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RankBran^wyn

AND HIS WORK E^ BY
W\LT£R SHAW-SPARROW

THE LIBRARY

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES

FRANK BRANGWYN

AND HIS WORK

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FRANK BRANGWYN

AND HIS WORK. 1911

BY WALTER SHAW-SPARROW

AUTHOR OF "OUR HOMES," "THE ENGLISH
HOUSE AND ITS STYLES," &c., PART AUTHOR
OF "THE GENIUS OF J. M. W. TURNER"

DANA ESTES ^ COMPANY

ESTES PRESS, SUMMER STREET, BOSTON

Printed in Great Britain

The rights of translation and reproduction are reserved

College
Library

CHARLES HOLME Esq.

KOUNUEk AND EDITOR OF
THE STUDIO MAGAZINE

20.U^5iO

PREFACE

I HAVE to express grateful thanks for assistance in
many forms rendered to me during the production
of this book. It is through the courtesy of M.
a Pacquement, the present owner of " Buccaneers," that
I have been able to include a reproduction of that famous
picture, the blocks being made specially in Paris. Much
help has been received from the Skinners' Company, from
Lloyd's Register, from the Royal Exchange, and from the
Art Gallery of Leeds, by whose courteous permission
seven copyright works are here illustrated. It is a great
pleasure also to acknowledge with thanks the assistance
given me by Mr. T. L. Devitt, Mr. R. H. Kitson, Mr. S.
Wilson, Dr. Tom Robinson, Mr. Haldane Macfall, Mr.
Warwick H. Draper, Mr. W. Gibbings, Mr. H. F. W.
Ganz, Mr. B. W. Willett, and Mr. Frederic Whyte ; by
Mr. Collier of New York ; by M. Pacquement, M. Stany
Oppenheim, and M. Bramson of Paris ; and by Herr Ernst
Arnold; of Dresden. To Messrs. Gibbings & Co. I am
indebted for the use of their blocks of the illustration,
" Queen Elizabeth going aboard the Golden Hind!' To
Messrs. Swain, the London blockmakers, and Mr. Edmund

Evans, the printer of the colour-plates, I owe a special
b vii

T^reface

word of acknowledgment for the care and skill they have
brought to their anxious work. The making of compara-
tively small illustrations of very large pictures is a matter
of the greatest difficulty, more especially when the works
in question involve special journeys to public buildings and
to private galleries out of London.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PAGE

PARENTAGE AND EARLY STUDIES ,

CHAPTER II

LATER STUDIES . . i6

CHAPTER III

CONTESTS OF CRITICISM: "A FUNERAL AT SEA," "THE BUC-
CANEERS," "SLAVE TRADERS," AND "A SLAVE MARKET" . 36

CHAPTER IV

CONTESTS OF CRITICISM: SUN-COLOUR AND RELIGIOUS ART . 53

CHAPTER V

CHARACTERISTICS: LIGHT AND COLOUR 7+

CHAPTER VI

LIGHT AND COLOUR l^continued) 88

CHAPTER VII

SOME OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 10+

CHAPTER VIII

DECORATIVE PAINTING n&

CHAPTER IX

DECORATIVE PAINTING (continued) 132

Contents

CHAPTER X

PAGE

POINTS OF VIEW IN DECORATIVE ART : AND THE SKINNERS-
HALL 144

CHAPTER XI

SKETCHES AND STUDIES 164

CHAPTER XH

WATER-COLOURS 175

CHAPTER Xni

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR MAGAZINES AND BOOKS— DESIGNS FOR

POSTERS 180

CHAPTER XIV

ETCHINGS: AND SUMMARY OF CHARACTERISTICS .... 185

CHAPTER XV

DESIGNS FOR HOUSE FURNISHING 206

APPENDIX I

PICTURES AND SKETCHES 219

APPENDIX II

ETCHINGS— CLASSIFIED 236

APPENDIX III

BIBLIOGRAPHY 249

INDEX 253

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOUR PLATES

A River Procession to Westminster in 1453 — City

AND Trade Barges Frontispiece

lUproduced by permiision of the akinners Cam f any, l^ndnn. Copy-
right.

Montreuil: Cottage Landscape Facing p. 8

Keprodtued fram a small Oil- Painting. Cepyrighl.

The Bridge of Alcantara „ 12

Rtprodtued from the Water-Colour, Copyright.

The Buccaneers „ 36

Reproduced by permission of M. J'acquement, Paris. Copyright,

Harvesters „ 48

Reproduced fr»m the large Oil-Painting. Copyright.

The Rajah's Birthday „ 84

Reproduced by permission of R. H. Kit son, E>ij., Leeds. Copyright.

The Brass Shop „ 88

Reproduced from the large Oil- Painting. Copyright.

Mars and Venus „ 92

Reproduced from the large Oil- Painting in the Municipal Art
Gallery, Dublin. Copyright.

The Card Players „ 96

Reproduced from the large Oil- Painting. Copyright.

List of Illustrations

The Retui^n from the Promised Land . Facing p. loo

Rtprodtued by permission of the Art Gallery at Johannesburg.
Copyright.

The Venetian Funeral ,,112

Keprodueed by permission of the I^eds Art Gallery. Copyright.

A Still-Life Study of Leeks ,,128

Keprodtued by permission of R. H. Kitson, Esq., Leeds. Copyright.

Queen Elizabeth Going Aboard the "Golden Hind" „ 132

Reproduced by permission of LloyiCs Register. Copyright.

Blake's Return after the Capture of the Plate

Ships ,,136

Reproduced by permission of Lloyd's Register. Copyright.

The Fruits of Industry ,,144

Rep^roduced from the large Panel in Tempera. Copyright.

Reception of General Monk at the Skinners' Hall,

4th April 1660 ,,152

Reproduced by permission of the Hiinners' Company. Copyright.

Life among the Ruins, Messina, 1910 .... ,,176

Reproduced from a IVater- Colour. Copyright.

The Duomo, Messina, 1910 „ 180

Reproduced from a Water- Colour. Copyright.

The Weavers: a Decorative Panel in the Leeds

Art Gallery ,, 212

Reproduced by permission. Copyrigh'.

Design for a Fan „ 216

From " History of the Fan," by G. Woolliscroft Rhead. Copyright.

xii

List of Illustrations

COLLOTYPE PLATES

Blacksmiths Facing p. 6

From a IVall-l'anel in the Leeds Art Gallery. Copyright.

Platelayers „ 20

From an Original Lithograph. Copyright.

The Baptism of Christ „ 68

From the Oil-Painting now in the Art Gallery at Stuttgart. Copyright,

The Windmill, Dixmude „ 80

From an Original Etching. Copyright.

The Departure of Columbus ,,104

From a Decorative Panel belonging to the Profj-ietor of " Collier'!
Weekly" i\ew Yori, U.S.A. Copyright.

Santa Maria della Salute ,,120

From the Oil-Painiing in the Wellington Art Gallery, New Zealand.
Copyright.

Old Houses, Ghent ,,124

From an Original Etching, Copyright.

Modern Commerce ,,140

From the Fresco in the Royal Exchange, London. Copyright.

Music ,,164

From an Original Lithograph. Copyright.

Unloading Oranges at London Bridge ... „ 168

From an Original Lithograph. Copyright.

The Loom

From an Original Lithogiaph. Copyright.

172

List of Illustrations

The Black Mill, Winchelsea Facing p. i88

From an Original Etching. Cofyrighl.

The Tow-Rope ,,192

From an Orif^tnal Etching. Copyright.

The Sawyers ,,196

From an Original Etching. Copyright.

Old Hammersmith „ 200

From an Original Etching. Copyright.

Santa Maria della Salute „ 204

From an Original Etching, Gold AUdal, Venice International
Exhibition, 1907 ; Grand I'ri.x, Jnternational Exhibition,
Milan, 1906. Copyright.

XIV

FRANK BRANGWYN

AND HIS WORK

CHAPTER I

PARENTAGE AND EARLY STUDIES

4 S many painters have been affected throughout life by
/\ inherited gifts and inclinations, it is proper to note
/ \ at once that Frank Brangwyn is partly Welsh and
partly English ; his father belonged to an Anglo-
Welsh family living in Buckinghamshire, and his mother,
nde Griffiths, is a Welsh lady from Brecon. One cannot
mention this blend of races without thinking of an earlier
painter of note, Peter De Wint, whose parentage gave him
two nationalities, Dutch and Scotch, and who developed
traits from both in his personal character, and also in his
landscape work. De Wint was a Scotsman in his deep
and rich harmonies of colour, as well as in simple breadth
of technique, while his favourite themes were as Dutch in
their low horizons as fiat country scenes in England would
allow them to be. Again, De Wint is not a student of
clouds, like Constable. His thoughts keep near to the
earth, just as Dutch minds for centuries have concerned
themselves with the dykes of Holland ; and these things

Frank 'Brangwyn and his M^ork

denoting the influence of a pedigree, perhaps Brangwyn,
like De Wint, inherits much from his parents. It is a
question of very great interest, particularly when we con-
nect it with the views held by Matthew Arnold on the
Anglo-Celts.

Matthew Arnold's theory was that England has owed
her finest poetry and art to a fusion of Celtic imagina-
tion with her own native qualities. Arnold never failed
to use the word " Celtic," but, strictly speaking, this term
applied to only one type of the inhabitants of Wales. The
pure Celts were energetic men of great stature, with light
hair and blue eyes ; they were nomads by instinct, they
travelled far, peopled France, and found their way across
the Channel into Britain. Some ethnologists think that
they then lost their own distinction, but their breed is
found to this day in Wales, tall and fair, making con-
trasts with the primitive type of Welshman, who is short
and sturdy, and whose lineage is probably as old as the
Neolithic inhabitants of England. He is akin to the
dark, short, oval-headed people with small features, whom
we encounter also in Cornwall, the Isle of Man, Ireland,
and the West of Scotland as far north as the Orkneys.
Brangwyn — on the distaff side of his family — belongs to
this dark breed of virile little men, whose life-struggle
from prehistoric times has served to prove that imagina-
tion and quick emotion and tenacity may go hand in hand
with indomitable pluck.

England owes innumerable debts of gratitude to Welsh
and Celtic imagination and emotion ; while from other races
she gets a fitful energy and the joy she takes in wandering
adventure.

T^arentage and Early Studies

These qualities you will find united in Frank Brangwyn.
Whether the Welsh alone would ever develop great art is
open to doubt, because their national love for music does
not, as a rule, show a preference for stringed instruments ;
and their gifts for eloquent talk break through the self-
discipline that art finds helpful. On the other hand, Anglo-
Welshmen of talent are emotional in a steadier way, though
routine worries them. Work between fixed hours does
not " set their genius." When the impulse comes they toil
as a racehorse runs, stopping when their emotion and
energy are spent. I have never noticed in Anglo-Welsh
artists a patience similar to that which Thackeray admired
in his little painter-hero, "J. J." Certainly it is not a trait
in Frank Brangwyn, who paints at a white heat or not
at all. From Wales, too, I think, comes his great liking
for what may be called tints of mountain colour — heather
tints, the hues of dried ferns, lichen greys, blue distances,
and the gleaming yellow of gorse blossoms. In his colour
there is a mingling of Eastern sunlight with the magic
of the Welsh hills. When painting an English landscape
he sees deeper tones than do our English eyes ; and in
this he resembles De Wint, who found no place in his art
for wet greens that flash into pale brilliance. But Brangwyn
is not drawn to Wales by any strong feeling of affection,
although his art owes so much to his mother's race and
country, and although his father, Mr. Curtis Brangwyn,
spoke always of Wales with great enthusiasm, and himself
claimed some descent from that country.

Mr. Curtis Brangwyn ' was a very remarkable man, and

' It is interesting to note that an earlier Brangwyn had turned from business to art,
and made a reputation for himself. This was Noah, a great-uncle, I believe, of Frank
Brangwyn. He spelt the last syllable of his surname with an " i,' Brangwin, and was

Frank "Brangwyn and his Tf^ork

his name has been coupled with that of Pugin, for he
greatly loved Gothic and helped to reawaken the public
taste for mediaeval arts and crafts. His temperament was
Anglo-Welsh ; and when he chose architecture as his pro-
fession, he did not know that building methods had lost
their old-time freedom, and that they needed long office
hours and stern business habits. Painting would have
suited him much better ; and although he gained the
confidence and admiration of distinguished architects like
G. E. Street and Sir Horace Jones, Mr. Curtis Brangwyn
was thwarted all his life by his inability to be at the same
moment an artist and a man of business. Many writers on
architecture have deplored the effects of a mercantile routine
on men of imagination. Fergusson went so far as to say
that modern architects in practice " could never afford to give
many hours to the artistic elaboration of their designs," and
that they generally succeeded " more from their business-
like habits than their artistic powers." Fergusson was right,
and the career of Mr. Curtis Brangwyn was a case in point.
The racehorse could not be broken to the plough ; that
is to say, the artist could not adapt himself to relentless
methods of routine in a city office, so he worked in the
employ of other men rather than bear the many respon-
sibilities that Fergusson hated and condemned.

Mr. Curtis Brangwyn married early, and his education
in architecture having brought him in touch with the
energetic school of thought known as the Gothic Revival,

living at Henley-on-Thames in 1854, when he sent two pictures to the Royal Academy,
entitled "Welsh Sheep" and "The Watchman." The following year he was represented
by "The Ploughman's Meal," and in 1856 by "A Berkshire Lane." His name does not
appear again in the R.A. catalogues. It has not been my good luck to see any of his
work, but his subjects prove that he was attracted by rustic life.

T^arenta^e and Early Studies

he kept his home for some time by doing for church uses
such work as many could afford to buy. Then, believing
that life on the Continent would be less expensive than
it was in London, he decided to make his home in Belgium,
at Bruges ; here he set up his quarters at No. 24 in the
Rue du Vieux Bourg, and then opened workrooms for
the reproduction of old embroideries for altar-cloths and
vestments. At Bruges his son Frank was born, May the
1 2th, 1867. Mrs. Brangwyn was then twenty-three, and
her husband twenty-seven. Frank Brangwyn was their
third child. He had two sisters for playmates, and Bruges
— she has been called the Dead City — was a quiet nursery.
One thinks of Bruges as a fitting birthplace for a Fernand
Khnopff or a Maeterlinck; but Brangwyn and Bruges?
Have they anything more in common than Rubens had
with Jiis birthplace in a foreign land, the little town of
Siegen, in the Duchy of Nassau ?

And I find, too, that Brangwyn has very little to tell
about his birthplace, though he remained there for eight
years. Some recollections are clear-cut, but they have
nothing to do with boyish mischief in the town. They
are all connected with art. He remembers many a visit
to his father's workrooms, where exquisite needlework lay
on tables, shimmering with bright colours ; and one day in
his father's garden he found by chance a bundle of photo-
graphic negatives, half broken, and looking up from them
he saw, against a background of houses and blue sky, a
tree covered with red blossoms, such as the Japanese love
in their lightly touched prints. Colour was to him what
music was to the boy Mozart. He has related — in an
article that appeared in M.A.P., February 27, 1904 — that

Frank 'Brangwyn and his Jf'^ork

the home garden in old Bruges was an enchanted place
to him, where great beasts lurked in the shadows, where
trees were giants and ogres, and flowers little lords and
ladies.

More important still, I think, is another recollection.
There was a portfolio of prints at home, and the boy was
allowed to play with it. A good many artists were re-
presented, but only one really delighted him ; it was Charles
Degroux, a painter of the Belgian poor, who died in 1870.
Some critics have compared Degroux with J. Israels, be-
cause both are masters of pathos. But Degroux is the
better colourist, and his brushwork is nearer to John
Phillip's than to that of the modern Dutchman. For the
rest, Degroux loves cottages, garrets, taverns and alleys,
and his feeling for the drama of poverty is so deep and
true that he has been called the painter of social in-
equalities. Degroux never laughs in his w^ork, like David
Wilkie, nor does he pass through character into idylls,
like William Hunt. It will be remembered how Ruskin
praised Hunt's water-colour of an old peasant in the act
of praying before he takes his dinner. Degroux painted
a similar work, "Saying Grace," now in the Brussels
Museum, but the emotion here has a subtle depth of effect
that Hunt never felt in his presentation of character. The
Belgian painter is not concerned with an idyllic piety ; he
sees below the surface of life, and finds in the garret of
a poor family that pathetic tragedy of temperament, that
compulsion of circumstances, from which good and evil
spring at the same moment.

Yet Brangwyn at the age of eight not only enjoyed
Degroux, but struggled to copy from engravings after
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T^arentage and Early Studies

Degroux's pictures. The boy was father to the man. His
present work (to a great extent) was foretold by his native
tastes in childhood. The same inborn liking for what
is typically modern and industrial may be found in the
noble drawing by which he commemorated the funeral
of Edward the Seventh — a drawing published in the
Standard newspaper. Photographers, with one accord,
took their stand in thronged streets. Brangwyn chose the
railway station at Paddington, and in his rapid drawing
a flash of sunlight comes down through the glazed roof
and rests on King Edward's coffin and the mourners
gathered about the train. This touches the heart of our
time. The railway station looks as quiet as Westminster
Hall, and it represents the genius of modern life and
industry, as that Hall typifies for us the spirit of home
in bygone ages.

At the beginning of 1875 Mr. Curtis Brang^vyn left
Bruges for England. " I remember dimly our embarka-
tion, though it might have resulted in the days of my
youth being ended once for all, for — at least, so I am told —
I was discovered crawling along one of the sponsons of
the steamer. From this highly perilous position I was
rescued in the nick of time, and — here recollection becomes
more vivid — soundly spanked and put to bed. In England
I went first of all to a dame's school, and then to a big
middle-class school, the name of which has totally escaped
me. For reasons into which I need not enter, but which
have nothing to do with myself, my schooldays came to
an abrupt end, and I made myself useful in my father's
office."

When Mr. Curtis Brangwyn arrived in London he

Frank "Brangwyn and his M^ork

took an office at No. 6 John Street, Adelphi, and sent two
architectural designs to the Royal Academy, " Hastings
Town Hall," and " Schools of the Grocers' Company,
Hackney." Next year, 1876, he exhibited again, "De-
sign for Offices of the Board of Works at Greenwich," and
also, in 1879, "Yarmouth Town Hall," and a fine sketch
in water-colour of a pulpit at Canford Church. The R.A.
catalogues give me no other information, but Mr. Curtis
Brangwyn is permanently represented at the Victoria and
Albert Museum by a beautiful piece of embroidery — a
banner carried out from his designs in his own establish-
ment. After a life of hard work, chequered with ups and
downs, he died in December 1907.

It will be remembered that the seventies were very
important years artistically. yEstheticism came into vogue,
with its limp clothes and forlornly gentle ideals, looking
very absurd in the pea-soup fogs of that time. In 1878
Whistler and Ruskin fought their battle in the law courts,
and modern art w^on a new farthing as a shining plaster
for its injuries. If Ruskin had been foreman of the jury
perhaps the damages would have been higher, for he tried
always to be fair when he held a position of trust as an on-
looker. In those days, again, a very distinguished French
artist, Alphonse Legros, was already at work in London,
trying to recover for us the art of teaching the arts, that
had been allowed to decline very much since the great
era of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Turner. Professor
Legros was the first of the foreign artists to whom England
would soon owe many debts of gratitude, both directly and
indirectly — directly, as in the work of Mr. Sargent, Mr.
Abbey, Mr. J. J. Shannon, and others ; indirectly through
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'Parentage and Early Studies

the English students who studied in continental schools and
through the sale of the best foreign pictures in England.
It was in 1877, after much hesitation, that the Paris Salon
made its famous compromise with the Realists, accepting
Manet's portrait of the singer Faure in the part of Hamlet,
but rejecting his " Nana."

It is pleasant to recall the enthusiasms then in vogue :
the earnest efforts, the talk about pictures, how dealers
besieged many a painter, and that few persons ever dared
to admit they had neglected to spend their shillings on
exhibitions and on catalogues worth twopence apiece. The
golden age of art had come to grim old London ! Many
thought so, and the belief lasted for some years, thanks
to the fervour of those who went to the Grosvenor Gallery
as pilgrims go to Mecca. Perhaps ordinary folk liked
W. P. Frith at the Royal Academy very much better than
E. Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor ; but Rossetti assured all
the world that pictures by Burne-Jones were unrivalled
for "gorgeous variegation of colour, sustained pitch of
imagination, and wistful, sorrowful beauty; all conspiring
to make them not only unique in English work, but in the
work of all times and nations." You remember? Art was
very dreamful and serious. ''Have you seen Bume-Jones ? "
was a question to awe any one, for it was spoken always
with so much fervour that you could not say " No," lest
your artistic reputation should die there and then. Yes, it
was a keen, ardent time, and a boy like Frank Brangwyn,
eager and quick, could see in many places during the ne.xt
six years an unusual number of differing aims, and could
get from them something for his own future. Millais,
Orchardson, Watts, Leighton, Whistler, Tissot, Albert
1) 9

Frank "Brangwyn and his W^ork

Moore, Holman Hunt, Pettie, Herkomer, Legros, Bastien-
Lepage, Alma-Tadema, Fantin-Latour, Cecil Lawson (he
died in 1882, aged thirty-one), Rossetti, Ouless, Frank
Holl (elected A.R.A. in 1878), made some among the
many contrasts that gave variety to picture galleries.
Fred Walker (1840- 1875) and George Mason (181 8-1 872)
were dead, but their paintings were to be seen here and
there, all high-minded, serene and sweet, but without the
seriousness, the depth of perception, the vigour of drawing
that appeal to us from the work of Brangwyn's fore-
runners, Millet, Meunier, Degroux, and Legros. Is it not
singular that Englishmen — a race of sportsmen and athletes
— should prefer in art the more feminine qualities of style?
So, in an atmosphere of enthusiasm, when the yEs-
thetic period made great ado about Oscar Wilde and
pre-Raphaelite visions, Frank Brangwyn began to find
himself as an art student, after attending day schools
for his general education. The etchings of Legros, ex-
hibited in a shop near the British Museum, were one
useful influence, and he was only about thirteen when
he first found his way to the South Kensington Museum,
pencil in hand, and made drawings of whatever struck
his fancy. Visitors took notice of him, stopping to look
at his work. Among them was Mr. Harold Rathbone,
an artist, who at once offered cricitisms, and then set
him to work from the early Florentine sculptors. The
lad was delighted. With a hard pencil he drew for
months on very smooth white paper, copying the reliefs
of Donatello, and doing whatever Mr. Rathbone wished.
It is never easy to train a young hand to represent in
hard outlines what the eyes are trying to analyse.
10

T^arentage and Early Studies

This long task has broken many a heart. For the
eyes throughout a painter's life do at least four times
as much work as the hand succeeds in doing ; they are
trained and very critical long before manual freedom
has been gained by constant practice. It is certain, then,
that very close and definite technique is a great help to
a young student, teaching him to be patient and exact,
to dwell lingeringly over the rhythm of each outline, and
to store up in his memory what he has learnt. At the
Brussels Academy I was set to draw eyes three feet long, and
Van Saverdonck, my class master, insisted upon the same
hard outlines that Brangwyn learned from Mr. Harold
Rathbone. There was no waste of time over elaborate
shading. Brangwyn remembers this with gratitude, for
English students in those days often followed a routine
of bad drawing methods. Any student who wished to
enter the Royal Academy schools toiled for months on
a single study from the antique, till his work became a
wonderful and fearful thing stippled all over with minute
dots. Such work never seemed to get finished, and nothing
of any value was learnt from it.

Saved from this ineffectual routine, Brangwyn worked
on at South Kensington until, one day, another visitor
made friends with him. It was Mr. A. H. Mackmurdo,
the architect and connoisseur, an artist of broad taste.
It was he who founded the Hobby Horse, now dead,
and prepared the way for all that is best in our maga-
zines of art. His influence on Brangwyn was important.
In those days at South Kensington there was a fine
work by Mantegna, the sketch of a Roman triumph, with
elephants, and Brangwyn was told to copy it. Mantegna

1 1

Frank "Brangwyn and his Work

gripped him at once, taking" a strong hold on his mind ;
and the same thing happened to Francois Millet when
Manteena was studied for the first time. Indeed Millet
related that in looking at Mantegna's martyrs "there were
moments when he felt as though the arrows of a Saint
Sebastian pierced him. These masters are like mesme-
rists," Millet added, quite truly. It was fortunate that
Brangwyn took his first painting lessons in a sternly
noble school, where no weakness in the presentation of
a chosen subject ever appears. Mantegna seems to build
with his brush, for he paints with a sculptor's hand
and knowledge, like Michael Angelo. You cannot be half-
hearted when you try to copy him. Much work was
done under Mr. Mackmurdo's supervision, relieved by
visits to a country house where master and pupil studied
plants together. But soon another turn was given to
these early studies. One day, at South Kensington,
William Morris spoke to Brangwyn, examined his work,
and then asked him to collect details from old tapestries.
Some critics have been puzzled to account for the com-
mand displayed by Brangwyn in practical methods of
decorative design — an art unknown to ninety-nine painters
in a hundred, perhaps. It is forgotten that his first know-
ledge in this very useful field came partly from his study
of plants with Mr. Mackmurdo, and partly from his
training under William Morris. For some time he worked
at the Morris rooms in Oxford Street, not only doing odd
jobs, but making full-sized working cartoons from his
employer's sketches. This sounds easy, perhaps, but
many artists of note would much rather see it done than
sit down to do it themselves. For the work is not only

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Tarentaqe and Early Studies

decorative freehand drawing ; it must be done at once,
without bungling and hesitation, each motif falling pat into
its right place, every detail in scale with its neighbours,
and all within a space appointed w^ith Procrustean rigour.
Now% the tendency of every kind of drawing, whether you
work from models or from memory, is to outgrow the
limits of space fixed by your paper or canvas. Many a
portrait painter, after years of practice, feels this when
he begins to place even a single figure effectively. Con-
sider, then, how useful it was to Frank Brangwyn to
enlarge the sketch designs by William Morris, turning
them cjuickly and correctly into full-sized cartoons for
carpets, wall-papers, tapestries, and so forth. This was
the exercise that gave him courage and self-confidence ;
it strengthened his hand ; it taught his eyes not only to
measure correctly, but to see on the paper before them
the exact spacing of a big composition. So, then, instead
of passing from life-class to life-class, he enjoyed from the
first a practical training very well fitted to bring out the
qualities of his temperament as an artist. There are many
dangers in life-schools. This is proved by the fact that
the most brilliant students — the prize-winners — seldom do
anything first-rate in after years. Not only do they miss
the encouragement of delighted masters, the enthusiasm
of fellow-students, but their early success generates man-
nerisms, with a belief that they have done something —
have even "arrived." And then, all at once, disenchant-
ment comes, and they learn that those who bore up against
defeats in the schools were lucky fellows because they
gained habits of persistent pluck. The less a student
hears about "art," and the more closely he is brought in

Frank "Brangwyn and his JV^ork

touch with practical methods, workmanlike and strong,
the better it is for him. And here is another point con-
nected with BrangAvyn's early studies : they did not teach
him to talk, did not make him facile of speech — a bad
thing that nearly always accompanies weak craftsmanship.
As soon as a painter begins to write about pictures, or
to talk with fluency about his impressions, you may be
quite certain that he will not have emotion enough for
his own work. He is like a boiling kettle, the steam
from which makes much ado while evaporating. A
critic is made by talk ; a painter by silence and energetic
practice.

For the rest, William Morris offered to take Brangwyn
into his employ, but events intervened, and the pupil passed
on into a wider experience, that included trips to distant
countries. Between his journeys he did some work for
Morris, and gained much by his business intercourse with
one of the most remarkable men of the last century. For
Morris was born to attract and to lead. His convictions
were magnetic, his presence was energy personified ; and
many a distinguished man now, like Mr. William De
Morgan, thinks of him with veneration. If Brangwyn
had been older, a young man instead of a wayward boy,
it is probable that Morris, with his ardent and deep-
rooted beliefs, would have gained too strong a hold of
the pupil's mind. As it was, BrangAvyn slipped away
into a life of adventure, and there was no loss of per-
sonality while he learned all he could from the master
spirit.

Not that ever)'body was satisfied with his work. Some
of the boy's drawings were shown to Mr. W. Q. Orchardson,
14

T^arentage and Early Studies

who had become a Royal Academician in 1877. The great
man was kind, but very far from pleased ; he had no hopes
at all for Brangwyn's future. Then other studies were
taken to Mr. Colin Hunter, and this painter mingled
encouragement with good advice, saying that fame in art
could never be foreseen ; it rested with each man's char-
acter. Tenacity, as well as talent, was essential.

CHAPTER II

LATER STUDIES

WHILE doing what he could to please
William Morris— from about 1882 and 1884
— Brangwyn saved from his earnings the sum
of forty shillings, and prepared for a sketching
tour in the country. It was a very natural feeling of dis-
content that urged him on. For all art students — unless
they happen to be prigs — rebel from time to time against
the artificialities that form around professional work an
unchanging atmosphere. The same thoughts are discussed
day after day, the same things are seen, almost the same
things are done ; and although the mind is active, it moves
within limits set by custom, rather like the mechanism
of a watch within its metal case. I know men to-day who
hated modern art when I was a lad of fifteen at the Slade
School. Their tastes then were all bred in museums among
the primitive masters ; and to this day they are antago-
nistic to any other painters. For thirty-two years they
have kept their atmosphere unrefreshed. So, as custom
is reason either fast asleep or only half awake, every art
student ought to break free from familiar surroundings and
the repetition of ordered studies. This was understood in
England years ago, for Cozens, Girtin, Turner, De Wint, Cox,
and many others, owed much more to independent observa-
tion out of doors than to lessons and methodical teaching.
16

Later Studies

This applies also to Frank Brangwyn, whose real schools
have been travel and the sea, distant countries and their
ways of living. It was an education in light, in colour,
and in wondrous varied towns, peoples and costumes.
Luckily, too, it began at a time when he was too much
of a boy to gather his impressions in a self-conscious way,
as if he were a correspondent for a newspaper. It is ever
indiscreet to trust a man who goes out deliberately to
observe given events ; he tries to be effective, and falsifies
what he sees. Brangwyn's aim when he left Morris was to
score a little off his own bat ; he knew nothing of the
world and its life, and was bored by a routine of talk
about familiar subjects.

His first trip was to a village on the coast of Kent —
Sandwich. Here there were fishermen with their boats,
little cottages and their kindly womenfolk, gleaming sands,
and the sea with its thousand moods. The boy painter
lived as simply as the villagers.

" During the day I worked hard at my sketching, and
by night I hobnobbed with the ships' captains who
frequented the inn in which I lodged. One of these
mariners was a man of some artistic ability, and soon we
became great friends. Thus the time passed very pleasantly
— until funds began to run low, and eventually ran out
altogether. H.xpected supplies from home did not arrive.
While the people of the inn were most kind and con-
siderate, the situation was unpleasant, though I daresay
my imagination made it worse than it was. Anyhow,
when my friend, the artistic captain, suggested that I
should make a voyage with him, I jumped at the chance"
{M.A.P., February 27, 1904).

c 17

Frank 'Brangwyn and his JVork

Indeed, he gladly worked for his passage on the schooner
Laura Ann, doing whatever came along. He stowed
sails, handled ropes, helped the cook, washed dishes, made
sketches of the ship, and sold them to the crew for sixpence
apiece. It was a capital opportunity to learn every rope
and spar on board a vessel ; and Brangwyn got to know
more about sea life than "The Cruise of the Midge'' would
have taught him. Here was an experience all alive with
good subjects, and it did not end when the boat anchored
in the Thames. A great liking for the sea remained, and
his earliest paintings were of ships and sailors.

"The first money I earned was by painting the name
on a vessel's hull. This work brought me sixpence.
After that I made friends with the Laura Ann; then
with some other coasters — not actually sailoring, you
know, though I had to work my passage more than
once. At times I was actually on my beam-ends — but
happy. On several occasions I had to assist in loading
a vessel to get a supper, and once I was even harder
pushed than that. A Welsh schooner came in, and I
applied for a job. For a couple of days I ran a barrow
across a plank backwards and forwards, and all the
generous skipper gave me was a mouldy old biscuit.
Still, I was following Art, so I just munched that
biscuit and was content, though I mentally registered
a vow never to work for a Welsh sea-captain again."

It was in the thick of these experiences that the boy
painted his first picture, a small one in oil, "A Bit on
the Esk," near Whitby ; he sent it to the Royal
Academy, and it was accepted and hung in 1885, when
Brangwyn was just eighteen. Then for a while he lived

hater Studies

in a single room at i8 Shepherd's Bush Green, doing-
work from time to time for William Morris. Besides
that he designed for several manufacturers, passing from
wall-papers to tiles, and from card backs to other utilities.
Very low prices were paid for his drawings. In modern
shop-expenses, advertisement is deemed of greater im-
portance than well-paid designing ; but Brangwyn some-
how managed to save a few pounds, and with their help
he tried his hand at a difficult picture, a seascape with a
wrecked boat lying on a sandbank in rough weather. It
was freely handled, it was true in dramatic feeling. The
Royal Academy accepted this early work in 1886, and a
shipowner bought it, and made friends with its author.
He was a patron such as any young artist would wish
to have; and in 1888 he allowed Brangwyn to give a
certain number of sketches in return for a sea voyage on
board one of his boats. The passage having been bought
in this way, Brangwyn set sail for Asia Minor.

An active life was very pleasant, and the painter was so
delighted with the East that he bargained for another trip,
setting sail in the summer of 1890. This time he visited
Tunis, Tripolis, Smyrna, Trebizond, Constantinople ; sailed
around the Black Sea, saw a part of Roumania, and made
sketches on the Danube. At Constantinople he met with
an adventure : —

"One evening I went for a stroll in company with two
of the ship's engineers. In the course of time we came to a
cypress grove, surrounded by a low wall. I don't think we
had any particular intention in our minds, and certainly we
had no thought of doing any harm, but we jumped over
the wall. Hardly had our feet touched ground when a

Frank 'Brangwyn and his IJ'^ork

ferocious-looking soldier rushed at us with drawn sword.
I did not stop to argue the matter, but transferred myself
to the other, and right side, of the wall with great rapidity.
The two engineers, however, being Scots — as I should say
ninety per cent, of ships' engineers are — wished to discuss
the metaphysical aspects of the case with the soldier. This
they proceeded to do in their broad and native Doric.
Whether the soldier followed the points the two Scotties
were endeavouring to make or not I can't say, but he
enforced his own point with his sword, and with such
vigour and earnestness that my comrades made an abrupt
and unceremonious departure as I had done. We found
out afterwards that we had unwittingly trespassed upon the
gardens of the old Seraglio, not the one where the Sultan's
womenfolk resided, but — what made our intrusion as
offensive as if we had disturbed the sanctity of the harem —
where the treasure-house was."

There were other travel adventures, but the painter de-
clines to relate them, arguing that the only proper events
to be told are those that directly influenced his work. He
learned, then, very soon, what sunlight and colours meant
in searching climates. In comparison with so much
brilliance and so much heat, London seemed a town of
perpetual twilight. But impression followed impression
too rapidly, and the wish to work was sated before the
struggle between handicraft and sunlight began. It is not
often that a real painter does any finished work out of
doors. Careful outlines, with a few touches of water-colour,
were enough for Turner ; and Brangwyn also, in his early
travels, usually followed the same method, having confi-
dence in that inward vision that dwells unimpaired in the
20

Pi
w
>^
<:

w
h

Vv.

i-i:

hater Studies

memor)' of those who are greatly fascinated by colour and
sunlight. On his return to London, his sketches were ex-
hibited at the Royal Arcade Gallery, Bond Street, in March
1891, under the title "From the Scheldt to the Danube."
Only a few critics noticed their freshness and sparkle.
I choose a notice from the Star, which says that
Brangwyn w\as seen to the best advantage. " It is his own
fault if he led one to suppose that he could paint only grey
seas and stormy skies. At most exhibitions of late years
he has been represented by pictures of a ship in a storm, or
rough weather, until one thought there were but greys and
pale browns on his palette. But in the Bond Street collec-
tion almost all the studies were made about Constantinople
and in the South or East, and they glow with colour. There
are waters of the most brilliant blue, glittering white roads
under intense blue skies, bazaars and quays filled with
gaily dressed crowds. Pink and white towns rise from
the bright seas, radiant hills bound the horizon, and only
in one or two canvases is there a reminder that Mr.
Brangwyn has studied nature in her quieter moods. But
it is curious to note in almost all the sketches how much
more successful he has been in rendering colour than light ;
he gives the colour of the South, but not its sunlight.
The cleverest are those of crowded streets and bazaars and
quays, in which the figures are put in in a most delightful
manner. Not the least charm of Mr. Brangwyn's work is
the direct simple method of recording his impressions."

Other journeys followed in quick succession, and there
had been a rapid one to Spain between these two Eastern
trips. One journey took him to Russia, giving him ex-
periences very different in kind, often cold and unplea.sant ;

Frank "Brangwyri and his IVork

while Spain was visited again early in 1891, this time with
Mr. Arthur Melville, whose death we mourned in 1904,
and whose name has often been coupled with that of
Brangwyn because of his originality in thought, in com-
position, in colour and in technique. I may speak of
Melville again in the chapter on Brangwyn's sketches in
water-colour ; the point to be noticed now is that he
was encouraged by his friend's example to develop without
fear his own style, even although the academic mind should
be horrified. Some writers have supposed that he copied
Melville's effects of palpitating heat obtained with swift
dashes and blobs of water-colour ; but there is no truth in
that. They were kindred spirits as well as friends ; both
belong to the same native feeling for style that has
formed at haphazard a sort of great little cosmopolitan
school in which we find Cottet, Simon, the late H. B.
Brabazon, and Mr. Sargent in his landscape work. These
fine artists, like Melville and Brangwyn, owe something —
each in his own way, by a large and free transmutation —
to the French Impressionists ; but their elective affinity
has nothing whatever to do with conscious effort.

Brangwyn, then, in 1891, travelled with Melville in
Spain, going first to Saragossa. Here they hired an old
boat called the Santa Maria, paying twenty pesetas a
day, this sum to include a crew and mules. It was their
intention to be towed up the canal. " A one-eyed man
named Rincon was signed on as captain, Antonio as crew
and cabin-boy, and a muleteer to superintend the mules,
gently or otherwise. The boat was simply Ai ; she rose
high out of the water, pierced on either side with many
windows, and having a carved figurehead of Neptune,
22

Later Studies

although she was supposed to be a Santa Alaria. The
roof would have been the better for a bit of caulking, for
whenever it rained we had to move our goods to the dry-
spots. The saloon, with its lockers round, and upholstered
in yellow silk, made us feel slightly more luxurious than
after-events warranted. At last, amid the jeers and cheers
of the cro\\d, we were uricler-weigh. . . . The sun was
setting, and the effect of light and colour stealing
through the rows of dark poplars on the bank was fine ;
while in the distance loomed a mysterious uncanny-looking
mountain which might have concealed a demon."

Two letters on this Spanish trip appeared in the first
numbers of the Studio, April and May, 1893. They
are vivid and lively. I will take from them a few
quotations — a little revised by their author.

"The landscape is quaint, and decorated with rich
yet subdued colouring : to some people it might seem
monotonous, but there is a subtle pathetic charm in its
monotony. On the banks we saw lightly clad girls with
great bundles of washing : all this made glad the heart of
a painter. Presently we came to a more hilly country :
the canal winds by hills, treeless, scorched by the sun.
Under the long shadows of the few poplars on the banks
we could see a goatherd surrounded by flocks of black
goats, looking like spots of ink on the sun-swept hills :
above the swell of the hill hung a great white cloud ..."

They reached a puebla called Catanillo — " a dead city,
peopled with strange earth-coloured phantoms. To the
day succeeded a night if possible more weird ; masses of
grey cloud swept over the sleeping town — here and there
rifts of opalescent green." One day — it was at Galar —

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

Melville, "by some occult means, managed to get a
goatherd with his flock down in the morning ; so, after
breakfast — otherwise a pint of coffee with a flavour of oil
about it — we began our work. It was charming at first,
till the frequent peregrinations of the goats over the hills
caused me to think the goat was not the amiable animal
one imagines him. We sweated in agony — not silent on
my part. Melville made a good morning of it, but the
wily goat proved too much for me."

They saw Huesca, where the old kings of Aragon
used to live ; they visited Huren, driving thence by
Agerbe, through the pine forests of the Serra de Quarra,
to ancient Jacca. Jacca, which claims to be the oldest town
in Spain, would not allow them to sketch, its fortifications
being under military law ; and the painters at last hired an
old carriage to drive over the Pyrenees into France, intend-
ing to return thence into Spain, this being the cheapest
and swiftest route. At first their way went between snow-
clad mountains, then amid great gloomy pine forests,
through which torrents rushed foaming ; until anon they
emerged into fertile plains, and reached Oleron, from which
place they booked to Pau, thence to Bayonne, I run, and
San Sebastian. From San Sebastian they moved on to
Puerta de Passages, a narrow inlet from the sea, widen-
ing into a large bay of the deepest and bluest waters,
surrounded with picturesque stone-built houses, once
owned by the flower of the Guipposcoan nobility, but now
tenanted by fishermen. " The architectural features of this
city of one street are unique and interesting. It is a tiny
Venice, with essentially Spanish features. The many-
storeyed and balconied houses all look on the bay, and
24

Later Studies

among these long-deserted palaces one comes across
treasures of wood and stone carving. Its single street
winds round the bay, and following its tortuous passages
one can find many pictures : gloomy alleys, with a peep
through of the bay bathed in sunlight ; here and there a
shrine, stone-covered, with its painted background, now
rapidly succumbing to the wear of sun and wind. The
place is as it was two hundred years ago. Time has
only knocked the angles off. ... I have been starting a
tolerably large canvas here of some pilots looking out
from the verandah across the bay, with its brilliant white
houses opposite. I suppose no one will understand it
when I bring it home." True. Few critics did when the
picture hung in the winter exhibition at the Suffolk Street
Galleries, 1892.

After this delightful holiday, Brangwyn went to South
Africa with Mr. William Hunt, to make sketches for a
London dealer, Mr. Larkin of Bond Street. They made
a circuit of some hundreds of miles round about Cape
Town, visiting the Paarl, with its main street eight miles
long, red and sandy, its running brook, its avenue of trees,
and surrounding vineyards. Brangwyn saw Berg River,
Simon's Town, Kimberley, Libertas, Worcester, Jonker's
Hoek, and Stellenbosch, &c. ; visited an ostrich farm, went
into fields where arum lilies thrived like daisies, looked into
the canteens, and studied life generally as it found its hundred
and one openings in the new colony. There was a greater
native story to tell than he and Mr. Hunt told ; but they
made sketches of things which they believed would interest
people at home, and they could do no more. Much good
material was found in the old Dutch towns, with their

D 25

Frank "Brangwyn and his W^ork

gabled roofs and their primitive home customs. Ancient
Holland was busy there under a hot sky. Some of the
old Dutch cleanliness was gone, killed by the heat, perhaps,
but Brangwyn still talks with pleasure about the kind-
ness he met with at Stellenbosch, Paarl, and Simonsburg
— a melancholy place, its white houses almost without
windows, for the early Dutch settlers had to guard them-
selves from attack. On his way home the painter stayed
at Madeira, and made from there a short expedition to
the West Coast of Africa.

His sketches were exhibited at the Japanese Gallery in
Bond Street, March 1892. Many notices appeared in the
Press, and opposite opinions were expressed, some critics
being very pleased, while others declared that the sketches
did not reveal the true genius loci — the genius of men
and things in South Africa — as distinct from their mere
aspects, as filmed on the memory of a rapid tourist. The
JVorld declared the sketches to be full of merit : " A most
laudable love of cool grey tones distinguishes his work, and
is prominent in ' The Valley of Drakenstein ' and ' The
Courtyard of a Dutch Farm.' He has a certain quaint
poetic feeling, which is both characteristic and pleasing,
that finds utterance in ' An Idyll,' representing a native
woman with her piccaninny on her back and followed by
another child, wandering along the seashore through
sedge and sand in the twilight, while the moon rising over
the sea is intercepted by the baby's black head, which it
frames, as it were, in a halo. The artist, however, does
not confine himself alone to grey tones and twilight scenes.
' The Fish Market, Funchal, Madeira,' and 'The Main Street,
Paarl,' prove that glaring sunshine and blazing colour also
26

Later Studies

find in him an admirer and an exponent." The Daily
TelegrapJi was encouraging also, saying that the general
effect of the exhibition was almost magical, for on entering
the room " one seemed really to be transported from our
own cold, foggy, unsympathetic climate to the burning
glory of Africa. The natives, their social life in primitive
huts and dwellings, and the picturesque corners of their
chief cities, as well as the more desolate regions charac-
terised by the grandeur of mountain ranges, rivers, rocks,
and veldts, introduce one vividly to a mighty country of
which most of us have little knowledge."

Still it was impossible to please everybody ; and I may
notice that South Africans appear to have been almost
as much offended with Mr. Brangwyn as Australians
were with Mr. Froude. Several years after the exhibition
closed, in 1895, the African Critic spoke with sorrow of
Brangwyn's visit to the Cape, and hoped that a really
competent artist would take advantage of " the present
boom in African millionaires," doing pictures of up-country
hunting and wagon life. Mr. C. W. Furse had just sailed
in the Dunottar Castle, and it was to be hoped that he
would be able to represent some part of the wonderful
beauty to be seen at the Cape. To satisfy the local mind
of a British dominion is a task beyond the power of a
traveller's art, perhaps.

Brangwyn had periods of work in England between his
voyages of enchantment. In 1886 he left Shepherd's Bush
Green and set up his home at 39A Queen's Square, Blooms-
bury. The following year he moved on to the Wentworth
Studios, Chelsea, and in this art centre he met Mr. J. J.
Shannon, as well as many painters fresh from the schools.

Frank "Brarigwyn a?id his JVork

The Chelsea period in his early work was one of gradual
transition. He joined the Institute of British Artists,
coming under the influence of the president, Mr. Whistler,
at a time when that great man's likes and dislikes were as
laws to many young fellows.^

The thing that counted then as the saving grace of
style was tone, which may be described as a unifying
mystery of colour that permeates a picture, and binds all
its parts together, giving a sort of inner depth and richness.
Brangwyn followed in the vogue and made studies in low
tone. But he kept away from all the vicious tricks and
pigments which at various times have been employed by
devotees of the Goddess Tone. Bitumen, asphaltum, lac
Robert, and glazing over unhardened paint, have ruined
many thousands of pictures, including a good many by
first-rate men. Reynolds in his quest for rich and
luminous tone often forgot the chemical interaction between
pigments, and prepared the way for deep cracks and
perished colour. Whistler was far and away more scien-
tific, and Brang^^yn also tried to understand the value of
tone in its relation both to nature and to good, simple,
non-fugitive pigments. Nature is a vast unity with
scattered parts, while art is a limited harmony ; and it is
tone that helps us to resolve profusion into a definite
whole, true to the same key in ev^ery plot of colour. Tone
arrives at a semblance of nature's infinity, not by searching
for details, as amateurs believe, but by a subtle orches-

' I note here that one critic accused Whistler of copying from Brangwyn. This occurred
in 1895, and the criticism appeared in the Speaker of October iS. Here are the words :
" Mr. Whistler exhibits a study in red (at the New Gallery). This picture reminds me of
Mr. Brangwyn, the juicy quality of whose work Mr. Whistler reproduces very well." What
next?

Later Studies

tratioii of each man's technical methods in their relation
to what must be left out, which is the main proJjlem of art.
Hrangwyn understood this early in his career. Tone
gave him but little trouble ; and in a good many of his
early pictures there was a kinsmanship between his
methods and those of George Morland. You will notice
the same facile play with the brush, and a similar choice
of tints, arising from a just belief that a simple palette is
the best. Morland preached that lesson all his life, and
his work has not changed without help from bungling
restorers. Between Brangwyn's palette and Morland's I
find a striking resemblance, for Brangwyn, even now, in
his most Eastern effects of sun-colour, works with a few
pigments that seem quite ascetic. Here they are : Flake
white, yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, cadmium,
Venetian red, vermilion, and French blue. It is a little
peal of bells upon which many carillon changes are rung
all in tune.

W^th this restricted palette he worked in low grey tones
at Chelsea, sending his work to the Academy, to Whistler's
Gallery in Suffolk Street, and sometimes to the Institute of
Oil Painters, of which he became a member in 1892. His
subjects were plain landscapes and sea-pieces with figures,
painted at a heat, and therefore free from the elaborate
retouching that Millet and Bastien Lepage brought into
vogue. From the first his touch has had fluency, for in
his early studies there was no effort to go beyond the
emotional reach of his knowledge and strength. That was
very important. Many a young fellow has tried to bend
the bow of Ulysses before he was strong enough, wasting
his time over futile and disheartening struggles. As if

Frank ^rangwyn and his Work

any good could ever be gained by making the study of
art more troublesome than it is invariably !

