The New Gallery

The Speaker, 8 October 1892, pages 435-437, 2,264 words

THE present exhibition at the New Gallery has been unexpectedly sprung upon us. A case of premature birth it seems to be. A circular letter was sent round to the usual exhibitors, asking them to send what they pleased; there would be no jury. Had the directors some project in view for their winter exhibition, which fell through at the last moment? Or is the early opening of the exhibition to be considered as an outburst of the ebullient rivalry occasioned by the recently projected scheme of the still newer gallery – the Grafton Gallery? However this may be, it is certain that the present exhibition is not nearly up to the average – that is to say, to the very high average that has hitherto been maintained in this gallery. The first room is especially disappointing. It would be very profitlless to explain at length how much I dislike Mr. Alma-Tadema's "Hadrian in England." Nor would good come of insisting too strongly on the vulgarity of Mr. Topham's portrait of the Rev. Dr. Merriman. But it is imperative that the critic should admire something. Therefore I say that Mr. Llewellyn's "River Camel, Cornwall," comes upon me as a pleasant surprise. There is an artistic intention in the contrast of this long strip of green sea-water, broken up with pink where the light falls, and the line of yellow sandhills showing against a cold, grey sky, impacted clouds quick with rainy weather. I find in a far corner a rather nice portrait by Monet Loudon; and by the side of some quite extraordinary parodies of Mr. Burne Jones there is a little picture by Miss Anna Norgren, the result of lessons learnt in a French studio. But in the next room there are three or four quite nice pictures. A group of five naked boys bathing, by Edward Stott, is especially good. Two are sitting on a green mound, one is standing by the brink, two are waist-deep in the shallow water. A crimson sun is about to disappear below the horizon. The great red disc sheds a last passionate glare of light across the still, shallow water, filling the shadows of the flesh with warm greys, defining with a rose tint the legs of the boy who stands looking towards the sunset. This picture radiates. The sunlight really floods the water. The painter sought for light and he attained light, and so his picture must be counted a success. But the figures, though not incorrect in drawing, are weakly drawn, which is worse. Were this not so – “If ‘ifs' were 'ands'" etc. At the end of the room I noticed a charming little picture by Miss Flora Reid. This lady seems to improve yearly, and her work this year is the best she has done. A little market-woman sitting amongst her wares – carrots, turnips, potatoes, baskets of vegetables piled about her. There is a dark tree behind the little woman, and we see the white caps of other market-women on the left. There is a white house and a white awning, and this balances the composition excellently well. The picture is no more and no less than it pretends to be. Miss Reid knows her limits, and is artist enough to keep within them. So I have hardly a fault to find. The execution of the baskets seems a little too painstaking, and does not quite correspond with the loose execution of the rest of the picture.

On the next wall Mr. George Clausen exhibits a large picture which imperatively puts this question to the spectator: Can art dispense not only with beauty, but with the picturesque, with all elements of strangeness, of fancy, of caprice, of everything except facts. From the present picture it is clear that Mr. Clausen once believed that art could live by facts alone, that a work of art might include nothing more than a plain, adequate statement of facts. The impressionists have been often accused of a desire to dispense with the element of beauty, but the accusation has always seemed to me to be quite groundless; and even memory of a certain portrait by Mr. Walter Sickert does not cause me to falter in this opinion. Until I saw Mr. Clausen's picture I did not fully realise how terrible a thing art becomes when divorced from beauty, grace, mystery, and suggestion. It would be difficult to say where and how this picture differs from a photograph; it seems to me to be little more than the vices of photography magnified. Having spoken so plainly, it is necessary that I should explain myself.

The subject of this picture is a group of field labourers finishing their mid-day dinner in the shade of some trees. They are portrayed in a still, even light, exactly as they were; the picture is one long explanation; it is as clear as a newspaper, and it reads like one. We can tell how many months that man in the foreground has worn those dreadful hobnailed boots; we can count the nails, and we notice that two or three are missing. Those disgusting corduroy trousers have hung about his legs for months; all the ugliness of their faces and the stolid earthiness of their lives are there: nothing has been omitted, curtailed, or exaggerated. There is some psychology. We see that the years have brought the old man cunning rather than wisdom. The middle-aged man and the middle-aged woman live in stolid, mute stupidity – they have known nothing but the daily hardship of living, and the vacuous face of their son tells how completely the life of his forefathers has descended upon him. Here there is neither the foolish gaiety of Teniers' peasants nor the vicious animality of Brauwers’; and it is hardly necessary to say that the painter has seen nothing of the legendary patriarchal beauty and solemnity which lends so holy and vast a charm to Millet's Breton folk. Mr. Clausen has seen nothing but the sordid and the mean, and his execution in this picture is as sordid and as mean as his vision. There is not a noble gesture expressive of weariness, nor an attitude expressive of resignation, nor is even sloth indicated. It is in the meaningless that Mlr. Clausen has sought his picture. He said, "I will go lower than the others; I will seek my art in the mean and the meaningless." But notwithstanding his very real talent, Mr. Clausen has not found art where art is not, where art never has been found, where art never will be found.

