 with a nursemaid and children on the sands. Manet had 
 not the gift of imagination. Like Brownmg's Lippo Lippi, 
 he saw, not visions, but 
 
 The shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades, 
 Changes, surprises ; 
 
 and certainly he saw, also, in his own way, " the value and 
 significance of flesh." And shapes, colours, lights, and 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES \l% 
 
 shades he sought ever more truthfully to record. This was 
 a passion with him. There was a time during which he saw 
 as he had learned from Velasquez ; there came a time when 
 his sight became more independent. But a large part of the 
 attraction that such masters as Franz Hals and "Velasquez 
 had for him, as compared with those most in vogue in his 
 time, was the individuality, the directness of their outlook. 
 Not that Manet, in escaping from the conventions in 
 which art was too closely confined, ceased to be an artist. 
 The realistic side of our own Pre-Kaphaelite movement 
 came near, at least, to making this mistake. Manet only 
 changed the methods of art to enable it more fully to inter- 
 pret life and nature. The conventional colour and light 
 and shade are absent from the Dyeuner sur I'Herbe. But 
 the figures are skilfully grouped and are pictorially related, 
 both in grouping and in colour, to the landscape. Green 
 and brown and grey, passing into black towards one end of 
 the scale, and to a warm tint, approaching white, in the flesh 
 of the nude figure towards the other, are the prevailing 
 colours. The canvas, as a whole, has a sober, cool efiect ; 
 what would otherwise be monotony is relieved by the blue 
 of the woman's dress, and by the restricted use of quiet 
 reds, as in the fruit and the tie of the man to the right. 
 Tradition lingers in the treatment of the landscape, and 
 there is as yet no approach to subtle rendering of atmo- 
 spheric effect. Manet wa^ consciously treating an old 
 theme in a modern way, and in doing this he could not but 
 to some extent suggest the old. 
 
 In the Olympia, again, where the colour-scheme is in 
 warmer tones, it is carried through the picture, and has no 
 less art because it is more natural than the conventions of 
 the older painters. Again the traditional proportions and 
 
Ii6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 and the open air, and living and working so many years 
 after Manet's death, Monet has been the leader of the 
 Impressionists, whether or not he was the first clearly to 
 apprehend and exalt into a principle that after which others 
 had been dimly feeling. 
 
 Manet was a Parisian. What is meant by this may, for 
 our immediate purpose, be expressed negatively by saying 
 that he was not a Puritan. He was, apart from his art, an 
 average man of the Parisian world. There is much in that 
 world that the average Englishman does not like — we think 
 of Matthew Arnold's word — lubricity. Let us say the 
 Englishman is right. Still, the work of a Parisian painting 
 life as it is in Paris may be good art, and, at least, has 
 actuality. One-half Paris, however, can criticise the other 
 half ; and Manet's pictures were not always rejected at the 
 Salon as bad art, but as bad morals, and likely to induce bad 
 morals. Such was the fate of Nana. Herr Muther says of 
 Manet's Parisian studies, and of this picture in particular : 
 " In tender, virginal, light grey tones, never seen before, he 
 depicted in fourteen pictures exhibited at a dealer's the 
 luxury and grace of Paris, the bright days of summer and 
 soirees flooded with gaslight, the faded features of the fallen 
 maiden and the refined chic of the woman of the world. 
 There was to be seen ' Nana,' that marvel of audacious 
 grace. Laced in a blue silk corset, and otherwise clad 
 merely in a muslin smock with her feet in pearl-grey stock- 
 ings, the blonde woman stands at the mirror painting her 
 lips, and carelessly replying to the words of a man who is 
 watching upon the sofa behind." Another writer praises 
 the technique of the picture, and says that the subject was 
 harmless enough. The authorities at the Salon rejected the 
 picture. Quite right, we say, from our average English 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES li? 
 
 point of view. Yet does any one ever cry for the rejection 
 at the Eoyal Academy of portraits of women who are, per- 
 haps, of impeccable conventional morals, yet are most 
 expensively dressed and bedecked with jewels, notwithstand- 
 ing the Christian injunction against riches, and insistence on 
 their evil power? Millais was an Englishman, and he 
 painted the portraits of those who could aiford to pay many 
 hundreds of pounds for the distinction ; and he made the 
 return he got in money one test, at least, of real success in 
 art. Manet was a Parisian, and he painted Nana, and A 
 Bar at the Folies-Bergeres. But Paris did not mean only 
 this to him. Boating may be taken to represent the 
 Parisian holiday-making on the sea, and is as wholesome as 
 any English yachting picture. By the way, M. de la 
 Sizeranne, in his criticism of English painting, blames our 
 artists for often letting the edge of the frame cut off 
 awkwardly the figures in their pictures, and says that they 
 often do not use canvas large enough for their subjects. In 
 this picture of Manet's we have a fragment of a boat, a 
 fragment of a sail, and a fragment of a girl. The legs of 
 the man who is steering the boat are only not cut off' by the 
 frame-edge because they are hidden behind the girl's dress. 
 Spring : Jeanne, is a charming picture of a girl walking out 
 in the sunshine, the play of light being the chief motive of 
 the work. Manet accepted — perhaps he never had any 
 alternative — the life into the midst of which he was born, 
 and used his art to interpret it. His pictures, therefore, will 
 be, for the future, historical documents. 
 
 How true this is already of one of his pictures here repro- 
 duced, Le Concert auz Tuileries sous le Secmd Empire. The 
 reproduction suffices to show that the picture is an impres- 
 sion. There is the indistinctness that movement gives ; the 
 
Ii8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 picture has the air of actuality. Here is all the bustle of a 
 crowd. The scene has been taken in as a whole ; that is to 
 say, it has been looked at pictorially, not analytically. A 
 colour-scheme runs through the picture. The prevailing 
 colours are black, gold, and green ; and there are notes here 
 and there of olive and dull red. The half -century that has 
 nearly elapsed since the picture was painted has brought, 
 needless to say, change after change in costume. In this the 
 picture becomes historic. Then some of those who seem 
 almost to live before us are historic personages. Here are 
 Offenbach and his wife, Baudelaire, Th^ophile Gautier, 
 Fantin Latour, Manet himself, and others. Manet did bring 
 art into closer touch with nature and life and the actual ap- 
 pearance of things. 
 
 The reproduction of the portrait of Mademoiselle Eva 
 Gonzales, who was a pupil of Manet, is a happy illustration 
 of one side of his art. It is admirable both in action and 
 exjaression. The fair painter is intent upon her work, yet, 
 it not being true that people cannot do two things at once, 
 she is either interested in something that is being said to 
 her, or in thoughts of her own apart from the work she is 
 doing. The reproduction shows how vivacious is the por- 
 trait, and how well the picture is composed ; something also 
 can be seen of the breadth yet subtlety of the lighting. 
 The colour is quiet yet rich, the greys, blues, browns, and 
 sober flesh tints are forced out by the black hair, sash, and 
 vase in the picture within the picture, and relieved by the 
 hues of the flowers. 
 
 A portrait of his sister-in-law, Berthe Morisot, is a fine 
 realisation of mood. Fan in hand, and as if weary after 
 some social function, she has thrown herself down upon 
 a couch, and half sitting, half reclining, is deep in a 
 
MLLE. EVA GONZALES 
 
 EDOUARD MANET 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR A l LIES 119 
 
 reverie which brings upon the mobile features and to the 
 eyes that see an inward vision, an expression of thoughtful- 
 ness that either is, or is near to, sadness. It is a portrait of 
 which one instinctively uses the word noble. And, again, 
 not only is the picture humanly lovely and true, it is also 
 beautiful as art; the figure and its accessories are well placed 
 within the area of the canvas, the light and shade are well 
 balanced, the colour is harmonious. 
 
 Manet, as we have seen, said that an artist's sincerity 
 might look like a protest. It is difficult to think that there 
 were not, at times, in his art protest and challenge. Anyhow, 
 he met with bitter antagonism. He felt it deeply. He had 
 high spirit, and the opposition spurred him on. But it 
 also exhausted him, and he died, worn out, at the early age 
 of fifty-one. 
 
 Another of the allies of the Impressionists, often, indeed, 
 counted as one of them, is Edgard Degas, who was born in 
 Paris in 1834. M. Duret says of him: "We have not in- 
 cluded Degas among the Impressionists, although he always 
 exhibited with them, and is to-day generally classed with 
 them; but this is because the name Impressionist has become 
 so vaguely used as to lose all precision. If we wish to be 
 exact, we must hold Degas apart from the Impressionists ; 
 his origins, the nature of his art, distinguish him from 
 them. To count him as one of them is, indeed, to go con- 
 trary to his own wish. He has personally always refused 
 the title Impressionist. When, at the exhibition of 1887, 
 those who really showed the qualities that had given rise to 
 the name finally adopted it, he opposed it to the utmost. 
 Degas has nothing in common with the Impressionists but 
 his colour, which he owes to them in part. For the rest, he 
 has never, like them, systematically painted in the open air. 
 
120 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 ■which is distinctive of them, and his technique is of another 
 kind. He has his point of departure in the classical tradi- 
 tion, he is ahove all things a draughtsman. His ancestors 
 are Poussin and Ingres. One finds in his early days an 
 admirable copy of Tlie Eape of the Sabines, and designs 
 executed according to the methods of Ingres. His own first 
 work was a Semiramis, conceived in the pure spirit of 
 historical painting, to which the Impressionists were always 
 indifferent or hostile." 
 
 Degas was the pupil of Ingres, who hoped great things of 
 him — hoped that he would be faithful to and exalt the 
 classical tradition. It was Degas who carried Ingres from 
 his studio when he fell down in the fit which ended only 
 with his death. As another instance of the nature of his 
 early studies, a copy may be mentioned that he made of Hol- 
 bein's portrait, in the Louvre, of Anne of Cleves. This copy is 
 now in the collection of M. Durand Ruel. An early work of 
 his was an Intmor of an American Cotton-Broker's Office, 
 remarkable for its minute elaboration of detail. This was 
 modern enough. His first contribution to the Salon, how- 
 ever, was a pastel having for its subject War in the Middle 
 Ages. One thinks of Millais, beginning as an emulator of 
 the classical Etty and ending as a realist, though in an 
 English way, as Degas did in a Parisian way. 
 
 The change in art, which was gathering force about the 
 mid-centurj', so strongly influenced the work of Degas that, 
 after 1870, he, the pupil of Ingres, ceased to exhibit at the 
 Salon, and joined with Manet, Monet, and the rest in their 
 separate exhibitions. Por all that, as it has been said, he 
 never became strictly an Impressionist. While they became 
 devotees of light and atmospheric effect, draughtsmanship, 
 action, and colour are the most conspicuous qualities of his 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 121 
 
 work. The Impressionists came early under the influence of 
 Corot and Courbet. Ingres was to them the leader in a 
 hostile camp. But enemies are not hostile in every particu- 
 lar j and Degas could turn away from the Salon and join 
 himself to the Impressionists without wholly adopting their 
 point of view — which, after aU, was only one point of view 
 — and without finding it necessary to forget aU he had 
 learned from Ingres. He did, however, become a colourist, 
 and he put aside subjects taken from legend and history, to 
 interpret as best he could the life of his own day. 
 
 Like Manet a Parisian, his outlook and his choice of 
 subject have been determined by his environment. As 
 Millet, the peasant, cared only to interpret the life of the 
 peasant, so Degas, the townsman, has cared only to interpret 
 the life of the town. And, it has to be said, it is the life 
 with which " the man about town " becomes familiar that 
 has been the main subject of his art. If aU the Impres- 
 sionists and their allies had limited themselves to such 
 subjects as Degas has almost invariably chosen, there would 
 have been much justification for the judgment passed upon 
 Impressionism by Mr. Holman Hunt and others, to which 
 allusion has frequently been made here. " Impressions of a 
 ballet dancer," a phrase of one of Kuskin's pupils that comes 
 to mind, was probably used with reference to the work of 
 Degas; but we must have regard to the movement as a 
 whole ; we must not forget Eenoir's many renderings of the 
 sweeter, more wholesome side of Parisian life; and when 
 we come to such work as that of Degas' American pupil. 
 Miss Mary Cassatt, we shall find to what irreproachable uses 
 his methods can be put. .Again, we have to ask if he has 
 regarded the seamy side of town life cynically. Has it made 
 him bitter? He has long been a recluse. Mr. George 
 
122 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Moore sees cynicism in his realistic renderings of what is 
 rather the naked than the nude. The whole question of 
 realism in literature and art looms up before us. We recol- 
 lect that Zola was the champion of Impressionism. There 
 is an idealism that wiU not walk along a street for fear of 
 soiling its boots. Is there also a realism that, sick of this 
 unreality, tramps in the mud by way of protest ? There is 
 certainly a monastic, a negative ideal of goodness to-day that 
 does not hide itself away in monasteries, that even thinks 
 itself actively good, is apparently, and often in intention, 
 beneficent, but in a cold, passionless way. It is so respect- 
 able as to get itself mistaken for real goodness ; but it is evil 
 and a root of evil. It was recognised and labelled nigh two 
 thousand years ago by one whose name is reverenced by 
 those who mistake it for real goodness. English art, reflect- 
 ing English life, has honoured it. There is deeper mischief 
 in this than in Degas' impressions of ballet-girls, whatever 
 may have been his motive in painting them ; for however 
 wonderful his skill, however beautiful his pictures may be as 
 art, they wring from us the cry, " the pity of it ! " 
 
 In earlier years he made the race-course the theme of 
 many pictures. Here the draughtsmanship asserts itself; 
 his colour, though harmonious, has not come to the full. 
 The horses are fine in action and in animal character. The 
 jockeys and the spectators are convincingly true. The mere 
 drawing of an open carriage becomes a miracle under his 
 hand. Yet there is no laboured definition. 
 
 The theatre scenes, which came later, are marvels of 
 colour, light, gesture, and movement. The light glares and 
 gleams, the colour seems to tremble and change before us ; 
 the dancers are flitting across the stage. But however fugi- 
 tive all may seem, the draughtsman is always in evidence. 
 
DANSEUSES EN SCENE 
 
 EDGAKD DEGAS 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 123 
 
 The splendour — the barbaric splendour of the ballet, shall 
 we say \ — has been transferred to paper or canvas so as to 
 lose little of its actuality, so as to seem hardly a motionless 
 imitation of the thing itself. Witness the picture repro- 
 duced in colour in this book, which is a triumph of realism 
 in terms of art. Is Degas alive to the degradation, the 
 horror, that too often underlie the glamour and the beauty ? 
 Does he wish us to see that the dead are there % Is there 
 any Hogarthian purpose in his work? I do not know. 
 I have shown the reproduction just mentioned to not a few 
 people, and not only to those with a narrow range of experi- 
 ence, and the degradation obvious in the faces of the dancers 
 has almost invariably so impressed them that they have 
 hardly been able to bring themselves to consider the skill 
 of the work, the vivid sense of movement, and the beauty 
 of the colour. These girls are human moths, heedlessly 
 because ignorantly light-hearted, singeing not the body only, 
 but the spirit in the flame. I will not moralise, at any rate 
 any more than to say that such evU as this will not be ended 
 until the average of that which accounts itself good has 
 been lifted to a higher plane. A friend once remarked to 
 me, after we had witnessed such a scene as Degas has often 
 represented so vividly, "I sometimes wonder if it is right 
 ever to seem to encourage such things." Has the reader 
 never left a place of so-called entertainment with a sickening 
 sense of loathing? Herr Muther says of Degas: "He was 
 the merciless observer of creatures whom society turns into 
 machines for its pleasure — dancing, racing, and erotic 
 machines. He has depicted cruelly the sort of woman Zola 
 has drawn in Nana — the woman who has no expression, no 
 play in her eyes, the woman who is merely animal, motion- 
 less as a Hindu idol. His pictures of this class are a natural 
 
124 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 history of prostitution of terrible veracity, a great poem on 
 the flesh, like the works of Titian and Rubens, except that 
 in the latter blooming beauty is the substance of the 
 brilliant strophes, while in Degas it is wrinkled skin, decay- 
 ing youth, and the artificial brightness of enamelled faces.'' 
 It is even worse than this. These women are not always 
 mere machines ; they are not without expression ; there is 
 play in the eyes — they are incarnations of evil. The 
 pictures are a strange, wild medley of sensuous beauty, 
 of sensuous hideousness, and of sensual evU. They are 
 appallingly true. They wrap nothing up. In a pastel draw- 
 ing, now in the Luxembourg, Degas has depicted a later 
 stage of the degradation — bedizened, drink-soddened creatures 
 in a caf6 on the Boulevard Montmartre. Through the win- 
 dow we see the stream of life surging along the street. The 
 scene is only too true. 
 
 The picture by which he is best known in England is 
 doubtless The Ballet Scene in Robert the Devil, now in the 
 South Kensington Museum. The spectators are the real 
 subject of the picture ; here again we have the truth, 
 whether cynically given or not. These black-coated, well- 
 groomed men, of a type that most congregates in places of 
 entertainment of a certain kind, are the counterpart, the 
 explanation, of the women in the cafd at Montmartre. The 
 works of Degas are historical documents of human in- 
 humanity. 
 
 Such, and so varied, was the return to nature and to 
 life in the art of France that was almost contemporary with 
 the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. In each case 
 there was more than a return. Nature and life were seen 
 and interpreted with an intensity hitherto unreached. 
 Neither movement is as yet exhausted. They have both 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 125 
 
 brought into art things which can never be taken from it 
 again; though not every artist, not every school, ■will 
 necessarily give them the same jironiinence. Of those who 
 have carried on, or in varying degrees made use of, the 
 experiments and discoveries of the French Impressionists 
 and Realists, we shall have to speak in a later chapter. 
 We turn now to follow the fortunes of the English move- 
 ment after the lapse of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
 But before doing so, a word should be said about an influ- 
 ence, hitherto unmentioned, that affected the art of the 
 French painters, and has since been more widely influential ; 
 that is to say, the art of Japan. 
 
 Just when the Pre-Eaphaelites were fighting their battle 
 in England, and when the way was being prepared for Im- 
 pressionism in France, an event took place in the Far East, 
 the fuU. significance of which, for art and for much besides, 
 it win be for the historian of the distant future to estimate. 
 It was in 1853 that Commander Perry entered the harbour 
 of Uraga, in Japan, with a squadron of United States war- 
 ships, and did not leave until he had extorted from the 
 Sliogun a treaty by which the long isolation of Japan from 
 the rest of the world was brought to an end. Treaty-ports 
 were opened, and many countries soon acquired trading 
 rights and formed settlements in them. In 1868 the old 
 feudal system of Japan was destroyed, and the country soon 
 set out on that career of development in the course of 
 which she has borrowed largely from Western civilisation, 
 and which has been followed with so much success as to 
 take the world by surprise. 
 
 Japanese art had influenced Western art in the eighteenth 
 century, when the wonderful porcelain and lacquer-work 
 found its way to Europe. The opening of the treaty-ports 
 
126 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 led before many years had passed to the arrival of Japanese 
 paintings in Europe, and they reached Paris just at the 
 time when the change that was taking place in art assured 
 to them appreciation and the exertion of a most powerful 
 influence. We have traced what may be called the natural 
 history of the change ; it was the correction of old theories 
 by a fresh return to nature and to life. I'he originative 
 masters of the past had painted as they saw and as they 
 felt. Their methods were valid for themselves and their 
 own time, but not for all men at all times. Yet they had 
 come to be regarded as having little less than absolute 
 authority. Hence the revolt whose course we have been 
 following. And, just when the revolt was in full progress, 
 there came the revelation of an art that had existed for cen- 
 turies quite independently of the art of the West, owing 
 nothing to Greek or Koman, to Raphael or to Michael 
 Angelo, but yet of obvious vitality and beauty. 
 
 Painting in oil has been, since its invention by the Van 
 Eycks, the method most in use and repute in the West. 
 This method is unknown in Japan, where painting means 
 only delicate tinting in water-colour or Chinese ink on paper 
 or silk. To an art with only such means as these at disposal 
 a ponderous realism is impossible. Certainly it has not been 
 attempted. Japanese painting is suggestive ; it is content to 
 leave much to the imagination. Yet it is full of signifi- 
 cance. What it has it uses to full purpose. Line has 
 never been made more expressive. The colour is not only 
 delicate, but harmonious and, at need, broad. There is 
 endless delight in the interest and beauty of natural facts, 
 but the artist by no means thinks that his duty ends — or 
 begins — with a mere literal transcript of them. He reserves 
 full liberty to express them in terms of art. He is con- 
 
THE IMPRESSIONISTS AND THEIR ALLIES 127 
 
 cerned not merely with facts, but with the emotions the 
 facts arouse in him ; he selects from the infinite multitude 
 of facts before him those that will express his emotion, and 
 being an artist be sets down even these, not in the way of 
 bald imitation, but rhytlimicaUy. This is not the place to 
 attempt even a mere summary of Japanese painting, but it 
 should be said further — the importance of this feature for 
 Western art will appear hereafter — that only occasionally 
 elsewhere has the emotion aroused by the contemplation of 
 vast spaces, such as the distance over a level landscape, the 
 void of air between the spectator and a distant mountain, 
 the infinity of the sky, been so marvellously interpreted as 
 in Japanese art. 
 
 The discovery of this art aroused nothing less than en- 
 thusiasm among those who were already committed to 
 innovation. It gave them authority for modifying the 
 tradition that had come down to them, since, while it owed 
 nothing to that tradition, it was yet expressive and beautiful. 
 It is interesting to note that a similar effect has been pro- 
 duced upon certain minds as to the question of authority in 
 religion, by the obvious power of Japanese rehgion and 
 ethics to support the nation in such a stupendous effort, 
 both physical and moral, as the recent struggle with Russia. 
 However this great question may be decided— and it is 
 matter here only for passing reference by way of illustration 
 drawn from another region of life— there can be no question 
 of the influence exercised by Japanese art in the sixties, and 
 of its continued influence hitherto. It had not only the 
 hberating effect just referred to; there were elements in it 
 that were obviously capable of immediate adoption into 
 Western art. In certain matters of colour, design, sugges- 
 tive interpretation, fresh outlook on life, it showed itself to 
 
128 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 be ahead of Western art in the direction in which that art, 
 under the hands of at least some of its exponents, was 
 tending. Monet, Manet, and Degas were among those who 
 studied Japanese art, and formed collections of its products ; 
 and to its influence, in part at least, was due the resolution 
 with which they put aside those traditions of colour, design, 
 and subject which they felt to be no longer for them adequate 
 means of expression. More joyous colour, more freedom in 
 design, suiting the structure of the picture to its emotional 
 purpose, as in the strictly Impressionist works, the novel 
 effects of perspective, foreshortening and light, obtained by 
 representing their subjects as seen from above — as in the 
 case, for example, of many of Degas' theatre scenes — these 
 and many other things were suggested by the art that had 
 come as a revelation. The nude studies of such men as 
 Renoir and Degas, some of them almost if not wholly re- 
 pulsive to those with whom the art to which they are 
 accustomed has not made such things familiar, receives part 
 of its explanation from the art of Japan. To that art 
 reference wiU have to be made not once nor twice later on, 
 for its influence on the movement we have just been study- 
 ing, here briefly noted, by no means, as already has been 
 said, exhausts its significance for Western art. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 
 
 HAVING now briefly studied, and grasped, as I hope, 
 the leading principles and characteristics of English 
 Pre-Raphaelitism and French Impressionism, as we find 
 them in the works and in the avowed opinions of those who 
 were in the forefront of the two movements, we oiaght 
 to have at our disposal resources of comparison and contrast 
 sufficient to enable us to assess, in the works of those who 
 have been influenced by them, the value of the contribution 
 made by each of the movements to artistic expression and 
 the interpretation of nature and life. 
 
 With regard to Pre-Eaphaelitism, we have yet to con- 
 sider the greater part of the life-work of its three chief 
 original exponents, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, as 
 well as of their ally. Ford Madox Brown; for we have 
 so far only carried the story of the movement to the point at 
 which some measure of recognition of the value of their 
 innovations had been won, and when, owing to growingly 
 obvious differences between the members of the Brother- 
 hood with regard to important principles of art, particularly 
 with regard to its relation to nature, the continuance of the 
 formal Brotherhood became no longer possible. For what- 
 ever differences of opinion there may be as to which side of 
 the movement most deserves the name Pre-Raphaelite, there 
 K 129 
 
I30 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 is no difference as to its having had two sides, the one 
 represented by Holman Hunt and Millais, the other by 
 Eossetti. In one respect both sides were alike : they went 
 to history and literature for their subjects. This is equally 
 true of Madox Brown. In this respect, as we have seen, 
 the English movement differs from the almost contemporary 
 French movement. The Impressionists broke away not 
 only from certain traditions of art, but also from history and 
 literature, and went to nature and contemporary life for 
 their subjects. Some will say that in so doing they were 
 led by a surer artistic instinct. This is at least doubtful ; 
 but is a matter for subsequent discussion. All we need 
 do at the moment is to note the fact that Holman Hunt and 
 Millais went to nature only to find a setting for subjects 
 taken from the Bible, from Italian and English history, 
 from the poetry of Shakespeare and Eeats. The only two 
 pictures exhibited by Eossetti as a member of the Brother- 
 hood had the life of the Virgin Mary for subject ; but the 
 treatment was not so realistic as that adopted by the other 
 two for their works. This difference between his work and 
 theirs was the parting of the ways ; it helped to make the 
 continuance of the Brotherhood impossible. Millais had 
 accepted Holman Hunt's view of the relation of art to 
 nature. The latter admits that no teaching of his could 
 produce the same effect on Eossetti and his work. 
 
 The Brotherhood had no formal constitution, and was 
 therefore never formally dissolved; it merely lapsed. 
 Mr. Holman Hunt says : " When after a year or so we, 
 the active members, saw that the majority of the seven 
 only talked — indeed, often in misconception of the objects 
 of our Brotherhood — all that could be done by us was to 
 discontinue keeping up an outward show of combination by 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 131 
 
 ceasing to convene or attend official meetings." It is some- 
 what strange that only the minority of the Brotherhood 
 should rightly understand its aims ; but, passing this with 
 the mere remark, it is clear from Mr. Hunt's statement that 
 the Brotherhood never was really united in aim, and that 
 soon each party went its own way. Each exercised a dis- 
 tinct influence and had a distinct following. There was the 
 Realistic school on the one hand, led by Hunt and Millais, 
 and the Romantic school on the other hand, led by Rossetti. 
 We have to foUow the fortunes of both, and will begin with 
 the realists, taking first the life-work of Holman Hunt and 
 Millais. Then we must take up Madox Brown again, his 
 work being closely allied with theirs. Afterwards we shall 
 turn to the painters whose aims were mainly determined by 
 the work of these older men. 
 
 Much has already been said about Holman Hunt's work 
 as a whole. We have seen that his faithful rendering of 
 detail, almost to minuteness, adopted as a principle, and 
 made more emphatic by the unusual keenness of his eye- 
 sight, has brought many, if not most, of his pictures near 
 at least to disintegration in design and colour. Even he did 
 not fully adhere to the truthfulness with which he set out. 
 There is by no means the same accurate rendering of tex- 
 tures in his later as in his early work. There is a wide 
 difference in this respect between such pictures as 77ie Tioo 
 Gentlemen of Verma and The Hireling Shepherd on the one 
 hand, and any of his pictures painted after his first visit to 
 the Holy Land on the other. In all his later pictures almost 
 everything, no matter what the material, looks as if it had 
 been smoothed down and oiled. In other respects he has 
 maintained all through the patient record of detail. 
 
 The subjects of most of his earlier pictures were taken, 
 
132 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 as we have seen, from history and poetry ; his later work 
 was devoted mainly to the person and work of Christ. 
 Even The Hireling Shepherd and The Strayed Sheep have 
 an obvious or latent ethical purpose. The Awakened 
 Conscietice, with all its careful study of a mid- Victorian 
 interior, was intended to be a companion picture to The 
 Light of the World. In The Ship, which has now found 
 a home in the National Gallery of British Art, he does 
 not in intention depart from literature, for the picture 
 was suggested by Tennyson's "In Memoriam." Being a 
 night-scene, the detail is not so insistent as in other pic- 
 tures, and he achieves unity of impression; but there is 
 also more detail than any one but Holman Holt would have 
 observed and recorded; more than can be seen without 
 careful examination. Two water-colour drawings of night- 
 effects — Halt for the Night, Zahle, and The Ponte Vecchio 
 at Florence — are interesting in the same way. They are 
 impressions. None of the details seems to ask, more than 
 others, for our attention, almost to clamour for it, as in 
 many of the other pictures, details that we should not see 
 at the place itself without the most careful scrutiny. 
 
 He painted several pictures, notably Amaryllis, H Dolce 
 Far Niente, and Bianca, to show that he was not abso- 
 lutely dependent on a subject of dramatic character. 
 It cannot be said that in these and similar pictures he 
 met with much success. They emphasise the limita- 
 tions of his art. The solid, painstaking craftsmanship, 
 the earnestness with which all detail is so faithfully 
 rendered, do not, in one sense, seem out of keeping 
 with subjects of religious or ethical character. There is 
 a strenuous moral quality in the subjects themselves with 
 which the workmanship is in keeping. But when such sub- 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM I33 
 
 jects as a woman enjoying an idle hour, or a maiden with a 
 lute, or a boy making a tracing against a window, receive 
 just the same elaboration of detail, the obvious labour ex- 
 pended by the artist makes the idleness or pleasure repre- 
 sented seem almost like a task. 
 
 The differences between the work of Mr. Holman Hunt 
 and that of almost any other, if not every other modern 
 painter, are obvious. They have not been with him a mere 
 matter of choice; they have not been the mere result of 
 theory. They were imposed upon him from within. The 
 key-note of his character is devotion, and devotion tends 
 towards a narrow intensity. Once the thought of truth to 
 nature possessed him, his whole nature demanded that he 
 should give it a rigid interpretation. Facts must be re- 
 corded to the least detail. Of transient effect there is no 
 record. The thing itself, with a steady light on it, showing 
 it as clearly as it can be shown, is what we are to have. 
 "Wonderful beauty there is of this and that object, in a way 
 often, it may be said, beauty throughout the picture, but 
 not the beauty that comes where detail is subordinated to 
 the whole. 
 
 Devotion is also the word that best sums up the subject- 
 matter of his pictures. Devotion to love and truth, or 
 betrayal of them, is the theme of nearly all his most im- 
 portant works. The contrast between Valentine and Proteus ; 
 the anguish with which Isabella discovers the baseness of 
 Claudio ; the lapse from duty of the hireling shepherd ; the 
 tragic travesty of love in The Aioakened Conscience; the 
 devotion of Christ to His self-imposed mission of redemp- 
 tion ) the failure, depicted in his last completed picture — 
 completed, indeed, by another hand, because his own mar- 
 vellous power of sight had failed — of the Lady of Shalott 
 
134 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 to accomplish her appointed task : the aim of all these pur- 
 poseful works of his has been to say that he that enduretli 
 to the end shall both save and be saved. Criticism may- 
 have to point out limitations in his art ; it may have much 
 — it must have something — to wish otherwise. But when 
 all critical detractions are made, Mr. Holman Hunt's work 
 remains — as a painter, almost a lifelong friend of his, wrote 
 to me recently — a precious heritage. 
 
 In Pre-Raphaslitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 
 Mr. Holman Hunt gives us clearly to understand it was 
 on his persuasion that Millais, at the beginning of his 
 career, determined to adopt a more literal rendering of 
 detail than was then customary. After recounting a long 
 conversation they had about the necessity for getting nearer 
 to nature, a conversation that seems to have consisted in a 
 stream of talk from the older youth, with occasional inter- 
 jections by the younger one, Mr. Hunt says : " In the midst 
 of my talk Millais continually expressed eagerness to get 
 away altogether from the conventions denounced, declaring 
 that often he had wondered whether something very in- 
 teresting could not be done in defiance of them." This 
 statement of the matter seems to fit in well with the after 
 course of events. It is at least probable that the artist who 
 throughout his life has kept to the methods with wliich the 
 two set out, should have been the one to suggest them rather 
 than he who abandoned them before anany years had 
 elapsed. And Millais was a so much more rapid worker 
 than Holman Hunt — he was the most brilliant Academy 
 student of his own or perhaps any other day, and this at an 
 unusually early age — that it seems likely he would not, un- 
 influenced, have submitted himself to the severe discipline 
 upon which the two decided. In his earlier work he had 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 13S 
 
 been much influenced by Etty, who, Sir J. G. Millais says 
 in his biography of his father, was the only man of the old 
 school whom he really admired. This influence is evident 
 in his Oymon and Iphigenia, which was painted in 1847, 
 when Holman Hunt and he were discussing together the 
 problems of art. His next picture was Lorenzo and Isabella, 
 exhibited at the Eoyal Academy in 1849, his first work 
 after the formation of the Pre-Eaphaelite Brotherhood. 
 There is a world of difference between the two. In the 
 former, the drawing of the figures and the treatment of 
 the drapery and of the landscape are iu accordance with 
 a suave academic convention ; the grouping of the figures 
 and the arrangement of light and shade are also in ac- 
 cordance with weU-established rule. In the latter picture 
 the rules are disregarded. Not to produce a conventional 
 work of art, but to represent a scene as it actually would 
 appear, was now the painter's aim ; and though there is 
 design' in the picture, it is not as obvious or as formal as 
 in the earlier one. The light and the grouping are not 
 so arranged as to concentrate the interest near the centre 
 of the canvas. Portraits of Millais' relatives and friends 
 serve for the persons represented ; truth is here again 
 the note. And in feature and gesture it is not conven- 
 tional beauty and grace that are sought, but expressive- 
 ness. 
 
 The pictures that Millais exhibited in the eventful years 
 1850 and 1851 have already been mentioned. They are 
 the same in general treatment as the Lorenzo and Isabella, 
 but are more concentrated in design and stronger in colour. 
 These are the pictures for which, in his o'wn phrase, he was 
 so "dreadfully bullied." What had been regarded in the 
 picture of 1849 as the result of youthful inexperience, 
 
136 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 was now known to be the outcome of set purpose; and 
 bitter, as we have seen, was the resentment occasioned in 
 orthodox quarters. 
 
 Holman Hunt and Millais held on, however, with the 
 help of Ruskin ; and so speedily came the reversal of judg- 
 ment in Millais' case that, in 1853, he was elected an 
 associate of the Eoyal Academy. 
 
 In 1852 he had exhibited Ophelia and The Huguenot. JS'o 
 change in his art immediately succeeded his entrance to the 
 Academy. The Order of Release, The Proscribed Royalist, 
 The Rescue, Peace Concluded, Autumn Leaves, and The Blind 
 Girl, were his most important pictures of the next four years. 
 It was in 1857 that there were signs of change. Euskiti 
 discovered them in his principal picture of that year, Sir 
 Isumbras at the Ford. There was not the same careful 
 observation and record of fact as in his previous work. The 
 critic said that the change was not fall merely, but catas- 
 trophe. The Vale of Rest, exhibited in 1859, was also 
 adversely criticised by Euskin. Millais himself admitted 
 that there had been a change in his work ; for in a letter of 
 this year he says of Ruskin : " He does not understand my 
 work, which is now too broad for him to appreciate, and I 
 think his eye is only fit to judge the portraits of uisects. 
 But then, I think he has lost all real influence as a critic." 
 Influence with whom 1 Presumably with the dealers and the 
 purchasing public ; for it was on the verdict of these critics 
 that Millais was now relying. Adverse criticisms from 
 Ruskin and others were in his estimation infamous attempts 
 to destroy him. They aroused indignation. When purchasers 
 held back he was depressed. When they came forward 
 again he recovered his good spirits. " So much," he writes, 
 "for the brutal criticisms! The fact is, I shall have my 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 137 
 
 own way after all. If dealers give my prices they must 
 make twenty per cent on them." 
 
 It was not only the critics that saw a falling-oflf. His old 
 comrade Holman Hunt saw it ; but he excuses Millais on the 
 ground that he could not be expected to go on producing 
 good work when the country did not support him. Even 
 men of the purest genius, he says, cannot do this. A man 
 of genius, he maintains, has a right to marry when he has 
 made for himself a commanding position, and then he must 
 support his family. This is how, according to Mr. Holman 
 Hunt, Millais put the case himself : the public and private 
 patrons went like a flock of sheep after any sUly bell-wether 
 who clinked before them; they would not have what he 
 knew to be best for them; he must live, so they should have 
 what they wanted. They got it ; he sold his pictures, could 
 support his family ; and in 1860 he took a shooting in the 
 Higlilands. ISTearly twenty years later he advised Holman 
 Hunt to set to work to meet the taste of the day, and not 
 the supposed taste of the future, and he would soon get out 
 of his difficulties; adding that he himself had just sold a 
 picture done in two weeks that would pay the expenses of all 
 his family, his own shooting and iishing included, for their 
 whole time in Scotland. The problem of supporting the 
 family had been adequately solved ! 
 
 It is not a little disquieting to find the painter of The. 
 Shadow of Death and The Light of the World saying that a 
 man of genius cannot continue to do his best unless he can 
 get general applause and abundant pay. Madox Brown, 
 who had perhaps some claim, to be regarded as a genius, 
 managed to do it. "We need not blame either Holman 
 Hunt or Millais overmuch. Perhaps the average English- 
 man could not afford to throw stones at them. Is this 
 
138 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 one of the things they do better in France? So much 
 was hinted in the last chapter. Burne-Jones said once of 
 French painters : " The skill and daring of their work, and 
 singleness of purpose and esprit de corps, their indifference 
 to comfort, and even necessary food, proves them to he a set 
 of splendid gentlemen, whom it would be difficult to match 
 in this country, which I do think is spoiled and sulhed by 
 wealth." 
 
 It would be wrong, however, to think that the change 
 from Millais' earlier to his later manner was only or mainly 
 an instance of "just for a handful of silver he left us." As 
 already suggested, he was not born to Holman Hunt's 
 painstaking manner. It was probably as foreign to him as it 
 was natural to his friend. Nor was he a poet like Rossetti. 
 The later Millais was the real Millais. His son and biographer 
 resents the often expressed opinion that his finest, his most 
 intense work was done under Rossetti's inspiration; and 
 mentions particular pictures that were completed before Ros- 
 setti ever saw them. But this is to take a very narrow view 
 of the way in which one man may influence another. This 
 is certain: that the difference between Millais' earlier and his 
 later work is not only in the greater breadth of the latter, in 
 the substitution of suggestion for detailed realisation of fact, 
 but that there is in it less intensity, less imagination. His 
 early work had been done to please himself and his com- 
 panions, in pursuit of an ideal they had enthusiastically set 
 before themselves. He was supported by the patient labor- 
 iousness of Holman Hunt, and inspired by the poet-painter 
 and painter-poet whose influence on all who came near him 
 was magnetic. When the Brotherhood was dissolved, 
 each member was comparatively left to himself. Hunt and 
 Rossetti continued and ended as they had begun. Millais, 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 139 
 
 who had taken an impress from them, now took an impress 
 from, or, at least, readily responded to, his new surround- 
 ings. Not long after the time when the removal of his 
 pictures from the walls of the Academy had been demanded 
 he had become a privileged exhibitor. The public began to 
 take pleasure in his works, and he was pecuniarily successful. 
 When he was told that the critics were severe on him, he 
 only said, " The wickedness and envy at the bottom of all 
 this are so apparent to me that I disregard all the reviews 
 (I have not read owe), but I shall certainly have this kind of 
 treatment all my life. The public crowd round my pictures 
 more than ever, and this, I think, must be the main cause 
 of animosity." It is perhaps not always wise to accept as 
 consolation for the hostility of educated opinion the ap- 
 proval of the uneducated. Critics who have no cause of 
 animosity still lament a falling-ofF in Millais' later work. 
 But he had his reward : he became a popular painter. 
 
 For this kind of success he had just the right qualifica- 
 tions. He was a rapid worker. In the days of the Brother- 
 hood he used to exhibit two or three pictures to Holman 
 Hunt's one. He was also versatile. He could paint, with 
 equal success, man, woman, child, animal, landscape — any- 
 thing, one might say. He was not handicapped by excess 
 of imagination. He was not a visionary. He had no par- 
 ticular quarrel with the world as he found it ; so he did not 
 dwell in dreamland, like Eossetti and Burne-Jones, and 
 perplex the public with pictorial puzzles. The quality of 
 his imagination may be gauged by a story that he wrote for 
 the Pre-Eaphaelite organ. The Germ. It never appeared, 
 since the number for which it was intended did not appear. 
 An outline of the story is given by his son in the Biography ; 
 we may, therefore, be sure that less than justice has not 
 
140 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 been done to it. It told of a knight who loved the daughter 
 of a king. The king lived in a moated castle, and, though 
 the lady returned the knight's affection, the king forbade 
 him to see her under pain of death. The knight waited 
 until winter, and then, when the moat was frozen over, 
 attempted to carry off the lady ; but the ice broke as they 
 were crossing the moat ; they were both drowned ; and the 
 king was inconsolable. Years afterwards, when the moat 
 was drained, the skeletons of the lovers were found, the 
 lady's dress still clinging to the points of the knight's 
 armour. Doubtless Millais told the stoiy as he would 
 have painted it— picturesquely ; but as a story, as a plot, it 
 would not have been particularly creditable to a child of 
 ten. It wiU be recollected that Millais painted not a few 
 pictures of pairs of lovers. M. de la Sizeranne complains 
 of their monotony : " Whenever he paints a lovers' duet, he 
 places his heroes standing, exactly in the same position, face 
 to face." In Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-RapTiaelite 
 Brotherhood, Mr. Holman Hunt gives an instructive account 
 of the beginning and growth of MOlais' picture. The 
 Huguenot. It was at first intended to illustrate a Ime in 
 Tennyson's poem "Circumstance " — 
 
 Two lovers whispering by a garden v.'all. 
 
 So Mr. Hunt quotes the line. The version I have says 
 " orchard wall." Mr, Hunt told him he did not think much 
 of the subject ; that he did not think lovers ought to be 
 pryed upon ; that a poet might describe a meeting of lovers 
 as part of a story ; but that a painting of such a meeting 
 had neither prelude nor sequel. MUlais agreed; but he 
 had designed the picture, and the background of it was 
 advanced. Hostile critics of Pre-Eaphaelitism have surely 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAEUTISM 141 
 
 made merry over this painting first the ivied wall, the 
 obtrusiveness of which has given so much offence ! Millais 
 happened to see a sketch by Holman Hunt for a picture of a 
 Lancastrian lady and a Yorkist knight, with castle parapet, 
 rope-ladder, etc. Millais at once jumped at the idea of the 
 rival roses for his lovers. Hunt objected that this would 
 require a castle, not an ivied wall. . Then Millais turned to 
 Cavalier and Puritan — he got them in later — but Hunt 
 urged that they had been worked to death. Then recol- 
 lection of the opera suggested the Huguenot, and he said he 
 would send his mother to the British Museum to find what 
 kind of badge the Catholics wore. Did Millais get other 
 such lifts out of the obvious in the Brotherhood days % The 
 story intended for The Germ suggests that he might need 
 them. Anyhow, it was the obvious in which, in later years, 
 he chiefly dealt. His rapidity in work, his versatility, his 
 instinct for painting prettily what nearly everybody had 
 seen or would like to see, were guarantees of popularity. 
 This does not mean that he deliberately played to the 
 gallery. It does not necessarily mean more than that what 
 pleased him pleased also the majority of those who thronged 
 the exhibition rooms at Burlington House. What was it he 
 said when he heard of the accusation that he had of set 
 purpose chosen trivial, popular subjects ? "Was it not to 
 the effect that had he done this, he would have painted, for 
 example, an old woman who had been reading the Bible, 
 and the tears that had come had dimmed her spectacles, and 
 she had taken them off to dry them % This, he said, would 
 have been a popular picture. EeaUy, many things he painted 
 were not much, if at all, above this level. 
 
 It is not made a complaint against him here that he 
 abandoned the elaboration of detail which marked his work 
 
142 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 in the Brotherhood days. Even Mr. Holman Hunt finds no 
 fault with this; for, though he himself has kept to the 
 detail, he says that it was only intended as a discipline, not 
 as a method necessarily to be continued in after years. 
 Millais valued it as a discipline. " This looks easy, does it 
 not ? " he remarked to one who was watching him paint one 
 of his later landscapes ; " but I could not do it had I not first 
 painted Autumn Leaves." What is to be regretted is that 
 with greater breadth there came less intensity. I recollect 
 the chief custodian of one of our national collections in- 
 stancing The Vale of Best to show that Millais had never 
 painted with Pre-Raphaelite detail ; but he was abandoning 
 the detail when he painted this picture. And there is 
 nothing like the marvellous rendering of twilight in it 
 that there is in Autumn Leaves. 
 
 Nor, as time went on, did Millais interpret child-character 
 as he did in that great work. Mr. Andrew Lang has said of 
 it : " The spiritual note of the picture lies in the contrast 
 between the carelessness of the young girls, who are heaping 
 the fire for the fun of it, and ' the serious whisper of the 
 twilight,' as Poe fancied he could hear the stealing of the 
 darkness over the horizon." But the girl who is actually 
 heaping up the leaves is doing so with the gesture and 
 expression of one offering sacrifice on an altar. She feels 
 the pathos of both twilight and autumn. The younger 
 ones do not feel it; so there is contrast between one girl 
 and the others, not merely between them all and the 
 solemnity of the hour and the season. And there is 
 further contrast, finely rendered, between the children of 
 the family and the gardener's children. The picture is 
 compact of beauty and emotion, of sight and insight. So, 
 also, and hardly, if at all, in less degree, is The Blind Girl 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 143 
 
 In Sir Isumhras at the Ford, the children epitomise childish 
 fear and wonder. One would not part with these children 
 of the earlier pictures for a wilderness of such as those in 
 Cherry Ripe, Cinderella, Pomona, Bubbles, and others of 
 the later pictures, where there is little more than mere 
 prettiness and fancy costumes. These might all be admir- 
 ably copied as tableaux for a children's party. They would 
 lose nothing in the process. But how much would the 
 children in the earlier pictures lose ! Cinderella is obviously 
 a pretty girl playing a part, or, rather, dressed for the part, 
 and not playing it well. I think of Eenoir's sleeping girl 
 with the cat on her knee, a Cinderella of real life, the very 
 thing itself ; and the contrast serves to show that there may 
 be loss to art through popular success. Millais' painting of 
 children, after being of the best, became superficial, trivial. 
 The child in A Souvenir of Velasquez was a pretty little 
 girl he happened to see in church ; and in the picture she 
 is merely a pretty, a very pretty, little girl, fancifully 
 dressed, and looking as if she were rather bored at having 
 to sit so stiU. Charming as the picture is, it is the charm 
 of representation, not of interpretation. 
 
 The casting round for a subject, of which Mr. Holman 
 Hunt gives an example, as already mentioned, was character- 
 istic of Millais all through. His subject-pictures have no 
 unity of intention. They do not variously illustrate, as, for 
 example, do the paintings of Jean Prangois Millet, a par- 
 ticular phase of life and work. MiUais was not a visionary. 
 Nor did the strenuous life of his own time take such a hold 
 upon his imagination that he must set himself to interpret 
 it. He only made pictorial excursions in many directions. 
 He saw something at an opera; he read something in a 
 book; a thought flashed upon him; he met with an in- 
 
144 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 cident in real life ; he coiild make a realistic picture of it, 
 and, in due time, the picture appeared. There was more 
 than a touch of melodrama, something sentimental or sensa- 
 tional, in many of these pictures. The "lovers' duets" have 
 already been mentioned. TTia Escape of a Heretic, Mercy, 
 St. Bartholomew's Day, and Speak, Speak I border, at least, 
 on the sensational. He is at a much higher level of story- 
 telling in The North-West Passage. But, if we take his 
 work as a whole, that is, from not long after the Brother- 
 hood period, it unmistakably suggests that what he gave to 
 the world was not drawn from what was deepest in his own 
 nature. There was loss as weU as gain in his marvellous 
 facility. There was nothing in his work that was not pure, 
 lovely, and of good report; but had he been one of the 
 poor gentlemen whom Burne- Jones recognised amid the 
 artists of France, the good qualities of his work might have 
 been intensified. 
 
 When we turn to his landscape painting we find our- 
 selves thinking what the man who painted Autumn Leaves 
 and the Blind Girl might have done. Only then he could 
 not have been the portrait painter he was, must we say? 
 We ought perhaps to accept his landscapes as part of his 
 recreation, or as holiday tasks. If so, they are uncommonly 
 good, so good that we cannot but wish they had been 
 better. Of his love of nature there can be no doubt. He 
 had more capacity for it than he found occasion to exercise. 
 His chief work lay in the town; it was when he laid it 
 aside that he could get into touch with nature; and, even 
 then, much of his time went in physical exercise in the 
 form of shooting and fishing. We may say that he chanced 
 upon rather than sought the subjects of his landscapes. 
 They were, therefore, limited in range ; nor did he interpret 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 145 
 
 more than a few of nature's many moods. He painted 
 realistic views of places for which associations quite un- 
 connected with art had won his affection; and he was 
 content to represent them under quite ordinary atmospheric 
 conditions. His love for plants and flowers amounted 
 almost to a passion. The flowers in Kensington Gardens 
 were a Godsend to him when he could not leave London. 
 In this connexion may be mentioned also his love of 
 animals, which is evidenced by the sympathetic rendering 
 of them, so true to their animal nature, in several of his 
 works. Millais was really a typical English gentleman, of 
 the old school we may say, fond of the pleasures of both 
 town and country, keenly observant of the people and 
 things about him, interested also, in an unpretentious way, 
 in history and poetry, and, beyond all this, possessed of a 
 wonderful gift of painting. 
 
 His portraits are intelligent appreciations of some of the 
 most distinguished people of his time. He marks off in 
 them varieties of character, temperament, and intellect. 
 And yet, though we feel sure that these are good likenesses, 
 that he has seen these people as he painted them, and that 
 the expression he has given them is true and characteristic, 
 yet the portraits have not the quality of the very greatest, 
 in which there are, not merely one, though it be a 
 characteristic expression, but lights and shades that almost 
 come and go, so that the face seems to change as we look 
 at it. Such portraits seem to take their subjects unawares, 
 while they are dwelling with their own thoughts and 
 feelings, memories and hopes, and are absolutely without 
 suspicion that any one is looking at them; or, if they do 
 know that some one else is there, it is they who look, not 
 who are looked at, and the look is a revelation of character. 
 I. 
 
146 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Millais painted many portraits of women, at times, as with 
 those of children, resorting to costume and fancy title, so 
 that, for example, the Hon. Caroline Roche becomes Diana 
 Vernon ; and there are, of course, many portraits of 
 women, as of men, in his subject-pictures. He could 
 unfailingly render beauty, charm, and sprightliness, the 
 self-possession of the woman in "society," and the grace, 
 naturalness, and gentleness of what we account most 
 womanly. 
 
 It is not unsignificant, when we are trying to assess the 
 value of Millais' gift to us — and from first to last, with all 
 failings admitted, we must admit its high value — that he 
 does not seem to have craved for any other sphere of work, 
 for any other access to the public, than such as v/as afforded 
 him by the Royal Academy exhibitions. He had no desire 
 to paint an epic on the walls of some great building. His 
 imagination would not have sustained him through such an 
 endeavour. His work was episodical. We may take a 
 literary parallel and say that his subject-pictures are only 
 so many short poems or stories. Holman Hunt has 
 painted nothing but easel-pictures. Yet his devotion, in 
 the main, to one theme, and the lofty seriousness that in- 
 forms almost the whole of this work — only occasionally has 
 he relaxed the tension — gives it an epic character. MUlais 
 rarely, if ever, struck a deeper note than the pathetic. Has 
 he ever, for example, sounded the depths of human nature 
 as did Holman Hunt in Glaudio and Isabella 1 I have not 
 trusted to memory, but have looked through a fuU list of his 
 works, and can find nothing that is the same in kind. We 
 get no tragedy from him ; nor do we get any humour. From 
 another painter — of whom something has already been said, 
 and to whom we were to return, Ford Madox Brown — we 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 147 
 
 get the whole range of the drama, even to the full extent 
 of the enumeration of its phases by Polonius. 
 
 "We left Madox Brown at the time when he was painting 
 such pictures as Chaucer at the Court of Edward III and 
 Wydiffe reading Ms Translation of the Bible to John of 
 Gaunt. "We saw that these works were inspired by those 
 of the Italian — actually — Pre-Eaphaelite painters. They 
 had not, therefore, either the independence of tradition, 
 or the close realism, at which Holman Hunt aimed. But 
 they had an earnestness and expressiveness, and an approxi- 
 mation to realism, very different from most contemporary 
 English work. The Chaucer, begun in 1846, was completed 
 in 1851 ; the Wydiffe, begun in 1847, was exhibited in 
 1848. The works exhibited by Hobuan Hunt and Millais 
 in 1849 were certainly less dependent on tradition and 
 more realistic than these of Madox Brown's. At this time 
 they were ahead of him in these respects. The first two 
 pictures of his that rivalled the work of the other two on 
 their own ground were Work and The Last of England, 
 both begun in 1852— the former completed in 1855, the latter 
 not untU 1863. Madox Brown was the first to move in the 
 direction of realism ; Holman Hunt and Millais then started 
 and outstripped him. He caught up with them again. 
 
 The two pictures just named were painted laboriously in 
 the open air, and with great elaboration of detail. They 
 were marked by an intensity of feeling and a dramatic 
 realisation of character to which the work of the Pre- 
 Eaphaelite brethren did not attain; and they were in ad- 
 vance also in this respect, that their subjects were taken 
 from contemporary life, not from liistory or poetry; they 
 were wrung from the painter by the struggle through 
 which he and his friends had to pass to secure even a bare 
 
148 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 livelihood. In both these pictures the aim of the artist was 
 not to produce a sensuously beautiful result. He sought to 
 express the thought and emotion aroused in him by contem- 
 porary life. Manet, painting a crowd in the gardens of the 
 Tuileries, had finished when he had given the general im- 
 pression upon the sight of form and movement, of play of 
 light and colour, that could be seen if the crowd and its 
 surroundings were looked at as a whole. It is true that 
 some of the people in the crowd are recognisable ; but that 
 is all. "We need not examine them more closely for charac- 
 teristic action, gesture, or expression. In Madox Brown's 
 Worlt^ Thomas Carlyle and Frederick Denison Maurice are 
 talking together. Maurice looks troubled, presumably at 
 some pessimistic utterance by Carlyle, whose sardonic grin is 
 made still more sardonic by a visible gap in his upper row of 
 teeth. The picture can be examined most minutely, and 
 every examination will disclose some hitherto unseen charac- 
 teristic detail. One of the figures is a powerfully-built, buU- 
 necked, gaudily-dressed beer- and pipe-seller, a scar on 
 whose cheek proclaims fighting propensities for which his 
 muscular arm clearly demands respect. Examine him more 
 closely, and you will find that his shirt-front is decorated 
 with little figures of pirouetting ballet-girls. The picture 
 is a painted parable of the work or the idleness of all sorts 
 and conditions of men and women — from the philosopher, the 
 divine, the Member of Parliament, and the lady tract-distri- 
 butor, to the navvy, the Irish reaper, the orange-seller, the 
 tatterdemalion flower-seUer, and the ragged children of 
 the street. The contrasts are even carried into the animal 
 world, the lady's flannel-jacketed spaniel — it is a blazing- 
 hot day — being in the act, to the horror of his mistress, of 
 chumming with the navvies' terrier and bull-pup. The 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELiriSM 149 
 
 fliole picture is a marvellous piece of craftsmansliip, bril- 
 iantly glowing in colour. Does it overstep the limits of 
 )ainting 1 Is it a literary trespasser in the field of art ? It 
 uay have been suggested by Carlj-le's " Past and Present," 
 ays the artist's grandson, Mr. Ford M. Hueffer. Jladox 
 3rown read, and, it seems probable, re-read Carlyle's book, 
 ,nd it would be with him as it has Iieen with many of us : 
 ife, such life as we see in the streets, life anywhere, would 
 eem different to him over after. It \vould have in one way 
 , more intense significance for him than for us. Madox 
 jiown was a painter. He could set down in form and 
 :olour what he saw. But he was not content to record only 
 he play of form and movement, light and colour, on his 
 >ptic nerve. He painted the reaction of what he saw upon 
 lis whole nature. And, for my part, I can only say that I 
 ihould be sorry if such pictures were never painted ; if it 
 ;ould he said to the painter, "Thou shaft not in thy art show 
 Iiyself as more than a being responsive to sensuous beauty." 
 
 Th<i Lad of England has the same qualities ; but it is 
 iiore concise. There are only two principal figures, an 
 imigrant and his wife, looking sadly at the receding shores 
 )f their native land. The picture is an epic of emigration ; 
 I chapter in the long and infinitely varied history of the 
 itruggle for existence which is the common lot of all living 
 Jiings. The man and woman sit hand in hand. The 
 iVoman's left hand clasps that of a baljy sheltered beneath 
 ler shawl. Behind the principal figures are others, such as 
 I man who defiantly shakes his fist at the land he is leaving. 
 
