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CONCERNING PAINTING

Plate 1. — "The Libyan Sibyl/' by Michelangelo.
In the Sistine Chapel, Rome.

CONCERNING PAINTING
CONSIDERATIONS THEORETICAL
AND HISTORICAL

BY
KENYON COX, N.A., LITT.D.
Member of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters

WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK * * * MCMXVII

Copyright, 1917, by The Kalon Publishing Co., Inc.
Copyright, 1917, by Charles Scribner' s Sons
Published September, 1917

TO
CHARLES A. PLATT
ETCHEB, PAINTER, AHCHITECT, BUT ALWATB ABTIST
THESE STUDIES OF ONE OF HIS ARTS
ARE INSCRIBED BT
THE AUTHOR

PREFACE
IT is a strange time in which to speak of so relatively insig
nificant a thing as art. For, greatly as we artists should like
to believe in its importance, we shall hardly convince the
world that much of the art — at least of the painting — of the
last hundred years has any profound significance for man
kind. In the last forty or fifty years, especially, painters have
been willing, for the most part, to appeal only to a profes
sional interest in the cleverness of their rendering of the
superficial aspects of nature, or to the still narrower inter
est of cliques and coteries in the exploitation of personal
whims and extravagant theories. They have cultivated a
contempt for the public and have little right to complain if,
in times like these, the public neglects them and what they
do.Yet there has seldom been a time when those who believe
in the seriousness of art as one of the greatest and most
permanent expressions of the human spirit have felt more
intensely the need of sound thinking on art's problems.
That epoch of civilization which we may call, roughly, the
nineteenth century began with wars and revolutions. It is
now ending with greater wars and greater revolutions. When
peace comes again, and a new epoch begins, the world will
again want art. What kind of art will it want and what kind
of art will it get? It is not to be believed that nineteenth-
century naturalism or nineteenth-century individualism will
satisfy it. If art cannot learn to express in the future, as it
has done in the past, the highest aspirations and the deepest
feelings of the age, then the age will learn to do without art.
[vii]
UOV 14 1917 14 4 0

This book, then, is the result of such thinking as I have been
able to do on my own art of painting. It divides itself into
three parts : the first is an inquiry into what painting essen
tially is and into the nature of its appeal to humanity; the
second is an attempted account of what painting was in that
golden age which lasted about two hundred years, from the
beginning of the sixteenth century to nearly the end of the
seventeenth; the third deals with some aspects of the paint
ing of the more immediate past. Part first was originally
given in the form of lectures at Union College. Parts second
and third were delivered at Yale, in the Trowbridge Course
on the History of Art, and at the Metropolitan Museum and
other institutions. The three chapters on "The Golden Age of
Painting" will have appeared in "Scribner's Magazine" be
fore the book is published and the other five — four of them
are already printed — in "The Art World." They are here,
for the first time, brought into their true connection. KENYON COX.
New York,
March 24, 1917.

[ viii

CONTENTS PART I
WHAT IS PAINTING?
PAGE
I. Painting as an Art op Imitation ... 3
H. Painting as an Art op Relation ... 34
PART H
THE GOLDEN AGE OF PAINTING
I. The Culmination of the Renaissance . 67
H. The Venetians  98
HI. Dutch and Flemish Painting op the
Seventeenth Century  133
PART HI
SOME PHASES OF NINETEENTH-
CENTURY PAINTING
I. Naturalism in the Nineteenth Century 165
II. The Lovers of Tradition  197
III. Mural Painting in France and in America 228

[ix]

ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Michelangelo, "The Libyan Sibyl," Sistine
Chapel . .... Frontispiece FACING PAGE
2. Leonardo, ''Study for Equestrian Statue,"
Windsor Library . ... 72
3. Raphael, "The School of Athens," Vatican 88
4. Correggio, "Madonna with St. Jerome,"
Parma ... ..... 94
5. Giorgione, "Partie Champetre," Louvre . 110
6. Titian, "Bacchus and Ariadne," National Gal
lery .... .... 122
7. Tintoretto, "Saint Jerome and Saint An
drew," Ducal Palace, Venice . 124
8. Veronese, "Martyrdom of St. George," San
Giorgio in Braida, Verona  128
9. Tiepolo, "Landing of Cleopatra," Palazzo
Labia, Venice .  130
10. Rubens, "Henry IV Receiving the Portrait
of Marie de' Medici," Louvre .... 140
11. Van Dyck, "Cupid and Psyche," Hampton
Court  . .... 146
12. Hals, "Vrouw Bodolphe," Morgan Collection . 150
[xi]

ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
13. Rembrandt, "The Orphan," Chicago Art In
stitute  154
14. Ter Borch, "The Concert," Berlin ... 156
15. Metsu, "Officer and Young Lady," Louvre . 158
16. Ver Meer, "Lady with Pearl Necklace,"
Berlin . .... . . 160
17. Delaunay, "Portrait of His Mother," Luxem
bourg . . . . . 176
18. Guillaumet, "The Leguia near Biskra,"
Luxembourg . .... . 178
19. Stevens, "Tous les Bonheurs," Brussels . 180
20. Bastien-Lepage, "Joan of Arc," Metropolitan
Museum . .... . 186
21. Winslow Homer, "A Summer Night," Luxem
bourg .  192
22. Prudhon, "Venus and Adonis," Wallace Col
lection . . . . 202
23. Ingres, " Ruggiero and Angelica," Louvre . 210
24. Millet, "Shepherdess and Flock," Drawing 214
25. Watts, "Love and Death"  220
26. Thayer, "Virgin Enthroned," Collection of
John Gellatly, Esq. ... ... 226
27. Chasseriau, "Peace," Fragment of Decora
tion of Cour des Comptes, Louvre . . . 232
28. Baudry, "The Flaying of Marsyas," Foyer of
the Opira, Paris . ... 234
[xii]

ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
29. Puvis de Chavannes, "The Sacred Wood,"
Lyons  240
30. LaFarge, "The Ascension," Church of The
Ascension, New York  248
31. Henry O. Walker, "Lyric Poetry," Library
of Congress  254
32. Blashfield, "Minnesota as the Granary of
the World," Minnesota State Capitol . . . 256

PART I
WHAT IS PAINTING?

PAINTING AS AN ART OF
IMITATION
The task I have here set myself is to con
sider what the art of painting essentially
is and how it resembles or differs from
the other fine arts and, so far as I can, to
determine in what desires or instincts it
originates and to what faculties of the hu
man mind it appeals.
In such an inquiry there is always a danger
that one may form a theory on an in
sufficient knowledge of the facts and bind
oneself by a premature definition and thus,
arguing from false premises, get further
from the truth in proportion as one argues
logically. One of the most curious instances
of such an error is in a book which made a
sensation in its day — Tolstoi's "What Is
Art?" In that book Tolstoi began by
formulating a plausible definition of art
and then, by powerful and perfectly logical
reasoning from that definition, demon-
[3]

CONCERNING PAINTING
strated to his own satisfaction that many of
the world's heroes of art, Shakespeare and
Beethoven, Michelangelo and Titian, were
either not artists at all or were bad artists
while the maker of child's dolls is a good
and true artist. Strangely enough, the ex
traordinary nature of his conclusions does
not seem to have awakened any doubt in
his mind as to the validity or the adequacy
of his definition. At the present time there
is an immense amount of such theorizing
going on about art, and particularly about
the art of painting, which seems to take no
account of the history of the art it is con
cerned with. It has long been a common
place with the makers of theories that
painting should tell no stories; it is now
proclaimed that painting should not paint
anything, and that the art is just about to
reach its final and proper form by the "def
ecation" — the word is not mine — of its
representative element.
If we wish to avoid errors and extrava
gances, we must examine the art of paint
ing as it is and has been. If we can find out
what have been its most permanent char
acteristics throughout the long ages during
which it has been practised and in all the
[4]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
countries in which it is practised to-day,
we may, perhaps, reasonably assume that
these characteristics are those most essen
tial to its nature. It is only from a knowl
edge of what painting is that we may hope
to generalize as to what it should be, and if
we dare risk any definition it must be at
the end of our inquiry, not at the begin
ning. The history of painting, and of its twin
art, sculpture, is as long as the history of
mankind — it may even be said to be longer,
for we know something of these arts as they
were practised by primitive races of men
about whom we know little but what their
carving and their painting reveal to us.
Perhaps as early as 100,000 B. C, at any
rate during the quaternary period, which
is supposed by geologists to have ended
about ten or twelve thousand years before
the beginning of the Christian era, a race
of men inhabited the caves of western
Europe who lived by hunting and fishing.
They were vitally interested in the animals
on which they lived and they have left
a series of remarkable representations of
these animals carved in bone, drawn with
[5]

CONCERNING PAINTING
incised lines upon bones and antlers, or
painted in colors upon the walls of their
caves. The carvings seem to be a little older
than the drawings and to show that sculp
ture, as has been the case in all subsequent
periods of art, developed before painting;
but the arts are largely contemporaneous
and clearly differentiated, and the pictures
on the walls are true paintings, not merely
outlined but attempting color and some
degree of light and dark. The paintings
and drawings represent the mammoth, the
reindeer, the salmon, the wild horse, the
bison, and the boar with singular truth of
form and with a truth of action which has
never again been attained until our own day.
What is most curious about these paint
ings, however, is that they are purely
naturalistic and imitative, with no trace of
a decorative motive, or an ornamental ar
rangement. There has been some specula
tion as to whether these representations
may not have had a magic purpose, and
have been intended to give the delineator
power over the thing delineated, and from
what we know of the ideas of primitive
man the supposition is a likely one; but it
is evident that such a supposition will not
[6]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
account for the origin of the art. Man
must have learned to make an image of
things before he can have thought of that
image as giving him power over the things
themselves. He must have made the first
images in obedience to some deeply im
planted instinct, and that instinct one
must believe to have been another form of
the instinct of imitation which controls I
the play of children and which originated
the art of acting. Some modern researches
into the art of savages seem to show that
even those patterns which are apparently
most meaningless originated in some imi
tation of natural forms, and that the earli
est art of all primitive peoples was like
the earliest art we know, an art of realism.
What is certain is that painting, as a
separate art, was already in existence at
the almost inconceivably remote period of
the cavemen, and that it was an art of ,
representation. This race of cavemen seems to have died
out and to have been succeeded by other
and alien races. In the bronze age, though
there was a civilization in many ways much
more advanced than that of the cavemen,
there seems to have been little art except a
[7]

CONCERNING PAINTING
form of decoration by incised lines which
have for us no representative value. If
there was anything like painting, it has
not come down to us, and what attempts
at sculpture we know are of the grossest
and most rudimentary description.
Anything that we can recognize as paint
ing emerges for the first time from its long
eclipse in the art of ancient Egypt, some
where about 4,000 years B. C, and it
emerges as it disappeared an art of rep
resentation. Egyptian painting differs in
many ways from the art of the cavemen.
It is vastly inferior to it in its represen
tation of life and movement. In many
technical matters it is superior. It is from
the first extremely conventional in its
manner of drawing and in the number of
attitudes it admits, and it grows more
conventional rather than less, but it intro
duced man for the first time as the prin
cipal subject of art. The whole life of man
from the King on his throne to the tiller of
the fields, his actions and occupations, his
houses and tools and costumes, his knowl
edge of this world and his beliefs as to the
next, is depicted for us on the walls of tem
ples and of tombs. [8]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
From the earliest Egyptian art to the art
of our own time the history of painting in
all countries is fairly well known to us.
There are gaps in it where much has been
destroyed, but there is always enough re
maining to give us some fair notion of what
the destroyed art must have been. And in
all countries and all ages the art has been
essentially the same. It has flourished at
one time and decayed at another, it has
been practised differently by different races
and nations, it has varied enormously in
the materials employed, in the method of
employing them, and in the degree of imi
tation attained, but the object has always
been the same. In all times the painter has
striven to represent, as truly as his knowl
edge, the materials at his disposal and the
conventions of his time would permit,
things and actions existing or conceived of
as existing. In all times which we think of
as times of progress in art there has been
an increasing truth of representation, as in
the Italian Renaissance from Cimabue to
Titian. In the times we think of as the
great epochs of art there has been a high
degree of such truth. In the times we
think of as the times of decadence there
[9]

CONCERNING PAINTING
has generally been a lessening of such
truth. From the whole history of art as we know
it, we can only conclude that, in its essential
nature, painting is the art of representing
on a plane surface (in contradistinction to
sculpture which works in three dimensions
or, as we say, in the round) the forms and
colors of objects. Its origin is in the instinct
of imitation. Its most fundamental appeal
— not necessarily its highest appeal but its
most universal and necessary one — is to the
sense of recognition. What first of all pleases
us, in looking at a painting, is the recog
nition of the thing represented and of the
truth of the representation.
From all this it might seem that the more
exact the imitation of nature, in all par
ticulars, the more pleasure the imitation
will afford; and that the best painting is
that which most nearly attains to an exact
imitation. This conclusion has been drawn
again and again, and by men whose knowl
edge and intelligence are sufficient to give
their opinions great weight. Did not Leo
nardo da Vinci himself, one of the greatest
of painters, proclaim that the finest paint-
[10]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
ing is that which most nearly resembles the
reflection of nature in a mirror? Yet the
experience of mankind has, I think, con
clusively proved that this is not true, and
that, entirely apart from those non-imi
tative qualities of art which we are to con
sider later, in the nature of pictorial imi
tation itself, it is not the imitation in all
respects the most exact which affords the
greatest pleasure.
Let us take, for an example, an art rigidly
limited in its degree of imitation by the
nature of the means employed, like Greek
vase-painting. The vase-painter had no
tools but a fine pointed brush and black
paint. He was limited to such truths as he
could represent with lines or with a few
flat masses, that is, to truths of contour.
He could give no idea even of the color of
objects, still less of the light that falls on
them or the shadows cast by them, of their
surrounding by air or of their softening by
distance. Yet if the contours he drew be
true in themselves the eye will at once
recognize and rejoice in that truth as fully
as if all other truths were added. It may
even recognize that truth more rapidly
and rejoice in it more fully because there
[H]

CONCERNING PAINTING
are no other truths to distract the attention.
Add to the truths of contour so much truth
of color as may be given without regard to
light and shadow and you have as much
truth as has satisfied the Oriental nations
and nearly as much as satisfied the Greeks
and the artists of mediaeval Europe.
But it is not only from the limitations of
the material employed or from lack of
knowledge that artists have abstained from
complete and exact imitation. In the de
velopment of the art of painting from the
early Renaissance to our own day, new
orders of truth have been added one after
the other to its domain. To truths of con
tour and of the colors of objects have been
first added truths of form as shown by light
and shade, giving roundness and projec
tion, and truths of color as affected by light
and shade, marking the difference between
colors in light, in shadow, and in reflection;
then truths of light and shadow for its own
sake, not merely revealing form or varying
color, but even disguising form and color;
finally truths of light and of air as of an
ambience in which all things exist and by
which all things are visible.
But as each new order of truth has been
[12]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
added there has been some loss in the
sharpness with which the old truths have
been expressed. In the first place, as the
artist's attention has been fixed on one
truth he has felt less interest in the others;
in the second place, as he has wished to
direct the attention of his public to one
truth he has deliberately neglected others;
in the third place, he has found that the
expression of the various orders of truth
in their highest degree, in any one work,
is physically impossible, one order of truth
obscuring another, fulness of light and
shade obstructing the perception of the
contour, and clearness of line interfering
with the expression of light and shade. We
have therefore, in all art, a number of vol
untary or necessary abstentions, and the
more sure a painter is of what he wants to
do the more certain he is to avoid close imi
tation of those quahties of things which are
not to his purpose. We know that the very
same Leonardo who declared that painting
should be a mirror, refrained from painting
whole categories of truth which he had seen
and noted, and we know why he did so. In
his note-books there are careful descriptions
of effects painted only in our own day, and
[13]

CONCERNING PAINTING
very clear explanations of the causes of
them. He saw the blue shadow of the im
pressionists and knew why it is blue. He
saw the cold light on the tops of leaves, the
golden green of transmitted light when the
same leaves are seen from below, and the
interruption of this light where the shadow
of one leaf falls upon another. And when he
has described all these things, with the
acuteness of the most modern observer of
effects of light, he adds: "These things
should not be painted, because they con
fuse the form."
Any one who knows much of modern
painting and of the painters of to-day will
know how completely this attitude has been
reversed. Our contemporary artists have
for the most part come to look upon ex-
plicitness of form almost with horror, and
to consider definition of contour as a griev
ous fault. If they were asked why they hate
a definite or what they would call a hard
line, those of them who are capable of giv
ing a reason would say: Because it inter
feres with the representation of nature's
light and nature's mystery. They are per
fectly right from their point of view, but
so was Leonardo from his. There never has
been and there never can be a complete
[14]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
art of painting, a perfect imitation of na
ture. There are only partial imitations in
which one or another truth is gained by the
sacrifice, in greater or less degree, of all
the rest.
Not only is anything like an exact imi
tation of nature impossible for these reasons
and for others — such as that nature's range
from light to dark is many times greater
than the range between white paint and
black, that nature's detail is so intricate
and minute that the human eye cannot
follow it or the human hand render it, that
at all points nature escapes from us and
defies our poor means of imitation — but an
exact imitation would not be desirable even
were it possible. Now and then, by careful
limitation of the subject-matter of painting
to what is most nearly imitable, by a sup
pression of the individual preferences of the
artist, and by exhaustive study and pains
taking labor, something measurably like
true imitation has been attained, with the
result that the beholder is left unmoved
and almost uninterested. The reason of the
ineffectiveness of such fairly exact imitation
is not far to seek.
We have seen that the fundamental ap-
[15]

CONCERNING PAINTING
peal of imitative art is to the sense of recog
nition, but as it is obvious that we can have
no pleasure in the recognition of the thing
itself, which we perform unconsciously and
automatically at every waking moment, so
we get little from the recognition of a re
flection of it which is so like as to be in
distinguishable from the thing. It is only
as the reflection is different from the thing
reflected that it interests us. The mere re
versal from right to left of the reflection in
a mirror may yield some slight interest.
The reflection of a landscape in still water
is much more interesting because its dif
ference from the real landscape is greater.
That nature should seem upside down is
a much greater difference from its normal
appearance than that it should be merely
reversed from right to left, and besides
this, reflections in water are generally
different in degree of light and in color
from the objects that cast them and, if
the standpoint of the beholder is much
above water-level, are different in form
also because seen from a different angle.
The presence of the landscape itself en
ables us to measure these differences, and
we receive a degree of pleasure from the
[16]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
recognition of the same objects under new
aspects. Even a striking difference in scale, in the
apparent size of things, may afford some
thing of this pleasure. I remember that,
as a child, one of my treasured possessions
was a diminishing glass, or double-con
cave lens, made from the bottom of a
broken tumbler. I would sit for hours in
the "back lot" behind our house gazing
through this bit of glass and taking de
light in the recognition of familiar objects
reduced to such tiny dimensions. Some
thing of this pleasure we get from minia
tures and statuettes, and their small scale
is undoubtedly a part of their interest for
us. But a perfect imitation of nature
would not be like the image in a diminish
ing glass or that reflected in water or in
a mirror; rather it would be like a bit of
nature seen through a perfectly clear win
dow-pane. Whatever pleasure this bit of
nature might afford us, through its essen
tial beauty or interest, such an image
would also afford us, but it would not
give us any specifically artistic pleasure —
any pleasure differing in kind or degree
from that afforded by nature. The func-
[17]

CONCERNING PAINTING
tion of the artist would be reduced to the
making of duplicates which we might en
joy in the absence of the original scene.
We have seen that painting cannot make
such duplicates, but it can do something
much more to the purpose. It can make
us sharers in the superior organization of
the painter, can reveal to us in painting
things we should not have seen for our
selves in nature, or make us recognize
more instantaneously and more poignantly
qualities of things that we should, if left
to ourselves, have perceived much more
slowly or dully.
The business of the painter as imitator
is to give us, temporarily, the benefit of
his power of vision, of his training and
knowledge, of his perception of the signif
icance of things, and by so doing to give
us an unwonted sense of physical and
mental efficiency which is in the highest
degree pleasurable. We feel ourselves, for
the moment, possessed of clearer senses,
of more lively emotions, of greater intel
lectual powers, than we had imagined;
we live more intensely, and rejoice in our
perception of this intensity of life. This
the painter effects by a selection of the
[18]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
characteristics of objects to which he wishes
to attract our attention, dwelling upon the
things he wishes us to see and eliding those
he does not wish us to concern ourselves
with, exaggerating here and suppressing
there, consciously or unconsciously fal
sifying his representation in a thousand
minute particulars so as to force us to see
what he sees, not what we see when un
aided, and giving a greater semblance of
truth by his very infidelity to fact. His
rank as an artist will depend largely upon
whether the truths to which he directs us
are important and essential or unimportant
and trivial, and also upon the degree of
exaggeration which he finds it necessary
to use, the greatest artists usually employ
ing delicate and restrained exaggerations
while lesser men resort to exaggerations
which are violent and extreme.
The aim of the great draftsmen of the
human figure, for instance, is to make us
feel in the sharpest and clearest manner
its form and structure, its movement or
action, the articulations of its bony frame
work, and the stresses and relaxations of
its muscles and tendons. For this pur
pose a myriad of trivial and unnecessary
[19]

CONCERNING PAINTING
details are ignored or slighted, the great
forms are selected and dwelt upon, every
line and touch becomes charged with the
highest significance, and the bosses and
hollows are so far exaggerated that we be
come acutely conscious of them and feel
that we could pass our hands over them
and follow the undulations of the surface
with our finger-tips. This is what Beren-
son means by "tactile values," the stim
ulation through the eye of the sense of
touch, and he is quite right in thinking it
one of the most important elements in the
art of figure-painting.
And now another and a curious exercise
of the imitative faculty is brought about.
We become the imitators of the imitation,
and feel inspired to put ourselves into the
attitude so clearly realized for us; we feel
in our own bodies the stresses and the
relaxations we have been made to observe,
and through feeling these are put into
the mental state that caused them. By
painting bodies the artist has forced us
to paint souls. By the representation of
the forms and movements of the human
figure Michelangelo has made us feel the
languid rousing into consciousness of the
[20]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
new-made Adam and the creative energy
of the outstretched arm of the Almighty
from whose finger flows the vivifying
spark. It is by a similar process of elimination
and exaggeration that all the miracles of
art are produced. It is by slight accentua
tions and slight suppressions that the
portrait-painter makes us divine the char
acter of his sitter. It is by such means
that the colorist reveals to us the beauty
of nature's hues and the chiaroscurist the
mystery of nature's light and shade. By
dwelling upon those changes in appear
ance which mark the recession of objects
into distance, Perugino can give us a sense
of infinite space in which we move and
breathe freely and feel, as Berenson has
said, "at one with the universe." By dwell
ing upon the mystery of shadow Rem
brandt can cause us to feel the mystery
of life, and by a deepening of nature's
gloom and a heightening of nature's ra
diance he can make us aware of the pres
ence of the supernatural. In all these ways
pictorial representation may be life-com
municating and life-enhancing, and may
therefore give us that highest of pleasures,
[21]

CONCERNING PAINTING
the sense of superiority to our ordinary
selves. As men imagine things unseen always in
the terms of things seen, their wildest
fancies being but the shifting and the re
combination of the elements of known
objects, the beings imagined by men are
as much within the purview of imitative
art as are the beings of the actual world.
The painter of little imagination constructs
these beings by the mechanical union of
the separate parts of existing beings, each
of these parts being literally copied from
the thing itself. The painter of profound
imagination feels what would be the nature
and the character of a being uniting the
characteristics of two or more actual beings,
and by selection and exaggeration so modi
fies all the parts of things which he copies
as to conform them to the compound
nature. He thus gives to his imagined
beings a life of their own, realizes and
externalizes them, and forces us to believe
in their objective existence. From man's
loftiest conception of spiritual power, as
in gods and angels, to his most terrible
or most playful fancies, as in devils and
[22]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
mermaids and hippogriffs, we accept them
unquestioningly, saying "so they must be,
they cannot be otherwise." And thus be
lieving, for the moment, in the reality of
these beings and feeling profoundly and
instantaneously the imaginative truth of
the representation of them, we get the
pleasure of recognition and of a sense of
our enhanced power of perception and
appreciation in an even greater degree
than we can get it from the picture of
real and familiar things. When we look
at Blake's plate of the "Morning Stars
Singing Together," we feel that we, too,
can see heavenly visions; when we gaze
at Boecklin's grotesque monsters we feel
that we, too, have voyaged in strange waters
and know a siren or a sea-centaur when
we meet them. Have we not all lived among
those strange feathered creatures of Hoku-
sai's and seen them carry bundles on their
preposterous, elongated noses ?
The selective imagination thus deals alike
with the creations of fancy and with the
world of reahty. As it forces you to see
and recognize the things that are not, so,
in the things that are, it forces you to see
and to recognize what it chooses. All rep-
[23]

CONCERNING PAINTING
resentative art proceeds by so selecting,
accenting, or suppressing facts as to make
us see more vividly the qualities of things
than we could do by our own efforts; but
there are two great categories of artists
distinguished by those qualities of things
upon which they dwell and which they
cause us to recognize.
One set of artists, in representing any
object or person, will be most interested
in noting the differences between that
object or person and all others of the same
kind; the other set of artists will be most
interested in recording the likeness of the
object or person to others of its kind. One
school deals with the individual, the other
with the typical; one with character, the
other with beauty. We call these two
categories of artists realists and idealists,
and we are apt to think that realism and
idealism are much more opposed in their
methods than they actually are. We think
of the realist as attempting exact imita
tion and of the idealist as hardly imitating
at all. But, as we have seen, the attempt
at exact imitation is essentially inartistic.
The true, or imaginative realist is as far
from attempting pure imitation as the
[24]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
idealist and selects as carefully as he the
qualities of things on which he shall in
sist. And the idealist finds in nature the
things he selects for accent as surely as
does the realist. When the realist tells you:
This particular man had such a mouth
and nose, and this oak-tree was so twisted
and thwarted by salt winds; when the
idealist tells you: Thus is man made and
this is the form of an oak; they are each
but selecting from the multiplicity of the
real what shall express and enforce their
idea of truth. The extreme of what one
may call the realistic ideal, the ideal of
the expression of individual character at
the expense of the typical and the uni
versal, is the art of caricature, and it is
obvious that caricature is further removed
from literal imitation than is the loftiest
idealism. Realism and idealism are but
the modes of selective imitation. Their
difference is not that one selects and the
other does not, or that one imitates and
the other does not, but only that they
select and imitate different things. Either
mode of selection may give us a master
piece; on the one hand, a portrait by Rem
brandt; on the other, a Madonna by
[25]

