France & Impressionism
While England was revelling in the realism, and sometimes super­realism, of genre painting, France was still feeling the effects of the grand academic painters David and Ingres. But there was a new school of thought coming into being among many others, which grew to be called Impressionism.
 
It was a revolutionary movement designed to defy and overthrow the academic traditions of their age.
The foundations were laid around 1860 when a group of young artists, living and studying in Paris joined together informally to find new forms and new approaches in painting.
 
They were far less concerned with a particular style of painting than with a communal attitude towards certain fundamental problems such as light and colour. When a group of these artists, including Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cezanne gave their first exhibition in 1874 as a marked defiance of the official Salon, their still academic contemporaries called them 'anarchistic lunatics, intoxicated lunatics'.
 
In their painting styles and techniques, they were totally different, but in their re-discovery of light as directness of colour; not to mention their determination to fight against all formalism and academic rules, they were completely united. Impressionism was far from being the only art in France in the late eighteen hundreds, in fact it was only a fringe activity, but it is frequently thought of as being so because it had such a strong and lasting effect once it was finally accepted.
 
In overthrowing the old it created and established a new tradition. When English painters wanted to undergo a similar revolution, it was surprisingly not the true Impressionist movement which first attracted their loyalties. The popularity of Bastien-Lepage with the young English painters must have given pain to the French Impressionists, who were already watching the man, and other 'pseudo-Impressionists' who knew how to please the tastes of all the 'right people', filling up the museums with their work. In fact the gulf between English and French art which had been so apparent at the Exposition Universalle of 1855, became even greater.
 
In the late nineteenth century, most certainly helped along by this virtual cold shouldering of the Impressionists, and together with the display of Continental painting in the increasing dealers' colony in Bond Street, it served only to reinforce the insularity of British art and its determined progress to go along its own lines. Ultimately, the sense of divergence between the intentions and quality of the two traditions became so great that the new generation of painters who had been labelled the 'wild young men' when they went to study at Julien's and other academies in France, found it necessary to escape from the official courses of development in order to find a new freedom in their painting.
 
James Charles, along with John Singer Sargent, Wilson Steer, Arthur Hacker, Greiffenhagen, Tuke, Bramley and Charles' two close friends La Thangue and Stanhope Forbes, followed this movement which lead to the formation in 1886 of the New English Art Club, which held its first exhibition in that year.
 
Although this show contained work by artists who are not now considered to have been the Avant Garde of their time, they instilled a sense of shock among the more conservative members of the patrons and dealers. It was the original intention that the group should run as a traditional organisation and hold its first exhibition under the blessing of an established dealer; a one Mr. Colnaghi, but when he saw the prospective exhibits, 'particularly one study of nude boys' by Tuke, he declined to be officially associated with the group. So an unusual constitution was drawn up for the Club which had no president and no permanent committee. It made it a very free-thinking organisation and was open to accept all the progressive new painters. However, with such a loose organisation, the Club in its original form split up and fell into smaller loose groups which called themselves the Glasgow School and the Newlyn School.
 
At last in 1886 with the swelling numbers of young progressive artists, and the new 'revolutionary' ideas on painting becoming almost a habit, the Impressionists were accepted in Britain as a valid movement, the same year, alas, as the last Impressionist exhibition in France.
 
Three years later, in 1889, the Paris World Exhibition opened its doors again and James Charles, who showed his work there, was awarded a silver medal and a diploma for 'La Bapteme', otherwise known in England as 'Christening Sunday'. Among others who exhibited there were Whistler, who received a first class award, Edgar Degas and Bastien Lepage.
In this same year, the French Impressionists, having closed their public shows in France, opened their first exhibition in London displaying their new allegiance, and the New English Art Club put on an exhibition of their own work calling themselves the London Impressionists.
 
At this time too, there began a new phase of controversy, carrying with it a bitterness which far surpassed the animosity of the earlier argument about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This discussion was concerned with the subject content of Victorian painting.
Was the subject necessary? Did it weaken the value of a work of art?
 
