BRABAZON

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Yale Center for British Art and British Studies

HERCULES BRABAZON BRABAZON

BY THE SAME AUTHOR—

LIFE'S LITTLE THINGS.
LIFE'S LESSER MOODS.
ADVENTURES AMONG PICTURES.
DAYS WITH VELASQUEZ.
REMBRANDT. THE EDUCATION OF AN ARTIST.
AUGUSTUS SAINT GAUDENS.
DAYS IN CORNWALL.
THE DIARY OF A LOOKER-ON.
TURNER'S GOLDEN VISIONS.
THE CONSOLATIONS OF A CRITIC.

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HERCULES BRABAZON BRABAZON
From the Drawing by John S. Sargent, R.A.

Hercules Brabazon
Brabazon 1821-1906
HIS ART AND LIFE

BY
C. LEW^IS HIND tn

LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN & COMPANY, LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, RATHBONE PLACE
1912.
[All Rights Reserveil.]

CONTENTS

Chapter I. Prelude.
A conversation between a Painter and a Writer. — Two Brabazon
water-colours. — The type of the happy artist.— Ruskin's
enthusiasm for Brabazon. — Turner and Brabazon. — "The best
water-colour painter we have had since Turner. "
Chapter II. His Art.
The 1892 exhibition of Brabazon's works. — " C'est la fin d'une
vie." — The chorus of praise. — Student days in Rome. — His
teachers and admirations. — Brabazons in the National Gallery
of British Art. — Comments on the illustrations in this volume.
— Cataloguing his water-colours and pastels. — The painters
he interpreted. — Turner and Velasquez his favourites. —
Brabazon, the Troubadour of art.
Chapter III. His Life.
Brabazon as letter writer. — His friends. — A memory of his home-
iife. — A drawing and a painting by Sargent. — Ancestry. —
Harrow and Cambridge. — Determines to be an Artist.—
Student days. — The art student becomes a country gentleman.
Artist and model landlord. — Diary of his first visit to Spain. —
His notes on Toledo and Algiers. — Music and Art. — The eve
of his " Discovery." — He is persuaded to exhibit, — Exhibitions
of his works. — Last years. — Death.
Chapter IV. Oaklands and Sedlescombe.
From Battle to Sedlescombe. — The Brabazon Art Gallery.— A
letter from Ruskin. — Brabazon on Impressionism. — His work
room at Oaklands. — His Commonplace or Education books. —
Brabazon as art critic. — His interest in art literature. —
Memories by Emil Sauer. — Arthur Severn's sketches of
Brabazon intime. — His water-colours. — Communications of
loveliness. — The undiminished gladness of his vision of the
beauty of the world.
Chapter V. Appreciations of the Art of
Brabazon.
By Mr. John S. Sargent, R.A., Mr. D. S. MacColl, Sir Claude
Phillips, Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mr. George Moore, the late
R. A. M. Stevenson.

^

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Portrait of Hercules Brabazon Brabazon.
By/. S. Sargent, R.A.
From Cap St. Martin
Harlech ...
Tetuan, Morocco ...
The Terrace, Oaklands
Karnak
6. Mentonb ...
7. On the Nile
8. On the Riviera ...
9. The Red Rocks, Mentone
10. Santa Caterina, Lago Maggiore
II. Italy Manfalut
Tangiers ...
Pointe Pescade ...
15. An Olive Orchard behind Mentone
16. Entrance to Grand Mosque, Delhi
17. The Taj Mahal, Agra ...
18. ISCHIA
19. VeniceThe Wengbrn Alp
The Grand Canal, Venice
Santa Maria della Salute
An Interpretation of Turner's " San
Benedetto : Looking Towards Fusina."
National Gallery
An Interpretation of Guardi's " Santa
Maria della Salute." Wallace Collection.

12.13' 14.

frontispiece

Facing Page

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9498

Chapter I.

PRELUDE.
A conversation between a Painter and a Writer. — Two
Brabazon water-colours. — ^The type of the happy
artist. — Ruskin's enthusiasm for Brabazon. —
Turner and Brabazon. — "The best water-colour
painter we have had since Turner."

FROM CAP ST. MARTIN

Chapter I.

PRELUDE. I.
Two men, a writer, and a painter who is also an
artist, were seated in a country cottage at the hour
when daylight and lampUght mingle in mystery.
The lattice windows were open, disclosing the
lonely twilight world — upland and distant hills.
The path over the rising ground gleamed white
against the grass. The wholesome room was
filled Vfith the aroma of a wood fire. It was the
hour of confidences, when happy things are
remembered, and the utterance of gratitude is a
joy. "That's lovely," said the writer, indicating a
water-colour hanging on the white wall. " And
that's wonderful," added the painter, motioning to
its companion. One of the water-colours was an early experi-
ment, just unpretentious beauty ; the other, a late
work, was also beautiful, but with a rarer beauty,
unessentials disregarded, the pure, fresh colour
seemingly floated upon the paper.

BRABAZON
The cry of an owl wheeling across the sky
came through the open window. The wood fire
crackled, and the scent was good. The two men
looked at the two water-colours, and the writer
muttered, " Progress! From the desire of the eye
to the longing of the heart. The path Turner
trod. From the thing seen with the eyes, to the
thing seen with the spirit. First the earthly
vision, then, after long years, a gUmpse of the
heavenly vision."
" I believe," continued the writer after a pause
(he wondered if his companion was smiUng), " I
believe that a man can say all he has to say of
love and wonder in a little water-colour. Turner
did, and Brabazon."
" Yes, and Brabazon," added the painter.
"When Brabazon died in 1906," said the
writer, " he left behind him at Oaklands, his
estate in Sussex, folios of water-colours — his
life work — that fill me with wonder and joy. He
garnered the beauty of the world for love's sake.
I lived for a week with his glorious records of
light and colour. I made a catalogue of them.
It was one of the most fascinating experiences of
my life."
" Was Brabazon ever wrong ? " asked the
painter. On reflection the question did not surprise
the writer. He dwelt in memory on that
entrancing array of water-colours, so various in
manner and method, the early works, the
4

PRELUDE
transition period, the delightful drawings of his
maturity, and he answered, " No, I don't think
from his point of view of recording the 'imme
diate sensation ' of the moment that Brabazon was
ever wrong."
" Most of us go wrong often," said the painter.
" It would be awful to see a complete exhibition of
one's own work. Why do we go wrong ? "
" Oh, I suppose it's owing to the wrong kind of
ambition and the. desire for glory. Competition,
and the necessity of selling, disturb the joyous
impulse of creation. You confuse the business
with the dream. You make pictures. Brabazon
was never a picture-maker. When the impulse
came, he worked, and when he had satisfied the
impulse, the work was finished, while he was still
tingling. I think of him producing unpremedi-
tatedly as a bird sings."
" His place in the annals of modern art is
unique." " Yes, he was the type of the happy artist.
His art was joy : he gives joy. ' Love that
endured through simple art of loving to the end.'
Look at those two water-colours on the wall — just
beauty." The two men gazed in silence. It was the
hour of confidences, when happy things are
remembered, and in that hour silence is more
eloquent than words.

BRABAZON

IL

Before me Hes a brief letter to Brabazon,
dated January 28th, 1882, written by Sir Herbert
Jekyll. It runs : " My dear Brabazon, — I met
Ruskin yesterday and I cannot resist telling you
what he said about you. Besides much else he
said, ' Brabazon is the only person since Turner
at whose feet I can sit and worship and learn about
colour.' "
Ruskin's enthusiasm is mentioned here for the
immediate pleasure of connecting Brabazon's
name with that of Turner. No, I am not com
paring them. Turner was the perfect professional.
Brabazon was the perfect amateur. He had a
boundless admiration for Turner, and no other
artist has dreamed, and told his dreams, so beauti
fully in the enchanted land where Turner saw the
visions of his later water-colours. How different
was the point of view, the infention of the two
men! The great Turner would allow no rival
near his throne. When he admired a brother
painter, living or dead, he set about at once to
out-paint him, and he usually succeeded. W^hen
Brabazon admired, rivalry or jealousy never
entered his mind. Admiration filled it. He sat
at his brother's feet, and proclaimed his joy in
an Interpretation, never a copy, of the work he
admired. His cathoUcity was boundless, and so

HARLECH

PRELUDE
intense was his appreciation of the best in art
that, when he saw a fine picture, he was at once
fired with the desire to make a study of it in his
own brilliant way, to have and to keep his love of
it visible, and always by him.
Art, in its highest manifestation, we are told,
is love. If God be love, what else can art be but
love? Brabazon's art was rooted and grounded
in love. His was the ideal career of an artist.
He painted, made music, read, travelled, was a
centre of loving kindness, beloved by and admired
by all, and he bequeathed to the world a large
legacy of beauty. Is not such a Ufe enviable?
It will be a pleasure to Hnger on the details of
that sunny life, but the happy have no annals,
and one could really tell the story of Brabazon's
external life in a sentence, in such a sentence as
the following taken from Sir Frederick Wedmore's
essay on Brabazon — " A country gentleman who
at seventy years old made his d^but as a pro
fessional artist and straightway became famous."
An artist from boyhood, ever wondering, ever
appreciating, ever progressing, hcirdly known out
side his own circle, entirely unconcerned as to
what the world might think of his work, then at
three-score years and ten, " discovered," famous,
eulogised by Mr. J. S. Sargent, R.A., acclaimed
by Mr. D. S. MacColl as " the best water-colour
painter we have had since Turner."
What a span of life! What an experience!
Here is an artist who won the highest praise from

BRABAZON
Ruskin, who was eulogised by our greatest
painter, who was bought for our national collec
tions, and who was hailed as Master, while still
Hving, by the ardent spirits of the New English
Art Club.
Someone said once, in a fugitive speech, that
he who improves after fifty conquers the world.
Brabazon, like Tumer, continued to improve long
after fifty, continued to see with clearer and
clearer eyes the spiritual beauty underlying
material beauty. Now we have lost sight of his
progress for awhile in the transition we call death.

Chapter II.

H I S ART.
The 1892 exhibition of Brabazon's works. — "C'est la
fin d'une vie." — The chorus of praise. — Student
days in Rome. — His teachers and admirations. —
Brabazons in the National Gallery of British art. —
Comments on the illustrations in this volume. —
Cataloguing his water-colours and pastels. — The
painters he interpreted. — Turner and Velasquez
his favourites. — Brabazon, the Troubadour of art.

TETUAN, MOROCCO
In ihe possession of R. A. Tatton, Esq.

Chapter II.

HIS ART.
I.
Brabazon made his first pubUc appearance as
artist, in 1892, at the age of seventy-one.
Many who visited the Goupil Gallery in
December of that year remember their astonish
ment and delight before the sixty-six water-
colours by Brabazon, arranged upon the walls.
It was startling to think that so rare a talent could
have been so long hidden. Our eyes roamed
wonderingly, and with ever- increasing joy, over
the colour-dreams of beauty by this Master of the
lyric in art. To most they were a revelation, for
although he had exhibited two water-colours,
" Lago Maggiore " and " Venice," at the New
English Art Club in the previous winter, this array
of " harmonies innumerable and unexpected, taken
from Nature, or, rather, imposed by her," was the
first intimation to the larger world of the
Brabazon achievement. Mr. Sargent contributed
a Note to the catalogue. This Note is printed,
II

BRABAZON
with his permission, in the chapter of " Apprecia
tions," at the end of this volume, but I could not
resist interpolating here the "harmonies innumer
able and unexpected " passage, and my pen
is eager to transcribe another extract from ,
Mr. Sargent's note : " A French artist, on seeing
some of these drawings, resumed in a word
another secret of their charm and of their power :
' C'est la fin d'une vie.' "
Few living artists, at a first exhibition, have
received so full a chorus of praise. There were
no discords. Even the " National Observer,"
hard to please, said, " Whether Mr. Brabazon may
wear the Messianic garment with which the new
criticism would indue him or not — he has killed
the old Water Colour Society!" No! he did not
do that. Art is not a bird of prey. Life and art
go on. Young birds capable of lofty flights have
since circled into the old Water Colour Society,
and the veterans are unmoved.
Brabazon was delighted at such recognition.
In his sincere nature there was no tincture of
affectation or pose. He preserved all his notices.
Often he copied them out in a sketch book or in
one of the innumerable manuscript volumes that
littered his study, known as the Music Room.
The criticisms pertaining to this exhibition were
also typewritten and bound together in pamphlet
form. I turn the pages. The eyes fall upon a
few Hnes by Mr. George Moore that evoke the
very spirit of a fine Brabazon. " His drawing of
12

HIS ART
the ' Riva dei Schiavoni ' is as exquisite as a
flower; it is not a thing that has been made — it
has grown — exquisite as a flower — bright as a
flower — delicate as a flower."
" C'est la fin d'une vie." But antecedent to
that sudden triumph there was long, long pre
paration ; yet even in his preparatory period he
seems to have gone straight to the mark ; he was
no fumbler ; he went after no other gods ; he
took instinctively the right steps in scholarship
that enabled him to will the simple art of his final
audacities in colour, brimming with light. I can
hardly call it effort, for can there be effort in joy?
One critic lamented the absence of the pre
liminaries which made possible the ultimate
triumph. He found that the unique characteristic
" of this marvellous Exhibition is that it introduces
the works of an English painter to a public which
has had no opportunity of watching the growth
and development of his art."
The preUminaries of growth and development
are numerous. Those who go through the folios
at Oaklands, arranged with loving care by his
nephew's wife, Mrs. Harvey T. Brabazon Combe,
to whom the collection was bequeathed, learn to
group his work into periods, which may be called
the formative, the transition, and the achievement
periods — ^when he was finding his wings, when he
flew, and when he soared. He homed to his own
nest ; he had no greed of ambition to tempt him
to art voyages unsuited to his temperament. He
13

BRABAZON
knew what he loved ; he knew his limitations ; he
never went outside them.
He never painted an oil picture : he never
undertook a commission: he never worked for
exhibition : he never painted a large or what the
world calls an important work: he never sought
success : he never had a studio : he never used an
easel : he worked anywhere, and if there was no
table handy he would balance the drawing paper
upon his knees. He was often indifferent as to
what became of the work when finished. Many of
his water-colours were preserved through the
watchfulness of his relations and friends. Colonel
Bence-Lambert for example, who accompanied
him sometimes on painting excursions in France,
saved a number from destruction.
This rare amateur, who' was hors concours
from choice, began to draw and to paint because
he loved it: 'twas aU he wanted to do. Each
achieved drawing he made, from the later forma
tive and transition periods, to the final flash of
colour which the old man splashed with artful
simplicity upon a piece of paper in his garden at
Oaklands, is in its way a lyrical cry of gratitude.
The charm of his work is that the impulse came
always from delight in Nature's revealed secrets
of beauty. He was loyal to the best that was in
him. He ne-ver swerved. He kept the faith.