 There are dramatic energy and keen, sympathetic insight 
 nto human uharacter and experience in all Madox Brown's 
 vorks. He is the Browning of English painting. We need 
 lot expect from him softly modulated form and colour. 
 
tso p-IFtY VeARS of MOD&RM PA I tf TING 
 
 They would suit his subjects about as well as the metre and 
 rhythm of " The Idylls of the King " would suit the subject- 
 matter of " The Eing and the Book." Tennyson admitted 
 the dramatic power of Browning's poetry, but complained 
 of the lack of music. " I cannot help thinking,'' he said, 
 "that there ought to be some melody in poetry; it should 
 not be all thought." I once took one of the younger 
 Academicians to see Madox Brown's paintings in the 
 Manchester Town Hall, and his comment on my enthusiastic 
 admiration of their wealth of dramatic incident was, "Yes, 
 that is all very interesting ; but what has it to do with art ? " 
 Yet in general effect these mural paintings are remarkably 
 decorative, both in colour and design. There is no lack of 
 art in Madox Brown's work ; only it is art that is in 
 harmony with the dramatic intention. If we take the 
 subject along Avith the art ; if we enter into the feeling that 
 led him to paint Tlie Last of England, or Cordelia's Poiilon, 
 or Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, or Jesus Washetli 
 Peter's Feet, we shall find that the art does suit the subject. 
 Browning's poetry is not artless, much less inartistic; nor 
 are Madox Brown's paintings. Only the art is not smooth 
 and conventional ; nor can it always be detached from the 
 subject and enjoyed apart. But to ask this is to beg the 
 whole question : to say that painting is wholly a matter of 
 colour and light, of tones and values, and that no expres- 
 siveness must interfere with harmonious sweep and curve of 
 line. Carried to its logical extreme this would mean that a 
 portrait painter ought never to paint any but a conventionally 
 handsome man or beautiful woman. Painting would have 
 to forswear facts altogether, or emasculate them. Which is 
 precisely what some people seem to be intensely anxious 
 that it should do. 
 
CHIC LAST Of ENGLAND 
 
 FORD MADOX BROWN 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 151 
 
 WorTi and Tlie Last of England were the only pictures of 
 importance by Madox Brown of which the subjects were 
 taken from contemporary life. Hogarth, when he determined 
 to be something more than a mere imitator of the old 
 masters, found in the life about him material for almost all 
 his pictures. The reformers of the mid-nineteenth century 
 treated their own time with comparative neglect. In this, 
 as we have seen, the movement differed from the realistic 
 movement in France. There are those who consider the 
 attempt to picture times gone by little more than waste 
 of energy ; who say that in the future people will not care 
 to know what a painter in the nineteenth or twentieth 
 century thought about the appearance of people and things 
 in this, that, or the other century before or after Christ. I 
 will content myself by saying that it seems to me this is 
 quite likely not to be the case. If it be so, it will probably 
 be because they will take more interest in what the painters 
 of their own time think the past was like. Wliy should 
 we interest ourselves in a modern historian's estimate of 
 those long dead ; and not interest ourselves in what a 
 painter — one to whom a poem or an historical narrative 
 inevitably calls up a picture — thinks those of whom he has 
 read would be lilie in features, if there be record or descrip- 
 tion of their features, and in expression and gesture 1 
 
 Of course, all depends on the insight and imagination of 
 the painter. If he have not these gifts we shall get mere 
 tableaux ; which also, however, may have their value. 
 Madox Brown, with whose work we are immediately con- 
 cerned, was possessed both of insght and imagination ; and 
 his pictures of historical events and personages are so vivid 
 and powerful as to be, to me at least, absolutely exciting. 
 There are many such pictures that only awaken a languid 
 
152 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 interest. His almost transport us amongst living people and 
 actually occurring events. "We wonder and rejoice with, the 
 widowed mother as the prophet brings to her the son who 
 has been restored to life. "We are with the Master and His 
 disciples when St. Peter can hardly bring himself to submit 
 to the washing of his feet. The face and form of Jesus 
 declare His gentleness and meekness ; St. Peter is all im- 
 pulsiveness; and how well the painter has understood and 
 shown the effect that this incident must have had on the 
 other disciples ! Judas has no scruples about having his 
 feet washed by the Master. St. John joyfully recognises the 
 significance of this humility ; the others, amongst whom are 
 those who wished to have the foremost places in the king- 
 dom that was to be established, look on with only half- 
 comprehending amazement which, in the case of some of 
 them, amounts to consternation. No other painter has 
 given such a penetrating interpretation of this scene, the full 
 significance of which the Christian Church is even now so 
 far from having learned. 
 
 Gordelia^s Portion makes vividly clear to us the flaw from 
 which all the tragic events of "King Lear" came as a necessary 
 consequence. " He hath ever but slenderly known himself," 
 said his daughter Regan. This was why he had to be 
 stretched upon the rack of this rough world and involve 
 others in his fate. Where other painters have made Romeo 
 and Juliet but conventional lovers, Madox Brown, true to 
 Shakespeare and to Italy, declares the elemental passionate- 
 ness of their love, and more than hints at its inevitably 
 tragic end by the gesture of Romeo, whose foot, seeking for 
 the ladder, and whose stiffly outstretched arm, show him to 
 be only too well aware of the danger he runs in staying 
 longer, though Juliet, regardless of all but the happiness of 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM IS3 
 
 the moment, still clasps him in her arms while he kisses 
 her. 
 
 To see the picture Cromwell on his Farm is to understand 
 hetter— to imderstand fully — why, when the Huntingdon- 
 shire farmer took the field, the fate of King Charles was 
 sealed. Here is a man amid a very pandemonium of noise — 
 the lowing of cattle, the grunting and squealing of pigs, 
 the crackling of flames, the shouting of a serving-maid, the 
 quacking of a duck she nearly strangles — we almost hear 
 the horrid din ; yet he, amongst it, is oblivious of it all. He 
 has been reading in the Bible in his hand, " Lord, how 
 long 1 Wilt thou hide Thyself for ever 1 " " And shall Thy 
 wrath burn like fire % " The fire at his horse's feet burns the 
 words in upon him, and he thinks only of what he has read, 
 and of the problems and the tasks that confront him; he 
 has neither eye nor ear for the things immediately around 
 him; he will soon be up and away, leading armies in the 
 field, and iU wUl it be for those who have to contend against 
 the force that here we see accumulating. The power and 
 fierce determination of the man are seen again in Cromwell, 
 Protector of the Vaudois, and the better seen by contrast 
 with the calmness of MUton, who measures so carefully the 
 words of the dispatch that is to go to the French king as 
 to make Andrew Marvell almost impatient, while Cromwell 
 trembles with iU-suppressed rage. 
 
 There is inexhaustible dramatic interest in the paintings 
 in the Manchester Town Hall, and the most widely different 
 natures are truthfully interpreted. The haughtiness of the 
 Eoman ofiicer and his wife, the fervent thankfulness of 
 Edwin's queen for the conversion of her husband, the fear- 
 less humility of Wickliff'e when on his trial, the rash defiance 
 of the powerful ecclesiastics by John of Gaunt — these remain 
 
1S+ FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 vividly in the memory; but even finer than these seem to me 
 the figures of Crabtree, the amateur astronomer, watching the 
 transit of Venus, and John Dalton, collecting marsh-gas. 
 They rank in painting with Browning's Grammarian and 
 Abt Vogler in poetry. 
 
 These men are enthusiastic devotees of knowledge. Crab- 
 tree, in the room above his draper's shop, has waited through 
 the morning, on into the afternoon, hoping that the clouds 
 would break and let the sun shine through ; at last they have 
 broken, and his instrument shows him the planet crossing 
 the sun's disc. His pipe has fallen to the ground, and lies 
 broken there, the smoke curling up from the smouldering 
 ash, while his rapt gaze is fixed on the sight he has so 
 eagerly anticipated ; and he presses his hands to his side as 
 if to quieten the tumultuous beating of his heart. His wife, 
 who, though she cannot share to the fuU her husband's 
 delight at this first observation of a natural phenomenon, yet 
 knows what it means to him, and stops her boy from playing 
 lest he should disturb his father. The younger child in her 
 arms recks nothing of the great event. This group serves to 
 emphasise the ecstasy of the astronomer. 
 
 John Dalton is not discovered at such a highly dramatic 
 moment ; he has but gone out from the town to a field-pond 
 to collect marsh-gas. A boy, lying at full length on a plank 
 laid across the pond, catches in an inverted bottle the bubbles 
 of gas that rise to the surface as Dalton stirs up the mud 
 with a pole. To the boy it is mere amusement to catch the 
 bubbles. Dalton is keenly interested in the operation; 
 simple though it be in itself, it is to provide him vath the 
 means of carrying on scientific experiments ; for he, now but 
 a humble schoolmaster, is to become famous as the dis- 
 coverer of a great natural law. As a foil to his eagerness 
 
THE C0ORS& OF PRE-RAPHAELlTISM iSS 
 
 there is not only the mere amusement of the boy who is 
 helping him. By the side of the pond is a group of four 
 children. One of them, a boy, is much interested in the 
 gas-collecting. A girl touches his shoulder, telling him that 
 Mr. Dalton is catching " Jack o' Lanterns." She carries a 
 younger child, who, half fearfully, wants the boy to turn round 
 and startle her. The fourth member of the group is offering 
 chenies to a little goat. The children are a delightful little 
 picture in themselves \ and, like the group in the Crabtree 
 picture, they emphasise by contrast, as already suggested, 
 the earnestness of the student of science. Dalton himself is 
 finely portrayed ; it is as if life had been breathed into 
 Chantrey's statue of him which is in the same building as 
 the pictme. 
 
 In almost all these pictures of Madox Brown's there is 
 some touch of humour, kindly or grim. Around the central 
 subject he gathers a wealth of subordinate detail that is 
 never irrelevant or perfunctory, but links it up with the 
 ordinary life which always surrounds and is in relation to 
 even the greatest events. In the Manchester painting, 
 Philippa of Hainault examining the Work of Flemish 
 Weavers, a boy refuses to kneel with other children in the 
 roadway, having found a point of vantage, from which to see 
 the queen, at the top of the steps of the market-cross. In 
 the same picture a weaver's apprentice looks adoringly at his 
 master's daughter, who takes no notice of him, but teases a 
 kitten. Here is a parable. The maiden he loves is more to 
 the youth than is the queen, in whose visit to the town he 
 betrays not the slightest interest. So we might go through 
 all Madox Brown's works, enjoying the evidence of his 
 many-sided interpretation of human nature. 
 
 It has already been said that the dramatic realism of his 
 
iS6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 work implies no abandonment of art, but only its accommo- 
 dation to his main purpose. His master, Baron Wappers, 
 was a pupil of David, and though he broke with the classical 
 tradition, he did not forget all he had learned from David \ 
 and his own pupU, Madox Brown, acquired in his school a 
 faculty for design which showed itself not only in his easel 
 and mural paintings, but also in cartoons for stained-glass 
 windows. There is a monumental quality in his work that 
 distinguishes it from that of both Holman Hunt and MUlais. 
 At its best, also, his colour can be called great ; it is strong, 
 broad in general effect, and harmonious. In the mm'al 
 paiating, The Romans huilding Manchester, for example, 
 he harmonises various shades of red in the most masterly 
 manner, contrastmg them with the grey of the sky and the 
 brown and blue of the autumn woods across the river. He 
 was a powerful draughtsman, though he developed manner- 
 isms and showed curious defects, as in the drawing of Hmbs 
 and the foreshortening of upturned faces. It is hardly apart 
 from our purpose to note that, beyond practising various 
 forms of pictorial art and making designs for stained glass, 
 he even designed furniture, anticipating in part the work of 
 WiUiam Morris and the Arts and Crafts Society. 
 
 His work did not become popular in his lifetime, nor has 
 it yet done so. There are some in whom it inspires intense 
 admiration; in others it arouses equally intense dislike. 
 Perhaps we may regard both these attitudes as tributes to 
 his originality and power. The Browning Societies have not 
 yet popularised Browning, his counterpart in poetry. 
 
 Madox Brown, outside the Pre-Eaphaelite Brotherhood, 
 Holman Hunt and Millais within it, were the realists of the 
 mid-century movement ; and they have not been without 
 their following. The most obvious influence has been that 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 157 
 
 of Millais. His versatility, showing itself in a wide range 
 of subjects, in each of which he achieved noteworthy suc- 
 cess, rendered this inevitable. Hohnan Hunt has so severely 
 Umited himself both in subject and treatment, Madox 
 Brown's strong individuality so impressed itself on his art, 
 imparting to it a peculiar character, an intense strenuousness 
 in line, coloiu", and expression, that neither of them could 
 possibly attract imitators and emulators as did Millais. One 
 rarely sees a picture that might almost be a Madox Brown 
 or a Holman Hunt; one often sees a picture that might 
 almost be a Millais. 
 
 Of the immediate followers, the friends of the early days, 
 not the least interesting, though he early abandoned art for 
 literature, was Charles Allston CoUms, the brother of Wilkie 
 CoUins. Two of his pictures, accessible to the public. 
 Convent ThoughU in the University Galleries, Oxford, and 
 The Pedlar in the Manchester City Art Gallery, have all 
 the painstaking insistence on detail demanded by Holman 
 Hunt's theory of what was good for the yonng painter at 
 least.' Despite its stiffness there is great charm in the for- 
 mer picture, and there is dramatic power in The Pedlar, 
 though the painting is painfully hard. It was the sense of 
 his technical deficiencies that led him to abandon painting. 
 He was much with Holman Hunt and Millais in the Brother- 
 hood days, and afterwards he stood as Millais' model for 
 The Huguenot and The Black BrunswicJcer. 
 
 One can see the influence of both Holman Hunt and 
 MiUais in the work of Collins ; the influence of Millais 
 alone is to be seen in that of W. S. Burton. His picture, 
 TJie Wounded Cavalier, hung next to Holman Hunt's 
 Scapegoat in the Eoyal Academy Exhibition of 1856, could 
 never have been painted, one thinks, but for Millais' Pro- 
 
158 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 scribed Royalist. It is the same theme difTerently treated — 
 a Puritan maiden succouring a Cavalier ; only, in Burton's 
 picture, it is obvious that the help is given out of pure 
 humanity. While the lady seeks to staunch the wound of 
 the Cavalier, a Puritan youth is standing by. They have 
 found the unfortunate man lying in the woodland, and, 
 apparently, near to death. There may be already, or there 
 may be soon, a personal attachment between Millais' 
 Puritan maiden and the Cavalier to whom she is bringing 
 food. Burton's picture strikes the deeper note. The paint- 
 ing of detail is marvellous. The composition, with respect 
 to the figures at least, is conventional. They are arranged 
 pyramidally, and a broken wall and some trailing under- 
 growth are placed so as to complete this conventional 
 design. Yet, through all the subject-interest of the picture 
 being concentrated to the left of a birch-stem that divides 
 the picture into two not very unequal parts, the humanly 
 untenanted space to the right of the stem gives an effect 
 of unconsidered naturalness to the scene. This tree-stem 
 has clearly played an important part in the fight between 
 the Cavalier and the victorious enemy who has gone 
 his way. The fight has taken place around it. A sword- 
 cut, intended for the Puritan, has been intercepted by 
 the tree, and the broken blade is still fixed in it. This mis- 
 chance left the Cavalier at the mercy of his foe. Thus 
 something of the course of the fight, its end, and the help 
 that has come, perhaps too late, to the wounded man, are aU 
 either suggested or shown to us. It is interesting to note 
 that a butterfly has alighted on the broken sword-blade. In 
 Millais' picture. The Blind Girl, shown in the same exhibi- 
 tion, a butterfly has similarly alighted on the girl's shawl. 
 There is a difference of motive in their introduction, but the 
 
THE COURSE OF PKE-RAPHAELITISM 159 
 
 coincidence, if such it be, is interesting, and illustrative of 
 the close observation of detail that characterised the Pre- 
 Eaphaelite movement 
 
 Burton has not fulfilled, at any rate in the amount of his 
 work, the promise of this picture. His picture of the fol- 
 lowing year, A London Magdalen, was rejected at the 
 Academy J and ill-health, non-recognition, and trouble un- 
 connected with his work, have combined to prevent him 
 from putting his unmistakable powers to fullest exercise. 
 Depth of feeling, sincerity, dignity, and excellent workman- 
 ship mark all his work. Of about the same age as Burton — 
 he was born in 1830 — is Arthur Hughes. His work is 
 always delicate, delightful in colour, simple and pure in 
 sentiment. Perhaps it is because Millais has over-shadowed 
 him that his work is not better known. He has nothing of 
 the obvious effectiveness of Millais. No picture of his has 
 been sufficiently strong and assertive to command attention 
 and make for him a name. It is easy to pass him by as an 
 echo of the stronger voice. Yet what he has to say is his 
 own, not another's, and it is delightfully said. The Ece of St. 
 Agnes, April Love, Silver and Gold, Home from the Sea, and 
 many other pictures are too good to be overlooked merely 
 because he was not chief among the prophets. 
 
 In 1856 W. L. Windus, a Liverpool painter, exhibited at 
 the Eoyal Academy a picture illustrating the old Scotch 
 baUad "Burd Helen." The lady, whose lover has been 
 faithless to her, follows him, dressed as a page. They come 
 to the river's brink, and he, mounted on a powerful horse, 
 makes no offer to take her upon it, but leaves her to swim 
 across. As Euskin said, the cruelty is almost incredible. He 
 noted, as robbing the picture of some look of truth, the erect- 
 ness of the horse's head. Although one foot already splashes 
 
i6o FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 ill the water, the horse exhibits no sign of fear or surprise. 
 All the details of sky and moorland are painted with great 
 literalness ; how closely so, a passage in Ruskin's criticism of 
 the picture would reveal to one who had never seen the 
 picture itself or any reproduction of it. After the remark 
 about the horse, he says : "I have some doubt also, whether, 
 unless the spectator himself were supposed to be wading the 
 ford, so as to bring the eye almost on a level with the water 
 surface, the reflection of the sky could so entirely prevent 
 the appearance of the pebbles through the water. They are 
 rightly shown throvigh the dark reflection at the horse's foot, 
 and rightly eiTaced, in a great degree, by that of the sky ; 
 but I think they should not have been entirely so." This is 
 a most exacting kind of criticism. We recollect that, three 
 years later, Millais said that Buskin's eye was only fit to 
 judge the portraits of insects. The minute examination of 
 Windus' picture makes Millais' later exasperation quite in- 
 telligible, when we recollect that he was then deliberately 
 abandoning the minute insistence on detail that Windus had 
 learned from him. 
 
 The cruelty of the lover in the picture just referred to is 
 unflinchingly shown. So is the tragic result that may come 
 of faithlessness or neglect shown in another picture by 
 Windus, Too Late. Here, again, the landscape, open fields 
 seen over a garden-hedge, is Pre-Raphaelite in treatment; 
 and the painter does not shrink from contemporary costume. 
 But he is far from being content with a merely pictorial 
 motive. We are not simply to take pleasure in his render- 
 ing of the visible aspect of persons and things as he repre- 
 sents or interprets it. A child brings to a lady who is dying 
 of consumption a lover who has been long away. She looks 
 at him as if in half-uncomprehending wonder. A sister 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM i6i 
 
 clasps her in her arms, and leans her face against the wasted 
 cheek. The man hides his face, while the child looks up 
 at him wonderingly. The picture was too tragically sad for 
 Kuskin, who said : " Something wrong here : either this 
 painter has been ill, or his picture has been sent to the 
 Academy in a hurry, or he has sickened his temper and 
 dimmed his sight by reading melancholy ballads." This is 
 really an eloquent tribute to the tragic power of the picture, 
 which probes one of the sorrows of life to its very depths. 
 It is impossible to get away from the face of the dying 
 woman. Madox Brown said of it : " The expression of the 
 dying face is quite sufficient — no other explanation is 
 needed." Against this picture in the catalogue of the 
 Academy Exhibition — it was shown in 1859 — were Tenny- 
 son's lines : 
 
 If it were thine error or thy crime 
 
 I care no longer, being all unblest ; 
 Wed whom thou wilt ; but I am sick of time, 
 
 And I desire to rest. 
 
 This is what the painter had been reading. It may be said, 
 Euskin said as much, that such an extremely painful subject 
 should not be painted. All I care to say here is that, 
 whether or not it ought to be painted, it has been painted, 
 in this picture, in a way that makes Tennyson's words, that 
 would make any words, seem feebleness itself in comparison. 
 After the two pictures just discussed, Windus did but 
 little work of importance. 
 
 Frederick Smallfield, Matthew James Lawless, Eobert 
 Martineau, and W. J. "Webbe are other painters who 
 came under the influence of Holman Hunt or Millais. 
 Lamhs at Play, by the last named, was obviously suggested 
 by Holman Hunt's Strayed Sheep. Mr. H. W. B. Davis 
 
t62 FIFTY YEARS OP MODERN PAINTING 
 
 similarly painted sheep near the clifF-edges, evidently with 
 this picture in mind. Eobert Martineau's The Last Day in 
 the Old House is now in the ^''ational Gallery of British 
 Art. It is Hogarthian in subject : a wastrel who is utterly 
 indifferent to the sorrow his wanton extravagance has brought 
 on his wife and his aged mother, and the moral ruin into 
 which he is dragging his son. In fact, his callousness is 
 almost incredible. The picture is painted with great 
 elaboration of detail. Henry Wallis was another painter 
 who adopted the Pre-Eaphaelite method. His best-known 
 picture is Chatterton, the scene being the poet's death. It 
 was exhibited at the Eoyal Academy in 1856. Euskin's 
 appreciation was : "Faultless and wonderful; a most noble 
 example of the great school. Examine it well inch by inch ; 
 it is one of the pictures which intend, and accomplish, the 
 entire placing before your eyes of an actual fact — and that a 
 solemn one." It may be admitted that to stand the test of at 
 least an approximation to inch by inch examination is a merit 
 in such a picture. The details of the garret and its scanty 
 furniture, the glimpse of the outside world that we get in 
 the morning light, neither the world nor the light of it 
 having any more meaning for him whose lifeless body lies 
 stretched beneath the window, the torn papers, the phial of 
 poison — all this is material to the story to be told. It is 
 not mere statement of fact for the sake of the statement; 
 it has emotional value. Euskin's criticism is concise, but 
 accurate and sufficient. An entire fact, a central fact and 
 its necessary accessories, is placed before us ; and it is a 
 solemn fact, one that appeals to deep emotions : the tragic 
 ending of a life of promise. 
 
 In The i^nglish Pre-Raphaelite Painters, Mr. Percy Bate 
 has given a comprehensive survey of those painters, English 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 163 
 
 and Scottish, whose art was either temporarily or permanently 
 affected by the realistic movement. He rightly, I think, 
 sees rather the influence of Madox Brown than of Eossetti 
 in the historical paintings of William Bell Scott. Valen- 
 tine Prinsep, although he joined in the decoration of the 
 Oxford Union, to be referred to hereafter, was on the real- 
 istic side. J. F. Lewis, who was much older than the 
 members of the Brotherhood, to a considerable extent anti- 
 cipated the movement. I shall have to refer to him again. 
 G. D. Leslie, G. A. Storey, and P. H. Calderon may certainly 
 be cited among those who owed much to the Pre-Eaphaelite 
 movement. We see at times the influence of Holman Hunt 
 and Millais, at times that of Eossetti ; sometimes we can 
 trace both influences in one picture. 
 
 Before we turn to the romantic side of the movement, 
 we ought briefly to consider the work of some of the land- 
 scape painters who heard and obeyed the call to return to 
 nature. 
 
 Mr. H. W. B. Davis, who has already been mentioned, 
 clearly came very near to Holman Hunt in his earlier 
 work, and has never, in his pictures of cattle and landscape, 
 departed further from the strict letter of Pre-Eaphaelite 
 realism than did Millais in his later work. The same 
 may be said of John Brett. His picture The Stonebreaker, 
 exhibited at the Eoyal Academy in 1858, aroused Euskin's 
 enthusiasm, as going in some points of precision past any- 
 thing the Pre-Eaphaelites had yet done. After pointing 
 out the almost inevitable minor faults, he said: "For all that, 
 it is a marvellous picture, and may be examined inch by 
 inch with delight." Euskin wondered what, if the painter 
 could make so much of flints and a view from the Surrey 
 downs, he would make of the Val d'Aosta. 
 
i64 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Thither the painter went, the same summer, and executed 
 what was little more than a marvellous transcript of a scene 
 in the famous valley. Of this picture Ruskin said : " For 
 the first time in history we have, by help of art, the power 
 of visiting a place, reasoning about it, and knowing it, just 
 as if we were there, except only that we cannot stir from 
 our place nor look behind us." But he found the picture 
 wholly emotionless. " I cannot find from it," he said, 
 "that the painter loved, or feared, anything in all that 
 wonderful piece of the world." There were "keenness of 
 eye and fineness of hand, as much as you choose; but of 
 emotion, or of intention, nothing traceable." Is not this 
 really a plea for selection, indeed for impressionism % Brett 
 painted every detail of the scene, so far as he could, without 
 emphasising any particular. Cannot we say that this was 
 his intention; and that he felt the beauty of each detail? 
 Ruskin would not have it so. " I never saw the mirror so 
 held up to nature," he said; "but it is mirror's work, not 
 man's." Brett, however, was but following the instruction 
 of Modern Painters to go to nature in all humUity, se- 
 lecting nothing and rejecting nothing. Or ought he, being 
 now twenty-eight years of age, to have passed this ele- 
 mentary stage ? Ruskin said further that it was historical, 
 meteorological landscape, but "poetical — by no means.'' I 
 have just called to mind a passage in which he praised 
 art of a very different kind. Of David Cox's fohage he 
 said : "It is altogether exquisite in colour, and in its im- 
 pressions of coolness, shade and mass ; of its drawing I 
 cannot say anything, but that I should be sorry to see it 
 better." Here is actually the much-dreaded word "Im- 
 pression ! " I have already quoted Ruskin as forbidding 
 us to be offended with " the loose and blotted handling" of 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 165 
 
 Cox, and as saying that there is no other means by which 
 his object could be attained, and further that what is 
 accidental in Cox's mode of reaching his object, "answers 
 gracefully to the accidental part of nature herself." This 
 looks as if Pre-Raphaelitism were not the one and only 
 sound gospel of art, even according to Euskin. To the end 
 of his life Brett painted in the spirit, and almost in the 
 letter, of this early work. His coast-scenes and seascapes 
 are like so many vistas through open windows. He recorded 
 the facts, and left the spectator to think or feel about them 
 as he might. In his Eoyal Academy Notes for 1875, 
 Ruskin said of Brett's picture of that year. Spires and 
 Steeples of the Channel Islands : " Mr. Brett, in his coast- 
 scene above noticed, gives us things without thoughts " ; 
 and, in the same place, he states the prmciple : " Land- 
 scape painting shows the relation between nature and man ; 
 and, in fine work, a particular tone of thought in the 
 pamter's mind respecting what he represents.'' Clearly, 
 detail should be a means, not an end; it should be kept 
 in close relation to the thought or emotion to be expressed. 
 It may be much or little, and yet the picture may be good 
 art, true to what the artist has felt, not merely to the 
 external facts, from which he has to select only such as 
 wUl serve his artistic end. 
 
 Mention of the work of Brett inevitably brings to my 
 mind that of Henry Moore, for I have been accustomed for 
 years to see the Northern Archipelago of the former, and 
 the Mount's Bay of the latter, facing each other in one of 
 the rooms of the Manchester Art Gallery. Henry Moore 
 began as a painter of Pre-Eaphaelite landscapes and cattle- 
 subjects. Euskin praised his Swiss Meadow in June, 
 exhibited in 1857. In the following year he exhibited his 
 
156 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 first seascape, and to the sea he afterwards remained faithful. 
 His work is not open to the complaint that Ruskin lodges 
 against that of Brett. He invariably recorded some effect 
 of nature that he had enjoyed, or some mood of nature to 
 which he had responded. His later work was far from 
 being detailed in its realism ; but it expressed a sincere, 
 unaffected and poetical love of nature. The waves, the 
 clouds, and light breaking through the clouds and gleaming 
 on the waves, were the staple of his subjects; it was a 
 moving world that he sought to interpret; and the ex- 
 treme of detail, such as the instantaneous photograph gives, 
 would have been fatal to any suggestion, any illusion, of 
 motion. As it is, when one stands before a seascape by 
 him, the waves seem actually to be moving, racing after 
 each other as if in eager chase ; and, in the sky above, the 
 clouds advance in their own more measured manner. His 
 pictures, though so natural in effect, were none the less 
 subtly designed. If he had a fault it was that his colour, 
 particularly his blue, was sometimes monotonous, almost un- 
 varied over so large a space that the jiicture as a whole lost 
 the feeling of nature's infinite variety and of atmospheric 
 vibration. He sought to record impressions, and somewhat 
 more of impressionist methods would at times have been 
 useful to him. J. W. Inchbold also came under the 
 influence of the Pre-Eaphaelites, and his landscapes combine 
 realism with true poetic feeling; and there were others, 
 also, who need not be individually mentioned here. To still 
 more recent evidences of the influence of Holman Hunt 
 and Millais realism I shall have to refer later on. 
 
 We have now to follow the fortunes of the romantic side 
 of the Pre-Eaphaelite movement, that side of it to which 
 Mr. Holman Hunt would deny the right to be included in 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 167 
 
 it. We recollect that he regards himself and Millais as 
 having been at any time the only true Pre-Eaphaelites ; and 
 Eossetti as having been from the first so steeped in Madox 
 Brown's medisBvalism that no tuition could rid him of it. 
 Certainly laborious painting of natural detail, not necessarily 
 relevant to the main subject of the picture, was not to his 
 mind. Close observation of the minutias of natural light, 
 colour, and so forth, was quite apart from his purpose. 
 Beauty was to his purpose, especially beauty of colour, 
 which he held, and rightly held, to be chief among the 
 essentials of the painter's art. In this he showed himself a 
 Eomanticist. The Classical school, as we have learned, put 
 drawing in the first place. 
 
 We have seen Eossetti wearying of the drudgery of 
 painting jars and bottles to which Madox Brown set him, 
 going to Holman Hunt for instruction, joining in the 
 formation of the Brotherhood, and painting and exhibiting 
 The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Aneilla Domini. 
 Then he withdrew from the contest with the critics, leaving 
 Holman Hunt and Millais to carry it on alone. Abeady his 
 work was different from theirs, in both method and aim. 
 There was to be a still greater divergence. We may put it 
 that whereas Holman Hunt and Millais told any story they 
 took for a subject in the way they thought it must have 
 happened, or would have happened had it been a true one, 
 Eossetti told his stories in what he thought would have 
 been a beautiful way for them to have happened. This 
 does not mean that the beauty was foremost in his thought. 
 We have already objected to Mr. Holman Hunt's saying 
 that "Eossetti treated the Gospel history simply as a 
 storehouse of interesting situations and beautiful personages 
 for the artist's pencil." He found the Gospel history to be 
 
l68 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 this, but not this only or mainly ; any more than this was all 
 that Dante's poetry meant to him. He once, indeed, wrote 
 to Madox Brown : "I am writing a long ballad about a 
 magic mirror. ... I have painted the better part of a little 
 picture besides, but don't know who is to buy it. I can't be 
 bothered to stick idle names : a head is a head, and fools 
 won't buy heads on that footing.'' This sounds like 
 contempt for the subject in painting; yet many, perhaps 
 most, of Rossetti's works have a quite definite subject : 
 freqtiently they are pictorial versions of his own poems, or 
 of Dante's poems, or other literary works ; and when Mr. 
 William Sharp asked him how he would reply to the assevera- 
 tion that he was the head of the "Art for Art's sake" 
 school, his response was to the effect that " the principle of 
 the phrase was two-thirds absolutely correct, and oue-third 
 so essentially wrong that it negatived the value of the whole 
 as an aphorism." 
 
 Rossetti stands alone in having expressed himself with 
 great, and not greatly unequal, ease and power in both poetry 
 and painting. William Morris, also, was both poet and 
 artist; but while continuing his poetical work, he early 
 abandoned pictorial for decorative art. Rossetti has been 
 called literary in his painting and pictorial in his poems; 
 which, in the extent to which it is true, only means that 
 his thought and emotion formed themselves into concrete 
 images ; which is true of all of us in degree, and of some 
 amongst us in exceptional degree. When a youth desirous 
 of being a painter came to Rossetti, he was asked if 
 he had any thoughts that could be expressed in design. 
 This explains the saying about art for art's sake. Painting 
 must have art, must have design ; but it only does its final 
 work when the design clothes a thought. He was not him- 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 169 
 
 self a really well-trained craftsman — he had been too indo- 
 lent. To have to do a thing was enough to turn him against 
 it. Technically his painting was inferior to his poetry. He 
 once expressed his regret that a painting could not, like a 
 poem, be teased into shape. 
 
 His art, his design, it has been already said, was based on 
 colour. "I believe colour," he said, "to be a quite indis- 
 pensable quality in the highest art, and that no picture ever 
 belonged to the highest order without it ; while many by 
 possessing it — as the works of Titian — are raised certainly 
 into the highest class, though not to the very highest grade 
 of that class, in spite of the limited degree of their other 
 great qualities. Perhaps the only exception which I should 
 be inclined to admit exists in the works of Hogarth, to 
 which I should never dare to assign any but the very 
 highest place, though their colour is certainly not a promi- 
 nent feature in them. I must add, however, that Hogarth's 
 colour is seldom other than pleasing to myself, and that, for 
 my own part, I should almost call him a colourist, though 
 not aiming at colour. On the other hand, there are men 
 who, merely on account of bad colour, prevent me from 
 thoroughly enjoying their works, though full of other quali- 
 ties. For instance, Wilkie, or Delaroche (in nearly all his 
 works, though the H^micycle is fine in colour). From 
 WUkie I would at any time prefer a thoroughly good 
 engraving — though of course he is in no respect even within 
 hail of Hogarth. Colour is the physiognomy of a picture ; 
 and, like the shape of the human forehead, it cannot be 
 perfectly beautiful without proving goodness and greatness. 
 Other qualities are its life exercised, but this is the body of 
 its life, by which we know and love it at first sight." 
 
 This passage is instructive in various ways. It is interest- 
 
170 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 ing to find Eossetti appreciating Hogarth's colour. Eecog- 
 nition of his colour as harmonious, though not brilliant, and 
 as being carried through his design, is more common now 
 than it used to be. Colour there must be ; colour alone wOl 
 make a picture great, but not of the greatest; colour is the 
 beautiful body of a picture : other qualities are its life exer- 
 cised. Such was the thoroughly sane creed of Rossetti. 
 
 He had very distinct preferences in colom ; he could place 
 his favourite hues in order of merit : first, pure, light, warm 
 green; second, deep gold colour; third, certain tints of 
 grey ; fourth, shadowy or steel blue ; fifth, brown with 
 crimson tinge ; sixth, scarlet. These he liked, each for its 
 own sake, separately, apart from any others. Then, for the 
 rest, he said that other colours, comparatively, were only 
 lovable according to the relations in which they were placed. 
 His own pictures and drawings are conspicuous for their 
 rich, glowing colour. The works of the great Venetians 
 hardly lose more by translation into monochrome than do 
 Rossetti's, so thoroughly did his own practice embody his 
 theory. 
 
 It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Rossetti existed 
 in the present but lived in the past. He was a devotee of 
 beauty, which was denied almost all its rights in the time 
 and the place in which he had to spend his days on earth. 
 No joyous picture, only, indeed, the saddest of all his 
 pictures, had modern London for its scene. Another drawing 
 gets as near to our own time as Dr. Johnson's day ; for the 
 rest, we are taken back to the Middle Ages, or to some date- 
 less time — the time, that is, when beauty holds sway in life. 
 The one drawing that does set us down in the mid-nineteenth 
 century shows a drover who, just as, in the early morning, 
 with a calf fastened in his cart, he is about to cross one of 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM \Ti. 
 
 the bridges that lead into London, sees in handsome but 
 disordered dress the girl ■whom he has loved, but who has 
 long been lost to him and to her village home. As she 
 shrinks away from him, falling to the ground and turning 
 her pain-stricken face to the wall, he seizes her by her 
 hands and seeks to raise her up again, his face instinct with 
 love and tender sorrow. The calf, taken into the town to be 
 slaughtered, is symbolic of her fate. Whether for her 
 there is any redemption on this side of the grave we are 
 left in doubt. In the sonnet written to accompany the 
 picture she is made to say — 
 
 ' ' Leave me — I do not know you — go away ! " 
 
 This was Kossetti's solitary attempt to express his emotion 
 through the medium of such an incident as might be met 
 with in a London street. After this there was no more 
 realism ; there was no care even about antiquarian accuracy; 
 he merely used any material that was available to create a 
 beautiful world in which the men and women of his 
 imagination might live and move. 
 
 One ought rather to have said women and men; for 
 woman, her love and her beauty, and man's love for her, 
 was almost exclusively the subject of Eossetti's art. A 
 cynic might almost sum up the romantic side of the Pre- 
 Eaphaelite movement as a cult of woman's beauty. Eobert 
 Buchanan's attack on " the fleshly school of poetry," which 
 had special reference to Eossetti, was unjust ; but the sensu- 
 ous and the sensual are much in evidence in both his poetry 
 and his painting, far more so than was customary at the 
 time. To what extent this cult was an obsession, how far 
 Eossetti was morbid, we need not inquire here. He has 
 often been subjected to pathological study. Certain it is 
 
172 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 that, especially in his painting, the one subject almost ex- 
 clusively engrossed him. If he read the New Testament, 
 it was the girlhood of Mary Virgin, the Annunciation, 
 Mary Magdalene at the house of Simon the Pharisee, that 
 attracted him as subjects for pictures. From Dante he took 
 the love of Dante for Beatrice, and the fatal love of Paolo 
 and Francesca da Eimini. From the Arthurian legend he 
 took Tristram and Iseult and Launcelot in Guenevere's cham- 
 ber. If he turned to Shakespeare's " Hamlet " it was to find 
 Ophelia there. From Browning he got the suggestion of 
 The Laboratory, where a woman is seeking for poison 
 with which to kill off a rival. From Florentine story he 
 chooses the Borgia family. Creating his own subjects we 
 get such as the Found, already described, Hestema Rosa, a 
 picture of satiated sensuality, and all the long list of subjects 
 such as How They Met Themselves— iyvo lovers faced by their 
 own apparitions — Mona Rosa, The Loving Gup, Mariana, 
 Vei'onica Veronese, Fiammetta, Lilith, and many others. 
 The Blessed Dainozel, both in the poem and in the picture, 
 carries the love that is but personal attachment — Vegoisme a 
 deux personnes, in the French phrase — beyond the grave; 
 Astarte Syriaca recreates the goddess who, in old-time belief, 
 delighted in such love. Earely does he appeal to anything 
 higher than the sensuous emotion. It intrudes even when 
 Joan of Arc is kissing the sword of deliverance. Of the 
 love that endures in higher love— that is wholly disinterested, 
 has no return on self — he rarely gives a hint. Such a 
 sweetly simple picture as JoK Cceur seems almost out of 
 place amongst so many in which not kind-heartedness, but 
 the love that does little more than seek self in another, 
 gazes out upon us from a world of luxurious beauty. 
 Kossetti, in his pictures, has interpreted, almost exclusively, 
 
IJKATA DKAJKIX 
 
 DANTE GABKIEL KOSbKTTl 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM i73 
 
 one phase of love, and that not the highest ; so that, had we 
 him alone for guide, we might take this fragment for the 
 whole. The generous emotions for which we use such words 
 as devotion, charity — in the large sense — unselfishness, are 
 not suggested by his pictures. Though there is no dallying 
 with evU, yet the word purity never comes to our lips, 
 as it inevitably does when we look at Holman Hunt's 
 Isabella, while we are before any but his earliest works; 
 nor do we find ourselves thinking of character and strength. 
 Soul does not stand before us clear from, or nobly dominating 
 sense. If the faces of the vast majority of living women 
 did not say things that the faces in Kossetti's pictures rarely, 
 if ever, say, it would go ill with mankind. 
 
 The picture here reproduced, Beata Beatrix, though an 
 imaginative work of great power and beauty — it was the 
 witness of his art to his love for the wife he had lost — does 
 not reveal love ennobled by death, but only claims con- 
 tinuance, despite of death, for personal attachment, as also 
 does TAe Blessed Damozel. It is a beautiful, deeply pas- 
 sionate assertion that what men call death is but a swooning 
 into another life. 
 
 Notwithstanding his imperfect technical equipment, 
 Rossetti's art became an exceedingly beautiful and subtly 
 appropriate language for the emotions he sought to express. 
 He was full of enthusiasm, and could infect others with his 
 own zeal — witness his carrying off to Oxford, despite their 
 protests, a number of young painters, Val Prinsep, Burne- 
 Jones, William Morris, Spencer Stanhope, and others, who 
 had no previous experience in mural painting, to decorate 
 with pictures the still damp walls of the new Union build- 
 ing there. In his intercourse with his friends and fellow- 
 artists he was, when in health of mind and body, con- 
 
174 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 spicuously generous. There is little wonder that the man, 
 his poetry and his art, have had an influence that still is 
 strong. 
 
 One evening, in the year 1856, a young Oxford under- 
 graduate found his way to the Working Men's College in 
 Great Ormond Street. He had gone with a definite object, 
 to set eyes, if he could, on Dante Rossetti, who, as he had 
 learned, taught in the art school of the college. He wished 
 to see Eossetti because he had read "The Blessed Damozel," 
 and had seen his water-colour of Dante, while drawing the 
 head of Beatrice, being disturbed by people of importance, 
 and his illustration to "William AUingham's " Maids of 
 Elfenmere," and because the creator of these works of 
 literature and art had become to him a hero. This hero- 
 worshipping undergraduate was Edward Burne-Jones, himself 
 to become little, if anything, less than a hero to others. 
 He had no thought of speaking to Rossetti; the genuine 
 hero-worshipper never aims so high. It would be enough if 
 he could see him. His purpose was accomplished, for 
 Rossetti came to the college that evening. More than this, 
 a few nights later Burne-Jones was actually introduced to 
 his hero, had a "first fearful talk'' with him, and was in- 
 vited to go to his studio on the following day. He went, 
 and so a lifelong friendship was begun. Rossetti's advice 
 confirmed Burne-Jones in an already formed resolution to 
 devote his life to art, and he left Oxford without taking his 
 degree. 
 
 Of his earlier life it is not necessary to say much here. 
 He was born in 1834 in Birmingham, where his father was 
 in business as picture-framer. He was educated at the King 
 Edward's School there, and when he went up to Oxford it 
 was with the intention of eventually entering into holy 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELJTISM I7S 
 
 orders. Difficulties that do not concern us here, and 
 counter-attractions at which we have briefly glanced, led, as 
 we have seen, to a complete change of purpose. This hap- 
 pened also to his closest college friend at Oxford, William 
 Morris, who can have but brief mention in this book, be- 
 cause he early gave up the practice of painting to pursue, 
 along with poetry and other literary production, the arts that 
 ally themselves to use. 
 
 It was Eossetti's recorded first impression of Burne-Jones 
 that he was ''one of the nicest young fellows in — Dream- 
 land." It was a true impression. It was in dreamland 
 that Burne-Jones spent his artistic life. He was a Celt, 
 and whether or not aU Celts are dreamers, Burne-Jones was 
 one. In the world where men contend for wealth and 
 power he felt himself a stranger. He was at home only in 
 the ideal world where love and beauty alone have sway. 
 He was not a misanthrope. He was full of kindness. 
 Merriment and mischief were never put away as childish 
 things. But he could take no pleasure in the things for 
 which most men Hve. One or two brief sayings of his own 
 will show better than much writing about him why he spent 
 his working life in dreamland. "A pity it is I was not 
 born ia the Middle Ages. People would then have known 
 how to use me — now they don't know what on earth to do 
 with me." Again, " I have learned to know beauty when 
 I see it, and that's the best thing.'' And again, "This is 
 rather sad talk, and sounds as if I had an impossible ideal — 
 and I have, and a bit of it shall come." 
 
 The old buildings of Oxford, the cathedrals and churches 
 of northern France, had told Burne-Jones and Morris that 
 civilisation had once been more beautiful than it was in 
 their day, and had inspired them with faith that some day 
 
176 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 it would be beautiful again. Morris, in after years, actively 
 joined in Socialist propaganda ; not in vain, perhaps. Quite 
 recently a Socialist Member of Parliament lias said: "The 
 present aim of Socialists is to find work for the unemployed, 
 food for the hungry, and clothes for the naked. After that 
 it will make the conquest of the intellectual and artistic 
 world. The foundation has been laid for the most beautiful 
 edifice which has ever been constructed." As this was said 
 in a public speech, we may pardon the orator for talking 
 of a building as being already constructed for which only 
 the foundation had been laid, and at once go on to say 
 that the Socialist member's hope was exactly the hope of 
 William Morris — yes, and of Ruskin also. It was also 
 Burne-Jones's hope ; but he shrank from such work as that 
 to which Morris set himself — though on more than one 
 occasion he uttered a protest against the tyranny of selfish- 
 ness — and sought rather to draw his fellows to better things 
 by translating into picture the lovely tales of long ago ; and 
 it may be that he, no less than Morris and Euskin, has 
 done something to hasten the coming of a better day. 
 
 For a time his art was little more than an echo of that of 
 Eossetti, whose pupil he became, in the sense of watching 
 the older painter engaged upon works which, to the end of 
 his life, filled him with admiration. Then his own in- 
 dividuality, steadily asserting itself, gave to his own art an 
 independent character. He sought by unremitting work, 
 persisted in despite frequent ill-health, to make up for the 
 lack of early training, for he was already twenty-two years old 
 when he turned of set purpose to art ; and he so far suc- 
 ceeded that, although he never attained to that consummate 
 mastery of the brush which marks the greatest craftsmen, 
 he executed a large number of works of singular and refined 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 177 
 
 beauty. He was greatly influenced by the Italian masters, 
 particularly the Florentines ; that is to say, his art was Pre- 
 Eaphaelite in the sense in which that of Holman Hunt and 
 MiUais was not, and against which Holman Hunt has so 
 strongly inveighed. After a visit to Italy in 1872 he said that 
 the masters he cared for most were Michael Angelo, Luca 
 SignoreUi, Mantegna, Giotto, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto, 
 Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca; and he further 
 said that, on this visit, artistic excellence alone had little 
 charm for him, so that he never wanted even to look at 
 Titian, and saw the Eaphaels at Rome for the first time as 
 unaffected by them as he could see the cartoons in London. 
 AU of which means that Burne-Jones was far from eschew- 
 ing the subject in painting, and that, in his own art, colour 
 would be subordinate to drawing. His colour was never 
 brilliantly glowing, like that of Eossetti; indeed, it is at 
 times open to the charge of harshness, and is best when 
 most restrained. His sense of line, also, does not always 
 carry him all through his picture, but stops short in the 
 individual figures and in the detail ; so that among his best 
 works are those containing only one or two figures. 
 
 Objection has often been made to the repetition of the 
 same face, and its almost invariable lack of expression. His 
 defence of this peculiarity was that his faces were not por- 
 traits of people in paroxysms of terror, hatred, benevolence, 
 desire, avarice, veneration, etc. It was but a variation of 
 this defence, or, perhaps we should say, explanation, when 
 he said, in effect, that his figures were not individuals, but 
 types. So Euskin, in his Oxford lecture entitled " Mythic 
 Schools of Painting," distinguishes between Eossetti as 
 representing persons and Burne-Jones as being content with 
 personification, so that " had both Eossetti and he been set 
 
lyS FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN FAINTING 
 
 to illustrate the first chapter of Genesis, Eossetti would have 
 painted either Adam or Eve — but Edward Burne-Jones, a 
 Day of Creation." Dramatic or personal, Euskin calls the 
 one school of painting, mythic or personifying the other. 
 The names matter little ; the things matter much. Holman 
 Hunt and Millais were more emphatically dramatic painters 
 in this sense than was Eossetti. "We may almost divide the 
 landscape painters also into the two orders, dramatic and 
 mythic, the former dwelling on detailed life and beauty, the 
 latter generalising until it seemS' not so much the visible 
 world that we see as the invisible power that lives and 
 operates in it. The landscape in not a few of Burne- 
 Jones's pictures — The Mirror of Venus and Love and the 
 Pilgrim, for instance — is of the latter kind. 
 
 Burne-Jones, in his art, virtually withdrew himself from 
 his own age, to dwell upon things he believed to be true and 
 beautiful for every age. This is how, on one occasion, he 
 descrilied his life-work to me. He did not withdraw himself 
 from sympathy with his own age, he was moved by its 
 sorrows and pained by its hideousness ; but he stood apart 
 from its activities, and he would not portray it. It would 
 not be well for every one to do this ; but it was well for 
 him ; and nothing can be more mistaken than to regard such 
 an attitude as morbid. To gather truth and beauty from 
 the past, and, by setting them forth, to enforce their claim 
 on the present and the future, is a sane and noble endeavom-. 
 When a lady wrote to Burne-Jones contrasting the ignoble 
 faces she had seen in Eegent Street with the divine hush of 
 the New Gallery, and talked of artists withdrawing themselves 
 from this wretched world like the gods of old, he begged 
 a friend to tell him that he had not wasted his whole life 
 in running after things no man would ever be the better for ! 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 179 
 
 His life-work is summed up in the opening lines of Keats' 
 "Endymion." To him a thing of beauty was indeed a joy 
 for ever, and he sought to create shapes of beauty that 
 would move away the pall from dark spirits, amid dearth of 
 noble natures, days of gloom, imhealthy and o'er darkened 
 ways. It is ill paraphrasing poetry ; let me quote the poet, 
 who almost describes Burne-Jones's work when he includes 
 in such shapes of beauty — 
 
 The grandeur of the dooms 
 We have imagined for the mighty dead ; 
 All lovely tales that we have heard or read : 
 An endless fountain of immortal drink, 
 Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink. 
 
 It is thus one understands Burne-Jones's pictures. This is 
 not the place to enumerate and describe them, even could 
 one's halting prose keep pace with their swift-winged poetry. 
 He lived in the myths and legends of Greece ; the book of 
 Genesis drew from him a visible psalm in praise of the 
 mystery of creation; the adoration of the Magi, the death 
 on the Cross, Christ in the Day of Judgment — these 
 things, for painting or for window, he chose from the 
 Christian Belief. One of the loveliest of his pictures has 
 for its subject the figure of Christ stooping from a cross at 
 a wayside shrine to kiss a merciful knight who has forgiven 
 his enemy. It is needless, almost, to say how much the 
 Arthurian legend meant to him, a Celt ; or, again, how he 
 delighted to turn into picture the story-teUing of Chaucer. 
 In such a painting as The Golden Stairs he creates his 
 own allegory. What did he mean by this company of 
 maidens, each with her iastrument of music, descending 
 from a higher to a lower room ? Do they tell us of a music 
 coming from above into human life, quenching its discords 
 
i8o FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN FAINTING 
 
 and making ever richer its harmonies ? So we miglit wander 
 on among these things of beauty, winch the unresting though 
 unhasting artist designed tlirougli many years, until, while 
 yet there were unfinished works upon his easels, and many a 
 contemplated work was not begun, the brush was for the last 
 time laid aside. 
 
 Madox Erown, as we have seen, got the opportunity at 
 Manchester of painting pictures for places in a public 
 building where they were permanently to remain. Such was 
 the kind of work that Burne-Jones wished to do. He dis- 
 liked miscellaneous exhibitions, and regarded easel-i)ictures 
 as but a poor sulistitute for those designed for particular 
 places and actually painted on the spot. He would have 
 liked to paint only big things in vast spaces, and that the 
 common people shoidd wonder at them. Little opportunity, 
 however, came to him for work of this kind, except in the 
 form of executing designs for stained-glass windows, of 
 which he did many for churches in -v^arious parts of the 
 country. The one chance he got, apart from the window- 
 designs, was that of designs for mosaics in the American 
 church at Eome ; and he did not see the completed work. 
 It was a part of his dream that art should not be a mere 
 luxury for the few, but the heritage, both in practice and 
 enjoymeirt, of the many. Designs of his were executed in 
 tapestry on Morris's looms ; he also, of course, designed 
 illustrations for books that Morris printed and published. 
 His view of the place that art ought to occupy in life was 
 large and generous, and he did what he could to make it 
 prevail. These wider questions of art will arise again when 
 we consider the work of other painters, such as G. F. Watts 
 and Leighton in England, and Puvis de Chavannes in 
 France. 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM i8i 
 
 The year following that in which Burne-Jones first became 
 acquainted with Kossetti another young painter sought and 
 obtained both his acquaintance and his friendship. This 
 was Frederic Sandys, who, born in 1832, the sou of a 
 Norwich painter, had already made considerable advance in 
 art, much in the Pre-Raphaelite manner of laborious truth- 
 fulness. Early in his career he executed many drawings for 
 woodcuts ; then he produced several oil-paintings ; and 
 lastly, his work mostly took the form of chalk drawing. 
 His oil-paintings are strongly reminiscent of Rossetti's work, 
 but with inevitable differences. He was a far abler crafts- 
 man than Rossetti, especially in his draughtsmanship ; there 
 is more dramatic intensity in his works than in those of 
 Rossetti ; it is as if the women whom Rossetti has shown to 
 us quite tranquil, and prone we cannot always tell whether 
 more to good or to evU, had been aroused to passionate 
 action. Cassandra and Helen, Medea preparing poison in 
 a brazier, Morgan le Fay looking at the shirt which she has 
 woven for her brother King Arthur, and which wiU bring 
 death to the wearer, she hating him for his purity and the 
 love and loyalty it has won for him : these he paints, and 
 the beautiful Vivien, not actively engaged in evil, but look- 
 ing, it may be, from a window or balcony at King Arthur 
 and his knights, contemptuous of their devotion to the good, 
 and thinking by what means she can overcome it with evU. 
 All these works are beautiful alike in draughtsmanship, 
 design, and colour, and powerfully imaginative. The beauty 
 of those who are so intent on evil helps to realise that 
 depth of evU which is the corruption of the best. 
 
 Spencer Stanhope was one of the Rossetti-Burne-Jones 
 group. He was enlisted to execute one of the pictures at 
 the Oxford Union. Many of his paintings, such as The 
 
i82 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Temptation of Eve and The Waters of Lethe, in the Man- 
 chester Art Gallery, are in tempera, and, being also decorative 
 in design, are more suited for an architectural setting than 
 for exhibition as easel-pictures ; indeed, much of his work 
 has been done as church decoration. It at once declares its 
 kinship with, particularly, the work of Burne-Jones, though 
 there is more expression in the faces and vigour in the 
 action. J. M. Strudwick, after passing through the 
 Academy Schools, became the pupil of Burne-Jones, of 
 whom he is often regarded as little more than an echo. It 
 is kinder, and more .just, to regard him as a kindred spirit, 
 for alike in sentiment, in decorative quality, in colour and 
 in technique there are marked differences between his work 
 and that of Burne-Jones. His world is one wdiere every- 
 thing is beautiful, and all or most of those who dwell in it 
 seem as if the storms of evil had ceased to trouble them and 
 had left them for ever calm ; there is need no longer fur 
 strenuous virtue. Walter Crane is another artist wdio came 
 under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. "When only a 
 boy he was attracted by the work of i\Iillais. His own 
 work has l)een chiefly decorative, and purely pictorial art 
 has lieen the least successful part of his achievement. He 
 has produced many pictures, however, his subjects being 
 chiefly drawn from myth and legend, and he must be counted 
 in the Pre-Raphaelite succession. Prederic Shields, again, 
 after working at the lithographic bench, and later executing 
 delightful drawings of child-life, came under the influence of 
 Rossetti, to whose work his pictures at one time showed 
 their indebtedness both in choice of subject and in treat- 
 ment. Ahvays a religious enthusiast, he has for a long 
 ■\vhile now been able to devote his art to what he hoLls to 
 be the highest service. He has done work for the private 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 183 
 
 chapels of Sir William Houldsworth at Kilmarnock and the 
 Duke of Westminster at Eaton Hall ; while, more recently, 
 the late Mrs. Russell Gurney entrusted to him the task of 
 painting a series of pictures in the chapel known as the 
 Chapel of the Ascension, which she caused to be built for 
 the purpose in the Bayswater Eoad. This work, which is 
 steadily approaching completion, is one of the most thought- 
 ful and loftUy conceived examples of its kind executed in 
 our time. FraAngelico cannot have brought more devotion 
 to his work than has Mr. Shields ; and even those who find 
 great limitations in his art, particularly in his colour, who 
 feel that his subjects are overweighted with symbolism, and 
 that the action and gestures of his figures are often over- 
 strained, can hardly fail, even if also they do not think as 
 he thinks about the lofty themes of which he treats, to be 
 impressed by the many noble qualities of his work and the 
 deeply spiritual purpose that informs it. 
 
 There is an interesting and highly creditable incident in 
 the career of Frederic Shields that deserves to be recorded 
 here. He spent many years of his earlier life in Manchester; 
 and this connection with the city led to the arrangement 
 that he should share with Madox Brown the decoration of 
 the large room in the Town Hall there. Each of them was 
 to execute six mural paintings, and Madox Brown was to 
 complete his quota first. When Mr. Shields saw his friend's 
 Work, he was convinced that the whole series should be 
 done by the one hand, and he absolutely refused to do his 
 share of the work, with the result that all the twelve 
 paintings were done by Madox Brown. There can be no 
 doubt that it was better thusj but the act of self-denial 
 none the less deserves its meed of praise, and it is satis- 
 factory to think that, at the Chapel of the Ascension, 
 
1 84 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Shields has found work for which he was better fitted than 
 the illustration of the history of Manchester, and at which 
 he could continue with unabated ardour through many- 
 years. 
 
 T. M. Rooke is another artist of merit, who worked at 
 one time with Burne-Jones, and has painted subject-pictures 
 of much power and beauty, taking his subjects mainly from 
 the Bible and the old myths. In later years his water- 
 colour drawings of medieeval buUdings and towns, records 
 of beauty that is fast disappearing, have been interesting 
 features in many an exhibition. 
 
 In his book already mentioned, Mr. Percy Bate instances 
 Sir Noel Paton as having come under the influence of Millais. 
 His works, and the laborious detail in them, are too well 
 known to need more than mention here. He was very 
 prolific, finding his themes in history, legend, poetry, and the 
 Biblical narratives. His work was always accomplished; 
 but he failed as a colourist, and his treatment of some of 
 the highest themes bordered at least on the sensational. 
 Mr. Bate notes also the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites on 
 several Scottish painters, but they need not detain us here. 
 Mrs. Stillman and Mrs. de Morgan clearly belong to the 
 romantic side of the movement. 
 
