Artistic Education

The Speaker, 30 January 1892, pages 136-137, 1,476 words

Of Fred Walker's life I know next to nothing. I have heard that he died young and lived for a long while in great poverty. There is a legend that he worked in the British Museum, making drawings on any piece of paper he could pick up, and that one day a passer-by was so much struck by the merit of these drawings that he helped Walker with money and enabled him to become a student in the Academy schools. The story is probably false. But however false it may be in fact, it is certainly the story that is written on every canvas that Fred Walker painted. From a clever boy taken up in such a way we should expect just that crude and defective style and that plebeian nobility of mind which are the characteristics of this painter's work. His boyish attempt to include a reminiscence of Michael Angelo's slave among "The Bathers," and the pose of the boy fishing, in the picture of which I spoke last week, surely bespeak an unformed mind just as plainly as the hand-work tells that the pencil has been thrown down for experimentation with the brush.

I said last week that there was nothing in Walker's work to lead us to think that if he had lived he would have succeeded in developing his art beyond the rudimentary stage he left it in. And why? Because he had not sufficient talent to carry it on further? Perhaps. But, independently of all question of talent, there is another reason. By drawing on its nerve force, a talent that has not been badly educated may, for a time, produce striking work. But every year after forty the light of personal idiosyncrasy grows dimmer, and it becomes more and more easy to recognise how slight is the artist's knowledge and how defective is his style. Ours is an age of hurry and transient emotions, and young men who are not famous before they are thirty are apt to consider that life has disappointed them at all points. But in the great ages talent was cultivated, and personal idocrasy met with but slight appreciation. Rembrandt's early pictures do not compare with those of his old age, and the portraits that Hals painted when he was eighty are in some respects his finest. Hals did not begin to paint well before he was forty; Cuyp lived till he was eighty-five, and to the very end his talent remained firm, developing and affirming itself even when he was seventy: and this because the Dutchmen allowed their temperaments to take care of themselves, and year after year, with the sublime patience of their race, continued to perfect and complete their artistic education. Among these admirable artists you find nowhere

(except in Rembrandt), seek it where you will, from Hals to Hondekoeter, any display of personality. These quiet Dutch folk wear the same clothes; they do not attempt to thrust their personality upon you; they are pleased that you should learn gradually the subtle differences of features and expression which separate them. But how different nowadays! Art is like a costume ball, and having satisfied himself that his coat is not cut like his neighbour's, the painter walks away satisfied. But surely the donning of an odd dress is a poor way of proving you are someone; and as the fête proceeds the novelty of the dress wears off, or is outshone by some still more brilliant arrival who in turn secures his momentary triumph.

So do modern and ancient art impress me one with the triviality and gaud of a masquerade, the other with the gravity and seriousness of real life. Fred Walker is a typical example. In him we find a man of talent suffering at once from want of education and from bad education. A man of talent I say, for Walker possessed an eye that saw truly; he was gifted with the sentiment of proportions and a love of anatomical correctness; he loved modern life, and was eagerly seeking a formula whereby he might express his vision. But, notwithstanding all these natural advantages, Fred WaIker failed to realise himself in any single instance, and has left behind him only suggestions of the ideal which he never attained, and which I do not think he ever would have attained. A painter may educate himself, he may acquire perfect technique without the aid of lessons; this is certain – instances abound; but I know of no instance of a man outgrowing the evil of a bad education. Potter was the only one of the Dutchmen who was self-taught. Three parts of his work are no more than attempts to solve by himself problems of light and shade which any one of the illustrious wasters of Haarlem or of Amsterdam could have explained to him in a few minutes. Why Potter received no instruction it is impossible to say; he lived and worked within a few miles of Rembrandt and Hals, but, as far as we know, he was entirely self-taught. But although Potter, like Walker, never realised the ideal he had in view, he left works which show that he certainly would have done so if he had lived. The young bull now hanging in the exhibition of old masters at the Academy is no doubt little more than a study done by Potter for the sake of certain measurements: it is as hard as if it had been painted with a file – it is not painted, it is brutally engraved; and the landscape which hangs close by is equally infantine in execution: the foliage of the trees looks as if it had been accomplished with a pair of knitting-needles. But there are pictures by Potter in existence which are as perfect and as beautiful in execution as anything done by the most learned of his contemporaries. The most celebrated is the little picture in the Louvre of two horses tied to the farm building which in Sussex is called a hovel. The carter comes up the bank from the river, carrying a full bucket of water, his right arm in the air. It is almost night, and his silhouette appears faintly but beautifully soft on the evening sky. This picture must have caused Meissonier many a pang.

Then thanks it was to his almost incredible genius that Potter could dispense with lessons and achieve his own education. Partly. His wings grew because they had never been clipped by the shears of a bad education; and if Potter received no direct education, he received the best education of all – he lived in an artistic period. He never visited the studios of Rembrandt or of Hals, but the air he breathed was an artistic air; and he learnt to paint as the birds learn to fly. That is the main truth. The only way to acquire a substantial artistic education is to be born in an artistic period. But as our own epoch, however wretched, is of more interest to us than any other, however great; and as man must struggle, however profitless his struggles may be, it has come to be very generally held that it would be well to obtain by artificial means what nature sometimes capriciously provides. As the man of letters cannot have the Mermaid’s Tavern, it is thought that he may supply the deficiency by a library; and as the painter cannot have the studios which existed in Italy in the sixteenth, in Holland in the seventeenth, and in England in the eighteenth centuries, it is thought that it would be well to have Government schools where the nation can study art at the cost of the nation. But it is no part of my intention to discuss the wisdom of this decision: I merely propose to inquire if our system of national instruction in art has succeeded in producing art.

The School of Art at the Kensington Museum costs the nation half a million annually. For at least five-and-twenty years the Kensington schools have been thronged with pupils, and, extraordinary as the fact may seem, no artist of even moderate ability has resulted from the system of artistic education that obtains there. It is possible that there may be some three or four artists of some reputation who, having wasted a couple of years at Kensington, completed their education abroad. But unaided Kensington cannot claim the honour of having turned out a single artist of sufficient ability to hold his own even in the modest competition held annually in Burlington House. Half a million yearly, thirteen and a half millions, and not even one fifth-rate artist to show for it.

This seems to me a matter worth looking into. We will continue our inquiry next week. G.M.