Art
The Royal Academy Exhibition—II.
IN painting as in everything else honesty is an endearing, though not always an immediately attractive quality. Strictly speaking, it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for greatness in an artist, though many great artists are dishonest at times.
First let me attempt a definition. Dishonesty in painting is of two sorts : the artist may fake his emotions and pretend that he is more excited by his subject than is really the case, or he may resort to technical trickery. On this definition we may take it that honesty is essential to great art, though this would be hard to prove and we can see that it is not a sufficient quality by considering an example. Pieter de Hooch was entirely honest, but Vermeer has some particular gift—call it genius, if you lice, for convenience—which puts him in a different class, in that of great painters, to which de Hooch cannot aspire.
Of all types of artists none is so liable to dishonesty as the portrait painter who has little freedom and is always liable to be confronted with a sitter for whom he has no particular predilection. If he is then strictly honest the portrait will be dull and the sitter dissatisfied. He is, therefore, continually open to the temptation of faking his feelings and of working up an interest in those points which he guesses to interest the sitter. In fact in one way or another he is almost bound to flatter by making the sitter either more interesting or more handsome than he really is.
This seems frequently to have been Orpen's situation when confronted with an official portrait and in many of his works he appears simply as the most adroit of flatterers. In the early portraits, such as that of Anita Bartle (11), this tendency is not apparent, and almost all the self-portraits are, as we might expect, relatively honest. But, of the later commissioned portraits, only that of Sir John Bean (569) is entirely free from that desire to please at all costs which spoils the general run of this class of Orpen's work. This portrait is also tech- nically honest, a fact which distinguishes it from most of his official portraits. For Orpen discovered certain tricks for -the painting of grey and black stuffs, by means of which he gives them an attractive sheen but which he used too often and without discrimination. After we have seen a dozen exath.- - pies of this device it begins to-wear rather thin and we realize that Orpen's method is superficial and does not give the true character of stuffs as a Dutch painter would have given it. It was only when he was confronted with some new material difficult to render, such as the rubber gloves in the Portrait of a Surgeon (83), that he was mused to real technical in- ventiveness. In general, however Orpen is at his most honest and, therefore, at his best in his satirical and genres pieces—not in the horrible official Peace Treaty paintings, but in such sincerely felt comments on the War as Bombing : Night (73), or in the splendid Play Scene from Hamlet (125), probably his masterpiece. Here no demand was made on his power of flattery or on his technical trickery.
Greiffenhagen cannot be accused of dishonesty, for he appears to have had no emotions to fake and certainly did not possess the technical efficiency necessary to start,playing tricks. He had a certain talent for the cheaper qualities of decoration and so could produce an effective poster, but few artists can have had less feeling for oil paint as a substance. There is hardly a square inch in his canvases which is not unpleasant in texture. Nor could he faintly suggest atmosphere or depth ; every part of his figures is at the same distance from the spectator and very often the construction breaks down altogether—as, for instance, in the legs in the portrait of Stuart Ogilvie (304). His portraits give one the impression that he painted each part of them without any regard for its relation to the whole picture.
Lambert, on the other hand, is honest and good. His pencil studies show that he had considerable gifts as a draughts- man and his finished portraits prove that he could really model solid form. His charming portrait of Constant Lambert in Blue-Coat dress displays to the best his feeling for colour, and in his big portrait groups, notably Mrs. Braaming and Children (228), he belongs to the true English tradition of monumental portrait painting and proves himself heir to Gainsborough. The latest of the big compositions, The Actress (225) is painted with greater freedom but with the same control of design and makes a worthy end to the vista which greets us as we enter Burlington House. ANT,014..y. BLUNT.
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