LECTURE IV.

In the address I delivered on the occasion of the opening of this school, I endeavoured to set forth the system in use in foreign, especially French, schools; (ftn. 2) a system which places Continental artists on so much higher a level as regards technical excellence in Art, than our own. That amazing facility of execution, which enables a French or German artist to attack a canvas ten or fifteen feet square, with as little trouble as it costs us to begin a cabinet picture, while he preserves at the same time the due unity of effect and an even thoroughness of execution, is the result of that system of constantly working from nature, which, giving but a limited time for the completion of a study, obliges the student to work in the simplest and most straightforward manner. This is the system which I have introduced in these schools, having for my aim to obviate as far as possible that timid and unmethodical style of work, which strikes us as the prevailing fault in our exhibitions. This school is but in its early days, and it is difficult to see as yet how far I may have been successful; but I may mention here what I find to be a serious drawback, and indeed the greatest obstacle I have to encounter. I refer to the absence in this place of those traditions, which are to be found in long-established Academies of Art, but which an institution like this must necessarily at first starting be without. There are as yet no elder students to whom the younger ones can look as guides: to see the elder ones who have been brought up in the traditions of the place at their work is perhaps the greatest help a young student can have.

I must confess to having felt somewhat of a shock each time I have looked at the drawings and paintings which were done for the prizes at the end of the last session; — I must confess to having been shocked at the crude absence of style that characterizes them; I mean of that free and intelligent manner of drawing, which is to be found in all the French Schools of Art, at a very early stage of advancement. I have often wondered how far this was due to my own method of instruction.

The above consideration however somewhat consoled me ; for I reflected that students learn mostly by examples, and a style can only be formed after a school has existed for a lengthened period. It is with a view to encourage among you a good style of work, that I now address you, my remarks being intended to direct you where to look for examples for imitation.

Although I have adopted here a system of instruction pretty closely following the French, I do not by any means consider, or intend to convey the impression, that the result at which French artists arrive is to be held up for imitation. Much as I admire their technical facility, I do not consider that they make that use of it which it should be the aim of a true artist to keep before him. French art has indeed, of late years, enormously degenerated. Thanks to the continued and persistent efforts of the "realistic" school, it is descending lower and lower to a mere brutal materialism, any subject which may afford a means of displaying technical ability being eagerly seized upon, and as every artist vies with his fellows in the production of the most sensational results, it is difficult to say at what depths of the horrible and morbidly sensual it may finally arrive. (ftn. 3) It is certainly not with this intention that the great school of David (the model of the existing French ateliers) was founded; his aim being the lofty one of trying to recall the glories of antique art.

It would moreover seem impossible for French artists to conceive of ideal beauty as existing in nature itself. Their ideal school was a failure; it was never more than a cold and uninteresting misconception of the Classical idea, and had no foundation in nature whatever; it copied the letter but failed to seize the spirit of antique art. Ingres, the pupil of David, was the great outcome of this school; and is the real founder of the present excellent system of instruction in France. He himself achieved a mastery of his material, which places him foremost as a painter (using the word in its limited sense), in modern times; his works are in roundness and richness of modelling comparable only to those of Velasquez, while there is in them a severe precision of drawing, which is worthy of all imitation; as regards colour however, his flesh-tints are invariably cold and clayey, while any local colour is sure to be harsh and disagreeable, and his works are generally uninteresting in idea. On the other hand, he has the rare merit in a French artist of having painted the nude female form naturally, gracefully, and without affectation; his picture of La Source stands almost alone for combining charm and purity, and is equally free from the sensuality which degrades most French pictures of this kind, and from that false simplicity which shocks us still more. But though painted and modelled in the most masterly manner, this and other of his figures are wanting in the higher forms of beauty, which we see in the noblest Italian works.

