International studio (44.1911)

J. W. Waterhouse, R.A.

SOME RECENT WORK BY MR.
J. W. WATERHOUSE, R.A.
There has grown up of late years a certain
tendency towards materialism in pictorial art,
a tendency not altogether wholesome to insist
upon and exalt the ugly and commonplace and to
choose the bald facts of modern existence as
subjects for study. Many painters, in a mistaken
striving after realism, seek perversely for the
deformities and defects which have come into life
as results of over-civilisation, and defend this
perversity by claiming that in the representation of
such deformities they are strictly true to nature.
Others put forward the argument that ugliness is
an essential of character and that beauty and
strength are incompatible—that a work of art
which does not represent some abnormality in an
ugly way must have the taint of prettiness and be
a weak and colourless reflection of nature.
These fallacies have unfortunately gained many
adherents. A number of clever painters are at the
present time wasting considerable capacities in
the production of pictures which illustrate an
objectionable misapprehension of the functions of
art. Really, the cult of ugliness, the worship of
the grossly material, is only a symptom of a kind
of mental laziness with which those workers are
afflicted who boast most loudly of their intimate
and precise study of nature. It is so much easier

to make a sensation by painting some obviously
sordid actuality than to find a beautiful motive
which requires for its proper appreciation a care-
fully cultivated taste. It saves them so much
labour in educating themselves if they give up any
idea of training their selective sense or of learning
to discriminate between the good things and the
bad in the world about them. Civilised life pro-
vides them with plenty of repulsive motives ready
to their hand ; it would be waste of energy, they
think, to choose material which would demand
of them refinement of thought and subtlety of
expression.
But as a result of this attitude on the part of so
many of the artists of to-day it has become the
fashion to decry sentiment in art as a thing
necessarily feeble and mawkish. The distinction
between sentiment that is beautiful and finely
suggestive, and that empty sentimentality from
which comes the vice of prettiness, is in danger of
being forgotten. All kinds of sentiment are equally
banned by artists who call themselves progressive ;
all are treated with the same want of discrimination
and good taste by the men who pride themselves
on being “ in the movement ” and properly in touch
with the modern point of view.
Such an evasion of the responsibility which
lies upon every true artist, to aim always at the
best and highest type of expression, cannot be
too strongly condemned. The man who by


“ariadne” (By permission of H. W. Henderson, Esq.)
XLIV. No. 175.—September 1911.

BY J. W. WATERHOUSE, R.^.
r75