International studio (27.1905/1906(1906))

The Whipple School of Art

Mr. Whipple neither clings to the old routine
nor abandons the careful study of the figure
apart from its uses in composition. He does,
however, almost omit the antique. A warm
admirer of his former master, Bougeureau, he
considers a thorough knowledge of the figure and
practise in drawing it of the utmost importance.
But he denies the necessity of a long preparation
in drawing from the cast. Accordingly, if a
Student on entering the school shows a good
proficiency in drawing he is put without further
delay in the life dass. If more practise is still
required there is brief period of work from the
cast, but a period literally not relatively brief.
The contrast here with the time-honoured
method is obvious. Month after month and
actually year after year the art school of the
longer-established type kept its students care-
fully, or, in the old-fashioned sense of the word,
painfully working on the form and the light and
shade of an innumerable army of plaster casts,
beginning, it might be, with some simple geo-
metric solid and a bald rosette of starfish origin
and going doggedly forward to feet with rec-
tangular toes, faces archaically bearded, and so
on tomore or less faithful reproductions of Orders
from Vitruvius and Michelanglo’s head of
David. And this, by haphazard, brings back
the horned head of the seated Moses and what
befel him on one historic occasion within our
knowledge. The recollection may be banal, but
it is certainly vivid. The dass, the average age
of which was rather young and its patience per-
haps accordingly a trifle short, wearied of the
white, chalky glare of the unresponsive models.
It had been given a taste of colour and of less
academic subjects, and the continued devotion
to the charcoal record of unvarying shadows
irked it. The trouble from which the dass
suffered was an atrophy of interest. The Symp-
toms were too complex and fugitive to be worth
recalling. But they were summed up in an event
that for all its triviality lives still as a picture of
protest. When the drawing master returned to
the galleries it was to see the dass solemnly
sketching in the head of the horned Moses upon
which they had been working, but drawing it
crowned. And there upon the august head in
plaster, sitting, because of the horns, rather
uneasily over the unconcerned and averted eyes,
was the dismal, mundane black pot hat of the
later nineteenth Century, the chapeau billicoque
of Du Maurier’s rhyme. If any one doubts the
compelling absurdity of the picture and has


POB.TB.AIT CLASS BY A. E. SHAW

little enough reverence let him experiment in the
nearest museum and watch the effect on the
attendant. That little spot of black was as the
hurricane cloud that grows on the horizon, and
the dass had neglected to provide a hurricane
cellar. But in the immortal words of Kipling,
that is another story, and the lesson of the out-
rage was better than its vengeance. It was as
though the spirit of youthful impatience had
said: “Here, Moses, you have sat there with
your tablets long enough. It is time you saw
something of the world, and time something in
this quiet, cloistered spot was up and stirring.
Put on this hat, for it’s the fashion to wear ’em,
and be off!” But Moses, like the Raven, “still
is sitting, still is sitting.”
Mr. Whipple’s pupils are, of course, serious
workers and as far beyond the stage of such puerile
revolts as they are freed from such causes of com-
plaint. It is rather the plastic of Paris than plaster
of Paris with which they are concerned. And their
relief from a long apprenticeship is also an instance
of the tendency in all our educational progress to
shorten the preparatory years. The study of
ancient art is as important as ever. But as in lan-
guage we are being told that it is not necessary to
scan Virgil or parse Cicero before speaking French,
so in art instruction we find the Suggestion that
some two years in the antique dass may be dis-
carded, and the study of Greek sculptural fonns
attacked with greater profit after the Student has
applied himself to the problems of the human figure

LXXVIII