Sir Frederick Wedmore

“ Now, with the delightful artist of the day whose eulogium I am slowly making, that is never the case.
Francis James’s fondness for flowers is, in some sense, akin to a woman’s instinctive fondness for everybody’s children. He has joy in their mere life. And it is their life that he paints. And he paints them in their own atmosphere—the sunlight heightening so the key of their colour, or a little rain perhaps has fallen and their life is refreshed. ”

“ But when one recognises this, one may remember, too, how the methods acceptable to one age may be ineffective in another. Mrs. Siddons’s epoch was the epoch of the acceptability of Claude’s and David’s art. It was the age of firm contour in draughtsmanship, of composition in painting, of deportment in manners. In manhood, the age admired as ideal what Mr. Turveydrop, some time afterwards, only unwittingly burlesqued. The fire, and genius, and spontaneity of Rachel would speak to us to-day. ”

“ For this reason and that, every industrious and thoughtful, as well as every careless, student of pictorial Art, has his own favourites in Portraiture: there is our pride in Reynolds, our joy in Gainsborough, our wonder at the magic of Velasquez, our steady confidence in truth when Holbein is the draughtsman, our grave and brooding satisfaction over the august portraiture of the Venetians. But Rembrandt unites men’s suffrages—carries with him even those who admire most warmly this painter’s unswerving veracity and that one’s fluent grace. ”

“ Chardin’s figures do not cease to be typical of the race, while they retain the delicate accuracy of personal studies, and betray an untiring reference not to a few models only, but to all the nature he lived amongst. Always without exaggeration, always with directness and a deep simplicity, the self-effacing art of Chardin accomplished its task, writing for us in picture after picture, or print after print, the history of the quietest of refined lives that the Eighteenth Century knew; arresting for us the delicate gesture, in itself so slight, yet so completely revealing ”

“ If Pater himself had been the inventor of the genre,168 or even, perhaps, if he had practised it in any fashion recognisably his own, this piece of delicate and painter-like work—which, as it is, no one with any true appreciation of the graceful can possibly dispraise—would have had a higher rank. As it is, we recognise the dexterous handiwork, the pupil’s strangely complete reception of his master’s spirit; but feel, at the same moment, that Pater is an echo rather than a voice—that his talent glowed only at the fire that Watteau lit. ”

“ LORD LEIGHTON By the death of Lord Leighton, the Royal Academy loses a great President and England a many-sided artist, who was certainly not far removed from being a great painter. It was more, perhaps, by the combination of so many various qualities of character and talent than by the firm possession of one especial vein of genius, that ‘our dear President, our admirable Leighton’—to use the words most fittingly applied to him by Sir John Millais—had come, of recent years at least, to be distinguished and known. ”

“ But his work, from end to end, in its serene, deliberate accomplishment, suggests no chances and changes, no personal emotion, and even no actual experience of human life. One says at first, it might have been done at any period; then one recognises perhaps what one may call a modern feeling for the object portrayed; then one thinks of Hollar’s ‘Five Muffs,’ and of Rembrandt’s ‘Shell,’ and remembers that both have a freedom, a delicate skill, akin, after all, to the skill and the freedom in the etchings of Jacquemart. ”

“ GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY ‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds—a lover of pomp and ceremony even in the art of Literature—doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. ”

“ Henner can perceive character, but it must be conveyed without emphasis. With the palette set as of old, and the schemes of colour such as the ideal work has already accustomed us to, Henner must pursue his task. Perhaps it is the pallor of a thoughtful face of middle age, to be framed in black hair, with an olive background. Perhaps, as in the ‘Créole,’ it is the old Venetian tresses that are to fall richly on the bust that is shining marble, that is gleaming ivory. ”

“ An immense sensitiveness as to colour, a refinement of colour which does not preclude boldness, the cultivation of an alertness as to the most delicate gradations of colour—these things characterise Francis James. They are of assistance to him, even of incalculable assistance to him, in all the things that he depicts, in all the visions he realises. But I think they are of most use to him of all when it is flowers he is looking at; composing with grace, painting with ineffable charm. ”

“ Pessimism, it seems to me, can only be excusable in those who are still bowed down by the immense responsibility of youth. It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers—a man of mature life—declared of him, not ‘he mopes picturesquely,’ but ‘he knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay.’ To such a writer—only to such a writer—is possible a happy comedy; and possible, besides, a true and an august vision of profounder things! And that is the spirit to which the Short Story, at its best, will certainly return. ”

“ It will be much fuller of Art than any drawing which ordinary good fortune is to enable you to get for the same outlay. And I say this as one who loves drawings—as one who, notwithstanding his theories, even ventures to live with a few of them; but, if I have a preference in the matter of collecting—well, I suppose it is for prints.
About a print, every point is interesting. Apart from subject, apart too from technical treatment of the copper, there is the delightful question, How does your own impression compare with other people’s? ”

“ Henner, it will be allowed by those who are most qualified to notice, is a great painter of the Nude. The Nude, according as you treat it, can rise to poetic heights and address itself to the refined, or can sink to more than prosaic depths. There is the high and there is the low, and there are many levels for the painter to stay at and live upon between them; and to the real artistic instinct, to the real fineness of taste, in looking at the Nude, there is permitted that immediate ease of judgment and decision by which the work is classed at once, and its motive appraised. ”

