BRITISH ART IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 226, 20 June 1936, Page 17

BRITISH ART IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

Modern Masters Of Impressionism In Landscape Painting

By

R. W. B.

IT is not intended in this article to write of the New Zealanders who will be represented in the

national gallery, but rather of the English impressionists to whom, influenced by the French, they show a close relationship, though brief mention must be made of the first influences of all in New Zealand art, John Gully, James Nairn and Petrus van der Velden. Gully was a Government oflicial, entirely self-taught, and most of his painting was done after he had retired from the service. There is a good collection of his paintings available for the gallery, a number being at present on loan in Nelson. James Nairn, whose influence was particularly great in Wellington art circles, was a representative of the Glasgow school of painting. He was a painter of sunlight and made most effective use of • pure colour, as is to be seen in his “Tess,” painted at Silverstream in 1803, and in several other works of his which the gallery possesses. _

When van der Velden came to New Zealand he was already a mature artist with a considerable reputation overseas. His pictures were already included in the collections at the National Museum, Amsterdam, The Hague, and also in the National Gallery at Sydney, though much of his best work was done afterwards in New Zealand. He brought with him the finest traditions of European art, and when he settled in Christchurch he had no difficulty in gathering around him a group

of earnest students. His influence was widespread and he worked in various parts of the country. At least two of the pictures in the wonderful collection to be hung in the national gallery are paintings executed in Wellington. One is “The Runaround Rock,” which has as its subject a rock on the coast near Island Bay, and the other is “My First Trial,” a picture of a boy with a violin, painted in the cottage of Black Jack, a fisherman, at Seatoun. The boy wlm acted as model for the picture belonged to a family named Marshall, his father be-

ing Mayor of Miramar. The story goes that he was offered half-a-crown for the sitting, but never received it—probably because van der Velden’s pockets were empty. This fine artist generally painted in a low key, but always with carefully considered finishing touches of pure colour to relieve the sober background. In his later works there is a more frequent use of bright colour to achieve the effect of light and with it a definite foreshadowing of impressionism.

New English Art Club The story of the English impressionists represented in the gallery can perhaps most conveniently begin with the formation in ISB6 of the New English Art Club as an act of secession from the ideals of the Royal Academy. At that time there was much dissatisfaction because it was felt that many promising young painters were being denied their chance by the Academy’s refusal to show their works. Nowadays the differences in alms represented by the Academy and the New English Art Club are not so particularly noticeable, but in the nineteenth century the gulf between them was great, the only real link being provided by the work of Sargent. ' Many prominent painters, including a number who afterwards entered the portals of the Academy, first exhibited their work at the club.

The term “impressionist” first came into use early in the ’7o’s after Claude Monet, the French painter, had en-

titled one of his pictures “Sunrise—An Impression.”' It began as a term of abuse, but soon came into general use to define a distinctive style of painting. The English impressionists owed much to the French and particularly to Monet (1840-1926) and to Edouard Manet (1832-1883), who in turn were greatly influenced by Constable (17761837) and Turner (1775-1851). Later Edgar Degas (1834-1917) has had influence in England, but the early members of the New English Art Club were little affected by him.

The leading figure in the club was Philip Wilson Steer, a magnificent craftsman who has been Influenced at different times by many painters and yet by his sincerity and appreciation

of beauty has achieved originality. In later years he has laid more stress on form and line and has limited his choice of pigments. .He will be represented in the new Wellington gallery by “The Waterfall.”

Sir George Clausen Another of the now famous artists who exhibited at the club in its early day s is Sir George Clausen, who has achieved many magnificent representations of the moods of pastoral life. He was born in 1852 and began his training as a designer of furniture. It is probably because he was so early compelled to apprehend form in the solid that he was never content merely to record the effect on the eye of tone and colour without including some definition of contour or explanation of structure. He sought always to reconcile renderings of atmospheric effects with statements of solid form, and in his

later works he did achieve this reconciliation. Many of his contemporaries have done work that in choice of subject and in technique is more original than his, but Clausen, while he has always been ready to learn from anything new, has never prematurely adopted a new method. He has waited until certain that its adoption would help his purpose, so that his progress has been slow, some of his best works being produced after the age of 70. His

paintings have not been confined to landscape and his compositions and portraits alone would have marked him as a remarkable painter.

