Studio: international art (35.1905)

The Tempera Exhibition

“ ATALANTA AND MELANION ”

was only a painter in oils. I mean Memlinc ; and
I am glad now to be able to recall having made
that reservation. For, so far from dispelling such
misgivings as I might have entertained at that time
with regard to the absolute superiority of egg
medium over oil, the latest tempera exhibition
has only increased and confirmed them. Regard-
ing the work as a whole, and particularly certain
specimens of harsh, leaden-toned attempts to
portray landscapes of decidedly modern cast, in
a modern style in all else save in the substitution
of tempera for oil medium, I am driven to con-
clude that artistic salvation is not to be realised in
any one given vehicle of itself—a mere shibboleth
—but in some quality more subtle and intangible,
more deeply underlying the outward surface. The
Tempera Society is a talented and (what is not a
whit less indispensable) a conscientious body of
artists, thoroughly in earnest about their work.
But if they want to effect any permanent reform
in the art practice of our time, they must beware
of adopting an attitude of servile archaism. It
is not by seizing upon and emphasising the
peculiarities of one of the old painters or
schools of painters that the highest perfection
in art is to be achieved. It is the inmost,

essential qualities constituting the fundamental
characteristics pertaining to all early paintings
alike, and these only, that artists, who are not
pedants but men of sound common sense,
should seek to assimilate. For, be one’s pre-
dilections in favour of tempera never so strong,
the study of the primitive oil painters of Northern
Europe ought to be cultivated just as much
as the early Italians. The work of a Hans
Memlinc, a Dierick Bouts, or a Jean Perreal, is
every whit as capable of furnishing valuable object-

BY J. D. BATTEN

lessons as is the work of an Angelico, a Vivarini
or a Carpaccio. And this because, howsoever
divergent the media they employed, old master
compared with old master—be the one an oil
painter like Van Eyck, the other an egg painter
like Crivelli—their several works have a far closer
relationship to each other than the work of either
class does to a modern production, from which,
indeed, a wide gulf divides them. In the presence
of ancient paintings one may often be in doubt as
to the nature of the medium employed, whether
oil or egg; but for an original old painting of
either kind who could mistake a new work,
except it were a cunning forgery expressly wrought
to deceive ?

In fine—and I trust that what I say may in no
wise wound the susceptibilities of tempera devotees
—I am inclined to the belief that the consideration
of how to produce the ideal picture is not so much
a question of egg versus oil as it is of primed versus
unprimed ground. If this be so, it seems to me
that it was a marvellous intuition of William Blake’s
that led him, notwithstanding his own abortive
efforts at grounding on canvas or sheet copper,
straight to the very root of the matter when he
wrote : “Before Vandyke’s time and in his time all
genuine pictures are on plaster or whiting grounds,
and none since.” In the nature of the ground,
then, whether primed solid panel or stretched
canvas, rather than in the particular kind of vehicle
used to dilute the pigment subsequently applied to
that ground, consists the crucial distinction between
the ancient and the modern art of painting.

And therefore the leaders of the tempera
movement in their respective centres—Mr. J. D.
Batten, in London, and Mr. Joseph Southall, in
Birmingham—have rendered signal service to art

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