Painters and sculptors : a second series of Old masters and new

Front matter

Painters and Sculptors

KENYOff COX

S/

Contents

CHAPTER

PAGE

I. The Education of an Artist

Preface

The Preface to the unillustrated edition of " Old Masters and New," published in 1905, concluded with a half promise of future editions, " augmented and enlarged," in which other masters, old and new, should be treated of. Circumstances and the publishers have decided that this independent collection of essays, produced during the past two years, should be offered, rather than an enlarged edition of the first series.

The promise was made conditional upon the encouragement of the public, and the encouragement extended has, indeed, been sufficient to incline me to believe that, in spite of the ancient opinion that artists are the worst of critics, a part of the public is willing to listen to a practical artist talking of art. The accusations most commonly made against the artist as critic are. two in number. The first is that the artist is necessarily so biassed by his own practice as to be unable to see the merits of other methods than his own ; that being himself in the midst of the immemorial battle of the schools, other artists, living or dead, will seem to him either allies or opponents, and that he will over-praise or over-blame accordingly.

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The second is that he is apt to be so engrossed in the study of means as to forget the aim of art ; that his point of view is too exclusively technical ; and that he fails to estimate the final value of a work of art to the world, because he is so busy in finding out how its efi^ect is produced.

Now, it is perfectly true that many artists are violent partisans, and even that a certain narrowness of vision may add to their efficiency as artists ; but partisanship is by no means confined to the actual combatants, and ignorance is no guarantee of impartiality. The artist who has attained to any degree of eminence in his art tnows its difficulties well enough to respect achievement in it even where he disapproves the direction of eff^ort. When Ingres complained of the smell of sulphur left behind by Delacroix, the implied comparison with the Devil was at least not a contemptuous one ; and if he passed by on the other side of the gallery, when he met Rubens, yet he took off his hat. In my own experience I have never found any artist so intolerant of others as his literary backers are apt to be. For downright illiberality there is nothing like a writer who has picked up a few catchwords from a coterie of artists he specially admires, and who uses these as a yardstick for the measurement of all men, ignorant that there can be any other standards than those he has learned to apply.

That an artist may be quite as broad-minded in his

PREFACE XV

views of art as any layman, the admirable writings of Fromentin sufficiently attest ; but an artist of less catholicity of judgment than he may yet render a real service to criticism. He may be unjust to what he dislikes, but, like the merest layman, he " knows what he likes " ; and, unlike the layman, he knows why he likes it. If he is honest — and artists are as likely to be honest men as are others — you may always trust an artist's praise, whatever you think of his blame. The quahtles he praises may not be, in a larger view, very Important ones ; and he may be quite insensible of other and higher qualities ; but the qualities he praises are there. That he sees, for instance, nothing to admire in Raphael, merely proves his own partial blindness; but if he admires TIepolo it Is because Tiepolo is, after his degree, truly admirable. If he can help you to see the admirableness of Tiepolo the gain is yours ; some one else may help you to understand the greatness of Raphael.

And it is by reason of his knowledge of technical matters — because of his too exclusive devotion to them, even, — that the artist can give you this help. The technical methods and the technical achievement of a master are not the only things of Importance about him — perhaps not the things of most importance — but they are important things ; and these important things no one can explain to you who does not practically understand them. Any one may know whether a dinner is good or bad — though there are xvi PREFACE

degrees of competence even here ; it is only a cook who can tell you what goes into the sauce. And, in the long run, the technical mastery of an artist is the best attainable measure of his greatness. There is much more to Rembrandt than his handling of paint and acid — much more to him, even, than his knowledge of light and shade or his mastery of expressive drawing ; but if it were not for the light and shade and the drawing, the paint and the acid, that " much more " would be unknown to us — without his technical mastery his genius would have been mute. The greatest artists have ever been the greatest technicians, and the successive judgments of their fellows on their technical achievement is what has, in the end, fixed their rank in the hierarchy of art.

