Chapter II: Part 2

I have heard it asserted that Daumier drew like a sculptor, but I think it would be nearer the truth to say that in his finest drawings he is concerned first and last and all the time with _light_. For him this was scarcely a limitation: the light rays are gathered by the point of his pencil and fixed--by some alchemic process of his will on the paper--to glow there for our satisfaction as long as his drawings endure. Whereas, in a sculptor’s drawings, light is but a means to an end (he would carve the paper if he could!) he throws lines like measuring cords round the form--each a statement of some measurement of contour--and having established in this way a mass, he is able to take from it the elevation of all subsidiary and related forms with, one might say, his mental calipers. A process of drawing widely different from that practised by Daumier.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Ingres_]

One cannot help feeling that, to this aristocrat of French artists, a display of emotions in a drawing would have been a most unclassic and plebeian sign of weakness. And one seems to know that in Ingres’ art of pure unemotional drawing--his eye measured, his brain commanded, his hand obeyed and the pencil glided from one position to the next by the most direct path, a curve so slight as to be almost straight; leaving its grey immaculate line to prove its absolute obedience to the draughtsman’s will ... and so the drawing would grow without an unnecessary stroke or a correction; simply the unfoldment of a preconception carried out according to plan and justly recording his penetrating analysis of a subject.

The guiding star and strength of Ingres’ genius was his conviction that he could not err.

M. Anatole France tells a characteristic story of an encounter with Ingres in his own youth:--he was at the opera one evening, the house was full and not an empty seat was to be seen. Suddenly an impressive looking stranger stepped up to him and said “Young man, give me your seat--I am Monsieur Ingres.”

How consistent the great man was! From his earliest youth he appears to have never doubted himself or his work; there was calm assurance in everything he did.

Elsewhere in these notes I have referred to the fact that artists often do their finest drawings early in life, and here we happen on one of the young men of whom I wrote: Ingres did some of his finest drawings twenty or thirty years before he painted his most famous pictures. That marvellous drawing--_The Stamaty Family_--is dated 1818, and the _Lady with Sunshade_--as perfect a portrait drawing as could well be imagined--was done in 1813; and many fine drawings earlier still; whereas his famous picture _La Source_ was painted in 1856, and many of his best known pictures were done in the period between 1840 and 1866.

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[Sidenote: _Cotman_]

Cotman is another man of whom one feels tempted to say--in studying his work--that one cannot see any signs in it that he ever mistrusted the rightness of his aims and methods. It is customary to write of Cotman’s life as both unhappy and unsuccessful, but instead it should be borne in mind that he did have success of the best kind--he was immensely successful in painting what he wanted to paint; and no artist can have a success more dear to him than that. His methods were most consistent, and so it is probable that--disgusted with a world that only required his services as a drawing-master--he pursued his own way and managed to be as happy as any other genius in the practice of his art.

Until very recently his name was generally mentioned with three or four of his contemporary water-colour painters--as though there were not much to choose between the batch; but gradually the weight of public opinion is proclaiming the conviction that Cotman was a head and shoulders above the group with which he has been catalogued; and year by year the appreciation of his work grows in volume. His position, however, is still not recognized as, I am convinced, it will be in a few years time. His method of painting was so widely different to Turner’s that the public and the critics--dazzled by the sunsets of “our greatest painter”--have been slow indeed to recognize the originality and distinction of Cotman’s genius. As a draughtsman of landscapes he excelled in lyrical beauty and perfection of technical accomplishment; but his paintings should be studied with his drawings, for it is in these that he showed his real originality--producing paintings that are comparable, _as decorations_, with the prints of the greater Japanese wood-engravers; and at a time, it should be remembered, when these prints were unknown in Europe.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Beardsley_]

“He became a sort of household word”--so wrote Mr. Robert Ross in his readable little book on Beardsley.

A description of Beardsley’s reputation more wide of the mark I cannot imagine. Beardsley is really one of England’s “skeletons in the cupboard.” The average Englishman is somewhat ashamed of Beardsley as a fellow countryman, he feels there has been some mistake--the fellow ought to have been a Czecho-Slovac! To think that the year 1872 (a most respectable year!) should have brought to light this utterly un-English phenomenon is not pleasing to him. I have seen more than one young English student embarrassed and somewhat annoyed when an enthusiastic Frenchman has congratulated him on being a compatriot of that “great genius Aubrey Beardsley.” All the world over Beardsley is still “caviare to the general” and particularly to the English general. He is acceptable enough when his ideas are popularized by other artists: throughout France and America whole schools of present day illustrators are founded on his work; and he is rightly acknowledged as the “old master” of mechanical line engraving. He was the first artist to understand really and utilize to the full the possibilities of this process of reproduction; and--as so often happens with the first man to use a process intelligently--he carried it further and found it less restricting than any who have followed him.

