Studio: international art (57.1913)

The Wonder of Work on the Panama Canal

panelling of the rooms he has fitted up for Dr.
Epstein the general surface is pleasantly relieved
by the introduction of inlays or carving. The pre-
ference of his client for sculpture as the chief decora-
tive feature of the rooms coincided entirely with the
architect’s ideas, but he has contrived to counteract
any feeling of austerity arising in this way by using
upholstery of rich colours. In the nursery oval pic-
tures with fairy-tale subjects relieve the monotony
of the white enamelled surface of the wainscot.

The wonder of work on

THE PANAMA CANAL. BY
JOSEPH PENNELL.

I went to Panama because I believed that, in
the making of the greatest work of modern time,
I should find the greatest inspiration. The desire
to draw, to etch, to lithograph the Wonder of Work
is no new thing with me—it is no new thing with
artists who have always believed in work as a
motive; building, digging, constructing, demolish-
ing, have from the earliest time been the subject
of endless art.

And the greater the artist the greater has been
his interest in work—in the work going on around
him—the work of his own time. As the Church
gave up art, the artist turned to another patron, the
State, and in the recording of great works under-
taken by the State there are great motives.

But the study of work for its own sake, for its
grandeur, picturesqueness, mystery, or pathos, has
always been a theme for artists; specially those
artists who have endeavoured to glorify the greatest
work being carried out in their day.

Rembrandt’s best etchings are of the mills and
dykes of Holland, the most important works, the
most vital subjects, in his country and his time.

Velasquez’s Spinners is of the same quality as
the Menitias, yet the picture is but an interior filled
with work-women. I do not call a painting like
his Forge, or Vulcan, a painting of work, for this,
fine as it is, is a machine—it is not a genuine
thing, and in this connection I would dismiss all
imaginative renderings of work from Cimabue to
Watts, though the greatest painting by Watts’s far
greater contemporary, Madox Brown, is Work. It
is far easier to be symbolic, imaginative, cubic, in
one’s studio than decorative, realistic, actual, at the
mouth of a coal mine. It is easy enough to give
a list of great artists who have glorified work, but
it is difficult enough to keep it within limits. There
is Claude, with his harbours; Canaletto, Guardi,
and Piranesi with the building and destruction of
132

Venice and Rome; Turner—though he got
everything wrong—-with his Carthage that never
would stand up, and a locomotive that never would
run. And it is really too funny to remember that,
while Ruskin was writing and damning the changing
character of England, Turner and Constable and
Crome were painting it and immortalizing it.

But in these last days work has become the
greatest thing in the world, and more and more
artists have turned to it, have devoted themselves
entirely to it. Nearly every one of Meryon’s
etchings is of work. Whistler’s Thames plates and
Nocturnes are but the glorifying of work. Of the
canvases and drawings of Millet and of Segantini
this is equally true, and with their contemporaries
we come to the greatest of all—I mean in that he
devoted himself entirely to portraying work in
sculpture, in drawing, in painting—Constantin
Meunier. No one before in Europe had found
subjects in the coal mines and iron furnaces of
Belgium. Of course the sentimental toiler had
been hauling canal boats and greeting his children,
with mills and smoke faintly suggested in the
distance, so as not to disturb the sensitive patron.
But Meunier saw the real Wonder of Work, Whistler
its exquisite beauty, its endless mystery, its perfect
decoration. And there are the Japanese to be
taken into account. It is to these widely varied
artists that I, in common with all others who care
for the Wonder of Work, owe my inspiration.

With me it is no new thing. The drawings of
ships I made as a boy from my father’s office were
followed by sketches of houses being built, made
from our home windows; and when, still a boy, my
father took me to the coal mines of my native
State, I found and drew subjects that I went back
to and drew again near forty years later—caring
for the subjects I had cared for as a boy and
seeing that I was right in the things I had then
drawn. The first magazine article I ever illustrated
was of work, and in it is a drawing of an oil refinery.
The love of and interest in modern work is no late
development. For years I have, with two or three
other men, been scouring Europe and America for
subjects ; you have to hunt for them, for not only
can no one tell you where they are to be found,
not only must you find them for yourself, but the
composition you see one day never returns, it has
got to be done then and there, either direct from
nature or from memory.

I have hunted these subjects from San Francisco
to Sorrento, and the more I hunt the more I find,
and the more I learn, for the first time I tackled a
steel mill I made a sorry mess of it. There is as