Statements as definite as the following about Clausen by Mr. Charles Johnson. official lecturer at the English National Gallery, are worth quoting: “Of Clausen’s work more than of any other living painter's it is safe to prophesy a continued fame rising above all changing fashions. The art of other men may live; that of Clausen will live. One reason for this is the evident sincerity of purpose in all his paintings. But lesser men have been almost equally sincere. Sincerity may go with eccentricity. The message of the man who is bursting to utter it may be of interest to himself and a few like him, whereas the sights that Clausen enjoys are what will always be en-'' joyed while beauty continues—trees and fields and sunshine in their relation to mankind. Clausen is then a great painter because his outlook is normal. He is also great because he is never satisfied with his own achievement and always trying for something better.”'

Clausen’s picture of hay-making should be seen to advantage when the new gallery opens.

Frank Brangwyn Another picture which should benefit greatly by the new environment is Frank Brangwyn’s Venetian scene,

“Santa Maria Della Salute,” which for gorgeous colour and such vigtfiir and energy has been unsurpassed by any other contemporary artist Brangwyn was another of the club’s early ex-

hlbitors, and he succeeded in turning his impressionistic qualities into a richly decorative art

One of the most remarkable things about him in his early days was the speed with which >he achieved the ability to set down his colour in exact value. His father was an English architect with Welsh blood and he had a Welsh mother. He was born at Bruges in 1867. where his artistic gifts rapidly developed. In his eighth year he returned to England and, schooldays being now over, entered his father's office in Loudpji. He was encouraged in the pursuit of art by several notable men, chief among them being William Morris, for whom he worked from the age of 15 to 17, making full-sized cartoons for tapestries from Morris’s sketches.

When tired of doing that he set out to see life and, with very little money, went to the tillage of Sandwich, where he lived among the fishermen and painted various phases of their activities. Running out of money, he accepted a sea captain’s offer to go on a voyage with him and thus he became infected with that love of sea life which has remained with him ever since. In fact, he became as much a sailor as an artist. Royal Academy at 18

At the age of 18 Brangwyn sent an old painting to the Royal Academy, and it was accepted. Thereafter he settled in London, working for a time once more with Morris and supplementing poor pay by selling seascapes. A shipowner who bought an Academy sea piece of his in 1886 became his personal friend and two years later sent him on a voyage to the Levant. There followed a trip to Spain and then another eastern voyage.

In 1891 Brangwyn exhibited a number of his paintings in which he revealed to the art world his astonishing sense of colour. Previously his masterly use of greys, silvers and low tones had been noticed, but now he was acclaimed as a master of colour, a great achievement for an artist only 14 years old. Within the next two years his fame had spread to Europe and his reputation has steadily increased with the passing years.

Works in oils and water-colours, etchings, woodcuts and lithographs are equally within his power, and in all of them he glorifies the work of mankind—fishermen toiling, sailors hand-

When it is opened at Wellington shortly, the National Art Gallery will be found adequately representative of the work of painters in at least two aspects. Its collection of oils and water-colours by New Zealanders is bound to be comprehensive—as it should be in a national gallery—and in addition there is available an excellent selection of the best work of the English impressionistic landscape artists of the past fifty years. It is possible that visitors to the gallery may express disappointment that there i are no examples of the work of the men of past genera tions who are world-famous in art. But displays of that nature lie outside the scope of a modem gallery with limited means, whose function must primarily be to afford recognition to the artists in its own coun try. Actually, however, New Zealand’s national gallery will have in it paintings by men—Sir George Clausen comes at once to mind—whose names, if not already household words, will certainly become as well-known as those of their compatriots of earlier periods, Turner, Constable and Gainsborough.

