.n' / 1 :i>?^r.vv. 'M j*,A.\v^ .^)<>,A>yk>\ -JiW^ LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Class Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/artofwilliamquilOOarmsrich THE PORTFOLIO MONOGR4.PHS ON ARTISTIC SUBJECTS WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS PUBLISHED MONTHLY No. 14 February^ 1895 The Art of William Quiller Orchardson h WALTER ARMSTRONG '^^^W London: SEELEY AND CO., LIMITED, ESSEX STREET, STRAND Sold by Hatchard, 187 Pic*. A 1)1 1.1, > Paris: Librairie Galignam, 224. Rue he Rivoli. Berlin : A. A$her t*. Co., 15 Unter din Likdin New York : Macmili-an & Co. THE PORTFOLIO. JAPANESE OBJECTS OF ART (ANCIENT). LACQUERS, ART BRONZES, POTTERY, NETSUKES, TSUBAS, METAL WORKS, COLOUR PRINTS BY KORIUSAI, SHUNSHO, 1st TOYOKUNE, TORIYE, YESHI, UTAMARO, HOKUSAI, &c., CHOICE EMBROIDERIES, BROCADES, and other ART WORKS OF OLD JAPAN. S. EIDA, IMPORTER, HONCHO DORi, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN, AND AT PICCADILLY CIRCUS CHAMBERS. 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THE NATIONAL GAULERY, LONDON. 270 Paintings re dnced in Autotype ; also num.-rous copies of Paintings from the R Collections at Wmdsor and Buckingham Palace. AUTOTYPE REPRODUCTIONS OF MODERN PAINTW fro n the Salon, the Luxembourg, and the Royal Academy. THE GREAT BRITISH PORTRAI FISTS (Reynolds, Lawrs Gainsborough, Romney, Hoppner, Morland, &C.), from choice P: in the British Museum. TURNER'S LIBER STUDIORUM. Facsimiles in Autotype line s.ates lent by Kev. Stopford Brooke, M.A. THE ART OF FRANCESCO BARTOLOZZI. One Hun i^Jxamples, with Noies and Menhirs, by Locks Fag.\n', Esq. THE GOOD SHEPHERD: CHRIST AND PETER: T ANGEL GUARDIAN : THE RESURRECTION MOI ING, &C. Autotypes of noble Drawings by Fkeuekic Shields. THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS OF PEACE AND WAR. Autot from the Cartoons for the Frescoes in South Kensington Museun: Sir FKiiDERic Leighton, P.R.A. THE AUTOTYPE FINE ART CATALOGUE. 186 pages Supplement, containing 68 miniature Photographs of notable Autot; Pust free. One Shilling. OFFICES AND FINE ART GALLERY: 74 NEW OXFORD STREET, LONDON. VENETIAN GLASS for WEDDING PRESENTS for TABLE d GENERAL USE. A Choice Collection at Moderate Prices may always be seen at the Gallery of the VENICE &MURANO GLASS CO., 30 ST. JAMES'S STREET, S.W. V ' , I t '■■' 'fh-y r " 1 =. r - ♦ 'J»\ifli4%'-r.t^ /^>/W-»i ****** •• THE ART OF WILLIAM QiUILLER OKCHAKDSON 31 of the Swords was so good a subject that it required nothing but the painter's modulating eye to turn it into a picture. With the next thing I have to speak about it was otherwise, and here I find an opportunity of showing how a good literary theme can be turned into a good pictorial one by taking a few judicious liberties. Every one is familiar with the delightful scene in Woodstock where Escaped. By permission of Humphrey Roberts, Esq., owner of the copyright. Roger Wildrake carries Mark Everard's cartel to the supposed Louis Kerneguy. " ' Let us get to business, sir, if you please,' said the King. * You have a message for me, you say .'' ' " ♦ True, sir,' replied Wildrake ; ♦ I am the friend of Colonel Mark- ham Everard, sir, a tall man, and a worthy person in the field, although 32 THE ART OF WILLIAM aUILLER ORCHARDSON I could wish him a better cause. A message I have to you, it is certain, in a slight note, which I take the liberty of presenting with the usual formalities.' So saying, he drew his sword, put the billet he mentioned upon the point, and, making a profound bow, presented it to Charles. "The disguised monarch accepted it," &c. Now that is the whole scene. The only characters on the stage are Charles and the Cavalier. Paint it as it stands, and you will have to quote a whole page of Scott before you can make it comprehensible to the poor wretch who finds himself before it with no preparation but his catalogue. And even then you will not move his interest. To do that you require to know all that has passed in the story. You require to have the jealousy of Everard, the fears of Alice Lee, the unconsciousness of Wildrake, and the consciousness of Charles, all vividly present in your mind. In fact, the force of the situation depends upon a multitude of things which paint — which no simultaneous form of art — can give. In the novel the scene is splendid, and most fit. In a picture it would be nothing. And yet it has wrapped up in it some first-rate pictorial materials, in the contrasted figures and characters of the two men, in the forward bend of the one and the recoil of the other, in the long hori- zontal line of the rapier and the menacing touch of white on its point. The problem Orchardson had to solve was how to clothe all this in accessories which would explain, and even heighten, its sig- nificance. Woodstock itself suggested a solution. Within the same boards as Louis Kerneguy lives Trusty Tomkins, the psalm-singing Roundhead, whose creed may well have allowed a little corner for the duello, no less than for the charms of Phoebe Mayflower. Put him in the place of the hiding king, set a dissuader in the person of a Puritan divine at his elbow, throw a combination of scruple and a taste for j«, sa into his physiognomy, and you have at once a complete and most paintable drama. TV" "If TT tF By this time the reader is probably feeling for his pencil, to scribble a sarcastic note on the margin of this page. And indeed the mistake into which I have fallen is absurd enough. It has at last dawned upon me, however, that it was not with Woodstock, as I find it in the notes Charles Mcxtti, Esquire. By permission of H\ O. Qnhardson^ Esq., R.A. THE art: of WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON 35 to one of my talks with Orchardson, that The Challenge has to do, but with Peveril of the Peak. There, of course, the scene will be found almost exactly as we see it in the picture. The challenger is Sir Jasper Cranbourne, the challenged Major Bridgenorth, and the dissuasive divine Master Solsgrace. I am tempted, however, to leave the paragraph as I wrote it, because, although it does not happen to apply to the par- ticular case as well as might be wished, it does explain the kind of process which most incidents taken from books have to undergo before they become self-contained works of art. # « # # I have said already that the dueen of the Swords was at the Paris exhibition of 1878. Together with other things from the same studio it had a very great success both with painters and critics on the south side of the Channel. Its happy design, its gallantry, and its debon- nair treatment generally appealed to the French mind, and seduced it for the moment from its preoccupation with the more actual moods of art. Nevertheless, to eyes accustomed to the cool, gray tones, the broad handling, and the solid pate of French pictures, the more positive tones, the more detailed if yet dexterous brushing, and the comparatively thin, transparent impasto of Orchardson, was