Modern Painting by George Moore

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MODERN PAINTING

By

GEORGE MOORE

TO SIR WILLIAM EDEN, BART.

OF ALL MY BOOKS, THIS IS THE ONE YOU LIKE BEST; ITS SUBJECT HAS BEEN
THE SUBJECT OF NEARLY ALL OUR CONVERSATIONS IN THE PAST, AND I SUPPOSE
WILL BE THE SUBJECT OF MANY CONVERSATIONS IN THE FUTURE; SO, LOOKING
BACK AND FORWARD, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO YOU.

G. M.

_The Editor of "The Speaker" allowed me to publish from time to time
chapters of a book on art. These chapters have been gathered from the
mass of art journalism which had grown about them, and I reprint them
in the sequence originally intended_.

_G. M._

CONTENTS.

WHISTLER
CHAVANNES, MILLET, AND MANET
THE FAILURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
ARTISTIC EDUCATION IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND
INGRES AND COROT
MONET, SISLEY, PISSARO, AND THE DECADENCE
OUR ACADEMICIANS
THE ORGANISATION OF ART
ART AND SCIENCE
ROYALTY IN ART
ART PATRONS
PICTURE DEALERS
MR. BURNE-JONES AND THE ACADEMY
THE ALDERMAN IN ART
RELIGIOSITY IN ART
THE CAMERA IN ART
THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB
A GREAT ARTIST
NATIONALITY IN ART
SEX IN ART
MR. STEER'S EXHIBITION
CLAUDE MONET
NOTES--
MR. MARK FISHER
A PORTRAIT BY MR. SARGENT
AN ORCHID BY MR. JAMES
THE WHISTLER ALBUM
INGRES
SOME JAPANESE PRINTS
NEW ART CRITICISM
LONG AGO IN ITALY

WHISTLER.

I have studied Mr. Whistler and thought about him this many a year.
His character was for a long time incomprehensible to me; it contained
elements apparently so antagonistic, so mutually destructive, that I
had to confess my inability to bring him within any imaginable
psychological laws, and classed him as one of the enigmas of life. But
Nature is never illogical; she only seems so, because our sight is not
sufficient to see into her intentions; and with study my psychological
difficulties dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitely
understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and
discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable; the
strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and
consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions
are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking
at the pictures I see the man.

But at the outset the difficulties were enormous. It was like a
newly-discovered Greek text, without punctuation or capital letters.
Here was a man capable of painting portraits, perhaps not quite so
full of grip as the best work done by Velasquez and Hals, only just
falling short of these masters at the point where they were strongest,
but plainly exceeding them in graciousness of intention, and subtle
happiness of design, who would lay down his palette and run to a
newspaper office to polish the tail of an epigram which he was
launching against an unfortunate critic who had failed to distinguish
between an etching and a pen-and-ink drawing! Here was a man who,
though he had spent the afternoon painting like the greatest, would
spend his evenings in frantic disputes over dinner-tables about the
ultimate ownership of a mild joke, possibly good enough for _Punch_,
something that any one might have said, and that most of us having
said it would have forgotten! It will be conceded that such
divagations are difficult to reconcile with the possession of artistic
faculties of the highest order.

The "Ten o'clock" contained a good deal of brilliant writing,
sparkling and audacious epigram, but amid all its glitter and "go"
there are statements which, coming from Mr. Whistler, are as
astonishing as a denial of the rotundity of the earth would be in a
pamphlet bearing the name of Professor Huxley. Mr. Whistler is only
serious in his art--a grave fault according to academicians, who are
serious in everything except their "art". A very boyish utterance is
the statement that such a thing as an artistic period has never been
known.

One rubbed one's eyes; one said, Is this a joke, and, if so, where is
the point of it? And then, as if not content with so much mystification,
Mr. Whistler assured his ten o'clock audience that there was no such
thing as nationality in art, and that you might as well speak of
English mathematics as of English art. We do not stop to inquire if
such answers contain one grain of truth; we know they do not--we stop
to consider them because we know that the criticism of a creative artist
never amounts to more than an ingenious defence of his own work--an
ingenious exaltation of a weakness (a weakness which perhaps none
suspects but himself) into a conspicuous merit.