14

THE TERRACE, OAKLANDS

HIS ART

II.

Brabazon, working from impulse, as a bird
sings, found his way to the completest self-
expression by a natural instinct that carried him to
realisation. Most artists, certainly all who make
painting a profession, require a rigorous and
laborious course of training in the schools.
Brabazon was an exception. I think he knew it.
Art was his mistress, not his employer. He
painted for pleasure. Art was always his dream,
and he never dreamed of exchanging the dream
for the business. I make bold to say that ten
years of work in the schools, drawing the figure,
would have bruised, if not have killed, his lyrical
spontaneity. True, he spent three years as an art
student in Rome, and those who were present at
the lecture delivered by Mr. Thomas Parkin at
the Hastings Museum in April, 191 1, reaUsed,
when some of Brabazon's Roman pencil sketches
were thrown upon the screen, the value of those
three years of study. Mr. Parkin argued against
the suggestion that Brabazon never went " through
the mill," and stated that it arose from the fact
that for fifty years nothing would induce him to
exhibit in public. Brabazon did go " through the
mill," but he chose his own miU. That miU was
Nature. He was never out of her company.
Like his master. Turner, he was a student to the
15

BRABAZON
end of his Hfe. Study to him was joy, not toil.
He never agonised over a painting. He was
always in an ecstasy when at work, and although
he realised the paramount importance of drawing
and composition, it was rather by native intuition
than by academic industry that he mastered the
rules. In the 1907 Loan Exhibition, a collection of
his pencil drawings was included, showing that it
was owing to the intuitive knowledge worked out
in those studies that he was able to preserve a
sense of form, proportion, and pictorial arrange
ment in the most rapid of his later colour
harmonies. Those three years in Rome helped to
ground him in art; so did the tuition of J. H.
D'EgviUe and Alfred Fripp, who were his masters
for a time. Two beautiful drawings by Fripp,
" Paestum " and " Pompeii," hang in the drawing-
room at Oaklands, placed there by his own hands.
Account must also be taken of the influence
of Ruskin, with whom he traveUed on two or three
occasions through France, Ruskin being accom
panied by Mr. Arthur Severn, and Brabazon by
his nephew. Preserved in one of the sketch
books is a drawing by Prout, inscribed " A present
from Ruskin," also a photograph of " Picquini,"
Amiens, " sketched with J. Ruskin and Arthur
Severn." At Amiens, Brabazon painted a " River
Scene " while in the company of Ruskin, and it
was on this occasion that he suggested to Ruskin
the title of " The Bible of Amiens " for the well-
16

HIS ART
known volume. The friendship between Ruskin
and Brabazon was deep and lasting. In 1886
Mrs. Arthur Severn, writing from Brantwood,
Coniston, about Ruskin's health, said, " He often
speaks of you most lovingly and longs to have you
here." Brabazon worked with D'EgviUe at Rome and
at Boulogne, fighting, we are told, " every point
with him." D'EgviUe must have been somewhat
bewildered when his pupil, even in those early
days, began to skip over the orthodox traces.
There is a drawing of the Campagna, after
D'EgviUe, " a drawing wrought," says Sir
Frederick Wedmore, " not by Brabazon after
D'EgviUe, but by D'EgviUe, in a sense after
Brabazon; for Brabazon's conceptions or per
formance, with its omissions and audacities, had
not, it would appear, quite satisfied his teacher,
and the teacher, possessed of a neat trick, of an
infaUible receipt if you will, had been minded to
show to Brabazon all that should have been done,
and had not been."
No, I cannot think that Brabazon owed much to
Rome, or to any teaching by word of mouth. He
taught himself, and his masters were Nature and
the works of other artists. To examine his sketch
books is to realise how strong, in his formative
period, was the influence of Cox, De Wint and
Miiller, to name but three. Above all of Turner,
yet Turner was not so much an influence as a
leader in ethereal adventures in colour and form,
17

BRABAZON
an elder, adored brother whom Brabazon followed
into every excursion of his genius, never tiring,
ever in an ecstasy of appreciation. His chief
admiration among contemporary painters was
Claude Monet. Recall the most visionary colour
harmonies of those two painters of light. Turner
and Monet, and we have a glimpse of the radiance
that Brabazon pursued in his art.
The National Gallery of British Art at Mill-
bank possesses seven Brabazons. They hang
together, and it is interesting to contrast " Houses
at Tivoli " with " The Pink Palace," and " TivoH "
with " Murcia." " Houses at TivoU," a careful,
sensitive, architectural representation, drawn about
i860, in pencil and wash with body-colour on
warm grey paper, might, as the compiler of the
catalogue remarks, be a careful study by Ruskin ;
but " The Pink Palace," painted about thirty years
later, is pure, undiluted Brabazon, a colour impres
sion of a dream building hanging in the rosy
evening Hght. The other " Tivoli," dating from
about 1868, is clearly influenced by De Wint, but
the "Murcia," a much later performance, in
brilliant sunshine, sings out as an example of his
perfected achievement when his hand was able to
record swiftly the instant impression of his eye.
One thinks of music and of flowers when look
ing at such harmonies as " The Pink Palace,"
" Murcia," " Les Rochers Rouge," or at " Roses,"
also in the National collection, pink and yellow
tea-roses in a blue and white vase against a brown
18

KARNAK

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HIS ART
background. In his flower studies Brabazon
derived from nobody. They are flower fantasies
culled from nature and arranged with unerring
taste.

19

BRABAZON

III.

To select twenty-four illustrations for this
volume from the wealth of his life work was a task
of such delightful difficulty that it seemed impos
sible ever to arrive at a final choice. Fifty sets of
twenty-four might have been arranged, and each
set would have been representative. As I write,
three framed water-colours stand before me that
happen to be the uppermost of three sets of
Brabazons, awaiting a catalogue number. How
hard it is to exclude them! One is an
impression of the " Zattere, Venice " — boats,
buildings, and a blue sky, flecked with light clouds.
The windows are blobs of colour, the boats are
dark masses with Brabazonian masts and furled
sails that would make a seaman rabid, yet it is
Venice infinitely nearer to the heart of Venice than
a laboured, accurate, colour transcript could ever
be. The forms of the objects are entirely pre
served, the essentials are given, and at a distance,
indeed even at close range, you say : " Yes, this
is Venice." So with the " Cairo." An arch, a
high wall, a tower, the whole scribbled over
with pencil marks, seemingly arbitrary, yet which
fall obediently into the scheme : you look, and lo !
tawny Cairo is wafted into a London room. The
third is a Temple in ruins : nothing is finished, yet
all is there, the mystery and the majesty and the
20

A

HIS ART
loneUness of dark, broken columns stained by the
centuries : and above them rises the immediate
freshness of the sky.
But if these three are accepted, which of the
chosen twenty-four shall they supplant? As it
is, no example of his formative period has
been included. A book of this kind should
express ripe achievement, so the tentative work,
done when he was trying his wings in experi
mental flutterings, does not find a place. Turn
the pages and you see him in his highest flights.
But the range of the twenty-four examples is wide,
and a few, such as the "Cap St. Martin" and
" Tetuan," show him in his transition period.
Contrast "From Cap St. Martin" (p. 2) with
the rendering of " Santa Maria della Salute "
(p. 86). How simple is the "Cap St. Martin,"
how suave, how unambitious, and yet we feel,
when looking at its well-balanced emptiness, that
the simplicity was inevitable, dictated by the
rhythmic sweep of lake and shore. But why dis
cuss it? There it is, broad, simple, spacious,
offering and giving tranquil joy, a serene pleasure
that many infinitely more complicated and am
bitious pictures fail to convey. The " Salute "
is sheer vision, la fin d'une vie, pure colour
harmony, treated in mass, details ignored. Only
a master-hand would have dared to attempt the
smudges of velvety blacks that suggest gondolas,
and give the needed balance of weight to the
diaphanous church. Probably it is not the Santa
21

BRABAZON
Maria della Salute that the reader, on his hurried
travels, knows. We take it for what it isi an
artist's instant impression, seen with the eyes of
imagination, done swiftly, in a fervour of mystical
communion with beauty, and, when the impulse
was spent, never touched again. That was
Brabazon's way. It is not the way that a great
gallery masterpiece is produced, an epic in oil
paint, but it is the way to sing a perfect song.
Brabazon's conversation with art was lyrical, not
epical. "Tetuan, Morocco" (p. lo), one of a series,
is much earlier. It is spacious, but the sweep of
vision at this stage of his development outsoars
the cunning of the hand : it is obvious that he
worked slowly upon this drawing. He is feeling
his way, and although there is no sign of fumbling
in the disposition of the figures, and the arrange
ment of the buildings, yet it has not the amazing
spontaneity of such a work as the " Entrance to
the Grand Mosque, Delhi" (p. 62). That is a
triumph. Note with what brilliance and certainty
the figures are indicated, the inevitableness of
those in the foreground, the huddle that suggests
a crowd, the mystery of the great doorway and
windows of the Mosque, the colour, and the sense
of heat that pervades the dazzling scene.
His visit to India fired Brabazon to an achieve
ment that he had not attempted before : he darted
towards the realisation of what has been described
as his later shorthand. Perhaps in no subject was
22

MENTONE

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 • tori _C ' i-JSHwill

HIS ART
he so personal, so sur6 of his "audacities and
omissions," so apparently careless, yet so com
pletely the artist, as in his impressions of " The Taj
Mahal, near Agra" (p. 66), that mausoleum of white
marble, extraordinary and beautiful, built by the
Emperor Shah Jehan for himself and his favourite
wife, on which twenty thousand men were em
ployed incessantly for twenty-two years. It hardly
looks like a real building in Brabazon's rendering.
It is an Eastern dream, that may vanish into air
before the wave of a magician's wand. If the
Emperor Shah Jehan were among the living, and
if he could be shovm side by side a photograph of
his glorious mausoleum and Brabazon's impres
sion of it, I think I know which would come nearest
to his dream.
" Harmonies taken from Nature or rather
imposed by her." Consider his " Venice " (p. 74)
on a rough day, alive with movement and sparkle,
and then look at the sultry silence of "On the
Nile " (p. 26). Or turn to the ruins of " Karnak "
(p. 18), aU the vast height of this monument of
fallen majesty suggested ; note the intimacy of the
Httle splashes of colour on the pillars, and the
large, deUcate masses of the eternal blue sky of
Egypt behind and over all. He could give the
very spirit of place — the terrace of his house at
Oaklands in Sussex (p. 14) on a stiU day; the
glamour of Mentone (p. 22); the peace of white
and orange buildings grouped about a sunUt sea,
some place in the land of sunshine he found on
23

BRABAZON
his wanderings, unknown, entitled simply " Italy "
(p. 42); yes ! veritable Italy; the stormy splendour
of grim " Harlech " (p. 6), and that reasoned orgy
of colour, a sunset trapped, " The Red Rocks,"
between Nice and Mentone (p. 34). This subject
attracted him again and again. There is a fine
example in the Tate Gallery.
I never tire of looking at his " Olive Orchard "
(p. 58), with the gnarled trees uprising in the
moist heat, the depth of the valley, the height
of the hills, a scene of soHtariness, yet not desolate.
Brabazon was not over-fond of the figure in a
landscape. Nature sufficed, but when figures
were needed, how deftly he suggested " human
interest." In the view of " Tangiers " (p. 50), one
of his later visions, burning in the sunshine, figures
were needed. The three Arabs in the foreground
and the further group are placed just where they
should be ; but in that scene of weedy, stagnant
desolation, the " Grand Canal, Venice " (p. 82),
a mass of buildings withered into a beauty that
is half pathetic, half ominous, figures would be
obtrusive. The suggestion of empty gondolas
only adds to the loneliness.
I have passed in review a few of his lyrics,
trying to describe them, but they speak for them
selves. They are just Brabazons — just a dreamy
" Santa Caterina," pale and quiet as the inmates ;
just a white town nestling between a cleft in the
rocks " On the Riviera " ; sturdy " Forio " in Ischia
looking seaward ; " Pointe Pescade," brusque and
24

HIS ART
strong in line and colour, and such dissimilarities
in vision, and consequently in handling, as
"Manfalut" in Egypt and the "Wengern Alp"
in Switzerland. The particular and inherent
beauty of each is expressed, dictated by the subject,
not by his own will. Beauty, ever moving like a
spirit over and through Nature, ever ready to give
to those who ask, lured and entranced him. He
asked and he received.

25

BRABAZON

IV.