not altogether agreeable — and yet they might have found a precedent for it all in some of their own great men, in more than one of those painters of fetes galantes who were the only glory of French painting in the eighteenth century. To this question, however, we must return when the moment comes for trying to fix Orchardson's place in the general march of art. The two portraits which I have chosen as characteristic examples of his work in the first half of his career were painted in 1875 ^'^^ 1876, Mr. Moxon belonging to the former year, and Conditional Neutrality to the latter. The first is a straightforward portrait, depending on no adventitious aid for its effect. The pose is momentary, full of power, at rest, but about to pass into action in pursuit of thought. The head is finely and most searchingly modelled, the left hand perfect in expression, the background thoroughly sympathetic and complementary. In short, it is a simple, sedate, and most thorough piece of work. The second is more deliberately picturesque. The portrait of a boy of five or so, it presents us with a delightful scheme of colour, picked up by the happy introduction c 2 1,6 THE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHJRDSON of some of those nursery properties which have done so much to smooth the paths of all who have had to paint children. In a way it reminds us of Sir Joshua's Master Crewe^ which by the time these lines are in print will be hanging on the walls of Burlington House. The pugnacity of the young human male is the keynote of both. Orchardson, like Reynolds, saw in proneness to resist the most characteristic feature of man at the age of five, and, also like Reynolds, he thought his truculence would be none the worse for being set off with the bravery of silk and velvet. Painters generally do best when they are painting for themselves. The hero of Conditional Neutrality is the painter's own first-born son, now a most promising student at the Royal Academy ; and this explains, per- haps, a certain audacity in the colour scheme, a certain bravura in the handling, a certain pervading vivacity of selection, which are scarcely to be found in the same degree in other things belonging to this period. It is usual to suppose that some of the mellow harmony of Venetian pictures is the gift of time and varnish. One of the greatest of English painters has consistently worked in obedience to that belief, and not a ftw smaller men have followed his example. Whether it be well founded or not it is difficult to say. One fact may be pointed to which throws some doubt on the theory^ — ^namely, that the shadows in good Venetian pictures are as warm and luminous as the lights. A brilliant passage, a piece of drapery, for instance, painted chiefly with vermilion, will undoubtedly become richer and more luminous when it glows through a coat of mellow varnish, because the tone of the latter is lower than its own. But suppose this same varnish overlying a very dark but still luminous shadow. Being higher in tone than the shadow, it will diminish its transparency. In short, it will act as a scumble, whereas in the first instance it acted as a glaze. Now any first-rate example of the greater Venetians is equally transparent all over, except in those very high lights which have been painted with extreme solidity. And this makes it doubtful whether time and accident have had so much to do with their superb tone as is often believed. However that may be, a picture painted almost entirely in high tones will certainly benefit by time, supposing it to have no seeds of premature decay in its own constitution. Conditional Neutrality is such a picture, and I suspect that a century hence it will be looked upon as one of the treasures of the English school. Conditional Neutraiitf. , 'i ?. * . . By permission of W. (^ Orckardson, Ej^., R J. ' THE ART OF fVILLIAM QIJILLER ORCHARDSON 39 During the earlier of the two periods into which I have ventured to divide his career, Orchardson's whole work was marked by judgment in conception and sobriety in execution. The subjects chosen, whether suggested by writers or spun out of his own inner consciousness, are always so arranged as at once to tell their own story, and yet to declare that the motive which led to their being painted at all was truly and essentially pictorial. In this respect it would not be fantastic to attempt a comparison between him and Hogarth, most of whose fame depends — not so much on those gifts of satire and detached common sense to which critics have chiefly directed our attention, but — on the extraordinary skill with which he combines dramatic with aesthetic qualities, and makes his scenes explain themselves, down to the minutest details, through matters required by pictorial balance and unity. Hogarth, in short, was a master of composition. His Marriage a la mode reads like Tom Jones. We pass from scene to scene, receiving from each exactly what it has to give, missing nothing, inventing nothing, and accumulating as we go a conviction of the painter's infallibility in selecting and marshalling materials, of his power to breathe the keenest vitality into his men and women. It would be going too far to transfer all this to Orchardson. He has never been pricked by the didactic spur. He feels no desire to reprove the time, or to strip poor human nature and lead it up naked to the mirror. To him the second of Hogarth's incentives is the first, and, when the events of life have supplied him with a hook on which fine colour, sympathetic design, and a coherent arabesque may be hung, he is content. The Paris exhibition of 1878 marks with sufficient accuracy the close of this first period ; and here I should like to quote what one of the more intelligent of the French critics was then impelled to write of our painter : — " Le maitre en ce domaine de I'expression, celui qui domine tout le groups des physionomistes par la mesure, par le jeu des nuances et aussi par I'habilete de la main, c'est Mons. W. Q. Orchardson. Ses tableaux cependant — est-ce un cloge .'' — sont peu ou mcme point du tout anglais. lis figureraient indiffcremment dans les galeries fran^'aises, beiges, ou dans Tecole de Diisscldorf, sans que personne en fut etonne. Est-ce done que le talent n'a point de nationalitc ! Ou plutot, ce que 40 THE ART OF WILLIAM dUILLEK ORCHARDSOIS j'incllne a croire, que Mons. Orchardson a soigneusement etudie, de ce cote de la Manche, les ecoles contemporaines, et qu'il s'est compose aiiisi, en y ajoutant sa propre personnalit^, un talent tres personnel, plus voisin des principes d'art du continent cependant que de ceux de ses compatriotes. " En tout cas, le resultat est des plus sedulsants, et les tableaux de Mons. Orchardson, le Deft [" The Challenge "] et Christopher Sly, ont obtenu chez nous un succes aussi rapide que legitime. " Le Defi est charmant de grace spirituelle ; je ne sais malheureuse- ment a quel drame le motif est emprunte. " Une sorte