Read Ebook: The Whistler Book A Monograph of the Life and Position in Art of James McNeill Whistler Together with a Careful Study of His More Important Works by Hartmann Sadakichi Whistler James McNeill Illustrator

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The model for both these pictures was Joanna Heffernan, an Irish girl, neither particularly handsome nor well educated; but she was a good model, who adapted herself easily to a painter's idea, and her native wit and willingness to learn atoned for any lack of knowledge. She generally read while she was posing for Whistler, and as she talked with his friends, posed for other artists and visited picture exhibitions, she played quite an important part in the painter's life during his early years in London. She went to Paris in the winter of 1861-2 to pose for "The Woman in White," in his studio on the boulevard des Battignoles. He painted her in a number of other pictures, notably as "Jo" and "The Little White Girl." Although different in each picture, now young, now more mature, in one case a lady and in another a buxom girl, she is really beautiful in none, though always attractive. He probably merely used her as a suggestion. He liked to have her in his studio even when he did not paint her form or features. There is also a dry point of "Jo," dated 1861, which shows her with streaming hair, which is probably the nearest approach to a likeness. It is a beautiful bit of drawing and interesting as a space arrangement. It shows how a head can almost fill the entire space of a picture without becoming obtrusive or looking too large. The line work is excellent in its purity of design and apparent carelessness.

A change of method is noticeable in "The Little White Girl," the colour scheme of which is exquisite. The white dress of the young girl, in profile, with loosened hair, leaning against a mantelpiece, and her reflection in the glass, are accentuated in a beautiful manner by the brilliant colour notes of a red lacquer box, a blue and white vase, a fan with a Hiroshige-like design and a decorative arrangement of pink and purple azaleas. The painting is thinner and there is greater repose in the composition. Swinburne saw the picture before it was sent up to the Royal Academy in 1865, and expressed his admiration by writing "Before the Mirror. Verses under a Picture:"

"Come snow, come wind or thunder, High up in the air I watch my face and wonder At my bright hair. Naught else exalts or grieves The rose at heart that heaves With love of our own leaves, and lips that pair.

"I cannot tell what pleasures Or what pains were, What pale new loves and treasures New Years will bear, What beam will fall, what shower With grief or joy for dower. But one thing knows the flower, the flower is fair."

"La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine" is perhaps his finest work in vivid colouring. The colour differentiations are well placed, but the canvas, after all, looks too much like a huge Japanese print, painted in the Western style, which represents objects round and in relief, and not merely in flat tints. The placing of the screen with the face looming above it is as peculiar as it is attractive, but it is an arrangement that is strictly Japanese in character. Whistler began with painting detail, and only gradually learned to see life in a broader and more mysterious way. It is a portrait of Miss Christie Spartali, a real Rossetti type, daughter of the Consul-General for Greece in London in 1863. Her father did not like it; but Rossetti did, and sold it from his own studio to help Whistler along. Later it came into the possession of F. R. Leyland, and was used to decorate the "Peacock Room." It was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865. It is really a combination of Rossetti and Outomaro, with a slight flavour of Whistler's individuality.

"On the Balcony" of the Freer collection is a peculiar combination of models masquerading in kimonos and a background of English river scenery. He essayed the same task as Chavannes in his mural decorations, i. e., to determine the local tints of each face or arm by the surrounding colours. The problem was made still more difficult by showing each face in a different illumination. One face is silhouetted in profile against the river, another shaded by a fan and the form of a standing figure, the others are seen in front light. I do not believe he has ever attempted a more ambitious problem, and he solved it in a most subtle and convincing fashion. It is a delightful harmony in colour, and exceedingly well-balanced; it reminds one of the Japanese, but the colour and vibrating atmosphere is Occidental. Pity that he found it necessary to introduce Japanese costumes. I perfectly realize that one of the principal charms of this picture is the incongruity of the ensemble. Yet who ever saw in a London town such a balcony with Japanese awnings, and English girls dressed up like geishas, whiling away the early hours of the night. The figures belong neither to Japan nor Great Britain. They are simply there for colour's sake, but, after all, such associations of thought, no matter whether in paint or poetry, never constitute the greatest art. The composition is more restful and simpler than in his earlier works. When Whistler began to realize this shortcoming of his earlier style, he turned away from "orchestral explosions of colour" and "volleys of paint," and began that wonderful process of elimination which helped him to become one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century.