There was a time in 1887 when Brangwyn was on the
point of forsaking his colours like a bad recruit. He was
very poor ; his pictures did not sell ; doing sketches to be
pawned for a few shillings was not entertaining; and the
sailor in his character was restive. Why not "chuck" art
altogether, and go to sea? Londoners, busy with their
own affairs, did little to help young painters ; and during
those hard times a wearisome inaction settled down upon
his studio life. How ridiculous it would be to work
when colours, canvases, brushes, frames, agents' fees,
with travelling expenses for pictures, asked constantly for
more money 1

But at last, one day, the unhappy painter spoke of his
troubles to his colourman, good and kind old Mr. Mills,
who was a generous friend to many young artists. Mr.
Mills believed firmly in youthful honour, and his con-
fidence was always at its best when materials had to be
given in exchange for promises of payment at some vague
date afar off. The good man laughed, then hinted that
the "blues" should be kept for palettes and fair skies.
Youngsters who painted well did not go to sea ; they
accepted £^2. a week for a year or two, gave up talking
nonsense, and paid regularly in good work. So the crisis
passed. With the capital supplied by Mr. Mills a new
start was made, this time in Cornwall, at the little fishing
village of Mevagissey, where Brangwyn worked at open-
air effects. Among the pictures he then painted was a
rustic scene in the vein of Millet, representing several men
in the act of stripping bark off felled trees. This picture,
30

Later Studies

exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888, was rather in
keeping with what is now known as the Newlyn School,
whose grey brilliance was first seen in Brittany, at Pont
Aven, Quimperl(f, and Concarneau. The Cornish period
in the forming of Brangwyn's style was important because
it fixed his attention on subtle half-tones that vary in-
finitely out of doors ; and the immediate eftect of these
studies gave charm to many seafaring pictures, some of
which were hung at the Royal Academy and the Society
of British Artists between 1889 and 1902. I will mention
three or four.

R.A., 1889. "Home" — an ocean-going steamer
brought towards harbour by a sturdy little tug that strains
its heart out in a gallant effort. " Minutes are like Hours "
— a pier-head with fisher-folk watching, and a vessel
beating into harbour.

S.B.A., 1889, shortly after the painter's election. A
picture entitled " Wraik Gatherers," representing a storm-
beaten sea and a beach swept by waves ; in the foreground
three men gather wraik from the surf. For other works
belonging to 1889, see my list of selected pictures.

S.B.A., 1890. "Conjecture" — a group of fishermen on
a damp grey day standing on a wet quay and discuss-
ing some point about a ship that is just arriving into
harbour. " It cannot be said that the picture is exactly
interesting," said the Times ; " but there is a solidity in the
way in which the men are set upon their feet and a reality
about their attitudes which show that Mr. Brangwyn has
mastered at least some of the principal essentials of his art."

R.A., 1890. "All Hands Shorten Sail" — very success-
ful at the Paris Salon of 1892.

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

S.B.A., 1890. "The Burial at Sea"— of which I shall
speak in the next chapter.

R.A., 1891. "Assistance" — a large picture with merit;
it represents a storm scene on board ship where sailors are
in the act of lowering a boat to save life off a vessel in
distress. Not fewer than fifteen men are shown in char-
acteristic attitudes, and the air is filled with spray. The
R.A. skied this painting, and several leading newspapers
protested.

R.A., 1892. "The Convict Ship" — with its living freight
of unfortunates, just freed in the Thames from the pilot's
boat, of which a glimpse through the gangway is descried.
The side of the vessel is lined with various groups, all
well characterised, and in the centre stands a young man in
chains — a captive to despair, his hands bound behind him.
It is one of those pictures which, besides their instantaneous
truth, their genuine appeal as art, have value as copy-
rights. "The Convict Ship" was medalled at the Chicago
Exhibition, the jury making their decision known in 1894.

British Artists, 1892. " Pilots ; Puerta de Passages " —
a vigorous work, very striking in colour. " In the deep
shadow of the verandah of a railed gallery overlooking the
water picturesque mariners sit or stand by the rough
wooden tables, drinking and gossiping. Without, on the
opposite shore, are visible quaint irregularly built houses
and a lofty green hillside, all in vivid sunlight. Relieved
against this brilliant background, the figures become little
more than silhouettes rich in colour, and with an in-
dividuality of contour which gives to them strongly marked
character" {Morning Post). This picture caused much
controversy.
32

Later Studies

Some writers, when speaking of Brangwyn's seascapes,
have coupled his name with R. L. Stevenson's. " Here,"
they say, " is the man to illustrate ' Treasure Island ' and
'Kidnapped.'" They would be much nearer the mark if
they called Brangwyn the Smollett among British marine
painters. No kindred feeling unites him and Stevenson,
while there is much in common between his marine pictures
and those that Smollett drew in words, with brawny
truthfulness, after getting knowledge at first-hand from
a draggled life on board a battleship. Stevenson was not
a realist. He hunted after romance ; and when he chose
the sea it was not because he knew a great deal about
sailors, but because romance there attracted him even more
than it did on land. To Brangwyn, in his sea pictures,
romance counted for less than a presentation of character,
and he showed from time to time a quality that parted
him from Smollett and united him to another master of
seascapes — Victor Hugo. That quality was a really deep
feeling for the drama of circumstances. Victor Hugo's
"Toilers of the Sea" brings before us many ocean pieces
with a terrible impressiveness ; we feel that the waves
are sterile, merciless, and that men may grow to be
like them in a life of maritime adventure. That is the
drama of circumstances ; and Brangwyn in his early days
painted as Hugo wrote. This helps to explain why "The
Funeral at Sea" and "The Buccaneers," when exhibited at
the Paris Salon — the first in 1891 and the other in 1893 —
not only stirred the French public in a memorable way, but
made Brangwyn better known and liked abroad than he
was in his own country. Critics of many difterent schools
— Max Nordau and Ary Renan, Henri Marcel, Lafenestre,

F?'ank "Brangwyn and his JVork

and L^once B^n^dite, to take just a few examples —
welcomed him as a brave and original painter.

I had written the foregoing paragraph with its parallel
between Brangwyn and Victor Hugo, when, in an article
by Maurice Guillemot, I came upon a very similar thought,
called forth this time by Brangwyn's etchings, their in-
sistent energy and their grip of farouche character and
humour. " Certaines de ses planches font petiser aux
dessins de Victor Hugo avec, en- plus, une technicitd
professiomieller M. Guillemot is right. The sentiment
of the handicraft, its impulsive emotion, sharp and quick
and powerful, impatient under restraint, nerves and muscles
at work together — all this may be seen plainly in both
artists, and it is worth remembering.

We have now reached a point where Brangwyn's later
studies may be said to have ended, because, after travelling
here and there from clime to clime, and having passed
through four or five phases, he had discovered what he
really wished to do and by which methods he was most
like to achieve his purpose. There had been a period
of hesitation. He could not at first choose between tone
in a low grey key and colour all aglow with brilliant sun-
light. For indeed, after his varied training, which had
taken him from William Morris to the North Sea, and
from his Chelsea and Cornish periods through a sort
of nautical pilgrimage from land to land, it was no easy
task to resolve a chaos of impressions into a workable
style. But he won his way at last to sunny daylight.
Doubts went one by one, and Brangwyn entered with con-
fidence into his own style. The rest belongs to a review
of his art as a whole, beginning with the first pictures
34

Later Studies

that challenged much attention ; and let it be remembered,
as we advance from stage to stage in a busy career, that
the painter is only forty-three at the present time. What
he has done, then, we may hope is only a small part of
what he will do as he develops, one by one, all those hints
and ideas on artistic presentation that appealed to him
during his early and later studies — from his fondness for
Degroux onward to his Eastern experiences.

CHAPTER III

CONTESTS OF CRITICISM: "A FUNERAL AT SEA,"

"THE BUCCANEERS," "SLAVE TRADERS,"

AND "A SLAVE MARKET"

TT is a battlefield always, the work done by gifted men ;
I year after year many critics fire their shots over it in
I all directions, aiming at things liked and disliked, and
trying to make good shots, however painful to human
targets. There have been Bisleys of art criticism, with much
volley-firing, since picture-shows and newspapers became
too numerous ; but when you pass the shooting in review,
its frequent hits and its many wounds, do you not feel that
there is little to be envied in this part of a painter's life?
While going with care through the war of Press notices
that Brangwyn had to face between the years 1889 and
1895, I have asked myself that question many times.
Why should a workman ask to be fired at in the News-
paper Press? And as to the critics, what function do
they serve? Biography cannot pass them by as of no
account, because their influence acts in two powerful ways :
either encouraging a man to make further efforts, or else
hurting him terribly in those very moments of discontent
that follow the excitement of creative efforts. " Every
finished picture is a subject thrown away," said Lord
Leighton ; and all true artists feel disenchanted after the
stress and strain of their endeavours.
36

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Contests of Criticism

It is to be feared that critics do not often remember
this drain on the self-confidence of painters and sculptors.
Indeed, while thinking of the work before them, they are
apt to forget the emotional man both in and behind the
work, for you can never separate an artist from his chil-
dren, his finished books, or pictures, or sculpture. I notice,
too, that Brangwyn received many hard blows during the
most tricky and uncertain period of his career, when he was
passing from tragic or desolate marine pictures to the bril-
liant life and colour made known to him by foreign travel ;
but I believe he met with kinder help from the daily news-
papers than from any other source. The great weeklies
were often arrogant, and sometimes they were even cruel.
I note this fact with regret. There is something pitiful in
all criticism having blind eyes and a tongue that whips.
For critics of that type soon die, leaving a poor record of
service to the public ; and presently their old bad tempers
have to be recorded in the life of some distinguished man.
"When we speak, let no painter call his soul his own" —
this humour was too evident in many notices of Brangwyn's
early work ; and there are men even now who venture to
write of him with a high-crested authority, as if they wished
him to work within their atmosphere, forsaking his own.
They object to his outlook in art; they do not understand
his temperament as a man of genius; and their tastes are
rather cobwebs of the study than a free result of know-
ledge acquired at first hand from nature and human life.
And I mention this here for three reasons. First, we must
allow every man of genius to have his own nature ; ne.xt,
we should study his work from within its own emotion ;
and again, it is impossible to have much sympathy witli

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

Brangwyn if you go to him for anecdotes, prettinesses,
literary refinements, these qualities having a subordinate
place in the painter's art that he loves and explores.
Foreigners understand all this ; and but for their unfailing
encouragement, which began in 1891, I do not think that
Brangwyn would have gone successfully through the most
critical time of his career. Our Royal Academy encour-
aged him at first, then gave him a cold shoulder ; and
after 1898, when his painting of "The Golden Horn" was
hung so high that it could not be judged, he thought it
discreet not to send in work to Burlington House, nor
did he appear there again until 1904, the year in which
he was elected A.R.A. Meantime, many honours were
conferred upon him both by foreign critics and by foreign
societies of artists. Brangwyn has gained many medals,
including the great gold medal of honour granted from
time to time by the Emperor of Austria. His work is
to be found at the Luxembourg, at Venice, Stuttgart,
Munich, Prague, Barcelona, Pittsburg, Chicago, Sydney,
Wellington, and Johannesburg. Many of the continental
print-rooms have made a choice from his etchings. It is
not too much to say that his fame travelled to us from
abroad and found us unready to receive it in a proper
spirit. This will appear evident as we review his first
successes, beginning with "The Funeral at Sea," that
represents what is best in his first period.

It is a large picture. We are looking up the deck of a
big merchant-ship. Midway, near the bridge, four rough
sailors carry a dead comrade on a stretcher ; other sailors
stand near, listening while their captain reads the burial
service : " We therefore commit his body to the deep."
38

Contests of Criticism

In the foreground, on our left, stand an old salt and a
boy of sixteen, facing the ceremony, and it is easy to
read in their attitudes, as in those of the other mourners,
what they feel. They are all English tars, these rugged,
strong men in weather-stained clothes ; they feel as
Englishmen do under unusual circumstances, showing a
certain constraint of manner, as if their part in life is to
be ashamed when a sudden emotion grips them by the
throat. The old salt has a clay pipe hidden in his
right hand ; the first mate, a bearded fellow, standing
near the head of the stretcher, has thrust both hands
into his coat pockets, and, his head drooping, he listens
in awkward sorrow while the captain reads. No ocean
drama, seen with our own eyes, could tell us more about
the simple loyalty and good comradeship that unite a
crew near the graveyard of our race — the sea. This work,
so true, so poignant, is but a symbol of our national
destiny. For England — " Our Lady of the Sea," as
Camden named her — has all her fortunes on the deep,
and one day they will be lost there and buried.

" C'est I'Angleterre," a Frenchman said of " The Funeral
at Sea," feeling the sturdy characters of each sailor, the
restrained grief, and the strange fatalism that cannot be
kept away from those who toil above the ocean in the
brave toys called ships. Nothing should take a sailor
unawares, accustomed as he is to all the most terrible
and majestic effects produced by winds and waves in their
agitation and thunders. So the sorrow in this picture is
not a bit like any grief that rough men show by a grave-
side in a churchyard. It is in keeping with the hazards of
marine adventure, not with the ordered security that shelters

Frank Tlrangwyn and his Jf^ork

life on land. Ashore, death comes ever as a surprise ; it
seems abnormal, and we blind our windows from the light,
and make our footsteps whisper with our voices. At sea,
on the other hand, death is but the spirit of storms and
the genius of triumphant waves. It is a part of that
everlasting conflict in nature that breeds fatalism among
those who earn their bread in the midst of great lonely
forests, or vast mountains, or perilous ocean strife.

In this picture by Brangwyn, painted when he was
only twenty-three, you will find — side by side with a few
youthful shortcomings — as much true psychology as any
painter has yet put into a typical scene from maritime
experience. Nothing here is forced. Every sailor keeps
his plane and place in the composition, and stands out
of doors with the salt air all around him. His emotion
belongs to his own character, and makes no direct appeal
for our sympathies. A true seaman who happens to be
a young man of genius has painted with penetrating
judgment and sincerity a work that all other seamen will
understand. One might suppose that the London public,
dependent on the sea for all things worth having, would
be quicker than the Parisian public to recognise the
merit in Brangwyn's pathos and observation. Yet "The
Funeral at Sea " was not very much noticed when it
hung at the Galleries in Suffolk Street, while a great
success was won by it immediately afterwards at the
Paris Salon, where its pathos and its power were fully ap-
preciated. Roger Marx was as delighted as A. Sylvestre ;
Leonce Bdnedite^ and Georges Lafenestre were as enthusi-

M. Benedite wrote as follows : " Mais c'est encore un etranger, M. Brangwyn, un Anglais
ne dans les Flandres, qui nous fait assister avec le plus d'emotion et d'impression vraie, dans
40

Contests of Criticism

astic as MM. Jacques, Groselande, Marcel, Wolff, and
others. One critic, writing in the Rdpublique Franqaise,
said that the sailors seemed to be alive : on croit les voir
soufflant. The picture is still remembered in Paris, though
its success belongs to 1891. The French Government
wished to buy it for the Luxembourg, but the work had
been bought by an Englishman.

Some good notices were written in England — ^just a
few, but visitors to the Suffolk Street Galleries cared no
more for the subject than they did for the year one. For
there was no prettiness, no sentimentalism ; it was a
quiet picture ; and because it asked for as much thought
as was freely given to sports and games, it seemed
" heavy " as art to Londoners.

The Daily Telegraph spoke well of "The Funeral at
Sea," finding it well-grouped and finely depicted in solemn
greys, pervaded also with an indescribable salt-air-like
touch. The Manchester Examiner threw in a technical
criticism with much praise, finding the sea too blue on a
grey day, while the Pall Mall Gazette described the picture
as excellently designed. Mr. Frederick Wedmore wrote
two encouraging criticisms at a time when his good words
were very welcome. The first one was in the Academy :
" It must at least be said that this picture shows . . .
dramatic power . . . fine and accurate observation, and
good craftsmanship," all " at the service of a genuine

un tablcMu d'un litre discutable, mais naif, Un Enlerretnent <} bord, au dernier acte de ces
existences d-ternellement baIIott6es, dont les restes ne trouvent m6me pas le repos apr^s la
mort. Sur le pont du navire en marche, respectueuscment d(5couverts, les visages se
dessinant rouges et hAles dans I'atmosphcre humide sur le gris continu du ciel, IVquipage
^coute rcligieusement le capitaine qui lit la Bible devant le corps du vieux compagnon de
luttes qui va glisser par-dessus bord, dans la mer aux eaux d'un bleu profond d'indigo."

F 41

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

imaginative gift." In the Magazine of Art, Mr. Wedmore
referred to the painters who had clung to the British
Artists after the secession of Mr. Whistler : —

" Really first among them in importance I place Mr.
Brangwyn's sea-funeral, 'We therefore commit his body to
the Deep.' Mr. Brangwyn — beginning perhaps with forcible
little visions of smoky steam-tugs in dirty weather making
manfully for the port — has developed into one of the most
important and original of living painters of the marine.
His grey schemes of Anglo-French colour interpret success-
fully enough the deck scenes to which he now most
frequently addresses himself. A greater range of hue, a
far more opulent palette, would be wanted if he saw the sea
in its variety, from the infinite agate of the waters off
Whitby to the opal and amethyst of the Sussex coast and
the sapphires of Cornwall. But these — in their mystery or
their splendour — he leaves to others : to Mr. Edwin Hayes,
Mr. Henry Moore, and Mr. Hook. And, retaining his
neutral tints — concentrating himself wholly upon themes
which it is possible for them to interpret — he seeks, in such
scenes, story and dramatic effect to which the pure or noble
colourist may perchance be indifferent. And this winter
(1890-91), at the 'British Artists,' he shows us that he has
conceived with dignity, yet with homely truth, the aspect
of things upon an unimportant merchant vessel when a
rough and shy but, one is sure, humane skipper is called
upon to read the noble words which bespeak, for our
dear brother here departed, a resurrection even from the
changeful sea — the 'vast and wandering grave' of 'In
Memoriam.' "

The fact is that Brangwyn just painted the marines that
42

Contests of Criticism

appealed to him most powerfully. It mattered not to him
what colour or what calm days attracted Mr. Hook or
Mr. Henry Moore, or Mr. Edwin Hayes. Nor had he
any wish to vie with Mr. Somerscales or Mr. J. R. Reid.
Having known storms at sea, under many lowering skies,
the tragedy of ships was to him what the dangers of
collieries were to Constantin Meunier. It was a question
of standpoint determined by emotion and experience. An
old fisherman from the North Sea, if endowed suddenly
with a genius for art, would not paint the infinite agate of
the waters off Whitby, nor the opal and amethyst of the
Sussex coast. His whole nature would tell him that the
mercilessness of rough waters, their terrific sublimity in
agitation, their appalling heaviness when they roll into
crested mountains and deep valleys, will for ever have a
more memorable impressiveness than any day of peaceful
glamour around our English coasts. It was in this spirit
that Brangwyn adventured among the shoals and reefs of
marine painting/

Moreover, at the very time when Mr. Wedmore implied
— quite without meaning it, I am sure — that Brangwyn
had settled down for life to a meagre palette of Anglo-
French greys, other critics complained because his trips to
the East had made known to him the splendour of bright
tints in a clear atmosphere of searching heat. " The
Buccaneers" brought to a climax this attack on his aims
and methods, for it offended many writers in England
when it hung at the Grafton Galleries in February 1893.

' "The Funeral at Sea" passed into the collection of the late Sir John Kelk, that came
up for sale at Christie's on Saturday, March ii, 1899. The Brangwyn was bought by
Lewis for loj guineas; and to-day it belongs to the Glasgow Corporation.

Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

The Spectator said that Mr. Brangwyn, naturally a black-
and-white painter, had been letting about him with strong
colours, like Mr. Melville. The Manchester Guardian
sniffed, and fired out the words " garish and aggressive."
The Satiirday Review was very indignant, sneering at
"The Buccaneers" as an example of slap-dash painting and
aggressive riotous colour that might well serve to show
that violence could never be vigour. TriitJi had a different
view, though not more favourable, since Mr. Brangwyn's
work looked much more like a piece of mosaic pavement
than a picture ; and the Pall Mall Budget hit upon
another little novelty in abuse. It said that Mr. Brangwyn's
production was the war-cry oi Jin-de-sidcle barbarism. As
to the Daily Telegraph, it assured him that his flaming
piece of impressionism, with the air left out, proved
decidedly that he was following a wrong road. But here
and there a criticism was favourable. The A thenceiun was
certain that when the observer's eye had grown accustomed
to Mr. Brangwyn's intense pigments, he would find that
the picture possessed many striking, and even great
qualities, which required only refining to become admirable.
That was praise indeed, for the Athencsiun in those days
was often as old-fashioned as it well could be. It was the
Morning Post, however, that got nearest to the merit of the
picture, forestalling, at least to some extent, the verdict
passed at the Salon a few weeks later : —

"A large work of great power is 'The Buccaneers' of
Mr. Frank Brangwyn. To the sea-rovers therein is dealt
out poetic justice. Their daring attack on a vessel lying in
the roadstead has failed, and they strain at the oars with all
their available strength the sooner to gain the shelter of
44

Contests of Criticism

their own ship. But many of the swarthy-skinned crew
are wounded ; the foremost rower has just been hit, and
involuntarily relinquishes his efforts, while the pirates'
destined prey is peppering them with its guns, and an
avenging boat is in full pursuit. The incident occurs on a
day when the sun blazes down with intense heat. The
rocky shore, the white houses of the town, and the poplars
are defined clearly where the sunlight strikes them, but their
forms when shadowed are blurred with haze. The white
boat and its picturesquely clad crew are relieved with sharp
contrast against the dark blue of the water, whose hue,
exaggerated in depth as it may appear to eyes accustomed
to look on Northern seas, may nevertheless be charac-
teristic of the Mediterranean. The picture needs to be
seen from a sufficient distance, for the execution is of the
boldest, most vigorous kind, and the colouring is intensely
vivid."

It was a complex problem that Brangwyn had set
himself to solve: namely, how to suggest with vigorous
truth the play of searching sunlight on gay colours and
a boatful of brown cut-throats. It was a drama of sun-
colour in full action, and he wished to make of it a
decorative whole. If R. L. Stevenson had described
it in a story, speaking of the white boat, the heavy blue
waters, the wonderful red flag at the stern, and the
character of each sea-rover, no critic would have com-
plained ; but no sooner was a scene of astonishing action
made real in its own artistic medium, than its author
became a target in England for sneering rebukes. To
Brangwyn, whose eyes were still attuned to the
radiance of the East, it seemed best to work mainly

Frank "Brangwyn and his Jl^ork

with primary colours, placing them side by side in such
contrastive harmonies that they lost their crudeness
and united into atmospheric reds, blues, yellows, whites,
and browns, all transfigured by scorching sunlight. To
compose with pure pigments, as if they were bright
flowers to be made into a perfect bouquet, needs a very
subtle eye for colour ; and I am sure that Brangwyn
succeeded, however melodramatic his work may have seemed
to critics living in grey London. As to his brushwork, it
was in keeping with his subject. What accord would there
have been between delicate technique and the actions of
ruthless pirates? Is Caliban to have a dainty language in
the British art of painting? Some London critics implied
as much as that.

Then the picture went to Paris, and was welcomed there
as a revelation. Fashions sprang up in Brangwyn reds, and
people flocked to see his buccaneers, till the carpet on the
floor of the gallery was worn out all around that one
painting. By critics, also, with just two or three excep-
tions, Brangwyn was welcomed with enthusiasm, and
most painters rejoiced in him as a new young master
with courage enough to do fine things in his own way.
M. Besnard was not pleased, and M. Gustave Geffroy saw
in "The Buccaneers" a ragotit of Delacroix and Manet, but
he was promptly corrected by other writers. M. Kersant
told him that Brangwyn was strong enough to be loyal to
himself, and that his methods had no resemblance with
those of Delacroix, as a visit to the Louvre would prove to
any observer. Apart from this, there was not in the whole
Salon a picture that possessed the intensity of colour and
life flashing from Brangvvyn's paint. " Oh 1 les bons
46

Contests of Criticism

Boucaniers. Qu'ils sont vrais dans leur sauvagerie et leur
grossieretd voulues ! Comme on les devine, ce qu'ils t^taient,
aussi prets a ccorcher un homme qu'un boeuf, pillards
intrcpides et joyeux, hdros de sac et de corde ! "

That was the general note. The painter was judged
from within the atmosphere of his work ; he was not
whipped and ridiculed because he had dared to treat a des-
perate scene in a rigorously dramatic manner. M. Ldonce
Bdnedite still remembers with delight the impression made
upon him by "The Buccaneers." As a member of the
purchasing committee he hoped that the picture would be
bought for the Luxembourg ; two other members shared
his enthusiasm ; but the majority chose a work less modern
in its audacious outlook, that could not surprise any person.
And they were right. It is not the business of any State
to encourage at once a new and successful departure from
the routine of academic painting. A conservative outlook
among officials enables the public to revise first impressions
and to wait for further evidence. I note, then, that " The
Buccaneers" was seen again at Paris in 1907, in Georges
Petit's rooms, at the time when the picture was purchased
by M. Pacquement from its first owner, M. Stany
Oppenheim ; and I am told in a criticism by Maurice
Guillemot that although the picture had been very much
imitated, the enchantment of its colour remained, and was
still, as in 1893, a surprise. This opinion is confirmed by
M. Henri Marcel, who says: "The pure tones in this
picture were extraordinary, and amazed and disgusted the
Philistines, but its reappearance at the Salle Petit last year
showed whose judgment was the right one. The passage
of fifteen years had softened its violent contrasts, and the

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

astonishing Tightness of its harmonies of colour had allowed
it to age without the development of a single dissonant note.'
M. Gaston Migeon, in 1893, was among the admirers of
the new Brangwyn ; and so were M. Roger Marx, M. Ary
Renan, and M. Raoul Sertat. Ary Renan was amazed
that the painter could pass with ease and success from
"The Funeral at Sea" to "The Buccaneers." ''Comment,
dis-je, est-il possible que ce soit le meme M. Brangwyn
qui nous dblouisse aujoiirdlmi ? Les rouges, les b/eiis,
les tons heurtds et sfirs de sa nouvelle toile sojit tout
simplenient d'une incomparable niaitrise, et Idcole
romantique na jamais rien fait de plus puissant T
Raoul Sertat was equally enthusiastic, praising the
picture as a striking symbol of that instinctive belli-
gerency in man, that drives him even into crime for
pleasure, because he desires to be active in the thick of
dangers. " Rarement, en vdritd, vit-on cette fureur et ce
bonheur de vivre mieux exprimds que par le peintre des
Boucaniers, dent le style, suivant de prds son inspiration
et s'y appropriant avec une merveilleuse soupiesse, se
ddchatne, cette fois, en une irrdsistible vdhdmence, oh les
coups de brosse fougueux, les colorations cJiaudes et
sonores, fortes et radieuses, concourent a Veffet le plus
passionnd et le plus vibrant^ But, meantime, British
protests were heard even from Paris. I find one written
in a Belgian paper, and attributed to a British writer
with a Scotch name. Another appeared in the Fortnightly
Review. It told the world that Brang\vyn's picture "scarce
deserved the unstinted praise being lavished upon it in
Paris " — a point that the French critics were very well able
to decide for themselves.
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Contests of Criticism

I might close here my review of the seafaring pictures
in Brangwyn's first period, but I find in the Times of
October 29, 1892, welcome reference to another picture
that disturbed our English writers on art. It was called
" Slave Traders," and represented a group of Arabs seated
on the deck of their dhow, the sun beating fiercely upon
a white cabin and the gay colour of the men's dresses,
with a brilliant note of red in the burnous of one figure.
The Times considered this in every way a brilliant per-
formance : " Taken altogether, it is the most interesting
picture at the Institute; the only one, perhaps, that seems
like a promise of great things to come from the painter
of it. Mr. Brangwyn, who knows the sea as only a
born seaman can, has till now painted only scenes from
our northern latitudes, with ships tossing on the grey
waves, and sea and sky gloomy and lowering. His work
has always been full of ability, but it has been monotonous
and always sad in colour. But now it seems that some
kind fate has taken him southwards, and shown him the
sunlight blazing on the coasts of Africa ; and he has
painted a picture which, for glow of colour, beats any-
thing here, anything that an Englishman has ventured
upon for a long time."

Contemporary with this work was a companion picture,
" A Slave Market," showing yet more clearly Brangwyn's
transition from menacing storms at sea to vivid sun-
light on shore. It was hung at the Royal Academy in
1893, with another painting, "Turkish Fishermen's Huts."
The " Slave Market " set reviewers by the ears. R. A. M.
Stevenson was betwixt and between : " We cannot over-
look the great change which has come in the aspect of
G 49

Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

Mr. Brangwyn's work. His 'Slave Market' glows with
the most vivid colours, laid on frankly, and without
much attention to value. We admire, but suffer from
the absence of light and air, which prevents our finding
our way about the picture." This sort of thing used
to be said in France about the brilliant and able pocJiades
that poor Regnault exhibited at the Salon, for it is always
difficult for western and northern eyes to accept in a paint-
ing the insistent East, its glare and its flashing tints.
The Manchester Gitardian, unwilling to be oriental with
Brangwyn, acted as a surgeon, performing an operation with
self-assurance, and then bandaging the wound with care and
self-satisfaction : " Mr. Frank Brangwyn has . . . sud-
denly passed from the green-blue-grey tonality of Newlyn
to the flaming scarlets and unmitigated blues of Africa.
His colours are splendid enough in their way, but they
are the colours of stained-glass windows, not of paintings.
In this ' Slave Market,' for instance, the total lack of atmos-
phere in a scene of outdoor sunlight renders the assault
made on the eyes by the fiercely red draperies and the
wall of blue sky intolerable. Mr. Brangwyn is even
here by no means le premier venu, and when he has sown
his wild oats he will no doubt return to a saner style
of treatment." What this critic would have said had
he seen the slave market itself, sweating in a sunlight
that almost seared the eyes, who can say? It is a pity
that artists cannot hold a sort of annual tribunal at which
all their principal reviewers would be obliged to attend,
for the pleasure of explaining and confirming their printed
opinions. What fun there would be ! And if any critic
broke down under cross-examination, he could be sent
50

Contests of Criticism

home all alone in a taxi, so that no cruel eyes might
watch the slow and painful return of his wounded self-
belief.

The Athenaumi mourned over Brangwyn, giving some
reasons: "This artist, who has done much for us at sea
and on shipboard, and brought large knowledge to aid
very clear views of nature, has, we hope only for a
time, left the mists and stormy weather of the northern
seas and English coasts for the fier)' lustre of the Medi-
terranean, the contrasting splendour and dark shadows
of Algerian streets. His 'Slave Market' belongs to
the same category as his ' Buccaneers,' and is pitched
in the same high keys of light and most fervid colours.
He has added Arabs and others, in vivid yellow, green,
white, and red robes, attending the selling of negresses,
whose naked blackness is good colour, while the dark
bronze of the other nudities in the market is creditable to
Mr. Brangwyn's taste and judgment. A powerful kaleido-
scopic effect is, not without harmony, produced by these
means ; but we confess to thinking that the unity, sim-
plicity, and energy of his pictures of Atlantic subjects are
far superior to barbaric splendours such as these, and we
hope Mr. Brangwyn will soon think so too."

Why compare opposed subjects ? Is day bad because
night is welcome? Is the East unfit to be painted because
northern themes are attractive ?

Another critic regretted that there were no outcasts
among the slaves to be sold. " They are mostly Hottentot
Venuses," with " none of the pathos that would be dis-
covered in a group of fifty-year-old coal-miners or chain-
makers of our country. A gang of English wage-slaves

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

after twoscore years of wage-slavery would present a far
more tragic group than Mr. Brangwyn's ebon beauties."
But this critic, after wandering so far from the picture
before him, rejoiced that "The Slave Market," when
compared with a similar work by Edwin Long, R.A.,
stood out "as a solid graphic composition of masterly
colouring, against a weak and meretricious composition
of feeble colour." Why, then, did he ask for something
else ? Did he expect a young painter to be perfect ?

It will be noticed how very rarely the painters inten-
tion was considered. He was little more than a boy in
1893; but because his gifts were riper than his years, he
was often treated as a master who had fallen short of his
usual mark through inattention to his usual methods of
work. And I have dwelt upon these matters, giving
quotations, because the first contests of criticism are more
difficult to bear than any others. Youth longs for the
hope of encouragement, just as plants thirst for water and
the sunlight.

CHAPTER IV

CONTESTS OF CRITICISM : SUN-COLOUR AND
RELIGIOUS ART

WHAT the French call the orientation of
modern art is a subject of great interest
to all students of painting. It began,
tentatively, among Englishmen of the
eighteenth century. John Webber, R.A. (1752- 1793),
sailed with Captain Cook on the eventful last voyage
in 1776; and William Alexander (1767-1816) visited
China in 1792 as draughtsman to Lord Macartney's
mission. Several painters went out to India, like
William Danicll, R.A. (1769- 1837), but they carried
England in their paint-boxes, and came home with
very little oriental light and colour. W^hen Brangwyn
exhibited "The Buccaneers" and "The Slave Traders,"
J. P. Lewis, R.A. (1805-1876), and poor and great
William Muller (181 2-1845), were the only painters of
the East whose works attracted much attention, and it
was often asked why Brangwyn did not work in the
manner of J. F. Lewis, whose rendering of details
could not be excelled. The people who put this question
would have been ashamed to ask why a lion was not
a leopard, or a nightingale a full-fledged eagle.

Of course J. P. Lewis is excellent and delightful
in his own way. Usually with transparent colours he

Frank "Rrangwyn and his IVork

painted quickly on panels, finishing a given part at
each sitting ; the ground upon which he worked was
a hard and polished white surface specially prepared
for him ; and as he belonged to the same school that
made Frith and the early style of David Wilkie, he
gave infinite, loving care to his treatment of details,
never acquiring that freer vision and more robust style
that came to John Phillip in his Spanish journeys and
studies. Phillip is to be placed among Brangwyn's
lineal forerunners, side by side with William Mtiller,
who gained from his travels in Egypt, in Greece, and
in Lycia, an outlook in art and an amplitude of style
that will ever be remarkable in British schools. Miiller,
so to speak, was the Brangwyn of 1845, but he did not
live long enough to overcome official opposition. The
Royal Academy, like the British Institution, treated
him as a sort of riotous innovator — a person who could
not e.xpect to be tolerated in London. Meantime, artists
went to Miiller for lessons, like David Cox, who sat at
the feet of the young master, and spoke of him always
with unstinted enthusiasm. Miiller died at the age of
thirty-three, leaving a brave record of good work in
water-colour and in oils. He delighted in vigour and
in size, like Brangwyn ; his colour was very fine, and
he worked with marvellous freedom. Behind his large
picture of " The Eel-Pots," painted in a single day,
Miiller wrote : " Left for some fool to finish ! " — words
that Brangwyn might use in connection with many of
his oil sketches. I cannot help thinking that if Muller
and John Phillip had been remembered by London
critics between 1891 and 1895, fewer attacks would have
54

Sun-Colour and T^ligious ^rt

been made on Frank Brangwyn, for it would have been
clear then that he belonged to a tradition in British
art.

Even M. Ldonce Benddite, who has gi\'en much time
and thought to the study of Brangwyn's work, has failed
to discover among his predecessors in England any direct
ancestor in the orientation of his outlook and style. In
France, on the other hand, where oriental painting has
been one of the principal founders of the modern school,
M. Bdnedite finds several masters with whom Brangwyn
has an elective affinity, mentioning Delacroix, Decamps,
and the brave Dehodencq, whom Brangwyn knows only
by name, and who played with sonorous effects of colour
like an organist with notes and chords. It is quite true
that Brangwyn would be more at home among these big
Frenchmen than he is at exhibitions in London ; but
you will find a certain kinship of temperament be-
tween him and .several Scotch painters, for the Scotch
have been original colourists from the days when they
invented their plaids. John Phillip I have mentioned,
and to him we may add Sir William Allan (1782-1850),
who visited Turkey and other countries. As to Sir
Henry Raeburn, who, like Turner and Bonington and
Holland, owed much to the Italian sunlight, he delighted
in a play of brush that appeals very strongly to
Brangwyn, and I have often wished that a great ex-
hibition could be held of all those British painters who
have brought into our schools some influence or other
from sunny countries in Europe and from the East.
A great many of our artists have inherited their birth-
right of sun-colour away from the British Isles.

Frank "Brarigwyn and his If^ork

It was in " The Buccaneers " that Brangwyn showed
for the first time with success what he had newly learnt
from the East, passing on rapidly to other experiments —
" Trade on the Beach " (bought by the Luxembourg in
1895), "The Scoffers," "The Adoration of the Magi,"
and " The Miraculous Draught of Fishes."

These two last pictures bring us to a series of
w^orks that I do not care to describe as scriptural,
because Bible art is associated with time-honoured con-
ventions ; but they were and are religious within those
modern limits that have been made familiar to us by
Francois Millet, Max Liebermann, and Professor von
Uhde. When Millet was asked to paint for the Pope
a picture of the Immaculate Conception, he did not
swerve from his usual style, but chose for his model
a humble peasant girl, and, reverent in the manner of
" The Angelus," strove to reach poetry and mystery
through the door of the life that he knew well and
loved best. Was not religion an essential in his own
life, and therefore present and modern ? True, modernism
in sacred art has been carried too far by some artists,
as by Jean Beraud, but it marks an attempt to make
Bible subjects less remote from to-day, and so more
contemporary with ourselves. It is always far and away
better than the rose-tinted and honey-sweet prettiness that
Bouguereau and others have imported into a biblical art
very much valued in copyrights ; and sometimes it has
notes of pathos, of deep and touching sincerity, that will
last as long as any religious picture by Portaels or by
the late Mr. Holman Hunt.

Brangwyn's contributions to this movement were tenta-
56

Sun-Colour and "Religious ^rt

tive, but they had great interest, though our English critics
very often missed their merits. Perhaps they were right
to complain of the " Eve," exhibited at the Grafton Galleries
at the same time as "The Buccaneers." Not only was this
Eve very fleshy in a Rubenesque way, but she lacked
the impersonality of Rubens ; and as Brangwyn placed
his Eve in a tangle of tropical fruits and foliage, and
was more concerned with the vagaries of real light
than the great Fleming ever was, he used greenish re-
flected tints in his flesh colour. Several critics objected
to this, and one of them asked : " Once admit an
emerald Eve, and how can a puce Adam be resisted,
or a mauve Abel, or a cobalt Cain?" The Saturday
Review happened to be more favourable, saying that the
picture " had a certain decorative distinction and qualities
of tone and colour that are distressingly absent from 'The
Buccaneers.' " After all, the picture was just a study of the
nude seen in the light of a tropical wood ; there was no
need to introduce the Serpent. Criticism needs no pro-
vocation, for unkind words are easier to write than kind.
The National Review declared that a modest amateur
might say to himself that were he Adam, and Mr. Brang-
wyn's Eve the tempter, there would have been no Fall ;
and the same modest amateur might go so far as to hint
that he could find surpassing skill, but little creative art,
in Mr. Whistler's well-known " Lady Meux."

How clearly those old times return with these boome-
rangs of criticism ! When Brangwyn, in 1893, exhibited
at the New Gallery his Adoration of the Magi, " Gold,
Frankincense and Myrrh," critics had quite a good time, so
opposed were they in their verdicts. That a young painter
H 57

Frank "Rrangwyn and his Jf'^ork

in his twenty-fifth year should have chosen so difficult a
subject and placed it in a deep and mysterious moonlight
was a thing to be encouraged. It showed a determination
to grapple with the biggest problems that painting offers
for solution. Yet here is the criticism that the Spectator
published: "Readers of Heine will remember his dream of a
bas-relief of Balaam and the Ass, in which the Ass was an
excellent likeness. Now, in a Nativity the Madonna ought
to be a possible likeness, and bits of likeness to other parts
and people in the scene must have very extraordinary merit
to excuse so essential a defect. The picture has merits and
ability, but it is a shocking Nativity." What Balaam has
to do with all this one cannot say, unless that critic wished
to imply that he could develop fair long ears like Bottom
the Weaver. Certainly he ought to have known that the
young painter's subject and its lighting would have taxed
the powers of a Veronese or a Tintoretto. The composition,
too, did not try to evade difficulties ; it sought for them as
problems to be solved for the sake of exercise and know-
ledge. An easy type of composition would have placed the
Virgin on our left, well in the foreground, but not too near
the frame ; then the Magi would come down the picture
towards her, showing their full faces. Brangwyn chose a
far more difficult setting. The Madonna, dressed in white,
is seated in the middle distance, a little towards our right
hand, a verandah trellised with faded vines overhead, and
behind a grey house shimmers in faint moonlight. St.
Joseph stands near, leaning against one of the wooden
posts that support the roof of trellis-work. He is plainly
a man of the people, a humble carpenter, but his features
are unattractive in profile ; they seem rather outside the
58

Sun -Colour and T^ligious z4rt

painter's sympathy and emotion. From the brown earth
near St. Joseph some tall white lilies grow ; and a negro
boy, who accompanies the Magi, carries an offering — a big
golden bowl. The Magi themselves, having passed up the
picture from our left towards the Madonna, stand erect,
one in profile, the others with their backs turned to the
spectator. They are stately and quiescent figures, clothed
in picturesque Moorish robes, and around them the moon-
light plays as a ghostly presence. Beyond the Magi, in
various attitudes of curiosity, are other pilgrims.

This being the theme, try to imagine to yourself its
many difficulties. You have to make real in paint a subject
that brings you into competition with a great many noble
old pictures, all familiar to educated persons ; and a good
many of Brangwyn's reviewers were as vexed as they would
have been if some young poet had asked them to review
a play of his own called "Hamlet" or "Othello." The
Stcxndard was among a few exceptions, admitting that,
whatever the picture lacked, it was nowhere marred by
insincerity of intention or flippancy of purpose ; in colour
it had the fascination of an ordered reticence, and in line
that dignity which counted always for so much as an
element in style. But listen, now, to the AtJiencciini :
" Another ambitious mistake on a needlessly large scale is
Mr. Brangwyn's version of the Adoration of the Magi,
really an ill-composed group of life-size lay figures, nearly
all back views, heavily draped in colours of low keys : a
shadowless, flat and feebly toned example which possesses
none of the vigour of his ' Slave Market ' at the Academy.
It is a pity so good an artist has thrown himself away
so completely."

Frank "Rnitigwyri and his J Fork

From this attempt to browbeat a young artist I wish to
pick out one word, because it tells you at once how small
was the amount of original observation that the fault-finder
thought necessary in art criticism. He speaks of the
figures as " flat," not knowing that moonlight invariably
produces an effect of flatness. Brangwyn knew this, while
a good many of his critics did not. Max Nordau, on the
other hand, like Leonce Bdncdite, understood the young
painter's aim, and described his researchful effort as a
night-piece reposefully coloured and marvellously deep.
It is true that several foreign critics thought the Magi
inferior to the Buccaneers, but there was no need to com-
pare unlikes. Moreover, it is not at all difficult to explain
why this picture has defects here and there. The painter,
when he started his work, was, I think, like a modern
Bassano, painting with a countrified simplicity and rever-
ence ; but no sooner did he come to the gilded haloes than
his emotion underwent a change, those ancient symbols
of the Divine being somehow at odds with the rusticity
implied by a carpenter's life and work. Later, when he
endeavoured to paint the Magi, he began to feel in sym-
pathy with that austere reserve, that haughty and calm
self-control that belongs to many peoples in the East. If
Brangwyn had chosen the Adoration of the Shepherds his
first emotion would have lasted throughout the subject, and
his picture would have been finer and more sympathetic,
as well as much nearer to the real bent of his genius.

" Rest," another religious piece, is a Holy Family, new

in feeling, vague and fascinating. Mary, with the Infant

Jesus asleep in her arms, sits on a well-side shaded by

trees ; she is wrapped in contemplation over her Child,

Sun-Colour and T^/icrious zArt

while a passer-by stops and drinks water from his hands.
Mr. George Moore reviewed this picture, taking for his
standpoint the minute subtleties of atmospheric treatment
that the French Impressionists were trying to make
popular. He said : " This picture is an example of the
Glasgow school of painting ; and the method of that school
seems to be a complete suppression of what is known as
values. By values I mean the black and white relation of
tones, the relation of this shadow to that shadow, of this
light to that light. Aerial perspective and chiaroscuro are
attained by a delicate perception of and a delicate distribu-
tion of values. Now, if you look at ' Rest ' you will see
that values have been systematically ignored ; there is
therefore neither light nor air in the picture; its beauty is
that of a Turkey carpet. But a Turkey carpet is beautiful
and harmonious, and so is Mr. Brangwyn's picture."

I cannot follow Mr. Moore entirely in this analysis,
for a photograph of the picture shows that the painter's
aim was entirely decorative, and that the relations of tone,
translated into black and white, give a most interesting
result.

The Standard was of this opinion seemingly, for its
critic admired "Rest" because "its great quality of
massiveness " had a " beautiful and delicately studied
relationship of part to part," and because " its balance of
low tones" went hand in hand with a "large decorative
effect." "Rest" to my eyes needs but one thing: more
attention might have been griven to the choice of a model
for the Virgin, because painters ought never to forget that
each historic ideal of womankind has formed for itself an
ideal beauty that artists may treat variously, but never

Frank "Brangwyri arid his JVork

with such character as recalls the day-by-day realism of
life. For any ideal held by mankind is imagination, is
poetry, sanctified by long inheritance. From existing
portraits we may suppose, for example, that Mary Queen
of Scots was not beautiful, but no artist ought ever to
dispute the old and popular belief in her loveliness. Joan
of Arc, again, as typified by Bastien Lepage, has fine rustic
character, but never in this world will that realism be
accepted by the chivalry of men. Joan must stir all hearts
with her radiant face and bewitchinsf fervour ; no artist
can create a beauty too noble for her, as she belongs for
all time to a universal admiration that forms vaguely
exalted ideas of womanly graciousness. The Welsh
peasant who said of Queen Victoria, in grievous dis-
appointment, "Ah, but her face is just a mother's, look
you," is an example of the yearning for something unusual
that accompanies all popular idealisations. Yet modern
art, misunderstanding this matter, has offended against a
good many ancient and lasting ideals. It has forgotten
that there are times when realism must rise from Mother
Earth like a lark from its nest, and be near at the same
moments to the dual points of heaven and home.

But if Brangwyn in his Virgin Mary had not enough
confidence in his imagination, he certainly discovered a
winning type of motherhood.

Turn we now to another religious painting, "The
Miraculous Draught of Fishes," a work not without
defects, but noble in conception. When this subject first
occurred to him, Brangwyn consulted one of his most
helpful friends. Dr. Tom Robinson, of London, who said,
"Yes, and why should not Christ be strong enough
62

Sun-Co/our and T^ligious zArt

physically to draw a net?" With this hint in mind the
painter made some studies, only to find that his mind
and hand recoiled from the perils of trying to represent
the Saviour as the principal figure in a picture. It
would be better to think of Christ as a distant spectator
of His miracle, and from this standpoint the painting
must be judged.

" The Miraculous Draught of Fishes " was first ex-
hibited at the New Gallery in 1894, and then at the Paris
Salon of the following year. It was, perhaps, the least
tentative of the larger religious pictures that Brangwyn
painted in those early days. In London, to be sure, it
was too often criticised as if its painter had suddenly
weakened, after an experience of thirty years ; but he was
gradually being recognised as a leader of our young
painters, perhaps because his great successes in Paris were
valued by Englishmen. M. Ary Renan had said a strong
word for him in the Pa// Ma// Gazette, after speaking
about the bizarre antiquity that our Academic school was
then trying to revive. It was not the heroic antiquity to
be found at the British Museum, said Ary Renan ; it was
a little decadent antiquity, a powdered and patched anti-
quity, curled and tawdry, mere fashion and imitation.
"Where must you go in London to find a conscientious
painting of life and light, of man and nature? Are there
painters of reality? Are they all lumped together among
the rejected whose acquaintance I should be so pleased to
make?" It was at this point that M. Ary Renan remem-
bered Brangwyn, and though he recognised that so young
a man must be immature and uneven, he made haste to
say : " No matter ; the eye is happy before the frames of

Frank "Brangwyn and his Jf^ork

this new-comer ; the eye opens and takes in a real joy. In
France we shall be sincerely disappointed if Mr. Brangwyn
does not keep the promises he is giving in his art."

The tone of that criticism gave the painter heart to
work on, despite all opposition. He was told by one
writer that "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes" was a
big picture pretentiously conceived, that the disciples in it
were effective, but in an Algerine pirate sort of way, and
that the figure of Christ was painfully weak and conven-
tional. Well now ! Christ was represented in the distance ;
and as the picture was lighted by an after-glow of sunset
growing dim and misty, the Saviour was intended not to
be seen in the composition, but felt there as a vague
presence. It is very pleasant to remember that Mr. C F.
Watts was delighted with Brangwyn's intentions, and
followed his doings from year to year. " I always admire
your work very much and look out for it," he wrote on
September 30, 1894. " I hope you won't give up your
grand schemes of colour," he added the following day ; and
again, "I think your treatment of broad masses of colour
just the right thing for fresco." And here, too, are the
opinions expressed by an American artist and writer, Mr.
Lorado Taft, on "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes " : —

"The picture was delightfully novel and individual
in its point of view. The iridescent hues of the fishes
were repeated in some sort throughout the entire canvas.
Though in a sense an arbitrary or fanciful scheme — a
dream picture — it was yet, withal, the work of a man whose
every touch expressed vigour and confidence. I liked it.
And what is considerably more important, the big French
artists did likewise. Our good friend, Raffaelli, told me
64

Sun-Colour and "Religious Jirt

that there were just two pictures aux Champs Elysdes that
interested him — Henri Martin's big decoration for the
Hotel de Ville, and Brangwyn's Peche Miraculeuse.'" {Arts
for America, December 1897.)

