A PRIVATE IMPRESSIONIST.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2734, 12 February 1910, Page 1 (Supplement)

A PRIVATE IMPRESSIONIST.

(By Rowland Strong.)

“How can you talk such nonsense!” said Edward Buss to his father, George Buss, R.A., in a tone which was now both angry and disrespectful. “The world has been going round since you were a young man. It’s, a sheer waste of energy for me to discuss Impressionism with you. Wc shall never convince each other. Let’s drop it. You can’t deny that the Impressionists sell their pictures, and I say that the other chaps don’t. Things have changed. I admit that ten or fifteen years ago the Impressionists were scoffed at. Everybody knows that passage in Zola’s “L’Oeuvre” describing the laughter of the public over Paul Rougon’s Impressionist picture at the Salon, with iis blue shadows and the rest of it. Well, those are the very x>eoiple who now —” “Exactly,” interrupted Buss, R.A., “the very same fools who sneered at Whistler when he had his lawsuit against Buskin are now his most enthusiastic admirers. It is the case of the wind rushing into a vacuum.” “Vacuum or no vacuum,” answered Edward Buss, impatiently, “the Impressionist pictures sell, and the <Mdiogey school which you stand for has hardly any market left. You know, father, that used to be your test of excellence —you can’t deny it—the market price, the verdict of the saleroom. For years you have put that particular spoke in my wheel whenever 1 praised Monet, or Remoir, or any other groat Impressionist—‘What price does he get? Depend upon it, my hoy, the public is the final judge. Vox populi, vox Dei. The public is not such a fool ns you think. If Manet and Signac are right, then Rembrandt and Rubens

were wrong.’ Well, in one respect I admit that you arc right. In the long run the public is and must he the judge. Manet’s “Olympia” is now m the Louvre!” he reiterated, triumphantly. “It’s in the Louvre cheek by jowl with Ingres and Delacroix, and the old masters ! Of course it is to the paying public that the greatest artists of all time have made their appeal. There can be no art without a public, and no artist, great or small, ever denied that.” “Every clown must have some sort of a circus,” interpolated Buss, It.A., resignedly. “An American portraitpainter once explained to me why be had temporarily given up painting when motoring became fashionable — ‘lt’s no good monkeying,’ lie said, ‘unless there’s someone looking on.’ ” “Of course, it’s not the public that makes the artist,” continued the junior Buss, argumentatively, “blit it is in the essence of art, which is an utterance, to have a public. And I say that the public is big enough for ail of us. What is contemptible is the effort of the old-fogey clique to make out that they alone have the ear of the judge. All good work will jn the long run meet with its reward. It mav take time —”

“During which time,'’ suggested Buss, It.A., “the artist may starve.” “There again I join issue with you,” replied the son. “I believe all those stories of artists starving to be fairytales. Some of them may have died of drink. Haydon committed suicide, but he was mad. Turner —take Turner! Who was more abused and attacked than Turner? Yet he died rich, and was the greatest Impressouist of us all.” “Hm!” muttered Buss, B.A. “ ‘Hm!” echoed his son, furiously. “ ‘Hm!’ indeed! What a feather it would have been in the cap of your argument if he had starved! I don’t believe you could quote a single case of an artist of any talent, starving. When an artist starves (and I have never heard of it happening), it is because he is not an artist.” A far-off reminiscent gaze came into Buss, ll.A.’s eyes, and his lips tightened.

“The fact is, father,” shouted the son, “I believe you are jealous.” Buss, R.A., gave a start. “Jealous!” Then after a pause, “Jealous . . eli? . ..”

“ ‘Of whom . . of. what, that’s what you were going to say,” supplemented the “Jealous of me—jealous of the fact that I sell every picture that I .paint, and though, of course, I don’t get the prices that you do, I get fair prices, and I am able to live by any art. I don’t profess to have the genius of a lionet, who easily gets twenty-five thousand dollars for a picture, and that’s a price that even an B.A. wouldn’t sneeze at. But I get fair prices, and I have no difficulty in placing my work. You know, and I know them too, father, more than one eminent painter of your generation who has literally ceased to sell. There was Burkett Brown lamenting the other day that, while five years ago Berlin meant a clean thousand pounds a year to him, the Berlin buyers now invest all their money in impressionist landscapes—olvicfly French and American. I don’t believe your own pictures sell as they used to.” '

“Have you sold anything in Berlin?” asked Buss, R. A., amiably interested.

“Not that I know of, but it is quite possible,” answered Buss, junior. “1 se'll everything through Simkin, the dealer, so I don’t come into touch with the ultimate buyer. .He may be .making a corner in Busses, for all I know, as they have done with Degas. In any case Simkin takes every picture I paint. He doesn’t pay a first-class price, but it is a decent price, a living wage, and J bet you that if some of your vaunted friends knew of lit their mouths would water.”

