ABSTRACT
The Herkomer school produced no great artists. Neither did the Kensington schools or the Royal Academy. The methods of teaching probably had little to do with this. We only have to read Vasari or Cellini to realise that far more eccentric systems prevailed during the Renaissance. The fact is that by 1914, when Herkomer died, the social and cultural importance of oil painting, if not the expression of significant ideas through the medium of oil paint, was virtually at an end. The popular, comprehensible painting never succeeded in finding a deeper purpose. Most of these artist-writers were aware of the problem and troubled by it. As can be seen, their expectations about painting were derived from earlier ages, as were their systems of art teaching. The possible inappropriateness of these to nineteenth-century conditions also worried them; but almost without exception, they blamed their own age for the resultant problems and turned their backs on it. This, of course, only exacerbated the difficulty. But it is quite understandable. The Industrial Revolution was ugly. It was also unprecedented and had led to immense social turmoil. The world of art must have seemed to offer at least an escape, at most a set of values cemented together in better times. Thus, to accept that art was nothing more than accurate renditions of reality (as Pre-Raphaelitism seemed), or the catching on canvas of passing moments (as Impressionism suggested) or the exposition of sordid contemporary life (as French Realism suggested): all these options were met with varying degrees of resistance, because to the traditionalists they were all betrayals of the greater purpose of art. They all held within them a whiff of nihilism; of art being driven into pointless or meaningless cul-de-sacs. In this much, perhaps the traditionalists were right. But they themselves had no firm ground to stand on, no satisfactory alternatives. What use was it for Poynter, Leighton, Armitage, O’Neil and the rest to proclaim something which they could not themselves deliver? Moreover, as teachers, they were in a double bind, since they all admit that the subject cannot really be taught, and that, as Reynolds had said a century earlier, if genius could be taught by rules it would no longer be genius.