CONCERNING PAINTING
Raphael. And no artist was ever con
sistently idealist or realist, for the ha
bitual idealist will now and then delight in
some trait of individual character, the
habitual realist afford us some glimpses
of typical beauty.
As painting represents not only objects
but actions, as it represents not merely
men and animals, but men and animals
doing as well as existing, it cannot, if it
would, avoid telling stories. The instant
you admit into painting any action what
ever, no matter how simple, you admit
some suggestion of what went before the
action and of what is to follow it and of
the cause and intention of the action —
that is, you admit some element, however
slight, of story.
Indeed, it is difficult to paint so much as
a piece of still-life without hinting at a
story; for if the objects chosen are con
gruous and such as might naturally come
together, their collocation will suggest some
reason for their being where they are, if
it is no more than that dinner is prepar
ing; while if the objects chosen are such
as would not naturally be found together,
[26]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
the spectator is set to wondering how they
came there and to inventing some tale to
account for their assemblage. If he sees a
beefsteak and a spilled pipe, he will think
the cook is untidy; if he sees a dead fish
and a lady's fan, he will speculate as to
why the mistress left her fan in the
kitchen. You cannot paint a landscape without
story-telling, for the mere indication of
the hour of the day or of the season of the
year will bring to mind the hours or the
seasons preceding and following the hour
or the season chosen. If you have been
successful in giving any life to your land
scape, it will have a sense of continuousness
and progression, and will tell the story of
the change of the year, of the dawning of
the day, or of the coming on of night. If
there are any houses in your picture, or
any tilled fields, they will tell something
of the history of man. If it is perfectly
wild nature that you have painted, that
fact will tell the spectator that man has
not yet come, or has come for the first
time in his person, he being the explorer
of that solitude.
With any representation of the human
[27]

CONCERNING PAINTING
figure the difficulty of avoiding a story
becomes still greater. Indeed, it becomes
so impossible that I have not been able
to discuss significant figure-drawing with
out showing how, in the hands of a great
master like Michelangelo, it can tell the
mighty story of the creation. But so far
from trying to avoid story-telling, the
figure-painters of all times and countries
have told stories with all their might, and
one may almost say that the greater the
artist the more determinedly has he set
himself to tell stories. They have not only
told stories of that generalized type which
they could not well avoid — stories of the
life of man and of his habitual actions —
but they have told stories of the most
specific kind, they have recounted their
country's history and, above all, its myths
and legends, the tales in which it has crys
tallized its philosophy and its religion.
Look where you will, to the art of the
Egyptians and the Assyrians, the art of
the Greeks and Romans, the art of the
Chinese and the Japanese, you will find
nothing but stories, stories, stories. The
artists of the Renaissance covered the walls
of their churches with the stories of the
[28]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
Bible, and Raphael and Michelangelo told
more stories and told them better than
the others. The Venetians told Bible stories,
too, or retold in their own language and
for their own day the old tales of Greece
and Rome. The Protestant Rembrandt
told the old stories over again in a new
way for a people that did not particularly
want them and preferred its own portrait.
The French painters of the eighteenth
century told light and lascivious tales for
a frivolous society, and Hogarth told moral
tales for the serious British public. The
classicists told stories seriously and some
times pompously, the romanticists told
them poetically or melodramatically, and
even the sturdiest of realists tell stories
of real life, though they disdain legend
and romance. The telling of stories has
been so all but universal in the history of
the imitative arts that the question is not
whether they may advantageously tell
stories, but only what stories they may
most advantageously tell and how they
may best tell them.
The human delight in a story has un
doubtedly led painters at different times
to tell stories that were not worth the
[29]

CONCERNING PAINTING
telling, or that could not be clearly told
in painting; and as bad painters have
drawn ill or colored ill, so they have told
stories badly. In the British art of the
last century there was a deal of senti
mental or humorous anecdotage, illustra
tion of novels and the like, which was
used as a sauce to disguise bad painting.
Hogarth, who was a good and sound
painter, allowed his moralizing tendencies
to lead him into the telling of stories which
are too complicated to be told by the
means proper to his art, and found it
necessary to explain himself by written
labels — marking papers "bill" or "mort
gage," as who should say: This is a sheep —
or to pack twenty incidents into the space
of one. Greuze told his stories theatrically,
setting the attendants at a humble death
bed into wild attitudes of frenzy and de
spair. His story-telling is as false as his
cold and disagreeable color. It is not so
that the great painters have told stories.
They have chosen some story of vital
import, of great dignity, of universal in
terest. They have so chosen it that it may
be told in its essential part by the attitude
and gesture of the principal figures, and
[30]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
they have generally chosen a story so well
known that, the critical moment being
depicted, the memory and imagination of
the spectator will at once supply all that
went before or comes after it. And having
so chosen, they have bent all their powers
to the telling of the chosen story as fully,
as forcibly, and as clearly as possible, purg
ing away everything unnecessary to that
end, avoiding all useless accessories, con
centrating upon the few essential facts,
the few necessary attitudes and gestures.
It is the peculiar glory of Giotto that he
so told a whole cycle of Bible stories and
of stories of the lives of saints that the
manner of their telling was fixed and that
for two hundred years his versions of
them were repeated with but slight varia
tions. It is one of the great glories of
Raphael that his manner of telling another
such cycle has not yet ceased to dominate
our imagination, so that we can see certain
subjects in no other way than as he saw
them. Michelangelo's frescoed epic of the
Book of Genesis is the most sublime crea
tion of pictorial art, as Rembrandt's ro
mances from the Apocrypha and his tales
of the Man of Sorrows are the most poign-
[31]

CONCERNING PAINTING
antly human. Finally, within the lifetime
of many of us, Millet told the story of
man's life of labor, of the sowing of the
seed and the reaping of the harvest, of
the guarding of the flocks, the hewing of
wood and the drawing of water, with the
same authority and the same finality. We
cannot hear the word sower without seeing
the "august gesture" of that striding
figure against the sunset; we cannot hear
of gleaning without seeing those bent backs
and fingers groping in the stubble. For in
painting as in poetry, the story once fit
tingly and completely told is told forever.
For at least fourteen thousand years,
then, from the time of the cavemen to
our own day, painting has been an imita
tive art, and it seems likely that it will
continue to be so. That it should, within
a few years, entirely reverse its current,
and should flow in the opposite direction
for thousands of years to come seems
highly improbable, not to say incredible.
Yet we are gravely told that it is about
to do this; that, at the hands of a few enthu
siasts it has, by the abandonment of its
representative element, reached its final
[32]

AS AN ART OF IMITATION
and definite form, and that no further
changes are possible. Henceforth, as long
as men hve in the world they are to be
satisfied with a non-representative art —
an art fundamentally different from that
which they have known and practised and
enjoyed. We have seen something of what man
kind would lose by such a change were
such a change possible. In the next chapter
we shall see what pleasure-giving elements
of the art of painting would still remain
for his enjoyment.

[33;

II
PAINTING AS AN ART OF
RELATION
Painting is, as we have seen, by its origin
and nature, an art of imitation, but it has
never been, except perhaps in its earliest
forms, solely an art of imitation. It has
always been akin to the other fine arts,
some of which have no imitative element,
or next to none, but all of which deal in
relations or proportions, in the ordering
of something for the attainment of har
mony and unity.
There are two possible classifications of
the fine arts which cut across each other,
and which group the arts differently. Thus,
if we group the arts according to whether
or not they are imitative in their nature,
we have on the one hand painting, sculp
ture, and acting as essentially imitative
arts, and on the other hand architecture
and music, which exist independently of
imitation and only occasionally and in-
[34]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
cidentally imitate anything. Dancing, par
taking of the nature of both acting and
music, stands about half-way between
these two groups. By another classification
we may group the arts according to the
sense to which they appeal and the mode
in which they exist. Music and poetry
appeal to the ear and exist in time. Archi
tecture, sculpture, and painting appeal to
the eye and exist in space. Acting and the
dance appeal to both senses and exist in
both modes. But by whatever classifica
tion we divide the fine arts, there is one
principle which unites them. Whether they
be imitative or non-imitative, arts of time
or arts of space, they are all arts of rela
tion. Music, which is almost entirely non-
imitative, being an art of time, deals with
the proportions and relations of simul
taneous or successive sounds. Architecture
and sculpture, the one as non-imitative
as music, the other as essentially imitative
as painting, both deal with the relations
of solid forms in space. Painting, as an
art of relation, deals with the characters
and relations, in two dimensions only,
of spaces, lines, and colors, of degrees of
[35]

CONCERNING PAINTING
light and dark, and of the materials and
means with which these are produced.
Although such an art can hardly be said
to exist, it is possible to conceive of an
art in which these elements and their re
lations should exist independently of all
imitation — an art which, on the analogy
of "absolute music," we might call ab
solute painting. What we have now to do
is to consider these relational elements of
the art of painting, and the manner in
which painting deals with them, as nearly
as possible as if painting were such an ab
solute or non-imitative art. Afterward we
can consider how the relational and the
imitative sides of painting work together
to produce a more powerful effect than
either could produce without the other.
What we shall have first to examine is
that dominating principle of all the fine
arts which is known as composition — that
principle of order and arrangement which
is less an element of any art than the gen
eral law to which all its elements must be
submitted to produce that unified result,
all the parts and elements concurring in
one expression, which constitutes a work
[36]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
of art. In painting we call this principle
design, and for convenience we consider
it generally as ruling over the disposition
of lines and spaces only, though it must
in reality control equally the use of all
the elements of the art. After considering
pure design, the principle of arrangement,
we will give some consideration to the ele
ments with which it works, to their char
acter and power of expression, and we
shall then be able to judge of the resources
of painting as an absolute art.
Painting, being an art of space in two
dimensions only, begins with the simple
plane or surface on which the work of art
is to be created; this primary space or sur
face must, in the nature of things, have
definite boundaries. It may be of any shape,
but is most commonly rectangular. In
painting connected with architecture the
boundaries are often fixed beforehand, but
in independent painting they are deter
mined by the painter himself, and his
first task is to determine on the shape and
size of the surface on which he is to work
and on the proportion of its length to its
breadth. This primary space once determined,
[37]

CONCERNING PAINTING
whether by external conditions or by the
artist himself, the first step toward trans
forming it from an empty space into a
work of art is to divide it into subordinate
spaces, or what we call masses, which shall
be of interesting and agreeable shapes
and agreeably related to each other and
to the whole space to be covered. Some of
these spaces will be relatively simple and
empty like the background of a panel of
ornament; others will be subdivided into
still smaller spaces and filled with details
like the ornament itself; and the most
fundamental principle of design is the
division of space and the balance of filled
and empty spaces. But if an effect of unity
is to be created, certain of these spaces
or masses will be given predominance over
the others. There will be generally one
mass more important than all the others,
and there will be subdominant masses
each of which will have subordinate masses
bearing the same relation to it as it bears
to the principal mass. The dominance of
the principal mass may be marked by its
size, by its centrality of position, by its
isolation, or by all of these means. It is
evident that, other things being equal,
[38]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
the largest mass will be the most impor
tant, but a small mass in the centre of a
symmetrical composition will be more im
portant than a larger mass elsewhere, and
a mass which is isolated from others will
gain importance from the lack of near
rivalry. In Raphael's "Disputa" in the Vatican
he wanted to make the Host in its mon
strance extremely important, as it is about
it that all his personages are occupied.
The whole field of the painting is a lu
nette — roughly, a semicircle with a nar
row rectangular strip added below. The
disk of the monstrance is very small, but
by placing it almost at the mathematical
centre of the bounding curve (it is really
a trifle higher, at the level of the spring of
the arch which is a little less than a semi
circle) and by allowing no other object of
interest near it, he has succeeded in mak
ing it dominate the whole vast composi
tion. It is evident that the boundaries of the
masses in any design, whether or not they
are defined by a drawn outline, have the
properties of lines. There may also be
lines within the masses and imaginary
[39]

CONCERNING PAINTING
lines made by the relations of points, as
a spray of foliage may be surrounded by
an imaginary curve drawn from leaf-end
to leaf-end — a curve which we can see,
although it has no material existence.
The whole of a design, therefore, is cov
ered by a network of lines, real or imag
inary, the great function of which is to
bind together what has been divided.
After division of space comes unification
by line, or rather they come together;
for when we are inventing the spaces, we
are necessarily inventing the lines that
bound and unite them. Now the eye nat
urally tends to follow a line, moving along
it from end to end and noting its general
sweep and direction and its deviations
from this general direction; and the lines
of a good composition are so arranged as
to lead the eye where the artist chooses,
generally toward the mass which he has
determined shall be the most important.
There are many ways in which this may
be done, but the most obvious are by
radiation from, or more strictly by con
vergence to, the centre of interest, and by
circling around this centre, like the radiat
ing and concentric lines of a spider-web.
[40]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
Of course the composition of line is seldom
as obvious as this example, but however
complicated the composition may be, and
by however devious a route the eye may
be led, it is led inevitably to the point to
which the artist wishes to lead it, and is
fixed there, so that on whatever part of
the composition the spectator first glances,
he shortly finds himself looking at this
point of interest and contentedly resting
there. But pure design has two other means of
action to reinforce its effects. We have seen
that it tends to make two kinds of spaces,
the filled and the empty spaces, or the
subject and the field or background. Now
this division may be emphasized either
by light and dark, or by color, or by both.
The filled spaces will be either lighter or
darker than the background, the extreme
instances of this being the old printers'
ornaments and initials, which are white
on black, and the silhouette, which is black
on white. Or the filled spaces may be both
lighter and darker than the ground, which
becomes a half-tone between the extreme
light and dark of the subject. Or again,
though this is rarer, the ground may be
[41]

CONCERNING PAINTING
divided into light and dark and the sub
ject treated in half-tone or, as in heraldry,
countercharged, light on dark and dark
on light. By any of these methods the im
portance of the principal mass may be
marked by a greater contrast with the
ground. It may be the lightest mass where
the contrast is of light on dark, the darkest
mass where the contrast is of dark on
light, or may have the strongest contrasts
of light and dark where the relief is of
variety on monotony. And all these meth
ods are capable of varying degrees of em
phasis which shall mark the subdominant
and sub-subdominant masses. If the relief
is rather of color than of light and dark,
as of blue on red or red on blue, or of varied
colors on a relatively neutral ground, there
is the same possibility of graduated em
phasis by the gradations of vividness of
color, and contrast.
In the arrangement of the masses which
are to be thus bound together by lines
and emphasized by light and dark, or by
color, there are a certain number of well-
understood and frequently employed meth
ods, such, for instance, as the pyramidal
composition, in which the principal mass
[42]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
is placed at the apex of a triangle of which
subordinate masses form the base. This is
frequently supplemented by the placing
of half pyramids at either side the central
pyramid, forming wings to the main com
position, and the bounding-line of these
subsidiary groups often forms a curve of
suspension, like a great garland hung be
hind the main group and visible only at
the ends. But the methods of arrangement
possible are quite literally infinite, and
afford endless scope to the genius and
originality of the artist, some of the best
compositions in existence being so sur
prising and seemingly capricious that one
knows not how to analyze them. There is,
however, one principle of arrangement that
always plays a large part, and that may
generally be clearly perceived in its opera
tion — the principle of balance. In design
as in physics, two masses of the same im
portance or weight, at equal distances
from a centre, will balance each other, or
two masses of different importance and
weight will balance each other, if the dis
tance from the centre is in inverse propor
tion to the weight. The principle of the
symmetrical composition is the principle
[43]

CONCERNING PAINTING
of the scales, and in such compositions the
point of interest is generally at the pivot.
The principle of the unsymmetrical com
position is that of the steelyard, and in
that form of composition the centre on
which the unequal masses depend is gen
erally an ideal point. But the restfulness
and pleasurableness of the design will de
pend very much on the accurate adjust
ment of weight to distance and the con
sequent sense of balance.
As long as we consider painting as an ab
solute or non-imitative art, there is little
to be said of the character or expressiveness
of masses in themselves. Imitation, by
bringing in the appearance of bulk and
projection, would give a new character to
them; but without that, they have little
other character than that of the lines which
bound them. Light and dark, until imita
tion transforms it into light and shade,
has little expressiveness except for its
emphasis of spaces. But lines and colors
have characters of their own which it is
now necessary to consider.
The most obvious distinction between
various kinds of lines is the distinction be-
[44]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
tween straight lines and curves. Straight
lines will always express rigidity and stiff
ness while curves will suggest some sort
of growth or motion; but straight lines
vary in expression according to their posi
tion and direction. The horizontal line is
always suggestive of repose; it is the line
of resting water, of the earth of alluvial
plains, of everything that has reached a
state of equilibrium. The vertical line is a
line of stability, of direct opposition to the
force of gravity, of strength and vigor.
Most compositions in which the sentiment
of restfulness and enduring peace is to be
expressed are built on a combination of
verticals and horizontals. Oblique straight
lines vary in expression according to their
combination with other lines and may
express anything from tottering to vigor
ous thrusting; but they nearly always
express some form of motion.
As straight lines express strength, so
curves express softness, and the softest
of curves are those approaching the cir
cular or made up of sections of circles. An
infusion of straightness into a curve will
give it stiffness and vigor, and the most
lively and elastic curves are those ap-
[45]

CONCERNING PAINTING
proaching straightness at one end and
curving more and more rapidly toward
the other. In the double or S-shaped curve,
unless it is very restrained in its degree of
curvature, there is nearly always a sense
of voluptuousness and floridity which may
sink to feebleness and aimlessness, like a
limp string. It is the characteristic line of
the baroque and the rococo. With a suf
ficient element of straightness in them,
however, such curves may ripple or flame
or flow gently like a river in a plain. All
these characters of lines may be the re
sult of association, or they may have some
deeper reason, but they are there, in the
lines themselves, without regard to what
the lines may be used to represent, and are
among the most valuable means of artistic
expression. Finally, as to their manner of
fulfilling their function of leading the eye
from one point to another, some lines do
this gently and flowingly and the easy
movement of the eye which they induce
is pleasurable. There are others which
deviate suddenly, which jar and shock,
and such lines may be stimulating and
exciting or even painful to follow. There
are arrangements of line which are rest-
[46]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
less and uneasy; there are others that are
intolerable. There is almost no emotion or
state of mind, from tranquillity to horror,
that may not be suggested by the char
acter and arrangement of pure lines.
There has been, for the last hundred
years, a great deal of investigation of the
laws of color and much has been written
on the subject, but as yet little has been
found out that is very helpful to the artist,
and our knowledge has not enabled us to
handle color with the felicity of the artists
of the sixteenth century, or the Oriental
of any time, who had no such knowledge.
The effects of color must, like the effects of
sound, be based upon the relations of wave
lengths, and it would seem that they should
present no greater difficulty of scientific
formulation; but there is one vast difference
between the way in which music handles
sound and the way in which painting han
dles color. Music uses only a few definite
notes whose relations are known and calcu
lable. Painting uses, or may use, all possi
ble notes, selecting as it pleases from an
infinite series, and it never maintains one
note unaltered but modulates and varies it
almost infinitely. Nothing but a highly
[47]

CONCERNING PAINTING
trained sensitiveness to color has ever en
abled an artist to do this with certainty, and
all theory breaks down in attempting such
a problem. But apart from the laws of har
mony and contrast of color, there are
certain qualities of colors, like the char
acters of lines, which we are able to rec
ognize and, in some cases, to give a scien
tific account of.
There are hot and cold colors; stimulat
ing colors and colors that are soothing or
depressing; luminous and non-luminous
colors; advancing and retiring colors. The
colors toward the red end of the spectrum
are warm, those toward the blue end are
cold, but violet, having a tinge of red, as
if it began a new octave, is less cold than
blue, and red is not so hot as orange. The
most luminous of colors is yellow, and there
is a pretty regular gradation from yellow
either way, through orange and red to
violet, and through green and blue to
violet, violet being the least luminous of
all colors. Scarlet is an extremely exciting
color, yellow is cheerful, green pleasant
and soothing, blue and violet are depress
ing, and violet especially so. In general
the warm and luminous colors tend to
[48]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
come forward and the cold and non-lu
minous colors to retire, and this without
any regard to representation or the ap
pearance of nature. A scarlet pattern will
detach itself and stand forward from a
blue ground.
But as artists almost never use true
spectral colors, but all sorts of modified
and broken tints, there are whole modes
or tones of coloring possible which affect
the character of each of the colors. The
whole tone of coloring may be neutral
and gray, and it may be either muddily
and heavily neutral or delicately and ex
quisitely neutral. It may be bright and
vivid, as in mediaeval illumination, which
always gives a sense of gayety and some
times of purity; or it may be sober, or deep
and rich and full, or again sombre and
gloomy, or even violent and stormy. In
color, as in line, there is almost an infinite
range of expression.
Finally, as the painter is performer as
well as composer, there is in painting a
beauty of technic which answers to the
beauty of accomplished performance in
music. It is based on the mastery of ma
terials and their proper and appropriate
[49]

CONCERNING PAINTING
use, and in its lower forms is nothing
other than good workmanship. But even
workmanship has considerable expressional
value. It may create exquisite surfaces
and give a feeling of preciousness to mere
oil paint by its subtlety of manipulation.
It may be quietly perfect, or ruggedly
strong, or it may have the gay dash and
brio of virtuosity. In the hands of the
great masters the workmanship is con
stantly varied with the mood of the work
or the needs of the moment, now delicate
and enigmatic, now direct and vigorous,
now almost brutal. In art nothing is to
be despised and mere workmanship is far
from despicable.
These, then, are the elements which paint
ing as an art of relation offers to the
artist. Upon these elements he plays as
the musician upon his keyboard, using
their various characters to express his
moods and emotions. His great aim, as
in all the fine arts, is to produce a per
fectly harmonious and unified result — to
make, as it were, a little universe of his
own in which order shall visibly reign.
His harmony must include variety and
[50]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
contrast, not merely for the interest of
variety and contrast in themselves, but
because they are necessary to give the
fullest sense of the triumph of order. It
is when order and unity are seen to dom
inate multiplicity, variety, and even op
position, that they are felt as a vital and
conquering force, and there is little merit
in a harmony attained by the absence of
all individuality in the things harmo
nized. Why might not such an art of relation,
shaking off all imitation, and relying en
tirely upon the expressiveness of colors,
lines, and spaces, be as satisfactory an art
as absolute music, or as architecture, neither
of which relies upon imitation?
It is somewhat difficult to give a reason
why colors and lines should make a weaker
appeal to the emotions and to the imagina
tion than sounds, but I think experience
proves that they do so. The nearest thing
to such an art as we have imagined, a
non-imitative and purely relational art of
painting, is to be found in pure ornament,
though even ornament, except in the geo
metrical decoration of the Moors, has
seldom been entirely divorced from rep-
[51]

CONCERNING PAINTING
resentation, and the best ornament con
tains a great deal of representation. But
has the best ornament that ever was painted
produced any deep effect on the feelings,
roused any great emotion, or excited any
thing more than a mild interest? It can
please in an unexciting way, and, if it is
very complex, can stimulate the curiosity
of him who beholds it and set him to the
threading of its mazes; but it can hardly
do more. We must conclude that painting,
as an art of pure relation, would be rad
ically inferior to music. It is easier to show
how and why it would be inferior to archi
tecture. Architecture deals with all the elements
of form and color that are at the command
of painting, and even, in its own way,
with that of workmanship, and with other,
and vastly important elements, which
painting has not. It can, in the first place,
attain to the sublimity of size, which is
impossible to painting; any attempt at
very great size in painting rendering it
impossible to see the work as a whole and
therefore depriving it of all effect. It com
poses in three dimensions and therefore
has actual space at its command and can
[52]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
work upon the powerful emotions aroused
by a sense of space; and its three-dimen
sional composition gives it the advantage
of an infinitely varied aspect as seen from
different points of view. Finally, architec
ture can call in the lighting of the sun and
play of shadow upon its surfaces, so that
the same building shall have a thousand
varying aspects even when seen from the
same point, and shall yet, if it is properly
composed, be always a unified whole and
a work of art. Painting is strictly limited
as to size, is quite flat, and quite unvary
ing. It is entirely limited to its own re
sources and can hope nothing from the
play of light upon it, being either well-
lighted or ill-lighted, no more. As a non-
imitative art, being denied size, space, and
change which architecture has, and having
nothing which architecture has not, it
would be an art of less resources and of
less range.
Painting, then, needs all the resources
of imitation to produce any great effects,
and the first result of the union of imita
tion with such a purely relational art as
we have been discussing is the immense
strengthening of that relational art itself
[53]

CONCERNING PAINTING
by the acquisition of new elements of
great expressional value.
We have seen that the mere gradations
from light to dark, or the mere contrast
of light and dark, as long as there is no
imitative suggestion, has little power of
expression and produces little effect on
the imagination; but once the suggestion
of imitation is admitted and white is con
ceived of as light and dark as shadow, the
art is possessed of one of the most power
ful of imaginative stimuli. Instead of deal
ing with lighter and darker spaces, as one
does in simple pattern-designing, the art
ist is dealing with radiance and gloom,
and in their mingling and their contrast,
in the infinite variety of their relations,
there is a whole world of dramatic and
emotional expression. But this transforma
tion of light and dark into light and shade,
which is brought about by the introduc
tion of imitation, endows the relational
art with yet other elements of the highest
value for purposes of expression. It creates
for painting the illusion of a third dimen
sion, and gives it the power of modelhng,
making it a sharer with sculpture in the
relations of boss and hollow, which are
[54]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
the essence of that art, and a sharer with
architecture in the relations of space and
size. If it cannot give actual space or actual
size, it can, by the use of this illusion, sug
gest space and size beyond the limits pos
sible of realization to architecture, giving
the appearance of miles of distance where
architecture gives the reality of yards, and
suggesting the bulk of an alp where archi
tecture realizes the bulk of a pyramid.
By these additions painting as an art of
relation is raised from a rather poor and
ineffective art to one of the richest and
most effective of all. But imitation not
only brings new elements to the art of
relation, it greatly enhances the effective
ness of all its elements by giving a visible
intention and direction to their employ
ment. By the choice of objects and actions,
of a scene to be represented, of the subject
in a word, it determines the mood of the
work of art and the emotions and sensa
tions which it shall be the aim of the artist
to evoke. The selection of lines and colors,
the treatment of light and shade, even
the manner of workmanship and the very
touches of the brush are controlled and
guided by a definite purpose and set to
[55]

