MR. WALLER'S PICTURES.
To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sia,—Fair criticism, from a competent critic, I receive with respect; but as your Art critic (sheltering himself behind your paper, like a Ribbonman behind the hedge) has chosen to pour a volley into me, accompanied by some personalities, please allow me to reply. He says I have "become conceited by yielding to the temptations which sudden popularity," &c. As to the conceit, it becomes me not to speak ; but I yield to no man, in my most earnest endeavours, as a humble student of Nature, to do my best with the limited amount of brains at my disposal. As to the "sudden popularity," your critic must be singularly ignorant of the man he elects to criticise. I have been on the same dead level of respectable mediocrity (to my shame be it spoken) for the last seven years. A "sudden popularity" would be an unexpected blessing. Farther, he states, "He made a success of a picture in which the finest thing was a group of two horses He painted another, in which the chief matter was two horses Again, he came to the
front with a third picture, in which two horses formed the principal feature." How very much more valuable this statement would have been had it been true ! The only horse-picture with which I had a small success consisted of four horses grouped together and five figures (not two horses, as your critic is so fond of quoting). After that came several horse-pictures, with the figures always in the majority, excepting in two instances, and in nearly every case the number of the horses was either one or four. Your critic chooses wholly to ignore the fact that of the five pictures I painted last year, only one consisted of horses, and that picture I did not send to the Academy. One of our best sea-painters has painted the same blue sea for twenty years (may he paint it for twenty more) ! Many of our best figure-painters have painted figures in the same costumes for a similar period without hostile criticism ; but the man who has the temerity to combine figures and animals (though working in a far more varied field) is always accused of sameness and repetition if he paints the same animal twice, as I learnt to my cost some years ago when two successive deer pictures drew a storm upon my head, because I had not invented a new animal. He adds, "There were symptoms of weariness on the part of the populace." They show it in a very remarkable way. They will keep asking me to paint horses. His last statement is,—" This is a bad picture All other work done in the same spirit will also be bad, though fools may admire and dealers buy it,"— from which I may gather that all the work I have in hand is to pass into the possession of moneyed imbeciles, and that if the whole world dared to differ from my critic, they would be catalogued as fools. As this is the opinion of the gentleman, who in his opening sentence accused me of conceit, I cannot help looking upon it as one of the most touching admissions in modern literature.—I am, Sir, &c., 58 Circus _Road, St. John's Wood. S. E. WALLER.
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