Brabazon, as I have said, was virtually self-
taught. He began as a careful sketcher, he ended
a sketcher of genius. The three years in Rome
showed him how to study; his association with
J. H. D'EgviUe and Alfred Fripp indicated the
formal lines of academic development, but his
knowledge as to the true direction of his schooling
was innate. He learned from the works of others
and from Nature. In his formative period he
made frank copies of the early water-colour masters
of the British school, but as he advanced in his
art these copies assumed the form of Interpreta
tions, "transcripts into his own language," in
Mr. Martin Hardie's phrase. To the end of his
life he never ceased this practice. A professional
artist could hardly find time, even if he had the
inclination, for such laborious delights. But
Brabazon was the perfect amateur always. These
Interpretations were done simply for pleasure.
Of the numerous painters whose work he sought
so patiently and lovingly to understand, making
sometimes mere shorthand summaries in colour of
the soul of their productions, two obsessed him —
Turner and Velasquez. His admiration for
Turner was boundless, and as his colour sense
became more refined, and his -vision more ethereal,
his work approached closer to the manner of
26

ON THE NILE

HIS ART
Turner's later water-colours, with a free use of
body colour.
The sheets of paper in the foUos at Oaklands
bearing in one form or another the impress of his
hand in water-colour, pastel, or pencil, number
over three thousand; but many of them are quite
slight, mere suggestions. The catalogued water-
colours and pastels signed with his initials include
about one thousand Interpretations, in which
Turner easily heads the list with over four hundred.
Velasquez approaches one hundred. Next come
David Cox with about forty, and Miiller, Constable,
and De Wint with over twenty. These figures are
approximate. In most cases the picture and the
name of the painter are indicated beneath the
Interpretation : in others one can judge only from
knowledge of the work interpreted, or by the style.
But it is abundantly clear that the artists who
made the strongest appeal to Brabazon were
Turner and Velasquez, and after them Cox,
MiiUer, Constable, and De Wint. Next in im
portance are the following, of whose works he
made several Interpretations: De Hoogh,
Bonington, Reynolds, Guardi, Courbet, Hals,
Van Dyck, Daubigny, Canaletto, Titian, Rem
brandt, Wilson, and Clays. I have been able to
find five or more Interpretations of Delacroix,
Rubens, Tintoretto, Claude, Corot, Ziem, and
Holland, and fewer of Jacob Maris, Wilkie,
Ruysdael, Goya, and Ingres. The Hst of the
painters whose works he interpreted once or twice
27

BRABAZON
is a long one, and does not pretend to be complete.
It shows how catholic he was in his appreciations :
Veronese, Hobbema, Teniers, Lawrence, Crome,
Hunt, Gericault, DetaiUe, Roberts, Constant,
Descamps, Mazo, an unidentified Japanese artist,
Philip, Fripp, Paris Bordone, Cotman, Terburg,
Metsu, Cima, Leonardo, Moroni, BelUni, Raeburn,
Chardin, Collins, Manet, Monet, Henner, Prout,
El Greco, Lotto, Rousseau, Etty, Whistler,
Watteau, Laurens, Salvator Rosa, and Cattermole.
Two of his Interpretations are included in this
volume, a Turner and a Guardi. Here again the
difficulty of choice was enormous. I longed to
include his Interpretation of De Hoogh's " Interior
of a Dutch House " in the National GaUery, an
extraordinary impression of the colour and form
essentials of the picture, a David Cox surging with
atmosphere, a Canaletto, a Courbet through which
the powerful personality of the Frenchman seems
to stalk, and the " Infanta in Red," by Velasquez,
a shimmer and sparkle of rose, silver, and — ,
but the two chosen. Turner and Guardi, must
suffice. They are typical, and they show admir
ably just where a Brabazon Interpretation of a
landscape differs from a copy. Compare " San
Benedetto : looking towards Fusina " (formerly
catalogued as " Approach to Venice "), by Turner,
in the National Gallery, with the Brabazon Inter
pretation (p. 94). The awkward figures to the
right in Turner's picture — and the most ardent
admirer of Turner must admit that his figures are
28

HIS ART
sometimes awkward — are dissolved in a rush of
colour. The mass of the gondolas remains, but
they are no longer defined; so with the towers
and the buildings : they linger faintly in the colour
haze, yet the soul, the spirit of Turner, is there.
Knowing how the vision of Turner became
spiritualised towards the end of his life, we can
well imagine that the Master might look upon
this Interpretation by Brabazon and feel that his
spirit moves in it, and that the changes are in
harmony with his later development. Remember
that when Jones wrote " Splendide mendax " under
Turner's " Bay of Baiae," Turner said, " All poets
are liars, but it is all there." So with Brabazon's
Interpretation of Guardi's " Santa Maria della
Salute" in the Wallace collection (p. 98). It
is the same picture yet it is not the same. The
tightness has gone, details are omitted, yet the
form is all there in its garment of colour-tone, as
if the soul of the picture had taken bodily shape.
Is it rash to say that if the spirit of Guardi could
see this water-colour it would murmur, " Yes, that
is what I meant " ? So with the Interpretation of
" Prince Balthasar," by Velasquez. The soul of
Velasquez is there, yet nothing in the original is
actually copied — the colour is broken, the action
of the horse is changed, the boy's features are
merely suggested, his pretty martial garments are
awhirl, and yet no actual liberties have been taken
with the handiwork of Velasquez — the soul of his
art is " aU there." 29

BRABAZON
One might continue interminably relating one's
pleasure in the art of Brabazon. It is so frankly
joyous, so spontaneous, never fatigued, never
against the collar. Everything he did was done
for the joy of doing it, and, as everything was done
to please himself, when once he had achieved his
effect, he never troubled to " tidy up " a drawing ;
nor did he bother about readjusting the letter of a
building or a boat when he had once expressed
the spirit of it. We cannot tell if he could have
carried out a large and ambitious canvas ; he never
tried; he did what he wanted to do — no more.
He is the Troubadour of art, singing as he goes,
and joy is always the burden of his songs.

30

on the RIVIERA

^'^'' '<':-' m-iiit^ii^-.

Chapter III.

HIS LIFE.
Brabazon as a letter writer. — His friends. — A memory
of his home-life. — ^A drawing and a painting by
Sargent. — Ancestry. — Harrow and Cambridge. —
Determines to be an Artist. — Student days. — The
art student becomes a country gentleman. — ^Artist
and model landlord. — Diary of his first visit to
Spain. — His notes' on Toledo and Algiers. — Music
and Art. — The eve of his "Discovery." — He is
persuaded to exhibit. — Exhibitions of his works. —
Last years. — Death.

Chapter III.

HIS LIFE.
I.
I saw Brabazon once only. It was in a Sienese
Hotel at the luncheon hour one brilliant day. I
think the room was crowded, but I remember only
the man seated next to me, who talked with hardly
a pause, buoyantly and rapidly, of the early Sienese
pictures he had seen during the morning.
Very tall, thin, keen, a noticeable man, a.
presence — I judged him to be some years over
seventy, but he was as enthusiastic as a youngster
upon whom the world is just opening. Charmed
by his vivacious talk, curious as to the identity of
one with such an appreciation and knowledge of
early Sienese art, that day in Siena became
memorable to me when I learnt that this vital
veteran was Brabazon.
His relatives (Brabazon never married), his
friends in Sussex and elsewhere have so many
intimate and happy memories of him, that it is
hard for a stranger to say anything about his
33

BRABAZON
personality that will not seem meagre and in
sufficient. Brabazon was not a good correspondent, and
he did not reveal himself in his letters. They were
usually brief, and his pen rarely wandered beyond
the immediate object of his communication. I
have had the privilege of reading a series of letters
received from him through many years by his Hfe-
long friend, Mrs. Fletcher, his companion in music
as well as in art, and have her permission to make a
few extracts: —
" I am not easily deceived about art. I
prophesied from the first moment I heard him
[Emil Sauer] that a splendid career must
sooner or later be before him. . . . My
rooms are filled with flowers and wreaths
presented to him after the concert by over
excited ladies."
" I enclose you the notice from ' St. Paul's.'
It is well written, and has not that note of
unstinted gush and praise which I dislike."
" I hardly know what to recommend as a
companion book. For my part I think I
should select Hans Andersen's ' Improvisatore
in Italy,' but I am afraid it is out of print."
" I have just priced my drawings, a terrible
wrench if I have to part with them."
" The Shakespeares were in the village
for a few days in August. I had some music
with him, and am more thankful every day
34

THE RED ROCKS, MENTONE

m^

ii r^ h

-¦««

HIS LIFE
that I have such a resource." [He was suffer
ing great grief at this time through the serious
illness of a beloved nephew, which resulted in
his early death.]
" I enclose two notices of your ' Sussex
Sunset ' [a Brabazon in Mrs. Fletcher's collec
tion]. One of the notices is rather elaborate
and overdone. I am proud, however, of being
mentioned with Corot, though there is a great
gulf between us, as the following extract from
Jules Breton shows, every word of which I
agree with : —
" ' The incomparable Corots, so resplen
dent with ideal beauty that they transport one
to heaven — so true to nature that in seeing
them one fancies one is looking through an
open window upon Nature. Each of his land
scapes is a hymn of serene purity, where
everything, however, lives, rejoices, loves, and
palpitates. We say the divine Mozart, we may
also say the divine Corot, for he is the Mozart
of painting.' "
To his intimates Brabazon was always " Dear
Brab " or " Dear Brabby." The names of his
friends, many now no more, appear again and again
in this Memoir ; here I may mention a few such as
Sir Godfrey Thomas (Rector of Bodiam) and Lady
Thomas, the Briscoes of Coghurst Hall, Sir
Andrew and Lady Pilkington of Catsfield Place
and their daughter, Mrs. BurreU Hayley,
35

BRABAZON
Mrs. Warner, Mr. Thomas Parkin, Mr. Crake,
the Margesson family, especially Louise Marges-
son, afterwards the second Lady Lamb. The
North family of Rougham and Hastings Lodge,
were also among his intimates, and to the end his
regard for Mary Anne North, the flower painter
and traveller, was unfailing. The Duchess of
Cleveland, with whom he often went sketching in
Sussex and Durham, and the late Lady Brassey,
like all his intimates, were women of intellectual
attainments. Among his artist friends were
Ruskin, Mr. John Sargent, Mr. J. J. Shannon,
Mr. Arthur Severn, Mr. Francis James, and Arthur
Ditchfield, whose sudden death was a great grief
to him. Brabazon is still present in the dining room
at Oaklands, in the portrait, a half-length, that
Sargent painted— the man himself you feel,
bird-like, watchful, eager, ready for the immediate
adventure of preserving some sudden moment of
beauty, ready for any froHc of speech or act. But,
perhaps, an even more intimate rendering of him
is Sargent's charcoal and pencil drawing (see
Frontispiece) with the observant eyes, the deter
mined chin, and the air of breeding. He was
aristocrat in life as in art, Hke, shall I say,
Velasquez. When I first saw this drawing at
Oaklands, which is full of memories of him, rooms
and corridors hung with his water-colours, certain
Hnes from Wordsworth's " Happy Warrior " re
called themselves : — 36

HIS LIFE
" Who comprehends his trust, and to the same
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim ....
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw."
Sargent's charcoal sketch of this happy artist,
who kept faithful with singleness of aim, was
reproduced as the Frontispiece to the 1906
Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, which also con
tained a photograph showing him seated in the
garden at Oaklands fondly examining a portfolio
of his water-colours. He loved to dream over
his work, to be reminded of joys found on his
rambles abroad. The old man, intensely alive, is
dreaming as he sits there in his garden, motionless,
his eyes arrested by the gleam of his own handi
work. He looks : the memory is mystical, he
looks at — just a lake, a lonely, sun-flushed ItaUan
lake lingering in faintly revealed loveHness.
Again we see him in a photograph dated 1892,
seated by his hostess, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, in the
loggia of her house at Asolo, where Browning
spent happy days, the inspiration of his
"Asolando." " This is the loggia Browning loved,
High on the banks of the friendly town."
Brabazon was then seventy-one, with fifteen
years of his long life still to be enjoyed. But
before telling the quiet story, I would like to record
a few words about his home Hfe by Mrs. Harvey T.
31

BRABAZON
Brabazon Combe, who was for eighteen years his
companion, and who was with him at the end.
" Every moment spent in his company was
an education, not alone on art subjects, but in
music and literature, and in real and beautiful
knowledge of the world. In Hterature I was
quite unequal to cope with him, but he had in
my husband's mother one with whom even he
found it hard to keep pace. His home life was
simple in the extreme. He rose at eight, had
a cold bath, followed by a run in the garden
and a sUght and rapid breakfast. From
twenty-five to seventy-five years of age this
was his sole meal until half-past seven, when
he partook of a substantial dinner. His wants
were few. Once when he was a guest at
Jacques Blumenthal's chalet, above Montreux,
he was called unwillingly into luncheon and
made to lift his own coverdish, to find on doing
so only a rose-leaf and a butterfly's wing."
Rose-leaf Brabazon! The epithet plays
prettily about his name. But he had character
and grit too, and he was ever in touch with the
primal simplicities. One of his sayings, often on
his lips, was, " Oh ! the value of simpHcity ! Oh !
the value of simpUcity ! "

38

SANTA CATERINA, LAGO MAGGIORE
In the possession of R. A. Tatton, Esq.

HIS LIFE

II.