Beardsley had an immense power of technical invention--like Hokusai, he was able to bring any subject of his choice within the scope of his convention, and to render it in a way that was perfect for the process by which his work was to be reproduced.

There is an ironical beauty in everything he ever did, and his compositions--regarded as an adjustment of spaces--are more consistently original and daring than those of any other Western artist, old or modern; only in the East can we find his equal in this particular expression of creative art.

The shock that Beardsley gave to British feelings was, I fancy, due far more to the intrinsic originality of his compositions than to the “nautiness,” imagined or real, in his drawings, about which we have heard so much. It is surely a case of _honi soit qui mal y pense_, for there is nothing in the books of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley that are published in this country that could offend a school miss.

Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s _Father Brown_ says in one of his adventures “Its the wrong shape in the abstract. Don’t you ever feel that about Eastern art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the shapes are mean and bad--deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked things in a Turkey carpet.” Well, _Father Brown’s_ remark is illuminating, for not only are there wicked shapes in Turkey carpets but, however “beautifully seen” the rest of a Beardsley drawing is, the drawing _of the faces_ in it is often _deliberately mean and bad_. But I think, also, that it would have been more just of _Father Brown_ to have completed his remark with the “finish” that “is an added truth” by saying that he had never seen a wicked shape in a Persian carpet. This generalization about Eastern art and “the wrong shape in the abstract” makes one fear that perhaps the champion of Mr. Bateman might be no friend to Beardsley; and I regret to think that Mr. Chesterton might not champion Eastern shapes; or Beardsley--though I can understand his not doing so: I venerate him as the British lion and therefore it seems but natural that he should wage perpetual war against the unicorn--and doubtless he might regard Beardsley as a fabulous beast. The British feeling is strong about shapes--an Englishman likes to recognize a shape instantly; should he fail to do so he really is extremely uncomfortable and affronted and will, as often as not, turn on the creator of the “wrong shape” and accuse him of ungentlemanly conduct.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Phil May_]

At any rate the British public has always accepted as final _Mr. Punch’s_ opinion on matters of humour. He has given it an almost unbroken tradition--which is more than can be said of any other institution of English art--and it is grateful. When he imported from Australia the brilliant draughtsman Phil May it took the newcomer to its bosom without any hesitation--and he has nestled there ever since. But the artworld--so-called--though on quite good terms with _Mr. Punch_ does not always accept his opinion unquestioned: it has been known to make invidious comparisons between his paper and _Jugend_ or _Le Rire_, and has even gone so far as to attempt wit at his expense; as in the case of the gentleman who said _Punch_ is “written by Mr. Pickwick, for Mr. Pickwick about Mr. Pickwick”--which was rude and surely lacking in the deference due to our elderly purveyor of humour! However, in the matter of Phil May, _Mr. Punch_ scored handsomely, and persons, even with the highest brows, have accepted his drawings _con amore_.

Phil May’s drawings look the most spontaneous things imaginable--and no doubt this is true of their humour--but his method of drawing was an elaborate process of elimination. The execution of a rather finished pencil drawing was the first stage of his work--in this he elaborated all the characteristics that his keen eye and ready humour had observed--and the final stage was calligraphic in character and displayed his genius for simplification. With a few deft strokes of the pen--disposed with an almost uncanny knowledge of essentials--he made what appeared to be--when the careful pencil work was rubbed out--a most spontaneous sketch. In truth, it was no such thing, but an intellectual exercise in the eclectic art of elimination arrived at by means exactly opposite to those usually employed by artists who seek spontaneity in their work. Phil May understood the English people and they understood Phil May. His humour synchronized with the public of his day--as did the work of Rowlandson in another age and probably, like his, it will be prized as a record of a period, as well as for its intrinsic value as the work of a most original draughtsman.

The witty line is most often the brief line, but though Phil May’s line was not always a brief one it never failed to be a witty one.

* * * * *

The Englishman has probably the finest collection of drawings that has ever been brought together in one place. It is housed in an excellent museum built for its accommodation and placed in charge of the finest experts that can be found. It is further ordained that if the Englishman wishes to inspect his treasures he shall do so in the greatest possible comfort. No guest of a Sultan could look at his host’s collection of, let us say, Persian miniatures, in more luxury than can the-man-in-the-street look at his own collection of drawings in the _Print Room_ of the British Museum; patient and courteous persons wait on his every whim; and expert opinion, should he require it, is imparted to him without a smile or hint of impatience at his ignorance. In short, everything is done to coax him to a study of his collections except one thing--and that is to inform him that he possesses these treasures.

