DOI article:
G. [George] Bernard Shaw on the London Exhibitions [reprint from The Amateur Photographer, October, 1901]
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.30582#0076
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I hope to say something next week about the instances in which the very photographers who
have copied from the painters the things they ought not to have copied, have also left uncopied the
things they ought to have copied, notably in matters of mounting, framing, and dimension. The
remarkable display of color-photography needs a word likewise. Meanwhile, let me here disclaim
any intention of writing a complete account of the exhibitions. There is plenty of admirable work
in them which I should point out with pleasure if that were my present business; as it is, I have
mentioned, and shall mention those works only which seem to me to best illustrate certain typical
faults or qualities of the movement.
II.
There is a good deal of blundering at the New Gallery by artists who have learnt that the
old-fashioned white mount and gilt frame is tabooed nowadays by those who are “ in the move-
ment." The insufficiency of this merely negative knowledge is shown by several attempts to get
into the movement by ignorantly following the latest fashion, with results quite as bad as the worst
American attempts to imitate the masterpieces of the Kelmscott Press. One gentleman, vaguely
associating high art with damaged panels of oak chests from Surrey cottages, gets an unsightly piece
of brown timber, cuts it to the shape and nearly to the size of a fanlight and sticks his photograph,
cut to the shape of a protractor, in the middle of the fanlight. And he invites the connoisseur to
buy this lumpish thing and stick it up in his wife’sdrawing-room. She will let him, perhaps, when
he has burnt the frame and replaced it with one of reasonable size and handsome appearance, like
that of Mr. Fitzgibbon-Forde’s “ Puritan Maiden.” Then there is Mr. Crooke, who last year
exhibited some portraits which owed their special charm to the intelligence with which he had
learnt from the eighteenth-century mezzotinters how to put his block of black tones on paper; how to
proportion its sides; how to letter it and how to frame it. But this year, instead of letting well enough
alone, he exhibits a portrait as to which, in spite of the sitter’s good looks, the critic can say
nothing except simply that it is too big. Strange that a photographer whose work in the merely
" professional " section last year positively tempted collectors, should, in the “ pictorial ” section
this year, exhibit a warning to others not to neglect his own former example ! Mr. Warneuke has
made the same mistake: his “Ready for Market” is an overgrown thing.
In the works which are presented as prints and not as family pictures, the confusion about
margins is so obvious that I may as well lay down a little law about it. The aspirants to a place
"in the movement" are right in supposing that the ordinary commercial slip-in mount, with the
photograph in the mathematical center of it, is a fashion of Gath. Fortunately, there is first-rate
authority to correct it and to give novices a safe starting-point for experiments of their own. The
medieval scribe, who for centuries had nothing to do but to find out how to make a margined page
look handsome, found out all that was to be found out about it; and modern pages have become
ugly in proportion to the straying of the modern printer from the medieval practice. Any pho-
tographer who can get hold of a good medieval MS., or a Kelmscott Press book, can get his mount
right by simply putting the photograph on it where the medieval monk, or, following him, William
Morris, put the block of letter-press on the page, always bearing in mind that the right-hand page
of the opened book is the one to be copied, as the photograph is held by the right hand and the
margin should leave room for the thumb. M. Pierre Dubreuil, missing this point, has, by the
mounting of his “ Profil Perdu,” irresistibly suggested that he is a left-handed man. Mr. Page
Croft knows better : his “ Meditation ” is as obviously in its right place on the mount as M.
Dubreuil's is out of it. Mr. French’smounting of his study is elaborately ingenious, and, centered
as it is, would make a capital design for a letter-box in a hall-door. If he would shift his strip of
platinum and its border well to the left of the mount and nearer the top, the letter-box suggestion
would vanish, and the picture be tout ce qu'il y a de plus dans le mouvement. The old white
mount, representing simply the symbolic starched collar and cuff of the respectable man, hopeless
from the artistic point of view, has very nearly vanished ; but in the South Room at the New
Gallery I noticed some stupendous examples exhibited by Messrs. Speaight, whose portrait of the
Misses Gardner nevertheless seems to prove that they know how to frame a photograph without
spoiling it, when their sitters will let them. M. Jean Lacroix has had the unhappy idea of trying
to make his photographs resemble small etchings on monstrous pieces of “outside ” paper. Why
on earth should photography, the most beautiful of all the artistic processes, ape etching, which is
quite the vilest ? I could forgive M. Lacroix for imitating lithography or mezzotint, just as I
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have copied from the painters the things they ought not to have copied, have also left uncopied the
things they ought to have copied, notably in matters of mounting, framing, and dimension. The
remarkable display of color-photography needs a word likewise. Meanwhile, let me here disclaim
any intention of writing a complete account of the exhibitions. There is plenty of admirable work
in them which I should point out with pleasure if that were my present business; as it is, I have
mentioned, and shall mention those works only which seem to me to best illustrate certain typical
faults or qualities of the movement.
