_ The difference between composition and mass is that a composition is a mere outline of pen or pencil, each object taking its proper place in the square of a canvas, while mass is the filling in between these outlines either of varied color or in lights or darks, their gradations but so many guides to the spectator's eye marking not only its perspective, form and atmosphere, but, if skilfully done, telling the story of your subject at a glance.
To do this the student must find the lightest light and darkest dark in the subject before him and, having found it, adhere to it to the end of his work. For as the sun dominates the sky and earth so do its rays dominate parts of the whole, making more luminous than the rest only one object upon which its light falls. To make this more explicit it is only necessary to look at an egg upon a white table-cloth. Here is a natural object devoid of local color except in reflected lights, and yet you will find that where the round of the egg reflects the light the highest light is found, while in the edge of the shadow, where the egg turns into the round--between that high light and the reflected light from the table-cloth, I mean--is found its darkest dark. But only one portion of that shadow, a point as large as the point of a pin, is the darkest dark. Everything else is gradation, from the highest light to the lowest light, the lowest light being almost a shadow; and from its darkest dark to its lightest dark the lightest dark again being almost a light.
In landscape art these problems are greatly simplified. The sun is always the strongest light, and whatever comes against it, church tower, rock, palace, or ship under full sail, is the darkest object. In addition to this there is always some one point where the outdoor painter can find a lesser supplementary light and near it a lesser supplementary dark. Moreover, throughout the rest of the composition these same lights and darks are echoed and re-echoed in constantly decreasing gradations.
You may apply these same tests everywhere in nature. Even in a gray day, when the sun is not so positive a factor in distributing light, and the shadows are so subtle that it is difficult to discover them, there is always some mass of foliage, the silver sheen from an old shingled roof, the glare of a white wall, which marks for the composition its lightest light, while a corresponding dark can always be found somewhere in the tree-trunks, under the overhanging eaves, or in the broken crevices of the masonry.
So it is with every other expression of nature. Even on a Venetian lagoon, where the sky and water are apparently one (not really one to the quick eye of an expert, the water always being one tone lower than the sky--that is, more gray than the overbending sky)--even in this lagoon you will find some one portion of the surface lighter than any other portion; and in expressing it your eye first and your brush next must catch in the opalescent sweep of delicious color under your eye its exact quantity of black and white. By black and white I mean, of course, that excess or absence of pure color which when translated into pure black and white would express the meaning of the subject-matter, as one of Raphael Morghen's engravings on steel gives you the feeling and color in his masterly rendering of Da Vinci's "Last Supper."
In my judgment one of the great landscapes of modern times is the picture by the distinguished Dutch painter, Mauve, known as "Changing Pasture," which is now owned by Mr. Charles P. Taft, of Cincinnati. Here the factor of mass is carried to its utmost limit. Sky one mass; flock of sheep another mass; and the foreground, sweeping under the sheep and beyond until it is lost in the haze of the distance, another mass, or, if one chooses to put it that way, another broad gradation of a section of the picture: the highest light being some infinitesimal speck in the diaphanous silver sky, the strongest dark being found somewhere in the foreground or in the flock of sheep.
By a strict adherence to this law of one supreme light and one supreme dark does Mauve's work, as it were, get back from and out of his canvas, as from the record of a phonograph into which some soul has breathed its own precise purpose and intent.
So, too, does nature often call out to you fixing your attention, often shrouding in shadow the unimportant in the landscape, while high up above the gloom it holds up to your gaze a white candle of a minaret or the bared breast of an Alpine peak reflecting the loving look of a tired sunbeam bidding it good-night.
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To accent the more strongly the value of this dominant light even though it be treated in very low gradation, I recall that a year ago the art world was startled by the sum received for a medium sized picture of some coryphees painted by Degas, now an old man over eighty years old--a subject which he always loved and, indeed, which he has painted many times. Some thirty years ago, when he was comparatively a young man, I saw, at the Bartholdi exhibition in New York, a picture by this master of these same coryphees, two figures standing together in the flies resting their weary, pink, fishworm legs as they balanced themselves with their hands against the wabbling scenery. It was a wholly gray picture, and almost in a monotone, and yet the flashes of their diamond earrings, no larger than the point of a pin, were distinctly visible, holding their place in, if not dominating, the whole color scheme.
