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JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES OF THE WONDER OF WORK

REPRODUCTIONS OF A SERIES OF DRAWINGS, ETCHINGS, LITHOGRAPHS, MADE BY HIM ABOUT THE WORLD, 1881-1915, WITH IMPRESSIONS AND NOTES BY THE ARTIST

PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1916

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1915 REPRINTED OCTOBER, 1916

I WISH IN THIS BOOK TO HONOR CONSTANTIN MEUNIER

THE PROPHET AND EXPONENT OF THE WONDER OF WORK

THE WONDER OF WORK INTRODUCTION

Work to-day is the greatest thing in the world, and the artist who best records it will be best remembered. Work has always been an inspiration to artists, from the time when we were told to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, till now, when most of us are trying to forget the command, and act like "ladies and gentlemen."

Under the Church, work--the building of the Tower of Babel and the Temple--was the subject of endless imaginings by painters, sculptors and gravers who never assisted at the functions they illustrated. Painters, who sat in their studios hundreds of years after the towers and temples were designed and destroyed, have showed what they imagined the towers and the temples looked like. This--this sort of creation or invention--we art students in America called "genius work" because it was "done out of our heads." In Europe it is called "scholarly," and is concocted from a classical dictionary; a trip for a few weeks to Greece or Italy is useful but not necessary, and adds to the expense; illustrated post cards may be used instead.

Now educated people, cultured people, take such painters seriously--and pay to sit in darkened chambers and brood. These are carefully but sadly illuminated, and the spectators pursue with diligence, scarce looking at the exhibits, the remarks of critics who prove conclusively that these painters show exactly what the world was like, what buildings were like and how they were built, and how the builders worked according to the bookman and archaeologist, and the critic.

Now as to these popular forms of art--the backbone of academics,--I know, for I am a multi-academician--I have nothing to say. The results, in a few instances, have been works of art because of excellence of technique. But the man with the greatest imagination is the man with the greatest information about his own surroundings, which he uses so skilfully that we call the result imagination, and this is the way the greatest art of the world has been created.

I am not disputing the power, in their day, nor the charm they still have--for the very few who understand--of Cimabue, of Giotto, of the painters of the Campo Santo at Pisa, when they painted the subjects I have mentioned, nor of Pintoricchio--he put work in the background of his paintings, as D?rer did in his prints. And there is a wonderful building of a cathedral by Van Eyck in Antwerp. There are compositions by Bellini and Carpaccio which show they studied work. It is strange, so far as I know, that Leonardo ignored work--in his pictures--he who was such a great workman, yet vowed he could paint with any one, amongst his other accomplishments. But, with all these artists, either work was a detail or imaginative; it was never the dominant motive, never a study of work for work's sake. There are a few records in sculpture, most notable amongst them being the Assyrian Reliefs at the British Museum. Curiously, I am unable to find, though they must exist, any sculptures, reliefs or paintings of the great architectural work of the Egyptians--or those of the Greeks either. In the Bayeux tapestries there is the work of the shipbuilder and porter.

The first artist I know of--though I am not an art historian--to see the pictorial possibility of work, the Wonder of Work for Work's Sake, was Rembrandt.

Rembrandt saw that his father's mill was beautiful, and by his renderings of the windmills and the dykes of Holland proved them the great works of his little country, and showed they were pictorial. And he drew, etched and painted them because he loved their big powerful forms, their splendid sails, the way they lorded the land and kept out the sea. They were for him the Wonder of Work, the wondrous works of his time, the works that were all about him. So strong and so powerful were these Dutch works that they have lasted till to-day, and so well were they designed that all windmills and watermills have kept their form till now. The working parts have possibly been improved, but the design has not been changed, and Rembrandt's etchings--so accurately drawn they would serve as working models--prove it. And yet Rembrandt has made a perfect artistic composition as well as a true mechanical rendering of these mills and dykes. And as Whistler said in the "Ten O'clock," the Bible of Art, Rembrandt regretted not that the Jews of the Ghetto were not Greeks, nor--may I add?--did he regret the windmills were not temples.

