Aims and ideals in art

Front matter

I

Ulrich Middeldorf

*

Contents

PACK

1905 I. On Truth to Nature ; and Style . i „ II. Imagination and the Ideal . . 25 „ III. Invention ..... S3

IV. Taste 79

II

IMAGINATION is the driving force of the artist, whether he paints the visible beauty of outward things, as did Velasquez, or the fancies of the mind, as did Blake, a man at the opposite pole of thought and temperament, whose pictures have no conscious reference to visual sensations. The painter's imagination directs whatever he does ; and although the word is commonly used in the restricted sense in which we apply it to Blake, it seems to me that for a good historical picture, or even for a good portrait, some imaginative power is required : some strong intuition, some dramatic insight which dictates the point of view and controls the artist's work. It would even seem as if the possession of imagination alone, with the very poorest technical equipment, makes the artist : not of course that it makes him a painter, but that if he has a definite thing to express he will find, somehow, the means of doing so. The work of Blake is an excellent instance of this, for in spite of his conventionalities, and from a painter's point of view, the feebleness and childishness of his execution, he conveys his meaning, and in such a way that there is even a charm in this weakness, telling of his struggle for expression : as usually happens in an artist's work, he tells more than he intends. Blake's sublimity seems to me a little stagey ; his simplicity is his finest quality.

Of course his style was formed largely on that of Michelangelo, but his knowledge of the master was derived from copies or prints, the only material available, which exaggerated the muscular action. It was not until photographs of the Sistine frescoes were available for study, that we could see how fine Michelangelo really was ; how true in the delicacy as well as in the force of his work.

Blake himself seems to have been quite unconscious of any technical weakness ; indeed, he thought himself better, as a painter, than his contemporaries. He says in his very characteristic way, referring to imagination : "he who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect, and more minutely organised, than anything seen by his mortal eye." How this contrasts with Reynolds's calm and reasonable statement, " We can no more form an idea of beauty superior to nature, than we can form an idea of a sixth sense, or any other excellence out of the limits of the human mind. We are forced to confine our conceptions, even of heaven itself, and its inhabitants, to what we see in this world."

Still, Blake was able to express his ideas ; and his pictures, because of this, touch us more than any amount of capable and accomplished works dealing with imaginative themes, but lacking imagination. Blake expresses himself ; his work leaves an impression on the mind, and this is one test of vital work : for, after all, it is expression which counts in art. One may recall the well-known words of Blake, in speaking of the sunrise, " What ! you will tell me that when the sun rises you see a little round golden spot like a guinea — I tell you I see all the hosts of heaven, singing Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty " ; and probably if he painted a sunrise, he would feel it natural to symbolise it in that way. But if we turn to the work of Turner, who was a fine painter and a master of his materials, as well as a man of great imagination, we find that he had the same great view of nature, as a living presence, although he did not personify it as Blake did. For he was able to see and to seize the elements in nature which give the suggestion of life, and by putting them before us, he arouses in us the same feelings as nature does. In the one case there was the imaginative insight only, the emotion received from nature, but in the other there was also the artist able to analyse the grounds of this emotion, and, having great power of drawing, and knowledge of gradation and colour at his command, to express it.

The imagination of an artist is shown, I think, rather in the treatment of his subject than in his choice of the subject itself ; and one may instance this by a comparison of the work of Jan Steen or Metsu, with that of Mieris. In the work of Steen or Metsu, although the common things they painted are perfectly realised, one feels that they are subordinated to the dramatic incident of their subjects (or that the dramatic incident is raised into prominence over them). Exactly how this is done it is difficult to sa}^ ; it is a question of the things the mind of the artist most dwelt on, which thereby are somehow brought to our minds. In the case of Steen or Metsu it is the human interest, or the beauty of the thing as seen ; we are made to feel something more than that so many items are comprised in the picture. But in the case of Mieris there is an utter lack of imagination. It is true everything is painted beautifully and minutely ; one could take a lens to examine it : but he paints his hares and cabbages and carrots and things, with the eye of a marketing housewife looking for defects, and his people too, in the same spirit. So that his work, for all its skill, is poor. It tells us nothing.