Mr. Whistler has shared his life equally between America, France, and
England. He is the one solitary example of cosmopolitanism in art, for
there is nothing in his pictures to show that they come from the
north, the south, the east, or the west. They are compounds of all
that is great in Eastern and Western culture. Conscious of this, and
fearing that it might be used as an argument against his art, Mr.
Whistler threw over the entire history, not only of art, but of the
world; and declared boldly that art was, like science, not national,
but essentially cosmopolitan; and then, becoming aware of the anomaly
of his genius in his generation, Mr. Whistler undertook to explain
away the anomaly by ignoring the fifth century B.C. in Athens, the
fifteenth century in Italy, and the seventeenth in Holland, and humbly
submitting that artists never appeared in numbers like swallows, but
singly like aerolites. Now our task is not to disprove these
statements, but to work out the relationship between the author of the
"Butterfly Letters" and the painter of the portrait of "The Mother",
"Lady Archibald Campbell", "Miss Alexander", and the other forty-one
masterpieces that were on exhibition in the Goupil galleries.

There is, however, an intermediate step, which is to point out the
intimate relationship between the letter-writer and the physical man.
Although there is no internal evidence to show that the pictures were
not painted by a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman, or a
Westernised Japanese, it would be impossible to read any one of the
butterfly-signed letters without feeling that the author was a man of
nerves rather than a man of muscle, and, while reading, we should
involuntarily picture him short and thin rather than tall and
stalwart. But what has physical condition got to do with painting? A
great deal. The greatest painters, I mean the very greatest--Michael
Angelo, Velasquez, and Rubens--were gifted by Nature with as full a
measure of health as of genius. Their physical constitutions resembled
more those of bulls than of men. Michael Angelo lay on his back for
three years painting the Sistine Chapel. Rubens painted a life-size
figure in a morning of pleasant work, and went out to ride in the
afternoon. But Nature has dowered Mr. Whistler with only genius. His
artistic perceptions are moreexquisite than Velasquez's. He knows as
much, possibly even a little more, and yet the result is never quite
equal. Why? A question of health. _C'est un temperament de chatte_. He
cannot pass from masterpiece to masterpiece like Velasquez. The
expenditure of nerve-force necessary to produce such a work as the
portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell or Miss Alexander exhausts him,
and he is obliged to wait till Nature recoups herself; and these
necessary intervals he has employed in writing letters signed
"Butterfly" to the papers, quarrelling with Oscar over a few mild
jokes, explaining his artistic existence, at the expense of the entire
artistic history of the world, collecting and classifying the
stupidities of the daily and weekly press.

But the lesser side of a man of genius is instructive to study--indeed,
it is necessary that we should study it if we would thoroughly
understand his genius. "No man," it has been very falsely said, "is a
hero to his _valet de chambre_." The very opposite is the truth. Man
will bow the knee only to his own image and likeness. The deeper the
humanity, the deeper the adoration; and from this law not even divinity
is excepted. All we adore is human, and through knowledge of the flesh
that grovels we may catch sight of the soul ascending towards the
divine stars.

And so the contemplation of Mr. Whistler, the author of the "Butterfly
Letters", the defender of his little jokes against the plagiarising
tongue, should stimulate rather than interrupt our prostrations. I
said that Nature had dowered Mr. Whistler with every gift except that
of physical strength. If Mr. Whistler had the bull-like health of
Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Hals, the Letters would never have been
written. They were the safety-valve by which his strained nerves found
relief from the intolerable tension of the masterpiece. He has not the
bodily strength to pass from masterpiece to masterpiece, as did the
great ones of old time. In the completed picture slight traces of his
agony remain. But painting is the most indiscreet of all the arts, and
here and there an omission or a feeble indication reveal the painter
to us in moments of exasperated impotence. To understand Mr.
Whistler's art you must understand his body. I do not mean that Mr.
Whistler has suffered from bad health--his health has always been
excellent; all great artists have excellent health, but his
constitution is more nervous than robust. He is even a strong man, but
he is lacking in weight. Were he six inches taller, and his bulk
proportionately increased, his art would be different. Instead of
having painted a dozen portraits, every one--even the mother and Miss
Alexander, which I personally take to be the two best--a little
febrile in its extreme beauty, whilst some, masterpieces though they
be, are clearly touched with weakness, and marked with hysteria--Mr.
Whistler would have painted a hundred portraits, as strong, as
vigorous, as decisive, and as easily accomplished as any by Velasquez
or Hals. But if Nature had willed him so, I do not think we should
have had the Nocturnes, which are clearly the outcome of a
highly-strung, bloodless nature whetted on the whetstone of its own
weakness to an exasperated sense of volatile colour and evanescent
light. It is hardly possible to doubt that this is so when we look on
these canvases, where, in all the stages of her repose, the night
dozes and dreams upon our river--a creole in Nocturne 34, upon whose
trembling eyelids the lustral moon is shining; a quadroon in Nocturne
17, who turns herself out of the light anhungered and set upon some
feast of dark slumber. And for the sake of these gem-like pictures,
whose blue serenities are comparable to the white perfections of
Athenian marbles, we should have done well to yield a littlestrength
in portraiture, if the distribution of Mr. Whistler's genius had been
left in our hands. So Nature has done her work well, and we have no
cause to regret the few pounds of flesh that she withheld. A few
pounds more of flesh and muscle, and we should have had another
Velasquez; but Nature shrinks from repetition, and at the last moment
she said, "The world has had Velasquez, another would be superfluous:
let there be Jimmy Whistler."