“By George!” exclaimed Buss, R.A. throwing off his reflected air and speak

ing briskly, “I believe you arc right, my son. I believe lam jealous of you. Not of your success, lad, for God knows I don’t grudge you that. But I am jealous of your splendid contentedness. Vou will never imakc me swallow that idiot Cezanne, nor Gauguin, a halfbaked Red Indian who daubs the colour on his canvas which was meant for his nose or some other Jpart of his body, but, damn it all, if impressionism art can make a man as happy as you arc, then I say God bless it. At least, so far as you are concerned, Edward. And now lot’s go round to that American bar and have a drink, for all this art talk has made me thirsty.” Buss, R.A., placed his hand on the young man’s shoulder and looked into his eye's with a glance of keenest affection. Buss, junior’s face still wore a somewhat heated look, the conversation had really irritated him, and unlike his father, he did not easily recover his temper once it had been disturbed. However, there was no resisting the elder Buss’s paternally winning manner, and so he accepted the proffered refreshment, and allowed his father to link his arm in his, still thinking, nevertheless, that from the point of view of art this illustrious R.A. was a shocking old fogey, “un vieux pompier,” as he put it to himself in the French studio jargon which he had learned in Paris. Apart from that the old man was tolerable enough, pigheaded, but amenable to a certain sort of reason if the proper pressure were put upon him. As far as it was possible for Edward Buss to love anybody but himself he loved Buss, R.A. It was at Dieppe that this conversation had taken place, and it was in a little peasant’s cottage near Dieppe, smartened up with sage-green paint on the wooden shutters, and red and white chequered curtains on the windows, that Edward Buss had been settled for some years now, painting Impressionist pictures, mostly landscapes. No doubt he was happy. Luckily his ambitions were limited by a sensative egotism. Pie disliked society because experience had taught him that he did not shine in it. He admired himself, on the other hand, for having thrown off the more cumbersome trammels of civilisation, living with ostentatious simplicity in a "lost corner" of Normandy dressed in something like a navvy’s costume, the most characteristic details of which were the broad trousers and tight-fit-ting vest of blue cotton, such as French stonemasons wear, and black clogs, the whole crowned with a slimy pointed Tonkinese straw hat. Thus accoutred, Edward Buss delighted to swagger along the streets of Dieppe at ail seasons. He had married a Die.ppomse. who had been an artist’s model—a buxom, blonde fisher-girl, with saltburnt hair, who had borne him three children, the. eldest of whom, a boy, now thirteen, a little freckled, sandlark, talked patoi s and sniggered at his father's English accent.

Edward Buss was in the main a water-colorist. He had tried oil, and still used this medium occasionally, but instinctively he preferred the other medium. "It is curious,” he would say to his father on the rare occasions that Buss, R.A., came over from London to visit him. "I sell my oil-paint-ings just as well as the water-colors, but 1 don't feel so .much at home in them.” Whereupon Buss. R.A., would recite a variant of the old studio rhvrne:

C’est tres difficile De faire la peinture a I'huile Mais o’est tout aussi beau De faire la neinture a l’eau.

—which would put Edward Buss in a fury. Still, though he could not resist teasing him from time to time, old Buss passionately loved his son. The young man resembled his mother—the same intense nervousness revealing itself by the constant twitching of an eyelid, the same restlessness which on the part of the mother had caused so many domestic troubles in the house-' hold, and had strained almost to the breaking-point Buss, R.A.'s. capacity for forgiveness. She was gone now, poor thing, and Buss, It. A., loved her memory all the more devotedly that she was no longer there to upset his illusions. Visibly what remained of her was just- that oval line of her son's cheek, the arch of the dark eyebrow, and the dark look of the eyes beneath them. Then there was this, too. that the late Mrs Buss had ever felt- and frankly expressed a profound contempt for her husband's art. She had known nothing about painting, and her views on the subject had been cordially communicated to her by a third party, but no doubt from this inherited revolt had been developed the son’s Impressionism. At least, so Buss, R.A., thought, and in an odd sort of way it made him cherish Edward all the -more. Edward Buss’s Impressionism was not much like anybody elso’s Impressionism so far as technique was concerned. He was neither a tacliiste like Henri Cross, nor a pointilliste like Henri Martin, nor a wild blotchist like poor mad Van Gogh, though, if asked his opinion of the work of any of these masters or their disciples, his invariable reply was, "I think it rather nice." His attitude toward Nature was entirely personal. If Nature had been at all receptive, it- is surprising what she might have learned from Edward Buss. He was constantly explaining her to herself, giving her hints as to conduct and deportment, re-arraiiging and reshaping her dress as to color and cut. He never allowed her to be what she apparently wanted to be taken for. If he caught her in a mood which -might he interpreted by inartistic minds as an effort to appear green, he promptly and firmly put her down on his paper or his canvas as yellow, or blue, or purple, or pink, as he thought proper, and there it was; there was no getting

[ over it, no appeal from h,is decision, for | this was Buss, junior’s, Impression, this was Art—Nature seen through the t temperament of Edward Buss. One thing, however, is certain that if the j neighborhood of Dieppe could have vis- . ioned itself to most people as it did to Edward Buss, it would have been much less frequented than it was by seaside excursionists, and this, perhaps, would not Lave been altogether an uiimixed evil. The general note of his work was gloomy, due, perhaps, to a s avage sense of temperamental distinction from the world at large.

