Modern Painting | Page 9

George Moore
understand
humbly and pathetically the casualness of our habitation, and the
limitlessreality of a plan, the intention of which we shall never know.
Mr. Whistler's nights are the blue transparent darknesses which are half
of the world's life. Sometimes he foregoes even the aid of earthly light,
and his picture is but luminous blue shadow, delicately graduated, as in
the nocturne in M. Duret's collection--purple above and below, a

shadow in the middle of the picture--a little less and there would be
nothing.
There is the celebrated nocturne in the shape of a T--one pier of the
bridge and part of the arch, the mystery of the barge, and the figure
guiding the barge in the current, the strange luminosity of the fleeting
river! lines of lights, vague purple and illusive distance, and all is so
obviously beautiful that one pauses to consider how there could have
been stupidity enough to deny it. Of less dramatic significance, but of
equal esthetic value, is the nocturne known as "the Cremorne lights".
Here the night is strangely pale; one of those summer nights when a
slight veil of darkness is drawn for an hour or more across the heavens.
Another of quite extraordinary beauty, even in a series of
extraordinarily beautiful things, is "Night on the Sea". The waves curl
white in the darkness, and figures are seen as in dreams; lights burn low,
ships rock in the offing, and beyond them, lost in the night, a vague
sense of illimitable sea.
Out of the night Mr. Whistler has gathered beauty as august as Phidias
took from Greek youths. Nocturne II is the picture which Professor
Ruskin declared to be equivalent to flinging a pot of paint in the face of
the public. But that black night, filling the garden even to the sky's
obliteration, is not black paint but darkness. The whirl of the St.
Catherine wheel in the midst of this darkness amounts to a miracle, and
the exquisite drawing of the shower of falling fire would arouse envy in
Rembrandt, and prompt imitation. The line of the watching crowd is
only just indicated, and yet the garden is crowded. There is another
nocturne in which rockets are rising and falling, and the drawing of
these two showers of fire is so perfect, that when you turn quickly
towards the picture, the sparks really do ascend and descend.
More than any other painter, Mr. Whistler's influence has made itself
felt on English art. More than any other man, Mr. Whistler has helped
to purge art of the vice of subject and belief that the mission of the
artist is to copy nature. Mr. Whistler's method is more learned, more
co-ordinate than that of any other painter of our time; all is
preconceived from the first touch to the last, nor has there ever been
much change in the method, the painting has grown looser, but the
method was always the same; to have seen him paint at once is to have
seen him paint at every moment of his life. Never did a man seem more

admirably destined to found a school which should worthily carry on
the tradition inherited from the old masters and represented only by
him. All the younger generation has accepted him as master, and that
my generation has not profited more than it has, leads me to think,
however elegant, refined, emotional, educated it may be, and anxious to
achieve, that it is lacking in creative force, that it is, in a word, slightly
too slight.

CHAVANNES, MILLET, AND MANET.
Of the great painters born before 1840 only two now are living, Puvis
de Chavannes and Degas. It is true to say of Chavannes that he is the
only man alive to whom a beautiful building might be given for
decoration without fear that its beauty would be disgraced. He is the
one man alive who can cover twenty feet of wall or vaulted roof with
decoration that will neither deform the grandeur nor jar the greyness of
the masonry. Mural decoration in his eyes is not merely a picture let
into a wall, nor is it necessarily mural decoration even if it be painted
on the wall itself: it is mural decoration if it form part of the wall, if it
be, if I may so express myself, a variant of the stonework. No other
painter ever kept this end so strictly before his eyes. For this end
Chavannes reduced his palette almost to a monochrome, for this end he
models in two flat tints, for this end he draws in huge undisciplined
masses.
Let us examine his palette: many various greys, some warmed with
vermilion, some with umber, and many more that are mere mixtures of
black and white, large quantities of white, for
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