PAINTING AT THE PRESENT DAY: FROM A
DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW
I WILL ask you to figure to yourselves an aspiring decorator, filled with the latter-day enthusiasm for beautifying human surroundings, and recognising a manifest, if superficial, improvement in domestic architecture and adornment,—recognising the excellent and sympathetic work that has been done by certain individual workers, or associated workers, in various arts and crafts, and still undaunted by the rapacity with which competitive commerce and the modern industrial system seize upon and spoil their ideas, and like
undaunted, I say, let us suppose our decorator filled with this fine enthusiasm, so as to have almost persuaded himself that we are on the brink of a second Renaissance; let us suppose him to turn for a moment from his all-engrossing studies in stained glass, tapestry, repoussée metal work, wood-carving, pottery, and the like, amid which he may have become possibly oblivious of the progress of painting; to turn from wall-hanging and wall-paper to what might be supposed to be the crown and summit of its decoration, the wall picture, or, to speak figuratively, from the courts of South Kensington to the galleries of Burlington House—I mean in the time of its May blossoming.
He enters the exhibition hoping to find his aspirations stimulated, if not satisfied, by some show of what he has been accustomed to consider the higher aims and influences in art—primarily the search for beauty of line, colour, and execution, where indeed they are practically unfettered, in the technical sense, except by the four sides of a frame (which in itself might contribute as the setting to the gem). Here, as our decorator would reasonably suppose, these qualities would be considered the prime necessities, the indispensable ingredients of the work, whatever sort of pathetic, dramatic, or high poetic expression a picture might bear.
But what are the actual evidences that meet his eye? To begin with, he is appalled by the effect of the galleries as a whole—a number of odd-sized painted panels in gilt mouldings, jostled together with scarcely any reference to scale or harmony, either of subject or colour. Here, perhaps, a life-sized human head and shoulders in startling relief appears almost bursting through some silvery retiring landscape distance; there tragedy and farce side by side, and on the same wall tradition on crutches next the most naked naturalism, with “no language but a cry,” or perhaps some piece of sentimentality leaning, as it were, on the shoulder of the coldest academic style.
Supposing our decorator to have at least partially recovered from the first shock of this impressionistic picture, and to have sufficient presence of mind to go more into detail, what does he find? Much ability certainly, much energy, much industry, but wasted for the most part upon objects and subjects either unrewarding or repulsive, and squandered in aimless, and therefore inartistic imitation; much striving after instantaneous photographic effects both in figures and landscapes—miscalled Realism; much academic learning and archæology; much sentimental as well as melo-dramatic feeling; plenty of domestic and quasi-historical incidents, some symptoms of war fever breaking out in red coats; plenty of sporting and animal life—live and dead stock; a superabundance of the personal element as in individual portraits, although the term portrait might often be more justly claimed by landscape painters, portraits so called being as often as not treated as if they were landscapes, and landscapes as portraits, in these days.
In these, and such as these, then, our decorator will haply discover the leading tendencies in modern painting. But he will reflect it does not need that men should be specially painters to exhibit such qualities as these. For any strong evidence of any feeling for, or search after style, design, composition, beauty of form, beauty of colour, or perfection of workmanship, not to speak of poetic expression—for those qualities, in short, most peculiarly and distinctively artistic—qualities at least inseparable from art with any title to be called decorative—our decorator might look long and far without finding much to cheer his drooping spirits.
He will depart from the exhibition a sadder, if not a wiser man; but he will say to himself, “It was not always so.” He will go into our national collection, and there he will find abundant evidence that painting was once what he fondly hoped it might be again, at the head of the decorative arts. Then perhaps he would go down to his house justified, possibly to dream, and, especially if he had an impression of Dürer’s “Melancholia” in his room, his dream might take some such shape as this (were it possible to conceive in an emblematic spirit such a being): The genius of modern painting would appear amidst the ruins and relics of ancient art attired in the last Paris fashion, leaning upon a photographic camera, with canvas and palette set, and looking in her paint-box for an idea. Instead of Amorini should flit around her the bats and owls of criticism, uttering discordant cries, and one flying with a scroll on which should be inscribed, “There is no beauty but where you would least expect to find it; there is no truth but literalism.”