Art Patrons

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Title:     Art Patrons
Author: George Augustus Moore [More Titles by Moore]

The general art patron in England is a brewer or distiller. Five-and-forty is the age at which he begins to make his taste felt in the art world, and the cause of his collection is the following, or an analogous reason. After a heavy dinner, when the smoke-cloud is blowing lustily, Brown says to Smith: "I know you don't care for pictures, so you wouldn't think that Leader was worth fifteen hundred pounds; well, I paid all that, and something more too, at the last Academy for it." Smith, who has never heard of Leader, turns slowly round on his chair, and his brain, stupefied with strong wine and tobacco, gradually becomes aware of a village by a river bank seen in black silhouette upon a sunset sky. Wine and food have made him happily sentimental, and he remembers having seen a village looking very like that village when he was paying his attentions to the eldest Miss Jones. Yes, it was looking like that, all quite sharp and clear on a yellow sky, and the trees were black and still just like those trees. Smith determines that he too shall possess a Leader. He may not be quite as big a man as Brown, but he has been doing pretty well lately.... There's no reason why he shouldn't have a Leader. So irredeemable mischief has been done at Brown's dinner-party: another five or six thousand a year will henceforth exert its mighty influence in the service of bad art.

Poor Smith, who never looked attentively at a picture before, does not see that what inspires such unutterable memories of Ethel Jones is but a magnified Christmas card; the dark trees do not suggest treacle to him, nor the sunset sky the rich cream which he is beginning to feel he partook of too freely; he does not see the thin drawing, looking as if it had been laboriously scratched out with a nail, nor yet the feeble handling which suggests a child and a pot of gum. But of technical achievement how should Mr. Smith know anything?--that mysterious something, different in every artist, taking a thousand forms, and yet always recognisable to the educated eye. How should poor Smith see anything in the picture except what Mr. Whistler wittily calls "rather a foolish sunset"? To perceive Mr. Leader's deficiency in technical accomplishment may seem easy to the young girl who has studied drawing for six months at South Kensington; but Smith is a stupid man who has money-grubbed for five-and-twenty years in the City; and through the fumes of wine and tobacco he resolves to have a Leader. He does not hesitate, he consults no one--and why should he? Mr. Leader put R.A. after his name--he charges fifteen hundred. Besides, the village on the river bank with a sunset behind is obviously a beautiful thing.... The mischief has been done, the irredeemable mischief has been achieved. Smith buys a Leader, and the Leader begets a Long, the Long begets a Fildes, the Fildes begets a Dicksee, the Dicksee begets a Herkomer.

Such is the genesis of Mr. Smith's collection, and it is typical of a hundred now being formed in London. In ten years Mr. Smith has laid out forty or fifty thousand pounds. He asks his friends if they don't like his collection quite as well as Brown's: he urges that he can't see much difference himself. Nor is there much difference. The same articles--that is to say, identically similar articles--vulgarly painted sunsets, vulgarly painted doctors, vulgarly painted babies, vulgarly painted manor-houses with saddle-horses and a young lady hesitating on the steps, have been acquired at or about the same prices. The popular R.A.s have appealed to popular sentiment, and popular sentiment has responded; and the City has paid the price. But Time is not at all a sentimental person: he is quite unaffected by the Adelphi reality of the doctor's face or the mawkish treacle of the village church; and when the collection is sold at auction twenty years hence, it will fetch about a fourth of the price that was paid.

Mr. Smith's artistic taste knows no change; it was formed on Mr. Brown's Leader, and developing logically from it, passing through Long, Fildes, and Dicksee, it touches high-water mark at Hook. The pretty blue sea and the brown fisher-folk call for popular admiration almost as imperatively as the sunset in the village churchyard; and when an artist--for in his adventures among dealers Mr. Smith met one or two--points out how much less like treacle Mr. Hook is than Mr. Leader, and how much more flowing and supple the drawing of the sea-shore is than the village seen against the sunset, Mr. Smith thinks he understands what is meant. But remembering the fifteen hundred pounds he paid for the cream sky and the treacle trees, he is quite sure that nothing could be better.