From the Paris Salon Mr. Taft came to London, and
saw the Royal Academy and the New Gallery (1895). At
both he found a picture by Brangwyn. "Rest" hung at
the Academy. " There was nothing of the conventional
religious painting in it, but still, in a way, it suggested the
Holy Family. It impressed me as something weird and
mighty, like a great half-hewn block in Michael Angelo's
workshop, as it might have looked in the evening dusk ;
only here, again, was a charm of rich colouring. Portions
recalled possibly Vedder's chocolates and greys, but instead
of using these tones monotonously, they were flecked here
and there with rich warm accents, as though a flood of
orange and gold and colour of flame had been poured over
the figures and foliage, while the background had a dull
glow of live coals. Coming, as I had, from the realism of
the French, and already well wearied by the indescribable
fatuity and feebleness of the work around me, I turned to
this triumphant canvas with a feeling of refreshment and
pleasure difficult to describe."

The New Gallery came next : —

" I had scarce stepped into the principal hall when I
became conscious of yet another of these strange, fasci-
nating works. It was at the other end of the room . . .
and when I reached it ... I was indeed in the presence
of one of the masterful pictures of our time. The impres-
sion was something tremendous : a great gaunt figure of
a dying man seated upon a platform of rock, his emaciated
I 65

Frank ^rangwyn and his JVork

body supported by a rude wooden post. Opposite him,
and subordinate, a priest and a young acolyte, who offer
the agonised fanatic his last communion. A second glance
and one perceives through the unusual perspective of the
scene that its Subject — and we as well — are supposed to be
elevated to a great height ; our lone sufferer can be no
other than St. Simeon Stylites of old, upon the elevated
column which he fondly hoped would bring him nearer
God. Away down a dizzy depth and stretching to a far
horizon were the streets and buildings of the city which
the saint had renounced years before, and in the yet more
distant distance a wall of darkening mountains and the
blue waters of a shoreless sea. All was bathed in the
golden haze of sunset, and it was glorious with colour and
power. How it spoiled the little works about it ! How
thin and artificial they all looked ! . . . Can the author
of St. Simeon be a Londoner, a brother of the men who
paint these things? "

This criticism can be put side by side with most of
those that appeared in English papers. Its standpoint is
different — more objective, free from dilettante prejudices,
and responsive to vigour of treatment and to fine new
schemes of colour. The ardent young American and Mr.
G. F. Watts at the age of seventy-eight were greatly moved
by the same qualities. But it is right and necessary for
me to say that the picture of St. Simeon Stylites caught
Brangwyn in two moods, and that he made a mistake when
he departed from the composition of his original sketch.^
Here St. Simeon was alone, dying in complete solitude,

1 It was purchased by Mr. William O. Cole of Chicago. The other picture bangs in the
Gallery of Modern An at Venice.

Sun-Colour and T(eligious <tArt

but finding his beliefs a companionship of resignation.
Add to this any other figures and your work begins to
speak of picture-making, and onlookers are disturbed
because they begin to wonder how a priest and his acolyte
mounted a pillar twenty-four yards high, or more, according
to the legend. But after all, the story as told by the
finished work is a matter of indifference. It is the wonder-
ful harmony of good paint that makes this picture so ex-
pressive. " It is late in the day ; twilight is approaching ;
the last ray of sunlight is finely sprinkled through the air
around the figures above the roofs of the Syrian town, from
which rises a transparent cloud, so thin that it is rather
a breath, an exhalation, than a vapour ; it is more surmised
than seen. A flight of swallows glides past the saint ; and
the birds, with their arrow-swift and pleasing motions, ob-
served in the precise Japanese way, greatly help to produce
an impression of height and airiness . . ." ^ M. Ary Renan
was not so well pleased, while M. Jourdain continued for
some years to speak of the picture as " i inonbliable
Simdon Stylite — line fotigueuse et superbe toile oil les
tons, violcmmcnt jtixtaposdes, se fondait pourtant dans
un himineux ensemble y

Still, religious art cannot be looked at exclusively from
a modern point of view, and I remember a criticism that
contrasted Brangwyn with Flandrin. It appeared in La
Revue des Deux Mondes, and was written by M. Lafenestre,
who at that time was director of the Louvre. No judge
could have been fairer than M. Lafenestre. He had studied
Brangwyn's "Adoration of the Magi,"' and although he

' "Art and Artists," by ^Tax Nordau, pp. 233-234. T. Fisher Unwin.
* This painting belongs to Mr. E. Seegar of Berlin.

Frank 'Brangwyn and his Work

noticed several weak points, notably a lack of response
in tenderness of technique to the poetry of the Madonna,
he was much impressed by the way in which the three
Magi told in their attitudes that they had indeed found the
shrine where their gifts were to be offered. " lis ont des
attitudes si graves et si recneillies, riiarnionie sourde et
grise qui les enveloppe ddgage tant de cabne et d' apaisement ,
qtton se siirprend a rester, conime etix, en contemplation
devant cette mdre et cet enfant.'' M. Lafenestre noticed
also that the painter's dominant feeling as a craftsman
made his work more robust and more audacious than
Flandrin's. True, Flandrin belonged to an earlier school
of modern religious painting. There was a classical cold-
ness in his rhythm of line, and he approached Bible subjects
with a sort of timid dignity, unlike Tintoretto, Veronese,
Michael Angelo, and Titian. Flandrin was quiescent in his
moods, like Burne-Jones, and his manner was decorative,
not pictorial. That was Flandrin's real merit ; but he,
like Burne-Jones, would not have hesitated to put aside a
physical law if it threatened to impart a vigorous action to
his regulated style, whose movement was as ordered as
a clock keeping good time. I think here of two lines in a
poem by Baudelaire : —

" Je hais le mouvetnent qui deplace les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleura et jamais je ne ris."

Yes, Flandrin could have said : "I hate the movement
that upsets the lines, and never do I weep, and never do
I laugh."

Now that form of religious art is not great in psycho-
logy. The Bible is the book of man ; it contains an infinite
68

THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST.
From an Original Oil-Fainting, flow
in the Art Gallery at Stuttgart.

Sun-Colour and litigious zArt

variety of human nature and conduct, all seen in actions
briefly related ; and any painter who would take his inspira-
tions from this great volume of dramatic poems, must
respond in his emotions to the life of each subject chosen,
both in its outward aspects and in its inward and spiritual
meaning. Flandrin did not realise the truth of this
because he had set ideas about beauty, and was afraid to
ruffle the composure of his quiet and mannered adherence
to rules. His ideal of beauty had a slow pulse, very little
of passion or desire, and very calm nerves. There are
minds to whom this ideal of beauty is a joy ; others
enlarge it just a little, adding some human warmth ; but
if you press for a definition of beauty from each of a dozen
critics, you will understand why artistic criticism is usually
so little catholic. The beauty that appeals to Brangwyn
is in accordance with the definition given by Lord Morley
in an article on Browning's "The Ring and the Book."
Beauty cannot mean anything more than such an arrange-
ment and disposition of the parts of a work as, first
kindling a great variety of dispersed emotions and thoughts
in the mind of the spectator, finally concentrate them in a
single mood of joyous, sad, meditative, or interested delight.
A sculptor, a painter, a musician, a poet, have each a
special means of producing this final and superlative
impression ; each is bound, in one direction and another,
by certain limits of expression imposed upon him by the
medium in which he works. A painter is greatly favoured
in three ways : from first to last, and in a second, he can
judge his effect as a whole, unlike writers, so that his art
is less difiicult in composition ; next, his human actions
are made real in a witchery of colour; and then, his critics

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

see what he has done all at once, as in a vision that appears
suddenly, while in literature we have to read till the piece
ends, and our judgment is determined by two difficult
things : practice in reading with attention and practice in
remembering what we read.

If we misunderstand a painter's aim it is our own fault,
because we can stand before his work and see it as a whole,
without any effort of memory. The useful and necessary
thing is to clear our minds of all dogmatising about classic
beauty, and to see whether the painter has done justice, in
his own way, to his conception of a chosen subject. He
has taken a given theme — that is to say, a given set of
actions, all alive with human character and emotion ; and
this theme has a definite setting, and is subject to the
magic play of light and colour. If the painter feels in a
dramatic manner each part of his composition, the senti-
ment of his technique will respond to the sentiment of
each part, just as Shakespeare is a child in one role, a
woman in another, and a murderer in a third. When a
painter is young there are always sudden breaks in the
changing emotion shown by his craftsmanship, for he is
drawn to things that he does with the least difficulty and
therefore with the greatest enjoyment ; and it was for this
reason that M. Lafenestre dwelt upon the strong points
in Brangwyn's " Adoration of the Magi," without attacking
any weakness.

In England, on the other hand, such attacks were
perhaps inevitable, because many of our critics were then
accustomed to a mannered kind of historical painting, so
they disliked the realisation of life in religious work.
"The Miraculous Draught of Fishes" was condemned,
70

Sun-Colour and ^^eligious ^?'t

more than once, because Brangvvyn, having in his mind
the uncommon weight of the fishes, had given energy to
the bearded disciple who strained at the fishing net.
There would have been nothing miraculous in a little
draught easy to be landed, so that muscular action
belonged to the poetry of the scene ; but the painter did
not allow this truth to be too prominent, since he veiled
it with evening light. One may see in all this what M.
Geffroy has noticed — " rhnagmation est celle d'lm podte."

For the rest, while painting these religious pictures,
Brangwyn exhibited a good many other works, mainly
incidents from African and Eastern life, like his "Trade
on the Beach," his "Orange Market," and "The Goat-
herds," a picture of life-sized figures, perhaps a little too
rugged in handling, but proving that the artist had found
his own style. M. Ary Renan said that he shone " comme
un niorceaii de corail dans rardue battue par tons " ; and
it is not often that a young painter attains a good and
distinctive manner. Indeed, modern education and work
act on the young as running water acts on pebbles, wearing
away their individuality and giving to them all a similar
polish. Brangwyn was withdrawn from this mediocrity
by a youth of hard experience ; that is why London critics
did not always know what to make of his free strength and
naturalness. Every one of his sunny pictures met with a
very mixed reception. Here, for example, are two criticisms
of "Trade on the Beach," one by the Athe)icBum, and the
other by the Morning Post : —

Athenccum. — "A large, heavily painted, not to say
coarse, badly composed group of costumes rather than
men, placed upon a sandy shore. The scene is supposed

Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

to be African, the effect that of hot and intense sunlight.
At no point has the painter succeeded ; in fact he has
completely failed in nearly every respect. Such work as
this may be bold, but it is not fine art."

Morning Post. — "Admirably realises the effect of hot
sunshine, and is to be commended for its beauty of colour
and equal grace and vigour of general execution. The
plan of the picture necessitates the intervention of plenty
of space between the spectator and the painting. The
work is altogether one of such eminent merit as cannot
fail to bring fresh access of fame to a painter who has
already achieved well-deserved celebrity."

I forget now who wrote for the Morning Post between
1890 and 1895, but his opinions on Brangwyn's work were
all confirmed on the Continent, and they were encouraging
at a time when abuse was common.

Better times were coming, little by little, bringing with
them patrons like Mr. T. L. Devitt, Dr. Tom Robinson,
Mr. Kitson, Mr. Kenneth S. Anderson, Mr. Mansergh,
Mr. MacCulloch, and others ; as well as sympathetic critics
like the editor of the Studio Magazine, ever a true friend.
Since then there has been no concession to any popular
notions as to what attractive painting should be. For
Brangwyn, like Mr. Rudyard Kipling, has formed his
own style, and his progress has followed the line of
least resistance, developing those qualities that come to
him unsought, like his joy in colour, and his feeling for
breadth, scale, power, and decorative arrangement. At this
moment he stands at the head of all those British painters
who from time to time have turned from easel pictures to
the larger and bolder conventions of style that belong to
72

Sun-Colour and T^eligious zArt

art in its relation to mural decoration. He is a workman
in the old, big way, but in a manner distinctively his own.
It is quite unnecessary for him to sign his name. We
know his work as we know the music of Wagner, the prose
of Hugo and Carlyle ; and whether it attracts you or repels
you, its life is spontaneous and organic. Of Brangwyn's
art at its best we may say what Cardinal Newman said of
something else: "Such work is always open to criticism,
and it is always above it."

And this being so, we can study its later characteristics,
not year by year, as we have done in the first pictures, but
from wider standpoints, remembering that no artist ever
progresses without set-backs. Ill-health, unsatisfactory
commissions, troubles, bereavements, came to him every
now and again ; and criticism must pass by in silence all
defects of art arising from such causes.

CHAPTER V

CHARACTERISTICS: LIGHT AND COLOUR

ODERN painting has taken for its motto the
last words spoken by Goethe — "More Hght ";
and Goethe, like modern painting, developed
theories on colour. This hobby became an
obsession, and the great man believed that science ought
to adopt his careful observations. But the phenomena of
light are like mirages, and the poet's theories on colour
are forgotten. Have painters succeeded where Goethe
failed ? Have they found some great new ways of manipu-
lating paint, as variously charming as those conventional
colour-schemes that we still enjoy in the work of Old
Masters? If so, is painting to creep nearer and nearer to an
imitation of things seen ? or should we own frankly that
because tubes of pigment cannot give us real daylight
and sun-colours, it matters not what methods and con-
ventions a painter adopts or in part invents, if only he
belongs to his own time and is born to delight us with
a poetry of coloured forms nobly orchestrated into un-
common harmonies? Briefly, can art ever approach too
near to nature?

If these questions could be answered conclusively,
modern art would benefit very much, and criticism of art
would become ampler and more charitable. Turner was
74

Characteris tics

ridiculed, Cotman died broken-hearted in great poverty,
and many others have had long and stern battles against
routine prejudices, like Brangwyn. Are we ever to pos-
sess great painters without foolish efforts to break their
courage? Surely it is high time that a critical apprecia-
tion of art arrived at some catholicity in common sense
and goodwill.

But there are many difficulties to be overcome. First
of all, critics may be divided into two classes with strongly
opposed limitations. In one class we find the most
modern men, whose aims are often sectarian, backing up
this or that little group of experimentalists. Some of them
even try to like the abortive rubbish that appears in certain
foreign magazines as a valuable new discovery in aesthetic
ideals. Perhaps it may lead to something good, but at
present it is nothing more than a bungled trial-trip, and
ought therefore to be kept away from public criticism, just as
men of science leave in the dark their fruitless experiments.
Why should art display to all the world her tentative
efforts, her laboratory research ? A horrible vanity tells
many young craftsmen to publish their failures, regardless
of the harm they do to a whole profession ; for the people
jeer and take sides with the other school of criticism, whose
likes and dislikes are very conservative and dogmatic.
Nothing could be worse than that. For, indeed, consider
how a conservative critic has formed his opinions. He
will speak to you by the hour about the Old Masters, and
presently you see that all his ideas on light and colour are
out of date even as regards those Masters, because colour
is greatly changed by time and varnish, and none can
tell now what it was like when the strong men of the

Frank "Brangwyn and his M^ork

past finished their work. Was Rubens garish ? Was
Veronese crude ? Did Correggio become too dappled in
his values ? We do not know, neither can we learn from
criticisms contemporary with the pictures ; for these are
useless for such a purpose because methods of art used
to be accepted as a matter of course, like fashions in
costumes. What the eyes look at day by day is never seen
quite truly. But we may be sure that when the Old
Masters painted for the dim light of churches they gave
their schemes of colour a high key, and did not mind when
their effects looked crude in a stronger light.

Conservative critics forget all this, and imagine that
the best of all educations for the sense of colour is a
pilgrimage through galleries filled with old pictures. By
this means they attune their eyesight to varnished colours
hundreds of years old ; and then they import their mis-
instruction into their written comments on modern painting.
At one time they blamed John Constable because of his
high lights, which they called his " snows." Constable
replied that a few years would give tone to every part,
and already his work is becoming too dark. To-day a
conservative critic meets with many painters who, at times,
annoy that fine old museum, his mind, and BrangAvyn is
among them. Let us remember, then, that while modern
painting has been trying to get nearer in its colour to the
subtleties and gradations of tone that sunlight produces
out of doors, a growing cult of the Old Masters has tried
to bring into vogue a liking for such colour harmonies as
time and varnish have deepened and matured.

This leads inevitably to much bad criticism. For a
hundred years, or rather more, the art world has been
76

Characteris tics

shaken by cyclones of controversy, always arising from
some realistic tendency that appeared wrong to a talkative
dogmatism bred in museums. Some painters have lived
as martyrs, and many others have been driven by oppo-
sition from quiet study into self-conscious chatter about
themselves and their theories. The French Impressionists
were very ill-treated. It is true they were not men of
great imaginative genius, but they loved colour passion-
ately, and there was nothing remarkable in their wish
to represent it by means of a new convention in the use
of paint. Their persecution was not only a crime ; it was
silly, and for that no excuse can be made. At the very
moment when science was doing the most marvellous
things, the artistic world had nothing better to do than to
treat with cruel ignorance the research-work of Manet,
Monet, Degas, and their companions ; and the cause of
all the disturbance was merely in paint what Goethe had
done peacefully in words ; that is to say, it was an attempt
to revise earlier fixed ideas on light and colour.

It is necessary for us to consider here how Brangwyn
stands in relation to this phase of art, but without re-
calling one by one the main principles for which the
Impressionists fought. Scientifically, they were right
principles, but science and art are not near and friendly
neighbours. It is certain, too, that the science of Im-
pressionism will soon be excelled by instantaneous photo-
graphy in colour. Sisley and Monet are excellent as
mechanics of light ; they are minor poets of the sun. Mr.
George Moore has fought a brave fight on behalf of the
French Impressionists, but some prefer the analysis given
by another of their critics, Camille Mauclair : —

Frank "Brangwyn and his Work

"There has been a disparity between Realism and the
technique of Impressionism. Its realistic origin has some-
times made it vulgar. It has often treated indifferent
subjects in a grand style, and it has too easily beheld
life from the anecdotal side. It has lacked psychologic
synthesis (if we except Degas). It has too willingly denied
all that exists hidden under the apparent reality of the
universe, and has affected to separate painting from the
ideologic faculties which rule over all art. Hatred of
academic allegory, defiance of symbolism, abstraction and
romantic scenes, have led it to refuse to occupy itself
with a whole order of ideas, and it has had the tendency
of making the painter beyond all a workman. It was
necessary at the moment of its arrival, but it is no longer
necessary now, and the painters understand this them-
selves. Finally, it has too often been superficial even
in obtaining effects ; it has given way to the wish to
surprise the eyes, of playing with tones merely for love
of cleverness. ... It has indulged in useless exaggera-
tions, faults of composition and of harmony, and all this
cannot be denied." ^

In plain words, the French Impressionists were brilliant
and ardent students, not imaginative painters of a lofty
rank. And yet, with all their narrowness, they achieved
one result which has had a world-wide influence, giving
hints to all painters of note who have risen into fame
since Monet in 1885 made his first luminous pictures.
That one result is not light on the surface of things
such as the Old Masters produced with their conven-

' " The French Impressionists," by Camille Mauclair. Translated by P. G. Konody.
Duckworth.

Characteris tics

tional methods ; it is sunlight enveloping things on
all sides, bathing them in its rays, and forming an
atmosphere of enchantment, that changes as the sun in
its day's journey goes from east to west. Monet proved
to the world that a haystack is transfigured by the radi-
ance of sunset as plainly as a lake of water, and that
a common pebble, lighted by the travelling sunshine, is
a jewel with chameleon tints. Turner had shown vastly
more than that, uniting new and exquisite discoveries
in artistic colour to a majesty of design unrivalled in
the art of any country ; but Monet and his companions
have been more useful to other painters, just because their
pictures as a rule were studies only, not works of inven-
tive imagination. Their defects were so evident that only
foolish youngsters copied them, while Cottet and Sorolla,
Sargent and Brangwyn, Segantini and Michetti, Lieber-
mann, Thaulow, Lavery, Harrison, Zuloaga, and Emile
Claus, got an invaluable hint here and there. Nothing"
can be more surprising than the variety of individual
fine work that would never have been what it is if the
French Impressionists had not dared to offend against
the tenets of academic criticism. Compare Thdo van
Rysselberghe with Rusifiol, Brangwyn with Besnard,
Kroyer with Guthrie, Verheyden with Dario de Regoyos,
Heymans with Boldini, or with Mdnard and Le Sidaner.

From the first, if we set aside two or three pictures,
Brangwyn sowed no wild oats in the least like those
which to this day show in German painting how harmful
Impressionism can be when devotees have neither humour
nor individuality of judgment. The first thing that a
man of genius learns when he begins to search into his-

F)'ank "Brangwyn and his JJ^ork

colour-box for more light and colour, is to be afraid of
the very things after which he seeks, because the nearer
his art gets to nature the more conscious he becomes
that his pigments are coarse and his effects neither art
nor nature. Lesser men, on the other hand, when they
decline to work within the limits of a school convention,
often get so enthralled by the sunlight that they feel scorn
for other qualities and enjoyments. For instance, when
Sisley was at work on a snow-scene, his one aim was
to show the effect of a certain light on snow, and he
did not care a row of pins for anything else. His trees
were often badly indicated, and I don't remember any
picture of his in the least charmed with human life and
labour. Light and colour were his only actors. And
this applies also to the bulk of Monet's work. Now this
passion for light goes too far ; it is a sort of drunkenness,
and painters have something better to do than to over-
excite their optic nerves.

Brangwyn understood this from the first, for he made no
experiments in light and colour unassociated with difficult
problems of design and character-painting. It was fortu-
nate that he chose this different road. Had he trained
himself to be content with sketches and notes, he would
have feared the risk of trying to pass from rapid impres-
sion into a completed picture ; like many a clever student
who paints well in a life-class and fails hopelessly in a
commissioned portrait. Brangwyn, then, has never looked
upon his work as light and colour only, but as colour
and light in their relation to other problems of art ; and
he believes, quite justly, that a painting should always
look well and be attractive as a black and white. Not
80

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Characteris tics

only ought it to be distinctive in its form, in its design,
but its presentation of life and character needs dramatic
sensibility. In other words, a painter should be emo-
tional in many ways outside his passion for subtleties
of atmosphere.

Take the question of landscape-painting and consider
it largely, keeping in mind any works of Brangwyn that
you know well, whether Eastern subjects, or glimpses of
the Thames through wreathing smoke, or a roma'nce of
old houses felt with an emotion akin to that in Piranesi
and Mer}'on. Landscapes of this kind are not only
human ; they have their own literature, inasmuch as they
compel us to feel and think, to pass from their value as
things observed to their poetry as historic backgrounds
to the drama of human life. Merj^on has such a feeling
for old architecture that some of his etched plates are
(juite uncanny with awe and pathos, as if bygone genera-
tions haunt ancient homes in presences unseen, that
Meryon enables us to feel. This comes from a great,
instinctive liking for the history suggested by the derelicts
of time ; and Brangwyn has shown the same rare quality
in landscapes of several kinds, ranging from old houses
at Hammersmith to stranded men-of-war, and from a
storm beating over tall trees along a road to a great
windmill standing out, huge and gaunt, against a wind-
blown sky full of clouds. To paint in this way is to
realise that landscape belongs to man and to human
history, and owes its importance in art to that fact
mainly, if not entirely.

This was understood by the old painters who com-
posed classic landscapes, for they never failed to touch
L 8i

Frank IRrangwyn and his Tf^ork

the educated mind of their times by introducing ruined
temples, broken columns, and figures from ancient poetry
and mythology, so that their work might awaken memories
and associations. Turner passed through this old school
into a Wordsworthian mood of style, as in the " Frosty
Morning," and Wordsworth himself was preceded by
the sweet serene manliness of Gainsborough's rustic art.
"There is a charm," says Allan Cunningham, "about
the children running wild in the landscapes of Gains-
borough, which is more deeply felt by comparing them
with those of Reynolds. The children of Sir Joshua are
indeed beautiful creatures, free, artless, and lovely ; but
they seem all to have been nursed on velvet laps, and
fed with golden spoons. There is a rustic grace, an
untrained wildness about the children of the other, which
speak of the country and of neglected toilets. They are
the offspring of Nature, running free among woods as
wild as themselves." It is all quite true ; and do you
suppose that Gainsborough could have done that with
equal success if his eyes and thoughts had been like
Monet's, or Sisley's, for ever seeking for minute grada-
tions of colour under the influence of ever-changing
light ?

Yes, too much attention may be given to that part of
the daily inspiration that painters take from things seen.
Find your own gamut of colour as soon as you can,
and then use it as a medium in which to unify all the
other emotional qualities that imaginative work needs.
Brangwyn has followed that method, freeing himself from
all hypersensitive cravings for more light and colour
than his paint will give him without injury to his subject.
82

Characteristics

Even in his "Rajah's Birthday,"^ where his impression
of Indian sunlight at midday is not only radiant but
quite near to the spectator, transfiguring objects in the
foreground, his gamut of colour is unstrained, and his
handling everywhere is free, ample, and joyous. There
is not a trace of tired manipulation. The blaze of light
being intense, your eyes do not at first resolve the plots
of colour into the merry scene which they represent ; but
presently the many-tinted figures in the crowd, emerging
one by one from the sunshine, begin to jostle around the
great elephants ; and you see that the noble animals,
bedecked like houris, have a half-humorous look in their
eyes, that elephants of state assume when little human
creatures amuse themselves in a noisy and feeble way.
That is how a mammoth must have looked if he ever
stooped from his dignity and allowed himself to work
for the diminutive hairy men who made their homes in
caves. A mammoth might have done that as a sort of
joke, just as elephants do, apparently.

I saw " A Rajah's Birthday " this year at the White-
chapel Art Gallery, where it hung in company with many
good pictures that represented the history of British art
during the last twenty years ; and its triumph was very
remarkable. It was alive, while all the other works were
paint and skill more or less animated. To pass from
canvas to canvas noticing the qualities of each, and see-
ing their varieties of expert skill, was gentle exercise on

' The reproduction of "A Rajah's Birthday" given in this book shows a large
picture in a small plate. This means, inevitably, a great loss of scale, and much sun-
light has vanished from the colour. Chromatic processes get their best results from
dark pictures, because the yellow block, so important in sunny effects, is always the
most defective and troublesome.

Frank 'Brangwyn and his JVork

a rare hot day, and quite entertaining. But "A Rajah's
Birthday " had a very different effect. It was a great
surprise. How had such life and colour been achieved?
How had the East been summoned to Whitechapel ?
Why should paint have organic life in this one picture
only? Across the hall was a fine canvas by the late Mr.
C. W. Furse ; it represented a great team of cart-horses
splashed with sunlight, and pulling with all their might
at a low wagon laden with timber. They moved over
uneven ground, and behind them a bank of yellow sand
glittered with spangled lights and shadows. I turned
from this picture to Brangwyn's, again and again, mar-
velling at the difference between them. They might
represent British art anywhere and win admiration. But
Furse, despite his great talent, despite his keen observa-
tion, despite his subtleness of handling, had accomplished
much less than Brangwyn, though Brangwyn had worked
at a heat without pausing to consider whether this or
that detail might be considered unintelligible. For one
thing, Furse had missed truth of impression in the most
essential part of his subject. The wheels of his wagon
were wrong in weight and strength ; they could not
possibly bear the immense strain put upon them by four
powerful horses hauling a dead weight of timber along a
gully of sand. And no sooner did this mistake become
evident, than the whole picture became unsteady on those
ill-felt wheels. On the other hand, Brangwyn's impres-
sionism was balanced and complete. It had the right
proportion of action and quietness ; and there was no
break in the nervous energy of its handling, though some
parts are more felicitous than others.
84

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Characteris tics

Although I have spoken of " A Rajah's Birthday " as
impressionism, I do not mean any such impressionism
as the French experimentalists would have given. Far
from that. Brangwyn's colour and technique are not
outside a direct descent from the boldest painters of the
Renaissance.^ Their originality continues a tradition of
virile and direct skill ; and it does not try to make real
all the effects of full sunlight. For instance, when rays
of sunshine are intensely ardent, the objects around
which they play seem to lose much of their solidity,
becoming variously unsubstantial ; and Monet is praised
by Camille Mauclair because his midday scenes show
how all material silhouettes — in trees, in rocks, in hay-
ricks— are annihilated, volatilised by the fiery vibration
of the dust of sunlight, so that a beholder gets really
blinded, just as he would in actual sunlight. "Some-
times even there are no more shadows at all, nothing
that could ser\'e to indicate the values and to create con-
trasts of colour. Everything is light, and the painter
seems easily to overcome these terrible difficulties, lights
upon lights, thanks to a gift of marvellous subtlety of
vision." Yes ; but there is another side to this matter.
Monet's colour, after a few years of maturing, is not
more luminous than Brang^vyn's, while his peculiar
brushwork has often a texture rather like those pictures
in tinted wools that ladies worked at the end of the
eighteenth century. Trees, earth, water, skies, archi-
tecture, have pretty much the same weight and volume,
though the eyes always feel that however fiercely the
sun pours down, buildings must have more solidity

• Ojetti, the treat Itali.in critic, is very urgent on this point.

Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

than their waving flags, and tree-trunks greater bulk than
their massed but quivering foliage. There are values of
weight and substance as well as values of tone and tint,
and art can never afford to pass them by as non-existent.

We see, then, that there are two forms of impression-
ism, one having for its aim the realisation of atmosphere,
and the other showing that art is concerned with life in
all its manifestations, and with substance in all its
varieties and gradations. "A Rajah's Birthday" is in
the open air and its colour has beauty and brilliance, but
the sunlight does not prevent us from seeing that ele-
phants are ponderous, that a bustling crowd moves, and
that banners are heavier than turbans and dress materials.

Still, a biographer has no right to be one-sided, and I
must mention the fact that some critics agree that "A
Rajah's Birthday" is too bright with sunlight, and if they
find it so, then for them it is too bright. While I looked
at this picture in the Whitechapel Gallery, an artist came
up with a lady, and I overheard an exchange of opinion,
running something like this :

Artist. "Great Scot! Magnificent! Ripping! Only
one man could do that. Lord, how thin and useless my
own work seems by comparison. Hang it ! "

Lady. " I'm beginning to see something after screw-
ing up my eyes. This picture needs a big parasol. But
I like those elephants now I begin to see them. Yes,
and that crowd of lively figures grows into distinctness.
Still, why paint movement and fun if they are not to be
seen at once ? I hate full sunlight out of doors — blink at
it like an owl ; and this picture bothered my eyes at first."

Points of view are always interesting, and a good
86

Characteris tics

picture creates many. Ruskin argued very well that al-
though the right of being obscure is not one to be lightly
claimed, yet all distinct drawing must be bad drawing,
and nothing can be right till it is unintelligible. " Ex-
cellence of the highest kind, without obscurity, cannot
e.xist." Why a critic should wish to see everything all
in one glance I do not know, but you must have noticed
that in art-criticism Englishmen are fond of two phrases
— "too obscure" and "too obvious.'' Let a painter miss
one of these verdicts, and behold ! the other awaits him.
It is certainly possible for an artist to be too obscure ;
he may forget that his own vision adds distinctness to
hinted forms, the eyes seeing what the mind wants them
to see. This occurred in a very remarkable way when
Lombroso found much evidence of criminality in photo-
graphs of very reputable Parisian market-women, these
photographs having been sent to him by mistake for por-
traits of criminals. Plainly, then, it is necessary for all
craftsmen to revise their own impressions of the work
they do, so as to be sure that what is distinct to them
will be sufficiently clear to onlookers also ; and this ap-
plies above all to painters of great force, who put so much
energy into their swift technique that they sometimes
fear to change a defect lest they should add a patch to a
homogeneous bit of painting. Then the mind begins to
work, and soon the defect is no longer noticed by obedient
eyes. I believe that Brangwyn has stumbled into this
pitfall on two or three occasions, like every other rapid
master of the brush ; but years bring patience, and he
finds already that he studies with enjoyment many things
which would have fretted him a few years ago.

CHAPTER VI

LIGHT AND COLOUR— coniimed

ONE thing in "A Rajah's Birthday" is par-
ticularly interesting ; it is the fact that light
and glowing colour are found in it together
— not by any means a common thing in
pictures. One might suppose that because every tint
in nature is simply an irradiation of light, composed of
the same elements as the sun's rays, a sensation of
luminous air would be attained inevitably in paint by
truthful values, or by using the seven tints of the
spectrum in spots of colour juxtaposed, leaving their
individual rays of light to blend when we look towards
them at a certain distance ; and yet, somehow, anyhow,
that blending often produces sunny colour without the
spaciousness of air. In other words, light and colour
very often are antagonistic to each other in painting.
When you attain both at the same time, it is an
inspiration, like music.

This point the French Impressionists often forgot.
When we learn from their principles that atmosphere
is the real subject of a picture, since everything repre-
sented upon it exists only through its medium ; when
we hear from Manet that colour is light, and light the
principal " person " in a painting, we remember pictures
of theirs in which there is considerably less light than

THE BRASS SHOP.
Reprodticed from the lar^e Oil-Painting.

IIIK MUASS SHOP
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Liqht and Colour

we find in a clear sky by Cuyp, in the palest landscape
by Corot, or in a tinted water-colour by Cozens. For
it is genius acting impulsively, not reason working
scientifically, that permeates paint with wind-blown air
or with sunned atmosphere. Art pours air with sun-
shine into many a monochrome, then she declines to receive
it when you offer her, orchestrated, the seven tints of
the spectrum. You rub in a sky or a background,
taking no trouble at all, and it is full of light, of air ;
ne.xt day you try to paint it, and your work looks as
hard as lead or as uninviting as cotton-wool. These
matters are beyond explanation ; but we may take it as
an axiom that intense light in painting is apt to look air-
less. Do you not feel that in Norwegian pictures, when
your eyes ache for some relief from the unmysterious
gleaming of far-off waters and hills? And then, as to
the action of brilliant sunshine, as on red and white in
the middle distance, it brings objects forward out of
their plane, so that they appear much nearer to us ; and
the closer those objects are to our eyes, the more their
radiance dominates all attention. That is why art lowers
their key and gets fresh air in subtle ways that no
painter of genius can ever explain. Monet's work looks
rather like a recipe, while a first-rate Brangwyn has the
unsought charm of an improvisation.

Further, the idea that painters borrow from nature
their finer harmonies of colour is frequently quite wrong.
Colour very often comes to them from that higher con-
sciousness that surprises the ordinary brain-consciousness
with intuitions, premonitions, and sudden day-dreams.
Sir Oliver Lodge now regards it as definitely proved

M 89

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

that our consciousness is much larger than the con-
sciousness that manifests itself through the brain ; that
outside and beyond what we know normally as con-
sciousness there exists a great field to which no name
except the name of consciousness can be given, because
we get from it certain emotions — certain impulses, lumi-
nous ideas, and quick warnings — that rule us despite all
the logic of ordinary and normal experience. Genius
when at work brings in flashes from that other con-
sciousness many things that vanish from memory unless
they find immediate interpretation into some form of
art ; and we may be sure that harmonies of colour, like
other poetic elements, enter into inspired workmanship
of genius. Milton says nobly that when a poet, at the
command of God, takes a trumpet to blow a dolorous
or thrilling blast, it rests not with his will what he
shall say, or what he shall conceal. And this being so,
there are evident limits to realism in all creative arts.

I see in a good many criticisms that Brangwyn is a
realist in colour, yet he could not give you any account
of his work as a colourist, other than this — that such
and such effects came of their own accord, without any
conscious reasoning on his part. So, too, with all
genuine painters. Turner was marvellous in his in-
spirations of what one may call chromo-spiritualism,
though Ruskin fancied that his friend had nature always
before his mind's eye. Turner, of course, being a won-
derful poet in his art, transcended nature with his other-
worldliness. His finest effects were unpremeditated.

There is, though, in BrangA\yn's case, as in Turner's,
one point that belongs more or less to the research of
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Light and Colour

art — namely, his studies from the first have united oil-
painting and water-colour, and the translucent brilliance
of the latter medium has influenced his use of oil-
pigments. Consider this point for a moment. If you
put water-colour drawings against the light, in some
dim corner of your room, you will find that they are
still full of brilliance, the cream-white of the paper
shining through each wash of colour. An oil-picture
in the same position would look heavy, dull, and lifeless.
Now, many of our English painters — from Gainsborough
and Wilson to Turner, Bonington, Constable, De Wint,
Cox, and J. S. Cotman — have profited by this difference
between oils and water-colours. Not only did they
work in both mediums, but to some extent they tried,
consciously or unconsciously, to get in oils something
of the translucent and beautiful light that water-colours
gave on cream-tinted paper. Turner was particularly
scornful of the heaviness peculiar to oiled pigments.
During his first period, when his colour was as dark
as Daniell's or De Loutherbourg's, he sprinkled sand
over a prepared canvas, then let it dry hard ; and upon
this gritty ground he painted his shadows in transparent
tints, so that the particles of sand might shine through
like little lamps, giving a sparkle akin to that of textured
paper under washes of watered pigment. From this
trick he passed into polychrome effects ever higher and
higher in key, substituting for the subdued chiaroscuro
of all early landscape a balanced diminution of opposi-
tion throughout the scale, and trying to take the lowest
portion of the scale truly, and merging the upper part
in high light. It was Turner water-colour in oil-paint.

Frank Brangwyn and his JVork

I shall speak in a later chapter of BrangAvyn's water-
colours, but here is the place to mention the effect which
they have had on the quality of his paint in oils. It is a
fact that no artist can experiment in water-colour without
acquiring a delicacy of perception for the finer niceties
of tint and tone, that prevents him from being heavy and
dull in the more virile medium of oil pigments. This
alone is enough to explain why British landscapes at their
best are better than any similar work by foreign artists.
Contrast a first-rate De Wint in oil with a Thdodore
Rousseau, choosing by each a picture of dark trees
sketched on a cloudy day, and you will find that De
Wint is the purer colourist. Like Brangwyn, he puts
an airy, inward life into masses of the darkest greens,
and his handling has a featherweight strong touch, sur-
prisingly light and easy and spontaneous. De Wint has
outlived all the landscape men of his time who scorned
water-colour. Holland, too, like Miiller, was a worker in
both mediums ; and so was J. F. Lewis.

To water-colour Brangwyn owes a part of his equip-
ment as a painter, and, curiously enough, the qualities
that water-colour encourages are very akin to those that
the great Venetians loved and obtained. Reynolds, after
years of close research into the harmonies of Venetian
painting, gave it as a general principle that the masses
of light in a picture must be of a warm mellow tint,
yellow, red, or cream-white, and that all cold colours —
blues, greys, and greens — must be kept out of these warm
masses, and be used only to support them and to set them
off. For this purpose, he said, a small proportion of cold

colours will be sufficient. " Let this conduct be reversed ;
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let the light be cold and the surrounding colours warm,
as we often see in the works of Roman and Florentine
painters, and it will be outside the power of art, even
in the hands of Rubens and Titian, to make a picture
splendid and harmonious." There is some exaggeration
here, for Reynolds speaks to young students ; he wants
to underline the danger of trying to prove that his
rule is not without exceptions. It may be called a
rule, I think, because it is illustrated in the work of all
colourists. Let us then see how it appears in a picture
by Brangwyn.

We will choose from his colour exercises, rapid sketches
brushed off usually in a day, sometimes in two or three
sittings, each subject a complete orchestration, and often
with a crowd of figures in action, like "The Return of
the Sacred Flag from Mecca." This brilliant and joyous
sketch being too animated for description, we will take
the Rabelaisian fantasy called " Mars and Venus," of which
a colour-print is given here in little. It is a jeti cTesprit
on a classic fable, and note the composition and its colour
— this last, by the way, being richer in the original sketch,
of course. The contrasts between cold tints and warm
are exceedingly good : they sing, they have voices that
foil each other in interchanging effects. That blue in the
centre, set against yellow drapery in one place, and else-
where against orange and yellow fruit in an old brass
dish, is the coldest tint in the whole picture. Orange
and yellow, this time enlivened by deep ruby red, are
repeated in the figure behind Mars, a figure holding a
dark vase against the white shirt worn by that warrior,
who jokes as he trifles with an orange. I wish the

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

colour-print could give the full variety of flesh tints,
with their warm health set off by chill reflected lights ;
but no discord appears in this mechanical reproduction,
that takes some life from every part. Note particularly
the fundamental opposition between yellow and . black —
a thing loved by painters so different in all respects as
Turner and Rubens ; and if you add cold grey to any
warm tint in this sketch — to the yellow or the orange
hues, or to the notes of red — you will understand what
Reynolds meant.

Again, it was worth while to paint this fantasy if for
no other purpose than to show with ease the pulsation
of reflected light in the jeering face of Mars. Brangwyn's
treatment of reflected light is always vital, and we know
that modern painting differs from elder schools in its
more conscious liking for luminous reflections in shadows,
their tremulous gradations and their contrasts between
cold and warm hues. Ruskin never liked this innova-
tion, declaring that students — and many advanced masters
also — filled a shadow with so much reflection that it
looked as if some one had been walking around the
object with a candle. For all that, reflected light is
enchanted light ; it makes ugliness beautiful, it sends
colour to play in a fairyland of shades. Who does not
know its bewitching playfulness when it darts through
deep shadows like sudden hope flashing through minds
darkened by grief? Yet Ruskin went so far as to believe
that the Mediterranean coast lacked beauty because the
radiance of reflected sunshine permeated everywhere and
made each effect "too pale." As for quite modern art,
that studies fire at noon, and is dazzled by the flashes
94

Light and Colour

of day, it did not exist for Ruskin, as Mrs. Meynell
points out in her thoughtful and admirable study.'

Brangwyn, in another sketch, illustrated here, studies
reflected light under unusual difficulties. The subject
represents a by-street shop of household metal-work in
France. The principal figure is a consumptive-looking
down-at-heel in a brilliant green coat which is much too
large for him. Negligently, his back towards us, he holds
a big copper jug in his right hand, and with a sort of
cowering half-heartedness, his head bent, he listens to
directions from his master and mistress. In a moment
or two he will start off on his journey to some customer,
and then stop for a glass at the nearest cabaret. There
is a fragment of human wreckage inside that green coat.
And the master of the shop is equally typical in another
way. Light plays around his keen face ; with a tender-
ness peculiar to humble foreign craftsmen — it is rarely
seen in England — he holds in both hands a small coffee-
pot recently finished ; and one cannot imagine him in
any other clothes except his old white apron, his blue
trousers, the bickering sabots, and that well-worn cap,
which has pressed down his ears into a fixed position of
listening expectation. This fellow is a working crafts-
man all the year round, all day long ; and perhaps he
sleeps in his cap through fear of draughts from a
window that is never opened. His good wife, neat in
white and rose, stands almost in shadow, behind the
copper and brass vessels ; and other persons are seen
beyond her, against a wall dappled with sunshine. It
is a large picture, and see the skill with which that

' "John Ruskin," pp. 204-206. By Mrs. Meynell.

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

bright green coat is worked into a difficult colour
scheme. As to the still-life, the metal pots and pans,
their handling could not well be bettered, but a colour-
print cannot give their sparkle and reflected lights.

In other recent sketch-pictures character and intricate
illumination are studied together. There is one of "Card
Players" in a room. The setting is novel and good.
Under a sort of counter draped with cloth a woman and
a man sit in huddled attitudes absorbed in a game of
cards ; above them, lying at full length on the counter,
is a boy, who glances humorously at the man's cards,
while a lad below, finger on lip, whispers advice to the
female gambler, though she looks quite sharp enough
to protect her interests by unfair means. Near the boy
is another onlooker, a veteran gamester with round eyes
and a queer oval face having the alertness of a jack-
daw. The chiaroscuro is difficult, deep shadows giving
their own varying degrees of light to recesses of different
depths. The highest brilliance shines from a white
waistcoat worn by the male card-player, a part of whose
naked back is seen against it. Every part is brushed in
with joyous verve, and the shadows will not deepen with
age into a dark airlessness, as may happen to a good many
modern Dutch pictures.

By way of contrast I will mention now a large and
elaborate picture recently bought for the Johannesburg Art
Gallery. It w^as exhibited at the Academy in 1908; it has
for its subject "The Return from the Promised Land."
On a cloudy day of intense heat the spies with their
trophies of fruit pass over the crest of a gentle slope and
begin to go down hill. Great bunches of grapes, some
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yellow and others purple, swing from a pole carried by-
several of the men, each one of whom bears the weight
in a different manner, and shows in his attitude what sort
of workman he is. Every movement is excellent ; the chill
reflected lights, bluey and sudden, are managed with a
brave judgment ; and there is a certain large air of romance
in the swing and verve of these turbaned bearers of good
news. The colour-print gives all that a mechanical repro-
duction can give, and it is more than the best line-
engravings ever gave. Note the hands, how vital they
are, as in that unhappy man behind the throng who fears
that the pot balanced on his head will be upset by some
jostled movement among the grape-bearers. That plot of
trees on the left, forming a background interest with a note
of dark colour, is happy in design ; and away on our right,
under the hot grey sky, far beyond the main subject, is
a glimpse of the Promised Land. There are pleasant,
rhythmic contrasts between quietness and movement. A
small boy leads the way thoughtfully, with a stout
grumbler to keep him company ; this pretty idea sets off
the strained effort of each weight-bearer.

The treatment of values in this difficult picture is in
accordance with Brangwyn's method of giving only those
relations that are essential, merging the others into masses;
and the effect of this, excellent to-day, will be better still
ten years hence, for a binding tone will be given by the
daily alembic of air acting on good, unfidgeted paint.

Values in paint do not always bear the test of years.
They don't in the Caillebotte collection of French Im-
pressionists. Here, from most of the pictures, you may
learn that a great deal of attention may be given to
N 97

Frank 'Brangwyn and his IVork

subtleties of value that disappear when pigments darken
a little and get hard as stones. It is easy to be deceived
by the luscious and translucent sparkle of wet pigment out
of doors. The Caillebotte pictures are dead in their values
when compared with a water-colour by any English master,
and I venture to argue from this fact that the French
Impressionists tried to do overmuch in their minute
relations of colour, forgetting that light and air and heat
act and react on finished oil-painting day after day
through the year, toning their pale values and deepening
the half-tones and shades. This tells with the greatest
disadvantage on those pictures which are strung up into
high keys — light upon light, in values subtly orchestrated
into intricate harmonies. Let time add a minute but
uneven toning to this delicate colour-craft, and the first
charm may disappear altogether. I cannot believe, for
instance, that Manet was so blind to the effect of bad,
airless greens that his painting of " The Balcony " when
newly finished had shutters and iron-railings as jarringly
out of tone as they are now. Certain values have been
wiped out by the years, and to-day those green railings
and shutters are vulgar discords. Painters need a
prophetic vision : they must see into the future and fore-
know the action of daylight on pigments.

Yet very few persons notice these things. Talkers on
art often speak of values as if values were as easy to prove
or disprove as definite sums in arithmetic. " These values
are true," " these values are false," they say ; but when
we press for common sense, asking whether the epithets
"false" and "true" are dictated by nature or by each
painter's attitude toward his subjects and its treatment,
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Light and Colour

we find that the criticism is just a matter of verbal
fanaticism. There is ever a type of critic who is tempted
to believe that a remark must be true if its look be acute
and specific. To vow that a picture is false in values,
or that the values are incoherent, is very simple to write,
and its aim is to kill like a revolver shot fired at point-
blank range. Brangwyn, like every other painter of note,
has been shot at by such phrases, for in recent years the
word "values" has been overworked, often with many
perversities of judgment. Let us then see what the
public is to understand by values or relations in painting.
Mauclair gives the Impressionist ideas on this troubled
question. After explaining that we see only colours, and
that we arrive at forms — namely, the outlines of colour —
by our perception of the different tinted surfaces appealing
to our eyes, he says : —

" The idea of distance, of perspective, of volume is
given us by darker or lighter colours : this idea is what
is called in painting the sense of values. A value is the
degree of dark or of light intensity that permits our eyes
to comprehend that one object is further or nearer than
another. And as painting is not and cannot be an
imitatio)i of nature " — despite Monet's hay-ricks, with
their efforts to show the time of day like clocks — " can-
not be an imitation of nature, but merely her artificial
interpretation, since it has at its disposal only two out
of three dimensions, the values are the only means that
remain for expressing depth on a flat surface."

So far, so good. But this explanation skips the main
point of all : namely, the fact that values in nature are
infinite even in single objects like trees ; and besides this,

Frank 'Brangwyn and his IVork

they belong to the scale of nature, and nature within her
scale is marvellously abundant, working with multitudinous
details on each plane of her compositions. Art, on the
other hand, has canvases of different sizes ; upon these,
whether large or small, an illusion of air and light and
space and scale must be achieved ; and this cannot be done
without falsifying all the minor values observed in nature.
No good painter tries to represent even one quarter of
what he sees distinctly.^ His aim always is to get away
from profuse details, forming simple planes and masses,
and omitting all values that are not essential to his work
as a beautiful thing of its own kind. Our pre-Raphaelites
wished to represent the organic all ol natural fact, striving
to give in paint infinities of detail, as if portraits of in-
imitable things, all crowded into one picture, could never
be too abundant or too wearisome. We should not see
a beard if our eyes enabled us to count the hairs in it.
Nor do we see a brick wall when we begin to count
the courses.

