THE PAINTING OF PICTURES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17170, 13 October 1923, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE PAINTING OF PICTURES.

RISKS RUN BY ARTISTS. DIFFICULTIES THAT WERE OVERCOME. Probably few of us, when we admire great pictures, realise what labour and peril have often gone to their making (says a London paper). Many of Mr A. D. M'Cormick’s wonderful canvases, for example, have been painted amid the solitudes of the highest Himalayas, with snowclad ridges and peaks stretching for a score of miles on every side, and with not a vestige of any form of life to be seen anywhere. This is a feat of which Mr M’Cormick makes light, though he pleads guilty to a little pride at having painted a picture a few thousaml feet higher than any other artist who ever lived. “ At that height ” —he was but 3000 ft below the summit of the Pioneer Peak, in the Himalayas—he says, “ the slightest exertion makes even the strongest man gasp, through the air being so rarefied; and when I sat clown it required strenuous exertion to cross one

leg over the other. At this twenty* thousand-feet-high camping place I did one water colour painting, which has at least the merit of beating the. record as to being painted at a vast height, though I made several water-colour drawings not many thousand feet below.” SLUNG FROM THE BOWSPRIT. King Edward’s marine painter, Gommendatore Martino, often practised his art under conditions which many men would find not only most uncomfortable, but for physical reasons impossible. “ What I do,” he says, “is to arrange a large basket either at the end of the bowsprit or at the stern, and then crawl inside it and get the sailors to lower me a few feet by means of a rope. Here I remain suspended as the ship pursues her course, watching the tumbling waters and taking rough notes in my sketch-book.” But the Chevalier has had more than one predecessor who pursued art with an equal enthusiasm and under as great difficulties. Turner, once, when overtaken by a snowstorm at sea, had himself lashed to the mast, so that he might observe, it without fear of being pitched into the tumbling waters; and Claude Yernet, a famous eighteenth century marine painter, always made a point of going out to sea when a storm was raging. On one occasion, when 'everyone else on board was praying for a safe deliverance, h© threw up his hands in an ecstasy of admiration and exclaimed; “How glorious it is!” Mr Caledon Cameron ran terrible risks when he was painting his enormous picture, “ Niagara in Winter,” spending scores of hours suspended from the cliffs at dizzy heights at the end of a Hoysa:, the greatest of Japanese artists, has many a time risked liis life to procure a desired sketch. On one occasion, when a tierce fire was raging in Tokio, he took his easel and sat- down in the midst of the furnace of blazing and tumbling houses anti painted until his clothes caught fire. A VETERAN WAR ARTIST. Verestchagin was as much at home on the battlefield as in his studio, and would calmly produce his sketch-book and make a drawing while bullets were whisting past his ears and the flash of swords and bayonets was in his eyes. He was wounded many a time while following his art. 1 have been hit here,” he once said, pointing to his leg. “ and there,” pointing to his forehead. “ I have been wounded all over. But it was necessary. There was no other way to obtain the facts. War painted otherwise is simply an illusion, a myth, a farce.” Among men who pursue their art under difficulties a very high place should be awarded to Mr Bertram Hiles, who produces the most remarkable paintings with his mouth. As a boy of eight he was run over by a Bristol tramoar and lost both his arms : but such was the boy’s pluck and love of art that he set to work to model, to draw, and to paint with his mouth. Within two years he had won a firstclass certificate for freehand drawing. Mr Charles Felu, the Flemish artist, it may be remembered, was born without arms, and yet. holding his brushes between his teeth, lie was able to paint pictures of surpassing merit: and James Carter, whose arms had been rendered useles by paralysis, produced

canvasses which woff the enthusiastic admiration of Landseer himself. Mr Holman Hunt spent months in the desert- fringing the Red Sea when he was painting “The Scapegoat,” and took with him the very goat he wished to paint. To get- local colour for his “Triumph of the Innocents ” and other Eastern pictures, he built a house and studio for himself on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and there he spent many years producing his wonderful canvases. So exacting a critic was lie of his own work that he often destroyed a picture on which he had spent months of hard labour rather than allow it to go out into the world branded with what he considered an imperfection. THT STORY OF “THE DOCTOR.” Before Sir Luke Fildes painted his pathetic and beautiful picture, “ The Doctor,” ho spent several weeks travelling over the country to get thoroughly acquainted with cottage interiors and their tenants, and when the cottageroom he wanted was finally pictured | in his brain, he had the room carefully built, exactly to size and perfect j to the minutest detail, at the end of | his studio, so that he was able to j transfer to canvas exactly what he J saw, even to the massive- rafters of i the ceiling. For tho doctor, he says: “Several! • people sat for me, but I knew per- j fectlv well the- kind of man I wanted ! —that is to say, I had the type in { my mind—and J got the brow from i oiio model, an eye from another, the j head from a third, until I had my : doctor complete as I had pictured him ) in mv mind.” Probably no artist was ever more ! conscientious in his work than Meis- j sonier. “ Flow did you paint- the | snowy road in your picture of ‘ Napoleon in 1814’?” Verestchagin once asked the great French artist, who picked out from under the table a low platform, about a yard and a half semare, and said: “On this I prepared ! all that was required—snow, mud, and j ruts. I kneaded the clay, and pushed i across it this piece of cannon several j times, up and down. "With a shod | hoof T then pressed the marks of the j horses’ feet ; I strewed flour over it. J pushed the cannon across again, and | continued to do so until I obtained the semblance of a real road. Then 1 salted it and the road was ready.” “ What did you salt it for?” “ To get the brilliancy of the snow. Why do' you smile? How else could you do it?” BOUGHT A WHEAT-FIELD. It was Meissonier, too. who. when he wanted to paint a wheat-field in a battle scene, actually bought- a field of growing wheat and got a squadron of cavalry to charge through it. Speaking of his “ Charge of the French Cuirassiers at Waterloo,” Mr Stanley Berkeley, painter of so many stirring pictures of battle and sport, “ For the animal pulled on to its haunches by it 3 frantic rider, when T. had completed my picture T got one of my own horses and rested Jts jaw on the head of my groom, in order to see whether I had some details correct about which I was a little anxious. “ Again, with regard to the Wellington boots the rider was wearing, you will recollect that the field of Waterloo was almost a quagmire on the day of the conflict. Weil, I went hunting one wet day, and, galloping over ploughed fields, got mv top-boots liberally splashed with mud. When l arrived home I carefully examined those boots to see how the spatters of mud fell upon them, and those which I had painted upon the boots of the cavalrymen in my picture.”