George Sheringham

“ This causes us no concern whatever; we get what we want—economy of public money; and what we deserve—unworthy memorials. To the present-day public the function of the artist is of small importance—his work is there to amuse us, to flatter our vanity, to decorate our hideous houses (with which we are well content) and, when he is dead, to afford us the mild excitement of a little speculative buying. With such a point of view we can produce no great school in art. Nothing can change us except we change ourselves. ”

“ Let us hope rather that the spirit of vision—guiding him now to look outward on the visible world for his subject—will inspire him to penetrate the darkness of the æsthetic desert we have set about him; and that—again communing with the spirit—he will give us—not, as before, ideals from his own mental psychology but—see for us and reveal to us finely the mass-psychology of mankind. But it is not possible to prophesy what the art of the future may be that mankind of the future will approve. ”

“ The creative artist is not satisfied with an intellectual grasp of a truth, for his aim must always be to translate abstract ideas into form; to clothe his thought in a visible or aural body. To the mind of the scholar, though, he must appear a most practical, almost utilitarian being—one who does not regard the acquirement of knowledge as an end sufficient in itself! Leonardo da Vinci combined in his personality the genius of both types. ”

“ It is not possible to predict what new thing the craftsman will next make beautiful or what new thing the artist will next interpret as beautiful. They are inspired by a spirit that bloweth where it listeth. How great the power of this spirit in us still is is proved by the astonishing number of unlovely things that have been lately revealed to the world as beautiful, through the mysterious alchemic process of this spirit of vision working in the artist. But the spirit of inspiration did not always work thus. ”

“ In everything he did one feels that the primary interest of each drawing for him lay always in a metaphysical, religious or philosophical idea. In all of them there is what Whistler condemned as out of place, in a picture, and called, “the literary quality.” If Taine, the Frenchman, be right, he puts Whistler’s argument out of court; for Taine is convinced that the artist’s whole raison d’être and mission is to present and interpret to the people in a simple language that they can understand the philosophical and other ideas they desire but cannot formulate for themselves. ”

“ And the artist—has lost his inner vision. And in his place a new one has been evolved; one who is equal to the task that we have set him: he paints—not ideas but—life as he finds it; he paints experiences; he records emotions; if he receives a visual shock—he cannot make enough haste to do a picture recording it; for to him it is a psychological experience and therefore supremely worth recording. We here set him about with evils and surround him with the sordid and ostentatious; the spirit working in him by a new alchemy has called evil good ”

“ 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!
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. ”

“ We adulate the great Italian artists instead of paying our homage to the Italian people for producing them—as they undoubtedly did, by desiring them; for art was not only a joy to their kings and prelates but a spiritual need to themselves. In such an atmosphere great men were bound to arise to give form to the ideals and emotions of the nation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That standard of excellence in art—that a picture or statue should “be true to life”—has befogged too many of us. Art is in its essence and in its finality—artificial. And proficiency is nothing if the obvious, the non-essential and the trivial have been relied on to convey the artist’s idea.
Reproductions of Michelangelo’s and Holbein’s finest drawings are usually hung in most art schools—as examples of how to draw I suppose. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The proportions in a Michelangelo drawing are not, accurately, those in a human figure. But, by a general concensus of opinion, they are accepted as suggesting a psychology more divine than human. This then must have been Michelangelo’s intention. ”

“ Dimly we are aware that we have lost that guiding intelligence—the spirit of art—that lighted the path for our forefathers; and shamelessly we ignore all the wealth of tradition we inherited from the preceding eras of their greatness. ”

“ Religion once held the artist as her most valuable ally and was, invariably, the source of his inspiration in all the greatest masterpieces he gave the world in all branches: whether in architecture, sculpture, painting, or in the lesser arts of carving, illuminating, embroidery, jewellery. ”

“ After a period more or less prolonged, this kind of neophyte discovers that the work of an artist is not materially assisted by sombrero hats, flowing ties, bobbed hair, corduroy trousers, fancy-dress dances, views about free love, all night discussions about ethics—and so on, one need not continue the familiar list. Having, I say, discovered that the most assiduous cultivation of these exciting manners and customs does not constitute the life of an artist this neophyte drops out of the race, as far as the art world is concerned, and disappears. ”

