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_ A certain importance attaches to the views on art of painters,
and this is the natural place for me to set down what I know
of Strickland's opinions of the great artists of the past.
I am afraid I have very little worth noting. Strickland was not
a conversationalist, and he had no gift for putting what he
had to say in the striking phrase that the listener remembers.
He had no wit. His humour, as will be seen if I have in any
way succeeded in reproducing the manner of his conversation,
was sardonic. His repartee was rude. He made one laugh
sometimes by speaking the truth, but this is a form of humour
which gains its force only by its unusualness; it would cease
to amuse if it were commonly practised.
Strickland was not, I should say, a man of great intelligence,
and his views on painting were by no means out of the ordinary.
I never heard him speak of those whose work had a certain
analogy with his own -- of Cezanne, for instance, or of Van Gogh;
and I doubt very much if he had ever seen their pictures.
He was not greatly interested in the Impressionists.
Their technique impressed him, but I fancy that
he thought their attitude commonplace. When Stroeve was
holding forth at length on the excellence of Monet, he said:
"I prefer Winterhalter." But I dare say he said it to annoy,
and if he did he certainly succeeded.
I am disappointed that I cannot report any extravagances in
his opinions on the old masters. There is so much in his
character which is strange that I feel it would complete the
picture if his views were outrageous. I feel the need to
ascribe to him fantastic theories about his predecessors, and
it is with a certain sense of disillusion that I confess he
thought about them pretty much as does everybody else.
I do not believe he knew El Greco. He had a great but somewhat
impatient admiration for Velasquez. Chardin delighted him,
and Rembrandt moved him to ecstasy. He described the
impression that Rembrandt made on him with a coarseness I
cannot repeat. The only painter that interested him who was
at all unexpected was Brueghel the Elder. I knew very little
about him at that time, and Strickland had no power to explain
himself. I remember what he said about him because it was so
unsatisfactory.
"He's all right," said Strickland. "I bet he found it hell to paint."
When later, in Vienna, I saw several of Peter Brueghel's
pictures, I thought I understood why he had attracted
Strickland's attention. Here, too, was a man with a vision of
the world peculiar to himself. I made somewhat copious notes
at the time, intending to write something about him, but I
have lost them, and have now only the recollection of an emotion.
He seemed to see his fellow-creatures grotesquely,
and he was angry with them because they were grotesque;
life was a confusion of ridiculous, sordid happenings, a fit
subject for laughter, and yet it made him sorrowful to laugh.
Brueghel gave me the impression of a man striving to express
in one medium feelings more appropriate to expression in another,
and it may be that it was the obscure consciousness of this
that excited Strickland's sympathy. Perhaps both were trying
to put down in paint ideas which were more suitable to literature.
Strickland at this time must have been nearly forty-seven. _
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