The French school as I have said has rapidly degenerated. Ingres, and one or two of his pupils who formed themselves the most successfully on his style, are dead, and during the last ten years of the Empire, the works of the French artists ran into every kind of extravagance. Their conception of ideal beauty is not that it is to be found by looking for it in nature, but rather by adding something to nature of their own devising ; this something is chiefly a theatrical and sickly sentimentality, which is peculiarly their own, but which is absolutely devoid of any real and inherent beauty. When on the other hand they paint nature unidealized, it is almost always on the disgusting or the horrible that they seize for imitation, with a cynical pleasure which is no less characteristic than their false and bombastic sentiment. But the skill with which all this is done seems to grow every day more remarkable, and it must be understood that in making these remarks, I do not include the whole French school, but am speaking of that which, for the present at all events, is in the ascendant. The poetry which they seem unable to feel or express in the higher branches of the art, shows itself in the most charming manner in their feeling for the beauty of landscape and country-life generally. The stage-peasant and the stage-landscape of our English school are almost unknown to them, and their skilful and simple method of painting places them far above us in all the lower branches of the art. This skill which shows itself in all the work they do, however false we may find the sentiment, is entirely, or almost entirely, due to that thorough training in the constant study of nature which all French students receive from the very beginning of their career, and it is their fault or misfortune if they cannot derive a better result from their studies. To this system I shall then adhere, as I believe that the English love of nature, which is unmistakable, and runs through all the efforts of our poets and painters from the highest to the lowest, should lead us under a good system to a much higher result. If the facility of English students is not so great, they must make up for it by working all the harder, and the mastery they acquire by these means, under good guidance, will be worth more than any natural talent misapplied.

But the love of nature alone is not sufficient: it may easily induce a trivial realism which is the besetting sin of many of our younger artists. What is wanted is an appreciative love which is capable of selecting what is worthy of imitation, and setting aside what is unimportant. It is to this end that your studies are to be directed. Your work from the models, which are daily set for your regular study, is not only to enable you to paint what you desire with ease and skill, but is to have a better result than this in forming your ideas of the beautiful, and enabling you to distinguish good from bad; for the study of nature is not the end of art, but merely a means of enabling you to express your ideas. Mr. Ruskin says on this point in his Modern Painters — "He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed. He has done just as much towards being a great painter, as a man who has learned how to express himself grammatically, and melodiously, has towards being a great poet." This power of selection you will not find come easily to you for some time, nor indeed is it desirable that it should do so until you have obtained a certain command over your powers of execution; but as you grow in knowledge a light will break in upon you, so that you will take more and more pleasure in whatever characteristics of beauty you may find, and as the eye gains practice, and the hand acquires facility, you will be able to draw and paint with more freedom and certainty, and thus to acquire that style, without which art must be limited to a mere reproduction of the ordinary aspects of nature. It will be well also to remember that all the great and beautiful works of art which have been produced in the world have no other foundation than that nature which is set before you for study: indeed you have an advantage which the producers of those great works had not, in that you are able to contemplate them for your guidance. It is therefore above all things necessary that you add to the study of nature the study of the works of the great masters.

There is in this institution, as I have explained, no tradition to help you, nor does there exist in England any such tradition; for such as there was in the days of Reynolds and his immediate successors, has now degenerated and indeed almost died out; the one faint remnant being that study of the antique, on the disadvantages of which, as pursued in our schools, I have already sufficiently dwelt. We must then form a style on some other school, having none of our own, not by imitating the manner of any particular painter or school of painters, but by studying their method of studying. If you think that this will induce mannerism, it is worth while to try and realize how far one painter is independent of another, how far you yourselves, when you think you are most original, are influenced by the works of others. You have probably no conception of the amount of unconscious imitation of particular styles of work you are employing when you think you are only affected by nature. But you can realize it to yourself, if you consider the works of the greatest geniuses of the early Italian school, in their representations of the simplest objects, when they were proceeding entirely by the light of their own intelligence, and had no predecessors to guide them. You will find that Giotto, a man endowed with an artistic faculty and imaginative genius, in no way inferior to the greatest of his successors, whose certainty of hand was so great that there is an anecdote of his having drawn a perfect circle with one sweep of his pencil, could not, in the very highest exercise of his powers, produce a better representation of a tree or flower than any boy with a taste for drawing might do at eight years old. I give you this instance to show you how helpless any artist is, when depending entirely on his own resources, and how certain it is that you are influenced by the works of other men in all that you do, even when you are most unconscious of it.