 Of the original members of the Brotherhood only 
 Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti take their place among 
 the chief painters of their time. James Collinson was the 
 only other member who did any considerable amount of 
 painting, but his work was not of conspicuous merit. He 
 became a Roman Catholic, left the Brotherhood, and his 
 place was taken by "Walter Howell Deverell, who, however, 
 died in 1854 at the age of twenty-six, before his powers 
 were fuUy matured. Madox Brown, of course, takes his 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 185 
 
 place along with the three painters who led the organised 
 movement ; and when to these four we have added Burne- 
 Jones, we have the five men who, by the quality and the 
 amount of their work, stand out as the chief exponents of 
 the two sides of the Pre-Eaphaelite movement. Among 
 those we have mentioned to whom minor place only is 
 accorded, there is not one who has not done work of at 
 least very considerable merit ; and the whole group, leaders 
 and followers, would leave English art grievously the poorer 
 were it possible to remove their names from its roU. They 
 form a numerous as weU as a strong company of artists, 
 and their work has been marked by sincerity both in crafts- 
 manship and in thought and feeling. MiUais is, perhaps, 
 the only one of them all of whom we are at all iaclined to 
 think as being in any measure spoiled by success — many of 
 them met with only too little success — and Millais' work, 
 even when he was most below his best, was stOl so whole- 
 some and so good as art that one can hardly think of it 
 without regretting anything said in the way of adverse criti- 
 cism. How delightful, within its limits, in design and in 
 colour and in expression of the human interest of its sub- 
 ject, is even such a picture as The Boyhood of Raleigh here 
 reproduced ! Yet it is not of his best, and many of the 
 lesser painters of the school have done far greater work than 
 this. 
 
 The effect of the movement upon our art is by no means 
 exhausted, nor is it likely to be. It insisted on things that 
 are permanently, if not exclusively, valuable. Even those 
 who could not closely follow the teachings of the school 
 have learned from it the meaning of sincerity and high en- 
 deavour; and our exhibitions to-day show that the letter 
 as well as the spirit of the movement still has power. Only 
 
i86 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 an example oi two must be given. Mr. Byam Shaw almost 
 startles us with a picture, The Boer War, 1900, that comes 
 close in its rendering of detail of flower and leaf to Millais' 
 Ophelia. There is good reason for the detail in each case. 
 OiDhelia is passing to her death, oblivious now of the leaves 
 and flowers and birds she has individually loved, and their 
 closely recorded loveliness adds to the pathos of the scene. 
 The lady in Mr. Shaw's picture has grown familiar with 
 every plant and bush by the stream-side. She has often 
 been amongst them ; but one who has been there with her 
 can now be with her no more ; and, in her grief, the old 
 familiar things about her, so well known in every least par- 
 ticular, have lost for her their beauty. In other pictures 
 Mr. Shaw shows his indebtedness to the romantic side of 
 the movement. Miss Eleanor F. Brickdale and Mr. Cayley 
 Robinson owe much, though in very different ways, to the 
 Pre-Eaphaelites. These are conspicuous instances ; and there 
 are many other painters now contributing to our exhibitions 
 whose work must have been very different but for the Pre- 
 Raphaelite example. 
 
 Have we sufficiently made clear to ourselves its charac- 
 teristics ? The reader may turn now with advantage to an 
 earlier page (42), where is given Mr. William Eossetti's 
 statement of the points upon which all the members of the 
 Brotherhood were agreed. M. de la Sizeranne sums up the 
 movement thus : " Looked at as a whole from Madox Brown 
 to Millais, from Watts to Rossetti, from the Westminster 
 cartoons to The Last of England, from Isabella to The 
 Huguenot, as from The Annunciation to Dante's Dream, the 
 movement of 1850 was this : new men longing for a new 
 art, substituting strange, novel, individual gesture for com- 
 monplace generalisations; and fresh, dry, pure colour. 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 187 
 
 brilliant by its juxtapositions, for sunken, overlaid colour ; 
 in one word, they exchanged the line of expression for the 
 line of decoration, and clear tones for warm tones. In its 
 simplicity this was Pre-Raphaelitism." Similarly, Herr 
 Muther says that the programme of the school was truth, 
 strict and keen study of nature j " even at the expense of 
 total effect, every picture was to be carried out in minutest 
 detail," the painters abandoned abstract beauty of form for 
 the "characteristic, energetic, angular; but their figures 
 painted faithfully from nature are the vehicles of a meta- 
 physical idea." This is how the Pre-Eaphaelite movement 
 appears to two foreign critics of our art. The subject- 
 pictures generally tell a story, be the theme great or simple. 
 In the great majority of cases our ability to understand the 
 subject depends upon our knowledge of literature. The 
 figures in the pictures do not explain themselves, and why 
 they look happy or sad, mild or fierce, or what else ; as the 
 people we meet in daily life explain themselves to us. There 
 are exceptions, of course, but they prove the rule. Then, 
 what these people are doing has to be done naturally; 
 gesture and expression must fit emotion, not the require- 
 ments of "abstract beauty of form." This characteristic is, 
 of course, most in evidence in the work of the realists, and 
 pre-eminently so in that of Madox Brown. Lastly, there is 
 the insistence upon detail, in every part of the picture, in 
 what is of chief importance to the subject, and what is of 
 least or no importance, detail such as the eye could not see 
 were the scene itself before us, except by long examination 
 of it, bit by bit. Both the general effect of the scene, such 
 as the Impressionists give, and fluid colour, are inevitably 
 lost by this method ; one kind of truth is obtained at the 
 cost of another, and beauty is imperilled if not sacrificed. 
 
i88 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 It is not only in the work of a Holman Hunt that we find 
 this insistence on detail, or in the work of those who were 
 especially influenced by him and by the earlier work of 
 Millais ; we find it in the paintings of Burne-Jones, Strud- 
 wick, and others on the romantic side of the movement, 
 though, with them, the decorative, as distinguished from the 
 realistic purpose of their art — they never give us the least 
 chance of thinking that, with a little more success on the 
 part of the artist, nature itself would seem to be before us 
 — enables them to put the detail to more artistic use. 
 
 The strength of Pre-Eaphaelitism lies in expression of 
 thought and the higher emotions. To those who think that 
 such things should be left to literature, this is its weakness, 
 for it means that sensuous beauty is not the sole or even the 
 paramount consideration. Herbert Spencer entered the lists 
 to combat Holman Hunt's theory of art. In an essay, " The 
 Purpose of Art," included in Facts and Comments, he 
 wrote : " Artists seek to magnify their office on the ground 
 that art is useful for intellectual culture : that reason being 
 the only one assigned. Years ago my attention was drawn 
 to this mistaken conception by a disquisition with which 
 Mr. Holman Hunt accompanied an exhibited picture— 
 ' Christ in the Workshop,' it may have been. The educa- 
 tional value of art was the theme of his proem. By 
 implication it appeared that it was not enough for a picture 
 to gratify the aesthetic perceptions or raise a pleasurable 
 emotion. It must teach something. The yielding of satis- 
 faction to certain feelings is not regarded as an aim to be put 
 in the foreground, but the primary aim must be instruc- 
 tion." Perhaps — certainly, I think— this is too crudely 
 stated. No artist would assign intellectual culture as the 
 only claim of his art to be useful. The utmost the Pre- 
 
THE COURSE OF PRE-KAPHAELITISM 189 
 
 Kaphaelites would say is that art may teach something, 
 may appeal to thought and the higher emotions, need not be 
 restricted to gratifying sesthetic perceptions or raising a plea- 
 surable emotion ; and that, in thus taking other than the 
 sensuous ground, it does not necessarily trespass on the 
 domain of literature ; that, indeed, it has means of inter- 
 preting ethical and spiritual things that are denied to words. 
 And it is not the Pre-Eaphaelites alone, nor only a few 
 artists here and there in this and that country, who hold 
 this view of the functions of art. Hitherto it has been 
 general. Those who think otherwise are a minority, prob- 
 ably among artists, certainly among those for whom the 
 artist works. "Whether or not the future will more rigidly 
 define the boundaries of literature and art we may leave the 
 writer of the future to say. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 PAINTING IN FRANCE 
 
 IT is not the aim of this book carefully to assay the art of 
 various countries during the second half of the last 
 century. It is written primarily for English readers, and 
 emphasis is laid upon English, or, to use the more com- 
 prehensive word so much insisted upon nowadays, British art. 
 Were this not so, the Pre-Eaphaelite movement should not 
 have had so much attention as I have given to it. It has 
 had this attention because our own art must here be our 
 chief concern, and because the movement has had a potent 
 influence upon that art during the last fifty years. It has 
 not been by the work of those alone who have been closely 
 identified with the movement that our art has been saved 
 from the tyranny of tradition and made free of nature and 
 life. Nor has it been maintained here that the pioneers of 
 the movement were wholly right in what they did and what 
 they left undone, what they praised and what they blamed. 
 There were painters who held on their way uninfluenced by 
 the movement ; there were others who took from it what 
 seemed to them good and eschewed what seemed to them 
 evil. In their work also tradition was modified and art 
 advanced. They have formed the large majority of our 
 painters, and an account of what some of the principal ones 
 among them have done has yet to be given, and co-ordinated 
 
 190 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 191 
 
 with the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, before we shall have 
 got even a summary of the achievement of our painters 
 during the half-century. Other modern tendencies in art 
 began to make themselves felt, and increasingly so as the 
 century drew to its close. The growing influence of French 
 art upon our own has led, as we have already seen, to strong 
 protestations in favour of a narrow nationalism in art, re- 
 gardless of the mischief that results from breeding-in in 
 any department of life. 
 
 The Pre-Raphaelite movement, as we have seen, owed 
 nothing in its inception to the contemporary art of other 
 countries. With Holman Huiiit it was a revulsion from the 
 conventions and triviality of the art of his own country ; 
 Madox Brown disliked contemporary French art, and M. 
 de la Sizeranne thinks he decided upon his methods almost 
 in a spirit of defiance. He was greatly influenced by the 
 old Italian masters, particularly those of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury ; so also, at a later date, as we have seen, was Burne- 
 Jones ; and doubtless the romantic side of the movement 
 owed much to Eossetti's Italian blood— he never, we may 
 note, actually went to Italy. From contemporary art the 
 Pre-Raphaelites learned little or nothing. It was not so 
 with the Impressionist movement in France. The Barbizon 
 school, which, by its close study of nature, made Impres- 
 sionism possible, owed no small debt to English landscape 
 painting; and, again, in 1870, Monet and Pissarro, we 
 recollect, were confirmed in their method of interpreting 
 nature, both by English landscape and by English art. 
 Tm-ner had endeavoured to render the most subtle and 
 fleeting atmospheric effects. Take Rain, Steam and Speed, 
 the picture of which a reproduction appears opposite an 
 earlier page. As the title suggests, the artist has not con- 
 
192 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 cerned himself primarily with the stable elements in the 
 landscape ; they are but a means to an end ; they are sacri- 
 ficed, almost blotted out by the rain which, even in England, 
 is but transitory. More fleeting still is the steam, first in- 
 visible, then, in its moment of change visible, soon invisible 
 again. Then there are dimly seen through the rain-laden air, 
 fugitive, also, themselves, not so much the train and the hare 
 as the rush of the train over the viaduct, and the swift 
 flight of the hare which is seeking to escape from the train. 
 It was such work as this that arrested the attention of the 
 two French painters and showed them the way along which 
 they were to travel even further than Turner had gone. 
 
 So English art influenced French art. During the last 
 quarter of the nineteenth century, however, French art 
 fully returned the service rendered. English and Scotch 
 students in large numbers went, as they still go, to Paris. 
 The efi'ects are visible — -only too visible some will say — in 
 all our exhibitions, even in that stronghold of convention, 
 the Royal Academy. And for this reason it is desirable 
 that before we complete our study of English painting we 
 should follow the general course of painting in France 
 during the half-century we are surveying. 
 
 The Impressionist movement in France, like the Pre- 
 Eaphaelite movement in England, was but one phase of the 
 growth of the whole art of the nation. It was, however, 
 so important as to justify our having taken it apart along 
 with the work of some of the painters who were most 
 closely associated with it, if not participators in it. By the 
 mid-century art had won for itself the right to find its sub- 
 ject-matter in modern life. In their various ways, Delacroix, 
 Courbet, and the Barbizon landscape painters had freed art 
 from the oppression of classicism. Painters were now free 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 193 
 
 to take their subjects from modern life, as well as to inter- 
 pret history, legend, and myth. "We have seen that one 
 marked difference between the Impressionists and our own 
 Pre-Eaphaelites was that, whereas the latter went chiefly to 
 books, the former went to life for their subjects, and this 
 actuality pervades the work of many more French painters 
 than the Impressionists and their close allies. 
 
 In completing our survey of French painting we will 
 first take account of its portrayal of contemporary life ; and 
 to begin with, we will take the work of the painters who, 
 like Millet and Courbet before them, were attracted by the 
 life of the country rather than by that of the town. The 
 former life is the basic one. The country can do without 
 the town, but not the town without the country. Life in 
 the country, also, comes close to nature, which indeed is all 
 around it ; and art has a noble, if not its noblest sphere, 
 when it deals with nature and the elemental facts of human 
 Hfe. 
 
 We begin, therefore, with the life of the fields which, 
 under the hand of Millet, became an epic, and almost a 
 tragic one. By Jules Breton, who was some thirteen years 
 his junior, it was treated more as an idyll, though he did 
 not depart so far from the hard facts as did George Mason 
 and Frederick Walker and this country. His reapers and 
 gleaners are strongly-built women easily capable of the 
 work they have to do, hard though it be. He takes an 
 optimistic view of the life of the peasant. We can see the 
 influence of Millet's peasants in the miners and iron-workers 
 of Meunier. If the Belgian sculptor had learned from 
 Jules Breton instead of from Millet, the King of the 
 Belgians would never have feared that his works might 
 powerfully reinforce the socialist propaganda. 
 
194 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 A generation later than Jules Breton came Bastien- 
 Lepage, born at Damvillers, in Lorraine, in 1848. As a 
 boy he lived in the country. School-days over, he went to 
 Paris, and, engaged part of the day in post office work, he 
 spent the rest of his tirae painting under Cabanel. In 
 after years he sharply criticised the methods in vogue in his 
 student days, in particular the imitation of classical art. 
 He set himself, when, after the war of 1870, he returned to 
 Damvillers, to paint the people and things around him ; he 
 threw off the classical yoke, and became and remained 
 through the whole of his short life — he died in 1884, when 
 only just over thirty-six years of age — an uncompromising,, 
 realist. It has been suggested that, had he lived, he might 
 have softened the vigour of his realism, escaped from a 
 narrow literalism into a broader treatment of his subjects. 
 This was not to be ; and we have to accept him — or as do 
 some, reject him — as an uncompromising recorder of facts:^ 
 
 If he did not quite know the peasant's life from within, 
 as did Millet, he was closely familiar with it, and his rustics 
 will carry conviction to those who have come into close con- 
 tact with the toilers in the fields. The man and woman in 
 his Hay Harvest recall the Mat and DoUy of the chapters 
 that Richard JefFeries called " The Field Play." The beggar, 
 whom the child watches as he turns away from the door, 
 while he puts in his wallet the food that has been given to 
 him, does not differ in essentials from tramps and beggars we 
 have known ; and many a village in other lands has its aged 
 Pfere Jacq-ues, though not everywhere will he go with his 
 grandchild gathering firewood among the trees. Lepage's 
 village lovers, his haymaker, his girl with a cow, are all 
 authentic renderings of an unlettered, hardworking pea- 
 santry. Their surroundings also, field, orchard, garden, 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 195 
 
 and simple homestead, in which industry seems hardly to 
 get the better of the large untidiness of nature, are recorded 
 with a fidelity that the landscape of our Pre-Eaphaelites, 
 with all its minute elaboration of detail, cannot equal. Mr. 
 Holman Hunt's lovers, in TAe Hireling Shepherd, cannot be 
 accepted as unquestioningly as the couple who, in the pic- 
 ture of Bastien-Lepage, have in their bashful awkwardness 
 a more serious barrier between them than the rickety fence ; 
 and all the minute elaboration of detail in the landscape in 
 the former picture does not bring us as near to nature as the 
 French painter's more suggestive rendering. 
 
 In such pictures as The Annunciation and Joan of Arc he 
 clothed old stories in modern dress, believing that, thereby, 
 the spirit of them was more fully expressed. Here, in one 
 particular, at least, he came very near to what has been both 
 alleged and denied to be a tenet of the Pre-Raphaelites : 
 the painting of an exact portrait of the living person who 
 most nearly realised the artist's conception of a character 
 taken from history or literature. As a portrait painter he 
 found his way to the character of his sitters, seeming 
 almost to tell the story of their life. The friendship be- 
 tween him and his Russian pupil, Marie Baskirtscheff, and 
 their death within a month of each other, from the same 
 disease, consumption, form one of the most pathetic stories 
 in the annals of art. 
 
 Ldon L'Hermitte belongs to the same generation as 
 Bastien-Lepage, and, like him, was born in the country, 
 His art has been chiefly devoted to the Hfe of the peasantry.. 
 He sets them before us in sober colour and clear light ; a 
 strong, fairly prosperous, well-clothed, contented people 
 they seem to be. There is no pervading note of sadness as 
 with Millet, no idealism as with Jules Breton, little that is 
 
196 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 pathetic as with Bastien-Lepage. These people work hard, 
 but pay-day comes round, and their religion brings poetry 
 into their lives. Church, churchyard-wall, houses, farm 
 buildings, are all in good repair ; the painter by no means 
 regards the peasant's lot as an undesirable one. These 
 accounts — may we put it ? — of the life of the peasant vary 
 according to the temperament of the artist, according also to 
 actual variety in conditions of life. Not any one of them 
 is exclusively to be trusted. 
 
 Somewhat younger than the men just mentioned, Dagnan- 
 Bouveret has also given a quite cheery version of village life 
 as the most important part of his life-work. He likes to 
 dwell upon the times when toil in the fields or the woodland 
 is suspended, so that the higher elements in human nature 
 may be called into play. Women receiving the consecrated 
 bread in church, a group of women, Bretonnes au Pardon, 
 seated on the grass, while one of their number reads from a 
 book of devotion, and two men stand by listening rever- 
 ently, while above other groups in the distance the church 
 spire rises : such are the subjects of two of his pictures. 
 In another we see a number of woodmen in the forest. 
 They also are resting from their toil, and are listening 
 entranced to a youth playing upon his violin. They are 
 robust, he is slight and pale — one of their number who 
 cannot work as they can, but who is capable of doing other 
 things which they cannot, and in return for which, as their 
 faces show, they will gladly let him share the fruit of 
 their labour, for man doth not live by bread alone, but by 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. This 
 picture vividly realises the right relation of the specially 
 gifted to those who in no particular rise above the general 
 level. Not to live a life as widely different as may be from 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE i97 
 
 the many, but to be one of tliem, cultivating the special gift 
 for the love of it, not for gain, and gladly using it so that 
 others to whom it is denied may yet enjoy the beauty it 
 creates — in a word, not to be ministered unto but to 
 minister — such is the artist's true place, as it is the true 
 place of each among his fellows. "We often lose sight of 
 this relation in the complex artificialities of life. Here we 
 see it in its simplicity and elemental strength. 
 
 Charles Cottet, another painter of the life of simple folk, 
 wiU serve to bring this phase of art quite to the present 
 time. He has painted in quiet, even sombre tones, the 
 people of Brittany. He takes us among such people and 
 such scenes as we read of in Pierre Loti's Pecheur d'Islande. 
 Let us look, for example, at his triple picture in the Luxem- 
 bourg. In the central panel the fishers are having a last 
 meal with their friends before they put out to sea. It is 
 not only the dim light of the lamp that makes the scene a 
 solemn one, or the night visible through the open window. 
 The event is in itself solemn, a veritable sacrament ; a com- 
 munion, it may be a last communion in this world. These 
 men and women may never again break bread together on 
 this side of the grave. The hour of parting must come — 
 has come, if we turn to right and left of the central 
 picture. To the right we see the fishermen out in their 
 boat ; they have the air of those in whom the sadness of the 
 farewell has not yet been dispersed by the need for action 
 and the thought of return. To the left, the women, seated 
 upon a cliff, are sad also, and, as their attitudes seem to say, 
 murmur a prayer ; for they watch the boat as it passes away 
 into the darkness, and soon the last glimmer of its light will 
 be gone. In all this there is nothing sensational. It is a 
 plain record of an everyday event; but of an event, the 
 
igS FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 going down to the sea in ships, that has over been felt to be 
 impressive ; and the painter has shown it to have epic 
 dignity. He has also shown his sense of the sacredness 
 that the love which centres upon even the humblest home 
 imparts to human life. This threefold picture, thus render- 
 ing homage to love, is worthy to be an altar-piece. 
 
 Such are some of the chief realistic painters who have 
 variously followed the lead given by Coiirbet and Millet, in 
 sympathetically studying the life of the peasantry and the 
 fisher-folk. The name of Butin may be mentioned as 
 another of those who have found by and on the sea subjects 
 for their art. There is no need, however, to add name to 
 name. It is enough to see that it has become possible to go 
 out into the country and to the fishing hamlet, and paint 
 what is there in all essentials as it is. To some painters the 
 interest will be almost purely pictorial ; light, colour, and 
 form will be their chief, perhaps their sole concern. Others 
 will add to these interests, will perhaps make them subserve, 
 the intimate human interest. However this may be, and 
 there is room for both renderings, it has been discovered and 
 fully shown that there is truer poetry in the mere facts of 
 daily life than in all the pastorals ever painted. 
 
 From the realists who have studied the life of the country 
 and the sea, men born, for the most jjart, amid the scenes 
 and people they have painted, and remaining deeply attached 
 to them, we pass to those who have interpreted the life of 
 the town. Alfred Eoll, a Parisian by birth, has combined 
 both interests, the town-workman, at his work or on strike, 
 and in angry mood, alternates with milkmaids and cattle in 
 the fields, and idyllic scenes in which nymphs play their 
 part. Jean Francois Raffaelli, also a Parisian by birth, has 
 made the city and the district just outside the fortifications 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 199 
 
 his special study. He comes very close to the Impressionists, 
 in fact, he exhibited with them ; and, under their influence, 
 •while putting in the forefront of his endeavour the realisa- 
 tion of various types of human character — caracterisme is a 
 word he has used to define his aim — ^he has also sufficiently 
 attended to play of light, and realised the all-pervading 
 atmosphere, so as to give his pictures something of the 
 illusion of reality. In pure landscapes he shows himself to 
 be almost one of the school. 
 
 But subject-pictures have been the staple of his work ; 
 and here, while Manet and Degas painted the Paris of the 
 boulevard, the theatre and the music-hall, he was fascinated 
 by the debatable ground that skirts the city. The spreading 
 of the hideous town, as William Morris describes one 
 feature of the growth of our civilisation, awakens emotions 
 which the artist can put to use. In the vacant space left 
 outside the walls of Paris, neither town nor country pre- 
 vails ; a halt has been called to the spread of the town, yet 
 the country has been destroyed. Such a district as this has 
 its own peculiar type of inhabitant and passer by. Needless 
 to say, the rich do not frequent it, nor do the rank and file 
 of the artisan class ; but we find there those whom we may 
 call the camp-followers of the city, who keep body and soul 
 together by activities that can hardly be dignified with the 
 name of work. This pitiful, waste land, and the pitiful, 
 waste lives that are on and about it, have found Raffaelli 
 the subject of many a picture in which both the scenes and 
 the people in it seem to make a mute appeal to us from 
 distances that our sympathy, but not our help, can reach. 
 EafiaeUi does not moralise ; he does not preach to us ; he 
 merely sets the facts before us. The facts speak, however, as 
 do many other pathetic and tragic facts of life. "Whether 
 
203 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 lie will or not, the painter, if he show human life as it is, 
 inevitably is in so doing a teacher. 
 
 Raffaelli has gone within the city and painted life there 
 also, the life chiefly of the workers and the very poor. That 
 which Madox Brown crowded into one picture, to the 
 danger both of his art and of the credibility of his facts, 
 Rafiaelli has set forth in many pictures and drawings, which 
 separately are convincingly true, and which, collectively, 
 assembling, yet not bringing into impossibly close conjunc- 
 tion, workers and idlers of many kinds, help in that 
 imaginative realisation of life as it is, which is so much 
 needed to take away the reproach that one-half the world 
 does not know how the other half lives. 
 
 In the Luxembourg, in the Caillebotte room, containing 
 the Impressionist pictures, Raffaelli is represented by a large 
 canvas showing a politician addressing a public meeting. 
 He stands on a platform. Some of his chief supporters 
 are with him. Behind him rises tier above tier of auditors ; 
 in front, a few men, immediately below the platform, suggest 
 a still larger audience that he faces. "We cannot, perhaps, 
 call this picture beautiful, but it is impressive. Clearly the 
 speaker holds his audience. He is seeking so to direct their 
 thoughts and stir their emotions that they will devote 
 themselves to the furtherance of purposes which probably 
 affect the workmen of the city and the vagrants of the 
 banlieue. Not beautiful, the picture, perhaps, but the 
 speaker and his audience are set before us with almost the 
 illusion of life. Subtle gradations of tone put them at the 
 right distance from each other and surround them with air ; 
 and sombre as is the general effect — a meeting composed of 
 black-coated men is never a brilliant spectacle — the painter 
 has not forgotten the claims of colour; he has used dull 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 201 
 
 red about the platform and in the ties of some of the 
 audience, to relieve what would otherwise be a monotony of 
 black coats and sallow faces. 
 
 James Tissot, after finding subjects in the picturesqueness 
 of the early Renaissance, took the fashionable world for his 
 subject. He lived and painted much in England. In later 
 years he turned with enthusiasm to the life of Christ. He 
 is represented in the Luxembourg by four pictures, which 
 form a series illustrating the parable of the Prodigal Son. 
 They are commonplace in colour, packed tight with detail, 
 and quite Hogarthian in their treatment of the subject. 
 The parable receives not only a modern, but an English 
 setting. The drama begins in a seaport inn, where the 
 father is giving the son good advice before he goes into a 
 far country. Other members of the famUy are present, 
 including the elder brother, who looks moodily out of the 
 window. In the second picture the prodigal has reached 
 the far country, and is in a dimly lighted room where 
 Japanese girls are dancing. In the third picture we are at 
 an English seaport again, and the prodigal, almost in rags, 
 kneels on the landing stage, clasping his father's knees. He 
 has worked his passage home, the last part of it in a cattle- 
 boat. Again the elder brother is present, looking on 
 indifferently. In the fourth and last picture the fatted calf 
 is being kUled in thoroughly English fashion. The family 
 is having an al fresco meal somewhere up the river. The 
 elder brother has been rowing. He comes up the steps 
 from the river, where are his boating companions, with a 
 sweater tied round his neck. He is also just filling his pipe. 
 His father invites him to join in the merry-making. His 
 response seems doubtful. At the moment he is scowling at 
 the returned prodigal. And at this point, as also in the 
 
202 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 parable itself, the story ends. Looking at these pictures in 
 the Luxembourg Gallery, we could more easily think our- 
 selves in the National Gallery of British Art, were it not 
 that the English people and English scenes have the air of 
 being seen from the outside. 
 
 Giuseppe de Mttis, an Italian who made Paris his home, 
 was a close associate of the Impressionists, joining with 
 them in their separate exhibitions. It was when painting 
 with him that Manet first made trial of ■plein air methods. 
 He studiously rendered the varying effects of atmosphere, 
 never forgetting that we do not live in an exhausted 
 receiver. He found his subjects in the streets, the quays, 
 the squares, the gardens of Paris, and at the race-course 
 outside the city. The scene itself, and the people in it, 
 divide the interest. In this his pictures resemble the earlier 
 ones of Degas, and some of those of Manet and Eenoir. 
 He visited England, and painted London as he had painted 
 Paris. Like Monet and Pissarro before him, he revelled in 
 the atmospheric effects produced by broken gleams of sun- 
 shine, and by mist and fog. 
 
 Paul Albert Besnard and Eugfene Carrifero, both born in 
 1849, have, each in his own way, carried forward the 
 rendering of light and atmosphere which the Impressionists 
 made the chief end of their art. Besnard, who gained the 
 Prix de Rome, has abandoned academic work to produce 
 pictures remarkable for subtle effects of light and for 
 brilliant colour. Nothing is too daring for him to essay. 
 His Portrait d'Artiste in the Lnxembourg, showing an 
 engraver at work in his studio under the semi-transparent 
 screen, is not only a fine character-study, but is a subtle 
 study of the play of cold grey light. The prevailing colour 
 is blue-grey, with the brown of the copper-plate upon which 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 203 
 
 the engraver is working, and of a vase, for contrast. Also 
 in tlie Luxembourg are his Entre deux Rayons and Femme 
 qui se cJiauffe, each a brilliant study of the play of light 
 upon flesh. In the former picture a woman is between the 
 window and the fire, and there is a mere drift of light and 
 colour — orange, deep red, and pink against purple-blue. In 
 the latter picture, where a nude woman is seated on the 
 ground before the lire, the flesh tints pass from blue through 
 white and pale pink to full pink and gleaming gold. In the 
 Luxembourg, also, is a landscape by him. Port d' Alger au 
 Ch'epuscule, and here blue, green, purple, and gold are 
 transformed into vibrating light. Besides other pictures, 
 in which, similarly, Besnard has played harmonies of light 
 and colour on flesh and costume and landscape, he has taken 
 part in the decoration of the Hotel de Yille, and there the 
 decorative quality of his art, and his capacity for working on 
 a large scale, are obvious. 
 
 The aim of Carricre, who died in 1896 at the early age 
 of forty-seven, was markedly different from that of Besnard. 
 Subtlety, not brilliancy of light attracted him. He was pre- 
 eminently a painter of children and their mothers. His 
 pictures are wholly simple and natural ; they are lyrics in 
 praise of domestic love. He is an Impressionist in the sense 
 that his figures are swathed in atmosphere, so as to give the 
 illusion of reality. This effect might be taken to be the 
 only aim of his art by one who only looked casually at his 
 pictures. But the look must be very casual that does not 
 discover the sympathetic rendering of character. Again, 
 although, in order to concentrate the interest upon the facial 
 expression as well as to give the sense of reality, all detail is 
 merely suggested, there is no lack of draughtsmanship. 
 Here is no covering of incompetency by fine names and 
 
204 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 theories, -which is Mr. Holman. Hunt's summary of Impres- 
 sionism. The drawing is masterly both in expressiveness 
 and in rhythm. In the picture, Intimite, in the Moreau 
 collection at the Louvre, the group of a mother and two 
 children is finely composed. In every particular the draw- 
 ing is admirable. One hand of the mother, and one of a 
 girl perhaps fifteen years old, are seen; and the contrast 
 between the firmness of the former, the result of years of 
 labour, and the softness of the latter, is one of the many 
 truly human touches in the picture. The contrast goes 
 even further than this. It is perhaps in keeping with her 
 mood that the girl's hand should be limp and expressionless. 
 She is closing her eyes and yielding to the baby's kiss and 
 embrace. Yet a girl's hand can hardly be as expressive as 
 that of a woman ; and the mother's hand here is not only 
 firm, but it shows the capability that comes with use. Her 
 face has an air of tender solicitude for her children, and tells 
 also of years of household care. Grey and black prevail in 
 the picture, relieved by the brown of the hair, and the pale 
 carmines of the children's faces. There are no definite 
 lines anywhere ; but the more defined edge of the girl's 
 sleeve, and of the wedding-ring on the woman's finger, give 
 assurance of solidity ; the gold of the ring being invalu- 
 able also in the colour-scheme of the picture. 
 
 It was easy, of course, for those who first saw these 
 misty-looking canvases to say that evidently the chimney 
 had been smoking. This kind of thing goes along with the 
 soapsuds and whitewash criticism which so angered Turner 
 when his Storm at Sea was first exhibited. I must not go 
 over old ground; but probably not every critic has dis- 
 covered how indistinctly we see everything but the one 
 small object upon which our gaze is fixed. And, even 
 
LKXFANT Al'X COXFITURES 
 
 EUGENE CARRIERE 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 205 
 
 though Carrifere adopted a somewhat rhetorical device to 
 give the iUusion of reality, and to suggest the "breathing- 
 sphere " in which we live ; it not only was justified by its 
 success in both these ways, but it brings all the figures in 
 his pictures into what seems more than a physical relation 
 with each other ; and, on the purely sesthetic side, it gives 
 occasion for subtle play of tones. It is interesting to find 
 that Carrifere expressed his indebtedness to Henner, Rodin, 
 Degas, Monet, and Fantin. It is impossible not to go further 
 back and think of Rembrandt and Velasquez. He is cer- 
 tainly of their lineage. 
 
 To refer in detail to others of his pictures would only be 
 to vary in particulars what has been said of Intimite. He 
 is well represented in the Luxembourg by La Famille and 
 Matemite. The variety of expression in the five children 
 in the former picture, according to both age and tempera- 
 ment, and the essential difference between the expression of 
 all of them and that of the mother, are most sympatheti- 
 cally rendered. In the latter picture a mother, with a child 
 asleep on her knee, leans forward, takes the face of an older 
 child in her hand, and kisses him. There are the same con- 
 centration and intensity here as in the first-named picture ; 
 and so we might go through the full list of his works. Our 
 illustration does not show him in the same vein as the three 
 pictures just mentioned ; but it is a delightful child-study, 
 and exquisitely painted. The youngster has found a pot of 
 jam; he is using his fingers to transfer the jam to his 
 mouth, and to his cheeks— and almost certainly to his 
 clothes. Conscience is by no means making a coward of 
 him ; and his mother has not yet arrived upon the scene. 
 He is supremely happy. 
 
 In the Theatre de Belleville, Carrifere successfully applied 
 
2o6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 his method to a subject outside the domestic shpere. Of his 
 Christ sur le Croix in the Luxembourg I hesitate to speak. 
 It has seemed to me that he has been content with the mys- 
 tery and the gloom, and missed the higher expressiveness 
 that the subject requires. His portraits do not call upon 
 him to leave ground vi^here he is a master. 
 
 I said on an earlier page that when we came to such work 
 as that of Miss Mary Cassatt, Degas' American pupU, we 
 should see to what irreproachable uses his methods could be 
 put. Carrifere, we know, was influenced by Degas, and 
 nothing could be further removed than his pictures from 
 the kind of charge often preferred in this country against 
 Impressionism, if not against French art as a whole. By 
 perhaps the most important part of her training, and by 
 years of residence and work. Miss Cassatt belongs rather to 
 France than to her native country. She is an exponent of 
 the Impressionist methods, and has worked a great deal in 
 pastel, as well as in oil, water-colour, and colour-etching, 
 delighting in pure and brilliant colour, and always surround- 
 ing with air the children and their mothers, whom, like 
 Carri^re, she takes for the subject of most of her pictures. 
 Her women and children have the charm and grace of 
 simple goodness, and we always seem to take them un- 
 awares, to have the chance of watching them for a moment, 
 at the work or the play of home, or enjoying its affection. 
 Eealism has been accused, to its disadvantage as compared 
 with idealism, of tending towards sensationalism. Of 
 course it lends itself to sensationahsm in ways that idealism 
 does not. There is even an idealism that is incapable of 
 either good or evil; that is mere emptiness. It is nega- 
 tive like asceticism. Such pictures as those of Carrike 
 and Miss Cassatt go far to prove, what perhaps needs little 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 207 
 
 proof, that the purest ideal is in the real, that the kingdom 
 of heaven is not far oflf, is very near — is within. Why are 
 the hallet-dancers and the drink-soddened women of Degas 
 so horrible % Because they are not cloistered nuns or saints 
 of the calendar? No; but because they are not like the 
 children and the women in the pictures of the two painters 
 just named, who, in the practice of their art, though not in 
 their choice of subject, were influenced and helped by 
 Degas. 
 
 Among the most interesting of the later Impressionists is 
 Maxime Maufra, who has combined with art, conceived in 
 the letter as well as in the spirit of that of Monet, some- 
 thing of the older methods of design. He has given to the 
 full the illusion of atmosphere that makes us forget the 
 canvas, while so designing his picture as not to disappoint 
 even those who look for the arrangements of form and 
 colour which give pleasure when we are not able to forget 
 canvas and frame. Thus, in an introduction to a catalogue 
 of a recent exhibition of his works, M. Arsfene Alexandre 
 says of him : " Distinguished from the Impressionist group 
 properly so called by regard for composition and by pictorial 
 instinct, this fine painter, profoundly enamoured of nature, 
 has remained faithful to the pursuit of light, of truth, and 
 of intensity, which Impressionism has henceforth imposed 
 upon all who paint outside as well the decorative as the 
 academic formula." A landscape by Maufra is not open to 
 the charge, often made against Impressionist works, of being 
 a mere fragment of reality ; it is as if nature had been sur- 
 prised, in the act of picture-making. No one unacquainted 
 with his method would suspect, on seeing his pictures from 
 the calculated distance, that there is not in them even an 
 approximation to detail, that form is so summarily rendered 
 
2o8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 as actually to be not merely generalised, but quite inaccu- 
 rate when closely examined. Yet, when seen as intended, 
 the pictures have both truth and beauty, and this in no 
 small measure. To quote further what M. Alexandre says 
 of Maufra : "He has been able, by his magnificent determin- 
 ation, to astonish our sight with scenes true, joyous, and 
 enchanting, in which the pictorial matter is richer than 
 ever, but is never indiscreet. He is equally removed from 
 wearisomely careful manipulation and from that intolerable 
 calculated clumsiness which conceit, or ignorance, or simply 
 dry theory, seeks to establish as individuality." Clearly 
 M. Alexandre is not blind to the vagaries of Impressionism. 
 
 Maufra was born at Nantes in 1861. His father was 
 engaged in business^ and sent his son to Liverpool to learn 
 English and to act in the interests of his father's firm. He 
 both attended to business and sketched in and near Liver- 
 pool, and having by speculation acquired a small capital, he 
 betook himself to art. Mr. Wynford Dewhurst, in his 
 book, Imp-essicmist Painting, quotes Maufra as declaring 
 to him his indebtedness to Turner and Constable, whom he 
 studied while in England, and as saying that Monet and 
 Pissarro were under a similar indebtedness to the same 
 painters as had been Delacroix and Manet before them. 
 
 Henri le Sidaner, born on the confines of Normandy and 
 Brittany in 1862, studied art first at the icole des Beaux 
 Arts at Dunkirk, and then at the ^cole des Beaux Arts in 
 Paris, under Cabanel. He was much attracted by the work 
 of Manet, and came somewhat later under the influence of 
 other painters who were engaged with the problems of light 
 and atmosphere, to which he also has addressed himself, 
 solving them in the Impressionist manner and creating 
 works of wonderfully subtle beauty. Two of his pictures, 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 2o0 
 
 La Table and Le Dessert, are in the Luxembourg. The 
 former is a night-scene in the open air. The cold light of 
 the moon gleams on buildings in the background. In the 
 foreground, under a tree, is a table, at which there has been 
 an al fresco meal. The dessert is on the table, and a lamp is 
 burning there, but the diners have gone away, and we who 
 look at the scene are alone with the grey moonlight and the 
 golden light of the lamp. These are the real subjects of 
 the picture; and, as with Monet's poplars, haystacks, and 
 cathedral fronts, the objects here — buildings, table, chairs, 
 and the dessert on the table — delightfully grouped though 
 they be, do but give occasion for the varied play of light, 
 which is so much exquisite visible music, in tones of deli- 
 cate grey, gold, green, and brown. Le Dessert is an interior, 
 where again a table is laid, but no one is present. The 
 symphony of light is played in the same colours, only here 
 the contrasts are stronger. Series of pictures of such cities 
 as Bruges and Venice have had motives of light and colour 
 similar to those of the Luxembourg pictures, and he has 
 treated figure-subjects in the same manner. Burne-Jones'a 
 complaint against the Impressionists was that they got 
 atmosphere, but nothing else ; they did not get beauty. 
 Whether or not it was because he was preoccupied with one 
 kind of beauty alone that he said this of the first Impres- 
 sionists, it certainly is the very reverse of true of such 
 artists as Maufra and Le Sidaner. 
 
 Auguste Emanuel Pointelin, older than the two painters 
 last mentioned, and Didier-Pouget, have loved and in- 
 terpreted the subtle moods and beautiful effects of nature 
 which are the gift of the light and the air in their many 
 changes. Pointelin is akin to Corot ; Didier-Pouget delights 
 to go out among the hills, when the haze spreads a delicate, 
 
iio FIFTY YEAkS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 transparent veil over the land, softening every outline, and 
 saturating the air above with beautifully tinted light. 
 
 D'Espagnat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Guillaumin, and 
 Van Gogh, a Dutchman who has made France his home, 
 are others who have used Impressionist methods. Vuillard 
 and others have evolved a form of decorative pictorial art, 
 applied chiefly to interiors, which has much the effect of 
 tapestry, dry colour being used and effects of light being 
 subordinated to decorative arrangement and colour. 
 
 An extreme scientific theory and practice of Impressionism, 
 known as pointillisme, carrying much further than Monet 
 has done the laying on the canvas of dots of pure pigments 
 calculated to produce from a given distance the same effect, 
 only with greater brilliance, as would have been produced 
 had the pigments first been mixed on the palette and then 
 transferred to the canvas, was worked out by Seurat, and 
 adopted by Signac, Anquetin, Van Rysselberghe, and others. 
 Camille Pissarro tried it for a time, and then abandoned it 
 again. Experiment has succeeded experiment, and will 
 continue to do so. Here we must not carry the story of 
 Impressionism further than the point at which, as is being 
 more and more generally admitted, it has made a most 
 valuable contribution to the resources of art for the in- 
 terpretation of nature and life. 
 
 We leave now the painters who have taken modern hfe, 
 and the world as modern eyes see it, for their subject. 
 They are not by any means all of them Impressionists; 
 though many of them who are not followers of Monet have 
 none the less been not a little influenced by the Impression- 
 ist point of view. All these painters, whatever may have 
 been their failings, have helped to bring art into closer 
 touch with nature and life, which they have seen and 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 211 
 
 interpreted for themselves, and not merely through the eyes 
 of their predecessors. 
 
 Yet the older formulae of art, with the modifications that 
 time inevitably brings, even to the most conservative 
 quarters, have still been applied. If at the Salon of the 
 Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts the modern methods are 
 so largely in evidence as to give to its exhibitions a dis- 
 tinctive character, at the old Salon there is a patchwork 
 of old and new. At the Luxembourg, the galleries of which 
 are wholly inadequate for their purpose, old and new 
 methods jostle each other, except where the peace of com- 
 mon consent reigns in the Caillebotte room, and in the 
 neighbouring room where are examples of the art of other 
 countries that has been largely based on French Impression- 
 ism. The older formulae have lived on because there are 
 certain classes of subject which are not so readily treated 
 according to plein air and kindred methods, as landscape 
 and modern life and portraiture. They have also lived on 
 upon their merits. After all, as has been said before, im- 
 pression of reality is not everything, and there are beauties 
 besides those of light, tone, and value. The end of art is 
 not yet. Impressionism has seized upon and opened our 
 eyes to truth and beauty hitherto unseen ; but it is not 
 therefore entitled to close our eyes to all other truth and 
 beauty. 
 
 We might, after following the course of French painting 
 down to Ingres and Delacroix, have considered first the 
 work of those who, during the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century, kept nearest to either the classical or the romantic 
 principle. The alternative was to push on at once with the 
 pioneers and then halt, and from the vantage gained take 
 account of those who were slowly pursuing the beaten track. 
 
212 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 The latter is the course that has been taken here, and we 
 have now briefly to consider the work of those who have 
 done little more than establish the victories already gained 
 by art, leaving others to win for it new territories from 
 nature and life. 
 
 In landscape painting the work of the Barbizon group 
 lasted over into our period, and its methods have been 
 adopted, with differences of course, by a succession of 
 painters. The elder Daubigny, Chintreuil, and Desbrosses 
 were among the older members of the group who have not 
 yet been mentioned. Rosa Bonheur, younger by ten years 
 than Troyon, and outliving him by over thirty years — she 
 died just before the century's close — carried on with true 
 sympathy his work of representing animals in landscape. 
 Many others have followed who have, in the main, painted 
 landscape and animals in the same manner — that is to say, 
 they have not, like the Impressionists, put vibrating light 
 and colour in the first place — or, even, almost alone — hut 
 they have been interested in the character of hiUs and 
 streams and trees and the living creatures amid them ; they 
 have not overlooked elements of power and beauty in nature 
 which the Impressionists, intent upon one gain for art, have 
 been apt to miss; and even with regard to the changing 
 moods and effects of nature, the gift, as I have aheady put 
 it, of the light and the air, these painters — or some of them 
 at least — have not only not left them unexplored, but have 
 given in some ways a fuller and deeper interpretation of 
 them than the Impressionists have yet done; and only 
 where that which the Impressionists have gained for us can 
 be combined with what the older schools have retained for 
 us shall we desire all our painters to break away from the 
 limitations of those older schools. 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 213 
 
 One type of picture that has had much vogue in France, 
 the military picture, need not detain us long. It is 
 referred to here mainly on accoimt of the work of one 
 painter, Ernest Meissonier. Speaking in general terms, it 
 may be said merely that this kind of picture has become 
 more realistic in treatment. It had its classical period, 
 when the modern soldier was approximated as closely as 
 possible to the Greek or Roman soldier; then it passed 
 through a romantic-heroic stage under Horace Vernet, Gros, 
 Eaffet, and others; under such painters as Alphonse de 
 Neuville, Edouard Dfetaille, and Aim4 Morot it has ap- 
 proached such realism as perfected photography in colour 
 might give, with the one advantage over the most perfect of 
 possible cameras : the painter's freedom to compose. 
 
 Meissonier, born in 1815, belonged to the generation 
 before that of the first Impressionists, though, living until 
 1891, his life outlasted that of Manet and others of the 
 group. Meissonier painted pictures of even considerable 
 size almost with the minuteness of miniature; and no 
 change in the tendency of art around him availed to 
 broaden his style. The laboriously painted detail of his 
 pictures was too much even for Mr. Holman Hunt, who 
 contrasts the small remuneration that Madox Brown obtained 
 for his work in the Manchester Town Hall with "the 
 extravagant glorification which greeted Meissonier's micro- 
 scopic representation of two dull old gentlemen playing 
 chess, or the picture representing nothing more ennobling 
 than a sign-painter painting his board, or again, a draughts- 
 man sketching in a barrack yard with a crowd of dull 
 onlookers, or, as the highest flight of military interest, 
 Napoleon on his white horse." Mr. Holman Hunt was 
 angry that such pictures as these were bought by English 
 
214 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 people at high prices, to the neglect of what he considered 
 more meritorious English work; and perhaps this makes 
 him something less than just to Meissonier, whom, let us 
 remember, Euskin praised ; indeed, he was one of the 
 purchasers of Meissonier's work. Mr. Holman Hunt also 
 contrasts the mechanical painting of a brick wall by 
 Meissonier, with the much more subtle and really beauti- 
 ful treatment of such material by Millais; and in this he 
 is certainly right. In fact, there is in Meissonier's work 
 much of that neglect of texture to which Mr. Hohnan Hunt 
 himself was given from the time of his first visit to the 
 Holy Land. 
 
 That there was nothing particularly ennobling in Meis- 
 sonier's pictures is no good reason for condemning him as 
 an artist ; and it is not wrong to pay well for a weU-painted 
 picture without asking whether the possession and enjoy- 
 ment of it will accomplish for us the same kind of good 
 we expect from the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten 
 Commandments. It is the mechanical precision and the 
 metallic hardness of his works that forbid us to admire in 
 them much beyond their mere skill and laboriousness which 
 have been indulged, one might almost put it, at too great a 
 cost. Manet's comment on Meissonier's Ouirassiers was that 
 everything was steel except the cuirasses ! 
 
 Pope, in the " Essay on Man," puts the questions : 
 
 Why has not Man a microscopic eye ? 
 For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. 
 Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, 
 T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n ? 
 
 For the purposes of art we may vary the second question, 
 and ask what is the use of inspecting the parts if we fail to 
 comprehend the whole. It is interesting to recollect that 
 
PAINTING TN FRANCE 215 
 
 Madox Brown applied the adjective "microscopic" to Mr. 
 Holman Hunt's work, just as the latter applied it to that of 
 Meissonier. The French painter can he credited with more 
 satisfactory composition than the English one; but the 
 complaint holds good against his work that he has sacrificed 
 the whole to laborious insistence on even the smallest parts ; 
 and this he continued to do while, around him, breadth of 
 treatment was growing apace in acceptance. 
 
 The example of Delacroix, and of those who, after him, 
 took art further along the road upon which he had set out 
 with it, did not prevent others, such as Charles Gleyre, from 
 still walking in the way of Classicism. The classical style 
 was almost inevitably modified ; but it was only modified, 
 not abandoned, by a succession of painters. 
 
 Alexandre Cabanel, born in 1823, and WiUiam Adolphe 
 Bouguereau, born in 1825, carry over into the second half of 
 the nineteenth century that which we might regard as more 
 properly belonging to the preceding fifty years. So do 
 Charles Henner and Jules Leffebvre, who came a few years 
 later, though Henner advanced in the painting of flesh 
 softened by the atmosphere and the play of light. We have 
 seen that he was one of the artists to whom so modern a 
 painter as Eugfene Carrifere expressed his indebtedness. 
 Paul Baudry, who belonged to the same generation, also 
 painted in a modified classical style, but infused more life 
 into it than the painters who have just been mentioned. 
 Henner, Lef^bvre, and Baudry were just about the same 
 age as Manet, and all of them survived him ; yet he became 
 a modern of the moderns while they only to a minor extent 
 broke with the past. Baudry won the Prix de Borne, and 
 spent five years in Italy, chiefly at the Villa Medici. He 
 copied Michael Angelo, Titian, Correggio, and others, and 
 
2i6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 his art was founded on that of the Italians of the fifteenth 
 century. Decorative painting on the great scale was that 
 which he desired, and his wish was gratified by his 
 receiving the commission for the paintings in the Opera 
 House at Paris. Both in this work and in his easel pic- 
 tures, mythology and allegory based on the old myths are 
 put to great use. The nude is, of course, paramount; and 
 Baudry gave it a distinct modern Parisian note. His 
 nymphs are elegant, highly artificial Parisian women. His 
 Truth, seated at the edge of a well, is a coquette. It is as 
 if one who went to Greek art for inspiration should he 
 unmoved by the idealism of Pheidias, and by all that was 
 nearest to it in the later sculpture — the Venus of Milo, for 
 example — and should seize upon all that was most seduc- 
 tively sensuous in the art of an age so conditioned as to lead 
 realism along doubtful paths. The art of the later Eenais- 
 sance was to the earlier art what Greek art, after the close 
 of the fifth century B.C., was to that of Pheidias ; and Baudry 
 did but interpret in Parisian fashion the lighter, it might be 
 said the baser, side of the art of the Renaissance. Along 
 with Baudry should be named Elie Delaunay, who aided 
 him in the work at the Opera House. Delaunay was a 
 child of the Renaissance, but he, like Madox Brown and 
 the Pre-Raphaelites, found guidance rather in its earlier 
 stages; and his art, if less brilliant than that of Baudry, 
 appeals to higher emotions. 
 
 Hippolyte Flandrin was a pupil of Ingres who won the 
 Prix de Rome, studied in Italy, placed draughtsmanship 
 before colour, and became a painter of religious subjects, in 
 his treatment of which he was little more than an echo of 
 the earlier Italian masters. Ary Schefi'er, though of Dutch 
 and German extraction, was so much influenced in his art 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 217 
 
 by the French painters that he is generally accounted as one 
 of them. He was a Classicist in that his draughtsmanship 
 was superior to his colour. He was more akin to the 
 Komantic school in his choice of pathetic or melancholy 
 subjects such as the Marguerite of "Faiist" and Paolo and 
 Francesca da Eimini. 
 
 In such ways as these did the classical influence persist 
 during the second half of the century. 
 
 Here, perhaps, is the best place to speak of two painters 
 whose names stand high on the roll of modern artists — 
 Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavaimes. They did not 
 merely carry on the work of either the Classical or the 
 Eomantic school. They defy any exact classification. 
 Moreau is allied to the Eomanticists, Chavannes to the 
 Classicists; but in the case of each of them a new spirit 
 seems to have come and to have moulded the form of his 
 art into something that also is new. Before their works we 
 find ourselves thinking, not so much how they have pic- 
 tured external things, as how they have used such things as 
 symbols with which to give utterance to their own thought 
 and emotion. With them, as with the Impressionists, the 
 subjective element strongly asserts itself. We may say that 
 they set problem-pictures before us, which also Watts, 
 Rossetti, and Burne-Jones and men of lesser name have 
 done in our own country. 
 
 In a house in the Eue Eochef oucauld in Paris there is one 
 of the most remarkable collections of pictures, drawings, 
 and studies to be seen anywhere. The word " collection " is 
 not the right one ; these works have not been brought to- 
 gether, they are in the place where they were produced; 
 they are the greater part of the life-work of Moreau, who, 
 horn in 1826, lived in this house, which came to him from 
 
2i8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 his father, until his death in 1898. He was under no 
 necessity to sell his pictures ; he disliked exhibitions. For 
 the most part he kept his work around him, working first at 
 one canvas and then at another, as the subject inspired liim ; 
 and now the house is maintained as a museum, and paint- 
 ings in all stages of progress are arranged in the two studios, 
 one above the other, in which the painter used to work. It 
 should also be mentioned that several of his pictures are in 
 the Luxembourg. 
 
 His master in art, Theodore Chass^riau, had taught him 
 to admire the earlier Italian masters ; and before this he had 
 copied the mural paintings at Pompeii. He was attracted by 
 the riclily decorative art of India, and he delighted in 
 beautiful art-work of all kinds. Though his home was in 
 the heart of Paris, he lived apart from the life of his own 
 day. Eeleased from the necessity of earning a livelihood, 
 he could choose, we may say, in what age or ages he would 
 live. We have said of Kossetti that he existed in the pre- 
 sent but lived in the past, and this was true also of Moreau. 
 He fed his emotions and his imagination on the myths and 
 legends of the days long gone by, and then he set them forth 
 in pictures that have no close parallel in the work of any 
 other single painter. He has often been compared to Burne- 
 Jones, but we must at least add Eossetti to eke out the com- 
 parison. "We do not feel satisfied even then. We need 
 something also that is akin to the spirit of William Blake, 
 an intense imaginative realisation of life other than that 
 which is revealed by the senses. We may liken him to a 
 composite portrait of these three artists. 
 
 The world he has conjured up is not an actual one, yet 
 he has so realised it that it becomes credible, almost even 
 inevitable. It has burning suns and glittering stars, it has 
 
■LA CHIMI.RE 
 
 GrsiAVF, MOREAU 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 2ig 
 
 gloomy forests and brilliantly hued flowers. The animals 
 that inhabit it are such as we read of in ancient lore, and 
 the people in it are human, yet strangely different from 
 the humanity we know, and dwell in halls of fabulous 
 magnificence. It is as if the painter had distilled beauti- 
 fully shaped and coloured essences of familiar things. To 
 say that he believed in this world of his imagination would, 
 be inadequate. He lived in it — lived in the world within 
 the world. This was what he saw. If the inner world 
 were not like this, it was because his vision was too dim to 
 see the beauty of it in its full intensity. 
 
 In this imagined world are gods, goddesses, and heroes 
 — Jupiter, Apollo, Hercules, Orpheus, Odysseus, Penelope, 
 Europa, Leda, Galatea, and many another. Here also are 
 Moses and David, Buddha and Christ. There is nothing 
 here of the dry literalism that buries the spirit of the past 
 under the letter of it. Yet how unfamiliar is the spirit 
 that pervades these strange imaginings ! How the old-time 
 stories and beliefs must have worked upon the brain and 
 the emotions of the painter before he could thus re-tell 
 them. The sumptuous sesthetic setting of them can hardly 
 faU to be repellent if we come to them wholly unprepared. 
 It is as if the myths and legends of the West, and those of 
 the Old and New Testament, had been translated into the 
 language of the Arabian Nights. They are, in fact, re- 
 told here by a recluse, to whom they bring no call to action, 
 but only delight and wonder at them, and for whom, nur- 
 tured as he was in art of exotic splendour, they inevitably 
 clothe themselves in form and colour too rich and glowing, 
 too fantastic, we may say, to have any correspondence 
 with the way in which all but a very few of us can ever 
 have imagined these things for themselves. 
 
220 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Comparison has often been made between the art of 
 Moreau and the poetry of Baudelaire ; and we are familiar 
 with the use of the word " decadence " in reference to both 
 of them. It is often used also of Eossetti, Burne-Jones, and 
 their followers. Are all these men morbid ; and, if so, are 
 they more morbid than those whose activities have made the 
 world hideous in the course of what one of the leading 
 men in commercial Lancashire has recently called the soul- 
 strangling pursuit of wealth % Do the mad who boast them- 
 selves sane drive the sane ones mad? However this may 
 be, Moreau created a world of strange, disquieting beauty, 
 one into the full significance of which it were too long and 
 difficult to enter here. 
 
 No such trouble and perplexity as we may well feel 
 before his works are caused when we turn to those of 
 Puvis de Chavannes ; rather would they give rest and 
 confidence to a perturbed spirit. Like Moreau, he turns 
 away from the world we know because he has a vision of 
 another one. Unlike Moreau, he does not see a world that 
 is passionately agitated, groaning and travailing in pain, but 
 one in which an infinite calm abides. We may liken the 
 one to the surface of the ocean, now rufiled by the breeze, 
 now lashed by the storm, and rarely wholly still ; and the 
 other to the ever untroubled depths below. The difference 
 between the worlds imagined by the two men is due, of 
 course, to the difference of their temperaments. We need 
 both visions; we need to feel that the heart-beat of the 
 universe, in alternate systole and diastole, will give us both 
 work and rest; if we be assm-ed of which, the paradox 
 becomes true that work and rest are one. 
 