de Scapin ironique, tout vetu de satin jaune serin, chapeau bas, le haut du corps incline, pr^sente a la pointe de son epee la lettre de defi a une sorte de cavalier philosophe que cette provocation intempestive trouble dans son travail. Un vieillard enveloppe d'une levite, son compagnon d'etudes, s'est leve avec empressement ; il retient le bras du cavalier comme pour le dissuader d'accepter et de prendre au serieux ce defi insolite et insolent. '* II est inutile de rappeler au lecteur que Christopher Sly est le heros de cette boufFonnerie qui sert de prologue a la Megere domptee de Shakespeare. " Mons. Orchardson a dispose tous ces groupes, anime toutes ces physionomies avec une entente profonde de la scene. L'interpretation de cette amusante parade etait pleinement dans son talent souple et enjoue. Les attitudes sont justes, d'un dessin facile et correct ; I'expression des tetes est fine et spirituelle, comique sans charge, grotesque sans gros- sierete. En outre, malgre certaines maigreurs de touche et bien que I'execution soit un peu mince, un peu epinglee, I'ensemble est cependant d'une coloration ravissante, harmonieuse comme I'envers d'une vieille tapisserie. " Depuis, bien d'autres tableaux d'un gout exquis, la Reine des Epees \_^ueen of the Swords\ V Antichambre, le Decave [Hard Hit'] ont place Mons. William Quiller Orchardson au premier rang des petits maitres du genre." To the English reader Mons. Chesneau's assertions that Orchardson's pictures are " little if at all English " and " might figure without causing remark in the school of Diisseldorf " will seem both strange and bold. Mrs. Qrckardson. By permission of IV. Q. OrchardsoHy Esq.^ R.J. THE art: of WILLIAM QJJILLER ORCHARDSON 43 and we shall see presently that his conjectural explanation has no foundation at all. But the remainder of his estimate strikes me as On the North ForeLtnJ. From the picture in the Diploma Gallery^ Burlington House. sound, although, no doubt, one or two of the phrases mean little more than that Orchardson does not paint quite as a Frenchman would. An 44 ^HE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON interesting question is suggested by his dictum that the painter's colour is "delightful, and as harmonious as the back of an old tapestry." Other French writers were not so kind — '■'■acre'' and '■'■ crue'' were the best epithets they could find for the English master's colour, and in view of the line taken by English painting since 1878 it is likely enough that their strictures would find many sympathizers on this side of the Channel. But colour is a large subject, and what I have to say about it in connection with Orchardson must be postponed to a later page. Here it will be enough to confess my agreement with Mons. Chesneau's comparison of Orchardson's colour schemes, before 1880, with the delicious harmonies in gray which meet you when you pull out an old arras from the wall, and examine the side which time has modulated without the help of dirt. VII Orchardson first blazed out into popularity in 1881. To the exhibition of that year he sent the large picture On Board the " Belle- rophon^'' which was bought by the Council of the Royal Academy in their capacity as Chantrey's Trustees. He had always been a believer in Napoleon. The modern conception of the first French Emperor — the idea which has found its strongest expression, perhaps, in the volumes of Mdme. de Remusat and the history left incomplete by Lanfrey — had never made a home in his mind, and those who talked to him on the subject ten years ago stumbled on a forecast of the notions which are now, thanks to Marbot, Sardou, Masson, and a number of other incon- gruous people, again beginning to group themselves round the figure of the Petit Capora!. Every one, I suppose, has a right to his own conception of such an apparition as Napoleon. His orbit was so far above the plane in which most of us move that it is difficult to get him into any rational perspective. We may guess at his motives by analyzing our own, but a single consideration is enough to make us doubt the result. The vast majority of mankind is unable to see conduct otherwise than in the light of inherited and instilled notions. It is unable to comprehend an individual in whom the intellectual powers are so audacious, independent, and self-reliant, that, by their own action, they can wipe out any inherited prejudice whatever. It is absurd to think of Napoleon as of a man believing in the usual morality, and deliberately outraging it for his own purposes ; absurd to paint him, as one writer has done, disturbed by no qualms over the fate of the Grande Armee^ but blenching at the name of the Due d'Enghien. He was one of those to whom the distinction the world 46 THE ART OF WILLIAM ilUILLER ORCHARDSON chose to make between devastating a neighbour's country and shooting an inconvenient prince in the ditch of Vincennes seemed purely fantastic ; still more fantastic would he think it to have such incidents turned into footrules to measure his own stature. He belonged to a system outside all this. He looked upon himself as a sort of kosmic force, and, like a kosmic force, he put the individual out of sight in taking measures for the triumph of an idea. The only question, perhaps, worth an answer in this connection is the very large one. Was his final impulse selfish or ideal ? Did he devastate the Continent to make his own name blaze in history, or because he had the ambition to do for the world at large what he had done for the laws of France and for the constitution of the Comedie Fran^aise .? Between these two explanations each man will choose according to his own predilection : Orchardson chose the latter. His Napoleon on the deck of an English ship of the line is an imprisoned force. It is not only a great soldier, not only an absolute ruler, not only a disappointed man, we see there. It is an embodiment of will, of order, of control, arrested for the moment by a vexatious accident. Grant that small, square, deep-thinking, firmly planted personality a respite from physical decay, and at the first opportunity it will be back at the work of bringing order out of destruction, or, if you like, clearing the site for a new civilization. You may say that all this is inconsistent with Napoleon's picture of himself, especially with that part of it in which we see him anxious about the verdict of posterity. You may say, too, that my reading of the painter's intention in the Bellerophon picture is contradicted by the Napoleon he himself painted twelve years later. This second picture is the St. Helena — 1816, which was at the Academy in 1893. Here the captive is by no means an heroic figure ; but he has been a captive for a year. For a year he has been controlled by his inferiors. For a year his vivid, all-embracing, essentially constructive imagination has hurtled against those of men to whom life is routine. For a year he has been a caged eagle, conscious of his