Nothing of this was unknown to Buss, R.A., but he, none the less, rejoiced, in his practical Philistine way, that his son should have an occupation, that lie should feel himself to he fairly successful. "It’s awful rubbish that lie turns out,” ho would say to himself, "but it gives him the sense of independence. It has made a man of him, inspired him to marry and settle down —though, of course, I couldn't receive liis wife in England—and saved him, perhaps, from goodness knows what, for with his weak temperament he could never have done a reasonable stroke of work at any other honest business.”

Three weeks had elapsed since Edward Buss had seen Buss, R.A., for the last time. He was .seated at the door of his cottage, painting his fortieth or fiftieth impression of the low line of hills covered with green pollarded oak which lay in the distance before him. In the centre of his canvas lie had just drawn a little curling pink ribbon. This vertical smear was a commencement, and Buss, junior, was pondering in his mind whether it might not be considered final, when a telegram was handed to him. It announced the serious illness of his rather, and an hour later -was followed by another, which told him that Buss, senior, had passed away. Both were signed by the family solicitor, a letter from whom, received the same evening, gave particulars of the sudden death, from apoplexy, of the illustrious R.A., and requested the son to come over at once to London. The survivor most visibly affected by the sad news was the Dieppoise airs Buss. She sobbed noisily, and was quickly surrounded by a crowd of sympathising relations of her own, who, though they had never seen 'her father-in-law, good-naturedly joined their lamentations to hers. She insisted, in spite of Buss’s opposition, on sending out great quantities of lettres de faire part announcing the death, large square double sheets of paper with heavy black borders, upon which all the members of her extensive family were set out in a long list with their full names and the varying degrees of their relationship by marriage with the deceased gentleman. This was objectionable to Edward Bus*, black forming no part of the Impressionist palette, and for this reason ho had thought of not wearing mourning. But his wife would hear of no such thing. With magical rapidity she and the little sand-lark, her son, and the two girls enveloped themselves in black, the boy with an enormous crepe scarf round his black bowler hat and a white necktie, the girls and the mother swathed in black crepe from head to foot. Throughout the journey to London the Dieppoise kept a pocket handkerchief -pressed to her eyes, and on the pier where they took the boat ta Newhaven all her relations had come to kiss her. Buss, junior, felt rather self-conscious during this performance, hut he was far from disapproving oi it. It helped to distinguish him from his own class. It entered into ms scheme of life. For himself, he had been contented with slipping a black band over the sleeve of a brown corduroy jacket. With his large brown velvet hat and broad corduroy trousers of peg-top shape he looked quite an artistic personage from behind, butin front the effect was rendered indecisive by the hard nervous eyes and the neat but insignificant oval of the face. At Newhaven he bought several of the London newspapers, hut merely cast a casual eye at the column which in each case was devoted to the obituary of Buss, R.A. Perhaps lie was right not to read these long paragraphs of glowing eulogy with -cinch he could not possibly agree, about a being whom in his way he had been fond of. At Victoria the odd-looking party got into a four-wheeler and drove at once to the residence of the late painter, which was in terrace. Waiting in the hall to greet them was the solicitor, who had been the deceased R.A.’s most intimate friend and an eager purchaser of his works. He was deeply moved. After a few words suitable to the sad occasion. the solicitor, who had taken a scat- in the dining-room, and was notparticularly impressed with the appearance of Edward Buss, whom he now saw for the first- time, thought it host to plunge at once into the details of the will. "All the property has been left to you, Mr Buss, apart from a souvenir to myself, your poor father’s sole executor. I have a choice of one of the finished pictures in the studio. I was always a great admirer of his immense talent. His business arrangements have been in my hands for many years, so that there will be no difficulty about 1 the probate. I understood, and till now believed, that he had no secrets from me as to his investments. But to my surprise I have found that there is one exception, I think the only one. I mention it to you at once, for there is no reference to the matter in the will. At the top of this house is a. room which contains a large collection of what I judge to be pictures. They aio certainly not by your poor father, for all his work is known and catalogued, as you are doubtless aware. I have not- looked at thorn, [llioy are piled one upon the top of another, and G- .'uiuigcd on rage d.)