Chapter II: Part 2

This is the ordinary way one would begin in studying from nature in colour. Now we go on. The scale of colour may be divided into warm and cold colours, and all colours we see in nature incline either to warm or cold--I am presuming we are making a study from nature--not only in themselves, but according to the degree in which they are influenced by light. We shall, I think, never find light and shadow on an object equally warm or equally cool. This would be a monochrome, like an etching or an engraving, which suggests colour, but does not give it; and those engravings best suggest colour which are printed in black or neutral tints, and not in a positive colour, for our imagination supplies the colour if the gradations are right. But in ordinary daylight in a room the lights are cool, and the shadows are warm in colour. So, out of doors in warm sunshine, we get the lights warm and the shadows cool, even to the point of absolute blue or violet. This brings me to one of the difficulties of outdoor painting--the tendency, especially if sunlight be attempted, to paint in too cold a key, so that a study which, at the time we were engaged on it seemed absolutely true, should afterwards, when brought into the even light of a room, fail to give the impression of warmth that the original scene gave. We often see pictures of sunshine painted which give us no impression whatever of warmth.

I think the reason of this is that we do not realise how warm the colour of the light is, being enveloped in it, perhaps even having it on our work--at anyrate, having our eyes filled with it. We are struck by the sharp contrast of the cool shadow, and paint that, it being obviously cool. But if we concede that the light is warm, we can get the opposition of the cool shadow, and get it to look blue, or almost so, even though as pigment it may be umber and white, or grey. A difficulty of the same kind is felt with regard to the blue of the sky, which, under some effects, appears as blue as one can possibly make it--bluer, even--and at the same time warm. We may pile on our brightest blue as much as we like, we cannot get it blue enough, and we cannot at the same time get it warm. Now, we know that the bright blues of our palette, when we look at them in a room, are bright enough to give the sense of any conceivable blue; so we may conclude that the fault does not lie in our paints, but in ourselves, as not knowing how to manage them, and that we must try and make the blue look more blue by accenting the complementary colours and painting the ground and surroundings warmer--_i.e._ by painting the whole picture in a warmer key.

There is the danger, of course, of going over to the other extreme, but of the two it is better to err on the side of warmth than of coldness; and I think that probably one reason of the fineness of colour of the Venetians is that they had the possible blue of the sky in their minds, if not in their pictures, as a key and point of contrast with their other colours. But doubtless the main reason was the situation and importance of Venice, and its relations with the East; which gave its artists the finest possible opportunities of studying colour. People of all races were there, dressed in fine and varied colours, and moving among beautiful buildings, with the sea and sky for background; and the Venetian artists had this fine show daily before their eyes, under all conditions of lighting. All the possibilities of colour would become familiar to them, and we can understand how the influence of their surroundings led them to their great results.

If we aim at getting the utmost fulness of colour in the lights, as the Venetians did, the limited range of our colours makes this impossible in the darks. It becomes necessary, then, to keep all the darks together, treating them very broadly. You will find the old painters were never afraid of strong darks or dark shadows. Sir Joshua Reynolds advises that in a picture the shadows should be all of one colour; or, at least, he says, they should _appear_ to be of one colour, meaning that the eye should not rest on nor question them. And though the old pictures impress one as being darker than nature,--and so, in the sense of the general colour of nature, untrue,--yet in themselves and within their conditions they give a true impression of nature.

We have not the opportunity of studying fine colours that the old painters had; our life goes on in more sombre dress. Still, there is fine colour to be seen wherever the sun shines, here as elsewhere, and of late years the search for the fulness of colour, with light, has led artists to the furthest limits of the palette, and the most violent means, in endeavouring to get the range and force of colour in the shadows as well as in the lights, so that we find pictures painted in spots of pure pigment placed side by side, the intention being that they should fuse together in the eye of the spectator. But the result is not successful; it is distressing to the eye, and, I think, shows that something must be sacrificed at one end of the scale or the other. And yet, if we paint in a very high key, in simple tints, I question if we are not in some danger of starving our colour for the sake of keeping our pictures light. White paint will not of itself express light, but only by contrast with dark.

To get colour and light is the great thing. The difficulty is to get them both. Turner, in his Italian landscapes, enhanced the colour of his sky by a dark pine-tree in the foreground, sacrificing the colour of the tree for the sake of accenting its value and warmth; and the old landscape painter’s device of a brown tree is used for the same end--to make the blue of the sky and distance more luminous and beautiful. This is also the reason for the dark-brown foreground usual in old landscapes; and our eye is not arrested by the tree or the dark foreground, but goes past it to the point of the picture.

