A Modern Among the Ancients

The Speaker, 23 January 1892, pages 107-108, 1,652 words

Modern consideration, and a full measure of it, has certainly been extended to Fred Walker. He is the man whom all have agreed to praise. From the New English Art Club to the Academy, from the New Gallery to the first outlying studio you happen upon, you will hear praise of Fred Walker. Does his work merit the praise it receives? Certainly, if you compare it with the work of Mr. Fildes or Mr. Herkomer; and that his wood drawings are superior to Sir John Millais' there can be no doubt whatever. But what matter whether Jones is better than Smith or Brown? – the question is not there at all. The question is,will Jones compare with the old masters? If he will not, his pictures are not pictures in any true sense of the word. The test is with the old masters, and a desire to apply the test to the last dead Academician, who might be supposed capable of bearing the test, must have been running in the heads of the Academicians when they decided to hang Fred Walker's picture, "The Sunny Thames," in the first room among the Gainsboroughs, the Romneys, the Cromes, the Morlands, and the Wilsons. Evidently the Academicians thought that the Walker would be able to hold its own in any company, and they prepared it for the most distinguished, expecting that it would achieve a vindication of modern painting. They had not ignored the claims of Walker as they have ignored the greater claims of Whistler and Albert Moore; his art did not differ so widely from their own as to prevent them making him an A.R.A., so it was quite natural that they should attempt to take Time by the forelock and dub Walker an old master. "We know that a great number of people do not think our pictures worth the canvases they are painted on; we know that it has become common talk that we have long ceased to elect anyone except the absolute duffer to the rank of Academician. We can't confute our enemies on these points. but we can show them that it was not always so. We'll hang Fred Walker among the old masters. Perhaps he'll be able to do something for us."

Fred Walker possibly had more talent than any man of our generation, except Mr. Orchardson, and those whose genius was so great that the Academicians were compelled, in the interests of mediocrity, to ignore them. So the Academicians are determined to make the most of Walker. They have got a picture of his into the National Gallery, and now behold him conspicuously placed amid Gainsboroughs and Romneys, challenging comparison with the eighteenth century. How does the picture bear the terrible stress of comparison that the Academicians have placed upon it? I am afraid it does not bear it at all. I am afraid it is immeasurably the worst picture in the room. From every point of view, it falls short of the humblest accepted standard in the last century. It fails where nearly all modern art fails – at the very root. The old masters are never wanting in what the French call tenue. You enter into the pictures of the old masters, you wander for ever through their landscapes, there is unity, there is atmosphere; I do not mean that curse of modern painting, plein air – I mean une atmosphère de tableau. Opposite the Walker hangs a beautiful Wilson. How uniform is the colour – a dark blue and a pale blue, very delicately blended. The hundred, or, to be more exact, the myriad colours of nature have disappeared, and with what remained, with the essence of the vanished colours, with the values, Wilson painted his picture. How restful is that landscape, how broad, how full of space! And the mountains, do they not sleep very tenderly; and the sky, does it not move and transport you? On the left there is a Crome – a river full of shipping. It has been raining all day, the water is muddy, and towards evening it has begun to clear. The pale yellow of the sunset comes up the picture from the extreme left. On the right the cloud hangs perfectly in its place, throwing the right bank into shadows. All the yellow hour is in mid-stream; the great sail is hardly extended in the moveless air, shadows exact but colourless, and the infinite beauty of distant shipping. True, that the Crome is nearer to nature than the Wilson, but that is a matter of no importance. What is of importance is that in both pictures the intention "'as to convey a general impression, an impression of the romantic twilight beauty of an Italian landscape and the chill silence of evening on an English river after a rainy day. In neither picture was nature copied; both painters observed nature and made use of nature – that was all. Now we will look at the Walker. Is nature subordinated to the intention of the painter, or is it a heterogeneous display in which no very definite intention is recognisable – something equivalent to a draper’s counter up-piled with all the newest materials, and the young man on the steps getting down some more?

Looking at this picture, I do not know if I should describe it as a river's bank from which some children are fishing, or whether I should describe it as some children who are fishing from a river's bank. It is in truth neither one nor the other: it is both, and therefore not a picture. The artist has not been able to decide whether he would paint a landscape or figures. Forget the picture, and imagine the scene in nature. A boy lies with his legs hanging over the bank, holding a fishing-rod; two girls stand behind, and some younger children are lying on the grass. Behind the children there are meadows with large trees; behind the meadows hills. In this familiar

scene one painter will see touches of colour, another will see the character of the faces, another will study the effect. The landscape will dwindle down to nothing for him who sees the figures: very little more will remain than an open space smitten with sunlight, and as he begins to study the action and significance of each gesture and the character of each face, the landscape becomes less and less important. It is in this way that a painter determines his point of view; separates the scene from the environment which absorbs it, sacrifices the background, suggests rather than points out, and by a series of ellipses leads the spectator to imagine what is not there; and it is sometimes by servilely copying and sometimes by neglecting nature that the old masters succeed in conveying not an illusion but an impression of life. But is there anything of all this in "The Sunny Thame"? We notice at once that the figures are wholly wanting in ease and simplicity of movement: the girl stands in the conventional pose of the studio model, the boy fishing is in a very grandiloquent pose; the painter has not yet shaken himself free from the conventional picturesque of the studio. The methods of the studio are all over the picture, and not always well applied. He has not even succeeded in measuring his model correctly. How tall would that boy be if he were to stand up? Can you fit those legs on to that body? In quality of drawing is it possible to conceive anything more ignorant, more pedantic, more geometrical? Is it anything more than the work of a very badly educl\ted young man – badly educated and self-educated? There is desire to draw well, and there is desire to draw closely; but did any canvas ever show greater ignorance, greater awkwardness, greater ugliness of handiwork? Is it anything more than a complete exposition of the savagery of modern artistic training? If you doubt me – I will not say look at the Gainsborough; you would say the comparison was not a fair one – I will say look at the Morland on the opposite wall: at that man who empties a pail of food into the pig-trough. How admirably he stoops, how exact is the movement of the arms and the legs – so exact is it that you know the weight of the pail he is emptying – and how easily all this is rendered! with what simplicity and absence of pedantry the hand drew and placed this figure in the picture! "'Twere well to range with simple Iivers in content," the picture seems to say. In Morland as in Wilson, in Wilson as in Crome, the intention was to convey a general impression. But what general impression was the painter of "The Sunny Thames" minded to express? I do not know. Had there been a distinct intention in the painter's mind, it would have appeared even through the obscuring veils of his academic execution.

The picture is just this: It shows a great deal of talent, and a great deal of bad education. It is the work of a man of talent who, unfortunately, lived at a wrong moment, and it has often been said that for great art two things are required: the man and the moment. Had Walker lived on, would his art have improved? I think not. I can see no improvement in any of his canvases. His art seems to have become petrified at an early date. He was really no more than an ardent-minded young man, full of passionate remembrance of the antiques he had just left off copying, and could not refrain from introducing into his pictures. On another side his horizon was bounded by as much modernity as finds its way into an illustrated newspaper. G.M.