"Jesus, there is but one art: to omit"

There are lots of quotations that swim around web, endlessly repeated, often incorrectly attributed, frequently without source of any kind and usually growing textual amendments to suit the new context. One such is this:

 The only art is to omit.

It has been used most recently (and negatively) by a reviewer of Eleanor Catton's lengthy Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries.

To be fair, it is nearly always given as by Robert Louis Stevenson, which is right. But where on earth is it from? I couldn't locate it, so eventually I asked my friend Roger Swearingen in California. He's one of, if not the leading RLS expert in the world. He, of course, knew immediately. "RLS to his cousin Bob, ?30 June 1883," he emailed, appending the plaintive personal note: "I only wish I could learn that art."

And so say all of us.

The correct version of the aphorism comes at the end of a paragraph in the letter, in which RLS, the great stylist, deals with the inadequacies of Balzac as a writer:

He was a man who never found his method. An inarticulate Shakespeare, smothered under forcible-feeble detail. It is astounding, to the riper mind, how bad he is, how feeble, how untrue, how tedious; and, of course, when he surrendered to his temperament, how good and powerful. And yet never plain nor clear. He could not consent to be dull, and thus became so. He would leave nothing undeveloped, and thus drowned out of sight of land amid the multitude of crying and incongruous details. Jesus, there is but one art: to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge.
 
Cousin Bob, by the way, was the pioneering (and still valuable) art critic, RAM Stevenson, author of a seminal book on Velasquez.

Above: RLS photographed by H Walter Barnett in Sydney, 1893

Australia at the RA

To the Royal Academy for their latest show, Australia. What a joy it is – filled both with old friends and new acquaintances. And a real credit to its curators ‒ Ron Radford and Anne Gray from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and Kathleen Soriano of the RA  in London.

The last major exhibition of Australian art in Britain took place at the Tate Gallery in 1962 ‒ over half a century ago. Although, as the catalogue shows, it had plenty of fine paintings, it was treated in a patronising fashion by the London art establishment, only “rather better than the more woeful prophets might have predicted,” according to The Times.

That kind of condescension has a long track-record. The critic RAM Stevenson (Robert Louis’s cousin) recalled the first substantial showing of Australian work in London in 1886, which included four paintings by Tom Roberts (including “Coming South”), as “still English, or, to speak more correctly, showed us fashions of painting that were founded upon the English trade picture… mechanical drawings and geological, botanical or topographical diagrams.”

By 1898, on the occasion of the second major Australian exhibition (at the Grafton Gallery), Stevenson was more enthusiastic: “The cleverest, the most brilliant, the highest toned work in the show is Mr Streeton’s square canvas, ‘Early Summer’.”*

The current exhibition, focused on landscape, is filled with major works, many of which have travelled around the world for the first time. Let’s see whether it unleashes a wave of patronising comment reminiscent of 1886. 

*Was this painting “Early Summer – Gorse in Bloom”, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Australia in Adelaide?