 The deep quietude that abides in the pictures of Chavannes 
 caused it to be said of him in his early days — he was born 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 221 
 
 at Lyons in 1826 and was a pupil of Couture — that he was 
 infatuated with tranquillity. There is certainly an ascetic 
 vein in both the spirit and the manner of his work. It is 
 not surprising that he has been said to be nervously de- 
 generate, not whole and strong enough to face life as it 
 really is. I recollect, years ago, looking at his great picture 
 in the Sorbonne, and feeling that the sacred grove, with the 
 listless figures motionless or slowly moving in it, was not 
 the most convincing symbol not only of the pursuit, but 
 of the attainment of knowledge which, for us, at least only 
 means the need for further pursuit. Yet, perhaps, were it 
 not for the conviction that beneath the unrest of knowledge 
 which so often seems but to enlarge the bounds of ignorance 
 there is perfect knowledge, a veritable, tranquil sacred 
 grove, that, in brief, the universe is rational, we should not 
 have the heart to live. At least, surely, reason must go if 
 it could not escape from the conclusion that it was faced 
 by only colossal unreason. The weary student may well be 
 soothed and strengthened by a vision of the calm on which 
 his troubled quest of knowledge is securely based. 
 
 Chavannes became a decorative artist on the large scale. 
 Perhaps no other painter of modern times has had such fine 
 opportunities, and has made such splendid use of them. 
 How our own Watts and Burne-Jones would have rejoiced 
 to have his chances ! In some ways, luidoubtedly, they 
 could not have used them so well. There has been a long 
 tradition in France of painting on the large scale. In 
 England there has been no such tradition. It is not possible 
 to think of such a fiasco having happened in France as the 
 futile attempt of Kossetti and his companions to decorate 
 with mural paintings the walls of the Union building at 
 Oxford. When Chavannes appeared, and showed marked 
 
222 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 ability for mural painting, it was certain that, being a 
 Frenchman, such work would be found for him to do. 
 Watts, who could have done fine, if not as fine things, in 
 the same kind, was reduced to asking the directors of the 
 London and North-Western Kailway Company to let him 
 decorate, at his own expense, the waiting-hall at Euston 
 Station ; and, when this offer was refused, he had to content 
 himself with but little more than the fragmentary record of 
 his visions by means of easel-pictures. It was quite otherwise 
 with Chavannes. He was commissioned to execute mm-al 
 paintings for the museums of Amiens, Lyons, and Marseilles, 
 for the Pantheon, the Sorbonne, and the Hotel de Ville at 
 Paris, for the h6tels de ville of several provincial towns, and, 
 outside his own country, for the Library at Boston, U.S.A. 
 It was for the American Church in Rome, we recollect, that 
 Bume-Jones got his solitary commission for pictorial work 
 on a large scale. 
 
 In work of this kind Chavannes bore in mind that his 
 pictures had not an independent existence, that they were 
 part of the decoration of a building. He aimed at no 
 illusion of reality which would induce forgetfulness of the 
 waU behind the picture. For this reason he avoided realistic 
 colour, modelling, and light and shade, thus preserving an 
 only slightly varied tone throughout the picture. Grey was 
 the predominant colour, varied with sober blues, greens, 
 reds, etc. Not only are the sentiment and action of his 
 pictures tranquil, they are studiously quiet in their decorative 
 effect ; the wall has been covered with delicately modulated 
 colour, which takes away all sense of bareness without the 
 picture seeming to clamour for attention to the exclusion 
 of the rest of the building of which it is but an accessory. 
 This can by no means be said of all the mural paintings 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 223 
 
 whicli those of Chavannes have for companions. To take 
 one glaring example : the paintings of Chavannes in the 
 Pantheon at Paris have for their subject the legend of Ste. 
 Genevieve, the patron saint of the city. They are quiet in 
 tone, and differ in this respect from nearly every other picture 
 in the place. But, on the wall beneath the eastern apse, 
 there is a particularly garish painting by Edouard D^taille, 
 representing a wild rush of horse-soldiers "««?•« la Gloire," 
 Glory being personified by an actress astride a winged horse. 
 Above this picture is a mosaic by Hubert, representing 
 Christ reveahng to the guardian angel of France the des- 
 tinies of the country, while at one side is standing Ste. 
 Genevifeve, and at the other Joan of Arc. D^taille's 
 picture, vulgar alike in realistic treatment and in sentiment, 
 is a painful contrast, not only from the mosaic above it, but 
 from the quiet beauty and refined feeling of the pictures of 
 Chavannes; yet, presumably, according to some critics, the 
 latter is morbid and the former healthy ! 
 
 Whatever he paints, be it a dream of classical antiquity, 
 mediaeval painters at work in a monastery, allegories of the 
 seasons of the year, of war and peace, of the Muses and 
 the poets, Prometheus tortured for giving fire to mankind, 
 or what else it may be, he seems to have materialised some- 
 thing of the spirit that lives in all history, in all phenomena. 
 The quietude, the delicate harmonies of tone and coloui', 
 seem to unite the spiritual and the material ; the painter's 
 thought and emotion, his vision of the past, his longings for 
 the future, his touch of the world within the world, seem to 
 he — are, we may say — disclosed to us, not in the way of in- 
 formation only, but of emotional influence. One writer, refer- 
 ring to a series of allegorical paintings by Chavannes, says : 
 " It taps on my school satchel " ; and he imagines a Japanese, 
 
224 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 an appreciator of the great works of the artists of his own 
 country, but ignorant of the Greek and Latin classics, won- 
 dering what the figures in it mean, for he has not the special 
 key to their meaning, and the figures have not the natural 
 constraining power of plain truth and beauty. To this effect 
 writes Max Nordau ; but, alas ! exactly the same thing may 
 be said about many Japanese pictures ; they also are utterly 
 incomprehensible without a special key, and have not plain 
 truth and beauty. We need not go through the schools of 
 art and tabulate what would have to be dismissed to the 
 rubbish-heap were this kind of criticism applied to them 
 all. It is enough to note merely that Chavannes painted, not 
 for the Japanese, but for people with Western traditions 
 and knowledge. 
 
 Applied to easel-pictures Chavannes' method is hardly 
 adequate, though his picture The Poor Fisherman, thrust 
 into rather than placed in a miscellaneous crowd of pictures 
 in the Luxembourg, is not finally to be judged amid such 
 incongruous surroundings. It may be taken — to refer to 
 the subject of it — as an allegory of humanity, with difficulty 
 winning a subsistence by land or by sea, yet toiling on in 
 patience and in faith. The babe is asleep on the grass ; an 
 older child gathers flowers ; the fisherman silently prays that 
 he may get that which will feed them all. Another of his 
 pictures. The Beheading of John the Baptist, shows clearly 
 that, although in a moment the headsman will have severed 
 the Baptist's head from his body, the victory lies with him, 
 not with his murderers. The Reapers needs no comment. 
 
 The limitations of Chavannes' technique have often been 
 urged against him. He was not a great master of the 
 brush ; in aiming at simplicity he became rudimentary. 
 This is what has been said of him. But the means he used 
 
THE REAPER 
 
 PLI\'IS 1)E CHA\-A_\.\liS 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 225 
 
 were well adapted to the end he had in view. It is idle to 
 compare him with Raphael or Rubens, and say that he did 
 not paint as they painted — and this has been done — unless 
 it be to point out that without having the technical skOl 
 and resource possessed by these painters Chavannes has pro- 
 duced works which are of great beauty within their limits, 
 and which, also, touch the strings of new emotions and 
 evoke strains that are silent when we are before the works 
 of the masters with whom, in point of technique, he may 
 not compare. 
 
 The art of Moreau was so emphatically the expression of 
 an exceptional individuality that we hardly expect to see it 
 repeated with only minor variations. That of Chavannes 
 was simpler in its derivation, and departed less from cus- 
 tomary methods and ideas, and his name comes to our lips 
 when we see the work of other, younger painters. His 
 influence is plainly seen in the mural paintings executed in 
 the Panth&n and elsewhere, and in easel-pictures and por- 
 traits, by Ferdinand Humbert ; and Henri Martin, in 
 paintings such as the large Sh'Snite in. the Luxembourg, also 
 shows himself to be a follower of Chavannes. Each of 
 these painters, however, comes nearer to the Impressionists 
 by rendering atmospheric vibration. This tendency is 
 noticeable in the works of many painters whose subjects 
 are of the Classical and the Romantic order. It may be an 
 exaggeration to say, as did an enthusiast for the Monet 
 school to me recently, that there is nothing left but Impres- 
 sionism j but certainly, as it has been said that in the 
 paintings of Masaccio and his contemporaries men first 
 began to move about in a world prepared for them, so it 
 can be said that gods and goddesses, nymphs and heroes, 
 now begin to move about in a world where the breathing of 
 Q 
 
226 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 which their human form suggests the necessity seems to be 
 possible. This is a characteristic of the art of that fine 
 poet-painter EmUe Ren^ Menard, who has been called " the 
 singer of the clouds, of the high heaven, of the tranquil 
 sea, and of the silent mountain forests." This description 
 alone would suggest to us that he was one for whom beyond 
 all the many voices of nature there was one deep, still voice 
 that most he loved to hear. That voice is best heard in 
 silence, for it is not without, but within us, who are a part 
 of nature ^or of whom nature is a part, for nature leaves 
 us unsatisfied. It is nature thus writ large that Mdnard 
 paints, or sings — the word fits better. His pictures are hke 
 solemn odes or chants. The spirit that informs them is the 
 one that informs the landscapes of "Watts, but the expres- 
 sion in those of Menard is more subtle. His colour is 
 simplified to a few clear, full, harmonious notes. The air, 
 that which makes possible life in the world, and creates its 
 beauty — we are on old ground again — vibrates in every 
 scene, and the revealing light plays everywhere, at its 
 fullest, or minished through dimness towards dark. Nature, 
 in these pictured psalms seems to say to us, " Be still, and 
 know that I am God." The cattle are there, nature raised 
 to higher life than tree and flower. Man, higher stUl, is 
 there. Homer tunes his lyre by the edge of the sea, and 
 shepherd calls to shepherd to come and hear his song. The 
 gods are there, they commune with men ; and the shepherd 
 Paris gives the apple to the goddess of his choice, with the 
 dire results of which the song of Homer told. The old 
 stories cannot die. They arose out of life, and life has not 
 changed so much that they are not still essentially true to it. 
 These pictures, therefore, even though a Japanese would not 
 know who Paris and Aphrodite were, do more in their story- 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 247 
 
 telling than merely "tap on the school satchel." The story 
 and the landscape are completely unified by art ; each not 
 merely does no injury to, but explains and exalts the other. 
 
 In such pictures as these, Realism, and some measure, at 
 least, of Impressionism, unite with a lofty Idealism. We 
 have now for a brief while to observe Romanticism and 
 Realism occupied with their own familiar tasks. 
 
 The right to paint as they wished, and not as they were 
 bidden, which Delacroix and those who fought with him 
 had won against Ingres and his fellow-classicists, was main- 
 tained, with but little advance on new ground, Jay a number 
 of painters, some of whom lived untU nea/the close of the 
 century. Honore Daumier, who was born in 1808 and died 
 in 1879, powerfully aided Delacroix by caricatures which 
 were really trenchant criticisms of the productions of the 
 Classical school. It has already been said that he and the 
 other draughtsmen of his time did much by their work in 
 that kind to enable painting also to get into touch with 
 contemporary life. He was painter as well as draughtsman, 
 and, as is shown by the picture here reproduced, he broke 
 away from the academic conventions, basing his art upon 
 colour and a broad and vigorous treatment of his subjects. 
 This was, indeed, what the Romanticists achieved. They 
 made good the painter's right to emphasise colour rather 
 than drawing, to treat his subjects according to his own 
 conception of them instead of according to externally im- 
 posed conventions, and, further, to choose his subjects 
 where he would. 
 
 Delaroche, who has already been mentioned as taking 
 several subjects from English history, barely lived past the 
 half-century; Decamps, who went to the "gorgeous East" 
 for his subjects, died in 1860 j and Marilhat, who painted 
 
228 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 largely in Egypt, died, though younger than Decamps, 
 before our period begins. These men sought to render the 
 brilliant, burning light and colour of the East. Eromentin, 
 who, born in 1820 and dying in 1886, lived the greater 
 number of the working years of his life in the second half 
 of the century, gave a romantic, brilliantly coloured, but 
 unconvincing picture of Arab life. Gustave GuUlaumet, 
 who also made the East his province, was born in 1840 and 
 died in 1887. He belongs, therefore, as to his work, wholly 
 to our time. He had a profounder insight into the differ- 
 ence between East and West than his predecessors, who 
 only idealised its brilliance and picturesqueness. He was 
 impressed by the intense, vibrating light and heat, and his 
 pictures seem also to say that he knew how deeply they 
 have affected Eastern life and thought. In Eastern lands 
 the European feels as if time had been set back. At home 
 he easily goes back to the Middle Ages ; he may get even 
 so far as imperial Eonie ; in the East he is back among the 
 patriarchs. When some fellaheen of modern Egypt saw 
 the wooden effigy of a headman, old by how many thousand 
 years we only approximately calciilate, brought up from the 
 tomb in the sand, they cried out that it was the headman of 
 their own vUlage ! It is of this continuity of Eastern life, 
 which the West with difficulty breaks, that Guillaumet's 
 pictures speak to us. Of this we think when we see the 
 colour-washed stone or mud of his buildings, and the 
 interiors with such primitive furnishing. In his Evening 
 Prayer in the Sahara, the desert is darkening as the light 
 fades in the unclouded sky, into which ascend the pillars 
 of smoke from the encampment fires. The irregularly 
 conical tents seem to the eye to rise higher than the distant 
 range of hills, and so give us the measure of the vast 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 229 
 
 spaciousness of tlie scene. The herdsman keeps watch over 
 the sheep and cattle ; by the well stand the camels ; in the 
 foreground the men prostrate themselves in prayer. Hardly 
 in any particular was life different from this in patriarchal 
 days. Such a picture can hardly be described as either 
 romantic or realistic. It escapes into the ideal. Our terms, 
 which we use to guide us, mislead us unless we are warj'. 
 The real holds the most truly ideal. If we wish for cor- 
 roboration of this, let us think of Millet's Angelas. 
 
 Robert-Fleury, Boulanger, L^on Cogniet, and GdrSme 
 were among the painters who maintained the Romantic 
 tradition after the death of Delacroix, whUe making it, 
 as Delaroche had already done, more the medium for his- 
 torical illustration. Monticelli was a brilliant colour-poet. 
 The delicately graceful portraiture and fantasies of Aman 
 Jean belong to the latest phase of Romanticism. 
 
 Where shall we place Alphonse Legros % Born at Dijon 
 in 1837, he settled in England in the sixties, and became 
 Professor of Etching at South Kensington, and subsequently 
 Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College, London. 
 In Fantin-Latour's portrait group, entitled Hommage a 
 Delacroix, painted in 1864, and now in the Moreau collec- 
 tion at the Louvre, Legros takes his place before the portrait 
 of the leader of the Romanticists, along with Manet,Whistler, 
 Baudelaire, Duranty, and others. Thoughtfully, almost to 
 sadness, he looks out at the spectator. He has nothing of 
 the eager vivacity of Manet and Whistler ; and in his art, 
 be the subject landscape, the life of the poor, or some sacred 
 theme, we find a noble austerity, in form and colour and 
 feeling, and hear the deep undertones of life and nature. 
 
 Courbet, as we have seen, pushed on further than Dela- 
 croix; he would have nothing to do with even recent 
 
230 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 history ; a painter's concern was, in his opinion, only with 
 what he could see. His Realism paved the way for Im- 
 pressionism. But there were others whom we must call 
 Kealists who yet were not as uncompromising as Courbet. 
 They were willing to take their subjects from history. 
 J. P. Laurens, who chose the darker side of ecclesiastical 
 history, the strong measures of repression and persecution 
 taken by the Church to maintain its authority, as material 
 for his art, belongs to this category. L4on Bonnat, best 
 known as a portrait painter, also paiuted pictures taken 
 from history and legend as well as from contemporary life. 
 Luminals, Br^han, and others ransacked history for deeds 
 of violence and blood. Tlie Moorish Headsman of Henri 
 Eegnault is a well-known picture in the Wallace Collection, 
 London. His Salome is a mere animaL These and other 
 pictures of his have a brUliant warmth of colour going 
 beyond that of Delacroix. Later still in date — he was born in 
 1859 — Georges Rochegrosse has treated scenes from history 
 in the same realistic manner. Eoybet fotmd many of his 
 subjects in recent history, and took the Spanish painters for 
 his model in the treatment of them. Fran9ois Bonvin, who 
 belonged to an earlier generation, painted domestic scenes 
 in the manner of the Dutch masters. Eihot painted scenes 
 from common life, under effects of light thrown out against 
 broad backgrounds of dark shade and shadow, with remark- 
 able power and rendering of character. Chaplin, in his 
 pictures of the semi-nude, passed beyond the sensuous to 
 the sensual. Antoine Vollon has painted interiors, land- 
 scapes, and above all, still life. Charles Cazin mingled 
 history with poetic landscape. 
 
 It remains, before we turn from painting in France to 
 painting in other countries, to say a word about portraiture. 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 231 
 
 Many of the painters already discussed have been portraitists, 
 and this side of the art of some of them has been referred 
 to, though in the main we have been occupied with land- 
 scape and subject painting. 
 
 Has there been a change in portraiture akin to that which 
 we have been tracing in the treatment of landscape and 
 figure-subjects ? The answer is a very decided affirmative. 
 One wonders what would be the effect upon David and 
 Ingres could they visit the exhibitions at the Salons to-day 
 and see portraits composed of dabs of pigment which some- 
 times are not lost sight of individually, even when we have 
 got back to the opposite wall of the room, and which cause 
 M. X. or Mme. Y. to have the appearance of being half- 
 obscured by a steady downfall of confetti ! This is the 
 extreme of change that has taken place from the clear, 
 decisive draughtsmanship of the Classical school, which 
 makes their portraits look as if light shone upon them, but 
 as if atmosphere were a thing unknown in the world in 
 which they lived. Such are the extremes. There are many 
 intermediate stages. Quite unintentionally, through their 
 being unfinished at his death, two of David's portraits now 
 in the Louvre — the Madame Eeeamier and the Madame 
 Ghalgrin — anticipate Impressionism. Some of the prelimi- 
 nary painting, done in a bold stipple, remains visible, and 
 quite gives the effect of atmospheric vibration. One is re- 
 minded of the outdoor studies of Constable which, as 
 already mentioned, are much more luminous than the pic- 
 tures which he afterwards worked up from them in the 
 studio. David, however, was a fine portrait painter, a 
 master of characterisation, and he could also interpret 
 femitiine charm and beauty. It is significant that in the 
 work of Ingres as a portrait painter his drawings rival, or 
 
232 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 rather excel, his paintings. He, like David, was a true and 
 sympathetic interpreter of character, and his portraits stUl 
 hold high place in this respect. 
 
 No attempt can be made here even to mention any con- 
 siderable number of the portrait painters who have worked 
 in France during the last half-century. We are concerned 
 only to note what the art has gained during the period. The 
 gain has been not in power to produce a likeness, to seize an 
 expression, or to interpret character. All this was done 
 long ago perhaps as well as ever it will be done. We may 
 find that the portraits by Baudry and Delaunay are reminis- 
 cent of those of Ingres, that, away from the classical 
 influence, Ricard was a colourist, that Bonnat was a virile 
 painter and interpreter of character who has left a valuable 
 record of many notable men of his time, that GaUlard was 
 a literalist, and Dubois more subtle. We may note the hard 
 brilliance of Carolus Duran, and the verve and vivacity of 
 Boldini ; but we can equally establish such differences be- 
 tween contemporary painters in other periods. Perhaps I 
 have said too absolutely that portraiture, in certain all-im- 
 portant respects, cannot nov.' progress. At least, as character 
 changes from age to age, so characterisation changes ; and it 
 changes also according to the value placed at different times 
 on various qualities — if this be not another way of putting 
 the preceding statement. Anyhow, into these questions I am 
 not prepared to enter. I cannot undertake to show how the 
 portraiture of each half of the nineteenth century reflects 
 contemporary life. The one point upon which I wish to 
 dwell for a moment is the gain to portraiture by the illusion 
 of life obtained by means of the illusion of atmosphere, 
 which, as we have seen, has brought gain also to landscape 
 and subject painting, 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 233 
 
 It is instmctive to note that M. Eodin and his followers 
 have sought to obtain this advantage for sculpture by a deli- 
 berate lack of finish and softening of hard edges calculated 
 to make the figure look as if it were not really hard and 
 rigid, but mobile, and even as if we saw it through a slightly 
 hazy atmosphere. 
 
 In painting, of course, we may go back to such masters as 
 Velasquez and Rembrandt and find in their work the effect 
 I have mentioned, and this is precisely what the painters 
 themselves have done. To take only one instance : we have 
 seen that Manet in his portrait painting was influenced by 
 Velasquez and Frans Hals. And has not the deliberate lack 
 of finish in sculpture been attributed to Michael Angelo 1 
 Certain of the portrait painters of our time, however, have 
 carried effect of atmosphere further than it had been carried 
 before. Eugene Carrifere, we recollect, made the atmosphere so 
 visible that the joke of the smoky chimney was made against 
 him. Fantin-Latour, to whose Hmnmage a Delacroix reference 
 has been made, rendered the effect of atmosphere with great 
 subtlety. A remarkable example of this is the double por- 
 trait of Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, now in the National Gallery. 
 I have known a lady to step back from a room in which 
 there was a portrait-group by Fantin-Latour under the 
 momentary impression that she was unexpectedly face to 
 face with a number of gentlemen. If the portrait be com- 
 monplace, the illusion of life, of course, will give it no 
 distinction. If apart from the illusion it be distinguished, 
 then it gains by all the difference there is between mobility 
 and immobility, between expression and gesture that seem to 
 have been arrested and fixed for ever, and those that seem 
 but momentary and certain soon to change. 
 
 The effect is obtained by no one method only. The 
 
234 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 picture may be smoothly painted, all contours being carefully 
 modelled, all hard edges avoided, all values accurately ren- 
 dered. Or there may be no finish, but only vigorous lines 
 and simple washes ; figures and objects may be defined in 
 part by hard lines that do not exist in reality ; there may 
 be no colour ; yet, as in a black-and-white reproduction of a 
 drawing by Berthe Morisot that lies before me, the light 
 seems so to flash and gleam, to soften even at the distance 
 of a few feet, to shine so dazzlingly nearer to, and so to die 
 away in shade and shadow, that the illusion of reality, of 
 life amid an atmosphere that can be breathed, is extremely 
 vivid. This advantage the portraiture of the later years 
 of the nineteenth century possessed over that of its earlier 
 years. 
 
 With this brief note on one conspicuous feature of the 
 development of portrait painting in France during the last 
 fifty years, our study of French painting during that period 
 comes to an end. What is it that we have seen? We 
 have seen the art, in the immediately preceding period, 
 struggling to free itself from the tyranny of tradition, those 
 who engaged in the struggle being subjected to contempt 
 and even derision. First Komanticism won the right to 
 exist, then Eealism; and lastly, freedom was gained for 
 the painter to select and emphasise, or even to isolate, any 
 element of beauty or expression in nature and life that 
 especially impressed him. Art became free, for those who 
 cared for the freedom, from the tyranny alike of tradition 
 and of nature. Has liberty come, in some instances, to 
 mean license; has the artist become a law unto himself? 
 It often seems so as we walk round exhibitions to-day. 
 On the other hand, tradition and nature have not been 
 deprived of their liberty, but only of their exclusive 
 
PAINTING IN FRANCE 235 
 
 authority; and they may he trusted to hold their own in 
 the course of time and change ; abeady we find that some 
 of the Impressionists are taking up again, because they have 
 enduring value, traditions that had been, perhaps inevitably, 
 cast aside in. the time of revolt. 
 
 "We have now to follow the course of change in other 
 countries, and afterwards to see how and under what 
 influences painting has fared in our own country outside 
 the Pre-Eaphaelite movement. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 
 
 rpHE title of this chapter must be taken to mean painting 
 -'- in other countries than France and England. The 
 painting of our own country, apart from that of the 
 Pre-Raphaelites and their following, which has already 
 been considered, will occupy us later. As I have said 
 before, this book being written primarily for English 
 readers, emphasis is laid in it upon our own art, and the 
 more material we have for comparison before completing 
 our survey of it, the more useful that survey will be. 
 
 In the opening of his book, English Contemporary 
 Painting, M. de la Sizeranne says : " There is an English 
 school of painting. This is what first strikes a visitor 
 to any International Exhibition of Fine Arts, in whatever 
 country it may be held. Passing through the galleries set 
 ajDart for Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, 
 even for the United States or for Scandinavia, you might 
 imagine yourself still to be in France, and you are, as a 
 fact, always among artists who live in Paris, or who have 
 studied in Paris, or who follow, at least from afar off, either 
 the discipline of her school or the revolutionary movement 
 of Parisian art circles. A great many labels are required 
 to convince you that the Atlantic rolls between Mr. Sargent 
 and the studio of M. Carolus Duran, or that the Baltic has 
 
 236 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 237 
 
 been crossed to reach M. Werenskiold and that M. KoU did 
 not cross it. But on reaching the English pictures you feel, 
 on the contrary, that you are no longer amongst fellow- 
 countrymen, and it is doubtful even whether they may be 
 your contemporaries." M. de la Sizeranne says further that 
 all countries except Britain would be coloured like France 
 on an aesthetic map, "as if they were colonies of French 
 art." 
 
 "We may perhaps be allowed to assume that this is an 
 exaggeration, although the great influence exerted by French 
 art upon the art of other countries is undoubted. To such 
 influence the space given to French art in this book is a 
 tribute. But there has been action and re-action. If much 
 has gone out from Paris, much has also gone into it. Did 
 not Delacroix alter his own work after seeing Constable's 
 B.ay Wain % The Barbizon school owed much to Constable \ 
 the Impressionists owed much to Turner. This is not an 
 attempt to claim France as an aesthetic colony of England, 
 but only a reference to admitted facts which show that 
 something of not the least importance in modern French 
 art has not come merely by native genius or talent improv- 
 ing on the past. M. de la Sizeranne himself says that it is 
 the glory of Constable to have initiated a new movement in 
 Europe. Still, it is true that during the nineteenth century 
 French art influenced that of other countries, with the 
 exception of England, more than it was itself influenced in 
 return. Not that the influence was by any means always 
 a good one. We shall soon find painters returning to their 
 own country, there to unlearn much that they had been 
 taught in Paris. 
 
 It might be a question to which country we should go 
 first after leaving France, were it not that our own art had 
 
238 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 been so often and so greatly influenced by the art of the 
 Netherlands that gratitude alone might well lead us to turn 
 our steps thitherward ; so we will go at once to Holland. 
 
 After the great time of the seventeenth century, Dutch 
 painting fell very low in the eighteenth. In the former 
 half of the nineteenth century it feebly echoed the Classicism 
 and Eomanticism of France. We gain nothing by even 
 merely naming the painters of this time. But the old 
 spirit was only dormant, not dead ; and it awoke again just 
 at the beginning of the period that has been marked off for 
 consideration in this book. 
 
 The awakening began with Josef Israels, who was born 
 at Groningen, in the north of HoUand, in the year 1824. 
 He was of Jewish parentage, and his father was a banker. 
 In early days he wished to become a rabbi, and studied 
 earnestly with this in view. However, when school days 
 were over, it was to his father's business that he went. 
 But he was to be neither rabbi nor banker, but painter, and 
 he went first to the studio of Jan Kruseman, an academic 
 painter at Amsterdam, and then to Paris, where he studied 
 under Picot, a pupil of David. That is to say, this young 
 Dutchman, with the original works of the old masters of 
 his own country around him, painters who were the pioneers, 
 if not the founders of modern art, must needs turn his 
 back upon them and go to a foreign city to become an 
 imitator of imitations. Such for a time he became. From 
 Picot he passed to Delaroche, and returned to Amsterdam 
 in 1848, having been about three years in Paris. He at 
 once set himself to paint historical pictures of the approved 
 pattern, taking his subjects from the Old Testament, 
 Shakespeare, the history of his own country, and similar 
 sources. These pictures are regarded now much as are re- 
 
H 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 239 
 
 pented sins after conversion : as things to be forgotten and 
 not repeated. 
 
 The whole character of his art was changed, however, by 
 a compulsory return to nature, which, like that of the 
 Barbizon painters, was much more thorough than the return 
 of Hohnan Hunt and MUlais. Israels had been delighted 
 with the picturesqueness of the narrow streets of the Jewish 
 quarter of Amsterdam, and yet he had become an academic 
 painter. The change came when illness compelled him to 
 leave the town, and he went to Zaandvoort, the village on 
 the coast near Haarlem, which is now a household word 
 amongst artists. Here, away from galleries and studios, he 
 discovered the sea and the sky and the lives and surround- 
 ings of simple folk to be both intensely interesting in 
 themselves, and also the very best of material for art. 
 
 Israels, then, did not learn these things from MUlet ; he 
 learned them direct from life and nature. His plot in the 
 assthetic map of art has not to be marked with the French 
 colour. In fact, he washed the French colour off it. He 
 had gone to Paris to learn what afterwards he unlearned. 
 Millet had- only just left the studio of Delaroche when 
 Israels entered it. In 1857 he exhibited at the Paris Salon 
 two pictures having the seashore for subject. In 1859 
 Millet's Deafh and the Woodcutter was rejected at the Salon. 
 Israels is often called the Dutch MUlet, and the compari- 
 son is perhaps inevitable. He is not, however, a mere echo, 
 or even a mere variation of Millet, either in the subject- 
 matter or the method of his art. Millet painted an epic of 
 labour. Israels has painted lyrics ; subdued or sad, mainly, 
 but still intimate, bringing us into sympathy with this and 
 that individual man and woman and their children ; whereas 
 we think of Millet's people chiefly as representatives of 
 
240 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 many more, a great army of toilers for whom we feel a strong 
 but not individual sympathy. 
 
 Israels, also, was more intimate than Millet in his painting 
 of the surroundings of the people in his pictures. This 
 almost follows from his attitude towards the people them- 
 selves. Individualising them, he of necessity treated their 
 surroundings in the same manner. This is not to say that 
 he entered minutely into detail. Both in his portraits — for 
 this is what essentially the figures in these pictures are — and 
 in the accessories it is the essential only that he gives. He 
 will let us know how the simple dwelling is furnished, what 
 the chairs and tables are like, and the bedstead and the 
 crockery, and so forth, because all this is necessary if we are 
 to have the sense of intimacy with these people. But these 
 necessary details are not minutely described. They do not 
 assert themselves. They are there, and we know they are 
 there; that is all. We need not try to apply Euskin's 
 " inch by inch " criticism to these pictures. 
 
 Tone and the play of light amid shade and shadow are 
 what we find in his work rather than truth of local colour. 
 He lived and painted, we must remember, where Kembrandt 
 had lived and painted, and where were many of his great 
 predecessor's finest works. Greys and browns, with only 
 absolutely indispensable relief from other colours, answer all 
 his purposes. The breadth of his treatment and the subtlety 
 of the light and shade give that sense of reality, of life, that 
 we have marked as one of the chief gains of art Ln the last 
 half-century. "We are with these sailors toiling on and by 
 the sea, and these children playing on the shore ; we are 
 vnth these women working, nursing children, attending to 
 the sick, weeping by the dead. These pictures, because of 
 the human sympathy of the painter and his knowledge and 
 

 H 
 
 -^ 
 
 W 
 
 w 
 
 H 
 
 o 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 241 
 
 consummate art, do not seem to us to come short of life itself. 
 And it is not the mere externals of life that they set hefore 
 us ; they take us right to its feeling, loving heart. 
 
 The awakening of Israels was not to be a solitary one in 
 HoUand. Christoffel Bisschop, only a few years younger, 
 also turned from what he learned in Paris, and painted the 
 homely life of his native Friesland, filling his interiors with 
 sun-lighted air. We have already had to refer to the work 
 of another Dutch painter, Jongkind, who was older than 
 Israels, and also found his way to nature, becoming a fore- 
 runner of Impressionism. He, except by birth, belongs 
 rather to France than to Holland. But we soon have to 
 add to the names of Israels and Bisschop, as painters who 
 belong essentially to their own country, such now familiar 
 names as Mauve, Mesdag, Maris, and others. A quite 
 distinct school of art arose in Holland, faithfully interpreting, 
 as had the old Dutch masters before them, the land and its 
 people. If they borrowed from outside, it was only to 
 assimilate their borrowings to native gifts which altogether 
 exceeded them. When we look at Dutch paintings we do 
 not think ourselves in France — face M, de la Sizeranne — 
 we think ourselves in Holland; and we think of the old 
 Dutch masters, with a difference that is by no means 
 wholly to the disadvantage of the modern painters. 
 
 AH these painters have the modern feeling for light and 
 air ; they convey the impression of reality and life. Anton 
 Mauve is a painter of landscapes, not chosen, however, for 
 any special beauty. The most ordinary waste or cultivated 
 laud will serve. For are there not the sun, the mist and 
 the rain to create everywhere beauty that is now brilliant, 
 now tender and tinged with melancholy, now passing into 
 power and awe ? It is the delicate, tranquil beauty of nature 
 
 R 
 
242 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 to which Mauve responds, and he paints it either alone, or 
 with men and women, natural as nature itself, busy with 
 their simple tasks. 
 
 The brothers Maris form an interestingly varied group of 
 painters, apart from the rarity of three brothers devoting 
 themselves to the same art. There seems to have been 
 nothing in their ancestry to account for the gift which each 
 was to put to good use. They were . not of pure Dutch 
 descent ; their paternal grandfather, in fact, was a Bohemian 
 who settled in Holland. James, the eldest brother, was 
 born in 1837, Matthew, two years, and William, six years, 
 later. Their father was a printer at the Hague, and the 
 first evidence we have of the practice of art in the family 
 is his encouraging the children to draw. James and Matthew 
 both went to the Art School at the Hague, and later into 
 the studio of Van Hove, at Antwerp. James was after- 
 wards a pupil of Hubert in Paris, and Matthew joined him 
 there. They were to depart widely, however, from any- 
 thing that could be learned from the pupil of Delaroche. 
 William Maris, the youngest brother, received his teaching 
 mainly from his brothers. James, who died in 1892, was 
 mainly a landscape painter, as is also WiOiam. The former 
 took for his subject the typical scenes of Holland, the wide 
 stretches of country, the canals, the towns, red-bricked and 
 red-roofed, the sea and the heavily-built fishing-boats. Of 
 course, on land there are windmills everywhere, and, 
 above all, the sky, which in Holland, as in our eastern 
 counties, will not let itself be overlooked, in fact, is more 
 there than elsewhere, an all-important factor in the land- 
 scape. All this he painted strongly, yet at need delicately, 
 with a quick response to changes of mood and effect. 
 William has gone amongst the meadows and the trees and 
 
FAXTASY 
 
 MAT'lllICU' MARIS 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 243 
 
 painted them, and the pools among them, reflecting from 
 myriads of points the brilliance of the snn; and amid all 
 the splendour the cattle feed, or wander, or seek shade 
 under the trees, or cool themselves in the water. Matthew, 
 the second brother, has gone a wholly different way in art. 
 Is he more than his brothers of the race of his grand- 
 father? Certainly neither the wide landscape nor the 
 pastures and cattle of Holland have sufficed for him. His 
 brush is guided by an inward vision. His "Lausanne" 
 is like a dream of the Middle Ages; and, indeed, he has 
 sought, for his art, more beautiful things than those about 
 him. Israels found his poetry in the actual life of his 
 poor neighbours ; Matthew Maris paints a young prince and 
 princess — young lovers, as it seems — in old-time costume; 
 The Kin^s Children is a drawing that takes us into legend 
 or fairy-tale; and The Christening, The Flower, He is 
 Ooming, and The Spinner, are pictures of irresistible charm, 
 something at least of which they owe to the dress and 
 architecture of other days. Another picture, A Fantasy, 
 where a maiden is seated disconsolately by the fire while 
 a youth is stealing up behind her, might well be taken as 
 symbolical of the painter's own art, seeking to surprise 
 beauty. His maidens and children would be delightful in 
 any garb ; but the quaint beauty in which he has dressed 
 them removes them into that imaginary land the sight of 
 which sets the spirit longing, not in vain it may be, for 
 the world, as man shapes it to his use, to become more 
 beautiful than it is now. When the painter of these idylls 
 has turned to landscape, it has been not to portray it or 
 merely to interpret its moods, but to use it as a means for 
 the expression of his own emotion. 
 H. W. Mesdag paints, with great fidelity and power, the 
 
244 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 sea — the sea that sailors know, grey under a grey sky, or 
 over which the storm-clouds hang. Albert Neuhuys painted 
 genre scenes more brightly, with less insistence on the 
 shadows of life, than Israels. 
 
 Around these and other older painters has grown up a 
 younger generation, which has received abundant help and 
 encouragement from such men as Israels and Mesdag ; and, 
 particularly in landscape, genre, and portraiture, Dutch 
 painting shows itself full of life ; and, although it has not 
 been unaifected by French Impressionism, it has had and 
 maintains a markedly individual character. 
 
 From Holland we naturally turn to Belgium, for our own 
 art has owed hardly, if any, less to the southern than to the 
 northern Netherlands. 
 
 Belgium, like Holland, has a great tradition of painting 
 that goes back to earlier times even than those of the 
 Van Eycks and Memling. In the sixteenth and seven- 
 teenth centuries Flemish painters made up in this country 
 for the lack of native talent. Having had in earlier days 
 such painters as those named above, and others of hardly 
 less note, in the seventeenth century the country could 
 boast of Rubens, Vandyck, and Jordaens; and they had 
 successors of merit. In the first half of the nineteenth 
 century there came the almost inevitable Classical and 
 Romantic periods. Franfois Navez was the pupil of David, 
 and painted, among other portraits, a fine one of his master. 
 His subject-pictures, Hagar in the Desert, and so forth, 
 were entirely orthodox. But after the revolution of 1830, 
 which established the independence of Belgium, there rose 
 up against the David of Belgium a Delacroix in the person 
 of Gustavo Wappers, under whom, we recollect, Madox 
 Brown received a great part of his training. Wappers' 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 245 
 
 Episode of the Belgian Revolution cast to the winds all the 
 rules of Classicism, and went boldly for expression, move- 
 ment, and colour. Nicaise de Keyser, Van Eycken, and 
 many others enthusiastically followed the new leader. 
 Wappers was at Antwerp. At Brussels, Louis Gallait, a 
 pupil of Delaroche and an historical painter of mediocre 
 gifts, also gathered pupils about him. Henri Leys, at the 
 H6tel de Ville at Antwerp and elsewhere, became the 
 painter of events of the sixteenth century. 
 
 This is all a familiar kind of story. So is it to read that 
 soon after Courbet's Stonebreakers was exhibited at Brussels 
 in 1851, though at the time it was received with derision. 
 Realism found its protagonist in Charles De Groux, who 
 took his subjects from among the poorest and most miser- 
 able of the poor, and earned for himself the title of " the 
 painter of social inequalities." Again, the mid-century 
 justifies itself as a significant date in the history of modern 
 painting. Constantin Meunier, who became known chiefly 
 as a sculptor, but who was also a painter, and to whom 
 reference has already been made in connexion with Millet, 
 was the true successor of De Groux. He went to live in 
 the coal and iron district of Belgium, near Mons, and 
 painted the miners, the iron - workers, and the factory 
 operatives at their toil. Both his pictures and his sculpture 
 are a terrible indictment of the conditions under which 
 some of the most laborious and monotonous work that falls 
 to lot of only too many people to-day is carried on. 
 Nothing that is gained by the degradation of men to some- 
 thing that almost sinks below the human is worth the 
 awful cost. Meunier has set the degradation before us with 
 tremendous power ; and if it be alleged against him that he 
 has told the worst as if the whole were equally bad, it can 
 
246 FTFTY YEARS OP MODERN' PAINTING 
 
 be replied that the whole is so bad that passionately in- 
 dignant overstatement is entirely pardonable, and, it may 
 be, has its own especial use. 
 
 Realism, then, has found its place — we may say its mis- 
 sion — in Belgium. But all life is not such as De Groux 
 and Meunier i^ictnred, and Henri de Braekeleer was a 
 Eealist who, with the example of the old Dutch masters 
 before him, found his subjects among the working-folk 
 ^'hose toU. brought them enough with which to live comfort- 
 able, if simple and uneventful lives. Louis Dubois, Jan 
 Stobbaerts, and others became, under the Courbet influence, 
 vigoroiis painters of the contemporary life of the people. 
 Alfred Stevens, on the other hand, after beginning with 
 similar work, became the painter of the women for whose 
 pleasure and luxury the masses toil. He completes the 
 painting of social inequalities. He was born in Brussels; 
 his father was a connoisseur of art. His older brother, 
 Joseph, became a painter of animals ; a younger brother, 
 Arthur, became a critic and dealer. Art was well-nigh as 
 strong in the Stevens as in the Maris family. Alfred went 
 with Eoqueplan to Paris, and there lived and died. His art 
 is the reflection of the life he lived : luxurious life in the 
 great city. The women he paints could not, if they would, 
 toil or spin. They are the highly cultivated flowers for 
 which the men and women whom De Groux and Meunier 
 painted are the hotbed. Some day such flowers wiU not he 
 produced, at least not quite like these, nor at such terrible 
 cost. Meanwhile there such women are, there they were in 
 Stevens' day, very beautiful, very beautifidly dressed, with 
 surroundings in the best of taste, receiving presents of 
 strange Japanese idols, because the art of Japan was then 
 all the rage in Paris. How thoroughly Stevens understood 
 
H 
 
 2; 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 247 
 
 these women, how exquisitely he painted them — their beau- 
 tiful hair and features, their delicate complexions, their ease, 
 their grace, their dress, so elegant ; how wonderfully he 
 painted the satins, the silks, the transparent muslins and 
 laces, showing the softly veiled flesh-tints beneath, with the 
 mUd, warm sunlight making subtle play about it aU ! How . 
 lovely are these flowers — if we can forget the cost which 
 Meunier so grimly counted ! 
 
 Stevens had an exquisite sense of colour than which 
 nothing could be more suited to the subjects he painted. In 
 the reproduction that serves to illustrate his work here we 
 can realise the subtle light of the original, and we can almost 
 imagine its colour, play of gold and blue against the warm 
 background, delicate pink of the flesh, and forcing notes of 
 red in the ear, nostril, and mouth of "the present." And 
 what of the woman's face, and the look fixed upon the 
 grotesque little monster before her ? What is she thinking ? 
 And is there any kinship between her and the spirit that the 
 cunning Eastern craftsman has sought to embody in the 
 fawning, cat-like creature he has made ? It is a strangely 
 fascinating picture, whether it states a human problem or 
 not. 
 
 De Jonghe and other painters played a similar role to that 
 of Stevens ; and, lest the reader should think that I have 
 put social contrasts too much to the front in writing of these 
 painters, suggesting what was far from their thoughts — 
 though this cannot be maintained with regard to Meunier — 
 let me mention the picture by which Charles Hermans, 
 another Belgian painter, is best known. The Daicn, now in 
 the Gallery of Modern Paintings at Brussels. In the early 
 morning revellers in evening dress are leaving a restaurant ; 
 two women are clinging to a man who is so nearly reeling- 
 
248 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 drunk as to make it likely that the trio — one of the women, 
 at least, being also drank — will soon be following the 
 dropped bouquets into the gutter. In the street are men 
 going to their work. The wife of one of them, as she holds 
 his arm, casts a saddened glance at the sorry spectacle at the 
 restaurant door. A fur-coated, silk-hatted man within the 
 doorway looks as if the sight of the working-folk were 
 awakening in him some sense of shame. Here is a picture 
 with a purpose, a Hogarthian picture, as it has inevitably 
 been called. I neither condemn it nor defend it, but only 
 instance it. I may add, however, that it is an excellent 
 piece of realistic work. Still other painters came, who in 
 their pictures of the people were almost carrying on a 
 socialist propaganda. On the other hand, Emile Wauters 
 turned to history painting, to Eastern subjects, and to por- 
 traiture. His best-known picture is The Madness of Hugo 
 van der Goes, now in the Brussels Gallery ; it shows the 
 choristers singing to calm the painter's overwrought nerves 
 and brain, and the pathetic scene is powerfully rendered, 
 with fine, sympathetic feeling, and yet with dignity and 
 restraint. 
 
 We have had the Classical, the Eomantic, and the Eealistic, 
 and now — passing the horrible imaginings of the etchings of 
 Fdlicien Eops — we come to a kindred spirit of Gustave 
 Moreau in the painter Fernand Khnopff, who has sought to 
 make outward forms reveal the innermost realities, in various 
 pictures in which the Sphinx appears. The Secret, and other 
 enigmatic works. The Secret is a double picture ; there 
 is a masked woman looking at a masked head ; and 
 there is the beautiful little Gothic annexe of the Hospital of 
 St. Jean at Bruges reflected in the still water of the canal. 
 What does it all mean : masked face searching masked face, 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 249 
 
 the outside of the building hiding the inside, the reflection 
 in the water hiding the depths of the water ? There is an 
 imknown reality behind phenomena : is this picture a 
 strangely beautiful affirmation of the agnosticism of Herbert 
 Spencer? Others of Khnopff's pictures touch deep chords 
 of feeling, whether they convey any clear meaning or not ; 
 we seem to be deep down with the subliminal self. 
 
 "We have hitherto followed the subject painters of 
 Belgium. There has been no lack of landscape painters. 
 Passing with only this general reference the painters who, 
 before and about 1850, produced mere studio compositions, 
 we find Alfred de Knyff doing what Constable taught the 
 Barbizon painters to do, and what he himself learned from 
 them : painting nature green when he saw it green. This 
 was too much for the Belgian critics, as Constable's truth 
 had been for Sir George Beaumont and his like, and that 
 of the Barbizon painters for the critics of Paris; for they 
 had all been brought up on brown. Hippolyte Boulenger, 
 who was bom in 1838 and died in 1874, painted from nature, 
 and became a devotee of light and air. On his initiative a 
 number of artists, in 1868, formed the Societe Lih-e des 
 Beaux Arts; its first exhibition was held in 1870, and in 
 1871 it began to issue a publication, Ai-t Lih-e, in which 
 the members of the society set forth their views. Even if 
 there be new things under the sun, this is not new ; it is 
 the Pre-Eaphaelite Brotherhood of Belgium, with its journal 
 corresponding to Tlie Germ. Not that the kind of art 
 practised and advocated by the Belgian Society was the 
 same as that for which the Pre-Raphaelites fought. In this 
 respect it may be compared rather to the New English Art 
 Club. Not detail, or the brilliance of nature's colouring! 
 were what the Belgian painters sought in breaking away 
 
2S0 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 from convention and claiming the right to paint nature as 
 they saw it. Truth of tone, not of detail — harmony, not 
 brilliance of colour, were the aims they set before themselves. 
 Baron, Heymans, and others carried on the movement, 
 though the painting of detail did not go wholly without 
 support. Clays, Bouvier, and others were marine painters. 
 
 We hurry on quickly, with the general features of this 
 art in view, to come to those painters who have been in- 
 fluenced by the Impressionists ; and when we have reached 
 them and look back, we find that painting in Belgium has 
 run a course almost identical with that run by French art 
 during the same period, and this because Belgian art, the 
 close relations of the two countries explaining it, was largely 
 modelled upon the art of France. EmUe Glaus is one of 
 the painters who followed the Impressionists in seizing 
 fugitive beauties of light and colour and painting them in 
 all their brilliance. Born in 1849, the son of poor parents, 
 it was only with great difficulty that he obtained a much- 
 desired training in art. After some years of portrait paint- 
 ing and subject painting in Spain and Morocco he turned to 
 landscape and became the recorder of the beauty with which 
 the sun can invest the homely landscape and farm-buildings 
 of Flanders. There is no watching for the spectacular 
 effects which only come at rare intervals, but keen en- 
 joyment of the beauty which nature gives as a daily, nay, 
 far oftener than a daily portion, and the interpretation 
 of it in terms of art. In him, and not in him alone, 
 Belgian art shows itself sensitive to the new freshness and 
 intimacy of touch with nature, and fulfils the promise that 
 was born with Jongkind. 
 
 Like Holland and Belgium, Germany had a long tradition 
 of art before the modern period began. Then, in the 
 
PAINTING IM OTHER COUNTRIES 251 
 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there came, in part 
 under the influence of France, a time -when classical art 
 reigned supreme. Later in the eighteenth century, Chodo- 
 wiecki and others gave to the art a more realistic bent. 
 Then, later stiU, the classical fetters were riveted on again. 
 Much was written for and against the contention that Greek 
 art had created forms that were binding for all time ; and, as 
 in France, pedantic Classicism, protest notwithstanding, held 
 the free spirit of art enchained for many years. Anton 
 Rafael Mengs — the Christian names chosen for him by his 
 father are a sign of the times, and a particular prophecy 
 with regard to himself — and Carstens were the leaders of 
 this reactionary movement. With whatever intelligence 
 and sympathy they might interpret Greek thought in the 
 forms bequeathed by Greek art, they were not expressing 
 emotions native to their own time, and were leaving un« 
 touched what was of paramoimt importance, the interpre- 
 tation of the life and the nature about them. We may 
 dream of the past ; we may rightly, in a measure, live in it ; 
 because the past had often what the present lacks, and not 
 to forget it is to enrich the present and ensure a better 
 future; the mistake is to live wholly in the past, and 
 this is what these artists of the Classical period sought 
 to do. 
 
 German art made the gi'eat step towards deliverance by 
 a change of bondage. To enthusiasm for the pre-Christian 
 art of Greece, followed enthusiasm for the Christian art 
 of the early Renaissance. This was a more plausible 
 attitude, at least ; for though no one any longer believed 
 in Zeus, most people did believe in Christ. The Classical 
 period was followed, we may say, by a Gothic period ; just 
 as, m this country, there was also a Gothic revival which 
 
252 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 had a powerful influence on the romantic side of our Pre- 
 Raphaelite movement. It was enthusiasm, as we have seen, 
 for the Gothic buildings of Oxford and northern France 
 that determined Burne-Jones and Morris to devote them- 
 selves to art. The mediaeval picturesqueness of Nuremberg 
 inspired in the writer Wackenroder, just before the close of 
 the eighteenth century, enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. 
 Who that has wandered until weary, if not footsore, 
 through the streets and into the churches and mediaeval 
 public buildings of Nuremberg, and revelled in the wonder- 
 ful sky-lines produced everywhere by the infinitely varied 
 beauty of the high-pitched roofs, with a love of Gothic 
 art already awakened at home, or, perhaps, in France, 
 cannot understand the joy with which such art came to 
 a German as a revelation of an era of creative, national 
 art in his country's past ? Wackenroder's story of the joys 
 of an art-loving friar was the beginning of a German Pre- 
 Raphaelite movement. Frederick Schlegel anticipated by 
 nearly half a century Holman Hunt's conclusion that corrup- 
 tion entered into art in and after the time of Raphael and 
 Michael Angelo ; and he sought to turn the painters back 
 to the earlier Italian artists, and even to the primitive 
 Germans. 
 
 Art was indeed caught up in the new enthusiasm; not 
 Classical Rome, but Christian Rome, was the shrine at 
 which, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, such 
 painters as Overbeck, Cornelius, Schnorr, Fuhrich, and 
 Steinle went to worship. Of course there was war between 
 these enthusiasts for things mediseval and the enthusiasts 
 for things Greek, and the latter took up as a contemptuous 
 epithet for the former the old term of derision — Nazarenes. 
 To-day we are inclined to cry a plague on both their 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 253 
 
 houses. Pale imitations of the forms in which the Greeks 
 imagined their gods, and equally pale imitations of the 
 Italian picturing of the Biblical records, have little interest 
 for us, though, as we have seen, Madox Brown was much 
 impressed by Overbeck and Cornelius and their work ; and 
 in this way, they are linked with the history of our own 
 art, in addition to having a distinct place in the history 
 of German painting. Into detail respecting their work we 
 must not go. It must suffice to say that with Munich as a 
 centre, there developed an art based on that of the earlier 
 Italian painters. 
 
 Away in the north, on the other hand, with Diisseldorf as 
 a centre, there sprang up a Eomantic school, which had no 
 contempt for the later Italian masters, and went freely to 
 myth, legend, the Bible, and the history and literature of 
 any period for its subjects. The painters furnished pictorial 
 Ulustration to the literature that was then in vogue. To this 
 race belong such painters as HUdebrandt, Steinbruck, and 
 Stilke. Then came Alfred Rethel who, born in 1816 and 
 dying in 1859, belongs to the period just preceding the one 
 selected for study in this book. In his designs for frescoes 
 in the Kaisersaal at Aix la Chapelle he told the story 
 of the deeds of Charlemagne. His art was essentially 
 German, an art of vigorous expression, not of beauty, as was 
 that of Albert Diirer. Its character has become familiar. to 
 many who have never seen or heard of his larger work, 
 through reproductions of the two smaU designs. Death, the 
 Assassin and Death the Friend, the former representing 
 Death dancing and fiddling on bones, as the dancers at the 
 Parisian masked-ball lie plague-stricken on the floor and 
 the terrified musicians steal away; and the other. Death 
 tolling the bell for the old sexton who sits dead in his chair 
 
254 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 in his room in the church-tower, lighted by the rays of the 
 setting sun half-sunk below the horizon. Moritz Schwind, 
 born in Vienna in 1804 and dying in 1871, held as his 
 artistic creed that an artist should devote himself to that 
 which he himself deeply felt, to that which took hold of 
 him, whatever it might be. He particularly inveighed 
 against imitation of the Italian masters in language that 
 reminds us of Holman Hunt's, urging that such imitation 
 divided a man from his own personality. But Schwind did 
 not, like our realistic Pre-Eaphaelites and the French 
 Eealists and Impressionists, go straight to nature and to life 
 for inspiration ; he lived in the past, in myth and legend 
 and the picturesqueness of earlier days. 
 
 Schwind asserted that foreign influence was disastrous to 
 a nation's art. The generation of German painters that suc- 
 ceeded him came to the exactly opposite conclusion and 
 looked to the influence of French and Belgian art for the 
 salvation of that of their own country. They were right. 
 There is nationality in art, despite Whistler's saying to the 
 contrary ; but this does not mean that a nation is never to 
 learn anything from the art of other nations. In the former 
 half of the nineteenth century German painters learned 
 little or nothing from their contemporaries abroad, who, 
 however, had much to teach them. At the mid-century the 
 Germans found their way to Paris, to Antwerp, and to 
 Brussels ; they became acquainted with the works of 
 Delacroix, Delaroche, Couture, Wappers, and Gallait, and 
 many another. There was nothing here, of course, com- 
 pletely to revolutionise their art, but there were differences 
 in design and colour, there was a struggling towards a more 
 vigorous and realistic treatment of the same themes as those 
 the Germans had been accustomed to treat, that greatly 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 255 
 
 modified their work. Karl Piloty based his art on colour. 
 Feuerbach, who was genuinely inspired by the old myth- 
 ologies, remained, for the most part, a classical painter, 
 as, coming rather later, Hans Makart treated classical sub- 
 jects in a scenic manner. Victor Miiller, like Delacroix, by 
 whom he was greatly influenced, added one more to the 
 number of illustrators of Shakespeare, of whom' there have 
 been so many, of very various merit, in the poet's own 
 country. History painting on the big scale, as we see it 
 now in the Louvre, was taken from France to Germany by 
 Richter, Schrader, and others. In fact, one influence of 
 French and Belgian art on that of Germany during the 
 latter half of the nineteenth century is seen in the long 
 succession of history painters, even the names alone of 
 whom we must not chronicle here. 
 
 Genre painting had its place in Germany in the earlier 
 part of the century alongside an art engaging the mind 
 in higher things, or at least in things more highly esteemed. 
 It was here, almost inevitably, that painting came nearest 
 to life, except in portraiture ; and in our own time Germany 
 has had its counterparts of our own WUkie, Mulready, 
 Webster, and others, in its Knaus, Defregger, Vautier, and 
 the rest. In all works of this kind there is much detail 
 and incident; the pictures are prosy stories of the life 
 of the people. If they awaken emotion it is not by any 
 subtlety in the art, but because there are things the plainest 
 recital of which can move us. 
 
 So, also, with landscape painting : during the former half 
 of the century it is a matter of little more than picturesque 
 views and scenic effects. The great majority of the 
 painters of those years, and, indeed, many of those painters 
 who have lived on until our own time, were men in 
 
2S6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 whose opinion only the exceptional could be of real and 
 lasting importance. There was little quiet, immediate inter- 
 course with nature and life ; the relation of the artists 
 to their surroundings may be compared to that of strangers 
 who, when they are introduced, must keep up a conver- 
 sation. Friends can be together and need no important or 
 sensational topics — indeed, little or no talk at aU \ silence 
 does not mean awkwardness ; they have a sympathy that 
 needs not to be constantly put to proof. Intimacy between 
 art and the subjects of art did not exist fifty years ago as it 
 exists to-day. 
 
 This coldness was broken through in the region of history 
 by Adolf Menzel. He was born in Breslau in 1815, spent 
 his life in Berlin, where he was a very familiar figure, and 
 died there in 1905, the whole city lamenting his loss. His 
 achievement was to realise that history was being made 
 in his own time, and to raise the painting of contemporary 
 events to the dignity of historical painting. We and those 
 who shall follow us may or may not be interested in scenes 
 from the life of Christ painted by an Overbeck or a 
 Cornelius, or in an epic of Charlemagne designed by a 
 Bethel ; all will depend upon their imaginative gift, without 
 which their work will be mere tableau; but we must be 
 interested when Menzel paints King William setting out to 
 join the Arrmj, or in the sphere of industry. The Iron 
 Foundry. Why should the war of Troy be matter for an 
 epic and not the war of Germany and France, or Vulcan in 
 his smithy be fine material for art and not the indubitable 
 actual Vulcan of to-day ? The question has been answered 
 by showing that there is no good reason for such things 
 to be. 
 