In the Nocturnes Mr. Whistler stands alone, withouta rival. In
portraits he is at his best when they are near to his Nocturnes in
intention, when the theme lends itself to an imaginative and
decorative treatment; for instance, as in the mother or Miss
Alexander. Mr. Whistler is at his worst when he is frankly realistic.
I have seen pictures by Mr. Henry Moore that I like better than "The
Blue Wave". Nor does Mr. Whistler seem to me to reach his highest
level in any one of the three portraits--Lady Archibald Campbell,
Miss Rose Corder, and "the lady in the fur jacket". I know that Mr.
Walter Sickert considers the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell to be
Mr. Whistler's finest portrait. I submit, however, that the attitude
is theatrical and not very explicit. It is a movement that has not
been frankly observed, nor is it a movement that has been frankly
imagined. It has none of the artless elegance of Nature; it is full of
studio combinations; and yet it is not a frankly decorative
arrangement, as the portrait of the mother or Miss Alexander. When
Hals painted his Burgomasters, he was careful to place them in
definite and comprehensible surroundings. He never left us in doubt
either as to the time or the place; and the same obligations of time
and place, which Hals never shirked, seem to me to rest on the
painter, if he elects to paint his sitter in any attitude except one
of conventional repose.

Lady Archibald Campbell is represented in violent movement, looking
backwards over her shoulder as she walks up the picture; yet there is
nothing to show that she is not standing on the low table on which the
model poses, and the few necessary indications are left out because
they would interfere with the general harmony of his picture; because,
if the table on which she is standing were indicated, the movement of
outstretched arm would be incomprehensible. The hand, too, is somewhat
uncertain, undetermined, and a gesture is meaningless that the hand
does not determine and complete. I do not speak of the fingers of the
right hand, which are non-existent; after a dozen attempts to paint
the gloved hand, only an approximate result was obtained. Look at the
ear, and say that the painter's nerves did not give wayonce or twice.
And the likeness is vague and shadowy; she is only fairly
representative of her class. We see fairly well that she is a lady _du
grand monde_, who is, however, not without knowledge of _les environs
du monde_. But she is hardly English--she might be a French woman or
an American. She is a sort of hybrid. Miss Rose Corder and "the lady
in the fur jacket" are equally cosmopolitan; so, too, is Miss
Alexander. Only once has Mr. Whistler expressed race, and that was in
his portrait of his mother. Then these three ladies--Miss Corder, Lady
Archibald Campbell, and "the lady in the fur jacket"--wear the same
complexion: a pale yellow complexion, burnt and dried. With this
conventional tint he obtains unison and a totality of effect; but he
obtains this result at the expense of truth. Hals and Velasquez
obtained the same result, without, however, resorting to such
meretricious methods.

The portrait of the mother is, as every one knows, in the Luxemburg;
but the engraving reminds us of the honour which France has done, but
which we failed to do, to the great painter of the nineteenth century;
and after much hesitation and arguing with myself I feel sure that on
the whole this picture is the painter's greatest work in portraiture.
We forget relations, friends, perhaps even our parents; but that
picture we never forget; it is for ever with us, in sickness and in
health; and in moments of extreme despair, when life seems hopeless,
the strange magic of that picture springs into consciousness, and we
wonder by what strange wizard craft was accomplished the marvellous
pattern on the black curtain that drops past the engraving on the
wall. We muse on the extraordinary beauty of that grey wall, on the
black silhouette sitting so tranquilly, on the large feet on a
foot-stool, on the hands crossed, on the long black dress that fills
the picture with such solemn harmony. Then mark the transition from
grey to white, and how _le ton local_ is carried through the entire
picture, from the highest light to the deepest shadow. Note the
tenderness of that white cap, the white lace cuffs, the certainty, the
choice, and think of anything if you can, even in the best Japanese
work, more beautiful, more delicate, subtle, illusive, certain in its
handicraft; and if the lace cuffs are marvellous, the delicate hands
of a beautiful old age lying in a small lace handkerchief are little
short of miraculous. They are not drawn out in anatomical diagram, but
appear and disappear, seen here on the black dress, lost there in the
small white handkerchief. And when we study the faint, subtle outline
of the mother's face, we seem to feel that there the painter has told
the story of his soul more fully than elsewhere. That soul, strangely
alive to all that is delicate and illusive in Nature, found perhaps
its fullest expression in that grave old Puritan lady looking through
the quiet refinement of her grey room, sitting in solemn profile in
all the quiet habit of her long life.