Again, in that marvellous portrait of Wertheimer, the bric-a-brac dealer, if you remember, the eye first catches the strong vermilion touch on the lower lip, and then, knowing that a master like Sargent would not leave it isolated, one finds, to one's delight and joy, a little swipe of red on the tongue of the barely discernible black poodle squatting at his feet. Had the red of the dog's tongue predominated, we should never have been thrilled and fascinated by one of the great portraits of this or any other time.
This is also true in other great portraits--in, for instance, the pictures of Rembrandt, Vandyck, and Frans Hals, especially where a face is relieved by the addition of a hand and the white of a ruff. Somewhere in that warm expanse of the face there can be found a pinhead of color, brighter and more dominating than any other brush touch on the canvas. It may be the high egg-light in the forehead, or the click on the tip of the nose, or a fold of the white ruff; but slight as it is and unnoticeable at first, because of it not only does the head look round as the egg looks round when relieved by the same treatment, but the attention is fixed. Unless this had been preserved, the eye would have, perhaps, rested first on the hand, something foreign to the painter's intention.
Recalling again the law of the high light and strong dark, and referring again to the value of the skilful manipulation of light and shade forming the mass thereby expressing the more clearly the meaning of a picture, I repeat that, while the eye is always caught by the strongest dark against the strongest light, it is next caught by the lesser supplementary light and lesser supplementary dark; and then, if the painter is skilful enough in the management of the remaining lesser lights and darks, the eye will run through the gradations to the end, rebounding once more to the greater light and dark, exactly in the order intended by the painter; thus unfolding to the spectator little by little, quite as a plot of a novel is made clear, the story which the painter had in his own mind to tell. This is effected purely and entirely by the correct accentuations of the explanatory lights and darks. One mistake in the management--that is, the accentuating of the third light, if you please, instead of the second--will not only confuse the eye of the spectator, but may perhaps give him an entirely different impression from what was intended by the painter, just as the shifting of a chapter in a novel would confuse a reader; and this, if you please, without depending in any way upon either the drawing or the color of the accessories.
I can best illustrate this by recalling to your mind that marvellous picture of the so-called literary school of England, a picture by Luke Fildes known as "The Doctor" and now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London, in which the whole sad story is told in logical sequence by the artist's consummate handling of the darks and lights in regular progression.
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You will pardon me, I hope, if I leave the more technical details of my subject for a moment that I may discuss with you one of the peculiarities of the so-called art-loving public of to-day, notably that section which insists that no picture should tell a story of any kind.
To my own mind this picture of Luke Fildes reaches high-water mark in the school of his time, and yet in watching as I have done the crowds who surge through the Tate Galleries and the National Gallery, it is an almost every-day occurrence to overhear such contemptuous remarks as "Oh, yes, one of those literary fellows," drop from the lips of some highbrow who only tolerates Constable because of the influence his example and work had on Corot and other men of the Barbizon school.
Another section lose their senses over pure brush work.
A story of Whistler--one he told me himself--will illustrate what I mean. Jules Stewart's father, a great lover of good pictures and one of Fortuny's earliest patrons, had invited Whistler to his house in Paris to see his collection, and in the course of the visit drew from a hiding-place a small panel of Meissonier's, of a quality so high that any dealer in Paris would have given him $30,000 for it.
Whistler would not even glance at it.
Upon Stewart insisting, he adjusted his monocle and said: "Oh, yes, very good--_snuff-box style_."
This affectation was to have been expected of Whistler because of his aggressive mental attitude toward the work of any man who handled his brush differently from his own personal methods, but saner minds may think along broader lines.
