Chapter XX: British Impressionists

In spite of the efforts of the Arts and Crafts movement the average man was still unmoved from his conviction that art was an affair of pictures. He even went so far as to believe that the new art movement was only accidentally derived from pictorial art and would eventually end where it began--in something to hang on a wall. He was supported in this belief by the usual predominance given to picture talk in the discussions of the contending art factions. The Nineties were very fruitful of such discussions, inheriting as they did the still unsettled principles and contentions which survived from the artistic battles of the Eighties. These battles were never more than the British echo of French Impressionism, but they were complicated by the so-called naturalism of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The latter was largely the affair of the preceding thirty years, and with the dawn of the Nineties Pre-Raphaelitism had become an accepted art convention for those desirous of accepting it, and a subject of indifference for the rest.

Whistler, allied with but apart from the Impressionists, had fought the fight of the open-air school to as conclusive an end as such contests ever reach. And Ruskin’s ideas had been almost entirely diverted into their more defensible channels of craftsmanship. George Moore had been for several years holding aloft the banner of French Impressionism with conspicuous success, in _The Speaker_ and elsewhere, and William Ernest Henley had fought in _The Scots Observer_ an equally vigorous and equally successful battle on behalf of the same ideals, laying stress upon a realism more definitely associated with romance. But in the midst of all this talk about paint and technique and new methods of approaching Nature, there was a very real undercurrent of philosophic thought which was not afraid of associating pictorial art with social life and action. The old sanity of applied art constantly reasserted itself in the newer movements. Whistler also, when occasion offered, did not scorn applied art, as we know from his enthusiasm over the decoration of the Peacock Room at Sir James Leyland’s house, and of his own house in Chelsea. Frank Brangwyn was as much inclined towards mural painting as George Frederick Watts, whilst William Nicholson, James Pryde, Dudley Hardy and Aubrey Beardsley devoted time and talent to the creation of a national school of poster decorators. And the revival of the decorated book gave black and white art a new sphere of expression.

Even so uncompromising an advocate of the framed picture as George Moore was not averse from discussing the value of pictures in relation to national life. Speaking of the practical utility of the Impressionist pictures he said: “They would inspire not only a desire to possess beautiful things, but I can imagine young men and women deriving an extraordinary desire of freedom from the landscapes of Monet and Sisley: Manet, too. Manet, perhaps, more than anyone liberates the mind from conventions, from prejudices. He creates a spirit of revolt against the old; he inculcates a desire of adventure. Adam standing in Eden looking at the sun rise was no more naked and unashamed than Manet. I believe that a gallery of Impressionist pictures would be more likely than any other pictures to send a man to France, and that is a great point. Everyone must go to France. France is the source of all the arts. Let the truth be told. We go there, every one of us, like rag-pickers, with baskets on our backs, to pick up the things that come in our way, and out of unconsidered trifles fortunes have often been made. We learn in France to appreciate not only art--we learn to appreciate life, to look upon life as an incomparable gift. In some café, in some Nouvelle Athènes, named though it be not in any Baedeker nor marked on any traveller’s chart, the young man’s soul will be exalted to praise life. Art is but praise of life, and it is only through art that we can praise life.” Such an attitude is inseparable from the modern art movement, and it survives to-day in the development of the decorative arts among the Post Impressionists.

_By Charles Conder_

_In the possession of Mr. Grant Richards_]

Conventional pictorial art in this country at the time of the modern revolt had long suffered from hopeless privacy and class distinction. Richard Muther says: “English painting is exclusively an art based on luxury, optimism and aristocracy; in its neatness, cleanliness and good-breeding it is exclusively designed to ingratiate itself with English ideas of comfort. Yet the pictures have to satisfy very different tastes--the taste of a wealthy middle class which wishes to have substantial nourishment, and the æsthetic taste of an _élite_ class, which will only tolerate the quintessence of art, the most subtle art that can be given. But all these works are not created for galleries, but for the drawing-room of a private house, and in subject and treatment they have all to reckon with the ascendant view that a picture ought, in the first place, to be an attractive article of furniture for the sitting-room. The traveller, the lover of antiquity, is pleased by imitation of the ancient style; the sportsman, the lover of country life, has a delight in little rustic scenes, and the women are enchanted with feminine types. And everything must be kept within the bounds of what is charming, temperate and prosperous, without in any degree suggesting the struggle for existence. The pictures have themselves the grace of that mundane refinement from the midst of which they are beheld.” Into some such condition of pictorial art the new men threw themselves, opening windows, as it were, and allowing the outside world, with all its rudeness and all its unseen and unrealised beauties, to enter.

