Modern Landscape Painters

A Loan Collection of Pictures by Nathaniel Hone, R.H.A. and John Butler Yeats, R.H.A., October 1901, pages 4-7, 1,713 words

A Propos of Mr. Hone

I am willing to admit that what am about to say regarding modern landscape painting may have been latent in my mind before I saw Mr. Hone's pictures, but I think I can say that Mr. Hone’s pictures helped to make me conscious of the fact that modern landscape painters do not live in the country. The modern landscape painter is generally a traveller who paints; sometimes he is a painter who travels, but he never seems to be more than an artist who has gone to the country in search of what journalists call "'copy." In the New English Art Club there are some painters, but even in Mr. Steer's most considered work there is no sign that he has lived in the places he paints. We feel sure he never saw the landscape in any aspect but its summer aspect. The landscape has not grown up in his mind; it was not sown there in autumn; it did not lie there in winter; it did not begin to germinate in spring. The New English landscape painter may be compared to a man who foregoes the labour of gardening and visits flower shows.

But it is only within the last thirty or forty years that landscape painters settled in London. I think this is the first time the question has been raised, whether four months in the country – June, July, August and September – are sufficient time for a landscape painter to receive ideas and to execute them. Within the last twenty years it has come to be tacitly admitted that the painter can learn all his art requires in this time; and it has come to be believed that no season except summer is worth painting, whereas the very contrary is nearer the truth. A summer landscape is

generally joyless. Nature is not beautiful in summer; she seems to know it, and resents the presence of the painter on dull, monotonous days, when an east wind is blowing and the trees and grass are an acid green. Summer is not a love season in the country. In July the low-toned sky is blue overhead and purple on the horizon; there are no clouds, and even the cows look hot and sulky. Travellers paint Naiture in these summer aspects and painters who live most of the year in town painting portraits. When there are no more people in town Steer and his companions visit the country and paint every morning for six weeks whatever landscape is most accessible and whatever effect happens to be there. Mark Fisher is the only New English landscape painter who lives in the country, and beyond doubt he is the only one whose pictures reveal an intimate love and knowledge of Nature. I am sure that Mark Fisher and his talented daughter draw and paint about the farm all winter. I am sure Miss Fisher has had to run in from the piggery to warm her hands, which had grown too cold to hold a pencil, and the moral of all this is that he who would be a landscape painter must live in the country, and make himself part of the life of the country. He must be out in all weathers observing, furnishing his mind with memories. He must remember in what weather and at what time of day each group of trees will have most meaning. He must know whether it is at dawn or after sunset that he will read the secret of the shadowy pools. He must know which way the shadows will slant at different time of the year, and what skies he may expect with every change of wind.

Directly we see a picture by Mr. Hone we know that he has seen his subjects under many aspects, and has chosen this one. His mind is in his pictures – a mind nurtured on grey skies and large estuaries. Where the tide rises high, and where the wind races like a flame.

Mr. Hone's landscapes are out of doors, and looking at them, we feel that the rain has just left off and the sun is coming out. He paints the subjects everyone paints – a rainy estuary, some sand hills, a strip of grey sea with a breaking wave. Our flat east coast calls him, and he paints long strips of grass near the sea, where cows are pasturing, and rich skies full of round white clouds that the south wind gathers up from the horizon. But he paints these subjects with a fine sense of design, and out of them he has made some beautiful pictures. Perhaps the one I like best in the exhibition is one of a meadow; I think it must be a meadow near the sea; low down in the distance dark clouds and white clouds, full of thunder, are gathering into large masses. In “Bundoran Rocks,” too, Mr. Hone has used the sky to make a very fine design. In this picture we are standing on some grey rocks, and just beyond is a strip of sea, into which a heavy shower is falling. In a moment the shower will sweep over us, a grey sea mist will blot out everything, and the first thing to go will be the gleam of sunshine that now lights up an island out to sea.

If the visitor to this exhibition should read these few lines, he will wonder why we do not include Mr. Hone among the suburban painters whose acquaintance with the country is casual, and confined to the summer months, for he will find nowhere days of frost and snow, when the wind beats like iron, and makes us wonder how Monet survived the hardships of his life. The visitor will not find in Mr. Hone’s exhibition wet evenings, when the trees shiver in a bitter March wind. Nowhere in this exhibition do we see Mr. Hone pursuing Nature across wet bogs in bitter weather. Mr. Hone is content from choice with the simple aspects of Nature that the suburban painter, from his limitations of time, is often forced to take, but he sees these as primitive men might see them; long habit has enabled him to regard the number of thistles in the field as unimportant, and he concentrates his attention on the large legendary aspects – I say legendary because there is something of the Irish legend in Mr. Hone’s work. He is never a Wordsworthian who discovers for the first time that primroses flicker down the valley. Nor does he weary of the same tale; he tells it many times, content with some interesting variation, and in this way he is like the old Bards. He has found his genius as they found theirs in limitations – style is limitation.

Now we will look at his painting: well, it is not very special, and it would be difficult to say in what school we should place him. His painting is not the painting of a school. We know that he studied in France; that he was the friend of Corot, of Daugbigny, but except for a certain facility “in slinging paint,” to use an expression which will be understood in the studios, the influence of France is not apparent in this work. His painting is somewhat abstract. It is not so vivacious as a Frenchman’s. It is, perhaps, a little apathetic, the painting of a man who lives in a flat country where life is easy and indolent. Therefore his painting reminds me of the modern Hollanders, whom I don’t admire, but I do admire Mr. Hone. His painting is more interesting than Maris; it is more like a legend, and I am sure that Puvis de Chavannes would have stopped  to look at it. It is summary, and so is Puvis. Mr. Hone’s pictures are often done, and they look as if they had been done, from rapid water colour sketches. Perhaps this is why the public has found fault with Mr. Hone. The casual man thinks he does not sufficiently elaborate his foreground, and for this the public has been jeered at by artists who know that the art of our time is to mark the relationship of earth and sky, rather than count the thistles in the grass. But the public is never wholly wrong; the fault of public appreciation is that it is ignorantly expressed. The absence of the thistles in Mr. Hone’s foreground does not distress us, but we should like a little more intimate and personal life in his canvasses than he cares to put into them. I have compared his landscapes to legends. Mr. Hone’s art is almost “folk”; it is a little general, sometimes casual, a little indifferent. We do not find in Mr. Hone that intensity of observation which is necessary in cultured art. Take, for instance, the picture that he exhibited at the last Royal Hibernian Academy – the picture of stormy weather by the sea shore. It was a variation of Bundoran rocks. Well, is it not curious that even Mr. Hone, who lives in the country, should have painted the same effect twice over without noticing that when a dark wisp of cloud trails over a blue sky its colour changes; that it turns from brown to a purplish grey when it touches the white cloud?

But this is an introduction to a catalogue of Mr. Hone’s work rather than a critical essay, and should end on a note of praise. Moreover in calling attention to such matters of minute observation, I feel I am doing an injustice to an artist who never went to nature in the spirit of the mere copyist. Mr. Home seems inspired by the same awe of nature as the primitive man, who conceived of the world he lived in as a single Being, a God, rather than as a collection of separate objects of interest. In Mr. Hone’s work nature is not lost sight of in a minute scrutiny. Nature seems to have come to Mr. Hone, whereas nearly all other landscape painters go to nature.