Studio: international art (47.1909)

Modern Interior Painting

In the old Dutch interior paintings, in their still
life paintings—for these two go together—we feel
the pleasure which the painters took in each little
incident they painted. How they loved to make
everything so very real though all on a doll’s house
scale. They were like children with a doll’s house.
It has significance, perhaps, that the present return
to all this interior incident began in Mr. William
Rothenstein’s The Doll's House. Mr. Rothenstein
had to go on to other things, for a true artist
scarcely directs himself. Perhaps Mr. Orpen has
expressed himself best in interior painting, because
of his pleasure in glasses and picture frames, in
papers and trays, in sunny spaces of wall and
bright things shining from the shadows, in the
curiously pale and rainbow gleams of old porce-
lain—and above all, because his art is so evidently
the expression of his pleasure in these things, his
and their owner’s—for he paints the portraits of
collectors, I believe, for the sake of their collections.
He has shown this pleasure in art which is also
expressive of the purest pleasures of painting itself.

Mr. Walter Russell has more than once been
attracted by the problem
of light coming through
large windows, invading
the room to such an extent
that the contrast between
the indoor and out-of-door
values becomes almost
hypothetical. But this
excess of light multiplies
rather than diminishes the
difficulties; the flowers
near the window greet it,
it flashes pleasantly upon
them ; but it wars upon
the kind of beauty in-
trinsic to interior objects
seen in a partial light.

To take pleasure in a
kind of surface beauty,
which is only to be found
indoors, as the old masters
took pleasure in it, and
yet to be compelled to
lose sight of it, to dissolve
it all into tones, and out of
these to reconstruct it all
over again with a miracu-
lous incorporation of the
light of which it is partly
made — this is the pro-
blem of modern painting.

256

By embracing truths which were beyond ancient
vision, which are impossible to realize by ancient
methods, this is how the not yet complete history
of interior genre desires to complete itself. To
preserve the right relationship of the whole
scheme of values, the picture must be conceived
not in parts—which admit of easy elaboration—
but, once for all, as a whole. This condition
it is, of course, that makes the difficulties in
obtaining that finish of touch in detail which
seems as essential to the true expression of these
things as it might be out of place in an
“ impression ” of the wind-driven sea. It is an “ im-
pression,” as with a sea-piece, but if of anything
at all, of surfaces precise and smooth, to which
in the end the paint must accommodate itself.
Many canvases, of course, give a very charm-
ing rendering of the precious quality of detail,
at the expense of all sense of atmosphere and
harmony. It might almost be said, I think,
that harmony and the sense of atmosphere go
together, that they are scientifically inter-dependent,
the result of the same law in the phenomenon of