DOI issue:
Nr. 150 (September 1905)
DOI article:Vallance, Aymer: The Tempera Exhibition at the Carfax Gallery
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20712#0309
The Tempera Exhibition
“ELAINE” BY BERNARD SLEIGH
guide them, aspirations, however lofty, could avail
but little. Cruel fate, rather, compelled them to
grope in the dark, haltingly, yet with an earnestness
of endeavour that merits profound respect and
gratitude, in their ineffectual experiments towards
the attainment of those very qualities which they
discerned in the works of most of the old masters,
and which, had they themselves possessed the same
knowledge which it is our privilege to enjoy, they
might perhaps have recognised to be the distinctive
property of tempera painting. Prominent among
these idealists, born out of due time, is William
Blake, in whom a deplorable incapacity of drawing
was united to an imagination inspired as, I think,
never English painter’s was before—nor since, until
the advent of the Pre-Raphaelites. The latter
artists, of all people, should by rights have been
tempera painters. That they were not so is one of
the strangest paradoxes in the whole history of the art.
Some effects, indeed, in painting—such as that of
the diaphanous white veils which confer, even more
perhaps than crowns and gems do, an air of queen-
liness, and mysterious purity withal, upon the
Madonnas of Italian primitives—can only, it is
claimed, be produced adequately in tempera. It
is on record that Dante Gabriel Rossetti “ tried to
copy in oil the white muslin dress over red velvet
of the portrait of Emeralda Baldinelli (which at
one time belonged to him and is now in the
Ionides bequest at South Kensington),” but was
obliged to own his inability to obtain the desired
effect. He may or may not have assigned a reason
for his ill-success, but a tempera advocate would
unhesitatingly attribute Rossetti’s failure to the fact
that he did not go the right way to work in adopting
an oil medium.
The greatest esteem for Blake was professed by
William Bell-Scott and his circle, and yet no one who
takes the trouble to ascertain what Blake’s opinions
and practice were in this regard can fail to be aware
291
“ELAINE” BY BERNARD SLEIGH
guide them, aspirations, however lofty, could avail
but little. Cruel fate, rather, compelled them to
grope in the dark, haltingly, yet with an earnestness
of endeavour that merits profound respect and
gratitude, in their ineffectual experiments towards
the attainment of those very qualities which they
discerned in the works of most of the old masters,
and which, had they themselves possessed the same
knowledge which it is our privilege to enjoy, they
might perhaps have recognised to be the distinctive
property of tempera painting. Prominent among
these idealists, born out of due time, is William
Blake, in whom a deplorable incapacity of drawing
was united to an imagination inspired as, I think,
never English painter’s was before—nor since, until
the advent of the Pre-Raphaelites. The latter
artists, of all people, should by rights have been
tempera painters. That they were not so is one of
the strangest paradoxes in the whole history of the art.
Some effects, indeed, in painting—such as that of
the diaphanous white veils which confer, even more
perhaps than crowns and gems do, an air of queen-
liness, and mysterious purity withal, upon the
Madonnas of Italian primitives—can only, it is
claimed, be produced adequately in tempera. It
is on record that Dante Gabriel Rossetti “ tried to
copy in oil the white muslin dress over red velvet
of the portrait of Emeralda Baldinelli (which at
one time belonged to him and is now in the
Ionides bequest at South Kensington),” but was
obliged to own his inability to obtain the desired
effect. He may or may not have assigned a reason
for his ill-success, but a tempera advocate would
unhesitatingly attribute Rossetti’s failure to the fact
that he did not go the right way to work in adopting
an oil medium.
The greatest esteem for Blake was professed by
William Bell-Scott and his circle, and yet no one who
takes the trouble to ascertain what Blake’s opinions
and practice were in this regard can fail to be aware
291