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This is what the English did in the Arts and Crafts movement, at whose exhibitions a craftsman signed his work just as a member of the Royal Academy signed his paintings. The most sensitive artists, the most subtle thinkers transform their dreams into carpet designs or hearth screens. Burne-Jones decorated glazed pans and pianos and painted mosaic tiles for churches. Herkomer designed elaborate decorations for plates. Walter Crane, Richmond, Holiday and twenty others devoted their rare talents to the most common work. Looking around the restaurant of the South Kensington museum, one finds that one is in the midst of enchanting décor by the great poet William Morris, surrounded by figures drawn by the great symbolist Burne-Jones, and that one is eating venison with redcurrant jelly or rhubarb pie!
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,Ecce Ancilla Domini!
(The Annunciation), 1849-1850.
Oil on canvas, 72.4 x 41.9 cm.
Tate Britain, London.
Arthur Hughes,
The Annunciation, 1872-1873.
Oil on canvas, 61.2 x 35.8 cm.
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.
If works of art were produced in this way by everyone, would they remain the privilege of a few, as paintings have? No, they must become the property of everyone. Only then can they truly achieve the status of useful works. When you see delicate and harmonious colours and beautiful designs in the manufacture of windows; when you see pretty dresses in the streets expressing the beautiful forms of the women who wear them with the grace of flowers; when you feel a certain sense of balance and harmony in colour in the most common arrangements of paper and paint in your interiors; when your beds have gracious lines; when you find books on the table whose printers and illustrators considered them to be works of art as much as literature, and thus experience a double pleasure because they satisfy more than one of your senses, then you will begin to think that something has happened, that a new spirit has come upon the country to make such refinement possible for the common citizen, when before it would have been impossible.[42]
If we still wish to use the designs of the great creators of palaces, paintings, and aristocratic pomp, may they at least be used in palaces which anyone may enter, in paintings that everyone can see, and in great popular exhibitions. This was Watts idea. It was also Ruskins, and he considered that the great works of the Middle Ages owe their existence and their splendour to this idea. The first role of art was to express truth or beautify something useful. In the thirteenth century, art expressed a religion that souls were still able to understand, and decorated the buildings of citizens whose greatest happiness came from private honour and public magnificence. Public, because their ways were simple. Monuments that served the people as a whole were constructed by the painters, sculptors, jewellers, blacksmiths, embroiderers, and carpenters who composed, along with the merchants, a large third estate. At this time, they constructed the walls of Milan, the Naviglio Grande canal that carries water thirty miles from Tessin to Milan, the two
storage facilities at Genoa, the walls on their banks, and their aqueducts. These immense public works employed legions of workmen and artists, who in those days were not distinct groups, as every artisan was a bit of an artist. They were paid reasonably and worked nobly for the city as best they could.[43] When it is seen in this way, art will truly moralise the people, because it will no longer be something outside their lives, that happens above them like diplomacy, without demanding anything from them and without giving them any pleasure. It will moralise them because it will ennoble common, daily work, thereby bringing the workman hope and pleasure in the place of fear and pain. It will finally become an art made by the people, and for the people, as happiness to the maker and the user.[44]
John Everett Millais,
The Return of the Dove to the Ark , 1851.
Oil on canvas, 88.2 x 54.9 cm.
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology,
University of Oxford, Oxford.
John William Waterhouse,
A Naiad (Hylas and a Water-Nymph) , 1893.
Oil on canvas. Roy Miles Fine Paintings, London.
John William Waterhouse,
Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896.
Oil on canvas, 132.1 x 197.5 cm.
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester.
These are certainly noble goals, but there is one more that seems to stand out in the minds of the English, that they may speak of less, but which they think of more. It is not enough for art to be suggestive, didactic, moral, or popular; it must also be national. It must be English. Except for some rare exceptions, all great British artists are clearly opposed to foreign (i.e. French) influence: Watts, Hunt, Burne-Jones and his entire school, Strudwick, Holiday, Stillman, Rooke, Walter Crane, Spencer-Stanhope, Spence it is quite obvious. In Alma-Tadema this is less visible, although we should not forget the originality of his compositions, and that a part of his training took place at Baron Wappers school in Antwerp. Leighton, who studied just about everywhere, studied less in France than in Italy and Germany, and Herkomer did not study there at all. Finally, Millais, who resembled a Frenchman when compared with his colleagues, distances himself so much from them by his colours that one could pick out his paintings among thousands of others. Their critics demand above all that they remain English. Phillips says of Walker he had that special quality which can never be too highly praised: despite his innovations he remained national in feeling and character. He adds that though this innovators art had its faults, the simple fact that it was born of the English soil and national in terms of colour made it successful. Harry Quilter says of Poynter that he was educated in an insular fashion, and had very little sympathy for modern art. What the French call the grands contours du dessin are totally lacking in his work. Mrs Barrington, praising Millais, informs us that his feeling is invariably pure, transparent, and deeply wholesome. Fortunately, these qualities contrast with the crude scarecrows and disagreeable suggestions so prominent in the art patronised by the French. And to ensure that we know exactly what this French taste is, she warns us elsewhere that it is, in terms of sentiment, a search for mediocrity. When addressing his students, Ruskin said of the Greeks that they were to be looked at sometimes. Not continually, and never as a model for imitation. For you are not Greeks; but, for better or worse, English creatures; and cannot do, even if it were a thousand times better worth doing, anything well, except what your English hearts shall prompt and your English skies teach you. At the opposite pole of aesthetics, Millais said: There is among us a band of young men who, though English, insist on painting with a broken French accent, all of them much alike, and seemingly content to lose their identity in the imitation of French masters, whom they are constitutionally, absolutely, and in the nature of things, unable to copy with justice either to themselves or their models.[45] And none of them doubted that the hearts and skies of England could inspire art superior to that of any other period and country. That sketch of four cherub heads from an English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Kensington, is an incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks did, says Ruskin.