The perfect union of technical skill with great imagination is found in Michelangelo, and only in him. His work attains perfection in this balance of the finest qualities, for not only are his figures true, in their expression, to nature, but his workmanship, in its mastery and skill, is perfect ; his sculpture bears comparison with that of the ancient artists. Such well-known figures as the David, the Slave, the Pieta in St. Peter's, and the beautiful basrelief in the Diploma Gallery, are masterpieces technically, if it is possible to look at them apart from all thought of their meaning ; but they were not finished so finely only to show his knowledge of anatomy, or of form, but in order to give the utmost truth of expression. His knowledge was gained that it might serve his imagination ; we see in his work expressive action carried to its extreme point, but not exaggerated : and although his figures are individualised, they include more than the individual, for by fixing a characteristic action, they become typical. His figures are not vague abstractions, made to conform to a conventional heroic or ideal type ; but they show differences of build and of characterisation, as marked as we find in life, so that in spite of their being removed from us by their grandeur, they are still individual, and human in their variety. This may be seen in the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, where the figures of the prophets and sibyls show a variety of types, as also do the fine supporting figures between them ; these are so individual that one can almost recognise the different models used. It is rarely that he gives a figure at rest ; he fixes the action of a moment, the most telling expression of the thought.

Can work such as this be done by rule ? One can recognise the imagination of an artist — we feel Michelangelo's mind from looking at his works better than if he had written his ideas down ; and we see that certain elements are used for expression. Yet his imitators seemed to think that by using these elements, beginning, as it were, at the other end, they would produce imaginative work ; forgetting 3 that, though they borrowed his properties, they could not borrow his brains.

The impulse in his work is from within ; the imagination directs. As Reynolds says, " There are two modes of imitating nature, one of which refers to the mind for its truth, and the other to the eye." The work of Michelangelo, and — at a distance and derived from it — that of Blake, refers to the mind. They both give expression to an imagined ideal. One cannot imagine that Michelangelo would free himself from his own strong bias, and become sufficiently detached to face nature quite frankly, like a portrait painter. His imagination governed his eyes, and he used his models only so far as they served his idea. This was not the case with Raphael, for although his work also refers to the mind for its truth, it refers, I think, more to the eye. He was more in touch with the world, more interested in his fellows. His imagination did not so much evolve things from within, as it assimilated and used things round about him. He had more observation than Michelangelo, or, it would be truer to say, a wider observation ;

for no observation, no searching, could be closer and deeper than that of Michelangelo : but it was, as it were, directed always to one figure, searching it to the uttermost. He did not, like Raphael, express the relations of figures to each other in a group, or the different play of one character with another, which is one of Raphael's greater qualities ; the one in which, perhaps, he excels all other artists except Rembrandt.

Raphael's figures come so naturally and beautifully into their places, and one often thinks of their beautiful grouping ; while with Michelangelo, one thinks always of one or another single figure : he was a solitary man and a dreamer, disliking even the presence of his assistants. Raphael lived surrounded by his friends and pupils, he was interested in the world ; and it seems to me that his painting is at its best when he painted individuals, and not abstractions. Some of his finest work, that certainly which we are most able to appreciate, is in portraiture ; and if one may presume to say so, there seems, in the Vatican frescoes, where his fine quaHties of construction, characterisation, and drawing are seen to perfection, to be more enjoyment in the work, when he is painting actual people. The " certain idea " which, as he said, the painter must have in his mind, did not control him altogether, as it did Michelangelo ; and it is interesting to notice in some of the splendid frescoes in the Vatican, the difference between the beautifully drawn and firmly characterised figures on the one side, all evidently portraits, and the conventional *' Raphaelesque " figures on the other. This is particularly noticeable in the " Heliodorus," and in the " Mass of Bolsena " ; the side groups of the latter fresco show a marked difference in character ; one group we feel to be real and the other unreal, and the strength and variety of the realistic figures emphasises the sameness in the types of the ideal figures : a sameness we do not find in Michelangelo. With all their appropriateness of action, they do not give us the same conviction as do the ideal figures of Michelangelo ; we even see in them the germ of that insipidity which marked his followers and imitators. And it is perhaps the recollection of so much conventionality founded on the external qualities of Raphael, that blinds us to the real greatness of his work. He had a wider range and a more sympathetic imagination than any other artist ; he was able to gather from everything he saw, its typical character ; so that, to every subject he painted, he gave its most characteristic expression, and fixed standards which still remain, for grouping and composition. The group of Heliodorus could not be attempted again without reference to Raphael, nor could a Madonna, or any subject which he treated.