CONCERNING PAINTING
a particular task, and this definiteness of
purpose not only clarifies the work of the
artist but greatly enhances his effective
ness. For the choice of subject gives the
clew to the imagination of the beholder,
predisposes him to the mood which the
artist has aimed to induce, and makes
him ready to feel the expressiveness of
the work, and of all the elements of which
it is composed. He is like a tuned string,
ready to vibrate to the faintest sounding
of a note that would not otherwise have
stirred him.
But if painting cannot do without imita
tion, still less can it do without an art of
relation. In the one case it would be a
meagre and ineffective art, in the other
it would cease to be an art at all. For the
spaces and lines, the colors and degrees
of light and dark with which painting
deals as a relational art are the very tools
of imitation. They are necessarily present
in every painting, and they necessarily
have their characters and relations, and
if these characters and relations are not
so chosen and controlled by art as to be
helpful to the expression of the subject,
[56]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
they will be hurtful to it. As soon as a
picture represents an object and a back
ground it contains the elements of division
of space. It may be well-designed or ill-
designed, but it cannot escape from design.
As soon as the contour of an object is
drawn there is an arrangement of lines,
and if these lines are not well-arranged
they will be ill-arranged, and if their in
herent characters are not in accord with
the character of the subject, they will be
in disaccord with it. As soon as any at
tempt is made to represent the color of
objects there is a scheme of coloring which
is either harmonious or inharmonious, ap
propriate or inappropriate. No matter how
strictly imitative a painting may be in
its intention, its mere existence sets up
relations of all sorts, and unless its pur
pose is entirely utilitarian — if it has any
intention to give pleasure — these relations
must be considered and made beautiful
and expressive.
We have seen, however, that the aim of
painting is very seldom exact imitation
and that all the higher qualities of imita
tive art are dependent upon selection,
emphasis, and suppression, that the chosen
[57]

CONCERNING PAINTING
characters of things may be more instan
taneously and more powerfully apprehended
than they could be in the presence of the
things themselves. These selections, exag
gerations, and suppressions are made upon
the principles of relational art. The actual
shapes and colors of objects are modified
to take advantage of the inherent character
of lines and colors. A line is straightened
here because straight lines express strength
and rigidity, or more curved there because
curved lines suggest grace and movement.
Colors are intensified to express passion or
clarified to give lightness and gayety. Thus
all the higher effects of imitation are not
only very greatly enhanced by the arts
of relation, they are dependent upon them
and cannot exist without them.
We have seen the great importance of
significant figure-drawing — of what Beren-
son calls tactile values — but such drawing
is entirely dependent on the expressiveness
or the relations of boss and hollow which
painting has taken over from sculpture,
and on the expressiveness of lines and their
arrangements. Motion is only expressible
in art by composition of line, by the choice
and arrangement of lines for that express
[58]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
purpose, and no accuracy of observation
or exactness of record of the forms and
positions of the limbs will make a figure
of a man or beast seem actually to move —
nothing but composition will do it. In the
same way it is by composing in depth — by
the careful proportioning of suggested re
cessions, one beyond another — that Peru-
gino and Raphael achieve the wonderful
spaciousness and serenity of their land
scape backgrounds. It is by composition
of light and shadow, not by mere imita
tion of natural effects, that Rembrandt
makes painting express mystery, romance,
even the supernatural.
It is this double aspect of painting that
makes it the extremely complicated, dif
ficult, and exacting art that it is. Every
particle of the surface of a picture must
represent something and represent it with
sufficient accuracy to give the illusion
of imitation, yet every particle must be
a part of a unified scheme of composition
or rather of a series of schemes overlying
and crossing each other, a composition of
lines and masses, a composition of light
and shadow, a composition of color, even
a composition of the very brush marks
[59]

CONCERNING PAINTING
and of the variations of workmanship and
of texture. And all of the representation
and all of the composition in these various
modes must work together for one end.
Every particle of nature represented and
every particle of the means employed in
representation must be so modified and
controlled that the result may be a unified
and intensified expression of that character
of the subject which has most impressed
the artist and of the feelings and emotions
with which that character has inspired
him. Painting, then, is necessarily a mixed
art, partly an imitative art and partly an
art of relation. As an art of relation it is
allied to the other fine arts and deals with
its material as they deal with theirs. As
an art of imitation it differs from music
and architecture and is allied to sculpture
in that the material it deals with corre
sponds with and represents the appearance
of objects outside itself. Imitation gives
it its substance, relation gives it its form.
Its most necessary and fundamental aim
is imitation. Its highest is the attainment
of unity through the submission of all its
elements and their relations to the principle
[60]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
of design — the creation of a limited and
visible order instead of that vast and in
visible order of the universe which we
must believe to exist but which we cannot
apprehend. The equal mastery of all parts of this
complicated art is impossible to any one
man, though some of the greatest masters
have come surprisingly near to such mas
tery. A sufficient mastery of all these ele
ments to prevent any part of the work
from contradicting and enfeebling the rest
is essential. And the compensation for the
enormous difficulty of the art is its immense
wealth of resource — a wealth which has
never been and is never likely to be ex
hausted. We have now reached the end of our
examination of the art of painting as it
has always existed in the world. We have
tried to find out what have been the aims'
of painting and how it has accomplished
them — what painters have tried to do and
how they have done it. We have tried to
enumerate the elements of the art and to
ascertain their value for representation
and for expression, and we have tried to
[61]

CONCERNING PAINTING
formulate some of the laws by which these
elements are made to work together for
the production of a single effect. Perhaps
we may now feel ready to attempt some
thing like a definition of the art, but we
must remember that, as painting is one
of the most complex of the arts, our ex
amination of it can hardly have been com
plete, and that if any important considera
tion has escaped us, our definition will
be so far insufficient. We must endeavor
to make it inclusive rather than exclusive,
and must be ready to admit that, if any
thing which the world has accepted and
loved as painting is in any important
character inconsistent with our definition,
the fault is with the definition.
Taking up our examination point by
point, then, our tentative definition would
be something like this: The art of painting
is the selective representation on a plane sur
face of objects or actions, real or imagined,
by means of spaces, lines, colors, and varia
tions of light and dark, all of which elements,
as well as the materials employed, have been
subjected to some principle of order for the
attainment of unity.
This definition is admittedly tentative
[62]

AS AN ART OF RELATION
and probably incomplete; but I do not
think, whatever it may lack, that it in
cludes anything which is not a necessary
and essential part of the art. I think it is
demonstrably true as far as it goes, and
indeed I am afraid that it will seem too
obviously true to be worth all the time it
has taken to arrive at it, rather than that
it will seem false. But it is just the obvious
that is always being forgotten or denied,
and it is therefore the obvious that needs
constant reassertion. If my analysis and
my consequent definition are as obviously
correct as I hope they are, we may take it
that the art of painting is at least as com
plex as I have represented it, that none
of the elements I have enumerated can be
spared from it, and that recent efforts
to improve it by eliminating half its dif
ficulties and more than half its resources
are doomed to failure.
The two great and opposite dangers to
the art are, that absorption in representa
tion shall lead to forgetfulness of its more
abstract qualities as an art of relation, or
that interest in these abstract qualities
shall lead to the neglect or denial of rep
resentation. The first was the great danger
[63]

CONCERNING PAINTING
to art during the later part of the last
century. To-day, in a natural reaction
against an excess of imitation, we are
running into the opposite extreme; and
that is the more dangerous of the two,
because what it neglects or denies is the
most necessary and fundamental part of
the art — its very substance rather than its
form. There will always be some oscillation
between the poles of representation and
relation; but good art will always try to
find a place of balance between them, and
the greatest painting will always be that
which attains the greatest degree of truth
as an art of imitation compatible with the
highest beauty and expressiveness as an
art of relation. On no other and no easier
terms can mastery be achieved.

[64]

PART II
THE GOLDEN AGE OF PAINTING

THE CULMINATION OF THE
RENAISSANCE
Just at the end of the fifteenth century,
after two hundred years of delightful if
incomplete creation or of strenuous study
of nature and of technic, the art of the
Italian Renaissance reached a sudden and
brilliant maturity. For a brief period it
produced a series of supreme masterpieces.
Then, everywhere but in Venice, that
decline began which has continued until
now. Venice maintained the supremacy of
Italian art until nearly the end of the six
teenth century, but with the beginning of
the seventeenth the leadership in art passed
definitely to the races of the North.
The suddenness of the change from an
art still more or less primitive to the full
blown art of the high Renaissance, and
the briefness of the period of splendor,
may be best shown by a few dates. The
[67]

CONCERNING PAINTING
first picture of the new and fully matured
style, Leonardo's "Last Supper," was prob
ably painted in 1497. Within fifteen years,
that is, by 1512, the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel and the frescos of the Camera
della Segnatura had been completed, and
when Raphael died, in 1520, the decline
had already begun. In 1505 Raphael, then
just beginning to break away from the
method of Perugino and to establish his
own artistic personality, had begun a
fresco of "The Trinity with Saints and
Monks" in San Severo at Perugia. He
left it unfinished, and the lower part of
it was painted, after his death, by Perugino
himself, still practising with diminished
power the old manner from which Raphael
had so entirely freed himself. Even Cor-
reggio, the youngest and the most revolu
tionary of the giants of the high Renais
sance, who transformed painting beyond
the dreams of Michelangelo or Raphael,
had completed his work and died in 1534.
Yet Lorenzo da Credi, Leonardo's fellow
pupil in Verrocchio's studio, younger than
Leonardo by seven years, survived until
1537, a primitive to the end.
Nothing can account for the extent and
[68]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
the rapidity of this change but the extraor
dinary genius of four men: Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Raphael, and Correggio; and
the art of this short and wonderful time
of culmination is essentially their work
as the art of the long decadence that fol
lowed is deeply tinged by their influence.
Without any one of them the high Renais
sance would have lacked something essen
tial to its peculiar glory. Without any one
of them the art of the succeeding age must
have been profoundly different from what
it actually was. Always excepting the
Venetians, who need separate considera
tion for many reasons, their contemporaries
were either survivals of the past, like Peru
gino and Botticelli; men of talent but of
little original force, like Fra Bartolommeo
and Andrea del Sarto; or their own followers
and imitators. Doubtless there are ' good
historical reasons why the culmination
should have come at that time, or, what
is really the same thing, why the decline
should have begun immediately after them.
Doubtless their time moulded them and
colored them, as it fostered them and gave
them their opportunity. But there was no
one else who could have used their op-
[69]

CONCERNING PAINTING
portunity as they used it, and in their
turn they moulded and colored their age.
The earliest of the four, Leonardo da
Vinci, was, in a sense, rather a precursor
of the high Renaissance than a full sharer
in it. Twenty-three years older than Mi
chelangelo and thirty-one years older than
Raphael, he was already a mature and
world-famed artist when they were begin
ning their careers, and in his later years
he completed very little work of impor
tance. Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer
and man of science, as well as musician
and courtier, he allowed his varied in
terests to distract him from artistic crea
tion, and of the few things he actually
painted most are lost or ruined. Enough
remains for us to see that his task was to
push all parts of the art of painting to the
very verge of perfection, not to carry any
one of its elements to the highest possible
point. His composition has an amplitude
and a dignity hitherto undreamed of, his
draftsmanship an expressiveness and pre
cision hitherto unattainable. One could
scarcely imagine anything better composed
or better drawn than are his best works
[70]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
had not Raphael and Michelangelo shown
us what that something might be. It is so
with everything else, with the noble cast
ing of his draperies, with his treatment of
light and shade, probably with his mastery
of color, though it is now impossible to
tell what his color may really have been.
It is in the treatment of light and shade
that he was most the innovator, and he
has been called the inventor of chiaroscuro,
but even here he did not go the whole
way. So much of light and shade as is
necessary to express the full roundness
of objects he thoroughly mastered. He
added the third dimension to the two
which had hitherto almost sufficed for
painting, and incurred the risk of black
ness to insure the perfection of modelling.
Of light and shade as a separate element
of art, capable of its own range of expres
sion — of light and shade which veils form
rather than reveals it — he knew nothing,
or chose not to utilize such knowledge as
he had.
For, as we saw in Part I, it is neces
sary to distinguish between what Leo
nardo the scientific investigator had learned
of the aspects of nature and what Leo-
[71]

CONCERNING PAINTING
nardo the artist thought fit for artistic
employment. He was a tireless student
of all kinds of natural phenomena, and
of many things he had learned a great
deal that has been rediscovered only in
our own time. Among other things, as his
note-books prove, he had studied effects
of transmitted and reflected light, under
stood the difference between diffused day
light and sunlight with its crisp-edged
shadows, saw the blue shadow which has
been introduced into modern painting by
the Impressionists and knew the reason
of it. He attempted none of these things
in painting and he tells us why. These
things, he says, after a long description
of the effects of sunlight upon foliage — of
the color of the sky in the high lights, of
the yellow light where the sun shines
through the leaf and the interruption of
this light where the shadow of one leaf
falls upon another — these things should
not be painted "because they confuse
the form."
The Florentine ideal in art was the ut
most realization of form. Leonardo was a
true Florentine, and he introduced into
painting just so much of light and shade
[72]

Plate 2. — "Study for Equestrian Statue," by Leonardo da Vinci.
In the Windsor Library.

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
as should assist in this realization, no
more. It is his use of modelling that is
his most personal contribution to art.
Much rhapsodical nonsense has been
written about the "Mona Lisa" and her
enigmatic smile, and there have been end
less speculations as to her character and
the meaning of her expression. It is all
beside the mark. The truth is that the
"Mona Lisa" is a study of modelling,
little more. Leonardo had discovered that
the expression of smiling is much more a
matter of the modelling of the cheek and
of the forms below the eye than of the
change in the line of the lips. It interested
him, with his new power of modelling, to
produce a smile wholly by these delicate
changes of surface; hence, the mysterious
expression. Poets may find "La Gioconda"
a vampire or what not — to artists with a
sense of form her portrait will always be
a masterpiece because it is one of the sub
tlest and most exquisite pieces of modelling
in existence. It is perfect as the surface of
a Greek marble is perfect, beautiful with
the beauty of a lily-petal, and is well worth
the years of study 'and of labor that it is
said to have cost. [73]

CONCERNING PAINTING
Another of Leonardo's innovations was
less fortunate. The technic of fresco-paint
ing, with its necessity for direct and im
mediate attainment of the desired result,
was ill-suited to his temper, which loved
to ponder deeply and to caress into final
perfection by an infinity of retouchings.
He abandoned it, and painted his "Last
Supper" in another medium which is now
said not to have been oils. Whatever it
was it proved ill-suited to mural decora
tion, and the painting must early have
begun to scale from the walls. To-day it
is a wreck in which the nobility of the
composition is all that is discernible of
what was once a masterpiece. Whether
a similar fate overtook his "Battle of the
Standard," which he began to paint upon
the wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence,
we do not know. It has utterly disappeared
and we can judge of it only by fragmen
tary copies.
So much of Leonardo's work was left
unfinished, so much of it has perished,
that we must form our estimate of him
as an artist rather from his countless draw
ings than from the few paintings that re
main to us. They are among the most
[74]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
delightful things in the world, infinitely.
delicate and refined yet full of masculine
power. There are single sketches of his
which are comparable only to the finest
fragments of Greek sculpture as an as
surance of a consummate art which the
world no longer possesses.
All the painting of the high Renaissance
is based upon Leonardo's acquisitions.
Even Michelangelo must have studied and
admired him, though he would not admit
it, and we know that Raphael humbly
imitated him. He achieved a colossal repu
tation, yet outside Lombardy the traces
of his personal influence are small, and
Lombardy produced no great masters.
Luini, too old to have been properly his
pupil, caught something of the grace of
his smiling heads and the charm of his
subtle modelling, and made with these
elements a secure place for himself. Among
the master's more direct following Sodoma
is perhaps the most considerable person,
and many of us feel that his swooning
Catherines and effeminate Sebastians could
well be spared. But the precursor had
made the ways straight, and the younger
men who came after him had each but to
[75]

CONCERNING PAINTING
explore a little further one of the paths
he had marked out.
At first sight Michelangelo may seem
almost as versatile a genius as Leonardo
himself. He, also, was painter, sculptor,
architect, and engineer, and he was, be
sides all these, a poet of true power. Yet
his task was a much narrower one than
that of Leonardo. In the three arts he
practised, his work was to express the
Renaissance ideal of energy, and to ex
press it by means of the Florentine ideal
of significant form. He is essentially the
draftsman and his special distinction is
to have pushed significant draftsmanship
further than it had ever gone before or
has ever gone since.
Not that this means, as has so often been
said, that he knew nothing of color. The
world is slowly learning that he knew a
great deal about color, and that his great
central masterpiece of painting, the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel, is, within the limits
of what is possible to fresco-painting or
profitable for decorative art, one of the
world's masterpieces of coloring, entirely
harmonious and admirable, held together
[76]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
throughout its vast extent with an ab
solute control and an astounding science.
But the mere fact that it has taken the
world nearly four hundred years to learn
this is evidence enough that it is not the
most important thing about the art of
Michelangelo. Within his limits, also, he
is a master of composition, but his mas
tery of composition seldom extends be
yond the single group. When he uses many
figures there is almost always a certain
confusion, a lack of clarity and order.
Where he seems to have no limits is in his
amazing draftsmanship and in the gigantic
energy which that draftsmanship could
express. It had been the effort of the Florentine
school for two hundred years to master
the human figure. It had been its distinc
tion to rely upon the gesture and expres
sion of the human figure for its greatest
effects. No one since the Greeks knew the
human figure as Michelangelo knew it,
and no one has relied so exclusively upon
the human figure as his means of expres
sion. Not merely in sculpture, but in paint
ing, he banished everything else. Landscape
is reduced to the barest symbolism — to the
[77]

CONCERNING PAINTING
most rudimentary indication. Drapery be
comes a mere aid to the revelation of the
movement and structure beneath it. Noth
ing is important but the realization of the
figure itself as a solid bulk in space, the
exact notation of its structure of bone
and muscle and tendon and of their inter
actions and stresses. The roll of the thorax
upon the pelvis, the tension of a muscle
in action, the heavy dragging of it when
relaxed, these are the things on which
Michelangelo concentrated his power. With
them he carries the expression of human
energy to the height of the sublime.
His drawing is never merely correct, and
it is sometimes careless. From the first he
indulges in any exaggeration that will gain
his end. But he is not indifferent to beauty,
and the languid Adam of his "Creation of
Man" is almost as nobly gracious as his
Creator is majestic and full of sweeping
power. Gradually the exaggerations are
exaggerated, the beauty disappears in the
effort to attain the utmost force. Bulk is
increased beyond the possibility of nature,
and attitudes are strained and contorted.
When he painted the "Last Judgment"
he had lived far into the decadence and
[78]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
had become, as it were, the chief of his
own imitators. He had lost his sense of
color; he had never had sufficient grasp of
composition to organize so vast a con
course of figures; but, above all, his forms
had become swollen and monstrous. Instead
of grandeur there is grandiosity; instead
of eloquence there is inflated rhetoric;
in place of the true energy of the high
Renaissance there is the fantastic dis
play of energy which we know as the
baroque. Though he was a sculptor, born and
bred, and painted under protest, Michel
angelo found the highest expression of his
genius in the painting of the vault of the
Sistine; but there is a side of his nature
that shows itself most decisively in his
sculpture — the romantic and melancholy
side. His greatest statues were produced
in the years between the painting of the
vault and that of the "Last Judgment,"
and show neither the triumphant and al
most joyous energy of the one nor the
pompous simulacrum of energy of the
other. Rather they show us thwarted energy,
energy struggling against and crushed by
fate. There is a titanic and rebellious
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CONCERNING PAINTING
melancholy in them that is scarcely any
where to be found in his painting.
We know that he was of a melancholy
temperament, soured by dyspepsia and
embittered by the thwarting of his great
projects. We know that he grieved deeply
over the degeneracy of the time and the
degradation of his native Florence. But
there are reasons in the nature of the art
of sculpture and in Michelangelo's training
and technic for this sense of struggle. It
is a struggle against the laws of sculpture
itself. He was a sculptor in the strictest
sense of the word, a cutter of stone. He
did nothing in bronze that has come down
to us, and he did not, as many modern
sculptors do, design freely in the clay,
leaving the problems of the actual execu
tion to others. He was accustomed to getting
his statues out of the block, and he respected
the block in which he worked and liked to
preserve something of its four-squareness
in the completed statue. Now the limits
of the block will not greatly hamper the
sculptor whose aim is tranquil and monu
mental beauty — to the sculptor whose aim
is energy they must ever serve as a con
straint, and his figures will seem to be
[80]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
struggling to free themselves from the
stone. Michelangelo's successors forgot the
block entirely and their figures attitudinize
in complete obliviousness of it. For him
the cramped postures enforced by the
limits of the stone had an expressional
value, and he came more and more to
leave a part of the stone unremoved that
the struggle for freedom from it might be
emphasized. Neither his own impatience, the exigence
of his powerful employers, nor any other
external circumstance will account for
the number of Michelangelo's unfinished
statues. A concentration of effort upon the
torso and a comparative neglect of the
extremities plays its part. So, perhaps,
does a love of contrasted surfaces, rough
against smooth, and a love of mystery.
But essentially his statues remain un
finished because he found that so they
expressed his mind and temper, and that
they ceased to do so when he tried to com
plete them.
His followers and successors understood
neither this temper nor the method by
which it expressed itself. They imitated
his forms and attitudes — they never
[81]

CONCERNING PAINTING
thought of imitating his unfinish, which
was to them a negligible accident. It was
not until our own day that it became an
easy trick of the studios, lending a false
air of mystery and of romance to the work
of any whipster who has neither energy
with which to struggle nor the austere
self-restraint which makes conflict inevi
table. In his old age, when the physical labor
of sculpture had become too hard for him
and he no longer knew how to paint,
Michelangelo devoted himself to archi
tecture, and the swelling curve of Saint
Peter's dome is his latest expression of
supreme energy nobly self-limited and self-
controlled. In architecture his example was
even more decisive than in painting or
sculpture. When painting and sculpture
were rapidly declining in Italy, architecture
remained a living art, fantastic at times
and extravagant but full of vigor; and
the architecture of the baroque is essen
tially the expression of energy. Its forms
and the direction of its effort were both
largely determined by his practice, as the
forms and the spirit of the other school
of Renaissance architecture, the academic,
[82]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
were largely derived from the work of
Bramante and of Raphael.
As Michelangelo was born to give in his
art the highest expression of the Renais
sance ideal of energy, so Raphael was born
to express the equally cherished, if partly
inconsistent, ideal of serene and ordered
dignity, of a clear and spacious existence
governed by intelligence and right reason;
and nothing could be more unlike the
proud and tortured spirit of the great
Florentine than the sunny wholesomeness
of Raphael's nature. His training was as
unlike Michelangelo's as his personality.
Born in Urbino, he was brought up at one
of the most cultivated courts in Italy, and
early became the friend of Bramante and
of Castiglione. He inherited the Umbrian
tradition of large and open distances and
gently smiling figures, and while he am
plified and elevated his style, he never lost
the Umbrian sweetness.
A part of his reasonableness was his
docility and, brilliantly precocious as he
was, Raphael was one of the most teach
able of men. He remained faithful to the
manner of his master, Perugino, until he
[83]

CONCERNING PAINTING
could do better work in it than Perugino
himself. Then he went to Florence for
further education and diligently studied
everything from which something might
be learned. From Masaccio and Filippino
he learned to tell a story clearly and to
give a large simplicity to his attitudes and
his draperies. He studied Michelangelo's
drawing and Leonardo's light and shade
and was not above taking lessons in com
position from a man so much his own in
ferior as Fra Bartolommeo. His task, at
first, was less to originate anything than
to absorb everything that had been orig
inated by others — to do together what
others had done separately, and to do it
with a final and accomplished grace which
no one else had been able to capture. Yet,
from the beginning there is a personality
in his very impersonality, and the mark
of his individuality is the lack of individ
ual bias. No one else, not even Leonardo,
could produce an art so rounded and bal
anced; no one else could give such airy
spaciousness to the smiling landscape; no
one else could fill it with men so noble or
women and children so beautiful; no one
else could create a world without evil, in-
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THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
habited by a race of ideal beings in whom
we rejoice to believe. His way of telling
the Bible story has become the way of all
the world, his ideals of dignity and beauty
have dominated us all, and no one has
been able to free himself entirely from
Raphael's vision of a serene and perfectly
ordered universe.
He was seldom successful in represent
ing any vehemence of action, and it was
not his function to evoke pity or terror.
His world is a world of peace and tran
quillity, and its dominating character is
orderliness. Now in art, the very principle
of order is design, and Raphael was the
greatest master of design that the world
has seen. The perfection of ordered design
— the mastery of formal composition —
was his gift to the world, and to it every
thing else was subordinated. He could
draw with correctness and even with some
vigor, but the strenuous draftsmanship
of Michelangelo would have been too in
sistent for his purpose, even had he been
capable of it. His drawing must be sim
plified and enlarged to fit it for his use,
and he did not much care if it became
empty. He was working in arrangements
[85]

CONCERNING PAINTING
of lines and spaces, and that they should
tell as such, it was necessary that the
spaces should not be too much cut up with
smaller forms and that the flow of the
lines should not be too much interrupted
with minor accents. The "grand style"
of his draperies is a matter of composition,
and it was because composition was his
principal affair that he was indifferent to
textures and to the character of stuffs
which he could paint admirably when he
chose. His use of color and of light and
shade is similarly conditioned. Each of
these elements is sufficiently studied to
be an agreeable accompaniment to a scheme
of composition, but neither is allowed to
attract too much attention to itself.
The perfect opportunity for the develop
ment of his new style and for the display
of his personal qualities was given to
Raphael when Pope Julius II commis
sioned him to decorate the room called
the Camera della Segnatura in that Vat
ican within whose walls Michelangelo was
even then at work on the vault of the Sis
tine. In the four years between 1508 and
1512 these two supreme and widely dis
similar works were completed. Those four
[86]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
years are the real culmination of the
Renaissance. As Michelangelo never again
found a subject so suited to his powers as
the story of the Creation and the fall of
man, so Raphael here found, or was given,
a subject exactly suited to his — the com
plete illustration of the Renaissance ideal
of culture in its fourfold division of the
ology, philosophy, poetry, and law- In the
decorative framework left by Sodoma he
placed fourteen compositions, On the ceil
ing are four medallions, each containing a
personification of one of these divisions of
learning, and four rectangular panels con
taining the stories of "The Temptation of
Adam," "The Judgment of Solomon," and
"The Flaying of Marsyas," and a figure
leaning over a celestial globe which must
be meant for "Science." In the great
lunettes of the longer walls he painted
below "Theology" that picture of the
church militant and the church triumphant
which has come to be called "La Disputa,"
below "Philosophy" that gathering of the
philosophers and scientists of the ancient
world which is known as "The School of
Athens." On the shorter walls he placed
"Parnassus" below the winged figure of
[87]

CONCERNING PAINTING
"Poetry," and below "Justice" the allegory
of "Jurisprudence" and two smaller frescos
of historical subjects — "Gregory IV De
livering the Decretals" and "Justinian De
livering the Institutes" — the foundations
of ecclesiastical and civil law.
The first painted of the greater composi
tions was probably the "Disputa," and
in the upper part of this there are still
reminiscences of the manner of Perugino
and Pintoricchio, though neither of them
was capable of the thought which trans
formed the flat wall into the semidome or
apse of a cathedral, any more than either
of them was capable of the clear yet in
tricate grouping and the infinite variety of
the lower part. In the other frescos every
trace of the earlier manner has disappeared.
They are the unapproachable examples of
what composition may accomplish, noble
and gracious in their ordering, perfect in
their balance, endlessly lovely in their
interweaving of line, fitting their spaces
with sovereign mastery and ease.
Even Raphael himself could do nothing
so perfect again. In the "Mass of Bolsena"
and the "Delivery of Peter" he attained
to fuller coloring and attempted new effects
of lighting. In the "Sibyls" of Santa Maria
[88]

Plate 3.—" The School of Athens," by Raphael.