The organised revolt took the form of protest by the New English Art Club against the Royal Academy, and of the Glasgow School against the conventions of the Royal Scottish Academy, and as art movements generally begin elsewhere and end here, the battles they were fighting represented practically the end of the fight for Impressionism. The artistic public was gradually becoming used to pictures that were visions of light and atmosphere rather than pictorial anecdotes, and the leaders of the new movement were being absorbed by both academies. Absorption by the old enemy was, however, not the fate of all the revolutionaries, for several, including their earliest leader, Wilson Steer, maintained an attitude of no compromise. Neither did the battle with academic conventions end with the work of the two groups of artists named. It was carried on into the new century and linked up with new movements by the International Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, founded, with Whistler as President and Lavery as Vice-President, in 1898.

The outstanding painters of the Impressionist movement in this country represented all phases of modern art and considerable variety of individual expression. There were Walter Sickert, Maitland and Roussel, who received early inspiration from Whistler; the realists of the Newlyn School led by Stanhope Forbes, and deriving their art from Bastien Lepage; and more individual and, consequently, less easily classified, such painters as George Clausen, John S. Sargent, Wilson Steer, William Rothenstein, Frank Brangwyn, William Nicholson, William Orpen and, later on, Augustus John; whilst standing apart from any particular “movement,” but none the less modern, were Charles Conder, Dudley Hardy, Maurice Greiffenhagen, Robert Fowler, Sidney H. Sime, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. The Glasgow School included most of the Scottish painters who became subjects of discussion at the Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition promoted by Sir Coutts Lindsay, on the suggestion of Clausen, in 1890. Among the men from the north who were either associated with the Glasgow group or in sympathy with its bid for freedom were John Lavery, James Guthrie, Arthur Melville, E. A. Hornel, T. Millie Dow, George Henry, James Pryde, D. Y. Cameron, Harrington Mann, W. Y. Macgregor and, at a later date, J. T. Peploe and John Duncan Fergusson.

Out of this wealth of artistic genius it would be idle to classify or to associate any single painter finally with any definite group of painters, even though he had deliberately allied himself with one or the other schools or coteries. The really big men of the period can only be classified in so indefinite a way as to make such classification almost worthless. The artistic associations of the period are interesting from another point of view. They prove the existence not only of widespread activity in painting, but of a healthy desire for that camaraderie which hitherto, with the exception of the friendships of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, had been almost confined to Paris. But if classification is impossible or unnecessary it is quite permissible to show how remarkably the artists of the time were grouped by the prevailing modern tendency. And it is interesting to note that, although the forward movement in pictorial art absolved itself from all charges of literariness, its very existence was a part of that trend of modern ideas which was affecting all the arts. In literature the tendency was called Realism, in the graphic arts it was called Impressionism. In this book I have called it--the search for reality. That search was the culmination of all the activities and changes of the nineteenth century. And in the last decade of the century it saw the human mind fall back upon individual preference as the surest guide to the fine arts and the bigger and more difficult art of life.

