ART.
MR. BRETT'S PAINTINGS AT THE FINE ART SOCIETY.
Ir is really to be wished that more painters would follow Mr. Brett's example, and show what great results may be obtained from one season's work. In the present exhibition there are forty-six sketches and three small pictures, all of which have been done during the summer season of 1886. The exhibition is a most interesting one,—interesting as showing the excellences and deficiencies of the painter ; and perhaps it would be hard to say which predominate.
Some years ago, the present writer was talking to this artist on the subject of ideas in works of art, and the extent to which they should be encouraged by painters. Of the precise words which Mr. Brett used I will not at this length of time be certain, but the gist of his opinion was as follows :—" Ideas ! I don't want any ideas in pictures ; there are no ideas in mine. What the artist has got to do, is to paint what he sees ; to see a little beauty, and then die." Well, this is the secret of Mr. Brett's power,—the secret also of Mr. Brett's weakness. He has banished ideas from the realm of Art, or rather, attempted to banish them, for a little bit of idea will creep in now and then, in spite of his efforts ; and his painting has become, crudely speaking, the delineation of an uninteresting beauty,—in some instances more strictly speaking, of no beauty at all. Of this we will speak further a little way down ; but for the moment, before entering into detail, we must say a few words upon the " Commentaries " which Mr. Brett has affixed to the catalogue of his sketches, and upon one or two statements therein con- tained.
This is a most amusing piece of writing,—terse, vigorous, and to the point, and expressed with a brasquerie very characteristic of the artist and very pleasant to the reader, but it is also full of crudest dogmatism, and contains a good many random charges against art critics, and much glorification of Mr. John Brett, A.R.A. It is all very well for an artist, in the privacy of his studio, to say that it is a well-established practice, " if you cannot dig, and to beg you are ashamed, you go into business as an art critic ;" but the sneer is too easy a one to redound to the credit of an artist who himself indulges in art criticism of the most superficial and exasperating kind. A painter who only sees in the works of David Cox daubs and blots jest distinct enough to suggest the most superficial aspect of things, is hardly a critic entitled to condemn the partiality or blindness of others, for the very truth which he tells us with so mach insistence is to be found in his own work, is the quality which lies at the root of Cox's art, since all verities are not of the catalogue order, and the broad facts of Nature are frequently expressed by great artists in inverse ratio to the apparent minute detail of their rendering. Take, for instance, a portraiture of clouds—and " portraiture " is essentially the right word to use here—since Mr. Brett paints every cloud in elaborate detail, and compare the truths of the sky as rendered by the dauber Cox, and by these "optically correct" sketches by Mr. Brett. The inferiority of the latter artist is too marked to be disputable. Look round these forty-six sketches, done in the varying weather of four months, and notice that there are scarcely more than two classes of sky in the whole series, one of these being greatly in predominance— that representing two or three long lines of cumulus clouds stretching across the sky some slight distance above, and in- variably parallel to the horizon—and then think for a moment of the (almost literally) thousand varieties of skies of which Cox was master,—of the golden light of his sunsets, of the depth and grandeur of his stormclonds, of the spacious calm of his cirrus skies, of the breezy freshness of such pictures as " The Hayfield" and the " Calais Pier." Why, to compare one of these men with the other, in respect to their general fidelity to cloud nature, is like comparing an actor who has elaborated with care one small part, to a great tragedian who has studied the reproduction of all the passions and sorrows of humanity.
Mr. Brett sees nothing in Cox but a hasty sketcher,—why P Because Mr. Brett does not see in Nature—see, that is, in the sense of appreciating and making hie own—all those diverse and beautiful effects which appealed to the elder painter ; and this brings ns at once to the great defect of these sketches, and that is, whatever their merits, that they are in the fullest sense of the word, merits of the earth, and not merits of the air.
You may focus a microscope, as it were, upon rock, or grass, or hill, or even on the calm ripples of sunny water ; but the cloud which passes, with its multitudinous subtle changes, across the wide vault of the sky, and the wave which drives hurriedly before the wind, or tumbles brokenly upon the shore, must be seized, if at all, by the mind's sympathy and perception, rather than by the slow accuracy of the hand.