In the Vatican, Rome.

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
della Pace and the Farnesina frescos of the
story of , Cupid and Psyche he composed
for new spaces with nearly his old felicity.
But he had commissions for far more work
than he could execute, he was increasingly
interested in architecture and the recovery
of that ancient world which seemed the
realization of his dream of order. He came
to rely more and more upon a throng of
pupils and to leave to them not merely the
execution but the design of the works of
which he was only nominally the author.
He wore himself out early, and though he
died at thirty-seven, he had outlived his
best powers and his art was on the decline.
He left behind him what was, for three
centuries, the greatest name in all art. If
it is not so authoritative to-day as it once
was, it is because we have drifted far away
from the ideals of which he was the incar
nation. He is forever the type of what we
know as the classic spirit, and when the
world has tired of individualism and of
lawlessness it will again find in him the
highest expression of order and of noble
submission of the individual to law.
If Correggio was a less supremely great
artist than Michelangelo or Raphael, yet
[89]

CONCERNING PAINTING
his art is even more surprising and unac
countable than theirs, and a more strik
ingly original genius than his has never
appeared. If Michelangelo invented the
baroque, Correggio foreshadowed the ro
coco. His pictures seem a century — one
might almost say two centuries — later than
those of his contemporaries, and it is al
most impossible to believe that he was
but nine years younger than Raphael and
that he died a year before Michelangelo's
"Last Judgment" was begun. His full
greatness was hardly realized and his in
fluence was certainly not at its highest
until the eighteenth century.
This delay in the establishment of his
fame was partly due to the isolation in
which he worked, and this isolation makes
the revolution he wrought in the art of
painting but the more wonderful. He must
have had an opportunity to study the
works of Mantegna at Mantua, for from
them he took the hint of his figures fore
shortened from below. He was more or
less influenced by certain Ferrarese mas
ters who are, after all, artists of a minor
importance. There is no proof and little
probability that he ever saw Rome or
[90]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
knew anything but by report of the work
of his greatest contemporaries. The pic
tures now accepted as his early works, like
the example in the Metropolitan Museum,'
have little merit and show little promise,
and the series of masterpieces in his own
personal style begins with the frescos
painted in the Convent of San Paolo in
Parma, probably in 1518, when he was
twenty-five years old. The rest of his short
life was passed in Parma or in his native
town of Correggio, entirely apart from
the great currents of Italian art.
It is a strange' art that he invented — an
art at once joyous and sentimental, frankly
sensuous and intolerably affected — an art
from which the last vestige of formality
is banished — an art full of agitation, of
airs and graces and posturings, of rumpled
draperies and naked limbs — an art in
which angels and loves are confounded,
and in which the spiritual rapture of a
crowned Madonna is indistinguishable from
the physical ecstasy of Io in the arms of
Jupiter. It is, above all, an art flooded
with light or swooning in shadow. His
innovations were innumerable. In decora
tion he broke up the architectural frame-
[91]

CONCERNING PAINTING
work entirely, brought pulpy clouds across
his arches for his saints to sit on, and trans
formed the dome above into an opening
of heaven thronged with soaring figures
seen from below in such realistic perspec
tive that one's first, and almost one's last,
impression is of a tangled fringe of legs.
In his altar-pieces he abandons the con
secrated pattern, places the Madonna at
one side of the centre, or builds up one of
the lateral groups while lowering the other,
composes on the diagonal and establishes
a new and picturesque balance of inequal
ities in place of the old formal balance of
equalities. Even in coloring he introduces
a glowing richness to be found nowhere else
except in that art of Venice of which he
can have known nothing, or a silvery cool
ness to be found nowhere else at all. In
the technical handling of material — the
mastery of pure painting — he has had no
superior and hardly a rival.
But all these innovations, admirable or
the reverse, are as nothing compared with
his invention of chiaroscuro, of which he
is the supreme master in Italian art. With
him light and shade ceases to be a mere
means of securing relief and becomes a
[92]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
separate element of art of the highest ex
pressional value. He could do anything
with it, and it becomes at times the real
theme of his work. It is not for nothing
that the "Nativity" at Dresden, the whole
picture illuminated by the miraculous light
from the body of the divine Child, and
the yet more wonderful "Madonna of
Saint Jerome" at Parma, have received
the traditional titles of "La Notte" and
"II Giorno." Night and day, light strug
gling through darkness and light joyously
triumphant and universal, these are his
true subjects. With Correggio light and
shade becomes mystery and poetry, an
escape from the real, a heightener of senti
ment, above all a veil and mitigant of
voluptuousness. Such pictures as his later
mythologies, his Ledas and Ios and Danaes,
would be intolerable and indecent if ex
pressed in the precise and revealing manner
of an earlier art. Bathed in floating and
languorous shadows which half hide, half
reveal them, his pearly nymphs are re
moved into a seductive dreamland of ro
mantic and unreal passion.
Tintoretto was to make a more dramatic
use of light and shadow — there is no drama
[93]

CONCERNING PAINTING
in Correggio — Rembrandt was to make it
expressive of a new pathos and a deeper
mystery; neither they nor any one could
achieve by its means such varied and such
consummate beauty. What Michelangelo
was to drawing and Raphael to composi
tion Correggio was to light and shade. Of
the greater elements of painting there re
mained but one to be fully mastered, the
element of color, and the mastery of it
was to employ not one artist but a whole
school. With the death of Correggio the golden
age of Italian painting, outside Venice*
comes to an end. The later art divides
itself into two main streams which cross
and intermingle — the stream of the baroque
springing from Michelangelo and the stream
of the academic springing from Raphael.
The later Florentine school is given over
to an imitation of Michelangelo, to a fran
tic effort to simulate his energy by exag
gerating his writhing poses and burlesquing
his display of anatomy. One of the worst
instances of this sort of thing is Bronzino's
"Christ in Limbo," a monstrous affecta
tion that makes one wonder how its author
[94]

Plate 4. — "Madonna with St. Jerome," by Correggio.
In the Museum at Parma.

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
could have produced his grave and ad
mirable portraits. A better work is Daniele
da Volterra's "Descent from the Cross,"
which is, however, mainly interesting be
cause it was imitated by Rubens. But the
influence of Michelangelo, modified by
that of Correggio, runs through the whole
art of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen
turies, wherever it is not academic, and
even the rococo of the eighteenth is ulti
mately traceable to them.
As Raphael was above all the apostle of
order, it was inevitable that his works
should become a sort of canon, and that
what he chose freely to do or not to do
should be made a binding rule upon his
successors. What he had chosen to do was
right; what he had not chosen to do was
wrong. He was supposed to have fixed
the limits of "the grand style" and to
have pointed out the only road for those
who would produce an elevated and "cor
rect" art. But there have always been
those who could distinguish between the
natural felicity of Raphael's own inven
tion and the rigidity and woodenness of
his imitators, and in our day we have re
lieved him of some of the poorer works that
[95]

CONCERNING PAINTING
he carelessly allowed to pass under his
name. Whenever and wherever there has
been an artist of truly classic feeling and
of true power of design there has been a
devoted admirer of Raphael who has made
the master a source of inspiration rather
than a principle of inhibition. Among his
right followers we may reckon Poussin
and Ingres and Paul Baudry.
In the latter part of the sixteenth cen
tury the Caracci founded the school of
the Eclectics, which endeavored to unite
the merits of all other schools; to compose
like Raphael, draw like Michelangelo, use
Correggio's chiaroscuro and Titian's color.
Like all attempts to be a little of every
thing, it became not very much of any
thing. The qualities it tried to reconcile
were incompatible in their nature, and the
refusal to sacrifice one to another ended in
the sacrifice of all. The school lasted near
a hundred years and produced many most
respectable and accomplished but rather
tiresome pictures which it was once the
fashion to admire only less than those of
the greatest masters. More recently it has,
perhaps, been the tendency to underrate
them, and something might now be said
[96]

THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE
in their defense if one had time and pa
tience for it. Later still, and perhaps as
a revolt against this school, came the
Naturalists, coarse in feeling, violent in
light and shade, blackish in color, but with
a certain brutal strength and vitality.
They, at least, had the capacity of being
ancestors and, through Ribera, they begat
the Spanish school of the seventeenth cen
tury. But Italian art was dying. Henceforth
the living art of the world was to be pro
duced elsewhere.

[97]

II
THE VENETIANS
We are apt to think of the Venetian
school of art as much later in date than
the other schools of Italy, and there is
indeed some justification for this thought
in the facts of the case. The Venetian
school of painting was late in beginning
and late in ending. Until the latter part
of the fifteenth century it produced little
that the world would hold in remembrance
were it not for what came after it, and it
continued to produce masterpieces of a
high order until nearly the end of the six
teenth century, when the art of the rest
of Italy had become a sterile imitation.
Even in the seventeenth century the art
of Venice was not without some lingering
sparks of vitality, and in the eighteenth it
flamed up again for a moment before its
final extinction. Yet Venetian art arrived
at maturity almost at the same moment
as that of the rest of Italy. Giorgione was
but two or three years younger than Mi-
[98]

THE VENETIANS
chelangelo and was five or six years older
than Raphael, and even if we place Titian's
birth, as some modern writers would have
us do, thirteen years later than the tradi
tional date of 1477, he was still four years
older than Correggio. It is the intense
vitality of the school which kept it at its
height full fifty years after the decline
had begun elsewhere, and its fecundity
which made it the direct ancestor of our
modern art, that mislead us, a little, as
to its chronology.
But there is no illusion in the other feel
ing we have, that Venetian art is pro
foundly different from that of the other
Italian schools. Venice produced a splen
did architecture, but it is an architecture
of color or of effect rather than an archi
tecture of structure or of form. She pro
duced very little sculpture worthy of con
sideration. But she produced a school of
painting which is one of the supreme
manifestations of the human spirit, so
that the very words "Venetian art" have
come to mean "painting" and little else.
And the one element of the art of painting
which the Venetians developed further
than any other, the element of painting
[99]

CONCERNING PAINTING
which they made specially their own, is
just that element which is most distinctive
of the art and least to be found in any
other — the element of color. This reliance
upon and this mastery of color is, however,
only the most striking of the differences
which separate the art of Venice from
that of the mainland. The difference in
choice and in treatment of subject-matter
is nearly as great, and the difference in
temper is almost greater.
Climate doubtless had some influence in
giving its peculiar character to Venetian
art. The schools of color have nearly al
ways been the product of wet regions,
where the air is saturated with moisture,
where atmosphere becomes visible while
solid objects seem tremulous and waver
ing; and the opalescent light of the la
goons must have had its effect upon the
Venetian painters. But indirectly the la
goons exercised an even greater influence
by isolating and protecting the Venetian
Republic; by separating it from the main
land, so that it might grow rich and pros
perous in its own way, without much out
side interference; by making it a sea-power
and a nation of traders, whose trade lay
[100]

THE VENETIANS
to the East. During a large part of its his
tory Venice was more intimately asso
ciated with the Eastern Empire than with
the rest of Italy. It was its intercourse
with Byzantium that kept it a nation of
mosaic workers when elsewhere Italy was
developing the art of the frescanti, and
mosaic is essentially an art of color while
fresco-painting is an art of form. It was
its trade with the East that familiarized
it with rich stuffs and splendid brocades.
It was its isolation that made it safe and
well-governed and prosperous, and enabled
it to keep even the Roman Church in some
sort of tolerable subjection to the civil
power. The art of the rest of Italy was
religious or scientific or intellectual. The
art of Venice was poetic or sensuous or
naturalistic. It was, above all, secular and
even worldly, delighting to represent the
pride of life and the joy of living.
For whatever reason, it is certain that
Venice did produce a school of art of this
entirely distinctive character — a school
more homogeneous and more abundant
than almost any other, and one in which
there are so many secondary masters, often
of very great merit, that the r61e of the
[101]

CONCERNING PAINTING
individual genius is less decisive than else
where. Individual geniuses it had — mas
ters of the very highest rank — but per
haps the school as a whole would not have
been very different, though much less
glorious, if they had not lived. To get any
view of it we must consider its achieve
ments and its methods as a whole, and
then devote some attention to the few
great individualities which stand out above
their fellows.
One of the most notable originalities of
the Venetian school is its early abandon
ment of ecclesiastical rigidity even in the
treatment of religious subjects. From the
early years of the sixteenth century, be
fore the great frescos of Michelangelo and
Raphael had been completed in Rome,
the Venetians had begun to paint what
were known as Santi Conversazioni or in
formal groups of holy personages, gen
erally in a landscape setting, talking quietly
together. Such pictures have neither the
regular pattern of the conventional altar-
piece nor any attempt at story-telling or
dramatic action. Except for the aureoles,
which are not always present, they might
be scenes of domestic genre. The next
[102 1

THE VENETIANS
step is easy to take, and in these same
years conversations no longer holy are
painted — pictures of men and women, nude
or draped or clothed in contemporary cos
tumes, seated under the trees and making
music or eating and drinking together —
pictures in which, if they have any definite
subjects, the subject has become so un
important that we have forgotten what
it is. They are full of poetry and romantic
charm, these pictures; they are never
coarsely or meanly realistic; but they mark
the beginning of our modern tendency to
accept life and nature as the sufficient
subjects of art. They no longer have any
object outside themselves. They are no
longer aids to devotion or books for the
illiterate, or even, in any proper sense,
decorations. They are just pictures, self-
limited and self-contained, with no other
end to serve than to be beautiful and en
joyable possessions — with them our modern
art has definitely begun.
One of the most notable of the character
istics of modern art is its interest in land
scape, and this also comes to us directly
from the Venetians. In their conversation
pieces the landscape background plays a
[103]

CONCERNING PAINTING
vastly more important part than it had
ever done elsewhere. The figures are not
in front of the landscape, they are in it,
and in many of them the importance of
the landscape becomes so great that they
might properly be called landscapes with
figures. The final step of removing the
figures altogether they never took, but
neither did Claude or Poussin, whom we
all admit to be primarily landscape-paint
ers. Giorgione and Titian were the first
painters to show a deep interest in land
scape for its own sake. They painted it
with far more truth than any of their
predecessors or contemporaries, and they
gave it a beauty and nobility that are
still unequalled. ^
In technic as in temper and in treatment
of subject the Venetians are the ancestors
of the moderns. Some of them occasionally
painted in fresco and, of necessity, the
earlier men painted in tempera. Neither
of these processes fully satisfied the Vene
tian love of color, and they eagerly seized
upon the new process of oils, commonly
said to have been brought to them
from Flanders by Antonello da Messina.
Wherever they got it, they rapidly made it
[104]

THE VENETIANS
their own and developed its special quali
ties to the highest possible point. For
tunately, they did not repeat Leonardo's
experiment of painting with it directly
upon the plaster. They preferred, even in
mural decoration, to substitute framed
canvases for paintings upon the wall it
self. Fresco they inclined to reserve for
the outside of buildings, and most of
their fresco-paintings have disappeared,
while their great paintings in oil are in
tact even when discolored and embrowned
by age.
For a long time the Venetians retained
in their paintings the underground of tem
pera, and it is difficult to know when, if
ever, they finally abandoned it. It is a
question of little importance to the lay
man except as it bears upon the preserva
tion of their works, for the painting we
see is in oils and the material of the under-
painting has little bearing on the results
attained. At first this surface painting was
entirely in transparent glazings, and by
these glazes was achieved a splendor and
richness of color hitherto unknown. But,
much as the Venetians loved this decora
tive splendor, it did not satisfy them. Grad-
[105]

CONCERNING PAINTING
ually the glazes are broken up, opaque and
semiopaque tones are added, the sur
faces are thumbed and kneaded; finally,
light and atmosphere are added to color,
complete illusion is attained, and we have
the full portrayal of the colored world —
that world about us which, so far as our
vision is concerned, exists only in light
and color. It is scarcely possible to go
further in this direction without arriving
at modern impressionism.
With this glorification of color goes a
necessary and profound modification of
form. It is not merely because the Vene
tian ladies and courtesans were big and
blond and sleepy that Venetian art intro
duced a new type of beauty into the world.
The Venetians were sometimes indifferent
draftsmen, but their lack of insistence
upon structure is not merely carelessness
or inefficiency. The best of them could
draw superbly within definite and self-
imposed limits. But because they cared
supremely for light and color and atmos
phere they melted away their contours
and simplified their masses, created large
united surfaces for light to play over,
painted out all minor accents, and sub-
[106]

THE VENETIANS
stituted infinitesimal gradations of color
for definite statements of form. By these
means they attained the peculiar irradia
tion of flesh which is one of its greatest
beauties at the same time that they for
mulated an ideal of the female figure which
is more nearly Greek than anything else
in painting. These massive, white-skinned
Venetian women are sisters of the women
of Phidias, and, as the late George Fred
erick Watts has acutely remarked, if one
were trying to reconstitute the pediments
of the Parthenon one might conceivably
supply missing figures from those which
Titian has painted, never from those drawn
or carved by Michelangelo.
The revolution which brought in all these
changes in the art of painting seems to
have begun in the workshop of Giovanni
Bellini. Some beginnings of it may be
found in the later work of Bellini himself,
but Bellini was long-lived arid a student
to the last, and in his old age he learned
from his own pupils something of this
new style which they had inaugurated.
The leader of the innovators was apparently
that fascinating and somewhat mysterious
[107]

CONCERNING PAINTING
person, Giorgione, and he is, as nearly as
any one, the indispensable man in Vene
tian art. But his fellow students, Palma
and Titian, were probably about of his
own age and one of them was certainly his
equal in genius, so that there is no reason
to suppose that the new manner would
not have taken something like the same
form without him. Indeed, we cannot tell
how far he himself may have been in
fluenced by these colleagues whom he
certainly influenced in turn.
We know little of Giorgione himself ex
cept that he was big and handsome and
an accomplished player on the lute, and
that he died of the plague at the age of
thirty two or three. We know almost as
little, with any certainty, of what he ac
tually painted, for the works traditionally
ascribed to him have been so much dis
puted by various critics that there are
only three of them whose authenticity is
unquestioned: "The Castelfranco Madon
na," the so-called "Soldier and Gypsy,"
now known as "Adrastus and Hypsipyle,"
and "The Three Philosophers" or "iEneas,
Evander, and Pallas." "The Castelfranco
Madonna" is a beautiful picture, but it
[108]

THE VENETIANS
would hardly of itself account for Gior-
gione's legendary importance as the founder
of a school. There is a softness and a poetic
charm in it that are personal, and the
landscape plays a somewhat greater part
than was usual at that time, but the com
position is formal and there is nothing
strikingly new in the work. But in the
"Soldier and Gypsy" the whole Venetian
school is implicit. The very uncertainty of
the title is symptomatic; the story to be
told was so unimportant that no one knows
certainly what it is, and that the picture
represents Adrastus and Hypsipyle is but
a modern guess. Here we have an informal
and naturalistic composition with com
paratively small figures in a dominant
landscape, a young man standing at ease
on one side, a nearly nude woman suckling
a child upon the other, the whole centre
of the canvas taken up with a rolling thun
der-storm over a distant city. There is no
action, and the two people pay little at
tention to each other. The figures are not
so massive as they are to become, but
there is already, in the figure of the woman,
that smooth and simplified drawing, that
sacrifice of precise accent to breadth of
[109]

CONCERNING PAINTING
light, which is characteristically Venetian,
and her very pose is one that is to haunt
Venetian art, appearing again and again
in the works of Tintoretto and Veronese.
The "Partie Champetre" of the Louvre
was surely painted by the same hand as
the "Soldier and Gypsy," and if so it is
one of Giorgione's most perfect and most
mature works. The composition is more
concentrated and more masterly but equally
informal, a marvellous composition held
together one knows not how. The drawing
is firmer and more solid, but it is drawing
of the same sort. These young men play-,
ing upon lutes are the brothers of Adrastus,
these women are the sisters of Hypsipyle,
more full-blown and ampler. The color is
incomparably rich and glowing, with a
sober yet fire-shot harmony. No one has
yet pretended to find a subject for it. Its
subject is youth and love and music, na
ture and life. If it is less technically perfect
than some things which were to come after
it, it has a depth of romantic and poetic
feeling which no later work can show. It
remains a masterpiece among the world's
masterpieces, a picture more loved than
any other by those who feel its abiding
charm.
[no]

THE VENETIANS
It is this depth of poetic feeling that
marks all Giorgione's work, and is almost
the only test of its authenticity. It is shown
in his wonderful portraits, it is shown in
his "Venus" at Dresden, the first of those
nude figures painted for their beauty alone,
which became so common in Venetian art.
Titian, who is said to have finished it after
his friend's death, imitated it again and
again, copied it, indeed, almost line for
line, but though he added a new richness
of technical resource, he never equalled
its. serene and noble beauty. There are
a few other pictures that are pretty gen
erally accepted as by Giorgione. There is
a whole series of works which are claimed
alternately for him or for Titian or some
minor member of the school. Even if they
are not his they help to show us what he
was like — what was the kind of picture
sure to be attributed to him. In the end
we can make out a definite and original
artistic personality of the highest order
of genius, and a profound and lasting if
not absolutely decisive influence on the
formation of the Venetian ideal of art.
It is difficult to know just what part
was played by Titian during Giorgione's
[in]

CONCERNING PAINTING
lifetime. Was he Giorgione's equal in age
and almost his equal in performance, divid
ing amicably with him the decoration of
the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, or was he, as
some would have it, a lad of eighteen when
that work was completed, the humble
follower and assistant of an already cele
brated master? Or is the truth, as would
seem intrinsically probable, somewhere be
tween these extremes? His earliest works
are inextricably confused with those of
his friend, and the critics will probably
never arrive at any perfect agreement as
to which of them painted certain well-
known canvases. Some of these seem, in
deed, to have been painted by both of
them, for there is a constant tradition
that Titian was intrusted with the com
pletion of the works which Giorgione left
unfinished. But whatever Titian's share in the golden
morning of Venetian art, its noonday splen
dor was for him. After the death of Gior
gione he rapidly became the acknowledged
head of the school, retaining that position
against all rivals during his long life, and
the first two-thirds of the sixteenth cen
tury are full of his glory. No artist was
[112]

THE VENETIANS
ever more splendidly successful. He could
paint anything and paint it in a way pleas
ing to everybody. He was prodigiously
industrious and turned out an incredible
number of works of all kinds — portraits,
easel-pictures, altar-pieces, mythologies,
nudities, vast decorations — all of them
supremely able and many of them master
pieces of the highest order. He was a per
fect man of the world, the friend of princes
and emperors, a wealthy and respected
citizen, Count Palatine of the Empire and
Knight of Saint Iago; and his fame was
coextensive with the civilized world. When
the plague at last carried him off, in 1576
(a patriarch of eighty-six years, according
to the lowest count, of ninety-nine accord
ing to that more commonly accepted), all
rules were broken to give him a public
funeral. He was a man born to succeed in
the world and meaning to do so; moral,
perhaps, rather from a certain coldness of
temperament than from any nice scruples
of conscience; able to enjoy the society of
a scamp like Aretino or to be complacent
to the vices of the rich and great without
personally sharing in them; a trifle avid
of honors and of money; just and honor-
[113]

