Studio: international art (3.1894)

The Poetic in Paint

the whole picture becomes rhythmic and musical;
figures, landscape, and sky all falling into a fine
harmony of movement, joining as it were in a
graceful yet restrained dance. Other artists of
poetic power, however, who work rather with and
through the capabilities of fine colour, tone, or
facture than of form, lead us into regions much
more obscure. It would seem, for one thing, that
their peculiar feeling for and expression of light
is a means of appeal common to most of them.
Their paint does not merely reflect light, but emits
and vibrates with it in a manner quite apart from,
and beyond, its ordinary capacities. On entering
a room where such a masterpiece hangs we do not
(as one of our painters has well said) first look at
the window to test the state of the light, for the
picture seems independent of such conditions, and
glows upon the wall with an inner light of its own.
And this peculiar lamp-like quality is of necessity
accompanied by another—viz., a rigid suppression
of surface. We are not aware of the painted panel;
we look into and not at the picture. The painter
has instinctively felt the necessity for the elimina-
tion of all that might stand in the way of his
peculiar personal sentiment.

It is not possible in a short statement of the
matter to do more than indicate the possible
direction of a search into paint of this kind. Un-
fortunately, we cannot help being struck with
doubts of our success, when we become aware, as
we very soon do, that the revelation of the means
used is in the inverse ratio to the strength of the
result. The greater the emotional power of the
painter the more closely he holds the secret of his
methods. We have only to think of Millet, who
was doubtless the most powerful exponent of purely
poetic or emotional paint the world has ever seen,
to recognise how curiously complete is his with-
drawal beyond the reach of our examination ; how
difficult, nay impossible, it is for us to follow him
into his workshop. And this has, certainly in his
case, led to some odd misunderstandings of the
position of the man as an artist. Millet has been
said, most absurdly, to be more of a poet than a
painter. He has even been pitied (Heaven save
the mark !) for not being able to paint at all; and
blamed for not drawing directly from the model.
What an extraordinary misapprehension of both
the man and his art! If we take him as a crafts-
man alone, Millet has given us enough to make a
name for half a dozen painters. He has presented
us with great problems in colour, tone, and light;
he has expressed weight as it has never been
expressed in paint before or since; his sense of the

largeness of things reminds us only of the drawing
of Michael Angelo, and all this with a handling and
facture at times as rich, luminous, and flowing as
that of an old master. Because, besides all this,
his work is dominated by a further element, the
powerful melancholy sentiment of his poetic tem-
perament ; because, in fact, he has solved with his
paint the more difficult problem rather than the
easier, is he not to be classed as before all things a
painter ? Surely the question answers itself. And
while speaking of Millet, let us make one simple
experiment in support of our original position—
viz., that it is in his technique that the painter's
poetic bias appears. Let us imagine the great
French painter's technique changed, and then try
and realise what would become in such case of
his sentimental power. I think we need not ask.

At first sight the particular artistic expression of
which we have been speaking would appear to be
an outcome of modern art only. Besides Millet,
we think of Corot and Turner, of Mason, Troyon,
Mathew Maris, Cecil Lawson, Whistler and Watts,
as examples in their different ways more or less
certain. But the thread of it on closer considera-
tion can be traced far back among the older
masters, where if less self-conscious and more
naive than with their modern successors, the same
emotional elements appear from time to time with
unmistakable vitality. The poetry of Giorgioni
and Titian and Rembrandt, of even Velasquez at
times, of Cuyp, de Hooghe, and old Crome, cannot
be left out of account merely because it is evident
they were unconscious themselves of its presence.

Lastly, what shall be said of the art of the
present day in relation to this question ? The
year's Exhibitions, at any rate here in England, are
peculiarly unfortunate for our purpose, because the
men to whom we might have turned for reference,
painters such as Messrs. Waterhouse and Swan,
Mark Fisher and Edward Stott, Leslie Thomson,
Peppercorn and George Clausen, who have at times
touched at least the borderlands of poetic paint,
are too insufficiently represented to furnish any
adequate argument. But be that as it may, the
domination of Realism, so far as one can judge, is
as yet in no way disturbed, and whatever of senti-
ment a painter here and there may possess, is
overlaid and smothered under pressure of its call
upon his powers. One curious and probably un-
expected result of this close adherence to the
realistic may be noted as a last remark. Our
artists are struggling day by day to reach a higher
key—to outshout each other in< colour, to blaze in
the rendering of sunlight. Yet, as an expression

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