The ordinary perception of the artistic value of a picture does not arise above Mr. Smith's. I have studied the artistic capacity of the ordinary mind long and diligently, and I know my analysis of it is exact; and if I do not exaggerate the artistic incapabilities of Mr. Smith, it must be admitted that the influence which his money permits him to exercise in the art world is an evil influence, and is exercised persistently to the very great detriment of the real artist. But it will be said that the moneyed man cannot be forbidden to buy the pictures that please him. No, but men should not be elected Academicians merely because their pictures are bought by City men, and this is just what is done. Do not think that Sir John Millais is unaware that Mr. Long's pictures, artistically considered, are quite worthless. Do not think that Mr. Orchardson does not turn in contempt from Mr. Leader's tea-trays. Do not think that every artist, however humble, however ignorant, does not know that Mr. Goodall's portrait of Mrs. Kettlewell stands quite beyond the range of criticism. Mr. Long, Mr. Leader, and Mr. Goodall were not elected Academicians because the Academicians who voted for them approved of their pictures, but because Mr. Smith and his like purchased their pictures; and by electing these painters to Academic honours the taste of Mr. Smith receives official confirmation.

The public can distinguish very readily--far better than it gets credit for--between bad literature and good; nor is the public deaf to good music, but the public seems quite powerless to distinguish between good painting and bad. No, I am wrong; it distinguishes very well between bad painting and good, only it invariably prefers the bad. The language of speech we are always in progress of learning; and the language of music being similar to that of speech, it becomes easier to hear that Wagner is superior to Rossini than to see that Whistler is better than Leader. Of all languages none is so difficult, so varying, so complex, so evanescent, as that of paint; and yet it is precisely the works written in this language that every one believes himself able to understand, and ready to purchase at the expense of a large part of his fortune. If I could make such folk understand how illusory is their belief, what a service I should render to art--if I could only make them understand that the original taste of man is always for the obvious and the commonplace, and that it is only by great labour and care that man learns to understand as beautiful that which the uneducated eye considers ugly.

Why will the art patron never take advice? I should seek it if I bought pictures. If Degas were to tell me that a picture I had intended to buy was not a good one I should not buy it, and if Degas were to praise a picture in which I could see no merit I should buy it and look at it until I did. Such confession will make me appear weak-minded to many; but this is so, because much instruction is necessary even to understand how infinitely more Degas knows than any one else can possibly know. The art patron never can understand as much about art as the artist, but he can learn a good deal. It is fifteen years since I went to Degas's studio for the first time. I looked at his portraits, at his marvellous ballet-girls, at the washerwomen, and understood nothing of what I saw. My blindness to Degas's merit alarmed me not a little, and I said to Manet--to whom I paid a visit in the course of the afternoon--"It is very odd, Manet, I understand your work, but for the life of me I cannot see the great merit you attribute to Degas." To hear that some one has not understood your rival's work as well as he understands your own is sweet flattery, and Manet only murmured under his breath that it was very odd, since there were astonishing things in Degas.

Since those days I have learnt to understand Degas; but unfortunately I have not been able to transmit my knowledge to any one. When important pictures by Degas could be bought for a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds apiece, I tried hard to persuade some City merchants to buy them. They only laughed and told me they liked Long better. Degas has gone up fifty per cent, Long has declined fifty per cent. Whistler's can be bought to-day for comparatively small prices; [Footnote: This was written before the Whistler boom.] in twenty years they will cost three times as much; in twenty years Mr. Leader's pictures will probably not be worth half as much as they are to-day. What I am saying is the merest commonplace, what every artist knows; but go to an art patron--a City merchant--and ask him to pay five hundred for a Degas, and he will laugh at you; he will say, "Why, I could get a Dicksee or a Leader for a thousand or two."

[The end]
George Moore's essay: Art Patrons

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