If they do not, they have short memories. Even in my own experience I have watched the rise and fall of men whose technic called from the housetops--a call which was heard by the passing throng below, many of whom stopped to listen and applaud; for in pictures as in bonnets the taste of the public changes almost daily. One has only to review several of the schools, both in English and in Continental art, noting their dawn of novelty, their sunrise of appreciation, their high noon of triumph, their afternoon of neglect, and their night of oblivion, to be convinced that the wheel of artistic appreciation is round like other wheels--the world, for one--and that its revolutions bring the night as surely as they bring the dawn.
Not a hundred years have passed since the broad, sensuous work of Turner, big in conception and big in treatment, was followed by the more exact painters of the English school, many of whom are still at work, notably Leader and Alfred Parsons, both Royal Academicians, and of whom some contemporaneous critic insisted that they had counted the leaves on their elm-trees fringing the polished water of the Thames. They, of course, had only been eclipsed by the broader brushes of more recent time, men like Frank Brangwyn and Colin Hunter, who have yielded to the pressure of the change in taste, or of whom it would be more just to say, have _set_ present taste, so that to-day not only the afternoon of night, but the twilight of forgetfulness, is slowly and surely casting long shadows over the more realistic men of the eighties and nineties.
What will follow this evolution of technic no man can predict. The lessons of the past, however, are valuable, and to-day one touch of Turner's brush is more sought for than acres of canvases so greatly prized twenty years after his death.
And this is not alone confined to the old realistic English school. In my own time I have seen Verbeckoeven eclipsed by Van Marcke, Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gerome by Manet, and Sir Frederick Leighton by John Sargent--a young David slaying the Goliath of English technic with but a wave of his magic brush--and, last and by no means least, the great French painter Meissonier by the equally great Spanish master Sorolla.
I am tempted to continue, for the success of these men in the fulness of the sunlight of their triumph, realists as well as impressionists, was wholly due to their understanding of and adherence to the rules of selection, composition, and mass which form the basis of these papers, and which despite their differences in brush work they all adhered to.
In the late half of the preceding century Meissonier received $66,000 for his "Friedland," a picture which cost him the best part of two years to paint, and the expenditure of many thousands of francs, notably the expense attendant upon the trampling down of a field of growing wheat by a drove of horses that he might study the action and the effect the better. Forty years later Sorolla received $20,000 for two figures in blazing sunlight which took him but two days to paint, the rest of his collection bringing $250,000, the whole exhibit of one hundred and odd pictures having been visited by 150,000 persons in thirty-two days. And he is still in the full tide of success, pre-eminently the greatest master of the out-of-doors of modern times, while to-day the work of Meissonier has fallen into such disrepute that no owner dares offer one of his canvases at public auction except under the keenest necessity. The first master expresses the refinement of extreme realism, or rather detailism; the other is a pronounced impressionist of the sanest of the open-air school of to-day. How long this pendulum will continue to swing no one can tell. Both men are great painters in the widest, deepest, and most pronounced sense; both men have glorified, ennobled, and enriched their time; and both men have reflected credit and honor upon their nation and their school.
Meissonier could not only draw the figure, give it life and action, keep it harmonious in color, perfect in its gradations of black and white, but he had that marvellous gift of color analysis which reproduces for you in a picture the size of the top of a cigar-box every tone in the local and reflected light to be found, say, in the folds of a cavalier's cloak, the pleats no wider than the point of a stub pen.
All this, of course, Sorolla ignores and, I am afraid, knowing the man personally as I do, despises. What concerns the great Spaniard is the whole composition alive in the blaze of the sunlight, the glare of the hot sand and the shimmer of the blue, overarching sky, beating up and down and over the figures, and all depicted with a slash of a brush almost as wide as your hand. The first picture, the size of a tobacco-box, you can hold between thumb and finger and enjoy, amazed at the master's knowledge and skill. The other grips you from afar off as you enter the gallery and stand startled and astounded before its truth and dignity. In the first Meissonier tells you the whole story to the very end. In the second Sorolla presents but a series of shorthand notes which you yourself can fill in to suit your taste and experience both of life and nature.
