ART.
ENGLISH ARTISTS IN PEN-AND-INK.
MESSRS. PERCIVAL AND CO. have put forth a handsome volume entitled "English Pen-Artists of To-Day," consisting of excellently reproduced specimens of work by Englishmen in this line. These specimens have been selected, and the accompanying letter-press supplied, by Mr. C. G. Harper, who is himself, it appears, a pen-and-ink draughtsman.
It is a very proper thing that English pen-and-ink artists should receive due honour; but Mr. Harper, by the curiously clumsy way in which he sets about his task, runs the risk of bringing ridicule upon his cause. His book at once suggests comparisons with the well-known work of Mr. Pennell, brought out some four years ago, all the more that it follows that volume closely in almost every feature of arrangement and type. That book did admirable service to English students by introducing many of them at first-hand to the great Continental draughts- men, known so far only in the echo of their American followers. It illustrated the fact that the Americans had been quicker than ourselves to note how the main stream was flowing, and had gone to school under those masters whose work suited the new requirements, and suggested new achievements for process-reproduction, while England still hugs, in a backwater, the ancient woodcut methods. Mr. Pennell at the same time gave a proportionate space to the older English school, did justice to the beginnings of a newer, and pointed the obvious moral. Now Mr. Harper begins his English supplement to Mr. Pennell's book, a supplement that in important respects adds very little, and in what it does add is an enforcement of the same moral, with a blundering attack on American artists. They conceal their inability to draw, it appears, beneath a flashy technique. Is this, in Mr. Harper's opinion,
a proper description of Mr. Abbey's style, to name only one artist ?—and if so, who are the English draughtsmen beneath whose standard he falls ? Again, this technique of the Americans is borrowed from foreign sources ; it is not "national." The American, in a word, is as little " national " in his style, as good English artists are ; for example, Rey- nolds and Turner, who were wise enough to go where painting was to be learned. But this fact is withheld from Mr. Harper's eyes by a label. " It has often been said," he remarks, " that Art has no Nationality, and this mis- leading dictum has been voiced by many whose names add weight to their utterances. Art has, on the contrary, as one may see with little trouble, many and marked nationalities. Even [why even' P] our National Gallery authorities tacitly [why tacitly' ?] acknowledge this truth by arranging the public collections in national' schools. There are English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German, and so forth." Now, if Mr. Harper, before " voicing," had taken the trouble to reflect on the difference between a school and a nationality, he might have saved himself from this absurdity. What he really wants to abuse is the lack of originality in a draughtsman who is merely a mannerist in the style of another. As it happens, some American draughtsmen are mannerists in the style of artists who happen to be foreigners ; but it is also possible to be a mannerist in the style of artists of one's own nation. To be a mannerist is to be a mannerist, that is to say, not worth troubling about, and it is no redeeming merit in him to resist the temptation of better models abroad, and "remain an Englishman." What is important in this matter is, not to confound the mannerist and the beginner or student. The beginner must needs be a copyist of some one, and the better and bigger artist that some one is, the less is the chance of the scholar fossilising into a mannerist. Give him a choice of masters to start with, and he will at least begin with a style that fits his temperament, instead of kicking against the pricks of an uncongenial method. Give the English student examples of the black-and-white masters of modern Europe, of Menzel, of Fortuny, of Vierge, and he will have a better chance of finding himself in the end, of adding his own to what he borrows, than if you force him to continue the mannerism of a mannerism, the perversion of those same masters, that he will find in the Graphic and other sources at home.