Then came Claude and found the Wonder of Work in commercial harbours, dominated by necessary lighthouses, and in the hustling cities of Civita Vecchia and Genoa--for it is amid the work, the life of one's own time, that the Wonder of Work is to be found.

Canaletto followed, and saw in the building of Venice the same inspiration that Tintoret found in her history, Titian in her great men. And Piranesi discovered the prisons, the Carceri, to be as enthralling as the ruins of Rome.

Turner's Carthage would not stand up, if built--Claude's palaces do. Turner, too, defying Ruskin--Ruskin anathematising workaday England--was a spectacle. But Turner was sometimes in the right, with Constable and Crome, and they, and not Ruskin, have triumphed. Turner had magnificent ideas, wonderful colour sense, grand composition. But when he came to fact he was often ridiculous or pitiful, simply because he had not observed work, noted facts--and to paint work one must study work. And lately I was given a print from a Book of Beauty by Allom of a coke furnace, while Mr. Joseph Jackson has discovered a painting of a forge by Bass Otis in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts--surprisingly well done, both are, too.

It is far easier to paint a heavenly host or a dream city in one's studio than to make a decoration out of a group of miners, or to draw a rolling mill in full blast. Yet one of these subjects can be as noble as the other, as Whistler proved, when he showed for the first time how in London "the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us." That is the Gospel of the Wonder of Work.

Though I never studied under Whistler--never was his pupil--he is and always will be my master--the master of the modern world, the master who will endure. Because he glorified the things about him, the things he knew, by "The Science of the Beautiful." What are the Thames etchings--"Wapping," "The Last of Old Westminster," "The Nocturnes"--but records of work? A fact most critics have never realised. But Whistler was a many-sided--a so many-sided--genius that his many essays in many fields are only just becoming known, and this study of work--the most difficult study in the world, under the most trying conditions--was never abandoned by him till he said what he wanted, in the ways he wanted, not till he had made a series of masterpieces which live and will live forever.

But there was a man--all the great have gone from us in the last few years, which accounts for the momentary popularity of the little--there was a man who gave his later life to the Wonder of Work--Constantin Meunier.

This was his life work, and the life of his world, the world, as with Whistler, around him, for "that is best which nearest lieth." Courbet in work had influenced Legros and Brett and Millet and Segantini, and I have no doubt Ford Madox Brown, the man too big to be a pre-Raphaelite, whose biggest picture is work--"Work in London"--the man who will one day make Manchester a place of pilgrimage because of his pictures of work and of war in the Town Hall.

The Japanese count for a little in work, Hokusai and Hiroshigi. Repine and De Nittis, L'Hermette, Bastien-Lepage, Tissot, Ridley, and W. L. Wyllie have shown the Wonder of Work, the last three on the Thames; and hundreds of imitators of these men have starved peasants, herded kine, rowed boats, and sat in harvest fields, and hauled barges, because they thought it the correct thing to do, or else that they could work the sentimental, pathetic, socialistic game as a diversion from mummy's darling, baby and the mustard-pot, dear little doggie, or poor old Dobbin. I do not mean to say there have not been, there are not, artists who have cared for the work and workers of the fields for their own sake: there are some; but I wish to speak only of industrial work. Millet has, I believe, honestly done the life around his home, the life of the fields, but, though he has endless imitators, there are scarcely any painters to-day who see through their own eyes the real life of the fields and farms and the fisherman--they are blinded by the Frenchman and debauched with sentiment.

It was incredible, but at the Panama-Pacific Exposition there was not one single official "mural" devoted to the glorification of the greatest work of modern times--the Panama Canal--the reason for the Exposition--in fact, there was only one in which there was any attempt at making a decoration out of the things the artist might have known or seen save Mr. Trumbull's Iron Workers in the Pennsylvania Building--and a few rather unimportant things in the Dutch and Argentine Pavilions.

