Studio: international art (9.1897)

Ideal Life of a Landscape Painter

self at any other price ; her inner mysteries may be
perceived fitfully by the well-fed, pampered man of
the world, but he can never hope to live in the
atmosphere of these Arcana ; never hope to possess
them as the circumambient air of his own being,
until he has brought himself into harmony with
those hidden things by throwing off the husk of a
self-indulgent civilisation. The first condition,
then, making for an ideal life, insuring for the
painter that his work shall be immortal, is that he
should live with Nature, reverently, simply, and
patiently, and with a singleness of purpose to
extract from her her secrets, from which nothing
can turn him. So will he be permitted to enjoy and
register her beauties. So he will have his reward.

As an almost necessary corollary to this
condition, two others follow. Loyalty to a par-
ticular corner of the earth—the world is too wide
and life is too short to permit the strongest of
painters to become a universalist—and rigorous
isolation. It may be objected that Turner was a
universalist,and this may be allowed. The present
is not the time to discuss Turner's art; its mag-
nificent power and range, its unhappy extravagances
and formalities. It may suffice to state boldly
that which I have been bold enough to assert
before, that Turner's strength is not shown by the
number or the variety of his productions ; therein
rather is his weakness demonstrated. His splendid
industry, his indomitable pluck notwithstanding,
Turner's art, standing by itself, has not the endur-
ing qualities to which Constable's work can
justly lay claim, nor has it exercised the influence
over his successors. Constable and the men of
the Norwich School had no pretentions to cosmo-
politan knowledge or achievement; neither had
the men of the Dutch, Nottingham, and Barbizon
Schools, nor have the men of the Wealden School
of to-day. In landscape art the Dutch, Early
English, Nottingham, Norwich, Barbizon and
Wealden Schools represent roughly nearly every-
thing that is enduring in the landscape art of the
world. Turner's art was not altogether free from
the taint of the theatre, as in justice it must be
allowed that Richard Wilson's was not. To labour
this contention would lead me too far afield : it
will suffice to say that the greatest masters of
landscape art have grasped that great initial truth
as affecting all fine art, that the obviously startling
and wonder-producing effects of Nature are not,
of necessity, its most intense manifestations, but
that there often lie, where the eye that has not
the second and inseeing sight would perceive
nothing but commonplace. Therefore, save as a
rest and tonic, the change of scene and of air
necessary for the mental and physical well-being
of all of us, it is not only not essential that the
landscape painter should be constantly changing
his locale, but it may be asserted that in the
majority of cases such a course of action is
distinctly baneful to him. Elsewhere, the present

writer has dealt with a small group of young
painters who, for the past ten years and upwards,
have been working in Sussex and Surrey, and who,
for convenience, he has called the Wealden
School. Contemporary criticism now allows that
these men are in the very fore-front of the land-
scape art of their day and generation, and in each
case their work has been done mainly in and
about the particular village in which they have
pitched their tents. It must always be borne in
mind that to do this—to check that wandering
spirit, that desire to be away, seeking fresh beauties
and experiences, a desire peculiarly incident to the
artistic temperament—makes a most exacting
demand upon the painter, and one to which he
does not submit without imposing upon himself the
most rigorous repression. Nevertheless, he knows
that this repression is necessary. It is only by
becoming familiar with scenes that their full
potentialities reveal themselves. A painter often
waits for years before the picture is discovered in
a given scene or scrap of landscape. Then, under
some happy influence external to himself, blending
with some fortuitous receptivity in himself, the
picture, or the germ of the picture, is revealed,
and the artist's harvest is reaped; for at the
back of the impression lies the knowledge of the
salient characteristics of the scene to be painted.
Never was the homely saying, " The rolling stone
gathers no moss," truer than in the case of the
landscapist. The impressions received in flying
about from place to place lack the depth and the
volume of those which are the result of long
watching and patience, when, the psychological
moment having arrived, the fruitful soil is fructified
by a kindly outside influence.

Then as to isolation. It may be said that the
artist's nature being sensitive, none needs more
than he the genial influences of sympathetic human
contact; and, doubtless, in a measure this is true.
This very sensitiveness, however, makes it
extremely difficult for a painter of Nature to
find in his contemporaries any real help. It is
his business to cultivate and accentuate to the
very utmost his own individual outlook upon
nature. In this personal individual note lies the
very essence of his power, and its presence in his
work gives to it its chief value. No doubt
general discussions on art problems and on the
technical difficulties of painting ; reciprocal con-
fidences on the birth-pangs of production, on the
emotions and moods which anticipate, as they
accompany, the processes of gestation, are health-
ful and needful. Still, for the most part, these
are best left for the moments of rest, and are
generally disturbing and mischievous if they are
the daily portion of the painter. The Barbizon
painters were scarcely more intimately associated
than are the Wealden painters of to-day. They
occasionally met; they occasionally painted
together, but, in the main, they evolved their

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