The same principle is true of values. A picture with
too many values is chaotic : and as for truth and falsehood
in this matter of relations, they depend on results. A

' Theodore Rousseau said : " What ' finishes ' a picture is not the quantity of details ; it is
the truth of the whole. If your picture contains exquisite detail, equal from one end of t>e
canvas to the other, the spectator will look at it with indifterence. Everything interesting
him alike, nothing will interest him very much. There will be no limit. Your picture
may prolong itself indefinitely ; you will never reach the end of it. You will never have
finished. The whole is the only thing that is finished in a picture. Strictly speakhif;,
you might do -without colour, but you can do iiothing wthout harmony." Millet shared
these views, which have much in common with the dicta of Poussin. " The singular
application bestowed on the study of colour," said Poussin, "is an obstacle that prevents
people from attaining the real aim of painting ; and the man who attaches himself to the
main thing — style — will acquire by practice a fine enough manner of painting." But views
on art are justified by one thing only — great achievement.
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painter chooses a key, and works in accordance with it ; if
his effects give pleasure the values are right in art, and
represent the painter in a given mood. This applies very
particularly to Frank Brangwyn, who paints at a white
heat and passes from dark pictures to sunny effects as his
feelings change from day to day. Many other men, as the
Paris Salon has proved during the last thirty years, look to
fashion for their values and their colour-schemes, and then
try to attract unusual attention by starting a vogue at
variance with the accepted one. Cottet did this when his
first Breton dramas, sombre and gloomy, were sent to
exhibitions filled with sunlit pictures. Changing fashions
cannot help modern art to find its proper evolution ; and
we should keep our greatest admiration for those men who
are painters not of modes but of moods, like Sargent and
Legros and Brangwyn.

There is one thing more that belongs to this chapter ; it
affects painters in their relation to all critics, whether lay or
professional : it is a fact that no two persons in this world
get from the same things the same impressions of colour.
That is to say, the colour-sense in man is as various as the
expression in human eyes or the shape of human foreheads
and noses and mouths. Even in a life-class, under the
most rigorous of school conventions, there is always some-
thing peculiar in each student's preferences of tint. It
follows, then, that the colours which a painter sees while at
work are not those which we see when we pass our several
opinions on his work ; and if there is any defect in the
colour-sense of an onlooker it prompts some injustice or
other to the picture. How rarely complete that sense has
been in the history of art is proved by the small number

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Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

of great colourists to be found in the winnowed harvest of
masterpieces ; and this being so among painters, consider
how very fallible the colour-sense must be in ordinary
persons. Yet the very thing in art that ordinary persons
feel that they have a right to speak about is colour. On
that one thing they have never the least self-distrust. But
this, after all, is not the main point. The main point is
that we criticise, not a painter's colour, but the varying
impressions that each of us receives from his colour ; and it
is only by noticing whether these impressions in a great
number of cases are favourable or unfavourable that we
can decide whether the painter is likely to be ranked
permanently among the rare ones who are called fine
colourists.

This being so, Brangwyn awaits the final verdict that
the revisions of time pass on all born painters. Is he a fine
colourist? There are a great many judges in Europe and
America who say "Yes"; and among his most ardent
devotees we find painters and men who went through a
long and practical training before they wrote a word of
criticism. On the other side we have two facts : Brangwyn
is a painter of unusual force, and powerful art does not
attract the gentler sex as a rule ; and the opinions of women,
like those from effeminate minds in men, count for much in
a final verdict. Reynolds, with his buoyant virility, put
Rubens among the greatest masters of colour, while Ruskin
omitted his name ; and women support Ruskin because
Rubens has little to offer them in the way of domestic
sentiment. It is odd that women, who in life keep their
greatest admiration for courage and stalwart manhood,
choose the feminine graciousness of a Luini rather than the
1 02

Light and Colour

conquering majesty of style in a Michael Angelo. Remem-
bering these points, we cannot predict what England will
think of Brangwyn fifty years hence. She has turned from
William Etty, who had some of the finest qualities that
a painter needs ; and she returned to Romney long before
she rediscovered the less variable charms of Raeburn, a
manlier and often a finer painter. Still, happily, there is
no need for us to look so far ahead : present art is present
enjoyment, and that is all we need. Brangwyn attracts me
in all his moods ; and I will venture to say of his tech-
nique, his colour and handling, what has been said of
Reynolds : " He rejoices in showing you his skill ; and
those of you who succeed in learning what painter's work
really is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter — that
highest laughter which springs of pure delight, in watching
the fortitude and fire of a hand which strikes forth its will
upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the
sea.

103

CHAPTER VII

SOME OTHER CHARACTERISTICS

A S I have read with care the notices on Brangwyn

/\ that have appeared during the last eighteen years,

/~\ I know very well what characteristics have been

mentioned most frequently, both in England and

in foreign countries. There are two concerning which the

very same things have been said hundreds of times, and

always — yes, I think I may venture to say always — without

reference to the painter's intention. Brangwyn's effects

have been likened to those in tapestries or in stained-glass

windows, or to those in Eastern carpets ; and complaint

has been made that his perspective is often too decorative,

giving an insufficient depth of space filled with air.

In examining these frequent criticisms we must bear in
mind that they are written from the standpoint of men who
have lost touch with fresco-painting and who give their
whole attention to the study of easel-pictures. It is equally
certain that Brangwyn, after passing away from his work
as a marine painter, began, consciously or unconsciously, to
prepare himself for the great mural decorations that now
occupy the principal part of his time and thought. Even in
"The Buccaneers" he is not a maker of easel-pictures, the
style being larger and more synthetic ; and this reminds us
that William Morris made no mistake when he discerned,
even in the boy's first studies, that he had come upon a
104

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Some other Characteristics

genius for design and handicraft. Brangwyn's ideas as a
painter are not bounded by a gold frame ; they belong to
the ampler and more difficult conventions of applied art —
that is to say, of art applied to the ornamentation of some
surface that will bear enrichment without harm to its value
as a structural feature. For instance, if walls are to be
decorated in a proper manner, there must be unity between
them and the paintings that form a part of their surface,
otherwise the walls will lose their look of flat strength and
become unlike a support in architecture. Some of the base
decorators of the eighteenth century went to great pains to
give a pictorial perspective to their mural work, with the
result that people seemed to be looking through the walls
at some distant landscape. They forgot that when a picture
is framed and hung up, it is accepted as a thing detached
from the wall behind it, so we are willing to take pleasure
in its far-going perspective, its illusion of disappearing dis-
tances. True art in any kind of fresco work is within the
domain of architecture ; and for this reason perspective is
suggested in such a way that it does not make holes in the
wall. We look into and tJiroiigli an easel-picture ; we look
at and o)i a mural decoration, and expect it to be apt for its
purpose.

At a time when painting has degenerated into a mere
ornament to be put in gilt frames against walls, it is inevit-
able that onlookers should be at first worried by any painter
whose feelings for art are decorative, not pictorial ; and
Brangwyn's native delight in the larger aspects of design,
when considered as a servant of architecture, has been de-
veloped by his liking for the most varied kinds of applied
ornamentation. He has collected fine examples of the best
o 105

Frank 'Brangwyn and his JVork

handicraft, ranging from Persian rugs to Old English fur-
niture, and from Japanese metal-work and screens to photo-
graphs of the most beautiful frescoes. It is possible that,
unconsciously, he has taken hints of colour from Eastern
work, his method being one of contrast, plots of colour
being happily placed in juxtaposition ; but, howev^er that
may be, I look upon his easel-pictures as a preparation for
the very difficult problems that he has solved in mural
paintings.

I have already hinted at another characteristic — namely,
his treatment of the volume and the weight of things that
he represents. It is not my contention, of course, that his
touch is invariably responsive to subtle variations of light-
ness and solidity ; but if you compare any of his finest
work with representative paintings or etchings by other
leading artists of to-day, I believe you will find that he
is often more sensitive than they are to values of bulk
and mass. To take examples from among living men
would be invidious in a book of this kind, but everybody
must have noticed how in many pictures by Millet the
surface quality of the paint is too much the same in all
parts, as if solid ground and worn clothes were equally
heavy, as if tremulous leaves and moving clouds had no
differences of weight. Millet himself became conscious of
this, for in some of his last pictures he tried with great
pains literally to construct a variety of textures. With
BrangAvyn it is instantaneous feeling that leads him to the
best results. His handicraft is never too light in all parts,
as happens pretty often in the airy technique of Corot :
nor too uniform in volume and strength, as Constable is
too frequently. There are skies by Constable that we
io6

Some other Characteristics

accept just because they are painted in sky tints, though
they are as heavy in substance as the ground bearing
great trees. This would be seen at once if the sky tints
were altered into earthen hues, every cloud being repre-
sented in paler or in darker tones.

Where painters go wrong most often is in their treat-
ment of architecture. Many do not feel either the upward
flight of Gothic or the great downward pressure of Classic
buildings. It is no uncommon thing to notice that their
attention is concentrated on the upper parts of a house or
a church, and that their touch grows feebler as it gets
nearer to the solid earth, upon which the whole structure
rests. Now Brangwyn, as a rule, like Turner, has a keen
liking and care for the spirit and the weight of architecture.
He can build with his brush, revealing the horizontal mass
of Classic and the hopeful, alert spring of Gothic. He does
not construct his buildings from the roof downwards, like
many a painter whom I could name ; he rises up from the
ground with a mason's delight in a secure foundation.
Mcryon had the same happy gift, and so had Piranesi.
You will find the same thing in Girtin, and also in the
exquisite pencil drawings by William Twopcny, who could
suggest in a few rapid touches the crumbled weight of any
object ravaged by the hand of time, from a fragment of
old wood-carving to a cathedral church.

On the other hand, if you compare the architecture
in Impressionist pictures, going from Ldon Dufrenoy to
Pissarro's "Boulevard Montmartre" and "The Boildieaux
Bridge at Rouen," you will see that Dufrenoy is apt to
be flimsy, as if he had but very little appreciation for the
witchery of design in brick and stone. Modern English

107

Frank ^rangwyn and his JVork

pictures also are often very weak from this standpoint,
while Brangvvyn will delight you with the cross-barred
airy look of a scaffolding or with the dead-weight of a
derelict ironclad lying heaved-over on the sand. That he
should construct ships admirably is not surprising, while
his interpretation of architecture is, for he served no
apprenticeship in that art. This may be a question of
heredity, since his father was an architect.

Volume and weight are very difficult to convey in a
few sketched lines. Rowlandson, with a few touches of a
pencil and a wash or two of water-colour, could put a fat
man erect on his feet, and you feel that the fatness really
is heavy, and not blown out with air like the false stomach
of a stageland Falstaff. Brangvvyn has the same gift. His
most rapid sketches have life and bulk ; there's a body
in every suit of clothes and a feeling for growth in his
roughly indicated trees. There are times when this envi-
able quality of his work is carried to excess (at least, so it
seems to me), for I remember certain dark masses of trees
against the sky that look too ponderous ; but no artist has
ever been perfect in this most delicate and difficult art
of showing by touch varieties of substance and weight,
all within the envelope of atmospheric illusion.

It is like violin playing, where bow and fingers and
strings answer at once to the changeful spirit of the music,
giving infinite variations of expressive volume in sounds.
Emotion passes continually from the music to the player,
and thence from him to the instrument — emotion having
an ordered sequence : and something akin to this happens
when the inspiration from external nature influences a
painter, whose eyes and whose touch pass (let us say) from
io8

Some other Characteristics

an unfathomable sky to a range of distant hills, thence
through a valley of trees to a group of figures in the fore-
ground. In every part of this picture the values of weight
differ, and the painter's touch is called upon to be in
emotional sympathy with each part. Yet few artists have
been alert and wide-awake to all that this orchestration of
weight-values means in painting. Critics, too, pass over
it in silence, as a rule, and the public is content to judge
pictures by their general aspects.

It is easy to tell a true e.xpert by the way in which he
examines a painting. He studies it at first with his eyes
near to the canvas, so as to learn by heart the peculiarities
of brush-craft ; these are as interesting to him as the facial
expression of a great actor when seen through an opera-
glass. Then he moves backward till he sees the whole
picture in focus, and he giv^es as much attention to values
of weight as to values of tone. The surface look of a
Brangwyn picture is indescribable — swift, deft, impetuous,
ruthless touches here, gliding touches there, plots of colour
contrasted with spaces of free, simple painting, and never
a thing that seems costive. Great emotional energy is
shown throughout ; and you learn that when a passage
here and there is not equal in felicity to the others, it
arises, not from any carelessness, but because an inspira-
tion spent itself and could not be recalled. For painting
of this kind is like the acting of Edmund Kean as de-
scribed by spectators ; we cannot expect that its energy in
every work will be equally inspired throughout.

If, now, we turn to one of Brangwyn's recent pictures,
choosing "Wine," exhibited this year at the Royal Academy,
we shall be able to follow the orchestration of weight-values.

109

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

What is the subject ? A rustic Bacchus in the act of
drinking from a small bowl the juice of crushed grapes.
He is garlanded with grapes ; other bunches lie in his lap
on a blue drapery ; his great torso, wonderfully modelled
with very simple variations of tint, is naked ; a pale scarf,
yellow-green in colour, is tied negligently around his neck ;
and with his left arm cast about a huge green vase-shaped
bottle, he waits while his companions fill another bowl
with liquor. There is a glimpse of sky, kept grey and
unobtrusive. The weight -values here range from the
greens within greens of a transparent bottle to the full fat
skins of purple grapes and white ; thence to firm muscle
and flesh in the sunburnt attendants, and on to the happy
Bacchus, whose torso is that of a fattening man who takes
his ease, and hates movement. It is not the transparent-
looking torso that Jordaens gave to his Bacchus ; there is
substance here, for this voluptuary is not yet ripe, he is on
his way to Falstaffhood. A fine picture, alive with a lusty
zest ; it killed every neighbour in a big room, showing that
there is justice in wine.

It is difficult to speak of weight-values in their relation
to water, because water is enchanted, having moods so
multitudinous that no one can .study them all. Turner
knew more about this phase of art than any painter, for
his sympathy was great enough to embrace the widest
extremes, ranging, for instance, from storm-waves at sea
to rippling brooks, and from Venetian canals to the little
round cups worn in rocks by the eddying of river water
through countless ages. Stanfield was another master of
seas and rivers. " He was sea-bred, knew what a ship
was, and loved it ; knew what rocks and waves were, and

I lO

Some other Characteristics

wrought out their strength and sway with steadfast will.
One work of Stanfield's alone presents us with as much
concentrated knowledge of sea and sky as, diluted, would
have lasted any one of the old masters his life " (Ruskin).
It is odd, but British marine painters are few and far
between, and therefore not fully representative of our
insular position and naval power. Monamy, Brooking,
Powell, Serres, Anderson, Scott, lead us on towards
George Chambers, E. W. Cooke, O. W. Brierly, James C.
Hook, John Brett, Henry Moore, Colin Hunter, W. L.
Wyllie, Edwin Hayes, C. Napier Hemy, Walter Shaw,
T. B. Hardy, J. R. Reid, Stanhope Forbes, Somerscales,
Frank Brangwyn, and others. If we except his treatment
of waves in a riot of movement, the waters that Brangwyn
loves best are those in the Near East, and those in our
heavy grey Thames when smoke soars up into a pageant
of the day's commercial work. On certain days there is a
wonderful fantasy of design in London's smoke over the
great river, and Brangwyn feels the charm of it more than
any other painter. It appeals to him as a symbol of power,
of human toil and invention, just as the river itself is in
a way humanised by the waste products from bankside
industries that thicken and sully the tides. There is poetry
in all labour, and Brangwyn is in touch with most of its
manifestations.

I cannot say with all, because he is not often drawn
towards the sinister and tragic aspects of life and toil,
like Legros and Meunier. His attitude to industrialism
is that of a sportsman towards football and hunting.
He accepts as inevitable the hazards that dangers bring;
loves action for its own tonic, and sees no reason why

1 1 1

Frank "Rrangwyri arid his Jf^ork

his workmen should not phiy their part with spirit and
be free from repining. So they carry their loads alertly,
bear the heat from molten metal as if it were nothing
more than April sunshine, or make a railway cutting
with as much zeal as they would show if they were on
their way to El Dorado. It is like the spirit of Rubens —
a manly optimism, a generous joy in the glow and health
of energetic muscles at work. There is a strong pulse
in this art, and a bracing circulation. I love Meunier,
Millet, Legros ; I respect Degroux and admire Leon
Frederic ; Cottet appeals to me greatly ; but not one of
these pioneers of industrial art has the observant cheer-
fulness that Brangwyn has shown many times in his
bold outlook on the world as it is to-day. Since life
is war, let us think it better to fight and lose than never
to fight at all. Since death will come one day, why wear
crape as a habit, and keep in our thoughts an unending
supply of black-edged notepaper? Good heavens! If
laughter be at all difficult, surely that difficulty should
urge us on into laughter ; for easy things are the least
worth doing. This, so I believe, is the spirit that underlies
most of the industrial phases of Brangwyn's work.

Detractors complain and ask for " sentiment," a cheap
quality indeed in English pictures ; one critic going so
far as to declare — in the Westniinstey Gazette, April 22,
1906 — that " Mr. Brangwyn has no more sentiment than
would lie on a threepenny piece." Libels of this blatant
kind ought to be subject to immediate public rebuke.
When a writer in the Press forgets that it is impossible
to paint without emotion and that every form of emotion
is a form of sentiment, protests should be made in the
112

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Some other Characteristics

most public manner. There is as much sentiment in the
fiercest jealousy of Othello as in his tender love. Senti-
ment in art is just a mood of aesthetic feeling, whether
tender or vehement, pathetic or joyous, contemplative or
heroic. And when Brangwyn is judged by this principle
of genuine criticism, he stands out as a master of sentiment
as varied as he is manly.

Though he takes no morbid pleasure in suffering,
he has touched more than once the heart of the greatest
sorrows, bringing us face to face with that dread Visitor
who claims every year from mankind 40,000,000 lives —
a whole world of friends and neighbours. Death is the
subject of "The Venetian Funeral," chosen as a colour-
print for this book. It is a noble picture, powerfully
rhythmic in design, rugged, masterful, painted with
tremendous vigour, and having just that degree of pathos
that a great sorrow can make known in a public thorough-
fare without loss of dignity, without moving onlookers
with a feeling of unpleasant self-consciousness. The figure
of the chief mourner is quite monumental ; and the spiritual
drama expressed by his attitude and face has a kindness
of reserve that few painters feel and represent. It is a
charity to veil tragic emotions ; grief must have its own
mysteries.

" The Venetian Funeral " was seen at the Royal
Academy in 1906 — the Red Academy, so called because
the walls were dappled all over with scarlet coats,
crimson dresses, vermilion draperies, and so forth. In
the reddest room of all we found Brangwyn's picture,
and its cool, decorative treatment was so much at odds
with its trivial neighbours that no one could appreciate it
p 113

Frank "Brangwyn and his J Fork

justly. Who could understand Grieg's " Funeral March "
if a score of brass bands played the most recent popular
tunes?

Many notices appeared, and I have chosen two
giving contrasts of opinion. The first is from the Daily
Telegraph: "Mr. Frank Brangwyn's canvas, 'A Venetian
Funeral ' (No. 532), is conceived on a still larger scale than
his ' Wine Sellers ' at the New Gallery, and handled with
the same tremendous breadth and dash. The subject here
chosen is, it must be owned, strangely unsuited to the bold
and even turbulent form of decorative treatment which
Mr. Brangwyn — not without striking results from his own
point of view — brings to bear upon it. A boat-load of
mourning Venetian folk, pioneered by brawny boatmen,
not of the gondolier tribe, is momentarily arrested in a
side canal, and faces the spectator at close quarters,
revealing many phases of woe, expressed with a tragic,
not a sordid, realism. Yet such a subject must be still
further generalised and removed from the actual, if it is
fitly to serve as the foundation for monumental decora-
tion. A Puvis de Chavannes would have given us
'Mourning' as a pendant to 'Rejoicing' — the sacrament
of Death balancing the sacrament of Marriage ; a Besnard
might possibly have succeeded, as he has, indeed, at the
Ecole de Pharmacie, in adapting such a subject to decora-
tive uses without loss of its modernity and its poignancy.
If Mr. Brangwyn has failed, he has failed most honourably
— in setting himself a technical and spiritual problem that
admits of no perfect solution. His design is powerfully
rhythmic and of a rugged grandeur, some of these figures
of mourners, taken by themselves, being among the noblest
114.

Some other Characteristics

things in an exhibition, to little in which the epithet
' noble ' can properly be applied."

The critic of the Pall Mall Gazette was less thoughtful,
being occupied with himself, not with the picture. He
said : " One need not consider the incident, for the mosaic
is too conscious to admit of pathos, and humanity is
eliminated. Here one puts one's finger on the difference
between Brangwyn and Veronese, and recognises the gap
between the less and the greater." But the work is a
Brangwyn, not a Veronese, and why is it that editors do
not keep watch and ward over their writers on art. To say
that humanity is eliminated from "The Venetian Funeral"
is a very evident slander on a fine picture. An artist
cannot do more than represent manly pathos ; it is beyond
his power to endow his judges with a capacity to feel the
difference between good pathos and bad. True pathos in
art has the dignity of self-respect ; it does not blab out
all its secrets to heedless chance-comers. "The Venetian
Funeral " is not without blemishes, but as a picture of
sunshine and shadow, of joy and sorrow, of mirth and
death, it is a remarkable work, and would hold its own
anywhere. It now hangs in the Leeds Art Gallery, and
people find that something new is to be discovered in it
every day.

We pass on now to another characteristic — namely, to
Brangwyn's liking for crowds. The figures in his pictures
seem to crave for companionship. This may be too evident
at times ; I feel now and again that the composition is too
full ; but it is the privilege of strong men to give over
much, as if nature compelled them to vie with her pro-
digality. Millet never ventured to compose with many

Frank "Brangwyn and his JJ^ork

figures, for his energy was of the kind that concentrates
on a few objects. Whistler, too, achieved much with
little, for he had not enough emotional endurance to do
more with much. It is only the men who have some
affinity of temperament with Rubens that long for many
characters in the dramatic design of their art.

Invention is another trait in the work of Frank
Brangwyn. You will find it ever)-where, and always with
a distinctive character. This fact being particularly evi-
dent, I will note only one phase of it, asking you to study
with care his treatment of clothes and draperies. There
is much variety here, but you will see very often that folds
and creases have a special air of their own, modelled with
a square brush, and having little attractive nodules. I
am sure you must know the frieze-like picture entitled
" Charity," which, when seen at the New Gallery in 1900,
was very much liked because of its four qualities : quaint
and graceful costumes, a felicitous grouping of figures
under a low horizontal pole, contrasts between crippled
age and youth, and a subtle blend of colour having a rare
beauty — strange modulated blues, pale russets and pearly
greys, faint carnations, and crimsons. A Lady Bountiful
in a blue robe, with ailing children gathered around her,
gives alms to a couple of old men, one halt, the other
blind, while a mother awaits her turn, carrying tenderly
in her arms a little nude baby. The draperies are all made
in the factory of Brangwyn's mind, and all are good. The
old fellow with a crutch under his arm is naked nearly
to the waist ; there a heavy garment gathers itself into a
girdle of folds and falls down about the legs in uncertain
lines of light and shade very suggestive of physical weak-
116

Some other Characteristics

ness. The children are all charming : with bare necks,
their light dresses gathered in about the hips by a belt, and
full sleeves of a rustling softness. The note of optimism
is found in every part, for this charity is given and accepted
in the same spirit — with joy and without parade. Grati-
tude does not come to those who expect it and wait
for it.

This decoration was not understood by a good many
critics, who looked for an easel-picture and found a work
to ornament the surface of a wall. The Athenceiim re-
gretted the painter's "abandonment of that original and
masculine style of art which he adopted in his delinea-
tion of the tragedies of maritime events — burials at sea,
storm-smitten ships, and the ocean's wars " — things which
had to cross the Channel before they were justly appreciated
between 1889 and 1894. It is distance of time that lend.s
enchantment to good things in a painter's art.

117

CHAPTER VIII

DECORATIVE PAINTING

IT is beyond doubt that Frank Brangvvyn at his best
is a master of design, who delights to be in close
alliance with applied art, its practical needs and its
ideals of ornamentation. His work, considered
separately and as a whole, comes within the great province
of decoration where painting is obedient to an ordered
scheme of colour and line required by some architectural
setting ; obedient in a big and aspiring way, as music bears
obedience to counterpoint and harmony, or as buildings
answer to the control of their sites and rational plans.
Brangwyn has never looked upon painting as a maker of
toys and trifles for an incalculable market where whims
and fashions vary from year to year. Temperament,
training, inborn gifts, helped by opportunities, have given
to his style as a modern of the moderns one thing that
allies it to the Old Masters, for all painters of high rank
used to be connoisseurs of design in all ways.

That is a fact to be underlined. It is true of times
much later than those of Diirer and Holbein. Even
among Italians of the decadence, among the Rossos and
Primatices, whose taste was often doubtful, you will find
an imagination full of life that creates decoratively, and
so it is different from the tamer imagination that finds
a home in most easel-pictures of the present day. Fran(^ois
ii8

decorative T^aintino

Millet stayed for hours before the Primatices and Rossos,
and called them his " kind oriants." He admired their
debonair brave skill, the ease with which they built up their
big inventions; and because he came upon similar qualities
of creative decoration in certain French painters of the
seventeenth century, he gave his heart to Le Brun and
Jouvenet, whom he thought very strong ; to Lesueur,
"one of the great souls of the French school," and to the
noble Poussin, " who is the prophet, the wise man and
philosopher of it, and also the most eloquent arranger of
a scene." ^

I mention Millet here not only because he was a fore-
runner of Brangwyn in democi-atic art, but because his
genius was sometimes decorative rather than pictorial ;
he designed, giving a large air of ornamental authority
to some of his most successful work. Millet, too, like
Brangwyn, is not much concerned with what may be called
the portraiture of natural facts ; he likes to express the
type very strongly, the type being, to his mind, the most
powerful truth, because it represents many facts and much
observation welded into a generic symbol. The French
peasant was far more attractive to Millet than a French
peasant, just as the Flemish collier or puddler held the
imagination of Constantin Meunier. And this transfor-
mation of individuals into types counts for a very great
deal in all art work that can be called monumental, or
architectural, or mural and decorative.

The eye, when once it has learnt to look for ornament,
rather than for isolated natural truth, finds the type every-
where : in the distinctive foliage of each species of tree, in the

' See " Romain Ronald," pp. 1.19-150. Duckworth & Co.

119

Frank 'Brangwyn and his JVo7'k

surging movement of water under the pressure of tempest
winds, in the peculiar character of face that belongs to some
profession or study or handicraft, and so forth. The type
dominates life and nature. Yet in easel-pictures, as a rule,
we find portraiture of things seen rather than the decorative
vision that resolves the concrete and individual into the
typical, fleshed with action and power. Easel-painting —
that is, the making of pictures for no definite purpose, to
be put somewhere, anywhere, by any person — is a second-
rate form of art that enfeebles the mind and gives us
infinitely too much every year. If it were stopped for a
whole decade there would still remain in the markets far
too many of its modern productions.

That a strong man should pass his life as a maker of
painted toys, never knowing what chance-buyers will like
them, never connecting his work with a given position in
a room — all this, to my mind, is pathetic in its want of
dignity. The rooms of England vary in every possible
way, yet easel-painters plod on and on as if their pictures
would suit any light in any home. Not one of them has
gone even to the pains of asking what is the average size of
the long walls in houses of a different type. This could be
learnt if we tabulated the facts collected from the varying
experience of a hundred architects ; and it would be useful
to know which pictures in an exhibition were intended for
villas of a given size and rent, which for country houses
having walls of a given area, and so on. As it is, easel-
painters go their own way in a freedom of inconsequent
trifling ; and very often they try to show contempt for those
whose gifts and aims are decorative and architectural.

We see, then, that there are two categories of painters,

I20

SANTA MARIA DELLA
SALUTE, VENICE.
From an Oil-Painting in the
Welli?igton Gallery, New Zealand.

^Decorative T^ainting

and that the greater of the two does not work at haphazard,
preferring to fit his schemes for some known purpose in a
home or in a public building. A painter of this kind is
never seen to proper advantage until his pictures are ex-
hibited in the places and positions and lights for which they
are destined ; and it is always easy to know whether his
aims are ornamental in a right way, not merely pictorial.
We have only to ask ourselves a few questions. Does the
design fit its place and suit its material ? Is it in scale with
its surroundings, or too big or too small ? Is it in harmony
with itself? Does it enrich the surface of that wall, or does
it look like a hole or window? Some easel-painters can
bear the test of these questions ; they are at ease in mural
decoration, like Mr. Sargent and Mr. Abbey ; but now that
picture-shows are markets for heterogeneous aims jumbled
all up together, few men think it worth while to pay
attention to design or to think with care of any point
outside their canvases and gilt frames.

Brangwyn from the first has been a very marked ex-
ception ; and we have seen that a good many writers
continue to find fault with him because his bold work
is not merely pictorial, but decorative, and therefore in
keeping with art as applied to walls and their orna-
mentation. A good many of his pictures are very well
fitted for public galleries, while others ought to be
framed within the panelling of walls. Indeed, though
a good Brangwyn has a great effect and charm when
it is hung up as a picture, it would look still better
were it framed structurally as a mural decoration. Even
his paintings of still-life are beautiful in a decorative
way, and should be set in the woodwork of wainscoted

Q 121

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

halls and billiard-rooms. As to the museum pieces, their
merit has been recognised by museums in many towns.
"The Return from the Promised Land" has gone to
Johannesburg, and the "Mars and Venus" to Dublin;
Glasgow has "The Funeral at Sea," and Southport "The
Slave Market"; "St. Simeon Stylites" hangs in Venice,
and " The Baptism of Christ " at Stuttgart ; the National
Gallery of New South Wales, at Sydney, owns "The
Scoffers " (a scattered rabble of Moors jibing at a captive
Spanish general before they kill him) ; at Prague you will
find a picture of Turkish fishermen, at Munich a noble
view of Assisi ; Barcelona owns " The Wine Shop," the
Luxembourg has "Trade on the Beach" and a delightful
water-colour, "A Moorish Well," and many other
galleries have one apiece, like Chicago and Pittsburg.
In Leeds we find a series of Brangwyns — the "Venetian
Funeral " and five labour panels, representing weavers,
potters, blacksmiths, workers in steel, and navvies, all
characteristic.

A few critics in England have long recognised and
admired the real bent of Brangwyn's genius. There is
Mr. Charles Holme, founder and editor of The Studio —
a magazine of world-wide reputation, which has kept in
touch with Brangwyn's work from the first number, pub-
lished in 1893, and containing the first part of a letter by
Brangwyn on Spain as a sketching ground. Next, there
are Mr. George Moore, Mr. M. H. Spielmann, Mr. Little,
Mr. Haldane Macfall, Mr. P. G. Konody, the late Gleeson
White, the late R. A. M. Stevenson, Mr. F. Rinder, Mr.
Laurence Binyon, Mr. Claude Phillips, Mr. Baldry, Mr. F.
Rutter, and Mr. Selwyn Image, Slade Professor at O-xford.
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T^ecorative T^ainting

Mr. Image has known Brangwyn for twenty-seven years,
watching his progress from the first efforts. He says : —

"That this virile and original artist should have at-
tained his admirable position is a matter for congratulation,
but assuredly it is no matter for surprise to those of us
who knew him as a boy. I remember, in those early days,
with what astonishment I used to watch him covering large
canvases with bold and deftly-painted designs, drawn
mostly from his intimate acquaintance with seafaring and
river life. His natural facility with the brush, his natural
instinct for handling pigment, seemed to me in those
days for a student the most remarkable I knew of. Do
not let me be misunderstood. I am speaking of Mr.
Brangwyn's natural instinct for laying on pigment with
a brush, and I would set emphasis on the epithet ' natural.'
If his studies and pictures in this boyish stage had many
remarkable qualities to commend them, it would be pre-
posterous to deny that they also had many faults. . . .
But to be able to lay on oil-colours as he, a mere boy, laid
them on, was to show a power many full-grown artists
would have envied ; and the point is that in Mr. Brangwyn
this ability was by way of nature, for of direct teaching and
assiduous training he had then practically nothing at all.
At any rate, it was this abnormal gift in him that first
attracted me personally to his work. It seemed to me at
the time so unique that I could not doubt it would carry
him through to great things by-and-by. He would settle
down gradually to severer study. He would not let this
facility of the brush content him and run away with him.
His strong accompanying sense of designing in broad
masses would more and more assert itself, and demand

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Frank "Rrangwyn and his JP^ork

from him an austerer insistence upon form. As the design
and the form grew, the colour too would grow purer and
more brilliant. And so, beyond all question, it has come
to pass. . . ."

Mr. Selwyn Image finds decoration in all phases
of Brangwyn's art : —

"I have just spoken of Mr. Brangwyn's sense and power
of designing in broad masses — it was as characteristic
of him when he was a bcQ^inner as it is characteristic of
him to-day. And undoubtedly it is this massive de-
signing which gives its immediate distinction to his
. . . pictures of fruit, vegetables, and the like. These,
in their way, are as impressive as his pictures of more
important subjects. Apart from the subject and its
suggestiveness, one would as lief have this artist's
presentation of a heap of melons or a bundle of onions
as his painting of a group of figures, even in some
heroic or moving human incident. Nor in this fine
treatment of these comparatively unimportant objects
does he attain his impressiveness by any forced or undue
means. Under proper artistic conditions he is as true
to the obvious appearances of nature as a man can be.
Any simple spectator, that is to say, would be as
readily receptive of his onions and melons as of the
onions and melons of William Hunt himself. To use a
natural expression, they are as like the things as like
can be. Towards the attainment of this desirable end
(for desirable it is that an artist's appeal should reach
as far as possible), two qualities in Mr. Brangwyn's
still-life pieces especially contribute — his clear definition
of forms, and his rich, luscious colour."
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Again : —

" That the emphasis laid by the English pre-
Raphaelites on detail and the intensity of local colour
was in some ways healthy and valuable, is not to be
denied. Equally, that the emphasis laid by the later
Impressionists on atmospheric effects of colour, pure and
vivid, was in some ways healthy and valuable, is not
to be denied. But in the art of landscape-painting the
doctrines of the pre-Raphaelites and of the Impressionists
did not make for largeness, impressiveness, and dignity —
did not make for what one means by Design ; and in
landscape, as in every other form of art, it is Design
that counts permanently for more than anything else.
Now, whatever other qualities Mr. Brangwyn's land-
scapes, large or small, elaborated or slight, may possess
or lack, this quality of Design they have pre-eminently.
. . . One notes also that it is in such masses as are
characterised by a certain rotundity of contour, expressive
at once of weight and motion, that he seems to take
peculiar delight — the contour, for example, of a cumulus
cloud, or of a full-branched tree bending under the wind,
or of an undulating hill, which, though actually immov-
able, yet suggests to us the sense of movement. And
these large contours, once caught and imaginatively dis-
posed in their decorative relation to one another, con-
stitute the structure, the anatomy, the main motive or
subject, of Mr. Brangvvyn's pictures." ^

Mr. P. G. Konody {The Magazine of Art, February
1903) has noticed other points, and let us examine them
one by one.

' The Studio, February 1903.

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Frank "Brangwyn and his IFork

I. The days of the Olympian gods and of mytho-
logical symbolism, to which so many of our decorative
artists cling with exasperating obstinacy, are over, and
modern artists have to search for new motives or for
adaptations of old ideas to the spirit of our time.
" Nude, classic figures, goddesses and nymphs of aca-
demic pose and proportion, are out of place in the
mural decoration of a modern building ; and historical
representations, though no doubt appropriate in many
instances, generally fail completely as regards decorative
effect, owing to the predominance of the literary interest,
to the attention paid to the correct rendering of many
archaeological details which may be necessary in a
historical picture, but only disturb the effect of a wall
decoration."

It is certainly true that the decline of mural decora-
tion and the rise of archaeology have been contem-
poraneous. The Old Masters were not pupils to the
social facts of bygone times. Either they used the
costumes and customs of their own periods in their
historical subjects, or else they wrapped their art in
conventional draperies having the reputation of being
ancient ; and their work certainly did not improve when
knowledge of classical antiquity became more researchful
and exact. Mr. Konody mentions with disapproval a
predominance of literary interest in decoration, but he
does not forget that the most august frescoes in the
world, inspired by the Bible, were sanctioned and en-
couraged by the Church because of their literary appeal
to those who either could not read or who turned away
from spoken sermons. Note, too, that as soon as a
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Uecorative T^ainting

picture of any kind makes a great effect on any person,
it enters the domain of literary feeling, for that person
tries to find words in which to describe the picture and
the peculiar delight it has given him. Let us not
think that a story betrays the art of painting, since
every incident in the Bible is a tale known to all the
world. The fatal thing is a picture having no other
merit than a literary interest — a picture without design,
without invention, and with poor, w^eak qualities of
handling. Even if you paint a face nobly, as Rembrandt
painted his old women and old men, you cannot help
filling it with a history of Time's own writing. And in
mural decoration, more than in any other painting, it
is needful that the public should know at once what
the subject tries to make real ; and that is why the
most fitting themes are to be chosen from three sources :
contemporary life, the most familiar episodes in past
history, and the Bible, especially the New Testament.
Instinct seems to have guided Brangwyn in this matter,
for his decorative art has passed to and fro between
to-day's life and scriptural episodes, like " The Baptism
of Christ " and " The Adoration of the Magi." To say
that these works have not a tale to relate, are without
a literary appeal, would be very incorrect. They enter
into literature by trying to penetrate to the inner essence
and the life of their subjects ; and those painters who
have missed the ever-new poetry of the Gospel story, like
Murillo and Velascjuez, show that a painter must clear
his mind of the fear of being literary, else he may fail
to be religious and moving in a scriptural work.

2. Mr. P. G. Konody goes on to say that too many

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Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

painters seem to think that a certain flatness of tints
and a key somewhat lighter than that of the average
easel-picture are all that is required to make a painting
suitable for mural decoration. " No notion could be
more erroneous. If the decoration is to be effective
as such, the artist must never for a moment forget the
conditions under which it will be seen, and in his
scrupulous consideration of this fundamental rule must
be found the primary cause of Mr. Brangwyn's success."
No doubt. But I should like to pause for a moment
on two phrases because they have a very practical bearing
on decorative art as applied to walls and public buildings.
Mr. Konody mentions "a certain flatness of tints," mean-
ing, I believe, a certain greyness of tints, for this was the
mode introduced by Puvis de Chavannes. There was a
real fear about ten years ago that Puvis had turned his
merited vogue into a tradition, but French critics of to-day
realise that his method in decoration is not final ; they
mention Brangwyn now with enthusiasm, and wish that
he had his home in Paris. Several have said so in
plain words, like Maurice Guillemot {Art et Decoration,
October 1909), who cries : ''On pent regretter que Frank
Brangwyn ne soit pas de chez nans." Puvis de Chavannes
did noble works, but they appear to be slipping away into
the past, faint in colour and rather spectral in design.
They are not fecund in their greatness ; they do not
triumph through this life into those living traditions that
give permanent inspiration ; and the future will belong
to a more virile manner, richer and more vital. What
that manner will be at its maturity we cannot guess, but
Brangwyn's art marks a period in its evolution.
128

A STUDY OF LEEKS.
Reproduced by permission of
R. H. Kitson, Esq., Leeds.

A STUDY OF l.KKKS
Ixi-pioiiuciii I'v /fi-tniissiou ,>/' A", //. Kitson, Jist/., Lt\

^Decorative T^ainting

Flatness of colour — namely, pigments that dry without
a gloss and lighter than when they are put on — is a dis-
tinguishing quality of fresco work, whether you paint while
the ground is wet, or employ tempera-pigments ground in
water and used with size, or with t.<g<g — the yoke or the
white. Both these methods need swift, direct workman-
ship, and therefore the practice and skill that enable you
to finish as the work proceeds. The painting dries without
lustre, and possesses a kind of inner light, a peculiar
luminous quality, that allies it with water-colour pictures.
Brangwyn is very fond of tempera, believes that it might
be varnished for easel-pictures, and suggests that if stu-
dents were taught to work in it from the life model they
would gain in quick perception and in painter-like tech-
nique. A colour plate in this book — a symbolistic decora-
tion of Labour and Commerce — shows one of his tempera
panels ; and Londoners can see another work in this medium
— it is less mature — at the office of the Grand Trunk Rail-
way in Cockspur Street, where a bold frieze above panelled
walls gives decoratively incidents from the colonisation of
Canada, its traffic with Red Indians, its march through
forests, its bridge-building, and glimpses of that victorious
sea that ebbs and flows at present as an emblem of union
between Great Britain and her scattered dominions. This
frieze was carried out for Sir Aston Webb, R.A., architect
of the building.

The second phrase by Mr. Konody is "a key of colour
somewhat lighter than that of the average easel-picture."
In our London climate, that deposits dirt and ravages
Portland stone, a dark fresco would soon become too dark,
while a pale fresco in course of time would lose whatever
R 129

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

freshness and beauty its harmony of colour possessed ; and
Brang\vyn is certainly right in being neither dark nor pale,
but joyous in broad rich colour, as witness the great panels
in Skinners' Hall.^

Tempera is safe enough when it is put under glass
and kept in a dry room ; but when its surface all day long
is free for the air of London to play upon, there is real
danger, for even although it may not crumble away through
the action of damp, you cannot clean it without risk.
Water is harmful, and bread crumbs not only drive the
dirt into the granulated surface, but, perhaps, may do
some harm to a very delicate material. For these reasons
tempera is better fitted for easel-pictures than for mural
decoration, in any climate moister and dirtier than Italy's.

These technical points considered, we pass on to Mr.
Konody's description of Brangwyn's leading traits : —

" He is not a modern decorator of the type which is
represented in its highest form by M. A. Besnard, the deep
thinker who has opened up a new field of decorative art
by creating a new pictorial symbolism from the elements
furnished by the enormous modern advance in all branches
of science and human knowledge, but in his broad gene-
ralisation, in the use he is making of impressions from
everyday life, in his complete rejection of stereotyped sym-
bols, and in his technical methods, Mr. Brangwyn is a
modern of the moderns. Perhaps the most striking differ-
ence between him and the majority of our decorative artists
will be found in his rejection of the theory that the female
nude represents the highest type of beauty. His is a mind

' This work, too, has the advantage of being painted in oils, so that dirt will be easy
to wash off if the panels should become too dirty.
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decorative T^ainting

that seeks for beauty in strength and vigour. ... In the
rare cases where he has introduced women into his decora-
tiv^e canvases they are nearly always clothed, and they
absolutely defy the generally accepted canons of female
beauty — of academic beauty. Such beauty as they possess
is the beauty of health and irrepressible joie-de-vivre — the
beauty of the untamed animal in the full enjoyment of its
physical strength."

This was written in 1903, and it gives Mr. Konody's
impressions to that date. He remembered, no doubt, the
presentation of maternal love in " Rest" and "The Adora-
tion of the Magi " ; and let us bear in mind that the
evolution of style in a virile artist goes very often through
the zest of life and strength to patience and tender emotion.
This evolution is found in the work of Alphonse Legros,
above all in his noble etchings ; and there is evidence al-
ready that Brangwyn also is travelling through the splendid
verve of youth towards the harbour of a gentler method.
There is a feeling for childhood in some of his more recent
work, as in "Charity," that could not have been foreseen
when his " Buccaneers" won for itself a permanent renown
in fickle Paris. But I do not rejoice over that. There are
scores of artists in England who can paint the tenderer
aspects and phases of human life ; while it is only once in
a long span of time that a Brangwyn is given to us ; and
I, for one, hope that his journey away from the lusty man-
hood of strength may be very slow. If people wish to
complain because oak trees are not weeping willows; if
they think that a BrangAvyn should be some one else, they
put themselves out of court and do no permanent harm.

13'

CHAPTER IX

DECORATIVE PAINTING— continueci

THERE is ever an urgent old sort of criticism
that prattles about art in its relation to women,
their beauty, clothed and unclothed ; and no
sooner is that topic started than the old Greek
ideal shines forth, because it is accepted by all cultivated
people, whereas nature's ideas of female beauty are not.
Nature is said to create hideous women in a good many
parts of the world, yet the women there are as happy
as elsewhere, and their men - folk are of Dr. Johnson's
opinion — feeling miserable when single and doubtful
when married. After all, beauty is a custom of the eyes,
and it is infinitely various.

Here, for example, is the photograph of a decorative
panel that Brangwyn painted for L'Art Nouveau in
Paris, now about sixteen years ago. In it I see two
young girls from some land of the sun ; they are in the
act of dancing along a glade of tall, slender trees, a
river shimmering behind them, while a dusky little imp
of a lad — he is naked to the waist like the dancers —
blows into a pipe with desperate good will, as if tipping
had reached that country without making it a sadder
place. One girl is a brunette, the other is darkly fair ;
they laugh marvellously and dance away from fatigue,
scornful of everything except their present mirth and
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enjoyment. Nothing in this wide world would turn them
into suffragettes. Yet the House of Commons would not
receive them in the Ladies' Gallery. There would be
complaints about their beauty; and the beauty, I admit,
is not British. Still, by dint of looking at this photo-
graph I have become a native of their sunny land, and
I find them pretty, and gracious, and winsome. I would
vote for them in a beauty show of modern decorative
painting.

Brangwyn did a great deal of work for the fine old
turreted house in the Rue de Provence, helping Mr. Bing
to transform it into L'Art Nouveau — a sort of palace for
modern ideas. Several artists had a part in this work,
M. Besnard decorating a room in the turret, and Brangwyn
designing the facade (he worked in conjunction with M.
Louis Bonnier, architect), painting in fresco on canvas
two large panels to flank the entrance (I have described
one), and brushing off a frieze more than sixty yards
long for the street elevation. A part of the frieze was
put up under the eaves ; it represented Eastern workmen
plying their craft of pottery, seated in characteristic
attitudes. Another band of frieze ran below the windows
of the top floor, and, like the one above, it was carried
round both sides of the building. Its decorative features
were a few human figures connected by a design of
scroll-work and plant forms. Newspapers spoke well of
the general effect, and a great many persons came to
see it. L'Art Nouveau was launched, and Prank
Brangwyn, after many difficulties of bad weather, had
completed his first important commissions in decorative
art. Eventually, the frieze was taken down — probably

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Frank "Brangwyn and his H^ork

because the weather injured it — and sold to a French
collector.

It will be noticed that the two panels for the main
entrance were movable, being painted on canvas and
then fixed up structurally. Brangwyn is in favour of
this method, and so was F. Mado.x Brown after his long
labours in the Manchester Town Hall. For seven of
his mural paintings Madox Brown used spirit fresco, or
what we in England claim as the Gambier-Parry system,
that consists in the use of a few pigments made from
metal oxides ; these are painted over a ground prepared
with the same colour. It is rather a troublesome
medium, but certainly it seems to be less perishable in
our climate than the water-glass process, a thing at one
time very much favoured in Germany, but now in bad
repute there. It was in water-glass that Daniel Maclise
carried out his great frescoes in the galleries of the
Houses of Parliament — "The Meeting of Wellington
and Blucher," and "The Death of Nelson" — works far
and away better than his easel-pictures. Time will show
their stability, but we should remember that Madox Brown
and Leighton had greater confidence in the Gambier-Parry
process. Then a fresh change came over the fortunes of
mural art, and Madox Brown welcomed it. He said : —

" In France, the mural painters have now taken to
painting on canvas, which is afterwards cemented — or
what the French call ^naronfi^e — on to the wall. White-
lead and oil, with a very small admixture of resin melted
in oil, are the ingredients used. It is laid on cold and
plentifully on the wall and on the back of the picture,
and the painting pressed down with a cloth or handker-
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'Decorative T^ainting

chief; nothing further being required, saving to guard
the edges of the canvas from curling up before the
white-lead has had time to harden. The advantage of
this process of cementing hes in the fact that with each
succeeding year it must become harder and more like
stone in its consistency. The canvases may be pre-
pared as if for oil-painting, and painted with common
oil-colours flatted (or matted) afterwards by gum-elemi
and spike-oil. Or the canvas may be prepared with the
Gambier-Parry colour and painted in that very mat
medium. The canvases should, if possible, be fine in
texture, as better adapted for adhering to the wall.
Another advantage of this process is that, should at any
time, through neglect, damp invade the wall, and the
canvas show a tendency to get loose, it would be easy
to replace it ; or the canvas might be altogether detached
from the wall and strained as a picture."

Brangwyn is even stronger in his views, believing
that for certain kinds of wall decoration — and notably
for overmantels in panelled rooms — it is better that oil-
colours should be used as in easel-pictures, without flat-
ting their surface with spike-oil and gum-elemi. That he
is right is proved by his two overmantels at Lloyd's
Registry, where the rooms are solidly panelled with oak,
and have an air of weight and power. It was essential
that the two decorations, when framed structurally, should
not sink behind nor seem to project beyond the plane
of the wainscot panels surrounding them, and Brangwyn
chose for his scheme of colour a sumptuous effect, kept
broad and vigorously simple. The result could not well
be bettered. One decoration — it is smaller than the other

'35

Frank ^rangwyn and his JVork

— has for its subject "Queen Elizabeth going aboard the
Golden Hind at Deptford." Her Majesty's barge of state
has just rowed up to the great tall ship, that looks not
unlike a timber-house of that period ; behind is a rolling
and tumbled sky, and it seems filled with many years
of English weather. To paint a sky in a wall decoration
is never easy, because it may recede from us too far and
be too naturalistic. The very essence of pictorial art is
distance, while the very essence of a mural painting is
nearness ; it must be part and parcel of the wall's surface,
not a breach in a flat and solid structure. Brangwyn
obeys this rule with great tact ; even his clouds complete
a decoration and yet look airy and not too close to us.
His ships also are very good, drawn and painted with
a hand of expert seamanship. They rise heavily up
from the sea, and seem to displace that weight of water
that is necessary to their safety as floating hotels. As
to the second picture, it holds its own place admirably
above a great fireplace where many rich contrasts of
colour meet together : lustrous tiles, varied marbles, and
a pediment upheld by gilded capitals. The subject is
"The Return of Blake after Capturing the Plate Ships."
As a painting — I refer you to the colour-print — it is
treated more maturely than the other, its style being
freer, more supple ; and its movement of industrial life
connects it with the large Brangwyn decoration at the
Royal Exchange.

