If, use of the images and sights of nature which are modified, in landscape, by every accident of atmosphere, and by every hour of the day, have inherited from earnest workers of the century just gone, a finer sense of vision, and a palette of greater clarity and wider range. The gain has not been without its revenges -its losses. For this advance has been achieved through a certain laxity of form. Drawing has suffered many neglects. however, the fascinations of light and new secrets of color have carried painters' thoughts away, for the time being, from the virtue and integrity of form, there are already indications of a return to the sincerity of the Renaissance with the added treasure of a subtler appreciation of the bewitching charm of light. This light-emitting palette bequeathed us by these men was discovered by long experimenting and patient practice. The former mixing of color was arbitrary and heavy. Men knew that the mingling of certain pigments would produce nominally other colors. This mixing then was done, but with no lightness of hand -no living tint was the result. A hard, nominal red or green or gray was produced, without vibration, and practically dead. There was, indeed, an early method employed by painters of laying in their pictures in what they were pleased to term “ dead color," as a kind of foundation or preparation for their succeeding painting. In many cases the "dead color" was never called to life. This was because even in the subsequent painting the new manner of manipulating pigment was not known. It was not known that the more freely the primary colors were permitted to reflect their respective rays, the greater the vigor and vitality of the tone produced under such conditions. If the work of a master in this new method of painting be examined closely, strands of pure color will be discovered in the greens or blues or reds he has made use of to record those corresponding tints in nature. Through a magnifying glass the effect is amazing when applied to the green of a tree or the blue of a painted sky; the same test to most early landscape art reveals the traditional and nominal green and blue. Under the new conditions of painting one can look into the colorful depths of trees and into azure distances of sky. Atmosphere, ether, is more largely the possession of recent landscape art than it has ever been in the past. Thackeray's Clive Newcome, a comparatively recent hero, for our purpose, ex claims, somewhere, at the futility of achieving color as compared with form: “A line must come right; you can force that into its place, but you can't compel the circumambient air.” Since that time Monet and others-Monet perhaps, above all, have succeeded in a large measure in "compelling" the all-embracing ether, and their contribution to landscape means a revelation of the possibilities of pigment. Art could no more evade this modern note than could other fields of human thought escape the stimulating effect of widening horizons. Nor is this note confined to landscape painting. It sounded in the schools and ateliers of the figure painters as well. The painter Monet struck it when his portrait study Le bon Bock" was shown, and he, too, was hailed as an innovator, a deliverer. Sur Conventional lighting and arbitrary color received a shock that was wholesome. face lights on garments, varying textures, hard or soft, were given with a truthfulness and with an authority that truthfulness inspires. No more "studio" painting, or if, indeed, in-doors, with the fidelity of vision and faithfulness of record that the "pleinair" painters practised. Accidental lights, happy reflections, a frank statement of indoor effects make as imperative a call for truthful record as the more transient and evanescent movement of light and air outside. Monet believed this, and said so in his work. He established his planes, values, and play of surface lights with a precision that was convincing, and although not in a great sense a colorist, he contributed much that was sound to the painting of these latter days. IV BUT it is the unfamiliar, the unusual which always excites suspicion, if not ridicule. When Constable painted the lilac, or even bluish or whitish light which exists on the varnished surface of a violin, or on the sparkling, glistening surfaces of green leaves, reflecting from their polished planes the blue or white light of the sky, then "Constable's snow" became a witticism with connoisseurs and critics. But thanks to the steady and persistent practise of landscapists since that time, and to the public whose eyes, through their efforts, have become more sensitive and more attuned to the harmonious sights of out-door nature, there is to-day no surprise when these obvious facts are stated. It is now, rather, if they be missed, that criticism takes up their cause and condemns-it is no world of ours to-day without them. And our sense of outside things has become so keen, that the visual aspect of all objects under all conditions of illumination,. in-doors or out-of-doors, seems in fair way to become the general property, the common attribute of human sight. Progress may be recorded here, undoubtedly; and so subtle are the statements now sometimes made in painted art, that one is moved to speculate as to the limit of the suggestive possibilities of human vision. Surely, with this new power of obtaining verisimilitude of a high order, painting may stride into a new realm of suggestive thought-interior work become more interesting and varied, portraiture more intimate, and still-life painting, even, less lifeless. Every object on which the light of heaven falls becomes a problem of fascinating and picturesque importance, a more beautiful world is disclosed to the sight, thence to the mind. It is very possible that the decline of panoramic art is due to the fact that mere breadth, extent, physical bigness, yields no such mental elation as does the contemplation of a corner of the world viewed by an artist of distinguished temperament, lyrical in his emotions, and possessed of all those sanctities of sight that a loving study of, and living with, nature has endowed him. This searching inquiry into the visual potentialities of outward things has really affected all branches of painting, so that mural art, even-a comparatively recent revival of painted thought-has been touched by it, and one has only to compare the Raphaelesque designs of Baudry with the primitive simplicity of form, but thoroughly modern note in color, of Puvis, to be convinced of this. In Puvis we have the modern vision trained into the service of decorative art. His mind, richly stored with the multitudinous facts of sight, is so controlled, that in his use of them, in architectural fitness. mural art, he always obeys the demands of his hand to create a world of realistically With the material in natural images, he has the conscience and the character to so transform them, as never the note is modern all the same, and has to offend the laws of mural rectitude. But given a new life to pictured walls. In making legitimate use, as Puvis does, of this "new sight" in painted panels, the heavens are brought down and vistas opened: still ceiling is supported and walls stand firm. The bogey of "holes in the wall" need not be feared, if tempered and intelligent use is made of this new visual sense. has penetrated and influenced all recent painted art-there is no getting away from it, nor any evident disposition to do so. This sense of things, to understand the laws which affect A resistless curiosity to peer into the world the semblance of any and all objects in nature-without and within-accidents of proxnatural aspect of the different hours of the imity, reflections, variations of color, the day, or the gloom of night-for night, too, has never been so adequately presented in visual truths have been found in that great art—all this, and myriads more of beautiful arsenal of nature, the storehouse of all facts, and been brought out by the painter to make there has been space, perhaps, for an enuse of in his art. In this limited review couraging glance. Let us hope that, after all "fads" and neglects have passed, drawing will again assert itself and the artist of the future be equipped to tell, in fairer colors and purer form, the radiant story of the world. FRANK FOWLER. |