THE ART OF OMISSION

A Blue-black night, broken by sparks of bursting skyrockets and weird forms of light, in which two illuminated towers are vaguely indicated. To the left a cluster of foliage and a crowd of people, felt rather than seen. Such is the subject matter of this little 17 x 23 canvas which probably excited more controversy and discussion than any other of Whistler's pictures. It was scarcely noticed when it was first exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in October. But in 1877 the storm broke loose, and the famous libel suit against Ruskin, and the record of all details of the trial in a brown-covered pamphlet, under the title "Whistler v. Ruskin, Art and Art Critics" , were the immediate results. And the discussion con or pro has not ceased to this very day. Some call it merely a clever sketch; others consider it one of the highest expressions beauty is capable of.

What is there so remarkable and fascinating in this picture, that it can exercise such an influence! Technically it is not perfect, the blacks are rather opaque, and it does not possess the haunting charm of the "Old Battersea Bridge" or even of the "Valparaiso Harbour."

Is it the subject matter? Fireworks were never painted before, or, at least, did not constitute the sole motif of a picture. Yet this should be no objection. Fireworks are one of the modern amusements that enjoy great popularity. There should be no objection to their representation, as little as to a baseball game, a prize fight or any realistic phase of our personal life. The curious interest of this painting, or any of Whistler's nocturnes, does not lie merely in the novelty of the subject , nor that it depicts the mystery of night in an unusual manner, as some artists and writers claim.

During the trial Whistler himself gave the following definition of a nocturne:

"I have perhaps meant rather to indicate an artistic interest alone in the work, divesting the picture of any sort of interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. It is an arrangement of line, form and colour first, and I make use of any incident which shall bring about a symmetrical result. Among my works are some night pieces, and I have chosen the word 'Nocturne' because it generalizes and simplifies the whole set of them."

After Whistler had stated that he had worked two days on the "Falling Rocket," the General Attorney said:

"The labour of two days, then, is that for what you ask two hundred guineas?"

To which Whistler replied:

"No--I ask it for the knowledge of a life-time."

This is hardly a satisfactory explanation. It merely informs us that the consideration of line, form and colour is more important than the incident depicted. Have not all painters worked in that way! The actual manipulation of the pigment on the canvas is the supreme pleasure of every genuine painter. But the source of inspiration after all lies in the incident that is in the line, form and colour indicated by the incident. Or does Whistler wish to convince us that he mentally invented a colour scheme and then set out to find the incident? He might have said to himself, "I want to paint a night scene, in blue and gold, and I want such a silhouette to dominate the scene," but, after all, the incident had to furnish, or rather suggest, the possibilities of the mental vision. He, more than most painters, saw poetry in nature. His wonderful description of a river scene at night in the "Ten O'clock" vouches for that. Read these lines that are worthy of any poet:

"When the evening mist clothes the riverside with 'poetry' as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and the fairy land is before us--then the wayfarer hastens home, the workman and the cultured one, the wise and the one of pleasures cease to understand as they have ceased to see, and nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master; her son in that he loves her, and her master in that he knows her."

A man who wrote like that surely received his inspirations from nature, and was dependent on the incident as much as anybody else. No, the true significance of his nocturne, as remarked before, lies in the original intention, not in the final effect of the subject he wished to produce. For conventionalist and impressionist alike, nature is the source of symbols for their mood. With them the standpoint is remarkably different from that of the superficial realists, who imagine that the mere copy of a scene must give the emotion that the scene itself arouses; who forget that the artist's emotion is as much a selective factor as his vision of the objective signs needful for the communication of his feeling to his public.