The late nineteenth century rebels were attempting to reaffirm the importance of the pictorial values, since they believed they had become a weakness, because too much attention to literary meaning made the painterly intelligence of the work.
 
Although James Charles was among the so called rebels, beginning with them the New English Art Club, he came under rather heavy fire, along with many others including Mulready, Frith, Holman Hunt and Orchardson, because of the high degree of 'story' in his paintings.
 
Charles had a dislike for Clubs and Societies and did not like to become too closely involved with them, and though he joined the New English Art Club in the beginning as a mark of his agreement with the principles, he stayed on their membership records for only the first two years; having to remove himself from the problems of internal politics which came about when it began splitting into smaller groups.
 
However, he continued to exhibit in their shows and in those of the smaller groups, the Newlyn and Glasgow schools for the rest of his life.
 
He spent the Summer seasons of 1889 and 1890 in Paris during which time he built up a following of a number of artistic admirers, which would have been a great morale booster, during a time when his painterly prowess was being questioned.
Having spent some considerable time in France, Charles could be compared and contrasted with a number of French painters with whom he might or might not have come into contact, though there is no available record of any particular meetings.
 
In 1890, for instance, Monet painted his haystack series and a parallel could very well be drawn between this and James Charles' many studies, drawings and paintings of hayfields. But he was so at home in the countryside and surrounded by Nature at its best, that one feels he would have used such a subject for the development of his work anyway. Also in the height of their careers at the time were Paul Gauguin and Toulouse Lautrec.
 
Though Gauguin's work was somewhat on the exotic side, one can find a parallel in the paintings of Toulouse Lautrec done in the brothels of Montmartre and James Charles' scenes of rustic genre. Both painters felt a mental affinity with their subjects and did not exploit them as it would have been so easy to do. It is as easy to make a shocking spectacle of either licentiousness or degradation with a community of prostitutes as it is to pour empty sentiment on children and patronizing amusement on old people. But Lautrec lived for many years in the brothels of Montmartre, and the prostitutes and show-girls were his friends. The results of this friendship came out in his paintings with neither sneer nor humour, but a sympathetic rendering of a certain type of people living a certain type of life - he makes no judgement.
 
Similarly James Charles in his 'Knife Grinder' painted in 1887 depicts the scene with a completely open mind. How aptly he portrays the skilled old man at his machine: concentrating and unpretentious and completely unruffled by his audience. The children could be waiting for the knife he is sharpening or merely watching his skill in fascination as they pass by; it doesn't matter. The composition is about concentration and singularity of intent, not about the prettiness of the children or the old man's beard. It is notable that none of the faces are turned towards us, showing that they are not the most important part.
 
There is a marked similarity in the style and subject matter of Jean-Francois Millet with Charles' work, although Millet died in 1875, the year that Charles exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy.
However, Charles had already been at Julien's Academy in Paris and it is quite possible that the two painters moved in similar circles, and therefore Charles could have been influenced by Millet's work. Millet used peasants as his subjects, as Charles did, and he chose not to dress them romantically in ribbons but in a plain, natural manner.
However, his reasons were different. He exaggerated their roughness and simplicity in an effort to rebel against the prettiness of other 'genre' paintings, where Charles only enhanced what he saw.
 
A charcoal sketch by Millet, 'November' illustrates the likeness of his competent, lively handling of media, to some of the small sketches by Charles. One can always draw parallels between paintings of various artists of the same era, because unless any of them lived totally as hermits, or never made contact with another artist, they were bound to be influenced in some way, if not in style or technique, in some philosophy or aspiration or even an emotion, which frequently colours an artistic era. Only Constable was brave enough to say that he would endeavour to paint as though he had never seen another painting.
 
If anything James Charles was like this. The part of him which disliked Clubs and similar such restrictions on the spirit, wanted to strive for an aim which was his own: never anyone else's and any noticeable influence was unconscious. Undoubtedly, once he had spent a few seasons in France, his subsequent paintings were more French than English but he did not forget his English subject paintings.