wings and of his ability to face the sun, and yet chained down by wingless, blinking mortals, to whom even his own glory had been a thing too dazzling to look at and comprehend. A painter might well choose such a change to give point to his drama, and yet I must confess that, to me, Orchardson seems to have slightly over- Study for the figure of Napoleon at St. Helena. By permission of W. O. Qrchdrdson^ Esq.., R.A. 48 THE ARr OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON done the contrast. In his second Napoleon we may trace a combination of impatience with solicitude, of irritability with a desire to put his best foot foremost, which do not grow inevitably out of the checked but irresistible personality of twelve months before. To me he even seems to have painted his idol concocting a lie, and the secretary knowing he is doing it. On this I do not animadvert from a moral but from an artistic point of view. It seems an error in proportion. The painter, of course, justifies himself, or rather, to be more exact, the presumptuous critic finds an excuse for what the painter has done, in the plea of physical decay, in the consideration that " General Bonaparte " had, in 1 8 1 6, already begun to understand that his time was short, and that, if he would leave such a portrait of himself as he would like the world to accept, he must make haste and get it done. I may put it another way. A novelist writes a story. Through the main development of his tale he takes full thought for the logical sequence of his events, for the natural growth of his characters, for the due presentation of the catas- trophe. So far his bow is at full stretch. His style is at the level of his theme. But afterwards he cannot resist the temptation of a little more. In pity, perhaps, for the curiosity of his readers, he lifts the curtain he has just rung down, and, in a few hurried, formless sentences, he lets you see the peace of the widow, the philoprogenitive delights of the married lovers, or, may be, when the writer is a cynic, the otiose triumph of the villain. It is anticlimax all round. The style sinks with the theme, and too often the postscript is to the novel what the call before the curtain is to the tragedy consummated before it fell. In painting his second Napoleon Orchardson yielded perhaps to a similar temptation ; the way in which he conducted himself therein shows that he knew well enough that the great French Emperor came to his end on the deck of an English man-of-war. So far I have said nothing of the pictorial constitution of this On Board the '* Bellerophonr It is, in fact, unmistakable. The aesthetic and the intellectual elements alike find their focus in the Emperor's figure. All the rest is complement, complement rightly placed and just in proportion, balancing the masses, picking up and resolving the lines, completing the chords of colour. Orchardson is often blamed for his empty spaces. The truth is that his spaces — and, I confess, they are THE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON 49 often ample enough — are seldom empty. They are filled with subtle colour modulations, with the infinite echoes of a harmony which never Study for the figure of Madame Recamier. dies completely into silence. Almost the only exception 1 can call to mind occurs in the picture we are now discussing. The mainsail D so THE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON of the Bellerophon seems " blinder," more monotonous and opaque, than it need have been. But that seems a pettifogging fault to find. Orchardson followed up his success of 1881 by building on a less satisfactory theme a still more perfect work of art. The incident which took his fancy is one of those too numerous events in the life of Voltaire which prevent him, as a personality, from looming over the life of his day at the height his intellect would justify. In the book already quoted, Chesneau complains that English pictures too often compel a reference to the catalogue before they can be understood. He goes on, with some simplicity, to find a partial excuse for this in the idea that the English public is much more literary in its tastes than the French, and " se tient tres generalement au courant de toutes les publications. Les personnages," he adds, " de I'histoire et du roman lui sont done bien plus familiers qu'ils ne le sont en France." Unhappily for our Voltaire, his next sentence is equally true, and here it is : " Les artistes de la Grande-Bretagne n'ont souci que du public de la Grande-Bretagne. Leurs oeuvres quittent rarement leur ile. lis sont done surs d'etre toujours compris." But the life of Voltaire, epoch- making person though he was, is not currently known in England. Among all the half-million persons who passed through the Academy turnstiles in 1882 it would have been difficult to find a hundred to whom the title of Orchardson's picture would have been explanation enough without the extract in the catalogue. As I hope these pages may be read by some outside that small minority, as Voltaire is, perhaps, Orchardson's masterpiece in its class, and as a book is, after all, the better for explaining itself, I may be excused if I repeat the story. It is about 1720. A large party is dining with the Due de Sully. Among the guests are the young Arouet de Voltaire and the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, notorious for usury and cowardice, vices not often allied with the grands noms of France. Voltaire ventures to contradict some assertion of the Chevalier's, who thereupon calls out with a sneer ; " Who is this young man who talks so loudly .'' " " Monsieur le Chevalier," replies Voltaire, "it is one who, if he cannot boast a great name, at least knows how to make the name he does bear honoured." The chevalier goes out in a cool fury, and the company thank his conqueror for driving him ofi^ the field. Presently comes one with a message to 1 THE ARr OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON 51 Voltaire, seducing him into the street by one of those tales of distress to which his ears were never closed. A great racket ensues, and in a few minutes Voltaire reappears in the dining-room, his clothes disordered, his wig awry, his face inflamed with rage, and calls on his host to avenge an outrage to himself just consummated on the person of his guest, who has been set upon and beaten by the footmen of Rohan, Sully, with many shrugs and phrases of regret, excuses himself from avenging a roturier on a ruffian of his own caste. There is the subject, and we cannot deny that it leaves too much outside the canvas to be an ideal one for pictorial treatment. On the other hand, it lends itself superbly to design and colour. The splendid room, the long table with its load of glass and gold, the figures about it, richly dressed and expressing a variety of emotions in the subtle way proper to a well-bred crowd, the deprecating duke, and the little flaming personality on which