These overmantels were presented to Lloyd's by men
who take a keen delight in art as applied to the orna-
mentation of city places of business. The one of " Blake's
Return " was commissioned by Sir John Davison Milburn,
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Uecorative T*ainting

Bart., in 1907 ; while the other was a gift to Lloyd's from
the committee of the General Shipowners' Society in 1903.
That is how England encourages genius — at second-hand,
leaving it (as a rule) to volunteer support, while conferring
knighthoods by the score on those who pay the many
pipers in political life. Why should not a few birthday
honours be granted every year to art for public build-
ings? The State has not given even one mural painting
to the Royal Exchange, and we do not find among the
list of donors any of the most national names. It is a
pity. The ground landlords of London should contribute
to the public art of London buildings, and we should
gain much if the Crown acted personally in this matter,
as did George III. when he not only founded the Royal
Academy but paid its debts from his private purse until
the Society no longer needed his help. Lord Leighton,
remembering his position both as President of the Royal
Academy and as trustee of the national work that
George III. wished to do, set a fine example when he
gave to the Royal Exchange his mural picture of
Phoenicians trading with Early Britons on the coast of
Cornwall. This was in 1895. Fourteen works have been
j)resented since then by private patrons of art, but nine
great spaces have yet to be filled.

It is unfortunate, but the donors are more important
than the decorations. They have done their work com-
pletely, while only three or four of the painters have
understood the difference between a picture and a mural
decoration. Many judges complain of this fact with
bitterness, yet there is no need here for criticism to be
ill-tempered, because we cannot reasonably expect to
s 137

Frank "Brangwyn and his U'^ork

evolve in a few years a school of masterly fresco-workers.
Such achievements as the Apartimenti Borgia, the Stanzi
of Raphael, the Sistine Chapel, speak to us not only of
a popular enthusiasm for ornamental art, but of technical
methods ripened by continued practice through many
generations. Mural painting on a large scale is far and
away more difficult than the art of making framed
pictures ; and because we have in Frank Brangwyn an
artist who cannot help being decorative, we must not
generalise from a rare case, and expect all easel-painters
to become mural decorators by the mere act of experi-
menting in a few efforts apiece. But there are several
points on which too much emphasis cannot be laid in
this matter of the Royal Exchange. The first one is
the fact that the city has taken these decorations quite
seriously, and now looks upon them as a standard for
all future efforts in applied art. This wrong notion will
take root in the conservatism of city men, and will then
act very unfavourably on all right aims in decoration. It
is English to make a bad beginning ; we do it in all
wars, we do it in all new public works ; and certainly
we cannot afford to allow these tentative efforts at the
Royal Exchange to misinstruct the public on questions
of fundamental principle. The second point is that too
many painters have had a hand in this scheme of
decoration. Fifteen different eyes for colour and fifteen
varying aims do not give us unity — an essential thing
in all ornamentation. Not more than two painters were
necessary, and these should have worked together in
accordance with a definite plan. To turn a great public
promenade into a mere picture gallery is ridiculous. Yet
138

^Decorative T^airitin(y

I am able to state that the Royal Exchange refused a
second panel from a decorative artist of the highest
standing, because the authorities did not want two works
by the same hand. It is only in England that such
an absurd refusal could be made. If the artist had
volunteered to paint such a gift for any public building
on the Continent or in America, there would have been
much rejoicing.^

At the Royal Exchange, moreover, a good many
peculiar difficulties have to be overcome. The diffused
light in the ambulatory is dim, so that each painting
ought to have such well-defined forms and such a scheme
of colours as will suit the lighting ; and each artist is
called upon to remember that all pale tints will blot the
design and be far more prominent than darker masses.
Pale tints, again, in the case of skies, will make a hole
in the wall unless great care be taken. Nor are these
the only points to be considered. The Royal Exchange
itself is a great national symbol in the immense life of
London, and imagination demands that the mural paint-
ings shall be heroic in scale and worthy of their position.
We do not wish to see in any decorative painting a
great flight of steps with a forlorn little man lost in the
middle of it. Nelson is not impressive in a position of
that .sort. And there is another flight of waterside steps
at the Royal Exchange ; this one thronged with frightened
women and children, all aglow with reflected light from
burning houses. Is this a proper theme for mural decora-

' This recalls to memory the fact th.it other generous offers have been refused by the
authorities of public buildings in London. G. F. Watts offered to decorate with frescoes
the large hall at Huston Station, but the London .ind North- Western Railway declined.

'39

Frank "Rrangwyn and his JJ^ork

tion? Is it at all possible to represent flames on a wall
without making your decoration seem like a big window
through which a moving scene of peril is distinctly
seen ?

In another painting a gateway is open in the very
middle of the composition, and looking through it we
behold, far off, a royal carriage waiting for Queen Victoria.
Could anything be more comical? Our eyes pierce the
wall of the Royal Exchange and see something outside.
Even Leighton is not decorative in his most fortunate
manner. His figures are not heroic ; the colour is rather
lifeless ; and the design shows that Leighton's respect for
the solid plane of the wall's surface was too anxious and
too timid. A line of male heads runs across the painting
horizontally, and it is made more noticeable by means of a
beast's hide that a Briton chieftain holds out temptingly to
a disdainful Phoenician. Again, wishing to blot out as
much of the sea as he could, lest its pale colour and its
movements should breach the wall's surface, Leighton
carried a wide length of drapery across from the Phoenicians
to the British women on our left, and its purple tint is not
to my eyes a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. I prefer
the two Leighton decorations at South Kensington, and
particularly the one representing the arts of war.

Oh, this art of mural painting is full of pitfalls ! The
composition of an opera for a troupe of jealous singers is
not more troublesome. It is what the French call a work
of long breath, and what we may describe as a long-
distance run in art, a Marathon race in emotion and
disciplined design. Most of the endeavours of our Royal
Exchange are patched with blunders, arising mainly from
140

MODERN COMMERCE.
From the Fresco in the Royal
Exchange, London.

^^^Sr^^^V9r^^Vr^ggSi^Ui'^

Uecorative l^aintincy

inexperience. In one an active little page-boy stands right
outside the composition, so far removed is he from the
general atmosphere that unites all the other characters.
But, as a rule, the later decorations show that progress
creeps and then jumps forward. The last one of all is
the most masterly as a genuine mural-painting.

Yet its subject is not only the most difficult to manage
in an appropriate way ; it is also least likely to attract
chance-comers. To realise this you have but to think for a
moment about Modern Commerce — a thin^- world-wide in
its adventures, and trafficking with so many commodities
that the mind knows not which to choose as the more
important in the national life of Great Britain. For we as
a nation have fallen into the perilous position of owing
nearly all our food-stuffs to seafaring imports from distant
and foreign orchards and farms. There is a coming tragedy
in that one fact. No economist can believe that a nation
can maintain her greatness by depending on foods grown
by strangers far beyond her own shores, because it is a
fixed law of nature that hunger and nutrition must be
near and friendly neighbours. If, again, we look at other
phases of our vast commercial enterprise, and consider
those imports of raw stuffs that our craftsfolk turn into
manufactured articles for export, we find another fact
as sinister and threatening as the first, since in this
matter also we get life-blood from many countries over-
seas that may veer from friendliness into enmity at any
moment. The heart of Britain throbs in the engine-rooms
of her battleships. She herself is defenceless, nourished
on a diet of cosmopolitanism in the necessaries of each
day's labour and hunger.

141

Frank 'Brangwyn and his U'^ork

That is Modern Commerce as applied to the British
Isles. To represent it in a fresco is a task that very few
artists would dare to undertake It cannot be symbolised
by any combination of emblems and figures without
seeming cold and tame ; and if you take any single incident
from its many thousands, you know that a whole must be
greater than its isolated parts. Face to face with all these
difficulties, Brangwyn looked at his subject from the stand-
point of its vague impressiveness as an international agent,
and then made up his mind to show, within the scale of his
wall space, such types of action as would connect sea-
coming produce with the labour and the life of Great
Britain. There should be a great bustling dock, but not
obviously the docks of London, since British commerce
must not be anchored in any port day after day through
the year. The atmosphere should be quite modern and
also typical of British weather and British energy, but no
detail should mark and give prominence to the present
hour, its passing inventions and its ever-varying costumes.
A spirit of timelessness would give this work the chance of
being a symbol of British commerce a hundred years hence
as it is to-day.

These points decided, he threw his figures upon canvas
in a scale that appears much larger than life, the heroic
scale of proportion ; and this is why, painted as Brangwyn
paints, his decoration has a certain grim majesty of design
that kills its pictorial neighbours. The colour, too, is rich
and massive ; it seems to grip the masonry of the wall, to
belong to the structure of its surface. Even the sky behind
— a sky with its piled-up clouds rising in a squadron
between perpendicular lines of colour that indicate huge
142

Uecorative T^ainting

cranes and other mechanical appliances — is a happy event
in decorative treatment and effect. There are workmen
restinc^, and boys at ease near a great tangle of golden
bananas, while other figures are in full action, bending
under their burdens of fruits and things. It is not perfect
as a composition, but who else could have solved so many
difficulties?

CHAPTER X

POINTS OF VIEW IN DECORATIVE ART: AND
THE SKINNERS' HALL

THE movement in decorative painting has fought a
stern battle during the last fifteen years. Easel-
painters have not often welcomed it because it has
asked them to start out on a new education, to
learn the principles of applied art ; and a good many critics
have refused to budge from their long submission to in-
numerable shows of dainty pictures. Accustomed to this
routine, they have looked upon modern decoration as an
interloper without "refinement," without "culture," and
have sneered at its " technique," writing labyrinthine de-
finitions of "refinement," "technique," and "culture."
Verbal fanaticism is always perplexing, and I wish to give
an example from the Spectator, May 25, 1895, because
it tried to discredit modern decorative art by attacking a
picture by Frank Brangwyn. The picture was " Rest," and
the Standard had praised its " modern sensitiveness of
technique," and placed it " in the vanguard of the artistic
forces of the day." This annoyed the Spectator, whose
critic happened to be a young pupil to the principles of
French Impressionism.

"What is this mysterious affair, technique? It is not
exactly simple, it is duplex ; but no mystery if we do not
mix it with the process of seeing, which results in an
144

O
C/3

■n

'Points of View in T^ecorative zArt

image, and the process of designing, which results in a
picture, but neither of which is technique."

Think over that ! We are to arrive at technique with-
out help from seeing eyes, though blind men have never
been noted for any sort of facility with a brush. Still,
let us listen again : " Technique is the last, the phy-
sical * step which ends each of these processes, each of
these two games which make up pictorial imagination,
and which the painter must carry on side by side."
There is here a restoration of sight ; the blind eyes have
been cured, and the critic runs on into new difficulties.
For example : —

" This last physical * step on the decorative or designing
side — the side that allies drawing to music, to dancing, to
abstract pleasant lines and patches — is the getting of a
pleasant consistency and surface in the paint. The choice
of patterns is not technique — that is design. The choice
of colours is not technique — that is design. Technique
is the laying-on with the hand of a good coat of paint, like
a house-painter, though with a variety again dictated by
the sense of design. This side of technique is known
as quality. It is the physical ' magic that makes paint
delightful for itself."

The critic rambles on into some confused remarks on
"handling," and at last he tells us that "we arc now in a
position to decide between good and bad technique. . . .
The newer fashionable examples give us what looks like
vigorous handling, dexterous brush-work, all expressing

' Note the use of the word "physical," as if all the emotions and actions of mankind
were not expressed through physical agents— the nerves, the brain, facial expression, the
hands, and so forth.

T 145

Frank "Brangwyn and his U^ork

nothing, or expressing, by painting across the forms ' dex-
terously,' the exact opposite of the fact.

" It is because I find more of this than of sensitiveness
in Mr. Brangwyn's picture that I cannot agree with the
critic of the Standard. ..."

Are you not reminded of the scientist who ripped open
a nightingale's throat in order to learn why the bird sang
so well? It is certainly injudicious to mystify the reading
public with a long and scattered definition of technique,
for expression in painting depends so much on incal-
culable things, that if we could summon a Parliament of
Dead Painters to discuss the question of technique, under
the speakership of Michael Angelo, the debate could not
tell us more than this : that technique is a totality of
effect, showing how a painter feels towards a chosen sub-
ject ; sometimes it is laboured in good pictures and skilful
in bad pictures, but it speaks to us always of the painter's
gifts — his temperament, his sense of colour, his changing
moods, his aims in design, his emotional skill of hand, and
his qualities of brain. Yes, and these agents of expression
are more or less influenced by school traditions and by the
forces of current life. In the work of the greatest painters
technique has the quality of fine velvets, and from velvets
it descends into the quality of inferior materials, ranging
from cheap silks to shagreen leather. But the main factor
of all in technique is temperament ; for temperament rules
each of us, and it can never give out more than Providence
has put into it. Temperament in a man of genius may
be compared to a cup of enchanted wine ; the cup cannot
be changed for another, and its wine belongs to a vintage
that is always good of its kind. There are times when
146

T^oints of P^ie'uo in Uecorative zArt

it asks us to cultivate an acquired taste, but gourmets
do not rail at it. Only gourmands do that. Ccst a
prendre on h laisser. When a critic forgets these simple
matters, he is likely also to forget that men of genius rule
over their own realms and invite us to be peaceful citizens
there.

As a citizen of Brangwyn's kingdom I am appealing
to those outside, among whom I notice several types of
mind. There is the ordinary layman who desires a picture
to be an incident from a stage play, and there is the
practising painter who gets from his own work such a
small amount of pleasure that he spends all his leisure
time in writing about art. This hobby is bad for any
painter when he happens to be displeased with himself.
Envy may creep unperceived into his paragraphs, and
the very dogmatism that serves an artist as a sort of
life-belt is apt to keep him aloof from any temperament
and ideals differing much from his own. For example,
if you have a great liking for the decorative art of Puvis
de Chavannes, are you not sometimes tempted to believe
that the style of Puvis ought to be the criterion of modern
taste in mural painting? It is well known that personal
sympathies are mistaken very often for sound judgments.
Lord Morley has noted this in literary appreciations. He
says : "A man remembers that a poem in one style has
filled him with consciousness of beauty and delight. Why
conclude that this style constitutes the one access to the
same impression?" Quite so. But likes and dislikes
are truants ; they hate to go to school. It is their nature
to get into mischief. People who are very fond of Puvis
condemn the virile modernity of Brangwyn, and those

147

Frank "Brangwyn and his Jf^ork

who are devoted to Brangwyn often lose touch with Puvis,
who tried to make real for us the naive spirit of the
younger-hearted times. What do we gain when criticism
is so little catholic?

There is a very sympathetic type of artistic expert who
tries to bring his subject into the daily thought of ordinary
persons, but who feels very acutely the influence of chang-
ing moods. Mr. C. Lewis Hind is a critic of this type.
He writes very well, but his emotions towards BrangAvyn
change in the most protean manner, carrying along with
him his many readers. In the Evening News, March 23,
1904, he proved that he could write with objective sym-
pathy from within Brangwyn's own atmosphere : —

" It is rash to prophesy, but I dare assert that in the
twenty-first century Mr. Brangwyn will be reckoned one of
the chief art forces of our time. He is entirely himself,
bold and original, and his work has the decorative quality,
the sense of pattern, that has always marked the masters.
. . . Leaning on a chair in the midst of the Brangwyns
was an engraving ... of Rembrandt's ' The Centurion
Cornelius,' one of those profoundly spiritual, haunting
Scripture scenes that the Dutchman felt so strongly, and
feeling, expressed so poignantly. To turn from this to
the Brangwyns was — well, it was to be switched from a
quiet age of faith and unquestioning belief to the rushing
and outwardly materialistic twentieth century. But Brang-
wyn is quite right ! He lives in his own age ; he draws
his inspiration from life, not from books. He is strong
enough to be himself, and therein lies his power to impress
you and me. We may prefer the Rembrandt tempera-
ment ; but Brangwyn remains — a force."
148

T^oints of P^iew in Uecorative <Art

That is criticism, objective and candid. It was written
before Brangwyn had done not only his best work, but
the best decorations ever painted in London, and Mr.
Hind was invited to review them for the Evening News,
in June 19 lo. Perhaps he has changed his address since
1904, perhaps he now feels the opinions of some new art
circle, for he is now as far distant from Brangwyn as
Charles Lamb was from Sir Walter Scott. In his article
Mr. Hind makes a false start : —

" The other evening a group of artists and others dis-
cussed the subject of 'The Something More in Art.' It
was decided, or, rather, suggested by the reader of the
paper that 'the something more' which is beyond tech-
nique, which gives a work of art vitality, and makes it
endure is — personality. One of the group found himself
confused between personality and temperament, where-
upon a sculptor, who thinks he is also a literary man,
said : ' Personality is spiritual, temperament is physical ;
personality grows from and expresses the innermost ego —
i.e. the soul ; temperament is of the body, and is awakened
by the senses and the sensations of the body.' " This
implies that personality is outside the life of man — out-
side our human senses. Does Mr. Hind suppose that a
creature destitute of nerves — unable to taste, to smell, to
see, to feel — would be a spiritual creature ? " Rightly or
wrongly," he confesses, " I found myself troubled by this
aesthetic conflict, personality versus temperament, when I
visited the Skinners' Hall in Dowgate Hill last Tuesday
to .see the eleven frescoes, or panels as they are called,
with which Mr. Frank Brangwyn has decorated the
bunqueting-hall. . . . Mr. Brangwyn has an interesting —

149

Frank "Brangwyn and his Jl'^ork

now, am I to say personality or temperament? Abroad,
he is treated with a respect that almost amounts to venera-
tion. At home he has his admirers, who will not hear a
word in disfavour of his great gifts. . . ."

Not from a man who writes in a wrong strain, certainly.
To pick holes in e.xcellent work is an easy pastime, for
beauty and blemish go hand in hand ; and to talk in the
air about temperament and personality, copying down
in all seriousness that sculptor's comical metaphysics, is
an odd way indeed to begin a newspaper article on an
artist who, whatever his natural limitations may be, is
welcomed in all countries as a man of genius. Moreover,
Mr. Hind passed through the City to the Skinners' Hall —
the City of London, the greatest battlefield in the universal
war of modern trade ; he knew, also, that the Skinners'
Company had contributed since its foundation to the
making of London ; and he ought also to have known
that decorative art should represent the spirit of its time
and stand out as a fitting emblem of just civic pride and
national power. Yet he stood in the banqueting-hall and
thought out a very jejune article, in which he would appeal
to half a million readers. I will not copy out the whole
of his remarks ; two brief quotations will be enough for
the present : —

"It is perhaps safer to suggest that on the walls of the
Skinners' Hall Mr. Brangwyn gives us his unclothed,
clamorous temperament, not his clothed and cloistral
personality."

"Think what has been done in the wall-painting way ;
think of Botticelli's two Tornabuoni frescoes, now on the
staircase at the Louvre, and the undying message of grace
150

T^oints of View in Uecorative ^rt

and loveliness that the personality of Botticelli, delicate as
a bed of wet violets in the springtime, conveys to us."

How pathetic ! Would Mr. Hind sigh for the " Pilgrim's
Progress" while glancing here and there into "The Ring
and the Book "? Perhaps Thomas a Kempis might be his
ideal while he read "Othello" or " King Lear," marvelling
why Shakespeare could have been so foolish as to show his
unclothed, clamorous temperament, instead of a cloistral
personality as delicate as a bed of wet violets in the spring-
time. Myself, I delight in the "strong men," as Francois
Millet always described the lusty, virile painters, because
the greater part of life is battle, not undying messages of
grace and loveliness from beds of violets ; and as to the
other thing in art, that Mr. Hind seeks in sweetness or in
dreamful pathos, it is a painter's moods, and the moods
are bad in decorative art if they do not accord with their
purpose and position. In his mind's eye Mr. Hind sees
work by Botticelli on the walls of a banqueting-hall in our
modern London. He seems even to believe that Brangwyn
by some means should exchange his own temperament for
Botticelli's. Yet Mr. Hind writes for the Press, influenc-
ing half a million readers in a day.

To earn bread by writing about the work of other men
is a privilege, and the least one can do is to try to under-
stand each painter's intention and never to e.xpcct from
him the peculiar gifts of some other man.

This being so, let us see what the Skinners' Company
wished to do, and how their chosen artist has fulfilled his
duty. In 1902, when the project was discussed by their
Court, strongly advocated by Mr. T. L. Devitt, five ideas
probably occurred to every member of the Company. The

'5'

Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

decorations might represent eleven outstanding events from
the great past of England, or eleven such events from the
history of London ; they might show the adventures of
skins from the hunter's success onward to the sale of
manufactured articles ; and then, of course, there were two
other sets of themes — one from the Company's long career,
the other from those trades arid manufactures that now
keep Britain in the fighting line of the world's industrial
warfare. To an artist who feels with intense energy the
life of his own time, the last choice of subjects was clearly
the best ; and because the mainspring of art is eye-know-
ledge gained from things seen, not mind-knowledge
acquired from things read in books, it was also the best
set of subjects considered from the standpoint of living art.
But the Company was a private one, and its own history
appealed to its members. That was very natural. For
the history was a good long chapter in the life of London
since 1327. City Companies in the past were as helpful to
England as Universities ; indeed, they were public schools
for handicrafts ; and although, as time went by, inevitable
conflicts arose between the craftsman who worked for hire
and the capitalist who invested money in that work, the
London Companies outlived all changes of fortune, pass-
ing from trade gilds into social clubs, famous for their
good-fellowship and for their charities. I am not aware
that they were ever patrons of decorative art until the
Skinners' Company invited Frank Brangwyn to paint from
its history ten or eleven subjects which had been chosen
for him.

In their own way the subjects are good, and in keeping
with Bacon's definition of history as the pomp of business.
152

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T^oints of Kiew in TJecorative ^rt

The perfume of wet violets does not come from them ; it
is virile human life that they represent : —

1. Skin-merchants selecting Furs and Pelts at the City
Mart in the Days before the Guild oi Corpus Christi
received their Charter.

2. The granting of their Charter to the Skinners' Com-
pany by Edward III., March i, 1327.

3. A River Procession of the City's and the Companies'
Barges to Westminster, a.d. 1453.

4. The Opening of the Strife between the Skinners and
the Merchant Taylors, a.d. 1484.

5. The Founding of Tonbridge School by Sir Andrew
Judd, 1553.

6. An Incident in the Defence of London Bridge by Sir
Andrew Judd, a.d. 1554.

7. A City Pageant in Olden Times.

8. The Departure of Sir James Lancaster for the East
Indies, a.d. 1594.

9. Reception of General Monk at the Skinners' Hall,
April 4th, 1660.

10. Sir Thomas Pilkington's Banquet to King William
the Third and Queen Mary, a.d. 1684.

11. Harmony.

It was a great event when the Skinners' Court decided
upon this big scheme of work, and there was much rejoic-
ing in the art world, though painters recognised that
tremendous difficulties would have to be encountered and
overcome. Themes from the annals of a private company
did not belong to that part of England's story which is
u 153

Frank "Brangwyn and his Jf^ork

generally known, so their realisation in decorative art
would not stir in chance-comers any associations of known
events. They could not possibly have the national and
popular interest that enshrines all the greatest hours in
the making of England. Then again, the subjects would
bring in questions of costume, of archaeology, many and
various questions, which might clog and weaken mural
painting as they have weakened and clogged Shakespearian
acting. These and other fears were expressed by artists ;
but one and all admitted that the Skinners' Company had
taken a step that would add permanently to the value of
modern art.

Brangwyn entered upon his work with knowledge of
the difficulties to be faced, and he had also to consider the
building in which his decorations would be put ; a banquet-
ing-hall of brown oak, with a top or roof light, the wood-
work enriched with gilding, and the walls divided by
pilasters having a projection of perhaps one-third of their
breadth. The decorations were to be placed as a sort of
frieze above the deep-brown wainscot, where the pilaster-
like projections formed five recessed panels on each side,
two uprights, and three large oblongs having a good
breadth. At the entrance end was a music gallery with
wall-space for another decoration. Across the hall was a
window of stained glass.

The dominant notes of colour were the brown oak and
the gilding. Mr. Hind thinks that the hue of the panelled
walls should have been taken as the leit-motif of the colour-
scheme, making the paintings above and the woodwork
beneath entirely congruous from the first day. But this
error is not made in London by decorative artists who
154

T^oints of View in T^ecorative -Art

know their business. In our London atmosphere painted
colours change so rapidly, growing deeper in tone, that
the earliest decoration at the Skinners' Hall has already
matured. Indeed, in this one work the painter made
scarcely enough allowance for the fact that his work would
pass through the alembic of time. He paid a little too
much deference to the leit-motif oi brown oak. Afterwards
he worked in higher keys of colour, so that the alchemy
of air acting on them year after year might mellow them
gradually into a new richness foreseen by him.

But questions of colour in their relation to acquired
tone were not the only technical matters needing care and
forethought. The decorations would be skied — put in
positions high above the line of sight, and this was very
important, because the panels, though big, were not large
enough to justify the use of a heroic scale in the figures.
Thus the carrying power of each composition would
depend, not upon figures considerably taller than life, but
upon the art displayed in the massed patterning of colour.
Further, as the subjects were not of a kind that appealed
by their familiar historical interest to every one, it would be
well to aim with infinite care at beauty in splendid colour
and at magnificence in active life. These qualities were
suggested by ten themes, and their presentation would
be a fitting symbol of the immense pageantry of events
that England has witnessed in her achievements.

The painter has won a noble success, but he is not
satisfied himself, because all true work is but the training
for a long race that never seems to be run. Sir Joshua
Reynolds felt this with a sort of tragic pathos, and he said :
"The beauty of which we are in quest is general and in-

•55

Frank "Brangwyri and his Ji'^ork

tellectual ; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind : the
sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it : it is an
idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always
labouring to impart, and which he dies at last without
imparting, but which he is yet so far able to communicate
as to raise the thoughts and extend the views of the spec-
tator." That is all true ; but, unfortunately, spectators do
not often respond to it until its originality has grown
familiar. And those painters whose ideals of beauty are
not sweetness and pathos but health and vigour and action
suffer the most, first because great depression follows their
spates of emotion, and next because the public is more
easily moved by gentle and pathetic beauty than by an art
full of manhood and triumphing enterprise. Gentleness
and pathos are known as " soul," and they help writers
to make pretty copy about wet violets in the springtime
and undying messages of grace and loveliness.

Even Mr. Hind admits that there is a triumph of life
in Brangwyn's art. He says, "In pomp, splendour, and
in the suggestion of pagan and pageant-unfolding episodes
in the history of the Worshipful Company of Skinners,
they are magnificent." But he yearns for " soul," that is
to say, for messages of grace and wet violets, and he
finds " soul " in a fresco by Puvis de Chavannes, in the
Panthdon, representing St. Gendvieve in the moonlight
watching and praying over Paris. We are not told what
St. Gendvieve has to do with the subjects chosen for
Brangwyn. But it seems clear enough that Mr. Hind is a
primitive in his preferences for art ; the years dead and
gone live for him in naive pictures filled with a cloistral
faith ; and in Puvis he finds a kindred temperament, while
156

T^oifits of View in Uecorative Jirt

in Brangwyn he is oppressed by what he calls a " bois-
terously beautiful and roysterously crowded vision.''
Brangwyn belongs to his own time, while Puvis de
Chavannes thought more of the long ago, and if we
compare the two we put ourselves out of court. Each
stands alone, and those who understand art feel the noble
qualities within the limitations of each.

For the rest, there is a distinct evolution of style in the
panels at the Skinners' Hall. In the first one painted —
" Departure of Sir James Lancaster for the East Indies,
A.D. 1594" — we feel the influence of Venice, and particularly
of Veronese. There is an artifice of lighting, as well as
an elaboration of studied design, that differs from modern
work ; and it is certain also that the first step being very
difficult, the painter was anxious, so he lingered too long
over several minor parts. One of the foreground figures
is a seated man with his nude back turned towards the
spectator, and the back might be simpler in its modelling ;
it draws attention from the principal group above, where
Lancaster — a darkling figure — is admirably placed in his
relation to a background of tall ships and of cumulus
clouds, all treated with great skill, for the solid plane of
the wall is nowhere breached by the perspective. In
quality the paint is good throughout, and no pedantry is
shown in the costumes. These mark a definite period
without asking us to think more about them than about
the painting as a whole.

When this panel was hung at the Royal Academy in
1904, it made as much disturbance as a whale would make
in a river full of trout and perch. I have by my side several
newspapers that decline to believe that art is justified of

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Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

her children. With facile largeness of censure, they sneer
at the big intruder, though the hanging committee had
put it up high on the centre wall of the third room. Some
other notices, while admitting with enthusiasm the
great and rare merits displayed, fell into the error of sup-
posing that decorative art must be flat, tame, and conven-
tional, not ornamental in a living way. This mistake
arises from a supposition that because decorations must
never make holes in a wall, therefore the structural con-
ception of the whole work must be artificial in all its planes.
As well might we argue that because a stage drama is
subject to the restraints of a stage setting which can never
be real, therefore the drama among its characters must be
formal and artificial, never showing how variously human
nature wrestles with circumstance, that outward destiny,
or is swayed by temperament, that inward ruler oscillating
between peace and war. To keep life from mural painting
is to produce a dead art, demanding infinite faith from
spectators. From among the notices I choose one from
the speaker; it has not the excess of praise of some
admirers, and it illustrates temperately the point now
under consideration : —

" Of Mr. Brangwyn as a colourist there might be many
things said. But the principal fact about his colour power
appears to me to be that he has gauged exactly the enor-
mous value of blue as a factor in building up a rich and
colourful composition ; that he has, in a word, taken up
the parable of the great Venetian painters at the point
where they left it. Not, indeed, that the blue in the " De-
parture of Lancaster for the East Indies " is an all-assertive
influence, for it is confined in the main to a patch of wine-
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T^oirits of View in decorative <tArt

dark sea in the centre, and in that part of the sky which
is not obscured by rolling cumuli. Yet what an amount
of power does it not give to the glowing golden reds, the
luminous browns, the luscious chocolate, in this work,
by virtue of its adequate use and exquisite management?
The whole panel is alive with colour from the scarlet robe
of the dominant figure on the right to the dusky Oriental
in shadow on the left, from the sun-tinged sails of the
barque beyond to the bunch of carrots and turnips in the
immediate foreground ; alive, too, with strong light and
shade and the sense of crowded humanity and the vigour
of individual form. In the last respect the artist goes
beyond the strictest limits of decoration ; his figures, dis-
posed as they are in masses of colour, are sculptural, not
flat ; there is a solidity about them that leaves no doubt
as to their actuality, and suggests the potent influence of
the modern realistic spirit on this most modern of English
decorators. Whether this influence would be healthy in
the majority of cases one may doubt. One can well imagine
an imitator of Mr. Brangwyn aiming at similar ends, and,
whilst striving to combine decorative symmetry with pro-
nounced colour and form of this nature, succeeding only
in giving one a distressing lumpishness. With the average
artist the chances would be mostly in favour of his losing
the decorative idea in the realistic, or producing a mixture
of both that would be merely chaotic. Mr. Brangu-yn,
however, is not the average artist, and his work cannot be
judged by elementary canons of decoration, however long
established. The undoubted success, from the decorative
standpoint, of his 'Departure of Lancaster' proves this,
if nothing else."

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Frank Tirangwyn and his JVork

We naturally wish to know whence the writer got
his elementary canons of decoration. From faded frescoes
by the Primitive Italians, or from Rubens ? From Man-
tegna and Michael Angelo, or from the Panth(^on at Paris?
Thank goodness, art in all its just forms has infinite
variety, for it is "/« nature vue a travers im tempdramenty

The first panel finished, Brangwyn felt at ease in his
work, so he passed from Venetian influences, and painted
with greater freedom, giving a more even circulation of
light and a more fluent rhythm to his handling. The
most sumptuous panel of all is, I believe, a " City Pageant
in Olden Days," an enchanted vision, splendidly tumultuous,
yet ordered in a masterful way. It contrasts admirably
with the fourth panel, that represents the strife between
the Skinners and Merchant Taylors. The sentiment here
is akin to that of Shakespearian crowds, ample, rude, and
full-blooded. One thinks of the opening scene in " Romeo
and Juliet," with the rival factions of Montague and Capulet ;
only, the mediaeval Londoners pass less rapidly from words
to blows. But these paintings must be seen to be enjoyed.
It is quite impossible to describe their distinguishing char-
acteristics, because words cannot do justice to qualities of
design or to harmonies of colour.' In large photographs
the decorations are very attractive, showing that every one
was designed not only with infinite skill and vigour, but
with something of the true classic spirit. And each com-
position has, above all, the authoritative quality of style.

How grateful we should be to the man who in these

' The illustrations give two of the panels, but although the greatest care has been
given to both, the resuhs are not what we should like them to be, for large paintings
lose life and charm in little reproductions.
I 60

T^oirits of View in Decorative ^rt

days has power to conceive and bring to completion a fine
series of decorative pictures, revealing such a breadth of
vision, such a lyrical swing in design, such a superb virility
.in handling, as will ever be remarkable in the history of
British art. I am aware that here, as in all work, beauties
are neighboured by blemishes ; but I know, too, that
Brangwyn is still evolving, and that no man of genius has
ever yet been helped by the pin-pricks of a nagging criti-
cism, that jabs and probes into inevitable imperfections.
It has been my duty to read many thousands of notices on
Brangwyn's art, and I can say without exaggeration that
I have come upon very few having the value of those hints
that one friendly painter gives to another.' What Goethe
said of criticism is quite true : it has not even a negative
value, for if a man of genius throughout life were to follow
the differing opinions of any fifty persons, he might waste
fifty years and more on one large picture, blotting it out a
thousand times in defiance of his judgment. Criticism,
then, is useless, except in matters which can be verified as
facts ; and that is why a writer should review only those
forms of art that attract him greatly. His enthusiasm may
then do good, for he will not try to be anything more than

' Mr. George Moore has wrilten well on this subject. " Every twenty years tells the
tale of a new victim, of an artist whose originality affronts public taste ; and sounvarjing
are the expressions used by the critics who voice public displeasure in the newspapers,
that it would almost seem to be possible to divine the new genius in their writings, if per-
sonal knowledge of his works were inaccessible. For these critics invariably find his
pictures ugly — ugly is their favourite adjective— or they declare them to be crude, and
lacking in refinement ; his figures do not look as if you could walk round them, nor do his
landscapes suggest places where they would like to be. . . . It is difficult to say whether
works of genius are disliked more by critics or the general public, nor have we any
means of knowing how far picture-buyers are led by what is printed in the papers. Pro-
bably not very much, for only on the rarest occasions have I been able to persuade my
intimate friends to purchase pictures which they disliked."

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Frank ^rangwyn and his U^ork

a. loyal interpreter between men of genius and the people.
Above all, he will never forget that artists should pursue
their own reasoned course without being affected by outside
praise and censure.

Brangwyn has been baited, as Meunier and Millet
were baited, but, happily, he has been as steadfast as
they were, and his contributions to the democratic art
that they loved are glorious in colour and romantic in
splendid vision and power. Little by little he has passed
away from dangers that beset all men who paint with a
great natural facility. The late Jean Portaels once said
to me : " Born painters and colourists should always
draw in monochrome paint, dwelling insistently on the
sculptural side of form, because a natural fluency with
the brush is an enemy to a planned method in draughts-
manship. It is a sort of eloquence that says too much ;
it needs a self-denying economy." Not only is this true,
but Brangwyn has shown in his recent advance that
he holds the same views. His first etchings date
from about the same year as his commission from the
Skinners' Company, and there is no sterner discipline
than that of the etcher's needle. We find, too, not only
in the work at the Skinners' Hall, but in recent easel-
pictures, that he is gaining a much firmer hold on his
impetuous vitality. If, for example, you compare the
picture "Wine" with an earlier work of the same type —
"The Blood of the Grape," painted in 1896 — you will be
surprised by the growth of self-control in a style that
pulsates with nervous animation. Equally remarkable
and admirable was the "Wine Shop" of 1906, a Brangwyn
of Brangwyns, a real masterpiece, painted at the age of
162

T^oints of P^iew in ^Decorative ^Art

thirty-nine. Mr. Claude Phillips has written the best
analysis of its qualities : —

" Mr. Frank Brangwyn has never yet produced any-
thing which so truly deserves to be described as masterly
as this superb ' Wine Shop.' We must, of course, take
him as he is, and abstain from exacting precisely what
he cannot and will not give. His vision, his execution,
are absolutely his own. Though a naturalist, he is not
in the narrower sense a realist ; or, at the most, he is
a decorative and romantic realist. In these powerful
heads of wine-sellers, painted with magnificent breadth of
brush, so as to dominate even the tremendously forceful
representation of the pumpkins and other gigantic vege-
tables which make so picturesque a foreground, there is
no doubt something of Velazquez, and something, too,
of Manet. Yet the picture as a whole is essentially Mr.
Brangwyn's own, and such as — precisely in this way — no
other artist among his contemporaries, whether British or
foreign, could have painted." — Daily Telegraph, April 21,
1906.

I do not myself see the influence of Manet, but art-
criticism is a record of differing impressions received
from the same work. French writers find that Brangwyn
is a kinsman of certain French painters, while Italian
writers associate his name with various Italian masters,
like Domenichino and Veronese. The aim in each case,
no doubt, is to suggest some quality in Brangwyn that
cannot be described in words.

163

CHAPTER XI

SKETCHES AND STUDIES

TO know an artist we must understand his studies
and sketches, for in these we see and feel the first
rush of inspiration as well as the after-thoughts
of self-criticism. There is ever a conflict be-
tween an artist and his materials, between the emotions
that create and the limits set to creation by tools and
pigments and practical considerations ; and it is only in
the preliminaries of a painter's art, in studies, in sketches,
that we are able to watch the battle, following its fortunes
from the first impulsive hints of a new subject given in
a few rapid lines, onward to drawings from the life for
separate figures. Then there are pochardes — impressions
in colour of things seen, the snapshots of art, invaluable
as documentary evidence of a painter's temperament, his
instantaneous feeling and his ways of work. All these
things belong to the psychology of invention, to the
workshop of that spiritual power known as talent or as
genius. Some painters of note have been unable to
sketch well, like Puvis de Chavannes ; they look trivial
in their experimental efforts, reminding us of that type
of general who needs a full-dress uniform before he
carries with him an air of authority. Other painters —
and even a famous writer here and there, like Victor
Hugo — command attention with half-a-dozen lines hur-
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Sketches and Studies

riedly drawn with pen or pencil. They are artists
through and through, and cannot touch paper without
displaying their natural greatness of spirit. The merest
fragment by a Turner or a Cotman is a joy to any person
who feels at home in the aesthetic factory of emotion.

There vwas a time when many used to say of Brangwyn
that he could not draw, that he painted large pictures
without sufficient preparation, but they took care not to
tell us what merits they expected to find in good drawing,
nor did they confess that they were unacquainted with
his ways of work. They were right in one respect only ;
in certain of his pictures Brangwyn did not draw well,
but you judge an artist by his good flights, not by his
falls, I hope. Of course, if you like that kind of im-
peccable draughtsmanship that seems to have the mechan-
ism of a musical-box, being quite accurate, but without
temperament and passion, then typical studies and
sketches by Frank Brangwyn will leave you cold, for
every line that he draws — draws, that is to say, in a
fortunate mood — vibrates with life. Mr. Arthur Layard,
writing in 1900, said with truth that the distinguishing
characteristic of Brangwyn's drawing — the key of his art
— is to be found in a robust liberty of design tempered by
an austere self-restraint. His impetuous ardour is usually
obedient to discipline, like that of a Highland soldier in
the heat and stress of an advance against the enemy.
The notion, still common in England, that good draughts-
manship laboriously copies the outlines of things observed
and then adds delicate and pretty shading, is, of course,
ridiculous, because photography along those lines can do
a great deal more than the human hand. It is life with

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Frank 'Brangwyn and his IVork

personality that counts in studies and sketches, and each
line must have a quality of touch that no other man
could give. A born draughtsman writes his signature
in every line. Fine sketching should owe no help to
borrowed tricks, to a knack acquired by trying to draw
like the Old Masters. Several painters in London at the
present time are developing mannerisms of this affected
kind, as if they had studied all the chalk drawings in the
print-rooms of Europe ; but they stop always at the same
place, with the sleight-of-hand peculiar to receptive students.

Foreigners remark this fact more keenly than we do,
because they live outside our little artistic sets, each one
of which is apt to become a society for mutual admiration.
They see our exhibitions and say: "Yes, you have a
good many young painters who are clever students, but
that counts for nothing in these days. Schools on the
Continent produce scores of brilliant students who never
do anything great as practising artists. London expects
to surprise us into admiration by displaying much art
work that has no breadth of inspiration. We still prefer
Brangwyn, because he has created a type in art, because
he seldom draws a line without showing that he is a strong
man of original distinction."

This does not mean that Brangwyn is without fault.
No man ever is in all his varying moods, and Brangwyn
may be placed in the same category of imperative crafts-
men as Carlyle and Browning. It is the easiest thing
in the world to pick holes in Browning and Carlyle ; to
resist that commonplace temptation in order to concentrate
on their merits may be a little difficult at times, but it
is always worth while, for these virile artists have infinite
166

Sketches and Studies

strength to impart, and why should we not accept them
as we do imperfect hills that we cannot climb with ease?
If there are bursts of metrical chaos in Browning and
many verbal perversities, so in Brangwyn you will find
here and there perversities of another kind, occasional
errors of judgment in his choice of models, for example;
but let us never point out a shortcoming in one person
of genius without thinking of those in his equals. One
characteristic — I do not call it a fault — becomes plain to
any one who examines with sympathy Brangwyn's sketches
and studies ; it is his growing sense of drama in the
colossal engines and factories built to-day by little men.
He sees man dwarfed by man-constructed things ; sees
human nature overawed by inventions of a mechanical
sort, created by a few rare minds and carried out by
millions of commonplace hands, almost automatically ;
and although his attitude to toil is like that of a sports-
man to games involving danger, there is yet at times
a tendency to make factories and machines the main
subjects of interest.

Let us consider this point still further. The most
remarkable thing of the present time is the fact that we all
use a great many wonderful inventions without knowing
anything about their mechanism. These inventions are
supposed to be the business sla\-es of to-day, and we have
not enough pride of mind to learn how and why they are
helpful to us. We use them as if we also were machines,
and in a feeble way we boast about the fact that they are
here for us to employ. Not one person in five thousand
has any real knowledge about the telephone, or the fitment
of electric light in a house, or the principles of aviation,

167

Frank "Brangwyn and his H^ork

or the engines that carry us by train or by steamer. Very
few of us know how the simplest household thing is made ;
and as workmanship to-day is very subdivided, most of
us are craftsmen of odds and ends, doing each of us some
small part of a big undertaking upon which many are
engaged. If we look at ourselves collectively, as a nation,
we are great, but if we consider ourselves one by one in
relation to what we know about our surroundings, we
are weaker and more isolated than civilised men have
ever been before. It is this that Brangwyn feels with
an intense dramatic energy which at times appears very
tragic and fatalistic. He has not lost hope in man, far
from that ; but he sees that man is using his skill, his
invention, his toil, not to ennoble his daily life with beauti-
ful things, but to make himself the sport of mechanisms
and hazards that he himself creates. It is a drama new
in kind, since the huge masses of metal and of brick-
buildings that we animate with pulsating machines seem
of greater import to the imagination than is any little
busy human creature that helps to work them. For in-
stance, I feel a tremendous tragedy in Brangwyn's sketch —
a sketch translated into a famous etching — of the gigantic
battleship ashore, and the wee pigmies who are going to
break her up. Here, indeed, is a new Gulliver in the land
of the Lilliputians.

These traits in Brangwyn's work have been noted also
by a French critic, M. Henri Marcel, Director of the
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, who wTote one of the
introductions to "The Etched Work of Frank Brangwyn,"
a very beautiful book published by the Fine Art Society,
London, in 1908. M. Marcel says: —
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Sketches and Studies

" It is London, the city that possesses the most im-
pressive scenery of this kind in the world, that without
doubt has taught Brangwyn the amazing Titanic beauty
of modern machinery and of all its great engines. Their
enormous dimensions, their bizarre outlines, the kind of
irresistible decision with which they move and work, the
absence of all visible effort in their labour, are qualities
not less stimulating to the imagination than the rhythmic
and measured beauty of human effort. They give us also
the moving spectacle of imprisoned forces that we know
to be deadly — forces of which the sudden revolt and terrible
cruelty are always possibilities that we must beware of.
The absence, too, of a common scale between man and
these colossal and unshapely monsters carries the mind
back, by analogy, to prehistoric ages, to the obscure be-
ginnings of the world ; at the same time the sentiment
of the social needs of which they are the provisional
expression, must plunge human thought into an abyss
of dreaming of what may be possible in ages to come.
This particular kind of beauty becomes exaggerated and
dramatic in London because ... of the capricious and
struggling character of the light, the rays there shifting with
the sunshine, and the wind that is continually blotting
it out with factory smoke and dust. ... It is, perhaps,
to this fact that we must attribute two of the principal
characteristics of Brangwyn's [etched] work. A great
inequality is noticeable when we contrast the plates that
represent natural forces and the engines that are their
instruments with other plates that depict the individual
labours of mankind. No matter how great is the emphasis
that he gives to the stature, the gesture or the strain of
Y 169

Frank "Brangwyn and his Tf^ork

effort in his workmen, sawyers, bricklayers, dyers, tanners,
rowers, or sailors hauling boats, by the artful dimensions
of his grouping, he is scarcely successful, and hardly
seems to trouble about making them very interesting ;
hence his composition often lacks what is necessary to
express the power of their effort — intensity of accent,
expressive synthesis. Lifeless things, on the other hand,
like machines, receive from his needle the most striking
colour and character. The infinite power that is for the
moment imprisoned in them seems to interest him in-
tensely. Such, indeed, is the impression that the wharf,
like the factory, produces upon us ; there the man, whose
intelligence enslaves and controls these inorganic forces,
seems in such places the inferior, the slave almost, of the
monsters that he has in reality tamed."

In fact, the average man does not at present enslave
the machine that he controls, but is himself often enslaved
by the machine, like stokers on board ship, for example,
or the drivers of railway engines, who rush into horrible
accidents if they neglect their engines. Mechanical in-
ventions are new forms of organism outside man, yet
belonging to him almost as intimately as his stomach
or as his lungs. That Brangwyn should feel all this
in a way different from Constantin Meunier is a point
of peculiar interest, and I believe it appears most re-
markably in his monochrome work — his crayon sketches
and his etchings. But it is only a phase in the evolu-
tion of his art, and we need not fear that its mood will
become a habit. He understands the deeper meaning
in art that underlies one of the most important criti-
cisms made by Lessing on the relation between man
170

Sketches and Studies

and human handicraft. " I grant," said Lessing, " that
there is also a beauty in drapery, but can it be compared
with that of the human form ? And shall he who can
attain to the greater, rest content with the less ? I
much fear that the most perfect master in drapery
shows by that very talent wherein his weakness lies."
As with drapery, so with all other accessories of human
life : and surely the most threatening sign of our time
is the circumstance that a great many thousands of
workmen are conscious of their inferiority to machines.
Let that consciousness spread, and the dignity of man-
hood must suffer much. Life is triumph over difficulties
and dangers, not a tame submission to a mindless
routine of subdivided labour ; and so, is not the highest
aim of modern art to represent the heroic aspects of man
in the battlefields of industrialism ?

For the rest, Brangwyn's sketches and studies ought
to be well known, because they have been illustrated
in many magazines. At first the artist used lead-pencil,
following an English tradition that goes back to the
youth of English water-colour ; but soon he took greater
pleasure in charcoal, in pastel, in natural red chalk, in
contd crayon, and in lithography. His studies in char-
coal are nearly all industrial subjects, and most of them
are in foreign collections. I remember very well " A
Shipbuilding Yard on the Tyne," with a great vessel
in skeleton cobwebbed by its scaffolding, and a number
of men — how tiny they look in comparison with the
ribbed frame of the ship ! — busy at their jobs. I re-
member, too, very distinctly, " The Railway Cutting,"
with navvies, and a fine design of smoke floating across

171

Frank "Brangwyn and his W^ork

the background. Other charcoal studies represent sea
life, Turkish sailors, and the like, but I prefer the
British workmen, with views of industrial towns, like
Newcastle.

In this typical phase of his work Brangwyn has used
pastel on a good many occasions, as in studies for the
room decorations that he carried out in the Venice
International Exhibition of 1905. He then designed the
whole scheme in the British section, its woodwork and
its furniture. There were four large oblong panels and
two smaller ones, representing forms of present-day
labour — potters, for instance, navvies, smiths, and workers
in steel, this one being a study in pastel. It was hoped
in Venice that these decorations would remain per-
manently there, in the Municipal Gallery, but thanks
to an English patron of art, Mr. S. Wilson, they were
purchased for the City Art Gallery of Leeds, and a fifth
panel — " Weavers " — was commissioned to bear them
company in the Brangwyn room. Many sketches were
made for these works, some in pastel, and others in
contd ; two of the most important passed into the
private collection of M. A. G. Migeon of the Louvre.

