Mr. Brabazon

The Speaker, 17 December 1892, pages 737-738, 1,222 words

What will become of our young artists and their aspirations is a tale that time will unfold gradually, and for the larger part of its surprises we shall have to wait ten years. In ten years many of these aesthetes will have become common Academicians, working for the perambulators and villas of numerous families. Many will have disappeared for ever, some may be resurrected two generations hence, may be raised from the dead like Mr. Brabazon, our modern Lazarus –

"Lazare allait mourir une seconde fois,"

or perchance to sleep for ever in Sir Joshua's bosom. That a place may be found there for Mr. Brabazon! Mr. Brabazon is described as an amateur, and the epithet is marvellously appropriate; no one – not even the great masters – deserved it better. The love of a long life is in those water-colours – they are aII love; out of love they have grown, in its light they have flourished, and they have been made lovely with love.

This man lived principally in the time of wire-drawn De Windts and slushy David Coxes; but his eyes were strangely his own, and he made no effort to see nature either as slush or wire. Even then he saw nature hardly explained at all – films of flowing colour transparent as rose-leaves, the lake's blue, and the white clouds curling above the line of hills – a sense of colour and a sense of distance, that was all, and he had the genius to remain within the limitations of his nature. And, with the persistency of true genius, Mr. Brabazon painted, with a flowing brush, rose-leaf water-colours in obscurity, unmindful of the long indifference of two generations, until it happened that the present generation, with its love of slight things, came upon this undiscovered genius. It has hailed him as master, and has dragged him into the popularity of a special exhibition of his work at the Goupil Galleries. And it; was inevitable that the present young men should discover Mr. Brabazon: for in discovering him, they were discovering themselves – his art is no more than a curious anticipation of the artistic ideal of to-day. The sketch he exhibits at the New English Art Club is a singularly beautiful tint of rose, spread with delicate grace over the paper. A little less, and there would be nothing; but a little beauty has always seemed to me preferable to a great deal of ugliness. And what is true about one is true about nearly all his drawings.We find in them always an harmonious colour contrast, and very rarely anything more. Sometimes there are those evanescent gradations of colour which are the lordship and signature of the colourist, and when le ton local is carried through the picture, through the deepest shadows as through the highest lights, when we find it persisting everywhere, as we do in No. 10, "Lake Maggiore," we feel in our souls the joy that comes of perfect beauty, however small the limits that confine it. But too frequently Mr. Brabazon's colour is restricted to an effective contrast; he often skips a great many notes, touching the extremes of the octave with certainty and with grace. And it is right that we should make a fuss over Mr. Brabazon; for though this work is slight, it is a little accomplishment – he has indubitably achieved a something, however little that something may be; and when art is disappearing in the destroying waters of civilisation, we may catch at straws. But it is not the littleness of the intention, but the slightness of the work, that reduces Mr. Brabazon's place among painters. Beyond colour – and even in colour his limitations are marked – Mr. Brabazon cannot go. He entered St. Mark's, and of the delicacy of ornamentation, of the balance of the architecture, he saw nothing; he cannot have been aware of the mystery of the august spirit of the past manifested in carved column and legended pane. He saw merely the colour of a few shadows; and let it be said again that Mr. Brabazon had the genius to recognise his limitations – he leaves out the drawing, which is better than to fumble with it. All his life he has done this; and though we may say that a water-colour with the drawing left out is a very slight thing, we cannot fail to perceive that these sketches, though less than sonnets or ballades, or even rondeaus or rondels – at most they are triolets – are akin to the masters, however distant the relationship.

I have not told you about the very serious progress that Mr. George Thompson has made since the last exhibition; I have not described his two admirable pictures; nor mentioned Mr. Linder's landscape, nor Mr. Buxton Knight's "Haymaking Meadows," nor Mr. Christie's pretty picture "A May's Frolic," nor Mr. MacColl's "Donkey Race." I have omitted much that it would have been a pleasure to praise; for my intention was not to write a guide to the exhibition, but to interpret some of the characteristics of the young generation. The New English Art Club is very typical of this end of the century. It is young, it is interesting, it is intelligent, it is emotional, it is cosmopolitan – not the Bouillon Duval cosmopolitanism of the Newlyn School, but rather an agreeable assimilation of the Montmartre Café of fifteen years ago. Art has fallen in France, and the New English seems to me like a seed blown over-sea from a ruined garden. It has caught English root, and already English colour and fragrance are in the flower. A frail flower; but, frail or strong, it is all we have of art in the present generation. It is slight, and so most typical; for, surely, no age was ever so slight in its art as ours? As the century runs on it becomes more and more slight and more and more intelligent. A sheet of Whatman's faintly flushed with a rose-tint, a few stray verses characterised with a few imperfect rhymes and a wrong accent, are sufficient foundation for two considerable reputations. The education of the rising generation is marvellous; its brains are excellent; it seems to be lacking in nothing except guts. As education spreads guts disappear, and that is the most serious word I have to say.

Without thinking of those great times when men lived in the giddiness and the exultation of a constant creation – when a day was sufficient for Rubens to paint the "Kermesse,'' thirteen days to paint the "Mages," seven or eight to paint the "Communion de St. François d'Assise " – and blotting from our mind the fabulous production of Tintoretto and Veronese, let us merely remember that thirty years ago Millais painted a beautiful picture every year until marriage and its consequences brought his art to a sudden end. One year it was "Autumn Leaves"; the following year it was "St. Agnes' Eve"; and behind these pictures there were at least ten masterpieces – "The Orchard,” "The Rainbow," "Mariana in the Moated Grange," "Ophelia," etc. These pictures are far behind Veronese and Tintoretto in magnificent excellence and extraordinary rapidity of production; but is not the New English Art Club even as far behind the excellence and fertility of production of thirty years ago? G.M.