More than this, however, the technique of any art is not merely the means of expressing the artist's thought — it is a condition precedent to the thought itself. The thought is moulded by, and grows out of, the mode of expression ; and what one shall endeavour to say is predetermined by one's knowledge of, and feeling about, the means of saying it. The union of matter and manner is so intimate, the reaction of manner on matter and of matter on manner so constant, that it is hopeless to attempt to understand the mind of an artist unless you measurably understand his processes. The mind of the colourist is not that of the draughtsman, and the very habit of hand — the mere use of a particular tool— tinges, as it expresses,

PREFACE . xvii

the soul. No one but another Titian could know, with certainty, the meaning of Titian.

What really prevents many artists from being the most effective of critics is not their bias, which is no greater than that of others, nor their interest in the technique of their art, which is an element of strength, but their lack of the technique of literature. The art of expression in words, like other arts, has its limitations ; and the writer, like the painter, must often say what he can rather than what he would. But its limitations are different for different persons, and are proportioned to natural gifts and to the degree of their training. That a man with a natural gift for expression in lines and colours should have an equal gift for expression in words, must be a rare occurrence. That a man who has spent a lifetime in mastering the trade of a painter should have mastered the trade of writing, also, as thoroughly as one who has done nothing else, must be stiU rarer. There are many artists whose judgment of a picture is invaluable, but who could not write a page of readable prose if their lives depended on it. No more difficult task can be laid upon any art than the translation into its own terms of a work in another and an alien art, and the literary criticism of painting demands a special mastery of words and a special flexibility of style which are not commonly to be found among professional writers — stiU less among those to whom writing is but a secondary occupation. Fortunately, however, xviii PREFACE

all our schooling is, to some extent, an education in literary expression, so that any man who is educated at all may, without hoping for consummate mastery of language, expect to attain some degree of intelUgibility. When to clear intellect, catholicity of judgment, and special technical knowledge, is added unusual literary power, you have the ideal critic — the man bom to interpret the artist to the public. Such an one was Fromentin. With something less than his literary faculty you may yet get much valuable criticism, as in the letters of Millet and Delacroix. From almost any artist, if he can but write plainly, you shall hear something worth listening to. From the literary genius without technical knowledge you get words — words brilliantly coloured, perhaps, and deftly arranged in wonderful patterns — words which form themselves into a work of art and thereby give you pleasure — ^but nothing serviceable as an interpretation of that other work of art with which they deal.

Believing, on these grounds, that the special training of a painter is one important qualification for the criticism of art, and may, by its presence, partially offset any deficiency in other most desirable qualifications, I have ventured to publish these studies of a few of the myriad aspects of the art of painting and the kindred art of sculpture — these attempted appreciations of a few out of the many ancient and modem masters whose achievements form the history

PREFACE xix

of art. All of them have appeared in print, though all of them have been subjected to some revision in preparation for the present volume. The essay on Rembrandt was originally delivered as an address before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and subsequently before other bodies, and was first printed in the Architectural Record. As it was desirable to make it as complete as possible, within its necessary limit of length, it will be found to contain a good deal that parallels, more or less closely, parts of the paper on that master in my former volume, but mingled with much fresh matter; the whole constituting, it is hoped, a more adequate presentation of the genius of one of the greatest of artists. In the Architectural Record appeared, also, the essay on Rodin. The opening paper, on the " Education of an Artist," is made up of two articles from the " Encyclopedia Americana." The essay on the " Painters of the Mode " first appeared, under another title, in Harper's Bazar for August and September, 1905 ; that on Holbein in Scribner's Magazine; and those on the Pollaiuoli and on Lord Leighton in The Nation. My thanks are due the publishers of all these periodicals for their kind permission to use the articles here. K. C.

I

THE EDUCATION OP AN ARTIST

Old Masters and New

THE education of a painter is to-day altogether different from what it was in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and this difference is largely dependent upon a different conception of the social status of the artist. In the mediseval world the painter was a craftsman, like the carpenter or the smith. The individual artist might rise to some eminence and consideration, but as an artist he was a member of a mechanical trade which no one would have thought of putting on a level with the learned professions. To-day the painter, the sculptor, the architect, is a professional man, like the lawyer or the physician, and his education is planned, as nearly as possible, on the lines of theirs. As long as the artist was considered a tradesman he was educated like a tradesman, that is, by apprenticeship to a master of the craft. In a modified form this apprenticeship system was in force as late as the eighteenth century, but its character can best be understood by considering it as it was practised in the fifteenth.