Rembrandt, in his colouring, seems to have avoided blue altogether, gaining the sense of it by the opposition of golden-brown to grey. The secret of his wonderful colour is difficult to read. A passing impression of one of his pictures is of a work all in golden-brown, with fine reds and strong blacks. But when one has looked long enough at it to get into the picture, as it were, this sense of a particular colour disappears, and we feel ourselves in presence of the actual scene, with its air, colour, and light.

I do not think we should try and imitate the colour of the old painters, though we can, by study, see in nature the indications of, and perhaps the reasons for, their method of work. It would be hopeless, for instance, for anyone to try and imitate Rembrandt’s colouring; and probably Rembrandt himself would be unable to explain his method, but would simply say, “I saw it so,” or “I wished to express a particular sentiment.”

There is the question of quality of colour--another difficult thing to define, though we recognise it readily. It does not seem to depend on truth of relations, or even on truth of colour, for a picture may be true in colour and yet the paint itself may be bad in quality--opaque, heavy, or showing much labour. But there is fine quality of colour in works differing as much from each other in method as Rembrandt and the Primitives, as Raphael and Franz Hals, as Velasquez and Titian. It means that the work impresses one as having clearness, freshness, and that, in short, the impression is produced of nature, and not of paint.

There are two methods of painting, and good quality of colour can be achieved by either. One method is that of simple and direct painting--that we put down the right colour at once with fresh, untroubled paint, as in a sketch, and we know how often there is greater charm in a sketch than in a finished work. This is the method of Hals, of Velasquez, of Moroni, and of most moderns. The other method is the elaborate one of preparing an underpainting, more or less of the nature of monochrome, with reference only to the drawing and massing of light and shade, and then painting by thin glazes, or by working over thin glazes with the right colours, the under colours showing through, and giving a richness and transparency. I think we see this in the work of Rubens and of Titian, though, of course, we nearly always see both direct and glazed colour in the same work, as in that most marvellous head by Rembrandt, of himself as an old man, in the National Gallery. The object of underpainting and glazing is, of course, to retain the freshness which is so easily lost in oil painting, if the same colour is painted over and over; especially as when half-dry, or if much medium is used, it becomes muddy: stiff colour stands fairly well.

Another object of underpainting is the determining of the design in light and dark. All paint changes a little, lowers a little, with time; and if a picture has no strong arrangement of light and dark, but depends for its beauty on subtle delicacies and differences of value, these are often lost in a few years through the flattening down of the paint; while if there is a strong backbone, as it were, of light and shade beneath the colour, the picture will always be effective, and the main features remain, in spite of any little changes.

The painter has to make the quality of his paint in oil-colour. If you compare oil- with water-colour you will see what I mean; for if you put a simple wash of colour on paper it is always beautiful, because of its transparency, and it is difficult to lose this quality in water-colour; but it is difficult to get it in oil, and still more difficult to retain it throughout a work.

Good quality is a measure of the painter’s perception. Two men will paint a plain blue sky, using, perhaps, the same pigment. One man will give you the actual sense of the sky and the air, and the other nothing but blue paint. The difference between them is that one man had perception of the quality of the sky, and the other had not. So, when we see a good quality in paint, we know that it means not only niceness of hand and perception, but great knowledge and judgment in the artist. It all comes back to the same old story--that we must work, and cultivate our perceptions.

I have spoken of the emotional power of colour--_i.e._ the power which colours in themselves have in inducing a mood--as an important element in painting. The sad, golden tone of Rembrandt seems to strike the keynote of his sentiment, and to bring us into his frame of mind before we realise his subject. In the same way, the rich reds and warm colours of Titian, Rubens, and Reynolds produce in our minds the sense of activity, richness, and splendour, quite irrespective of the drawing or modelling of their figures, or their meaning.

If they had painted their figures as they would look in the cold light of a studio, this effect would not have been produced.

The picture of Admiral Keppel by Reynolds, in the present Old Masters Exhibition, is painted in a clear grey key of daylight--a realistic effect, as anyone might see it; and one may infer from this that in those instances where Reynolds darkened down his pictures with rich warm glazes, it was done designedly, in order to produce an effect by the means of colour.

I think, then, that we may conclude in these cases--I may mention as an example an “Adoration of the Magi,” by Filippino Lippi, in the National Gallery, where red and gold and other rich colours are pushed to their extreme power--that painters deliberately employed the emotional power of colour, _as colour_, quite apart from any immediate resemblance to nature, in order to produce an effect on the mood of the spectator. And it must be the most difficult thing of all in painting, to do this so as to include general truth of resemblance.

But these paths are outside the track of most artists to-day. Our efforts are not so much directed to imaginative subjects, as to actualities, and our endeavour is to find and express the beauty which exists among us. We are more literal, less imaginative; and this enhancing of nature by the power of colour is beyond us. We feel that it may be possible to paint with our first and main reference to nature as we see it around us, and, while trying to understand what has been done, to claim still that beauty of colour may be found also in the plain aspect of visible things even to-day.