It will almost always be found that it is our more immediate surroundings which influence us the most. Andrea Mantegna, the greatest artist of his time, whose works in some respects give us more pleasure than those of any other, devoted his life to the worship of the antique, and yet rarely succeeded in drawing a figure in correct proportion, or in getting rid of a certain rigidity in the movement and expression of his figures; the fact being that the art of the day, being undeveloped in these matters, had more influence on him, doubtless unconsciously to himself, than all the beautiful works of past ages which were the objects of his study. What you are certain to do in the first place is to imitate each other, and in the present unformed state of your powers this will not do you much good. You cannot also but be affected by the general style of work which prevails in the present day, and I would have you get as much good out of this as you can, but it will not take you very far. If then our immediate surroundings are such as are not likely to induce a good style of drawing and painting, and with certain exceptions the spirit of the work which fills our exhibitions is ltot generally calculated to produce an elevating effect, we must, to come back to what I have said, try to seek a counteracting influence elsewhere. The spirit of antiquity, as shown in its sculpture, is too far from us to produce a very strong effect on a student of painting; it is only after much study that its real beauty and intrinsic truth begins to be intelligible enough to influence his work. It is therefore to the great masters of painting, and especially of the Italian school, that I would rather direct your attention. If in our visits to the National Gallery, we study the pictures of the great masters of that school, from the time of the revival of art in the thirteenth century to its culmination in the works of Raffaelle and Michelangelo we shall find in them, and in them alone, not only everything that is required for our guidance in the practice of Art, but nothing that we should consider it necessary to avoid.

The causes of this distinguishing excellence are principally two. First, there was a universally prevailing love of what is beautiful in nature, which, leading them instinctively to select what is worthy of treatment in art, never permitted them to choose an ugly, vulgar, or mean subject, or to treat a beautiful one in a mean or vulgar way, and which made them look upon all art in so serious a light as to invest naturally all they did with beauty and dignity; and, secondly, a love of beauty of workmanship which seems never to have failed them, so that we may look in vain through their pictures for any sign of fatigue, with its inevitable accompaniment of coarse and slovenly execution. In both cases, in fact, we find amongst them such a genuine love for, and all absorbing interest in their art, as leads them never to tire of reproducing beauty with the most perfect skill of which they are capable. These, therefore, are the models to whom I would have you look for the spirit by which you are to be guided in your work.

You will find the works of many artists of other ages and countries equally full of invention and imagination, but it is only in those of the Italians that we find represented every form of beauty. Especially in the workmanship of their pictures is this noticeable, and it is to this point that I wish to call your attention. Even where they were most wanting in what we understand by masterly execution, as in the case of the early Florentines, Giotto and his followers, the workmanship of their pictures charms us by its noble simplicity and absence of pretension; and as their power of execution developed, it became more and more what Mr. Ruskin calls "precious," that is, done as if it were a thing of value in itself, and not as a mere display of technical skill. The most consummate examples of this are to be found in the pictures of Andrea Mantegna, and Filippo Lippi; especially of the former, who combines with the most inexhaustible imagination and invention that ever fell to the lot of an artist, and powers which include the whole range of art, from the most playful fantasy to the profoundest and most passionate tragedy — a skill of workmanship so minutely and marvellously delicate as to defy imitation.

