Une Rencontre Au Salon

Impressions and Opinions, 1 February 1913, pages 204-217, 4,254 words

In the May of '85, as I stood before a bust by Rodin, lost in admiration, saying to myself, "What an admirable portraitist he is, though he be nothing more!" I heard some one behind me mutter:

"Michel-Ange à la coule...."

The words caused me to turn suddenly, and I found myself face to face with a handsome young man, thoughtfully dressed, and yet there was something in his blue cloth jacket buttoned across his throat, in his manner of wearing it (or was it the large trousers cut somewhat after the pattern of the white ducks of a house painter?), that suggested the artisan.

"Alors pour vous Rodin est un Michel-Ange à la coule? Vous êtes donc sculpteur?"

He avoided answering my question, and I did not press him to do so, knowing well that the phrase Michel-Ange à la coule was a sculptor's; and we walked about discussing the groups, single figures and busts, myself interested in the young man's hatred of Salon sculpture, and curious to hear him tell why he hated it. For a long time he was indefinite, saying at last:

"I don't see any choice of material here. Wherever I look I see glaring white marble."

"You don't like marble? "

"It isn't so much that I don't like it, but it isn't the only material. It suited the Greeks very well, enabling them to express their ideas, but not one of the sculptors here has ever thought that he might express himself better in terra-cotta, in bronze, or in wax; he chooses marble from habit, and works it as if it were his slave instead of his collaborator."

"You like bronze better?"

"It is more suitable to a modern house. But if you would care to see sculpture of a different kind I will show you some. A young friend of mine, a provincial, is exhibiting his work in Passy.... A lady who is interested in his work has allowed him to show his things in her house."

We got into a cab and were driven to a real French villa, a Passy villa hidden away under chestnut trees, at that moment all in flower, the white blossom shedding itself over the sunlit steps leading to the portico. As we passed through the house we caught sight of tapestries through the open doors, and the corridors were lined with painted and gilded tables, laden with Italian porcelain; and, going up a rich staircase, we came to the drawing-room, hung – or, shall I say, festooned? – with pink silk.

"I don't care for variegated ceilings, do you?"

My companion did not answer; he was thinking of the sculpture which filled the drawing-rooms; some twenty-five or thirty pieces, wax models, bronzes, and wood carvings were all around me, and picking up a block, seemingly a huge paper-weight, on which was carved the head and throat and breast of a Sphinx, I said, "You don't always disdain marble. This example of your work helps me to understand your art better than anything you have said. You looked at this piece of marble as a Chinaman looks at a piece of jade, thinking what form the grain of the stone was prone to take, and throwing back accordantly the arms like wings; and you have worked the marble with such loving care that it has become as beautiful as a piece of jade."

This appreciation satisfied the young man, and he began to talk of the Aubusson carpet, whose roses were as real as coloured thread allowed them to be.

"We must always seek reality, but we must seek it within the limitations of our material. If these roses – "

A faint rustling sound was heard; a lady came into the room, and he went towards her and muttered a rapid explanation which I did not catch. She came across the room, smiling graciously, and he said:

"This English gentleman is much interested in sculpture, and feeling sure that you would not mind if I brought him here – "

"On the contrary, I am most pleased. I should be sorry if he returned to England without having seen anything but the marbles exhibited at the Salon."

"It was very kind of this gentleman to bring me to see his friend's sculpture."

A slight smile appeared in the lady's face, and my companion took his leave abruptly, asking me if I would meet him an hour hence at the Café de l'Etoile. I promised to do so, and turned to the lady for information regarding her protégé. But the lady avoided answering my questions, and when it seemed to me that I had praised the sculpture sufficiently I thanked her for her kindness in allowing me to see it, and bade her good-bye.

"There is something in him," I said to myself; "something that will transpire later on… perhaps. He is at present thinking too much of the material, and for that reason his sculpture is a little empty."

ln the street there was a great glare of light, and Passy is a long way from l'Etoile; and in pursuit of ideas I wandered up a very long and hot street, Rue de la Pompe, arriving tired and hot at l'Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, my inflamed feet hardly able to carry me across it. My young friend had told me that I would find the Café de l'Etoile at the corner of l'Avenue de la Grande Armée. For a long time it was sought in vain, but at last a garçon said to me: "C’est ici, monsieur," and I wondered why my companion had directed me to a café not much better than a marchand de vins; in fact, a marchand de vins it was, and nothing more, with three workmen lounging over a zinc counter, and outside a few chairs under an insufficient awning.

On one of these I sat, resting my inflamed feet on another, thinking what folly it had been to come all this way. And for why? L'Avenue de la Grande Armée is one of the least interesting avenues in Paris; it contains three or four little roadways, and between each one is a line of trees, very small, uninteresting trees, and the houses are small and insignificant, and the avenue extends away and away in a straight line into an uninteresting district called Neuilly. We never see anybody interesting in I'Avenue de la Grande Armée, nobody one knows, and as soon as I was rested and my thirst assuaged I fell to thinking of art to pass the time.