It is for this reason, I think, that the art of Velasquez specially appeals to us. In it the ordinary aspects of nature are found to be not inconsistent with the finest art. There is nothing conventional in his colour. It is simply like that of nature, and I think that none but artists, or those who have studied the appearance of nature, can quite understand the intense admiration his work excites. It is not, as in the case of Titian and the colourists, an emotion produced by colour, as colour, taking us beyond our ordinary sensations; but it gives us something of the pleasure of a surprise, in finding and recognising that such beautiful modulations of colour are apparent under ordinary conditions. Velasquez is sometimes, perhaps rightly, called unemotional, because his colour is not prearranged to influence us, but is, as it were, an impartial statement, as contrasted with the work of those painters who pushed the emotional power of colour to its extreme limit.

As I hope to consider the work of Velasquez later, I will not touch further on it now, but may mention one or two men of kindred spirit. Chardin, the French painter, gives us very beautiful colour in his still-life paintings in the Louvre, and there is one in the National Gallery. We are shown, not what beautiful things are painted, but how beautiful they appear under the influence of light. The effect of one colour on another, the harmony of the different tints produced by light on a few simple things--these things may be seen in his work; as also in the work of Edouard Manet, who had much the same feeling as Velasquez for the beauty of colour in simple, cool lighting, and expressed it with a directness of vision and execution (being able by a true eye to strike the tint at once) that gives his colour a very great charm.

The splendid work of Sir John Millais--the “North-West Passage” and the “Yeomen of the Guard,” for example--appeal to us in the same way, as fine painting and fine colour, apart from the interest of the subject. And that great artist who died recently--Mr. Whistler--has not only given us the example of a fine and simple method in painting, but has shown us more fully than any other artist the modulations of colour by light. In his portraits, with their fine realisation of the effects of atmosphere on colour, and in his pictures of twilight and of night, he has recorded effects which no artist before him had attempted. We can all see these things now, and how beautiful they are, but Mr. Whistler was the one who showed us. He was, I think, the one artist since Turner who has extended the range of the artist’s vision in the direction of revealing to us the beauty of colour as it appears in nature.

I have already spoken of the painter’s main difficulty--in determining the proper relation of parts to the whole--in the matter of lighting and arrangement of his picture. This is also the main difficulty in colouring, and the only solution I can give you is that you should, at least once, endeavour to have the scene you are painting--if it is of such a nature that you can do this--actually before you, and to consider it as a whole, taking in the whole scene as comprehensively as possible; and so you can judge the effect of one colour against another, and see which colour strikes you most unmistakably, and so gives the keynote to the rest. We should study in the same way anything we happen to see that strikes us as having the material for a picture.

Truth or beauty of colour is the main thing in a picture. It is, in fact, the only thing that gives a picture a high place among the masterpieces. A picture that is well drawn and modelled only will interest, but will be passed by in favour of colour. For colour touches us more deeply; its sense is more instinctive. A child will be excited by colours, but indifferent to form. We all, artists or not, have some latent memory or mental image, which is called forth in us when we look at a picture, and recognise, or fail to recognise, nature in it; not, I think, so much by our memories of form, as by our memories of the colour and general appearance of nature.

We can only see what we have learned to look for. An uneducated person will consider a face in a picture beautiful if it has bright eyes, pink cheeks, and red lips; or a landscape beautiful if it also presents him with the obvious facts. It will be enough for him; it is as much as he sees in nature. But Nature does not reveal her beauties unsought, and the study of paintings by those who are not artists is not only an education, but an added pleasure to their lives, enlarging and directing their minds, so that they learn to detect and appreciate beauties in nature to which they would otherwise have been blind.

IV

TITIAN, VELASQUEZ, AND REMBRANDT

In speaking of these great artists, the greatest masters of painting that the world has seen, I do not propose to do more than make a rough comparison of their main qualities, with the idea of indicating the points of agreement and of difference between them. It seems almost an impertinence to speak at all of men who are above discussion or praise, whose names alone suggest the finest painting, and each of whom in his own way has reached the limits of achievement. One might discuss all the problems of painting by reference only to what each has done. I am not qualified to do this, but can only give my own, perhaps superficial, impressions of their work.

It seems to me that the differences which divide Italian painting into schools are of much less account than are the great qualities these schools had in common--a noble simplicity of form, broad lighting, and rich, full colouring. Indeed, to my mind there are only two schools of Italian painting--Michelangelo is the one, and the rest of the Italian painters all come together in the other. The great ceiling of the Sistine Chapel stands apart from, and beyond, all other work; but of all the other Italians, Titian most fully represents the finest painting. By his great genius he brought together the theories of his predecessors, and carried on their practice to a degree of completeness which cannot be surpassed. Velasquez said, “It is Titian who bears the banner”; whether in subject pictures or portraits, his work is perfect in all the qualities of painting, and it may almost be said that he has done with colour all that can be done.

