ART.
MR. BRABAZON'S WATER-COLOURS.
IT is a common complaint that the English water-colour art is neglected. It is; it is sadly neglected by Nature, who sup- plies few artists in that medium. But one, it appears, has been in hiding this long while; and instead of the public neglecting him, he has been neglecting the public. He is the best water-colour painter we have had since Turner; he reaches back to the days of Cox ; he has been quietly per- fecting his art since that date, and at last condescends to let ns see the result. This strange course of action dubs him an amateur ; and he is an amateur in the sense that he has had the good fortune to be able to pursue his art undistracted by the need of selling or exhibiting. The ordinary professional has neither the time nor desire nor capacity to learn the art like this; and if a few more such amateurs were to be had, the stigma in painting, as in other forms of sport, would be on the professionals, and not on the amateurs. The vices of the amateur as commonly conceived are a small prettiness of imagination, a timid niggling in execution, an incapacity to apprehend any big relations of colour or form. But these are the proud characteristics of professional English water- colour. Go to the Old Water-Colour Society, and you will find that, with few exceptions, its members understand by drawing a faltering account of the edges of things, by colour the wrong tints worried to death in the hope of getting on terms with their neighbours, and as to that element of painting that is half the battle—a feeling for the delightful stuff they are using, its natural action and pleasures and effects—they are constrained by a mild, firm pedantry to do with the paint everything but what it is disposed to do. Nor is their sense for nature less petty. It is polite to suppose that when they set to work to paint a scene, it is because they have been vaguely stirred by some beautiful effect ; but if so, they have been unable to analyse to themselves wherein it consisted ; a bird was singing, but has flown away ; a confused glory hangs about the place, and they are at huge pains to bring home the bush.
To pass from this to Mr. Brabazon,—Oh the peace and relief of it! He has served a severe apprenticeship to the masters of selection and effect, as one or two translations here out of a large collection witness. Translations, not copies, for in a study like the little figure from Velasquez, he deals with the material of a painting as freely as with the material of Nature, and turns it from the language of the original into that of another medium with a creative tact. He has gathered from Turner the hints that extraordinary genius flung out of a technique partly transparent, partly opaque, embracing the full range of resource in the medium, and adapted to ex- press by its speed and suggestiveness the most fleeting and exquisite surprises of colour. These he has developed, and uses his method with a bravery and certainty of attack, and a freshness of result, that are unsurpassed. He has ceased long ago to see in terms of brown; his notation is in pure colour. And if his handling is certain and delicate, his imagination, his knowledge of what he wants from a scene, is no less so. There is a cry and passion in the recognition, there is no possible doubt. Sketch after sketch says,—How beautiful this was ! and this ! and this ! and we echo the ex- clamation, because it is. Look at that note of admiration, the little sketch of the Piazzetta ; was ever effect more clearly understood and simply rendered ? Or, take the interior of St. Mark's. That has been painted often enough, and once more it is polite to suppose that the painters, on entering, felt the picture,—this great cave of a place, with its purple and golden gloom,—and green lights spilt about the columns and floor. But they sit down and work at it, and forget; and the picture goes ; they get all of the marble and mosaic but the glister, all of the architecture but the colour, all of the facts but the effect. Mr. Brabazon has grasped the essential secrets of the place. Take a point. There is a certain screen in front of the sanctuary which is heavy and ungainly in form, and which therefore the common fool of painting elaborates unsparingly. Mr. Brabazon, in mercy, restrains the thing, lets it speak its beautiful note of colour, but not maunder about its shape. So, in another case, when the ordinary man would have been losing the precious moments in counting windows or measuring bricks, this painter was noting the blaze of pink light on a palace-front, and the bewildered dance of colours in the canal ; and to get these true between the shadow and the sky is a more difficult kind of measurement. Then there is the pile of red and grey houses above a campo and a bridge, an astonishingly fine composition of forms and colours ; there is the milky opal of a Taj, the white and blue and red of the Capri market-place, a moon- rise, hitting the precarious, trembling colour of the hour, a lake with white clouds at anchor, and the light growing upon the road before the eyes, a pergola terrace with sunshine glowing on the plaster and glistening on distant white roofs, and a dozen other lessons how to see. The amusing thing is that the niggler will treat these pictures as slight sketches which any one could do if he chose to be so slight, being under the pleasing illusion that, buried under his " finished " work, at some early stage, lies a Brabazon. In this he flatters himself. It is like supposing that a hasty draft of a page of " Bradshaw " would be the same thing as an impromptu poem. The only quality they have in common is that they are impromptus. The niggler can readily, if he pleases, become a dauber, but he cannot, by a mere effort of carelessness, become a Brabazon.
D. S. M.
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