Meunier showed without sentiment the workman at work, not with any idea of preaching about his wrongs, his trials, his struggles, his misery, but to show the Wonder of Work for its own sake, and the pictorial possibilities of workmen and workwomen in Belgium. Meunier showed that the workman was worthy of the artist's chisel, chalk, needle, and paint. There is no sentiment about Meunier; there is grandeur, dignity, and power, and from him we have learned that modern work is wonderful. Meunier was an old man when a few years ago I first heard of him and saw his work. He had then done his heroic "Antwerp" and his puddlers and miners in bronze, his paintings and his chalk drawings, his decorations, his great apse for the unbuilt basilica--the monument to modern work and workers. His work is decorative because it is true, and this brings up another side of the Wonder of Work. In France, Germany, and Italy the Wonder of Work around us has been made the subject of endless commissions from the State to artists mostly realistic. But records of facts, facts of one's own time, in England and America, are scarcely ever recorded. Go to the Royal Exchange, in London, and you will find Wat Tyler, Phoenicians, Britons painted blue, and everything in the history of London that can be made into a painting of the past, and not a single record of the present. Where is the building of the Tower Bridge, the Power Houses, the Docks, the Blackwall Tunnel, the Trams, the Tube, or any of the other works by which this age, this workaday age, has distinguished itself, all of which are worth painting? In America we have imaginings of Holy Grails, Pied Pipers, Religious Liberties, when one fact in "murals" about steel works, skyscrapers, or the Brooklyn Bridge would be worth the lot in the future, when these factless fancies are whitewashed out, or made a good ground to paint on. One man in America, W. B. Van Ingen, has glorified work by his Panama decorations in the Administration Building at Balboa. These were not wanted at the Panama Exhibition. In France men like Henri Martin have painted decoratively, yet realistically, the harvest of last summer; Besnard and Anquetin have done wonders; and the biggest French artists have decorated the Mairies. In Chicago they turn students out to make "murals" in school houses, a system of artistic debauchery worthy of Chicago's originality. And Puvis de Chavannes, first of all magnificently showed the way to combine the old decoration with the new realism. His life work at Amiens is pure convention, so are his designs in the Boston Library and in the Sorbonne, but they are the most perfect examples of decorative, imaginative, conventional work in the modern world.

At Rouen and Marseilles he has treated decoratively modern subjects, or rather he has used modern motives. At Rouen, the city with its spires and chimneys, its old bridges and new transporters, as seen from Bon Secours, prove the Wonder of Work; in the foreground are modern figures, greeting the Spirit of old France. At Marseilles there are two subjects in which symbolism and realism, modernity and mediaevalism are harmonised--the most difficult problem to solve; but Puvis has solved it, and proved himself the greatest if not the only decorator since Pierro della Francesco, the supreme master of decoration. Raphael, in the Stanzi of the Vatican, was a decorator of his own time, and so was Pintoricchio in the Library at Siena, and Mantegna at Padua, for they made decoration out of the life about them.

And John Lavery has made, in Glasgow, a decoration out of shipbuilding which is worth the whole wall coverings of the Royal Exchange and the Library of Congress, and the Carnegie Institute put together. But decoration is a difficult matter, and Lavery has done much for Glasgow. I regret that John Alexander and E. A. Abbey, who had far better official opportunities, only proved how unfit the average painter is to decorate.

From the very beginning I have cared for the Wonder of Work; from the time I built cities of blocks and sailed models of ships of them across the floor in my father's office, till I went to the Panama Canal, I have cared for the Wonder of Work. There are others who care--Brangwyn has cared, and so have Sauter, Muirhead Bone, Strang and Short. Crane and Anning Bell, Way, Cameron, Bone and Brangwyn have cared for the building up and the breaking down, and Brangwyn for life--the life of the workman, possibly because of his Belgian and seafaring education or his knowledge of Meunier, his countryman. And Seymour Haden's "Breaking-up the Agamemnon" is notable. And there are Belgians like Baertsoen, de Bruyeke and Pierre Paulus; and Frenchmen like Lepere, Gillot and Adler; and Italians like Pieretto Bianco, and there was the great German Menzel.