Whether you prefer one or the other, or neither, is a matter for you to decide. You pay your money or you don't, and you can take your choice. The future only can tell the story of the revolution of the wheel. In the next decade a single Meissonier may be worth its weight in sheet gold and layers of Sorollas may be stored in attics awaiting some fortunate auction.
What will ensue, the art world over, before the wheel travels its full periphery, no man knows. It will not be the hysteria of paint, I feel assured, with its dabbers, spotters, and smearers; nor will it be the litters of the cub-ists, that new breed of artistic pups, sponsors for "The girl coming down-stairs," or "The stairs coming down the girl," or "The coming girl and the down-stairs," it makes no difference which, all are equally incoherent and unintelligible; but it will be something which, at least, will boast the element of beauty which is the one and only excuse for art's existence. I may not live to see Meissonier's second dawn and I never want to see Sorolla's eclipse, but you may. You have only to remember Turner's second high noon to be assured of it.
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And just here it might be well to consider this question of technic, especially its value in obtaining the results desired. While it has nothing to do with either selection, composition, or mass, it has, I claim, much to do with the way a painter expresses himself--his tone of voice, his handwriting, his gestures in talking, so to speak--and therefore becomes an integral part of my discourse. It may also be of service in the striking of a note of compromise, some middle ground upon which the extremes may one day meet.
To make my point the clearer, let me recall an exhibition in New York, held some years ago, when the bonnets were five deep trying to get a glimpse of a picture of half a dozen red prelates who were listening to a missionary's story. Many of these devotees went into raptures over the brass nails in the sofa, and were only disappointed when they could not read the monogram on the bishop's ring. Later on, a highly cultivated and intelligent American citizen was so entranced that he bought the missionary, story and all, for the price of a brown-stone front, and carried him away that he might enjoy him forever.
One month later, almost exactly in the same spot hung another picture, the subject of which I forget, or it may be that I did not understand it or that it had no subject at all. If I remember, it was not like anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth. In this respect one could have fallen down and worshipped it and escaped the charge of idolatry. With the exception of a few stray art critics, delighted at an opportunity for a new sensation, it was not surrounded by an idolatrous gathering at all. On the contrary, the audience before it reminded me more of Artemas Ward and his panorama.
"When I first exhibited this picture in New York," he said, "the artists came with lanterns before daybreak to look at it, and then they called for the artist, and when he appeared--they threw things at him."
For one picture a gentleman gave a brown-stone front; for the other he would not have given a single brick, unless he had been sure of planting it in the middle of the canvas the first shot. The first was Vibert's realistic picture so well known to you. The other was an example of the modern French school or what was then known as advanced impressionists.
I shall not go into an analysis of the technic of the two painters. I refer to them and their brush work here because of the undue value set upon the way a thing is done rather than its value after it is done.
Speaking for myself, I must admit that the value of technic has never impressed me as have the other and greater qualities in a picture--namely, its expression of truth and the message it carries of beauty and often tenderness. I have always held that it is of no moment to the world at large by what means and methods an artist expresses himself; that the world is only concerned as to whether he has expressed himself at all; and if so, to what end and extent.
If the artist says to us, "I scumbled in the background solid, using bitumen as an undertone, then I dragged over my high lights and painted my cool color right into it," it is as meaningless to most of us as if another bread-winner had said, "I use a Singer with a straight shuttle and No. 60 cotton." What we want to know is whether she made the shirt.
Art terms are, however, synonymous with other terms and in this connection may be of assistance. To make my purpose clear we will suppose that "technic" in art is handwriting. "Composition," the arrangement of sentences. "Details," the choice of words. "Drawing," good grammar. "Mass, or light and shade," contrasting expressions giving value each to the other. I hold, however, that there is something more. The author may write a good hand, spell correctly, and have a proper respect for Lindley Murray, but what does he say? What idea does he convey? Has he told us anything of human life, of human love, of human suffering or joy, or uncovered for us any fresh hiding-place of nature and taught us to love it? Or is it only words?
It really matters very little to any of us what the handwriting of an author may be, and so it should matter very little how an artist touches the canvas.