He is the meeting-point of the old and the new. His work combines minuteness and freedom. His early training must have given him the power he possessed of treating detail with the most dainty fineness, yet keeping it always in its place, never letting it appear laboured or obtrusive. There is a “Madonna” of his in the Vienna Gallery--an early work--that has the clearness and simplicity of the Primitives, with a greater fulness. It is carried to the finest point of realisation, with seemingly the greatest ease. It is one of the most beautiful things in the Gallery.

Titian chose, as a rule, a simple mode of lighting--a warm daylight, or evening light, upon his figures; not concentrating the interest on one main point of his picture by suppression of minor things, but controlling it from one end to the other, and including everything in his attention. His effect was produced by devices of composition which he invented, or developed, from his own observation of nature. I have already indicated how, by relieving figures in light by figures and objects in shade, or by uniting figures and groups by shadows--on the ground, on or from trees and buildings--he constructed his pictures, using these momentary effects of contrast which we may notice for ourselves in nature. These devices, besides enabling him to make his picture by placing his principal objects in prominence, give us the sense of living and moving nature; of man not merely posed against a background of landscape or building, but in the scene, and part of its setting, so that one influence is felt throughout. And in this use of landscape, as well as in his treatment of landscape as a mood of nature, and not a transcript of nature, Titian was the first and one of the greatest of landscape painters.

His method was usually to keep the principal parts of his picture warm and light, and this warmth was enhanced by the blue of the sky, which he frequently used in his background; and the colours of his principal figures were made to tell out strongly, as well as separated from the background, by masses or spaces of shadow in the middle distance; as we see in the picture of the “Entombment” in the Louvre. We may notice, too, in this picture how the central light is packed round with various colours--rich reds and dark greens--in the dresses of the supporting figures.

_Titian_ _Louvre_

THE ENTOMBMENT]

When we endeavour, in cold blood, as it were, to gauge the actual colour of his work by comparing it with white, its richness and depth are amazing. It seems, indeed, to go beyond the power of the palette as we know it, but, of course, it cannot be so; and it is recorded that Titian used few and very simple colours to produce his fine harmonies. I doubt if his work owes much to the mellowing of age. It must always have been fine and rich, and I think, as I have said, that the Italian painters were led in the direction of warm and glowing colour through feeling strongly the beauty of blue; for, as we know, it is only by keeping the whole tone of a picture warm that the beauty of blue can be expressed. How this richness was produced, this depth without darkness, has been again and again discussed. It is called the “Venetian secret,” and certainly no other painting is so full of colour; and is considered--I think rightly--to have been produced by first painting a solid monochrome in tempera, on which the picture was finished, in its colours, in oil. But we need not trouble much about the method, for whatever it was, great knowledge, and that only, was the secret of Titian, as of all the other masters. This is brought home to us when we see a number of fine pictures of different schools hanging side by side, as in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, where there are on the same wall, works by painters as different in their methods as Rembrandt and Giorgione, Da Vinci and Velasquez, Raphael and Holbein, all agreeing together like good brothers. Their methods are as various as may be, but great knowledge was the basis of them all.

When in presence of one of Titian’s pictures we are conscious of their being true to a noble vision of nature,--_i.e._ that particular elements have been chosen and put before us,--and we feel, although we are not always conscious of it, except by comparison with other men’s work, a sentiment, which by means of colour alone he has conveyed to us. I think the sentiment of his pictures is communicated but little by form or expression, and almost entirely by the emotional power of their colour. His figures have the natural grace and gravity of their race, with an air of nobility, and, as Reynolds says, of senatorial dignity, of his own; but to me they seem to go through their actions as in a formal pageant, without interest, with something even of an air of indifference. There is in them nothing of the familiar, passionate human interest--of insight, almost, one feels, into the very souls of his subjects, that we find in Rembrandt; which moves us so deeply, and makes us--at anyrate, I find it so--to hold Rembrandt nearer to our hearts than any other artist. Titian’s power is in the beauty of his colour, and this is the special power of the painter. By his command of colour he imposes his mood upon us without our knowledge, making us look at nature through his eyes.

