Studio: international art (9.1897)

Ideal Life of a Landscape Painter

life of the landscape painter. I will not say
whether it were better for him to be born in a
congenial atmosphere, his earlier efforts applauded
by sympathetic and possibly informed friends, or
that he should have to fight his way through
indifference, ridicule, and opposition ; though per-
haps the balance of evidence favours the accept-
ance of the latter proposition. Again, it would be
rash to attempt to decide whether a youth of
opulence or indigence were more to the advantage
of the young painter, or whether a long course of
study in the schools, or the employment of these
years in the fields, tended more to the attainment
of the final result. Upon such points it is impos-
sible to dogmatise with profit or safety. It will
suffice to take the young painter at that point in
his life when he may be considered to have started
fairly on his career. It is then, when the responsi-
bility for his future rests, or rather may be assumed
to rest, with himself alone, that it becomes necessary
for the sincere artist to consider wherein lies his
duty to himself and what course it will be
necessary for him to pursue in order that he may
best achieve the goal which he has set before
him.

A landscape painter cannot be said to begin to
know his business until he has become thoroughly
saturated with the life and spirit of the country.
He must have sat for hours before Nature, rever-
ently studying its varied panorama ; its kalei-
doscopic changes ; its magnificent surprises. As
an athlete trains his muscles by assiduous exercise
and practice, so must a landscape painter train
his eye and perfect his memory. It is not, how-
ever, always the country-born-and-bred artist who
achieves the greater success, indeed ; on the prin-
ciple that human nature craves most that which is
the least readily attainable, and values most the
unfamiliar, many of our finest landscape painters
have been town-bred men. Corot and Turner
were citizens respectively of the capitals of France
and England. Again, many country-born land-
scapists have begun their artistic careers as painters
of portraits and genre, and have only returned to
the fields in later life. A general rule may be laid
down, however, and one admitting of no exception
—that the great landscape painter must live, and
move, and have his being in the country. The
rule appears so self-evident that its enunciation here
will probably provoke a smile. But self-evident as
it is, it is one which scores of landscape men have
found it most difficult to follow. Anxious friends
are ever at their elbow, telling them that if they
aspire to be known, to have their pictures talked
about and bought, they must bring their works and
their personalities into evidence; they must mix
with their fellows and court the suffrages of power-
ful patrons, amateurs, and critics. The sane land-
scape man knows what value to put upon such
advice. He need not, of course, reduce himself to
an anchorite; to preserve his balance, it is
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necessary for him to mingle, now and again, with
the world ; but he knows full well that any attempt
to compel the suffrages of his contemporaries by
any other means save by and through the inherent
force and value of his work, must inevitably result
in injury to the work itself. To the landscape
painter Nature is the most exacting of mistresses;
she tolerates no semblance of divided allegiance,
and invariably resents every act of infidelity by
robbing her votary of just such measure of his
power as may be in direct ratio to his offence. It
would be quite possible to prove this assertion by
pointing to individual instances in substantiation ;
but that would necessitate bringing in the names of
contemporaries, and it is not well to give unneces-
sary pain, when every informed person can supply
the examples for himself. As touching the past,
the landscape man of earlier generations was
scarcely confronted by this temptation. Turner
had an almost princely patron in Lord Egremont;
but the Sussex peer was himself a Bohemian, and
had far too high a respect for the man of genius
who enjoyed his friendship and hospitality, to
attempt to turn him into a useful social property ;
an attempt, too, which if made, Turner himself
would have promptly resented with the con-
temptuous disdain it so richly deserved. Cuyp, it
is true, carried on the business of brewing, but it is
clear the business worked almost automatically; it
simply supplied him with the means to indulge
without strain his passion for painting. Cuyp was,
in the very best sense of the word, an amateur, and,
in that sense, all really great landscape painters are
amateurs. As soon as they develop the attributes
of the tradesman, the courtier, or the diplomat,
they inflict upon their art distinct injuries, and a
persistence in such courses must of necessity end
in destroying the art faculty altogether. Of
course, one is not insensible to the fact that
the absence of creature comforts, the anxiety
about to-morrow's meal, must also prove dis-
tinctly hurtful; but for a landscape painter, con-
cerned as he is with translating and suggesting
that which in its variety, its infinite breadth
and depth, its all-but-incommunicable subtilty,
the highest wisdom lies in reducing the number
of his needs to the lowest minimum. Sometimes,
alas ! this minimum is denied, and the painter
being of the earth, like the rest of us, succumbs.
Happily, however, the sum total of life's tragedy
has not been added to by many such pathetic
denouements as this. At the last moment, the
discerning purchaser arrives, or by other turn of
fortune's wheel the struggling artist is permitted to
struggle on. For, whether necessity or a sane
choice imposes it, I say advisedly and deliberately,
that no great and enduring work can be achieved
in landscape art, save at the price of severe self-
renunciation. In order to enter into the very soul
of Nature, a painter must consent to simplify and
clarify his own soul. Nature will not reveal her-