“ But it is not pure realism, for she holds an arrow—suggests some light allegory, as much, save for her imperfections, as some nudity of Titian’s or Tintoret’s—just that touch of the Classic, that one remove from the actual, Rembrandt’s tribute to an art inspired by higher thought, by fancy more elegant, than any that it was the privilege, generally, of the art of Amsterdam to show. ”

“ In life, the mind associates with a given and chosen landscape the more magnetic and memorable of the figures that people it. These alone bestow on it the reality of its human interest, and the others may be ignored. And so, among the masses of description and criticism of the arts of design, the writings which we really associate with the works they endeavour to vivify are those generally which have a charm of their own—the charm of the literary touch. Restif de la Bretonne’s stories, with all their faults, have just that charm. ”

“ To institute a perpetual comparison between him and Sir Joshua is to make the sterile blunder that is made when Dickens is pitted against Thackeray, the epic of Copperfield against the satire of Vanity Fair. In each case it was only accident that brought the men into juxtaposition; and as regards Gainsborough, it is rather with Velasquez or Vandyke, or with some French Eighteenth Century Master of familiar grace, that we should compare him. ”

“ Rembrandt is for all Time. Every year—taking the wide world over—there is an increase in the number of people sensible enough to desire and determine to possess themselves of some representation of his work.
Nothing but small means has prevented my buying in abundance Rembrandt’s incomparable landscapes, so well aware am I that Landscape Art reaches its topmost level in the best of Rembrandt’s work—in his ‘Cottage with Dutch Hay-Barn,’ say, and in his ‘Landscape with a Tower.’ His Sacred Subjects, with all their virtues of ‘sincerity and inwardness,’ commend themselves less to us. ”

“ In the contemporary theatre, in some of the very cleverest of our acted dramas, the characters are frequently doing, not what the man of intuition, and the man who remembers life, knows that they would do, but that which they must do to conciliate the dress circle, to entertain the pit, to defer not too long the gentle chuckle with which the ‘average sensual man’ receives the assurance that it is a delusion to suppose our world contains any soul, even a woman’s soul, that is higher and purer than his. ”

“ Like all the greater works of its writer, it is a study of the heart. And in Romola the subtle wit of Italy is displayed, with curious variety of power, by a writer who had shown herself mistress, long before, of the blunter English humour.
But such a success as that of Romola—the success of an historical novelist for whom history is alive and is not a mere tradition, mere decorative background—is hardly to be made more than once. ”

“ Certain black-and-white studies done in the last autumn of Cotman’s life—one October and November, when the country around Norwich lay under flood, and Cotman, visiting his native city, went out to depict no definite landscape, but ‘the world afloat’—display that faculty of seizing the spirit of a thing more than its body, which Youth, in any art, can hardly claim—which comes to men, it may be, with the refinement and chastening of the years. ”

“ A future generation may find, and, indeed, not a few judges, most worthy to be listened to, declare already, that much of her sad philosophy is itself a mistake as great as any which her genius discovered in the world she lived in. But if George Eliot’s analysis of life betrays some deeply rooted faults, it will at least always be admitted that it was that of a grave and gifted inquirer. ”

“ Gainsborough was never a mere copyist of Nature. From the first he composed and arranged, but his artifices were seldom very apparent, and his control over actual form—his artistic modification of it—was gentle and tempered, and this is most of all made evident by the display of his Landscape. With the permanent exhibition at the National Gallery and the annually recurring winter shows at Burlington House, no one of course has any need to be ignorant of the fact that one of the most fascinating of the painters of portraits was also a landscape painter. ”

“ French Eighteenth Century Art, like Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century, like the Art of Titian and of Velasquez, reflected Life—much of the charm of Life—and unless it be that Life itself and Beauty have no interest for us, we cannot afford to pass that Art superciliously by. ”

“ He is a painter essentially of the succession of Rembrandt—a master of the arrangement of light and shade—holding his own honourably in the presentation of landscape, but known chiefly, and known on the whole most to his advantage, as a painter of church interiors. His earlier work is in method drier and smaller than his later. The maturity of his genius finds him as broad as Cotman or Dewint. He has the restfulness and dignity of these men when they are at their best. ”

“ In the Atheist’s Mass, again—the short story of such a nameless pathos—the piece which, more even than Eugénie Grandet itself, should be everybody’s introduction, and especially every woman’s introduction, to the genius of Balzac: La Messe de l’Athée has no dialogue. Coming to our actual contemporaries in France, of whom Zola and Daudet must still, it is possible, be accounted the foremost, it is natural that the more finished and minute worker—the worker lately lamented—should be the one who has made the most of the short story. ”

“ There are, of course, larger works not claiming less attention; and one and all, by their deficiencies as well as by their merits, show that the greatness or the general attractiveness of Gainsborough as a landscape painter is due not much to his naturalism—which was naturalism only in his own day, and is seen to have been almost idealism in ours. His greatness as a landscape painter consists much more in his continual endowment of Nature with the grace and magic of Style. ”

“ And in the case of Rembrandt, the character and charm of whose three hundred etchings are the theme of my discourse, the first thing to take account of is that we have to deal not only with a conjurer of the brush and a magician of the needle, but with a deep soul. An âme d’élite—that is the true phrase for it: a being not above human faults, but above average human excellence; a reveller in pageantry, who yet had a tender eye for the large lines of simple landscape ”

“ Of course the short story, like all other fiction to be read, does not share the other difficulties of the acted drama—above all, the disadvantage which drags the acted drama down—the disadvantage of appealing to, at all events of having to give sops to, at one and the same moment, gallery and stalls: an audience so incongruous that it lies outside the power of Literature to weld it really together. ”