I think the attention of the Trustees of the British and other Museums might be drawn to the fact that the-man-in-the-street cannot know about his priceless possessions unless someone informs him. The assumption that the information is imparted to him in early youth by his parents is erroneous. He may well live and die, and frequently does, without knowing what the words _Print Room_ stand for. The question of how to inform him if he does not know might be left in the hands of one who is an expert in the art of reaching his intelligence. True, the notice boards of our Museums might then assume a somewhat jaunty air, offensive to the grave habitués--this is what might greet them and what they might not like: “Come where it’s always bright! Free! Now showing all day in the _Print Room_. The finest collection of drawings in the world: Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, supported by an allstar company of draughtsmen! Central heating! Perfect ventilation!” But the habitués would doubtless come back to their haunts after a few days’ disgusted abstention from their habits and--what is more important--the-man-in-the-street would now be the-man-in-the-Print-Room.

I am aware that the subject I am required to write about is _Pen and Pencil Drawings_, and I have faith that I shall come to it but--being filled with a desire to write about chalk drawings, charcoal drawings, paintings, the-man-in-the-street, and all manner of things relevant and irrelevant--I need to remind myself of it. Even then I may come to my subject by a route not unlike that taken by Mr. William Caine in his essay on _Cats_: he began, he continued and he went on to the end in an unbroken eulogy on dogs and their admirable qualities viewed from all angles, and then summed up and dismissed his subject for ever with this line: “Cats have none of these characteristics.”

I shall, then, continue my aberrant course with the remark that I am constantly struck by the fact, in most exhibitions, that in half the pictures there either the subject is too small to deserve a picture or the picture is too large for its subject. The first is an error of taste and the second an error of _scale_.

The pleasure we derive from a sense of the fitness and rightness of the scale of a picture may be only common-sense but it is certainly lacking in many painters, especially in the average painter of modern “exhibition pictures.” In these so often there are great spaces of merely tinted canvas which serve no really useful or legitimate purpose; and do not even contribute to the scheme of the picture as a decoration. Sometimes, possibly, this coloured canvas may suggest a sense of space and bigness but it is a rather obvious expedient and it fails to be impressive if one compares it with the sense of spaciousness that has been conveyed to one often by a few square inches of paper in a drawing. Fortunately, as a rule, big pictures nowadays are generally painted for exhibitions--just as fat-stock is reared to be shown at a particular agricultural show: the show over--the fat-stock is hastily conveyed to the nearest butcher. But the fate of the big picture is rather mysterious and I will not suggest what I think really happens to it, for after all I may be quite wrong. Certainly in France though, where the output of big pictures is double or treble that of this country, their post-exhibition fate is fairly obvious: the great majority of French houses are incapable of accommodating these Salon triumphs, and it is the rarest thing to find one of these huge canvases in the houses of the rich and ostentatious _bourgeois_. Happily for the draughtsman he is not tempted to work on the heroic scale so that--when the swing of the pendulum may have placed his work temporarily or permanently out of fashion--his work can usually be accommodated in a portfolio; for the size of a drawing is generally regulated by the medium employed. However, as genius may ignore custom, habit and even existing rules of good taste, someone--with a right to the title--may come along and do silverpoint drawings on ten-foot sheets of paper--just as a famous modern etcher is doing plates of a size absolutely forbidden by the professors, and yet everyone--except a few contemporary etchers--admits them to be masterly.

The _official_ picture could and should be a human document, but this it can hardly be if all humorous side-lights are rigidly excluded in it--however serious the affairs it purports to present. The old masters knew human nature, therefore in their paintings of ceremonial affairs they did not forget to touch delicately on its weaknesses, even sometimes accenting these as comic-relief. Though I would not be so rash as to suggest the desirability of comic-relief in our _official_ pictures, I am tempted to think that relief of some kind would be well received.

Another point about the _official_ picture is that it is generally very large and is, as a rule, about the dullest product of the brush; for the average modern painter when called upon to perform in this way generally becomes simply overwhelmed with deep seriousness. He designs his picture in the most pompous and formal manner and produces results either boring or unintentionally funny, which latter is perhaps the more tolerable.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _William Orpen_]

Not so with Sir William Orpen--his keen sense of humour is apparent in all his work, whether he is painting tone studies of mirrors at Versailles or drawing his friends on the rocky coasts of Ireland. It is one of the many charms that delight us in his work and does not detract an iota from its distinction and importance. Some of his exquisite drawings are reproduced here, and though the full purity of the line cannot be retained in reproduction they are some of the perfect things in this book.