All great art, all valuable art, is inspired by the surroundings in which men live. For instance, there would have been no frescoe painting if there had been no Gothic cathedrals. The romanesque cathedrals were gloomy, tomb-like places, and mosaics were sufficient ornamentations; but the Gothic cathedral was graver; men's minds were arising out of the gloom of the real Middle Ages, and as soon as the cathedrals were built the sculptors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries began to carve statues; and when the niches were filled the artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries covered the walls with saints, angels, and ecclesiastics. At the end of the fifteenth century interest in the Mass began to decline, and men began to build palaces for their pleasure in this world; and just as the cathedral had brought saints, angels, and ecclesiastics into art, the palace brought voluptuous women in embroidered gowns and young men in chain armour with velvet cloaks thrown about their shoulders. About the middle of the seventeenth century feudalism was a declining force; men began to build houses, and the house introduced family life into art; it inspired the Dutchmen continuously for nearly seventy years; they painted everything that could happen in the house and everything that could happen in the fields around the house. Their inventions include local colour, truth of effect and chiaroscuro; and upon Dutch art we have been living ever since; and we must wait for some architectural change before we can hope to find a new pictorial formula.

The villa! We have invented the villa. The word is the Italian for house, but in English it carries a suggestion of a somewhat archaic structure standing in the middle of a garden. When we go on Sunday to lunch with our friends who live in Surrey, long before we arrive at their suburban station we have in mind gable ends, tiled roofs, and false beams showing between the trees; and when we jump out of the train we find pa and ma and the girls and the boys all waiting to meet us, and we go up the smooth wide road together, a pleasant ten minutes' walk from the railway station, hearing all the while that the morning and evening trains are excellent. Kent, Sussex, and Surrey are crowded with villas, all run up within the last fifty years, and the question arises if our English villa will create an art peculiar to itself, as the cathedral, the palace, and the house have done.

Nothing seems more probable than that it will, for the younger generation has begun to perceive that the Royal Academy prices are incompatible with parties; and a drove of Highland cattle driven across the moors is relinquished at mother's instigation. She reminds father that the girls have been promised a month at Boulogne at the end of the summer. Father admires the work of the Academician, but mother finds a resolute supporter in Julia; Julia's opinions have to be

considered, for she goes to Camden Town three times a week for lessons in painting, and her advice to her father is that quality, not subject, should be sought for, and Highland cattle in heavy gold frames are out of place, she says, in white-painted rooms hung with chintz and muslin; she suggests to her father etchings in pretty Whistlerian frames for the drawing-room. "And she would agree with the young man whom I met in the Salon, and for whom I am waiting in this very hot and detestable little café, that if father is to buy sculpture at all it had better be in terra-cotta, or wax, or in bronze….''

It was pleasant to close one's eyes and to listen to Julia and the young man discussing the beauty of the material and its limitations till Julia begins to weary of Theseus and the Venus de Milo, and to long for talk about men and women….

"We may be," I said, "on the eve of a new artistic formula. We must be, for we can't go on painting Highland cattle and seagulls screaming round wintry rocks for ever and ever; and our houses are becoming more and more unsuited to marble. That is the discovery of the young man whom I am waiting for.''

And I fell to wondering how it was that I had not perceived at once that he was aiming at Oriental art. His love of the material for its own sake came to him from the East, and his dislike of marble as a medium of sculpture is derived from his knowledge that no Oriental sculptor has used marble, and perhaps from some religious sense going back to ancient Egypt, where granite and porphyry were used in preference to marble, these materials being more solemn, more disposed to inspire awe. Marble went westward; the Greeks were the first secularisers, and ever since the secularisation of the world has been going on continuously. On such an idea one can dream a long while, and five seconds or half an hour may have passed before I awoke and saw again the miserable aspects of the Avenue de la Grande Armée. After a little stare I muttered aloud:

"It is strange that I should not have thought of these things before. I'll speak to my young friend about the religious aspects of porphyry and granite as soon as he arrives. He will have to admit, I think, that both are too solemn for modern consumption. But I am with him; yes, I am with him altogether when he says that we do not consider the material sufficiently, and have but little interest in the handicraft on which the Oriental sculptors rely to make beautiful material seem more beautiful. He is quite right when he says that we have not a sculptor to-day who can wield a mallet; Rodin never raises one: he sends his plaster casts to Italian copyists, and the public prefers these copies to the bronze castings, though the bronze contains the sculptor's thought unadulterated."