In the fifteenth century, then, the master painter kept a shop, a hottega, which differed in no essential particular from the shop of any other tradesman, and his business was to supply anything that was wanted in the way of painting, from the ornamentation of a chest or the painting of a sign to the production of an altarpiece or the frescoing of a palace waU. He maintained a force of journeymen and apprentices, and it was no more expected that he should produce with his own hands everything which left his shop than it was expected that the master joiner should saw every beam, or the master mason lay every stone. To such a master a boy who showed any disposition toward art was bound out, at the age of twelve or thirteen, for a term of years. He was to give his services in any capacity in which they were available and a sum of money was paid the master, who, in return for this premium and service, engaged himself to teach the boy his trade. The apprentices swept out the shop, ran errands, waited on customers, ground colours, prepared canvases and panels, pricked cartoons and pounced them upon the wall, set the palette and cleaned the brushes of the master. At odd times they copied the master's studies, and always they watched his methods and learned how he did things and by what succession of processes a picture was produced. At the end of his term of apprenticeship the boy had learned enough to be useful and was worth a wage. He became a journeyman, and was free to stay with his master or to engage himself to another. At this stage of his evolution he was intrusted with more important work, painted backgrounds or draperies from the master's studies, made studies himself for the less important parts of pictures, finally painted entire pictures himself under the master's supervision and on the master's account — pictures which were almost indistinguishable from the master's own and were frequently signed by him before delivery to the customer who had ordered them.

If the young painter were unambitious he might remain at this stage all his life. If he were determined to be a master in his turn he probably travelled a little and engaged himself to this or that more celebrated master that he might study other methods than those he had learned, pick up other traditions, and familiarise himself with the best work that was being done in his art. When he could do what his masters did as well as they did it, and hardly until then, he was ready to observe nature for himself, to allow his own temperament to influence his work, to become, perhaps, a creator and an Innovator, and to teach others all that he had been taught and all that he had learned for himself, so that they might begin, as nearly as possible, where he left off.

The typical education of a modern painter is as different from this as possible. He begins his special education later than did the mediaeval painter, having spent some years in ordinary schooling ; perhaps, even, in securing a college training. He may have done a little desultory drawing during this time, but, about the age of twenty or later, he decides to become a painter and begins his serious education in art. He begins it not as an apprentice, but as a student ; not in a shop, but in a school. If the school is a great state institution or one connected with a university it will afford lectures on the theory and history of art, to which, likely enough, he will pay little attention. It will be in a great city where he will be able to visit museums which have gathered together the art of many ages and many countries and to see exhibitions where almost as many methods of work are exemplified as there are individual exhibitors. Even in default of museums and exhibitions he will infallibly have access to many cheap publications which, by some of the applications of photography, will give him a fair idea of the results attained by the art of the past and the present ; of its methods he will know nothing. Meanwhile, he will be set down before a plaster cast or a living model and bidden to draw. He will be more or less thoroughly grounded in anatomy and perspective and other sciences, above all in the science of aspects, but he will have practically no instruction whatever in his craft. His canvases and colours, like his brushes, he will buy ready-made. His master he will see twice a week, for a few minutes, and that master's criticisms will be directed exclusively to the justness of his observation and the truth of his rendering of nature. The master's own work will be carried on in another place, in quiet and in solitude, and the student will know nothing of it except, now and then, to see the completed picture. The more intelligent and conscientious the master, the less likely he will be to attempt real technical instruction, for he will feel that his own methods are tentative, suited to himself alone, and of doubtful validity or permanence, while he will be hampered by our modern respect for individuality and the fear of destroying something more precious than anything he can supply.