It is a relief to find oneself thinking in terms of “perfection” about the work of any man so modern as Sir William Orpen. Because, of course, where the modern draughtsman and painter--as is so commonly the case--despises his materials and scorns technique it is impossible for one to do so. The mind--which is so much the product of the senses--must know distaste where the senses are repelled. One may forgive him because of other merits in his work, but the merits have to be rather splendid to cover sufficiently such sins. To Whistler and the stylists who have followed him much of their inspiration must have come from the materials of their craft. One is grateful that they grasped this truth that

[Sidenote: _Glyn Philpot_]

the English Pre-Raphaelites also missed--that _rare and delicious qualities in the handling of a medium best present to the mind rare and beautiful qualities in nature_. In this sense Mr. Philpot is essentially a stylist--one feels that to him the intrinsic beauties of his medium form an appreciable amount of his inspiration: that--quite literally--common oils and varnishes can be blended to a golden elixir for his use. For the materials of his craft are for the artist what he chooses to make them: a piece of red chalk in one man’s hand is a lump of hardened mud, conveniently sharpened to a point for making marks on paper, while, to another, it is a precious substance mined from the earth in some distant country and prepared with infinite care, and he knows that one touch of it on a paper--most carefully chosen--can be the basis of a delicious colour-harmony; that ink can flow from a reed pen in a line straight and true or run its course with subtle modulations--as a little stream flows from the hills.

A lead pencil after all can be only the bitten stump on the office boy’s desk--an instrument for unseemly writings or obscene scrawlings; or it can be a cunningly wrought stick of plumbago encased in a scented cylinder of cedar--such a thing as Leonardo would have loved. Is not the artist capable of an alchemy that can change dross to gold!

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Brangwyn_]

The rewards of the successful artist are many and varied, but the most coveted, surely--and the least often secured--is the reward of international fame. The list is not long of the English artists who have achieved it--indeed it is unjustly short. The English are, themselves, always generous in their acceptance of foreign artists--even to the neglect of their own; in this they are unlike other nations, particularly the French who, though slow to acclaim foreign artists, are loud-voiced in praise of their own home-grown products. But Mr. Brangwyn’s name, in spite of this, stands high in Europe. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that his work stands for English contemporary painting half the world over.

An artist who is painting for an international public distributed in all parts of the world is not likely to bother himself with artistic party-politics, and it is noticeable that Mr. Brangwyn does not move with the ebb and flow of opinion in London. He is not a fashionable painter and is not ever likely to be. In another age his art might have produced a new school.

There have, it might be said, been two Rubens in the history of European art. The first was Peter Paul and the second--Brangwyn.

Rubens (Peter Paul) has been out of fashion since Mr. Sickert made Tottenham Court Road delightful by teaching us how they paint in Paris, but Venice seems more interested in how Mr. Brangwyn paints in London.

Fine draughtsman as Mr. Brangwyn is, his drawings always remind us that he is a painter, and a decorative painter. Curiously enough though, they scarcely suggest a reserve of strength, in fact on the contrary, for everything that Mr. Brangwyn has to say is stated--whether in painting or drawing--with the utmost energy and vigour of his capacity. He gives generously, freely, without stint from a full brush--he draws from the shoulder as it were; and that his aim is the decoration of large spaces in architectural settings is always apparent in his work; and that this is its usual destiny should be remembered when his drawings are being studied. It is through the medium of his drawings and sketches that we have, in these days, to study Mr. Brangwyn’s art, for the large decorations--destined for public buildings in other countries--on which he is constantly engaged, leave England (as a rule) without being exhibited. Doubtless we can add this loss to our list of grudges against the officials of the painting world, for the public have long ago realized the importance of Mr. Brangwyn’s position and are justly proud of him. The psychological interest of his figures is of a basic and standard kind and generally full of suggestion of forms personal to his own art.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Bateman_]

The difficulty with Mr. Bateman is to take him seriously. Really he is a most serious phenomenon--and yet the bare mention of his name sets us chuckling in happy reminiscence and digging each other in the ribs in cheery anticipation of jokes yet unborn.