I am thinking more especially at this moment of one of his pictures in Florence, a triptych, containing an Adoration of the Magi, a Circumcision, and an Ascension. The finish of this picture is such as to amaze us, and as I have said, defies copying. A noble work of this master is in the National Gallery, and will afford an example of what I mean. Look at the refinement with which the drapery is drawn, the wonderful delicacy of handling with which the gold-lights are laid on (ftn. 4), the beautiful and loving spirit which has presided over the execution of the foliage in the background, and indeed of every detail in the picture, and you will begin to have an understanding of what I mean by workmanship as such, and how an artist proceeds whose hand has been thoroughly trained, and who is truly in love with his art. The two pictures by Filippo Lippi, the Annunciation and the picture of Saints seated in a circle, are equally worthy of attention. Everything in them, as in all his pictures, and in those of Sandro Botticelli, whose works are frequently hardly to be distinguished from those of Filippo Lippi, is done with this one idea of making the whole work as full of charm and beauty as possible, every detail being subservient to this end. Another gem of workmanship, of a school rather more developed, is the picture of Peter Martyr, by Giovanni Bellini. In this work the dramatic action is kept subordinate to the pastoral scenery in which it takes place, and as such it cannot be said to be the highest representation of the subject; but there is a certain naivete in this idea which is not without its charm as showing that the horrible and tragic had no attractions for him; while the spirit of beauty and love for what is delightful in form, and colour, and sentiment, breathes throughout the whole, and has expressed itself in the most perfectly beautiful piece of workmanship that ever was put into a picture ; I mean the painting of the green forest which makes the principal part of the background. There will also be found equal perfection of workmanship in the best pictures of the early Flemish schools, notably in the works of Mending and Van Eyck, whose pictures are unsurpassable for delicacy of execution, and as such are most worthy of examination and study. This quality is however combined with such an amount of awkwardness, and ugliness, and poverty of form, wherever the human face and figure are represented, as to modify considerably the pleasure we derive from their contemplation.

It is not my intention however, to make a critical examination of the pictures in the National Gallery. I have pointed out to you a few of the most noticeable for the perfection of their workmanship, and leave you to find out others for yourselves. Now I do not want you to imitate the special manner of these painters of the fifteenth century (although you might do much worse) so much as to work in their untiring spirit of love for nature and their art. My object has been moreover to show you what beauties are to be looked for in their work, knowing that with many students the difference between the spirit of modern work, and the Italian art of the Middle Ages, is so great as to render it difficult for them to find where the special beauty lies which so enraptures its admirers; in which case a hint of this kind is often sufficient to set the student thinking, and to animate him with something of the same spirit.

For the immediate imitation of the pupils of this school, I wish that it were possessed of a few specimens of paintings of the good schools of a later period, that they might be copied, and the actual method of painting studied in this manner. To copy a portrait by Titian or Velasquez is a better and surer means of forming a good style of handling than all the precept in the world, provided that the work be done under good direction: but we have unfortunately nothing that we can look to nearer than the National Gallery. The large painting which has been presented to us is of great value, as setting before you one of Raffaelle's most imaginative and most masterly compositions; and I shall refer you to it as a study of design; but as a painting, although a fair and careful representation of the original, it is hardly so good for study, being after all but a copy, and a copy of a fresco. As a means, however, of forming the best possible style of drawing, I have acquired some of the most instructive of the series of photographs from Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. These are placed in the Art Library, which, though small at present, will I hope some day become of more important dimensions, and be frequently consulted by the students. It is needless for me to express my admiration for these works; they are almost beyond admiration, and remain for the amazement of the world for all time. What is the point now is that their subtle truth to nature renders them most admirable studies for students in art to copy, and I have come to the conclusion that the study of them, though doubtless very difficult, on account of the imperfections which necessarily occur in the photographs, will do more to correct that crude want of style, which I have mentioned as a defect in the drawing in this school, than any works of any other master that I could put before you. You will learn also to appreciate these works by copying them, and gain by that means an insight into the possibilities, if also into the extreme difficulties, of your art. You will find also in the Library, among the books presented by Mrs. Grote, large volumes of prints of almost all the famous pictures in the world of the later schools; though of the time before Raffaelle there is hardly any representation, this collection having been formed at a time when the excellences of that period of art were ignored. These prints will be of great use in forming your style, and should be much consulted for the study of composition, especially those from the works of Raffaelle, who is fully represented; they will also be of service in acquainting you with the great works which exist in foreign countries; on which point many of my students seem painfully ignorant. You will find also books of prints from the Dutch painters, whose pictures are generally remarkable for the technical skill and subtle appreciation with which the more vulgar and ordinary aspects and themes of nature are represented. Many of these prints moreover are gems of engraving of their kind. I have also acquired for the Art Library, in addition to Mrs. Grote's gift, some standard works, such as Vasari's Lives, which you will do well to read, and some books on costume, which will be of great assistance to you in treating the subjects which I shall give out for composition from time to time. Reynolds's writings, which I have before recommended, have been removed from the General Library to ours, as well as some others.