Titian was greatest as a portrait painter, as Reynolds has said. In arrangement, and in painting, and in character also, although he does not give so searching a reading as Rembrandt, they are as fine as can be. We have none in our National Gallery, but there is a very fine portrait in the Louvre, the “Man with the Glove.” This work is beautifully drawn and modelled, the head very simply and broadly, so that everything seems left out, but everything essential is there. The head is not forced out into the highest light, as is the usual practice now, but is kept lower in tone than the linen, which is the brightest light, and each colour tells in its natural degree. I should imagine that his painting-room was not lighted in our ordinary way, from the north, but probably from the south, with a veiled light, and that he painted or studied sometimes out of doors; for the lighting of his pictures could, I think, only have been arrived at by studying in sunlight, or perhaps by artificial light. His portraits seem to me to have very much the effect, both in colour and modelling, of people as seen by the light of a candle, where the light is reflected from the bright colours only, and is absorbed by the dark ones.

The influence of Titian can be traced in the work of all succeeding painters. Both Velasquez and Rembrandt owe something to him; Velasquez more than Rembrandt, as he was better acquainted with his work. But the influence of Titian, of Rubens, and of Tintoret on Velasquez only supplemented, and did not lead him away from, his own frank and straightforward view of nature.

We know, now that we have his whole life’s work before us, that Velasquez had the surest eye and the truest hand of any artist who has ever lived, or at least that he was the equal in this respect of any other artist; but if we look at his early work in the National Gallery, we find that it is not “clever” in any sense. It is most uncompromising, somewhat heavy-handed, one may almost say common, in its execution; suggesting not brilliant ability, but clear insight and determination. We may notice in this picture--the small still-life group with figures, called “Christ in the House of Martha”--how everything is set down relentlessly and thoroughly; and in another early work, the “Dead Warrior,” we see the same thing--everything is painted deliberately and apparently without alterations. It is only those who try to paint who know how much knowledge, how much determination, this implies.

But so much is said of the freedom of Velasquez’s painting, and so often is his name used to justify careless and sloppy work, that one may be allowed to draw attention again to the old truth--that this freedom was only gained at the price of labour, greater than most of his worshippers seem willing or able to undertake; and that the charm of his painting is that, with all its freedom, it is so careful and so beautifully drawn. He having, by great labour, learnt what to do, practice gave him a ready means to his end. It is surely, then, a mistaken idea for an artist to think that he can begin in Velasquez’s later manner, where he left off. If he will follow this great master, let him begin as the master began, and tramp the whole road.

The work of Velasquez seems to reveal the temperament of a dispassionate observer, with an eye so keen and so thoroughly trained that nothing escapes him; but he does not show us his own feeling towards his sitter. In other painters’ work, we get at least some hint of the artist’s feeling towards the persons he brings before us, but we do not get this in Velasquez. He is a perfect mirror. His attitude is that of one apart, or aloof, from his fellows, understanding, but without appearing to show sympathy or enthusiasm. These feelings seem to be reserved for the painting itself, though in some of his pictures, such as the “Surrender of Breda,” where, I fancy, the Italian influence can be seen, and in some of his dwarfs, there is, I think,--I have not seen the pictures themselves, and only know them from photographs and copies,--a little nearer approach to his persons, a little less detachment than usual.

_Velasquez_ _Prado_

THE SURRENDER OF BREDA]

In examining his work we can follow with delight the interest he must have felt in recording the things before him, and yet the final impression remains that the picture was not painted for the sake of fine painting, and that his manner was but his ready way of expressing his subject. When we look at that fine portrait of the Admiral in the National Gallery, we think only of the man who stands before us, as he stood before the painter; and it is only when we come near and realise the extreme simplicity of the means by which the illusion of his presence is produced that we are amazed at the painter’s skill. These odd, apparently unrelated, touches of colour, which we see at close quarters, explain themselves and take their place when the picture is seen at its proper distance. The fine portrait of Pope Innocent X. in Rome impresses in the same way.

The later work of Velasquez is the finest of all. One cannot imagine direct painting finer than the head of Philip IV. in the National Gallery, and it has every appearance of being done with ease and certainty. There is no display, no trace of effort, no “execution.” And in what must be his finest work, “Las Meniñas,” of which I have only seen a study, a problem of the utmost complexity in gradation is solved with apparently the greatest ease. The arrangement is so easy and natural that one does not realise its consummate art. How beautifully the figures are proportioned to the room, and how finely the large dark empty space above contrasts with the light and sparkle of the figures! His paint charms by its clear silvery colour and by what looks like unconscious certainty in his handling, and this must have come to him naturally, unsought. But the great interest of his work lies in the fact that it is so “modern,” that he paints things as we see them; and this has been well pointed out by the late R. A. M. Stevenson in his excellent appreciation of Velasquez, which I should advise you to read.