 Those who saw the exhibition of Menzel's life-work 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 257 
 
 at Berlin in the spring of 1905, know how keenly observant 
 and unwearyingly industrious he was. At the same time it 
 was evident that he was hardly more than a chronicler of 
 facts ; there is little imagination in his work. His realism 
 has not the dramatic intensity that informs the art of Madox 
 Brown ; nor has it the subtle, sensuous charm and personal 
 intimacy of that of the French Impressionists. He gives 
 only a plain, prose record. He went so far into the past as 
 to make the life of Frederick the Great the subject of many 
 pictures; but contemporary life, from State ceremonials to 
 Sunday crowds in the Tuileries Gardens, scenes in Alpine 
 health-resorts, a crush in the Piazza d'Erbe at Verona, and 
 the exhausting toil of the ironworker, were the chief 
 material of his painstaking art. He was a German version 
 of our English Frith. 
 
 While Menzel was recording contemporary scenes and 
 events, Franz Lenbach was painting a series of powerful 
 and finely interpretative portraits ; doing for Germany that 
 which Watts more than any other of our painters did for 
 England during the same time. Little more than the head 
 is of moment in Lenbach's portraits, and, in the head, 
 chiefly the eyes, through the startlingly vivid expression 
 of which the very soul seems to become visible. His 
 Emperor William I, in the decline of his life; Bismarck, 
 the man of iron plainly seen as such, with an intensity of 
 expression that makes the face seem almost visibly to 
 quiver ; his Moltke, Strossmayer, Ddllinger, and many other 
 portraits, will make more vivid the reading of history for 
 the people of the future, as indeed they already begin to do 
 for us. They cast aside aU accessories; a wizard might 
 have called forth the naked spirit. 
 
 Passing even unnamed other exponents of realism, wc 
 
258 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 have to note that Germany has also had its representatives 
 in the same field of imaginative art as that in which Moreau 
 and Chavannes, Watts, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, and, in 
 Belgium, Khnopff, have worked. These men differ from 
 the Classicists and Eomanticists of earlier generations, in 
 that mythology has not been approached from the outside, 
 as something lending itself peculiarly to the ends of art by 
 giving occasion for use of the forms created by the Greeks, 
 and held to be of paramount sesthetic value, but as a means 
 for the expression of genuine emotion. Wordsworth, who, 
 as we have already had occasion to call to miud, " walked 
 with Nature," and felt always that he was communing with 
 the great spirit that informed nature, could none the less in 
 a moment of depression almost long for the gods of Greece 
 to return, so that he could 
 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 
 
 Though the gods of Greece be dead, we cannot yet dis- 
 pense with them as aids to the expression of thoughts and 
 emotions identical with or akin to those that called them 
 forth. In Germany, Feuerbach, we may say, lived in the 
 very atmosphere of the old myths; Arnold Boecklin, his 
 friend and almost his exact contemporary, older by only 
 about a year, used them to express his ovm emotions when 
 face to face with nature. He was an imaginative landscape 
 painter ; he felt that in nature there was a life akin to his 
 own, though vastly exceeding it in power. He painted A 
 Villa hy the Sea, and the bitter wind that bows the stately 
 heads of the cypresses becomes a symbol of the grief of the 
 woman who stands with bowed head by the waves, and a 
 prelude to his Island of the Dead. Silence in the forest 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 259 
 
 haunts his imagination and takes the form of a strange wild- 
 eyed monster passing amid the pmes. The sight of a 
 boisterous sea raises the vision of mermen and mermaids 
 disporting themselves in it. When rocks fall headlong 
 down the mountain-side, what is it but Pan frightening the 
 shepherd? And there must needs be terriiic monsters 
 dwelling in a gorge like that of the Via Mala, the name of 
 which is evidence of the prevalence of such a feeling, as is 
 the legend, not confined only to one Swiss pass, that there 
 are wUd chasms over which no bridge could have been built 
 without the Devil's aid. Himself a man of powerful phy- 
 sique, it was the power of nature that most laid hold of 
 him ; he looked as if he would answer the lightning with a 
 flashing eye and the thunder with a shout. His colour 
 answers to his own exuberant strenuousness ; so intense, so 
 uncompromising, refusing each of them to abate one tittle of 
 its utmost power, are his reds and blues and greens, that to 
 eyes unused to them they are little less than intolerable. 
 Yet softly blended and harmonised colours would have been 
 little to the purpose for the expression of such exuberant 
 vitality. We may compare his feeling towards nature with 
 Madox Brown's penetrative sympathy with his fellow-men. 
 It is as if the spirit of nature had gripped the one and the 
 spirit of humanity the other, and resistlessly forced the hand 
 to express, not the mere form, but the very essence of nature 
 and of himianity. For there is a sense in which the art of 
 Boecklin is as realistic as that of Madox Brown. His gods, 
 mermen, mermaids, and nymphs are no ghosts; they are 
 real with a flesh-and-blood reality. There is no question of 
 both the power and the spontaneity of his art. 
 
 Hans Thoma is a landscape painter who in many of his 
 pictures bids forth again the gods of old; while Max 
 
z6o FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Klinger can perhaps only be likened to Gustave Moreau in 
 the fecundity of an imagination that uses everything, 
 Pagan and Christian alike, to body forth the unseen. 
 Before his pictures we feel as if a spiritualist medium were 
 clothing revelations in the forms of art. Franz Stuck, born 
 in 1863, and therefore wholly of our own time, has, like 
 Boecklin, made the gods and satyrs and nymphs of Greece 
 live again ; but though he treats these with a certain dramatic 
 power, he seems to lack the qualities — spiritual, we must call 
 them — that are needed for anything that can be accounted 
 an adequate setting-f orth of themes drawn from Christianity. 
 Michael Munkacsy's pictures, Christ hefoi-e Pilate, "Not 
 this man, hut Barahbas ! " and The Crucifixion have been 
 seen in this country. They are attempts, melodramatic in 
 character, at a realistic portrayal — and perhaps a naturalistic 
 interpretation — of events described in the Bible. 
 
 Fritz von Udhe has learned what the French have 
 had to teach of the realism that fills the picture with light 
 and air, and having painted many pictures with familiar 
 scenes of contemporary life for subject, he has ventured 
 upon the doubtful path of giving to the narratives of the 
 Gospels a wholly modern setting. Yet the sincerity and 
 the spirituality of the treatment of these themes are beyond 
 question. It is in a modern schoolroom that Christ gathers 
 the little children round him ; to such peasants as we see in 
 field and village to-day he delivers the sublime teaching of 
 the Sermon on the Mount ; in a farm-kitchen such peasants 
 invite the Lord Jesus to be their guest ; the Last Supper is 
 eaten with Christ by men of our own time ; and whether or 
 not we think that rehgion needs or is really helped by such 
 an expedient as this, we can find no fault with the way in 
 which the painter, having determined it to be right, has 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 261 
 
 carried it out. The doubt — to many it will be more than a 
 doubt — of its value to religion we need not here seek to 
 resolve. 
 
 It is not possible here, it is not needfid to our purpose, 
 to give anything approaching a complete survey of the art 
 of Germany to-day. So varied is the work of its exponents, 
 so numerous are they, that not a few pages, but volumes 
 would be required had this to be done. We need only to 
 see, with help of a few conspicuous instances, that German 
 artists, like those of other countries, have passed from a 
 narrow conception of their mission, imposed upon those who 
 preceded them by too great reverence for tradition, to a 
 catholic understanding of what it is both lawful and ex- 
 pedient for them to do. One more painter only need be 
 named. Max Liebermann, who has adopted, in painting 
 scenes of modern life, the general aims of the French 
 Impressionists, and has in this given a lead to many younger 
 painters. He was born in Berlin in 1847. An early desire 
 to be an artist was opposed by his father, a merchant who 
 had other wishes for his son. But the bent towards art 
 was too strong to be resisted, and it was with his father's 
 consent that the youth eventually had his way. After 
 studying at Weimar he went to Paris, from there to 
 Holland, and again to Paris, studied the works of the 
 Barbizon painters, visited Millet at Barbizon, and came 
 under the influence of the Impressionist group. It was 
 not, however, until after other wanderings, and the painting 
 of pictures of religious subjects, that he found his vocation 
 in the painting of scenes from everyday life treated in an 
 Impressionist manner. An Asylum for Old Men, painted 
 in Amsterdam, whither he had gone because his religious 
 pictures had given offence in Munich, obtained a medal of 
 
262 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 the third class at the Paris Salon of 1881 ; and now, reputa- 
 tion having thus been made, he returned to live in his own 
 country. He has also spent much time at Zaandvoort, the 
 Dutch village already mentioned in connexion with Josef 
 Israels, whom he met there during his stay in Holland. 
 The subject of Liebermann's art is simply life being lived 
 in a world that has an atmosphere and in which the sun 
 shines. His pictures are purely pictorial ; they tell no story 
 and seek to enforce no moral. The people he has painted 
 are the working poor, but he has taken no gloomy view of 
 their lot. They toil, but they seem healthy and happy in 
 their toil, and they are always in the sunshine. It dapples 
 everything as it shines through the trees in the Amsterdam 
 asylum picture ; it floods the rooms in which are working 
 the cobbler and his boy, the sempstress, and the flax- 
 spinners. His pictures of women and girls out in the open, 
 mending nets, or — as in our illustration — tending sheep or 
 goats, remind us strongly of the work of Millet — only these 
 people are happier than those of MUlet. It takes all sorts, 
 we say, to make a world. It takes many artists of very 
 various temperaments to interpret even a Uttle corner of 
 our world ; and, even then, how much is left untold ! 
 
 Here must end our brief survey of German art. Did it 
 profess to be a record of all painters of considerable merit, 
 much would have to be added. As a survey to aid in 
 forming a general estimate of the art of our own country in 
 relation to that of others, it may sufifice. 
 
 The countries whose art we have already considered- 
 France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany— are the most 
 important for the purpose of enabling us to understand the 
 general progress of painting during the period we have 
 under review. To them we must add America or, strictly. 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 263 
 
 the United States of America, whose artists — we can hardly 
 say, as we shall see hereafter, whose art — have had a 
 marked influence on the art of our own country. First, 
 however, we must say what seems needful about the art 
 of other European countries, to which I purpose to refer in 
 only the most general terms. Eussia may be left out of 
 account altogether; not because painting in Eussia lacks 
 ii iterest and importance, but because it is not in close rela- 
 tion to the art-movements that have influenced and still 
 influence the art of the rest of Europe and America and 
 our own country. Of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden but 
 little need be said. They are among the provinces of 
 European art, taking from the great centres much more 
 than they have to give. Their painters treat historical, 
 reUgious, genre, and landscape subjects with only local 
 differences — interesting, however, to note — from the way 
 in which they are treated elsewhere. "Without the aid of 
 illustrations, however, what could be said here would only 
 he in the way of record of things much less familiar than 
 are the works of the French, Dutch, Belgian, and German 
 painters already discussed ; and a comprehensive record for 
 the purposes of reference is not what this book professes to 
 give. Occasionally an artist from one of these countries 
 becomes as familiar to us as are our own painters. Such an 
 one was the Norwegian painter Fritz Thaulow, whose works 
 for years past have been regularly seen in our own exhibi- 
 tions. He was the master-painter of snow and of reflec- 
 tions in running water, where the curves due to movement 
 add beauty of form to exquisitely lovely variations of 
 colour. The Swedish painter Anders Zorn, who has so 
 brilliantly rendered effects of light and colour, has also 
 become well known outside his own country. To say more 
 
264 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 than this, without saying very much more, ahout those 
 whom we may call our kinsfolk in the north, would he to 
 do them an injustice. 
 
 Turning south, we find Spain, after a long period of 
 stagnation, producing in the latter half of the eighteenth 
 century a revolutionary artist of extraordinary power in 
 the person of Francisco Goya — a necromancer he might well 
 be styled. Then came a period of Classicism and Eomance, 
 such as we have seen in other countries — even those 
 northern ones we have just glanced at did not escape it. In 
 1838 was born Mariano Fortuny, who, after studying art in 
 Rome, spent several months in Morocco, a visit that led to 
 his painting a number of pictures of Eastern life. Then 
 he won applause for the works with which his name is now 
 almost exclusively associated, the marvellously executed 
 pictures, with their wealth of glittering detail, of high-life 
 in Spain in the previous century. 
 
 Fortuny, who died in 1876, had many imitators in his 
 own country and abroad. There was ready appreciation of 
 such dexterous and superficially brilliant work. His methods 
 were applied in Spain itself not merely to the re-creating of 
 the past, but to the delineating of the present. Kico, 
 Madrazo, Domingo, and Pradilla are among those who have 
 done work of this kind ; while other painters, and some of 
 those also who painted in Fortuny's manner, have executed 
 large historical pictures in the manner of the French 
 Romanticists. Of such are Casado's The, Bells of Huesca, 
 Pradilla's Surrender of Granada, 14-92, and many others. 
 Such work as this has| lasted- over from an earlier time — 
 and may yet continue ; but it is not new. Other painters, 
 such as Ignacio Zuloaga, La Gandara, Hermen Anglada, and 
 SoroUa y Bastida, have been caught up in the modern 
 
TlIK liAl.('ON\- 
 
 ICXACIO ZUI.OAGA 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 265 
 
 movement. Such men disport themselves at times, as if 
 with the joy of children bathing in a sunlit sea, in light and 
 colour, without concerning themselves with subject, with 
 doings and happenings whether important or trivial. Indeed, 
 we have sometimes mere play of brilliant colour, out of 
 which it is with the utmost difficulty that we make anything 
 in the way of representation. There is the spirit of Goya in 
 the picture by Zuloaga here reproduced, but the manner of 
 its painting belongs to the latest phase of the art. 
 
 Italy has very little to offer that is to our purpose. The 
 modern movements in art have originated and jDrogressed to 
 the north of the Alps and the Pyrenees alike. The stamp 
 of Fortuny has been deeply impressed on Italian painting, 
 particularly in the south, where climate, surroundings, and 
 temperament all alike invite towards colour, verve, and 
 vivacity. Italy, of course, has had and has her painters, 
 many painters, of religious, historical, and genre subjects 
 and of landscape. This goes without saying. But Italian 
 art has given to Europe little that is originative or inspiring, 
 while it has given much that is trivial or sensational. The 
 names of MorelH, the Neapolitan painter of religious sub- 
 jects, and of Segantini, an imaginative painter of the 
 landscape of the mountains, who is well known outside his 
 own country, stand oixt prominently. Into his pictures 
 Segantini knows how to bring a Dantesque element, as in 
 The, Punishment of Luxury, now in the Liverpool Art 
 Gallery, where those who, like Dives, once had their good 
 things, now float in the clear, cold, biting air above the 
 frozen snows. 
 
 An Italian who has made his reputation outside his own 
 country is Giovanni Boldini, who was born at Ferrara. 
 "\'\Tien quite a young man he left Italy for London, and 
 
266 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 afterwards settled in Paris. With extraordinary and varied 
 skill, and a rapid choice of what is essential to his purpose, 
 which is like an artistic shorthand, he has painted portraits 
 of fashionable women, and of children and scenes of Hfe in 
 the open air. 
 
 Spain and Italy, we find, then, do not detain us long. It 
 is an abrupt change at once to cross the Atlantic. But 
 there is advantage in considering the art of the United 
 States immediately before completing our account of that 
 of our own country. 
 
 Painting in America only came to have any importance 
 towards the end of the eighteenth century, after John 
 Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, both of whom were 
 Americans, had settled in England, and the American pupils 
 of the latter had begun to return to their own country. It 
 was only to be expected that colonial art would come under 
 the influence of that of the old country ; but we shall find 
 that after the English influence declined, the art of France 
 and Germany became and has continued to be of paramount 
 importance for America down to the present day ; indeed, 
 one of the difficulties in writing of American painting is to 
 know how to deal with men who, having received their 
 training in Germany or in France, have settled in France or 
 in this country, and, when they have settled here, have be- 
 come members of our official and unofficial art institutions. 
 English influence on American art gradually declined after 
 the political severance of the colonies from the mother 
 country ; American artists gradually began to seek instruc- 
 tion elsewhere than in England, as at Dusseldorf, Kome, 
 and Paris ; and the art of America is now in the greater 
 part a branch of European art, with the influence of France 
 largely preponderating. 
 
rAiJviJivij lis uittnK i^uuis i Kinii iiyj 
 
 Glancing briefly at the earlier history of American art, we 
 find Copley painting portraits and subject-pictures of no 
 little merit, among the best of the latter being The Death 
 of CJiathani and The Death of Major Pierson. West also 
 painted historical pictures, and created a revolution in such 
 art by representing the soldiers in his Death of Wolfe in 
 the military costume of the time, not in that of the Greeks 
 or the Komans. He became President of the Eoyal 
 Academy, and numbers of young Americans studied paint- 
 ing under him. Of these, C. R. Leslie, who, though born 
 in England, was of American parentage, and G. S. Newton, 
 became virtually English painters. Stuart, the painter of 
 the weU-known portrait of Washington, spent five years in 
 Ireland after leaving London, and then returned to America. 
 John Trumbull, who was also one of West's pupils, painted 
 portraits, and also historical pictures after the manner of 
 those of West, including The Battle of BunJce7-'s Hill and 
 The Death of General Montgomery. He also executed in 
 the Capitol at Washington a series of paintings commemora- 
 ting the establishment of American Independence. 
 
 Of the painters in the United States after the decline of 
 the English influence, Chester Harding, who had prepared 
 to go to England to study, was persuaded, for family reasons, 
 not to do so, and settled in Boston, but he eventually carried 
 out his intention, and for some time successfully practised 
 his art in England ; but prosperity declined, and he returned 
 to America, where he continued to work as a portrait 
 painter. Charles W. Peale, ISTeagle, and Inman were other 
 artists of merit in the second quarter of the century. 
 Landscape painting was pursued by Doughty, Durand, and 
 Thomas Cole. They, and others who shortly followed them, 
 were close literalists. A little later George Inness studied 
 
268 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 in Germany, Paris, and Rome, and sought to get beyond the 
 merely imitative stage in landscape painting. He worked 
 out and stated his own philosophy of art. " The purpose of 
 the painter,'' he said, "is simply to reproduce in other 
 minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. 
 A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not 
 appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is not to instruct, not to 
 edify, but to awaken our emotion." A work of art, he said 
 further, should awaken only a single emotion, upon the 
 beauty of which the beauty of the work would depend, 
 and its greatness on the quality and force of the emotion. 
 Detail should be elaborated only so far as is necessary to 
 reproduce the artist's impression. To make thought clear 
 and to maintain imity of impression are the artist's aims. 
 Meissonier's detail made his thought clear. To some minds 
 Corot lacked objective force, but Corot's art was higher than 
 Meissonier's. This was the substance of the American 
 landscape painter's philosophy of art ; and it is a very good 
 philosophy — except, the present writer must say, when he 
 opposes the awakening of an emotion to appeal to the 
 intellect and the moral sense. These water-tight compart- 
 ments need to be carefully used. The emotions are reached 
 through the intellect, and morals are not wholly unemotional. 
 In his art Inness passed from laborious detail to fulness of 
 tone and breadth of handling, and later to greater freedom 
 of touch. Wyant and Martin were contemporaries of Inness. 
 Portrait painting was continued by Charles Loring Elliott, 
 Healy, Huntingdon, and others. Among the subject-painters, 
 Emanuel Leutze, the painter of Washington Crossing the 
 Delaware, and other incidents in American history, was 
 born in Wurtemberg, but his family emigrated to the United 
 States while he was an infant. For twenty years of his hfe 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 269 
 
 he lived at Dusseldorf and painted some of his principal 
 pictures there, so that he was, if anything, more a German 
 than an American, Such was the condition of painting in 
 the United States before and about the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 
 After the Civil War, young Americans desirous of study- 
 ing art abroad went to Paris rather than to Germany or 
 England. As to England, the painters began to come here 
 not to learn their art, but to practise it and to profit by it. 
 Several artists, however, among whom was the imaginative 
 painter Elihu Vedder, found their inspiration in Italy. 
 Vedder, indeed, has spent the greater part of his life in 
 Kome. He has painted such subjects as The Questioner of 
 the Sphinx, The Cumcean Sibyl, and Marsyas, and executed 
 illustrations to the Ruhdiydt of Omar Khayyam. Among 
 the artists who went to Paris were Edward Harrison May 
 and Wmiam Morris Hunt, the former being English by 
 birth, but American by residence from the age of ten years. 
 They were both pupils of Couture. May was an academic 
 painter of subject-pictures. Mr. Samuel Isham, in his 
 book on American painting, can only say of him that he 
 "should probably be considered an American artist, but 
 from his work he might have been a Frenchman, or even a 
 German." Hunt found his way from Couture to Millet, 
 spendmg two or three years at Barbizon, and then returned 
 to America and painted portraits, subject-pictures, and land- 
 scapes. Another young American — by birth, though not 
 by parentage— John La Farge, was under Couture, though 
 only for a short time. He also studied the old masters in 
 Munich and Dresden, and in England made acquaintance 
 with the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. After his return 
 to America he began to study law, for art had not been 
 
270 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 thought of as a profession. Hunt, however, persuaded him 
 to devote himself entirely to art. He executed mural 
 paintings for Trinity Church, Boston, and the Church of 
 the Ascension, New York, as well as many designs for 
 stained glass ; and he also painted easel-pictures. He was a 
 fine colourist, and his religious subjects are treated with 
 dignity and considerable depth of feeling. Along with La 
 Farge should be mentioned Francis Lathrop, who, after 
 studying at Dresden, went to London, where Whistler 
 introduced him to Madox Brown, with whom he worked. 
 This brought him into contact with the Burne-Jones and 
 Morris group, and their influence is to be seen in his art. 
 He assisted La Farge in his decorative work ; and the Pre- 
 Rajphaelite associations of the two American artists are an 
 interesting exception to the general lack of English in- 
 fluence. 
 
 Winslow Homer is a versatile painter of subject-pictures 
 and landscapes, whose distinct merit in realistic works is 
 the more interesting as he received no foreign trainuig. 
 
 It would be time now to say something about "VSTiistler 
 and his art were it not that, after mere recognition here of 
 his having been an American, I purpose to consider his life 
 and work m the next chapter, which will deal with English 
 painting. For, although an American, he was whoUy trained 
 in Paris, and did his most important work in England ; and 
 it was here that his influence was most strongly exercised, 
 here that he made his friends — and his enemies. In the 
 same way such artists as F. D. Millet, E. A. Abbey, and 
 even Sargent, though Americans by birth, can no more be 
 separated from English art than West or Copley ; but while 
 this has to be said, the fact that they are Americans has not 
 merely to be admitted, but proclaimed. And it may be 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 271 
 
 pointed out also, that to take them along with our own 
 painters is not to say that they have learned their work 
 here, hut, on the contrary, that they have so influenced our 
 own art as to make a knowledge of their connexion with it 
 indispensable to its understanding. 
 
 Many American artists have also settled in Paris. They 
 are not distinctively or even largely American as respects 
 their art, in which they have been tramed in Europe. We 
 have already seen that Miss Mary Cassatt, the American 
 pupil of Degas, has made Paris her home ; and that only 
 the sentiment of her pictures, and the people who have sat 
 for them, not her technique, suggest that she is not a French- 
 woman. The salons are open to artists of all nationalities, 
 and foreigners find that they can as successfully practise 
 their art in Paris as in their own countries. Americans 
 obtain a cHentele in Paris, and then fear to take the risk of 
 starting anew either at home or in London, although they 
 would then be among their own km. Thus, many Ameri- 
 cans by birth are m art the children of Manet, Monet, 
 Bastien-Lepage, Carolus Duran, or — as, in art, the child 
 may have many parents — of more than one French painter, 
 and they are also resident in France though they may not 
 become French by residence. At the same time, it must 
 not be forgotten that many American painters have learned 
 their art in Munich or Diisseldorf or elsewhere, if also they 
 owe something to Paris. 
 
 Julius L. Stewart is one of the painters who has made 
 Paris his home. After being under Zama9ois, one of 
 Fortuny's pupUs, he went to G^rome. In Tlie Hunt Ball 
 and other pictures he shows himself to be French in tech- 
 nique and American, or Anglo-Saxon, or Scotch, or whatever 
 may he the race or blend of races, in the characterisation of 
 
272 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 the dancers. William L. Dannatt first went to Munich and 
 then to Munkacsy in Paris. He has painted Spanish suh- 
 jccts with great vigour and vivacity, owing much to Manet 
 and Degas, as well as to his actual teachers. Julian Story, 
 Walter McEwen, J. Eidgeway Knight, and Walter Gay 
 should also be mentioned. McEwen and George Hitchcock 
 and Gari Melchers have painted in Holland. Alexander 
 Harrison, a pupil of G4r6me, but owing more to Bastien- 
 Lepage and the Impressionists, became a painter of the sea, 
 and in his work the realisation of light, air, and movement 
 does not mean the neglect of form. Frederick A. Bridgman 
 and Edwin Lord Weeks are devotees of the splendour of 
 the East. 
 
 Such are some of the American artists who have made 
 Paris their home, or at least their head-quarters. Once 
 more, let it be said, comprehensive list-making is not our 
 task. 
 
 Of the American painters who studied at Munich, 
 F. Duveneck and William M. Chase are the most promi- 
 nent ; the latter, departing from the heavy painting of the 
 Munich school, under the influence of the work of Velas- 
 quez and the direct influence of Whistler, has taken a high 
 place among American artists, painting in various mediums, 
 and with great variety of treatment ; and he has also 
 covered a wide range of subjects. It might almost be said, 
 indeed, that he has painted everything ; and always his 
 colour is luminous, and in later years his work has become 
 remarkably fine also in tone. 
 
 Wyatt Eaton studied under Leutze in Diisseldorf, then 
 under Ger6me ; lastly, he came under the influence of Millet 
 and Bastien-Lepage, and his pictures of country life have 
 often called up the name of the Barbizon master. Other 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 273 
 
 pupils of G^r6m6 were J. Aldeii Weir and "Will H. Low. 
 They also, lil5:e Eaton, admired Millet. Weir, however, 
 adopted methods akin to those of the Impressionists, and 
 applied them to portraiture and landscape, while Low, after 
 paintiag portraits in the manner of Carolus Duran, returned 
 to America to paint figure-pictures in the Impressionist 
 manner, and then to betake himself to classical subjects. 
 
 American figure-painting has become exceedingly varied, 
 both in subject and treatment. The Classical ideal and the 
 Romantic ideal have both been pursued. In real life, 
 the elegant society lady, mother and child, children of all 
 ages and degrees, and genre subjects have all been treated by 
 numerous painters. 
 
 Bryson Burroughs has used the powers of an admirable 
 draughtsman and true colourist to re-tell the myths of the 
 classical and the northern lands, as well as for subjects 
 drawn from real life; while A. B. Davies has created a 
 romantic world of his own. Kenyon Cox, a pupil of G&6me 
 and Carolus Duran, has painted the nude and the draped 
 figure and put them to the service of allegory. He also is 
 a notable colourist. Thomas W. Dewing is the painter of 
 elegant women, who are splendid creatures, graceful in 
 movement or repose, beautifully dressed, surrounded with 
 every luxury, in the best of taste. Dewing has set them 
 before us with delicate, illusive art, in which he has added 
 much to what he learned in Paris under Boulanger and 
 Leffebvre. To subtle play of light and atmosphere is due 
 no small part of the beauty of his pictures. Other painters 
 have singled out the charms of maidenhood; of such are 
 Thayer, Benson, Eeid, and others. The family groups, 
 mothers and their children, of G. De Forest Brush, may 
 perhaps be best described as Madonnas of daily life. They 
 
274 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERM PAINTING 
 
 have the best purity — that of the home. Horatio Walker 
 and Eobert Blum stand high among the genre painters, of 
 whom there are many, and by whom the preference has 
 been given, perhaps, to foreign subjects, though American 
 life has not been neglected. It is said, however, that the 
 American city-dweller does not care for genre pictures deal- 
 ing with familiar scenes. 
 
 The greatest living American portrait painter, Sargent, 
 whose work we are to consider later, has practically sepa- 
 rated himself from his country, and foreign painters who 
 have gone over to America have interfered with the growth 
 of native portrait painting, beyond which, of course, the 
 travelling American can choose from the widest possible 
 area who shall paint himself and his wife and his daughters. 
 Many of the painters already noticed have, of course, 
 painted portraits. Among those whose names are more 
 closely associated with this branch of art is J. W. Alex- 
 ander, who by skilfully calculated breadth of treatment in 
 all but the face rivets the attention on a subtle interpreta- 
 tion of personality. Irving K. Wiles allows his canvas to be 
 more generally interesting, yet the face is stiU the centre of 
 interest. Wilton Lockwood's portraits are close studies of 
 character, with a convincing air of reality, due to subtle 
 modelling and suggestion of atmosphere. 
 
 Numerous American painters have devoted themselves to 
 the landscape of their own country, a country which is half 
 a continent, and is correspondingly varied in climate and in 
 scene. To enumerate any considerable number of them 
 would be impossible. Some general characteristics of recent 
 American landscape painting may, however, be mentioned, 
 and a few names cited to illustrate them. 
 
 These painters j[have not gone to nature as novices to 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 275 
 
 L on the spot a brand-new language of interpretation, 
 earlier painters, many of them, had done little more 
 this. But the later ones know all about their pre- 
 jsors in the art. They have only to adapt a language 
 leir own need, not to create one. They know aU about 
 jerman and Dutch painters, about the Barbizon group 
 the Impressionists; and they have not failed to use 
 ' knowledge. Mr. Charles H. Caffin, in American 
 ters of Painting, says that the work of some of the 
 ne and landscape painters is what is most distinctively 
 rican in his country's art, and that the foreigner 
 uld be least likely in these to detect the influence of 
 ipe.'' These painters, he says, "like most other true 
 Bnts of nature, have found, each for himself, their own 
 ssary language of expression." This may weU be true, 
 yet the language be an American version of some other 
 ae. It is at the beginning of an appreciation of the 
 scape painter Dwight W. Tryon that jMi. Caffin thus 
 ;s of the originality of his fellow-countrymen's work ; 
 Tryon was a pupil of Daubigny, and was not un- 
 enced by the Impressionists. Yet it is true that Tryon 
 speak his own language. He expresses, in his own 
 his own emotion, not that of Daubigny or Monet, or 
 3re compound of both. H. W. Ranger, however, has 
 3ntly seen nature through the eyes of Corot; and we 
 tell at a glance that Childe Hassam could not have 
 ted his street scenes, his interiors, and his landscapes 
 e has done had not Monet painted before him. Mr. 
 m, in his book already referred to, mentions the tonal 
 ity in much American landscape, and attributes it to 
 1 of the works of Barbizon masters and other foreign 
 iers. At the same time he insists, like Mr. Caffin, that 
 
276 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 the American painters express their own emotions. Only a 
 slight acquaintance with American landscape painting is 
 needed to induce acceptance of the judgment of these 
 writers, with abundant opportunity for studying the art 
 on the spot, that a really living school of landscape painting 
 is developing in America. It has borrowed, but borrowing 
 that is assimilation of what, when once discovered, is valid 
 everywhere and for all, is true originality. The scenery of 
 the United States — one would rather say nature in the 
 United States — is being interpreted by men of true feeling, 
 who in this, as men do in all things, profit by the ex- 
 perience of those who have done the same thing before 
 them. At this we must leave an interesting side of 
 American art. What more could be said, with profit to 
 the reader, would both go beyond our limits of space and 
 be but statement at second-hand of a perhaps not legitimate 
 kind. 
 
 One interesting feature of painting in America is the 
 growing encouragement of mural pamting, and the bringing 
 into relation with architecture of all the other arts and 
 crafts. This encouragement has been given both by public 
 bodies and by private individuals, and already has become 
 quite considerable in amount. Such work has the greatest 
 value in itself ; and it has the indirect effect of doing much 
 towards the formation of a national school of painting. 
 
 It is perhaps too early yet to say that there is such a 
 school in America. It seems more correct to speak of 
 painting by Americans than of American paintmg. Yet 
 this is not said as a reproach, but as a prophecy. The 
 painting by Americans is so good, as even those who have 
 only seen it in Europe know well ; so good in purely 
 artistic quality, and so clear and sympathetic in its inter- 
 
PAINTING IN OTHER COUNTRIES 277 
 
 pretation of life and nature, that a school, or more than one 
 school, of painting must surely be developed to give ex- 
 pression, in their own land, to the emotions of the people 
 of America. As yet, for the most part, individual Americans 
 are merely giving expression to their individual emotions, 
 and many of them are content — or find it pays better — to 
 do this abroad rather than at home. This is but a temporary 
 condition. Even now one hesitates not to use the expres- 
 sion American painting — it has been used here, indeed, 
 repeatedly. And the cosmopolitan nature of the American 
 population cannot in the end prevent those who are united 
 by political ties and by living in the same, though a wide, 
 land, from having an art which shall be truly national. 
 
 With these brief notes about America ends our survey of 
 the progress of painting in countries other than our own. 
 To our own country we must now return. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 TT remains for us now to follow the general course of 
 -*- painting in our own country outside the Pre-Raphaelite 
 movement. "We have isolated that movement, and en- 
 deavoured to grasp its by no means simple character, be- 
 cause it did so much during the half -century we have 
 in review to free our art from the heavy weight of 
 tradition. We have also compared it with the almost 
 contemporary movement in France, by which there also 
 art obtained greater freedom. Then we have left for a time 
 the art of our own country and briefly surveyed the pro- 
 gress of painting in France and elsewhere, because towards 
 the end of the century painting here was and still is power- 
 fully affected by the developments taking place abroad. 
 
 English painting until quite recently has been little 
 affected by contemporary art in other coimtries. It has 
 been a vigorous national development, guided, where it has 
 received guidance from without, by the study of the older 
 European schools of painting. This is why it has been 
 possible for M. de la Sizeranne to say that England is the 
 only country outside France that possesses a distinctly 
 national school of painting. He says that this is only 
 true of our art in the last century, that in the eighteenth 
 century our aesthetics were those of the rest of Europe, 
 that Reynolds and Gainsborough were great masters, but 
 
 27S 
 
■%' 
 
 PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 279 
 
 that their work was merely eighteenth-century painting, not 
 English painting. "We may dispute this dictum, saying that 
 nowhere else was there such subtlety both of colour and 
 interpretation of character as in the work of the English 
 portrait painters of that time. Turner and Constable, and 
 our other landscape painters, he credits with striking a new 
 and powerful note at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century, but he goes on to say that Turner no more belonged 
 to one portion of the globe than a comet to one region of 
 the sky, and that he could not be imitated either at home 
 or abroad. Yet M. de la Sizeranne himself admits the 
 influence of Turner on the French Impressionists, which, 
 as we have seen, they themselves are also glad to recognise. 
 Of Constable he says that his glory is rather to have 
 initiated a new movement in Europe than his good fortune 
 to have founded a national art in his native land. This is 
 a very remarkable statement. We cannot permit ourselves 
 thus to be robbed of our landscape painting. There was no 
 need for Constable to found a national art, nor for Turner 
 to be imitated if such an art were to exist; for, besides 
 these two men, there were the Cromes, Vincent, Stark, 
 Cotman, and the other Norwich painters, and then David 
 Cox, De Wint, and others, who painted chiefly in water- 
 colour. Here was surely abundant vitality of varied 
 character, sufficient to constitute a national school, and 
 capable, as we have seen and as M. de la Sizeranne admits, 
 of profoundly modifying the art of France, and through 
 France that of other countries. 
 
 The Pre-Baphaelite movement, in which an awakening 
 from stagnation that must in any event have come was 
 hastened by a few young painters who persistently shook 
 the academic sleepers, also owed nothing to foreign in- 
 
2So FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 fluence. The simple creed of Holraan Hunt and Millaii 
 was fidelity to facts, and in formulating their creed the] 
 owed nothing to Madox Brown and whatever impetus to 
 wards realism he may have received in the studio of Haroi 
 Wappers. Indeed, they showed him the way to the thorough 
 going realism that became the mark of one side of the Pre 
 Kaphaelite movement. Nor did Eossetti and those whi 
 followed him owe anything to contemporary Eomanticisn 
 abroad, unless we can say that, through Madox Brown 
 Rossetti came to some extent, at second-hand, under tht 
 influence of the German Nazarenes. Anyhow, the reallj 
 potent influence under which he came was that of tht 
 Italian painters who preceded Raphael, and this was ever 
 truer stUl of Burne-Jones, who repeatedly studied theii 
 works in Italy itself, and expressed his growing admiration 
 for them. 
 
 English painting, then, went its way, learning from the 
 past, but comparatively heedless of what was being done 
 elsewhere in the present. This attitude, however, has 
 recently been changed, as we shall shortly see. But first 
 we must turn to the work of the painters who have been 
 little or at all influenced either by the Pre-Raphaelite move 
 ment or by the more recent developments of art abroad. 
 In doing this we need do no more than refer to those 
 painters who lived and worked during the latter half of the 
 century, but did not break any fresh ground. 
 
 One painter, however, we may name, who actually died 
 before the mid-century, WiUiam J. Miiller, whose work, 
 though he received his only art-training from J. B. Pyne, ia 
 much more closely allied to that of Constable than to that 
 of his teacher. This may be because he soon forsook all 
 tuition except that of nature. He is mentioned here be 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 281 
 
 cause, several years before the Pre-Eaphaelite movement 
 was projected, he wrote : " I paint in oil on the spot ; in 
 deed, I am more than ever convinced of the actual necessity 
 of looking at Nature with a much more observant eye than 
 the most of yomig artists do, and in particular at skies; 
 these are generally neglected." This is interesting, as show- 
 ing that the Pre-Eaphaelites were not alone in their con- 
 viction of the need for a return to nature. Miiller's idea of 
 the return was, however, different from theirs. He was no 
 devotee of elaborate detail. I have already referred to the 
 note on the back of his Eel-luck^ at Goring, to the effect 
 that it was left for some fool to finish and ruin. 
 
 Another painter, older than Miiller, but who survived him 
 —living, indeed, until 1876 — John Frederick Lewis, must 
 be mentioned here because he, if anything, anticipated the 
 realistic side of the Pre-Eaphaelite movement. Euskin 
 said that he "worked with the sternest precision twenty 
 years before Pre-Eaphaelitism had ever been heard of; 
 pursued cahnly the same principles, developed by himself 
 for himself, through years of lonely labour in Syria." He 
 began to paint with very much more minuteness in detail 
 just about the time that Holman Hunt and Millais were 
 determining to adopt the same method ; but as he was away 
 in the East from 1843 for a period of eight years, there 
 was no chance of his getting into touch with them. Per- 
 haps because he came gradually to render detail more faith- 
 fully, and also because he painted in the brilliant sunlight 
 of an eastern clime, the detail is less obtrusive in his work 
 than in that of the Pre-Eaphaelites, there is more sense of 
 light and atmosphere and more unity of design. What 
 with the Pre-Eaphaelites was revolution, a turning away 
 from the methods they had previously adopted, was with 
 
282 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Lewis an evolution, an addition of greater detail withoi 
 essentially changing the character of his work, so thi 
 Redgrave, who calls the work of the Pre - Raphaelitf 
 laborious idling, can say of Lewis that "there is not oi 
 touch too much or one thrown away in his work, and th; 
 the result is always very perfect, conveying an impression ( 
 power without too great a sense of labour." 
 
 So much by way of showing that English art at the mii 
 century would not have wholly lost touch with nature hi 
 for the organised effort of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethrei 
 We can now proceed to consider what other progress we 
 made after the mid-century, or, in some respects, it migl 
 be said, how the art marked time. What, for example, t 
 turn abruptly from Realism to Classicism, shall we accoui 
 the life-work of Frederick, Lord Leighton, who was th 
 most conspicuous representative of classical art in Englan 
 during the latter half of the nineteenth century \ Was 
 advance, halt, or retrogression % 
 
 His first picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy i 
 1855, and he died. President of the Academy and a peer c 
 the realm, in 1896. He was born in 1830 at Scarborougl 
 where his father practised as a doctor. He early shows 
 inclination and capacity for art, and his father, acting o 
 the advice of Hiram Powers, the American sculptor, decide 
 that an artist the boy should be. He taught him Latia an 
 Greek, and also anatomy. Being taken to live abroad at a 
 early age on account of his mother's health, he was thirt 
 years of age before he returned to live in England. Befoi 
 he entered on his teens he could speak French, Italian, an 
 German; and subsequently he added Spanish to the Ks 
 He studied in Rome, Dresden, Berlin, Frankfort, an 
 Brussels. He was thus a child of the academies and tl 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 283 
 
 galleries. He travelled also both in many countries in 
 Europe and in the near East. In any event, he was prob- 
 ably unsuited by temperament to be either a pioneer or a 
 revolutionary; and the study of so many schools of art 
 might well have sapped the energy of one gifted with 
 much greater originative powers. As it was, Leighton did 
 but develop an eclectic style devoid of intensity both in the 
 treatment of the subject and in purely aesthetic qualities. 
 He became highly accomplished in both painting and 
 sculpture ; but it is the accomplishment that impresses us ; 
 there is nothing deeper to make us forget it. This is even 
 more true, perhaps, of his painting than of his sculpture ; 
 and it is with the former we are concerned here. 
 
 He declared his artistic faith in the addresses that he 
 delivered as President of the Koyal Academy. He said 
 that while the ethos of the painter was of the utmost im- 
 portance for his work, art was in its nature wholly inde- 
 pendent of morality, and that the loftiest moral purport 
 could add no jot or tittle to the merits of a work of art as 
 such. This we will say is true ; it is even obvious ; just as 
 an ungrammatical sentence is such even if it enunciate a 
 great truth. We may even say that a picture is less likely 
 to be beautiful than otherwise it might be if the painter be 
 seeking to give some rather dry, unemotional instruction. 
 But what if he be moved by passionate enthusiasm for 
 something nobly human? Such enthusiasm surely cannot 
 fail to change, if it do not increase, the purely artistic 
 merit of his work. There is a difference between passionate 
 expression and emotionless expression. Are we to say that 
 this relates to the ethos of the painter, and that moral 
 purport is something different from thisl If so, Lord 
 Leighton's dictum covers very little ground, and leaves 
 
284 FIFTY. YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 much more to be said. But there is moral purport that 
 springs from deep emotion, that is the form such emotion 
 takes, and this does certainly influence the aesthetic 
 character of an artist's work. Given, if it may be put 
 thus, equal Eesthetic gift in two artists, but a difference in 
 enthusiasm with regard to the subjects of their art, there 
 will be a more intense beauty in the work of the more 
 enthusiastic artist than in that of the other. Thus Leigliton 
 himself said : " Believe me, whatever of dignity, whatever 
 of strength we have within us wiU dignify and will make 
 strong the work of our hands ; whatever littleness degrades 
 our spirit will lessen them and drag them down. Whatever 
 noble fire is in our hearts wUl burn also in our work ; what- 
 ever purity is ours will chasten and exalt it.'' 
 
 Leighton's own works look like those of a man who has 
 somewhat coldly selected their subjects, not like those of one 
 who has had to paint them, because whUe he mused the fire 
 burned within him. Even when he has selected his subjects 
 he does not seem to have been carried away by them. His 
 works have the look of deliberate arrangement; they are 
 wholly lacking in spontaneity. We can hardly believe in 
 the grief of his Hero, her attitude is so exactly what 
 would be chosen for theatrical effect. Always Leighton 
 seems to approach his subject from the outside, not from 
 within. Does not the following passage in one of his 
 Academy addresses suggest that this was so : " You will 
 find that through the Association of Ideas, lines and forms 
 and combinations of lines and forms, colours and combina- 
 tions of colours, have acquired a distinct expressional signifi- 
 cance, and, so to speak, have an ethos of their own, and 
 will convey in the one province notions of strength, of 
 repose, of solidity, of flowing motion, and of life; in the 
 
PAINTIh'G IN GREAT BRITAIN 285 
 
 other, sensations of joy or sadness, of heat or cold, of 
 languor or of health ? " There is an air of rule and recipe 
 about this passage. It speaks of much study in the galleries 
 and museums rather than of the creative imagination that 
 makes its owti rules. This kind of analysis is common in 
 his addresses ; and it has a marked bearing on his art, 
 between which and nature and life comes ever a veil com- 
 posed of conventions that he has gathered for himself out 
 of the works of the great masters of the past. Leighton 
 was a learned, an academic, an eclectic artist ; which means 
 also that he was decorous and dull. 
 
 His first exhibited picture, Gimabue's Madonna carried 
 through Flwence, might by the choice of subject have 
 seemed to promise that the painter would not merely mark 
 time in his art. In the picture Cimabue is seen leading by 
 the hand Giotto, the pupil who was destined to escape from 
 the Byzantiue conventions and become a naturalist painter. 
 No more rapid advance in art has surely ever been made 
 than that which the works of Giotto show when compared 
 with those of Cimabue. The subject of Leighton's picture 
 -would almost have entitled him to be considered a Romantic 
 painter, and it was pleasant in colour and piquant in 
 incident. Rossetti thought the youth who painted it might 
 do good things if only he could lose what was French in his 
 work by coming to England. Leighton, however, went to 
 Paris, and remained there for several years. This, let us 
 recollect, was the Paris in which Ingres and Delacroix were 
 still living; in which painters like Millet and Gorot were 
 held of little account, and in which the stirrings of Im- 
 pressionism had not yet been felt. There was nothing here 
 to inspire Leighton so that he would eventually return to 
 England, if not to join the Pre-Raphaelites, yet at least to 
 
286 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 move forward alongside them on a way of his own. He 
 remained an eclectic to the end of his days. Never again, 
 I think, did he paint anything so delightfully, naturally 
 human as his Cimabue and Giotto walking along hand in 
 hand. Ever afterwards the stylist in him seemed to freeze 
 up his emotions. His subject-pictures are excellent tableaux, 
 but they are not the thing itself. Hercules in his picture is 
 not wrestling with Death, he is only standing in the posi- 
 tion of a wrestler ; and so it is all through Leighton's work : 
 there are lines and colours and combinations of them by 
 which we know he has meant to represent human beings as 
 doing certain things, or as being in certain states of feeling, 
 but he has not been able to endue these forms with active, 
 passionate life. 
 
 His colour is no more than a pleasant arrangement of 
 various hues and shades ; it never fuses into a whole, and 
 comes upon the eye like organ-music on the ear. The small 
 sketches for his large pictures often have this latter quality. 
 Always while looking at the Captive Andromache, in which 
 the colour of the maidens' dress is varied as a skilful 
 draper's assistant might vary colours in the window, I re- 
 call a small oil-sketch for the picture, the rich glow of which 
 has left an indelible impression on the brain. 
 
 What strikes one most in Leighton's works is their 
 decorative quality. Such pictures as The Daphnejphoria 
 and Captive Andromache would be better as panels enclosed 
 in an architectural setting than as framed pictures. A haU 
 decorated by Leighton would be exceedingly restful. The 
 pictures would not excite us ; they would gently remind us 
 of myths and legends, and set us quietly thinking. The 
 South Kensington lunettes and the panel he did for the 
 Eoyal Exchange, London, show how admirably his work 
 
THE BATH OF PSYCHE LEIGHTON 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 287 
 
 was adapted for this purpose. The panels may not be the 
 best of their kind, but Leighton's art is best suited to that 
 kind of picture. There was this quality in the collection 
 of his life-work at Burlington House ; the rooms were rest- 
 ful. It was otherwise with the Millais exhibition, in which 
 not only were there strong contrasts in the colour-schemes 
 of different pictures, so that one had fresh sensations at 
 nearly every step, but the greater spontaneity and more 
 telling dramatic interest of the pictures constantly challenged 
 alert attention. The strenuous rarely enters into Leighton's 
 pictures. His Greek girls play at ball in garments that 
 must greatly impede their movements. And the smooth 
 finish of his painting and the waxen complexions of the 
 figures in the pictures add to the feeling of almost anaimic 
 listlessness. Above all things no zeal, these people say to 
 us. Their mission is to exist beautifully. 
 
 Hence when Leighton tried to represent vigorous action 
 he failed, as in the Hercules wrestling with Death 
 already referred to. He failed also in the region of imagi- 
 nation, as in The Spirit of the Peak, where, to apply a test 
 already used, the picture would lose nothing if imitated in 
 a tableau. Life has in all these pictures been subordinated 
 to beauty, and the beauty itself is cold and superficial; 
 there radiate no light and heat from inward fires. Kefined, 
 stylistic beauty is the note of Leighton's art. In this kind 
 of art his contribution was a very considerable one. It was 
 not a new kind. He only produced a variation of the old. 
 
 With Lord Leighton we inevitably associate Sir Edward 
 John Poynter, who succeeded him as President of the Eoyal 
 Academy after Millais' brief, intervening occupancy of the 
 position. In 1853, when he was only seventeen years of 
 age, he was working in Leighton's studio in Kome, so that 
 
288 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINT iNG 
 
 the association of tlie two men is first and last a close one. 
 Three years later he was studying in Paris under Gleyre, 
 everything in his student-days thus tending to prepare him 
 to be the classical painter he actually became, although 
 Du Maurier and "Whistler were among his fellow-students 
 in Paris, and they went widely different ways from him in 
 art. Sir Edward is a Classicist through and through in his 
 art and in his teaching. Subjects from Biblical or Classical 
 sources requiring treatment of a classical nature — that is to 
 say, the introduction of nude or classically draped figures — 
 are what he says he has always given out to his students 
 for practice, " because I consider that practice in that form 
 of art, demanding as it does the highest sense of beauty 
 and involving the greatest difficulties in drawing and design, 
 is the best preparation for any style which the student's 
 natural tendencies will lead him ultimately to adopt." The 
 educational mould cannot make the man. It must influence 
 him, however, and it may help to mar him; and it may 
 well be questioned whether one plan is good for all students. 
 In the case of Sir Edward Poynter himself we find care- 
 fully studied nude figures which only lack life ; and life is 
 not an unimportant matter. Just as the Hercules in Leigh- 
 ton's picture is not wrestling, but is only in the attitude of 
 wrestling, so the runner, Milanion, in Sir Edward's Atalanta's 
 Race, is not running, but is only in the attitude of running. 
 His subjects, no more than Leighton's, are passionately felt 
 and dramatically realised. His Visit to ^sculapius is gener- 
 ally regarded as his most successful work. It may well be 
 so, for the subject makes no demand on the imagination, 
 and on the power to express action and emotion. It is the 
 kind of thing that can be coldly built up out of archseo- 
 logical learning and painstaking study of the nude, 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 289 
 
 Sir Laurens Alma Tadema is aa importation into English 
 art. He is Dutch both by parentage and birth, a native of 
 the little village of Dronryp, near Leeuevarden, in Frisia, 
 where he was bom in 1836. His father was a notary, and 
 he himself was first trained for the law ; but he was too 
 strongly inclined towards art for the original intention to 
 be carried out. He received his training at the Antwerp 
 Academy under Baron Wappers and in the studio of Baron 
 Leys. In 1863 he went to Eome, the city of which, in the 
 days of its imperial splendour, he was to be the pictorial 
 restorer. In 1869 he settled in London, and four years 
 later became naturalised as a British subject. He was from 
 the first an historical painter, but his earliest pictures dealt 
 with the Merovingian period of history, whereas afterwards 
 he went back to classical Rome. The essentials of his art 
 had been determined when he came to this country. He 
 owes nothing to its earlier art, though he may well have 
 been confirmed in the choice he had made by the companion- 
 ship in this country of Leighton and Poynter. Under 
 Wappers and Leys he would receive an entirely adequate 
 technical training, well adapted for the kind of work to 
 which he afterwards devoted himself. Then he himself 
 has added an immense apparatus of archaeological learning. 
 It has been said that his work is an accurate illustration of 
 Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities, and ought to delight the 
 minds of archaeologists. This is true, but perhaps not quite 
 the whole truth; there is some life in his pictures; they 
 are not merely beautifully designed and coloured diagrams. 
 This very point of the life in his figures has often been in 
 dispute. They have been called puppets, not individually 
 and psychologically interesting. Such interest is perhaps 
 not necessary to the purpose of most of his pictures. He 
 
290 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 is not a genre painter, nor a painter of dramatic moments in 
 history. He has for the most part sought only to realise 
 the ordinary look of life in imperial Rome, and for this 
 purpose close psychological study is not needed. The 
 pictures surely do what the painter has set himself to do. 
 It is not an achievement that appeals to the emotions, and 
 therefore we are not moved. He has not on the artistic 
 side made the beauty of the total result the first considera- 
 tion, but its truth to fact as far as by searchiag and by 
 imagination he could get at the fact; we are often, there- 
 fore, left aesthetically cold. We are interested, we are 
 instructed; we admire the skill with which aU kinds of 
 objects and materials are imitated and gathered not un- 
 harmoniously together. When we read Roman history 
 we have a more vividly particular mental picture of 
 the stage upon which the drama was enacted than we 
 should have had without the painter's help; and we can 
 beheve that the picture is not widely distant from the 
 truth. 
 
 The people in these pictures are certainly more living 
 than those in the pictures of Leighton and Poynter. Is 
 this recognised when these two are called classical painters 
 and Alma Tadema an historical painter? And does the 
 difference show the limitation of the classical point of view 
 and the classical training? Madox Brown, a pupil like 
 Alma Tadema of Wappers, painted historical subjects with 
 great dramatic intensity. Alma Tadema, choosing to see 
 his people under more ordinary conditions, still makes them 
 live. The figures of the classical painters do not live. 
 Rossetti, in a playfully or earnestly sarcastic rhyme, called 
 one classical painter " of well-jointed dummies the jointer." 
 It is in this want of life that we find the weakness of 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 291 
 
 classical art, and, as a rule, the drawing of the figure being 
 put first, the colour is weak also. 
 
 In Albert Moore, brother of Henry Moore, the sea 
 painter, who has been mentioned in connexion with the 
 Pre-Eaphaelites, we find again the influence of Japanese 
 art. It has softened the dignity of the classical ideal into 
 delicate grace and loveliness. He was born at York in 
 1841. His father was a painter, and three of his brothers, 
 besides Henry, were painters. He was for a short time in 
 the Academy Schools, and after this there came a most 
 important preparation for the kind of art he was to pro- 
 duce, in his engagement by the architect, W. Eden Nesfield, 
 to design mural and ceiling paintings. He visited Eome in 
 1862, tried his hand at a Biblical subject, but soon turned 
 to the decorative art which was the chief, indeed almost the 
 only work of his life. 
 
 We may sum up his art by saying that the form is the 
 form of Greece, but the colour is the colour of Japan. The 
 female figures of the Parthenon sculptures and the Venus 
 of Milo have been clothed in garments of delicately har- 
 monised colour, and bidden to do nothing but exist grace- 
 fully. He was entirely of the opinion of Mr. George 
 Moore, already quoted, that subject is out of place in art. 
 It mihtates against decorative quality. That is to say, art 
 should always be decorative, never expressive. Above all 
 things there must be no zeal. Nobody must seem even so 
 much as capable of dreaming that there might ever be any- 
 thing to be done that would require energetic action. The 
 utmost that the maidens in these pictures seem to be able to 
 do is to stand; and they take the first opportunity not 
 merely of sitting, but of reclining on soft cushions. There 
 is no suggestion that their idleness is merely temporary, 
 
292 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 that it is rest after toil. They are too weak in the back 
 ever to do any work. They could not even join Leighton's 
 Greek girls in a game of hall. Of course this is a dream- 
 land of the painter's imagining. We may accept it as 
 such, though it is a dreamland that is not very flattering to 
 human nature. The male sex may congratulate itself upon 
 having no representatives in this lazy company. One may 
 doubt whether the attitudes — the sprawling attitudes — of 
 some of the maidens are really beautiful. It does not 
 follow that because activity may not always be graceful 
 idleness always is so. Yet it may be said that one is 
 dragging in subject here; that the artist is not concerned 
 with attitudes, but with rhythm of lines and harmony of 
 colour, and that the human figure is only introduced in 
 order that it may be subordinated to the praise of decorative 
 beauty which thereby receives honour almost divine. These 
 maidens are indeed cloistered nuns, expressionless because 
 emotionless, dedicated, it might almost be said sacrificed, 
 not to the contemplative worship of God, but to the worship 
 of merely sensuous beauty. Such art as this ought surely, 
 in its intention at least, to please M. de la Sizeranne, who, 
 in warning his fellow-countrymen against being led astray 
 by English art with its insistence on the subject in paint- 
 ing, says : " Let us beware, above aU, of theories which 
 pretend to ennoble the mission of art by making it the 
 mere interpreter of ideas and feelings, of affirmations or 
 doubts, and which give the artist another fimction than the 
 expression of the Beautiful, the Beautiful alone free from 
 figures of speech, from purpose, from preaching ; as if there 
 were anything in the world that could deserve to have the 
 Beautiful for its servant, its interpreter, or its herald. Let 
 us beware of the error of believing that art can be widened 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 293 
 
 by wandering, deepened by the overthrow of foundations, 
 ennobled by servitude." Albert Moore did not commit 
 these alleged crimes against art — or, to be really accurate, 
 against beauty. The correction is necessary; for M. de la 
 Sizeranne takes up a position which has the support neither 
 of history nor of reason when he makes beauty the sole 
 end of art. So does Mr. Swinburne when he says that 
 " Mr. Albert Moore's painting is to artists what the verse of 
 Th^ophile Gautier is to poets : the faultless and secure ex- 
 pression of an exclusive worship of things formally beauti- 
 ful. That contents them ; they leave to others the labours 
 and the joys of thought or passion." Some artists and 
 poets may have been content with the exclusive worship of 
 things formally beautiful, but certainly the great majority 
 have not unless, of course, we are to say that any one not 
 so content is not artist or poet. M. de la Sizeranne thinks 
 that it is the peculiar sin of English artists not exclusively 
 to worship beauty. Were none but such worshippers 
 among the painters of his own country accounted artists, 
 the ranks would be sadly thinned out. 
 