The very conception of a painter which causes him to believe that detailed accuracy to Nature is invariably possible, is one that implies the certainty of his losing the broader truths of his sub- jects. The artist who will invariably render the special tint of each spot of lichen, each blade of grass, each ripple of water, is most apt to surrender—and surrender unconsciously—the effect of atmosphere, and the unity of impression with which all natural details are surrounded and modified ; and so truly is this the case with Mr. Brett's work, that his (so-called) optical and scien- tific truth makes him continually forget to grasp the fact which lies at the very groundwork of outdoor painting,—the first truth of natural effect, viz., that it is from the sky and not the earth that the light comes. In not a few of the sketches before us, even in the effects of summer skies, supposed to be radiant with light, the sky is one of the darkest parts of the whole picture ; and the clouds have, in their minute modelling, lost all that sense of lightness, transparency, and distance which is of the very essence of their impressiveness. Mr. Brett has brought them down to earth for us. This is not to be wondered at when considered in connection with this painter's theory. He says that all clouds more than 15° above the horizon are diffuse, and, with one exception, have no forms of any interest, and asserts that the necessary clouds can be swept in with complete certainty and "with a degree of sem- blance that may be called absolute." Certainty ! absolute resemblance ! Great heavens ! where can the man have lived and painted during his " forty industrious years ? " one is tempted to exclaim. Has he never seen a sunset? or a dawn ? or a storm ? or a moonlight? or the gradation of an evening sky ? or the softness of a rain-cloud or the million flakes of brightness which dash up almost from the horizon to the zenith ? or, in fact, any of the more beautiful cloud effects ? Let him go to the National Gallery and look at his Turners, and then read Mr. Ruskin's description of the cirri and the cumuli, before he writes such confident nonsense for the future.
But passing from Mr. Brett's literary dogmas and artistic deficiencies, to the excellences of his painting, let us point out what are really the merits to be found in these sketches,—merits one is apt to forget in the irritation of the artist's excessive claims on their behalf. And, first of all, let us speak of the technical excellence with which Mr. Brett depicts the brilliancy of cast sunlight. It is true that to this end he frequently—almost habitually—surrenders the light in the sky ; but he does manage to convey with intensity the light cast upon the rock, or on the water, from an unseen sun. Another merit in many of these sketches, especially in one called " Silver Clyde," is the painter's power in rendering the transparency of calm water. This he does with the greatest knowledge ; it is the one point, in fact, in which his quasi-scientific study of Art has borne fruit. In the minutest variations of colour, and in the power of indicating precisely, and yet unobtrusively, the ripples on water in calm weather, Mr. Brett has scarcely a rival. Again, this artist is able when he takes the trouble—which is not always—not only to draw with precision and freedom the forms of his rocks and mountains, but to endow them with an appearance of firmness and solidity, to make their opacity and immovability as true and interesting as the translucency of the water. Look for an instance of this at the drawing entitled " Farland Rocks," which is, indeed, in many ways one of the best sketches of the collection ; and note, in addition to the merits we have mentioned, the easy and yet minute indications of form in the drawing of the distant mountains, and note the completeness with which the long grass and yellow flowers in the foreground are suggested with comparatively little work.
It is a sarcastic commentary on Mr. Brett's assertion that a finished picture should be more like the real scene than a sketch, that the picture which he entitles "Arran from Farland Head" is in nearly every respect inferior to its original, and is in places absolutely false, owing to its elaboration from memory. Not only the freshness of impression of the sketch is lost,
but even the troth of the foreground details is gone,—look, for instance, at the monotonous aspect of the grass and the want of translucency in the water beyond. We believe it is true, generally speaking, of Mr. Brett's painting, that his sketches are better than his pictures, and that for the very simple reason hinted at, at the beginning of this article ; for in a sketch, which should be the fresh, untouched representation of Nature, we are not likely to miss the absence of an idea,—by which we mean the absence of some conception on the part of the artist, the evidence of his having exercised the power of selection, modification, and arrangement. No artist should strive to render himself a living camera ; but this is apparently Mr. Brett's aim, so far as we understand the meaning of his " Commentaries," and the doc- trines laid down therein. He will have no ideas in his painting, and from his pictures it might be said-
" Life and thought have gone away, Side by side,
Leaving door and window wide, Careless tenants they."
The doors and windows of Nature are, it is true, very widely opened here, and the sun shines and the wind blows very freely
through them ; but the essence of all great art, of both ancient and modern times, will be sought in vain. The work is that of a dexterous, industrious, clear-seeing, but limited nature; of an artist who goes about with a foot-rule, measuring the universe, and finding here and there his measure to be too small, cuts out a narrow slice of natural detail, and shuts his eyes to all the rest.
The one definite mental impression stamped upon each of these sketches is that Mr. Brett alone "has found artistic salvation," that he alone is scientifically true, that his rendering of Nature is an absolute resemblance, and is rendered with unfailing cer- tainty. He is so "confoundedly cocksure" about everything in a land or sea-scape, that he never dreams that there can be a beauty which he has not seen, a meaning which he has not fathomed, a significance which he does not understand, in the- simplest scene which his brash renders so dexterously, and from which, nevertheless, he fails to extract the hints of fancy and loveliness to which many a more blundering artist would give us the key.
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