II.
There is a good deal of blundering at the New Gallery by artists who have learnt that the
old-fashioned white mount and gilt frame is tabooed nowadays by those who are “ in the move-
ment." The insufficiency of this merely negative knowledge is shown by several attempts to get
into the movement by ignorantly following the latest fashion, with results quite as bad as the worst
American attempts to imitate the masterpieces of the Kelmscott Press. One gentleman, vaguely
associating high art with damaged panels of oak chests from Surrey cottages, gets an unsightly piece
of brown timber, cuts it to the shape and nearly to the size of a fanlight and sticks his photograph,
cut to the shape of a protractor, in the middle of the fanlight. And he invites the connoisseur to
buy this lumpish thing and stick it up in his wife’sdrawing-room. She will let him, perhaps, when
he has burnt the frame and replaced it with one of reasonable size and handsome appearance, like
that of Mr. Fitzgibbon-Forde’s “ Puritan Maiden.” Then there is Mr. Crooke, who last year
exhibited some portraits which owed their special charm to the intelligence with which he had
learnt from the eighteenth-century mezzotinters how to put his block of black tones on paper; how to
proportion its sides; how to letter it and how to frame it. But this year, instead of letting well enough
alone, he exhibits a portrait as to which, in spite of the sitter’s good looks, the critic can say
nothing except simply that it is too big. Strange that a photographer whose work in the merely
" professional " section last year positively tempted collectors, should, in the “ pictorial ” section
this year, exhibit a warning to others not to neglect his own former example ! Mr. Warneuke has
made the same mistake: his “Ready for Market” is an overgrown thing.
In the works which are presented as prints and not as family pictures, the confusion about
margins is so obvious that I may as well lay down a little law about it. The aspirants to a place
"in the movement" are right in supposing that the ordinary commercial slip-in mount, with the
photograph in the mathematical center of it, is a fashion of Gath. Fortunately, there is first-rate
authority to correct it and to give novices a safe starting-point for experiments of their own. The
medieval scribe, who for centuries had nothing to do but to find out how to make a margined page
look handsome, found out all that was to be found out about it; and modern pages have become
ugly in proportion to the straying of the modern printer from the medieval practice. Any pho-
tographer who can get hold of a good medieval MS., or a Kelmscott Press book, can get his mount
right by simply putting the photograph on it where the medieval monk, or, following him, William
Morris, put the block of letter-press on the page, always bearing in mind that the right-hand page
of the opened book is the one to be copied, as the photograph is held by the right hand and the
margin should leave room for the thumb. M. Pierre Dubreuil, missing this point, has, by the
mounting of his “ Profil Perdu,” irresistibly suggested that he is a left-handed man. Mr. Page
Croft knows better : his “ Meditation ” is as obviously in its right place on the mount as M.
Dubreuil's is out of it. Mr. French’smounting of his study is elaborately ingenious, and, centered
as it is, would make a capital design for a letter-box in a hall-door. If he would shift his strip of
platinum and its border well to the left of the mount and nearer the top, the letter-box suggestion
would vanish, and the picture be tout ce qu'il y a de plus dans le mouvement. The old white
mount, representing simply the symbolic starched collar and cuff of the respectable man, hopeless
from the artistic point of view, has very nearly vanished ; but in the South Room at the New
Gallery I noticed some stupendous examples exhibited by Messrs. Speaight, whose portrait of the
Misses Gardner nevertheless seems to prove that they know how to frame a photograph without
spoiling it, when their sitters will let them. M. Jean Lacroix has had the unhappy idea of trying
to make his photographs resemble small etchings on monstrous pieces of “outside ” paper. Why
on earth should photography, the most beautiful of all the artistic processes, ape etching, which is
quite the vilest ? I could forgive M. Lacroix for imitating lithography or mezzotint, just as I
60