He probably wished to remain under cover, and not come out boldly and say: "This is the Japanese way of doing things. I disengage the poetical significance from an object or fact in Eastern fashion. I have learned this from the Hiroshige prints."

Few artists are willing to lay bare the mechanism of their individual way of interpretation. They would be misunderstood anyhow. Painters would have rejoiced to call him a downright imitator. And that is just the point where he differed from the average artist who followed the Eastern trail of art. He succeeded in combining the two great art elements of the world, those of the East and the West. In the sixties he was interested merely in a phase of Japanese art, that of colour. Hiroshige prints were hung on the wall or scattered on the floor of his studio, as can be noted in several of his earlier paintings. The Japanese artists were virtuosos of colour. They combined the most contradictory colours into a harmony, nuances which for centuries had escaped the appreciation of the European eye. After many experiments Whistler realized that this refined sense of colour was only one of the external accomplishments of Japanese art, that its true soul was revealed in its suggestive quality.

The Japanese artists work without perspective, shadows and reflections, and even when they apply them they do so in a purely decorative way. They rely entirely on design, on line and the juxtaposition of flat colour shapes. They do not care to produce an illusion, as if the frame afforded a view on a scene of actual life. They are satisfied with making a mere delineation, a suggestion of a beautiful gown or mountain view.

In literature, or even in such a simple matter as the naming of things, the Japanese invariably give play to the exercise of their imagination to bring out a suggestive effect. The same tendency extends into their fine arts. In treating objects of nature, however insignificant, the Japanese artist strives to suggest or indicate some sentiment beyond what is conveyed by the facts represented, just as the poet strives to store up a mine of thought in the thirty-one syllables of an ordinary verse, the Tanka, or in the still shorter Haikai of seventeen syllables. In short, the Japanese artist exerts himself to produce more than beauty of form or colour. This quality is less apparent in the coloured wood print so popular with Westerners. An Outomaro is really lacking suggestiveness. It runs too much into technical detail, and just for that reason perhaps we more readily understand the European artists.

Take for instant a simple representation of summer plants, merely a few stalks. The artist is not satisfied to show us the actual facts but endeavours to indicate something beyond what is actually represented, the delight of a flowery field in summer or the cool refreshing breeze under which the plants are bending and swaying.

The Western artists hitherto entertained a different ideal and though there were many schools, each advocating a different ideal, they all agreed on one point: that they had to create an illusion, with modelling, rotundity of form, light, shade and distance. Suggesting a fact is subtler than actually representing a fact. A sketch has something, a virility and freshness that a finished painting rarely has. We prefer Courbet to Ingres, Israels to Leighton. There must be something left to imagination, to our emotions and aesthetic consciousness. The Japanese leave most to imagination. Their method lacks strength but is capable of conveying finer poetic sentiments. Their vision is clearer, more rapid and less disturbed by intellectual preoccupations than ours. They are perhaps more perceptual than conceptual. Not that they lack deep poignant expression, but that they are deficient in intensity and depth of representation. The grandiose unity of effect of a Titian, Tintoretto or Rubens is beyond the kakemono and colour print. They succeeded in some instances in adumbrating in lines of conventional severity and precision strange and mystical intimations of spiritual existence. But we find it difficult to discern these qualities as we need more than suggestion to arrive at such conclusions.

Whistler tried and succeeded in translating this suggestiveness in such a manner that the Western mind could understand and appreciate it. How did he accomplish this task! He realized that he could not abandon atmosphere, light and distance. He had to apply the Eastern principle without deteriorating the Western technique. To proceed like the Japanese would have resulted in a failure. His "Princess of the Porcelain Land" must have taught him this. He strove for something else than a mere resemblance. He adopted certain ideas of space arrangement, certain forms of design and the elimination of detail. The underlying composition reminds of the Japanese, but not the finish.