 Albert Moore's art is beautiful; but the painters who 
 have cared for other things than beauty, even those who 
 have put other things to the front, such men as Madox 
 Brown and Watts, have in the course of their work pro- 
 duced splendid rhythm of line and form and rich harmony 
 of colour in comparison with which his pictures are little 
 more than prettiness. The same superiority is evident in 
 the art of Eossetti — who, as we have seen, would not 
 accept art for art's sake as a religion — and Burne-Jones and 
 many others. One has to think of beauty as having lower 
 and higher degrees ; and the highest degrees have not been 
 reached only, if ever, by those who in their art have made 
 
294 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN FAINTING 
 
 beauty their one and only aim. Happily, therefore, for the 
 sake of beauty itself, artists as a body show no sign of 
 limitmg themselves as Albert Moore limited himself, and 
 according to the law that M. de la Sizeranne lays down. 
 These matters are determined by temperament, not by rules 
 imposed from without, and those who feel impelled to use 
 the human form to other ends besides that of formal beauty 
 will continue to do so, however loudly the idolaters of 
 beauty may cry out against them. For idolaters do not 
 rightly worship their own gods. 
 
 It is here, perhaps, immediately after commenting on the 
 work of a painter who made beauty the exclusive end of his 
 art, that we can with most advantage consider the work of 
 G. F. Watts, who said that his own aim was rather to teach 
 great truths than to paint pictures that would please the 
 eye. It may be that the pictures please the eye despite the 
 priority given by the artist himself to the teaching. I 
 should maintain that even if this were not so, if beauty 
 were sacrificed to the success of the teaching, the sacrifice 
 would be justified if the teaching went home. There are 
 those, of course, who say that words are the proper media 
 for teaching; that if painting attempts it there has only 
 been an invasion of the province of oratory or literature. 
 But if the teaching of a picture does get home, it is clear 
 that painting is on its own ground. 
 
 Can it be said that Watts succeeds as a teacher 1 
 Happily I am not reduced to the statement that he succeeds 
 for me. I can bring in M. de la Sizeranne as a witness. 
 He tells us that he "held the conviction, common to many, 
 that mythological painting was a false, decadent, common- 
 place style; that out of such impersonal figures as Death, 
 Justice, Time, and Love, nothing more could nowadays be 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 29S 
 
 made than a spiritless decoration for the ceilings of a public 
 building or of a confectioner's shop," but that Watts's Lom 
 and Life and Love and Death convinced him to the con- 
 trary; and of Watts's pictures generally he says : "And yet 
 you linger, for whilst Watts's colour distracts the eye, his 
 ideas penetrate to the depths of the soul, and slowly arouse 
 something that was sleeping there." 
 
 I have said that Watts's pictures may please the eye even 
 though they chiefly aim to teach great truths. They do not 
 please the eye of M. de la Sizeranne, who denies to Watts 
 all picturesque feeling. Mr. George Clausen, on the other 
 hand, who is not unacquainted with French painting, who 
 has, indeed, been much influenced by it, says that although 
 Watts did not primarily wish his pictures to have beauty, 
 yet " he was so fine an artist that he could not help himself 
 in this." A good deal of the French writer's criticism of 
 English painting suggests his having merely concluded that 
 what was strange to him must be wrong. He says that 
 Watts's colours are out of tune and his pictures colour- 
 discords. Mr. Clausen says that colour was certainly one of 
 his strong points, and he mentions Watts's landscapes, in 
 connexion with the statement that "he had the whole 
 range of colour in nature, and what it means or suggests, at 
 his command, and used it in his pictures as Turner did in 
 his landscapes . . . treating his figures as if they were 
 subject to all variations of light; and almost, at times, 
 making the play of light and shadow on figures to suggest 
 the play of light and shadow on a mountain side, so that 
 one instinctively feels the figure to be of larger than ordinary 
 human stature : something colossal." The French writer 
 boldly says that Watts painted no landscapes, because 
 landscapes prove nothing ; yet Watts actually painted land- 
 
296 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 scapes not a few, and some of those who will have none of 
 him as a teacher find his landscapes very beautiful. Are we 
 to think, as some of these critics would have us, that his 
 colour-sense availed him in his landscapes and failed him in 
 his imaginative subject-pictures % 
 
 Born in London in 1817, Watts was by four years the 
 senior of Madox Brown, who was so much older than 
 Holman Hunt, Millais, and their companions of the Pre- 
 Eaphaelite Brotherhood as almost, if not quite, to be dis- 
 qualified by age alone from joining in a movement originating 
 in youthful enthusiasm. Watts was, in fact, ten years older 
 than Holman Hunt; and when the Brotherhood was formed 
 was nearly thirty-three years of age, and already a painter 
 of some repute. He was sixteen years older than Manet; 
 and by the time the Impressionist movement was fully 
 developed and was beginning to excite derision in Paris, he 
 was between fifty and sixty years old. But his life and his 
 productivity were so prolonged — he outlived Manet by over 
 twenty years — that one occasionally suspects writers of for- 
 getting to what generation he really belonged, and of 
 blaming him because when past middle life he did not 
 throw himself into movements initiated by men who were 
 children when he was maturing his art. Yet Watts was 
 consciously an Impressionist — consciously and avowedly, 
 " I must produce an effect," he said, " and so I must ignore 
 something, and accentuate something else. Thus only can 
 I make the representation." He pointed out that though 
 the photographer, in rendering material truth, could beat 
 the greatest of artists, yet his object twenty yards away was 
 not the same as his object close to. Watts did not, of 
 course, go as far as the Impressionists in giving to his pictures 
 an illusive appearance of reality ; he had other aims which 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 297 
 
 had become fixed before such zeal for atmospheric effect 
 had been aroused. Yet there is more even of this quality 
 to be found in his later work than in that of many younger 
 men who had not the excuse of age for their not learning 
 the lesson taught by Monet and his companions in France. 
 Watts, in fact, dried most of the oil out of the pigments 
 he used, in order that the crumbly texture of the paint 
 might give the effect of atmospheric vibration. 
 
 He began as a student of classical art. He tried the 
 Academy Schools, but soon left them. The most fruitful 
 part of his early training was the study of the Elgin marbles. 
 He also used to watch the sculptor William Behnes at 
 work J indeed, but for a physical infirmity that prevented 
 him from working with the wet clay, it is as likely as not 
 that he would have become a sculptor, instead of a painter 
 who also did work in sculpture. His art owes much to the 
 art of Pheidias. He made the Parthenon figures to live. 
 Time, in his picture Time, Death, and Judgment, is the 
 Theseus of the Parthenon, up and striding along, and there 
 is a recollection at least of the same figure in others of his 
 pictures. His Ariadne is sister to the seated female figui-es 
 of the Parthenon. Yet although we are reminded again 
 and again in his paintings of the masterpieces of the idealist 
 school of Greek sculpture, his paintings are by no means 
 sculpturesque. 
 
 In 1843, when he was twenty-six years of age, he 
 obtained a prize for a cartoon, Oaradacus led in triumph 
 through the streets of Borne, which he had submitted in 
 a competition for designs for the decoration of the Houses 
 of Parliament. This enabled him to visit Italy, and 
 through the kindness of Lord Holland, who was then 
 British Mmister at the Court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, 
 
298 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 he was enabled to remain there for four years. The chief 
 result of his stay was, perhaps, the admiration he acquired 
 for the colour of the Venetian painters. He would never 
 have become a classical painter, basing his design upon 
 form. His earliest paintings show a strong sense of colour. 
 Those that were painted before he went to Italy — his Aurora, 
 for example — are strongly reminiscent of Etty. His study 
 of the Venetian masters merely added to the resources of 
 one who was already a colourist, and made it sure that each 
 picture would have its complete colour-scheme, and not be 
 a mere congeries of local colours. Would it be correct, 
 then, to describe "Watts as an imitator of Greek form and 
 Venetian colour? I think not. He learned from them, 
 but he did not become their slave and echo. His form was 
 at need, and often at need, less severe than that of the 
 Parthenon marbles ; his colour had a wider range than that 
 of the Venetians. He was a debtor, but not a bondsman 
 to the past. 
 
 While yet quite young he had set before himself a two- 
 fold aim : to paint an epic of human life, and also to pamt, 
 and to give to the nation, the portraits of many of the most 
 eminent men of his own time. Both these aims were 
 realised, but the former not in the manner he had wished. 
 Adequately to carry it out he required a building of which 
 his epic pictures would be the decoration, and this was 
 denied to him. We have seen that he proposed to the 
 directors of the London and North- Western Kailway Com- 
 pany that he should, at his own expense, paint his epic on 
 the walls of the waiting-hall at Euston Station, and that the 
 offer was refused. One opportunity for such work he 
 sought and obtained : the painting of The School of Legis- 
 lature or Justice : a Hemicycle of Law-givers, on the end 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 299 
 
 wall of the Hall of Lincoln's Inn. For the rest he had to 
 be content with easel-pictures, and it is in this form, as 
 Uttle more than a fragment, that his epic now exists. 
 Eeference has already been made to the better fortune in 
 this respect of such an artist as Puvis de Chavannes in. 
 France. 
 
 Watts was, of course, much older than even Leighton, 
 the eldest of the four painters mentioned before him. He 
 has been taken after them because thereby we are better 
 able to bring out the richer content of his art. Albert 
 Moore aimed at nothing more than decorative effect. He 
 put the female figures of the Parthenon pediments to deco- 
 rative use. It is easy, as we have said, to see the influence 
 of those . figures in Watts's work. But whereas Albert 
 Moore's reclining maidens are merely idle, Watts's Ariadne 
 half lies upon the rock in the listlessness of despair. In 
 form and feature she is sister to the others ; but whereas 
 they merely exist, she is living. No trouble comes nigh 
 them ; her heart is full of sorrow, which finds expression in 
 her face and in the drooping body and limb ; she is like 
 a plant that fades for want of water. In the paintings of 
 Leighton and Poynter there is not the entire absence of 
 subject that marks those of Albert Moore. But even here 
 there is a wide difference from the work of Watts. It has 
 been said aheady that they seem to approach their subject 
 from the outside. And, beginning there, they do not 
 penetrate to the heart of it. With them it seems only 
 a means to an end. In Alma Tadema's pictures the figures 
 have, on the whole, more vitality. Watts's figures are 
 enturely vital. And the reason of this is not far to seek. 
 
 His aim, we have seen, as stated by himself, was to teach 
 great truths. The phrase is not adequate. Perhaps no 
 
3CX3 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 single, simple phrase could adequately describe his aim, but 
 it would certainly be nearer the mark to say that he sought 
 to express deep emotions. He was concerned not with 
 science or philosophy, not with morals or political economy, 
 but with Love. The subject that above all others engaged 
 "Watts's thought, that almost engrossed his art, was the 
 charity that is the greatest of all. His art was controlled 
 not by thought, but by feeling. He only ^minted that which 
 he deeply felt. He did not approach his subject from the 
 outside. The man had reached the heart of it before the 
 artist began to give form to it. Hence, we may say, the 
 form itself vibrates with emotion. 
 
 The reader may wonder why it should have been said 
 above that Watts was not concerned with political economy. 
 To speak paradoxically, this was said because, in the deepest 
 sense, he was concerned with it : he felt deeply the loveless- 
 ness that makes possible, that makes inevitable, our existing 
 competitive methods. We do not believe in love as a motive 
 strong enough to ensure steady social activity in the ordinary 
 work of the world. Hence we have a panic struggle to 
 escape from poverty. We are always in a condition of 
 panic, which at times becomes disastrously acute. Watts 
 felt this, and painted the oak, the symbol of England, 
 weighed down by a heavy, golden pall ; and the lurid hues 
 of the picture prove it to be a work of emotion, not of cold 
 analysis. This is true also of Peace and Goodwill, the out- 
 cast mother and child. The former, wearied with much 
 wandering, has sunk to the earth and is looking at a light 
 on the horizon, wondering if it be a peaceful dawn or but 
 a new conflagration of war. In Labour and Greed, the con- 
 trast between the stalwart, open-faced workman and the 
 shrivelled-up miser grasping his money-bags may seem to 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 301 
 
 many plain preaching merely ; but this can only be because 
 they are emotionally dead where Watts was emotionally 
 alive. So it is also with Mammon and with The Minotaur, 
 those horrible personifications of evil. Another appeal to 
 love against lovelessness is A Dedication, an angel weeping 
 over birds' feathers lying upon an altar : a lament over the 
 heedless cruelty that sacrifices life to vanity. What I want 
 at the moment to say about these pictures is independent of 
 the question of the fitness of such subjects for treatment in 
 painting, though even there the final question with me is, 
 " Do they strike home % " They are, perhaps, from the art for 
 beauty's sake standpoint, among the worst of W"atts's pictures, 
 though they are far from wanting in sesthetic quality. Mr. 
 Clausen, for example, says, with reference to Watts's pictures 
 generally, and in particular to the one showing England's 
 oak weighed down under a pall of gold : " Every tone, every 
 suggestion has its meaning ; take, for instance, the dark and 
 threatening sky in the picture ' Can these Bones live 1 ' 
 But these artifices are not at first apparent. They are used 
 so splendidly that the pictures are in themselves beautiful as 
 decorations, were there no meaning in them at all." The 
 pictures do not lack beauty ; only they insist so on our 
 feeling other than merely sensuous emotions that those who 
 will have nothing else from art inevitably grow angry with 
 them. What, however, I want to lay stress upon at the 
 moment is that such subjects as these were chosen by Watts 
 not because he " set himself up " as a teacher, but because 
 a deep sympathy with the oppressed and the suffering, pure 
 love for his kind, must needs find expression in the only 
 way possible to him. 
 
 Watts was a man of quick and generous feeling and of 
 lofty imagmation. He could dramatise the evolution of the 
 
302 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 human race, and yet keenly sympathise with the individual, 
 and even play with the children; and the whole man is 
 revealed in his art. Probably the work of no other painter 
 has been a more complete self-revelation. What we can 
 learn of him apart from his pictures adds nothing of essen- 
 tial importance. 
 
 Watts was singularly fortunate in that at no period of his 
 life did he find himself under the necessity of painting to 
 order. He was always able to paint what he liked as he 
 liked. If any exception can be made to this statement 
 it is that he won this independence by portrait painting, 
 which could not therefore be entirely a matter of choice ; 
 though even here, probably, the compulsion did not mean 
 that he had to do anything that he would not otherwise 
 have been glad to do. Apart from this, he was not limited 
 by commissions ; we can never think of him, as we have 
 to think of Millais, as falling below his best in order to 
 please his public. There is much self-revelation in Millais' 
 works. We can learn from them much about his likes, 
 and we can infer his dislikes. But Millais did not work 
 as independently of his public as did Watts, who always 
 could, or did, afford to please himself whether others 
 were pleased or not; and others were pleased. He could 
 have had his own price for paintings that he kept in order 
 to give them to the nation. He gave pictures to public 
 bodies whose offers to buy he had refused. He chose the 
 men whose portraits he would paint, so that he might by 
 gift enrich the national collection of portraits. We may put 
 it that he had not to impose himself upon his contempo- 
 raries ; he was accepted on his own terms. That is why his 
 art could be and was a self-revelation. 
 
 At one time or another, in one picture or another, he 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 303 
 
 covered a wide range of subject. And always, just because 
 he could be entirely true to his own self, could fearlessly set 
 forth his thought and feeling, his work is always sincere in 
 the strongest sense of the word ; it tells not merely nothing 
 that is untrue, but it hides nothing of what he held to be 
 true. The whole man, one repeats, is revealed in his work. 
 He took many subjects from Greek mythology. One of 
 these was the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. M. de la 
 Sizeranne objects to the figure of Orpheus, because the 
 trunk turns whilst the legs remain stationary in their first 
 position. This is an objection to truth. Orpheus, continu- 
 ing to walk, has turned his body and head to assure himself 
 that Eurydice is following him. Because of this disobedience 
 to the god's command, she fades from his sight, and he 
 seeks to grasp her. The awkward action of Orpheus is 
 exactly true to what would happen, and in no other way 
 could "Watts have so vividly conveyed to us a sense of his 
 sudden agony. The action is similar to that of Eomeo in 
 Madox Brown's Romeo and Juliet, where one leg is already 
 astride the balcony, for the dawn has broken and he must 
 depart. His outstretched arm also seems to say that he must 
 be gone. But he has turned for a last kiss, and the mo- 
 mentary position teUs of the lover's agony ; he fain would 
 stay, but he knows it is death to linger. 
 
 In expressiveness of this kind Watts comes close to the 
 Pre-Eaphaelites. Mr. Holman Hunt thought that, at the 
 time of the movement, he could see it of influence on Watts's 
 work ; that there was evidence in its closer attention to detail. 
 Certainly Watts never became a Pre-Eaphaelite in this 
 sense, whether or not his practice was modified for a time to 
 a minor extent. But if he had a story to tell, he told it as 
 dramatically as possible; and his story-telling was none the 
 
304 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 worse because he never brought in irrelevant detail. The 
 staging of the piece never distracts our attention from the 
 action, and yet it is never bald ; it is simple but sufficient. 
 This follows from what has been said before : that the man 
 had got to the heart of the subject before the painter gave 
 ^orm to it. How true this is of Love and Death. He had 
 actually been the sorrowing witness of love vainly striving 
 to keep death away from the house of life. He had seen a 
 young nobleman of great promise, whose portrait he was 
 painting, gradually faU, despite all that could be done for 
 him, until the end came. The picture represents the 
 reaction of "Watts's spirit against the crushing sense of 
 irreparable loss. It shows Love to be wrong — one hesitates 
 to say foolish — in looking upon Death as an enemy. That 
 grand, grey figure with the bowed head does but hide the 
 light for a moment, that the splendour of its shining may 
 be the more intensely realised. This the picture says with 
 the utmost impressiveness ; and precisely because, still to 
 refer to it in terms of speech, not a word is wasted in the 
 telling. It is exactly the same with the picture reproduced 
 here. Love and Life. At once, as soon as he has seen her 
 plight. Love has sped down to where dim-sighted Life is 
 straying near the perilous edge of the precipice, and he is 
 now gently leading her from darkness and danger up to 
 safety and the light. Here also there is nothing too little 
 and nothing too much, that either way the story should fail 
 of its desired effect upon us. 
 
 Of course, Watts was not always at his best. Some of 
 the subjects he treated were less easily than others to be 
 dealt with by pictorial art. Even in respect to the purely 
 artistic side of his work he was not always at the same level 
 of accomplishment. He ventured too much for that, His 
 
LOVE AXD LIFE 
 
 G. F. WATTS 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 305 
 
 life-work as a whole leaves us with a feeling of inequality, 
 of incompleteness, much more so than does the work of 
 many who have never gained the heights that he did. His 
 reach exceeded his grasp. He would not limit himself to 
 that which he could say with perfect utterance. The man 
 shows himself in his work to have been greater than his 
 work. 
 
 To follow him in detail through his work is impossible 
 here ; and besides, I have attempted it elsewhere. The burden 
 of his pictures, it has already been said, is Love, and the 
 few that have been mentioned testify to this. He has 
 shown us much of healthy and beautiful life. He was not 
 bUnd to the splendour of the universe in which we live, 
 nor to the beauty of the world in which one scene in the 
 drama of our life is being played. He faced the great 
 twia-tragedy of sin and death, and proclaimed that only 
 against lovelessness could Time and Death and Judgment 
 prevail ; while Love would spring up triumphant when they 
 were for ever laid low. There is nothing sensational, nothing 
 abstruse, nothiag even esoteric or mystical in this "teaching " 
 of Watts's. There is merely the variously but always in- 
 tensely felt and uttered belief, that, to vary only slightly the 
 words of his friend Tennyson — 
 
 God is love indeed. 
 And love Creation's final law. 
 
 Thus he accomplished one of the tasks he set himself : the 
 paiating of a human epic. It is not to be found on the walls 
 of a great building erected for its reception; for he con- 
 ceived his epic when even less than now was there much 
 chance of one who had a gift for mural painting getting 
 faculties for the exercise of his gift. Much of his epic. 
 
3o6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 however, is, through his generosity, in one of the rooms of 
 the National Gallery. In the National Portrait Gallery we 
 can see how he accomplished the other task he set himself : 
 that of painting the portraits of the most eminent of his 
 contemporaries. Here, again, is nothing but what is neces- 
 sary for the achievement of his aim, which was to find and 
 subtly render the expression that most revealed the spirit 
 within. "Whatever may be said about some or many of his 
 subject-pictures, there are few to say that he did not almost, 
 if not wholly without exception, give a profound interpreta- 
 tion of those whose portraits he painted. If at times there 
 is over-statement with regard to certain, characteristics of his 
 subject, it is never more than emphasis of the quahties for 
 which he is chiefly known or remembered. We must not 
 particularise ; but the future will be "Watts's debtor for such 
 portraits as those of Stuart Mill, Manning, Tennyson, 
 Matthew Arnold, Eossetti, William Morris, and many 
 another. It will be laiown how these men looked to one 
 who desired to paint, and did paint, their portraits, because 
 of his great admiration for them and the work they did. 
 
 After mentioning Mrs. Swynnerton as an imaginative 
 painter we may well link the men just discussed with the 
 Pre-Eaphaelite leaders. Watts was the oldest of them aU. 
 Then came Madox Brown. Holman Hunt, Millais, and 
 Eossetti were a few years younger again. Poynter, Alma 
 Tadema, and Burne-Jones were almost a generation later 
 still. Together they show us what we have seen in other 
 countries. Classicism, Eomanticism, and Eealism flourishing 
 side by side ; and we have the Eealists going now to history 
 and now to contemporary life for their subjects. 
 
 Watts, Holman Hunt, Millais, Eossetti, and Burne-Jones 
 owed nothing to contemporary art abroad. Madox Brown 
 
ALFRED LORD TKXXVSriN 
 
 G. F \\-A'ns 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 307 
 
 owed to his Flemish teachers rather the technique than the 
 spirit of his art. Foreign influence, doubtless, accounted for 
 much in the art of Leighton ; and Poynter was the pupQ of 
 Gleyre. Albert Moore took his form from the Greeks and 
 his colour from the Japanese. Alma Tadema brought over 
 from HoUand an art to which our own art was already akin. 
 Eossetti was more an Italian than an Englishman. Burne- 
 Jones learned from him, and was greatly influenced by the 
 work of the earlier Italian masters. Watts, we have just 
 seen, was a child of Greece and of Venice. Holman Hunt 
 and Millais seem the only two among them all who were 
 anything approaching a purely English breed in art; and 
 while Millais was early an admirer of Etty, the admirer 
 in his turn of the Venetians, we should, of course, find 
 other foreign mfluences at work if we pushed our inquiry 
 further back in the history of English art. 
 
 Sir Hubert Herkomer said once that his school at 
 Bushey, which was founded in 1883, was intended to keep 
 students from rushing abroad, "only perhaps to lose their 
 English feeling, without being able to grasp the foreign 
 style and thought in art." But he who said this was a 
 German, who learned the art of painting in this country. 
 Notwithstanding the foundation of his school, English 
 students have rushed, or at least have gone abroad; and, 
 as we shall see later, one of the most vigorous of our un- 
 official art institutions, the New English Art Club, was 
 foimded in 1886 as a raUying-ground for those artists who 
 had received their training in Paris, and who felt that their 
 work did not receive adequate recognition in official quarters. 
 We may not be able to agree with Whistler that there is no 
 such thing as nationality in art ; but what we have just seen 
 with respect to some of the chief English painters who 
 
3o8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 reached their maturity during the earlier part of the last 
 half-century, proves that the art of our own nation at that 
 time was largely indebted to the influence of foreign art, 
 contemporary or of earlier date. Only the extreme Pre- 
 Eaphaelite literalism of Holman Hunt and Millais was a 
 purely indigenous growth ; and this was rather a matter of 
 scientific record than of art. 
 
 Of the painters who, coming later than those just men- 
 tioned, have also drawn their inspiration from myth and 
 legend, Mr. J. W. Waterhouse should perhaps be men- 
 tioned first. His work at once invites comparison with 
 that of Burne-Jones, because he chose much the same kiad 
 of subjects, such as the Greek myths and the Arthurian 
 legend. There is a marked difference, however, in the 
 spirit in which the two men have approached such subjects. 
 With Burne-Jones we are clearly in dreamland ; Mr. "Water- 
 house takes us among flesh-and-blood realities. If he were 
 painting scenes from contemporary life he could hardly 
 make them more realistic. The people who believed the 
 mythical and legendary stories must, we thinlc, have thought 
 of them in this way. The figures are realistic, and so are 
 their surroundings. The landscape of his Hylas and the 
 Nymphs has been studied on the spot, and is realised with 
 only less than Pre-Eaphaelite literalness. Hylas, and the 
 nymphs who are casting their spell over him, are equally 
 real. The story is being enacted before our eyes. It is so 
 with his Lady of Shalott, both where the curse comes upon 
 her and where she is drifting down the river in her boat, 
 and, indeed, with all his pictures. Leighton's formal com- 
 positions, with their decorative colour, and Burne-Jones's 
 elaborate designs, the figures in which are intended only to 
 be types, keep us far away from naturalism. In Mr. Water- 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 309 
 
 house's work there is less formality in the design, and 
 though the same face may appear again and again to play 
 many different parts, the expression is always varied to 
 sait the parts. Mr. Waterhouse is the son of a painter. 
 He was born in Eome in 1849, and though lie was brought 
 to England when only five years old, he was an impression- 
 able child, and the early years spent in the land of romance 
 were probably not the least important in determining his 
 career and the particular direction his art-Avork would take. 
 That he could look back to treasuring a bit of Pompeian 
 fresco when he was hardly beyond infancy, must have 
 helped to draw him tov.^ards the old-time stories he has 
 retold with a naturalism that might almost be called simple. 
 
 Sir William B. Richmond was closely allied to the 
 Eossetti and Burne- Jones group in his early days; but after- 
 v.'ards he turned more towards Classicism, and has painted 
 pictures of classical subjects more animated than those of 
 Leighton and Poynter, but lacking both in design and 
 colour. His brush-work also is smooth and uninteresting. 
 He has painted numerous portraits which show the same 
 technical limitations. 
 
 Mr. Frank Dicksee comes of a family of painters. Born 
 in 1853, he studied in the Academy Schools, and his 
 picture Harmony, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877, 
 created little less than a sensation in academic circles, and was 
 purchased for the nation under the terms of the Chantrey 
 Bequest. His style might perhaps be most fitly described, 
 taking a hint from Gothic architecture, as the decorated 
 academic; and the quality suggested by the first adjective 
 is even more prominent in his later than in his early work. 
 Some of his canvases are an almost barbaric display of 
 gorgeous stuffs and jewels ; but all the splendour does not 
 
3IO FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 result in really fine colour, while the interpretation of his 
 subjects is quite commonplace. 
 
 Mr. Arthur Hacker belongs to this group. He was a 
 student in the Academy Schools, and then studied in Paris 
 under Bonnat, the French influence being evident in his 
 leaning towards tone rather than colour. He was one of the 
 first members of the New English Art Club, but his 
 membership soon terminated, as did that of others who had 
 joined it at the commencement, when its standpoint became 
 something more definite than that of a rallying-ground for 
 painters who had been trained in France. Mr. Hacker has 
 painted the nude without offence, except to those who 
 place upon it an absolute ban; and as one thinks of him 
 there come to mind a Syrinx, a charming picture, but hardly 
 an interpretation of a Greek myth, an Annunciation that 
 betrays no sign of spiritual imagination, a knight almost 
 but not quite overcome by a temptress, and similar pictures, 
 each of them a capable academic exercise. Still later — we 
 have passed from the forties, through the fifties to the 
 sixties in point of birth — we come to Mr. Herbert Draper, 
 an Academy-trained painter who has taken Lord Leighton 
 for his model. He retells the Greek myths and legends 
 without freshness of interpretation; once more they prove 
 good material for academic picture-making. There is some- 
 what more animation in his pictures than in those of 
 Leighton; in fact, they may be said to halt between two 
 opinions : they faU short of the dignity and reserve of the 
 purely classical, and they are not sufficiently realistic to 
 make the story-telling anything like convincing. In another 
 direction, he is completely outside Burne-Jones's dreamland. 
 
 We go back a little in mentioning Mr. T. C. Gotch, whose 
 romantic pictures of childhood are most fittingly referred to 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 311 
 
 here. The chief scenes of his art training were Antwerp and 
 Paris ; for a time he was a pupil of Laurens ; and afterwards 
 he visited Italy. The Flemish and Italian influences are 
 the most obvious ones in his work. In virtue of having 
 heen in Paris he joined the New English Art Club, but he 
 was at home neither there nor, afterwards, with the Newlyn 
 Kealists. He has made an idealised childhood in a romantic 
 world his theme ; and before his pictures we cannot but 
 think of the charming processional scenes of the Florentine 
 masters. Such a picture as Alleluia, in the Tate Gallery, is 
 surely what Mr. Berenson calls, with reference to the work 
 of Fra Lippo Lippi, religious genre. Sometimes we find 
 ourselves vaguely wishing that all children, even elementary 
 school-children, could be as nice and as nicely dressed and 
 in such a beautiful world as are Mr. Gotch's children ; and 
 then disillusionment comes, for we cannot, in our aestheti- 
 cally unregenerate condition, think of such children as being 
 not tainted with priggish self -consciousness. Fancy children 
 marching to judgment a culprit who has broken a costly 
 china bowl ! 
 
 Mr. C. H. Shannon and Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen should 
 also be mentioned here. Mr. Shannon may remind us of 
 Watts, Kossetti, and Burne-Jones, but the fact that we can 
 mention three names in this manner — and, doubtless, they 
 might be added to — suggests that he has individuality of his 
 own ; for it is not successively that we dimly think of these 
 other painters, of one of them before one of his pictures, 
 and of another before another picture, but they all flit before 
 us when we look at any one of his works. But his design, 
 sometimes too obviously worked out, and his colour are his 
 own despite what they may recall. And so is his treatment 
 of mythical and legendary subjects, We do not think of 
 
312 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 primitive man in connexion with the paintings of the three 
 older artists ; but it is to a time when man was naked and 
 not ashamed that Mr. Shannon takes us back. He ideahses 
 the Stone Age — shall we sayl Or, perhaps, this is too 
 definite, it is the far-off Golden Age which he does not idealise, 
 but merely realises, and precisely because it never was real. 
 Once, at least. Watts did go back to primitive man when he 
 painted the picture of that great leap in the dark, the first 
 eating of an oyster ! But his gods and goddesses and his 
 nymphs are usually civilised people for all their unolothed- 
 ness. Mr. Shannon, even when he finds his way into the 
 full civilisation of the Eenaissance, does not get far away 
 from the elemental and so often uncontrolled passions of 
 mankind. Mr. Greiffenhagen's The Sons of God looked 
 upon the Daughters of Men is so powerful that the sonorous- 
 ness of the Biblical language, and its mystic significance, 
 seem to have been merely transposed from sound into 
 colour. Here it is impossible not to think of Watts, but by 
 no means as if there had been mere imitation or plagiarism. 
 His Idyl in the Liverpool Art Gallery, strong in colour and 
 fine in draughtsmanship, is as elemental — is an as simply 
 profound interpretation of the passionate love of youth and 
 maiden — as Madox Brown's Romeo and Juliet. We have 
 got far away now from the cold Classicism of Leighton and 
 Poynter, further still from the merely decorative loveliness 
 of Albert Moore ; and there is warmer blood here than that 
 which courses along the veins of Mr. Waterhouse's people. 
 We must now pass to the historical and genre painters 
 who, if many of them are academic, are yet not, like Alma 
 Tadema, classical painters, and who have taken their subjects, 
 like the Eomanticists, from comparatively recent history or 
 modern times. 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 313 
 
 That the average Englishman likes a picture to tell a 
 story has become a commonplace. He thinks none the 
 worse of the story if it have a moral. The print-seller 
 knows well the kind of picture that will keep a crowd in 
 front of his window. Just before writing these lines I have 
 seen a crowd before a window in which was displayed 
 Mr. Frith's Hogarth arrested as a Spy and taken before the 
 Governor of Calais. The painter of this picture is a link 
 between the present and the Pre-Raphaelite past; for he 
 was born in 1819, and was elected A.R.A. in 1844. He 
 passed into full membership in 1852, taking the place made 
 vacant by the death of Turner. He had thus reached the 
 height of the ambition of many an artist, while Holman 
 Hunt and Millais were in the throes of their struggle for a 
 realism such as Frith himself had never attempted. "With- 
 out comparing the two as artists, we can still say that Frith 
 is, in his subjects such as The Derby Day, The Railway 
 Station, TJie Road to Ruin, and The Race for Wealth, a 
 lineal descendant of Hogarth. 
 
 But it is only as a link in the chain that he is mentioned 
 here. Along with him we think, of course, of MacUse, 
 C. R. LesUe, E. M. Ward, Mulready, T. Webster, J. C. 
 Horsley, P, F. Poole, and others, men who, if they lived on 
 into the second half of the century, merely brought over 
 with them an earlier tradition. One thing the Pre-Raphael- 
 ites set themselves to do was to get to a higher level 
 of historical and genre painting than these men had 
 reached, to put more thought and passion into their work. 
 What a wide difference there is in this respect between a 
 Shakespeare picture even by Maclise and one by Holman 
 Hunt or Madox Brown ! 
 
 But a younger race of historical and genre pictures has 
 
314 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 followed the earlier one, and that quite outside the ranks of 
 the Pre-Eaphaelites and their successors. Their name is 
 almost legion, and one hardly knows where to begin, how to 
 continue, and where to end. Their very number shows how 
 popular is the kind of work they do. Was not the picture 
 of pictures, from this standpoint, at the last Academy 
 Exhibition, one showing how the Devil, disguised as a 
 troubadour, and having been hospitably entertained by some 
 nuns, in gratitude sang to them a song of love ? And is not 
 the painter of this picture now an Associate of the 
 Academy ? It is so. The people will have it so ; and the 
 Academy lets it be so. If they be wrong, they are only 
 wrong at one extreme ; while the people who will have the 
 painter only paint beautiful things that don't matter merely 
 for the sake of painting them beautifully, are wrong at the 
 other extreme. Let us bravely push our way into the 
 crowd of historical and genre painters. 
 
 Here, to begin with, is Mr. Yeames, who has painted 
 Arthur and Hubert, The Death of Amy Rohsart, and When 
 did you last see your father ? that pathetic picture of the 
 young Royalist being questioned by the Parliamentarians in 
 his father's house. The painter, beyond the skill of his 
 craftsmanship, has invested such subjects as these with 
 human interest. And the time is far off, if ever it is to 
 come, when painters as well as writers will not wish to 
 picture the past. 
 
 But before Mr. Yeames — if we had not been pushing 
 our way into a crowd — ought to have come the Scotch 
 painter, John Pettie, with respect to whom there is more to 
 be said. One of the strong influences at the back of some 
 of the Scotch painting of our time was the colourist John 
 Phillip; another was Robert Scott Lauder, who became 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 315 
 
 teacher at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1850. He had tra- 
 velled abroad, and had studied the Italian painters, Velasquez, 
 and Eubens. In Paris he had seen the work of Delacroix. 
 Among his pupils at Edinburgh were Pettie, Mr. Orchard- 
 son, and Mr. Peter Graham. He trained his pupils to see — 
 to see the model or the subject as a whole, in all its relations 
 of colour and light and shade and form. He had seen that 
 there was pictorial unity in the works of the great masters. 
 Pettie learned the lesson well. His pictures impress us by 
 their fulness of tone, and by the fine colour-sense they 
 reveal. The blue ribbon of the garter or a crimson flower 
 or handkerchief will be used to give value to sober yet rich 
 browns, and to complete the colour-harmony. Indeed, 
 Whistler's phraseology might be applied to Pettie's pictures, 
 and we might not only speak of their harmony, but of them 
 as harmonies. Though he painted historical pictures with 
 dramatic subjects, he was always the artist — the word being 
 taken to mean one who knows how to get a fine sensuous 
 effect out of his pigments. There is atmospheric unity also 
 in his pictures. His figures never become mere puppets, 
 and to take but two or three examples, his James II spurn- 
 ing the grovelling Monmouth, and his Prince Charles, are 
 both good studies of character ; and if the bearer of the 
 challenge of Laertes to Hamlet were such a gaily-apparelled 
 and fatuous-looking dandy as we see in Pettie's Water-fly, 
 Hamlet could certainly have chosen no better nickname 
 for him. 
 
 Mr. Seymour Lucas received his training in the Eoyal 
 Academy schools. He saw and was attracted by Sir Richard 
 Wallace's Meissoniers, so familiar now to visitors to the 
 Hertford House collections, and he was also greatly im- 
 pressed by the work of Pettie. He shows himself a clever 
 
3i6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 academic painter of historical incident in The Armada in 
 Sight, After Culloden, Rebel Hunting, The Surrender of 
 Don Pedro de Valdex to Drake on Board the Revenge, and 
 other pictures ; and he has also painted subjects that are 
 on the borderland between history and genre. This is the 
 province of Mr. Dendy Sadler also, in such pictures as 
 Thursday and A Good Story in the Tate Gallery, and In 
 the Camp of the Amaleldtes, now at Manchester. Historical, 
 principally military, subjects have occupied Mr. Eyre 
 Crowe, Mr. A. C. Gow, and INIr. Ernest Crofts, the work 
 of Mr. Gow being often reminiscent of that of Meissonier. 
 The battle pictures of Lady Butler should also be men- 
 tioned here. Mr. F. D. Millet, an American by birth, and 
 trained in Antwerp, has painted subjects in historical genre, 
 of which the best known is the picture in the Tate Gallery, 
 Between Two Fires, where a Puritan is being raked fore 
 and aft by the merry wit of two pretty serving-maids. 
 
 Mr. E. A. Abbey is another American painter, but by' 
 accepting membership in the Koyal Academy he has 
 definitely attached himself to the English school of paint- 
 ing, and has strongly influenced some of our younger 
 painters. He began as an illustrator, and it was to find 
 material for illustrations to Herrick's poems that he first 
 came to England. There is much affinity between his oil 
 paintings and the mural painting of the Flemish masters, 
 and he often calls to mind Madox Brown and the realistic 
 side of pre-Kaphaelitism. He is a daring colourist, or, it 
 might be better to say, he uses colour daringly, in masses 
 that stand out separately from each other, so that if we 
 had to seek for a parallel in the sister art of music it would 
 not be of harmony or sympathy that we should think, as 
 with his fellow-countryman Whistler, but, say, of a fanfare 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 317 
 
 of trumpets. Such use of colour is quite in keeping with 
 the subjects of his pictures, which are, for the most 
 part, intensely dramatic scenes from history in the days 
 when costume was nothing less than brilliant. Such are 
 Richard III and Lady Anne, The Penance of Eleanor, 
 Duchess of Gloucester, The Trial of Queen Katherine, The 
 Omsadm-s, and Columbus in the New World, He is a vivid 
 story-teller ; and if his art be at times bizarre, it is art none 
 the less. 
 
 These, with some of the artists already referred to as 
 belonging to the pre-Raphaelite succession, and, above all, 
 Ford Madox Brown, are the chief historical painters of our 
 period. "Whatever differences there may be between them 
 they are united in one respect, quite characteristic of the 
 time, namely, carefulness with regard to accuracy in details. 
 Architecture, furniture, dress, weapons, etc., are studied 
 with the zest of an antiquary. Art must now go hand-in- 
 hand with science, and need not cease to be art in so 
 doing. These painters are the immediate successors of Dyce, 
 Machse, Goodall, Frith, Sir John Gilbert, and others ; 
 successors, even though some of the older men have out- 
 lived some of the younger ones. Mr. Frith should strictly, 
 perhaps, be placed among the genre painters, to whom we 
 now come, the successors of such painters as Sir David 
 Wilkie, Muheady, the elder Leslie, and Thomas Webster. 
 
 First among these we will take George Mason and 
 Frederick Walker, who were close kinsmen in art. It is 
 difficult, indeed, not to think of them as being just about 
 the same age; yet the former was born in 1818, and the 
 latter in 1840; they died, however, within three years of 
 each other. Mason in 1872 knd Walker in 1875. Neither 
 of them was robust, and this may largely account for the 
 
3i8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 almost pathetically idyllic character of their art. They 
 both treated the same kind of subject, and in much the 
 same way : they read their own feelings into the life of 
 the common folk. 
 
 Mason was greatly influenced by Leighton. He was a 
 native of Wetley, in Staffordshire, and was intended for 
 the medical profession, in preparation for which he walked 
 the hospitals at Birmingham. He was in Italy, having 
 decided to leave medicine for art, when he heard that his 
 father had lost all his money, and he at once began to work 
 hard at painting. He was now twenty-seven years old. 
 Thrown upon his own resources he suffered great priva- 
 tions which told on his health. A Staffordshire friend 
 whom he met in Italy bought pictures from him, and he 
 was also much encouraged by Leighton, whom he met in 
 Rome. In 1855 he returned to England, married, and 
 went to live at the old house of the family, Wetley Abbey. 
 Once more he had a hard struggle; he was almost in 
 poverty, and there was a family to keep. Leighton came 
 to his help again, by visiting him, and pointing out to him 
 the beauty and pictorial possibilities of his immediate sur- 
 roundings. The results of this influence are often evident 
 in his pictures, in which the figures at times look as if 
 they had stepped from Leighton's classical scenes into an 
 English countryside. Leighton also helped him with com- 
 missions, some for himself, and others that he had obtained 
 from friends, and on account of which he managed to per- 
 suade Mason to accept money in advance. 
 
 Thus helped, both in the practice of his art and finan- 
 cially. Mason set to work courageously. The landscape in 
 his pictures shows how successful Leighton had been as 
 an interpreter. The country about Wetley has no special 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 319 
 
 beauty, but there are wide vistas on the higher lands, there 
 are commons and pools and scanty woods with gnarled and 
 twisted trees, and there are the sun and the moon, and 
 the sweet mystery, touched always with sadness, of the 
 twilight. When Mason saw and felt all this, and painted 
 the labouring folk and the children amidst it, and gave 
 them a grace and reiinement they did not actually possess, 
 he was not cheaply idealising, he was only expressing his sense 
 of the beauty of human life lived face to face with nature. 
 
 And, of course, the beauty is there. Mason's idealism 
 is only an impassioned statement of the truth. At times 
 there is no exaggeration, as in The Cast Shoe and The End 
 of the Day. The maidens in The Evening Hymn may be 
 too idyllic j and yet that hymn, when deeply felt, almost 
 seems to transform both face and figure. The exaltation 
 of the moment is expressed by the grace of the maidens 
 singing as they cross the common. Perhaps we are a little 
 too much reminded of Greek heroes and the most graceful 
 Tanagra figures in The Harvest Moon. Yet, doubtless, 
 many, like the writer, having Mr. Macbeth's etching of 
 the picture, and nature, with its changing seasons, always 
 near them, have felt the truth, the beautiful truth, of the 
 picture utterly to outweigh any difficulty occasioned by the 
 ideal character of the harvesters. 
 
 The colour in Mason's pictures is beautifully modulated 
 and harmonised, and has nature's glow and vibration in it. 
 The Harvest Moon is perhaps less satisfying in this respect 
 than most, if not all, of the others. 
 
 In 1868 he was elected A.E.A. ; but the struggle of 
 earher years had undermined his constitution, and four 
 years later he died of heart disease. 
 
 Frederick "Walker first exhibited a picture at the Academy 
 
320 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 in 1867, the year before Mason ivas elected to an associate- 
 ship. It was The Bathers ; and it is impossible not to see 
 in the figures of these boys upon the river-bank the result of 
 his study of the Greek marbles in the British Museum. It 
 is as if the youths of the Parthenon frieze had escaped and 
 gone to bathe in an English river. Before this time he had 
 been making drawings for wood-engraving. After ITie 
 Bathers came The Vagrants; and again there is something 
 too much of the heroic in the figures. In The Plough the 
 ploughman is a lithe, graceful athlete, striding out vigor- 
 ously, as if he were helping the horses in their work as well 
 as doing his own work of guidance. Probably by this time 
 all who care for Walker's art have agreed to accept this 
 overstatement which appears in all his work. It may not 
 correspond with the facts, but it did correspond with his 
 feeling. It is far removed from the mere shepherd's crook 
 pastoral. Life has been felt, if not literally seen, like this ; 
 and the departure from the literal truth is not a wide one. 
 We come to the same conclusion about him as about George 
 Mason. 
 
 His best-known picture is, of course. The Harlour of 
 Refuge. It is an idyll of the close of life contrasted with 
 life in its strength, and the man who is mowing the grass of 
 the almshouse court may well have been intended as a 
 symbol. Euskin had little that was good to say of Walker's 
 art. He disliked his grey skies. He would make no excuse 
 for the idealised figures, which he described as " got up for 
 the stage," and this particular mower he called ridiculous, 
 and " galvanised Elgin marble in his attitude, and the sweep 
 of the scythe utterly out of drawing by the way." As 
 already said, Walker died in 1875 a victim to consumption. 
 He was only thirty-five years of age. 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 321 
 
 The work of these two painters still retains its hold upon 
 us. In one sense Millet and Josef Israels may have been 
 more true. They are at least more literal. But there is a 
 deeper than the literal truth. What is artificial, borrowed, 
 in the idealism of Mason and Walker, is a weakness, and 
 there is perhaps more of this in the art of the latter than 
 in that of the former. But what is the outcome of feeling 
 is a strength, and this far outweighs the other. 
 
 Such art as that of Mason and Walker, beautiful as art, 
 and gently playing on the minor chords of feeling, was 
 bound to influence other painters; and it is not only the 
 work itself that lives in general esteem, but its influence 
 continues in our art. 
 
 George H. Boughton has been called a follower of 
 Frederick Walker ; and with many differences there is this 
 general resemblance between them that they gave an idyllic 
 account of ordinary life. Born in 1834, he was an English- 
 man who, as his parents took him to America when he was 
 only three years old, and as his early training was received 
 there, is sometimes regarded as an American artist. He had 
 little regular teaching. The sale of a picture to the Albany 
 Art Union enabled him to visit England when he was only 
 seventeen, and a little later he went to Paris. There he got 
 help from various painters, particularly Edouard Frfere, and, 
 after working for a time in Normandy and Brittany, he 
 migrated to London, where he spent the rest of his life. 
 Mr. Isham, in the book already quoted, says that although 
 Boughton was born in England, and returned here while 
 young, he belonged more to America than mere dates 
 suggest. He exhibited in American exhibitions, found 
 patrons there, the spirit of his art was formed there, many 
 of his subjects were taken from the life of the early colonists. 
 
322 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 "Even his Holland pictures, when they came," says Mr. 
 Isham, "seemed to be a reversion to the old Dutch tradi- 
 tions of Albany and knickerbocker New York. It is a pity 
 that a still stronger plea for his Americanism cannot be 
 made, for Boughton's art is of a sort so sweet and whole- 
 some that one would wUlingly annex it if one could." The 
 impossibility of such annexation can only be cause for 
 rejoicing on this side of the Atlantic, for there was great 
 charm in Boughton's work, both in his landscape and in his 
 figure-subjects. It was the personal note in it that allied 
 him to Mason and Walker; yet it was not, as with them, 
 a pathetic note, but one of delicacy and daintiness. There 
 was distinction in his cool colour-harmonies, and in his com- 
 position and draughtsmanship. As the bee extracts the sweet- 
 ness from the flower, so he gathered from nature and from life 
 every suggestion they gave him of tender beauty and grace. 
 Mr. Marcus Stone, born in 1840, belongs to this genera- 
 tion. He received his instruction in art from his father, 
 Frank Stone, the subject painter. After painting historical 
 pictures for a time, he turned to the particular form of 
 genre that he has made his own. He has been called the 
 painter of sweethearts. Lovers' joys and lovers' hopes and 
 fears and sorrows and little quarrels are the chief subject of 
 his pictures, the scene of which is almost invariably laid in 
 old-fashioned gardens, while the lovers are dressed in what 
 now look to us quaint costumes. These expedients aid the 
 sentimental effect. The colour of the pictures also is 
 dainty; there are plenty of green garden seats and pink 
 flowers in vases. Everything looks as if the requirements 
 of the most elementary taste, and the necessities of repro- 
 duction in colour, had never been overlooked. He is super- 
 ficial where Boughton was subtle. 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 323 
 
 Mr. William Quilier Orohardson must be counted amongst 
 the genre painters; though one of his best-known works, 
 Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon, is a fine exami^le of 
 imaginative historical painting ; and he has also distinguished 
 himself as a portrait painter. Born in Edinburgh in 1835, 
 he was a fellow-student of John Pettie and Mr. Peter 
 Graham under Robert Scott Lauder at the Trustees' 
 Academy. The character of Lauder's teaching, his insistence 
 upon seeing a subject as a whole, has already been alluded 
 to ; and its iufluence is obvious in the breadth of treatment, 
 the unity of tone and harmony of colour, that mark all 
 Mr. Orchardson's work. He settled in London in 1862, he 
 and Pettie living together for a time ; and his pictures have 
 for all these years been regularly-expected items in the 
 Koyal Academy exhibitions. 
 
 A picture by him is recognised in an exhibition almost 
 before it is seen; its pervading golden tone tells us it is 
 there before we have actually reached and looked at it. 
 Because of the broad treatment of colour to which they 
 lend themselves, he has chosen for many of his subject- 
 pictures the dress, furniture, and decoration of the period 
 of the French Directoire; and even when his subject 
 belongs to another time, and also in his portraiture, he has 
 only modified, not changed, his general colour-scheme. 
 
 In his choice of subjects he has limited himself almost 
 entirely to the spoiled children of civilisation. Elegantly 
 dressed people, amid luxurious surroundings, are the staple 
 of his art. Of such is the young girl timorously essaying 
 her first dance, under the eyes of friends, and perhaps 
 rivals, who are following her every movement with interest. 
 Under the archway of unsheathed weapons the queen of 
 swords walks with due stateliness, the other ladies following 
 
324 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 in her train. The young duke hears with self-complacent 
 smile the noisy applause of his guests as they drink to his 
 health. The ruined card-player pauses at the door, as if he 
 would fain reverse his fate, while the winners almost wear 
 the air of culprits as they watch his departure. Voltaire 
 returning to the dinner- tahle of the Due de Sully, after 
 being thrashed hy the lackeys of the Due de Rohan, who 
 thus took vengeance for Voltaire's bitter sarcasms, is the 
 subject of another picture ; and in another we see Madame 
 R(5camier doing the honours of her ealon. The Manage 
 de Convenance, The First Cloud, and Alone are refined, up-to- 
 date versions of Hogarth. Her Mother's Voice is an 
 elegant, after-dinner account of the widower's dream which 
 Longfellow tells of the village blacksmith ; for the deepest 
 joys, and the tenderest regrets and hopes, are confined to 
 no one class of society, but are the human endowment 
 of rich and poor alike. And this thought makes it possible 
 to regret that Mr. Orchardson should have taken no cog- 
 nisance of any world but one into which the blacksmith 
 could only come, cap in hand, and after very carefully 
 wiping his boots on the mat. He comes perilously near to 
 a confusion of taste and refinement with mere expensive- 
 ness. The upholsterer, the tailor, and the dressmaker are 
 too much in evidence; and this is not without bearing on 
 his art, which achieves success within very narrow limits of 
 light and colour. He ventures nothing, but remains content 
 with a formula that we are inclined to call a recipe. 
 
 Now, perhaps, we should come to Frank Holl and Sir 
 Luke Fildes, both of whom have also been portrait painters, 
 the former almost challenging comparison with the best in 
 his fine characterisation of such men as Gladstone, Earl 
 Spencer, Lord Duflerin, Samuel Cousins the engraver, and 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 325 
 
 others. His genie pictures are quite of the popularly 
 pathetic kind, to which Millais said he had not stooped. 
 The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away ; blessed be the 
 Name of the Lord shows a family, from whom the mother 
 has been taken, seated or kneeling at the table, while the 
 clergyman stands and prays. No News from the Sea, Hush, 
 and Hushed, in the Tate Gallery, Leaving Home and Ordered 
 to the Front, as their titles wUl suggest to those who have 
 seen neither the originals nor reproductions of them, are of 
 the same kind. They are competently painted pathetic 
 incidents. 
 
 Holl, who was born in 1845, died at the early age of 
 forty-three. Sir Luke FUdes, who was born in 1844 — they 
 were both trained in the Academy Schools — has struck the 
 same note as Holl in his well-known picture The Doctor. 
 In other pictures, such as An al fresco Toilet, Venetians, and 
 The Village Wedding, he is in a lighter vein. Mr. George 
 Moore pours scorn on Manchester for purchasing Venetians, 
 when it had managed to do so well as to acquire Cecil 
 Lawson's landscape The Minister's Garden, and describes 
 The Doctor as " bald illustration." Others have seen in the 
 picture intense realism and yet high imagination, and have 
 regarded it as " a symbol of the struggle between Science 
 and Death." Mr. Moore calls Eossetti's Dante's Dream 
 imaginative interpretation; but he will have nothing to 
 do with a plain representation of a doctor intently watching 
 a sick child just at the crisis of its illness, v/hile the mother 
 buries her head in her arms, and the father, standing with 
 one hand laid affectionately on her shoulder, looks anxiously 
 towards the doctor and the child. "Eossetti is a painter 
 we admire," says Mr. Moore, " and we place him above Mr. 
 FUdes, because his interpretations are more imaginative." 
 
3z6 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 The Doctor was not intended to be bald illustration ; the 
 artist's idea was, quoting his own words, " to put on record 
 the status of the doctor of our own time," than whom " no 
 more noble figure could be imagined — the grave anxiety, 
 supported by calm assurance in his own knowledge and 
 skill, not put forward in any self-sufficient way, but with 
 dignity and patience, following out the course his experi- 
 ence tells him is correct ; the implicit faith of the parents, 
 who, although deeply moved and almost overcome with 
 terrible dread, stand in the background trusting the doctor 
 even while their hearts fail." 
 
 "We are intended to think, so the painter has also said, 
 that the child is going to recover, that the doctor's skill will 
 triumph. But the picture itself does not suggest this; there 
 is in it only the anguish of uncertainty ; for we know that 
 often the doctor's skill is unavailing. That is to say, we 
 know that this doctor may have to tell the father and 
 mother that the child cannot recover. The real subject of 
 the picture, that which moves us in it, is the pathos of love 
 face to face with death. It is to the man and his wife in 
 the background, not to the doctor in the foreground, that our 
 thought and sympathy go. The painter says that no more 
 noble figure can be imagined than the doctor of our time. 
 "We need not discuss this statement. It is sufficient to note 
 that, in the picture, the doctor and his skill, and the nobility 
 that attaches to them, have to compete for our interest with 
 the love of a father and a mother for their child, and utterly 
 fail to hold their own against it. Technically the picture is 
 a competent piece of matter-of-fact reahsni, making no appeal 
 to the sense of beauty, and leaving nothing to the imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 Mr. Frank Bramley is a much younger painter than Sir 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 327 
 
 Luke Fildes, and than others we shall have to mention, but 
 his Tate Gallery picture, A Hopeless Datm, is called to mind 
 by the things we have just been discussing. Here, again, 
 we have what may be styled a bald illustration, a realistic 
 picture of the cottage to which the fisherman for whom the 
 supper has been prepared, and for whose help the light has 
 been put in the window, will never return ; while the aged 
 mother seeks to console the young wife, and the Bible lies 
 open in the window-seat. The picture is a direct appeal to 
 the simplest yet most profound emotions, and the skill 
 with which the appeal is made could hardly be bettered. 
 Consolation is suggested, and of the kind such people will 
 seek and find. There is the open Bible ; on the wall is a 
 print of Kaphael's cartoon of Christ delivering His charge 
 to St. Peter. This picture had a literary origin. The 
 subject, its title, and the print on the wall were all sug- 
 gested by one of Euskin's eloquent passages in the Har- 
 hours of England, in which he turns from the joy and 
 beauty of the beach and the fishing-boats, to storm, and 
 suspense, and death; "and stUl at the helm of every 
 lonely boat, through starless night and hopeless dawn, His 
 hand, who spread the fisher's net over the dust of the 
 Sidonian palaces, and gave into the fisher's hand the keys of 
 the Kingdom of Heaven." In later years Mr. Bramley has 
 chosen less sorrowftd themes. 
 
 By this time we ought to be finding Sir Hubert Her- 
 komer in the crowd. He has already been mentioned as a 
 German who learned his art in this country. He was born 
 in 1849 at Waal, near Landsberg, in Bavaria, where his 
 father was a master-joiner. He was only two years old 
 when the family migrated to America ; six years later they 
 came to England, making their home at Southampton. The 
 
328 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 father had intended his son to he an artist ; hut it was only 
 hy the most rigid economy that he could achieve his 
 purpose. After a visit to Bavaria, in connexion with some 
 wood-carving the father was commissioned to do, the family 
 returned to England, made their home at Wandsworth, and 
 the youth studied art in the South Kensington schools. 
 He only managed to get along by selling drawings to the 
 Graphic and Fun, and by stencilling a frieze in the South 
 Kensington Museum for a wage of ninepence an hour. 
 Gradually he began to sell his water-colour drawings, and, 
 in 1873, his oil painting, After the Toil of the Day, was 
 hung on the line at the Academy and found a purchaser at 
 £500. Success was now assured. In the following year he 
 exhibited The Last Muster, which received an ovation from 
 the Hanging Committee at the Academy, and was a great 
 popular success. The old pensioners are at service in their 
 chapel. One of them is suddenly taken ill. A comrade 
 touches him on the arm and looks anxiously at him. The 
 anxiety is well-founded. The veteran has joined his com- 
 rades for the last time. 
 