CONCERNING PAINTING
able in his dealings, yet jealous of any
rivalry; a character well-regulated and
admirable rather than entirely sympa
thetic. He painted continuously for seventy or
eighty years on end, and his works are
almost as various in manner as in subject.
He lived through a time of rapid changes,
and his later work is as different from his
earlier as the world of the end of the six
teenth century was different from the
world of its beginning. But there are great
differences also among the pictures of any
one time. He was a many-sided man, with
multiple interests and abilities, experiment
ing in new directions and brusquely re
turning upon himself to execute new varia
tions on an earlier theme; and he would
not admit that any one could do what he
could not, and must enter into direct
rivalry with anything accounted successful,
pitting himself, now against Diirer for
minute finish, now against Michelangelo
for vigorous and colossal forms. If, upon
the whole, we prefer the productions of
the first half of his career, we must re
member that that half includes the work
of some forty years and brings him nearly
[114]

THE VENETIANS
or quite to the age of sixty. All his later
work was the production of what, in any
one else, would have been old age; yet at
the very end of his life his prodigious vitality
was capable of technical innovations which,
for good or evil, profoundly influenced the
subsequent course of art.
While youth and early manhood endured
he retained something of the Giorgionesque
romance, and his first task was to carry
to a higher perfection the Giorgionesque
tradition. Apart from the works which may
be either his or Giorgione's we have a
series of unmistakable Titians, saintly or
secular conversations? which culminate in
that exquisite vision known as "Sacred
and Profane Love" — a picture with nearly
all Giorgione's poetry and passion and
more than his accomplishment — a picture of
more closely woven tissue, firmer in its
drawing, of a nobler style in its draperies,
more delicate in its surfaces, and more
flower-like in the mingling of lovely hues.
Then he enlarges his canvas and com
plicates his scheme, adds more figures,
risks a certain diffusion, but holds together
by his color and his light what the line
alone would have left straggling. There is
[115]

CONCERNING PAINTING
not much poetic intensity in the "Bac
chanal" of the Prado, or even in the "Bac
chus and Ariadne" of the National Gallery,
but there is freedom and energy, an abound
ing joyousness and a magnificent science.
Or he concentrates himself, becomes
thoughtful and serious, attains to a brood
ing solemnity in that unique and inimitable
picture, the "Entombment" of the Louvre
— a perfect composition by one who was
not naturally a composer.
For it is not so much a lack of religious
feeling as a lack of decorative feeling — a
lack, above all, of a spontaneous genius
for composition — that gives a certain hol-
lowness and theatricality to Titian's great
altar-pieces, to the "Assumption of the
Virgin" and the "Pesaro Madonna." There
is the same hollowness and theatricality
in nearly all his larger pictures, whatever
the subject. They are composed, but they
are composed by main force, and the at
titudes of the figures are imposed upon them
by an arbitrary scheme. Or if he escapes
this danger he falls into confusion, or into
a certain emptiness and commonplaceness.
He is at his best in comparatively small
canvases; in his portraits of dignified men
[lie]

THE VENETIANS
or beautiful women, in his little pic
tures of two or three figures, in his single
nudes, like the delicious "Venus" of the
Tribuna, or half-lengths like the "Flora."
He has left us a multitude of such things,
painted as no one else has ever painted,
with such fusion of lovely tones, such
glow of light and color, such variety of
touch, crisp or melting and tender, such
perfection of surface and texture as makes
of a few square feet of canvas a source of
endless delight — "infinite riches in a little
room." This is his ultimate distinction, and in
this he is the representative Venetian,
that he was not a poet or a composer or
a draftsman, but precisely the greatest
painter in the stricter sense of the word
that ever lived. And yet, before this or
that masterpiece, one feels that reserva
tions are ungracious, that comparisons are
only possible with the greatest, that there
is in him a balance of all good qualities
which is almost but not quite unparalleled.
As he grew old a certain bluntness and
even coarseness of feeling becomes more
conspicuous in the work of Titian. His
sensuousness becomes sensuality and some-
[117]

CONCERNING PAINTING
times sinks to grossness. His female figures
grow fat and creased and their faces be
come blocky and stupid. He becomes
pompous and emphatic, and in such at
tempts at the grandiose and the Michel-
angelesque as the decorations of Santa
Maria della Salute reaches the point of in
tolerable flatulence. His admirable technic
begins to break up, his color becomes hot
and disagreeable, his brush-work thin or
crumbling and heavy. Nearly everything
he painted after 1540, and it is half his
life-work, could be removed with gain
rather than loss to his fame — nearly every
thing except a few of his very latest pic
tures. In his extreme old age there is a
sudden revival of fire. The old technic
has gone altogether and a strange new
one takes its place — a technic in which
nothing is precise, in which a maze of col
ored strokes builds the figures out of space.
Conventional composition is entirely aban
doned and a new composition of unexpected
angles and odd spottings comes into being.
The color becomes cool, the browns and reds
giving place to grays and blues. Finally,
there is a strange smouldering passion, a
fierce intensity, in such a picture as the
[118]

THE VENETIANS
"Entombment" of Madrid that is singu
larly different from the almost brutal cal
lousness of the work of a few years earlier.
In the last picture of all, "The Pieta"
of the Venice Academy, the flame has
burned out, leaving but a heap of ashes.
No other painter than Titian ever more
nearly resumed a whole school in his proper
person. Before him Venetian art was still
primitive. It progressed with his progress,
and its character was most perfectly ful
filled in the work of his prime, while its
secondary masters were dominated by his
influence when they were not directly his
pupils. In his later years it would have
been in full decline but for the work of
two younger men, Veronese and Tintoretto,
who survived him by twelve and eighteen
years, respectively.
And, indeed, the elder of the two, who
outlived the younger, brilliant as are his
finer performances, is, in a sense, a de
cadent painter. Ever since Ruskin, with
the enthusiasm of a pseudo-discoverer,
found in Tintoretto's pictures not only
thoughts and meanings which had never
entered the painter's head, but objects and
[119]

CONCERNING PAINTING
incidents and figures which he had not
placed upon his canvas, it has been the
fashion to exalt that artist to a place en
tirely beyond his merits and to overrate
him even more than he had been under
rated. He was a man of something of
Michelangelo's temperament without the
Florentine austerity or the Florentine train
ing — a man of furious and turbulent energy
without curb or restraint — and he wreaked
himself in a violence of improvisation in
which composition, drawing, color, and
sound method were all sacrificed in the
effort at self-expression. He came upon
the stage just as Titian was entering upon
the second half of his career, when the
beautiful workmanship of that master's
prime was as much a thing of the past
as the lyric mood of his youth. Tintoretto
is essentially a painter of the baroque, a
painter in whom all sense of measure is
lost, with whom dignity is almost impos
sible, and tranquillity quite inconceivable.
Everything is bustle and hurry. Figures
never stand upright, they rush and tum
ble and fall headlong. They cannot sit or
recline without agitation, and the apostles
of the "Last Supper," as at San Trovaso,
[120]

THE VENETIANS
look as if a bomb had suddenly exploded
in the middle of the table. One of them
cannot so much as pick up a wine-flask
without a violence of theatrical gesture
as if he were about to throw it at an
enemy's head.
He had taken as his motto "the drawing
of Michelangelo and the coloring of Titian,"
but he was as far from understanding the
one as the other. He knew the figure well,
after a fashion, but his study of Michel
angelo went no further than an imitation
of the long-legged type of the women on
the Medici Tombs and an exaggeration of
their twisted movement. He was always
in a hurry, and his drawing is almost al
ways cursory and calligraphic and some
times inexcusably careless. He wanted no
more drawing generally than would con
vey the sense of vigorous action, and was
content to rest with that. His color is
violent, running to strong contrasts, cold
rather than warm, with a tendency to
blue and sharp pink; or it is of a nearly
uniform ashy gray. That is, as nearly as
we can judge of it, for there are few of his
pictures that have not blackened or faded.
His impetuosity and his mania for speed
[121]

CONCERNING PAINTING
would not allow him to give the necessary
time to the complicated processes of Vene
tian technic, and he knew no other. Per
haps the small prices for which he was
willing to work rather than be unoccupied
led him to economize in the quality of his
materials. At any rate, while many of his
canvases never were anything more than
vast sketches, almost all of them are
ruined. His most original contribution to art is
his treatment of light and shade. He was
fond of experimenting with little mani
kins, hung up by strings and lit by candles,
and he invented a new chiaroscuro, au
dacious, capricious, but often fascinating;
barred his figures with arbitrary cast shad
ows, brought high light against deep dark
with startling effect, made of his lights
and shades a new and independent pattern,
overlying and dominating the pattern of
line and mass. With him light and shade
becomes the great vehicle of expression,
dramatic, intense, almost savage in its
energy, making us forget the essential
triviality of his conception.
For there is nothing for which he has
been more overpraised than for the truth
[122]

Plate 6. — "Bacchus and Ariadne," by Titian.
In the National Gallery, London.

THE VENETIANS
and power of his imagination. His treat
ment of subject is rarely more than vigor
ously picturesque, is often coarse, and at
times sinks to the level of claptrap and
sensationalism, as in the "Last Supper"
of San Giorgio Maggiore, where the troop
of angels formed from the smoke of the lamp
is an invention worthy of Gustave Dore.
And yet he is a great master. When the
subject suits his turbulence, as in the
"Miracle of Saint Mark," he is wonder
fully exhilarating. His force and his abun
dance are equal to Rubens, his color is more
fiery and superb, and his virtuosity of
hand incomparable. And, once or twice,
in quieter subjects, when there is a mo
ment of appeasement and he gives him
self time to express his genius fully, he
has produced masterpieces of perfect art.
There are few things in the world more
noble than the "Saint Jerome and Saint
Andrew," few things more masterly than
the "Saint George," and there is nothing
lovelier than the "Ariadne" or the "Pallas
Driving Away Mars."
Tintoretto was an exception in the Vene
tian school as he would have been in any
[123]

CONCERNING PAINTING
other, a kind of thunder-storm in the heat
of the day. Veronese was a calm and serene
afternoon. Though he came to Venice
from without, and much in his art was not
strictly Venetian, yet he had the Venetian
qualities in their utmost perfection, united
with those which he brought with him or
created for himself. Painters, from his
own day to ours, have always known him
for what he was, one of the mightiest of
masters; but, misled by the apparent sim
plicity of his art, criticism has hardly yet
done him justice.
Veronese was by nature and by train
ing what most of the Venetians were not,
a decorator, and with him, though he
painted it admirably, the isolated easel-
picture was the exception rather than the
rule. Therefore, the purely Venetian quali
ties of painting were modified in his work.
The exquisiteness of surface and texture
of the earlier work of Titian would be
quite ineffectual on a vast scale, placed
upon a ceiling or at the end of a long hall,
and Veronese invented, or adopted, a
simpler method and used it even in small
pictures. His painting, as such, is always
beautiful, but it is straightforward and
[124]

Plate 7. — "Saint Jerome and Saint Andrew," by Tintoretto.
In the Ducal Palace, Venice.

THE VENETIANS
direct, appearing to deal in few subtleties,
yet much more subtle and refined than is
at first apparent. He had all the Venetian
love for color and for light, but his color
is cooler and his light broader than those
of the other Venetians. The richness and
fiery depth of Giorgione, the deep gloom
or the violent contrasts of Tintoretto are
equally unsuited to pure decoration. Ver
onese was an admirable fresco-painter and
he brought to oil-painting something of
the paleness and unity of tone of fresco.
But as his knowledge of color, of chiaro
scuro, and of the resources of oil-painting
was complete, the result was a greater
truth to the full-colored appearance of
nature in open daylight than had ever
been attained or than has since been at
tained on anything approaching his scale.
It is only in small pictures that his degree
of naturalism in the treatment of light
has been surpassed, and it has never been
combined with his decorative splendor.
He had to the full, also, the Venetian
naturalism of temper — the love of life as
it is, and especially of all that is sumptu
ous and luxurious in life. He had little of
Giorgione's romanticism — his temper is
[125]

CONCERNING PAINTING
more like Titian's, but like Titian at his
best — a frank and manly spirit, with a
spice of humor which Titian had not, but
with an unfailing simple dignity also, per
fectly free from pompousness and affec
tation. He is never violent or theatrical,
as Tintoretto often is, never coarse or
unfeeling, never sentimental or morbid.
His is a great, kindly, smiling, giant-like
nature, loving all that is beautiful and re
joicing in it, but not squeamish, and quite
willing that even a dog should have its
day or that a cat should look at his
kings. In his broad tolerance of temper, in his
love of light and color, in his perfect mas
tery of the technic of painting, Veronese
was typically a Venetian, the equal of
any of his fellows, and he had even added
new conquests to the Venetian domain.
But with the purely Venetian elements of
his art he combined in a singular degree
those qualities which were not specially
Venetian but had marked the other great
schools of Italy. He drew far better than
any other Venetian and better than any but
a few of the Florentines, and he composed
better than any one except Raphael. Not
[ 126 ]

THE VENETIANS
that he was in the least an Eclectic. His
drawing and his composition are his own
and fit him perfectly. His drawing is es
sentially Venetian drawing, simplified and
enlarged to carry light and color, but he
had a stronger sense of form and structure
than other Venetians, and a purer taste, and
no one in the whole range of painting has
created an ideal of the female form that
approaches so nearly to that of the finest
Greek sculpture — sculpture which he never
saw and from which he can have borrowed
nothing. And his design is even more his
own, the development of his greatest native
gift — the gift that makes him the incompar
able decorator he was. It is incredibly spon
taneous, resourceful, and varied, ranging
from great formality to the extreme of pic
turesque irregularity, but it is always sover
eign and dominating, and not the smallest
detail of his most crowded and sumptuous
canvases escapes from its sway. In other
things he may fail now and then. Occasion
ally a bit of false drawing will show itself;
occasionally a note of color is wrongly felt
or is so altered by time as to escape from
the general harmony; in composition he is
never wrong, and the best proof that a
[127]

CONCERNING PAINTING
work is not his, but an imitation, is that it
anywhere fails in design.
In the work of no other master what
ever — not even in that of Titian — are so
many of the great elements of painting
combined in so high a degree of perfec
tion. If he is not the greatest of all mas
ters, he is assuredly the most complete
painter that ever lived. With him the
art of painting reached its highest point
— its greatest balance of all possible vir
tues. If it has gained something in the
changes it has undergone since his day,
it has lost more than it has gained.
Veronese died in 1588, Tintoretto not
until 1594. After a hundred years of con
tinuous and magnificent productiveness
even the Venetian school was losing some
thing of its splendid vitality. Yet all
through the seventeenth century it con
tinued to produce artists who, if not of
the first rank, were yet painters and Vene
tians. The splendid tradition of the school
had still some life in it, and would not
give way to the eclecticism of the Bolognese
or even to the naturalism of Caravaggio
and his followers, though their art had
[128]

Plate 8. — "Martyrdom of St. George," by Veronese.
In San Giorgio in Braida, Verona.

THE VENETIANS
some points of contact with the later Vene
tian style. And in the eighteenth century
the dying energy of Venice renewed itself
and again produced a group of able
painters and one man of surpassing talent
who in a better time might have done
almost anything.
The old Venetian love of landscape and
architecture and the charm of their own
wonderful city inspired Canaletto and
Guardi. Canaletto painted Venice with a
degree of architectural accuracy, a feeling
for atmosphere, and a manly sobriety of
tone that excuse his lack of color and
make him a painter of real importance and
one of the ancestors of modern landscape-
painting. Guardi is slighter, gayer, more
amusing, but much less serious. The last
form of the Venetian conversation piece
is found in Longhi's little interiors in which
the degenerate Venetians of his own day
carry on their little flirtations and their
trivial affairs. But it is in the work of the
greatest decorator of the eighteenth cen
tury that the old splendor of Venetian art
is most nearly revived.
Tiepolo almost renewed Titian's inter
national successes of two centuries earlier.
[1291

CONCERNING PAINTING
His art was in demand in Germany as
well as in Italy, and he died in Spain, where
his work influenced Goya and, through
him, the art of modern France. He was
thoroughly of his time and pushed the ex
travagances of the baroque and the ro
coco further than any one else. Nowhere
else will you find such audacities of per
spective, such violence of foreshortening,
such reckless disregard of all measure and
all restraint. He erects pyramids and obe
lisks on the clouds, paints galloping horses
seen from directly beneath, fills the air
with frolicking girl-angels whose long white
legs hang out of immense masses of rum
pled and tormented draperies. He allows
his picture to tumble out of its frame on
all sides, plastering clouds and cherubs
straight across the cornice mouldings and
doing to the actual architecture what
Correggio did to an architecture that was
merely simulated. At Nervasa, in the lake
district, he has even painted a ceiling in
two stories, the lower one cut out as with
gigantic scissors and allowing the upper to
be seen through its interstices like a piece
of stage scenery or a child's valentine. All
this he does with an amazing virtuosity
[130]

Plate 9.— "Landing of Cleopatra," by Tiepolo.
In Palazzo Labia, Venice.

THE VENETIANS
and in a captivating scheme of light but
warm color interspersed with vivacious
darks. Nothing is difficult to him, and
nothing seems to require any preliminary
study. His power of improvisation is un
precedented, and his slightest sketches,
like his completed works, show an absolute
foreknowledge of what he intends to do.
There is not a wasted touch in them, or
the slightest indication of afterthought. If
he does not carry out a work exactly as
planned, he replans it in his head and does
it differently — he makes no alterations in
the sketch.
All this shows a prodigious and almost
superhuman cleverness, but the frescos
of the Palazzo Labia in Venice show how
much more than mere cleverness there
was in Tiepolo. On four bare walls he has
painted a simulated architecture, a quite
possible and even dignified architecture of
the late Renaissance, such as Veronese de
lighted in, and between the columns he
has painted, in frank imitation of Veronese,
scenes from the story of Antony and Cleo
patra. The costumes are Veronese's with
a slight change that gives an eighteenth-
century touch to them. The coloring is
[131]

CONCERNING PAINTING
Veronese's, only a little cooler and a little
more vivacious. The compositions have
almost the richness and the authority of
those of the earlier painter. Imitative as
they are, and therefore less characteristic
of their time and of their author than some
other of his works, they show a real kin
ship with the master they imitate. They
lack the gravity and the simplicity of
Veronese, but they have almost his bril
liancy and more of his spirit than any one
else has ever attained, and they incline us
to believe that in a more serious age Tie
polo might almost have equalled his great
prototype. So, down almost to the end of her in
dependent existence, Venice maintained a
living school of painting — a school that is
still living in its offshoots in other lands.
It is, in the literal sense, a school — the
school — of painting as a separate and dis
tinct art — a school which Rubens and
Velasquez attended and whose lessons they
passed on to others. The masters of that
school are the teachers of all the world,
and all who have fruitfully studied the
art of painting have found in Venice their
Alma Mater. [132]

Ill
DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTING
OF THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY
By the end of the sixteenth century Ital
ian art was rapidly declining, even in
Venice; but the influence of Italy was
spreading into other countries, and in the
seventeenth century the vital art of the
world was produced in Flanders, in Hol
land, and in Spain. It was a century of
painting. These countries had produced
the best of which they were capable in
architecture and in sculpture long before
this time; now, while they were creating
great and important schools of painting,
their architecture was mediocre and their
sculpture almost non-existent.
In Flanders there had been an admirable
native school of painting in the fifteenth
century — a school not unlike the Venetian
in some things and one that, by its inven
tion of oil-painting, provided the Vene
tians with their necessary means of ex-
[133]

CONCERNING PAINTING
pression. The Flemings, like the Venetians,
lived in a moist climate and, like the Vene
tians, they were a nation of traders with
the East. They were fond of color, of ma
terial luxury, of rich brocades and splendid
materials of all sorts. Even more than the
Venetians they were Naturalists, accept
ing life as they saw it and reproducing it
as accurately as they were able. What
they had not was the Italian love of beau
ty, the Italian genius for form, and the
Italian mastery of ordered arrangement.
When intercourse with Italy taught them
to perceive this lack they set themselves
to studying Italian art, and when Ru
bens came upon the scene they had been
"Italianizing" for near a hundred years
with deplorable results. Their imitation of
Raphael and Michelangelo had succeeded
only in eradicating the native qualities of
the school and in substituting for them a
ridiculous misunderstanding of the Italian
genius. It is doubtful if any painting more
worthless and sterile than that of the
Italianized Flemings of the latter part of
the sixteenth century has ever been pro
duced. Rubens, too, was an "Italianizer" and
[134]

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
spent many years in Italy, but he had a
great genius for painting, and his instinct
led him to find in the Venetians a school
sufficiently akin to that which had once
flourished in his native land to be capable
of a fertile union with it. The result was
an art of immense vitality and fecundity
— an art prepotent among all others —
which filled the seventeenth century with
its glory and became, in its turn, the an
cestor of the best art, English or French,
of the succeeding century.
Peter Paul Rubens is almost, in his
proper person, the Flemish school of the
seventeenth century. He was surrounded
by able men, many of them of his own
age or older than he, but his dominant per
sonality reduces them to the role of mere
satellites, revolving about him and add
ing to, while they reflect, his splendor.
Born almost exactly a hundred years after
Titian, he held in his day much such a
position as Titian had held a century
earlier. His fame was world-wide and his
art everywhere in request. Whenever the
best man was wanted he was called upon,
and he served the little courts of Italy
[135]

CONCERNING PAINTING
and the great ones of England, France,
and Spain as well as that of his native
country at Antwerp. He is a splendid
figure in history, a cultivated gentleman
speaking seven languages, a knight, an
ambassador, and a friend of princes, a
man occupied with many things besides
his art, yet withal a painter of such prodig
ious industry that he produced more than
twenty-two hundred pictures, many of
them of huge size. Such an enormous pro
duction was made possible only by the
systematic use of a corps of pupils and
assistants; but while Rubens was the head
of a vast manufactory of works of art, he
put so much of himself into everything
that left his workshop as to maintain its
output at an extraordinarily high level,
and there are enough works of his own
hand extant to provide masterpieces for
half a dozen painters of our modern stat
ure. In temper his art is more like that of
Veronese than any other; he had much
of Veronese's power, his love for the sump
tuous, his pride and joy of life. But he
is without the Venetian seriousness, with
out the grave and dignified elegance of
[136]

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
Veronese. He is, by comparison, a trifle
barbaric, more exuberant, more emphat
ic, coarser-fibred. Veronese is often at his
best in depicting a banquet; Rubens is
never more himself than when painting
a kermess. His sensuality is franker than
that of any Venetian, and where Veronese's
female figures are amply classic, Rubens' s
are pulpy and even baggy. Yet he has an
easy, florid, high-worded eloquence that
can rise to almost any theme. No one was
ever more flowing, more abundant, more
vigorous — perhaps no one was ever so
skilful. For him difficulties exist only to
be conquered with a triumphant facility,
yet his virtuosity is never indulged in for
its own sake but is kept in subjection to
a cool intelligence and a profound learn
ing. For this jovial, ruddy, full-blooded,
Flemish giant is in his way a Classicist
and an Eclectic. Everything in his work
is calculated and everything is based upon
a deep study of the art of the past. He has
pondered the works of Leonardo and Mi
chelangelo no less than those of Veronese
and Titian; has found time in the midst
of his vast productivity to make many
copies; has chosen from everything that
[137]

CONCERNING PAINTING
has been done before him those elements
which he can usefully incorporate into his
own style and bend to the expression of
his own ideals and the ideals of his own
time. How thoroughly he did express those
ideals is shown by his almost universal
popularity. At the close of the wars with Spain,
Flanders had remained Catholic and
monarchical while Holland had become
Protestant and republican. Rubens is the
painter of the Catholic and monarchical
reaction and his art was of the same kind
as that of the Jesuit churches — splendid,
a little pompous, without great purity of
taste, an art intended to impress and to
dazzle rather than to win. His business
was to paint great altar-pieces for the
churches or great allegorical decorations
for royal palaces; and to carry out such
tasks one of the most essential qualifica
tions is rapidity of execution. So he be
came one of the speediest of executants,
but his speed is very different from the
hasty improvisation of a Tintoretto. . His
rapidity is simply efficiency. It is perfectly
deliberate, and both his style and his
technical methods have been profoundly
[138]

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
modified to attain it. His drawing is full
of flowing and redundant curves, partly
because they are in the taste of the day,
partly because such forms are most rapidly
and easily executed with the brush; but
these curves are not the result of rapid
and careless brush-work. They are intel
ligent modifications, consciously adopted,
of the forms of Michelangelo, and they
are carefully provided for in his prelim
inary studies. When one of his patrons —
a Frenchman who was, perhaps, influenced
by the severer classicism of Poussin —
found fault with the bandy legs of some
of his figures he gravely defended them as
properly drawn according to the best tradi
tion. His composition, his color, his tech
nical method have all received a similar
modification. His composition is full of
the same emphatic, cursive, S-shaped lines
as his drawing. It is restless and full of
turbulent movement, but it is rigidly con
trolled, perfectly lucid, never for a mo
ment out of hand. His color is now rich
and sonorous, now coolly brilliant, but it
is never carried beyond a certain point of
subtlety, and there is always an element of
recipe in it. It is neither passionate nor
[139]

CONCERNING PAINTING
exquisite, but the best color attainable in
the time given to the work by a man who
knows all that is to be known about color,
as about other things, and who has learned
just how his effects may be obtained with
the least labor. His method of painting is
based upon the Venetian, modified by the
old Flemish love for thinness of material
and smoothness of surface — modified above
all by the necessity of speed. Nothing so
light, so rapid, so flexible was ever in
vented, and as he grows older and his
mastery of it increases he comes to paint
almost with vapor, and there seems to
be no solid matter at all on his can
vas. The consciously eclectic and almost aca
demic nature of Rubens's art is most clearly
seen in the "Descent from the Cross," the
first important picture which he painted
after his return from Italy. Here the at
tempt at a synthesis of great qualities is
almost as patent as in any of the Bolognese.
The composition is largely borrowed from
Daniele da Volterra, and the determina
tion to combine Florentine draftsmanship,
Venetian color, and the realistic force and
sombre light and shade of the Naturalists
[140]

Plate 10. — "Henry IV Receiving the Portrait of Marie de' Medici,
by Rubens.

In the Louvre.