Hiroshige was the first designer of Japanese colour prints who devoted himself largely to landscapes with figures, and with Eastern ingenuity almost exhausted the subject. His "Hundred Views of Fusi-yama" contain the most startling designs and problems of composition that have ever been attempted, and they are treated with incomparable boldness, and solved with astounding skill. The rarest aspects of nature are treated with perfect balance. It is a play of curves and geometrical shapes that bewilders the Western mind that has been content with comparatively few formulae.

The vista idea of representing a scene as if viewed through the frame of a doorway, which Whistler so frequently used in his etchings as in "The Lime Burner" and "The Garden," is strictly Japanese. One of his friends said that Whistler never objected to any one trying to copy his way of painting, but looked upon filching of ideas as grand larceny. This proves how ignorant we all are about our conduct of life. If anybody ever plagiarized ideas it was Whistler. The "T" shape of the "Old Battersea Bridge," in his nocturne of blue and gold, is almost an exact copy of a Hiroshige design. The same can be said of the branch of leaves protruding like a silhouette from the margin of his "Ocean," and the composition of several other nocturnes. But Whistler added something which no Japanese print suggests. He added light, atmosphere, distance and mystery.

Hiroshige relied entirely upon design and line, and he was not a good draughtsman at that, at least not in his figures. His human figures frequently look like miniature caricatures or curious little insects. His line lacks purity and sweep, but is more realistic and less conventional than that of his predecessors. His colour is crude in comparison with the older artists. His prints that were executed after the introduction of European aniline colours in 1850, with their streaks of vivid red and blue, are almost offensive to the eye. His earlier ones, when he was content in working in pale colours, in pale blue and black with just a suggestion of pink, are vastly superior. Later on he tried to learn from the Europeans, and strove for atmospheric effects, but always suggested it rather by design than colour. If he used colour for that purpose it went never beyond a simple wash.

Whistler sacrificed line almost entirely. He worked in big masses, shapes and silhouettes and made colour the principal attraction. The simplicity of design he borrowed from the Japanese, but the intimate charm of his colour he got from another art, the art of music. Many paintings of the latter half of the nineteenth century show this musical tendency. Chavannes, Cazin, our American landscape painter Tryon, even the Impressionists, try to produce with colour something similar to the effect of sound. It is either a resemblance of feeling in execution, or the desire to deliver us over to a mood like music. Generally both desires go hand in hand.

The colour combinations are frequently the same. Blue and silver, and blue and gold appear most frequently. Then there is brown with gold or silver, and a crepuscule in flesh colour and green, which was also the theme of "On the Balcony."

His subjects were chosen with great discretion. Outside of the "Valparaiso Harbour" picture, a "Southampton Water" and a "St. Marks, Venice," most were devoted to London. There is a Chelsea embankment in winter, a Chelsea in snow and ice, the Westminster Bridge, the Trafalgar Square in snow, and the old Battersea reach and bridge in three versions. Whistler never stopped work at a picture until it was as perfect as he could make it. Many of the pictures that are now on the market, mere scraps and fragments at ridiculous prices, he would not have allowed to go out of his studio. He had the conscience of the true artist, but he never went to the extreme. He knew when to stop, a quality which is exceedingly rare. He would never have spoiled a canvas as Maris and Ryder do. He worked very hard on most of his pictures, but they do not show it. The difficulties and deliberate slowness of execution are lost in the final result. "To say of a picture, as it is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view." He followed this maxim out to the letter. Industry was with him a necessity--not a virtue. Were you to ask me to define the charm of his nocturnes, I should say, I fancy that it lies in the delicious purity of their expression. The emotions which Whistler wishes to excite are those of visional pleasure, of subtle speculation and vague emotional joy. In him inspiration always prevailed over caprice. The picture had first to express the arrangement of colour entrusted to it, and was scarcely allowed any dash or extravagance of brushwork or form, unless they would form a part of his original plan and serve as a contrast or dissonance. He never added anything in his repaintings, but cut out one passage after another; he did not graft on, he pruned, for he meant nothing should remain but the most essential. If there was ever a man tormented by the accursed ambition to put the whole world into one picture, the whole picture into one tonality, and the whole tonality into one colour note, it was Whistler. It is difficult to understand why his work was ever criticized as being unfinished. When Burne-Jones, in a spirit hostile to Whistler's work, declared in the witness box at the Ruskin trial: "In my opinion ... a picture ought not to fall short of what has been for ages considered as complete and finished," Whistler retorted effectively: "A picture is completely finished when nothing more can be done to improve it."