ling their ships, craftsmen at their benches, miners hewing in the earth. Of the painters who have attempted to depict the romance of industrial enterprise none has approached Brangwyn in boldness of rhythm, brilliance of colour and majesty of design. Career of Charles Sims Two paintings to be exhibited in the new gallery are interesting, not only in themselves alone, but also because of their maker’s extraordinary career. They are “The Death of the Year” and “By Summer Seas,” the work of

Harold Speed, who, incidentally will also be represented in the gallery, by a sunlit picture of a girl which was brought to New Zealand in one of the Murray Fuller collections. It happened that Sims did not prove popular with his tutors at the schools and within two years he was expelled on an absurd excuse. He was involved with a group of youths caught smoking in a forbidden precinct; Sims himself did not smoke, but that did not affect the sentence. Years of poverty followed, and though his expulsion from the schools

Charles Sims, that most brilliant artist who died in 1928. He was born in 1873 and, confounding his father’s intention of making him a draper, spent most of his time as a boy drawing. When he was 17 years old his father gave him his chance to become an artist, though actually be showed a very promising talent as a violinist. However, an artist he was determined to be and he studied for that purpose. After preliminary training in Paris, he entered the Royal Academy schools on the advice of his life-long friend,

did not prevent him from exhibiting at the Academy and brightening Its walls with the rich and delicate fancy of his work, money was hard to come by. His paintings, however, had attracted attention, and one of a series of four exhibited in 1902, which showed him in the first rank as a landscape artist, was bought for the Sydney Art Gallery. Four years later he really achieved success with a one-man show and was

recognised as a born painter of light, capable of transferring to canvas the most vivid statements of atmosphere. He had been lame from early childhood and it was due to this, perhaps, that his attention was directed so much toward athletic technique and the depicting of the human form in perfection. He was imaginative and fanciful in his choice of subjects, but by insisting on conforming in at least some degree to the standards of the Royal Academy, he imposed an unnatural limitation upon his work. The pictures he exhibited were astonishingly brilliant, when compared with those around them, but they did not go further than that.

Until the war came he was completely happy in his Sussex home. Then his son was killed, his “terrestrial paradise,” as he had called it, became uninhabitable and he went to London to be a fashionable portrait painter, though as he sought whenever he could to make his sitter merely the principal item in a decorative scheme of his own choosing, he was not always successful in legitimate portraiture. In 1915 he was elected a full Academician and during the last months of the war he went to France as one of the British official artists, an experience which dealt a fatal wound to his spirit, owing to the clash between his sensitivity to the beauty of the human form and his sight of its wholesale mutilation.

The Royal Academy in 1895 had welcomed a pretext to expel Sims from its schools. In 1920 it was glad to have him back in the schools as Keeper, a choice which it speedily regretted, for not only did he institute reforms in the matter of visiting teachers by introducing such men as Augustus John, but when the Summer Exhibition came round artists who had exhibited for 10, 20 or 40 years found their offerings turned down. Royal Portrait Since the days of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy has always painted a command

portrait of the Sovereign. The president in 1923 being an architect, the duty devolved upon the Keeper and his effort appeared in the Academy of 1924. It defied tradition by being more decorative than dignified. Some months later the new president, Sir Frank Dicksee, after a visit to Buckingham Palace, informed the Keeper that his portrait was giving offence, and the Keeper ultimately settled the question by consigning his work to the flames.

By this time Sims felt he had given up enough of his life to pleasing the Royal Academy. In 1917 he had painted a series of pictures which clearly showed how his early promise might have developed but for his deliberate curbing of it. This was his “Seven Sacraments of Holy Church.” They were deliberately archaic and showed the simple fervour and serenity of the Italian primitive manner. They were not exhibited at the Academy.

