Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

if he will “paint” the picture that he has saved from the wreck of a weekly
illustrated journal,—no less than the manifold uses to which color tinting has
been put in the service of modern mechanical processes of color reproduction.
But we have only to consult, what we are seldom able to do, the best examples
in this highly refined art to understand how utterly they are removed alike in
design and execution from the worse than wantonly ineffective and insipid
efforts of its unnumbered practitioners. In America the art has scarcely
emerged from its infantile stage—of gross output and little genuine or serious
effectiveness. In England, in the hands of a small number of really distinguished
artists it has been, and is being, rapidly saved from the utter forlornness into
which it had fallen. On the European continent, where it is not so much
either practiced or mispracticed, and especially in France, its reputation is
safe in the hands of a few men of genius who in this, as in other branches of
art to-day, have given to it a new and vital meaning of expression beyond the
common run of stagnant effort.
The singular charm and notable characteristic of Mr. Marin’s work,—
and it is one which belongs to-day rather to the French than to the strictly
British school (if we exclude the three most brilliant modern British exponents—
I mean Melville, Brabazon and Whistler, all three now deceased)—is his
ability to conceive and to carry out his scheme in terms from first to last of
pure color—what is sometimes called ‘‘impressionistic” painting. But if we
examine this so-called “impressionistic” method in relation to water-color
drawing we shall find, I believe, what we might not have expected, an even
more intimate and logical relation to past models in this branch of art than is
directly discernible in the art of oil-painting. Putting aside for a moment the
work of such singular men of genius as Turner and Constable, who in this as
in all else that they touched used their art solely as a vehicle of expression for
their own imaginative fancies,—Constable, we instinctively feel, was more at ease
even in his water-color sketches and studies than elsewhere in attaining to that
desired condition of “forgetting that he had ever seen a picture,”—in tfie works
that still remain to us from other hands, a lovely heritage of water-color draw-
ing, we find, even within the extraordinarily wide boundaries of expression
that water-color drawing had found for itself, the same principles holding good
throughout. The special poetical possibilities that lay within the compass of
this medium, arising primarily out of the luminousness and transparency of
its color, that received such a tremendous impetus from the fiery visions of
Turner’s fancy, still depended as ever for their effect upon what might be termed
the architectonics of a scene, what was in the beginning the mere substance of
light and shade, the mere “drawing” balanced by those thin stains or washes
of monochrome (as in the tinted figure sketches of Rembrandt or of Rodin),
and only afterwards and by degrees of local patches of color. And, inevitably,
as the joy and delight in color and in an exalted color-sense arose like a lumi-
nous phantom out of the dark night of plain chiaroscuro, the need for an
elaborate structural drawing gave way as the mists at dawn and it was found
that the world could be as steadfastly built up out of the miraculous image of a
spectrum. That is what we find, I think, in the transition from those great

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