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Updated: June 14, 2025
Anarch and courtier, atheist and decorator of churches, his "whole art seems like a bullfight," says Richard Muther. One might improve on this by calling him a subtle bull, a Hercules who had read Byron. "Nature, Velasquez, and Rembrandt!" cries MacColl in a too brief summary. "How inadequate the list! Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Legion had a hand in the teaching."
It bittered his life at the last, that behind his back his townspeople should call him "Old Mars," in an irony he was keen enough to feel the thrust of. "Captain Mars, Captain Mars, Who never saw wars," said Evan MacColl, the bard of the parish, and the name stuck as the bye-names of that wonderful town have a way of doing.
Telescopic eyes his, as MacColl has it, and an imagination that perceived the spectre lurking behind the door, the horror of enclosed spaces, and the mystic fear of shadows a Poe imagination, romantic, with madness as an accomplice in the horrible game of his life. One is tempted to add that the romantic imagination is always slightly mad. It runs to seed in darkness and despair.
And yet, a year came when, of the old group, only D.S. MacColl and I met in the Champ-de-Mars and he, with boredom in his face and voice, assured me he had found nothing in it from end to end except a silk panel decorated by Conder, and so helped to kill any belief I still cherished in the emotion that does not wear itself out with time.
Professor Clausen is a temperate critic, MacColl a brilliant, revolutionary one. The critical temper in either man is not dogmatic. Seurat, the French Neo-Impressionist, has defended his theories; indeed, the number of talented Frenchmen who paint well and write with style as well as substance is amazing.
The way in which these figures move among themselves, as the spectator walks round, so as to produce from every fresh angle sweeping commanding lines, each of them thus playing a dozen parts at once, is surely one of the most astounding feats of the genius of design. Nothing in the history of art is exactly comparable with it." <1> D. S. MacColl, Nineteenth Century Art, 1902, p. 101.
The late Anglican Canon MacColl is, of course, perfectly right, and his inference is strictly logical.
Thus the country is still a country of prehistoric beliefs and of fairly accurate traditions. For example, at the trial of James Stewart for the murder of Glenure, one MacColl gave damaging evidence, the MacColls being a sept subordinate to the MacIans or Macdonalds of Glencoe, who, by the way, had no hand in the murder.
He was Japanese and Spanish, never Watteau, Monticelli, Turner, or Monet. MacColl has pointed out the weakness of the scientific side of impressionism. Its values are strictly æsthetic; attempts to paint on a purely scientific basis have proved both monotonous and ludicrous.
MacColl says: "Painting is continually swaying between the chiaroscuro reading of the world which gives it depth and the colour reading which reduces it to flatness. Manet takes all that the modern inquisition of shadows will give to strike his compromise near the singing colours of the Japanese mosaic." What a wit this Parisian painter possessed!
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