And for this finish he tried incessantly. There was never an artist who was more conscientious and more ardently striving for perfection than he. He sometimes tried experiments with different mediums in oil painting. At one time he used benzine to thin the colours, another time kerosene. He would cover a large canvas all over with the latter, in order to bring out the dried tints, before he started to repaint or overpaint. And he said to Clifford Adams, his last apprentice, "In the morning we may not succeed in getting the direct relation of colour, but at noon it may become more harmonious and at sundown we might strike just the right thing." And so he worked, day after day and year after year, on his pictures, until every trace of labour was obliterated and the picture had become a masterpiece. "A masterpiece that would appear "as a flower" to the painter--perfect in its bud as in its bloom--with no reason to explain its presence, no mission to fulfil; a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist--a puzzle to the botanist--an accident of sentiment to the literary man."

The only thing which has any semblance to a constant method is a moderate adherence, in his portraits at least, to the old way of painting from dark to light which, in the final painting, in overlapping pieces of paint, as in the case of most oil paintings until recently, results in the thickening of the paint towards the light.

There are scarcely more than sixteen finished nocturnes on record. Of these, most are masterpieces, or would pass as belonging to the best of his works. And as he worked at them ever since he returned from Valparaiso in 1866 and held the first important exhibition of nocturnes at the Dowdswell Gallery, and in Paris not previous to 1883, when quite a number were still unfinished, we are astonished at the small output. But masterpieces are scarce. And if a painter can be credited with two or three every year he is a hero in his profession.

The importance of the nocturne in Whistler's own career, everybody must realize who is familiar with his work. They add to his personality a delicious flavour that even his lithographs and large paintings do not grant in the same manner. It was to him an instrument that obeyed his slightest wishes. It was art, at once aristocratic, delicate, of high finish and moreover imbued with an individual rhythm and the poetry of nature.

What wonderful rain and snow this man has painted! What vast expanses of water as mystic as the night! And those vagrant mists, that envelop everything and blot out the very existence of things! There has not been anything in art since Turner that could be compared with it. There are no banal sunsets, no glaring moonlights, only the more intricate moods of nature, snowfall, mist, late evening and night. Also in the choice of his subject he added a new note.

The art of a landscape painter is determined by a thousand influences upon his mind other than those of nature. The essence of Monet's art is one of an hour, but with such a painter as Daubigny or Rousseau it is one of a place. There is the sense of the atmosphere of the moment given by one school of landscape painters, of locality by another, poetry by a third and of the historic associations of a place by yet another school. These things are, of course, determined by temperament, and schools of painting may be classified in this way more adequately than they are. Human association creeps into landscapes in various degrees, and also in other ways than the historical way which we feel,--as in F. E. Church's pictures, for instance,--but landscape, generally subordinate to the human interest, now sometimes tries to free itself from this influence entirely. It has become like poetry, simply the record of an emotion or mood remembered in colour. This is Whistler's peculiar innovation.

And yet the final significance of the nocturne in the world of art is still an open question. Time alone can decide its value. The rest is mere hypothesis. Many--and I only talk of people who understand--argue that despite its perfection, the nocturne represents a minor phase of art. Of course, a nocturne, no matter how beautiful, cannot compete in importance with the "Portrait of Carlyle," or "The Artist's Mother." Size does not mean much, but it means something. A small painting can be as exquisite in workmanship as a large one, but it can never rise to the same dignity of expression. A frescoe by Chavannes would lose much if executed in the size of the average easel picture.