Hercules Brabazon Brabazon was born in
Paris on November 27th, 1821, the younger son of
Hercules Sharpe, of Blackballs, Durham, and of
Oaklands, Battle.
" One of the renowned rose gardens of
East Sussex," writes Mrs. Harvey T. Braba
zon Combe in her "Notes on the Life of the
Artist," "was arranged by the late Colonel
Brown at Domons, the home of Brabazon's
childhood. Here the child would rush out
during May, after lesson-time, to observe the
beauty of colour in the apple orchards of
Northiam. In his later days I loved to drive
with him on sketching expeditions to Northiam,
when he would often talk of the past and of
his school life, especiaUy of his journeys with
his brother William to his mother's home,
Brabazon Park, in the far west of Ireland,
taking four days by coach and sea. His uncle
and host, Sir William Brabazon, was an ardent
supporter of O'Connell, ideas imbued no doubt
from his maternal uncle, Sir Capel Molyneux,
the' patriot. It was to his connection with the
Spencer family that Brabazon owed his early
artistic awakening. Charles, Lord Lucan, was
guardian, with Lady Brabazon, of Sir William
Brabazon and his two sisters, who afterwards
39

BRABAZON
became Mrs. Sharpe of Oaklands and Lady
Teynham. Sir WiUiam was sent by his
guardians in early days to travel in Italy with
his cousin. Lord Althorp, son of the great art
patron. Lord Spencer, of Reynolds renown.
This, no doubt, led to the sisters, with their
mother, also traveUing, and in 1819 Hercules
Sharpe and Ann Brabazon met in Rome, were
married, and became the parents of four
children : William Brabazon of Brabazon Park,
H. B. Brabazon the artist, Anthony who died
an infant, and Ann Sarah (Mrs. Combe), who
passed away at Oaklands in 191 1."
The subject of this memoir, Hercules Sharpe,
took the name of Brabazon in 1847, under the will
of his uncle. Sir William Brabazon, Bart., when
he succeeded his elder brother, William, in the
Brabazon estates at Ballinasloe, County Galway,
and Roscommon, and Brabazon Park, County
Mayo. In 1858, on the death of his father, he
inherited the Sussex property at Oaklands, near
Battle, Sussex, and the Durham estate. Black-
halls Manor, Durham, came to the family through
Brass Crosby (Brabazon's great uncle), Lord
Mayor of .London in 1771. The presentation
silver cup (of which there is a picture in Loftie's
" History of London ") and his portrait are now
heirlooms at Oaklands. In the " Memoir of Brass
Crosby," published in 1829, I find that the Sharpes
— Hercules Brabazon's father and his learned
40

HIS LIFE
brother. Sir Cuthbert Sharpe, F.S.A. — were
grandsons of Cuthbert Sharpe and his wife Mary
Rafton. In a quaint old will their ancestor,
Thomas Sharpe, bequeathed, in 1559, his estate
in trust for " My wife and my V CheUder qwhome
I make my executors ... for all my lands in
hertillpuU" [Hartlepool]. Blackballs and the
other Sharpe estates are now part of Castle
Eden ColUeries, the last portion of which was sold
by H.. B. Brabazon. These facts, on the authority
of R. Surtees in the " Memoir of Brass Crosby,"
are fully to be relied upon, as he was a lifelong
friend of Sir Cuthbert Sharpe and a fellow
historian. It would also appear that relatives of
H. B. Brabazon's went to America. One, an
uncle of Brass Crosby's, settled in Virginia, where
he rose to affluence, and left Crosby descendants.
Another, Brass Crosby's brother, after serving
some time as a lieutenant in the navy, died in
New York in 1780. The Memoir, quoting from
Surtees' "History of Durham," also says: "Some
respectable families of the same name, claiming
descent from this Yorkshire family, are resident
in Philadelphia, and there is a populous town
called Crosby, County of Hamilton, Ohio."
Brabazon, who loved flowers, perpetuating
their fragile life in water-colours so delicate that
they seem hardly able to survive handling, came
to know and to love flowers in the days of his
childhood in the rose-garden of Domons. It is
pleasant to think of him lingering there, rushing
41

BRABAZON
out in May, " when his lessons were over, to observe
the beauty of colour in the apple orchards of
Northiam." The love of colour was instinct in him. One
of his delights, when quite a small child, was to
handle a ruby owned by his mother, to gaze at
it, to hold it against the light, to flash and turn
the wonder-thing, and make it reveal the subtleties
of its imprisoned colour. That he was a boy with
exceptional powers of observation is shown by his
diary of "A Tour in Germany," on which he was
taken at the age of twelve. Written in copper
plate calligraphy, it is packed with records of
things seen of a character that would have had
no interest for the ordinary boy. The Diary is
a manuscript book of eighty pages, and includes
two pencil drawings, a " View of Ostend " and
" Church near Ostend." Each shows extreme care
in the drawing of the architecture, and the way
he has placed the towers and buildings of Ostend
on the horizon, with a vast, eloquent empty space
in the foreground, shows how unerring, even at
the age of twelve, was his instinct for selection and
form. Here is the naive beginning of the Diary :
" I took my seat on the stem of the vessel
(all the passengers then except myself being
sick), contemplating the beautiful waves as
they rolled after each other, and the paddles
dashing through the waves and throwing the
refreshing spray upon the deck. However,
feeling a little sick, I was obliged to leave my
42

ITALY

HIS LIFE
little corner, but afterwards, finding myself
better, I soon returned. The coast of Flanders
now appeared, looking like a low bank stretch
ing along for a great way, and the Httle village
spires peeped here and there along the coast."
In Ghent he refers to a picture by Rubens
with this curious comment, " The colouring was
so beautiful as to resemble real Hfe," but usually
the boy is content to mention the names of great
painters with reverence, but without personal
enthusiasm. He is more interested in nature than
in art — "the mountain ash with its little red
berries," "a lake dotted with innumerable small
wooded islands." At the end of the Diary he
utters the cry of the true wanderer. He shrinks
from returning to school, and "a thousand times
wished that he might be in one of the canal boats
gliding smoothly and swiftly along to Antwerp."
In later years his aged sister would often talk
of that tour, recalling her fright at a terrific thunder
storm, and the calmness of her small brother, who
was intent only on watching the effects.
Brabazon entered Harrow in 1835. After two
years his father sent him to Geneva to prepare
for Cambridge under a private tutor. The first
item in the catalogue of the Memorial Exhibition
of 1906 was a landscape done at Harrow when
he was sixteen years of age.
In 1840 he proceeded to Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he graduated with honours in
43

BRABAZON
the Mathematical Tripos. Surely no other artist
has ever taken honours in mathematics! Yet it
is obvious, on reflection, how helpful a knowledge
of mathematics may be to an artist. Colour is a
gift. No one can be taught colour. Taste is a
gift; but the scientific sides of art are simplified
and strengthened by a knowledge of mathematics.
There is Httle record of Brabazon's Cambridge
life, and no information that he devoted even his
leisure time to sketching, but his future career
must have been often in his thoughts, and the
course of it was probably quite arranged in his
own mind during his undergraduate days.
The decision had to be made after leaving
Cambridge : he made it, and he would not swerve.
It was the wish of the family that he should go
to the bar, and he was promised a generous allow
ance if he would enter at one of the Inns of Court.
But, to paraphrase his own words, when he looked
up the dingy and unpicturesque staircases which
adorn our celebrated seats of legal learning, the
sight to his artistic and aesthetic tastes was too
dreadful, and the grim and unromantic facts that
he would have to encounter daily too terrible for
contemplation. He appealed to his father; he
announced firmly that the only career possible to
him was that of an artist, that Rome caUed him
(it was Rome in those days, not Paris), and his
father relented, but told his son, after the manner
of fathers, that if he was determined to proceed
as an art student to Rome, his aUowance would
44

HIS LIFE
be considerably curtailed. To an enthusiastic youth
smitten with the art fever mere money matters are
negligible. So to Rome he went, and there he
lived and worked and learnt for three years.
I do not think that any of his friends or fellow
students in Rome had the slightest prevision of
his future career, of his latent genius, and his extra
ordinary capabilities for development. He was
not a prodigy. Indeed, he showed more aptitude
for music than for art ; at the age of ten he could
play the piano with facility. The " Drawing made
at the Academy, Rome, about 1847," is a careful
copy, such as any earnest youth might produce,
and his other productions of this period are no
more than the work of an industrious and com
petent student. The "View of Ostend," done
some years before, shows more personality and
promise. He was no solitary. Then, as always, he was
gregarious, with a great gift for friendship.
Besides many Sussex friends who were living in
Italy at that time, he had the advantage of the
acquaintance of Joseph Severn, Consul at Rome,
and father of his life-long friend, Arthur Severn.
Another of his art friends was Charles Perkins,
afterwards connected with the Boston Museum,
U.S.A., with whom he shared rooms.
The years in Rome were happy and fruitful,
and the student on the "curtailed income" of a
younger son looked forward to a career in which,
if he would not actually have to depend upon his
45

BRABAZON
brush for a livelihood, he would probably find it
necessary to augment his income by selling his
pictures. Suddenly the prospect entirely changed.
He had been studying in Rome three years when,
by the death of his elder brother, WiUiam, at
Malta, he inherited the Brabazon estates, became
an independent man, his own master, and able to
pursue his art where and how he pleased. For
nearly fifty years he pursued it as an enthusiastic
amateur, producing ecstaticaUy just when the spirit
moved him, making gifts of his drawings to a few
favoured friends, never thinking of selling them,
hating the mere idea of exhibiting, producing lyrics
in paint because he loved doing it better than
anything else in the world. But he had a proper
- appreciation of his work. A lady to whom he had
given a water-colour having treated it as he thought
inconsiderately, he promptly reUeved her of the
charge. When, in 1892, persuaded much against
his wish to have an exhibition, he entered the ranks
of the professionals, it made not the sHghtest
difference to him. He " awoke to find himself
famous." Everybody seems to have used the
well-worn phrase. A letter from Mr. Leonard
Borwick, who was in Berlin at the time, begins :
" Dear Brabs, — Long ere this reaches you — Hke
Byron — you will have awoken to find yourself
famous." That strange condition of being grati
fied Brabazon exceedingly, but he remained always
the happy, enthusiastic amateur, working entirely
for his own pleasure. 46

MANFALUT
In the possession of Miss Vickers.

HIS LIFE
But I am anticipating. We have now arrived
at the beginning of the second stage of his career :
he has finished copying casts in Rome ; he is a
country gentleman, determined to devote himself,
not to hounds or to the breeding of cattle, but to
art. His first thought when he came into the
Oaklands inheritance was to " sell the place," as
he shrank from the mere idea of estate management,
but his second thought was to ask his brother-in-
law. Major Combe, to live with him and "look
after things." No arrangement could have been
happier. Major Combe reUeved him of all busi
ness matters, and, when he died, his son, Mr.
Harvey T. Brabazon Combe, managed the estate
for his uncle with equal zeal. Never a sportsman,
uninterested in the pursuits of the countryside,
Brabazon was vicariously a model landlord, per
haps the only model landlord who ever spent his
entire time in the pursuit of art, and half his days
in travelling, with art always as the objective.

47

BRABAZON

III.

His personal luggage when travelling was, I
am told, always absurdly light. " If you want to be
happy," he would say, "travel with what you can
carry." On a long foreign tour he would start
from Oaklands with — a handbag! He would
forget many necessaries, but never his painting
materials. He travelled to paint and to see
pictures. The quick years passed in intimate
converse with Nature and with art, the summers
in England — after 1858 usually at Oaklands — the
winters often on the Riviera, varied by journeys
to Egypt and Spain, and one memorable expe
dition to India.
Soon after leaving Rome, in 1848, he made his
first visit to Spain, where, in the works of
Velasquez, he found, after Turner, the art inspira
tion of his Ufe. Velasquez he profoundly under
stood ; he went to the heart of the great Spaniard ;
his interpretations of Velasquez' pictures give the
very spirit of the originals — the rhythm of " The
Tapestry Weavers," the movement of Prince
Balthasar Carlos, the colour of Princess Margarita
Maria. He and the late Colonel Hugh BaiUie
share with Stirling Maxwell the credit of proclaim
ing the greatness of Spanish art long before the
bulk of the EngUsh pubHc had begun to appreciate
the glories of Velasquez and of Goya. It was at
48

HIS LIFE
Colonel Hugh Baillie's sale that Brabazon pur
chased his " Mariana of Austria," which hung
during his lifetime in the drawing-room at Oak
lands, and which he was never tired of extolling.
In his Spanish drawings we may trace the gradual
development of his art from the formative to the
transition period, on to greater breadth of treat
ment and increasing subtlety of colour, to that final
period when he was in full possession of the
amazing colour sense that makes a fine Brabazon
so entirely lovely and so exhilarating.
He kept a Diary of that first memorable visit
to Spain, a volume of fifty-five pages of manuscript,
written hastily with a running pen, not very plainly,
indeed often almost illegible, as if his impressions
hurried one upon another so quickly that the pen
had to race to record them. The months and
days are given throughout the sections of the
Diary, but not the year, which must have been
1 848, when he was twenty-seven. He sailed from
Naples, touching at Palermo, and then on to
Gibraltar, Seville, Madrid, Bayonne, Bordeaux,
through Paris, and home. The chief interest, of
course, is in the account of Brabazon's first im
pressions of the Prado, Madrid ; but the pages
are full of intimate observations of natural effects,
and records of national characteristics. He was
intensely interested in life, the oddities as well as
the quiddities ; but beauty in colour or form was
always paramount, and he would rather sketch a
thing than write about it. In the early pages of
49

BRABAZON
the Diary are several drawings — types of character,
sketches of Paestum, of frescoes at Pompeii, a head
of a man by Goya, who, after Velasquez, was his
Spanish idol, a view of Naples: then the Diary
begins. Note his appreciation, in the year 1848,
of the fact that shadows are purple : —
"Left Naples for Sicily, 24th May [1848].
The sea was perfectly smooth, and the sun just
setting as we passed Capri, and the deep purple
shadows of its stupendous rocks were reflected
in the mirror-like water. The sea afterwards
became like an immense sheet of shot silk
reflecting all the different hues of the sky.
Early next morning the coast of Sicily was
plainly visible."
Here the artist overcomes the diarist. He
makes a pencil drawing of "The Coast of Sicily,"
simple, yet sufficient to tell us, more than sixty
years afterwards, what he saw that spring morning
as the boat neared Sicily. I turn the pages of
the Diary. He has reached Gibraltar ; he has
passed inland. It is the 7th of June. Hurriedly
he writes: —
" Spain ! We are in Spain, actually tread
ing on Spanish ground, and yet it seems
incredible."Then Seville, and, at last, Madrid — the Prado
— Velasquez! Here are Brabazon's first impres
sions of the pictures in the Prado: —
50

