The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-colours

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS. BY ALEXANDER J.FINBERG

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT AS APPLIED TO ART

THE idea of development has played, for considerably more than half a century, and still plays, a large part in all discussions about art. And it is obvious that it is a very useful and at the same time a very dangerous idea ; useful, because with its aid you can prove anything you have a mind to, and dangerous, because it conceals all sorts of latent suggestions, vague presuppositions, and lurking misconceptions, and thus misleads and beguiles the unwary. The most insidious and dangerous of these suggestions is its connexion with the ideas of progress or advance. The dictionaries, indeed, give " progress" as one of the synonyms of "development," and amongst the synonyms of "progress" I find "advance," "attainment," "growth," "improvement," and "proficiency." So that as soon as we begin to connect the idea of development with the history of art we find ourselves committed, before we quite realize what we are doing, to the view that the latest productions of art are necessarily the best. If art develops, it necessarily grows, improves, and advances, and the history of art becomes a record of the steps by which primitive work has passed into the fully developed art of the present; the latest productions being evidently the most valuable, because they sum up in their triumphant complexity all the tentative variations and advances of which time and experience have approved.

Stated thus baldly the idea as applied to art seems perhaps too obviously at variance with our tastes, experience, and instinctive standards of artistic values to be worth a moment's consideration. Yet we are all too well aware that this is the line of argument by which every freak, every eccentric, insane or immoral manifestation of artistic perversity and incompetence which has appeared in Europe within the last thirty or forty years has been commended and justified. Certainly in England every writer on art who calls himself " advanced " is an evolutionist of this crude and uncritical type. At one time it was Cezanne and Van Gogh who were supposed to have summed up in their triumphant complexity the less developed efforts of Titian, Rembrandt, Watteau,^ *nd Turner, and at the present moment Cezanne and Van Gogh are bemg superseded by Mr. Roger Fry and his young lions of" The New Movement."

The worst of it is that the idea of development, ot evolution, is a perfectly sound and useful one in certain spheres of activity. In science, for instance, the idea works and is helpful. The successive modifications and

improvements by which the latest type of steam-engine has been evolved from Stevenson's " Puffing Billy," or the latest type of air-ship from the Montgolfier balloon, form a series of steps which are related and connected with each other, and they are so intimately connected that the latest step sums up and supersedes all the others. No one would travel with Stevenson's engine who could employ a British or American engine of the latest type. There we have a definite system of development—of growth, improvement, and increased proficiency. And we find the same thing if we look at science as a whole, as a body of knowledge of a special kind. Its problems arc tied together, subordinated and co-ordinated, unified in one vast system, so that we can represent its history as a single line of progress or retreat.

But art is not like science. Donatcllo's sculpture is not a growth from the sculpture of Pheidias or Praxiteles in the same way that the London and North-Western engine is a growth from Stevenson's model ; nor was Raphael's work developed from Giotto's in th

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Pages: 92

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The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-colours

Charles Holme

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Pages: 92

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The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-colours

The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-colours

The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-colours

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