Francis James

Francis James by Frederick Wedmore

Frederick Wedmore's essay assesses the water-colour artist Francis James, treating his drawings as the only true evidence of the man, since no biographer has yet fixed his birthplace or years. Wedmore notes James works exclusively in water-colour, with no oils, pencil studies, etchings, lithographs, or silver point to his name, and that colour is the essence of everything he does. Wedmore defends James against the charge of being a mere amateur. As a country gentleman with modest private means, James never had to train for a profession, but Wedmore argues that what makes an artist professional is the seriousness of spirit brought to the work, not need for money, citing Méryon, W. W. May, Robert Goff, and Seymour Haden as other men of means or other careers who were nonetheless serious artists. James's art began, Wedmore supposes, from his own delight in flowers seen in their natural settings through every season. His method shows the early influence of Dewint, then of modern French practice, and especially of his Sussex neighbour, the Impressionist H. B. Brabazon, whose spare, exact "blobs" of colour left their mark, though James's work shows more deliberate draughtsmanship than Brabazon's. Beyond flowers, James has made a distinct subject of church interiors seen in clear light, valued less for architecture than for colour and incidental detail: altar ornaments, a saint's wreath of flowers, heraldic glass recalling Nuremberg, altar cushions, confessional curtains. At Nuremberg he painted the Kaiser Kapelle and St. Sebald; at Rothenburg he studied statues, traceried walls, and altar plate, and also turned to humbler subjects like a tradesman's window-sill with fuchsia and geranium. He has likewise painted provincial English scenes, such as the grocer's shop and Mr. Bryan's bookshop at Bewdley, and landscapes like "Autumn, Asolo" and other Lombard, Venetian, and Alpine views. Wedmore returns to flowers as James's truest subject, noting the inevitable but only partial influence of Japanese art on his freedom of treatment, visible in pale trailing roses but less so in his bolder massed arrangements, such as a full posy in a tumbler. He compares James favourably to the eighteenth-century flower painter Van Huysum, known through oils, Earlom's mezzotints, and water-colour sketches at the British Museum, arguing James's flowers capture living vigour rather than imitated accident, as in a described primula with mauveish reds and rich green leaves. Wedmore calls James universal in his floral attachments, loyal to no single bloom, moving from primula to tulip, rose, pelargonium, and orchid. He recounts how James, ruthless with his own failures, destroyed many drawings, especially during a prolonged effort at Sanders' nursery in St. Albans to master the orchid, a subject Wedmore notes is uneven in beauty and unfamiliar in its intricacy to the public, making it one notable but not central episode in a career Wedmore judges full of individuality, distinction, and charm.

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1899 · Genre: Art Criticism, Essay, Biographical Essay · 2,887 words

First lines

I leave to a biographer in the Future the task of recording Mr. Francis James's birthplace and of settling the number of his years; of saying, too, where he chiefly lived and chiefly practised. I am concerned with his drawings, and not with the man, except in so far as his drawings must reveal him; and the real man, and not the outside facts about him, a man's work does always to some extent reveal. In the case of Francis James, his work is his water-colours. I know no oil painting by him. I remember no pencil studies. I know no etchings by him, no lithographs by him. And, moreover, modern man though he is, he seems to be able to express himself without the assistance of silver point -- the interesting and difficult medium, the employment of which threatens to become a label of the cultivated. His own work in water-colour is as direct, immediate, uncorrectable as that; but colour is of the very essence of it. Whatever he tackles, whatever he elects to let alone, Francis James is essentially a colourist.

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water-colour painting · flower painting · art criticism · artistic professionalism · impressionism · color and light · botanical art · church interiors · landscape painting · water-colour technique · orchids · artistic vision

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