_Velasquez_ _Prado_

LAS MENIÑAS]

Rembrandt in some of his works, as in the “Syndics,” at Amsterdam, is as fine and rich in colour as Titian; but in the range and variety of his lighting, and in the interest he shows in life and character, he goes beyond either Titian or Velasquez. Every portrait, every picture indeed that he painted, seems to have been undertaken as a problem of lighting, as well as of character; but there is nearly always, I think, some reflection of himself in his portraits, and if detachment is the ideal, he was inferior to Titian or Velasquez in this respect. But he was greater, perhaps, than any other painter in human feeling and sympathy, in dramatic sense and invention; and his imagination seems inexhaustible.

His qualities, however, do not strike us at once. If we come from looking at Titian, or any of the fine Italians, to Rembrandt, our first impression is of plebeian coarseness, of uncouthness, and even of vulgarity, and all these qualities are there. But if we can put aside our prejudices, and try to understand his meaning, we find, after a time--it takes a little time--that beauty may wear the most unlikely dress. We discover beauties of design, of delicate drawing, and of sentiment, and a depth and intensity of feeling so convincing, that the ugliness of his types becomes of small account. Compare, for example, Rembrandt’s etching of the “Descent from the Cross,” either the large or the small plate (the small one is the better, for probably the design only of the large plate is Rembrandt’s) with the “Entombment” by Titian. The tragic side of the scene is finely given by Rembrandt, and Titian’s picture is formal in comparison with it, although this is one of his most expressive works.

Rembrandt’s eye seems to have been always attracted to the point of light, or the source of light, when the actual colours of objects were rather suggested than seen, or if the light shone on objects it was always focussed on the principal parts by shadows; and we find his work characterised by the most searching study of shadows and their infinite gradations, as well as of the diffusion of light. This study of light and shade in his pictures is so thorough as to seem an end and object in itself, but it was only with him the means of expressing or enhancing his idea. The idea and its presentation are inseparable, and his pictures seem to be imagined rather than constructed. He seems to take a suggestion from some very ordinary scene, and to carry it on in his mind and make it significant; as in the “Adoration of the Shepherds” in the National Gallery, the light and shade motive of which was probably inspired by something he happened to see in a stable.

_Rembrandt_ _National Gallery_

THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS]

This is, to my mind, one of his most beautiful works. If we look at it long enough to get beyond the paint, we find ourselves in the stable, taking part in the scene, with the shepherds; we seem even to know them well. The lighting, expression, gesture, and sentiment in this work are all natural and true; and the picture in the Wallace Collection, the “Unmerciful Servant,” with the figures starting out of the deep background, is also an instance of his lighting, or conceiving a picture so as--unconsciously, it seems--to emphasise the dramatic element in the story.

There is something greater and deeper in this than the mere artifice of lighting. The “Supper at Emmaus,” and the “Good Samaritan,” both in the Louvre, are instances of this marvellous power of conceiving his subject which can be seen in all his works, even in the slightest sketch.

Two drawings are reproduced here from the British Museum Collection. These drawings of his, made on the impulse of the moment, with expression as the one aim, show the richness of his imagination and his mastery more clearly than do his paintings, where other aims and problems enter, and sometimes confuse or obscure the thought. They are most wonderful in directness and expressiveness; in a happy instinctive rightness of arrangement, which seems inevitable. Every essential thing is given with the slightest of means--with the greatest economy of line; yet they are not slight sketches, but full and complete expressions.

_Rembrandt_ _British Museum_

JOSEPH CONSOLING THE PRISONERS (PEN DRAWING)]

We should study his drawings and the magnificent series of his etchings, as well as his paintings, for not only do we see in these the great range of his invention and expression, but his fine draughtsmanship. It is, too, in his drawings, but most of all in his etchings, that we see Rembrandt’s greatness in landscape. As an etcher, he is beyond question the greatest master, and the completeness and delicacy of his plates has never been surpassed. His etchings alone number about three hundred, and there are about four hundred and fifty of his paintings, and some hundreds of drawings, so that his life must have been one of unflagging industry, of constant progress towards perfection; everything that he touched is fine in some way. And if we think of this enormous number of works from his hand, and their great perfection; and realise how readily his work must have been done, and how few mistakes were made, we can understand what is meant by mastery.

Our knowledge of art is wider than that of our predecessors. Not that we have greater abilities, but we have greater opportunities of judging and making comparisons between schools. And time has helped us in coming to some conclusion on the vital question: On what does the reputation of an artist rest? His work should express some kind of beauty; it should be true to some aspect of nature; but, above all, it seems to me that an artist should be true to himself. In the work of all great artists we feel that we make the acquaintance of a person, and share a personal view--as in Titian, the interest is in the rich and beautiful aspect of nature; in Velasquez, in an absolute truth of presentation, with no preference; while Rembrandt saw with the eye of a poet, looking for the soul of things through their outward appearances.