For what is the condition of our English schools ? En- throned in popular estimation, reproduced weekly in the Graphic, the Illustrated London News, in Black and White, there is a tiresome kind of wood-engraving that represents no natural effect, gives no decorative pleasure, is inimical to every sort of character in black-and-white drawing. In Punch there is the continuation of an admirable school, that of Once a Week, Good Words, and other papers, but one whose methods are unreasonable, whose conventions are needless, in face of modern reproductive processes. Then there are the se-called " decorative " artists of the Century Guild Hobby-Horse and the English Illustrated Magazine. Several of them are masters of an admirable art, but a very limited one, since their decoration never attempts the problems of tone, of atmosphere, of the modern subject. It is to the pages of Pick-Me-Up, of the Ladies' Pictorial, and the like, that we must turn for any attempts by English hands to use the new resources and attempt the new effects of the art of black-and-white. The pity is, that at present the. English artist who wishes to work in pen-and-ink, as his knowledge and temperament suggest, is so much limited to the fictitious representation of current events, to the repro- duction of photographs, to the illustration of a trivial facetiousness. When shall we see an English black-and- white paper reproducing the designs of artists without literary trammels or editorial superstitions about method P Mr. Harper's book naturally mirrors this state of affairs, as Mr. Pennell's did before; and the case is very little altered by his additional illustrations. He is very meagre in examples of the fine older period, though he includes the veteran Sir John Gilbert. There is nothing by Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Millais, Madox Brown, Leighton, Hughes, Orchardson, Pettie, and others. It is true that in many cases the drawings were cut away on the wood block, nor is it always the case that ink was used. The Punch men are given as in Pennell, and the men of Pick-Ate-Up and other process-using papers, as in Pennell. Some of these artists have not passed the imitative stage. Thus, Mr. Raven Hill is a mannerist after Charles Keene in his drunken men and four-wheelers, an imitator of Lunel and others in his stage figures. Mr. Willson is a translator of Sehliettgen, Mr. Wilson of the Japanese. Messrs Greiffenhagen and Partridge stand out as draughtsmen of individual method ; and Mr. Phil May, who was not illustrated_ in Mr. Pennell's work, is a draughtsman of whom England may be proud. He has absorbed much from abroad, but he has a genius for line and arrangement that is his own. From the Whirlwind, again, is borrowed Mr. Sickert's capital head of M. Lemoinne ; and there are two brilliant sketches by Mr. Caton Woodville. Among the decorators, there is the im- portant addition of Mr. Ricketts. His design for Igdrasil is a worthy companion to Mr. Image's cover for the Hobby-Horse,.
It is when we pass from the field common to the two boob., and consider the merits of Mr. Harper's additions from other sources, that we are forced to doubt his competence. In the forefront of the book are placed six artists, whose claims to notice appear to have been in great part the motive of its publication. These are Messrs. Barnard, Barnes, Gordon Browne, Alfred Bryan, Yates Carrington, and Chantrey Cor- bould. To put the case gently, none of these draughtsmen can be put forward as the master of a good pen-and-ink style, though Mr. Barnard has certainly an eye for humorous character. About Mr. Bryan, even the author has qualms,. for he confesses that " he has nothing to show the technician ; " but he goes on to give the amazing reason for including him, that " he accomplishes an immense amount of work week by week, and from one year to another "—(are these different amounts ?)—" and if only for this reason, should be represented, even though he possessed none of those qualities which have made him so- ready a caricaturist," &c. "Outrageous caricature" is the- phrase Mr. Harper uses for one of the drawings, and it fits. He ends the notice with this piece of moralising :—" It is a pity, for distinction's sake, that one should work so continually at high pressure ; but hurry is a sign of the age that is evident- on every hand." This may explain Mr. Bryan's work, but it does not excuse its being taken from its proper place and printed in a sumptuous book that is intended to be, not an encyclopaedia of signs of the age, but an anthology of artistic. work. It would be cruel to go through the book in detail ; it is enough to say that there will be found in it mannerists after- Frederick Walker, after Parsons, after Caldecott and Abbey, after Mr. Pennell himself, and that beyond the few cases already noted, Mr. Harper's additions to the roll of English pen-and-ink artists are indiscreet. There is plenty of promise in the new English school, but the time has hardly yet come for it to exhibit itself. It would be more to the purpose of the present moment, to supplement Mr. Pennell's- labours with fuller illustration of contemporary foreign work by men like Legrand, Lund, Gognet, Steinlen Forain, and many another, or of the masters of Japan whom some of these have studied to such excellent effect. D. S. M.
Previous page