It is true that a picture containing and expressing an idea the most elevated can be painted either in mass or detail, at the pleasure of the painter. He may write in the Munich style, or after the manner of the Duesseldorf ready writers, or the modern French pothook and hanger, or the antiquated Dutch. He can use the English of Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Josh Billings, at his own good pleasure. If he conveys an intelligible idea he has accomplished a result the value of which is just in proportion to the quality of that idea.
To continue this parallel, it may be said that extreme realism is the use of too many words in a sentence and too many sentences in a paragraph; extreme impressionism, the use of too few. Neither, however, is fundamental, and art can be good, bad, or indifferent containing each or combining both.
Realism, or, to express it more clearly, detailism, is the realizing of the whole subject-matter or motive of a picture in exact detail. Impressionism is the generalizing of the subject-matter as a whole and the expression of only its salient features.
The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle and every crack in the blade became apparent.
The more advanced would have insisted on not only the fibre in the wood, but the brand on the other side of the blade, had it been physically possible to show it.
In absolute contrast to this, there lived a man at Barbizon who maintained that a spade was not a spade at all, but merely a mass of shadow against a low twilight sky, in the hands of a figure who with uncovered head listens reverently; that the spade is merely a symbol of labor; that he used it as he would use a word necessary to express a sentence, which would be unintelligible without it, and that it was perfectly immaterial to him, and should be to the world, whether it was a spade or a shovel so long as the soft twilight, and the reverent figures wearied with the day's work, and the flat waste of field stretching away to the little village spire on the dim horizon line told the story of human suffering and patience and toil, as with folded hands they listened to the soft cadence of the angelus.
Which of these two methods of expression is correct--Ruskin or Millet? Are there any laws which govern, or is it a matter of taste, fancy, or feeling? Is it a matter of individuality? If so, which individual by his methods tells us the most truths? Let us endeavor to analyze.
I whirl through a mountain gorge and catch a glance through a car-window--an impression. In the darkness of the tunnel it remains with me. I see the great mass of white cumuli and against them the dark cedars, the straggling foot-path and steep cliffs. I am impressed with the sweep of the cloud form pressing over and around them. With my eyes closed I paint this on my brain, and if I am great enough and wide enough and deep enough I can subdue my personality and forget my surroundings, and when opportunity offers I can express upon my canvas the few salient facts which impressed me and should impress my fellow men. If it is the silvery light of the morning, I am Corot; if the day is gone and across the cool lagoon I see the ripple amid the tall grass catching the fading color of the warm sky, I am Daubigny; if a gray mist hangs over the hillside and the patches of snow half melted express the warmth and mellowness of the coming spring, I am our own Inness.
Perhaps, however, I am not content. I am overburdened with curiosity. I say to myself: "What sort of trees, pine or cedar?" I think, pine, but I am uneasy lest they should be hemlock. Were the rocks all perpendicular, or did not detached bowlders line the path? About the clouds, were they not some small cirri beneath the zenith? My memory is so bad--and so I stop the train and go back. Just as I expected. The trees were spruce and the rocks were grass-grown and full of fissures, and so I begin to paint and continue. I get the bark on the trees, and the foliage until each particular leaf stands on end, and the strata of the cliffs, and the very sand on the path. I crowd into my canvas geology, botany, and the laws governing cloud forms.
Being an ordinary mortal, my curiosity, my telescopic eyes, my magnifying-glass of vision, my love of truth, my positive conviction that it is a spruce and should not be painted as a pine, except through rank perjury, all these forces together have undermined my impression or, like thorns, have grown up and choked it. Being honest, I am ready to confess that before returning to the spot I was in doubt about the pine. But I am still ready to affirm that what I have labored over is the exact counterfeit and presentment of nature, and equally willing to denounce the public for not seeing it as I do. I forget that I have been a boor and a vulgarian--that I have been invited to a feast and that I have pried into mysteries which my goddess would veil from my sight; that I have had the impertinence to bring my own personal advice into the discussion; that I have insisted that fissures, and leaves, and sand, and infinite detail were necessary to this expression of nature's sublimity.