the interest is focused, all this gives an opportunity for characterization, for the sort of design which pursues coherence through the most changeful and apparently capricious rhythm, for a decorative scheme of colour, incessantly developing itself out of itself, like a fugue in music. Looking at its organization, nothing could be better than the Voltaire. The walls of the room, the stooping servants busied at the sideboard, the long perspective of the table and the men about it, the warm-toned oak parquet, all these form a back- ground against which is set, exactly in the right place, the cool, silvery passage which is the figure of Voltaire. The violence of the little gentleman is undeniably a blot, and, as it was a necessary outcome of the choice of subject, that choice had to be justified. The painter has gone far to afibrd that justification by the quality of his art. Voltaire was bought by Mr. Schwabe, and forms part of his gift to his native city of Hamburg. Twice more Orchardson returned to the vein he had struck so successfully in 1882 — in The Salon of Madame Recamier of 1885, and The Toung Duke of 1889. ^ P"^ these in the same class as the Voltairey because the pictorial inducement in each case was the opportunity given by a picturesquely accoutred crowd in a picturesque interior. In such a subject his correct but facile and intensely personal draughtsmanship could enjoy itself to the top of its bent ; his light, dexterous, occasionally D 2 52 THE ART OF WILLIAM QJJILLER ORCHARDSON meticulous, handling could revel among such gauds as epaulets, sword- hilts, Gouthiere mounts, glass and gold and silver plate ; while in the passions only half hidden under the conventional masks of society he found satisfaction for his desire at all costs to get character. " Character I must have," I have heard him say ; " good character if possible, but, if not good, then give me bad ! " There was plenty of both in the salon presided over by Juliette Recamier and Germaine de Stael ; and it is not all good character that peeps from beneath the wigs in The Tcung Duke. Our illustration makes it needless to describe the arrangement of the Madame Recamier. Here again the painter hit upon a telling arabesque. The opposition of the deep, dark masses on the left to the higher-toned and smaller groups on the right is managed with con- summate tact, while through the whole runs a subtle cadence of line, of which some indication is given to those who have only these pages to refer to in the beautiful sketch we reproduce (page 49). It would be impertinent, perhaps, to say much on the subject treated in this picture. Every one knows enough about the most famous, if not the most notorious, of the Parisian salons to understand all that Orchard- son has here to tell them. It may, nevertheless, be as well to remind the reader that the room in which all these soldiers, diplomats, and men of letters are assembled is not that drawing-room in the Rue de Sevres to which our thoughts turn most readily at the words Salon de Madame Recamier. It is the earlier salon, the throne of which the fair Recamier had to share with the brilliant and by no means fair De Stael. The presence of Lucien, of Bernadotte, of Necker's daughter herself, is enough to show that the time was not yet when half the patronage of the French minister had to pass through the hands of the sexless beauty. The subject of The Toung Duke is all upon the canvas. A young grandee has come of age, and celebrates his manhood by feasting his men friends. Pictorially, it is a variation on the Voltaire. Putting aside the suggested drama — tragedy or comedy, as it strikes you — of the earlier picture, the materials are the same in both cases, and the new creation is little else than the old looked at from a different point of view. Again we have the shimmer of tapestry and gilded mouldings for a background, a line of periwigged and be-satined men for population, a table with its ^ "^ ^ THE ART OF WILLIAM dUILLER ORCHARDSON SS load of furniture and its white cloth for nucleus. The focus and the trend of the masses are different, and the element of opposition — furious Arouet versus impassive Sully and Co. — on which the vitality of the Voltaire so greatly depended, is absent altogether, unless, indeed, the freshness of the bowl of roses, with its silent protest against the dissipation going on within its scent, may be taken to supply it. VIII The most popular of all Orchardson's pictures is probably the Ma?-- iage de Convenance. The group to which it belongs includes its sequel. After ^ and such domestic scenes as A Social Eddy, Her Mother' s Voice, An Enigma, If Music be the Food of Love, flay on. Hard Hit, Her First Dance, and Music, when Sweet Voices die, vibrates in the Memory. All these, with the one exception of After, explain themselves, or rather require no explanation. They afford glimpses into the kaleidoscope of society, which you cannot fail to interpret satisfactorily to yourself, and may be classed with those social notes, suggesting much, but putting no dots on the i's, which threaten to supersede the regular short story, just as the latter has half superseded the novel. The Mariage de Convenance speaks a language every man and woman who sees it can understand. The fairly respectable viveur, range at last, and settled down — in his own belief, poor man ! — to the quietude of good dinners, good wines, and a handsome wife, with nothing exciting to think about for the rest of his days but the monthly checking of his bank-book, is a not uncommon sight. Every one understands it when they see it, and, happily for the peace of the world, the discontent perceptible on the face of Orchardson's heroine develops into a shattering of all these comfortable arrangements with less frequency than one might expect. This picture shows all Orchardson's usual judgment. The proportions between the figures and the canvas, the placing of the table furniture, the opposition of the two men to the one woman^ — -put the butler beside the lady and you ruin the composition — are all right ; that is, they work actively together towards the winning of unity, while the pattern of the chiaro- scuro and the envelope of atmosphere and colour fall smartly into line with the rest. The alertness of the painter's fancy is illustrated by Study for Manage de Convenance. Bv permission of H'. O. Orc^ardson, Esq., R.J. THE ART OF WILLIAM QiUILLER ORCHARDSON 59 a curious device, which breaks the monotony of the background, and helps to keep it in its place. A shaded lamp stands in the middle of Rifection. By permission of Messrs. Laurie and Co. the table. At the wife's left hand there is a finger-glass. Note the angle at which the lamp-light strikes the water, the angle of incidence ; and 6o THE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON then raise your eyes to the left. There, at a point fixed by the angle of reflection, you will find a disk of light, shimmering through