The Art Of Today

(via The Outline of Art) Frank Rutter writes:

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No two institutions in the United Kingdom have produced a more remarkable sequence of illustrious artists than the New English Art Club and the Slade School of Art, and since, though separate in their origin, the two have come to be closely related to each other, it is convenient to consider them together. The New English Art Club was founded in the ‘eighties by a number of young artists whose bond of union was a Paris training. Among the founders were the painters P Wilson Steer and Frederick Brown and the sculptors J Harvard Thomas and T Stirling Lee; while other early members included John S Sargent, H H La Thangue, Mark Fisher, and George Clausen. For more than twenty years the New English Art Club has supplied the Royal Academy with nearly all its most distinguished members. At the present moment fifty percent of the Academicians and Associates are or have been exhibitors at the New English Art Club, while almost all the most important official art positions in London have been gradually captured by members of this Club. Sir Charles J Holmes and C J Collins Baker, respectively Director and Keeper of the National Gallery, Mr D S MacColl, Keeper of the Wallace Collection, Mr William Rothenstein, Principal of the Royal College of Art at South Kensington, are all former members of the New English Art Club.

Since its foundation the New English Art Club has largely recruited its strength from students of the Slade School, and the close alliance between the School and the Club is easily understood when we remember that the bond of union between the original clubmen was a Paris training, and when we discover that French influence has been paramount at the Slade School. This school of drawing and painting, situated in Gower Street and connected with University College, was named after Felix Slade (1790-1868), a famous art collector, who left money for the endowment of (Slade) professorships of fine arts in Oxford, Cambridge, and University College, London.

The first Slade Professor at University College was Sir E J Poynter (1871-5), under whose direction the teaching was much the same as that given in the Royal Academy Schools, but in 1876 he was succeeded by a distinguished French artist, M Alphonse Legros, who more than any other one man perhaps, may be said to have changed the character of British painting. Born at Dijon in 1837 and afterwards studying in Paris under the famous teacher of drawing, Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Alphonse Legros came to England in 1863. He was befriended by Whistler, Rossetti, Watts, and other English artists, and made his living principally by etching and by teaching. For a time he taught at the South Kensington School of Art, but in 1876 he was appointed Slade Professor at University College, a position he held till 1892. His picture of French peasant women at prayer, painted at University College in 1888, is a characteristic example of the seriousness and shows that Legros was a a lineal descendant of Ingres. To a generation absorbed in problems of color, lighting, and atmosphere, this broadminded exponent of the French classical school came as a prophet in his insistence on impeccable drawing as the sure foundation of all good painting.

At the Slade, Legros worked wonders in two ways. His great reputation as a teacher attracted the most promising art students of the time; and his influence on these students has far reaching effects. Legros, it has been well said, ‘brought English art again into closer touch with the main European tradition, and contributed largely to the noticeable revival of draughtsmanship in England at the close of the nineteenth century.’ Among the most gifted of his pupils were Charles Wellington Furse, William Strang, and William Rothenstein, all of whom laid the foundations of their reputationsas painters by sterling drawing. After Legros left the Slade in 1892, the great tradition he bequeathed to the School was ably maintained by Professor Frederick Brown, among whose pupils were Sir William Orpen and Augustus John, and since Mr Brown’s retirement, Mr Henry Tonks, also of the New English Art Club, has successfully conducted the Slade School along the lines laid down by Legros.

The Art Of Today (continued)