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What they taught us is above all their idea of work. The sort of improvisationist who makes a horse or a Harmony in two days, like Fromentin or Whistler, and who asks two hundred guineas for it under the pretext that he has been preparing it for thirty years, is extremely rare among the English. Most of their artists share a disdain for easy success, are persistent in their work, and are determined to never be satisfied so long as they still find something better in themselves than in their work. They have conscience, if this word, the most beautiful that can be said of a man, had not already lost its value by being abusively applied to artists in whom it is completely lacking. Madox Brown spent four years making his Last of England , which includes only two main figures, and fifteen years painting the frescoes in Manchester Town Hall. Mr Hodgson said of Walker that no artist has ever struggled so much while working. It was painful to watch him.[35] Hunt spent an entire life of continuous labour on a few small paintings, as many as some painters exhibit in a year on the Champs de Mars or in a club. Watts painted hundreds, but he kept all of them in his studio, considering that only two out of this number did not need any retouching. Burne-Jones spent seven years planning and executing his Briar Rose , which does however include four panels, each containing several figures. He sketched his Wheel of Fortune in 1871, but did not begin painting it until 1877, and finished it in 1883. One must read Mr Hamertons stories about camping in the moors of Lancashire to imagine the effort and time that a Pre-Raphaelite could devote to studying a tuft of ferns in the field, frond by frond. In his tar-sealed wood and tile hut, which predated Mr de Nittiss famous roulotte by ten years, Mr Hamerton had to endure cold, humidity, gusty wind, the curiosity of peasants who came along, believing that they had seen him executing the turns and attacks of night hunters, and the inane questions of neighbouring country gentlemen, and all of this for months on end.[36] This same desire for accuracy inspired Mr. Boot to paint his ocean and river scenes from on board a studio-boat equipped to travel in both salt and fresh water, which he named the
Thelis and whose voyages are well-known among English artists. Alma-Tadema was very productive, this is true, but he professed and proved through his own example that nothing is accomplished without difficulty. He showed no leniency toward his own work. If one bit, which had cost him a thousand efforts, seemed useless or dangerous to him: Art lives on sacrifice! he would say, and would scrape it off. If an entire work did not seem good to him, he destroyed it without hesitation, in a valiant caprice. In 1859, one of his paintings sent to the Brussels exhibition was refused by the jury. It depicted a fire. He asked his friends to come see this painting in his studio, to tear holes in it and pass through it like a door. He gave the example himself, by jumping headfirst into the flames of his painting. This joking about was not without courage. It demonstrated the necessity of effort, the price of steadfastness, and the strength of the will. This was the first lesson given by English painting.
Edward Robert Hughes, Midsummer Eve.
Watercolour and gouache on paper mounted
on cardboard, 114.4 x 76.2 cm.
Private Collection.
Arthur Hughes,Ophelia, 1852.
Oil on canvas, 68.7 x 123.8 cm.
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester.
Arthur Hughes,April Love, 1855-1856.
Oil on canvas, 89.9 x 49.5 cm.
Tate Gallery, London.
It has others to offer, numerous and useful, about the phenomena of nature, the events of history and the meaning of life. All great art is to some degree didactic, said Ruskin, the principal goal of popular art should be didactic. Here we have the explanation, and to a certain degree the excuse, for the minute details and prodigious accessories that encumber most English paintings to the detriment of the whole. They are intended to teach the onlooker. It is not out of conceit over his ability, dexterity and virtuosity that the English painter studies every detail of a flower or a rock; it is so that a dicotyledone is not confused with a monocotyledone, or a granitic terrain with a schistose terrain. Remember that one of the first P.R.B., Collins, included an Alisma plantage in one of his paintings and thereby won over the botanists. Mr. Chesneau told the story of a scholar, surprised to find one of Hunts paintings (The Hireling Shepherd ) in a zoological museum. He was moved to recognise an admirable depiction of a deaths head sphinx moth in the foreground, as well as a Geranium roberlianum and other plants painted with so much scientific precision that this work could have been used in a natural history lesson.[37] Thus, said Ruskin, it is not at all a question of taste whether one prefers a finished painting or an unfinished one. It is simply a question of whether one wants to see truth or falsehood, and those who are inclined to prefer darkness to light or illusion to fact would do better to devote themselves to anything but art. He did not hesitate to declare that the primary goal of the painter should be to scientifically teach the laws of the universe and the facts of history. He thought badly of a painting that teaches us nothing about the geological composition of the landscape, or the families of plants that grow in it, or the architectural ruins that lie in it: Nor do I myself see, he said, wherein the great difference lies between a master and a novice, except in the rendering of the finer truths of which I am at present speaking. To handle the brush freely, and to paint grass and weeds with accuracy enough to satisfy the eye, are accomplishments that a year or twos practice will give any man: but to trace among the grass and weeds those mysteries of invention and combination by which nature appeals to the intellect; to render the delicate fissure, and descending curve, and undulating shadow of the mouldering soil, with gentle and fine finger, like the touch of the rain itself; to find even in all that appears most trifling or contemptible, fresh evidence of the working of the Divine power for glory and for beauty, and to teach it and proclaim it to the unthinking and the unregarding: this, as it is the peculiar province and faculty of the master-mind, so it is the peculiar duty which is demanded of it by the Deity.[38]