Strange, is it not, that man should be so conventional? Any originality he ever attains to is the result of circumstance, and therefore it is quite possible that the villa will bring a new art along with it, an art dependent on the material employed and the use it is put to rather than upon ideas. The mark of a chalk pencil on a sheet of Whatman is not beautiful in itself, but a beautiful texture can be obtained with a chalk pencil, and it is certain that a drawing may give pleasure in which there is nothing but beauty of touch. No. one is blinder to proportions, anatomies, and gestures than Walter Sickert; from the point of view of – shall we say Ingres? – his drawing does not exist at all; he has only "quality," and his cleverness consists in always keeping well within his limitations, putting down upon paper and canvas only that which he can express well. It will be noticed that he always chooses subjects which do not tax his powers of drawing – street corners, for instance. A street comer may present much perplexing drawing, but Walter Sickert avoids these, choosing for preference a simple gable end. It taxes his capacity, but he gets it down, and once he has it down the rest is easy, for his art does not include values. Whosoever says "values" suggests chiaroscuro, and chiaroscuro brings endless difficulties into art, and Walter Sickert has discovered that it is unnecessary to seek a true relation between his gable end and his sky. According to his aestheticism, any grey tint will do for the sky provided the paint is nicely laid on, and with brown and a little Indian red the roofs and the shadows can be achieved. His one pre-occupation is beauty of touch, and he gets it in the curve of the pavement. He has invented a formula which leaves out almost everything, and is therefore suitable to his own talent and to the talents of a large following, principally ladies. For the last seven summers his pupils have been painting in our streets, and they have left London seeking gable ends in all the old English towns; they have spread over the Continent; Dieppe has not a wall left unpainted; they have reached Venice, and St Mark's affords endless opportunities for their art; they have gone on to Constantinople and to Egypt, applying their method unembarrassed by the fact that in Egypt the relations of the sky and earth are the reverse of what they are here. Here the sky is pale and the earth dark; in Egypt the sky is dark and the earth light. But truth of effect does not trouble them. The strip of grey that sets off the tower in Smith's Square, Westminster, furnishes an equally truthful background for the domes and minarets of Egypt; and hundreds of small pictures of unvarying merit are brought back – faint designs in gold frames, inoffensive always, and sometimes soothing to the eye. A considerable number of their pictures are to be seen in the exhibitions of the New English Art Club, but not all, and this is a grievance which has been to some extent removed by the organisation of vast picture-shows at the Albert Hall. It is reported that as many as a thousand street-corners have been exhibited there; and among this somewhat bewildering array of gable ends we find portraits of chairs, jugs, basins, and brooms. The Dutchmen relied upon a ray of light or a shadow to give interest to some such simple object, but these ladies rely entirely on Mr Sickert's recipes.

The master is, however, a little more venturesome than his pupils; he sometimes leaves his street-corners for music-halls, and his method is as applicable to interiors as it is to exteriors. The stage box at the Bedford is represented by a patch of slate-colour – white broken with blue-black, and a gold arabesque; and his recipe for gold is a foundation of yellow ochre, with raw umber for the shadows, and Naples yellow for the high lights. Figures are sometimes introduced into the music-hall pieces, and he talks so well about the drawing he has omitted that we forget to examine what is there, and the stuttering and the stammering among the gallery boys are forgiven him for he never altogether lacks quality, and it is not easy to get quality in oil paint. No material is more rebellious, but he has tamed it.

"He must meet the young man whom I met this morning in the Salon," I cried to myself. "They have many ideas in common." "Before a dressmaker designs a dress," Sickert will say to him, "he asks himself what material the dress is to be made of, and I think we should do the same." And the two will agree heartily about the necessity of cheap art for the villa.

In his articles be has always advocated cheap art, deriding his friends in Chelsea for selling their pictures at high prices, for painting chintz in winter and castles in summer; and his friend Mortimer Menpes is also working for the villa, neglecting proportions, movement, and gesture, all that it was once the fashion to regard as the essentials of drawing, and thinking much more of the effect of a sheet of Whatman in a gold frame and the relation of the gold frame to the wall. Like Walter Sickert he was a pupil of Whistler, and Whistler was the first to draw the attention of the Western world to Oriental art. He has been in Japan and many other countries, and has brought back a great deal of local colour; he has given us not only Japanese, but Indian and Turkish, and, for all I know, Circassian dresses; spots of colour very often laid upon a gold background. He is also addicted to etching and, like Walter Sickert, leaves out all that he has not understood. The gold frame that he took from Whistler, and into which he has introduced many modifications of his own, enhances the beauty of the old Dutch paper laid upon a sheet of Whatman. And Helleu's etchings are nearly as suitable to the villa as Menpes's. In an indulgent moment Degas described Helleu as un Watteau à vapeur; and thinking how his etchings are appreciated in villadom, I remembered a man whose merit is that he works in silver point, a medium so difficult that he claims dispensation from all drawing and design. "And there are others," I said. But it was too hot to seek out names, and my thoughts drifted on, dismissing the drawings of Conder, Brabazon, and Aubrey Beardsley as being too recondite for the taste of the villa; "and too expensive," I added. "Garçon, encore une limonade!"