After three to five years' work on this system, our student wiU be able to draw with fair accuracy anything set before him, to distinguish its values, even to copy its colour with some approximation to success. On the other hand he will have exercised little either his invention or his memory, will be entirely in the dark as to what he wishes to do with his acquired science, and will have practically no knowledge of the thousand and one processes that go to the production of a picture. Likely enough he will never have made a tracing or squared up a sketch; almost certainly he will never have arranged a drapery ; quite certainly he wiU, no more than his master, know anything of the proper management of oil colours, of the use of vehicles, or of the composition and permanence of pigments. For a time he will try to do outside the school what he has always done in it, and will be surprised that no one cares for the result. Then it will perhaps dawn upon him that he has learned a science, but not an art ; he wiU

'nT flounder and experiment, and, if he is a man of force and originality, he will invent an art of his own, and methods that will somehow serve his needs. If he is of a cool and logical mind he will recognise that his training was vastly better than none, and will, in default of a better, recommend it to others or help to give it to them. If he is of a warm and emotional

f-^f temper he will condemn it as useless or worse, and tell those who consult him to get along without it.

It is obvious that the results of these two educations must differ as greatly as the conditions which produced them. The modem painter may readily be a man of broader culture and wider outlook than the painter of the Renaissance ; with anything hke the same original force he will probably be a more personal and individual artist ; he will certainly know a great deal about the aspects of nature that the Renaissance painter never dreamed of. Just as surely he will be the inferior of the Renaissance painter as an efficient workman, will rarely attain complete mastery of his tools, and will try to substitute the charm of his personal sentiment and his individual view of nature for that assured rightness which \ comes of an accepted body of traditions and the possession of tried methods. What modern art has gained in variety and in the perception of new truths it has lost in weight and coherence. Each artist works in his own way, for the attainment of self-expression, and does little toward the building up of a great school.

It is easier to see the weakness of modern education in painting than to devise a remedy, and those who are most opposed to the modern academic system seldom suggest anything to take its place. There are many reasons why the old apprenticeship system could hardly be revived. There are such multitudes of students to-day that it would be impossible to find masters for them, and our masters have, in general, nothing for apprentices to do. They are no longer at the head of great workshops, turning out a multiplicity of diverse products. Each is engaged in a more or less narrow specialty, producing work which is valuable only as it possesses his personal quality and exhibits his personal touch, and his patrons would resent the intrusion of any hand but his own as Httle less than commercial dishonesty. The modern student, also, knows too much of the art of all times and countries to choose a single master and docilely follow his teaching. It is doubtful if modern conditions have not rendered forever impossible anything like a local school of painting.

The conditions of mural painting do, indeed, entail something like the old apprenticeship system, and in the growing demand for the decoration of public and private buildings there is a hope for the revival of older methods of education. It is recognised that a decorative painter may properly have a corps of assistants, and while these assistants are not hkely to be mere beginners, but wiU already have had an academic training, they are enabled to supplement it with the practical instruction of a master in the methods of creating a work of art. How far a similar instruction can be engrafted on our academic system is the problem that should most seriously occupy the directors of our schools of art. The rigid discipline in drawing and painting from nature need not be relaxed, — in its way it is admirable and should be strengthened rather than weakened, — but it should be pointed out that the ability to imitate form and colour is a tool, not an end, and that the creation of a work of art is something different from the production of a life-study. The student should be encouraged to train his imagination and his memory as well as his eye, and it would be well if some knowledge of technical processes could be conveyed and the pupil encouraged, as soon as he is at all fit, to attempt the actual creation of a work of art, under the guidance of the master. Meanwhile it should be insisted upon that the education of eye and hand can hardly begin too early, if technical mastery is to be attained, and that we must be wilhng to sacrifice something of the education of a gentleman to the education of a painter.

We know little of the education of the sculptor in ancient Greece, and can only guess at the training which produced the greatest sculptors the world has seen. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance education in sculpture proceeded on much the same lines as education in painting, the young sculptor entering the workshop of a master and learning thoroughly all the mechanical parts of the trade before he attempted anything in the way of independent study of nature. To-day the education of the sculptor is organised in the same way as that of the painter, and the student has much the same training in the observation of nature, and much the same lack of training in the essentials of art. There are, however, certain differences between the conditions under which sculpture and painting are carried on in modern times which seem to favour the education of competent craftsmen in sculpture. The mere bulk and weight of material involved in the creation of heroic statues or groups makes it inevitable that the sculptor should have some assistance, and most prominent sculptors are more like the heads of mediaeval shops than are almost any modern painters. Apart from the more or less illegitimate employment of what are known as " ghosts " (that is, artists, often of more ability than the employer, who actually produce the work for which the employer secures the commission and appropriates the rewards), a sculptor may have a corps of perfectly legitimate helpers who vary from the mere studio boy or the caster to the accomphshed modeller. Many young sculptors thus pass through the studios of their seniors and gam invaluable experience in the actual production of works of art which is supplemented, either before or afterward, by a regular school education. Such a double training is the best our time has to offer, and is certainly far better than either an apprenticeship or a term of study in an art school taken singly ; but it is not yet an ideal training.