the otherwise unbroken shadow. The trick is slight enough ; you might call it trivial ; but it has its value in building up not only the truth, but the aesthetic balance, of the scene. Afier is an anticlimax in all but art. In colour, in the transparent depth of its shadows and the brilliancy of its quick sparkling points of light, and in the expression of character, it is even better than the Mariage. And the insinuation of a departed glory, the quiet, sympathetic fire — a crackling blaze would have spoilt the whole expression of the scene — -the one lamp deepening the gulfs of shadow beyond, and the absolute immobility of the single figure, all these empha- size the disappearance of the one disturbing element in the quietude of the first scene. The man's prospective cares have been whittled down to little more than the temperature of his claret. The painter was in a more tender mood when he conceived Her Mother s Voice. It was one of the first things undertaken after his move into Portland Place, and the room, with its wall of glass and hints of palm and fern, is his own back drawing-room. A girl sings to a young man — her fiance, if you like, but Orchardson had no such meaning — while her widowed father lays down his 'Times, and listens with a face full of memories to an echo of the voice which had won him thirty years before. Few things are more impertinent than the suggesting to a painter of some vital change in his work. Nine times out of ten it amounts to nothing less than asking him to make your individuality, and not his own, the modulus for his ideas. Still it is not impossible, with some experience and a vast amount of goodwill, to put oneself behind the artist, to see through his brain and eye, and occasionally to hit upon a notion which may have escaped himself, and yet would reinforce his own conception. It may be pure fatuity, but I fancy that if Orchardson had turned his young lady's back to us, reflecting the efi^ect of her song from her companion's face only, his picture would have profited. One difficulty would have had to be overcome — that of keeping the two groups in efi^ective proportion to each other. This is done at present by pushing the couple away into a distant corner, while the old man is brought down, as it were, to the foot- lights. Disturb this arrangement, and the balance would have to be Music^ when Sweet ^eices die, Hhratei in the Mf^tifrj. B\ perm is i ion of Messrs. Hildesheimer and Faulkner. • '•:%:^;f THE ART OF WILLIAM QUILLER ORCHARDSON 63 reconsidered, but the problem is by no means so insoluble as that of painting a singing mouth which shall be anything but a disfigurement. Orchardson is a great lover — I won't say admirer, for indeed his fancy is by no means of the kind which blinds its possessor to defects — of the Empire style in furniture as well as other things. His house is filled with it, and more than once the genesis of a picture is to be traced to the purchase of a piano, or a sofa, or a set of chairs. In the series of domestic idyls which we are at present looking at you will find three of these. An Enigma^ perhaps the finest of the three, would never have existed just as it is but for the introduction into the painter's household of the ample, curly-ended sofa, on which his man and woman, his Jeune femme and roue^ are at some cross purpose not closely defined even to their creator himself. Again, If Music be the Food of LovCy play on is the portraiture of a superb, five-pedalled bronze and orw<9«/«-mounted grand piano, weighted with an incident which, no doubt, it may have seen many a time during its lifetime of ninety years. Another piano, a vertical, harp-shaped engine, recalling with a difference the cupboard-like machines still to be found in the back regions of most old provincial houses, suggested an exquisite little picture most unsympathetically treated by the hangmen of the 1893 Academy. The design of Musicy when Sweet Voices die^ Vibrates in the Memory^ no less than its motive, was determined by the shape of the piano. A young girl, in a pink dress, the long lines of the skirt repeating happily the perspec- tives of the instrument at which she sits, turns over the leaves of old music-books, or invokes the echoes of half-forgotten airs. It is among the simplest and sweetest of Orchardson's later pictures, excelling in design even the beautiful work we reproduce in our frontispiece. A Tender Chord is lovely in colour, but as a creation in line it must yield the pas to its sister-picture of two years ago. Here the painter has de- liberately concocted a double entente. His title may be taken, if you like, to refer to the sounds produced by the young fingers straying pensively over the keys ; but it may refer just as well to the chord of delicate pinkish tones in which most of the work is done. Her First Dance is another scene from the days of short waists and conspicuous ankles. A girl stands up to open a ball with a young buck whose self-satisfaction is fanned by the too evident timidity of his partner. The room has not filled yet, and 64 "THE ART OF WILLIAM QiUILLER ORCHARDSON in its empty spaces the girl looks like a veritable Iphigenia, waiting for the knife. The picture reads like a page from Miss Austen, whose delicate literary workmanship is represented by the delightful colour and airy, silvery tone of Orchardson's painting. Hard Hit has technical affinities with Her First Dance. The ample spacing, the high key, the cool silvery tonality, the infinitely subtle Her First Dance. By permission of Messrs. Dowdeswell and Dowdeswell., owners of the copyright. contrasts of the one picture are repeated in the other. Both are full ot light, atmosphere, and tone. In spite of what the hasty critic might call empty spaces, there is no sense of paint. The broad surfaces of white panelled wall play all over with tone and colour. In spite of their superficial baldness they are full of infinity, and not an inch degenerates into mere pigment. Imagine, too, the difficulty of painting all those cards, so that they should seem neither too monotonous nor too various, so that they should at once look what they are, a multitude of squares of THE ART OF WILLIAM QJJILLER ORCHARBSON 65 one colour, receiving the light at a hundred ever so slightly varied angles, and each affected, in its own degree and way by its own number of spots of red or black, and fulfilling their proper functions in the scheme. For this part of the picture Orchardson used fifty packs of cards, throwing them down successively at each corner of the table, so that the actual pattern we see represents two hundred packs. The scene recalls the story of how Fox and some kindred spirits once played at Brooks's, from six o'clock one evening to late into the morning of the next day but one, w^hen a servant stood at each man's elbow to tell him what was trumps, and they were all up to their knees in cards ! Hard Hit was engraved by the late French etcher Champollion — a descendant, I believe, of Champollion the Egyptologist— who contrived to entirely lose its fine tone and delicious colour under an incredible hardness and dryness of method. IX So far little has been said about Orchardson's portraits, and yet the very best of his subject-pictures do not excel, even in interest, such things as the Mr. Moxon or the Sir Walter Gilbey. These portraits, and many others hardly less fine, have not yet won all the applause they deserve, and they may have to wait some time before they do. They are not painted in the way made fashionable by the rush to Paris. At present, French models are too often accepted without the least attempt at argument as the one touchstone of excellence. Those who seek to guide opinion seem not unfrequently to form their own after the manner of the famous, " Kneller in painting, and Shakespeare in poetry, damme ! " And yet, if, instead of taking a contemporary school, with all its temptations to error, for their test, they would turn to those masters who have steadily grown in fame through one generation after another, until, like Shakespeare, they have seated themselves on thrones which no one tries any more to shake, they would find Orchardson bearing the juxtaposition vastly better than some of their idols. Let us try the comparison here, and let us take no less a man than Rembrandt for our purpose. Supposing we apply the fashionable notion as to how a subject should be looked at, as to how paint should be handled, as to how far objective fact should control the whole perform- ance, to him, we should be forced to allow that three or four living artists are greater painters. Tested in any way whatever, except by the creative force of the imagination displayed in his work, and by the certainty with which he selected those facts which helped him to enforce his own conceptions, Rembrandt's present elevation to the highest summits of art will be difficult to justify. If we judge his colour, or his sense of values, or even, down to a comparatively late period in his life, his hand- Portrait of Miss Or chard son. By permission of W. (^. Orchardson, Esq., R.A. THE ART OF WILLIAM QIJILLER ORCHARBSON 69 ling, by the standards we accept from the French school of the moment, we shall be driven to confess that two or three French and Franco- Sir Walter Gilbey, Bart. American painters can beat him. The conceptions of Rembrandt arc entirely personal ; his objective treatment is governed by the determina- tion to take only what coheres with his individual preferences, modified, 70 THE ART OF WILLIAM Q.UILLER ORCHJRDSON of course, by the necessity for enough truth to prevent any suspicion of incapacity or of poor equipment in himself. Put a head by Rem- brandt, say his own head in Lord Ilchester's picture, beside Carolus- Duran's portrait of Pasteur. Compare them in the light of the principles on which the most important section of the French and its affiliated schools work for the moment, and you will be staggered at the result. As a piece of objective truth the Rembrandt will be beaten out of the field. Its colour, illumination, and even to some extent its handling will be recognized as arbitrary. But, nevertheless, you will find the Rembrandt stirring your imagination long after the impression made by the Carolus has faded away. The Dutchman has been able to see the soul, the intellect, the total personality within the outward head, and has been able to select from the facts before him all those, and only those, which actively helped to enforce that personality, and has enhanced them without such violence to truth as to either awaken our resentment or make us doubt his own equipment. Put as shortly as I can contrive to put it, the finest portrait painter is the one who most completely succeeds in building an organic pictorial structure upon the character of his sitter. The sitter gives the keynote, the splendour of the harmony depends upon the artist. So far as this conviction will guide us, such a portrait as Orchardson's Sir Walter Gilbey has a right to a higher place than the best work now being done by any French painter. This does not mean that I want to put our English master on a level with Rembrandt, but simply that the essential principles on which they work are the same, and that those principles alone lead to the highest art. Look at the Sir Walter Gilbey^ or the Mr. Moxon^ or the Mrs. Joseph^ or at a still quieter conception which was at the Academy some ten years ago, Mrs. Ralli^ or even at his more decorative and less closely organized performances, such as the Sir Andrew Walker and the Professor Dewar. In these creations you will find a grip on the personalities before him, an instinctive determina- tion to make those personalities his keynotes, and a power to compel every touch he puts upon the canvas to at once give vivacity to the expression of the sitter's character, and to prove, subjectively, that thus and thus only the artist intended to present him, which approach the painter of the Syndics^ and excel anything of the same kind we ever •V. *« -^ >• ^ «s; THE ART OF WILLIAM QiUILLER ORCHARDSON 73 now see at the Salon. For the Dutchman and the Englishman objective truth is a medium for the strongest possible enforcement of a subjective, aesthetic conception, while the French school is apt to concentrate its attention mainly on the objective qualities, using the subjective ones merely for control and restraint. On the one side we have passionate, on the other dispassionate, statements ; on the one side science in a rich robe of art, on the other science to which art has granted a scanty rag to veil her nakedness. And this brings me back to the theory from which I started, that all fine art which works through imitation must be a happy mixture of objective and subjective qualities. The imitation or reproduction of objects is the medium through which the personal conceptions have to be made visible, and so it must be good enough not only to avoid giving offence or betraying weakness, but even to give a certain amount of pleasure for its own sake. But as the gratification we receive from the best imitation is both limited in quantity and not of the highest order in kind, it should not be allowed to substitute itself for those subjective, expressional qualities whose power to give enjoyment is as wide as the capacities of the human mind. The objective side of such an art as painting has a limit, which is reached as often by a South Kensington student as any one else. You cannot go beyond illusion in that direction, and yet illusion will only give you the sort of pleasure you derive from looking at a rope-dancer. The subjective side has no limits upwards, although its base, as it were, is limited by the conditions of the materials in which you work. Objectively the artist has to satisfy the critical sense ; subjectively he has to stimulate the sympathetic imagination as vigorously as he can. Between these two constituents