Rembrandt in his later years, when he was producing his finest work, was, as we know, poor, and in such obscurity that his death was unnoticed by his contemporaries; and Michel, in his interesting book on Rembrandt, enforces this by quoting Gerard de Lairesse, who wrote of Rembrandt some thirty years after his death, that “in his efforts to attain mellow colour he merely achieved the effect of rottenness. The vulgar and prosaic aspects of a subject were the only ones he was capable of noting, and his colours lie like liquid mud on the canvas,” etc. He goes on to say that in early life he was much attracted by Rembrandt’s manner, and thought of following it, but better counsels prevailed! Gerard was an artist of some standing, and a follower of the Classic tradition, as the Dutchmen understood it; but the world has very willingly let his work die, while Rembrandt has come to his own.

_Rembrandt_ _British Museum_

ZACHARIAS AND THE ANGEL (PEN DRAWING)]

The history of art shows that an artist’s work lives by its own vitality rather than by following blindly a tradition, however noble. And the innovator is usually, in his lifetime, decried; it must be so. But sometimes it is recognised afterwards that the innovator was the loyal follower of good tradition, and that his opponents merely imagined they were. The work of the great minds, the great masters, remains unapproachable, and is, if possible, more highly esteemed now than ever; but where are the Caracci, Carlo, Maratta, Pompeo Battoni, and the rest who were so highly esteemed in their day? They are--perhaps a little undeservedly--forgotten, for they were able painters; but their glory is absorbed again into that of their masters. For, as Jean François Millet said: “Decadence set in when people began to believe that art was the supreme end; when such and such an artist was taken as model and aim, without remembering that he had his eyes fixed on infinity.”

V

ON LANDSCAPE AND OPEN-AIR PAINTING

The main development of painting in the last century has been in the direction of landscape painting, and, as allied to it, of figures under the conditions of outdoor lighting--in the open air. We may go back to the Italian Primitives for the first landscape painters, although landscape was then only an accessory, and did not, as a rule, consist of more than a sky and a view of distant country, used as a background for figures. But these little glimpses of landscape, especially the skies, are most interesting and beautiful. I do not, indeed, think that skies have at any time been painted which give the feeling of light so beautifully, or a finer, purer sentiment in the landscape itself. There is a very fine instance in the large fresco by Perugino in the National Gallery--a picture representing the “Adoration of the Shepherds.” The figures are in a field, under a very light and delicate sky. The tender sentiment of the scene is much the same as we find in the pictures of Corot.

In the little “Crucifixion” by Antonello da Messina, also in the National Gallery, there is a landscape--the effect is that of dawn--with a sky of the most beautiful quality; and, among many others, there are two pictures by Ambrogio Bourgognone, a contemporary of Da Vinci’s, also in the National Gallery, which have, in their backgrounds, charming little glimpses of rivers and towns, painted very freely and sweetly, as one would like to see them painted to-day. And the picture of “Christ in the Garden,” by Bellini, shows a landscape splendid in the tragic sentiment of its colour, especially in the lurid sky. You know the picture; the effect is that of nightfall. And there is also, in the background of a picture of a Magdalen by Savoldo, a beautiful little nightpiece, with water, boats, and sky of a deep and beautiful blue. I should imagine it is one of the first “nocturnes.”

One of the first men to treat landscape as the principal element in a picture was a contemporary of Dürer’s, named Patinir. There are some of his pictures in the National Gallery; one, of a winding river between mountains, a very light picture, is a very interesting work.

We may consider Titian as the first great landscape painter, though in his paintings it was only an accessory; but his construction of landscape by the use of shadows, of which I have already spoken, is one of the inventions or discoveries of painting. There are many fine drawings of landscape by him which you should see and study. His was, I think, the leading influence in treatment of landscape until the time of Claude and Poussin, when landscape painting may really be said to begin.

There was an old Fleming, Peter Breughel, who did some beautiful landscapes with figures (he was principally a figure painter) in the sixteenth century extremely rich in colour, and with a naïve rustic feeling that reminds one a little of Millet. I should imagine him to be the first “rustic” painter, and one of the best. After him, from Rubens, who painted many fine landscapes, we come down to Rembrandt, whose influence is still the leading one in the Dutch school. There is a little-known Dutch artist, Hercules Seghers, a landscape painter, who lived a little before Rembrandt, and is believed to have greatly influenced him in his feeling for landscape. I think only one of his paintings is definitely known; but there are a number of very beautiful etchings in the British Museum, some printed in different colours, a method which he is believed to have invented. These are very remarkable works, and should be studied. From Rembrandt, through Ruisdael, Hobbema, Vermeer of Delft, down to our Norwich school, to Gainsborough and Constable, and to Turner, the connection is all clearly traceable and well known. The great French school of the forties--the Romanticists, as they are called--Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, and their allies, received their impulse through Constable. Delacroix was influenced by him also; and the later impressionistic developments of landscape painting in France may be traced to the inspiration of Turner.