Every painter of the Nineties who stood for modernity strove to use his own personality and his own experience as the test of his art. He may have said that he would paint things as they are, but in his heart he knew that that was an impossible ideal. Those painters of genius who had set out with the intention had ended always by painting their own particular view of things, and modern art-philosophy sought to prove, and succeeded in proving, that such results justified the means. Auguste Rodin, who is the greatest, as well as the most realistic and most personal, of modern sculptors, insisted upon the reverent and exact copying of Nature as a means towards personal expression. And as a further proof that naturalism may produce personal variety, one has but to remember the Pre-Raphaelites, who were as devoted in the pursuit of natural exactitude as any of the Impressionists; but, with the possible exception of Ford Madox Brown, they never produced a canvas that was not romantic and literary, and, in spite of the most devoted attention to Nature, unnatural. The cause of this was that, whilst talking much of Nature, they were not inspired by physical reality at all. They were essentially a group of thinkers and visionaries, and the whole of the movement was book-inspired. It was the result of life approached by way of the Arthurian and the Biblical legends, Dante and Shakespeare, and the observation of natural things always subserved this literary interest. The Pre-Raphaelites brought with them a fine æsthetic sense and high purpose, and some of them could draw, and all of them paint, but, without any intention of under-estimating their achievement, it must be admitted that they never succeeded in doing more than represent in paint what had already been realised in literature.

The Impressionists adopted the opposite course. They treated the art of painting as the medium of actual sight. What could be seen rather than what could be thought or imagined was the business of their art. This did not mean the ultimate eradication of thought from painting, but it did mean that thought must take second place to vision. Where thought existed in the artist it was bound to show in his work, but that work was primarily a view of life arranged in tones and values of colour and light. As a matter of fact, the Impressionist paintings do actually reveal abundance of thought, and nowadays it is quite easy to see that the movement was even more intellectual than Pre-Raphaelitism; but never in the literary sense. In this country Impressionism did not reach its logical conclusion. The older English movement had its uncompromising Holman Hunt, as Impressionism in France had its Manet, but the modernists of the Nineties in this country recognised no logic of progress save idiosyncrasy or circumstance. For that reason the period produced no convention in painting. It borrowed much from France and something from Germany, it defended its adopted ideas with spirit, it compromised where and when it liked, and it argued about the meaning of art, sometimes as if a definition would confirm or compel a renaissance. For the rest, it produced many competent painters, but fewer than might have been expected who could be said to represent the peculiar genius of the age.

The characteristic artists of the period were drawn from no particular school; indeed, in many instances they were quite remote from all definable groups. Aubrey Beardsley, although deriving in some measure from Burne-Jones, might easily have stepped out of eighteenth-century France with Charles Conder; Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, Robert Fowler and Maurice Greiffenhagen, although recalling past influences, have each sufficient individuality to stand as manifestations of the more definite spirit of the period without in any single instance representing all that was modern or strikingly new.

Charles Conder represents perhaps more than any of these artists, except Beardsley, the peculiar artificial mood of the Nineties. His work has the indefinable hot-house atmosphere of the decadence. The drowsiness of a replete civilisation idles through his paintings, and to the innate luxury of his themes he added the material luxury of the silk panels and fans which he loved to decorate. Nothing is decisive about his vision save the voluptuousness of doing nothing. His world is all languorous and dreamful, and there is no movement except the occasional strolling or dancing of stately or delicate persons and the swaying of fans; no sound save the rustle of silk or the music of faintly touched harps or viols; no odours save those of flowers and scented bodies; and for place and boundary there is only colour--colour suggesting form, suggesting all corporeal things, suggesting even itself, for Conder never more than hints at the vivid possibilities of life, more than a hint might waken his puppets from their Laodicean dream. “Conder’s women are not timeless,” writes Charles Ricketts, “they have forgotten their age; but this, like beauty, is often a mere matter of opinion! We shall find their histories on the stage of Beaumarchais: they have passed into the realms of immortality not in the paintings of Watteau but in the melodies of Mozart. They are ‘The Countess,’ Susanna, Donna Elvira; all are anxious to pardon--they are peeping at the moving pageant, for Don Juan was seen but a moment since. But what can have detained Donna Anna? It is so late, the ‘Queen of the Night’ has sung her great aria, the air is close--there are too many roses!” Too many roses! Charles Conder’s art is in that phrase. It is the art of the privileged, recalling the decadent folk who were the prey of the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’ romance. Watteau, Fragonard and Monticelli have each contributed something towards the making of this delicate art, but, as Ricketts points out, “the rest of his art is modern, and was possible only at the time in which it appeared.” If the _Fêtes Galantes_ of Watteau became literature in Paul Verlaine, they were translated back into painting by Charles Conder; and both he and the poet added to them their own special sense of the world-weariness of modernity.