Is it at all strange that the impression which so charmed me as I saw it from my car-window has faded? Nature unrolled for me suddenly a poem. For symbols she used a great mass of dark, sturdy trees against a majestic cloud, a rugged cliff, and a straggling path. I have ignored them all and insisted that "truth was mighty and must prevail." I am a realist and "paint things as they are." Not so. I am an iconoclast and have broken my god and cannot put together the pieces. I have sacrificed a divine impression to a human realism.
Suppose, however, that the painter who had this glimpse of nature before entering the tunnel was no ordinary man, but a man of steadfast mind, of firm convictions, of a sure touch, with an absolute belief in nature, and so reverential that he dare not offer even a suggestion of his own. He has seen it; he has felt it; it has gone down deep into his memory and heart. The cloud, the cliff, the mass, the path--that is all. And it is enough. The annoyances of the day, the seductions of fresh impressions of newer subjects, the weakness of the flesh do not deter him. With a single aim, to the exclusion of all else, and with a direct simplicity, he records what he saw, and lo! we have a poem. Such a man was Courbet, Corot, Dupre.
But one would say: That may answer for landscape: what about the figure-painter? Let us counsel together.
A man only rises to his own level. In art, as in music and literature, he only expresses himself. Each selects his own method. The school of Meissonier is not content with a few grand truths simply expressed. They want a multitude of facts; they must tell the story in their own way. They are the Dickens and Walter Scott of art. It is iteration and reiteration. My cardinal must not only have red stockings, says Vibert, but they must be silk; every detail must be elaborated. Very well, what of it? you say. What do you criticise, the drawing? No. The color? No. The composition? No. Does the painter express himself? Perfectly. What then? Just this. He expresses himself too perfectly. At first I am delighted. The story is so well told--the well-fed prelates; the half-sneer; the cynical smile; the earnest missionary telling his experience. But the next day?--well, he is still telling it. By the end of the week the enjoyment is confined to allowing him to tell it to a fresh eye, and that eye another's, and watching his pleasure. At the end of the year it becomes a part of the decoration of the wall. You perhaps feel that the frame needs retouching, and that is all the impression it makes upon you, except as would an old timepiece with the mainspring gone. The works are exquisite and the enamelling charming, but it has been four o'clock for forty years.
In the library, however, hangs an etching which you often look at; in fact, you never pass it without noticing it. Two figures, a wheelbarrow, a spade, a stretch of country, a spire pencilled against a low-tone sky; and yet, somehow, you hear the tolling of the bell and the whispered prayer. Ah! but you say this has nothing to do with the treatment; it is the subject. One moment. The missionary's story is as full of pathos and of human suffering and courage as the "Angelus," and at first as profoundly stirs our sympathy; but, in one, Vibert has monopolized the conversation; he has exhausted the subject; he has told you everything he knows. Nothing has been omitted; nails, monograms, and all; there is nothing left for you to supply--he is not so complimentary. But Millet has taken you into his confidence. He says: "Come, see what I once saw. Do you ever remember any such couple working in the field?" And you immediately, and unconsciously to yourself, remember just such a bent back and reverent, uncovered head. Where, you cannot tell, for the picture comes to you out of the dim lumber-room in your brain where you store your old memories and faint impressions of bygone days and sad faces.
But if he added, "See, my peasant wears a woollen jacket trimmed with worsted braid," your impression would immediately fade. You might remember the jacket, but the braid, never. But for this it would have been delightful for you, although unconsciously, to add your own sweet memory to the picture.
Another impression choked to death with unnecessary realism.
But be you realist or impressionist, remember that a true work of art is that which has pleased _the greatest number of people for the longest period of time_; that the love of beauty indicates our highest intellectual plane, and that if you will express to your fellow sinners burdened with life's cares something of the enthusiasm of your own life, and will assist them to see their mother earth through your own eyes in constantly increasing beauty--you having by your art, in your possession, the key to the cipher, and interpreting and translating for them--you will confer upon them one of the greatest blessings which fall to their lot on this mundane sphere. _