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
is self-evident. But the fusion of elements
is more conspicuous in this instance only
because it is as yet incomplete. The pic
ture is his "masterpiece" only in the orig
inal sense of the word — the piece intended
to announce and to assure acceptance of
his mastery. It is in later works that this
style, compounded of many simples, is fully
matured and becomes fully his own, so
that he speaks through it with perfect
ease. How entirely his manner is suited
to the matter, and how admirably his
painting accords with its natural setting
of sumptuous and somewhat overorna-
mented architecture may be seen in the
"Marie de' Medici" series in the Louvre,
now that these pictures are seen together
in a room designed to hold them. They
are not of Rubens's very best and they
contain only here and there his own handi
work, but it is all the more evident how
magnificently they are planned. Years ago,
when they hung among other pictures
in the Long Gallery, they seemed rather
pompous and summary, empty and lack
ing in quality. Now they are seen to be
superb decorations which, in the great
halls of the Luxembourg Palace for which
[141]

CONCERNING PAINTING
they were designed, can have lacked noth
ing of perfect appropriateness.
Such was what one may call the official
art of Rubens. Others have created an
art that is nobler and purer, more pas
sionate or more delicate and lovely; there
is no art that is more intelligent or, in its
own way, more admirable, and hardly any
from which so much may be learned. But,
after all, Rubens was a man and not a
formula, and so he escapes on all sides
from our definition. He had his likes and
his loves, which were those of an eminently
sane and manly nature, and as he could
paint as easily as he could talk, these likes
and these loves expressed themselves pic-
torially. He liked hunting and was fond
of animals, and he painted beasts as al
most no one else has done. He was fond
of country life and he became a great
landscape-painter, painting a landscape
more homely and less stately than that of
the Venetians and making distinct ad
vances in truth of light and natural effect.
He could even be tenderly poetic now and
then, painting one of the most delicate
and beautiful representations of moon
light known to art; or romantic, as in that
[142]

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
little picture of fighting knights that might
have been painted by a Frenchman of
1830. Most of these things are the work of
his later years when he had retired from
statesmanship and from the execution of
great commissions and painted to please
himself. At fifty-three he married his
second wife, Helena Fourment, a girl of
sixteen, and his love for her inspired a
series of portraits and of pictures in which
she is ever the central figure, which are
among the most delicious things in the
world. He painted her in the most splen
did costumes his well-furnished purse could
buy; he painted her, with singular frank
ness, in next to nothing at all. Plump and
white and blond, a true Fleming, but
radiant with youth and beauty, we know
her as a bride, we know her as a young
mother, we know her as this or that per
sonage of mythology or of sacred legend.
In "The Garden of Love," at Madrid,
there seem to be half a dozen Helenas,
each lovelier than the other.
In such pictures as this last, Rubens
descends straight from Giorgione. They
are like the "Partie Champetre," but a
little gayer, a little more florid, a little
[143]

CONCERNING PAINTING
less nobly poetical. A hundred years later
Watteau was to take up the theme, to
treat it at once more frivolously and more
sentimentally, to etherealize its frank and
solid humanity, and to find the type of the
French eighteenth century.
Among the brilliant courtiers of this
king of painting, one needs special men
tion not only for his own merit but for his
decisive influence on the English school.
Anton Van Dyck is not a painter of the
very highest rank — not one of the world's
dozen supreme masters — but, as Fromen-
tin said of him, if not on the throne he was
near it. No other painter not of this su
preme rank is quite his equal, and he
needs but a little more sturdy strength,
a little more originality, to step from the
highest place in the second line into a
place in the first. He is like a Rubens of
less rugged fibre, more polished, more
elegant, with a languid and melancholy
distinction that predestines him for the
favorite painter of Charles I, but without
the sap and vigor, the hearty, natural hu
manity of the greater man. He is more
impressionable and therefore more vari-
[144]

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
able than Rubens. His early work is thor
oughly Flemish and scarce to be distin
guished from that of his master. In his
Italian days he comes under the influence
of Titian and achieves, in both portraits
and subject pictures, a dignity and a
beauty of color beyond Rubens's range
and almost worthy of the great Venetian.
Back in his native land, at a time when
Rubens is absent, he almost usurps the
leadership, and his art has the full-ripe
Flemish savor. Finally, in England, he
ceases to paint altar-pieces or mythologies
and becomes definitely the court portrait-
painter. Gentility and prettiness gain upon
him. Having no rivals, he gives himself
less trouble and relies upon assistants for
nearly everything but the heads. His art
had already fallen far below its best estate
before he died at the. early age of forty-
two. But he was a peintre de race, if, perhaps,
a little too high-bred for stamina. In his
"Charles I" of the Louvre he has given
us the finest example of the state portrait
— the portrait which is also a decoration
and in which dignity and decorative splen
dor are as important as likeness. He has
[145]

CONCERNING PAINTING
given more seductiveness to the beauty of
women than almost any other. And in
such an accomplished and straightforward
piece of work as that portrait, in our own
Metropolitan Museum, of the Duke of
Lenox and his wonderful dog, he reaches
very nearly to the highest level. Lastly,
and this itself is a kind of glory, if we can
not imagine a Van Dyck without a pre
existing Rubens, neither can we imagine
Reynolds or Gainsborough without the
pre-existence of Van Dyck.
Nothing could well be more unlike the
royalist and Catholic art of Rubens or
the eminently aristocratic art of Van Dyck
than the bourgeois, almost plebeian, art
that was developing during these same
years in the northern provinces. In the
Protestant Netherlands there were no great
church pictures to be painted; in republican
Holland there was no demand for splen
did allegorical glorifications of the royal
house. These comfortable Dutch traders
wanted only two things of art: they wanted
their own portraits, and they wanted little
pictures to hang upon the walls of their
comfortable little rooms. The -guilds and
[146]

Plate 11. — "Cupid and Psyche," by Van Dyck.
At Hampton Court.

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
shooting companies wanted group portraits
for their halls, and some of these are very
large, but they were the only large can
vases in demand. And every burgher wanted
the portrait of himself and his wife to
hand down to his children. Of these por
traits, whether large or small, they did
not ask splendor or distinction, they asked
only that they should be indubitably and
recognizably like. They were not to rep
resent a caste but an individual. And of
the little pictures also they demanded that
they should be likenesses of the things
they knew and could recognize — portraits
of their own houses with the people that
lived in them, of their peaceful Dutch
landscape with its canals and polders and
cattle, of their towns or their ships and
harbors. If you tried to give them anything
more or anything else, it was at your own
peril. One more thing they asked, and that
was perfect workmanship. Like the trades
men and manufacturers they were, they
wanted their money's worth of sound paint
ing, as of sound carpentry or solid weav
ing, and you must know your trade if
you were to please them. You might be
[147]

CONCERNING PAINTING
a brilliant executant, you might be merely
a painstaking mechanic, but from the
bravura of a Hals to the painful finish of
a Gerard Dou some form of competent
workmanship was imperiously necessary.
And a thorough craftsman could look for
the reward of a craftsman, no more. Each
town had its painters as it had its black
smiths, and the best painter in the town
could make a fair income; but he might
no more look for fame, international or
even national, than the best blacksmith.
He might, indeed, travel from one town
to another in search of work, as the black
smith might, but if he prospered where
he was he stayed there, and his reputa
tion might not, in his lifetime, travel so
far as from one town to the next one in
a country where distances are absurdly
small. Such a local tradesman, the best painter
of Haarlem, was Frans Hals. Not an ex
emplary tradesman; rather too fond of
drinking and notoriously quarrelsome with
his wife; having to be fetched from the
tavern now and then when his services
were wanted; unthrifty, and dying at last
[148]

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
in the poorhouse. What was worse, a little
careless and slovenly at times, but, even
in the poorhouse, so much the best work
man to be had and so sure of his likeness
that one had to employ him. He had even
been called as far as Amsterdam once,
thirteen miles away, but came back be
fore he had finished the great guild pic
ture he began there. He is inimitable at
these great guild pictures; half a dozen
of them are to be seen in the town gallery.
They have not much composition, but
are put together anyhow; they have not
even, at least the early ones, any gen
eral harmony of tone, being full of bright
colors rather than of color. But they are
miracles of rendering, unimaginably dex
terous, marvellous in freedom and preci
sion. Nobody can paint a sash or a halberd,
a glass goblet or a cut-velvet jerkin, as he
can. His handling is like sword-play, as
free, as dazzling, above all as accurate.
It is made up of separate, sharp, slashing
touches, each falling into its exact place,
each of the right shape and size to a hair's
breadth, each more wonderful for its pre
cision than for its rapidity. And there can
be no doubt about his likenesses. You
[149]

CONCERNING PAINTING
would know one of these men anywhere;
you do know some of them at once, when
they turn up again after an interval of
years. They are not psychological mas
terpieces, these heads; there is no great
depth of feeling or subtlety of expression
about them. Hals is content with externals;
but for exact portraiture, sheer physical
resemblance, it would be hard to better
them. Later, and in other things, single por
traits of burghers and their wives, Hals
can be graver and more solid. Nobody
but Rembrandt could improve on the
portrait of Vrouw Bodolphe in the Mor
gan Collection, and even Rembrandt could
not much improve on it as mere painting,
its free handling based upon impeccable
draftsmanship, its quiet color perfect in
its relations of tone. And Rembrandt alone
could better its rendering of character.
It is Hals at his best, which is as much
as to say that it is as good as the best of
any one in all that it attempts.
As he grew older still Hals simplified his
palette still more, until he painted with
three or four colors only, of which black
and white are the chief. His handling grows
[150]

Plate 12. — "Vrouw Bodolphe," by Frans Hals.
In the Morgan Colleetioti.

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
ever looser and less explicit. In the last
stage of all, his wonderful eye has lost its
sharpness, his wonderful hand its cunning.
He is an old, old man. But the profound
knowledge gained by a lifetime of work is
still there, and a kind of pathos that is
his own rather than his sitter's, and in the
wreck of his physical organization he is
still a master — perhaps a more affecting
one than ever before.
No theory of demand and supply, no
philosophy of "the race, the milieu, and
the moment," will account for Rembrandt.
Negatively, indeed, the fact that he was
a Dutchman of the seventeenth century
may help to explain some of the things
he was not, but it will go a very little
way toward explaining what he was.
He was that entirely inexplicable thing,
a great original genius. He had enough of
what was common to his countrymen to
make an early and marked success, and to
be for a time the fashion. He had so much
of what they could never understand that
he early ceased to be popular and sank
further and further into poverty and neg
lect as his genius developed. He is the
[151]

CONCERNING PAINTING
first notable instance in the history of
art of the romantic and misunderstood
artist — the artist out of harmony with his
public. He had to the full, when he chose to
exercise it, the admirable Dutch lucidity
of observation, the capacity to see and to
reproduce the external world. He had,
though it is not quite clear where he got
it, the sound Dutch training. At any
time of his life he could, if he chose, paint
a portrait as like as those of Hals and as
well painted, perhaps even more like and
better painted, but you could never tell
if he would choose. He would begin to
dream of expressing the inmost soul of his
sitter and forget the shape of his nose. He
would see the possibility of some pictur
esque effect and violate all probability of
costume. He would lose himself in the
poetry of light and shade, and indulge
in all sorts of expedients and experiments
to the destruction of accepted methods.
He would accept a commission to paint
the shooting company of Captain Frans
Banning Cocq, and instead of the kind of
thing that Van der Heist could do so well
and Hals so brilliantly, he would turn you
[152]

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
out a fantastic Cour des Miracles or a
troop of bandits. What were you to do
with a man who might thus, at any time,
substitute a grotesque fancy or an imagina
tive vision for the plain statement of facts
that you wanted? Really, he was not to
be trusted.
And the thing this strange genius sub
stituted for the truth was as likely to be
trivially picturesque as profoundly imag
inative. He had inherited a sham Orien
talism from his master Lastman, and he
made it more absurd than his master's.
He got together all sorts of strange frip
pery and odds and ends of costume, had
a magpie love for chains and gorgets and
old morions or anything that shone and
glittered, liked beggars' rags or Jewish gab
erdines; and of all these things he would
concoct elaborate nonsense pictures. The
next moment he is seized and dominated
by a true vision and becomes amazing in
his clairvoyance, gives you blind Tobit
feeling for the door or Doctor Faustus
silent before the miraculous vision, or makes
you feel that his Christ, breaking bread
with the disciples at Emmaus, has as surely
been dead as he is now risen and living.
[153]

CONCERNING PAINTING
And the same man who does these things is
capable of the most hideous vulgarity and
even of the grossest indecency.
He has no dignity, no sense of propriety,
no sense of beauty, does not conceive the
meaning of good taste. But he has a breadth
of humanity and a depth of sympathetic
insight that are unequalled. It is these
qualities that enable him to enthrall us
with those story-telling pictures which no
other painter — least of all any other Dutch
painter — could have produced; that make
us accept the stories of the Gospel or of
the Old Testament as actual happenings
that we have seen, and believe in Tobias
and his angel as we believe in our next-
door neighbors. It is this humanity and this
sympathy that give a strange intensity
of life to his portraits, even when their
accuracy of physical likeness is most dubi
ous; that make them, when he is able to
combine the powers of the observer and the
man of imagination, the most wonderful
portraits ever painted.
Some of these wonderful portraits we have
in this country. There is nothing more
characteristic of Rembrandt than "The
Man with the Black Hat," in the Metro-
[154]

Plate 13. — "The Orphan," by Rembrandt.
In the Chicago Art Institute.

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
politan Museum; nothing in the world
finer than "The Orphan," in the Chicago
Art Institute. Perhaps his greatest master
piece is a group of such portraits on one
canvas, the famous "Syndics," of the Rijks
Museum at Amsterdam. Here he has al
lowed nothing strange or fantastic — the
conception is as simple and as straight
forward as it can well be — but the power
of his imagination and the magic of his
light and shade have endowed these plain
citizens, busy over the accounts of the
Cloth Hall, with an essential humanity
that is eternally interesting to mankind.
It is always with light and shade that
Rembrandt performs his miracles, that
he expresses the inexpressible and realizes
the supernatural. Of light and shade he is
the supreme master, understanding its pos
sibilities of mystery and of sentiment as
no one else has done, doing with it what
can be done by no other means and what
no one else has done at all. Neither Tin
toretto nor Correggio himself understood
Correggio's invention as Rembrandt under
stood it — neither of them makes it the warp
and woof of his art as Rembrandt does.
For Rembrandt the world exists only as
[155]

CONCERNING PAINTING
light breaking through shadow, as light
illuminating shadow. He composes by light
and shade, he draws by light and shade,
he colors in light and shade, he executes
for light and shade. With him composition
is not a matter of lines and spaces, it is a
matter of lighting. The importance of any
part of his picture is strictly measurable
by the amount of light it receives; the eye
is led by gradations and directions of light;
the things which are to be subordinated
are lost in swimming shadow. Without some
suggestion of his light and shade no com
position of Rembrandt's would be intelligi
ble, and he thinks so habitually in light
and shade that his merest scratch of out
line always gives this suggestion. His draw
ing is so essentially a matter of light and
shade that he never draws a true contour,
but follows an edge here or an interior mark
ing there as the light reveals it to him.
For him the color of an object is only im
portant as it is luminous or shadowy in its
nature. He never hesitates to falsify the
color if it will help him to get the light he
wants, and in his mature work the color
tends to disappear entirely and we have
a brown world in which the illusion of
color is maintained only by degrees of
[156]

From a Photograph by the Berlin Photographic Co.
Plate 14.— "The Concert," by Ter Borch.
In the Berlin Gallery,

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
light and dark. The degree of luminosity
of a given color has been extracted and is
made to do duty for the color itself. Even
his handling is modified and broken up
by his search for light. In his earlier days
he can still paint objects as well as any one,
with all Hals' s explicitness if not with his
brilliancy. Later he no longer paints a
hand or a sword-hilt, he paints only the
light upon it. As a registry of form his
touch is enigmatical, is clumsy and fum
bling, is even, sometimes, physically un
pleasant, as is his hot brown tone. But as
a rendering of hght it is infallible.
The very qualities which have made
Rembrandt one of our gods of art and
have caused him to be reckoned, by many,
the very greatest of masters, rendered him
incomprehensible to his own countrymen
and contemporaries, and the painters un
derstood him little better than the public.
Ruysdael had, perhaps, a little of his
romantic temper and this, with a love for
such exotic things as rocks and water
falls, insured his failure of popularity and
his death in poverty and neglect. The
typical Dutch painters are those who, with
as little of Rembrandt's intensity of feel-
[157]

CONCERNING PAINTING
ing as of the Italian love for decorative
splendor, carried out the truly Dutch task
of embodying in an exemplary technic
a prosaic and exact portraiture of the
familiar world about them. There are a
host of them, almost all admirable after
their degree, and they painted everything
in Holland and in the narrow seas, indoors
and out. They were a race of specialists
and created a number of new genres. One
man painted only drunken boors, another
the lower middle classes, a third ladies and
gentlemen. They were the first pure land
scape-painters, the first marine-painters,
the first painters of cattle, the first still-
life painters. They subdivided these genres
almost indefinitely, and one man would
devote himself wholly to winter scenes,
another to architecture, or even to church
interiors. By this piecemeal attack they
accomplished their aim of an almost com
plete picture of the visible world as they
knew it. Little as they had in common
with Rembrandt, he had yet furnished
them with their necessary tool. If they could
not make light and shade express the super
natural, they found in it the only possible
and complete expression of the natural, and
the whole Dutch school became a school of
[158]

Plate 15. — "Officer and Young Lady," by Metsu.
In the Louvre.

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
chiaroscurists who devoted their best efforts
to rendering the gradations and reverbera
tions of light. Indeed, it is often their in
terest in light that alone makes their choice
of subject comprehensible. It is only the
play of light and shade that makes their
church interiors interesting or their butch
er's meat and dead game tolerable.
And if the Dutchmen were all naturalists
and chiaroscurists, they were all admirable
and impeccable craftsmen. Such sound,
enduring, beautiful workmanship, such thor
oughness of education, such precision and
delightfulness of handling, had seldom been
seen in the world and are hardly likely to be
seen again. We have lost their methods and
forgotten their training, and the best mod
ern work, whatever its merit in other re
spects, is in technical matters but bun-
glingly amateurish in comparison with
theirs. In the study of landscape the attempt
at a minute and complete investigation of
natural appearances was not carried to so
full and satisfactory a conclusion as in the
painting of interiors. Dutch landscape is
of great historical importance because it
opened the way to further exploration in
many new directions, and when landscape
f 159]

CONCERNING PAINTING
began to be seriously studied again, in
the nineteenth century, Dutch influence
was, for a time, not only stimulating but
dominant. But there were but a few effects
of light in the open air that the Dutch
painters really mastered, and in that field
they left a great deal for their successors to
accomplish. In the painting of interiors, on
the contrary, they achieved a complete and
final success, and the best works of three or
four of their best painters have remained
unequalled and inimitable.
These pictures have no subjects, there is
no conceivable story connected with them.
There is no emotion in them, no passion or
imagination, and assuredly no idealism.
They are well-arranged, or they would not
be works of art, but there is little of what
the great Italians would have recognized
as composition. There is an impeccable
draftsmanship as far as the accurate
notation of the shapes of things is drafts
manship, but of drawing as a great expres
sional art there is no trace. Even color does
not exist for its own sake or for the deco
rative and emotional effects that may be
obtained from it. It is merged in tone and
becomes an element in securing truth of
[160]

Plate 16. — "Lady with Pearl Necklace," by Ver Meer.
In the Berlin Gallery.

DUTCH AND FLEMISH
representation. But such absolute truth of
representation, combined with material and
technical perfection, exists nowhere else
in art, and is in itself capable of giving a
high and enduring pleasure. In such pic
tures as that by Ter Borch, in Berlin, of
two well-bred women playing together on
the harpsichord and the violoncello, or in
Mr. Morgan's wonderful Metsu, "A Visit
to the Nursery," now in the Metropolitan
Museum, the simplest incidents, seen under
the simplest effects, are sufficient for the
creation of endlessly delightful masterpieces.
De Hooch, who draws less well than the
others, attempts more complicated effects
of lighting, opens his rooms onto vistas of
sunny streets and courtyards, or lets the
sun into the rooms themselves. But the
greatest of all these masters of light, of
these extractors of beauty from the com
monplace, is Ver Meer of Delft, an artist
of rare subtlety, of infinite delicacy, of
exquisite refinement — a master as absolute,
within his own narrow domain, as any
that ever lived.
Before the end of the seventeenth cen
tury this admirable school had died out.
[161]

CONCERNING PAINTING
In two hundred years the art of paint
ing had passed through many stages.
From an art of form it had become first
an art of color and then an art of what we
moderns know as "values" — of the exact
notation of degrees of light. To an art
abstract and expressive it had added more
and more of truth to the appearance of
nature, till it reached, with Titian and
Veronese, the noblest balance of the ideal
and the real; then it had slowly lost its
more abstract and formal elements until
it had become an art of almost pure repre
sentation. At each of these stages it had
brought forth masterpieces of a perfection
since unknown. The eighteenth century
could still create an amiable art of its
own, but it is an art of weaker fibre. The
nineteenth century could find here or
there an unexplored corner in the domain
of realism, or produce artists of an essen
tial greatness though mutilated and in
complete from the struggle with uncon
genial surroundings. But the golden age
of painting was past.

[162]

PART III
SOME PHASES OF NINETEENTH-
CENTURY PAINTING

NATURALISM IN THE NINE
TEENTH CENTURY
Except for the work of a few great
masters who stand apart from the general
stream of tendency, what the art of
the nineteenth century accomplished was
mainly a broadening of the subject-matter
of painting, and a new and detailed in
vestigation of the appearance of nature.
The nineteenth century painted many
subjects that had not been painted before,
and it made discoveries of certain aspects
of nature which had not been previously
observed or, if observed, had not been re
corded in art. It studied landscape for
itself and painted it as it had never been
painted; it placed the human figure in
the open air and tried to register the exact
effect upon it of the sun and the sky. Its
activities were so essentially naturalistic
that even the schoolmen admitted more
and more the direct imitation of nature,
and it was late in the century before the
[165]

CONCERNING PAINTING
realization that an exact imitation of nature
is not sufficient to art led certain artists
to abandon nearly everything savoring of
representation and to concentrate them
selves upon the effort at self-expression.
One of the later phases of nineteenth-
century realism was that attempt at a
scientific analysis of light and that sacrifice
of everything else to the rendering of light
which we know as impressionism. One of
the earliest was the English Pre-Raphaelite
movement. In the late forties the art of England
was at low ebb. If it had escaped the
pseudo-classicism of David and his school
it had also missed the exhilaration of the
romantic revival of painting, and its tradi
tionalism, though not very old, was already
moribund. If the art was not to sputter out
like a burned candle, some new source of
inspiration must be found. A revolution
was necessary, and when it came its form
was largely determined by two things: the
teaching of John Ruskin and the invention
of photography.
In the first volume of "Modern Painters,"
Ruskin, who at that time knew more of
nature than of art and who always loved
[166]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
nature better than art, had based his de
fense of Turner entirely upon an exam
ination of the facts of nature and a demon
stration that Turner was a more accurate
recorder of such facts than was Claude;
and had, in a celebrated and eloquent
passage, advised young artists to attempt
nothing but simple imitation — to "go to
nature in all singleness of heart ... re
jecting nothing, selecting nothing, and
scorning nothing."
At about the same time the new art of
photography began to show the world how
surprisingly different was the actual ap
pearance of nature from the conventions
that had passed muster as representations
of it. To a few enthusiastic young students
these two influences were decisive. They
were to imitate nature exactly, and as
nature was entirely unlike what they had
seen in pictures, they were to throw all
traditions to the winds and begin art all
over again. And as they constantly heard
Raphael quoted as the great authority
for the academic rule and knew very little
of the intensely traditional art of the
earlier Renaissance, they called themselves
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
[167]

CONCERNING PAINTING
Ford Madox Brown, a somewhat older
man who was never formally a member of
the brotherhood, though intimate with all
its membership, had made some more or
less tentative efforts at the representation
of the figure in true, open-air lighting as
early as 1840-42, and had attempted ab
solute and unconventional realism in the
portrait of Mr. Bamford, painted in 1846.
Of the seven actual members of the brother
hood, only three achieved any notable
reputation in painting. Millais was the pre
cocious and brilliant executant, destined
to an early success, for whom Pre-Raphael-
itism was but a phase of youthful militancy,
soon to be outlived. Rossetti, whose en
thusiasm and persuasive power made him
the apparent leader in a movement to which
he never really belonged, made one or two
efforts at strenuous realism but soon gave
it up as too difficult for him and became a
poetic dreamer. Holman Hunt was the true
originator of the movement, as he was its
last adherent, and it is from his works, and
from some of those of Madox Brown, that
the truest idea of its nature may be formed.
In such pictures as Hunt's "Hireling
Shepherd" and "Awakened Conscience" or
[168]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
Brown's "Work" and "Last of England,"
the overthrow of all established conventions
is well-nigh complete. For composition is
substituted the effort to depict the in
cident as it might really have happened
without regard to the agreeability or dis-
agreeability of the resultant arrangement.
All accepted attitudes and gestures are
discarded in the attempt to find the gesture
most likely to have been employed, with
the result that awkwardness seems deliber
ately preferred to grace and constraint to
amplitude. In the same way all typical
drawing is abandoned in favor of precise
portraiture of individuals, all chiaroscuro
in favor of the exhaustive study of the
actual lighting, all breadth of effect or of
handling to the most laborious and minute
research into detail. Add to all this that
these men had an exasperated sensitive
ness to colors and little sense of color and
one begins to understand their extraor
dinary productions. There is an immense
amount of fact in these pictures, an immense
amount of thought, a prodigious labori-
ousness; the thing that has been left out
of them is art. They are meritorious, emi
nently respectable, and hideous.
[169]