It may be taken as an axiom in art that those who
make the largest number of preparatory studies are
either careful and elaborate artists like Leighton and
Ingres, or impetuous and very virile painters, like
Delacroix and Brangwyn. Extremes meet. People often
forget this fact and stumble into mistakes. It was long
believed that Brangwyn made no sketches at all, and
criticisms were written from that standpoint. This
happened particularly in the case of such pictures as
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Sketches and Studies

"The Scoffers," though beautiful studies of expression
had been made in crayon for each figure. It was Mr.
Konody, I believe, who first published a series of
drawings for the Moorish figures in " The Scoffers," and
called attention also to the life-studies that Brangwyn
made in 1895 when working for M. Bing in Paris. I dwell
upon this matter because I am constantly being told
that Brangwyn is one of those lucky fellows who paint
rapidly without rehearsing their intentions and effects.

For the purpose in hand, let me here make another
general remark, not, I think, irrelevant : it is the fact
that Brang\\-yn gives examples of the two methods of
drawing that appeal to us from pictures. The first
method sets us thinking about nature's delight in circular
or in rotund forms, while the other avoids as many
round shapes as it can by the use of suggestive angular
touches. I happen to be very sensitive on this point,
because my masters at the Brussels Academy told me
always that my work had a tendency to be " too round " ;
and there can be no doubt that there is more life and
character in a square method of sketching. Nature her-
self creates angles when her moods are violent. This
she shows in forked lightning and in the ragged forms
of rocks shattered by an earthquake ; while in all her
manifestations of abundance her shapes are rounded, as
witness the forms of fruits, flowers, birds' eggs, tree trunks,
the sun, and the physical beauty of women. A round
method of drawing is excellent in decorative design,
for it suggests repose and poise ; and that is why
flowing curves have ever been chosen for patterns.
Angles have a much stronger accent and suggest an

Frank 'Brangwyn and his Work

active vigour ; this will be seen at once if you draw
a man's leg, indicating the muscles first with a curved
touch and then with an angular feeling. I am sure
you will be greatly interested when you note the con-
trastive use that Brangwyn makes of both methods,
responding to different moods of sentiment.

Here, for example, is a lithograph showing a cooper
at work ; he wears a loose shirt that takes angular
pleats, while his baggy trousers roll into rotund lines ;
he leans forward with his hands grasping a huge barrel,
and the muscles of a bare arm, put in with a touch
free from roundness, tell me that the man is ready to
push the heavy thing forward. The technique in this
lithograph is good sketching, easy and strong and
distinctive. Among other lithographs I may mention
"The Harvesters," "Platelayers," " Music," "The Loom,"
" Unloading Oranges at London Bridge," " Men Carrying
Fruit," "The Pool of Bethesda" (a very large print), "A
Winepress in Spain," " The Drunkards," and " The
Buccaneers," in which ten rascals and their absurd
accoutrements are studied with humorous pleasure.
M. Marcel describes this print as fantastically comic,
but he prefers the " Winepress in Spain," calling it
a masterpiece of exact observation. Mr. Claude Phillips
has a great admiration for " The Men Carrying Fruit,"
superb as a work of art ; " a design treated with something
of the Greek freedom and the Greek spirit, although it is
anything but Greek in aspect."

174

CHAPTER XII

WATER-COLOUR

WE have seen already that Brangwyn has found
it helpful to his aims as a colourist to paint
from time to time in water-colour. He has
used this medium occasionally since boy-
hood, for one of his water-colours was hung at the Royal
Academy in 1887. There are people who say that his
technique is apart from the tradition of the English
masters, and Brangwyn himself agrees that he never served
an apprenticeship in those methods that developed from
stained or tinted drawings into the multitudinous delicacy
of Turner, into the breadth of Girtin and Cotman, of David
Cox, and Miiller and De Wint ; or again, into the admir-
able assurance of such lesser men as Ibbetson, Francia,
Varley, Havell, Joseph Nash, Prout, Harding, and Leitch.
But methods are not devised by men and superimposed on
any medium for artistic expression ; they arise from the
medium itself, and their essential qualities are respected
when new aims in technique displace the old. The chief
and distinguishing beauty of water-colour is the gleam of
paper through transparent tints having a luminous surface
without gloss, a surface that never stands in need of
varnish ; and there is always a distinct loss when that
limpid brilliance is deadened either by paper which is too
dark, or by turning pigment into body-colour by mixing it

175

Frank 'Brangwyn and his Ji^ork

with white. Body-colour is virtuall)' tempera, though it
has not the solidity and power of real tempera. For this
reason I prefer Brangwyn water-colours to Brangwyn
body-colours, while feeling the charm that the latter have
at their best. In the spring of this year he made several
fine ones in the ruins of Messina, showing the architectural
wreckage in that vast graveyard, and noting how certain
men, under the shadow of broken walls, gathered together
odds and ends of furniture and went on with their futile
devilries as gamblers and cheats. The Messina sketches
have great interest, and those which are in pure water-
colour belong to the tradition of Muller's rapid manipula-
tion with a full brush.

When body-colour is used it is best to take a hint
from old William Hunt, whose technique in the water-
medium was always learned and suggestive. When he
wished to get a degree of brilliance that his paper would
not give, as in ripe fruits, he made a good ground with
Chinese white and let it dry hard ; then, in swift and fluent
touches with transparent colour, he painted over it, taking
care never to disturb the white. Brangwyn has not yet
employed this method, but he has used tinted papers, as
did Miiller and George Cattermole. The danger here is
that in seeking for depth of tone by this means some other
loveliness peculiar to the medium may be lost. De Wint
was faithful all his life to cream-faced Whatman paper with a
biting grain, and Girtin was loyal to a peculiar kind of strong,
wire-laid cartridge paper that he bought in folded quires
from a stationer at Charing Cross. Its colour is not white,
and the effects it produces under the free and bold washes
are seldom equal to the luminous strength of a De Wint.
176

t— 4

O 2
O -
< 5

y. .

3- 5

•r. ,t:

'X. =

5 e

IVater- Colour

I mention here with particular interest these fine
painters, De Wint and Girtin, not only because Brangwyn
loves their work, but because he and they have a certain
kinship in sentiment of handling. This fact may not be
apparent to you at a first glance, because Brangwyn appeals
to us very often as an orientalist, like Miiller, while Girtin
never travelled farther than Paris, and De Wint was so
d£voted to flat country scenes in England that he refused
to try foreign landscape. But if these men had gone to the
East their swift, full brushes would have recorded the
intense sunlight in ways having much in common with
Brangwyn's nervous washes, accented with a crisp touch
here and there. Brangwyn, too, like De Wint, is at his
best in water-colour when he does not go beyond the
sketch, leaving his work for some fool to finish. He is
very well represented at the Luxembourg by a glowing
aquarelle — Uti Putts an Maroc, intense with light and
shade, a group of figures behind, silhouetted against green
shrubs seen through a trellised wall ; and in the fore-
ground is a ruddy-faced boy in a golden yellow gown,
carrying a water-gourd.

The method is quite different from Melville's, though
we are told from time to time that Brangvvyn owes much in
his water-colours to the happy skill with which Melville
got his delightful effects, interspersing his dots and dashes
and blobs with empty spaces. Both are colourists of the
first order, both are virile and impetuous, and each shows
in his own way a buoyant delight in grasping the essential
points of an Eastern scene crowded with figures, or a phase
of life elsewhere. Stipplers tell us that they have another
thing in common — defective drawing; but their powers of
z 177

Frank "Brangwyn and his U'^ork

suggestion in the difficult art of water-colour is consummate
draughtsmanship, as stipplers would find if they tried to
analyse synthetically, instead of in detail, copying line by
line. To draw in that manner is within the reach of any
academic patience, while the massed synthesis of Brangwyn
or the blotted unity of Melville is the expression of original
observation and feeling, and those who try to imitate it
do not succeed. Art of this kind has to be judged by
imaginative eyes, and I take pleasure in applying to it
what Ruskin says in his comparison between Reynolds
and Hobbema : —

"A few strokes of the pencil, or dashes of colour, will
be enough to enable the imagination to conceive a tree ;
and in those dashes of colour Sir Joshua Reynolds would
have rested, and would have suffered the imagination to
paint what more it liked for itself, and grow oaks, or olives,
or apples out of the dashes of colour at its leisure. On the
other hand, Hobbema . . . smites the imagination on the
mouth, and bids it be silent, while he sets to work to paint
his oak of the right green."

Melville and Brangwyn, in their fortunate moods,
suggest the impression that actual facts have made on
their minds, and no higher compliment can be paid to us
— the onlookers of art, who have to collaborate with artists
when we wish to enjoy their skill. Where Brangwyn and
Melville differ essentially is in nervous temperament, for
while Brangwyn feels the need of a sweeping touch, that
gathers details rapidly into battalion masses, Melville's
brush blobs, and dabs, and flicks, not irritably, like a
hungry bird pecking at fruit, but with pleasure and great
technical knowledge. Further, Brangwyn is decorative
178

neater- Colour

in many of his water-colours, while Melville is pictorial,
seeking always to suggest the full glory of light and air,
with their effects on contours, distances, colours, and
movements. We can never have too much variety in art,
and these two painters — each within limits set by tempera-
ment and by aesthetic outlook — have enriched the beauti-
ful art of English water-colour.

179

CHAPTER XIII

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR MAGAZINES AND BOOKS-
DESIGNS FOR POSTERS

WHEN a painter from time to time turns
from his own work to illustrations, either
he wants to earn money while struggling
with a big picture, or else he feels that
" parerga" (as the Greeks called the by-play efforts of more
leisured hours), will take him away from the main stress
of his usual professional life. Brangu'yn speaks of his
illustrations as bread-and-butter things, but this applies
more often to his books than to his drawings for magazines,
and the reason is practical. The book market has been so
glutted during the last twenty years that the fortunes
of its stock have been like those of little children lost
in a turbulent crowd. To foresee what would happen to
them, to divine which would be saved and which killed,
has been impossible ; and therefore it has needed courage
to pay large fees for illustrations. Even two guineas for
each of a dozen drawings, when added to the cost of
blocks, and paper, and printing, may be too much. Many
a good venture has, indeed, been turned by that price into
a failure. It is hard upon the rank and file of illustrators,
unless they are popular with those magazines and weeklies
that actually do what they can afford to do — paying well
and promptly. American magazines lead the way in this
1 80

a--

Illustrations for Magazines and 'Books

respect, and Brangwyn has worked — always with much
pleasure — for Scribners, Maclnre's, the Century, Collier's
Weekly, and the Cambridge Press, U.S.A.

The Graphic has supported him from the days of his
first adventures as a sea-painter, and always in a way
that he has liked to remember. The plates were very
popular. Several were in colours, like the " Sail Ho I "
in the Christmas number of 1902 ; and in the Christmas
numbers of 1895 and 1896, Brangwyn illustrated tw^o stories
by Mr. Rudyard Kipling — "The Devil and the Deep Sea,"
and " Bread upon the Waters." The two colour-prints are
typical and good. The better one belongs to " Bread upon
the Waters." It recalls to memory the fact that some
foreign critics have noted a kinship between Rudyard
Kipling and Frank Brangwyn. M. Gabriel Mourey says,
for instance : " Brangwyn ne possede-t-il pas la meme
fagon de grandir, de ' lyriciser,' si Ton pent dire, la rdalit^,
de glorifier les aspects momentands des choses pour nous
en faire sentir plus profonddment les beautds secretes, aussi
pour nous donner de I'homme qui les possede et les com-
prend une idee plus haute, plus dominatrice." Anyway,
one thing is certain : Kipling and Brangwyn are friendly
shipmates in a fine sea-story.

1894. "The Wreck of the Golden Fleece" the story
of a North Sea fisher-boy, by Robert Leighton. Messrs.
Blackie.

1895. " Don Quixote." Translated by Thomas Shelton
in 161 2, from the second edition of the story published
at Madrid in 1605. 4 vols. London : Gibbings & Co.
The pictures — four in photogravure and the rest in half-
tone— are conceived in the right spirit. The subjects

181

Frank "Brangwyn and his M^ork

chosen are varied, and I note a few : Don Quixote ready
to receive on the point of his lance the merchants of
Toledo ; he discourses with the goatherds ; he sees some
twelve men in a company on foot, fastened together by
a chain of iron, that is tied about their necks; the pro-
cession of ecclesiastics in white, who call upon God to
bestow some rain upon the land ; the Puppet Play ;
Sancho and the Don on board the enchanted bark ; they
appear as shepherds, and Quixote's return home — a lively
street scene.

1896. "The Arabian Nights." Translated by Edward
William Lane. 6 vols. Gibbings & Co. Pleasantly illus-
trated in monochromes. Brangwyn is not here attracted
by fantastic episodes, nor does he keep the book from the
hands of little children by drawing voluptuous scenes of
harem life ; he is a realist in most of the plates, giving
scenes in Damascus or in Bagdad, or showing carriers
unloading a vessel, or galley-slaves at their chained oars
and a taskmaster wielding his long whip. There is a
charming woman in one plate ; she reclines on a carpeted
dai's, with her head resting against her lord, and listens
while a story is being told.

1899. "A Spliced Yarn." A volume of good sea-
stories by George Cupples, author of "The Green Hand."
Gibbings & Co.

1900. Cervantes : " Exemplary Tales — A Story of Two
Damosels, The Lady Cornelia, The Jealous Husband, The
Liberal Lover, The Force of Blood, and The Spanish
Lady." Translated by James Mabbe in 1640. 2 vols.
Two photogravures and ten half-tone blocks. There are
several sea-pictures, like "The Boarding of All's Galley,"

182

Illustrations for Magazines and 'Books

an original composition ; and I like the Rembrandtesque
supper-party in " The Force of Blood," and the redeeming
of Christian captives in " The Spanish Lady." This would
enlarge into a fine fresco.

1905. "Tom Cringle's Log." By Michael Scott.
Gibbings & Co. The pictures are small photogravures,
all interesting, but they do not represent the text, giving
the main incidents and characters.

1905. " The Spirit of the Age." Text by Ldonce
Bdnddite and W. Shaw-Sparrow. Four lithographs, four
plates in colour, and twelve Rembrandt photogravures.
1905. Hodder & Stoughton.

1908. "The Last Fight of the Revenge." By Sir
Walter Raleigh. Six colour-plates and many line-blocks
in the text as headpieces and tailpieces. Subjects of the
colour-plates : "Queen Elizabeth going on board the Golden
Hind," from the overmantel at Lloyd's; "A Captured
Galleon," from a picture belonging to Colonel Goff; "The
Last Mght," " Galleons in Harbour," " Loading the
Galleons," and "The Galleon Fair." Gibbings & Co.

1908. " The Etched Work of Frank Brangwyn."
With a Catalogue of 133 Etchings compiled by Frank
Newbolt, A.R.E., and Appreciations by Henri Marcel,
Director of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and Prof.
Dr. Hans W. Singer, Keeper of the Royal Print-Room,
Dresden. The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street,
London. A beautiful work.

1909. " Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." Translated by
Edward Fitzgerald. Introduction by Joseph Jacobs. Four
good plates in colour, well printed, and ornamental
borderings to each page. Gibbings lv: Co.

183

Frank 'Brangwyn and his Work

1909. " Historical Paintings in the Great Hall in
London of the Worshipful Company of Skinners." By
Frank Brangwyn, A.R.A., R.E., Membre de la Soci^td
Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris ; Socidtd Royale Beige,
Royal Academy of Milan, and Royal Academy of Stock-
holm. With an Introductory Essay by Warwick H.
Draper, M.A. The Caradoc Press. A book for collectors.

In addition to these, Brangwyn has illustrated Southey's
"Life of Nelson," and another edition of "Omar Khayyam."
Then again, there are a few excellent posters, the best of
all being one for the Orient Pacific Line ; it represents a
huge steamer and some little craft manned by Orientals.
It is good in every way. The advertisement of words is
not overdone ; the eye takes it in at a glance, and the mind
can remember it without effort. These points are essential
in all advertising, yet they are usually forgotten by trades-
men. Every artist who designs a poster has a battle to
fight as soon as his work comes in touch with the vain-
glory of advertisers, who believe that they must be effective
if they say far too much about themselves and their work.
If a few words are necessary in this form of design, so, too,
are a few well-chosen colours, carefully massed and kept
flat and pure. Brangwyn uses primary colours — red,
yellow, and blue — and brings them into contrast with
the long dark hull of the ocean steamer that stretches
across the poster, forming a mass of neutral tints. How
gay and beautiful our hoardings would be if all poste-rs
had to be approved by a small committee of competent
experts at the Board of Trade. " The poor man's art-
gallery " — and the general look of our towns and cities —
need some national protection.
184

CHAPTER XIV

ETCHINGS: AND SUMMARY OF CHARACTERISTICS

THE first important etchings by Frank Brangvvyn
date from the year 1902. Long before then, in
boyhood, he had made some experimental plates ;
at a later period he tried his luck in "The Mill,
Manningtree," one proof of which now belongs to Mr.
H. F. W. Ganz ; but these first attempts had no real
value, while those of 1902 proved that Brangwyn had
found for himself an original line. A man of his
temperament could not follow at the heel of modern
etchers, striving always after dainty suggestion, after
subtle allusiveness. He would need large metal plates,
choosing soft zinc more often than hard copper ; and he
would bite his work with very strong nitrous acid until
the lines became deep and fat and silky. In his crafts-
manship there would be impatient emotion, ner\'ous and
rugged life ; and because etching gave harmonies in
black and white, he would not be afraid to use those
two colours in bold masses, all well orchestrated, and
printed with great care. Questions of ink would interest
him greatly, for blacks without transparence, without
inner light, would annoy him, just as they annoyed
Turner. The best French black, thick and stiff, and
difficult to use. would be chosen, probably, but he
would add to it a little burnt sienna with a trifle of

2 A 185

Frank 'Brangwyn and his IVork

raw sienna also, just to give translucency. He would
see that his ink had the quality of good paint. It
would not be possible for a Brangwyn temperament to
find adequate self-interpretation by any other aims and
technical methods, yet his etchings still continue to pro-
voke surprise and controversy, as if onlookers do not
mind when they fail to penetrate into the inner essence
and the life of those arts that they wish to understand.

Since 1902, for example, there has been much lamenta-
tion in England — but never on the Continent — over the
size of Brangwyn's etchings. They are said to be much
too large. One critic writes as follows on this point : —

"These big etchings tell tremendously in an exhibition,
but they are more suitable for the large portfolios and,
in many cases, ample wall-space of a public collection
than for the more limited accommodation of a private
house. ... In England, at least, we are not con-
tented with one picture on a wall ; most of us like our
walls rather crowded, and we cannot all afford to crowd
them with Brangwyns. Nor do the conditions of light
and space with which the majority of us have to be con-
tented in our dwelling-rooms permit us to enjoy these
robust and imposing compositions at the proper distance
from the eye. It is impossible to mix Brangwyns with
Whistlers, Hadens, Bones, or any of the humbler English
etchings likely to be found in a house where painter-
etchers' work is appreciated at all ; the difference of scale
is too great, the adjustment of focus too exhausting to
the eye."

It is difficult to find one's way about that criticism.
There is no starting-point within the art of Brangwyn,
186

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

and if householders like their walls to be crowded with
small prints, all out of scale with the mural surface, we
have reason to wish for a better taste in British homes.
Small etchings should be put in cabinets or in portfolios,
while large prints by Piranesi, by Legros, by Brangwyn,
have a scale and a style that fit them for mural decora-
tion. If we like, we can keep them also in cabinets, for
their ornamental value does not interfere with their varied
charm when we study them closely and near at hand.
A little etching never looks in place on a wall, unless
we forget that the first principles of applied art are fit-
ness for a given purpose and a just proportion between
a decoration and the object decorated. Even in little
rooms the walls are too big to be in scale with small
etchings. And other useful things can be said about
large etchings, considered in their relation to household
taste. They are less costly than good paintings of equal
size, and they look quite well in the dim winter light of
big towns ; their colour is neither fugitive nor changeful,
and they bear their part with credit in almost any scheme
of room decoration, except one with panelled walls.

Whistler, as we know, held other views on this sub-
ject, and expressed them in his " Gentle Art of Making
Enemies." The Hoboken Etching Club had invited him
to enter a competition, and to do a big plate measuring
not less than 2 feet by 3 feet. If the committee of
that Club had been well acquainted with Whistler's
etched work, they would have remembered that even in
little prints of the Thames his effect was often scattered,
wanting the grasp of hand that produces firm structure
and good design. It is said that he did try to etch

187

Frank "Brangwyn and his Ji^ork

in large, but a ten-mile race in black-and-white art was
too much for his emotional stamina ; he broke down,
making a complete failure. In small plates, on the
other hand, he achieved the new and original romance
of his Venetian period, when every line had a sympa-
thetic charm, wonderfully alive with a sort of airy magic.
Small etchings were right for Whistler, but, artist-like,
he wished to pass from himself and his limitations into
a general rule. If large etchings were wrong in his own
case, why should they be right at any time? To forget
Piranesi and Legros was not difficult, since a theory
had to be bolstered up by arguments, and Whistler
delighted to be subtle in effervescent reasonings. With
great care he wrote to the Hoboken Etching Club,
copied his letter, and kept the copy for future reference ;
nor did he forget to show method and pride in the
tabulation of his dicta: —

" I. That in art it is criminal to go beyond the means
used in its exercise.

"2. That the space to be covered should always be in
proper relation to the means used for covering it.

"3. That in etching the means used, or instrument
employed, being the finest possible point, the space to
be covered should be small in proportion.

"4. That all attempts to overstep the limits, insisted
upon by such proportion, are inartistic thoroughly, and
tend to reveal the paucity of the means used, instead of
concealing the same, as required by Art in its refine-
ment.

"5. That the huge plate, therefore, is an offence."
188

t-H

•5?

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

To all this we must add two dicta omitted by Whistler.
The first is that a complete success in any art is in its own
justification. At a time when metal plates for etching were
beaten out by hand, a small expanse of copper may have
seemed, perhaps, to be an essential limitation to a difficult
art ; but as soon as metal could be rolled out with a perfect
flatness by machine-power, a big sheet of copper was not
more difficult to get than a small one, so that experiments
could be made on an ampler scale. Then success would
be determined, not by dicta as to size, but by the genius
of a man who worked more freely in large than in little.
True, his instrument was the finest possible point, that
made the finest possible line, but this was not the whole
of his handicraft, since his metal plate had yet to be bitten
by acid. The acid could be either weak or strong, and the
finest lines, bitten deeply, would grow into scale with the
large surface, becoming rich and strong. So then, to argue
from the fine point of one instrument was incorrect ; it was
necessary to remember two other factors — the acid bath and
a natural aptitude of some artists to do their best work
on a spacious scale.

Perhaps Whistler's dicta may be true if we apply them
to dry-points, but to give them a general authority over
etching is unreasonable. Brangwyn found that they were
far and away too Procrustean ; they did not suit his tem-
perament at all, but cramped his natural style, so he thrust
them aside, etching " London Bridge," that measured
22 by i6J inches, and "A Turkish Cemetery," where he
designed with freedom over a surface measuring 18 inches
by 19 inches.

Professor Legros saw these early efforts in 1903, and

189

Frank "Brangwyn and his IJ'^ork

admired their bold aspect. "A Turkish Cemetery" has,
indeed, an oriental feeling, a sensation of vivid light and
of rich colour, while the "London Bridge" is massive
and cloudy and industrial. The general effect is not
perfect, I admit. The steamer is too even in her black-
ness ; and again, the distant houses are drawn with a
mathematical neatness, cold and correct, not nervous and
suggestive, like those touches of architectural shorthand
that count for so much in line draughtsmanship. There
is more maturity in another etching of the first period,
" A Road in Picardy," reminiscent of the fine Hobbema
in our National Gallery, but with a still more romantic
charm in the aspiring avenue. The trees feel the wind
unevenly, and their elastic strength is made real with high-
spirited joy. By way of contrast, in order to show the
scope of these early etchings, I now choose the busy
"Tan-Yard," with its men at work, strong fellows, all well
drawn ; but I notice a peculiarity in their grouping. They
are placed two by two — a defect in composition that appears
here and there in Brangwyn pictures. Perhaps it arises
from his practice since boyhood in pattern decoration,
where all details are repeated exactly.

Again, the etchings are very valuable to all who would
appreciate his genius.^ The eye is not influenced by many
colours all in harmony, and we pass from print to print
as travellers do through drawings that recall to their re-
collection their journeys in various lands. One might say,

' It is never difficult to see Brangwyn etchings here in London, for the Fine Art
Society, New Bond Street, has always a large number, as well as a catalogue to June
1908, with 133 brief descriptions. In Paris the etchings are to be seen ckez M. Brajnson,
Galerie d'Art D6coratif, 7 Rue Laffitte.
190

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

in figurative language, that Brangwyn etchings are the
maps and charts of Brangwyn's realm, a realm with many
provinces. Let us study their characteristics one by one,
keeping always in mind the fact that they belong also
to his work as a painter.

I. Masculinity. — To this word we must give a much
wider meaning than that which is attached to it in daily
talk. Coleridge said — and his opinion in this matter was
supported by Goethe and by other great thinkers and ob-
servers— that creative minds were always androgynous ;
in other words, that the qualities of genius were partly
masculine and partly feminine. Not only is this true, but
we find in it a sure basis for useful criticism. When we
come in contact with the work of a genuine artist, the first
question to be asked and answered is as follows : Does
this man develop the female side of his genius, or does he
allow the male attributes to dominate the female ? Does
his appeal strike a feminine note, or is it militant and
masculine ? To answer this question is to get a mental
foothold within the psychological significance of that man's
work ; and no criticism is worth a moment's attention
unless it understands the personal equation revealed in
the emotions of an artist. Here is an example. If you
compare George Mason's colliery girls — "The Evening
Hymn" — with any industrial picture by Constantin
Meunier, you will find that while the Englishman tries to
attract us with a feminine graciousness and sympathy, the
great Fleming is a Michael Angelo of the people, modelling
his figures with a male energy, and feeling always as a
strong man feels when he has learnt to see in human life
the inevitableness of incessant battle and suffering. The

191

Frank ^rangwyn and his JVork

very title of Mason's picture ' would have been offensive to
Meunier. It appeals to the groundlings, it has no relation
whatever to the dramatic toil of a colliery district ; and
again, it marks a very weak tendency in British art. Turn
to the catalogues of picture exhibitions, and you will find
that many of our artists like sweet titles and pretty quo-
tations from familiar poetry. This feminine weakness
astonished Ary Renan seventeen years ago," because
foreigners expect that the most athletic nation in the world,
the home of all dangerous sports, and the nursery for
adventurous colonisers, will show in her arts the heroic
qualities that stand to her credit historically ; and when
they find that gentleness and prettiness are ideals in
British pictures they begin to think that British painters
have no stamina, but turn out playthings in order to earn
money.

It is felt abroad that Brangwyn alone in his work sym-
bolises the daring manliness of the British temperament ;
that he alone represents his time and race, showing courage,
indomitable energy, and blending knowledge of the East

' I am not finding fault with Mason, whose work has many gracious and winning
qualities. My aim is to point out the fact that he, an Anglo-Saxon, was attracted by the
female attributes of style.

* Ary Kenan's " Impressions of English Art " were published in the Pall Afall
Gazette. He said : " I think that Punch will long make merry over the sensational
titles of certain pictures. Who would suppose, for example, that 'The Interval' was
a simple family scene ; that ' Dead Heat ' represents little dogs ; that ' Two is Com-
pany' represents sea birds; and 'The News of Trafalgar' a woman at the spinning
wheel? ... 1 blackened my catalogue with pencil marks against the pictures imitated
from those of Alma Tadema. The Pompeian houses, the white marble, the rose leaves,
the leopard skins ! It is really comic. Pompeii, as you know, was a town of pleasure
and of bad taste. In the houses that have so much interest for archaeologists, there
were allowed all sorts of things — hardly to be recommended ; and here is the English
imagination taking pagan Pompeii as the frame for a perpetual sentimental idyl, a chaste
masquerade !"

192

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:§

t*^

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

with an intense sympathy for the grim stress and strain
of Western industrialism. Good foreign critics see, no
doubt, that his ample style is not yet fully matured, its
virile strength being somewhat of a rebel ; but they see
also that there is little hope for any artist who in youth
turns away from the development of power to nurse the
feminine attributes of his genius. The creation of a style
is like the building" of an obelisk : there must be no soften-
ing workmanship until the thing itself stands complete,
erect and commanding.

But the manliness of Frank Brangwyn is a singular
thing — more impulsive, more vehement, than that of any
other artist in the whole range of our British schools.
Compare him with Reynolds, with Raeburn, with Con-
stable, with James \Vard, whose manliness cannot be
denied, and you will find that they have not the instanta-
neous nerve-force that vibrates through the best Brangwyn
pictures and etchings. If you are sensitive to the throbbing
tide of energy in creative work, you will find it a fatigue
to follow with dramatic pleasure the constructural work-
manship of two or three Brangwyns in a single sitting. I
have felt the same fatigue when watching a strong athlete
run in a great race, and there is, in fact, a certain resem-
blance between the nervous energy of the trained athlete
and the constructive energy shown by Brangwyn. The
danger in both is that they will exhaust themselves too
early in their race and give way, spent, before the crisis.
When a ten-miler tumbles fonvard suddenly, or a rower
falls over his oar, no onlooker complains; he has failed
nobly in a big effort. So, too, when we feel now^and then
in Brangwyn's work that his nervous vigour suddenly
2B 193

Frank "Erangwyn and his Work

paused, hesitated, broke off, we must not dwell upon the
fact as a mistake to be criticised, for any temperament
similar to his cannot but be subject to moments of
exhaustion.

The marvellous thing is that such moments have been
infrequent with this great artist. Consider his work during
the last eight years. It includes nearly two hundred etch-
ings, most of them large and scarcely one that is not good ;
the eleven panels at the Skinners' Hall ; decorative work
for two exhibitions in Venice ; holiday sketches in various
places, from Winchelsea to Montreuil-sur-Mer, and from
Messina to Cahors ; and more than half-a-dozen fine
pictures, " The Rajah's Birthday," " The Return from the
Promised Land," "Wine," "The Cider Press," "The Card-
Players," "The Wine Shop," "The Venetian Funeral,"
" Modern Commerce," and so forth. It would be a life's
work to many a painter, while to Brangwyn's it has been
an exhilarating exercise, troubled from time to time — but
infrequently — by fatigue.

So much vitality in the nervous system is rare indeed,
and we may be sure that it owes much to the stamina that
Brangwyn gained at sea from a hard, invigorating life.
And from the same influence he got a very delightful thing
in this masculine style of his. Sailors are simple-hearted ;
the instincts of childhood are not killed but kept alive by
the immense realities of nature; and the survival of the
child in those who take what fortune sends them on the
sea is beautiful. Now, if you study with care the art of
Brangwyn, you will find many sailor-like good points. It
is fresh and breezy, full of robust health, free from pedantry,
without vice, very brave, generous, and simple-hearted.
194

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

There is also a feeling of wonder, particularly in the artist's
attitude to storms. In one etched plate he represents a
tempest passing over some heroic dark trees and piling
up the clouds into squadrons and battalions. The emotion
here is wonder, awe, such as no mere landsman feels to-day.
It is a primitive emotion, that does not long co-exist with
the sheltering artificialities of life in ordered communities.

But I am told that Brangwyn is too masculine, that
he is not concerned enough with the graciousness of
women. This depends on the spectator. The useful
and necessary thing is to accept from each artist the
best that he has to give ; and at a time when the great
majority of British painters and etchers develop the
feminine side of art, we are lucky to have one in whom
the male attributes of power are always dominant and
simple-hearted. These qualities run through all the
Brangwyn etchings, and you will find, too, that they
have the inner grace of manhood — sympathy for those
who are fallen, pity for distress. Not sentimental pity,
but a pity that comes near to tragedy, so deep and true
is the feeling shown in its presentation.

As an example of this I will instance the " Old
Women of Bruges," and " The Tow-Rope." This last
represents five men straining mechanically at a rope on
the edge of a canal at Bruges. They have been fit for
no other work since they were first able to pull a barge
through the water ; they look less intelligent than pit-
ponies, for there is no danger to set their thoughts astir.
Each mind is dazed or deadened by the slow, plodding
routine of automatic labour. The very creases in their
clothes show the dogged repetition of the same heavy

195

Frank "Brangwyn and his H^ork

movements day after day. The realism here is strongly
grim, pathetic, and monumental. The subject would
have attracted Meunier, but its realisation is a rapid
masterpiece by Brangwyn, etched on the spot in 1906.

Nor must we forget the penetrating sympathy that
this great observer shows in his etched work for down-
at-heels and beggars. He has never forgotten his early
struggles, the days when he was often so hungry that
he was glad to help in the unloading of a vessel. Those
who have felt real poverty, who remember how the rats
of hunger gnaw in the stomach, understand all outcasts,
and recognise that beggars are their kinsmen. The
mendicants in Brangwyn's etchings are of many types,
some sketched with irony because they are shamming
to be lame or blind, while others belong to the un-
doubted shreds and patches of humanity who find
warmth and solace in dirt, and whose clothes are as
eloquent as their faces and hands.

Nomads, too, have a peculiar interest to Brangwyn ;
the nomads that visit fairs and earn their bread as
wrestlers or jugglers or musicians ; and in one magni-
ficent plate, "The Cathedral Church of Eu,'' he groups
these wayfarers with their booths in the historic shadow
of a vast old building. The sun illumines the mediaeval
architecture, and below, sketched with an art as typical
as Daumier's, is a little Kermesse busy with human
puppets, whose little amusements go on from age to
age, and grow not a bit older than that grand history in
chiselled stone.

2. Modern Life and Work. — There are many artists in
England who do not even try to interpret the great human
196

THE SAWYERS.
From an Original Etching.

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

realities that they see around them. Their art is not even
city-bred ; it stays at home, it occupies itself with problems
of indoor light, and mistakes virtuosity for life and its
time-spirit. This school has many friends among the
writers on art, but it has no staying power. Virtuosity
is not at all likely to hold the field against the great
actions of mankind interpreted by such masters as Millet,
Meunier, Degroux, Brangwyn, Laermans, La Thangue,
Clausen, Legros, and other members of the democracy of
art. But there is one point that we must keep in mind
when we are told that the interpretation of contemporary
life is sure to triumph over virtuosity. The time-spirit
acts in two ways on those who represent it in the fine
arts. In some it produces a conscious striving, while in
others it finds temperaments so well prepared for it that
the time-spirit seems to be the artist, doing its work
through human agents or mediums. Millet was deeply
conscious of what he wished to do, and could talk about
his aims with the enthusiasm of a literary man, while
Meunier worked out his destiny in silence, unconscious of
the revolution in aesthetics that his paintings and bronzes
denoted. Millet used the time-spirit, Meunier was its
agent. And we may regard these two noble men as
marking two distinct types of art in what we call the
presentation of contemporary life.

One type is much nearer than the other to the primitive
expression of emotion in art; nearer, for instance, to the
birth of sculpture and painting among the realists of the
Mammoth Time, who, on days when the weather was too
bad for sport, painted the walls of their caves with figures
of animals, or carved mammoth teeth into female figures.

'97

Frank 'Brangwyn and his TJ'^ork

That lover of the old Stone Age who chipped out the
Venus of Brassempuoy was a Meunier, and, relatively,
he was greater than Meunier, for he began his work in
ignorance, and won his own methods from the dark of
inexperience. Emotion, observation, patience, these were
his only guides ; and to this day they remain the basis of all
great art. But, as we know, civilisation not only produces
styles and traditions, it treasures their work from age
to age, so that each to-day becomes a museum for each
yesterday. Art is a figure with two profiles, one gazing
towards the past, the other towards the future ; and because
it is always easier to copy than to pass through fresh experi-
ments into new discoveries, we find that the repetitions of
virtuosity are always more common and more popular
than the works of a Meunier, whose intercourse with life
is not only direct and intimate but primitively ingenuous.
Meunier was a collier of colliers, and his mind being
as naive as a child's, he delighted to be loyal to his
feelings.

Brangwyn belongs to the same rare type of natural
artist. Though critics have tried to harry him into habits
of self-fear, he is still what he was in his early marine
pictures — a simple-hearted observer, with an inborn sym-
pathy for the drama in things seen, and a native command
over the implements of art. His work is hot emotion.
It is not possible for him to be anything but modern.
The historical panels at the Skinners' Hall are as modern
in spirit as his etchings, and for the same reason ; he
belongs to his own time, he is an agent of its genius.

To one characteristic of his modernity I have re-
ferred in another chapter (p. 169), giving a quotation from
198

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

M. Henri Marcel ; it is the intensely dramatic significance
that BrangAvyn sees in the contrast between little men and
huge machines. But we must notice also in the etchings
that his sympathies are drawn towards everything that has
an outstanding symbolism in the drama of human life ;
to bridges, for example, because the mind can look across
them into the familiar past and forward into the unknown ;
to old churches whose bells still chime with the youth of
faith ; and to windmills that bicker slowly as they grind
corn into flour. Over these things he throws a quite
wonderful glamour of austere romance. A strange imagi-
nation— it is often quite uncanny — dwells in the august
patterning of the light and shade. Subjects that seem
quite trivial when they are mentioned by their titles assume
under the magic of his art a visionary greatness. You
know "The Butcher's Shop," of course? It represents a
low shed flanked by two immense tree-trunks upon which
the sunlight plays, so that their age and decrepitude look
spectral. One tree is leafless, while the other still keeps
a mass of foliage that hangs over the timber shed. From
trunk to trunk stretches a pole with two pigs' heads fas-
tened to it as a trade sign. Under them, dressed in a
smock, the butcher stands, in sunlight, looking towards
his right with expectation ; and behind him, dimly, from
a chaos of transparent dark shadows flecked with sunny
patches, several things emerge — a sheep's carcase hanging
from the pole, and some human figures. What does he
expect, that butcher? For whom does he wait? Is he to
be met with on Wormwood Scrubbs, as a prosaic catalogue
invites us to believe? If Edgar Poe had seen this etching,
he could not have failed to write a story about its peculiar

199

Frank 'Brangwyn and his ff^ork

loneliness. As one looks, the sunlight turns into moon-
light, and those huge trees — contrasted with the trivial little
foolish shed, and suggesting a life many hundreds of years old
— become almost supernatural. One never knows precisely
why a great artist chose a given subject ; he was moved
by something in its aspect, and his emotion did not awaken
the brain-centre of speech, it found expression for itself in
the pattern-work of light and shade and form. This we
know; but I have an idea in my mind that this etching,
"The Butcher's Shop," belongs to the superstition that
Welshmen have nursed in their rugged hills and valleys
from time immemorial.

For the rest, there is an opulent variety in Brangwyn's
etched work. Several plates, and notably the " Market
Square, Montreuil," and "The Brewery, Bruges," show
that his hand can be as light as Whistler's, while keeping
its own sign manual. Elsewhere, as in the romantic
etching of " Old Hammersmith," with its shadowed fore-
ground where bargemen rest and talk, with its middle
distance of sunlit carts, horses, and figures, there is a pro-
fusion of detail treated with a Mdryon-like precision, and
the factories arainst the skv are as attractive in their
sunny magic as ancient churches. But it is not fair to pick
out examples when all is good in its own way. A de-
scriptive list has been published of one hundred and thirty-
three, including such noble proofs as " The Santa Maria
della Salute, Venice," " The Ghent Gate, Bruges," " The
Gate of Montreuil-sur-Mer," and "The Mill Bridge, Mont-
reuil," "The Black Mill, Winchelsea," "The Castello della
Ziza, Palermo," "The Bridge, Barnard Castle," "The Coal-
Pit," with its procession of workmen carrying the wounded,
200

C/3

O ^

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

"Old Kew Bridge," "The Paper Mill," with its exquisite
diffused light, "The Rialto, Venice," and "The Boat-
Builders, Venice," "Windmills, Bruges," " The Sawyers,"
"Old Houses, Ghent," "The Church of Sainte-Saulve,
Montreuil," and "The Church of Sainte-Austreberthe,
Montreuil," "Santa Sophia, Constantinople," " Building the
New Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington,"
"The Tan-Pit," "The Breaking up of the Hannibal,'' and
" Breaking up the Caledonia^ These etchings, and many
others, have been exhibited many times ; and as to the
more recent work — at Dixmude, at Furnes, at Eu, at
Messina — it will soon be as well known. "The Apse of
the Cathedral at Messina" is a masterpiece; it should
hang as a pendant with "The Cathedral of Eu."

Among the foreign devotees of Brangwyn there are
critics who say that his etchings are even more note-
worthy than his pictures and mural decorations. M. T.
Dest^ve has expressed this opinion, speaking of the
" somptueuses gravures ou Brangwyn se rdvtile a mes
yeux plus grand artiste encore que dans ses peintures,
pages gravdes dblouissantes et profondes, mystdrieuses et
dmouvantes ou son dtrange gdnie de visionnaire se mani-
feste victorieusemcnt." From the very first foreign con-
noisseurs have been fascinated by the etchings, and in a
list of public galleries having proofs we can place already
the names of Barcelona, Berlin, Bremen, Brussels, Buda-
pest, Buenos Ayres, Christiania, Dresden, Elberfeld,
Frankfurt, Gothenburg, Hamburg, Lugano, Malmo,
Milan, Mtihlhausen, Munich, Naples, Paris, Rome, Stock-
holm, South Kensington, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Ziirich.

So the etchings, like the first sea-pictures and the later

2 C 20I

Fra?ik 'Brangwy?! a)id his JJ^ork

paintings soon won for themselves a reputation far outside
Great Britain. They are among the emissaries of peace
that soothe international jealousies. They belong to a
universal language that finds concord in rivalry and good-
will in success. There was no protest this year from
Austrian artists when their Emperor granted his Great
Gold Medal of Honour to a Brangwyn etching, "The
Bridge of Sighs." It is only among our own writers
on art that we find, here and there, a stereotyped
hostility to Frank Brangwyn. But foes do not matter
when friends remain loyal, and the most wide-minded
critic, Mr, Claude Phillips, is on the right side. From
the Daily Telegraph, March 26, 1908, I take the
following paragraph : —

" Mr. BrangAvyn takes rank now among the most
original artists of modern Europe ; he is certainly better
understood and more highly appreciated in France and
Italy ^ than at home. He has invented for himself an art
of decoration, which is, at the same time, one of a lofty
and tragic realism ; he has so generalised, broadened, and
emphasised in their great outlines the elements of every-
day humanity and its bustling surroundings, that in his
hands they acquire naturally a monumental and symbolical
character. And this he has been able to do without muting
the audacity, without dimming the brilliancy of his decora-
tive effects, which, in their tawny splendour, are often
those of stained glass rather than true painting. To annex
modern man and his modern surroundings instead of
shunning and despising him, to show the greatness and

' This applies also to Germany, to Belgium, to Austria, and — in a lesser degree — to
Spain.

202

Etchings : and Summary of Characteristics

the passion, even the beauty and the rhythm that are
latent in that which faces us every day — this has been
Mr. Brangwyn's lofty aim in his later and more ambitious
works of the decorative order. This turbulence, this
passion to re-create, to present in a new light and with
a new significance, shows itself in a wholly different
fashion in the etchings on a large scale which play a
prominent part in the present exhibition.' Here it is
himself above all, his own artistic emotion, his own
temperament, that he strives through these sombre etched
poems of the outer world to bring to the surface. From
every point of view Mr. Brangwyn's art calls for serious
consideration and that sympathy \vithout which there
can be disintegrating criticism, but no true comprehen-
sion. At this stage of his career Mr. Brangwyn has
victoriously asserted the right, which should be accorded
to all really original artists, to use his own technical
methods for complete self-interpretation."

Among the many studies which have been written about
the Brangwyn etchings, it is very pleasant to remember
the vivid impressionism of Mr. Haldane Macfall, who has
followed with keen enthusiasm the progress of Brangwyn's
work from the days of the later sea-pictures. Mr. Macfall
says ; " Here is a hand that moves to the ordering of a
majestic vision ; the musical sense that is in line and mass
is seen ranging through a wide gamut, and the result is
not only as of an instrument played by a master-hand,
but of a full orchestra, rich in deep, sonorous harmonies.
Whistler had led us almost to believe that etching could
be only a dainty thing — he set up the axiom to conceal

' At the Fine Art Society.

203

Frank IBrangwyn and his Tf^ork

his own limitations. Mr. Brangwyn flings Whistler's
laws to the winds, and using large or small plates just
as they suit his mood and are fit to e.xpress his intentions,
he makes etching yield up majestic qualities which were
utterly beyond Whistler's range.

" In delicacy and subtlety, Whistler was without a
rival in his day. Yet even in these qualities and in
tenderness, Mr. Brangwyn gives us so exquisite an
example — the beautiful plate entitled 'The Brewery,
Bruges, No. 2' — that he seems to have wrought it in
order to warn us that he is a wizard, when he wills, in
delicatesse. The softness of the smoke, the steely glitter
of the water, the subtle beauty of the whole thing are
very perfect. But he is here more generally concerned
with moods of grandeur and power. . . . There is a
largeness, an inimitable sense of grandeur, in all that this
artist does ; and it is a vast quality that has been pitifully
lacking in our native art. Mr. Brangwyn is the first
British painter, save only Turner, who has been granted
this splendid gift. And how inherent this sense of the
grand manner is in him, we may see in his etchings and
in his many moods. Nothing could be more profoundly
solemn than his etching of a 'Windmill at Bruges' —
the high building with its sails . . . springs upwards
with a majestic dignity, as though it realised in some
strange fashion its great importance, standing there against
the immensity of the firmament, inviting with giant
arrogance the stormy blasts that threaten out of the
sombre miles of hollowness. This is no mere picture-
making. It is the very intensity of nature, and of man's
work in nature, wrought into poetic expression."
204

<
►J

<■ ■??

^ kl t^

■5

^ ^ ^

Stchings : and Summary of Characteristics

One might quote from many other writers, British
and foreign, but the gist of the whole matter is simply
this — that Brangwyn appeals to everybody who enjoys
the spirit of strife that man must share with nature. This
note of virile endeavour, this militancy in brave action,
is seldom found among British artists, because art with us
is rarely a dweller in the thronged highways of life ; it
fears invigorating gusts of rude air from the outside welter
of human realities. Millet's criticism on the delicate
peasant-girls painted by Jules Breton — "They are too
pretty to stay in the village ! " — is one that many British
artists ought always to remember, because their styles
are too dainty to be in touch with the living forces
of society.

205

CHAPTER XV

DESIGNS FOR HOUSE FURNISHING

IS there any real danger in the natural versatility of
Frank Brangvvyn ? Till now it has been successful,
but the vigour of youth has helped it greatly, and
youth slips away unperceived. There are also two
other facts that we are called upon to remember here
since we are trying to understand the aims and works
of a man of genius. The first one is this — that
versatility, at the present time, is mistrusted ; it never
fails to encounter a dogged opposition from the public.
Next, work has become subdivided, not because any
man is satisfied with a narrow specialism, but because
to-day's life is so hurried and so agitated that a mind
loses grip when its energies try year after year to con-
centrate in prolonged efforts on many branches of one
study. Artists of the Middle Ages were not troubled by
telegrams and telephones, by a postal ser\dce all day long,
by a newspaper press and its sharpshooters, by facilities
of travel to lands far off, by rushed journeys to and fro
in vast cities, and by a host of other hindrances to con-
centrated thought and purpose. There comes a time
when even the most virile and versatile genius must
limit the scope of its efforts or else pay the lasting
penalty of overstrain ; and so I am happy to know that
Brangwyn, having passed through a rich period of
206

Designs for House Furnishing

multiform successes, will decline henceforth to be tempted
away from his main work.

After his association with William Morris it was
natural that his aptitude for constructive designing should
be used while he painted large pictures that not only made
great calls on a slender purse, they did not always pay
their expenses even when they found buyers. Laymen do
not realise an artist's cost of production, not in materials
only, but in frames, in agents' fees, in packing-cases and
their travelling expenses, and in the commissions charged
on sales at all picture galleries. When a young man can
do nothing else except paint, when he has not that
mechanical faculty of mind that grips the technical and
constructional problems of design and handicraft, he needs a
private income to help him through his first struggles. It
was lucky that Brangwyn found it quite an easy task to
master the art of wooden furniture, to experiment in the
technique of glass windows, and to apply the principles
of design to other materials. I have studied these matters
for twenty-three years, writing about them often, and
Brangwyn appeals to me strongly in most of his original
experiments. I do not say that his wooden furniture —
his tables, chairs, and cabinets — are equal to Mr. Gimson's,
nor is it right to contrast their work, for Mr. Gimson has
his own workshops, like Chippendale, like Heppelwhite,
while Brangwyn has been handicapped by designing for
artisans in the employ of manufacturers.