Looking at this picture, the ordinary man will say, "If such ugliness as that exists, I don't want to see it. Why paint such subjects?" And at least the first part of this criticism seems to me to be quite incontrovertible. I can imagine no valid reason for the portrayal of so much ugliness; and, what is more important, I can find among the unquestioned masters no slightest precedent for the blank realism of this picture. The ordinary man's aversion to such ugliness seems to me to be entirely right, and I only join issue with him when he says, "Why paint such subjects? Why not? For all subjects contain elements of beauty, and ugliness does not exist for the eye that sees beautifully, and meanness vanishes if the sensation is a noble one. Have not the very subjects which Mr. Clausen sees so meanly, and which he degrades below the level even of the photograph, been seen nobly, and have they not been rendered incomparably touching, even august, by – Well, the whole world knows by whom. But it will be said that Mr. Clausen painted these people as he saw them. I dare say he did; but if he could not see these field-folk differently, he should have abstained from painting them. The mission of art is not truth, but beauty; and I know of no great work – I will go even further, I know no even tolerable work – in literature or in painting in which the element of beauty does not inform the intention. Art is surely but a series of conventions which enable us to express our special sense of beauty – for beauty is everywhere, and abounds in subtle manifestations. Things ugly in themselves become beautiful by association; or perhaps I should say that they become picturesque. The slightest insistence in a line will redeem and make artistically interesting the ugliest face. Look at Degas' ballet-girls, and say if, artistically, they are not beautiful. I defy you to say that they are mean. Again, an alteration in the light and shade will create beautiful pictures among the meanest brick buildings that ever were run up by the jerry-builder. See the violet suburb stretching into the golden sunset. How exquisite it has become! how full of suggestion and fairy tale!

Mystery and suggestion are the characteristics and the recognisable signs of every work of art. If the artist's subjects are angels, Madonnas, and nymphs, the light of white limbs, the ecstatic gaze of heavenly eyes, the pomp of golden-woven robes, lofty arches and clustered columns, compel the necessary sense of wonderment and charm; but if the painter's subjects are tavern-wenches cleaning or scolding, or field-folk finishing their mid-day crusts in the shelter of the hedges, he must find mystery and suggestion in the light and shade. A picturesque shadow must clothe the squalor of the miser's den, and the subdued light of the little kitchen, where the red-petticoated housewife is sweeping, must contrast so delicately with the white glare of the little brick yard, where the neighbour stands in parley, leaning against the doorpost, that the humble life of the place is transformed and poetised, and by a series of ellipses in the execution the spectator is led to imagine much that is not there. This was the A B C of Dutch art; it was the Dutchmen who first found out that with the poetising aid of light and shade the meanest and most commonplace incidents of everyday life could be made the subjects of pictures.

There are no merits in painting except technical merits; and though my criticism of Mr. Clausen's picture may at first sight seem to be a literary criticism, it is in truth a strictly technical criticism. For Mr. Clausen has neglected the admirable lessons which our Dutch cousins taught us two hundred years ago; he has neglected to avail himself of those principles of chiaroscuro which they perfected, and which would have enabled him to redeem the grossness, the ugliness, the meanness inherent in his subject. I said that he had gone further, in abject realism, than a  photograph. I do not think I have exaggerated. It is not probable that those peasants would look so ugly in a pho~graph as they do in his picture. For had they been photographed, the chances are that some shadow would have clothed, would have hid, something, and a chance gleam might have concentrated the attention on some particular spot. Nine times out of ten the exposure of the plate would not have taken place in a moment of flat grey light.

But it is the theory of Mr. Clausen and his school that it is right and proper to take a six-foot canvas into the open, and paint the entire picture from Nature. But when the sun is shining, it is not possible to paint for more than an hour – an hour and a half at most. At the end of that time the shadows have moved so much that the effect is wholly different. But on a grey day it is possible to paint on the same picture for four or five hours. Hence the preference shown by this school for grey days. Then the whole subject is seen clearly, like a newspaper; and the artist, if he is a realist, copies every patch on the trousers, and does not omit to tell us how many nails have fallen from the great clay-stained boots. Pre-Raphaelitism is only possible among august and beautiful things, when the subjects of the pictures are Virgins and angels, and the accessories are marbles, agate columns, Persian carpets, golden-woven robes and vestments, ivories, engraven metals, pearls, velvets and silks, and when the object of the painter is to convey sensation of the beauty of these materil\ls by the luxury and beauty of the workmanship. The common workaday world, with accessories of tin pots and pans, corduroy breeches and clay pipes, can be only depicted by a series of ellipses through a mystery of light and shade.

Beauty of some sort there must be in a work of art, and the very conditions under which Mr. Clausen painted precluded any beauty from entering into his picture. But Mr. Clausen exhibited a beautiful picture, conceived in an entirely different spirit, in this year's Academy. The garments were generalised, the picturesqueness of a strong sunlight effect hid unseemly detail, and we saw "the mower" in his typical manhood. This picture was the one redeeming feature of an exhibition of wretched pictures, and the unstinted praise that I bestowed upon "The Mowers" should excuse the flagrance of my attack on "Labourers after Dinner." This picture was probably painted some years ago. I hope that it is the last of its kind, and that the other autumn exhibition will prove that Mr. Clausen has abjured Bastien-Lepage, his evil ways, and all the derivative vices, for ever. G.M.