ALBERT MOORE.*
Mn. BALDRY has produced the book about Albert Moore and his work which could at the moment be most usefully put together. He is a pupil and admiring disciple of the artist who died so recently ; it was therefore a. labour of love to him to collect the facts of his master's artistic life, and to describe in the order of their production all his important works. The life was quiet and uneventful. A friendship with Nesfield, the well-known architect, who had a good deal to do with the reversion to picturesque domestic architecture, appears from the record to have been one of the most im- portant outside circumstances that went to determine Moore's activity ; for it led to his employment on the decoration of buildings, and this no doubt strengthened his bent for an abstract kind of painting. For the rest, the life was strenuous, fall of honourable and single-minded effort, undistracted by low ambitions, undegraded by concession to standards not the artist's own, and courageous in the face of sulferip,-4- and imminent death. So particular a description of his work would have been tedious to any one but an enthusiast, and does not of course make good reading. No catalogue of arrangements of figures and schemes of colour could be that. But it settles once for all the chronology of the paintings, and any one will be able to fix from these pages the date and order of important works. All this part might perhaps with advantage have been reduced to a shorter and more formal shape ; but there is no great harm in the longer. It is so amply illustrated with process-blocks and photogravures as to be almost a pictorial catalogue.
The Life and Catalogue demanded care and pains, but might have been pieced together by any one who took the necessary trouble; the part of the book which no one but a pupil could have executed, and which is much the most interesting, is the chapter on Albert Moore's methods of work. His mind was singularly methodical. His theory of painting was clear-cut and complete, and to carry it out he elaborated a systematic procedure, conforming at each step to his logic of pictorial evolution, and including many ingenious devices. The most curious of these was the device by which he secured that each bit of his picture should be painted immediately of its full final strength. When the colour arrangement had been fixed by a series of studies, and a monochrome of the painting was complete upon the canvas, he covered this monochrome with tracing-paper, and on the tracing-paper obtained a version of the colours as they were to be ultimately on the canvas. Then the tracing-paper was cut away bit by bit, and on each part of the canvas thus laid bare the colour of the piece removed was exactly matched. By this means the painter's judgment of the value of a patch of colour was not endangered by the surrounding tint of the monochrome, but was laid into its place in the temporary mosaic. In many other ways he strove to secure his effects, setting, for instance, a revolving fan to agitate a piece of drapery so that he might note its ripples. Mr. Baldry is able to tell us something even of the rules of line design into which Albert Moore had analysed his practice.
It will be seen, then, that we have in this book what is very unusual in the lives of artists; an account by an intelligent observer of the technical practice of the painter, with the theoretical grounds on which it was based. Whether or not we place Albert Moore as high as Mr. Baldry places him, real stuff of this kind is to be welcomed in the hazy regions of artistic biography, and cannot but be of interest to the many painters who, in the present time, are fighting out the problems of procedure. How much we should give for a full and intelligent account of the practice and theory of some of the older masters What has been a merit so far in Mr. Baldry, becomes naturally enough a limitation on the critical side. He is too much the admiring disciple to do more than reflect his master's theory ; and so convinced is he of the sufficiency of the theory and the triumph of the practice, that he is even unaware of the possible points of attack that an alert defender would have to see to. He pictures a dull and stiff-necked generation at length thoroughly ashamed and convinced. This leads him to an error of judgment in referring rather largely to the newspaper critics. In the
• Albert Moo,.: his Lips and Work. By Alfred Lys Ba'dry. London : Bell and Bons. less.
campaign of journalism, the incompetent critic must be fought ; but it is hardly worth while to fight him over again when a reputation has been made, or to complain of his stupidity. After all, what else is to be expected P How should the dull critic appreciate a new and original painter F Besides, it is probable that, at the worst point in the journalistic fight, Albert Moore was as highly estimated on one side as he ever will be. The same is true of the silly Academy business. When an artist is living, it may be of some commercial advantage to him to be an Academician ; when he is dead, it matters nothing one way or the other to his reputation.
It would have been more dignified, then, to abbreviate the references to want of appreciation, and—what is more—it would have been safer, in view of the verdict that time is likely to pass on this artist. Mr. Baldry places his idol on a pinnacle where it is unlikely that he will remain. That Albert Moore despised, as they deserved, many of the bastard forms of art, those that pass off insignificant form and colour under cover of a joke or a story, was to his credit in a time when even so much artistic rectitude is rare. That he was intensely convinced of the existence of a music of form and colour, is to say no more than that he was a conscious artist. He was aware, further, that dramatic incident and its explanation is no necessary part of a painting's appeal; but this, again, only proves him a clear-headed critic. But when we have allowed all this clearness of mind, which many others have shared, we have not gone a step towards stating positively what it was he himself did as a painter. To say that it was "decoration" he aimed at, is to say nothing of praise or blame ; and to argue that he accomplished his end because he minimised emotional interest, would be to raise a false issue. "Decora- tion" does not imply a minimum of emotion, as Mr. Baldry would seem to argue; it only implies a convention in the terms of its expression. Decoration often implies abstrac- tion, but abstraction does not constitute decoration, still less great painting. Albert Moore abstracted emotion from painting, till nothing was left but the idea of gracefulness. That, if anything, is his peculiarity.
The facts surely are something like this. Albert Moore was sensitive to beauty of line and colour, sensitive also at starting to some other elements in the beauty of human life. But he was not one of those masters whose perception warms and grows more intense as the work goes on and is carried to completion. His feeling was exhausted long before that, and the completion was handed over to frigid theory. He could produce a beautiful study of a single figure (his combining power was small), and touch it delicately with flecks of pasteL When he went further, life oozed out ; a reminiscence of stony Greek sculpture was in wait, and he straightway forgot to see as a painter and to feel as a human being. The mixture can be accurately analysed. Those heavy sculpturesque figures retain incongruous vestiges of the pretty English girl turned dolly instead of heroic, by the immobility and solidity imposed upon her. Equally incongruous with this heroic intrusion from the Temple of Nike Apteros, is the frippery of little pots and patterns with which it is surrounded. All is cast in too petty a mould for the pretensions of the sculpturesque pose. And the colour and the painting are conceived in as petty a fashion. Mr. l3aldry's description of the method is enough to raise a suspicion of this; inspection proves it. The colour is never more than pretty, the painting is never great. As we should expect from all this, the emotion, the sentiment, is dangerously near the level of bric-it-brac. To choose a human being fer your subject, and paint her like a doll, is to be blind to the responsibilities of the subject chosen. The Elgin Marbles have overstrained our English painting. They have prevented two gifted men, Sir F. Leighton and Albert Moore, from painting the less exalted type of human being natural to them, and confused their art with a sculpturesque ideal. If we turn away from the finished paintings of Albert Moore, and remember them just enough to reconstruct sympathetically his taste and intention, we think of a man revelling in all that is dainty, flowers and shells and lace and pretty people, and bothered by the mental effort to connect those tastes with an art which his reason told him was grand in its design and the impregnable tranquillity of its emotion. But the effort to make the connection cost his art too much; it merely emptied his pretty material of the. emotions natural to it,—stiffened and posed its impulses. A fine tribute results ; hardly a complete achievement.
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