Even so, he has obtained very good results, and among
them is a fine billiard-table and cue-cabinet, which may
be seen at Messrs Thurston's. It is not a billiard-table
with several bulbous calves on each of its eight legs, you

207

Frank "Brangwyn and his W^ork

may be sure, nor is it made of bay wood — an inferior kind
of mahogany grown in Honduras, that cabinetmakers
generally use to-day, the real Cuban mahogany being rare
and costly. Billiard-tables of bay wood are as common
as London 'buses, and very often as ungainly. Messrs.
Thurston are aware of this, and wish to bring in a better
taste, but I fear they will have a long and hard fight, owing
to the iron conservatism of billiard players. Brangwyn
designed a whole billiard-room, with panelled walls and a
painted frieze, unstained English oak to be used for all the
woodwork. The room has not yet been done, but the table
and cabinets are finished, and their workmanship through-
out could not well be bettered. Two problems of design
have to be solved in designing a billiard-table : how to
scheme plenty of visible support for the heavy slate bed,
without inconveniencing the players, and yet give elegance
to a cumbersome piece of furniture. Brangwyn has cracked
these hard nuts, and his method is modern and attractive.
There is no waste of wood ; the legs are square in section ;
and struts run from leg to leg, and each strut from its
centre is connected to the woodwork above by three up-
rights placed about two inches apart. This arrangement
is quite new ; it satisfies the eye, and as the two central
legs on each side are placed inwards a little, and therefore
on a different plane from the corner legs, no person can
knock his knee against the additional woodwork. A pro-
fessional player expressed doubt on this point, but he had
no fault to find when he tried the table.

Equally difficult was the bedroom designed for Mr.
and Mrs. E. J. Davis at their house in Lansdowne
Road, Bayswater. This piece of work is very well
2o8

T>esigns for House Furnishing

known ; indeed, so much has been written about it, both
by myself and by many others, that nothing' new and
true remains to be said — except this, that few house-
holders have accepted its lesson of simple strength, of
good citizen's furnishing. The chairs are neither too
heavy nor too light, and their construction is plain as
well as handsome, so that their manufacture is not a
luxurious job for workmen having uncommon skill.
Brangwyn does not like the reversed curves that Chip-
pendale in his first period borrowed from the French,
and that gave a sort of restlessness to furniture. He
prefers the repose of upright lines, relieved by quiet
inlay and by curved arms to the chairs. The treatment
of inlay is always very important. It must keep its
plane, and not start out from the surface of the wood
surrounding it, as happens frecjuently in Dutch cabinet-
work and usually in British commercial furniture.
Brangwyn inlays show much fancy, and their setting
is well in accord with the proper principles of the art
of applied ornament. Sometimes he contrasts ebony
with other woods, as in his billiard-table, and the dark
colour is a pleasant foil to natural oak — that is, to oak
not fumed, but deepened in tone by the action of day-
light. A little beeswax and turpentine, with rubbing,
are all that fine woods need in the way of polish.
Brangwyn would never spoil his furniture with naphtha
and shellac mixed together, nor with that horrible
treacle-like polish, so beloved by most shopkeepers,
that seems intended as a trap for insects or as a
mirror in which the female flies can admire their beauty.
Nor would he darken good oak by subjecting it to the
2 D 209

Frank T^rangwyn and his IFork

fumes of liquid ammonia, or by treating it with a
solution of chromate of potash, by which light-tinted
woods are now " converted " into mahogany !

In his work for Mr. Davis the use of wood entered
into every part of Brangwyn's scheme. The first
question to be considered was practical in a general
way : What are the qualities of a good bedroom ?
Freshness and airiness ; the scheme of colour should be
pale and yet rich, then it will please the eye without
seeming to lessen the size of your bedroom. Oak would
look rather stubborn, walnut and mahogany would be too
heavy in tone ; satinwood might appear too glossy in its
delicate charm, too superfine ; so Brangwyn decided that
cherry wood — beautiful in texture, pale and warm in tint —
would be most appropriate.

This point decided, others began to bid for attention.
What was the main fault in a modern bed ? Did it
not leave too much space between the mattress and the
floor, making a sort of extra cupboard for odds and
ends of luggage ? Dust accumulates there, for even the
best modern servant cannot be expected to clear away
unseen hindrances to her work of dusting and sweeping.
On the other hand, there must be space enough under the
bed to give freedom to a broom, whether pneumatic or not.

Again, parquet flooring would be easier to dust
than a carpet, and a rug could be placed wherever it
was needed. But the principal thing of all was the
background — the walls, which, in most houses, are
treated as a much-bepatterned foreground, in the midst
of which a pretty woman in evening dress looks almost
unimportant. The outstanding rule in the treatment of

2IO

T^e signs for House Furnishing

domestic walls is to be afraid of reticulated pattern. I
have said this in a good many books, but it can never
be repeated too often, for modern shopkeepers believe
in pattern, pattern everywhere, all realistic and obtrusive.
There is not a patterned paper in Rrangwyn's own
house; all the walls are silent in nondescript tints of a
pleasant hue — cool, but not cold. He likes the grey
warmth of ripe English corn, and he has a great liking
for painted friezes, like those which he has carried out
at Venice in the dining-room of the Palazzo Rezzonico,
or like the silvery-toned one in Mr. Davis's bedroom.
The Venetian frieze has been v&ry well summed up by
Mr. Gerald C. Horslcy, F.R.I. B.A., who says: "Here
is a treatment of panelling and woodwork that is all
the artist's own ; and it depends for its fulfilment upon
a splendid frieze of painted subjects. This scheme, indi-
vidual though it is, recalls, by its arrangement of panel-
ling below^ and paintings above, the beautiful rooms at
Venice of San Giorgio dei Schiavoni by Carpaccio, and
the exquisite cabinet built to receive the pictures by
Mantegna." The work, then, is not outside the tradition
of Venetian decoration ; and we find in the bedroom
also a proper adaptation of design to the needs of a given
environment.

Besides the frieze there are paintings of the Twelve
Months, not hung up in gilt frames, but enniched in bands
of wood that run from the skirting to the frieze-rail and
divide the walls into compartments. In each decorative
picture the colour is a happy arrangement of silver-greys
with other delicate hues, that harmonise richly with a dove-
tinted paper, forming plain spaces of light greyish-brown

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Frank "Brangwyn and his Jf'^ork

between the panelled bands. The same care and taste are
shown in the chased-metal fittings, all of oxidised silver ;
and the fireplace, that faces the bed, has a simple o\^er-
mantel of cherrywood, enriched with a little inlay, and
divided into useful cupboards.

I have now to speak of the work done in Paris for
the late M. Bing, a man of many gifts, and always a firm
believer in Brangwyn. Their friendship began in 1895,
when the old house in the Rue de Provence was trans-
formed into L'Art Nouveau. Of one portion of this work
I have spoken (p. 133), and we have now to consider the
textile fabrics, tapestries, carpets, rugs, and the designs
for stained-glass windows. I cannot describe either the
carpets or the rugs, but you would like to own them. The)'
would look well in any light, would not clash with any
good scheme of colour in the walls, and more important
still, would help you to respect the guiding principle of
floor decoration — namely, that carpets and rugs must be in
harmonious contrast with your walls. Ladies are very apt
to forget this principle. They very often like "tints that
match," and carry shades of the same colour throughout
their rooms. The harmony of friendly opposition does not
appeal to them as a rule — I mean in decoration. A distin-
guished Belgian expert, M. H. Fidrens-Gevaert, has said
of BrangxA^n's carpets that since the great Persian period,
no one seems to have done better in this line ; and certainly
the colours and designs mark, as it were, a new and charm-
ing orientalism.

One excellent piece of work is neither a carpet nor a
tapestry, but a beautiful wall-hanging based on the vine —
its grapes, leaves, tendrils and stems, all treated with a
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very happy appreciation for the conventionalism of applied
design. It is quite astonishingly able — what the French
call a coup de 7naitre, a master-stroke. At Paris it was
known as a carpet, as if any person of taste in the decora-
tive arts would ever wish to tread underfoot a patterning
of grapes and vine-leaves. Brangwyn, of course, intended
his work as an ornament for walls, keeping his formal
arrangements of colour for his rugs and carpets.

It is astonishing how reluctant many people are to
accept the logical principle that a pattern must be fit for
its purpose. Even Ruskin was Early Victorian in this
matter, for he liked to walk on flower-bedecked carpets, as
if roses were meant to be trodden upon. When once you
accept such an unfortunate covering for a floor, you should
go a step or two farther, and order a carpet covered with
vegetables. Why, a sheet of blue water dappled with
battleships would be a still greater novelty, and not worse
in principle.

As to tapestries, they are mosaics of colour made up of
dyed threads, and the warp being quite hidden, the colours
are as solid as paint is on canvas. In Gothic tapestries
the style is rarely too pictorial, while an excess of realism
is usually found in post-Gothic examples. Brangwyn
wished to avoid this error when he designed his " Roi au
Chantier" — the arrival of an Eastern king in port, and his
reception there. The boat has armorial shields, and rowers
hold uj) their oars, making useful perpendicular lines.
Foreign critics have spoken frequentl)- of this design, and
most of them praise its rich and ringing contrasts of
beautiful frank colour. Two or three seem to think that
a new tapestry should have the faded beauty of the old,

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Frank 'Brangwyn and his JJ^ork

and even Morris never dared to give splendidly brilliant
hues, preferring an equalised tone that time will bleach
into faintness. I have never seen the " Roi au Chantier,"
but photographs show that the design is a genuine
tapestPy^ crisp in all details, quite strong enough in the
silhouette of each figure, and well framed with a graceful
border. It is a Brangwyn, and therefore new in conception
and style ; but the Oriental costumes seem to ally it with
the mediaeval spirit.

While working for M. Bing, from the year 1895,
Brangwyn made interesting experiments in cartoons for
stained glass, and these brought him into technical rela-
tions with Mr. Louis Tiffany, inventor of " favrile glass,"
and son of the celebrated New York goldsmith and jeweller.
In May 1899, M. Bing held an exhibition at the Grafton
Gallery, and fine examples of Tiff'any's art in stained
windows and in glass-blowing formed part of a very rich
and varied show, which included Meunier bronzes and
pictures, jewellery by Colonna, works by the Impressionists,
a great collection of antique Japanese prints, and some
Indo-Persian miniatures by the best masters of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. There were two large windows by
Brangwyn : one secular — " Music," the other religious — the
" Baptism of Christ." Both ofi'ered useful suggestions to
householders. A Catholic himself, Brangwyn remembered
that a good many families in Great Britain, as on the
Continent, have chapels in their homes, and his noble
design for the " Baptism of Christ " belongs to such houses
as well as to church decoration.

The points to be remembered in this phase of orna-
mental design are as follows : that coloured windows are
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designs for Mouse Furnishing

not easel-pictures, isolated from objects surrounding them,
and asking us to give our whole attention to their beauty.
Their office is that of a single instrument in an orchestra,
always subordinated to the total effect produced by many
minds and many varieties of skill, all acting together for
the sake of a complete result. But skilled artisans have
ever been proud and vain, each has wished to play the first
fiddle, and their conductor — he was always an architect
in the Middle Ages — has been like the chief of an opera
house, who tries very hard to soothe into submission his
spoiled tenors and sopranos. To-day we are educating
a type of man who is something much more than a
skilled artisan ; he is an artist-craftsman, and therefore
glad not only to accept the special limitations of his
material, but to work in accord with decorative schemes.
" If you feel yourself hampered by the material in which
you are working, instead of being helped by it," said
Morris, "you have so far not learned your business, any
more than a would-be poet has who complains of the
hardship of writing in measure and rhyme." No doubt ;
but all kinds of new difficulties and problems are enforced
to-day upon artist-craftsmen. Here is an example in
Brangwyn's cartoons for stained glass.

If he had been living in the great period of window
decoration, the fourteenth or the fifteenth century, his pot-
metal — glass tinted when in a state of fusion by a mixture
of metallic oxides — would be all in small pieces, and each
piece would have been separated from, yet joined to, its
neighbour by a leaded "cane" — a grooved slip of thin lead
— holding the two. No large piece of glass would have
been used ; each fragment would have been une\en in

215

Frank "Brangwyn and his Ji^ork

thickness, varied in transparent colour, and dotted with
little air-bubbles, little prisons through which light would
escape in a waywardness of effect. With those leaden
canes uniting fragments of bright colour a cartoon was
thought out in those days, and the designer had always
to keep in mind the horizontal iron bars that would hold
in place his mosaic of glass. Even if he tried to make
a realistic picture, instead of a decoration through which
daylight would pass, he could not possibly succeed, because
his methods and materials declined to be naturalistic. So
it came to pass that even crude draughtsmanship was not
objected to, the mosaic of colour being looked upon as
more important ; and this judgment was accepted in the
last century by Pugin, as if good drawing and glorious
colour were impossible to unite in a window decoration.
Then larger pieces of glass were made, and cartoonists had
to face the difficulty of keeping away from pictorial realism
while composing with human figures and with fewer leaded
canes. And that was not all. As soon as the lead strips
became less numerous, their effect became less and less
like a mosaic, and craftsmen and the public became
conscious that occasional strips of lead were ugly ; and
this gave a great impetus to a vogue in /«////^^ windows,
where the lead was concealed with the utmost care, and
in which artists used plates of translucent glass and applied
the designs and colours with enamels, vitrifiable pigments,
metallic oxides combined with vitreous compounds known
as fluxes. In such windows we are expected to forget
that glass is the material, and usually they are not decora-
tions at all, but third- and fourth-rate pictures stuck up
in a window opening.
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We see, then, that experiments for a long time have
run counter to the old conception of a coloured window —
as a many-tinted mosaic made up with small pieces of
glass, these being patterned into a translucent ornament
by means of many leaded canes. Brangwyn had to accept
the existing conditions, and to find in his cartoons a
true method of fenestral decoration without much help
from the lead and the iron which used to be essential
to coloured windows, their construction and safety. The
difficulties were very great, and if some of the results do
not seem to be worthy of the inventive skill and care
bestowed on them, others are quite charming. Foremost
among the secular subjects I may put the " Flute Players "
— a design of true and gracious decoration ; its lines are
all beautiful and carefully thought out in their relation
to a speculative treatment of material. A purist might
object to the sitting nude figure of the girl, because her
whole body is cut out of a single piece of glass, but all
experiments are useful because they enable us to reconsider
the old routine of craft methods.

In his own home Brangwyn keeps away from himself;
that is, he does not use his own designs, preferring to
be in touch with the work of other hands, just as authors
put their own books aside and browse in a library. His
likings are as versatile as his attainments, and with fine
things from many countries — English furniture of the
eighteenth century, Spanish cabinets, PZastern rugs, Oriental
pottery, and so forth — he has made a home, not a museum,
for excellent things harmonise when they are well-chosen
and grouped together with judgment. Amid these sur-
roundings he will talk to you about many subjects, and
2 E 217

Frank "Brangwyn and his JJ'^ork

you will find that his views on art defend men having
no aim in common with his own ; pointing out, for in-
stance, the merits of Frith's best pictures, their accurate
history, their minute observation, and the skill of hand
that never hesitates and rarely blunders within the methods
of a school discipline. It is the mark of a modest great-
ness to find good in all unaffected styles. This was a
trait in Robert Browning, in Sir Walter Scott, in Alex-
andre Dumas p^re ; and it will continue to help Brangwyn
in his own achievements.

This book has tried to pass in review twenty-five years
of professional industry, each chapter struggling to express
in words the indescribable — qualities of form, beauties of
colour, characteristics of design, subtle questions of tem-
perament; but life at forty-three is a Marathon race half-
run, and we wait for much more from Frank Brangwyn.

218

APPENDIX I

PICTURES AND SKETCHES

A SELECTED LIST
1885-1910

1885. Royal Academy. "A Bit on the Esk, near Whitby." A small
oil-painting done at the age of seventeen, after a trip in a coasting
vessel.

1885-86. British Artists, Winter E.xhibition. "Putney Bridge."
Catalogue price, ;^io, los. The painter all his life has been
very much attracted by the romance of bridges.

1886. Royal Academy. "Waterlogged." A large oil-picture of a
wrecked vessel lying on a sandbank in rough weather.

I S86 (a/ioiif). "Near Eltham." Collection of Dr. Tom Robinson,
London.

1886. British Artists. "Cold November," and "O'er the Sands of
Dee." A long strip of a picture representing the gold sands of the
riverside at low water. " A Bit of Shore, Par, Cornwall." A water-
colour, with boats and trees, and a stretch of beach.

1887. Royal Academy. "Sunday." Water-colour. The stern of a
boat with men leaning over the side, idly smoking their pipes.

1887. British Artists. "A Western Port." Coasters in harbour,

drying their sails,
1887. British Artists. "An Idle Hour," and "A Cornish Yard."
1 88y {(ibori/). "Off to the P'ishing Ponds," and "A Cornish Port,"

showing a row of old men in the sun, seated near houses ; a glimpse

of the sea.
1887. "A Bankside with Gorse." Collection of Dr. Tom Robinson,

London.
1887. "A Sketch on the Coast." Collection of Dr. Tom Robinson,

London.

219

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Frank "Brangwyn and his Work

1888. Royal Academy. " Bark-Stripping." Several men on a hillside
stripping trees. Painted in Cornwall.

1888. British Artists. "October," and "Rye Ferry." A study of
twilight, painted simply, rich and low in tone.

1889. Royal Academy. "Home." A marine version of the blind
man and his dog ; it represents a small, fussy tug towing a great
vessel over a bar on a wet and gusty day.

1889. Royal Academy. "When we were Boys together." A couple
of old farm-labourers in the twilight seated outside a cottage.
Painted at Stratford-on-Avon.

1889. Royal Academy. "Minutes are like Hours." A group of
fishermen in an.xiety because a vessel makes the harbour with
difficulty.

1889. British Artists. " Wraik Gatherers." A storm-beaten sea, and a
beach swept by waves ; in the foreground three men gather wraik in
the surf. Sea, beach, and sky are in tones of silvery grey, and from
this background the figures stand out in dark relief.

1889. New English Art Club. "The Last Load." A harmony in
cool greys and greens.

1889. Institute of Oil-Painters. "Ashore." Cold early morning light,
with stress of wind and a stormy sea ; figures about the mast of a
stranded vessel, and a man being hauled to land by a life-saving
apparatus. Through mist and spray the coast is seen dimly.

1889. Grosvenor Gallery. "Homeward." Harvesters return home
from work in the evening. A large picture, cool and pleasant in
tone.

1889 (about). " Spinning a Yarn."

1889 (about). "The Rope Walk." Figures in the sunlight making

rope.

To this period belong several good pictures ; their titles are

forgotten. Information invited from their present owners.

1890. Royal Academy. " Outward Bound." A tug has just cast off
from a vessel.

1890. Royal Academy. "All Hands Shorten Sail!" Exhibited also

at the Paris Salon.
1890. Royal Academy. "Stand By!" Some men in a small boat

going to board a vessel.
1890. Royal Academy. "A Stranger." A large water-colour. It
220

appendix I. : T^ictures and Sketches

represents a group of men on a pier-head watcliing the approach
of a foreign vessel.

1890. British Artists. "Conjecture." A small painting. Critics were
very pleased with this bold and simple study of a drenched pier-head,
where a group of salts in sou'-westers discuss some point or other
concerning a vessel that drives her way into harbour through mist
and a grey sea.

1890. British Artists. "January." A large winter - scene, having
much merit as a design, particularly in the distance of town
and shipping, with lights coming out in the winter twilight.
Writers at this period often bracketed Frank Brangwyn with
Mr. Stanhope Forbes, though he was never a Newlynite pur
sang.

1890. British Artists. "Poppies." A little Cornish sketch of a back-
yard filled with flowers.

1890. British Artists, Winter E.xhibition. "Off Ostend," and "Off the
Beriings." Two outdoor sketches.

1890. British Artists. "Loading Grain on the Danube." This was
the first hint of a coming change in outlook and in colour.

1890. British Artists, Winter E.xhibition. "The Funeral at Sea: ' We
therefore commit his body to the deep.' " We are on the deck of
a merchantman ; the crew stand bareheaded, while the captain,
prayer-book in hand, reads the last words of the Burial Service.
They have just taken off the Union Jack before giving the corpse to
the sea. This picture, whicli now belongs to tlie Corporation of
Glasgow, attracted little attention in the Suffolk Street Galleries ;
while in Paris, soon afterwards, it was put in a place of honour at
the Salon, a medal of the third class was granted, and the Govern-
ment wished to buy it. The Saturday Revieiv was among the few
London papers that noticed "The Funeral at Sea." " It is all painted
in dim colours, under a grey sky, the angle of dark rolling sea to the
right being the only positive bit of colour. The scene is treated
without dramatic emphasis ; the mourners are in their working
dress ; the labour of the ship has evidently been put aside for a
moment. Yet the general effect of the composition is one of great
sincerity and truth, while the individual figures are well grouped and
carefully distinguished." R. A. M. Stevenson said: "This picture
is less unpleasant in colour than much of this talented painter's work

221

Frank ^ranowyn and his H^ork

is wont to be, and the rough, hardy-looking seamen and their skipper
are drawn with much ch:iracter, the men being probably portraits.
. . . Taken altogether, it is an excellently designed picture, and the
ship's rigging and boats are drawn with the knowledge of a practical
seaman."

1890. Grosvenor Gallery. "The Weekly Despatch." A very large
water-colour, representing a group of fishermen in the yard of a
seaside inn, one reading a newspaper to the rest. 'l"he Daily News
said : " The grouping of the men is so natural and their expressions
are so varied, that any one will recognise the fact that the artist has
a will and a way of his own. His gossips clearly enjoy a story,
whether it be a chapter in real life from their weekly budget of news
or a yarn that might be told only to the marines. Perhaps Mr.
Brangwyn's real danger is a tendency to monotony of colour, and
when he paints the sea he sometimes wants more strength and
decidedly more suggestion of form in his breakers."

1890. Grosvenor Gallery. "Sail Ho!" In the foreground is a water-
logged vessel, w-ith her wet deck aslant ; the crew, seeing a ship on
the horizon, look out across the waves, through the pale light of a
chill dawn.

1890. Tooth's Gallery. " Yeo, Heave Ho!" A lot of men heaving
in a vessel on a capstan.

1891. Royal Academy. "Salvage." Badly skied. A tug bringing
home a wreck.

1891. Royal Academy. "Assistance." Badly skied. A large picture
of much merit, representing a storm on board ship and sailors in the
act of lowering a boat to save life off a vessel in distress.

1891, British Artists. " Four Ale." A small picture of some old salts
in an English ale-garden.

1891. A collection of studies and sketches — "From the Scheldt to the
Danube" — were exhibited at the Royal Arcade Gallery, Bond Street,
London. The most important were sketches of Oriental ports, rich
in colour, and studies of the open sea. Two subjects were repro-
duced in colour by the Graphic. One represented some wild-looking
fishermen in their rafts on the Danube, while the other — a better
picture by far — was a scene on the quay at Constantinople, with a
Turkish angler waiting peacefully for a bite. As for the other sketches,
here is a notice from the Sunday Times, March 29, 1891 : —
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zAppendix I. : l^ictures and Sketches

" Mr. Brangwyn has simply revelled in the ever varied aspect of
the sea under different conditions of light and weather, and latitude.
He has a fine sense of colour, and a graphic grasp of a scene,
whether it be a waste of waters with a single ship tossing on the
waves, or a group of Orientals at Stamboul, all brilliant in colour.
He is always essentially pictorial, and he has a keen eye for charac-
ter. These pictures have distinct charm, and, as a whole, they
reveal the artist in a much more versatile light than that with which
he has hitherto shone. Among the many pictures in this trulv
interesting show which we have specially enjoyed are ' Tenedos
Island ' and ' The Sea of Marmora,' with their fine contrasts of
deep blue sea and pale sky ; ' Michaelmas Day,' ' Going into
Sulina,' an impressive night effect ; ' Evening on the Black Sea,'
'The .^gean Sea,' 'On Deck,' 'Unloading at Stamboul,' 'The
Steward,' ' Outside a Store, Galata,' ' Entrance to the Dardanelles,'
' Danube Village,' ' Entrance to the Bosphorus,' and ' Entrance to
the Black Sea.' This is an unpretentious exhibition, but it is full of
pictorial interest."

1892. British Artists. "A Sketch." A sailor's funeral leaving a vessel,
watched by curious folk from a quay-side. It was noticed very
favourably.

1892. British Artists. "Pilots, Puerta de Passages, Spain." Painted
during the trip in Spain with Melville. Now at the Chicago Art Insti-
tute. A medal was awarded to it at the Chicago Exhibition, 1894.

1892. British Artists. " Puerta de Passage." A bold, splashing water-
colour.

1892. British Artists. "Tarifa, Spain."

1892 {about). "Spanish Houses." A brilliant water-colour. Collection
of Dr. Tom Robinson.

1892. Royal Academy. "The Convict Ship." With its freight of
unhappy men, just freed in the Thames from the pilot's boat.
In the centre stands a young fellow in chains, his hands bound be-
hind him ; along the vessel's side there are other unfortunates, well
studied and painted with breadth. The charm of this early work
is its human nature, its grasp of character. The convicts are all
plainly landsmen, and their new surroundings increase their forlorn
despair. R. A. M. Stevenson liked this grey picture, and the jury
gave it a medal at the Chicago Exhibition, 1894.

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Frank "Bj'angwyn and his Jf'^ork

1892. Exhibition in the spring of South African sketches, painted
for Mr. Larkin.

" Outside a Store, Diep River : Saturday Evening." Twilight,
with figures in the street outside the store, and a lamp shining
through an open doorway.

Two Views of Simonsburgh. A melancholy looking place, with
strange white houses, all walls and no windows seemingly ; built, in
fact, by the earliest Dutch settlers as a protection from attack.

" Outside a Wine Store," with ruddy brown trees ; " A Police
Station," an innocent-looking cottage standing in the midst of pretty
shrubberies; "Native Women Washing Clothes, Brede River";
" Drankenstein Mountains," capped with snow, a foreground of
yellow flowers; "Ploughing Vines," "A Street, Ceres"; "Loop
Street, Cape Town" ; "Outside a Wine Store" ; "A Windmill, Salt
River " ; " Courtyard of a Dutch Farm, Libertas " ; " Malay Fish-
monger, Cape Town"; " Stoep of Hotel, Paarl" ; "A Peach
Orchard " ; " A F'arm, Fransche Hoek " ; " A Native Hut " ; " A Creek,
Idas Vallei " ; " Main Street, Paar! " ; " Buttengracht Street, Cape
Town : Malay Quarter " ; "A Native Brandy Still," " A Stoep," " A
Farm near Villiersdorp."

"Cape Town from Salt River." Showing the city in the distance
on a strip of land ; deep blue sea, and sand-dunes covered with
bluish-coloured grasses.

" An Ostrich Farm, South Africa." In a blaze of sunlight, and a
black woman on guard.

" River Scene." A clear evening after rain, and dark mountains
seen in blue against a luminous sky.

" Evening among the Lilies." A charming fantasy, showing a
native girl in a field of beautiful arum lilies.

" A Waterside Street, Cape Town," " Cape Town from the Sea,"
with a cloud above the flat top of Table Mountain ; " Kimberley," a
familiar scene at a pits mouth, with rough miners ; " Main Street,
Paarl," a long road moist with rain, bordered by trees, and animated
with busy women and men ; " A Street, Stellenbosch," with white
old houses, and water running along one side ; " The Valley of
Drankenstein " ; "A Doorway," an old shed overgrown with vines
and surrounded by trees ; "An Idyll," representing a young native
mother with her baby on her back and followed by another child,

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Appendix I. : T^ictures and Sketches

strolling on the seashore in the twilight ; tiie moon sails in a clear
sky, and the infant's head relieved against it seems to be encircled by
a nimbus.

"Berg River," "Wild Roses," "In the Dock," "Jonkers Hoek,"
" Houts Bay," " Kimberley Market," "Castle Square, Cape Town,"
" Table Mountain from the Sea," " A Back Yard," " Front of a
Dutch House, Stellenbosch," "A Native Nurse," "Landing at
Cape Town," and " Outward Bound — the Dimottar Castle leaving
London." This last was a large painting, grey and sombre, with a
crowd saying farewell. It was not successful.

1892. "A Street in Funchal, Madeira," "A Native of Madeira," and
other sketches in that island.

1892 {about). "The Dance." A large picture of negroes dancing by
the light of a lamp, that throws great shadows on a whitewashed
wall.

1892. Institute of Oil-Painters. "Slave Traders." "Fine in the
colour of rich Eastern costumes and of the stretch of deep blue sea
and sky, a strip of sand between " {Star). This picture — an original
deck-scene in burning sunlight — had many enemies. It was said ta
be as lifeless as a display of bric-a-brac, yet critics were drawn to-
wards it, in answer or in pleasure. The Magastiie 0/ Art said : " Here
a group of darkest Africans, clad in flaming scarlet, tawny, and dark-
blue garments, are seen crouching on the white deck of a steamer,
with a background of deepest indigo sea, and appropriately blue sky.
The problem of conveying a true visual impression under such self-
created difficulties as here indicated is boldly and powerfully attacked,
but it is not adequately solved ; some of the figures are mere
silhouettes, and atmosphere is conspicuously lacking."

1893. Became Corresponding Member of the Secession, Munich.
1893. Glasgow Institute. " Blake at Santa Cruz." A small picture.
1893. Society of Scottish Artists. "Shade." The Glasgow He ra Id aii'id :

" It is an artist's picture rather than a direct reading from nature.
Mr. Brangwyn shows us a courtyard, and men sitting under the cool
greens of a spreading tree. The lights and shadows are artistically
managed, and the effect of broken sunshine is realised with great
dexterity. The visitor, however, need not analyse the canvas too
narrowly, else he may find patches of sunlight and slashes of red in
unexpected places. What of that ? The artist is here concerned
2 r 225

Frank "Brangwyn and his JJ^ork

not with literal truth but with resolving a problem ot much difficulty,
and the result is such as to justify his daring." " Shade " was
exhibited at the R.A. in 1894.

1893. Royal Academy. "A Slave Market." See Chapter III. This
picture now belongs to the Corporation of Southport.

1893. Royal Academy. " Turkish Fishermen's Huts."

1893. Grafton Gallery, Spring Exhibition. "The Buccaneers." See
Chapter III. Now in the Collection of M. Pacquement, Paris.
Illustrated in this book. Max Nordau gave a thoughtful explanation
of the method of work employed by Brangwyn in the period of
"The Buccaneers." He said: "Brangwyn shows his figures either
flushed by the blazing heat of the glaring sun-fire or enveloped in
the veil of semi-transparent obscurity. Both kinds of illumination
have the peculiarity of suppressing all accessories and allowing the
essential only to remain. A human face, a human body, dipped
into glowing sunlight, will become almost transparent. Behind the
skin and integument, which appear only like a veil, muscles and
bones will come forward. Strong light prepares a body almost like
the anatomist's dissecting knife. Obscurity acts in a similar way.
It effaces the connections and transitions, and accentuates nothing
but the strong lines of construction. Only diffused light lends equal
value to all parts of the surface ; it shows everything, and explains
nothing. Direct light, on the other hand, like obscurity, hierarchises
the appearance, and enables r,s to separate at the first glance mere
superficial ornamentation from girders and beams."

1893. "Eve." A study of the nude in a forest of tropical foliage and
fruit. Grafton Gallery.

1893, Institute of Oil-Painters, "Dolce Far Niente." Half-clad
Southern women in orange draperies lie around a blue-tiled fountain ;
a rich background of magnolia trees. R. A. M. Stevenson admired
this picture for its delicacy and truthfulness, while the Athenaum
was annoyed by it, insisting that the odalisques were like the
dummies in the windows of hairdressers. It is the privilege of
experts to contradict each other. Collection of J. H. Freeman,
Esq., K.C.

1893. "A Sketch in Spain." An arrangement of brown sands, blue
streams and sky, and brilliant red mule-trappings. " You must not
look for delicate harmony or a subtle study of tones, but the flaunt-
226

zAppendix I. : T^ictures and Sketches

ing colours catch the eye pleasantly and resolve themselves into a
fine stirring piece of decoration on walls otherwise all too dull and
colourless " — Star.
1893 {about). " Spoil." A large picture of robbers in the act of playing
at dice near their captives ; a town on fire in the background.

1893. New Gallery. "Adoration of the Magi." See Chapter IV.
Collection of E. Seegar, Berlin.

1894. Royal Academy. "Oranges." A large picture of an orange
booth at Jaffa. Woodiwiss Collection.

In March, 1894, Brangwyn was at Tangier and Morocco with
Mr. Ganz and Mr. Dudley Hardy. He painted several oils and
water-colours, and his study for "Trade on the Beach."
1894. Institute of Oil-Painters. "Trade on the Beach." Exhibited
afterwards at the Salon, and bought there by the French Govern-
ment for the Luxembourg, 1895. It represents a scene on the coast
of Morocco, with great boats hauled up on the golden sands ; negroes
and Moors are engaged in barter. In colour it possesses a certain
quiet splendour; and at the same time it shows a fine sense of
atmosphere, and an effect of strong sunshine. Once again the
Athenceum was indignant, while the Saturday Review described the
work as wonderful in pictorial force. Mr. Haldane Macfall said :
" The decorative quality and arrangement of this work are beyond
criticism. The general buff and grey tone of the picture is set aglow
with rich colours that fall upon it in well-placed patches balanced
with rare art. The curves of the arches in the white buildings at
the back, their purple and lilac shadows, the almost silhouetted
effects of the negroes who sit together bargaining in the left fore-
ground, the horizontal sweep of the great picturesque boats from left
to right across the middle of the picture, and the dignified effect of
the standing negro to the right, are very fine art. The work is
peifectly executed ; the detail all subordinated to the decorative
scheme — every little form and patch of colour as splendidly placed
as in the best Japanese art. And the colour scheme is a glorious
harmony. Above all, the artist has caught the spirit of the people
as only genius can catch it."

1894. New Gallery. "The Miraculous Draught of F'ishes." See
Chapter IV.

1895. New Gallery. " St. Simeon Stylites." See Chapter IV. Municipal

Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

Art Gallery at Venice. Mr. H. F. W. Ganz made an etching of this
picture, and showed it at the R.A. in 1895.

1895. Grafton Gallery. Small picture of St. Simeon Stylites.

1895. Royal Academy. "Rest." See Chapter IV.

1895. Royal Academy. " In the Square." Water-colour. Painted in
the market-place of Algeciras.

1895 {about). "A Captive." Illustrated in The Studio Magazine.

1895. Illustrations for "Don Qui.xote," published by Mr. Gibbings.

1895. "Spanish Goatherds." Life-sized figures playing at dice; an
effect of brilliant colour. This picture was sent to the Paris Salon,
and many French critics thought it too airless and too arbitrary.
Others praised it warmly as a decoration. The picture was really
an experiment, a sort of jugglery with strong pigments, and its skill
would be appreciated by any one who tried to copy it.

1895. "A Port in Spain." In the background is a grey bridge, above
which towers the sails of a vessel ; this side the bridge is another
boat, with men at work. A wall stands between the river and the
promenade, where groups of picturesque idlers lounge. On our
right, in the foreground, seated at a rough table, are three men,
whose talk interests a tall onlooker. It is a good travel picture,
showing sympathy in its keen observation. It takes us to a land of
ease, where basking in the sun seems to be hard work, and where
past centuries appear to have a sort of ghostly presence in the acts
of to-day.

1895. In the late summer Brangwyn was in Paris, and there painted for
M. Bing two large decorative panels, as well as the frieze for the
street elevation of " L'Art Nouveau." The panels were called
"Music" and "Dancing." Now in the Collection of M. Agache.

1896. Royal Academy. "The Blood of the Grape." A large canvas
representing a modern celebration of the festival of Bacchus ; in it a
crowd of villagers in a vineyard press around a nude man riding a
grey donkey. Seegar Collection, Berlin.

To this period — i.e. from 1895 to 1896— the following works
belong : —

" Virgin and Child resting at a Well." In the Collection of Sir
Alfred East, A.R.A. " One of Brangwyn's less-known works, akin,
as far as the background is concerned, to ' St. Simeon Stylites,' in
the Venice Gallery." — F. Rinder.

228

jlppendix L: T^ictures and Sketches

"The Saddle Shop," a small picture painted at A^isisi.

"The Market." In the Collection of M. Tchoukine, Moscow.

" The Quarry," with an old stonebreakcr resting ; trees beyond,
and a low range of chalky hills against an evening sky.

" Moorish Women seated on a Terrace."

" The Snake Charmer." A large picture.

"The Story-Teller." A big water-colour.

"Turkish Fishermen." National Gallery, Prague.

" A Turkish Pot Market " ; and " A Moorish Market."

Design for a tapestry — Le Rot an Chantier — now in the Leeds Gallery.

" A Turkish Sweatmeat Seller." There are two pictures of this
subject, one in a collection at Pittsburg, the other belonging to
E. Fox, Esq.

" Music." Three men and a boy seated under the shade of a
tree and playing musical instruments. Rich and low in tone. In
the Collection of Sir Alfred East, A.R.A.
1895-96. Small picture of a boy piping. Exhibited at Venice. Col-
lection of C. Schmutzer, Bucharest.

"Venetian Boatmen in their Craft." Shown at Pittsburg. In
the Collection of Peter A. Schemm, Philadelphia.

"The Beach, Funchal." Water-colour.

" Bathers." Boys enjoying themselves in a pond ; trees on the
right. In the Collection of Sir Alfred East, A.R.A.
1897. "The Market at Bushire." Figures on the beach, some sitting,
others standing. Silver medal at the great Exhibition of Paris. It
is probably the best coast scene, alert, humorous, well drawn, admir-
ably composed, and harmonious in flashing colour. Mr. Spielmann
gives a good illustration of this work in Scribncr's Magazine, January
1904. Fry Collection.
1897. "The Scoffers." Paris Salon. The subject is taken from an old
Spanish ballad about a Castilian general who was taken prisoner by
the Moors. Once a week he was removed from his prison, tied to a
stake, and insulted by the population of the town. This picture won
a great success in Paris, and at Munich it gained a gold medal. It
was bought by the National Gallery of New South Wales at Sydney.
Mr. Rinder considers this work to be one of the most masterly
things that Brangwyn has yet done.
1897. Royal Academy. "Venice." Skied. Boatmen in the fore-

229

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

ground, the Dogana beyond, seen against a cloudy sky. Fry
Collection.
1897. "Assisi." A noble landscape bought by the Bavarian Govern-
ment for the Pinakothek at Munich.

1897. Clifford Gallery. " Waiting for the Fishermen."

1898. Royal Academy. "The Golden Horn." Skied.

The Spectator protested against this ill-treatment. " This painter
is gifted with a highly original way of seeing things, together with a
fine sense of colour and a great knowledge of decorative effect,
qualities which the average pictures hung on the line seldom possess.
There are dozens of sleek mediocrities one would willingly banish to
the sky-line to make room for such a breezy piece of shipping and
great clouds as Mr. Brangwyn's picture seems to be." The Fromentin
Collection, Paris.

1898, Royal Academy. "The Story." Skied. An Eastern garden
with Arabs seated under the trees. " It shows the spirit in which
Brangwyn works. Here is no niggling detail, no attempt at shallow
prettiness. It is big in feeling, big in touch." — Frank Rixder. The
Olivier Senn Collection, Havre,

1898. Maclean's Gallery. "A Passing Storm in Venice." A picture of
Venice at work, with sailors and fishermen ; cloudy weather. R. A.M.
Stevenson spoke of this work as a gorgeous decorative scheme, most
agreeable in colour and handling, and passably like something that
might exist.

1898. "Custom-House Quay, Venice," equally vigorous and direct.

1899. Maclean's Gallery. " Limehouse." One of the best among the
landscapes, free and natural in design, rich in subdued colour, and
spacious.

1899. Grafton Galleries. "Music," and "The Baptism of Christ":
two stained windows in Tiffany glass.

1899. "Corner of a Market in Spain." Brilliant and attractive.

1900. New Gallery. "Charity." MacCulIock Collection.
1900. New Gallery. "The Needle." Pastel.

A silver medal was won at Paris by the " Market at Bushire,"
now in the Fry Collection,
1900. Pastel Society. "The Meal," A study in the Black Country.
1900, Frieze for a Music Room, painted for E. Davis, Esq. ; also
Decorative Panels of the Months for a bedroom.
230

appendix I.: T^ictures and Sketches

1900. A painting of old houses at Limehouse, and a picture of half-
nude girls in a landscape listening to music.

1900 {about). "Hammersmith," seen across the river from the south
side, a clump of dark trees on the left balanced by a cumulus cloud
beyond the distant buildings. Kitson Collection, Leeds.

1 90 1. " Old Kew Bridge," painted just before its destruction. S.Wilson
Collection, Leeds.

1 90 1. "Approach to Old Kew Bridge." A small picture.

1 90 1. "A Road in Norfolk." A tine effect of dark trees against a sky.
Collection of Kenneth S. Anderson, Esq.

1902. "The Cider Press." New Gallery. Now in the Collection of
Sir Alfred East, A.R.A.

This picture brought to an end the second period in the develop-
ment of a decorative style. The first period extended from the later
sea-pictures to the " Spanish Goatherds," passing through a series of
religious subjects. Then, little by little, the handling became more
supple and the design more mature, without any loss of virility.
Ne.xt, in 1902, the painter began his great work for the Skinners'
Company, and all the most difficult problems of mural painting
entered his daily practice. His " Cider Press " marked the point of
transition. Though a noble picture in many ways, it was much
opposed in 1902. Some critics wrote of it as if they were pedagogues
entrusted with the guardianship of a brilliant but unruly pupil. Here
is an example from the Athcnaum : —

'' Mr. Brangwyn approaches the problem of finding a sumptuous
decorative treatment on different lines. In his 'Cider Press' (58)
he endeavours, with the least possible disregard of verisimilitude, to
construct a lyrical fantasy from the conditions of modern life. The
problem is so difficult and the aim so praiseworthy that we must
welcome any approach towards achievement. Mr. Brangwyn feels
rightly the necessity of changing the key from that of nature, but he
does so not by ennobling the types, or by giving to his figures a
larger, freer movement — his boys, for instance, remain undisguised
urchins, with even an insistence on what wants distinction in their
build and bearing — but by a peculiar conventional way of represent-
ing things, by reducing his expression to rude blocks and clots of
sharply opposed tones and colours. It is undeniable that by this
convention he obtains the possibility of a vigorous and strongly

231

Frank 'Erangwyn and his Jf^ork

planned decorative disposition, but he does so not only at the cost of
the liner qualities of beauty — it is difficult to enjoy, in and for itself,
a picture made up of brushmarks each of about the size and shape of
a potato-peeling — but also at the cost of expressiveness. In fact,
Mr. Brangwyn's method is the result of a determined and heroic effort
to do by inverted means what has always been done in the straight-
forward manner. The argument must be of this kind. We want to
paint at once decoratively and in a modern manner. What is the
distinctive discovery of modern art ? The neglect of the object as a
separate entity and the abandonment of the contour : representation
by means of recording patches of tone and colour apart from their
significance as forming distinct objects to the eye. But decorative
design implies the simplification of masses and the wilful assertion
of definite contours. How are these qualities to be united ? By
exaggerating the contrasts, by sharpening the edges and neglecting
the transitions of Hght and shade wherever they occur within the
outline of a figure, and obliterating the contrasts where they coincide
with the edges of a figure or object. So in 'The Cider Press' the
contours that tell in the pattern of the design are the contrasts of
cast shadow upon the flesh, where in nature we should be conscious
of tender gradations, where, moreover, the imagination demands that
the passage should be gradual rather than abrupt. That this is a
novelty we may admit in the sense that it is carried out upon
principles the exact opposite of those invariably employed by the
greatest masters of decorative design from Giotto to Puvis de
Chavannes. But is it either a reasonable or beautiful convention as
well as a novel one ? In spite of Mr. Brangwyn's ingenuity and his
evident thoughtfulness and deliberation we are not yet convinced
that it is."

1902. Poster for the Orient Pacific Line.

1902. "The Bridge, Barnard Castle."

1902. "The Spanish Galleons." Colonel Goff's Collection.

1902. "Hammersmith." The Kitson Collection.

1902. " Melons." Municipal Gallery at Venice.

1902. "Leeks." The Kitson Collection, Leeds. Illustrated in this
book.

1902. "Mushrooms." Collection of G. Burnett, Esq.

1902. "Crab in a Green Bowl."
232

appendix I.: T^ict tires and Sketches

1902. "Wine Bottle and Turnips." Collection of E. Fox, Esq.

1902. "A French Farmyard, Montreuil." Chase Collection, U.S.A.

1903. " London Bridge," low tone painting of the river bank, showing
ships and the bridge.

1903. "Queen Elizabeth going aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford."
Presented by the Committee of the General Shipowners' Society to
Lloyd's Register. Illustrated in this book.

1903 (about). "The Storm." In the Collection of Kenneth S. Anderson,
Esq.

1903. A series of Pastels for Charles Holme, Esq., representing "The
Tower Bridge " and other Thames subjects.

1904. "Departure of Sir James Lancaster to the East Indies." Royal
Academy. One of eleven panels for the Skinners' Company. Their
subjects are given in Chapter X.

1904. Royal Academy. " The Moorish Well." Water-colour. Luxem-
bourg, Paris.

1904. Diisseldorf Exhibition. "The Turkish Cemetery." Exhibited
previously in the Rowland Club, Clifford's Inn, 1903.

1904. "The Orange Market." Collection of T. L. Devitt, Esq. Elected
A.R.A.

About this time the painter carried out a long decorative panel
for the proprietor of Collier's Weekly, New York, showing "The
Departure of Columbus." A collotype is given in this book.

Z905. Four Panels painted for the English Room at the Venice
Exhibition : " Navvies at Work," " Workers in Steel," " Blacksmiths,"
and " Potters." These decorations were bought by Mr. S. Wilson,
of Leeds, in 1906, and presented to the Art Gallery of Leeds. A
fifth panel was added, entitled " Weavers." It is illustrated in this
book. A gold medal was won at Venice.

1905 {about). "Factories at Hammersmith"; " The Lord Mayor's River
Procession," now at the Guildhall ; " The Tower Bridge," now at the
Guildhall.

1905. Work for the Skinners' Hall.

1905 {about). "Unloading Coal, Bruges." The Kitson Collection,

Leeds.
1905 {about). Study of a Nude Figure. Collection of R. Douglas Wells.

1906. Royal Academy. "The Venetian Funeral," now in the Leeds
Gallery. Illustrated in this book.

2G 233

Frank 'Brangwyn and his M^ork

1906. New Galiery. "The Wine Shop." Gallery of Barcelona. See

the criticism of Mr. Claude Phillips in Chapter X., page 163.
1906, " Road near Etaples." Barcelona Chamber of Deputies.
1906. "The Santa Maria della Salute." Gold medal at the International

Exhibition in Amsterdam. Now in the Wellington Art Gallery, New

Zealand. Reproduced in this book.
1906. Work for the Skinners' Company.
1906. " Canal, Bruges."
1906. "The Rialto," spacious and noble; one of the finest among the

architectural subjects.
1906. " Modern Commerce." Fresco at the Royal Exchange, London.

Illustrated in this book, and described in Chapter IX. Reproduced

in this book.
1906. "The Return from Mecca," a brilliant sketch of camels and many

figures.
1906. Grand Prix, Milan, for the etching of " Santa Maria della Salute " ;

elected corresponding member of the Society of Illustrators, U.S.A.,

and member of the Asociacion de Artistas Espanoles.

1906. "A Bridge near Venice." Ecclesiastical procession over a bridge,
fishermen and beggars watching.

1907. "The Tinker." Goupil Gallery. Exhibited also at Ghent. "A
tremendously vehement sketch ; certainly not a thing of beauty, but
a picture that sets us wondering by what magic the artist can make
sure that these dabs and splashes of paint on the canvas will, at a few
yards' distance, give so unerringly the impression of reality and life."
— Times.

1907. Goupil Gallery. " Ramparts of Montreuil."

1907. "The Turkish Well"; " Boatbuilder's Yard, Venice," a painting
in body-colour on blue paper ; " On the Walls."

1907. "The Brass Shop," with a down-at-heel in a green coat. Illus-
trated in this book.

1907. Four Panels for the English Room at the Venice Exhibition.

1907. " Blake's Return after Capturing the Plate Ships." A decorative
panel presented to Lloyd's Register by Sir John Davison Milburn,
Bart. Reproduced in this book.

1908. Royal Academy. "The Return of the Spies from the Promised
Land." Now in the Art Gallery at Johannesburg. Illustrated in this
book.

234

<iAppendix L: T^ictures and Sketches

1908. " The Rajah's Birthday." New Gallery. The Kitson ColLction,
Leeds. Illustrated in this book.

1908. An exhibition of Brangwyn pictures at the Fine Art Society.
"Ghent," "The Market, Bruges," " A Gleam of Gold," "Twilight,"
" The Sun," " Evening," " The Festa, Venice," " The Pergola," " A
Canal, Bruges," "A Fisherman," and "The Bottle-Washer."

1908. "Harvesters." Illustrated in this book.

1908. " Mars and Venus." Dublin. Illustrated in this book.

1908. " Susanna and the Elders."

1909. Frieze at the Grand Trunk Railway Offices, Cockspur Street,
London ; carried out for Sir Aston Webb, R.A.

1909. "Wine." E.xhibited at the Royal Academy in 19 10. Collection
of Captain John Audley Harvey.

1909. " An Oriental Drug-Shop."

1909. "The Doge going to the Ledo." Collection of T. L. Devitt, Esq,

1909. "An Oriental Market." Collection of A. Clarence, Esq.