TANGIERS

^"H '^'0'-^

t^)****"

*4PVW-

HIS LIFE
"We passed our few days in Madrid in
the glorious gaUery. Some of the paintings
are superb, and though there is much trash,
yet every now and then such divine pictures
startle one that it is a treat which never tires —
stroUing along the rooms.
"Velasquez' pictures especially, few of
which I had ever seen before, struck me. I
was never tired of standing before those beings,
painted, to be sure, on perishable canvases,
but yet breathing, moving, living, speaking!
Never were portraits more admirably painted.
Vandyck even (though in his greatest strength
here in some splendid portraits) is weak beside
the mighty Spaniard. The old Corsair
* Barbarossa ' [Christobal de Pernia] in red,
with a drawn sword, glaring fiercely as he
contemplates the deadly blow, makes one's
blood run cold. Next to him is an actor
[Pabillos de ValladoUd], all in black, one foot
advanced. He is probably a comic actor, as
there is a humorous expression about the eye
which is unmistakable. He is probably reciting
from one of Calderon's lately written plays, or
may be from one of Lope de Vega's, or from
one of the dramas of the immortal author of
' Don Quixote.' No one who has once seen
can forget those living features and the Hfe-
Hke attitude. It is most admirably painted,
and without the slightest aid from the tricks
51

BRABAZON
of colour. The dress is black, the background
grey, and the flesh tones are soft and subdued.
" Of Velasquez' large pictures, ' The
Surrender of Breda' I think is the finest.
Every figure is a perfect animated portrait,
and yet they are all grouped with admirable
skill. Such a coUection of dwarfs and
dwarfesses, monstrous in their deformity,
perhaps never were coUected together. They
are all by Velasquez, who turns everything he
touches into refined gold, so that one is
enchanted instead of disgusted with this extra
ordinary display. One little fellow, who is
utterly deformed and, moreover, squints, and,
not being able to raise his eyeUds, turns up
his ugly head to look at you, is so admirably
painted with such delicious colour and such
exquisite chiaroscuro that it is difficult to tear
oneself away. You actually become in love
with deformity, or, rather, with deformity made
beautiful. " Even amidst these splendid portraits one
of Tintoretto's of a Venetian nobleman is too
fine to pass by without a long gaze.
" The Raphaels have been almost all ruined
by cleaning and touching up. His ' Christ
bearing the Cross ' fortunately has been less
injured, and though the colouring is very brick-
dusty, the expression of the limbs are all in
Raphael's finest and most inspired style.
Never was the divine expression of our Saviour
52

HIS LIFE
more beautifully given than here, as He looks
upon His Mother and the women with her,
sinking at the time under the weight of the
cross. " Murillo is in no force here. We look
in vain for the expression and colour which
enchanted us at Seville. To be sure there he
had no such mighty rivals as Velasquez and
Titian to contend with, but there cannot be
any doubt that no pictures in his best style
are in the Madrid Museum. I expected to
see whole hosts of Spanish beggar boys, eating,
fighting, and sleeping, but I saw nothing of
the sort. I am heretic enough to think he
painted a beggar boy better than a Madonna.
At all events, that dirty urchin hunting for
game in his rags at Paris is one of the finest
paintings of Murillo's I ever saw.
" The three days we gave ourselves for the
Gallery passed quickly. We should like to
have visited Toledo and the Escorial, but our
time was short, and so we set off over the burn
ing deserts for the North. Oh, for water!
Oh, for green fields and trees and cool air and
clouds! Two weary days and nights passed,
and then there they were all — the green fields,
the green trees, and the grey cool clouds."
The first visit to Toledo was made some years
later, in the sixties. His brief account of this tour,
marked on the top of the page " Toledo," begins :
53

BRABAZON
"Arrived in the dark last night. There
was a moon, but some angry, threatening clouds
covered her, and I only saw the dim outline
of the towers as we ascended the steep hill.
. . . I spent a deUghtful afternoon sketch
ing — splendid subject for a Lewis. . . . "
In Toledo he finds " excellent subjects for
painting." Then this section breaks off, Madrid
caUs him again ; but the reference is brief, merely
this : " At Madrid the last few days were well
occupied in the Gallery and in searching for more
Goyas." The middle leaves of the " Toledo " Diary
contain sketches of Spanish pictures and scenes,
and at the end of the book are fourteen pages of
notes, headed "Algiers," undated, beginning
" Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle," followed by a lament
that he is no longer in the " comfortable, well-
cushioned, hot-water heated carriages of the
Marseilles express." Bad climatic conditions
depressed him. In winter he needed for his
happiness a roaring fire : in summer, sunshine.
I dare not thirik what would have happened had
he, at one period of his Hfe, been compelled, as
an Irish landlord, to live six months in moist
Ireland, a fate that might have been his.
Unmethodical in his habits, regardless of trifles,
scornful of superficial social obligations, forgetful
of appointments, indifferent to dates as to time,
it is impossible to make a chronological record of
54

POINTE PESCADE

HIS LIFE
his many wanderings. He soon tired of writing
diaries. His water-colours are his diaries. Some
times his pencil dropped into a date, as in a clever
drawing of a stout violinist, signed " H. B. B.,
1854." In 1859 he again visited Spain. Velasquez
also called him several times to Vienna, to the
inspiration of those two marvellous studies of
child-life — Prince Prosper, whose life flickered
out just when he was beginning to walk, and
Princess Margarita, as fresh and dewy as the cut
flowers in the crystal vase upon the table by which
she stands.
His first set of Algerian studies is dated 1868,
and in this year he made his first Nile tour, which
he repeated in 1874 and 1877. Wherever he
sojourned he made and found friends — his
presence in a room carried there the gladness that
informs his work. In Algiers, in Rome and
Venice, he was eagerly welcomed by the sisters
of Mr. Leigh Smith, the Arctic explorer, one of
whom became well known as Madame Bodichon,
founder of Girton College. These ladies, with
AmeUa and Matilda Betham Edwards and Mr.
and Mrs. Ludlow, were among his closest friends,
and greatly encouraged him in his art. Mention
must also be made of Miss lekyll, to whose
encouragement he owed much, and to whom is
due the decoration of his study at Oaklands.
The itinerary of the 1873-4 tour can be
followed in the Journal kept by his nephew,
55

BRABAZON
Mr. Harvey T. Brabazon Combe — Nice, Bologna,
Florence, Ancona, Brindisi, Alexandria, Egypt,
and back to MarseiUes via Naples. On his return
Brabazon occupied himself much with music, and
during the summer Blumenthal, Madame Loeser,
Carl Dickman, Mr. and Mrs. William Shakes
peare, Lady Edith Adeane, Mrs. Frewen, and
many others were constant visitors at Oaklands.
Those were great days. Eight hands on two
pianos would be going for hours, the floor of the
room would be littered with the scores of operas,
and then suddenly, when excited by the music,
Brabazon would rush out of doors to snatch a
sunset. If he had been successful, he would
break into a run as he came back across the
lawn, the afterglow of his emotion shining on his
face. Music and art! In each a happy set of
friends, each group pulling at him ; but art won.
From some musical programmes carefuUy
preserved, as is every scrap of writing pertaining
to him, I find that he was playing in concerts at
his chambers, 5, Pall MaU, in 1871, and at
Morpeth Terrace in 1872. There were days when
he would sit at the piano for six hours at a time.
Many have vivid and delightful memories of the
musical evenings at his flat in Morpeth Terrace,
with the supper laid in the hall, and the host always
the most eager in any discussion about art or music.
There one met Blumenthal, Paderewski, Emil
Sauer, Leonard Borwick, David Bispham, the
Shakespeares, Harvey Lionel Benson, Herbert
56

HIS LIFE
Thorndike, Major Layard, and troops of other
musical and artistic friends. One day he made
a sketch of London, under a wild sky, from the
window of his flat — a consummate impression.
In 1875 he sailed for India again, accompanied
by his nephew — a memorable tour. Always a
master of colour, the splendours of India under
the cloudless sky aroused him to enthusiasm, and
to the production of some of his most personal and
characteristic works. In such drawings as the
" Taj Mahal," and the " Mosque, Delhi," he is
feeling his way to the final expressions of his
vision — "The Pink Palace," and "Les Rochers
Rouges " of fifteen years later.
In 1879, at Brook HiU, County Mayo, Brabazon
first met Miss Lambert, who married his nephew,
Mr. Harvey T. Brabazon Combe, in 1882. In
1888 they settled at Oaklands, "to look after
things." His niece. Miss Combe, who had hitherto
lived at Oaklands, and who, to his great delight,
sometimes accompanied her uncle on his foreign
tours, was married this year to Baron von Roemer,
her Sussex neighbour.
The days passed happily. Summer and
autumn, Mrs. Harvey T. Brabazon Combe and
Brabazon would sketch together, accompanied in
after years by her children, and at other times
by a younger brother of her husband's, a man of
rare gifts, who died in early manhood. His death
was one of the griefs of Brabazon's later life.
57

BRABAZON
From this date onward he produced his finest
work, the water-colours of his highest achievement,
flushes of colour and atmosphere, form lingering
in Hght, his essential self to which he had been
working through all the kindly, fruitful years. I
think of Brabazon when I read that unforgettable
passage in Francis Thompson's " Essay on
SheUey " : " He stands in the lap of patient nature,
and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred
wilful fashions to see how she will look nicest in
his song."
" La fin d'une vie." He is now three-score
years and ten. It might seem that nothing more
could happen to this veteran artist, save to go on
to the peaceful end living his own beautiful Hfe,
expressing himself beautifully. But something
momentous, astonishing, did happen. Suddenly
he was discovered, hailed by high authorities as
the first of water-colour painters.
The story of the brilliant decHnation upward
of his life in old age reads like romance.

58

AN OLIVE ORCHARD BEHIND MENTONE
In the fossession of Fred Ziegler, Esq.

^-

HIS LIFE

IV.

Long before 1891 artist friends had praised
the work of Brabazon in superlatives, and his inti
mates urged him again and again to exhibit.
Such compliments gratified him exceedingly, but
he was shy of publicity.
At seventy years of age a man does not
willingly break the habits of a life-time. He might
never have done so had not his admirers of the
New EngUsh Art Club taken a decided step. In
November, 1891, proposed by Mr. Wilson Steer,
and seconded by Mr. Francis James, the Club
elected him a full member. If it had not been
for that election (it would have been ungracious
not to exhibit after such an honour), Brabazon
might never have made the plunge into publicity.
It was a very modest plunge : two drawings, " Lago
Maggiore " and "Venice," sent by him to the 1891
Winter Exhibition of the New EngUsh Art Club.
To the Summer Exhibition of the following year
he contributed " The Rigi " and " Malaga."
These four drawings increased the ardour of
his friends. Again he was urged to hold an
exhibition, among the most insistent being Mr.
J. J. Shannon, R.A., and Mr. D. S. MacCoU.
But Brabazon still shrank from the ordeal. It was
Mr. Sargent who finaUy overcame his reluctance
when lunching with him one day at Morpeth
59

BRABAZON
Terrace. The matter was pressed forward, and
it was arranged with Mr. D. Croal Thomson, then
Manager of the Goupil Gallery in New Bond
Street, that a Brabazon exhibition should be held
in December, 1892. On the eve of the opening,
horrified at the imminence of pubUcity, Brabazon
telegraphed from Oaklands his desire that the
exhibition should not be held. He " wired to stop
it." He was argued with by telegraph, and at
last was prevailed upon to withdraw his opposition.
I have already narrated in Chapter II. the
enthusiasm of appreciation that the exhibition
aroused — "dreams of ideal landscape beauty,"
"alive with the chemistry of light," "the greatest
master of water-colour at present to be found in
this country." Sargent, called away before
Brabazon appeared in the gallery, wrote upon his
visiting card, " A wonderful show." Alfred Hunt
was " immensely delighted," and communicated
his delight in a letter to Mrs. Fletcher, Brabazon's
friend. He said that it would give him the
greatest pleasure to make Brabazon " a member,
an honorary member, or anything he likes, con
nected with the Old Water-Colour Society."
Yes : Brabazon was famous, but it is said that
before his private view was over he had rushed off
to a recital by Emil Sauer.
Now, indeed, he had come into his kingdom
without seeking it. Henceforward the name of
Brabazon was magical in the advanced movement
in art. The wall or screen of water-colours at the
60

HIS LIFE
New English Art Club never lacked brilliant
examples by him. Another exhibition of seventy
drawings was held in 1894 ^t the Goupil Gallery
in Regent Street, under the control of Mr.
Marchant, a third in 1898 with ninety-five
examples, a fourth in 1 899 with seventy^five, which
included several Pastels, a medium in which he
had experimented before, but which he now took
up with avidity, producing in it some of his most
sensitive realisations. He was elected a member
of the Pastel Society, and contributed regularly to
their exhibitions.
In this St. Martin's summer of his Hfe, he
went each winter to Mentone and Nice, bringing
back dreams of colour. He was keen as ever,
rejoicing in the works of others as in his own,
fraternising with his fellows, taking the chair at
an annual supper of the New English Art Club,
visiting concert halls and picture galleries —
learning, learning, enjoying, enjoying. A drawing
by Mr. Arthur Severn, witty and now pathetic,
shows the old man, seated stiff and taut in an
exhibition, staring at Besnard's portrait of
" Madame Rejane," with these words beneath :
" B. cannot be got away from Besnard's ' Rejane.' "
But even his magnificent vitality and strength,
supported by an unconquerable spirit, must
decline. In 1904, when he was eighty-three, he
began to be conscious of the lethargy of age. He
gave up his flat in Morpeth Terrace, and became
practically a stay-at-home at Oaklands. He spent
61

BRABAZON
most of his time going through his portfolios,
signing his dravnngs, and helping his friend,
Mr. T. Pearce Jacomb, to make a rough catalogue
of them. He ceased to travel : his strength
decUned, and on May 17th, 1906, he passed
peacefully away. Let the simple end be told in
Mrs. Harvey T. Brabazon Combe's own words: —
" His religious life was as firm as it was
unostentatious. By my side, as I write in his
Music Room, are his large print Testament and
Church Service. From the latter I read him
the Litany, without the responses, the night
before he left us, and he said, in thanking me,
that he liked it better given in that way. He
had no last illness. The following morning
he did not get up owing to a feeling of faint-
ness, but several times asked to be moved to
the summer-house. At 1.40 p.m. I took his
valet's place beside his bed, and while sitting
there he passed away in his sleep.
" On a bright May day we laid his mortal
remains to rest in Sedlescombe Churchyard,
the last of his branch of his family. My
husband, to whom he bequeathed aU his worldly
possessions, has assiduously supported me in
making the Brabazon Art Museum at Sedles
combe worthy of his dear memory."

