Not so with Sir William Orpen—his keen sense of humour is apparent in all his work, whether he is painting tone studies of mirrors at Versailles or drawing his friends on the rocky coasts of Ireland. It is one of the many charms that delight us in his work and does not detract an iota from its distinction and importance. Some of his exquisite drawings are reproduced here, and though the full purity of the line cannot be retained in reproduction they are some of the perfect things in this book.

It is a relief to find oneself thinking in terms of “perfection” about the work of any man so modern as Sir William Orpen. Because, of course, where the modern draughtsman and painter—as is so commonly the case—despises his materials and scorns technique it is impossible for one to do so. The mind—which is so much the product of the senses—must know distaste where the senses are repelled. One may forgive him because of other merits in his work, but the merits have to be rather splendid to cover sufficiently such sins. To Whistler and the stylists who have followed him much of their inspiration must have come from the materials of their craft. One is grateful that they grasped this truth that

the English Pre-Raphaelites also missed—that rare and delicious qualities in the handling of a medium best present to the mind rare and beautiful qualities in nature. In this sense Mr. Philpot is essentially a stylist—one feels that to him the intrinsic beauties of his medium form an appreciable amount of his inspiration: that—quite literally—common oils and varnishes can be blended to a golden elixir for his use. For the materials of his craft are for the artist what he chooses to make them: a piece of red chalk in one man’s hand is a lump of hardened mud, conveniently sharpened to a point for making marks on paper, while, to another, it is a precious substance mined from the earth in some distant country and prepared with infinite care, and he knows that one touch of it on a paper—most carefully chosen—can be the basis of a delicious colour-harmony; that ink can flow from a reed pen in a line straight and true or run its course with subtle modulations—as a little stream flows from the hills.

A lead pencil after all can be only the bitten stump on the office boy’s desk—an instrument for unseemly writings or obscene scrawlings; or it can be a cunningly wrought stick of plumbago encased in a scented cylinder of cedar—such a thing as Leonardo would have loved. Is not the artist capable of an alchemy that can change dross to gold!

————

The rewards of the successful artist are many and varied, but the most coveted, surely—and the least often secured—is the reward of international fame. The list is not long of the English artists who have achieved it—indeed it is unjustly short. The English are, themselves, always generous in their acceptance of foreign artists—even to the neglect of their own; in this they are unlike other nations, particularly the French who, though slow to acclaim foreign artists, are loud-voiced in praise of their own home-grown products. But Mr. Brangwyn’s name, in spite of this, stands high in Europe. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that his work stands for English contemporary painting half the world over.

An artist who is painting for an international public distributed in all parts of the world is not likely to bother himself with artistic party-politics, and it is noticeable that Mr. Brangwyn does not move with the ebb and flow of opinion in London. He is not a fashionable painter and is not ever likely to be. In another age his art might have produced a new school.

There have, it might be said, been two Rubens in the history of European art. The first was Peter Paul and the second—Brangwyn.

Rubens (Peter Paul) has been out of fashion since Mr. Sickert made Tottenham Court Road delightful by teaching us how they paint in Paris, but Venice seems more interested in how Mr. Brangwyn paints in London.

Fine draughtsman as Mr. Brangwyn is, his drawings always remind us that he is a painter, and a decorative painter. Curiously enough though, they scarcely suggest a reserve of strength, in fact on the contrary, for everything that Mr. Brangwyn has to say is stated—whether in painting or drawing—with the utmost energy and vigour of his capacity. He gives generously, freely, without stint from a full brush—he draws from the shoulder as it were; and that his aim is the decoration of large spaces in architectural settings is always apparent in his work; and that this is its usual destiny should be remembered when his drawings are being studied. It is through the medium of his drawings and sketches that we have, in these days, to study Mr. Brangwyn’s art, for the large decorations—destined for public buildings in other countries—on which he is constantly engaged, leave England (as a rule) without being exhibited. Doubtless we can add this loss to our list of grudges against the officials of the painting world, for the public have long ago realized the importance of Mr. Brangwyn’s position and are justly proud of him. The psychological interest of his figures is of a basic and standard kind and generally full of suggestion of forms personal to his own art.