The great genius that this shows has come now to be taken for granted : it does not astonish us. His work seems to have come about so easily, so naturally, and it has been so long with us, that we take it as a matter of course, as we do the sky or the sunshine. It is not until we begin to think it all out, that all this had to be created ; not until we think of the artist facing the great blank walls do we realise how stupendous was his work. And if we pass from the consideration of isolated figures and groups — no one ever grouped figures so finely — to the design of such pictures as the " School of Athens/' or the " Heliodorus," and consider the placing of the figures and the design of the background ; if we study how these works are arranged and controlled, and how natural and easy it all seems, we must feel his true greatness, and that his work belongs to the eternal things of art.

We must remember, however, that Raphael's work was a continuation and development of the earlier art ; the methods, and to some extent the groupings employed, were those already in use. But I think we may be sure that the new things he won were reached through the study of nature, by direct observation, not only of people, but of lighting in nature ; for the arrangement of the light, and the fine aerial quality of colour, in the "School of Athens" could only come that way, and the knowledge how to light effectively a large number of figures can only have been gained by first-hand observation. This broad and simple lighting, which is one of the great charms of Italian work.

Raphael

THE MASS OF BOLSENA (LEFT SFDE)

must have been dictated by the necessity of fining large spaces ; for, as this requires a distant point of view to be taken, the picture has to be seen broadly ; but what is wonderful, especially in Raphael's work, is that with all this there is no sacrifice of necessary detail, and at close quarters one can see that the figures are minutely finished, and are hatched, like a drawing.

This form of art developed naturally in the Italian Renaissance ; it does not develop naturally with us. Our life is too complicated, and its conditions are opposed to it ; we cannot get the same opportunities for observation, and a painter who essays imaginative work in this manner now has nothing to lead him up to it ; he cannot refer to nature, with older work to guide him, but only, a long way back, to the older work.

It is sometimes said, indeed, that there is no scope for imaginative art nowadays ; but this is not so, for imagination does not depend on externals. If it exists, it will express itself freely through the materials at hand ; and although the art of the great Italians cannot be re-created.

imaginative art is still possible, though its direction may be different. Rousseau, the French landscape painter, said, "It is asked that art should abandon retrospective history : that it should confine itself to actuality and repudiate the past. This is evidently a healthy and fruitful idea, but the artist is essentially sensitive, he is not master of his emotion, he paints best that which moves him most. Go and tell Delacroix to burn Shakespere, destroy Goethe, Dante, and all who have inspired him ; tell Gericault to forget the Iliad, Proudhon to give up Longus and the great figures of Greek antiquity, Ingres to be false to Raphael. . . . The artist has a right to his professional education ; we can teach him to see well, to construct well : but to feel, to be touched, is a matter which concerns him and his temperament alone. He must have the most perfect liberty of expression and of development." This seems to me true and wise. If we consider another great imaginative artist, Rembrandt, whose imagination, like that of Raphael, was nourished by his surroundings, we find that he, like Raphael, painted

Scriptural subjects. Raphael used the handsome types of his fine race for models, Rembrandt used very ordinary Dutchmen. Each had the power of imagining and re-creating a scene, and it is curious to notice the difference in the nature of their appeal to us. Raphael's appeals by its beauty, its general appropriateness and rightness; so that, apart from the charm of his figures, we feel that even if the events did not happen as he has depicted them, they ought to have happened so : we accept his version as worthy of its subject. But the first impression of Rembrandt, with his ugly and very ordinary persons, is that these events cannot possibly have happened in this way ; we have an idea that it was nobler, more dignified, and so on. But we find, when we get to know Rembrandt, that he brushes all these ideas of dignity aside, for it did not occur to him that the men and women of Scriptural times could be different from those of his own : and his pictures convince us because he goes straight to the heart of his subjects, re-creating a scene with all its emotion and expression, and giving it a sense of reality that raises it far above the conventional view impressed on our minds by the famihar traditional renderings. It is presented so truly that it too becomes typical. All his amazing skill, his knowledge of light, expression, colour, and movement, is used in the service of his imagination, to bring the scene home to us. In such a masterpiece as the " Hundred Guilder " plate, how splendid is the grouping, and how fine the sentiment expressed through the arrangement of the light, with the line of sick people coming forward out of the shadow ; and all the expressions and incidents truly imagined, and something more than that ; for he has expressed all the possibilities of the scene so truly that his picture is typical ; the subject has been done once for all. And we find this living force of his imagination present throughout his work. There is something more in his portraits than the cold stare of the eye, there is the power of reaching to and showing us the person within ; he makes his portraits speak to us. His imaginative power, though perhaps not so wide in its range as Raphael's, is deeper; his work compels one's interest and sympathy, and leaves as profound an impression on the mind as even that of Michelangelo.