In November and December, 1906, a
" Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Hercules
62

ENTRANCE TO GRAND MOSQUE, DELHI

HIS LIFE
Brabazon Brabazon" was held at the Goupil
Gallery. The two hundred and thirteen numbers
illustrated the whole of his artistic career, from the
landscape made at Harrow when he was sixteen,
to examples of his finest period. In 1907 a Loan
Exhibition was opened at the Corporation Museum,
Hastings, under the auspices of the Hastings and
St. Leonards Museum Association, of which
Brabazon was for fifteen years Vice-President.
In 1908, he was represented by forty-five drawings
at the Spring Exhibition in the Public Art
Galleries, Brighton, and in 1909 a fifth exhibition
of his works was held at the Goupil Gallery.
Examples of his water-colours are in the following
public gaUeries: National Gallery of British Art,
the British Museum, Manchester, Dublin, Edin
burgh, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
A description of the Brabazon Art Museum at
Sedlescombe will be found in the next chapter.
There, as at Oaklands, memories cHng and linger
of this happy artist, who died young on a May day,
at the age qf eighty-six.

63

Chapter IV.

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE.
From Battle to Sedlescombe. — The Brabazon Art
Gallery. — ^A letter from Ruskin. — Brabazon on
Impressionism. — ^His work-room at Oaklands. —
His Commonplace or Education books. — Bra
bazon as art critic. — His interest in art literature.
— Memories by Emil Sauer. — ^Arthur Severn's
sketches of Brabazon intime. — His water-colours.
— Communications of loveliness. — The undimin
ished gladness of his vision of the beauty of the
world .

THE TAJ MAHAL, AGRA

Chapter IV.

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE.
I.
Sedlescombe, on a hill, his village, well tended,
beautifully preserved, is an easy drive from Battle
through rolling Sussex. High up, overlooking the
climbing red roofs of Sedlescombe, is the old half-
timbered house, " Brickwall," the ancient home of
the Sackvilles and Farndens in days when Sussex
was an iron country. At the foot of the hill stands
the Brabazon Art Gallery, once " a very early tithe
barn, no doubt used by Abbot Athelstan of Sedles
combe for the service of the Battle Abbey retainers
early in the sixteenth century."
This roomy tithe bam has been converted into
a Brabazon Gallery, the massive oak beams,
which loom out from the white walls, making a
severe yet suitable contrast to the ethereal water-
colours flashing forth their beauty. The visitor,
if he be a stranger to the work of Brabazon, is
astonished to find such loveliness in a remote
Sussex village : he lingers : he surveys with deHght
67

BRABAZON
the ten sections into which the water-colours are
grouped, and when he returns another day, perhaps
six months later, as he will, he is half glad, half
sorry to find that a different collection of Brabazons
meets his eyes. Like the Turners in the National
GaUery, they are changed periodically.
When I was there last my memory harboured
for long afterwards his impressions of Antibes,
of a fresh day at sea, of a sun-drenched day in
England, of Venice in a dozen moods, of Como,
of Karnac, and of flowers, such flowers — rhodo
dendrons, roses, zenias. Really, one is almost
surprised to find that they have no scent. This quiet
room — it is hardly more than a large room — is a
Brabazon shrine, dedicated to his memory.
Memorials of him abound there — letters, photo
graphs, books, missives in his own handwriting,
a Httle vase he was fond of painting; yes, it is a
Brabazon shrine. In an adjoining apartment is
a collection of Sussex iron and obsolete domestic
instruments, an apartment with a rush-strewn floor,
recreated from the pleasant part.
One of the treasures in the Brabazon Gallery
is a letter from Ruskin, dated Brantwood, June
22nd, 1885, in which Ruskin expresses his
" immense delight " that Brabazon is about to pay
him a visit.
Another interesting relic is Brabazon's reply to
an invitation from the Editor of the " Art Journal "
soliciting his opinion on certain statements on
Impressionism by Sir George Reid. Brabazon's
68

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE
reply, which I transcribe, was published in the
"Art Journal" for March, 1893:—
" I quite agree with Sir George Reid as to
the advice he gives to young artists in the early
stage of their studies, and that, without an
earnest and constant study, it is on their part
an 'impertinence' to imitate the clever
technique of the so-called Impressionists. Sir
George Reid seems to avoid a definition about
the meaning of that much discussed word
' Impressionism.' In its right and true sense,
Raphael is as much an Impressionist as Monet
or any of his school.
Paint your impressions ' was one of
Turner's favourite sayings. No doubt the
impressions of each individual must vary con
siderably, but it is only the true and great artist
whose impressions are beautiful, and who is
able, by constant and persevering study, to
communicate to the spectator that feeling of
deHght in the beauty he has himself so strongly
felt."As to his statement that " In its right and
true sense, Raphael is as much an Impressionist
as Monet," I feel a little bewildered. But the
last clause of the document is entirely true and
appropriate to Brabazon's art. From reading his
words, I turned to his work, to his communica
tions of beauty on the walls. They seemed to
have the power of utterance, to be saying, "It
69

BRABAZON
is only the true and great artist whose impressions
are beautiful, and who is able, by constant and
persevering study, to communicate to the spectator
that feeling of delight in the beauty he has him
self so strongly felt."
" The rest is silence." No ! The room was
very silent, but vnth such golden whispers, articu
late and continuing, there is no silence in death.

70

ISCHIA

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE

II.
The gates of the Park of Oaklands, " the little
Park in Sussex," lie near the Brabazon Art
Gallery, beyond the bridge that crosses the river
Brede on the outskirts of Sedlescombe. You
ascend by the winding drive, pausing as you climb
to watch the rising landscape, a joy to town-tired
eyes; you skirt the walled garden and the home
farm, and so reach the comfortable home planned
by Decimus Burton, and the grounds by Gilpin.
There is the terrace where Brabazon delighted to
sit and paint, the poplars in the corner that he
loved, the giant rhododendrons, a glorious mass
of colour in the spring, and, beyond, as far as the
eye can see, uplands and pasturage, farm houses
nestling in the folds of the hills, and the scattered
"blessed woods of Sussex." In his copy of Mr.
E. V. Lucas's " Highways and Byways in Sussex,"
he marked, with the double Hne of approval, an
extract from Kipling's Sussex poem: —
" God gave all men all earth to love,
But since man's heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground — in a fair ground —
Yea, Sussex by the sea ! "
71

BRABAZON
The Sedlescombe Art Gallery enshrines
Brabazon's art, but in his own room at Oaklands,
the Music Room as it has always been caUed, the
man himself, this unique artist who never had a
studio, who never used an easel, who never painted
an oil picture, is poignantly present. The room
is as he left it. The walls are covered with his
favourite examples of his own work. The book
cases are packed with volumes relating to art : he
bought every book on art of permanent value.
Shelves are filled with portfolios containing his
water-colours, and all available places are stacked
with his " Commonplace Books," piled on the
window seats, overflowing into the adjoining room.
Here only in this Music Room, order in disorder
such as he loved, can one really grasp the extent
of his absorption in art, apart altogether from his
practice of it. Literary men sometimes keep
Commonplace Books, but they usually tire of the
drudgery. Brabazon persevered in the task
throughout his Hfe, assiduously, enthusiastically.
There are nearly eighty of these Commonplace
Books, many of them over a foot square, which
should really be caUed Education Books, as they
are entirely composed of material that, in any way,
aided his education in art — photographs innumer
able ; sketches by himself of things that he wished
to remember ; art extracts interminable from books,
magazines, and newspapers; cuttings dating back
for years, relating not only to his own work, but
also to the productions of others in whom he was
72

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE
interested, dealing with art, music, and anything
that attracted him, often copied out in his own
handwriting, a record of persistent work that we
can imagine a George Augustus Sala, or a pro
fessional maker of books, undertaking, but not an
artist. The contents of these Education Books
are entirely objective. There is no hint of intro
spection, no personal record of ideals, dreams,
hopes, or regrets. Once only, I think, apart from
the four Diaries, is there a piece of original writing,
in the form of a short criticism of an exhibition of
Madame Bodichon's pictures at the Hastings
Museum, which was printed in the " St. Leonards
News." The criticism was pubUshed anony
mously, but Brabazon signed the cutting which is
pasted in Commonplace Book No. 23, so we may
infer that it was from his pen, Here, then, is
his first and last published art criticism : —
"Of all the elements which contribute to
the charm of a good picture, perhaps the one
which strikes the observer most in the late
Madame Bodichon's drawings is the element of
poetry; however humble, however common
place to ordinary eyes the subject may be, the
attention is rivetted, the artistic sense is
charmed by the poetic interpretation of it.
This tells us instinctively that no ordinary
artist is before us. Not so much the sunny
aspects we often but too rarely enjoy in our
uncertain climate, but the vdld tempestuous
weather, the wind rushing from the Atlantic,
73
10

BRABAZON
bearing heavy clouds and rain. These were
her deHght, and these she depicted with
admirable power. Her style was formed on
the old, grand, matchless school of David Cox,
De Wint, Prout, and William Hunt, artists
whom she knew personally, and who in their
early days loved and illustrated many scenes
in Hastings and its neighbourhood. With all
her feehng for colour and effect, Madame
Bodichon always retained an admirable purity
and dignity in her drawing, qualities which,
even amongst more accomplished artists, are
rarely to be found. Though resident many
years of her married life in Algeria, she returned
to her Sussex home with, if possible, increased
love for its beauty, and many of the quaint old
farmhouses and timbered cottages which
abound in the neighbourhood were often the
chosen subjects for her pencil, and she con
templated publishing an illustrated description
of them, a plan which she unfortunately did not
live to accomplish. Sussex has been painted
by many an admiring artist, but it may safely
be said that few have performed their task with
the accompHshed ease and earnest love which
we have the pleasure of having here displayed
in this selection of her works."
Throughout these Commonplace or Education
Books Brabazon records his triumphs and successes
as calmly as if he were making out a bill of lading,
as in the careful Hst he made of the various jewels
74

VENICE

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE
to which his water-colours have been compared in
newspaper articles. Following it is a list of
" Artists who possess drawings by H. B. B.," and
a jjassage wherein " H. B. B." is described as " a
painter for painters," as Spenser is "a poet for
poets." He transcribes a reference to " Brabazon's
inspired chromatic smears," and on the rare
occasions when he received a tepid or a captious
criticism it apparently amused him to accompany
the extract with a photograph of the writer.
Another of these Education Books is entirely
devoted to an account of Mariana, wife of
PhiUp IV. of Spain, in his own handwriting; in
another is a translation from the French of a
"Journal of a Voyage in Spain made in 1659";
elsewhere is a long extract from Prosper Merimee
called " Sunset on the Riviera " ; an interview
with Coquelin ; passages referring to the works of
Reynolds, Delacroix, Manet, Meunier, Bouguereau,
and du Maurier ; pages and pages of appreciations
of his own work, long and short. When anything
especiaUy pleased him he would underUne it ; this,
for example, from the " Saturday Review " : " Has
any Dutch water-colourist ever dreamed of colour
as it exists in a good Brabazon ? "
Many of the Books contain sketches by himself,
on the margins of which he would scrawl art
memorabilia, such as, " If they meant nothing else
they would still be deUcious" (Henley on Diaz).
" The painter must select" (" Edinburgh Review ").
" The best art is to suggest " (Hamerton). " There
75

BRABAZON
is a saying that the true artist is known by what
he omits " (Pater). " Music gives consolation in
sorrow, refreshes the heart, and gives peace to the
soul." On other pages the eye falls upon a series
of extracts from Ruskin on colour; some remarks
about Millais' "ChiU October"; a batch of
appreciations of Sargent's " Carnation, Lily, Lily
Rose " ; descriptions of Orvieto by John Addington
Symonds and of Calais by Ruskin ; an " inventory "
of a picture by Alma-Tadema; passages on
" Ravenna " and " The Taj " ; extracts from the
newspaper controversy on Degas' " L' Absinthe,"
followed by a reference to H. B. B. as " the colour
magician," and pages about music and the weather,
a subject which had an unending interest for him.
But these eighty Education Books are mainly
devoted to painting and music. Nothing of any
importance in the world of art, or rather in the art
world in which he was interested, escaped him.
With the hundreds of his own Interpretations of
the painters he loved, the volumes devoted to art,
the Education Books, there was justification in the
remark he was wont to make to eager students,
be sure with a twinkle in his eyes : " You needn't
go to galleries to study art. Come to my
room." I think the twinkle meant that the moment
nature called to him he would be out in the
sunshine, away from books, away from criticisms,
absorbed, rapt in reverie with his real teacher —
Nature.

