International studio (22.1904)

71%<?

out of the mass and reveals. More rarely the pub-
lic demand creates a special response, as it has in
England, where the appetite for anecdote overrides
all other considerations. Few exhibitions mark a
distinct and definite alteration in the attitude of the
artist towards his material. Such an exception
came early in the nineteenth century, when David
and his confreres substituted the narrow palette of
his effects, almost in monochrome, for the lavish
color which began with Tiepolo and ended in
Greuze.
Such another befell when Turner and a group of
colorists succeeded a duller Engiish tradition in
water-coior. The Water-Color Exhibition, which
has just been held in Philadelphia under the joint
auspices of the Philadelphia Water-Color Club and
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, marks
the complete triumph of a change, long in progress,
in the medium artists use. The layman cares for
the picture. The artist cares for the pigment. The
vehicle of the pigment is the despair of the artist.
The artist's desire is for pure color applied directly
without vehicle, furnishing at a touch exactly the
shade, tint, and color he yearns to use in his inter-
pretation of the varied light and shape of the outer
world. But color without vehicle or medium is
not. The pastel comes near, but a picture in pastel
cannot even be moved without losing a pellicle of
its surface, and the faintest change in what the artist
has done alters the effect of a picture. Where, as
with some pictures in the Louvre, a pastel by
Greuze has hung in almost the same place, almost
untouched for a century, to the man familiar with
changes, which time brings in every picture, there is
something startling in the fashion in which one can
see that these untouched, unshaken, and unaltered
pastels reflect the exact purpose and desire of a
painter four generations ago. But a touch may
ruin a pastel. No fixative is quite successful. Each
alters balance. The passage of time, the shock of
accident, the slightest change, a mere careless rap,
renders an evanescent pastel open to destruction,
through a thousand causes, from the wind that
blows to the man who hangs.
Some vehicle or medium is therefore necessary,
and every medium removes a little farther the work
which the painter is doing from his original idea.
Each slightly alters the character of color ; its appli-
cation, its handling, and its treatment; renders it
necessary that the artist should not use exactly the
color which he sees before him, but a color which,
when it has gone through the various changes of the
vehicle, its manipulation, and the application of the
brush, will, on drying in relation to all the other
cclxxxii

colors laid on the same picture, produce the same
relative effect, — not of nature, — but of that which
will make on the sensitive observer the same effect
which nature would make. We do not photograph
with the rays we see, but the photograph repeats
that which we see.
These conditions govern the use of all the various
materia picta. The world of painting began with
water-color in its various variances of distemper,
wash, and tempera, found it difficult to use, and
elusive in its effects, though of a wonderful certainty.
Artists experimented for a while with olive oil, and
gave all its whites the greenish-yellow tint of early
Italian oils. After various tests and trials, essays
and experiments, to some of which we owe the dis-
appearance of the work of the greatest artist that
ever lived in his field, Da Vinci, painting settled to
linseed oil, a vehicle white, transparent, and oxidiz-
ing, so as to produce tone instead of obscuration,
particularly under a coat of varnish which lowers
extremes by obscuring, but maintains relations by
preventing capricious oxidization.
This was the eclipse of water-color. It disap-
peared under the dominance of oil; and it is no
exaggeration to say that for three centuries, from
the middle of the sixteenth to the beginning of the
nineteenth century, while men continued to use
water-colors for mural decoration and washes on
maps and the like, outside of a few Dutchmen,
for serious easel work water-color as good as
disappeared.
The wide range of the mineral paints dissolved
in water, with which savage man first began the work
of smearing himself in his early figure compositions,
met yearly development as to range of color in the
chemical discoveries of the first half of the nine-
teenth century. There was an instant return to
water-color in landscape, particularly in England,
led by Girtin first, and then by Turner, a return
which rested on earlier employment in France; but
it began with attention rather to the medium or
vehicle than to the color. In working in water-
color men once thought first and chiefly of wash
rather than paint.
The Water-Color Exhibition just closed at Phila-
delphia has its double interest. A collection brought
together by the joint efforts of the Academy and
the Philadelphia Water-Color Club, it combined the
prestige which attaches to a school and place of
the arts a century old, and something of the energy
and canons of selection which always pertain to art
associations still young, full of those just beginning
and ready for high standards.
The very committee of selection to those who