“ To the student of drawing he is still a god and, because of his superhuman ability to draw, he lives in the student’s mind in a divine halo.
With regard to works of art considered as speculative investments I offer the following advice: be sure you know a good drawing when you see one, and buy a man’s drawings when he is young. To wait until he has proved himself as a painter before accepting him as a draughtsman is, economically, a bad principle. ”

“ Ultimately it is the love of the people that alike crowns the king or acclaims the artist, and until this happens no artist can be sure of a prominent rank among the great; however much seeming popularity he may enjoy in his lifetime. But there are reasons why an artist is sometimes not given the rank he deserves until long after he should be—apart from those supplied by the uncatholic point of view engendered in the people by lack of education and the jealousy engendered in his contemporary artists by their struggle for recognition. ”

“ It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for an artist to be a just critic of his contemporaries. The truth of this assertion is easily tested: ask an artist his opinion of a mixed dozen of old masters—he will have words of praise for all of them and his comparisons will be just and true. Then ask him his opinion of a dozen of the leading artists of his own day—he will not have words of praise for more than two; and if by chance he should still be a student in the schools he will find himself only able to praise one of them ”

“ But the English have given innumerable proofs, too, that the desire of the mass of this people does not tend towards the arts—for however many great painters the English have produced the fact remains that our only national art—except perhaps the school of Reynolds and a tradition of landscape painting—is, still, literature; as it always has been. It is nothing to us that a national memorial is not conceived on nearly such large or costly lines as are our drapery stores. ”

“ An artist as a rule lives by selling his work and though the fact that works of art are articles of commerce may delay or accelerate the verdict on him it will not ultimately affect it. These things are on the knees of the gods ”

“ A process of drawing widely different from that practised by Daumier.
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 the drawings will probably be as good as any he will ever do; for, later in life, when drawing is practised with a view to painting, the results are generally more summary and, though frequently more masterly, they seldom have quite the same sincerity as those done early in life, when—as a rule forbidden by his teacher to paint—he will put into his drawings the whole of his best endeavour and aim at creating a drawing that shall be a complete work of art in itself ”

“ France has now no national art—save her sense of humour (and we all know to what she turns infallibly for stimulation in that!) but she does know a great man when she produces one; nor does she confound him{12} with a lesser artist, however much excitement she may indulge in in making a passing fashion of the latter: her pride in Puvis de Chavannes does not waver. She has recently had some men of genius, and they are typically French, but can we accept them as having founded a national art in France? ”

“ Napoleon said:{6}
“Inspiration is the instantaneous solution of a long meditated problem”; what more perfect description could one have of a composition sketch, for the artist does, as a rule, meditate a problem for a long time but the moment he finds the solution he sets down his idea with the greatest zest seizing the first thing to hand—generally a pen or a pencil. Moreover, in the first rapid sketch that records his inspiration his mental vision is clear; the interruptions—inevitable in the slow process of painting a picture—having not yet occurred. ”

“ The artist can but launch his work of art on the world and hope that the other man will recognize it.
Such diversity of presentment as the collection of drawings in this book gives should do something to inculcate a more catholic appreciation of art than one finds in that unpleasant being—“the average man.” It is the critic’s business to educate the public to that catholicity of appreciation, but unfortunately he may delight in doing the opposite: too often Ruskin’s eloquent writings did but beautifully express his bigoted prejudices. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is obviously the carefully thought out design for a painting of considerable size and, like all Holbein’s portraits, is a most intimate and searching study of psychology. Composition drawings (and this one is a good example) are among the most valuable to us of all works of art. Valuable because the composition sketches of a great man are generally pure inspiration throughout. In them he has worked too rapidly to be conscious of his method—he has been as unconscious as a writer is of his hand-writing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is equipped with the experience and opinions of his fellow students and the maxims that are the stock in trade of the professional art-master; who—though he is sometimes a real teacher and even an inspired and inspiring teacher—is far more often merely an artist earning his living by instructing his pupils in a system that he has himself evolved, and which he is quite unable to demonstrate has ever been used by any great draughtsman or painter. ”