76

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE

III.

" Come to my room ! " In spirit I Hke to fancy
the quick invitation, quickly accepted, "Come to
my room ! " I am there, seeing as vividly as if
he were still among the living, the very tall, very
thin, square-shouldered man, quick in movements,
active in body, so warm-hearted, so impulsive, so
hot in argument about art and music, so curiously
interested in the irrelevancies of life, so indifferent
to personal appearance, yet so distinguished, the
long arms and long legs as restless as the alert
brain — so beloved and so pleased to be beloved.
Before me is an array of letters he received at
various times, many of them acknowledgments of
kindnesses, or of gifts of water-colours ; others are
testimonies of admiration for the work of
musicians in whom he was interested. " We were
at the concert," writes one ; " the Chopin nocturne
was Hke one of your water-colours." Another
correspondent is "filled with amazed appreciation
and delight at the wonderful art of your friend,
Herr Emil Sauer."
In an article, one of the interesting series
caUed "In the Days of My Youth," that EmU
Sauer contributed to the journal called " M. A. P.,"
the distinguished pianist wrote : —
n

BRABAZON
" I owe much to London, and, above all,
do I owe it perhaps the greatest friendship of
my Ufe. ... I often wonder what would
have happened had I never met Brabazon.
. . . My meeting with him was the turning
point of my life. . . . He used to say that
I helped him in his art; I can return the
compliment with interest. Just as Rubinstein's
playing transformed my boyish nature, so
Brabazon's influence, his originality, his wide
and catholic sympathies, his all-embracing
knowledge of art in every form, acted upon me
in my adolescence. I am glad to think that I
in time was able to do something for my friend.
A profound lover of music, it was his great
ambition to meet and speak with Liszt, and
that desire was eventually gratified through
me. We went off on a delightful tour through
Spain and Italy, Brabazon painting, I playing,
and, when we came to Rome, the Princess
Witgenstein gave me a letter of introduction
to Liszt, whom we found at Weimar. That
was a memorable meeting. Liszt knew some
thing of my struggles, and how Brabazon had
lightened them, and he was very kind to my
friend, and I remember, when we came away,
the tccirs were in Brabazon's eyes, so moved
was he by at last meeting Liszt, and by his
reception." 78

THE WENGERN ALP

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE
Miss Betham Edwards, in a chapter devoted
to " Brabby " in her book " Friendly Faces,"
speaks of his eighty and odd years as " a perpetual
ecstasy. His mission in life was to imbibe and
dispense ideal beauty, to enforce, in so far as in
him lay, the great Aristotelian dictum that art
consists in capture of the beautiful."
Many have written about him, but nowhere do
we obtain such -vi-vid pictures of Brabazon intime,
his ways, his looks, his fun, as in the series of
rapid sketches in pen and pencil, humorous, high-
spirited, made by his friend, Arthur Severn, during
the years of their intimacy, unconsidered trifles,
but now precious, bringing very near to us the tall,
abrupt, eager man copying a Velasquez in a public
gallery surrounded by an astonished crowd ; march
ing away with six-foot strides after a croquet ball
that had been driven off the lawn at Oaklands ;
" ye usual evening argument " in the home circle,
Brabazon, with long arm outstretched towards the
ceiling, " arguing," while the ladies hang on his
words and the men doze ; a sketch showing him
seated at the piano in an hotel in Rouen with this
comment : " Empty salon ! good fire ! ! new piano ! ! !
lots of music ! ! ! ! H. B. B. at length ceases railing
at the bad weather outside " ; a sketch of H. B. B.
packing, the floor a litter, the artist on his knees
compelling the bulging trunk to close ; the artist
" dancing with delight on hearing that we can have
a better salon, a better piano, and a better fire."
Another sketch portrays pictorially Ruskin's gift of
79

BRABAZON
the Prout drawing. Written beneath is this ex
planation : " Just before leaving, the Prof. [Ruskin]
comes dancing forward with a Prout drawing, a
present for Brabazon, who advances with the
utmost eagerness to receive it " ; an accompanying
sketch shows the "desperate struggle inside the
omnibus to get first sight of the Prout drawing."
A delightful example of Brabazon and Ruskin
in lighter mood, a memory of the tour through
France in 1880, was supplied by Mr. Severn to
Mr. E. T. Cook, who prints it in his "Life of
Ruskin " :—
" Our Amiens landlady had introduced us
to a very nice old Frenchman, asking us all
into her private sitting-room to hear him play
the piano. But instead of his playing a solo,
he and Brabazon played a four-hand piece,
Brabazon with such vigour, and gradually
quickening the time, so that at last the French
man could stand it no longer, and, pushing
himself away from the piano, said, ' But, sir,
you are a master. I am only a coal merchant.
Bless me, how I sweat ! ' With that he mopped
his bald head, and, after a few minutes' rest,
they went at it again. But we all felt that
Brabazon had played him out. A little later,
when Ruskin was wrestling with modern
German music, he wrote to Mr. Severn, send
ing his 'love to Brabazon,' and saying 'what
larks ' it would be if he would only ' smash a
German man as he did the Amiens' one.' "
80

OAKLANDS AND SEDLESCOMBE
We are also shown in the Severn sketch-book
a pair of disorderly huge boots, described as " The
Brabic boot — method of lacing"; and, finally, a
wicker easy chair, broken and crumpled, as if it
had been through a siege, labelled " Drawing-room
chair — lately sat in by H. B. B." And here I may
quote a parody composed by Lionel Benson that
amused Brabazon hugely. He certainly was a
most "messy" painter: —
" Ride a cock-horse
To near Charing Cross,
To see Brabby copying Turner, of course,
With paint on his fingers,
And paint on his clothes,
He always makes messes wherever he goes."
The lighter moods of this " Original," as Emil
Sauer called him, pass before us in Severn's witty
sketches. I close the book in which they are
preserved, sadly. The frolics are erided. I close
the book and enter a room where two hundred of
his water-colours are gathered, mounted with noble
margins, showing them to full advantage. I pass
them in review wonderingly, with joy, ever
astonished at their range, their beauty, their colour,
now fragrant, now sombre, now piercing, now
ethereal, their never-failing communications. This
is immortality; that, when eyes are closed and
hands stiU, such loveHness should remain.
R. L. Stevenson, in a poem he wrote about one
8i

BRABAZON
who died young, had pity for the grief of those
who are left, but for him who was gone he rejoiced
that his was the undiminished gladness, the unde
caying glory, the undeparted dream. Brabazon
has passed from sight, but ours is still his vision of
the beauty of the world he saw and loved — the
undiminished gladness, the undecaying glory, the
undeparted dream.

82

THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE
In ihe -possession of Miss Vtckers.

Chapter V.

APPRECIATIONS OF THE ART OF
BRABAZON.
By John S. Sargent, R.A., Mr. D. S. MacColl, Sir
Claude Phillips, Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mr.
George Moore, the late R. A. M. Stevenson.

Chapter V.

APPRECIATIONS OF THE ART OF
BRABAZON.

I. By John S. Sargent, R.A.
(A Note to The Goupil Gallery Catalogue of the first
Brabazon Exhibition, December, 1892.)
The water-colour drawings of Mr. Brabazon are
now being shown for the first time at the instance
of the artists of his acquaintance, who have over
borne his prerogative as an amateur of withholding
them from general view. Their rare merit will be
their best advocate, and any introduction of them
by a member of the artistic profession is a formality
of significance only to their author, to whom
exhibiting is an adventure ; for distinctions are lost
when work attains a certain level. The exclusive
following of a personal inspiration is admitted to
be the condition of high professional work, and
with talent such as Mr. Brabazon's, this condition
has led to a degree of excellence only to be found
in work unhampered by adverse influences or
victorious over them.
85

BRABAZON
The gift of colour, together with an exquisite
sensitiveness to impressions of Nature, has here
been the constant incentive, and the immunity
from " picture "-making has gone far to keep
perception delicate and execution convincing.
Each sketch is a new deHght of harmony, and
the harmonies are innumerable and unexpected,
taken from Nature, or, rather, imposed by her.
Immediate sensations flower again in Mr. Braba
zon's drawings, with a swiftness that makes one
for the time forget that there has been a medium.
Those who look principally for suggestions of
Nature in pictures will be grateful, and if they try
to analyse, will wonder whether the word lyrical,
borrowed from other arts, would help to define a
certain kind of temperament.
A French artist, on seeing some of these
drawings, resumed in a word another secret of
their charm and of their power : " C'est la fin d'une
vie." Only after years of the contemplation of
Nature can the process of selection become so
sure an instinct ; and a handling so spontaneous
and so freed from the commonplaces of expression
is final mastery, the result of long artistic training.

86

SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE

APPRECIATIONS
II. By D. S. MacColl.
(From The Spectator, 1892, and The Saturday Review.')
" It is a common complaint that the English water-
colour art is neglected. It is ; it is sadly neglected
by Nature, who supplies few artists in that medium.
But one, it appears, has been in hiding this long
while ; and instead of the public neglecting him,
he has been neglecting the public. He is the best
water-colour painter we have had since Turner;
he reaches back to the days of Cox ; he has been
quietly perfecting his art since that date, and at
last condescends to let us see the result. This
strange course of action dubs him an amateur;
and he is an amateur in the sense that he has had
the good fortune to be able to pursue his art
undistracted by the need of selling or exhibiting.
The ordinary professional has neither the time nor
desire nor capacity to learn the art like this ; and if
a few more such amateurs were to be had, the
stigma in painting, as in other forms of sport,
would be on the professionals, and not on the
amateurs. " The vices of the amateur, as commonly con
ceived, are a small prettiness of imagination, a
timid niggling in execution, an incapacity to appre
hend any big relations of colour or form. But
there are the proud characteristics of professional
87

BRABAZON
EngUsh water-colour. Go to the Old Water-
Colour Society, and you wiU find that, with few
exceptions, its members understand by drawing
a faltering account of the edges of things, by colour
the wrong tints worried to death in the hope of
getting on terms with their neighbours, and as to
that element of painting that is half the battle — a
feeling for the delightful stuff they are using, its
natural action and pleasures and effects — they are
constrained by a mild, firm pedantry to do with the
paint everything but what it is disposed to do.
Nor is their sense for Nature less petty. It is
polite to suppose that when they set to work to
paint a scene, it is because they have been vaguely
stirred by some beautiful effect; but if so, they
have been unable to analyse to themselves wherein
it consisted ; a bird was singing, but has flown
away; a confused glory hangs about the place,
and they are at huge pains to bring home the bush.
" To pass from this to Mr. Brabazon — oh, the
peace and reUef of it! He has served a severe
apprenticeship to the masters of selection and
effect, as one or two translations here out of a
large coUection witness. Translations, not copies,
for in a study like the little figure from Velasquez
he deals with the material of a painting as freely
as with the material of Nature, and turns it from
the language of the original into that of another
medium with a creative tact. He has gathered
from Turner the hints that extraordinary genius
flung out of a technique partly transparent, partly
88

APPRECIATIONS
opaque, embracing the full range of resource in
the medium, and adapted to express by its speed
and suggestiveness the most fleeting actions and
exquisite surprises of colour. These he has
developed, and uses his method with a bravery
and certainty of attack, and a freshness of result,
that are unsurpassed. He has ceased long ago to
see in terms of brown ; his notation is in pure
colour. And if his handling is certain and delicate,
his imagination, his knowledge of what he wants
from a scene, is no less so. There is a cry and
passion in the recognition, there is no possible
doubt. Sketch after sketch says. How beautiful
this was! and this! and this! and we echo the
exclamation, because it is. Look at that note of
admiration, the little sketch of the Piazzetta; was
ever effect more clearly understood and simply
rendered? Or, take the interior of St. Mark's.
This has been painted often enough, and once
more it is polite to suppose that the painters, on
entering, felt the picture — this great cave of a
place, with its purple and golden gloom — and
green lights spilt about columns and floor. But
they sit down and work at it, and forget; and the
picture goes ; they get all of the marble and mosaic
but the glister, all of the architecture but the
colour, all of the facts but the effect. Mr.
Brabazon has grasped the essential secrets of the
place. Take a point. There is a certain screen
in front of the sanctuary which is heavy and
ungainly in form, and which therefore the common
89

BRABAZON
fool of painting elaborates unsparingly. Mr.
Brabazon, in mercy, restrains the thing, lets it
speak its beautiful note of colour, but not maunder
about its shape. So, in another case, when the
ordinary man would have been losing the precious
moments in counting windows or measuring bricks,
this painter was noting the blaze of pink light on
a palace-front, and the bewildered dance of colours
in the canal; and to get these true between the
shadow and the sky is a more difficult kind of
measurement. " Then there is the pile of red and grey houses
above a campo and a bridge, an astonishingly fine
composition of forms and colours ; there is the
milky opal of a Taj, the white and blue and red
of the Capri market-place, a moonrise, hitting the
precarious, trembling colour of the hour, a lake
with white clouds at anchor, and the light growing
upon the road before the eyes, a pergola terrace
with sunshine glowing on the plaster and glistening
on distant white roofs, and a dozen other lessons
how to see. The amusing thing is that the niggler
will treat these pictures as slight sketches, which
anyone could do if he chose to be so slight, being
under the pleasing illusion that, buried under
his ' finished ' work, at some early stage, lies a
Brabazon. In this he flatters himself. It is Hke
supposing that a hasty draft of a page of ' Brad-
shaw' would be the same thing as an impromptu
poem. The only quaUty they have in common
is that they are impromptus. The niggler can
90

APPRECIATIONS
readily, if he pleases, become a dauber, but he
cannot, by his mere effort of carelessness, become
a Brabazon." — (From "The Spectator.") . . .
" He is the enthusiast who does dare to live in
Turner's last light, who keeps a traveUer's journal
of colour all but disembodied. Here we have not
the draughtsman who found master Unes to express
the swelling of a hillside, or the spring and drop
of branches; we have structure suggested by
splotches of Hght and shadow, by its colour-ghost.
For once in a way appears an amateur with a gift,
one who takes his pleasure unconstrained in a
corner of the art, and who, among a host of notes
and souvenirs almost too slight for any but the
man who made them, catches every now and then,
and conveys to us with the desperate technique
of the moment the thing lasts, an Italian town
transfigured by the evening flush and its strange
attendant greys. While another would be mark
ing out his ground plan, he tumbles up enough
of a town and bay to note the rare essential fact
upon, and often by his feverish snatch at the place
traps its image more convincingly than the man
whose method of work is to draw all that he would
not otherwise notice." — (From " The Saturday
Review.")