Rembrandt may be said to have fixed the type of Dutch art, as Raphael did of Italian : and his influence is still the guiding one in the living Dutch school to-day : while in Italy, whatever influence reigns now among its painters, it is not that of Raphael, or their other great masters. Theirs is an art of the past. No one was great enough to succeed the great Italians ; there was nothing left but to follow at a distance ; and these in turn had their followers, and the fresh reference to nature dropped out of men's minds. It is a curious comparison, that of Raphael dying at the height of his fame and the life of his school with him ; and Rembrandt dying obscure and discredited, and his influence growing greater with time, and inspiring a school. Both drew their inspiration from without ; one aiming at an ideal perfection of form, the other absolutely blind to it, accepting and using whatever came to hand. One can hardly compare them, or say which was the higher aim or the greater achievement, but if we take a great man's work as a legacy to his successors, it would seem that Rembrandt's was the more fruitful ; and perhaps this is because the impulse towards realising an abstract beauty is confined to few, while the desire to express people and things as they are will be felt by many ; and that Rembrandt is still a living influence because he comes nearer to us, and is, as it were, everybody's friend, while men of kindred spirit with the great souls of the past are rare, and their road is difficult to tread.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Watts was one of these rare spirits. It is not my place to make, nor am I capable of making, a just estimate of his great gifts, but I may touch on some points in his work, which is as remarkable for its great range as for its high aim. In the first place, we may see that he had a thorough command of his means ; he was a born painter, and had a natural gift of expression. His early pictures show this ; such a work as the " Wounded Heron " is painted with an ease and accomplishment equal to that of the best Dutch still-life painters. Indeed, it reminds one in many ways of the early Velasquez in the National Gallery, though it is not quite so stern. In the presence of Mr. Watts's early work we feel that he knew his business, and that in whatever direction his nature had led him, he would have shown himself a master : we are (as Millet said of Rousseau) *' struck by the fact that a power is a power from its very beginning." ..." You were,'* Millet said to Rousseau, "from the beginning the little oak which was destined to become the great oak." We may see in Watts's early work hints of the influences of the time, of Lawrence, of Etty, and perhaps of Turner ; but he soon finds himself, and in the splendid series of his portraits and pictures, but especially, it seems to me, in the portraits, we see how thorough was his knowledge of form, how true was his draughtsmanship, and how fine his colour-sense. His heads are finely constructed and modelled, and true in character ; nothing is slurred over, nothing essential is sacrificed.

And they are remarkable among portraits in another way : that everything is subordinated to the expression of character, to the extent even that his method of work varies according to the character of his sitter, so that there is a kind of childhke, unconscious obedience of the hand to the mind. If we notice the difference in method between the portraits of Walter Crane and of Lord Roberts, and some of his ladies' or children's portraits, we see something of his range. His colour is fine and true, with no forcing for effect ; the relation of flesh to linen — to the whites, as well as to the darks of his picture — is so beautifully kept, that his colour seems to have a wider range than that of the ordinary palette. This is due to his fine sense of gradation, and also to his fine sense of quality of colour ; for though, as we know, it is not possible to get a greater range than from white to black, yet a greater variety in this range is produced by varying the kind of colour (that is to say, by using in some places solid, in others transparent colours) than is possible if all the tints are mixed and painted solidly. The transparent colour, although it may be taken down to the full strength of a shadow, yet has a brilliancy from the lighter ground beneath, which keeps it nearer to the light ; and Mr. Watts's method in this is like that of the great Venetians, and his colour has the same range and fulness.

