Studio: international art (50.1910)

Sir William Quiller Orchardson, R.A.

defies analysis. In science analysis is everything ;
in art it has no place. To understand the
chemical formulae of the component parts of a
flower would lend no aid to the aesthetic appre-
ciation of its beauty and its perfume. To the
philosophic mind such knowledge has its deep
poetry just as a reverent study of Nature in any of
her manifestations is food for wondering admira-
tion. But to say of a great painter that he was great
because he drew finely, had a magnificent sense of
colour, of form, and so on, is what one is able to
say not of one but of a hundred great painters.
When these things have been said there remains
the purely personal equation which defies all
definition, and never more completely than in the
present instance. Of the literary side of his work,
upon which J have already lightly touched, I can
only say that one would judge that had he been a
writer instead of a painter, he would, in all proba-
bility, have attained an
equal and similar eminence
in the sister art. Still
would refinement have
been the keynote of all he
did. One imagines the
sparkling epigram ex-
pressed by the word of
words needed to suit the
case. Somehow I think
he would have written
short stories for the most
part, with only an occa-
sional large volume; verse
sometimes, too, which
would have been eagerly
read, looked forward to
eagerly by men and women
of taste. And it pleases
me to think that even as
he painted Napoleon he
would have written of him,
for no one who looks at
the fallen hero on the
“ Bellerophon,” with all
the pathos (not entirely
unmixed with petulance
as of a spoiled child) of
its expression, can fail to
feel how absorbed the
painter was in the psychic
side of his picture as well
as in the painting of it.

And just a word here of
that other great Napoleon

94

picture, now to be seen in the Japan British
Exhibition. It will be a delight to multitudes
of Sir William Orchardson’s admirers to have an
opportunity of seeing his St. Helena, 1816:
Napoleon dictating the Account of his Campaigns—
a work which has never been publicly shown
since it was seen on the walls of the Royal
Academy in 1892. If a less dramatic moment
of the great man’s life, it is, in a way, more
solemnly impressive than the well-known picture
in the Tate Gallery. If anything, too, the art
of it seems more absolutely certain of itself
even than that of the earlier picture ; and in the
extreme beauty and harmony of its colour scheme
it takes rank among the master’s finest achieve-
ments. Once more we have the great sense of
space, once more the lonely figure, older this time,
and, in a sense, sadder, because the years have
passed, and hope is buried at last, yet still the

“on the north foreland” (diploma work), by w. q. ORCHARDSON, R.A,
(By permission of the Fresident and Council of the Royal Academy and the
Berlin Photographic Co., 133, New Bond Street, London)