————

The difficulty with Mr. Bateman is to take him seriously. Really he is a most serious phenomenon—and yet the bare mention of his name sets us chuckling in happy reminiscence and digging each other in the ribs in cheery anticipation of jokes yet unborn.

It would be doing him but scant justice, really, if we were to give him some honorary degree—called him Dr. Bateman and sat him in a “chair” at one of the Universities as Professor of human psychology. Instead we just go on buying any paper that he happens to be drawing for—and laughing. But the day may come when he might turn round on us, wearied of our interminable cackling, and say “Cry you devils, cry!” and then we shall be sorry—but we shall cry all right: a few little adjustments of that subtle line of his and the humour we value so highly would become tragedy.

In England there seems to be a curious tradition that a drawing becomes funny if it has a funny story printed underneath it; that the expression on one face in a group of persons if slightly ludicrous makes a drawing humorous. In a Bateman drawing the drawing is the humour and the humour is the drawing. Everything is in the same terms throughout. His very line seems to have a risible ripple in it, for his humour is the real thing—not irony or satire but the essential spiritual faculty of perceiving the incongruous wherever it occurs. He has a host of imitators, abroad as well as in this home circle of islands, but they are sheep in wolves’ clothing and the joke is not in them—they satirise the already ridiculous.

————

Mr. Muirhead Bone is another artist who has many imitators—some with considerable technical success—but fortunately an artist’s vision is his own and no one can borrow his eyes or his soul though they may well nigh take the pencil from his hand. Of Mr. Bone’s vision much might be said. It is unique in the art of the time; and in his hand a pencil becomes a truly magical instrument—like the bow in the hand of a great violinist: when his pencil has touched the paper one takes a keen pleasure in each line for its own sake, and when to this is added a full realization of the interpretation and vision they collectively record, one may well say—here is a real draughtsman! He endows St. James’s Hall with such beauty in his drawing of its Demolition that one is tempted to desire the destruction of several of our buildings.... Imagine what he would draw for us if we took half the roof off the Albert Hall and gashed a great hole in its obese side! What a flood of light he would let into that gloomy interior and what dignity he would impart to the last remains of that bun-like edifice!

————

And now I find that I have come to the limit of the space allowed to me for these notes, and I look through the list of over a hundred fine names—splendid names because they belong to men who have done splendid things—and I realize that I have not written a word about the larger number of them and also that if I wrote from now until my personal doomsday I could not express the admiration I feel for the sum of their achievement. I have written notes only on a few of those who make an immense appeal to me; it has been a purely personal choice and, as a fact, quite unconscious; and as that, too, very incomplete, for it was my optimistic conviction that I should return and write about the others—scores of them; but now the chance is gone, in a few hours from now these notes will have been flung to the printer’s devil (a person I have always wanted to meet—but now had better not!) I want to rush back and explain my personal beliefs about Botticelli and his influence on the pre-British-Raphaelites, before the chance is gone, probably for ever; I want to air certain convictions about the principles of rhythm in Raphael’s curving lines; I want to write of Pinturicchio and Claude; of Fragonard and Blake; I want to write about a dozen Frenchmen who are not in the book and more about the four or five who are; I want to argue with an imaginary reader as to whether Mr. Dulac is greater as a caricaturist or as a decorator; I want to abuse nearly everybody for not fully understanding that Mr. Vernon Hill is one of our finest draughtsmen; I want to pen a humble appreciation of Mr. Tonks and his salutary influence as a professor and his benign influence as an artist. I want—I have just time for that—to again remind the reader—who has my gratitude for still being with me to the end—that a drawing is a thing to be looked at and not written about.

George Sheringham.