 Not for once only, in this picture, has Sir Herkomer 
 struck the pathetic note. Again and again he has done so, 
 taking sickness, poverty, or old age as the subject-matter 
 of his pictures. We have sickness in the Convalescent, 
 poverty in Hard Times, old age in Charterhouse Chapel, Der 
 Bittgang, and other pictures. There is pathos even in The 
 Guards' Cheer. In this he shows the influence of Fred 
 Walker, which was particularly marked in his earlier work. 
 Subsequently, when his canvases have become more fully 
 occupied with figures, which, though playing their part in a 
 drama, have assumed the character and importance of por- 
 traiture, the resemblance in the work of the two artists has 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 321 
 
 diminished; wliile from portraiture in subject-pictures, as 
 notably in Cfharterhouse Chapel, Sir Herkomer has easily 
 passed to portraiture pure and simple. His versatile accom 
 plishment, which has led to excursions into many arts anc 
 crafts, needs no more than mention here. In painting, witl 
 which alone we are concerned here, he is an able craftsman, 
 who has placed considerable gifts of design, colour, anc 
 characterisation at the service of realistic interpretation oJ 
 life. 
 
 It must suffice merely to mention here the refined charm 
 of the art of Mr. G. D. Leslie and the Venetian studies ol 
 Mr. Henry "Woods ; while Mr. G. A. Storey should not gc 
 unnamed. The Hon. John CoUier's genre pictures, drawn 
 from diiferent periods, their dramatic interest not seldom 
 bordering on the sensational, while their academic accom- 
 plishment is always to be relied upon, also are too familial 
 to require more than mention. Mr. J. E. Reid, born ic 
 Edinburgh in 1851, has mingled landscape and figure in his 
 pictures of open-air life, chiefly by the sea. He is a vigorous 
 painter, who bravely faces the problems of brilliant light 
 and strong colour. Mr. E. J. Gregory, born in 1850, is a 
 fastidious craftsman, who has applied remarkable powers oi 
 realistic painting largely to boating scenes on the Thames, 
 with, in the end, it must be said, a somewhat commonplace 
 result. It is not possible to be interested in his holiday 
 makers, and his treatment of landscape is without imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 A few years later comes Mr. Stanhope Forbes, a prominent 
 member of the little company of artists who settled at 
 Newlyn in Cornwall, there to work in the open air. Born 
 in Dublin in 1857, Mr. Forbes studied at Dulwich, in the 
 Lambeth School of Art and the Academy Schools, and 
 
330 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 subsequently under Bonnat in Paris. He joined the Newlyn 
 painters in 1884, Mr. Walter Langley being the iirst of those 
 who had preceded him there. It is not possible to suggest 
 a regret, as in the case of Mr. Orchardson, that Mr. Forbes 
 has limited himself to a social sphere in which the black- 
 smith would not feel at home; for it is chiefly into the 
 company of people in whose society the blacksmith would 
 be quite comfortable that Mr. Porbes takes us. It is dis- 
 tinctly a prose version of their life that he gives, whether 
 he paints fishermen, village musicians, a village wedding, an 
 auction-sale, or what else. His colour also is usually very 
 sober, not to say dull. The equable grey climate of Corn- 
 wall, allowing the study of the model in difiiised dayHght, 
 is said to have been one thing that attracted the painters to 
 Newlyn. There is an excess of equable greyness in Mr. 
 Forbes's pictures. The open air has become a roofless studio, 
 but it is stUl a studio. 
 
 Mr. H. S. Tuke is also one of the Newlyn group ; though 
 he has painted much at Falmouth, and no charge of greyness 
 can be brought against his bright pictures of yachting and 
 bathing scenes. He was born at York in 1858, and studied 
 at the Slade School, and subsequently imder Laurens in 
 Paris. He was one of the founders of the New English Art 
 Club, of which more will be said hereafter. While Mr. Frank 
 Bramley, who also went to Newlyn, and Mr. Forbes, have 
 taken the work-a-day world for their subject, Mr. Tuke has, 
 in the main, shown us English youth making holiday on and 
 by the sea. 
 
 We return to the work-a-day world with Mr. George 
 Clausen and Mr. H. H. La Thangue. They have both often 
 been compared to Bastien-Lepage ; and the comparison is 
 certainly a fair one, particularly with regard to their earlier 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 331 
 
 work, such as Mr. Clausen's The Girl at the Gate, and Mr. 
 La Thangue's ITie Man with the Scythe, both of which are 
 in the Tate Gallery. 
 
 Mr. Clausen, who is of Danish descent, was born in 
 London in 1852, and, during the time that he was working 
 as a draughtsman and designer for a firm of builders and 
 decorators, he attended evening classes at South Kensing- 
 ton. One thinks with difficulty of his having worked in 
 the studio of Edwin Long. He was one of the first 
 members of the New English Art Club, the promoters of 
 which were much encouraged by his support. A strong 
 opponent at one time of the Royal Academy, he is now one 
 of its associates, and has held the position of Professor of 
 Painting. Until quite recently he has lived in the country, 
 at Widdington, in Essex, amid the agriculturists, who, and 
 whose work and surroundings, have been the subject of his 
 pictures. 
 
 If his early work reminds us of Bastien-Lepage, in his 
 later work he is like a Millet possessed with the Impres- 
 sionist zeal for light and atmosphere. Like Millet he has 
 heen content to portray the peasantry amid whom he has 
 lived, engaged in their ordinary work, apart from any 
 special incident. Digging, ploughing, sowing, reaping, 
 binding the corn into sheaves, building the stack, threshing 
 —in short, all the varied work of the farm as it is carried 
 on through the seasons of the year has been his subject; 
 and occasionally he has painted the portraits of those whose 
 lives are passed in the performance of these fundamental 
 human tasks. He has not idealised the work of the fields. 
 Some of it is laborious, monotonous, mechanical, and he 
 has shown it thus. In one picture of harvesters at work 
 m an "upland field, under a blazing sun, one of the men, 
 
332 FIFTY YEARS OF. MODERN PAINTING 
 
 after binding up a sheaf, is moving forward to gather the 
 corn for another one. He is staring vacantly before him, 
 his thoughts evidently far from his work ; but already his 
 arms and hands are instinctively bent, as they need to be, 
 to gather the corn for the next sheaf. But farm-work is 
 by no means all like this; it is more varied than much 
 town-work, and has the interest of dealing with plant- and 
 animal life, so that the mere representation of it without 
 idealism or the fevered townsman's exaggeration of its 
 " slowness " is a worthy task for art. 
 
 Taking a cheerier view of such life than Millet did, 
 Mr. Clausen has also added the interest of keen enjoyment 
 of the beauty of light and atmospheric effect. Indeed, these 
 have counted for so much in his art as to bring him at least 
 close to the border-line that divides genre from landscape. 
 Many things are suggested in these days to make the life 
 of the agriculturist more interesting, and so to reduce the 
 exodus from the country to the town. Better housing, 
 small holdings, reading-rooms, and billiard tables : some of 
 us have urged these things, perhaps helped to provide them. 
 Have we ventured the attempt to get the agriculturist to 
 see himself and his surroundings as the artist sees them! 
 It is a task from which even the brave may shrink. Would 
 the ploughman be a happier, a nobler being, if, when he 
 paused for a moment at the headland, he could see that his 
 fellow-ploughman in the next field made, with his surround- 
 ings, under certain conditions of light and shade, a beautiful 
 picture ? We cannot answer such a question in the negative 
 without giving the lie to our own experience. We cannot 
 answer it in the afi&rmative without making our own experi- 
 ence more authentic. One hopes that some of the people 
 among whom Mr. Clausen lived for years are now enjoying 
 
-J. 
 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 333 
 
 life more because they have learned, through him, to see 
 themselves and their surroundings as he saw them. The 
 point is, of course, that Mr. Clausen's pictures do not tell 
 a story like Sir Luke Fildes's Doctor and Village Wedding ; 
 they only reveal the beauty of ordinary scenes, the har- 
 monies of light and colour and form, the visible music, 
 which the mere facts present, or to which they at least 
 approximate. Sunlight peeping through the chinks in a 
 barn, suffusing the misty morning air when the hoar frost 
 glistens on the earth and the trees, blazing behind the rick 
 and its builders, or down on the harvesters while a dull 
 heat-haze lies on the horizon ; the warm after-glow in the 
 wintry sky with the snow lying, cold grey in hue, in the 
 shady places : such are the quite ordinary, yet beautiful 
 effects which to those who have learned to see them convert 
 the most common-place countryside into a beautiful paradise. 
 These are the things that Mr. Clausen has seen and inter- 
 preted ; and, seeing them, what need has he had of more in 
 the way of story-telling than that of the great story of 
 human toil? 
 
 Mr. La Thangue, born in 1860, studied art at South 
 Kensington, the Lambeth School of Art, and later in the 
 Academy Schools. Subsequently he worked for three years 
 in Paris in the studio of Gdr6me, and painted for a time 
 in France. Devoting himself, like Mr. Clausen, to the 
 paintmg of workers in the country, he has found his sub- 
 jects abroad as well as at home. His methods approximate 
 to those of the Impressionists, light and atmospheric vibra- 
 tion bemg chief considerations with him ; yet, on the whole, 
 not as much so as with Mr. Clausen; and his figures occupy 
 a larger part of the canvas, are more individualised, and the 
 landscape becomes a mere setting for them. Like Mr. 
 
334 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Clausen he is generally content witli ordinary doings and 
 happenings, with the tending of cattle, the driving home 
 of the plough-horses, the feeding of poultry, the gather- 
 ing of fruit, the working of the cider-press. So far as 
 he can he realises such things in the full strength of 
 nature's light and colour. Not as imaginative as that of 
 Mr. Clausen, his work is still a revelation of heauty. 
 
 Here must end for the present our account of the genre 
 painters ; though something more will have to he said of 
 them in the next chapter. But this is a convenient place 
 to look at their work from a particular point of view. To 
 what extent has the work of our genre "painters of the 
 latter half of the nineteenth century been a chronicle of 
 their timel Have they been comprehensive in their see- 
 ing and recording, or have they merely picked and chosen 
 here and there? The answer seems to be that they have 
 shrunk from the recording of a large part of modern life ; 
 much more so than have many of their foreign brethren. 
 The French painters, as we have seen, have found material 
 for their art in the ordinary scenes of town and country 
 alike. Some of the Belgians have made the record of such 
 scenes a part of social propaganda. The life that the 
 majority of us live in Britain has been almost passed over 
 in the serious art of our time. The art galleries of London 
 do not interpret London. The last thing we expect to find 
 in any city is the pictorial representation of its contem- 
 porary life. The toilers of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the 
 factory and mine workers, the Staffordshire potters, the 
 metal workers of Birmingham, the men of the railways and 
 the ship-yards, at their work and their play, and in their 
 homes, have hardly attracted attention ; nor have the modern 
 shop, warehouse, and office. Yet they all afford the finest 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 335 
 
 material for art ; for it is surely too late in the day to need 
 to say that the artist can use to artistic ends that which is 
 not in itself, in its entirety, beautiful. And beyond beauty 
 there is life, always significant for the living. 
 
 Glasgow, indeed, in its municipal buildings, has ventured 
 on the representation of its great shipbuilding industry. In 
 the London Koyal Exchange we are taken into the past, 
 Manchester, in its Town Hall, let Madox Brown bring its 
 history to the time of John Dalton; and, hitherto, has 
 stopped short there. G. F. "Watts, in his huge picture of 
 the brewer's drayman with his horses, gave a pretty broad 
 hint of what art might do in the way of a record of ordi- 
 nary contemporary life. In Wmlt — which is in Manchester, 
 hut surely ought to have -been in London — Madox Brown 
 crowded into one picture enough of town-incident to serve 
 for a dozen. Frith's Derhy Day and Railway Station might 
 have suggested to later artists the treatment of similar 
 subjects in their own way. There is inexhaustible material. 
 Of course it has been used, but casually ; the work of the 
 town has not been as systematically dealt with as the work 
 of the country and the sea. 
 
 If it be argued that the kind of life most people live to- 
 day does not provide good material for art, it must be said 
 in reply that this is a terrible criticism of our civilisation ; 
 and, indeed, a candid pictorial statement as to a large part 
 of our life would be its condemnation. There would be 
 some misgivings surely, on the private view day at the 
 Royal Academy, if the pictures on the walls set forth the 
 conditions of life of vast numbers of people in this country. 
 As it is, there is little but elegant trifling and sentiment. 
 What criticisms of the wrongs and inequalities of life there 
 may be too often takes the form of a sensationalism that 
 
336 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 defeats its own ends. Our genre painters have yet to see 
 life steadily and to see it whole. Perhaps the people for 
 whom chiefly they have to work do not want them to do 
 this. Anyhow, it is not done. 
 
 In his inaugural lecture as Slade Professor at Oxford, 
 Ruskin, when enumerating the directions of effort in which 
 he thought English artists were liable to failure, and those 
 in which he thought that past experience had shown them 
 to be sure of success, said : " Our first great gift is in the 
 portraiture of living people — a power already so accomplished 
 in both Eeynolds and Gainsborough, that nothing is left for 
 future masters but to add the calm of perfect workmanship to 
 their vigour and felicity of perception." Whether or not 
 portrait painting in the latter half of the nineteenth century 
 has followed the course thus marked out for it by Euskin, it 
 is certain that both in intention and accomplishment our 
 portrait painters, during that time, have been worthy of a 
 great tradition. To name only some of the chief among 
 them — "Watts, Millais, Holl, Orchardson, Herkomer, Ouless, 
 Sir George Eeid, and, among painters to be mentioned 
 in the next chapter, such men as "Whistler, Sargent, 
 Lavery, and Sir James Guthrie, wUl have left a record of 
 many of the most notable people of their own time that the 
 future will value as we value the records of the past. 
 
 In the same lecture, after claiming for us intense power of 
 invention and expression in domestic drama, Euskin went on 
 to say : " In connection with our simplicity and good humour, 
 and partly with that very love of the grotesque which de- 
 bases our ideal, we have a sympathy with the lower 
 animals which is peculiarly our own ; and which, though it 
 has already found some exquisite expression in the works of 
 Bewick and Landseer, is yet quite undeveloped." Eedgrave 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 337 
 
 had already associated the demand for pictures of horses 
 •with the love of hunting and racing, as a preliminary to 
 writing of such early animal painters as "Wootton, Stubhs, 
 Sa^vrey Gilpin and Morland. He does not forget Bewick, 
 and also James Ward ; and, coming to artists of a later 
 period, he mentions Kichard Ansdell along with Landseer. 
 Prominent among the animal painters of our time are Mr. 
 Briton Eiviere, J. T. Nettleship, and J. M. Swan ; but animal 
 life has been sympathetically rendered, and none the less 
 so because incidentally, by many of our subject painters. 
 MUlais' affection for animals is evinced over and over again 
 in his works. Even Mr. Holman Hunt has given us the 
 sheep of The Hireling Shepherd and Strayed Sheep. Sidney 
 Cooper has had successors not a few whose work at times 
 we hardly know whether to describe as cattle and landscape 
 or landscape and cattle. 
 
 Turning to the two painters singled out above, we find 
 some difficulty in placing Mr. Briton Eiviere. He is above 
 all things an animal painter, but a painter of animals in 
 association with man, and in this respect he has been both an 
 historical and a genre painter. "We have historical painting 
 in his pictures of Daniel in the lions' den, of lions prowling 
 among the ruins of Persepolis, of the herd of swine running 
 down the steep place into the sea, of the Christian knight 
 holding up his cross-hilted sword as he rides into the forest 
 gloom from which horse and hounds shrink back in fear, of 
 the dog that, at the cost of its life, has sought to protect the 
 Eoyalist home against the enemy. "We have genre painting 
 when he shows us navvies playing with a puppy, a navvy 
 asleep with his dog beside him, the poacher and his dog, 
 the terrier sympathising with his little mistress in her dis- 
 grace. He takes us completely into the animal world when 
 
338 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 be paints the lion followed by a troop of jackals. Mr. 
 Riviere cannot be charged with a fault that was too often 
 evident in Landseer's work : he does not endow his animals 
 with a nature higher than their ownj he does not read 
 human nature into them. Nor had Nettleship and Swan 
 Landseer's fault ; they were the less likely to make the 
 mistake because they painted almost exclusively, not the 
 animals that man has tamed for use and companionship, but 
 the wild denizens of the forest. 
 
 The last class of painters to whom we have to refer, the 
 landscape painters, are perhaps not the least important; 
 certainly they are not the least numerous. It is surely not 
 lack of modesty that makes us think well of our landscape 
 painting. "We have seen that twice, in the cases of Con- 
 stable and the Barbizon painters, and of Turner and the 
 Impressionists, our landscape painters have greatly influenced 
 the art of France, and through France that of other 
 countries. Our painters have been the pioneers of modern 
 landscape art. We think that the great variety of scenery 
 within the narrow limits of our islands, and the variability 
 of our climate, producing within short spaces of time great 
 differences of effect in the same scene, have had much to 
 do with this. These variations helped to quicken the sensi- 
 bility of Monet and Pissarro to atmospheric effects when 
 they were in this country in 1871. The air is more visible 
 here, counts for more in the general look of things than it 
 iocs in drier climates. 
 
 In writing of recent English art, M. de la Sizeranne says 
 [ittle about our landscape painters, on the ground that there 
 !s no longer an English school of landscape, but only con- 
 ;emporary landscape painting ! On his own showing we 
 lave gone far to teach Europe the art, and therefore, he 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 339 
 
 argues, we have no longer a school of our own ! We might 
 almost imitate M. de la Sizeranne's patriotism, and claim 
 aU contemporary landscape painting as a province of English 
 art. French Impressionism is perhaps the chief obstacle to 
 our doing so ; and even Impressionism has been undergoing 
 changes that bring it nearer to our own art, while not a few 
 of our younger painters have learned from the Impressionists 
 without sacrificing their own individuality. Our landscape 
 painting is rich enough to be able to rely mainly on its own 
 resources, and yet not to be afraid wisely to borrow. 
 
 It is not within our scope to attempt a statement of the 
 various sources of interest in landscape. Beauty of light, 
 colour, tone, form; movement and life; appearances and 
 effects that awaken within us feelings sometimes joyous 
 and sometimes pensive — such are, at any rate, among the 
 chief of such sources, and they are infinite in variety and 
 in the ways in which they combine with each other. And 
 our landscape painting has been and still is marked by a 
 wide use of the material that nature has placed at the 
 disposal of art. 
 
 We have seen the great importance that was attached by 
 one side of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to presentment 
 of the detailed truth of nature, and that quite a succession 
 of painters has subsequently done the same thing. Millais, 
 as we have seen, abandoned this method, substituting the 
 suggestion of detaU for its actual rendering; and many of 
 our later landscape painters have treated landscape in this 
 way j but many if not most of the landscapes of the latter 
 half of the century have been more realistic, have made us 
 feel more as if nature were before us, than did most of the 
 landscapes, particularly the oil paintings, of the immediately 
 preceding period. More recently, classical and decorative 
 
340 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN- PAINTING 
 
 landscape, neither of which depends for its interest on 
 illusion of reality, have asserted themselves again. 
 
 "We need not concern ourselves with the painters who 
 merely lasted on into our period. One of them, however, 
 may be mentioned, as much of his best work was done on 
 our side of the half-century. This is John Linnell, who 
 was born in London in 1792, and lived to the advanced 
 age of eighty-nine years. Though it is by his landscapes 
 that he is best known, he worked also as a portrait painter 
 and engraver, and himself would speak of Biblical study as 
 the serious work of his life, and of landscape painting as a 
 recreation. He was the friend of William Blake, whose 
 
 In England's green and pleasant land, 
 
 shows him to have seen his own country as the landscape 
 painter sees it. Linnell's pictures of English scenery are 
 strongly painted, with much truth of detail and local colour, 
 and he was also observant of effects of light. There was 
 an epic feeling in his art ; he woidd paint the blackness of 
 the coming storm, hiding the sun in the heavens, as if the 
 prophet Micah's description of one were in his mind. 
 His work has a more modern look than that of many of 
 his younger contemporaries. His sons, J. T. and William 
 Linnell, whose art bears considerable resemblance to his, 
 belonging wholly, in their work, to the latter half of the 
 century. 
 
 To most people J. C. Hook is known as having been a 
 painter of the sea and fisher-folk. Some may also know 
 him to have been in earlier days a painter of pastoral 
 subjects. Going further back again we find him commenc- 
 ing as a painter of figure-subjects. He was born in 1819, 
 and his early love for art was encouraged by no less a master 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 341 
 
 than Constable, and, like so many other English painters, he 
 carefully studied the Elgin marbles. Then he became a 
 pupil in the Academy Schools, and it was with a picture, 
 Tht Finding of the Body of Harold, that he won the gold 
 medal of the Academy, and with Rizpah Watching the Dead 
 Sons of Saul that he won the travelling studentship. He 
 went to Italy, and on his return to this country painted 
 Venetian figure-subjects. One of these, a representation of 
 the trial scene in " The Merchant of Venice,'' with which 
 the writer has long been familiar, is, in its colour, closely 
 allied to the work of Carpaccio, the Italian master by whom 
 the young English artist was particularly attracted. 
 
 It was love of outdoor life that drew him away from the 
 painting of figure-subjects, and led him to become a painter 
 first of pastoral subjects, and then of the sea. His pictures 
 of rural England, which he began to paint just about the 
 time that Holman Hunt and Millais were fighting for 
 realism, were intimate enough to win the enthusiastic praise 
 of Euskin, as also were his sea-pieces. The youth who 
 had been encouraged by Constable might be cited as another 
 proof that more than the Pre-Eaphaelite Brethren stood in 
 the way of the fulfilment of Constable's prediction of the 
 decay of English art. It is curious to note that the house 
 he had built for himself on Campden Hill, and which he 
 left to go and live in Surrey, was afterwards occupied by 
 Holman Hunt and A. "W". Hunt. Something of Constable's 
 spirit might have entered into him, for freshness, the sense 
 of atmosphere, sea-breeze and salt spray is in his work ; and 
 his colour is strong and true. He was himself full of vigour, 
 could farm with the farmer, work with the farm-labourer, 
 sail and fish with the fisherman ; he did not merely see, but 
 lived and worked amongst the scenes and the people that 
 
342 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 lie painted, and his interpretation of nature and life has the 
 brightness that comes of health and good spirits. 
 
 Mr. B. W. Leader is one of the most conspicuous examples 
 of the artist who, having made a reputation for a particular 
 kind of work, finds himself able to repeat it year after year, 
 even though manner becomes mannerism, and art, arti- 
 ficiality. He was born at Worcester in 1831, and received 
 his art teaching in the School of Design there and in the 
 Royal Academy Schools. His pleasantly composed and 
 agreeably coloured landscapes have long made him one of 
 the most popular of our landscape painters. He is a dex- 
 terously rapid worker, with an eye for the picturesque view. 
 There is no sign in his works of a deep love of nature. He 
 records something of her superficial beauty, but interprets 
 little or nothing of her innermost spirit. His earlier work 
 was much more subtle than his later work has been, and it 
 was stronger in colour and fuller in tone. 
 
 About eleven years the junior of Mr. Leader is Mr. J. W. 
 North, whose landscapes have just the sympathetic, intimate 
 interpretation of the truth and beauty of nature that 
 is lacking in those of the older painter. He was the 
 fellow-student of Fred "Walker and the friend of Eichard 
 Jefferies. The former owed not a little to Mr. North, who, in 
 his intimate love of nature, comes close to the latter. 
 It is not for the painter to attempt to rival the Avriter in 
 minute description of nature, though Mr. Holman Hunt, 
 and Millais in his early time, may almost be said to have 
 done this. Mr. North has endeavoured to suggest nature's 
 infinity of detail without losing breadth ; for, having lived 
 with nature, mere general statements about her life and 
 beauty could not content him. To achieve his end he has 
 spent_ much time on his work, so that his output has been 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 343 
 
 comparatively small as to mere number of pictures. One 
 of his works, with which the writer happens to be very- 
 familiar, bears the title The Floioer and the Leaf, and the 
 painter's effort, and successful effort, has been to portray 
 the effect of palpitating, summer sunlight playing upon the 
 infinite intricacy of detail in a luxuriant Devonshire or 
 Somersetshire coomb. If he paints the winter woodland, 
 he wiU lovingly trace the slender gracefulness of the young 
 tree-shoots, the more distant ones becoming faint in the 
 misty air. The freshness of spring and the ripeness of 
 autumn — cider orchards with the grass beneath the trees 
 strewn with apples — he has recorded also, for, like a true 
 nature lover, he wUl miss nothing of the whole cycle of the 
 changing year. If now and again his colour be somewhat 
 crude, it is because of his desire to keep as far from mere 
 conventionality as possible ; and time may be trusted to 
 mellow the harshness that now and again, but only now and 
 again, we feel. Many of our landscape painters have 
 entirely or almost confined themselves to one locality, and 
 Mr. North has strayed but little from the two counties 
 named above. 
 
 Mr. Peter Graham has already been mentioned as a 
 fellow-student of Pettie and Mr. Orchardson at the Trustees' 
 Academy, Edinburgh, under Eobert Scott Lauder ; but 
 whereas they began and ended as painters of figure-subjects, 
 he abandoned that side of art for landscape. His vigorous, 
 realistic pictures of the moors and glens of the Scottish 
 Highlands, and the shaggy cattle that inhabit them, and 
 of the haunts of the wild fowl on the rock-bound northern 
 coasts, have become very familiar, even to the man in the 
 street, through the reproductions so often exhibited in the 
 print-sellers' windows. Grey misty skies, with, perhaps, 
 
144 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 itful gleams of sunlight breaking through the clouds, and 
 ighting up the otherwise cold green grass, grey rock, or 
 ;rey-green sea, have been painted by him with minor varia- 
 iions year after year until we have been ready to take them 
 is looked at. 
 
 George Vicat Cole, born at Portsmouth in 1833, might 
 dmost be described, with regard to his art, as having one 
 'oot on land and one foot on sea. At least he loved to 
 )aint both English pastoral scenes and the Eiver Thames, 
 rom its upper reaches down to where, as it merges in the 
 lea, the great ships pass along it. Speaking of him at the 
 Academy Banquet after his death, Leigh ton said: "English 
 andscape painting has lost in Vicat Cole one of its most 
 lonoured names. Typically English were the scenes on 
 yhich he loved to dwell — the coppice, the glade, the rolling 
 )asture fading from green to distant blue, summer slumber- 
 ng on brown-tipped corn. But most of all our English 
 Chames had won his heart and occupied his hands. He 
 lad followed its stream with faithfid brush throughout its 
 ength, from where its first sweet gurgle is heard within the 
 ;rass, to where, far away, salt and suUied, it rocks on turbid 
 ide the carriers of the commerce of the world." 
 
 Vicat Cole may well lead up to two of the most con- 
 picuous painters in our time of the sea and seafaring folk, 
 he late Colin Hunter and Mr. C. Napier Hemy, who were 
 lorn in the same year, 1841. Both of them were originally 
 atended for careers other than that which they eventually 
 dopted. Colin Hunter was the son of a Glasgow book- 
 jUer, was for several years a commercial clerk, and did 
 ot take seriously to painting until he was twenty years 
 I age. He may be said to have been self-taught, for 
 [etching expeditions with an old landscape painter, and a 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 345 
 
 few weeks in the studio of Bonnat in Paris, were all that he 
 received in the way of regular teaching. After a few years 
 of varied work he settled down to sea-painting, and his 
 fresh and vigorous renderings of the neighbourhood of the 
 Scottish sea-lochs and islands were regularly seen in our 
 exhibitions for many years, and some of them have found 
 places in our public collections. 
 
 Mr. Hemy, who was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, had 
 experience in the Australian gold-fields, and in helping to 
 work the ship in which he returned to England, before 
 he became an art student. After this he had intervals of 
 travel and monastic life. The reading of Ruskin's Modem 
 Painters led to his adoption for a time of Pre-Raphaelite 
 methods, and he afterwards studied figure-painting at 
 Antwerp under Baron Leys. Like Hook and Colin Hunter, 
 he only finally devoted himself to sea-paiating after working 
 for a time at other subjects. He has covered a much 
 wider range of scene and subject than Hunter; he has 
 gone out upon the ocean as well as the narrow seas ; he 
 has visited the ports of other countries besides our own ; 
 craft of many kinds, including the modern man-of-war, 
 appear in his pictures, which by no means shrink from the 
 incident that ensures a certain popularity. 
 
 Ten years later than the two painters last-named comes 
 Mr. W. L. "Wyllie, and he and his brother, Mr. C. "W. 
 WyUie, have carried on the English tradition of the 
 painting of sea and river-estuary and the shipping that 
 enlivens them. To the number of these painters, whose 
 work is so proper to an island country, may be added Mr. 
 W. H. Bartlett and H. H. Maccallum. Mr. H. S. Tuke, 
 whom we have placed among the genre painters, might 
 almost as well have been included here. These and other 
 
46 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 lainters are the successors of Turner and — of somewhat 
 iter time — Clarkson Stanfield, and E. W. Cooke. 
 
 Two Scottish i^ainters of the same name, but not of the 
 ame family, David Farquharson and Joseph Farquharson, 
 hould be mentioned here. The former was born at Perth 
 n 1843, and received liis education in art in the classes 
 )f the Edinburgh Eoyal Institution. The latter was born 
 n Edinburgh in 1846, and studied under Mr. Peter Graham, 
 md also at the Edinburgh School of Art \ while, afterwards, 
 le worked in the studio of Carolus Duran in Paris. Both 
 )f them close observers of nature, and realists in their 
 ;reatment of landscape, there is something more of self- 
 fevelation, of the expression of mood and feeling, in the 
 work of David than in that of Joseph, who often gives what 
 is little more than a vivid transcript of nature, without 
 1 clue as to his own feeling about it, except that he 
 has been arrested by the scene, and thought it worth 
 recording. 
 
 Few landscape painters are more in evidence in our exhi- 
 bition galleries than Mr. David Murray, who was born in 
 1849, and began life in a Glasgow business-house. While 
 thus engaged, however, he found time for the pursuit of art, 
 and eventually devoted himself to it. His work has been 
 done chiefly in English pastoral country, or in the southern 
 Highlands of Scotland ; and he has recorded the varying 
 beauty, at different seasons of the year, and under many 
 conditions of light and shade, of the lowlands, with their 
 level landscape broken by lofty and wide-spreading trees, 
 md of the country where hill and dale abound. 
 
 Sir Ernest A. Waterlow is another painter of our more 
 softly beautiful scenery. He was born in 1850, and, after 
 studying at Carey's school and travelling in Germany and 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 347 
 
 Switzerland, lie became a stuilenfc in tlio schools of the 
 Eoyal Academy. lie is now President of the Royal Society 
 of Painters in "Water-Colours. He chooses places picturesque 
 in themselves, or made so liy some temporary condition of 
 light, and treats them in a realistic spirit, though with 
 much feeling for atmospheric eiTeot. Mr. R. Thorne Waito 
 comes to mind here, for he and Sir Ernest Waterlow have 
 painted the same scenes together. Often, inevitably, our 
 later painters remind us of some of the earlier ones. With 
 many differences, of course, Jilr. David Murray at times 
 makes us think of Constable ; Sir Ernest Waterlow also 
 reminds us of him, and of David Cox as well ; and perhaps 
 more than to any other painter Mr. Thorne Waite takes 
 us back to De Wint. Breadth and freshness are con- 
 spicuous qualities in his work. 
 
 Another realistic landscape painter who may be named 
 in this company is Mr. Alfred Parsons, a native of 
 Somersetshire, where he was born in 1847. W^hile occu- 
 pied in the General Post Office, London, he gave his even- 
 ings to the study of art, at South Kensington and elsewhere. 
 In many of liis pictures he comes near to the Pre-Raphael- 
 itism of Holman Hunt, so close is his observation, and 
 so careful his rendering, of nature's wealth of intricate 
 detail. 
 
 To this generation, and, generally, to this type of land- 
 scape painters, belong two Scottish artists, Mr. Leslie 
 Thomson, born in Aberdeen in 1S81, and Mr. Robert 
 W. Allan, born in Glasgow in 1852. Mr. Thomson has an 
 especial affection for luminous skies over wide-spreading 
 landscapes ; while prior to, and ever since, recent travels 
 in foreign lands, both near and far, we have chiefly asso- 
 ciated Mr. Allan with the rock-bound Scottish coasts, and 
 
348 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 the harbours of their fishing villages, which he has painted 
 with vigour and broad truthfulness. 
 
 The landscape painters mentioned hitherto may be classed 
 together as realists. What strikes us first — and often last 
 — in their work, is resemblance to the fact as we have seen 
 it. There is never, of course, mere transcript without 
 selection and composition ; the artist is always more or less 
 in evidence ; but the external fact is more in evidence. We 
 may put it that the artist says to us, " This is what I have 
 seen ; how does it appeal to you ? " rather than, " This is how 
 I myself have felt." Yet many of the pictures do also say 
 this to us, esfiecially in the case of some of the painters, 
 and that they have all been grouped together by no means 
 implies that they do not differ considerably in this respect. 
 
 The list might, of course, be extended. Mr. Arnesby 
 Brown, for example, would bring us nearly a generation 
 later than the youngest of the painters already considered. 
 One more name must be mentioned, that of Mr. Alfred 
 East. Born at Kettering in 1849, he studied at the Glasgow 
 School of Art, and in Paris under Bouguereau and Tony 
 Fleury. Afterwards he painted at Barbizon, and enlarged 
 his experience subsequently by visiting Japan. He was 
 one of the first members of the New English Art Club, but 
 retired from it within two or three years. Though there 
 has always been a strong element of realism in his work, 
 yet picture-making, in the sense of formal composition and 
 design, has also always been present; and, under Japanese 
 influence, there has been a marked decorative element as 
 well. His work, indeed, has often seemed to halt between 
 various opinions. We have not known quite what chiefly 
 we were intended to enjoy. Latterly, however, he has 
 declared himself more plainly. He has elected to put 
 

 AI.KREI) EAST 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 349 
 
 design, formal design, upon the plane of the canvas, in the 
 forefront of his art, so that, in principle, his work now 
 approximates closely to the point of view of Claude. He 
 has hecome a classicist, and his erstwhile membership of 
 the New English Art Club must seem to him now one of 
 the strange things that happen in the whirligig of time. 
 But both he and the club have changed. In his case the 
 change is interesting as illustrating what has already been 
 said, namely, that because much has been added in recent 
 years to the resources of art, and new pleasures have been 
 provided for us, it is not necessary to renounce the older 
 pleasures because they are not new. 
 
 We turn now to a number of landscape painters in whose 
 work there is more self-revelation than in that of the 
 painters already considered. 
 
 In this connexion it is interesting to note how slight has 
 been the following of Turner in his own country. He did 
 more than merely modify the natural world in his art; 
 he transformed it into a world of his own imagining. Re- 
 semblance to the fact is not what strikes us first in his 
 pictures, but rather the subtle departures from resemblance 
 that convert the whole into something new and strange. 
 Nature is the starting-point, not the goal of his art. Among 
 English landscape painters one only thinks of such men as Mr. 
 Clarence Whaite, the veteran painter of the "Welsh moun- 
 tains, Mr. Albert Goodwin, and, in a measure, Mr. A. "W. 
 Hunt, as having thus subordinated nature to the ends of 
 art. There is no question here, of course, of comparison in 
 detail, but only as to general principle. Some of the Scot- 
 tish painters, to be mentioned in the next chapter, have 
 also ventured to create a world of their own. Turner's in- 
 fluence on the French Impressionists also was only in one 
 
350 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 particular; they were impressed by his successful quest of 
 light. The creative element in his art did not appeal to 
 them. 
 
 First among the painters who, more than the majority, 
 reveal their own temperament and moods to us, we may take 
 Cecil Lawson, the story of whose life is that of a career of 
 great promise all too early closed. He was born in 1851 
 and died in 1882, at the age of thirty-one. He received his 
 training in art from his father, William Lawson, an 
 Edinburgh portrait painter. He drew in black and white 
 for magazine illustrations before devoting himself to land- 
 scape painting. His best known works are The August 
 Moon, in the Tate Gallery, and The Minister's Garden, 
 in the Manchester City Art Gallery, which also possesses a 
 smaller landscape 'Twixt Sun and Moon, a subtle rendering 
 of the time that is neither night nor day, when the waning 
 light of the sun and the growing light of the moon are con- 
 tending for mastery, and, as the cattle go homewards across 
 the water-meadows, a thin veil of mist begins to obscure the 
 distance. 
 
 The August Moon shows the ruler of the night at full 
 strength, and yet but partially defeating the darkness which 
 lurks like an ambushed foe behind each and every hiding- 
 place. The painter told a friend that he should try in this 
 picture to do what had not yet been done : to show how 
 much colour there was in a moonlighted landscape. In both 
 this picture and The Minister's Garden there is something 
 of the abundantly satisfying strength of Kubens. The 
 latter picture is simply the vista, from a little garden on a 
 low hillside, over a wide stretch of fertile country. The 
 title lends a touch of poetry to a scene already poetic. It 
 was suggested by Goldsmith's "Deserted Yillage," and it is 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 351 
 
 pleasant to think of a good-hearted, earnest man as being the 
 gardener here, and, as he gardens, pondering over the needs 
 of the parishioners, some of whom we can see in the little 
 valley below. But the thought is not necessary to the 
 enjoyment of the picture, and could easily be banished by 
 any one who would prefer to be without it. To the left of 
 the picture are the stem and the lower branches of a Scots 
 pine, under which are the beehives, with trailing nastur- 
 tiums on the ground before them, and a fine group of holly- 
 hocks on the farther side of them. To the right are roses, 
 growing over a low fence ; and the kitchen-garden is beyond 
 again on the slope of the hUl. There is no lack of detail, 
 but it is subordinated to the general impression, and the 
 foreground, the wide-reaching distance, and the narrow 
 space of sliy seen above it, are combined into singular rich- 
 ness of colour and depth of tone. 
 
 "We may perhaps also bring Mr. James Aumonier among 
 the more imaginative painters, for although there is a- strong 
 element, of realism in his art, the fact is largely impreg- 
 nated with feeling. Indeed, the objects in the picture seem 
 often the mere occasion for tones of light and colour that 
 appeal to our emotions. He is a native of London, was 
 self-taught in art, which, in his youth, he pursued in the 
 leisure he could obtain from the work of designing for 
 printed calicoes. 
 
 Thomas Hope McLachlan, born at Darlington in 1845, is 
 a painter who deserves to be mentioned here, though he did 
 but little work, and his reputation is chiefly among his 
 fellow-artists. He was educated at Cambridge, and became, 
 and practised as, a barrister, but eventually devoted himself 
 entirely to painting. He died suddenly in 1897. His 
 landscapes are full of tender, mysterious charm. A shep- 
 
352 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 herdess, silhouetted against the evening sky, while the sheep 
 fed about her, would be sufficient subject for him. He 
 stayed his hand when he had expressed the feeling nature 
 had awakened in him, so that all his pictures have a per- 
 sonal note. They communicate what he had felt ; they are 
 very far from recording everything that he might have seen 
 had he examined the landscape carefully bit by bit. To say 
 that his work recalls that of Millet, and, in a measure, that 
 of George Mason and Fred Walker, is not to accuse him of 
 lack of originality, for his expression is unmistakably his 
 own, but is to affirm the true poetic quality of his work. 
 
 M. Ridley Corbet, a pupil of Signer Costa, was a true 
 poet-painter, sensitive to subtle qualities of light and colour ; 
 and his landscapes make that appeal to the emotions which 
 seems to come to us mysteriously from the painter himself. 
 "We are brought into touch with a human personality. As 
 his two pictures in the Tate Gallery show, nature anywhere 
 could arouse his feeling. The Severn Valley would suffice 
 as well as Val d'Arno. The poetic landscapes of George 
 Mason — he and Fred Walker should both be remembered 
 here — were painted, as we saw, in Staffordshire. The sun, 
 the moon, and the stars, and the earth they lighten, brightly 
 or dimly or leave dark, under and upon which the countless 
 generations of men have lived, are anywhere commonplace 
 only to those who are devoid of feeling. 
 
 Edward Stott is the poet-painter of the twilight. To say 
 this is to state a limitation. One would be glad if, now and 
 again, Mr. Stott showed that he could feEl and express the 
 poetry of other times of day. But his one main theme has 
 many variations, and these he has rendered with rare 
 subtlety. William Stott, who called himself ' of Oldham,' 
 to distinguish himself from his namesake who is of Roch- 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 353 
 
 dale, was, to the present writer at least, above all else the 
 poet-painter of the Alps, whose vast massiveness, appalling 
 precipices, high-towering pinnacles and wide fields of snow 
 he transformed into visions of majesty, splendour, and 
 solemnity. There is in many of his paintings, even in his 
 pastel studies, a wonderful sense of the vast solitudes upon 
 which man enters at his peril. "We seem to be where first 
 the gods might step when they come to visit the earth. 
 Stott was a master of subtle tones, which gave fine quality 
 to all his landscapes. As a figure painter, with myths and 
 idylls for subjects, he did not reach the same distinction. 
 
 Mr. Adrian Stokes and Mr. Mofiat Lindner, both of 
 whom have been members of the New English Art Club, as 
 well as of the Newlyn group of painters, should also be 
 mentioned here, together with Mr. Julius Olsson. Mr. 
 Adrian Stokes has found true lyric poetry in bright light 
 and colour ; nature is glad and gay in his pictures. Mr. 
 Moffat Lindner is moved by the intense colour that often 
 invests great spaces of water beneath the infinite vastness of 
 the sky. Mr. Olsson loves the delicate harmonies played by 
 the moonlight air. 
 
 Other landscape painters wLU be mentioned in the next 
 chapter, in which we shaU discuss the art of Whistler and 
 certain Scottish painters, and of Sargent and the painters 
 who perhaps best represent the chief aims of the New 
 English Art Club. The landscape painters already men- 
 tioned have, for the most part, either always belonged to, or 
 fomid their way into, the orthodox ranks. They have been 
 welcome at the Eoyal Academy. We must not forget that 
 many painters who have been included in other categories 
 have also made important contributions to landscape paint- 
 ing. Mr. Clausen and Mr. La Thangue may be instanced. 
 2 A 
 
354 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 George Mason and Fred Walker have already been men- 
 tioned in the same sense. 
 
 In this chapter the endeavour has been made to give the 
 main features of painting in Great Britain during the last 
 half-century, apart from the work of a number of painters 
 reserved for separate discussion. When this also has been 
 done, our task will be completed. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 (Contirmed) 
 
 IN this chapter we have to consider the work of two 
 American artists who have become English artists by 
 adoption — Whistler and Sargent; of a number of Scottish 
 artists, who are often and appropriately linked with 
 Whistler ; of certain members, past and present, of the New 
 EngHsh Art Club, of which Mr. Sargent has been a member 
 since its foundation ; and then to say what seems desirable in 
 the way of summary and conclusion. 
 
 It was a saying of Whistler's, already quoted, that there 
 is no such thing as nationality in art. The truth in the 
 saying is that art is ever transcending the limits of nation- 
 ality. No nation lives unto itself. Yet there remain 
 national differences. Even in these duU days, when local 
 differences in dress are dying out, when Paris fashions are 
 discussed in the newspapers of remote towns in the Canadian 
 Far West, and when Paris is only a seven hours' journey 
 from London, there are marked differences in the dress 
 of both sexes, and of aU sections of the community, in these 
 two cities. And dress is a form of art. 
 
 Whistler, as Mr. George Moore points out, needed the 
 saying to account for himself. He was an American by 
 birth. To go back further still, he was Irish by ancestry no 
 
 355 
 
356 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 more remote, indeed, than his grandparents. He himself 
 was born at Lowell, in Massachusetts, in 1834, and was 
 educated at the United States Military School at West Point. 
 He was there for three years, during which period he ac- 
 quired so little knowledge of chemistry as to call silica 
 an elastic gas or a " saponifiable fat ! " Thereupon "West 
 Point decided that it had no further need of him. He then 
 obtained employment in the United States Coast Survey, 
 but soon found the necessary topographical work so irksome 
 that he frequently absented himself without leave, and again 
 he received his dismissal. He then went to London, and 
 shortly afterwards to Paris, where he became a pupU of 
 Gleyre. He had always shown skill in drawing, and now, 
 at last, he had found his vocation. Among his fellow- 
 students were Degas, Fantin-Latour, and Legros. As we 
 have already seen, he is one of those who, in Fantin-Latour's 
 Hoininage a Delacroix, are grouped before the portrait of 
 the apostle of Komanticism. Delacroix died in 1863; the 
 picture is dated 1864. 
 
 The portrait of Whistler in this picture is thoroughly 
 characteristic. He stands, leaning on his cane, and half 
 turns his head to look at the spectator out of the corner of 
 his eye, with an expression that may be described as a 
 quizzical note of interrogation. It was thus that he used- 
 to watch fresh visitors to his studio, keen to discover if 
 they knew anything about art as he understood it, and 
 whether or not, according to the result of the scrutiny, they 
 were worth consideration. 
 
 From 1874 he made London his head-quarters, but he 
 flitted about between London, Paris, Venice, and his native 
 country. It cannot be said that, even yet, his art has found 
 general acceptance in this country, though one of his 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 3S7 
 
 nocturnes is now to be seen in the National Gallery of 
 British Art. A Pre-Kaphaelite leader recently would not 
 so much as look at a fine example of Whistler's art when it 
 was pointed out to him. Whistler had only been in London 
 about three years when Ruskin wrote, in Fors Clavigera, 
 apropos of an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery: "For 
 Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of 
 the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have 
 admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated 
 conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of 
 wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney 
 impudence before now, but never expected to hear a cox- 
 comb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in 
 the public's face." It was Ruskin, however, that was the 
 Cockney, as elsewhere he has self-critically remarked, say- 
 ing of himself as a boy : " I began to lead a very small, 
 perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of 
 life, in the central point which it appeared to me (as it 
 must naturally appear to geometrical animals) that I occu- 
 pied in the universe." 
 
 As is well known. Whistler brought a libel action against 
 Euskin on account of the Fors Clavigera criticism, and 
 obtained a farthing damages. He insisted on having the 
 farthing, and wore it as a pendant to his watch-chain. 
 
 The adverse criticism of Whistler in Fors followed a 
 eulogy of Burne-Jones; and, to the regret of the latter, 
 Ruskin asked him to give evidence at the trial — a request 
 that friendship made it impossible to refuse. His evidence 
 was no help to Ruskin's case. It did nothing to justify 
 such a savage attack, though it would have justified, at 
 any rate as not being libellous, more measured adverse 
 criticism, "I think," he said, "that nothing but perfect 
 
3S8 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 finish ought to be allowed by artists ; that they should not 
 be content with anything that falls short of what the age 
 acknowledges as essential to perfect work. I have seen the 
 pictures by Mr. Whistler which were produced yesterday in 
 this court, and I think the Nocturne in Blue and Silver is a 
 work of art, but a very incomplete one ; an admirable 
 beginning, but that it in no sense whatever shows the finisji 
 of a complete work of art. I am led to the conclusion 
 because while I think the picture has many good qualities — 
 in colour, for instance, it is beautiful — it is deficient in 
 form, and form is as essential as colour." This is but faint 
 damnation. It is really praise, almost remarkable as coming 
 from such a man at such a time. How uncertain was the 
 ground of what was adverse in his statement wLU be seen 
 from a mere quotation of the phrase, " what the age 
 acknowledges as essential to perfect work." He said him- 
 self that he wished Whistler knew that the trial made him 
 sorry. Lady Burne-Jones says, in her biography of her 
 husband : " Whistler, who was quoted to him sometimes^ he 
 placed far above any of his followers; his technique he 
 called perfect, and his colour always good." 
 
 The Euskin- Whistler incident is not a pleasant one to 
 think about, especially for those who hold Kuskin in high 
 esteem on many grounds. But it is too instructive for us to 
 pass it over here ; and the part played in it by Barne-Jones, 
 and his estimate of Whistler's art, are of great interest as 
 showing that a rapprochement was not impossible between 
 the second generation of the romantic side of Pre-Rapliaelit- 
 ism and this so different art, so differently derived. Whistler, 
 indeed, has been said to have come under the influence of 
 Rossetti, by whom Burne-Jones was inspired ; there were 
 resemblances as well as differences between the two schools. 
 
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO I. Mc\Ell,l. whistle 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 3S9 
 
 Neither of them, was realistic ; both sought beauty. Only- 
 Whistler -was content with beauty alone, desiring not at all 
 that, as in Eossetti and Burne-Jones's work, there should be 
 a "literary" element as well. Also, he entirely subordinated 
 form to colour, regarding the latter as the main objective of 
 painting j though his paintings show the beauty of line 
 which he pursued in another art, that of etching, from 
 which, in his work, colour is excluded. 
 
 Though Whistler was the pupil of Gleyre, he was not to 
 become a classical painter. Probably he would not in any 
 event have done so ; but he met Courbet in the studio of 
 Fantin-Latour, saw much of him subsequently, and any 
 slight chance that he could become a Classicist was thereby 
 doubtless swept away. On the other hand, he was as little 
 likely to become a follower of Courbet. There was too 
 great a difference in the physique and temperament of the 
 two men. Courbet was strength itself ; Whistler was frail 
 and nervous. But he would at least be prevented by Courbet 
 from going to history and to myth for his subjects ; he was 
 bound, if he came under the influence of the champion of 
 Realism, to concern himself with what he could see round 
 about him. But Fantin-Latour, the student of tone and 
 atmosphere, was his fellow-pupil; and he also became ac- 
 quainted with Manet, who was feeling his way in the same 
 direction; and the work of these young painters would, if 
 nothing else would, reveal to him where his own strength 
 lay. He was sensitive and impressionable; hence he be- 
 came, in a broad sense, an Impressionist. He was not 
 destined to give clear accounts of external facts, after the 
 manner of Courbet, but to record only the impressions that the 
 facts made upon him, impressions of colour, tone, and light. 
 The substantial external fact was not entirely suppressed, but 
 
36o FlFfV YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 it was entirely subordinated to the sensuous emotion it 
 aroused in him. Anything tliat produced visible harmony 
 was sufficient for his purpose, and to obtain such harmony 
 he was willing to sacrifice much else — even to sacrifice truth. 
 For example, he painted a full-length portrait of M. Buret, 
 and in order to get over the stiffness of legs cased in modern 
 trousers, he threw a lady's domino over the arm of his 
 subject, so that it hung down and partly hid the legs, in 
 addition to providing material for a colour-scheme. When 
 M. Buret's friends saw the portrait they exclaimed that they 
 did not know he was such a lady's man ! Nor was he. The 
 domino was not specially appropriate to the man himself ; it 
 was useful pictorially, which was enough for Whistler, and 
 also for M. Duret. A portrait painter who once remarked 
 to the present writer that the practice of his art was not an 
 agreeable thing in a certain provincial city, because the 
 people there expected portraits to be good likenesses, was 
 surely, in this at least, a good Whistlerian ! Yet there 
 was no essential untruth in the domino. It is surely quite 
 characteristic of a Parisian gentleman that he should have 
 the courtesy to relieve a lady of the weight of a garment 
 she is not wearing. 
 
 It was to emphasise his point of view that Whistler 
 called his pictures Harmonies, Symphonies, Arrangements, 
 and Nocturnes. The portraits of his mother and Thomas 
 Carlyle received the sub-title Arrangement in Blaclc and 
 Grey. Symphony in White, Numhen- 1 : The White Girl, is 
 the title of one of his earliest exhibited pictures. Yet 
 although it might seem as if Whistler regretted having to 
 mingle any record of fact with colour-music, subtle interpre- 
 tation of facts is obvious in his pictures. Those who care 
 little for tone and colour may feel the pathos of the two 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 361 
 
 portraits just mentioned. Tliey are deeply sympathetic 
 records of old age, of the time when the fire of life is burn- 
 ing low. They are not only sympathetic, they are reverent. 
 In aU his portraits, far removed though they be from illu- 
 sion of corporeity, there are character and expression, in 
 gesture and attitude as well as in the face. Whether there 
 be detailed likeness or not we may not know ; but the 
 artist referred to in the preceding paragraph as contemptuous 
 of mere likeness is not a true Whistlerian if he be not 
 solicitous of interpreting the mental and emotional nature of 
 his subjects. The spirit of Whistler's men, women, and 
 children seems to have been exhaled on the canvas and to 
 have become visible there. Was the etcher with marvellous 
 sense of line, the painter who put foremost subtlety of tone 
 and colour, so sensitive also to the outward visible signs of 
 the spirit within that he instinctively selected and recorded 
 them? 
 
 In his landscapes also Whistler may be said to have dis- 
 tilled the essence of the scene he painted, or at least to 
 have distilled one essence from the scene. No one painter, 
 no single method of art, can achieve everything. "Wliistler 
 could not give what others had to give, but what he did give 
 was valuable. He separated from what else in nature was 
 beautiful or significant, that to which he was most sensitive, 
 tone, delicate gradations of colour, and significant and 
 beautiful line. A strong adherent of the Pre-Kaphaelites 
 recently sought to belittle Whistler's pictures of the night- 
 time by saying that he himself had appreciated the beauty 
 of hghts shining out against the blue blackness of the night 
 long before Whistler sought to fix it upon the canvas. 
 Doubtless many a beautiful thing has been recognised as 
 beautiful before it has been set down by the artist. Its 
 
362 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 beauty, indeed, must be seen before it can be recognised as 
 a fit subject for art. Whistler, however, was not the first 
 who sought to render in art the beauty of the night-time. 
 He might, indeed, have been led to do so by the example of 
 Holman Hunt, who in the Holy Land had done this before 
 Whistler had completed his studentship in Paris, and not as 
 part of a subject-picture, but with the beauty of the night 
 and the lights shining out in it, for the subject of the 
 picture. His pauiting Tlie Ship, in which the steamer's 
 lights, the red glow from the funnel, and the moon and stars 
 in the blue-black sky, are the pictorial subject, was painted 
 in 1875, two years before Whistler exhibited the Nocturne 
 that roused Ruskin's ire. But in these studies of Holman 
 Hunt's there was still much form and even incident. 
 Whistler eliminated everything, as nearly as might be, but 
 the tone and colour and light. 
 
 Time has its revenges. The painter who made sport for 
 lawyers and public, and whom artists were called upon to 
 declare hardly to be an artist, is now acclaimed as one of the 
 foremost artists of his time. 
 
 Ho was not an Impressionist in the same sense as Monet 
 and Pissarro. He did not use their methods, for he did not 
 seek their ends. He was allied rather to Manet in his 
 earlier style, to Degas and to Fantin-Latour. It must not 
 be overlooked also, that for much of the charm and decora- 
 tive quality of his art he was, as were his fellow-artists in 
 Paris, indebted to the Japanese. 
 
 There is good reason for associating Whistler with the 
 Scottish painters who have become known as the Glasgow 
 school. Pictures by him would look more at home in an 
 exhibition of their works than in any other British exhibi- 
 tion. In fact, almost anywhere else, they would be out of 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 363 
 
 place. And this is due to the fact that these painters have 
 been influenced by Whistler and by other painters, such as 
 Millet, Corot, Manet, and Israels and his fellow-painters in 
 Holland, in whose work, tone, and harmonious if subdued 
 colour are conspicuous features. No pictures — by British 
 painters — are so easy to hang as those of the Glasgow 
 school. They do not cry out upon the walls. Never does 
 the sky in one of their pictures look from a short distance 
 like a space to let. Natural fact is never allowed to over- 
 ride the claims of art. In this they are akin to Whistler 
 and, as suggested in the last chapter, to Turner. Herr 
 Muther's criticism of the school is interesting. " The art 
 of the Continent,'' he says, " is deeper and more serious, 
 and the union between temperament and nature to be found 
 in it is more spiritual. With its decorative palette pictures 
 this Scotch art approaches the border where painting ends 
 and the Persian carpet begins. For all that, it has had a 
 quickening influence upon the art of the Continent. After 
 an epoch of ' bright-painting,' it taught the painter to feel 
 once more the witchery of mood with its full and sonorous 
 harmonies of colour." 
 
 The subordination of the pictorial to the decorative 
 motive is nowhere more evident than in the work of Mr. 
 E. A. Hornel. Some years ago, in the course of a dis- 
 cussion in the Liverpool City Council as to whether a 
 picture by Mr. Hornel should be purchased for the Walker 
 Art Gallery, one of the aldermen said : " The only motive 
 of Mr. Hornel's picture is a mode of art, or rather artifice, 
 in introducing a number of colours with the idea of making 
 them harmonise; and this could be done, and had been 
 done, by means of the palette-knife." Mr. George Moore 
 says that he has not the least idea what this means. Surely 
 
364 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 it means exactly what Herr Muther says about the Glasgow 
 school. Mr. HorneFs pictures have until quite recently 
 looked more fitted for panel decorations than for enclosing 
 in frames. They have been above everything decorative. 
 Eecently they have become more pictorial while not ceasing 
 to be decorative ; and Liverpool has purchased one of them. 
 Had the alderman whom Mr. George Moore failed to under- 
 stand some right upon his side 1 At least his point was an 
 arguable one. 
 
 Many of these Scottish painters have been members of 
 the New English Art Club. Not a few of them were 
 among its first members. For the most part they have left 
 it. Whatever may have been the reason of this segrega- 
 tion there is fitness in it. Fitness, surely, has been the 
 reason. The Club, as we shall see later, has come to stand 
 chiefly for a certain jshase of realism. Mr. Sargent and Mr. 
 Wilson Steer have been dominating personalities in it. 
 Some who used to be members have gone to the Academy. 
 Other new groups have been formed. The Scotchmen have 
 gone their own decorative way. 
 
 The word decorative is not wholly appropriate to describe 
 this art. If we were allowed to speak of visible harmony 
 as music we should call the art musical. Mr. John Lavery's 
 portraits, for instance, are Harmonies, in the Whistlerian 
 sense. At times he gives them titles that simply draw 
 attention to their colour-schemes. So with the landscape 
 painters. They do not, like most of their English brethren, 
 think chiefly of the facts, and try to represent them truth- 
 fully, even though, unable to do everything at once, they 
 must needs make a selection. Mr. Hornel is only an ex- 
 treme instance, with his children in the woodlands, of the 
 regarding of facts as mere raw material for beautiful designs. 
 