Now in the last year of his life Sims completely lost touch with the Academy and gave himself up to a new inspiration. He painted his “Spirituals,” six remarkable works in tempera in which he abandoned his famous suavity of technique and charm of anecdote in favour of the use of abstract colour with which to illustrate mystical experience. When they were sent to the Summer Exhbiition of 1928, the Royal Academy was horrified. There was talk of over-riding Sims’s privilege as a member and declining to show them, on the ground that they were in no way representative of his accepted manner of painting, and eventually they were banished to the furthermost room.

But before this Sims had died. Once the exaltation produced during the painting of the “Spirituals” had subsided he became despondent and the prey of insomnia. He ceased to believe in forthcoming happiness and life no longer seemed worth living. Orpen and Others

Other fine artists who came under the same influences as Steer and Clausen and who will be represented in the new building, can be mentioned only in passing. Glyn W. Philpot’s “Girl at her Toilet” must rank as one of the gallery’s treasures. An autumn study by J. A. Arnesby Brown shows the qualities of a fine artist who is especially remarkable for the movement and colour of his clouds. The work of a fine colourist Is to be seen in Connard’s scene of a crowded beach at a water-ing-place in France. Orpen, who with Augustus John began exhibiting at the New English Art Club in 1899, is re-

presented only by a small water-colour sketch. It was his association with the club which first set him on the road to fame. Examples more worthy than Orpen’s of the work of others of the English school Include paintings bj Bertram Priestman, Algernon Taimadge, Frank Craig, Lamorna Birch, Harry Watson and Harold Knight. One might also mention here the replica of Oswald Birley’s portrait of Lord Rutherford and the same artist’s study of the Punch and Judy proprietor, “Professor Smith.” George Morland

There is one picture likely to be well displayed in the new gallery which takes one back to a period more than a century before this, when a certain leaning toward the Italian in style as typified in George Romney’s work seemed likely to stultify English painting. This is “A Carrier’s Stable,” by the prolific George Morland (17631804). In almost every'way, except perhaps in a certain softness of character, George Morland’s life was in direct contrast to the results of his art. His pictures are vigorous, healthy representations of the best aspects of country 'life, while he himself was a drunken roysterer quite incapable of leading any sort of a stable existence. His father, mother and grandfather were all painters of repute, Henry Morland, his father, being chiefly known for his portraits of elegant women masquerading as dairymaids and so forth, as was the fashion of the time.

George, the small son, was kept hard at work making copies of the paintings of Dutch masters, and of such people as Gainsborough, which afterward, if rumour is true, were sold by the father as originals. Fortunately the lad was in love with brush and pencil, and there was consolation In working in an upper room while his parents down below entertained their fellow-artists, among them Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two of George’s brothers had run away to sea and George himself was tiring of his narrow upbringing. He had been, taken away from the academy schools for falling into bad company, and now he refused an offer by Romney to take him as an apprentice and give him £3OO a year.

<4 Bolted Into Debauch” He left home and, as one historian has well put it, “bolted into debauch.” He painted and sold readily many pictures, quite a few of them indecent ones, and being handsome, gay and reckless, had no difficulty in having as wild a time as was to be had. He attended cock fights and prize fights, rode as a jockey in at least two important horse races, one of which he won, and yet still found time to paint.

But the prosperous times could not last, and between increasingly short periods of serious work, George Morland found himself sliding down the path of debauchery with no power to pull himself back. Accompanied always by his faithful wife, he flitted, harried by creditors, from one residence to another, and though he had the ability to paint rapidly—he is known to have produced two worthwhile pictures in a day—and though also he could sell his works as quickly as he painted them and could make a hundred guineas a week with ease, yet he could not keep money in his pocket. Finally, drunken revels had their effect on his constitution and at the age of 41 he died, burnt out at a time when his powers should have been at their height. His constant wife, now a wan shadow of the charming creature who early in their married career had sat for his famous “Letitia” sequence of pictures dealing witn a girl’s life, fell into convulsions when told of his death, and was dead within four days. Such was the man who gave a fresh and democratic stimulus to English painting at a critical period of its history.