It seems to me that Mr. Watts's work divides roughly into three stages : the first is the search for truth and accuracy, the portrait stage ; the second, for the expression of ideal beauty, as we see in the " Daphne " and others of that time, which are splendid examples of the way an ideal subject should be rendered. It is not enough for us to pose a model and paint a figure, and call it Venus, or Juno, or what not, and then to think we have painted an ideal picture. The idea should be the starting point, and should control both the design and its treatment, and Mr. Watts's ideal figures are splendid in this respect. They do not suggest the model in the studio, but rather that he was inspired by the finest Greek work, and tried to work in its spirit. The finest of the antique painting must have been very like his work of this time, and the illustration given, from a fresco at Pompeii, cannot fail to remind us of his work, and to show how thoroughly he entered into the antique spirit.

Mr. Watts's third stage was the expression of his imagination ; of his own feehngs. He seems to have felt that it was not enough to record things, that it was not enough to give aesthetic pleasure, but that the object of his work should be, in his own words, " to suggest, in the language of art, modern thought in things ethical and spiritual " ; he was not content to embody old myths in fresh forms, but has given fresh forms to ideas and problems which touch us now. The question is often raised, whether in endeavouring to give pictorial form to abstract ideas, he was not giving up the finest qualities of the painter, such as we see in his portraits and earlier works ; which come from his more immediate touch with life. It may be so. For my own part, these works appeal to me more, but I do not propose to discuss it here ; and indeed I do not think it really worth discussing : we must take a man's life work as expressing his nature and his convictions. This development eame naturally to him, and whether by

reason of it our loss is greater than our gain, there can be no question of the nobility of his aim, nor of the greatness of his achievement ; for such works as the " Hope," " Love and Death," " Opportunity," and many others which will occur to us, have, like great poems, passed into our thought, and become part of our inheritance.

A criticism is sometimes made of Mr. Watts's work, especially of his colour, that though it is no doubt very beautiful, and fine in effect, it is all borrowed from the Venetians, and that we should not go back for our inspiration, but endeavour to create for ourselves as they did. How far is this true ? If the only merits of Mr. Watts's work were that it recalls the fine qualities of the Venetians, and if his admirers were content to copy these qualities from him, and so on, we can foresee that deterioration would result ; and there would be a reason to protest, and to appeal for a fresh start. But Mr. Watts's fine qualities are his own ; his sympathy with the Venetians rests on his understanding of their use of colour as well as form, 4 as a means of expression, and expression was what he sought. He learnt from the Venetians that colour speaks to us, that the mood of a picture depends on the tone of its colour. For example, a picture may be all painted in golden tones, and so far, we may say, be untrue to the actual look of things ; but within this golden envelope all the true relations of parts may exist, the general colour giving the key or setting the mood of the picture. This is what Rembrandt did ; and I think we all, in our small ways, try to use colour in this way. But it is only when a man knows all the possibilities of colour that he can do this well, and that he becomes, like Mr. Watts, a master, having the whole scale at his command. I am convinced that we cannot get this knowledge if we only study in the cold north light of a studio, or even if we supplement this by study of the masters ; but that we must go back to the old source, and study the whole wide range of light and colour in nature. Mr. Watts, like all great figure painters, was also a landscape painter, and some of his landscapes, such as " The dove that returned not," are as fine things as have been done ; and it was, I feel sure, through the study of landscape, not the study of little " bits," but of the great controlhng things, the sun and the sky, in their relation to the earth and to people, that he was able to find out the reasons for the fine colour of the Venetians, and how to use it for himself.

In looking at a picture, the mind refers to more than is before the eye, to our consciousness of things outside the picture. There may be no sky in the picture, but our recollection of the balance between sky and earth will be felt by us ; and it seems to me in all Mr. Watts's pictures, whether it is actually expressed in the work or not, that the blue of the sky is the determining point of the scale, in his mind : so that there is, as it were, reflected back from his pictures — it may be only in a vague suggestion — a sense of harmony with the great elementary things of nature, by subtle indications of their correspondences with his figures. In some of his pictures, too, the alternations of light and shadow on the figures rouses the same feeling that we get in nature in noticing the play of light and shadow over a wide country, and perhaps indirectly recalls it. I do not pretend to know, it is an obscure and difficult thing to trace ; but something of this is, I fancy, at the bottom of the sense of the life, and harmony with nature, that we feel before his finest work.