I have drawn your attention more especially to the Library, because I hold that it is quite as important for an artist to cultivate his mind as his hand. The results of want of education and cultivation are painfully apparent in much of the work that is done in England; and the educated and intelligent man is to be recognised at once by his works; and so also, I may add, is the stupid and the ignorant. The artistic gift is doubtless bestowed indiscriminately, and a man of genius will always produce results that will astonish, if not charm us. But unless his mind is cultivated, not only by a good general education, but by a knowledge of what other artists have done in the world before him, his range of themes will be of the most limited nature; and we shall find that most of the artists of the socalled realistic school, that is the school which realises only what is common and obvious in nature, are of this ill-educated kind. It is no sign of genius to despise the work that has been done before us; but such affectation is not uncommon, and is generally the offspring of ignorance and conceit. For this reason I am especially glad that I have been able to arrange for some lectures on Classical Archaeology. Independently of its artistic associations, there is no more interesting study in the world than that of ancient history through its antiquities, and when we consider that, except by means of limited fragments of written history that remain to us, it is entirely through its art that we are enabled to construct the history of the ancient world, the matter becomes one which is especially interesting to artists. The converse holds equally good; it is a knowledge of the history of the past that helps us to understand its art.

You will observe that I have made a special point in this lecture of drawing your attention to the excellence cf workmanship which is to be found generally in the work of the old masters, and especially of the Italian painters. I am afraid that there may have been a slight misunderstanding of some of the points in the system that I have laid down for study in this school. It may have been supposed that, because I allow but a limited time in which each study is to be done, I do not recognise the great importance of careful finish. What I really want is that you should acquire the habit of finishing as highly as you can in the time given. I may add that the time allowed is ample for the purpose, and if you use it properly you will gain a direct method of work which will go far to give you that style in which the drawings here have hitherto been deficient. I have seen drawings by French students done in six sittings of two hours each which are quite as highly worked up as any turned out in our English schools in double the time. Remember that the first essential to a good artist is that he should be a good workman; the art of painting in the days of which I have spoken so much, was studied regularly as a trade; and young men were apprenticed to an artist to learn their business, just as they are now to a jeweller or silversmith. If we look at the English pictures of the present day, we shall find that this point is the one in which they are most deficient. The sort of execution which passes current is generally of the flimsiest kind. Now it is not given to every one to be a genius, but all can be good workmen. The fine artist doubtless is he who, as Midas turned everything he touched into gold, cannot make a study or design without giving it some character of beauty; but it is, alas, given to but few of us instinctively to beautify everything we touch. Those who have this gift by nature in any high degree are the great geniuses of the world, and may be counted on the fingers. But the qualities of good workmanship are such as can be attained by any one who has the true spirit of love for his art; and nothing will ever make me believe — nothing I hope will ever induce you to believe — that it is necessary to work down to the level of the taste of the age. This is the true cause of the degeneracy of the art of this time; but it is easy to rise above it, if we make up our minds to be influenced neither by the interest of our pockets, nor by the vulgar criticism of the ignorant.

Footnotes:

1. Given at the opening of the second session of the Slade Schools, Oct. 1872.

2. Lecture III. p. 97.

3. This is a true prediction of what has since happened. The French portion of the picture gallery in the Exhibition of 1S78 was remarkable for nothing so much as the display of sensational horrors treated iu the most realistic style, and on an immense scale.

4. This picture is one of the rare instances of a tempera-painting of that date which has happily escaped being varnished.