The technique of sculpture, as far at least as regards the handling of the clay or wax model, is an infinitely simpler thing than that of painting. There are no complicated processes to master, no questions of the chemistry of pigments, of the optical effects of colours on each other or of the different qualities of reflected and transmitted light, such as are involved in the manipulation of paint. Modelling is a matter of knowledge of form and facility of hand, and both the knowledge and the facility might be attained as readily in the school as in the studio, for there is so much rough manual labour to be done in a sculptor's studio that a helper might work there for years without doing much real modelling. And the technique of modelling is, after all, of relatively little importance ; for the sculptor, unlike the painter, puts his personal handiwork upon a thing destined

TOMB OF ANTONIO AND PIEKO POLLAIUOLO to be destroyed and never to be seen by the public. He works in clay or wax, while it is the interpretation of his work in marble or bronze that is set before the world, so that he is almost in the position of the draughtsman upon the wood block, whose work ceases to exist and is replaced by that of another. The sculptor of the Renaissance was either a stone carver or a bronze founder or both, and the craft he practised was the craft of carving or of metal working, the modelling being only a preliminary and being sometimes dispensed with altogether. The modern sculptor tends to become a modeller and to put all his strength into the clay, the final carrying out of his ideas being largely intrusted to others ; and his knowledge and invention count for much more than his skill of hand, while the worker in stone or bronze rarely becomes an original artist. Of course the best of our sculptors do not only control and oversee the final carrying out of their work, but actually put hand to it themselves, at times; and even when they do not they must vary the manner of modelling they employ according to the material of the definitive work, and these variations of manner they will teach their assistants. Also there is a great deal to be learned in a sculptor's workshop hardly likely to be picked up elsewhere, were it only the mechanics of setting up great armatures, the processes of pointing and enlarging small models, and the rest. Still there is some tendency to a divorce between the original artist and the workman, and it is difficult for the modern sculptor to become a thorough master of his craft, thinking naturally in stone or bronze rather than in clay.

There is another respect in which the education afforded by the apprenticeship of the Renaissance was greatly superior to that obtainable in a modern studio. The Renaissance master was often a painter as well as a sculptor and, not infrequently, an architect as well, and the essential unity of the three great arts of design was inevitably impressed upon his pupils. The modern sculptor rarely knows anything of painting or architecture, and his studio assistant has little opportunity even to learn drawing, the foundation of all the arts. If he would learn to draw he must study in an art school, and he is generally encouraged to do so in such time as his necessary work leaves at his own disposal. In the modern art school the students are allowed, or even required, to change from class to class, and their chance of acquiring some notion of the interdependence of the arts, and some breadth of artistic culture, is greater than that of the mere studio assistant. Such interchange of work between drawing or painting and modelling would be of great benefit to the painter also, if he more often took advantage of it, but is hardly as essential to him as to the sculptor.

In some measure, then, the schools offer a valuable supplement to the training of the studio, but they do not give nearly all that they might or should give.

Of the true meaning of composition, and of the difference between artistic expression and imitation, the school, at its best, can give no such idea as can the studio, where the actual production of a work of art, through all its stages, may be watched. Yet the students might be encouraged and aided in the actual carrying out of original work, taught something of the difference between the use of the model for the attainment of a predetermined result and the mere copying of a set pose, and, possibly, instructed in casting, pointing, marble cutting, and even bronze founding and chasing, and the production of various patinas. A thorough mastery of drawing cannot be too much insisted upon. Of course the constant study of modelling from the living figure would continue to be the principal element of training, but it would be well if some study of drapery and costume could be added to it. The graduate of our art schools, either painter or sculptor, generally knows Httle or nothing of the arrangement of draperies, and this is one of his most serious deficiencies.