But it is to America we must turn, to White's etching of Brooklyn Bridge, Cooper's skyscrapers, Alden Weir's New York at night, Bellow's docks, Childe Hassam's high buildings, Thornton Oakley's coal breakers--to these one must look for the modern rendering of work. There are others, too, who have seen the opportunity to prig and steal--but this is evident, just as it is evident that they will give up painting or drawing work for the next new thing. And there is another artist who really cares for the Wonder of Work. I do not know what else Van Ingen has done, but he has made a huge decoration of Culebra Cut--and Paul Bartlett has put American work on the pediment of the Capitol. I have tried to do what I could in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, the coal mines of my native State--Niagara--and in Europe and at Panama; and whatever their worth, I can only tell of the Wonder of Work as I see it.

New York, as the incoming foreigner, full of prejudice, or doubt, or hope, and the returning American, crammed with guide-book and catalogue culture, see it or might see it, rises a vision, a mirage of the lower bay, the colour by day more shimmering than Venice, by night more magical than London. In the morning the mountains of buildings hide themselves, to reveal themselves in the rosy steam clouds that chase each other across their flanks; when evening fades, they are mighty cliffs glimmering with glistening lights in the magic and mystery of the night. As the steamer moves up the bay on the left the Great Goddess greets you, a composition in colour and form, with the city beyond, finer than any in any world that ever existed, finer than Claude ever imagined, or Turner ever dreamed. Why did not Whistler see it? Piling up higher and higher right before you is New York; and what does it remind you of? San Gimignano of the Beautiful Towers away off in Tuscany, only here are not eleven, but eleven times eleven, not low mean brick piles, but noble palaces crowned with gold, with green, with rose; and over them the waving, fluttering plume of steam, the emblem of New York. To the right, filmy and lace-like by day, are the great bridges; by night a pattern of stars that Hiroshigi never knew. You land in streets that are Florence glorified. You emerge in squares more noble than Seville. Golden statues are about you, triumphal arches make splendid frames for endless vistas; and it is all new and all untouched, all to be done, and save for the work of a few of us, and we are Americans, all undone. The Unbelievable City, the city that has been built since I grew up, the city beautiful, built by men I know, built for people I know. The city that inspires me, that I love. And all America is like this and--all--or nearly all unseen, unknown, untouched.

I went to Panama because I believed that, in the making of the greatest work of modern time, I should find my greatest inspiration.

Almost before I left the Canal, artists, architects and decorators were on their way there. I hope it may interest them half as much as it interested me. One man has succeeded, I repeat, in doing something for himself down there--W. B. Van Ingen--and this has been acknowledged by the government, which has purchased his great decoration. This is the finest, in fact the only complete decorative work from him done in the United States--and done because Van Ingen, the pupil of La Farge--who alone counts--was trained in the right way and had something to say for himself.

We have recently been told that art will disappear in fifty years . But, though he will disappear, and Post Impressionism will be swallowed up in shopkeeping, and war has engulfed that, and work is stopped--save for war--and though the mustard pot has gone with the soulful doggie, and the tearful baby rival of the Dresden Madonna, the artist who has something to say in his own way about his own time, and can say it, will live, and his work will live, with Rembrandt, Velasquez, Franz Hals, Meunier, and Whistler--artists who painted and drew the work and life about them, who carried on tradition, and never regretted the past. And art which shows life and work will never die, for such art is everlasting, undying, "The Science of the Beautiful."

JOSEPH PENNELL

BUILDING THE PUBLIC BUILDINGS, PHILADELPHIA I

THE NEW HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA II

OIL REFINING, POINT BREEZE, PHILADELPHIA IV

OIL WELLS, ALBERTA, BRITISH COLUMBIA V

STEEL AT GARY, INDIANA VI

THE CAMBRIA STEEL WORKS, JOHNSTOWN X

BUTTE, MONTANA, ON ITS MOUNTAIN TOP XX

THE NEW BAY OF BAIE, ITALY XXX

THE LAKE OF FIRE, CHARLEROI, BELGIUM XL

THE GREAT DUMP, CHARLEROI, BELGIUM XLI

THE IRON GATE, CHARLEROI, BELGIUM XLII

NEW RHINE, GERMANY XLIV

BUILDING THE RAILROAD STATION, LEIPZIG, GERMANY XLV

BUILDING THE BRIDGE AT COLOGNE, GERMANY XLVI

KRUPP'S WORKS, ESSEN, GERMANY L

POWER-HOUSE, BERLIN, GERMANY LI

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