SPRING 
 
 JOHN I,A\'KKV 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 36; 
 
 We can think of these painters as redyeing natural object! 
 in order to make them suit their designs. This impression is 
 produced particularly by the work of Mr. James Paterson, 
 If we say that he has seen what he has painted, we musi 
 understand a subtle selection of certain features, and even 
 then we more than suspect an inward vision also. Of course 
 this enters into all art ; but here, as with Turner, it asserts 
 itself strongly. Mr. D. Y. Cameron, etcher as well as painter, 
 makes a similar use of colour, though with more reserve, 
 Mr. T. Millie Dow and Mr. Mouat Loudan may be named 
 in the same connexion. 
 
 Sir James Guthrie was a pupil of John Pettie, and after- 
 wards studied in Paris. He is one of the leaders of the 
 school, and is now President of the Eoyal Scottish Academy, 
 Strength and fine characterisation are conspicuous in his 
 portraits and subject-pictures, while with something more oi 
 naturalism he stUl maintains the unity of decorative effect. 
 Arthur MelviUe achieved his vivid interpretations of town- 
 scenes in Spain and the East by means of variation of the 
 Impressionist methods. Mr. E. A. Walton, in portrait, 
 subject, or landscape painting, delights at times by the pure 
 artistry of his pictures, and at other times admits a largei 
 measure of naturalism. The poetry of strong colour, and ol 
 the life and surroundings of working-folk, appeals to Mr. T, 
 Austen Brown. Mr. Alexander Roche, Mr. Coutts Michie, 
 Mr. Joseph CrawhaD, and Mr. Grosvenor Thomas are othej 
 painters of the group who should be mentioned. 
 
 The movement is only some twenty years old, and is being 
 carried on by a younger generation of painters. It is fai 
 removed from the older traditions of Scottish art. We have 
 only to think of, among the older contemporaries of the 
 Glasgow men, such painters as the two Faeds, Mr 
 
366 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 McWhirter, and most of those mentioned in the last chapter, 
 to realise how distinct a contribution the Glasgow painters 
 have made to the art of Scotland, and therefore to British 
 art. 
 
 Daring the period covered by this book numerous 
 societies of painters have been formed in London for the 
 purpose of separate exhibition ; but in most cases this has 
 not been done in the way of revolt, but only to emphasise 
 the kindred aims of painters who have also had ready access 
 to the larger and, as they may be styled, official exhibitions. 
 The formation of the New English Art Club, however, signi- 
 fied a revolt. It arose from the growing influence of French 
 art upon that of England. English painters who had studied 
 in Paris felt the need of a rallying-point in view of what 
 they held to be the narrowness of the Royal Academy in not 
 giving sufficient recognition to their work. Those who were 
 thus aggrieved were wont to discuss the matter from time to 
 time in Paris and in London. This went on for two or three 
 years without anything being done, but eventually, in the 
 first days of 1886, a meeting was held at the Gallery of Mr. 
 Colnaghi in Pall Mall, at which an offer by him " to open an 
 exhibition for the better representation of the younger 
 English painters " was accepted with enthusiasm. A com- 
 mittee, consisting of Messrs. W. H. Bartlett, Gotch, Brown, 
 Solomon, Hacker, and Tuke, was elected to work with Mr. 
 Colnaghi ; the name by which the club is still known was 
 decided upon, and the first exhibition was held in the follow- 
 ing April. 
 
 We have already seen that nonconformity is as in- 
 evitable, as necessary, we may say, in art as in religion. 
 Academies and other official bodies, like churches, insist 
 upon traditions which increasing knowledge is steadily 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 367 
 
 rendering not merely useless but harmful, and reform from 
 within never accomplishes all that is necessary. We have 
 seen hov/ strenuously the Eomanticists and the Eealists 
 opposed themselves to the classical doctrine of the French 
 Academy at Eome. Refused admission to the Salon, the 
 Impressionists and their allies organised separate exhibi- 
 tions. To-day there are two great Salons. Only turnstiled 
 doorways divide them, but they diifer widely in character. 
 The Pre-Kaphaelite Brethren were nonconformists of art. 
 The formation in 1868 of the Belgian Societe Libre des 
 Beaux Arts has already been mentioned. Munich and 
 other places have had and still have their Secessionists. 
 Instances need not be multiplied. Freedom in art cannot 
 be won save with the help of men who are free from 
 academic restraint. 
 
 On the whole the new club was well received, and there 
 was a fair number of visitors to the exhibition. Among 
 these was the official head of the Royal Academy, Sir 
 Frederick Leighton, who ventured the prophecy that the 
 second year would try the men who formed the club, and 
 the third year probably disband them. But though not a 
 few of those who have at one time or another been members 
 of the club are now within the Academy, or have formed 
 other groups, the club is still alive, has attained its majority, 
 and is holding two exhibitions each year; while Mr. 
 Sargent, who contributes so greatly to the success of the 
 Academy exhibitions, remains a member of it, and one of 
 its regular exhibitors. 
 
 The club is democratic in constitution. It dispenses 
 with president and vice-presidents. The members elect 
 annually an executive committee and honorary secretary and 
 treasiu'er. The selecting jury and hanging committee for 
 
368 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 its exhibitions are elected by and from the members, and 
 by and from the exhibitors at the previous exhibition. 
 That is to say, as artists who are not members of the club 
 can, on the invitation of two members, submit works to 
 the jury, and thus may become exhibitors, non-members 
 have a voice in the determination of the standpoint of the 
 club. Its very constitution, therefore, is a protest against 
 that of the Royal Academy, where all power is in the 
 hands of the forty members, even the associates being en- 
 tirely without authority. What would the forty say to a 
 proposal that the selecting and hanging committees for each 
 of their exhibitions should be elected by themselves, the 
 associates and the general body of exhibitors at the previous 
 exhibition? Wliat they would say to it we know, and 
 this renders it unnecessary to discuss the probable effect of 
 such a change in its working. It may be remarked, however, 
 that there would still be need for separate exhibitions, but 
 that, with the Academy placed on a more democratic basis, 
 they would not need to be in the nature of revolt. 
 
 A gibe that can obviously be made at a club formed in the 
 interest of painters who have studied in France is that the 
 art to be seen in its exhibitions is neither new nor English. 
 The equally obvious reply is that, whde this may be true, it 
 may also be true that the art is new to England and a valu- 
 able addition to the resources of English art. We who have 
 been following the recent history of painting in France ought 
 to be prepared also with the further reply that much that in 
 recent years it has been possible to learn in France better 
 than in England, is in part a modification of what has been 
 learned by the French from us in England. We ought 
 not to sneer, for example, when we see the name of M. 
 Lucien Pissarro as an exhibitor at the New English Art 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 369 
 
 Club ; for he is the son of Camille Pissarro, the companion 
 of Monet's brief exile in England during the Franco-German 
 war, and the interested student, with him, of Turner and 
 other English painters. M. Lucien Pissarro's frankly Impres- 
 sionist pictures at the New English Art Club may be 
 regarded as in part the acknowledgment of a debt. The 
 preservation of national character in art is not ensured, as 
 we have frequently urged here, by refusal to learn from the 
 art of other nations. The example of some of our greatest 
 masters has been better followed abroad than at home, and 
 we miss some of the best of their influence if we refuse to 
 look abroad. 
 
 The mere fact of having studied in France was soon felt to 
 be too general a mark to give the club sufficient distinction 
 to justify its existence, and a somewhat narrower position 
 had to be adopted. Hence, inevitably, there came selection, 
 which also means weeding out. How this was accomplished 
 we need not stay to inquire. It is perhaps not possible 
 to sum up in a plirase what the club has chiefly stood for. 
 One thing it may safely be said to stand for is the reduction 
 to a minimum of the kind of subject in painting to which 
 the epithet literary is often applied. The catalogues of its 
 exhibitions show very few titles composed of quotations 
 from poets, novelists, or historians, and little information 
 that cannot be gathered from the picture itself, beyond mere 
 identity of place or portrait — and this is by no means always 
 given — can be obtained by reference to the catalogue. We 
 do not now see in the exhibitions subject-pictures by Mr. 
 Frank Bramley, Mr. Stanhope Forbes, Mr. T. C. Gotch, Mr. 
 Arthur Hacker, Mr. Jacomb Hood, Mr. T. B. Kennington, 
 and others who were among the first members and invited 
 exhibitors, nor do we see the same kind of thing from the 
 2 B 
 
3/0 PlFTY YEARS OP MOPiERN' PAINTING 
 
 hands of other painters who have more recently joined 
 the club. 
 
 Leighton used the word Impressionist as a general de- 
 scription of the first exhibition held by the club, but even 
 now, when the field has been greatly narrowed, the word, 
 unless used in a very loose manner, would be a misnomer. 
 We certainly do not find Eealism in the sense of detail for 
 the sake of detail, though the exhibitors as a rule do not 
 concern themselves with things and people they cannot 
 actually see, and so are Realists in one sense of the word. 
 The description of art as nature seen through a temperament 
 will be useful to us here ; for if there be one thing that the 
 selecting juries of the club do make a sine qua non for the 
 acceptance of picture or drawing it is surely that it shall not 
 merely state facts, but shall express the emotion the facts 
 have stirred in the artist, that it shall tell not merely what 
 the artist has seen, but what he has felt, and, the " literary " 
 or dramatic subject being discouraged if not excluded, it is 
 the feeling awakened by the visible aspect of quite ordinary 
 things and happenings that is chiefly in question. To show 
 that the common is only commonplace to the commonplace is 
 one of the functions of the New English Art Club. The 
 most ordinary landscape, street-scene, interior, or person or 
 group of persons, is seen to possess qualities the selection of 
 which by the painter results in a true work of art. This 
 had been learned in France. In England there had been 
 selection of a fine subject, not of what was fine in any 
 subject. Even such a Realist as Mr. Holman Hunt has said 
 — as quoted on an earlier page — that MUlais and he enforced 
 their aesthetic aims in the themes they treated, " selecting 
 beautiful objects for fastidious discrimination in their por- 
 trayal." This was the "Pre-Raphaelite, English" faith; the 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 371 
 
 " New English " faitli was the one the French had arrived 
 at, with the help of Turner, Constable, Old Crome, and 
 other English painters, that any theme can be treated aestheti- 
 cally. There are conditions under which soaflFolding is as 
 beautiful as are trees or shipping ; chimneys, as Whistler 
 said, may rival campanili ; warehouses may not fall behind 
 palaces, and he must be a sorry specimen of humanity before 
 whose portrait, if it have been intelligently and sympatheti- 
 cally painted, we need to say, "God made him, and therefore 
 let him pass for a man." 
 
 The older English point of view, that what can ordinarily 
 be seen is not a fit subject for art, really supposes that the 
 artist cannot see more in what is around him than others see ; 
 and when he shov/s what he has seen, others are either blind 
 to it or charge him with exaggeration if not untruthfulness. 
 The writer stood recently with a fellow-countryman before a 
 painting by Degas of a woman ironing, and was asked, 
 " What was the use of painting that 1 " One could not but 
 think of George Herbert's saying, that a servant who swept 
 a room as for God's laws made drudgery divine, for, though 
 one could hardly take Degas for a moralist in paint, he has 
 so faithfully pictured the woman at her work, entirely occu- 
 pied with it, intent on putting the best gloss on the shirt- 
 front she is ironing, that the picture may certainly be called 
 wholesome, even if we do not attribute to it a moral. It may 
 be that Degas, along with fine drawing of the figure and its 
 action, was concerned with no more than the diffused light 
 coming through the curtained window from a narrow street 
 and the subdued colour-harmonies that it occasioned. By 
 this light and colour the Englishman, narrowly adherent to 
 an older tradition of painting, was entirely unmoved. At 
 the New English Art Club we shall find Mr. Walter Sickert 
 
372 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 revealing subtle beauties of light, tone, and colour in a mere 
 corner of a dingy London room, or in its reflection in a 
 mirror, and one seems to recollect having seen Mr. Sickert's 
 ■work summed up as everything that the average Englishman 
 detests, or something to that effect. 
 
 The name of Mr. Wilson Steer is much honoured at the 
 New English Art Club. He was one of its original members, 
 and, whether or not he has been tempted to go elsewhere, he 
 has remained faithful to it. Mr. C. J. Holmes, himself a 
 member of the club, has said, " Had Claude Monet never 
 lived, even Mr. Mark Eisher might not have painted as he 
 does, while Mr. Clausen, Mr. Stott, and Mr. Steer would have 
 lost their best teacher." "We have already spoken of Mr. 
 Clausen and Mr. Stott, and shall shortly come to Mr. Fisher. 
 What Mr. Holmes says of Mr. Steer is obviously true ; but 
 he follows his Monet with a difference, and the difference is 
 an English one. If we are to think of any one but Mr. 
 Steer when we are looking at his landscape painting, we can 
 as readily think of Constable as of Monet ; for his art 
 remains English, modified only by French influence, which 
 also has resulted chiefly in Mr. Steer's carrying further the 
 treatment of the effects of light of which Constable was the 
 first investigator. Monet interested himself mainly in tran- 
 quil effects of light under unclouded skies. Mr. Steer is a 
 true son of the land of cloud and mist. The alternate light 
 and shadow on a landscape overhung by slowly movinjr, 
 detached masses of cloud, the blaze of light in clear or misty 
 air, when the spectator faces the sun, trees brilliantly 
 illuminated by the sun and intensifying the solemn blue- 
 blackness of a thunder-cloud behind them, such are the 
 visual memories that remain of Mr. Steer's pictures. There 
 is mere suggestion, yet abundant suggestion, of nature's 
 

 <F 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 373 
 
 infinite detail, and the broken, crumbly colour ensures the 
 sense of atmospheric vibration. The pictures do not lack 
 composition, but it is not so much a design traced on the 
 surface of the canvas, which it is the artist's purpose to make 
 us forget, as such an arrangement of forms subordinated to 
 the subtle rendering of varied tones as will convey to the 
 eye a sense of luminous atmosphere stretching far away 
 behind the frame that encloses the picture. 
 
 Mr. Steer has applied the same method of painting to 
 portraiture. We may say, and in so saying we go a long 
 way towards summarising the standpoint of the ISTew 
 English Art Club, that he insists upon light — colour 
 becoming variety of light — truth, which is also beauty, 
 of atmospheric tones and vibration, the suggestion every- 
 where of movement, either of objects or of light upon 
 objects, and only so much statement of form and detail 
 as is necessary for essential expressiveness under the actual 
 conditions of seeing. 
 
 Mr. Steer was a pupil of Cabanel in Paris; Mr. Mark 
 Fisher, an American by birth, was a pupil of Gleyre. They 
 both learned much from painters who were not thus 
 definitely their teachers. Mr. Fisher, after his return to 
 America, found so little encouragement there that he came 
 over to England and settled here. His landscapes, taken 
 usually from cattle-pastures by lowland rivers, show, in the 
 difference between early and later examples, that he con- 
 sciously set himself to render above everything else the 
 effect of vibrating light. In so doing, however, he confines 
 himself to a narrower range of atmospheric subject than 
 Mr. Steer. Mr. J. Buxton Knight only appears after the 
 earliest lists of the club's membership, and this is perhaps 
 significant of the club's specialising on ways of seeing and 
 
374 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 painting, rather than, as at first, upon the place of training ; 
 for Mr. Knight was a pupil in the Eoyal Academy Schools. 
 Again, it is the quality of light in his forcible landscapes 
 that chiefly arrests us. James Charles, one of the first 
 members of the club, but early leaving it, put the realisa- 
 tion of light in the very front of his art. 
 
 An original member of the club who still belongs to it is 
 Mr. Frederick Brown, the Slade Professor at University 
 College; and not only is he an exponent of the kind of 
 seeing and record sketched above, but he has the training of 
 numerous pupils, whose work plainly declares his influence 
 and that of the group of painters with which he is associ- 
 ated. Mr. J. L. Henry, a painter of landscapes marked by 
 breadth and tone and atmospheric feeling, has also been 
 a member from the first, as also has Mr. W. W. Kussell. 
 
 This is not the place to chronicle its membership through- 
 out, but Mr. George Henry, who floods his portraits and 
 subject-pictures with light and gleaming colour, and Mr. 
 Bertram Priestman should be mentioned. There is also Mr. 
 A. D. Peppercorn, who has put his own interpretation upon 
 Impressionism. British art would be sorely impoverished 
 if those who at one time or another have been connected 
 with the club could be removed from our annals. Among 
 the younger painters who are now members Mr. William 
 Orpen, who in his portraits and figure-subjects may almost 
 be called a magician of the brush, rendering tone and hght 
 and significant form, and the character of those whose 
 portraits he paints, with subtle penetration, deserves to be 
 mentioned first. The fine quality of Mr. William Eothen- 
 stein's portraits of his co-religionists has been officially 
 recognised by the acceptance of one of his paintings for the 
 Tate Gallery. The club counts among its members that 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 375 
 
 painter of delicate colour fantasies. Mr. W. A rinnrloi.- on.i 
 
 ERRATUM 
 
 Page 375, first line, for Mr. W. A. Oonder, 
 read Mr. Charles Conder. 
 
 we are to halt. No one else, perhaps, could be so appro- 
 priately taken as a typical exponent in this country of the 
 movement that, since the days of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 Brotherhood, has done more than anything else to vivify 
 the art of painting. At least the century's close found him, 
 and he still is, much in evidence. We have dated our 
 special period from the time when the French painter Corot 
 reached his artistic maturity ; and we end with an American 
 painter who, like Whistler, was trained in France and made 
 England the country of his adoption. To Corot light was 
 so much exquisite poetry, sweetly or pensively idyllic. The 
 gentle temperament of the man dominated his art. He was 
 content with a world of exquisite, warm or pearly greys and 
 quiet, restful greens. Some of those who, in various countries, 
 beginning with his own, have, like him and like others who 
 were immediately influenced by him, sought light, if not 
 above all things, yet as an essential, have almost challenged 
 the sun in his splendour. No period in art can be arbi- 
 trarily detached from what has preceded it; and the 
 influence of Turner and Constable upon this modern move- 
 ment has been sufficiently emphasised here. Yet it would 
 at once seem wrong to say " From Constable to Sargent," 
 
374 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 painting, rather than, as at first, upon the place of training ; 
 
 numerous pupils, whose work plainly declares his influence 
 and that of the group of painters with which he is associ- 
 ated. Mr. J. L. Henry, a painter of landscapes marked by 
 breadth and tone and atmospheric feeling, has also been 
 a member from the first, as also has Mr. W. W. Russell. 
 
 This is not the place to chronicle its membership through- 
 out, but Mr. George Henry, who floods his portraits and 
 subject-pictures with light and gleaming colour, and Mr. 
 Bertram Priestman should be mentioned. There is also Mr. 
 A. D. Peppercorn, who has put his own interpretation upon 
 Impressionism. British art would be sorely impoverished 
 if those who at one time or another have been connected 
 with the club could be removed from our annals. Among 
 the younger painters who are now members Mr. WUliam 
 Orpen, who in his portraits and figure-subjects may almost 
 be called a magician of the brush, rendering tone and light 
 and significant form, and the character of those whose 
 portraits he paints, with subtle penetration, deserves to be 
 mentioned first. The fine quality of Mr. William Rothen- 
 stein's portraits of his co-religionists has been officially 
 recognised by the acceptance of one of his paintings for the 
 Tate Gallery. The club counts among its members that 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 375 
 
 painter of delicate colour fantasies, Mr. W. A, Conder; and 
 Mr. A. McEvoy's interiors, pervaded with atmosphere, are 
 always a welcome feature of its exhibitions. Mr. Francis 
 Dodd should also be mentioned ; and it is interesting to 
 note that Mr. D. S. MacColl, Mr. Eoger E. Fry, Mr. C. J. 
 Holmes, and Mr. A. L. Baldry, all of them painters who 
 are stiU better known as art administrators or as writers 
 upon art, are members of the club. 
 
 Mr. Sargent has been kept to the last, as his name 
 appears in the title of this book to mark the point at which 
 we are to halt. No one else, perhaps, could be so appro- 
 priately taken as a typical exponent in this country of the 
 movement that, since the days of the Pre-Eaphaelite 
 Brotherhood, has done more than anything else to vivify 
 the art of painting. At least the century's close found him, 
 and he still is, much in evidence. We have dated our 
 special period from the time when the French painter Corot 
 reached his artistic maturity ; and we end with an American 
 painter who, like Wliistler, was trained in France and made 
 England the country of his adoption. To Corot light was 
 so much exquisite poetry, sweetly or pensively idyllic. The 
 gentle temperament of the man dominated his art. He was 
 content with a world of exquisite, warm or pearly greys and 
 quiet, restful greens. Some of those who, in various countries, 
 beginning with his own, have, like him and like others who 
 were immediately influenced by him, sought light, if not 
 above all things, yet as an essential, have almost challenged 
 the sun in his splendour. No period in art can be arbi- 
 trarily detached from what has preceded it; and the 
 influence of Turner and Constable upon this modern move- 
 ment has been sufficiently emphasised here. Yet it would 
 at once seem wrong to say "From Constable to Sargent," 
 
376 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 or " From Turner to Sargent." The line of advance has not 
 been continuous in this country. The Pre-Eaplmelite move- 
 ment was a protest against a dull formalism that had 
 invaded English art, and if this break were ignored, we 
 still could not get to Mr. Sargent by beginning with Mr. 
 Holman Hunt; but we can get to him, right from Constable 
 and Turner, by way of Corot and Courbet and their 
 successors, who were also their younger contemporaries, the 
 French Impressionists ; for though Mr. Sargent cannot 
 strictly be affiliated to the Impressionist group, the art he 
 learned in Paris was a similar advance to that which they 
 made on what we may call the poetic realism of Corot and 
 the prose realism of Courbet. 
 
 Mr. Sargent, it has been said, is by parentage an 
 American. I have already given reasons for not including 
 him in the sketch of American painting given in an earlier 
 chapter. The same thing has had to be done in the case 
 of Whistler and of other painters who are American by 
 parentage. As an artist Mr. Sargent belongs first to France 
 and then to England. He was not even born in America, 
 but at Florence, in 1856. His father was a doctor of medi- 
 cine who had jiractised in Philadelphia, but had retired at 
 the time of the birth of his son. The future artist first 
 studied in the Academy at Florence, and then, at the age 
 of seventeen, became the pupil of Carolus Duran in Paris. 
 The drawings that he presented, to show what he could 
 already do, won the approval — with reserves — of his master 
 and the enthusiasm of his fellow-pupils. He was a facile 
 worker, direct in his methods; and this quality was con- 
 firmed in him by the teacher he had chosen, who was 
 nothing if not economical of labour, which, be it said, the 
 phrase being interpreted, is not the same thing as being 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 377 
 
 economical of work. The method he acquired was, by 
 vigorous, direct, sweeping brushwork, to map out the various 
 planes of his subject, and to add what was necessary to 
 give the illusion of reality with as little labour as possible. 
 He has done this, chiefly in portraiture but also in subject- 
 pictures and landscape, with success, to express which the 
 adjective astonishing, commonly used for the purpose, is 
 quite justifiable. Though his technique differs widely from 
 that of Monet, the general result is the same : that which 
 when closely looked at is a mere daub or smear, as Monet's 
 paint when thus looked at becomes mere meaningless dabs, 
 seems, when seen from a certain distance, to put it briefly, 
 whatever it is desired to seem. There are form and move- 
 ment and texture, as well as enveloping atmosphere; in 
 a word, there is a strong illusion of actuality. 
 
 Is the result superficial, mere brilliant sketching ? Some 
 of his admirers are so much at pains to prove that it is not 
 so as to make us almost have doubts upon the subject. 
 One critic of his art, a fellow-painter, more than a genera- 
 tion his senior, said that his portraits existed but did not 
 live. By this was probably meant that all we learn from 
 them of their subjects is only what a very brief interview 
 would reveal to us. There is no sense of the understanding 
 and sympathy that come with longer acquaintance. One 
 of his fellow-countrymen, Mr. Charles H. Caffin, while con- 
 tending that "to say his characterisation is slap-dash and 
 superficial is surely going too far," can yet say that Sargent 
 is a picture-maker before he is a portraitist, and that his 
 work, notwithstanding its actuality, " has not the perma- 
 nence of feeling, either in its characterisation or method ; 
 that suggestion of perennial, stable truth which, so far as 
 we can judge from the past, would ensure it a place among 
 
78 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 le great old masters of the future." Another of his 
 ;llow - countrymen, Mr. Samuel Isham, whose book on 
 Lmericaii painting has already been quoted, says his por- 
 :aits suggest that he does not care at all "for the people 
 e paints, either for their past or future, or for anything 
 xcept the moment that they stand before him twiddling 
 lieir watch-chains or spreading their fans," but that of this 
 loment we have an absolute, and sometimes a terrible 
 3Cord, "for the artist, without illusions himself, is pitiless 
 3r those of his sitters." 
 
 But is a portrait painter justified in being pitiless on the 
 trength of little more than a momentary impression ? One 
 an well understand that a fashionable painter may condemn 
 imself to take as subjects persons in whose character he 
 an feel no interest, and whose weaknesses he may cynically 
 mphasise. Thus Mr. Cailin can say, " The elegant shallow- 
 ess of so many of his portraits is true enough in a general 
 ray, and very likely in the individual case." But it often 
 eems as if the habit of not getting into intimate personal 
 ympathy with his subjects had become so fixed that even 
 fhere there is something worth recording he has failed to 
 ive more than the expression of his sitter at what may 
 asily not be a self-revealing moment, that, namely, of the 
 itting. Two of the old masters of portrait painting, 
 /"elasquez and Frans Hals, are often mentioned in connexion 
 s^ith Sargent. Actuality, though arrived at by different 
 aethods, is a quality of the work of both of them. Yet we 
 io not think of them as not caring for their sitters, their past 
 ,nd their future, or as being pitiless towards them. Were 
 hey more fortunate in their sitters than Mr. Sargent, or 
 vere their sitters more fortunate in having them as their 
 nterpreters ? Tennyson, in well-known lines written after a 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 379 
 
 talk -with Watts, describes the portrait painter as poring on 
 a face until he — 
 
 Divinely thro' all liiudraiioe finds the man 
 Behind it, and so paints him that his face, 
 The shape and colour of a mind and life, 
 Lives for his children, ever at its best 
 And fullest. 
 
 One does not find even Mr. Sargent's admirers claiming 
 such truth as this for his art. Where sympathetic truthful- 
 ness is unhesitatingly affirmed of his work is in his portraits 
 of children, and here there is no room for pitilessness or 
 cynicism. If we may not call his portraits superficial, we 
 certainly cannot call them profound. Their vivid actuality 
 nothing but the ravages of time can take from them, and 
 this and their piquant mise en scene may well win admira- 
 tion for them so long as they endure ; but with this may 
 there not go the regret that as characterisation they are not 
 to be trusted, indeed are to be suspected? For, to many 
 people, they are even more than suspect already. It is not 
 in this way that we think of any other of our chief portrait 
 painters. 
 
 Mr. Sargent's landscapes have little importance in com- 
 parison with his portraits. They are in the nature of 
 recreation. But they are akin to the portraits. They are 
 not the work of one who has lived with the scenes painted. 
 They are records of a traveller's hasty glimpses, and they are 
 brilliatit things of their kind. What a complete contrast 
 there is between them and the landscapes of the Pre- 
 Eaphaelite realists ! Mr. Holman Hunt went to Syria and 
 laboriously painted the gullies and defiles of the mountains 
 of Moab beyond the Dead Sea in his picture The Scapeyoat. 
 Mr. Sargent goes to Syria, and his picture of the same 
 
38o FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 mountains is a wonderful rendering mainly of quivering 
 light and heat. John Brett went, on Ruskin's recommenda- 
 tion, to the Val d'Aosta, and painted it, as Ruskin said, so as 
 to give " the power of visiting a place, reasoning about it, 
 and knowing it, just as if we were there, except only that we 
 cannot stir from our place nor look behind us." Mr. Sargent 
 goes to the Alps, and paints a picture of them which makes 
 us feel, even when we see it in a London exhibition, as if we 
 were before the scene itself. His record, also, tells us much 
 about the j)ast, and also about the future, of the Alps : it 
 shows that slowly, if surely, they are crumbling to decay. 
 But having told us what a glimpse would reveal, it tells us 
 no more. The New English Art Club Exhibitions contain 
 many such brilliant glimpses by him at natural scenery and 
 at architecture of the towns to which he has gone holiday- 
 making. His portraits go chiefly to the Academy, because 
 that institution enjoys social prestige ; and people who can 
 afford to pay large sums for their portraits do not want them 
 to be exliibited in a little room up a Bond Street yard. But 
 whatever Mr. Sargent paints and wherever he exhibits, he 
 keeps us very near to, if not upon the surface, both of 
 things and people. He is not an interpreter. We need not 
 complain of this. We can accept him for what he is : a 
 brilliant recorder of swift impressions. Apart from other 
 considerations, his dexterous craftsmanship, his instinct for 
 what is telling in light and colour, are fit things for our 
 delight and admiration. If only we could be SMe that in- 
 difference in his portraiture does not at least come perilously 
 near to cynicism ! 
 
 "" With Mr. Sargent we ought to end. But place must be 
 found to praise the intense actuality, the largeness, vigour 
 and freshness, the subtle draughtsmanship and the sense of 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 381 
 
 colour, and the sympathetic characterisation that marked the 
 portraits and portrait groups of the late Charles W. Furse. 
 
 "We have come to the end ot our survey of the painting 
 of the latter half of the nineteenth century. What has it 
 shown usl We have seen that there have been some posi- 
 tive gains. The realistic side of the Pre-Eaphaelite move- 
 ment has given us the close study of the marvellous detail 
 of nature, ■which has at least quickened our sight and added 
 to our means of enjoyment. And, as we have contended, 
 this literalness, though not essential to art, is not necessarily 
 alien to it, but can exist along with beauty. It has been 
 said that Pre-Eaphaelitism could only have risen among a 
 Teutonic people. If this be so, still the Teutons have their 
 rights; and were truth, and expressiveness of face and 
 gesture — which the movement also secured for us — incom- 
 patible with beauty, some of us, at least, would not wish to 
 see them banished from art. 
 
 We need not labour the contention that Impressionism, 
 giving effects of light and colour and atmosphere as they 
 had never been given before, has not only already accom- 
 phshed much, but has also added largely to the resources of 
 the art of the future. Again our sight has been quickened, 
 and the visible world, not in exceptional places and under 
 unusual conditions alone, but everywhere and under quite 
 ordinary conditions, has for us a beauty it had not for those 
 who knew not Monet and his friends. 
 
 Such are our chief gains. They have value for us. What 
 use the future vnll make of them, how it will employ them 
 in art, we do not know ; nor can we say how the use made 
 of them by those who first discovered and used them will 
 be estimated in the future. Art has certainly been brought 
 into closer touch with nature and life by means of them. 
 
382 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Has art itself suffered in the process ? It might Be so, and 
 yet we might not need to be cast down. In no sphere of 
 life and thought do new discoveries at once find their proper 
 place. 
 
 But, as we have seen, the new has not made the con- 
 tinuance of the old, witli such inevitable change as the 
 years must bring, impossible. "We found that Classicism 
 struggled in vain for monopoly when Eomanticism demanded 
 a place. The demand was enforced, but classical art was 
 not thereby refused a place ; and, though modified, it has 
 held on, alongside Romanticism and the later Realism and 
 Impressionism. In all these things we are the heirs of the 
 ages. We have what we ourselves have gained ; and none 
 the less we have, or we may have, what the past has be- 
 queathed to us, though inevitably, be it said again, with a 
 difference. 
 
 What has been said of the art of our own country attests 
 its vitality and the width of its range, both in subject and 
 in all that can be covered by the word technique. We have 
 our classical, our romantic, our realistic and our impressionist 
 painters. Ruskin, in the Oxford lecture more than once 
 referred to already, maintained that our painters could never 
 be successful in the higher fields of ideal or theological art. 
 But surely such men as Watts, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones 
 have at least gone far to bring this prophecy to naught. It 
 might even be urged that they had anticipated its disproof. 
 May we not also congratulate ourselves on having at least 
 made a beginning of enjoying art for art's sake? And 
 surely we can do this and yet also enjoy the subject in art. 
 
 In one respect our art has failed adequately to develop 
 during the half-century. We have little to show of mural 
 painting ; and much of what we have to show is not good, 
 
PAINTING IN GREAT BRITAIN 383 
 
 is only easel painting on a large scale. It is lamentable that 
 it can be seriously urged that the attempt should not be 
 made to add to the mural paintings in the Houses of Parlia- 
 ment because we have not artists capable of doing such 
 work. The rei^ly has been made, and rightly so, that we 
 cannot succeed unless we try. The question must not be 
 discussed here. But some of our painters have shown them- 
 selves to be fitted for such work ; and it is to be hoped that 
 the next fifty years will see this reproach removed from our 
 art. Eeference to this subject reminds one that no mention 
 has hitherto been made here of an artist who is a master 
 of decorative art, Mr. Frank Brangwyn. 
 
 It is perhaps not out of place to mention the great 
 increase in the number of art galleries during the half- 
 century. Not only is there now a National Gallery of 
 British Art in London, but the provincial cities that have 
 long had galleries have been adding to them or building 
 new ones ; and no town that sufficiently respects itself now 
 thinks it can do without an art gallery. This cannot be 
 without effect upon our art. For one thing, it must bring 
 it into closer touch with the people. We may hope that 
 the municipalities will in the future do much to encourage 
 mural painting. We have plenty of examples in foreign 
 countries, and, at home, such instances as the work of 
 Ford Madox Brown in the Manchester Town Hall and the 
 paintings in the Glasgow Municipal Buildings. Painting 
 with us is too much a matter of exhibitions of easel-pictures 
 destined for private houses or for public collections of 
 pictures hung more or less promiscuously on the walls of 
 otherwise empty rooms. The closer alliance of the art with 
 architecture is desirable both in its own interest and for 
 the expressiveness which is thereby given to public build- 
 
384 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 ings. There is abundant opportunity in town-lialls, libraries, 
 concert-halls, and other buildings; and mural paintings 
 might well be more frequently introduced into art galleries 
 also, as in the case of those by Puvis de Chavannes in some 
 of the provincial art galleries of France. Beyond municipal 
 buildings there are also, of course, the national buildings 
 and the churches ; and it is interesting to note the growing 
 tendency to decorate the more important commercial build- 
 ings with both painting and sculpture. 
 
 It has not been possible to say anything here about the 
 art of water-colour painting, or the related arts of drawing 
 in black-and-white, etching, and engraving. We may just 
 note the tendency there has been for water-colourists to 
 seek almost to rival the strength of oil-painting, with in- 
 evitable loss of much of the delicate charm of the art as 
 it used to be practised. Still, no deductions can surely 
 forbid us to affirm that, during the half-century, our art has 
 not been unworthy of its earlier history, has kept well 
 abreast at least of the art of other countries, has accom- 
 plished some things that can be called great, and gives us 
 now no reason to fear for its future. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbey, E. A., 270, 316 
 Alexander, J. W., 274 
 Alexandre, Arsene, 207-8 
 Allan, Robert AY., 347 
 Allingham, William, 174 
 Anglada, Hermen, 264 
 Anquetin, 210 
 Arnold, Matthew, 6, 116 
 Aumonier, James, 351 
 
 Baldry, A. L., 375 
 Baron, Theodore, 250 
 Bartlett, W. H.,345, 366 
 Baskirtscheff, Marie, 195 
 Bastida, Sorolla y, 264 
 Bastien -Lepage, 194-5 
 Bate, Percy, 162, 184 
 Baudry, Paul, 215, 216 
 Bayet, C, 8 
 
 Beaumont, Sir George, 3 
 Benson, F. "W., 273 
 Besnard, Paul Albert, 202-3 
 Bidault, Xavier, 9, 61 
 Bischopp, Christoffel, 241 
 Blake, "William, 218, 340 
 Blum, Robert, 274 
 Boeeklin, Arnold, 208 
 Boldini, Giovanni, 232, 265 
 ^Bonheur, llosa, 212 
 Bonington, E. P., 61, 62, 82 
 Bonnat, Leon, 230 
 Bonvin, Fran9ois, 230 
 Boucher, Franjois, 9 
 Boudin, L. E., 4, 73 et seq., 78, 
 
 80 
 Bonghton, G. H., 321 
 Bouguereau, W. A., 215 
 Boulanger, Hippolyte, 229, 249 
 
 2 c 385 
 
 Bouvier, Arthur, 250 
 
 Braekeleer, Henri de, 246 
 
 Bramley, Frank, 326 
 
 Brangwyn, Frank, 383 
 
 Br^han, 230 
 
 Breton, Jules, 193 et seq. ' 
 
 Brett, John, 163 et seq. 
 
 Brickdale, Eleanor F., 186 
 
 Bridgman, F. A., 272 
 
 Brown, Arneaby, 348 
 
 Brown, Prof. Frederick, 366, 
 
 374 
 
 Brown, Ford Madox, 13, 14, 17 
 etseq., 28, 35, 41, 48, 51, 129 
 et seq., 137, 146 et seq., 155 et 
 seq., 161, 163, 167-8, 180, 
 183-4, i86-7, 191, 200, 280, 
 303. 306, 335 
 
 Brown, T. Austen, 365 
 
 Browning, Robert, 112, 150, 154, 
 172 
 
 Brush, G. de Forest, 273 
 
 Buchanan, Robert, 171 
 
 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 78, 93 
 et seq., 138, 144, 173 et seq., 
 ly; etseq., 184, 185, 188, 191, 
 
 306, 307. 357 
 Burne-Jones, Lady, 358 
 Burroughs, Bryson, 273 
 Burton, W. S., 157 et seq. 
 Butin, Ulysse, 198 
 Butler, Lady, 316 
 
 Cabanel, Alexandre, 215 J 
 
 Caffin, Charles H., 275, 377. 
 
 378 
 Oalderon, P. H., 163 
 Cameron, D. Y., 365 
 
386 
 
 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 149 
 Carriere, Eugene, 202 el seq. 
 Carstens, A. J., 257 
 Casado del Alisal, 264 
 Cassatt, Mary, 121, 206, 271 
 Cazin, Charles, 230 
 Cezanne, Paul, 97, 101-2 
 Chan trey. Sir Francis L., 3, 
 
 15s 
 Chaplin, Cliarles, 230 
 ! Chardin, J. S., 9 
 Charles, James, 374 
 Chase, William M., 272 
 Chintreuil, Antoiiie, 212 
 Chodowieeki, Daniel, 251 
 Claude, 75, 82 
 Claus, Emile, 250 
 Clausen, George, 295, 330 et seq., 
 
 353 
 Clays, P. J. , 250 
 Cogniet, Leon, 229 
 Cole, George Vicat, 344 
 Cole, Thomas, 267 
 Collier, The Hon. John, 329 
 Collins, Charles Alston, 157 
 Collinson, James, 28, 41, 184 
 Conder, W. A., 375 
 Constable, John, 2, 55, 61 et seq., 
 
 72, 75 et seq., 82, 89, 237, 
 
 279 
 Cooper, T. Sidney, 337 
 Copley, J. S., 266, 267 
 Corbet, M. Ridley, 352 
 Cornelius, Peter, 17, 252 
 Corot, Camille, 4, 62, 64, 67 
 
 et seq., 77 ei seq., 96, 268 
 Cottet, Charles, 197 
 Courbet, Gustave, 58, 59, 66, 
 
 114, 121, 193, 229-30 
 Couture, Thomas, 58, 108, 109 
 Cox, David, 76, 86, 164, 165 
 Cox, Kenyon, 273 
 Crane, Walter, 182 
 Crawhall, Joseph, 365 
 Crofts, Ernest, 316 
 Crome, John, 77, 82 
 Crowe, Eyre, 316 
 
 Dagnan-Bouveret, 196 
 Dannatt, William L., 272 
 Dante, 168, 172 
 
 ^Daubigny, Charles Fran9ois, 212 
 Daumier, Honor^, 60, 227 
 
 t David, Jacques Louis, 10, 54 
 et seq. ,231 
 Da vies, A. B., 273 
 Davis, H. W. B., i6i, 163 
 Decamps, Alexandre, 227 
 D'Espagnat, Georges, 210 
 Defregger, Franz, 255 
 Degas, Edgard, 11 get seq. , 1 28, 37 1 
 De Groux, Charles, 248 
 De Jonghe, Gustave, 247 
 
 i/ Delacroix, Eugene, 55 et seq., 
 
 237 
 
 Delaroche, Paul, 57, 169 
 
 Delaunay, Elie, 216 
 
 De Morgan, Mrs. Evelyn, 184 
 
 Desbrosses, Jean, 212 
 
 Detaille, Edouard, 213, 223 
 
 Deverell, Walter Howell, 184 
 
 Dewhurst, Wynford, 208 
 
 Dewing, Thomas W., 273 
 >/ Diaz, Naroisse V. , 62, 64 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 44-5 
 
 Dicksee, Frank, 309 
 
 Didier-Pouget, 209 
 
 Dodd, Francis, 375 
 
 Domingo, Francisco, 264 
 
 Dou, Gerard, 38 
 
 Doughty, Thomas, 267 
 
 Dow, T. Millie, 365 
 
 Draper, Herbert, 310 
 
 Du Maurier, George, 60 
 
 Dubois, 232, 246 
 ■/Dupr^, Jules, 64 
 
 Duran, Carolus, 232 
 
 Durand, A. B., 267 
 
 Durand-Euel, 82, 123 
 
 Duranty, 229 
 
 Duret, Theodore, 61, 76, 81, 97, 
 loi, 102, 119, 360 
 
 Duveneck, F., 272 
 
 East, Alfred, 348 
 Eaton, Wyatt, 272 
 Elliott, Charles Loring, 268 
 Etty, William, 120, 135 
 
 »Fantin-Latour, Henri, 118, 233 
 Farquharson, David, 346 
 Farquharson, Joseph, 346 
 
INDEX 
 
 3S7 
 
 Feuerbach, 258 
 Fielding, Copley, 61 
 Fildes, Sir Luke, 324-5 
 Fisher, Mai-k^ 373 
 Flandrin, Hippolyte, 216 
 Forbes, Stanhope, 329 
 /Fortuny, Mariano, 264 
 Fragonard, J. H. , 9 
 Frith, W. P.,313. 3'7, 335 
 Fromentin, Eugene, 228 
 Fry, Roger E,, 37S 
 Fiihrich, Joseph, 252 
 Furse, Charles W., 381 
 
 Gaillard, Ferdinand, 232 
 i/Gainsborough, Thomas, 87 
 
 Gallait, Louis, 245 
 
 Gauguin, 210 
 
 Gay, Walter, 272 
 
 Gerard, Franfois, 55 
 ><Gericault, Theodore, 55 
 
 Ger6me, L&d, 229 
 
 Girodet, 55 
 
 Gleyre, Charles, 215 
 
 Goodwin, Albert, 349 
 
 Gotch, T. C, 310, 366 
 
 Gow, A. C, 316 
 J Goya, Francisco, 264 
 
 Graham, Peter, 315, 343 
 
 Gregory, E. J., 329 
 
 Greiffenhagen, Maurice, 311-12 
 'Greuze, J. B., 9, 33 
 
 Gros, A. J., 55, 213 
 
 Guerin, Pierre, 55 
 
 Guillaumet, Gustave, 228 
 
 Guillaumin, 107, 210 
 
 Gurney, Mrs. Russell, 183 
 
 Guthrie, Sir James, 365 
 
 Hacker, Arthur, 310, 366 
 Hals, Frans, 108-9, ii4) 233 
 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 31, 
 
 „33 
 
 Harding, Chester, 267 
 ^> Harpignies, Henri, 64-5 
 Harrison, Alexander, 272 
 J Hassam, Childe, 275 
 Healy, G. P. A., 268 
 Hubert, Ernest, 223 
 Hemy, 0. Napier, 344-5 
 
 Henner, Charles, 215 
 Henry, George, 374 
 Henry, J. L., 374 
 Herbert, George, 371 
 Herkomer, Sir Hubert, 307, 
 
 327-9 
 
 Hermans, Charles, 247 
 
 Heymans, Joseph, 250 
 
 Hildebrandt, Theodor, 253 
 
 Hiuton, James, 90-3, 96 
 
 Hitchcock, George, 272 
 
 Hogarth, William, 9, 21, 15 r, 
 169, 170 
 
 Holl, Frank, 324-5 
 
 Holmes, C. J., 372, 375 
 
 Homer, Winslow, 270 
 
 Hook, J. C, 340 
 
 Hornel, E. A., 363 
 
 Horsley, J. C, 313 
 
 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 21, 149 
 
 Hughes, Arthur, 159 
 
 Humbert, Ferdinand, 225 
 
 Hunt, A. W., 349 
 
 Hunt, W. Holman, 14, iTelseq., 
 21 ei seg., 34 et scq., 40 et seg., 
 45. 47-8. 50, 70, 72, 77. 95- 
 129 et seg., 146-7, 156, 163, 
 166-7, 173, 177-8, 184. 18S, 
 191. 195. 280, 3C6, 307, 362, 
 379 
 
 Hunt, William Morris, 269 
 
 Hunter, Colin, 344 
 
 Huntingdon, Daniel, 268 
 
 Inobbold, J. W., 166 
 
 Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique, 
 
 57 
 Inman, Henry, 267 
 Inness, George, 267 
 Isham, Samuel, 269, 275, 321, 
 
 322, 378 
 Israels, Josef, 238 et seg. 
 
 Japanese Art, 125 et seg. 
 Jefferies, Richard, 194 
 Jongkind, J. B., 4, 73-4, 78 
 
 Keats, John, 179 
 Keene, Charles, 60 
 Keyser, Nioaise de, 245 
 Khnopff, Fernand, 248 
 
388 
 
 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 'Klinger, Max, 260 
 Knaus, Louis, 255 
 Knight, J. BuxtoE, 373 
 Knight, J. Ridgway, 272 
 Kuyff, Alfred de, 249 
 
 La Farge, John, 269 
 
 La Gandara, 264 
 
 La Thangue, H. H., 330, 333, 
 
 Landseer, Sir Edwin, 337, 338 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 142 
 
 Langley, Walter, 330 
 
 Lathrop, Francis, 270 
 
 Lauder, Robert Scott, 314 
 
 Laurens, J. P., 230 
 
 Lavery, John, 336, 364 
 
 Lawless, M. J., 161 
 
 Lawson, Cecil, 350 
 
 Lawson, William, 350 
 
 Le Sidaner, 208 
 
 Leader, B. W., 342 
 
 Lefebvre, Jules, 215 
 
 Legros, Alphouse, 229 
 
 Leighton, Frederick, Lord, 282 
 
 etseq., 299, 307, 367 
 Lenhach, Franz, 257 
 Leslie, C. R., 267, 313 
 Leslie, G. D., 163, 329 
 Leutze, Emanuel, 268 
 Lewis, J. F. , 163, 281-2 
 Leys, Henri, 245 
 L'Hermitte, Leon, 195 
 Liebermann, Max, 261 
 Lindner, Moffat, 353 
 Linnell, John, 340 
 Linnell, J. T., 340 
 Linnell, William, 340 
 Lippi, Lippo, 1 12 
 Lockwood, Wilton, 274 
 Loti, Pierre, 197 
 Loudan, Mouat, 365 
 Low, Will H., 273 
 Lowell, J. Kussell, 12 
 Lucas, Seymour, 315 
 Luminals, 230 
 
 Maocallum, H. H., 345 
 MacCoU, D. S., 375 
 Maclise, Daniel, 313 
 McEvoy, A., 375 
 
 McEwen, Walter, 272 
 MoLaohlan, T. H., 351 
 McWhirter, J., 366 
 Madrazo, Federico, 264 
 Makart, Hans, 255 
 Manet, Edouard, 58, 80, 81, 
 
 83, 90, 106, 108 et seq., 128, 
 
 148 
 Marilhat, Prosper, 227 
 Maris, James, 242 
 Maris, Matthew, 242 
 Maris, William, 242 
 Martin, Henri, 225 
 Martin, Homer D., 268 
 Martineau, Robert, 161, 162 
 Mason, George, 193, 317 et seq., 
 
 321 
 Maufra, Maxime, 207 
 Mauve, Anton, 241 
 May, Edward Harrison, 269 
 yileissonier, Ernest, 213 et seq., 
 
 268 
 /Melchers, Gari, 272 
 Melville, Arthur, 365 
 Menard, Emile Ren^, 226 
 Mengs, Anton Rafael, 251 
 Menzel, Adolf, 256 
 Mesdag, H. W., 243 
 Meunier, Constantin, 59, 66, 193, 
 
 245 et seq. 
 Michel, Georges, 9, 61 
 Miohie, Coutts, 365 
 yMillais, Sir J. E., 17, 18, 27, 28, 
 
 34 c< seq., 40 et seq., 70, 77, 
 
 95, 117, 120, 129 etseq., 134 
 
 et seq., 145 et seq., 156 etseq., 
 
 163, 166-7, 177-8, 182, 184 et 
 
 seq., 188, 280, 306-7. 
 Millais, Sir J. G., 135 
 Millet, F. D., 270, 316 
 • ^Millet, Jean rran9ois, 60, 62, 6; 
 
 etseq., 71, 97, 143, 193 el! leq., 
 
 239 
 Monet, Claude Oscar, 77, 80 et 
 
 seq, ^^ etseq., 107, 115, 116, 
 
 128, 207 et seq. 
 Monticelli, Adolphe, 229 
 Moore, Albert, 291, 293, 299, 
 
 307 
 VMoore, George, 36 etseq., 90, ill- 
 12, 122, 325, 355, 364 
 
INDEX 
 
 389 
 
 Moore, Henry, 165 
 
 Moreau Gustave, no, 217-18, 
 
 225 
 MorelU, Domenico, 265 
 Morisot, Berthe, io6, 234 
 Morot, Aim^, 213 
 Morris, William, 156, 168, 173, 
 
 I7S-6, 180, 199 
 MuUer, Victor, 75 
 Miiller, W. J., 280 
 Mulready, William, 313 
 li'Munkacsy, Michael, 260 
 Murray, David, 346, 347 
 Muther, Kiohard, 116, 123, 187, 
 
 363 
 
 Favez, Franjois, 244 
 Neagle, John, 267 
 ITettleship, J. T., 337-8 
 Neulmys, Albert, 244 
 Neuville, Alphonse de, 213 
 Newton, 6. S., 267 
 Nittis, Giuseppe de, 202 
 Nordau, Max, 224 
 North, J. W., 342 
 
 Olsaon, Julius, 353 
 / Orohardson, W. Quiller, 315, 
 
 „ 323-4 
 
 Orpen, William, 374 
 
 Overbeok, Friedrich, 17, 252 
 
 Parsons, Alfred, 347 
 
 Paterson, James, 365 
 
 Paton, Sir J. Noel, 184 
 
 Peppercorn, A. D., 374 
 
 Pettie, John, 314 
 
 Phillip, John, 314 
 
 Piloty, Karl, 255 
 
 Pissarro, Camille, 77, 79 eisej., 
 
 96 tt seq. , 208 
 Pissarro, Luoien, 368 
 Pointelin, A. E., 209 
 Poole, P. F., 313 
 Pope, Alexander, 214 
 Powers, Hiram, 282 
 Poynter, Sir E. J., 287, 299, 
 
 307 
 Fradilla, Francisco, 264 
 Priestman, Bertram, 374 
 
 Prinsep, Valentine, 168, 178 
 Prudhon, Pierre-Paul, 55 "^ 
 
 Puvis de Chavannes, 180, 217, ^ 
 220 et seq. 
 
 Kaffaelli, Jean Fran9ois, 198 et 
 seq. 
 
 Raffet, A. M., 213 
 
 Ranger, H. W., 275 
 
 Redgrave, 33, 87, 336 
 
 Regnault, Henri, 55, 230 
 
 Reid, J. R., 329 
 
 Reid, R., 273 
 
 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 103 et 
 seq., 121, 128, 143 
 
 Rethel, Alfred, 253 
 
 Ribot, Th^odule, 230 
 
 Ricard, Gustave, 232 
 
 Richmond, Sir William B., 309 
 
 Richter, Ludwig, 255 
 
 Rico, Martin, 264 
 
 Riviere, Briton, 337-8 
 
 Robert-Fleury, Nicolas, 229 
 
 Robinson, Cayley, 186 
 
 Robson, 61 
 
 Roche, Alexander, 365 
 
 Rochegrosse, Georges, 230 
 
 Rodin, Auguste, 233 
 
 Roll, Alfred, 198 
 
 Rooke, T. M., 184 
 
 Rops, Fdlicien, 248 
 
 Rossetti, DanteG., 17, 18, 28, 29, V 
 35 et seq., 40 et seq., 47 et seq., 
 129 et seq., 138-9, 163, 167 
 etseq., 177-8, 181-2, 184, 186, 
 191, 280, 306, 307 
 
 Rossetti, W. M., 28, 41, 42, 43, 
 186 
 
 Rothenstein, William, 374 
 
 Rousseau, Theodore, 62 et seq. 
 
 Roybet, Ferdinand, 230 
 
 Rubens, P. P., 124 
 
 Ruskin, John, 23, 26, 29 et seq., 
 35, 47. 48-9. 64, 66, 76, 136, 
 159 et seq., 162 et seq., 176 et 
 seq., 214, 281, 336, 357, 382 
 
 Russell, W. W.,374 
 
 Sadler, W. Dendy, 316 
 Sandys, Frederic, 181 
 
390 
 
 FIFTY YEARS OF MODERN PAINTING 
 
 "i Sai-gent, J. S., 270, 274, 365, 
 
 367, 375 et seq. 
 Scheffer, Ary, 216 
 SoUegel, Frederick, 252 
 Schnorr, Julius, 252 
 Schrader, Julius, 255 
 Schwind, Moritz, 254 
 Scott, William Bell, 163 
 Segantini, Giovanni, 265 
 Seurat, 210 
 Shannon, C. H., 311 
 Sharp, William, 168 
 Shaw, Byam, 186 
 Shields, Frederic, 182 
 Sickert, Walter, 371 
 Signao, Paul, 210 
 Sialey, Alfred, 99, 100 
 / Sizeranne, Robert de la, 8, 13, 
 
 19, 39. S3> "7, 140. 186, 191, 
 
 236, 237, 278-9, 292-3, 294, 
 
 338 
 Smallfield, Frederick, 161 
 Solomon, S. J., 366 
 Spencer, Herbert, 188 
 Stanhope, Spencer, 173, 181 
 Steer, P. Wilson, 364, 372 
 Steinbruck, Eduard, 253 
 Steinle, Edward, 252 
 Stephens, F. G., 28, 41-2 
 Stevens, Alfred, 246-7 
 Stewart, Julius L., 271 
 Stillman, Mrs. M, S., 184 
 Stobbaerts, Jan, 246 
 Stokes, Adrian, 353 
 Stone, Marcus, 322 
 Storey, G. A., 163, 329 
 Story, Julian, 272 
 Stott, Edward, 352 
 Stott, William, 353 
 Stradwick, J. M., 182, 188 
 Stuart, C. G., 267 
 Stuck, Franz, 260 
 Swan, J. M., 337-8 
 Swinburne, A. G., 293 
 Swynnerton, Mrs. A. L., 306 
 
 •J Tadema, Sir Laurens Alma, 289, 
 299, 307 
 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 132, 140, 
 
 150, 161, 305, 379 
 Thaulow, Fritz, 263 
 
 Thayer, A. H., 273 
 Thoma, Hans, 259 
 Thomas, Grosvenor, 365 
 Thomson, Leslie, 347 
 Tissot, James, 201 
 Titian, 124, 169, 215 
 Toulouse-Lautrec, 210 
 Troyon, Constant, 63, 65 
 Trumbull, John, 267 
 Tryon, Dwight, W., 275 
 Tuke, H. S., 330, 345, 366 
 f Turner, J. M. W., 2, 3, 7, 30, 
 
 31 a seq., 67, 75, 77, 82, 191, 
 
 204, 237, 279 
 
 Udhe, Fritz Von, 260 
 
 Van Eyck, 126 
 
 Van Eycken, 245 
 
 Van Gogh, 210 
 
 Van Rysselberghe, Theo, 210 
 
 Varley, John, 61 
 
 Vautier, Benjamin, 255 
 
 Vedder, Elihu, 269 
 
 Velasquez, 87, 109 
 
 Vernet, Horace, 213 
 
 Vincent, George, 55 
 
 Vignon, 97 
 
 Vollon, Antoine, 230 
 
 Vuillard, 210 
 
 Wackenroder, 252 
 Waite, R. Thorne, 347 
 Walker, Frederick, 193, 317, 
 
 319 c« seq. 
 Walker, Horatio, 274 
 Wallis, Henry, 162 
 Walton, E. A., 365 
 Wappers, Baron, 156, 244 
 Ward, E. M., 313 
 Ward, James, 337 
 Watelet, 61 
 
 Waterhouse, J. W., 308 
 Waterlow, Sir E. A., 346 
 Watteau, 9 
 f Watts, G. F., 77, 294 et seq., 
 
 33S 
 Wauters, Eniile, 248 
 
 Webbe, W. J., 161 
 Webster, T., 313 
 Weekes, Edwin Lord, 272 
 
INDEX 
 
 39 
 
 Weir, J. Alden, 273 
 l/West, Sir Benjamin, 56, 266, 
 267 
 
 Whaite, H. Clarence, 349 
 / Whistler, J. McNeill, 68, 270, 
 355 et seq. 
 
 Wiles, Irving E. , 274 
 
 Wilkie, Sir David, 169 
 
 Windus, W. L., i^getseq. 
 
 Woods, Henry, 329 
 
 Woolner, Thomas, 28, 41 
 Wyant, A. H., 268 
 Wyllie, 0. W., 345 
 Wyllie, W. L., 345 
 
 Yeamcs, W. F., 314 
 
 Zorn, Anders, 263 
 Zuloaga, Ignacio, 264-5 ""^