CONCERNING PAINTING
The technical methods of the Pre-Raphael-
ites were as revolutionary as everything
else. On a pure white canvas or panel, on
which the design was lightly traced, they
began with the background and finished
minutely a bit at a time. When the back
ground was entirely completed, and not
until then, they began painting the figures
in the same piecemeal way, each little
bit being pushed to the utmost degree of
detail possible to eyes and hands "fit for
the portraiture of insects." Sometimes they
began upon the background without even
an outline of the figures which were to form
the principal subject. Madox Brown re
cords in his diary how, having settled on
a subject the night before, he "began by
three and worked till eight" and "painted
eight bricks and some leaves." It was not
until a month later that he began to draw
his figures.
Any unity of effect is impossible of attain
ment by such a method, except as the old
fresco-painters attained it, by the rigid
adherence to a conventional scale of color
ing, consciously adopted and perfectly mas
tered through long practice. In the hands
of men who would have no conventions
[170]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
and would accept nothing on trust it could
lead only to a confusion of separate, un
related, and irreconcilable observations. It
was in this way that Millais worked until
he found that "one could not live doing
that." It was in this way that Rossetti
struggled for weeks over the calf in the
never-finished picture "Found" until he
gave it up in despair, and began paint
ing little water-colors out of his head with
out reference to nature.
If there has been endless dispute as to
who was the real leader of the Pre-Raphael-
ites and as to what their doctrines really
were, it is because Pre-Raphaelitism was,
from the beginning, a mixed movement.
To Rossetti it meant a kind of sentimental
medievalism. It was he who recruited the
weaker brothers; his quaintness and pic-
ture-bookiness were easier of imitation than
the strenuosity of Hunt or Brown. Later
his forces were joined by William Morris
and Burne-Jones and Brown came over to
them, and what had begun as a revolt
against tradition and an exaltation of exact
imitation became a purely aesthetic move
ment. Yet in popular parlance it retained
the old name, and the secondary followers
[171]

CONCERNING PAINTING
of Burne-Jones are still spoken of as Pre-
Raphaelites.
. The effort to found a great school of art
upon the purely analytical study of nature
was bound to fail in the long run, but it
had, for a time, a very great influence and
that influence was, upon the whole, bene
ficial. It shook the English school out of an
indolent and empty traditionalism, forced
it to reconsider the relation of art to nature,
and made it try for a larger amount of
truthful representation in its art. It is safe
to say that everything good in modern
English art owes something to this coura
geous if short-lived revolt against the na
ture of art itself.
In the same years in which the Pre-
Raphaelite battle against traditionalism was
at its hottest Gustave Courbet, on the other
side of the Channel, was proclaiming in his
own way the doctrine of realism and the
return to nature. But as no two men could
be more unlike than Hunt and Courbet,
so there was a vast difference between
Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism and Courbet's
realism. Hunt was a man of high moral
purpose and of deep religious conviction
[172]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
who thought that art should deal only with
the noblest themes and wished to revivify
religious art by exact literalism of treat
ment. Courbet was a robust, full-blooded
animal with little intellectual power, a
free-thinker and a radical, who scoffed at
all attempts at elevation of subject or of
manner. As a man he was every way Hunt's
inferior, but he had the great advantage of
being a born painter, and the revolution in
art which he inaugurated, while much less
fundamental than that attempted by the
Pre-Raphaelites, was much more fertile
in results.
With Courbet realism is a matter of tem
per rather than of technic. Being a born
painter, his one desire is to paint — to paint
as well and as much as possible — and he
could not conceive of sacrificing technical
beauty and freedom to painstaking analy
sis, or of spending years on one picture
when one might produce twenty in the same
time. But if he wanted good painting, he
wanted nothing else of art. He hated taste
and denied the existence of style. Anything
like classic elegance and reticence savored
of aristocracy to this democrat, and all re
straints were intolerable to his exuberance.
[ 173 ]

CONCERNING PAINTING
As for romanticism, with its exoticism and
its research for emotion, all that sort of
thing struck him as purely "literary."
He cared no more for mediaeval knights
or Oriental sultanas than for Greek nymphs
or Roman Emperors. His business was to
see and to paint, and to paint only what he
saw. The one important thing about a sub
ject was that it should furnish good paint-
able material, and that was to be found all
about him. Thus it was in the attitude of the
artist to his subject, where the Pre-Raphael
ites remained idealistic or sentimental, that
Courbet was most revolutionary. Where
they were most revolutionary he was least
so and was content to paint in a manner
founded mainly on that of Ribera and the
seventeenth-century realists — a manner of
vigorous brush-work and powerful light
and shade, not unlike, though less sombre
than, that which Ribot made the vehicle
for his graver naturalism. Later, in his
search for vigor, he used the palette-knife
in place of the brush, and some of his most
original and effective paintings are rather
unpleasant in handling.
As Courbet was a politician as well as a
painter, and a most active beater on the
[174]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
great drum of reclame, it often happens
that his most "important" canvases are
theses rather than pictures. The "Funeral
at Ornans " can hardly be taken seriously as
a representation of anything that ever hap
pened, and "My Studio after Seven Years
of Artistic Life" seems rather a preposter
ous allegory than a record of fact. Moreover,
his mere vigor of representation was not
enough to carry him across such vast spaces,
which need tying together and unifying
by atmospheric subtleties of which he had
no perception. It is in smaller things that
he is at his best. Some of his portraits are
admirable, and his early portrait of himself,
known as "The Man with the Belt," is
superb. His nudes, inelegant and even in
correct in form, are yet masterly in the
rendering of the pulpy firmness and soft
ness of white flesh under a studio-light.
It is only when he puts a landscape behind
them that the* very literalness of his ob
servation of them entails a falsity of rela
tion. Perhaps he is at his best in his animal
pictures and hunting-scenes, where his
somewhat brutal power has full play, and
in his landscapes which, if they inevitably
lack grace and sentiment, are as inevitably
[175]

CONCERNING PAINTING
full of sap and life and of a certain fresh
ness and joyousness which is invigorating.
Forcible, unfastidious, a bit rude, now and
then not a little vulgar, Courbet, at this
distance of time and in comparison with
many of his successors, assumes rather
giant-like proportions. Certainly he was
a great power. His work is the starting-
point for that of Manet and he influenced
men as unlike as Whistler and Monet.
Not only impressionism but all that less
specialized and less scientific naturalism
which in many forms pervades the later
nineteenth century is the child of his loins.
Among the group of young men of the
early sixties who were to make so much
noise in the world, an intimate of both
Manet and Whistler, was a quiet, gentle
manly painter who, because he indulged
neither in controversy nor in self-advertis
ing, has been relatively neglected — yet who
seems to many of his admirers to have
had a rarer talent than either of his more
loudly acclaimed friends. By his charming
pastels illustrative of music, of which he
was a true lover, Fantin-Latour is a Roman
tic, but in his portraits and flower-pieces he
[176]

Plate 17.— "Portrait of His Mother,1
In the Luxembourg.

by Elie Delaunay.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
is a pure Naturalist, content to see and to
paint, but to see with a fine and sensitive
penetration, to paint with a breadth, a
precision, a refinement, and a restrained
power almost beyond praise. His canvases
are very gray, almost colorless, yet full of
those delicate discriminations of hue which
mark the accomplished colorist. His draw
ing is correct, unnoticeable — almost photo
graphic, one might think, were it not always
beautiful and always expressive. His light
and shade is simple but his perception of
subtle gradations of value is almost in
finitely tender. He never speaks loud — he
is as reserved as Ver Meer of Delft — but
what he says is well worth listening to,
and it is always perfectly said. The same
eminently aristocratic reserve marks his
presentation of character. To have been
painted by him is almost a certificate of
good breeding, and if one were ever in
clined to heretical doubts of the genuine
ness of Manet's talent and character, a
look at Fantin's wonderful portrait of him
is enough to reassure one that the sitter
must have been worthy of the noble fidelity
of the treatment. It is one of the greatest
of modern portraits, and no other painter
[177]

CONCERNING PAINTING
of the time was capable of emulating its
admirable faithfulness restrained by perfect
taste, unless it were another of those art
ists whose popular reputation has never
equalled his merit, Elie Delaunay.
A talent not unlike that of Fantin, but
exercised upon a very different subject-
matter, is that of Gustave Guillaumet.
Guillaumet may be reckoned among the
Orientalists in so much as he went to Al
giers for his subjects, but he has little else
in common with the Romantic painters.
There is nothing of "the gorgeous East"
in his work, no glitter of costumes or pranc
ing of horses. What he saw there was sun
baked, dust-colored villages under an ar
dent sky, the inhabitants as sun-baked and
dust-colored as their houses; and these he
painted with wonderful truth, gaining an
extraordinary illusion of brilliant sunshine
and clear, dry atmosphere by the perfect
modulation of his simple tones. His work is
a capital example of what has been the chief
task of modern art: the discovery of new
opportunities for beauty in the intelligent
study of hitherto neglected aspects of
nature. The Dutch and the Flemings have always
[178]

J'J-^

Plate 18. — "The Leguia near Biskra," by Gustave Guillaumet.
In the Luxembourg.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
retained something of the spirit of their
older art, and even Israels was a sound
naturalistic painter, if not a very great one,
before, in his addiction to sentimentality,
he almost ceased to be a painter at all.
But it is the Belgian Alfred Stevens who
gave to the nineteenth century its nearest
equivalent for the sober and admirable
art of Ter Borch and Metsu. It was in this
same wonderful time of the sixties when
the Barbizon men were still living and paint
ing, when Courbet was at the height of his
power, when Manet and Whistler, though
young, were doing their best work; it was
in this silvern age — the brazen was yet to
come — that he produced a series of little
pictures of the Parisienne in her habit,
and her habitat, as she lived. They are
marked by a mingling of delicate sentiment
and yet more delicate humor which gives
them a slight literary flavor — a flavor ad
vantageous to them, though Ter Borch
would not have appreciated it — but they
are seen almost as the old Dutchman saw
things, with the same breadth of effect and
the same sharpness of realization, and
they are painted with almost the old Dutch
feeling for beauty of surface and grace
[179]

CONCERNING PAINTING
of handling, making the very paint a pre
cious and delectable thing. But the love of
painting for its own sake, which in these
early works is balanced by a thorough ob
servation of nature, leads Stevens in the
end to a mere display of virtuosity. The
more human and the more truly artistic
side of his talent tends to disappear and,
from a little master who might almost be
called a master without the little, he be
came an astonishingly clever painter of
clothes and bric-a-brac.
It is virtuosity that distinguishes a whole
section of modern realists — realists in so
much as they care for little in art beyond
representation, having nothing more to
say than that "things look so to me,"
but differing from the refined realists we
have been considering in that they care
less for the things represented, or even
for the truth of their own observations,
than for the brilliancy of the language
in which their observations are set down.
If there were no painters who care more
for painting than for what is painted,
there would be no pictures of still-life;
but not all still-life painters are virtuosi.
[180]

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Plate 19. — "Tous les Bonheurs," by Alfred Stevens.
In the Brussels Museum.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
Chardin was a pure painter who could
find enough occasion in a jug, a bunch
of grapes, and a home-made loaf for the
expenditure of his best powers, but there is
nothing of the virtuoso in him. His observa
tion is close, attentive, almost humble; his
painting exquisite but with no display —
rather with a careful hiding — of his dex
terity. With Vollon or our own Chase you
feel that the immense brio, the evident
delight of the painter in the wielding of his
tools and in the exercise of his skill, is the
principal source of your own enjoyment,
and that the truthfulness and acuteness of
observation, acute and truthful as it is,
is a secondary matter. Of course neither
Vollon nor Chase is a mere still-life painter,
and indeed there is almost nothing that
Chase has not painted and painted ex
tremely well. But whatever they paint
you feel that a masterly and vigorous
handling of their material is the thing that
has most interested them, and is therefore
what most interests you.
But it is with certain Spaniards and
Italians that virtuosity most completely
usurps the place of everything else, and the
display of it becomes apparently the sole
[181]

CONCERNING PAINTING
aim of art. In the marvellous little pictures
of Fortuny and the almost more marvellous
little pictures that Boldini used to paint
in his younger days everything becomes
still-life and is treated quite impartially as
the occasion for a dazzling and capricious
brilliancy of handling. In looking at such
a picture as Fortuny' s "Choice of a Model"
you cannot feel that the nude back of the
woman interested him any more than the
rococo table on which she stands, or that
he cared for the heads of his Academicians
as much as for their clothes. He does not
say "things look so to me," but rather:
"See how well and how easily I can paint
things ! See what witty touches I can invent !
Would you ever have thought painting
could be so entertaining?" And Boldini,
on his six-inch panels, can be even more
fantastically and audaciously amusing.
There is a less artificial side to Fortuny.
He had at bottom something of the old
Spanish temper and he could feel inclined
to paint a "Moorish Slaughter-house."
There is rugged character study in some of
his figures of Arabs and Kabyles, and he
was one of the serious students of sunlight.
But, after all, his prodigious virtuosity
[182]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
remains his chief characteristic, and even
for sunlight he cared primarily, one im
agines, because of the glitter and the touch-
and-go of his manner of rendering it. In
Robert Blum, America had a technician of
the same school, and of almost equal bril
liancy, who died before he had completed
that evolution toward a larger style which
is shown in his decorations for Mendelssohn
Hall. A naturalism of a very different order is
that of the Germans Lenbach and Leibl.
Theirs is a realism by true descent from that
of Diirer, a realism of which the exact
expression of character is the primal aim.
In Lenbach's thinly smeared, bituminous
portraits nothing but the character exists
— the character almost unembodied — but
the research of character is carried to a
point of extraordinary vividness. Leibl's
studies of peasants are more in the old
tradition. They are hard and gray and flat,
exhaustively studied in detail, showing no
more care for general effect than for beauty
or for suavity of manner. Character is
attained in them by the remorseless pur
suit of .the individual and the accidental —
[183]

CONCERNING PAINTING
by the portraiture of every wart and the
mapping of every wrinkle. In Paris that
admirable engraver Gaillard did much the
same thing in his few paintings, handling
the brush like a burin and pushing analysis
to the rendition of the separate hairs of
the eyebrow, the striations of the iris, and
the minutest corrugations of the skin of
the lips. His results are as dry and as effect
less as Leibl's, but far more agreeable
because more sympathetic. You feel that
Gaillard likes the people he is depicting
and pushes his investigations so far only
because he wishes to depict them com
pletely. Leibl seems moved by a cold curi
osity which has no feeling of any sort
toward its subject.
In a brief sketch of the multifarious ac
tivities of nineteenth-century naturalism
during thirty years it has been possible
only to touch here and there and to men
tion none but the most prominent or the
most interesting among the swarms of
artists who were working at one or another
part of the great task of a detailed re
examination of nature. By the end of the
seventies the time had come when, if ever,
the audacious attempt of the Pre-Raphael-
[184]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
ites at an art entirely devoid of convention
and corresponding at all points with the
actual appearance of the real world might
be renewed with some prospect of success.
The renewed attempt was made by Bas-
tien-Lepage. At the first glance the resemblance be
tween such a picture as Bastien's "Hay
Harvest" and the works of Holman Hunt
and Madox Brown is apparent. Here is the
same contempt for conventional composi
tion, the same awkwardness of attitudes
imitated from nature and not invented,
the same replacement of artificial light and
shade by a thorough analysis of out-of-door
lighting, almost the same insistence on
accumulated detail. But the differences
are very great also, and they are almost all
in Bastien's favor. The efforts of a genera
tion of painters have taught him both what
can and what cannot be done, and his
realism is less uncompromising than it seems
and is wisely limited in what it attempts.
Also he is a Frenchman, with French train
ing and French taste, and therefore in
capable of the crudities of technic which
marred the work of his English predecessors.
[185]

CONCERNING PAINTING
Bastien realizes that the task of imitation is
difficult enough without unnecessary com
plication, and he limits himself to the paint
ing of one or two figures at a time, com
posing them with a certain care, in spite of
his air of unconventionality, and avoiding,
except in its simpler forms, the problem
of placing figures one behind the other
at varying distances. He knows that sun
light cannot be imitated and that it can
be suggested only by such methods as are
incompatible with prolonged and careful
study in the open air, and he paints only
on cloudy days. He knows that even in
cloudy weather the sky is bright beyond
the range of his palette, and he reduces the
sky in his pictures to the smallest limit or
excludes it entirely. Finally, though he
gives great fulness of detail, he is too in
telligent to attempt the microscopic, or to
give more detail than can be readily seen
and appreciated.
By such careful limitation of his effort to
the imitation of what is most nearly imi-
table in nature, and by the exercise of very
great talents, Bastien succeeded better
than any one else has done in actually
holding the mirror up to nature — in pro
ducing the nearest possible resemblance
[186]

Plate 20. — "Joan of Arc," by Bastien-Lepage.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
to the image on the back of the camera.
And his very success in this is decisive of
the uselessness of the effort. His pictures
leave us entirely cold. They approach so
closely to the exact reproduction of a
natural scene that they produce no other
effect upon us than that which the scene
itself would produce, and they are there
fore quite evidently superfluous. There was
great good sense in the question of the
peasant to the painter: "Why take so
much pains to imitate an oak-tree when you
can always look at the tree ? " You scarcely
get from such pictures even that lowest and
most fundamental of the pleasures afforded
by the imitative arts, the pleasure of recog
nition, just as you do not get it from the
image in a mirror. The imitation is so much
like the thing imitated that there is not
the least excitement in the perception of
the likeness. The experiment has proved
too successful, and it is doubtful if it will
ever be repeated. Even with l'Hermitte,
who most resembles Bastien, there is more
composition, a more academic drawing, and
much less insistence on detail.
After 1880 there is a sort of relaxation of
fibre in modern naturalism. Its strenuous
[187]

CONCERNING PAINTING
days are over. The great investigations have
been made and their results are at every
one's command. Every one has learned to
paint in the key of light which shocked the
conservatives when Manet first employed
it. Every one has learned to see blue
shadows instead of brown ones, and to
dissect light more or less after the manner
of Monet. Every one draws in the natural
istic way and composes unconventionally if
he takes the pains to compose at all. What
had been innovation has become current
practice, and what it had once taken cour
age and originality to do, it now takes
courage and originality not to do. Hence
forth the revolutionary spirits will be found
fighting against rather than for naturalism.
But as naturalism has become the art of
all the world, it must somewhat mitigate
its rigor. If all the world is to take to re
cording observations, the observations can
not be very profound and they must be
recorded in some current language, not too
difficult to learn and admitting of rapid
and facile expression. This language was
furnished by that brilliant portrait-painter
Carolus Duran and by his yet more bril
liant pupil John Sargent. Duran somewhat
[188]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
rapidly degenerated from the sound and
vigorous realism of his earlier work into a
facile painter of fashionable ladies in splen
did toilettes, but he had a great command
of his brush and invented a manner of
painting, founded on a simplification of
the later method of Velasquez, which, after
Sargent had supplied and enriched it, be
came the basic manner of recent natural
ism, on which each practitioner founds his
own, following it as closely as he is able
or varying from it as much as he chooses.
It is a manner of painting more or less
directly in opaque color, without prepara
tion or underpainting and without subse
quent modification by transparent rubbings
or glazes, the colors being mixed on the
palette and applied in great sweeps of a
large brush. Such a method has been used
by artists of many schools for rapid sketch
ing because it lends itself readily to the
notation of effects and the expression of
masses, but it cannot easily express beauty
of line or readily attain to any great fulness
or subtlety of color. In the hands of any
but the greatest painters it tends to become
a kind of enlarged sketching which gives
up at the first glance all that it contains.
[189]

CONCERNING PAINTING
It is impossible to notice one out of a
hundred in the multitude of clever prac
titioners who, in something like this style,
have registered for us their impressions
of man and of nature in every quarter of
the globe. We must let a very few stand
for all the others. In the work of Alfred
Roll, sturdy, solid, with a certain homeli
ness, there is much of that sound sense for
the paintable which has always marked
French naturalism. His "Woman with a
Bull" is like a Courbet painted with a more
modern palette. Brighter, sharper, more
wide awake and up to date, superficially
more brilliant but fundamentally more
rudimental, Anders Zorn may represent
a host of modern Scandinavians. The Span
ish aptitude for virtuosity made of Sorolla
the somewhat startling phenomenon that he
seemed to us a few years ago, until we dis
covered that his observation is as facile
and as much on the surface as his very
able handling. His countryman Zuloaga is
less superficial and less pleasing. He has
more of the old, savage, Spanish spirit
which had always a rather cruel delight in
ugliness and deformity and his handling of
his material is increasingly brutal. But the
[190]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
ablest of all these more modern realists is
John Sargent, and if I were to choose one
picture as an example of the best that the
school can do, it should be one of those that
this many-sided man has produced for his
own amusement in the intervals of painting
portraits for a living and mural decorations
for glory. He has produced them at all peri
ods of his life, with ever-increasing power;
and for acuteness of unexpected observa
tion and easy, direct, almost instantaneous
execution I know nothing more astonishing
than, for instance, his "Hermit" in the
Metropolitan Museum. It is a particularly
typical if extreme example of the school, in
the way in which the effect of light has be
come the centre of interest, the figure of
the hermit himself almost disappearing into
his surroundings and receiving attention
only as another object on which the spots
of sunlight fall. This is the final state to
which a too exclusive occupation with the
visual aspects of nature was bound to lead.
Our own school of painting has, almost all
of it, inclined more or less toward natural
ism, and in Winslow Homer this country
produced one of the most powerful and
[191]

CONCERNING PAINTING
original realists of the nineteenth century
— a painter so entirely independent and
self-sufficing, so surprisingly free from any
trace of the influence of others, that it is
impossible to consider him except by and
for himself. He belongs to no school, he is
just Winslow Homer — a separate and dis
tinct personality, almost as detached from
groups and movements as if no one else
had been painting during his lifetime.
He was one of the most acute observers
that ever lived, almost every picture he
ever painted being the result of a fresh
observation of nature differing from all
previous observations, and he covered an
extraordinarily wide range of subjects, in
cluding figures, animals, landscape, and,
above all, the sea. He had little academic
training and never mastered the structure
of the human figure, but his native sense
of weight and mass gave his figures bulk
and even a certain majesty, and he almost
infallibly finds the one right and inevitable
attitude to express the action and the state
of mind of his personages; while the same
sense of weight and bulk and movement
which confers expression and dignity upon
his figures gives an unequalled power and
[192]

Plate 21. — "A Summer Night," by Winslow Homer.
In the Luxembourg.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
veracity to his pictures of surf and rock.
No great painter had ever less amenity
or less care for the purely decorative and
aesthetic elements of art. His coloring is
sometimes powerful, sometimes almost non
existent, but is never subtle and seldom
beautiful. His handling is vigorous but
rude and even harsh and repellent. In
everything his work is calculated to give
the utmost sense of unmitigated truthful
ness and he is quite ready to forego charm
— if he is even conscious of the existence of
such a thing.
All this is realism, but it is a very different
realism from that which deals primarily
with the visual aspects of things. If it had
occurred to Homer to paint a hermit,
which, since he saw no hermits in the world
he knew, is a quite unlikely supposition,
there could have been no doubt as to what
was the principal subject of the picture.
The hermit himself and his human signifi
cance would have been everything to us
and to the artist. That the picture should
have become a sort of puzzle of light and
air, or challenge us to find the hermit, is
quite inconceivable. It is first this power
of dealing with essentials, whatever the
[193]

CONCERNING PAINTING
subject on which he is engaged — a power in
which he is akin to such a true Classicist as
Millet — that raises Homer out of the ranks
of the mere Naturalists and marks him as
a great interpretative artist; and with it —
perhaps a part of it — an extraordinary
capacity for vital and original design. He
is certainly one of the most remarkable
painters of his time, and his peculiarly
native quality gives us an especial right to
be proud of him.
How much our contemporary painters of
the sea owe to the example of Homer it
is difficult to judge, but we have a whole
school of marine-painters such as, I think,
exists nowhere else, Waugh is the most
exact realist of the school, Dougherty per
haps the most brilliant painter, while Emil
Carlsen adds to his profound knowledge of
nature an unfailingly decorative sense of
color and line. The most conspicuous of
our present-day landscape-painters are di
rect and rapid sketchers of nature's aspects,
such as Schofield, Redfield, Gardner Sy-
mons, and a host of others. A more del
icate and penetrating observation marks
the work, whether in landscape or figure, of
Julian Alden Weir and is combined with a
[194]

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATURALISM
charming personal caprice in the pictures of
T."W. Dewing; while a quiet and thought
ful naturalism is the principal character
istic of Sergeant Kendall. Finally, in the
work of what is known as the Boston school,
with Edmund C. Tarbell at its head, we
have a naturalism akin to that of Stevens,
less witty and less technically admirable,
but pushing the study of interior lighting
to a higher refinement.
If, in all this naturalistic effort of the last
seventy-five years, there has been some
neglect of the higher aims and qualities of
art, yet the naturalistic movement has
been in the main a wholesome one. At
least the Naturalists have never forgotten
that it is the business of a painter to paint,
that painting is essentially and necessarily
an imitative art, and that, if an exhaustive
analysis of the aspects of nature is not
artistic creation, yet all acquired knowledge
of such aspects is an invaluable tool in the
hands of the artistic creator. They have
been equally free from the pedantries of
a hidebound pseudo-classicism on the one
hand and from the excesses of a lawless
individualism on the other. In an age not
[195]

CONCERNING PAINTING
very propitious to the creation of art, be
cause the natural relations of the artist to
his public have been dislocated, they have
at least kept the tools of art bright and
furbished, and the best of them have pro
duced works of real merit which are likely
always to retain some interest for mankind.