But the nocturne stands for something in modern art which lends it special importance, aside of all workmanship and beauty of pictorial treatment. It represents a return to the art of painting for painting's sake. Every art, may it be music, poetry, dancing, sculpture or painting, has its own peculiar technique, which the technically ignorant person cannot appreciate. Poetry which has no formal conventions is inconceivable. And, in a similar manner, painting has the charm of texture and brushwork, the charm of how the paint is actually put on and displayed on the canvas. The aesthetic satisfaction derived from an art is in exact proportion to one's knowledge of the art's technique.

This largely explains the general public's indifference to art. And the everlasting fight between the artist and the public has been on these lines. The plea of the modern experimentist that all poetry of painting should be in the paint, which also Whistler advanced, is a just one if not carried to extremes. Absolute paucity of idea is as unfavourable as story-telling. The intrinsic beauty of a painting lies in the method of painting, and the only guide for the painter is colour and the general arrangement--not a method learned by rote, not an arrangement garroted by a thousand rules which others have invented, but that personal style or rhythm which is inveterately the painter's own. So Whistler's style is beautiful because it is personal. His revolt was against story-telling, against the genre pictures, which adulterated painting with the skill of the novel writer. It is for future aesthetics to decide whether the introduction of musical ideals is not just as dangerous as the intermixture of any other art. There is no doubt, however, that the new combination grants a higher pleasure to the connoisseur at present. Music is the most fashionable and, perhaps, most widely understood art to-day.

There has been too much story-telling. The David school, with its pompous historical, allegorical and mythological representations, has become intolerable to us. David, Vernet, etc., up to Ingres and Delaroche all seem lifeless. Also the Romanticists, who were the interpreters of poets, appear highstrung to more recent art ideas. The reaction was inevitable. The Impressionists--and their merit lies principally in that their work represents a technical reaction--went too far, inasmuch as it allows scarcely any scope to intellectual expansion. It is based on immediate vision, and occupies itself only with the consideration of light and colour, and keen observation of modern life. All the great painters met the public half way. The great painters, we need only to recall Rembrandt, Velasquez or Leonardo, were painters as much as they were poets, but each in equal measure. The qualities balanced each other, and they did not, like the modern painters, sacrifice one for the other.

He protested against literary elements, but emphasized the psychological and symbolical qualities of painting. Nobody was further remote from gross superficial realism. Like Flaubert and the Goncourts, he proved that realism can go hand in hand with refined form and delicate psychology. He was sane throughout. And that is why the aesthetic revolution, produced by him, is not yet at an end.

The first principle for the painter is to acquire a personal mode of feeling and thinking, and the second that he should find an adequate and personal method of expressing himself. The painter must choose his method. If he has only the old themes to paint the old forms will suit him well enough--portraits and single figures, landscapes and marines, cattle pictures and still life--but if he has anything special to say, he must find for himself a special and unique form of expression. The only criterion is beauty.

ON LIGHT AND TONE PROBLEMS

In his "Art in the Netherlands," and his various books on Italian art, H. Taine has maintained that the hand of the mediaeval painter was largely guided by optical sensations. And, following this rather suggestive, than conclusive, trend of argument, we will readily perceive that the peculiar lighting conditions of those days, the semi-darkness of the interiors, the play of sunlight dying in the obscurity of shadows, and the absence of strong artificial lights have done much to disclose to the genius of a Titian and a Rembrandt the manifold harmonies of chiaroscura, of colouring, modelling and emotion. The tallow candle, the oil lamp, the torch and the open fire-place were the only artificial light appliances known to the Middle Ages, and they were all only like solitary rays of light in universal darkness. Illumine a room by night, by placing a candle on the table or on the floor, and judge for yourself. The effects obtained, no doubt, would appear to you as weird and picturesque. The flickering light is uncertain, the shadows are intensely dark and pronounced, almost crude and vacillating, as if engaged in a continual combat with light. The contrasts are startling, yet not discordant, the vague train of light mingled with shadows accentuate only a few places with vivid spots, perchance the polished surface of a piece of furniture, a glass or pewter mug on the table, the collaret or jewelled belt of some fair lady. The eye is led to noticing gradations of obscurity, the darkness grows animated with colour and form, and we see the objects as through a glaze of Van Dyke brown.