_By Charles Conder_

_From the picture in the possession of Mr. Grant
Richards_]

Equally characteristic of the Nineties, but of a more virile type, were James Pryde and William Nicholson. Pryde took the life about him as his model, the town folk and the country folk, and with power and originality made them live again in paint. Nicholson saw both the countryside and the town with a new vision which combined when transferred to his canvases reticence of colour and power of suggestion. During the period his masterly series of woodcuts in colour were widely known and appreciated at first through the series of portraits in _The New Review_, and later in such volumes as _London Types_ and the _Almanack of Twelve Sports_. It was Pryde and Nicholson, under the title of the Beggarstaff Brothers, who gave the poster movement, already well established in France, something like a firm basis in this country. They were not alone in the field, but it was their work which made British genius a factor to be reckoned with in a peculiarly modern branch of art. Each had studied in Paris and had doubtless come under the spell of the striking poster work of Toulouse-Lautrec, but the designs afterwards produced by them were in no sense imitative. Indeed, as Charles Hiatt has pointed out, their posters were intensely English in character. “In their way,” he said, “they are as racy of the soil as the caricatures of Rowlandson, the paintings of Morland, or the drawings of Charles Keene.” The work of the Beggarstaff Brothers was first seen at the Poster Exhibition held at the Royal Aquarium, Westminster, in 1894. Their exhibit included the masterly _Hamlet_, stencilled in four colours, and a number of sketches and studies for posters of all kinds. The attractive use of simple masses of colour without shading, in fine, the entirely successful application of the idea of the stencil to poster work, made the artists famous at a bound, and their posters became familiar and altogether satisfying features of the street hoardings. It is worth recording, however, that although the Beggarstaff Brothers won so much appreciation, there were people who could see nothing but blotches of paint in the new work. This may be illustrated by a story told of an early adventure of the artists with a client. The Beggarstaff Brothers had been commissioned to produce a poster for the Drury Lane Pantomime, 1895–1896. The result was that classic among posters, the _Cinderella_. But the work did not find favour with Sir Augustus Harris; and the famous manager was supported in his dislike by Dan Leno, who thought the poster looked as though someone had spilt ink down it. The situation was saved by the fortunate arrival of Phil May, who, realising the state of affairs, turned the position by innocently congratulating Sir Augustus on having been so fortunate in obtaining such an effective advertisement.

The chief characteristics of painting in the Nineties were personal courage and adventurous technique. Years of strife with convention had at length cleared a path for free play in both, and, although skirmishing still continued, those who desired to be themselves in paint had at least as much encouragement as their brothers in the literary camp.

The works of painters who thought and dreamt about life were, of course, as numerous as ever, but no exhibition was complete without specimens of the work of those painters who added to thought and imagination the revived faculty of careful observation. And even modern artists who remained visionaries and dreamers adopted a symbolism of form and colour which possessed a new delicacy and an approximation to observed knowledge in keeping with the tendencies of the period though of earlier inspiration. Ricketts and Charles Shannon achieved rare qualities of imaginative expression with fine technique; Maurice Greiffenhagen and Robert Fowler gave Impressionism a romantic meaning, and symbolism found exponents in these painters and others, and in the work of many black and white artists and pen-draughtsmen. But the final pictorial achievement of the period is not to be found in one artist, but in many; perhaps not in any painter or group of painters, but in the fresh possibilities of vision thrown open by the whole artistic effort of the decade, possibilities which led always to the most modern of all accomplishments--the art of looking at life in one’s own way.