Compared with later work, the execution is "tighter", if I may be
permitted an expression which will be understood in studios; we are
very far indeed from the admirable looseness of handling which is the
charm of the portrait of Miss Rose Corder. There every object is born
unconsciously beneath the passing of the brush. If not less certain,
the touch in the portrait of the mother is less prompt; but the
painter's vision is more sincere and more intense. And to those who
object to the artificiality of the arrangement, I reply that if the
old lady is sitting in a room artificially arranged, Lady Archibald
Campbell may be said to be walking through incomprehensible space. But
what really decides me to place this portrait above the others is the
fact that while painting his mother's portrait he was unquestionably
absorbed in his model; and absorption in the model is perhaps the
first quality in portrait-painting.

Still, for my own personal pleasure, to satisfy the innermost cravings
of my own soul, I would choose to live with the portrait of Miss
Alexander. Truly, this picture seems to me the most beautiful in the
world. I know very well that it has not the profound beauty of the
Infantes by Velasquez in the Louvre; but for pure magic of inspiration,
is it not more delightful? Just as Shelley's "Sensitive Plant" thrills
the innermost sense like no other poem in the language, the portrait
of Miss Alexander enchants with the harmony of colour, with the melody
of composition.

Strangely original, a rare and unique thing, is this picture, yet we
know whence it came, and may easily appreciate the influences that
brought it into being. Exquisite and happy combination of the art of
an entire nation and the genius of one man-the soul of Japan incarnate
in the body of the immortal Spaniard. It was Japan that counselled the
strange grace of the silhouette, and it was that country, too, that
inspired in a dim, far-off way those subtly sweet and magical passages
from grey to green, from green again to changing evanescent grey. But
a higher intelligence massed and impelled those chords of green and
grey than ever manifested itself in Japanese fan or screen; the means
are simpler, the effect is greater, and by the side of this picture
the best Japanese work seems only facile superficial improvisation. In
the picture itself there is really little of Japan. The painter merely
understood all that Japan might teach. He went to the very root,
appropriating only the innermost essence of its art. We Westerns had
thought it sufficient to copy Nature, but the Japanese knew it was
better to observe Nature. The whole art of Japan is selection, and
Japan taught Mr. Whistler, or impressed upon Mr. Whistler, the
imperative necessity of selection. No Western artist of the present or
of past time--no, not Velasquez himself--ever selected from the model
so tenderly as Mr. Whistler; Japan taught him to consider Nature as a
storehouse whence the artist may pick and choose, combining the
fragments of his choice into an exquisite whole. Sir John Millais' art
is the opposite; there we find no selection; the model is copied--and
sometimes only with sufficient technical skill.

But this picture is throughout a selection from the model; nowhere has
anything been copied brutally, yet the reality of the girl is not
sacrificed.

The picture represents a girl of ten or eleven. She is dressed
according to the fashion of twenty years ago--a starched muslin frock,
a small overskirt pale brown, white stockings, square-toed black
shoes. She stands, her left foot advanced, holding in her left hand a
grey felt hat adorned with a long plume reaching nearly to the ground.
The wall behind her is grey with a black wainscot. On the left, far
back in the picture, on a low stool, some grey-green drapery strikes
the highest note of colour in the picture. On the right, in the
foreground, some tall daisies come into the picture, and two
butterflies flutter over the girl's blonde head. This picture seems to
exist principally in the seeing! I mean that the execution is so
strangely simple that the thought, "If I could only see the model like
that, I think Icould do it myself", comes spontaneously into the mind.
And this spontaneous thought is excellent criticism, for three-parts
of Mr. Whistler's art lies in the seeing; no one ever saw Nature so
artistically. Notice on the left the sharp line of the white frock
cutting against the black wainscoting. Were that line taken away, how
much would the picture lose! Look at the leg that is advanced, and
tell me if you can detect the modelling. There is modelling, I know,
but there are no vulgar roundnesses. Apparently, only a flat tint; but
there is on the bone a light, hardly discernible; and this light is
sufficient. And the leg that is turned away, the thick, chubby ankle
of the child, how admirable in drawing; and that touch of darker
colour, how it tells the exact form of the bone! To indicate is the
final accomplishment of the painter's art, and I know no indication
like that ankle bone. And now passing from the feet to the face,
notice, I beg of you to notice--it is one of the points in the
picture--that jaw bone. The face is seen in three-quarter, and to
focus the interest in the face the painter has slightly insisted on
the line of the jaw bone, which, taken in conjunction with the line of
the hair, brings into prominence the oval of the face. In Nature that
charming oval only appeared at moments. The painter seized one of
those moments, and called it into our consciousness as a musician with
certain finger will choose to give prominence to a certain note in a
chord.

