Modern Painting — A Closer Reading

Whistler as a Psychological Puzzle

Moore’s treatment of Whistler is less about technique than about temperament. He confesses that for years Whistler’s character was “incomprehensible” to him, containing elements “so antagonistic, so mutually destructive” that he could not fit the painter into any psychological law. Only with study did the discordant traits become “harmonious and inevitable.” This approach is revealing: Moore reads the art through the artist’s personality, and vice versa. He compares the difficulty of understanding Whistler to deciphering “a newly-discovered Greek text, without punctuation or capital letters.”

The essay does not offer a systematic analysis of Whistler’s paintings. Instead, Moore focuses on the apparent contradiction between the painter who could produce portraits “only just falling short” of Velasquez and Hals, and the man who would “lay down his palette and run to a newspaper office to polish the tail of an epigram” against a critic. For Moore, this duality is not a flaw but the key to Whistler’s art.

The Anatomy of a Bad Purchase

In a later chapter, Moore invents a character—Mr. Smith, a City businessman—to illustrate how mediocre art enters private collections. At a dinner party, Smith sees a painting by Mr. Leader: a village in silhouette against a sunset. The scene triggers sentimental memories of courting “the eldest Miss Jones,” and Smith resolves to buy a Leader himself. Moore’s description is deliberately crude: the painting is “a magnified Christmas card,” the trees look like “treacle,” the sky like “rich cream.” But Smith, who has “money-grubbed for five-and-twenty years,” cannot see the technical faults.

Moore traces the chain reaction: “Smith buys a Leader, and the Leader begets a Long, the Long begets a Fildes, the Fildes begets a Dicksee, the Dicksee begets a Herkomer.” The passage is a satire of the art market, where one bad purchase leads to another, and the collector’s taste ossifies. Moore predicts that when Smith’s collection is sold at auction, it will fetch “about a fourth of the price that was paid.”

The Educated Eye vs. Popular Sentiment

Throughout the excerpts, Moore contrasts the trained eye with the untutored taste of the public. He notes that “technical achievement” is “that mysterious something, different in every artist, taking a thousand forms, and yet always recognisable to the educated eye.” The young girl who has studied drawing for six months at South Kensington can see what Smith cannot: the “thin drawing” and “feeble handling” of a Leader painting. But Smith, drunk on wine and nostalgia, buys anyway.

Moore’s critique extends to the Royal Academicians who cater to popular sentiment. He describes their works as “vulgarly painted sunsets, vulgarly painted doctors, vulgarly painted babies.” The repetition of “vulgarly” underscores his contempt. Yet Moore does not claim that all popular art is bad; rather, he objects to the mechanism by which commercial success reinforces mediocrity. The passage is a sharp reminder that Moore’s essays are not neutral surveys but polemics aimed at reforming taste.

Structure and Sequence of the Essays

The table of contents reveals a deliberate arc. After the opening essay on Whistler, Moore moves to “Chavannes, Millet, and Manet,” then to “The Failure of the Nineteenth Century” and “Artistic Education in France and England.” Later chapters address specific artists (Monet, Sisley, Pissarro), institutions (the Academy, the New English Art Club), and themes (nationality, sex, religion in art). The final notes include brief pieces on Mr. Mark Fisher, a portrait by Mr. Sargent, and an orchid by Mr. James.

Moore’s preface states that the chapters were originally published separately in The Speaker and are now “reprinted in the sequence originally intended.” This suggests that the order matters: the book is not a random collection but a structured argument. Readers may benefit from following the sequence, as earlier essays establish principles that later ones apply to specific cases.

Moore’s voice is that of a critic who expects to be disagreed with. He does not pretend to objectivity; his judgments are personal, his prose often sardonic. Readers should approach Modern Painting as a series of provocations rather than a definitive history. The essays reward attention to Moore’s recurring concerns—the psychology of the artist, the corruption of the market, the gap between popular and educated taste—and to the specific observations he makes about individual works. The book is best read slowly, one essay at a time, allowing Moore’s arguments to accumulate.

Reading George Moore’s sharp, intimate dissections of Whistler, I was suddenly back in my grandfather’s study, the smell of pipe smoke and old paper. He’d lend me his worn copy of Modern Painters, Volume 1 (of 5) — Background and Themes, and we’d argue about Ruskin’s dogmatism. There’s a similar feeling here — that quiet, delighted squabble over what art truly means, held across a decade.