of a work of art there can be no doubt, I imagine, as to which should hold the higher rank. One exists for its own sake, the other as an antecedent necessity to its companion. The great charm of Orchardson appears to me to lie in a happy union of these two characteristics. Facts have a powerful fascination for him. Look, for instance, at the heap of maps in his Napoleon at St. Helena. These were painted from a set actually prepared for the 1805 campaign in Germany, which the painter spent weeks in hunting up. Evidence to the same effect is conspicuous all over his work. 74 "THE ARr OF WILLIAM QIJILLER ORCHARDSON And yet this scientific interest never gets the upper hand ; the modulating personality never yields or slumbers. The cadence of the lines pursues its unerring way through and about every object set upon the canvas, building up and enriching the general harmony, and providing a skeleton, well knit and most dexterously articulated, for the whole conception. To this result his powers of drawing contribute enor- mously. He is one of the very few painters whose drawing is in their bones. It is sometimes by no means literal ; with a pair of compasses and a treatise on proportion you might now and then convict a limb of being too long. But it never fails in subtlety ; it is always intensely vital and consistent with the movement of the scene, and it never betrays the slightest sense of labour. He seems, indeed, to revel in feats of draughtsmanship which almost any other painter would avoid. Into a small picture, which may possibly be seen at the next Academy — the subject is a young woman in a conservatory — he has gratuitously introduced about as irksome an object to draw as can well be imagined. It is one of those hammered iron tripods, in which all sorts of intricate curves have to be followed through their convolutions with extreme precision if, at the end, they are to look at all probable and organic. Who else would add to the difficulties of such a subject as the Toung Duke^ the extra task of putting in a nef^ with all its complication of ropes, ports, and arbitrary bends and planes .'' Look at our plate after Hard Hit. Note the crystal chandelier, with its dozens of scintil- lating pendants and the skeleton of gilded bronze peeping through them here and there. Let your eye search among the various dejecta from a night of dissipation which load a side table, and you will find all sorts of unconsidered trifles which help to tell the story, such as the wig of the chief swindler, hung inside out upon a bottle, so that its owner's head may stay cool enough for his purpose. All these things are drawn with delightful precision and painted with an unsurpassable eye for their envelope of light and colour. Turn back to our reproduction of his study for the head, shoulders, and arms of Madame Recamier. Who has excelled it in elegance and in that justness of accent in which lies the highest test of draughtsmanship ? Slight as it is, the best drawings of many men more famous as draughtsmen would look amateurish beside it. ''>''i''\'i\ THE ARr OF WILLIAM dUILLER ORCHARDSON -j-j About his colour there may be more dispute. Occasionally it rises to a very high level indeed, as in the Voltaire^ and such less ambitious Mn. Joseph. By permission of Mrs. Joseph. things as A Tender Chord and Music when Sweet Voices die. In his early period it was full of the most delicate grays, and^was as a *rulc 78 THE ART OF WILLIAM QIJILLER ORCHARBSON silvery in tone. I have already quoted the similitude found for it by Mons. Ernest Chesneau, which so happily characterized the harmonies of green, gray, gray-brown, and blue we find in so many of his pictures before 1880. Since that date a tendency towards a brassy yellow has occasionally over-asserted itself, and perhaps he has been a little over- fond of schemes in which the chief and all the minor parts were played by a brownish buff ! But when at his best, as in the three pictures just named, Orchardson has no superior as a colourist. Just now, when we so often hear the painter restricted in theory to a bare imitation of natural colour, this assertion will not find general acceptance. And yet the objectors themselves will go down on their knees before the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian, the St. George of Tintoretto, the Rape of the Sahines of Rubens, and a hundred other pictures in which a gorgeous conven- tion has been substituted for any attempt to render the literal tints of nature. The question, again, is one of the due proportions between subjective and objective elements, only that here we at last find these opposing, or parallel, or complementary qualities, which ever we may elect to call them, difficult to reconcile. It is enough for the present to point out that those in whom the world agrees to see its greatest colourists have been the most personal in their dealings with colour, have taken the widest liberties with nature, have shown the greatest audacity in elaborat- ing splendours of their own in which to clothe the sedateness of the world about them. The final verdict on Orchardson will have to be given by posterity, but he who can put fine colour and exquisite design at the service of a sound judgment and of an essentially pictorial imagination, may trust his reputation to his pictures with complete equanimity. INDEX "After," 56, 60 Antonio (gondolier), 27, 28 Burlington House, 18, 36 Cameron, Hugh, 12, 13 "Challenge, The," 29, 30, 31, 35, 40 Chalmers, G. P., 12 Champollion, 65 Chesneau, E., 28, 39, 40, 43, 44, 50, 78 "Conditional Neutrality," 29, 35, 36 " Dewar, Professor," 70 Edinburgh, 12, 13, 14, 17 " Enigma, An," 56, 63 " Gilbey, Sir W.," 66, 69, 70 Glasgow, 12 Graham, Peter, 12, 13 Graham, Tom, 12, " Hard Hit," 40, 56, 64, 65, 74 Hay, George, 13 " Her First Dance," 56, 63 " Her Mother's Voice," 56, 59, 60 Herdman, Robert, 12 Hutchinson, John, 12, 13, 14 " If Music be the Food of Love, play on," 56, 63 "Joseph, Mrs.," 70 Kcnnet, the, 21 Lauder, Robert S., 10 — 12, 1 7 London, 1 1, 17 M'Taggart, W., 12, 13 Macvvhirter, J., 12 " Mariagc de Convcnancc," 56, 59, 60 Moxon, Miss E., 22 " Moxon, Portrait of Charles," 29, 35, 66, 70 " Music, When Sweet Voices die " etc., 56, 63, 11 " Napoleon on board the Bellerophon" 44, 46—49 "Napoleon at St. Helena," 46, 47, 73 Orchardson, W. Q., his parentage and education, 12 ; early work in Scotland, 14 ; comes to London, 18 ; his marriage, 22 ; visits Italy, 25 ; becomes A.R.A., 18 ; R.A., 18 Paris, 29 Pcttic, John, 12, 17 "^ueen of the Swords," 29, 30, 31, 35, 40 " Ralli, Mrs.," 70 " Rccamier, Salon of Madame," 52 Rccamier, Sketch for Madame, 74 " Sly, Christopher," 40 " Social Eddy, A," 56 "Tender Chord, A," 63, -j-j Uffizi, 14 Venice, 25 — 27 "Voltaire," 50 — 52, 55 "Walker, Sir A.," 70 Walker, Fred, 27 Wcstgate, 21 Wilson, Andrew, 10 "Young Duke," 51, 51, 74 demand £!; ^e "?" ^^^-the six?^ dif **"|' 'P^^^^i-^g ^PRBO 1979 Mtcm DEC 11 1978 15w-i2,'24 ^ 44d Ckj- i