Walter Sickert is an economist as well as an aesthete, and foresees that in about fifty years all and sundry will be living in villas, and that there is no end to the art that will be required for those who come after him. It is only here that we feel inclined to join issue with him. Is the villa the end of art? The last word? We think not. The bungalow will succeed the villa, and after a little while the bungalow will become a tie, and man will wander over the earth again, but not on a camel's back by day, sleeping in a tent by night; he will wander in railway trains, in Pullman cars, and the traveller returning to Paris from Cape Horn, vid Behring Straits, will need pictorial refreshment. Pictures will – . As the art of the Pullman car was about to rise up before me my reverie was interrupted by the sculptor whose acquaintance I had made that morning in the Salon before Rodin's bust.

"A quoi rêvez-vous?"

"Je veux bien vous raconter mes rêves; seulement ce sera long;" and while walking round the Arc de Triomphe he listened to me telling him the gradations by which we should reach the end of the Art age. "You kept me waiting so long in that cafê that I have had time to think out the question of nationality in art from end to end."

My companion laughed sympathetically, and encouraged by his laughter I continued my theory of nationality in art, telling him that if the Greeks had had the compass their ships might have reached the Red Sea, for a canal existed in ancient times; and through the Red Sea their ships might have wandered eastward, and if one laden with marbles had been wrecked off the coasts of Japan in the year 200 B.C. we should not have had Japanese art; Hokusai and Outamaro would not have existed.

"Degas would agree with you that segregation is the source of the artistic river."

"Degas! You know Degas?"

"Yes, I have known him for some time, and I met him soon after leaving you, and told him about our meeting in the Salon. He asked me to tell you that he is dining at the Nouvelle Athènes. He hopes you will come."

"Who would miss an evening with Degas!"

We walked down the Avenue Friedland together, talking of the hordes of young English and Americans who come to Paris to learn to paint, thinking that there is but one painting and no other, and that if they can get the recipe they will be able to produce the article required.

"A sort of international art; that is what the world is making for," my companion said. "International cooking is with us," and he related how he had asked the manager of the Splendid Hotel if the cooking in his establishment was international, and, smiling, the manager assured him that he could count upon the cooking as being of the very same quality as the Splendid Hotel in Rome, in Aix les Bains, in Munich, in Geneva; in fact, in all the capital cities of Europe. "Et vous n'avez pas de plats locaux!" I said to him.

" He began to suspect that you were poking fun at him?"

"A moment later he did, and assured me that notwithstanding international cooking they were still prepared – "

We laughed together, and our thoughts reverting to the subject of our conversation of international art, I said: "If you send a Japanese artist to Ville d'Avray he will bring you back a piece of Japan, and if you send a French artist to Japan he will bring you back a piece of Ville d,Avray."

“I'm afraid that isn't so," my companion interposed.

“How is that?”

“You forget that Eastern artists have already begun to imitate the Western. Japanese art ended with the opening up of Japan to Western ideas; and now all that Japan can do in the way of art is to imitate us or its old masters."

“Yes; isn't it sad? Art ended once before in the fourth century; a new idea came into the world, and from the fourth to the thirteenth there was no art except the cathedrals, no sculpture, no painting, no literature. Another new idea has come into the world, locomotion; and railways and steamboats have made art impossible; every man knows his neighbour; man is an imitative animal, and if he can imitate he will. There will be plenty of international art, and man's lot will be worse than ever."

“Pas de plats locaux.”

“No," I answered, laughing sadly. "Great geniuses will be born in vain. Men of talent were born in the Middle Ages, but there was no artistic formula, and they remained mute and inglorious. Nature is always the same. What is art but intellectual formulae, and it requires three or four generations living in an obscure corner of the world to create an artistic formula. One of these corners still exists; we are going to the Place Pigalle, and the artists we shall see there to-night – Degas, Pissaro, Renoir are the last; Monet is in the country, so is Sisley, and together they are developing the Impressionistic formula. To-day there are no buyers for their pictures, but in about fifty years' time almost any price will be paid for them; the worst will be a masterpiece then. I didn't think of it before, if we only had a few hundred pounds we could invest it at a thousand per cent., and our children would be millionaires. But we have no money."

"We have better than money or children," my companion answered, "for if all that you say be right we have immortality; not on account of any merit we possess, but because of the mediocrity that will follow us. We are the demi-gods, and the demi-gods are to-night going to dine with the gods, with the last of the old world's gods."