There must have been a day in Mr. Whistler's life when the artists of
Japan convinced him once and for ever of the primary importance of
selection. In Velasquez, too, there is selection, and very often it is
in the same direction as Mr. Whistler's, but the selection is never, I
think, so much insisted upon; and sometimes in Velasquez there is, as
in the portrait of the Admiral in the National Gallery, hardly any
selection--I mean, of course, conscious selection. Velasquez sometimes
brutally accepted Nature for what she was worth; this Mr. Whistler
never does. But it was Velasquez that gave consistency and strength to
what in Mr. Whistler might have run into an art of trivial but
exquisite decoration. Velasquez, too, had a voice in the composition
of the palette generally, so sober, so grave. The palette of Velasquez
is the opposite of the palette of Rubens; the fantasy of Rubens'
palette created the art of Watteau, Turner, Gainsborough; it obtained
throughout the eighteenth century in England and in France. Chardin
was the one exception. Alone amid the eighteenth century painters he
chose the palette of Velasquez in preference to that of Rubens, and in
the nineteenth century Whistler too has chosen it. It was Velasquez
who taught Mr. Whistler that flowing, limpid execution. In the
painting of that blonde hair there is something more than a souvenir
of the blonde hair of the Infante in the _salle carree_ in the Louvre.
There is also something of Velasquez in the black notes of the shoes.
Those blacks--are they not perfectly observed? How light and dry the
colour is! How heavy and shiny it would have become in other hands!
Notice, too, that in the frock nowhere is there a single touch of pure
white, and yet it is all white--a rich, luminous white that makes
every other white in the gallery seem either chalky or dirty. What an
enchantment and a delight the handling is! How flowing, how supple,
infinitely and beautifully sure, the music of perfect accomplishment!
In the portrait of the mother the execution seems slower, hardly so
spontaneous. For this, no doubt, the subject is accountable. But this
little girl is the very finest flower, and the culminating point of
Mr. Whistler's art. The eye travels over the canvas seeking a fault.
In vain; nothing has been omitted that might have been included,
nothing has been included that might have been omitted. There is much
in Velasquez that is stronger, but nothing in this world ever seemed
to me so perfect as this picture.

The portrait of Carlyle has been painted about an arabesque similar, I
might almost say identical, to that of the portrait of the mother. But
as is usually the case, the attempt to repeat a success has resulted a
failure. Mr. Whistler has sought to vary the arabesque in the
direction of greater naturalness. He has broken the severity of the
line, which the lace handkerchief and the hands scarcely stayed in the
first picture, by placing the philosopher's hat upon his knees, he has
attenuated the symmetry of the picture-frames on the walls, and has
omitted the black curtain which drops through the earlier picture. And
all these alterations seemed to me like so many leaks through which
the eternal something of the first design has run out. A pattern like
that of the egg and dart cannot be disturbed, and Columbus himself
cannot rediscover America. And, turning from the arabesque to the
painting, we notice at once that the balance of colour, held with such
exquisite grace by the curtain on one side and the dress on the other,
is absent in the later work; and if we examine the colours separately
we cannot fail to apprehend the fact that the blacks in the later are
not nearly so beautiful as those in the earlier picture. The blacks of
the philosopher's coat and rug are neither as rich, not as rare, nor
as deep as the blacks of the mother's gown. Never have the vital
differences and the beauty of this colour been brought out as in that
gown and that curtain, never even in Hals, who excels all other
painters in this use of black. Mr. Whistler's failure with the first
colour, when we compare the two pictures, is exceeded by his failure
with the second colour. We miss the beauty of those extraordinary and
exquisite high notes--the cap and cuffs; and the place of the rich,
palpitating greys, so tremulous in the background of the earlier
picture, is taken by an insignificant grey that hardly seems necessary
or helpful to the coat and rug, and is only just raised out of the
commonplace by the dim yellow of two picture-frames. It must be
admitted, however, that the yellow is perfectly successful; it may be
almost said to be what is most attractive in the picture. The greys in
chin, beard, and hair must, however, be admitted to be beautiful,
although they are not so full of charm as the greys in the portrait of
Miss Alexander.

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