No wonder that the painter of the Middle Ages, having become sensible to the beauty of transparent darkness and the brilliant passages of light, dared to unite extremes and to show every form and colour in its full strength. The vagueness of chiaroscural effects was the great modifier which enveloped all adjacent objects in clair obscure and tempered them with a warm and mellow radiance.

How different are the conditions in our time. There are no more Schalcken or Rembrandt effects. We have succeeded in banishing darkness from our homes. We have become very sanitary, we want light and air, the walls of houses are built less substantial, and through the increased largeness and transparency of panes, the daylight streams in with dazzling vehemence. It penetrates into the remotest nooks and corners. Even at dawn the shadows are only vaguely dark, of an uncertain and mixed bluish grey. Lenbach, the portrait painter, realized this deficiency, and found it necessary to construct a special studio, where the light was only sparingly admitted through deep casements, and where the sitters for his old-master-like interpretations of modern characters were placed far away from the windows.

The greatest havoc among chiaroscural effects, however, has been played by modern light appliances. Gas and electric light, with their various modifiers and intensifiers, have killed all the old ideals. There are no longer any striking chiaroscural contrasts or strong accentuations. In the Middle Ages dress and drapery showed depth of folds and recesses which are absolutely unknown to-day. Now, everything is diffused with light. Nothing is steady and fixed, and yet objects stand out in painful relief. The modelling has lost much of its tonal variety, and all objects vaguely reflect the imprint of all-pervading light. The values of colour appear bleached and vary incessantly. Our eyes are perpetually moving in a restless manner from one part to another, and no longer find any place to rest in the depth of shadows.

Luckily for us, we have been rendered unconscious of these dangers, we have grown accustomed to them, but their influence on modern painting has been a most palpable one. Chiaroscural composition underwent a complete transformation. Saliency of object induced the modern painter for a time, at the beginning of the last century, to strive solely for fixed and precise conceptions of form and to utterly neglect the beauty of light and shade. When he discovered his error, he went to the other extreme, and not merely softened contours, but blotted them out completely. At a loss how to meet this difficulty he lost himself in an intenser and more varied study of illumination, with the aim to reach a higher pitch of light. Lamplight and firelight effects and the contrasts of commingling light rays from two, or even three, sources became the order of the day. Sargent studied the effect of Japanese lanterns on white dresses in twilight. Harrison tried to fix the play of sunlight on the naked human body. Dannat experimented with flesh tones and electrical arclight and magnesium flashlight illumination. Zorn endeavoured to solve in his Omnibus picture the conflict of various lights in a glass-encased interior. Degas and Besnard became enchanted with illumination from below, in the cross lights and the lurid unnatural lights of the stage, and his disciples introduced the effects of footlights into interiors by placing the lamp on the floor.

All these studies address themselves most powerfully to the modern mind, as they depict contemporary conditions. The eye may be offended or even repelled by unnecessary trivialities at times, but the underlying aspiration is, after all, the truth. From an aesthetic view-point it is less satisfactory, as this modern substitute of light and shade composition, consisting of an opposition of colours, rather than of masses, does not afford, in the speech of Herbert Spencer, "the maximum of stimulation with the minimum of fatigue." It contains a discord, a lack of normal gratification, and this shortcoming, in conjunction with the deterioration of the crafts, which were replaced by factory labour, and the hopelessly prosaic aspect of modern dress, as far as colour is concerned, directed the painter into other fields of investigation. He realized that nature had remained unchanged, that the colour-symphony of sea and landscapes, of dawn and sunset, were as beautiful as ever, and he went out of doors for inspiration. And then, to his great astonishment, he discovered that the optical sensations afforded by nature were very similar to those he had experienced in his home life, also how everything was diffused with light, and forms rendered uncertain by the vibration of light.

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