1909. "The Fruits of Industry." A large decoration in tempera. It
is illustrated in this book. " In this noble piece, under the blue
heaven which not even men's factories can wholly obscure, across
the river where the bathers lose the grime of their toil and refresh
their strength, sit the human family, the men bearing the fruits of
their labour, the mother serene possessor of the beauty and honour
of her womanhood, and the infant sublimely unconscious of a great
inheritance. . . . These are they who ever give to human life its stir
and colour, the winners of the fruits of industry. It is the simple and
yet grand drama that lies behind history at every turn. It is the
drama that the poet and the painter see for us, that we may see it."
— Warwick W. Dr.\per. Reproduced in this book.

1909. The last panel for the Skinners' Company was finished.

19 10. "The Card Players." Reproduced in this book.
1910. "The Fish Woman."

1910. "New Wine." Figures playing music while others tread out the

grapes.
19 10. "A Grey Day."
1910. Messina sketches in water-colour. About fifty in all. See the

Messina subjects in this book.
1910. "The Bridge, Alcantara." Reproduced in this book. Water-colour.

235

APPENDIX II

ETCHINGS— CLASSIFIED

The numbers refer to the Catalogue compiled by Mr. Frank Newholt, and published in
1908 by The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, London. The unnumbered
etchings have been put into circulation since June 1908. // will be noted that some
plates belong to several categories.

FRENCH SUBJECTS

" A Road in Picardy." No. 8.
"The Mill Wheel, Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 35.
"The Mill Bridge, Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 36.
"The Mills, Montreuil." No. 37.
"The Road, Montreuil." No. 38.
" Sawyers in a Shipyard at Boulogne." No. 45.
" Men repairing a Boiler : in a Shipyard at Boulogne." No. 46.
"Sketch of a Man, Montreuil." No. 58.
" Entrance to Montreuil." No. 72.
"A Cornfield, Montreuil." No. 73.
"Two Men in a Bakehouse at Montreuil." No. 87.
" Church of Sainte-Austreberthe, Montreuil." No. 89,
"A Paper-Mill, Montreuil, 1907." No. 90.
"Church of Sainte-Saulve, Montreuil." No. 93.
"The Gate of a Farm, Montreuil, 1907." No. 95.
"The Market Square at Montreuil." No. 96.
"An Estaminet, Montreuil." No. 98.
"A Fulling-Mill, Montreuil." No. 99.
"Bootmakers, Montreuil." No. 100.
"The River: Boys bathing at Longpre." No. 107.
" Cathedral Church of Eu, Normandy."
" Canal at Hesdin, Pas-de-Calais." No, 43.
" Hesdin, Pas-de-Calais." No. 121.
236

Jtppendix II.: Etchings — Classified

BELGIAN SUBJECTS

Entrance to a Canal, Bruges." No. 56.

Old Women at Bruges." No. 61.

Windmills at Bruges." No. 62.

A Brewery at Bruges." Nos. 63 and 64.

Ghent Gate, Bruges." No. 65.

Bottle-Washers at Bruges, 1906." No. 66.

Barges, Bruges." No. 67.

Old Houses at Ghent ; formerly the Official Residence of the Corn

Measurers." No. 68.
The Tow-Rope — Bruges, 1906." No. 79.
Ghent, 1906." No. 104.
Porte St. Croi.x, Bruges." No. 112.
Meat Market at Bruges." No. 117.
A Cafe." No. 120.
Mill at Di.xmude."
Windmill at Dixmude."
The Apse of Saint-Nicolas at Furnes."
Church of Saint-Nicolas at Furnes."
Timber Pile, Furnes."
Mill at Furnes."
Inn of the Parrot, Di.xmude."
Church of Saint- Valbert, Furnes."
Church of Saint-Nicolas at Dixmude."
Canal at Nieuport."

ITALIAN SUBJECTS

"A Beggar, Assisi." No. 5.

" Assisi." No. 7.

" The Rialto, Venice." No. 60.

" Santa Maria della Salute, Venice." Gold Medal, Venice International

Exhibition, 1907; Grand Prix, International Exhibition, Milan,

1906. No. 88.
" Boat-Builders, Venice." No. 91.
" Boatyard, Venice." No. 92.
"Unloading Wine from a Merchantman at Night, Venice." No. 109.

237

Frank 'Brangwyn and his ff^ork

"Santa Maria della Salute, Venice." No. no. See also No. 88.

" A Gate, Assisi." No. 122.

"Sunshine and Shadow: A Venetian Funeral." No. 123.

" Santa Maria della Salute, from the Street." No. 124.

"The Bridge of Sighs." Grand Medal of Honour from the Emperor

of Austria, 19 10.
" Tiie Traghetto."

TURKISH SUBJECTS

"A Turkish Cemetery." No. 30.

"Santa Sophia, Constantinople." No. 105.

"Two Turks walking in a Landscape." No. 128.

BEGGARS

" Head of an Old Blind Man with a Patch over one Eye." No. 4.

" A Beggar, Assisi, under a Dark Archway ; other Figures silhouetted

against a Light Wall." No. 5.
"Two Men Begging." No. 113.

"Four Men with Crutches asking for Alms." No. 115.
"Three Men Begging — a Sketch." No. 127.
"The Feast of Lazarus." No. 133. In the foreground a group of

mendicants ; a feast in the background.

HEADS, SINGLE FIGURES, AND SMALL GROUPS

" Head of a Jew." No. 2.

" An Old Man seated in a Chair." No. 3.

" Head of an Old Blind Man with a Patch over one Eye." No. 4.

" Head of a Fisherman." An old man with a white beard and a fur
cap. No. 19.

" Head of an Old Man." No. 20.

"An Organ-Grinder, London." No. 55.

" Sketch of a Man putting on his Coat." No. 58.

" Man carrying a Load of Books." Buildings and figures in the back-
ground. No. 71.

"Sketch of an Old Man's Head." No. 81.

238

<tAppendix II.: Etchings — Classified

" Man resting on a Scythe on the Brow of a Hill." No. 83.

" Sketch of a Man with his Hands in his Pockets." No. 114.

" Sketch of a Boy with a Pot." No. 1 16.

"Two Turks walking in a Landscape." No. 128.

"The Preacher." No. 126.

"Two Blacksmiths working at an Anvil." No. 125.

"Lawyers in Court." No. 103.

"Bootmakers, Montreuil." No. 100.

Two soldiers in the doorway of a beershop ; " Estaminet, Montreuil."

No. 98.
"Two Men rowing on a Thames Lighter." No. 85.
" Man rowing on a Thames Lighter." No. 86.
"Two Men in a Bakehouse at Montreuil." No. 87.
" Men scraping Skins at Brentford." No. 75.
"A Man scraping Skins at Brentford." No. 76.
" Bottle-Washers at Bruges." No. 66.
"The Tan-Pit." No. 52.

"Two Boatmen hauling on a Rope." No. 53.
"A Dye Vat, Leeds." No. 57.
"Old Women, Bruges." No. 61.

" Men repairing a Boiler in a Shipyard at Boulogne." No. 46.
" Sawyers in a Shipyard at Boulogne." No. 45.

" Three Brickmakers loading Barrows at Wormwood Scrubbs." No. 44.
"The Butcher's Shop, Wormwood Scrubbs." No. 41.
" Boys playing Music — a Christmas Card." No. 40.
" Tiie Tanyard, Brentford." No. 11.

INDUSTRIAL SUBJECTS

" London Bridge." No. 6.

" London Bridge." No. 9.

"Bark-Strippers." No. 10.

" The Tanyard, Brentford." No. 11.

"Trees and Factory, Hammersmith." No. 12.

" Hammersmith Reach." No. 13.

" The Tree, Hammersmith." No. 17.

"Barge-Builders, Brentford." No. 18.

"On London Bridge." No. 21.

239

Frank "Brangwyn and his Work

"Shipbuilding Yard, London." No. 22.

"The Tree, Hammersmith." No, 26. See also No. 17.

" London Bridge " (3). No. 28.

" Brentford Bridge, with Barges and Figures." No. 29.

" Building the New Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington."

No. 42.
" Three Brickmakers loading Barrows at Wormwood Scrubbs," No, 44.
" Sawyers in a Shipyard at Boulogne." No. 45.
" Men repairing a Boiler in a Shipyard at Boulogne." No. 46.
"Shipbuilders, Greenwich, 1905," No. 47.
" Breaking up the Hannibal, Woolwich, 1905." No. 48.
" Hammersmith" (3). No. 49.
" Scaffolding, South Kensington." No. 50.
"Fishmongers' Hall." No. 51.
"The Tan-Pit." No. 52.
"Two Boatmen hauling on a Rope." No. 53.
"A Dye Vat, Leeds." No. 57.
" A Brewery at Bruges." No. 63.
"A Brewery at Bruges" (2). No. 64.
" Bottle-Washers, Bruges, 1906." No. 66.
"Men scraping Skins at Brentford." No. 75.
" Man scraping Skins at Brentford." No. 76.
" Barge-Builders, Hammersmith." No. 77.
" Breaking up the Caledonia at Charlton." No. 78.
"The Tow-Rope, Bruges, 1906." No. 79.
" The End of the Day." No. 80.
" Men leaving Work in a Shipyard." No. 82.
'' Blacksmiths. Three Men working at an Anvil." No. 84.
" Men rowing on a Thames Lighter." Nos. 85 and 86.
"Two Men in a Bakehouse at Montreuil." No. 87.
" A Paper-Mill, Montreuil." No. 90.
" Boat-Builders, Venice." Nos. 91 and 92.
"The Farmyard." Nos. 94 and 97.
" A FuUing-Mill, Montreuil." No. 99.
"Bootmakers, Montreuil." No. 100.
"The Hay Cart." No. loi.
"A Coal-Mine after an Explosion." No. 106.
"Unloading Wine, Venice." No. 109.
240

<tAppendix IL: Etchings — Classified

" Miners pushing Trucks of Coal." No. iii.

"The Meat-Market at Bruges." No. 117.

"A Sand-Shoot on the Thames." No. 119.

"Two Blacksmiths working at an Anvil." No. 125.

" Evening, Hammersmith." No. 129.

"Old Hammersmith." No. 132.

MESSINA AND PALERMO

" The Campo San Spirito, Messina." A noble ruin in sunlight, storm-
clouds behind ; building a settlement,

"Old Houses, Messina."

" Shrine of the Immaculate Virgin, Messina, with People praying
around its Base." This monument was left untouched by the
earthquake.

" Corner of the Via del Trombe, Messina."

" Apse of the Cathedral at Messina."

"The Garden Wall, Messina."

" Castello della Ziza, Palermo." No. 27.

BRITISH SUBJECTS

"Old Wooden Houses at Walberswick, near Southwold." No. i.

"London Bridge." Nos. 6, 9, 21, 28.

"Bark-Strippers." No. 10.

Subjects at Brentford. Nos. 11, 14, 15, 18, 29, 75, 76.

Views at Hammersmith. Nos. 12, 13, 16, 17, 49, 77, 129, 132.

'Strand on the Green, Kcw Bridge in the Distance." Nos. 23 and 39,

'A Storm, near Craven Cottage, Fulham." No. 24.

'Trees with Snow." No. 25.

'Brentford Bridge." No. 29.

' Fairlight." No. 31.

' Barnard Castle." No. 32.

'The Bridge, Barnard Castle." Nos. 33 and 74.

'The Maple-Tree, Barnard Castle." No. 34.

'A Butcher's Shop, Wormwood Scrubbs." No. 41.

' Building the New Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington."
No. 42.

2 II 241

Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

" Three Brickmakers loading Barrows at Wormwood Scrubbs." No. 44.
" Ship-Builders, Greenwich, 1905." No. 47.
" Breaking up the Hannibal, Woolwich, 1905." No, 48.
" Scaffolding, South Kensington." No. 50.
" Fishmongers' Hall." No. 51.
"The Tan-Pit." No. 52.
" A Pigsty, Wormwood Scrubbs." No. 54.
"An Organ-Grinder, London." No. 55.
" A Dye Vat, Leeds." No. 57.
" Old Kew Bridge." No. 59.

" Men scraping Skins at Brentford." Nos. 75 and 76.
"Barge-Builders, Hammersmith." No. 77.
" Breaking up the Caledonia at Charlton." No. 78.
" The End of the Day." No. 80.
" Men leaving Work in a Shipyard." No. 82.
" Men rowing on a Thames Lighter." Nos. 85 and 86.
" A Coal-mine after an Explosion." No. 106.
" Miners pushing Trucks of Coal." No. 1 1 1.
"A Sand-Shoot on the Thames." No. 1 19.
"Evening, Hammersmith." No. 129.
"The Black Mill at Winchelsea." No. 131.
"Old Hammersmith." No. 132.

"The Mill, Manningtree." This etching was done before 1902. Two
or three proofs exist; one belongs to Mr. H. F. W. Ganz.

CERTIFICATES AND BOOKPLATES

Bookplate for Mr. F. Nevvbolt. No. 130.

Certificate for the Master Shipwrights' Company. No. 108.

Bookplate. No. 102.

Certificate for the Shipping Federation of the Port of London, No. 69.

Bookplate for Professor Dr. H. W. Singer. No. 70.

ARCHITECTURAL SUBJECTS

" Church of Sainte-Austreberthe at Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 89.
" Church of Sainte-Saulve at Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 93.
"The Market Square at Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 96.
242

.Appendix II.: Etchings — Classified

"The Cathedral Church of Eu, Normandy."

"A Brewery at Bruges." Nos. 63 and 64.

"Old Houses at Ghent." No. 68.

"Assisi." With the Monastery and Church of St. Francis. No. 7.

" Castello della Ziza, Palermo." No. 27.

" The Rialto, Venice." No. 60.

" The Bridge of Sighs, Venice."

" Ghent Gate, Bruges." No. 65.

"Santa Maria della Salute." Nos. 88, no, 124.

"Ghent, 1906." No. 104,

" Santa Sophia, Constantinople." No. 105.

"Meat-Market at Bruges." No. 117.

"Old Hammersmith." No. 132.

" Apse of Saint-Nicolas at Furnes."

"Church of Saint-Nicolas at Furnes."

" Inn of the Parrot, Dixmude."

"Church of Saint-Valbert, Furnes."

"Church of Saint-Nicolas at Dixmude."

"Apse of the Cathedral at Messina."

" The Campo San Spirito, Messina."

BOATS, BARGES, SHIPS

"London Bridge" (i). No. 6.

" London Bridge" (2). No. 9.

"The Tree, Hammersmith." No. 17.

"Barge-Builders at Brentford." No. 18.

"A Shipbuilding Yard, London." No. 22.

"London Bridge" (3). No. 28.

"Shipbuilders, Venice, 1905." No. 47.

" Breaking up the Hannibal, Woolwich, 1905." No. 48.

" Entrance to a Canal at Bruges." No. 56.

" Barges, Bruges." No. 67.

" Certificate for the Shipping Corporation of the Port of London.'

No. 69.
" Barge-Builders, Hammersmith." No. 77.
" Breaking up the Caledonia at Charlton." No. 78.
"The Tow-Rope, Bruges, 1906." No. 79.

243

Frank "Brangwyn and his Work

"Santa Maria della Salute, Venice." Nos. 88 and no.

" Boat-Builders, Venice." No. 91.

" Boatyard, Venice." No. 92.

"Certificate for the Master Shipwrights' Company." No. 108.

"Unloading Wine from a Merchantman at Night, Venice." No. 109.

"Sunshine and Shadow: A Venetian Funeral." No. 123.

MILLS, WINDMILLS, BRIDGES

'London Bridge" (2). No. 9.

'The Water-Mill, Brentford." No. 15.

'The Bridge, Barnard Castle." Nos. 33 and 74.

' Mill Wheel at Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 35.

'Mill Bridge at Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 36.

'The Mills, Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 37.

' Old Kew Bridge." No. 59.

' The Rialto, Venice." No. 60.

' The Bridge of Sighs, Venice."

'Windmills at Bruges." No. 62.

'A Paper-Mill at Montreuil-sur-Mer, 1907." No. 90.

' FuIIing-Mill at Montreuil." No. 99.

'The Black Mill at Winchelsea." No. 131.

' Mill at Di.\mude."

'Windmill at Dixmude."

' Mill at Furnes."

'Brentford Bridge." No. 29.

SIMPLE LANDSCAPE

" A Road in Picardy." No. 8.
"Strand on the Green." Nos. 23 and 39.
"Trees with Snow." No. 25.
" Fairlight." No. 31.

" The Maple-Tree, Barnard Castle." No. 34.
" A Road at Montreuil-sur-Mer." No. 38.
" Hesdin." No. 121.

"A Storm, near Craven Cottage, Fulham." No. 24.
244

jlppendix II.: Etchings — Classified

There have been six exhibitions on the Continent of Brangwyn
etchings and lithographs, all arranged by his foreign agent, M. Bramson,
Galerie d'Art D^coratif, 7 Rue Laffitte, Paris.

1906, at Paris; 1907, at Stockholm; 1909, at Paris; 1909, at
Brussels ; 19 10, at Florence ; 19 10, at Rome.

ETCHINGS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES

Barcelona, Museum of Modern Art.

" A Butcher's Shop " ; " Building the New Victoria and Albert
Museum at South Kensington"; "Breaking up the Hannibal" ;
"The Tan-Pit"; "The Rialto, Venice" ; "Old Women, Bruges";
" Windmills, Bruges " ; " Ghent Gate, Bruges " ; " Bottle-Washers,
Bruges " ; " Barges, Bruges " ; " Old Houses, Ghent " ; " Breaking up
the Caledonia " ; " The Tow-Rope " ; " The Return from Work " ; and
" Santa Maria della Salute," No. 88.

Berlin, Royal Print Room.

"The Shipbuilding Yard, London"; and "The Turkish Ceme-
tery."

Bradford, Corporation Museum.

" A Storm, near Craven Cottage, Fulham."

Bremen, Kiinsthalle.

"London Bridge" (2); and "The Mill-Wheel, Montreuil-sur-
Mer."

Brussels, Royal Library.

"A Road in Picardy " ; "A Butcher's Shop"; "Old Women,
Bruges " ; " Brewery, Bruges " (2) ; " Ghent Gate, Bruges " ; " Bottle-
Washers, Bruges"; "Barges, Bruges"; "Old Houses, Ghent";
"The Tow-Rope " ; " Santa Maria della Salute, Venice," No. 88 ; and
" Man on a Barrel," lithograph.

Budapest, National Museum.

" Breaking up the Caledonia."

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

Buenos Ayres, the Museum.

" Santa Maria della Salute, Venice," No. 88.

Christiania, Museum of Art.

" Road at Montreuil-sur-Mer " ; " Laveurs de Laine," lithograph.

Dresden , Royal Print Room.

"Assisi" ; "A Turkish Cemetery" ; " Building the New Victoria
and Albert Museum, South Kensington " ; " Shipbuilders, Green-
wich," No. 47.

Florence, Les Offices.

"A Butcher's Shop"; "Shipbuilders, Greenwich," No. 47;
"The Tan-Pit"; "Church of St. Austreberthe at Montreuil-sur-
Mer"; and "Breaking up the Caledonia." A lithograph — "Har-
vesters."

Gothenburg, Goteborgs Museum.

"The Tan- Pit" ; " Barges, Bruges."

Lugano, Civic Museum.

"The Tow-Rope."

Malmo, the Museum.
" Assisi."

Milan, Gallery 0/ Modern Art,

"Santa Maria della Salute, Venice," No. 88.

Miihlhausen, the Museum.

" Mill-Wheel at Montreuil-sur-Mer."

Naples, Museum 0/ San Martino.

" Castello della Ziza, Palermo."

Paris, National Library.

" Shipbuilding Yard, London " ; "The Storm"; "Mill-Wheel at
Montreuil"; " Brickmakers " ; "Breaking up the Hannibal"; "Old
246

appendix II.: Etchings — Classified

Kew Bridge " ; " Certificate for the Shipping Federation of the Port
of London"; "The Bridge, Barnard Castle "(2); "Santa Maria
della Salute, Venice" ; "The Bark-Strippers."

Rome, National Print Room.

"A Butcher's Shop"; "Building the New Victoria and Albert
Museum at South Kensington"; "Brewery, Bruges"; "The Storm";
" Church of St. Nicolas, Furnes."

This museum owns two Brangwyn drawings : " Loading Barrels,
London " ; and " Two Old Women."

Rome, Gallery of Modern Art.

"The Bridge, Barnard Castle" (2) ; "Hammersmith" (3), No. 49;
"Old Houses, Ghent"; "Santa Maria della Salute," No. 88;
"Church of Sainte-Austreberthe, Montreuil-sur-Mer"; " Boatbuilders,
Venice"; "A Coal Mine after an explosion"; "Building the New
Museum, South Kensington."

South Kensington, Victoria and Albert Museum.

"Assisi" ; " Road in Picardy " ; " London Bridge" (2) ; " London
Bridge" (3); "Building the New Victoria and Albert Museum";
"Breaking up the Hannibal"; and "Certificate for the Shipping
Federation of the Port of London."

Stockholm, Museum.

"The Tree, Hammersmith"; "Old Houses, Ghent " ; "Breaking
up the Caledonia " ; " The Tow-Rope " ; and " Building the New
Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington."

Stuttgart, Royal Print Room.

" London Bridge" (2).

Vienna, Royal Print Room.

"London Bridge" (2); " Castello della Ziza, Palermo"; "A
Butcher's Shop."

Venice, Gallery of Modern Art.

" Santa Maria della Salute, Venice," No. 88.

247

Frank Erangwyn and his JVork

Zurich, Polytechnic.

"A Road in Picardy " ; "The Rialto, Venice."
There are prints also at Elberfeld, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and
Munich.

OTHER HONOURS

Frank Brangwyn has been elected into five important Academies of
Art. They comprise La Soci6t6 Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris ; La
Soci^te Royale Beige ; the Royal Academy of Milan ; the Royal
Academy, Stockholm ; and A.R.A., England.

248

APPENDIX III

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHOSEN ARTICLES AND REVIEWS

The "Studio" Magazine

1893, vol. i. " Spain as a Sketching Ground " (i). By Frank Brangwyn.
1893, vol. i. " Spain as a Sketching Ground " (2). By Frank Brangwyn.
1897, vol. xii. "Frank Brangwyn and his Art." By J. Stanley Little.

1899, vol. xvi. "Frank Brangwyn's Stained-Glass Designs." Editorial.

1900, vol. xix. " A Bedroom Decorated by Frank Brangwyn." Editorial.
1903, vol. xxviii. " Frank Brangwyn's Landscapes and Still Life." By

Selwyn Image.

1905, vol. xxxiv. " Scheme for the Decoration of the British Section at
the Venice Exhibition." By Arthur S. Covey.

1906, vol. xxxix. "The New Pane! for the Royal Exchange." By Arthur
S. Covey.

1907, vol. xl. "The Brangwyn Room at the City Art Gallery, Leeds."
By Arthur S. Covey.

1907, vol. xli. "Decorative Panels in the British Section of the Venice

Exhibition." By Arthur S. Covey.
1909, vol. xlviii. " Tempera Frieze at the new London Offices of the

Grand Trunk Railway." By E. Trumbull.

" The Artist" " The Magazine of Art " and " The Art Journar

May 1897. "The Artist." General article by P. G. Konody.
March 1903. "Art Journal." General article by F. Rinder.
February 1903. "Magazine of Art." "The Decorative Work of Frank

Brangwyn." By P. G. Konody. This article belongs to a series by

Mr. Konody, good alike in text and in illustrations.

2 I 249

Frank "Brangwyn and his JVork

Autobiographical and Interviews

May 28, 1898. " Great Thoughts." Interview.

February 7, 1904. "The Weekly Dispatch." An interview entitled

"Brine and Brush."
February 27, 1904. " M.A.P." Autobiographical sketch.
May 1905. "The World." " Celebrities at Home." No. MCCCLI.

American Publications

December 1897. " Arts for America." " Frank Brangwyn." By Lorado

Taft.

January 1904. " Scribner's Magazine." General article by M. H.

Spielmann. Suggestive and thorough.

'■'•Art et Decoration" Paris

Juillet 1899. An excellent study by Fierens-Gevaert.

Fevrier 1900. A good article by Arthur Layard.

Janvier 1905. A general review, thoughtful and suggestive, by L^once

B6n6dite.
Mars 1909. " Les Eaux-Fortes de Frank Brangwyn." T. Desteve.
Octobre 1909. " Brangwyn, D^corateur." By Maurice Guillemot.

Italian Publications

April 1899. "Emporium." General article by Mario Borsa.
April 1905. " L'lllustrazione Italiana." Article by Mario Borsa.
November 16, 1909. "Nuova Antologia." Article by Mario Borsa.
April 1 910. " L'lllustrazione Italiana." The Etchings. By Ugo Ojetti.
Serie i,Fascicolo 16. " La Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Venezia." Vittoria

Pica studies the work of Brangwyn, and gives a good colour-plate of

"St. Simeon Stylites."
Serie 3, Fascicolo 8. " Attraverso Gli Albi E Le Cartelle." Etchings

and Lithographs. Vittorio Pica. Istituto Italiana a'Arti GraHche,

Bergamo
250

^Appendix III. : "Bibliography

German and Austrian Publications

December 1897. " Dekorative Kunst," Munich. A review giving a large

colour plate of the " Vine " wall-hanging.
1900. "Kunst und Kunsthandwerk." A good study by P. G. Konody.

1905. "Die Graphischen Kiinste," Vienna. An article by Campbell
Dodgson.

1906. " Meister der Farbe," Leipzig. An article by W. Gibson, with a
good colour-plate of "The Goatherds."

January-February 1909. " Erdgeist," Vienna. An article.

1909. "Die Graphischen Kiinste," Vienna. The Etchings. By Dr.

Arpad Weixlgiirtner.
May 1910. "Die Kunst Fiir Alle." The Etchings. By Fortunat v.

Schubert-Soldern.

For a penetrating study of the etchings, see " Peintres de Race," by
Marius-Ary Leblond, 19 10, G. van Oest et Cie., Bruxelles.

Many persons are interested in " The Buccaneers," a picture that
makes the turning-point in the artist's career ; and I have been asked to
give a selection from the many notices that appeared in France : —

June 3, 1893. "La Revue Hebdomadaire." By Claude Bienne.

May 29, 1893. "Journal des Artistes." By Raoul Sertat ; also "La

Revue Encyclopedique," May 19.
June 1893. "Revue des Deu.\ Mondes." By Lafenestre. The critic

prefers "The Funeral at Sea."
May 7, 1893. " Monde Artiste." By Lucas.
May 5, 1893. "Grande Bataille." By Jourdain.
April 29, 1893. " Liberte." By Pallier.
RLiy 7, 1893. "Echo de la Semaine." By Gustave Gefifroy.
June I, 1893. " Mus6 des Families." By Gaston Migeon.
May 19, 1893. "Gazette de France." By Kersant.
May 19, 1893. " Univers lllustrd'." By P. Havard.
April 30, 1893. "Voltaire." By Roger Marx.
May 9, 1893. "Temps." By Ary Renan.
May 9, 1893. "Journal." By Mirbeau.
May 1893. " Revue Socialiste." By Gervaise.

«5i

Frank "Brangwyn and his IVork

January 1905. "Art et Decoration." By Leonce B^n^dite.

1907. "On Art and Artists." By Max Nordau (London, Fisher Unwin).
See the appreciation of Brangwyn's early works — "The Funeral at
Sea," "All Hands Aloft," "The Buccaneers," "The Goatherds,"
" The Adoration of the Magi," " The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,"
"The Scoffers," and "St. Simeon Stylites."

1908. For a notice by Henri Marcel, see "The Etched Work of Frank
Brangwyn," published by the Fine Art Society, London.

252

INDEX

Abbey, E. A., 8, 121

Academy, the, 41

/Esthetic period in England, 10

Alexander, William, 53

Allan, Sir William, 55

Alma Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 10

Anderson, Kenneth S., 72, in

Angelo, Michael, 65, 102, 146, 160, 191

Angles and vigour, 173

Anglo-Celts and Anglo-Welsh, 2

Antagonism of light and colour in painting

88
"Arabian Nights," the, 182
Arnold, Ernst, vii
Arnold, Matthew, 2
Art and conservatism, 47

and criticism, 36-37

and industrialism, 4

and modern education, 71

antiquity in English, 63

Art, decorative, 1 1 9-2 1

emotion in, 1 12-13

in its relation to modern life, 196-205

inspiration in, 108-9

literary appeal in, 126

— — ■ masculine versus feminine, 191-96

■ mural, 73, 104, 121, 140, 158

• Nouveau, L', 132, 133, 212

orientation in, 53

preference of English

qualities in, 10

prettiness in, 38, 56, 192

religious, 56, 67-70

versatility in, 206

Artist, facilities in creating

enjoyed by, 69-70
Artists, British, their liking

qualities of style, 192
Assisi, 122

Athenaum, the, 44, 51, 59, 70-71, 117
Atmosphere, the difficulty of obtaining, 89

Bacon, Francis, 152
Baldry, A. Lys, 122

for feminine

desired effect
for feminine

"Baptism of Christ," 122

Barcelona, 122, 201

Bassano, Cesare, 60

Bastien- Lepage, Jules, 10, 29, 62

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 68

Beauty, definition of, 69

Bdn^dite, Ldonce, 34, 40, 47, 55, 60, 183

Beraud, Jean, 56

Besnard, Albert, 46, 130, 133

Bibliothfeque Nationale, 168

Bing, M., 212, 214

Binyon, Laurence, 122

Blackie, Messrs., 181

Boldini, 79

Bonington, Richard P., 55, 91

Bonnier, Louis, 133

Borsa, Mario, 250

Botticelli, Sandro, 150, 151

Bouguereau, 56

Brabazon, H. B., affinity of style between
artist and. 22

Bramson, M., foreign agent for Brangwyn's
etchings, vii, 190

Brangwin, Noah, 3, 4

Brangwvn, Curtis, the painter's father, 3, 4,
5, 7, 8

Brangwyn, Frank, parentage, i ; birth of,
5 ; enters his father's office, 7 ; comes to
England, 7; artistic forerunners of, 10,
54, 55 ; becomes an art student, 10;
William Morris, 12-15; second picture
exhibited and purchased, 19; voyage to
Asia Minor, 19, 20 ; influence of Eastern
colour and sunlight on, 20, 106; sketches
at Royal Arcade Gallery, 21 ; journey to
Spain, 22-25 ; journey to South Africa, 25-
26 ; joins Institute of British Artists, 28 ;
pictures exhibited 1889-1902,31-32; Cor-
nish period, 31-32, 34 ; and R. L. Steven-
son, 33 ; affinity to Smollett, 33; parallel
between Victor Hugo and, 33 ; end of
student period, 34-35 ; " Funeral at Sea,"
38-42 ; and foreign critics, 38, 60, 72 ;
" Buccaneers," 43-48 ; success in Paris,
46 ; " Slave Traders," 49 ; " Slave

Index

Market," 49-52 ; and religious art, 56,
67-70 ; " Eve," 57 ; " Gold, Frankincense
and Myrrh," 57-60 ; " Rest," 60-62 ;
" Miraculous Draught of Fishes," 62-
65 ; " St. Simeon Stylites," 62-67 ; pic-
tures from African and Eastern life, 71;
in his relation to the French Impres-
sionists, 77, 79 ; colour and light in art
of, 80-81 ; impressionism of, 85 ; " Rajah's
Birthday," 83 ; " Mars and Venus," 93-94 ;
treatment of reflected light, 94; "Card
Players," 96 ; " Return from the Promised
Land," 96-97 ; as a colourist, 102 ; decora-
tive work of, 104-105, 118; treatment of
values, 106-107 ; sense of drama in, 107 ;
"Wine," 109-110; sentiment of, 112-13;
"Venetian Funeral/' 1 13-15; liking for
crowds, 1 15-16; "Charity," 1 16-17;
friendly critics of, 122 ; strength and
vigour of, 131 ; decorative work in the
Royal Exchange, 137-43 ; decorative work
in the Skinners' Hall, 149-61 ; Sketches
and Studies, 164-74; water-colour work of,
176-79; illustrations and designs, 181-84;
method of etching, 185 ; masculinity in
the art of, 193-96; art of, in relation to
modern life, 196-205 ; Austrian Great
Gold Medal awarded to, 202 ; designs for
house furnishing by, 207 ; home of, 217-
18 ; a selected list of pictures and sketches
by, 219-235; etchings by, classified, 236-
248 ; bibliography, 249-252

Brangwyn, Mrs., the painter's mother, 4, 5

Bremen, 201

Breton, Jules, 205

Brett, John, in

Brierley, O. W., 1 1 1

Brooking, 1 1 1

Brown, F. Madox, 134-5

Browning, Robert, 69, 166, 167, 218

Bruges, the artist's life at, 5, 6

Brussels, 201

Brussels Academy, 173

"Buccaneers," the, 43-48, 57, 60, 131, 226,
251

Budapest, 201

Bume-Jones, Sir E., 9, 68

" Butcher's Shop," the, 199-200

Caillebotte collection, the, 97-98
Cambridge Press, U.S.A., the, 181
Caradoc Press, the, 184
" Card Players," 96
Carlyle, Thomas, 73, 166
254

Cattermole, George, 176

Century, the, 181

Cervantes, 182

Chambers, George, 1 1 1

" Charity," 116-17, 131

Chavannes, Puvis de, 114, 128, 147, 148,

156, 157, 164
Chicago, 122
Chippendale, 207, 209
Christiania, 201
Chromo-spiritualism, 90
" Cider Press," the, 231
Claus, Emile, 79
Clausen, 197
Cole, William O., 66
Collier's Weekly, 181, 233
Colour and the emotions, 82
Colour in relation to nature and art, 80
Colour-sense, individual, 101-102
Constable, John, 76, 106, 193
Cook, Captain, 53
Cooke, E. \V., 1 1 1
Cornwall, pictures exhibited as a result of

sojourn in, 31-32

stay in, 31

Corot, Jean Baptiste, 89, 106
Correggio, Antonio A., 76
Cotman, John S., 75, 91, 165, 175
Cottet, Charles, 22, 79, loi, 112
Covey, Arthur S., 249
Cox, David, 16, 54, 91, 175
Cozens, A., 16
Criticism, art, 36-7

envy in, 147

genius and, 161

Critics and conservatism, 75, 76

and modem decoration, 144

and modernism, 75

and values, 98, 09, 100

Cunningham, Allan, 82
Cupples, George, 182
Cuyp, Albert, 89

Daily News, the, 222

Daily Telegraph, the, 27, 41, 44, 114, 163, 202

Daniel!, W., 91

Daumier, 196

Davis, E. J, 208, 209

Decamps, A. G., 55

Decoration, mural, 186-87

Degas, Edgar H. G., 77

Degroux, Charles, 6, 10, 35, 112, 197

Dehodencq, Alfred, 55

Delacroix, F. V. E., 46, 55, 172

Index

" Departure of Lancaster," 157-59

Destive, M. T., 201

Devitt, T. L., vii, 72, 151

Domenichino, 163

"Don Quixote," l8l

Donatello, 10

Drama in modern mechanical inventions, 167

Draper, Warwick H., vii, 1S4, 235

Dresden, 201

Dublin, 122

Dufrenoy, Leon, 107

Dumas p^re, Alexandre, 218

Diirer, Albrecht, 118

East, Sir Alfred, 229, 231

Edward VI L, artist's drawing comme-
morating funeral of, 7

Elberfeld, 201

Emotion in art, 11 2-1 3

England, esthetic period in, 10

English artists and sun-colour, 55

English artists and their liking for feminine
qualities of style, 10

English critics discourage Brangwyn, 38, 48

English idea of good draughtsmanship, the,
165

"Etched work of Frank Brangwyn," the, 183

Etchings, classified hst of, 236

Etty, William, 103

Evans, Edmund, vii

" Eve," 57

Evening Neivs, 148-49

Fantin-Latour, Henri, 10

Feminine art, 191-92

Fergusson, J. D., on business methods and

architecture, 4
Fi6rens-Gevaert, M. H., 212
Fine Art Society, 168, 183, 190
FitzGerald, Edward, 183
Flandrin, J. H., 67, 68, 69
Flatness of tints, 128-29
Floor decoration, guiding principle of, 212
Forbes, Stanhope, in, 221
Foreign critics m relation to painter's work,

38.72
Fortnightly Kevi€u\ the, 48
Frankfurt, 201
Frederic, Leon, 112
French Impressionists, 61, 77, 78, 79, 85, 88,

97, 107, 125, 214
Frieze at Grand Trunk Railway Office, 129
for L'Art Nouveau, 132-3

Frieze in the Palazzo Rezzonico, 21 1
Frith, W. P., 9, 54, 218
" Funeral at Sea," the, 38-42, 122, 221
Furniture, how to polish good, 209
Furse, C. W., 84

Gainsborough, Thomas, 8, 82, 91
Gambier-Parry system, the, 134-35
Ganz, H. F. W., vii, 185, 227
Geffroy, Gustave, 46, 71
Genius and criticism, 161

and realism, 90

and sex, 191

and the sub-conscious, 90

"Gentle Art," Whistler's, 187

George III. of England, 137

Georges, Lafenestre, 2,2,, 40

Gibbings & Co., Messrs., vii, 181, 182, 183

Gimson, Mr., 207

Girtin, Thomas, 16, 107, 175, 177

Glasgow, 122

Corporation, 43

Glasgow Herald, 11'^

Goethe, Wolfgang von, 74, 77

" Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh," 57-60, 131

Gothenburg, 201

Grafton Galleries, 43, 57, 214

Grand Trunk Railway, Office of, 129

Craphii\ the, 181, 222

Greig, Edward, 114

Guillemot, Maurice, 34, 47, 250

Guthrie, 79

Hamburg, 201
Hardy, Dudley, 227

T. B., Ill

Harrison, T. E., 79

Hayes, Edwin, 42, 43, in

Heine, Heinrich, 58

Henry, C. Napier, 1 1 1

Heppelwhite, 207

Herkomer, Hubert von, 10

Heymans, Johannes, 79

Hind, Lewis, 148-51, 154

History, Landscape and, 81

Hobbema, Meindert, 17S, 190

Hoboken Etching Club, the, 187, 188

Hodder & Stougluon, Messrs., 183

Holbein, Hans, 1 18

Holl, Frank, 10

Holland, 55, 92

Holme, Charles, 122

Hook, Jaines C, 42, 43, in

255

Index

Horsley, G. C, 211

Hugo, Victor, 33, 34, 73, 164

Hunt, William, 6, 25, 124, 176

William Holman, 10

Hunter, Colin, 15, 11 1

Image, Selwyn, 122-25

Inconsistency of English art critics, 87

Infinite, the, 19

Ingres, J. A. D., 172

Inspiration in art, 108-iog

Institute of British Artists, artist becomes a

member of, 28
Institute of Oil Painters, artist becomes a

member of, 29
Israels, J., 6

Jacobs, Joseph, 183

Japanese Gallery, exhibition of sketches at,

26-27
Joan of Arc, 62

Johannesburg Art Gallery, the, 96, 122
Jones, Sir Horace, 4
Jordaens, Jakob, 1 10
Jourdain, 67
Jouvenet, 119

Kelk, Sir John, 43

Kempis, Thomas k, 151

Kersant, 46

Khnopff, Fernand, 5

Kipling, Rudyard, 72, 181

Kitson, R. H., vii, 72

Konody, P. G., 122, 125-131, 173. ^49

Kroyer, 79

Kuehl, 79

Lafenestre, Georges, 67, 68, 70

Lamb, Charles, 149

Landscape and human history, 8 1

Lane, E. W., 182

Larkin, Mr., commission from, 25

La Thangue, 197

Lavery, John, 79

Lawson, Cecil, 10

Layard, Arthur, 165

Le Brun, 119

Leeds, 122

Legros, Alphonse, 8, 10, 101, ui, 112, 131,

187, 188, 189, 197
Leighton, Frederick (Lord), 9, 36
256

Leighton, Robert, 181

Lessing, 170

Lesueur, 119

Lewis, J. F., 43, 53, 92

Liebermann, Max, 56, 79

Light and colour, antagonism in painting

of, 88
Literatureandart, 126
Little, J. S., 122, 249
Lloyd's Register, overmantles at, 135-36
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 89
Lombroso, Cesare, 87
Loutherbourg, De, 91
Lugano, 201
Luini, Bernadino, 102
Luxembourg, the, 122, 177

M.AJ'., article on the artist appearing in,

5. '7
Mabbe, James, 182
Macartney, Lord, 53
MacCulloch, James, 72
Macfall, Haldane, 122, 203, 227
Mackmurdo, A. H., artist influenced by, 11,

12
Maclise, Daniel, 134
Madur^s Magazine, 181
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 5
Magazine o/Ar/.the, 125, 225, 249
Malmo, 201

Manchester Examiner^ the, 4 1
Manchester Guardian, the, 44, 50
Manet, Edouard, 9, 46, 77, 88, 98, 163
Mansergh, Cornewall Lewis, 72
Mantegna, Andrea, 11, 12, 160, 211
Marcel, Henri, 33, 47, 168, 183, 199
Marine painting, 43
" Mars and Venus," 93-94, 122
Martin, Henri, 65
Marx, Roger, 40, 48
Mary Queen of Scots, 62
Mason, George, 10, 191, 192
Mauclair, Camille, 77, 85, 99
Melville, Arthur, 22, 44, 177, 178, 179
Meryon, 81

Messina sketches, the, 176
Meunier, Constantin, 10, in, 112, 119, 162,

170, 191, 192, 196, 197, 198, 214
Meynell, Mrs. Alice, 95
Michelti, 79
Middle Ages, window decoration in the,

215-16
Migeon, Gaston, 48, 172
Milan, 201

Index

Milburn, Sir John Davison, 136

Millais, Sir John E., 9

Millet, Jean Franijois, ic, 12, 29, 30, 56, 106,

112, 1 15, 119, 162, 205
Milton, John, 90

" Miraculous Draught of Fishes," 62-65
Modern decoration, critics and, 144
Monet, Claude, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 89,

99
Monomy, 1 1 1

Moods ill decorative art, the danger of, l^i
Moore, Albert, 10

George, 61, 77, 122, 161

Moore, Henry, 42,43, iil

" Moorish Well," a, 122
Morgan, William de, 14
Morland, George, affinity of artist's work to,

29
Morley, Lord, 69, 147
Mornint; Post, the, 32, 44, 45, 72
Morris,' William, 12, 13, 14, 15, 34, 207, 214,

215
Mourey, Gabriel, iSi
Miihlhausen, 201

Miiller, William, 53, 54,92, 176, 177
Munich, 122, 201

Mural decoration, the decline of, 126
Murillo, 127

Naples, 201

National Gallery, the, 190
National Ri'-'icw, the, 57
Nelson, Horatio, 139
Newbolt, Frank, 183
New Gallery, 57,63,65, 116
Newman, Cardinal, 73
Nordau, Max, 33, 60, 67

OjF.TTi, Raffaele, 85

Old Masters and their colour, 75-76

Old Masters, the cult of the, 76

" Open-air" movement, 16

Oppenheim, Stany, vii, 47

Orchardson, W. Q., 9, 14, 15

Orientation of art, 53

Ouless, W. W., 10

Overmantles at Lloyd's Register, 135-36

Pacquement M., vii, 47
P,j/l Mall Budi^et, the, 44
Pall Mall Gac'etit-, the, 41, 63, 1 15, 192
Panels in -Skinners' Hall, 198, 130
2 K

Pantheon, the, 160

" Parerga," 180

Paris, 201

Pattern, modern craze for, 211

Petit, Georges, 47

Pettie, John, 10

Phillip, John, 6, 54, 55, 56

Phillips, Claude, 132, 202

Pigments, action of time on, 98

flatness of, 129

Pirancsi, Giaubattista, 81, 107, 187, 18S

Pissarro, 107

Pittsburg, 122

Ppchatdes, 164

Portaels, Jean, 162

Posters, difficulties in designing, 184

Poussin, Nicolas, 1 19

Prague, 122

Pre-Kaphaclites, 10, 100, 125

Psychology, religious art and, 68-69

Puerta de Passages, visit to, 24

Pugin, Augustus Charles, 4, 216

Punch, 192

RaEBURN, Sir Henrv, 55, 103, 193

" Rajah's Birthday," 83 seq.

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 183

Rapid work and its pitfalls, 87

Rathbone, Harold, criticism and instruction

from, 10, 1 1
Realism, genius and, 90
Realists, compromise of Paris Salon with

the, 9
Regnault, A. D., 50
Regoyos, Dario de, 79
Reid, J. R,, in
Rembrandt, 129, 148
Renan, .Ary, 33, 48, 63, 67, 71
Republique Franfaise, 4 1
"Rest," 60-62, 65, 131, 144
" Return from the Promised Land," 96-97,

122

Revue des Deux Mondes, 67

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 8, 28, 82, 92, 93, 94.

10:, 103, 178, 193
Rinder, F., 122, 2-8, 229
Robinson, Dr. Tom, vii, 62, 72, 219, 223
Rome, 201
Romney, 103

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 9, 10
Rousseau, Theodore, 92, 100
Rowlandson, loS

Royal Academy, the. 18, 49> 59> 65, I09r
"3. I37i '57, 175. Appendix \., passim

Index

Royal Arcade Gallery, 21

Roval Exchange, 136, 137-143

" Rubiiydt of Omar Khdyydm," 183

Rubens, Peter Paul, 5, 57, 76, 102, 116,

160
Rusinol, S., 79
Ruskin, John, 6, 8, 87, 90, 94, 95, 102, III,

178,213
Rutter, F., 122
Rysselberghe, Thdo van, 79

"St. Simeon Stylites," 65-67, 122
Salon, the, 46, 63, 65, loi
Sargent, J. S., 8, 22, 79, 121
Saturday Review, 57, 221, 227
"Scoffers," the, 122, 229
Scott, Michael, 183

Sir Walter, 149, 218

Scribner's Magazine, 181

Seegar, E., 67

Segantini, Giovanni, 79

Serres, 1 1 1

Sertat, Raoul, 48

Sex, genius and, 191

Shakespeare. William, 151

Shannon, J. J., 8, 27

Shaw, Walter, 1 1 1

Shelton, Thomas, iSi

Simon, Lucien, affinity of style between

artist and, 22
Singer, Dr. Hans W., 183
Sisley, Alfred, 77, 80, 82
Skinners' Hall, 130

panels in the, 149-161

"Slave Market," a, 49-52, 59, 122

" Slave Traders," 49, 225

Smollett, painter's affinity to, 33

Somerscales, T., 43, in

Sorolla, J., 79

South Africa, exhibition of sketches made

in, 26-27
South Africa, journey to, 25-26
South Kensington, 201
Southport, 122

Spain, painter's journey to, 22-25
Sparrow, W. Shaw-, 183
Speaker, 158

Spectator, 44, 58, 144, 230
Spielmann, M. H., 122, 229, 250
"Spirit of the Age," the, 183
Standard, 7, 59, 61, 144
Stanfield, Clarkson, iio-ll
Star, 21, 225, 226

Stevenson, R. A. M., 49-50, 122, 223
258

Stevenson, R. L., 33, 45

Stockholm, 201

Street, G. E., 4

Studio Magazine, the, 23, 122, 125, 249

editor of, 72

Stuttgart, 122, 201

Sub-conscious, genius and the, 90

Suffolk Street Galleries, 25, 40, 41

Sultan, adventure at treasure-house of, 20

Sunday Times, 222

Sunshine, the effect of, 89

Swain, Messrs., vii

Sydney, 122

Sylvestre, A., 40

Symbolism, modern, 126

Taft, Lorado, 64, 65, 66

Technique, definition of, 146

Thackeray, William Makepeace, and his

painter-hero, "J. J.," 3
Thaulow, Fritz, 79
Thurston, Messrs., 208
Tiffany, Louis, 214
Tillies, the, 31, 49
Tintorello, 58, 68
Tissot, James Joseph Jacques, 9
Titian, 68

" Tom Cringle's Log," 183
Tone, artist's study of, 28-29
"Trade on the Beach," 122, 227
Truth, criticism appearing in, 44
Turner, J. M. W., S, 16, 20, 55, 75, 79,82,90,

91, 107, no, 165, 175, 204
Twopeny, William, 107

Uhde, Professor von, 56

Values, critics and, 98, 99, 100

Van Saverdonck, II

V'edder, Elihu, 65

Velasquez, 127, 163

Venice, 122, 211

"Venetian Funeral," 1 13-15, 122

Veronese, Paul, 58, 68, 76, 115, 163

Verheyden, Francois P., 79

Versatility in art, 206-207

Victoria, Queen, 62

Vienna, 201

Wagner, Richard, 73
Walker, Fred, 10

Index

Ward, James, 193

Water-colour, the beauty of, 175-76

Watts, G. F., 9, 64, 66, 139

Webb, Sir Aston, 129

Webber, John, 53

Wedmore, Frederick, 41, 42, 43

West Africa, expedition to, 26

Whistler, James MacNcil, 8, 9, 42, 57, 8j

86, 116, I §7, 188, i8y, 200, 203, 204
Whitechapel Art Gallery, 83, 86
Wilde, Oscar, period of enthusiasm for, 10
Wilkie, David, 6, 54
Wilson, S., vii

Window decoration in the Middle Ages,

215-216
"Wine," 109-1 10, 162
"Wine Shop," the, 122, 162-63
Wint, Peter de, i, 16, 91, 92, 175, 177
Women, their preference for the eft'eminate

in art, 102-103
Wordsworth, William, 82
World, 26-27
Wyllie, W. L., Ill

ZULOAGA, Felix de A., 79
Ziirich, 201

THE END

PrintctI by BALLAN'n'NE, Hanson &• Co.
Edinburgh 6" London

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