It is not easy to single out painters from among the large number contributing to this movement, but a fair idea of the more normal tendencies which have survived from the time may be acquired by a consideration of three typical _fin de siècle_ artists whose work has maintained its high quality and distinction down to to-day. These painters are John Lavery, William Rothenstein and Frank Brangwyn. Each of them represents a compromise with Impressionism. They are Impressionists, each in his own way, but the way of each is to add to an essentially realistic idea some personal quality which prevents that idea ever reaching its full logical conclusion. Lavery is in the Velasquez-Whistler descent, and he possesses technical reserves which might, had he been a Frenchman, have urged him into the camp of scientific Impressionism. He preferred to use his modern skill, and all that modernity had taught him in the way of vision, in mating reality with sentiment. He lacks Whistler’s decorative sense, and even when he is most realistic he never achieves the frankness of a Manet or a Degas. But taking what he wants from reality, and adding what he pleases from human sentiment (which is also reality), he has created a series of paintings with some of the technical qualities of Whistler’s portraits, but nothing of that profound sense of character which immortalises those works.

William Rothenstein carries Impressionism further than Lavery, and instead of sentiment he adds a remarkably keen sense of reality to thoughtfulness and spirituality. His pictures are interpretations. In all of them intellect plays an important part; but he is too much of an artist ever to allow mind finally to dominate imagination or vision. He recalls George Frederick Watts in his concern for what is lofty in thought and inspiring in idea, although he has never illustrated abstract ideas after the manner of Watts, nor are his pictures didactic. His works impress by quiet profundity of theme and fine qualities of light and colour. His test for art, as expressed in the introductory chapter of his essay on _Goya_ (1900), can be applied with success to his own pictures: “For however many reasons men may give for the admiration of masterpieces,” he said, “it is in reality the probity and intensity with which the master has carried out his work, by which they are dominated; and it is his method of overcoming difficulties, not of evading them, which gives style, breadth and becoming mystery to his execution. And this quality of intensity, whether it be the result of curiosity for form, or of a profound imagination for nature, which lives, as it were, upon the surface of a drawing, or of a picture, is the best test we have for what we may consider as art.” Rothenstein has many of the characteristics of the Nineties--curiosity about life and thought, personality in vision and statement, and that sincerity of aim which is originality; but he is never decadent, if only for the reason that he never looked upon art as a thing in itself, but as a means towards the fulfilment of life.

Impressionism and romanticism meet in the art of Frank Brangwyn, as Impressionism and sentiment meet in that of John Lavery, and Impressionism and intellect in Rothenstein. But more than that--a picture by Brangwyn is a bridge between private luxury and public splendour. His art suggests the big virile world made splendid by the romance of action. His pictures, even his etchings, seem to have small relationship with what are called the fine arts; they are not to be associated with dainty things: the bric-à-brac of drawing-rooms and the baubles of collectors and connoisseurs. Brangwyn’s work has no connection with such things. He is as far removed from them as Walt Whitman is from the writers of drawing-room love lyrics. Everything about his work is large and vigorous. His vivid colours, his heroic masses of form, his bold lighting, even apart from any bigness of canvas, suggest the public place rather than the room. Frank Brangwyn is, in fact, a decorative painter. Impressionism in its less imaginative aspects hardly touched him; he learnt from it what all artists could learn without endangering imagination or individual genius--the use of light in relation to colour and form. And this knowledge he applied to his own inborn sense of design in the creation of those richly patterned mural paintings which in themselves are little short of an artistic renaissance.

It will be seen from these three examples that the painters of the period were wide-ranged in vision. Yet even they symbolise little more than the broad and normal phases of painting. Such painters, to name but three more, as Walter Sickert, James Pryde and E. A. Hornel, are as different in every way from Lavery, Rothenstein and Brangwyn, as they are from one another. But they also represent the period. Sickert by his mastery over his materials and by the individuality of his outlook; Pryde by equal mastery and equal individuality in addition to rare insight into character; and Hornel by his unique sense of decoration and colour. Such variety among painters was hitherto unknown in this country, and apart from the vitality it reveals, it indicates also a complete victory over academic convention, and the creation of such a margin of freedom as would permit of any painter thenceforth expressing himself in his own way. This freedom, subject of battle for several decades, was consummated in the Nineties.