Any view of outdoor nature may be said to be a landscape; it may be the barest record of facts, or it may give something like a vision, with hardly any support at all from facts: the range is very wide. But in what does the charm of a landscape consist? It must be a record of a scene; that is, it must be true to the appearance, and must show the facts of nature under the influence of some definite effect of light. But there must be something more. An accurate record of a scene, although it may be true to the facts, will not charm, will not move us so much as a picture where the effect, or sentiment, of atmosphere or light is the dominating motive.

Constable pointed out that painters should not think that the sky terminated at the horizon, but should realise that it comes all through the picture, and close up to us. That there is a particular tree, river, or hill in a certain place is of no great interest. The interest for us lies in seeing or recognising the great elemental forces of nature, living and acting in and through the little things upon the earth. A landscape should not be so much an inventory as a transcript or translation of a mood of nature. Its appeal is to the primitive instincts--not to primitive people, not so much to people who pass their lives in the open air; for they take nature and its changes as a matter of course, and look on the weather as a capricious master whose whims have to be met, and a tree only as so much timber, or flocks and herds as so much stock. This is really quite a natural and proper view, but the artist’s view is outside this; and a picture of landscape appeals mainly to the primitive instincts of cultivated people, of people who live in cities, who look from the standpoint of civilisation with a sentimental longing towards a more simple state. The French gallants and ladies of the eighteenth century liked to imagine themselves shepherds and shepherdesses; and we, with our increased development of commerce and industry, have an increased appreciation of landscape, as if, since we cannot live with Nature, we would still be reminded of and be brought, even at second hand, into association with her.

The wide range of vision or treatment in landscape, as compared with that of figure painting, makes it difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at any rules which can be generally applied; for selection of subject seems more determined by emotion or impulse, and less by reason, than in figure work. The landscape painter is more instinctive than the figure painter, and, as a rule, is less definite in his study of form, or seems so; but has a finer sense of gradation of colour. But the building up of a landscape seems governed by pretty much the same unformulated rules as of a figure picture, and to depend on the same elements--the balancing of light by dark, and the contrast of warm and cool colour, so that the masses of the picture shall be agreeable to the eye; and the study of pictures, carried on concurrently with the study of nature, is the only way by which a student can learn how he can bring his vision of nature within the limits of a picture. I mean, by the study of pictures, that the student should follow the plan indicated by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, if a picture pleases him, take the trouble to note and, if necessary, make a memorandum of the general masses of light and dark, where they come, and in what degree, so as to learn the general disposition of the main things.

All the great landscape painters have presented Nature in the way I have indicated, as records of her moods. Claude, in his picture of the “Queen of Sheba,” did not, we may be sure, care about the Queen of Sheba at all. She was only a point for his picture; nor was he much interested in the towers, columns, and palaces which frame his picture. What he wanted to paint, what he wanted to impress upon us, was the beauty of the evening sun shining in the clear sky over the sea; and so well did he do it that the sun still shines in his picture, after over two hundred years. No one but Turner has ever equalled him in the knowledge of subtle gradations of light. An infinite space in air is suggested without forcing the range of colour; for the lightest part of the picture is far from white, and the darkest part by no means black.

_Claude_ _National Gallery_

THE EMBARKATION OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBA]

In another picture of his, “The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca,” also in the National Gallery, the subject is not the marriage, which is a mere incident, to give excuse for some figures as spots of colour, but the beautiful peep of sunlit country seen through the trees. In this picture we may remark how the dark trees accent the sky and the river, and how dark they have to be painted to express the lightness of the sky. Their colour is sacrificed to their tone. Claude did not wish us to look really at anything but the stretch of open country. We notice the trees, but our eye goes through to the distance.

Wilson and Turner followed in the same path. Wilson’s work is most beautiful in its direct, full painting, but he is limited in his range; while Turner’s seems to know no limit, for he touched the extremes of light and dark, of sunshine and of gloom. Such pictures as the “Shipwreck,” the “Sun rising in a Mist,” and the “Calais Pier” show the power which he possessed--in which he is quite unapproachable--of giving the greatest minuteness of detail without losing the breadth of the general impression. In his later work, as in the “Approach to Venice,” detail was suggested rather than expressed, but it was fully suggested. How delicate, in these pictures of his later time, are the gradations, and how slight the intervals between the tints!

_Turner_ _National Gallery_

APPROACH TO VENICE]

Turner’s enormous range, his comprehensiveness, and the beauty of his vision should be studied in his drawings as much as in his paintings. I do not, indeed, know if the drawings do not to the artist express his qualities best.