91

BRABAZON
III. By Sir Claude Phillips.
(From The Daily Telegraph, December, 1905.)
" Mr. Brabazon furnishes among moderns a
striking and indeed unique example of the artist
who only in old age has attained to complete
success and a perfect mastery of his medium.
Other painters, passing laboriously through succes
sive stages, and achieving a certain degree of
excellence in each, have, it is true, exhibited in
the last phases of their career the greatest measure
of technical accompHshment and possession of self.
But here is an artist who, remaining an inconsider
able amateur throughout the prime of life,
suddenly blossoms out, only in the fullest maturity,
into an Impressionist of the rarest and most
exquisite — one, indeed, sui generis, and owing
little or nothing to foreign example. The inter
mediate stages — the stages of the chrysalis that
is to burst forth the myriad-hued butterfly, flutter
ing between heaven and earth — these are to be
traced in one or two only of the drawings now
exhibited. It would, however, be rash to conclude
that Mr., Brabazon has wholly escaped the patient
drudgery that generally precedes the spontaneity
of absolute effortless accomplishment. In his best
'impressions' he succeeds in giving, not so much
the essential structure, or the, from a terrestrial
92

APPRECIATIONS
point of view, vital elements of a scene, as its
vesture of light, air, and beauty — as a kind of
celestial music of colour-harmony that he draws
forth from it. The eye is gladdened with these
exquisite, ephemeral moments of beauty that pass
but leave their indefinable impress on the soul. A
spiritual joy, pure, ethereal, unalloyed by that
pessimistic sadness which adds so much of poig
nant beauty and tragic significance to modern
landscape, is the result. It is a subtle, chromatic
music, not perceptible to all eyes, or all ears, but
of a rare and soothing beauty to those who can
perceive it, who are willing to submit themselves
to its spells. Mr. Brabazon's art is a kind of
Ariel — ^as elusive, as indefinable by the ordinary
methods of criticism, but as rare in diaphanous
charm and delicate super-sensuous, appeal.
" It is amusing enough to see how, in the
studies after the old masters, the artist feminizes —
in an attractive way of his own — the virility of
Velasquez in the ' Innocent X.,' and of Rembrandt
in one of his own portraits ; how he translates or
transmutes the sunset gold of Cuyp into a glow
less vivid and vibrating and less earthly. But it
is Turner — the potent magician of the third
manner — ^to whom Mr. Brabazon feels himself
nearest akin, and to whose elusive beauties, with
out mechanical imitation, he most nearly ap
proaches. No better proof of this contention of
ours could be desired than the diaphanous ' Rigi :
Evening.' The singularly beautiful ' Lake of
93

BRABAZON
Lucerne,' though it might be described as
Turneresque, is, all the same, in its summing up
of Hght and loveHness, essentially Mr. Brabazon's
own. Here the design, though it is purposely
veiled and deprived of all obtrusive decision of
contour, has an authority which is but rarely in
the same measure a feature of this artist's work.
Very interesting studies of luminous greyness in
different gradations are the ' Old Bridge in Light
— ^Avignon,' and ' Old Bridge in Shadow —
Avignon.' Authoritative again, and singular
among its feUows in sobriety of tone, is the
' Gateway in the Vatican Gardens, Rome.' Among
the finest illustrations of the artist's subtlety of
vision and his feeling for spiritual in terrestrial
beauty are the studies of Venice ; and notably
the ' Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice,' the
' Canal, Venice,' and the ' Near the Church of the
Jesuits, Venice.'
" It is interesting to compare these seeming-
slight yet comprehensive impressions with the
Venetian studies of Mr. J. S. Sargent, who first
by his enthusiastic admiration brought Mr.
Brabazon into prominence, and with characteristic
generosity did so much for his artistic glory. The
former has, of course, an infinitely greater brush-
power, an infinitely greater vigour, a higher
authority in composition; he makes a stronger
appeal to the eye of the everyday mortal, and
reminds him much more convincingly, though, no
doubt en mieux, of what he has himself seen.
94

AN INTERPRETATION OF TURNER'S " SAN
BENEDETTO : LOOKING TOWARDS FUSINA."
In ihe ¦possession of Miss Vickers.

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APPRECIATIONS
Mr. Brabazon's 'Venice,' in its sHghtness, gives
more of her immortal dower of beauty, more of
the spirit that still underUes her sadness and
decay, more of the magic that none but the spiritual
vision can perceive and evoke. The productions
of the more famous painter are so much magni
ficent, stimulating prose, weU calculated to bring
us to our senses and show things with their obvious
everyday beauty. But no : we prefer to remain
unawakened, to continue subject to the glamour
that a Turner, most potent enchanter, casts over
us ; or even to joy in the short glimpses of radiant
aerial beauty that a Brabazon can give. The fact,
the existence of which is patent to all, with what
authority soever it be stated, remains just fact,
and no more. The fancy that we may be led to
see with the mind's eye, if only there be one whose
magic touch may lift, without rending the veil, is
often the higher truth, that truth which, but for
the ' muddy vesture of decay ' we should see less
dim, less doubtful than we do."

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BRABAZON

IV. By Sir Frederick Wedmore.
(From " An Essay on Brabazon " and The Standard.)
" He had the eye of a g^eat colourist. He had
acquired subtlety and fearlessness. He had loved
and noticed — ^and now it was found he had
recorded — some of the most beautiful things in
Nature, and in Art he had had the good fortune
and the common-sense to care for Tintoretto and
Velasquez, for Turner and De Wint. The result
was, we were confronted with a series of sketches
in which the artist's hold upon the effects intended
to be secured was quite exceptionally firm —
sketches in which, free always from the suspicion
of commercial picture-making, that which was
curiously vivid stood by the side of that which
was exquisitely dreamy. There was not percep
tible any tendency to succeed less well with one
class of subject than with another, save that where,
broadly speaking. Form was and Colour was not,
Brabazon was deprived of that which he rendered
the best. But then, where Form was only, or
where the interest of the theme lay in Form alone,
there, it might pretty safely be said, his instinct
would never take him." — (From "An Essay on
Brabazon.")
96

APPRECIATIONS
" The poetry of the art of Brabazon is the
poetry of colour and the poetry of atmosphere.
. . . This singularly keen observer of all
beautiful things seems concerned mainly, of course,
not in building up pictures, but in arresting, and
making to endure, the transient vision, the happy
moment of his choice." — (From " The Standard.")

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BRABAZON
V. By George Moore.
(From The Speaker, December, 1892, reprinted in Modern Painting.)
" Mr. Brabazon is described as an amateur, and
the epithet is marvellously appropriate ; no one —
not even the great masters — deserved it better.
The love of a long life is in those water-colours —
they are all love ; out of love they have grown,
in its Hght they have flourished, and they have been
made lovely with love.
" In a time of slushy David Coxes, Mr.
Brabazon's eyes were strangely his own. Even
then he saw Nature hardly explained at all — films
of flowing colour transparent as rose leaves, the
lake's blue, and the white clouds curling above
the line of hills — a sense of colour and a sense of
distance, that was all, and he had the genius to
remain within the limitations of his nature. And,
with the persistency of true genius, Mr. Brabazon
painted, with a flowing brush, rose-leaf water-
colours, unmindful of the long indifference of two
generations, until it happened that the present
generation, with its love of slight things, came
upon this undiscovered genius. It has hailed him
as master, and has dragged him into the popularity
of a special exhibition of his work at the Goupil
Galleries. And it was inevitable that the present
young men should discover Mr. Brabazon : for in
98

AN INTERPRETATION OF GUARDI'S " SANTA
MARIA DELLA SALUTE."
In ihe fossession of R. G. Tatton, Esq.

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13

APPRECIATIONS
discovering him they were discovering themselves
— his art is no more than a curious anticipation of
the artistic ideal of to-day.
" The sketch he exhibits at the New EngUsh
Art Club is a singularly beautiful tint of rose,
spread with delicate grace over the paper. A little
less, and there would be nothing; but a Uttle
beauty has always seemed to me preferable to a
great deal of ugliness. And what is true about
one is true about nearly all his drawings. We
find in them always an harmonious colour contrast,
and very rarely anything more. Sometimes there
are those evanescent gradations of colour which
are the lordship and signature of the colourist,
and when le ton local is carried through the
picture, through the deepest shadows as through
the highest lights, when we find it persisting every
where, as we do in ' Lake Maggiore,' we feel in
our souls the joy that comes of perfect beauty.
But too frequently Mr. Brabazon's colour is
restricted to an effective contrast; he often skips
a great many notes, touching the extremes of the
octave with certainty and with grace.
" But it is right that we should make a little
fuss over Mr. Brabazon ; for though this work is
slight, it is an accomplishment — he has indubitably
achieved a something, however little that some
thing may be ; and when art is disappearing in the
destroying waters of civilisation, we may catch at
straws. Beyond colour — and even in colour his
limitations are marked — Mr. Brabazon cannot go.
99

BRABAZON
He entered St. Mark's, and of the deUcacy of
ornjimentation, of the balance of the architecture,
he saw nothing — neither the tracery of carven
column nor the aerial perspective of the groined
arches. It was his genius not to see these things
— to leave out the drawing is better than to fumble
with it, and all his life he has done this; and
though we may say that a water-colour with the
drawing left out is a very slight thing, we cannot
fail to perceive that these sketches, though less
than sonnets or baUades, or even rondeaus or
rondels — at most they are triolets — are akin to the
masters, however distant the relationship."

lOO

APPRECIATIONS
VI. By Late R. A. M. Stevenson.
(From the Pall Mall Gazette, November, 1894, and December, 1898.)
" Mr. Brabazon's art proves that with genius you
need not be able to do everything in order to do
something supremely weU. This success of his,
however, offers little comfort to the ordinary
professional artist. He must live while he
improves, and to do so must undertake commis
sions, please purchasers, and strive to catch the
buyer's eye in crowded exhibitions. He dare not
neglect many kinds of study, whether they are or
are not of service to his art. Seldom can he wait,
like Corot, till he grows old and great before
pleasing the public. Mr. Brabazon has been able
to do this, and he has scored an artistic triumph
in the one game of sketching. If you want to
know the charm of a real sketch, of a note snatched
from Nature, but snatched with the art that has
been matured by the practice of a lifetime, go to
a collection of his pictures. These are not the
neat little pictures that come of a Hfe given to
timid consultation of the public fancy, and to still
more timid copying of successful painters. Had
Mr. Brabazon given his time to making sham,
large, finished oil pictures, historical, religious,
mythic, without the necessary learning, training,
and perhaps gifts, he might have sooner imposed
IOI

BRABAZON
on the public, yet never succeeded in doing any
thing admirable and unique of its kind. Now,
these sketches of his express no more than it
amused or interested him to express ; if you have
never seen and noted similar qualities in Nature
you must turn away, since Mr. Brabazon makes
no attempt to reconcile the rendering of his own
personal impression with a sort of exoteric prose
description of all the siUy things which any fool
might contrive to see in Nature. . . .
" He works entirely for himself, dispensing with
qualities that complete a picture for other people.
He contents himself with rendering the beauty he
felt, where a more general completion would
hamper the expression of that beauty. Mr.
Brabazon sometimes conveys a more poignant
sensation of certain colour harmonies than any
other painter. For the sake of such a quality in
colour it is worth anyone's while to accustom
himself to the loss of the usual make-weight extras
of fuller expression, and to learn to understand
Mr. Brabazon's shorthand record of the facts
essential to his scheme. When he gives you blank
paper scarce covered with a broad soft blotting,
only half touched with a loose drag, or spotted
here and there with a broad splash or two of colour,
he never gives you papery tone or the flimsy
spotty effect of Turner's later water-colours. He
trusts not to firm drawing, to careful local colour,
or to a well-planted detail, but to a depth of air,
to richness of quaUty, and to a big value or two
I02

APPRECIATIONS
for each picture. ' In Venice ' is slight enough,
but the dome swims in air sufficiently rounded,
the shadows place themselves at their due distance,
and the turquoise sky, a slight drag of paint,
palpitates with airy depths. Usually his sketches,
however slender, show taste and thought in the
general arrangement, in the use of blank paper,
in the effect of the handling. One or two, how
ever, by an extravagance of method, by a violent
value, attract an astonished attention to the work
manship, and distract us somewhat from the
essential beauty. . . . This master of gentle
ness and richness — this enchanter who can juggle
with the form and firmness of things, and yet
charm our regard and win our respectful admira
tion. . . . His stately blots, ' Road on the
Riviera,' or ' Old Houses at Alassio,' immense
and suggestive, are not so much like poems as
like the august and felicitous lines that say more
than a thousand laboured passages of careful
prose."

103