It would be doing him but scant justice, really, if we were to give him some honorary degree--called him Dr. Bateman and sat him in a “chair” at one of the Universities as Professor of human psychology. Instead we just go on buying any paper that he happens to be drawing for--and laughing. But the day may come when he might turn round on us, wearied of our interminable cackling, and say “Cry you devils, cry!” and then we shall be sorry--but we shall cry all right: a few little adjustments of that subtle line of his and the humour we value so highly would become tragedy.

In England there seems to be a curious tradition that a drawing becomes funny if it has a funny story printed underneath it; that the expression on one face in a group of persons if slightly ludicrous makes a drawing humorous. In a Bateman drawing the drawing is the humour and the humour is the drawing. Everything is in the same terms throughout. His very line seems to have a risible ripple in it, for his humour is the real thing--not irony or satire but the essential spiritual faculty of perceiving the incongruous wherever it occurs. He has a host of imitators, abroad as well as in this home circle of islands, but they are sheep in wolves’ clothing and the joke is not in them--they satirise the already ridiculous.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Muirhead Bone_]

Mr. Muirhead Bone is another artist who has many imitators--some with considerable technical success--but fortunately an artist’s vision is his own and no one can borrow his eyes or his soul though they may well nigh take the pencil from his hand. Of Mr. Bone’s vision much might be said. It is unique in the art of the time; and in his hand a pencil becomes a truly magical instrument--like the bow in the hand of a great violinist: when his pencil has touched the paper one takes a keen pleasure in each line for its own sake, and when to this is added a full realization of the interpretation and vision they collectively record, one may well say--here is a real draughtsman! He endows St. James’s Hall with such beauty in his drawing of its _Demolition_ that one is tempted to desire the destruction of several of our buildings.... Imagine what he would draw for us if we took half the roof off the Albert Hall and gashed a great hole in its obese side! What a flood of light he would let into that gloomy interior and what dignity he would impart to the last remains of that bun-like edifice!

* * * * *

And now I find that I have come to the limit of the space allowed to me for these notes, and I look through the list of over a hundred fine names--splendid names because they belong to men who have done splendid things--and I realize that I have not written a word about the larger number of them and also that if I wrote from now until my personal doomsday I could not express the admiration I feel for the sum of their achievement. I have written notes only on a few of those who make an immense appeal to me; it has been a purely personal choice and, as a fact, quite unconscious; and as that, too, very incomplete, for it was my optimistic conviction that I should return and write about the others--scores of them; but now the chance is gone, in a few hours from now these notes will have been flung to the printer’s devil (a person I have always wanted to meet--but now had better not!) I want to rush back and explain my personal beliefs about Botticelli and his influence on the pre-British-Raphaelites, before the chance is gone, probably for ever; I want to air certain convictions about the principles of rhythm in Raphael’s curving lines; I want to write of Pinturicchio and Claude; of Fragonard and Blake; I want to write about a dozen Frenchmen who are not in the book and more about the four or five who are; I want to argue with an imaginary reader as to whether Mr. Dulac is greater as a caricaturist or as a decorator; I want to abuse nearly everybody for not fully understanding that Mr. Vernon Hill is one of our finest draughtsmen; I want to pen a humble appreciation of Mr. Tonks and his salutary influence as a professor and his benign influence as an artist. I want--I have just time for that--to again remind the reader--who has my gratitude for still being with me to the end--that a drawing is a thing to be looked at and not written about.

GEORGE SHERINGHAM.

SKETCH IN PEN AND INK BY HANS HOLBEIN IN THE BASLE MUSEUM FOR THE PAINTING “THE FAMILY OF SIR THOMAS MORE”]

“HEAD OF AN OLD MAN.” PENCIL DRAWING BY LEONARDO DA VINCI IN THE LOUVRE, PARIS. SIZE, 9 × 6¼ IN.]

DRAWING IN PEN AND INK BY TITIAN IN THE UFFIZI, FLORENCE.]

PHOTO. COPYRIGHT BY BRAUN AND CO.]

PORTRAIT STUDIES IN PENCIL BY FRANZ XAVER WINTERHALTER IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM]

PORTRAIT STUDIES IN PENCIL BY FRANZ XAVER WINTERHALTER IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM]

“PAGANINI.” PENCIL DRAWING BY J. A. D. INGRES IN THE BONNAT COLLECTION]

SIZE, 6 IN. SQUARE

DRAWINGS IN PEN AND INK BY JOSEPH CRAWHALL IN THE POSSESSION OF WILLIAM BURRELL, ESQ.]

SIZE, 5⅜ × 9⅛ IN.

DRAWINGS IN PEN AND INK BY JOSEPH CRAWHALL IN THE POSSESSION OF WILLIAM BURRELL, ESQ.]