What Pictures To Buy

( Originally Published 1913 )

I suppose there are few professed collectors of other things who do not go in for a picture now and then, preferably an old one, in water-colour, in pastels, or in oil. You may swear by porcelain, books, Wedgwood, furniture, lustre-ware, lace, miniatures, brasses, enamels, paste, embroideries, rococo jewels, silhouettes, book-plates, cameos, ivories, spoons, snuff-boxes, nutmeg-graters, costumes, glass, stay-busks, pinchbeck, chap-books, watch-cocks, tankards, harness-amulets, coins, armour, medals, bronzes, or what not, but you still have the upper part of the wall-paper in your rooms to adorn.

People who collect mezzotints, colour-prints, etchings, aquatints, Baxters, stipple-prints, copper-plates, glass-pictures, and so forth, may hang the walls with their larger treasures, and not need to buy an oilpainting, a water-colour drawing, or a crayon-sketch at all. But for the rest of us the question "What pictures to buy ?" is imperative; and by the word "pictures" I here mean not oil-paintings only, but water-colours and pastels, too.

The Possibilities Still. I think it is good to be catholic in picture-buying. I am sure it is good to purchase pictures when you come across them casually, rather than to go hunting for them specially, and buying them all at once. The chances of casually coming upon a treasure of a picture are still numerous, if you possess the seeing eye and the knowing lore. There is a man-not myself, alas!-who, within the last two years, motoring through a village in wild Wales, found in the same little shop a perfectly lovely Carlo Dolci, and a Lely, with two late Serves vases, on sale for less than L25 in all. The vases alone are worth the money.By the side of that taken chance, other "finds" may well look meagre-and note that the purchaser in this case was not a collector, but a business man, who thought, and rightly, that he knew value for cash when he saw it, even in an unfamiliar "line." But when I look around a room I know, I am almost surprised to see what, in the course of only a few years, a wandering collector with alert eyes, some taste, and a fair knowledge of schools of painting and artists' styles, can do with a slender purse. I see on the walls of that room an Etty, an Opie, a likely Morland, a Stark, two Varleys, a Bright, a Kneller, a de Hooge, a Pothoven, a Carlo Maratti, a Nash, a Taverner, a Madox Brown, a Pyne seapiece, a group of boors that may be by Ostade, and a sketch of cattle that Troyon may have done; and only one of them cost more than three pounds. Most of them cost less than two. No doubt some money has since been spent on each in restoring, varnishing, mounting, stretching, or framing, and many of them are smallish or small. But what does that matter? In these days of flats, bungalows, and small villas big pictures cannot well be hung. Some of them, too, are sketches, I know, but what then? A fine painter was often at his best in a sketch.

Buying Sketches. Out of every artist's studio go numberless unfinished essays, sketches, and "bits," that often are bits of pure delight. They are going out of studios to-day, "unconsidered trifles" by painters who will be famous a generation hence. If you have the flair and the patience you may collect such "bits." They will afford an exercise for taste in mounting and framing so as to make the best of them; but, how do you suppose most of the countless water-colours kept at the Print Room, British Museum, and in the Victoria and Albert Museum were first got together? By contemporary collectors who picked up bits by contemporary brushes in the way I describe.

To do the same thing to-day one must know whose "bits" to acquire. If you cannot afford to buy off an exhibition wall a Brangwyn, an Orpen, an East, a Clausen, and so on (not to say a Sargent), you can study them in the exhibitions, and thus learn to recognise a chip from those workshops, so to speak.

You can study the illustrated books and periodicals which tell about the best pictures being painted in England and Scotland to-day. New or old, there are sketches and bits on mill-board, paper, or canvas to be found by tireless seekers yet; and these, I think, for people with more taste than spare five-pound notes, are the kind of pictures to buy.