[196]

II
THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
Throughout the nineteenth century a
few powerful and original artists maintained
a reverence for the great traditions of the
past and produced, each in his own way, an
art that was truly classical. However they
may appear to be mingled in the quarrels
of the schools and the movements, they
really stand apart from and superior to
them. They are neither Pseudo-classics nor
Romantics nor Naturalists. They are, first
of all, great individual masters, and their
connections are less with those around them
or even with each other than with the
great masters of all time. The first of them
was born in 1758, the last of them died in
1904, and their lifetimes so overlap that
their activities cover the whole century
from the rigid tyranny of David at its be
ginning to the capricious lawlessness of its
end. As against the absolutism of authority
[197]

CONCERNING PAINTING
they are apostles of freedom; as against
latter-day anarchy they are the upholders
of eternal law.
Prudhon belongs, by the years of his pro
duction and by the character of his art,
to both the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries. Ten years younger than David,
he was twenty-six — an unknown student
but an artist whose convictions were already
formed, whose personal point of view was
already established — when David made the
first proclamation of his doctrines by the
exhibition in 1785 of his "Oath of the
Horatii"; and he never submitted himself
to the influence of the great dictator.
When he died in 1823, Gericault's "Raft of
the Medusa" and Delacroix's "Bark of
Dante" had both been painted and the
romantic revolt had begun. His art is so
much akin to that of the eighteenth cen
tury that David slightingly called him
"the Boucher of his time"; so much akin
to that of the earlier Romantics that they
were the first to hail him as the great
master he was.
In his grace, his exquisite fancy, his
delicate elegance; in his flights of baby
[198 1

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
Loves and his swinging Zephyrs, in his
dainty sentiment and gentle moralizings,
Prudhon is thoroughly of the eighteenth
century, of the epoch of Louis XVI, when
the exuberance of the rococo is giving
place to a kind of staid simplicity which
prepared the way for that Empire style of
decoration of which he was so eminent a
practitioner. He belongs to the Romantics
by a deep personal feeling which underlies
his graciousness — a passionate and unsatis
fied yearning for the noble and the beautiful
— and by the fact that he is a painter in
love with light and air and the pearly
gleam of flesh emerging from ambient
shadow. He went to Rome a poor and ill-
educated youth to study Raphael, for the
time had not yet come when Raphael
himself, the founder of the academic tradi
tion, was thought insufficiently austere for
profitable study. He remained to become
a fanatic admirer of Leonardo and to make
a deep study of Correggio, whose use of
light and shade he better understood and
more nearly equalled than has any other
painter. Like every one else of his time he
studied the antique also, and studied it
profoundly, but with what different re-
[199]

CONCERNING PAINTING
suits! Where David could find only hel
mets and sword-hilts or set patterns for
the drawing of pectoral muscles and knee
caps, Prudhon, by a sympathetic intuition,
found nature and life, infinite charm, ex
quisite refinement. Out of fragments here
and there, for much of the ancient art that
we know to-day was inaccessible to him,
he formed a truer conception of the spirit
of the Greeks as it showed itself in the lighter
and more delicate side of their work than
any other modern has possessed. Of eight
eenth-century gayety, of romantic feeling,
of Greek sense of form and arrangement, of
Correggiesque light and shade — out of these
various elements by the strange alchemy
of personality is combined that perfectly
unified and homogeneous thing, the art of
Prudhon. He is so steeped in chiaroscuro that he sees
everything in masses of light and shadow,
and draws by such masses and by the soft
modelling of surfaces more consistently
than almost any one. He was fond of draw
ing upon blue or gray paper and of building
up his figure by the gradations of light,
laid on with white chalk, almost more than
by the shadows. And even in his slighter
[200]

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
drawings you never feel that the contour
exists for itself or is more than the limit
of the mass of light. If he has drawn it with
a line, it is because he had not time, at the
moment, to realize everything in tone. But
the forms he draws with light are more
classic than those which others draw with
lines. He seems to have worked very little
from nature. He had learned the human
figure early and knew all he needed of its
construction; he had formulated an ideal
of human beauty which was at his finger
tips, and on it he played endless modulations
and variations. It is not massive or majestic,
this ideal, but youthful, supple, suave, yet
with a certain plenitude of form. He draws
children, youths' and maidens, seldom a
man. His women approach now and then
to a riper splendor, but they never pass it;
like the women of Leonardo, they are eter
nally and desirably young. On the other
hand, his maidens, with all their youthful
slenderness, are rounded into an adorable
maturity. There is ever something of Venus
in his vision of Psyche. Only Correggio, and
Correggio only once, has come so near to
the exquisite perfection of some little Greek
torso, and if the "Danae" is as beautiful
[201]

CONCERNING PAINTING
as Prudhon's "Psyche" and more humanly
fascinating, she is less impeccable in the
draftsmanship of the attachments. And
these beautiful forms of Prudhon's are
never cold and immobile, but palpitating,
breathing, living flesh, cool and silvery in
tone but radiant and glowing, bathed in a
strange purple twilight of their own.
For Prudhon's coloring is entirely per
sonal. He had a dislike and distrust of yel
low and banished it almost entirely from
his palette, so that all his tones, subtly
and delicately varied, are based upon violet,
and this coloring, together with the chastity
of the forms themselves, gives a cold and
moonlit purity to the most passionate of
his dreams.
Another thing that Prudhon must have
learned from the Greeks is the supreme
elegance of his draperies. Not that his
draperies are copied from statues, or that
they are particularly correct from an archae
ological point of view; but no one knew
better how to make the crisp folds draw the
contour beneath and continually reveal
what they as continually cross and con
tradict. His thin stuffs never cling too
tightly, as if they were wet through; his
[202]

IK^b' ^H

¦- JKJj^

^¦; "* B
1 i jfl
1 '^
c~ 4H
H> >''.^B
<h
^n
Plate 22. — "Venus and Adonis," by Prudhon.
In the Wallace Collection.
THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
ampler draperies never swathe and conceal
what they cover. In a style so modified as
to be pictorial rather than sculptural, they
have the perfect Tightness of the draperies
of the Attic stelae.
Such was the art that Prudhon, during his
long struggle for existence, put into count
less drawings for all sorts of purposes,
official letter-heads, business-cards, even
bonbon-boxes. Such was the art he put
into the pictures of his few happier and more
prosperous years. Once or twice he struck
a graver note, as in his first really successful
work, painted in 1808 at the age of fifty
for the criminal court, but now placed
in the Louvre: "Justice and Divine Ven
geance Pursuing the Criminal." In this
noble work there is a true tragic intensity
restrained] and controlled by a classic dig
nity, and the beauty of the pursuers as they
sweep upon their victim is the lofty and
severe beauty of Pallas Athene. And in
this, as in the still more tragic " Crucifixion"
of his last days, after the death of his be
loved pupil Constance Mayer, his chiaros
curo and his purplish coloring take on a
sombre and almost a terrible aspect. But
these are exceptions in his work, and in
[203]

CONCERNING PAINTING
general he remains the painter of love and
of the dreams of youth.
Unfortunate experiments with a medium
of his own invention and the abuse of bitu
men have played havoc with some of Prud
hon's paintings; but the best of them are
of immortal beauty and there is no material
degeneration to mar the exquisiteness of
his perfect drawings.
Jean-Auguste Domenique Ingres — Mon
sieur Ingres, as the Romanticists of 1830
used to call him with an ironic respect —
was a pupil of David, but not a very docile
one. Compared with the Gerards, the Guer-
ins, and the Girodets, he is almost a Roman
ticist and a realist. In Rome he had the
audacity to fall in love with Raphael, which
was become almost a crime for a Pseudo-
classicist, who should study nothing but
David and the antique; and his "GMipus
and the Sphinx;" which seems too coldly
classical to us nowadays, created a sort of
scandal by its exact representation of the
forms of a particular model. To the straiter
members of the sect he was almost as anti
pathetic as the revolutionaries themselves,
but he was the only man with enough
[204]

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
talent to be opposed to the terrible Dela
croix — Delacroix who was himself, if they
could have seen it, a Classicist and a wor
shipper of tradition after his fashion — and
he cared nothing for color, disliked all
looseness of handling, and detested Ru
bens. Against their will they were obliged
to make him their standard-bearer, and for
thirty years he was the head of the Ecole,
though he never heartily believed in its
ideals or its methods.
In theory, strangely enough, he was an
absolute realist, a literalist, though his
realism was of rather an unusual kind.
He had a horror of ugliness and could not
look at a cripple without physical pain, or
listen to a singer whose eyes were too close
together. He resolutely refused to see any
thing that was not beautiful; but he vio
lently disclaimed idealizing anything or
doing more than copy exactly the beauty
that he found in nature. He would not study
anatomy or allow a skeleton in the stu
dent's workroom, partly because anatomy
was an ugly thing, partly because he held it
useless or worse. You should not know any
thing or ever allow yourself to draw more
than you can see. Your business is to follow
[205]

CONCERNING PAINTING
the model submissively, naively, even stu
pidly. His saying that "drawing is the
probity of art" shows exactly what he
thought drawing ought to be — a perfectly
honest and literally truthful statement of
form. And that this statement shall be
accurate enough, nothing must be allowed
to interfere with it. To him color was a
negligible accident of nature; atmosphere
and mystery were merely annoying ob
stacles to clear vision. Of light and shade
he wanted no more than was strictly neces
sary to model objects, and even that much
was a concession to the public. For himself
he was perfectly indifferent whether things
looked round or flat, but people preferred
them round. As to handling, there was no
such thing in nature. He wanted to abolish
all painting-classes in the schools, maintain
ing that any one who could draw could
color well enough, and that painting could
be taught to any one in a week.
This belief of Ingres in the literal accuracy
of his drawing was largely an illusion, but
it has imposed upon others as well as on
himself, and he is constantly referred to
as the "impeccable draftsman" and the
"high priest of form." It is most nearly
[206]

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
true of some of his portraits and of those
wonderful little portrait-drawings in pencil
by which he earned his living when he was,
as yet, an almost unknown young man.
But even in these there are frequently to
be found what we must believe to be devia
tions from fact for the sake of style or of
beauty. In the drawing of the nude he is
very capricious, and he was not only igno
rant of anatomy but, what is more serious,
he had very little native feeling for struc
ture. In the sense in which Michelangelo
was the greatest of draftsmen, Ingres was
hardly a draftsman at all. The nudes of
his "Turkish Bath" are as boneless as so
many white grubs, and the foreshortened
figure in the lower right-hand corner could
hardly be more ill-drawn. It would be
difficult to account for the position of the
head and neck of the "Angelica" or for
that of the right arm of "Ruggiero" in the
little picture in the Louvre, and even in
that masterpiece "La Grande Odalisque"
the height of the bust and the extreme
length of the hip are, to say the least of
them, highly improbable. Of course these
examples are exceptional, and there are
plenty of figures in his works, from the
[207]

CONCERNING PAINTING
"CEdipus" of his youth to the "Source"
of his old age, which are perfectly well-
proportioned and perfectly just in their
attitudes. But even in these the charac
ters of structure and movement which are
the material of the true draftsman are
not conspicuous. When he tried in his "St.
Symphorien" to prove that he could, if he
chose, depict the human figure in violent
action, he succeeded only in demonstrating
the contrary.
What Ingres truly was is something much
rarer and more important than a correct
draftsman — something quite as rare and as
important as a great structural and sig
nificant draftsman. He was one of the
world's great masters of the line. It is the
line by and for itself, the line studied for
its own beauty, its own subtlety, its own
elegance that is his means of expression.
It is the character of the line that he is
searching for in his exhaustive and re
peated study of the model, and he really
cares very little for what is inside it. It is
the line that he pursues, as he said it must
be pursued, avec nerf et rage, with the con
centrated fire of a domineering and violent
nature. This "cold Classicist" draws with
[208]

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
a white-hot excitement, and not Mantegna
nor Botticelli ever made the line more
subtle and sinuous, more suave or more
austere, more passionately pure or more
icily voluptuous. Beside Ingres's line that
of his adored Raphael is undistinguished
and cursory.
And if Ingres far surpassed Raphael in the
quality of the individual line, he almost
equalled him in that arrangement of lines
and of the spaces they bound which we
know as composition. One is obliged to
say "almost" because in his large composi
tions of many figures he has not Raphael's
inimitable felicity, but in smaller things,
in the "Grande Odalisque" or the "Mme.
Riviere," his design is beautiful beyond
anything, save that of the most perfect of
antique gems. To study the long, almost
unbroken, curves of back and arm in the
"Odalisque" with their marvellously deli
cate flattenings and accents which mark the
bony planes and the joints, is a revelation
of what beauty of line can be. To see the
way in which these curves are taken up and
carried on by those of the silken curtain,
how these last are carried down across the
figure, at exactly the right point by the
[209]

CONCERNING PAINTING
feather fan, and to note the perfect Tight
ness of relation between all these lines and
those of- the enclosing rectangle, is to have
an unforgetable lesson in the meaning of
linear design. In the placing of "Mme.
Riviere" within the oval boundary, in the
wonderful lines of her veil and shawl, in
the unalterable perfection of each detail
to the swirl of the arm of her couch, the
art is almost more consummate.
Even in color and in technic the true lover
of Ingres would not have his work other
than it is. His dictum that "it is without
example that a great draftsman should
not have found the color that went exactly
with the character of his drawing" was
certainly justified in his own case. His gray
and ivory tones are the natural and in
evitable accompaniment of his line, pleas
antly sustaining but never drowning it
with too full a harmony, and the enamelled
hardness of his surfaces is the proper
technical expression for his gem-like per
fection of composition. The slightest loosen
ing of his touch, the most momentary relax
ing of his tension, would have been fatal to
that air of permanence, of a fixed and
eternal repose, which renders his art unique
[210]

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Plate 23. — "Ruggiero and Angelica," by Ingres.
In the IiOuvre.
THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
in the history of painting — an art sui generis,
unequalled, and in its own way inimitable.
What is known as the Romantic move
ment was, as far as painting is concerned,
an effort to get back of the pseudo-classic
regime to the older traditions and to recover
the lost art of painting. Even Delacroix
with all his exotism and his medievalism
in the choice of subject was as true a wor
shipper of tradition as Ingres himself (only
it was to the tradition of Rubens and the
Venetians that he looked instead of to the
tradition of Raphael), and Corot was far
more truly a Classicist than David. But
the most classically minded of all these
so-called revolutionists was that one whose
long residence in the little village of Bar-
bizon has led us to give the name of the
Barbizon school to this whole group of
painters, many of whom, likely enough,
never saw the place.
Jean Frangois Millet was a Romanticist
only by his love of landscape and by the
accident of association. He was a Naturalist
inasmuch as he chose to paint peasants
and so aided in the expansion of the sub
ject-matter of art. Essentially he was a
[211]

CONCERNING PAINTING
Classicist of the Classicists, the one modern
master of the grand style, the lineal de
scendant of that most austere of painters,
Nicolas Poussin, a Norman like himself,
and like that sturdiest of literary Classicists,
Pierre Corneille.
Born a peasant and accustomed from child
hood to work in the fields^ Millet had re
ceived an unusual education at the hands of
his great-uncle, who was a priest. He read
Virgil in the original, and Homer, Shake
speare, and Goethe in translations, and was
steeped in the Bible. He came up to Paris
in 1837, a young man of twenty-three, with
a pension of six hundred francs, and en
tered the studio of Delaroche, where he
studied for little more than a year. Then he
broke away from the school and worked
by himself, doing anything that came to
his hand from portraits to sign-boards, de
signing covers for sheet-music, and painting
many little pictures of nude figures for the
market in which is to be discerned a con
stantly increasing power. But he had al
ways wanted to paint men at work in the
fields with their fine attitudes, and he
began to experiment in that direction be
fore 1847 and exhibited "The Winnower"
[212]

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
in 1848. In 1849 he went to Barbizon for a
summer's holiday and to remove his family
from the danger of cholera which had broken
out in Paris, and there he lived in decent
poverty the rest of his life, devoting himself
to the production of his great epic of the
soil. Even in the choice of subject the art of
Millet is essentially classic. Though he
paints the lives of peasants, he is far from
being a painter of genre, and though he had
ever a story to tell, it is never a trivial anec
dote or an insignificant action that he de
picts. What he deals with are the sowing of
the seed and the gathering of the harvest,
the hewing of wood and the drawing of
water, the guarding of sheep and cattle,
the shearing and the spinning of the wool —
the most important and significant labors
of man from the days of the patriarchs to
our own. And these actions he deals with
in the classic way, eliminating all non
essentials, purging away everything tem
porary or accidental, telling his story with
the utmost force and clarity. He returns to
a subject again and again, enlarging it,
broadening it, simplifying it, until he has
found its typical expression. He does not
[213]

CONCERNING PAINTING
paint a peasant sowing corn, he paints
forever "The Sower." A subject on which
he expended his full power has found its
final and definite form and need never —
one might say can never — be painted again.
This constant effort at simplification, at
the discovery of the permanent and the
essential in all things, this attempt to
establish the type, is the constant charac
teristic of Millet in every part of his art.
The costume of the peasant of his day was
simpler and more rustic than it has since
become, but he simplified it still further,
eliminated all folds and details that could
be spared, moulding it to the figure beneath
it, until it has almost the value of classical
drapery, "expressing," as he said, "even
more than the nude, the larger and simpler
forms of nature." And these forms he treated
in the same manner, drawing heads almost
without features and hands almost without
fingers, but finding always the essentials of
structure and movement.
He was the most profound master of struc
tural drawing since Michelangelo, who
deeply influenced him and who "haunted
him through his whole life"; but his draw
ing is much less explicitly anatomical,
much more abstract and generalized than
[214]

Plate 24. — "Shepherdess and Flock," Drawing by Millet.

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
that of the great Florentine. It is only the
"larger and simpler" forms that he ex
presses — the forms strictly necessary to
convey the sense of bulk and weight and
movement which are the essentials of great
figure-drawing. It is especially in the ren
dering of the adjustment of the human body
to a weight which it has to sustain or to
move that he is incomparable. It is the
strain of the weight upon her arms that
gives such monumental gravity to the figure
of his "Woman with Buckets." It is this
same strain upon the arms combined with
the pushing movement of the whole figure
that makes his little etching of a "Man
with a Wheelbarrow" as grand as one of
the Prophets of the Sistine vault. It was
his creed that "one must be able to make
use of the trivial for the expression of the
sublime," and this seemingly impossible
task he nobly performed.
There is the same power of simplification,
the same reduction to the essentials in
Millet's composition as in his drawing. It
is a single vertical and a single horizontal
that give the enduring serenity to his
"Shepherdess," two or three curves that
make us feel the day-long, back-breaking
toil of his "Gleaners." There is never a line
[215]

CONCERNING PAINTING
or a touch that is not necessary, never a
failure in complete expressiveness. His pic
tures are inevitably "all of a piece" and
"things are where they are for a purpose."
Nothing could be added to them and noth
ing taken away.
But if, in all these things, we see in Millet
a Classicist more intellectual and more
austere than Poussin himself, he was also
what Poussin was not: a great painter and
a great colorist. In his earlier days before
he went to Barbizon he had acquired an
admirable method, and Diaz used to speak
of his "immortal flesh-painting." When he
began his long series of rustic pictures
this earlier technic seemed too luscious to
him, and for a time his workmanship be
came harsh and his handling heavy. Gradu
ally he learned to subdue his material to
his uses, to soften and enrich his manner,
until he painted well-nigh perfectly. His
coloring is not modern, in the sense that
he had not learned to see blue shadows;
but it is grave, simple, powerful, with great
fulness and subtlety in its sobriety, and few
men have been able to attain greater beauty
of individual hue or a nearer approach to
splendor within a restricted gamut.
[216]

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
Finally, Millet was as great a master of
landscape as of the figure. He treated it as
he treated the figure, reducing its multi
fold details to what was strictly necessary
for his purpose and expressing its essen
tial character by the simplest means, with
a profound knowledge of natural forms
and an assured mastery of atmospheric
effect. No one has so made a flat plain
recede gradually into almost infinite dis
tance; no one has so overarched it with
the dome of sky; no one has so modelled
the back of a hill or expressed the rugged-
ness of a bit of waste ground. Above all,
no one has so made us feel the rejoicing
of all nature after the passing of the storm,
the wet brightness of the apple blossoms
and the glory of the shining rainbow, as he
has done in that marvellous little landscape
in the Louvre called "Spring."
For if a certain solemnity and almost
biblical grandeur give the prevailing color
to Millet's mind, he is capable of infinite
tenderness and even of lyrical fervor, and
this little masterpiece is his "Ode to Joy."
These three — Prudhon, Ingres, and Millet
— differing from each other at almost every
[217]

CONCERNING PAINTING
point, are the only painters of the nine
teenth century to whom we may give quite
unreservedly and unequivocally the title
of master, placing them upon the same
level with the great ones of the past; yet
there is another who, in spite of such grave
shortcomings as must make his claim to
the title doubtful, produced work of a
high order which inclines us to rate him as
almost a fourth with them.
George Frederick Watts lived so long and
died so recently that it is almost impossible
to remember that he was born in 1817
and was only three years younger than
Millet, whom he survived nearly thirty
years. He was a man of noble character
and of lofty ideals. He aspired to "paint
ideas, not things," and "to suggest great
thoughts which shall speak to the imagina
tion and to the heart and arouse all that
is best and noblest in humanity." This
high and legitimate ambition he attained
in his best works, by the exercise of great
powers of drawing, of coloring, and of de
sign, and his masterpieces have an ele
vation of style which would have been rare
in almost any epoch and was particularly
so in the nineteenth century.
[218]

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
He was almost entirely self-taught, leav
ing the schools of the Royal Academy after
a very brief experience, and he formed his
style first by a prolonged study of the Elgin
marbles and later by a study of those great
Venetians who, as he always maintained,
were nearest akin of all painters to the
spirit of Phidias. These two influences are
visible in his work and in the faults of that
work almost as much as in its merits.
His admiration for the marbles, for instance,
led him to an insistence on draperies crum
pled into a multiplicity of small folds,
which, as they do not cling to and draw the
figure as the Greek draperies did, often
become distracting in his pictures and con
flict with the serenity of the greater lines.
And his admiration for the later work of
Titian led him to a dry and crumbling
technic which becomes more and more
habitual with him, and which, in conjunc
tion with his habit of constant retouching,
results at the end in an almost total form
lessness. But the study of Phidias led also
to such grandeur of abstract form as in
that mighty and sombre figure of Death in
the "Love and Death," and the study of
Titian led to much beautiful painting in
[219]

CONCERNING PAINTING
his earlier work and to a sober richness of
color in almost everything he did.
Like Prudhon and Millet, Watts hardly
ever worked directly from nature, using
the model only for studies of parts of the
figure when he felt his knowledge insuffi
cient. Though he never reached Millet's
solidity of structure or Prudhon's perfec
tion of form, he yet succeeded in evolving
a type of the figure of great decorative
value and in becoming so far master of it
that he could employ it freely in the expres
sion of his feeling and the construction of
the sweeping lines of his design. In his
compositions of many figures, such as the
"Death of Abel" and the tall and narrow
"Birth of Eve" — he painted some subjects
so many times that it is necessary to specify
— he is liker to Tintoret than to any other
master and has more of Tintoret's swing
and force than can be readily found else
where. The rush of the avenging angels in
the first of these pictures and the repelling
vigor of their outstretched arms are par
ticularly fine, while there is something
majestic in the slow upheaval of Eve from
the side of the sleeping Adam, and a splen
did energy of joy in the soaring spirits
above her. [220]

Plate 25.— "Love and Death," by G. F. Watts.

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
But the most unequivocally successful of
his pictures are the two great allegories
of "Love and Death" and "Love and Life,"
simple compositions of two figures each,
in which the thought has found its appro
priate and inevitable expression: in the
one case Life, trembling, unclad, feeble,
painfully mounting the steep and rocky
way, encouraged and guided by the gentle
spirit of Love: in the other, irresistible
Death advancing, slowly but inevitably,
heedless of the agony of Love — who, with
wings crushed against the door-jambs,
struggles in vain to resist her approach.
Unhappily, the same noble purpose that
led to these successes led also to many
failures; and when Watts fails, he fails
almost altogether. The thought in these
two pictures was capable of presentation
in clear and beautiful pictorial form, but
not all his thoughts were so, and when
they were not, his desire to paint ideas
rather than things led him to forget paint
ing altogether. The result of a determina
tion to be moral and didactic, whatever
happened to his art, is the existence of
such unspeakable nightmares as "Mam
mon" and "Cruel Vengeance" — things it
[221]

CONCERNING PAINTING
is almost a crime to have committed — or
such mushy sentimentalities as his "Con
science." From such total failures and from
a great range of half -failures or of grievously
marred successes it is a relief to turn to
such early works as "The Childhood of
Jupiter," in which beauty was his only and
sufficient preoccupation.
Besides his imaginative figure-compositions
Watts has left behind him a few landscapes
treated in something like the old classical
manner — composed landscapes, not merely
transcripts from nature — and a large num
ber of portraits, including a gallery of the
greatest men of his time, as well as a few
pieces of sculpture. In portraiture he tried,
as in everything else, for something more
than the delineation of externals. He was
not content to paint men's foreheads and
noses, he tried deliberately, and not merely
unconsciously, as most painters do, to de
pict their characters rather than their
features. His portraits, in a word, no less
than his allegories, are works of the imagina
tion, and as such they share the strength
and the weakness, the success and the fail
ure of his other works. When he succeeds,
as in the noble portrait of Joachim, in
[222]

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
which the very spirit of music reigns, he
is as superior to other portrait-painters as
he is inferior to them when his inspiration
fails him, and we have neither the clear
conception of a personality nor the truth
ful record of a physical appearance.
Few artists of any time have so uniformly
aimed at the highest, and if his failures
were many, his successes were so frequent
and of an order so nearly unique in the art
of the recent past that he has fairly earned
the respect and honor in which his name is
ever likely to be held. After a disinterested
and laborious life, he died at the age of
eighty-seven, leaving the greater part of
his work, which he would never sell, to the
British nation.
No other country in the nineteenth cen
tury produced an art comparable to that
Of the three great Frenchmen we have
discussed, or even to that of the less com
pletely great Englishman. Certainly Amer
ica did not. Yet if we have had no such
masters as these, we have had and have
artists with something of their temper,
men who shared their reverence for the
great traditions of the past, and have tried
[223]

CONCERNING PAINTING
with some success to carry on these tradi
tions in their own art. Such an artist was
John La Farge and such artists are Abbott
Thayer and George de Forest Brush.
It is more difficult to form at present a
final estimate of the work of John La Farge
than of that of almost any other artist.
The man himself was so extraordinary, his
personality is so vivid to us, the impression
of his culture, his wit, his subtlety of
intellect is so strong, that it is almost im
possible for us to separate our feeling of
what he was from our feeling for what he
did, and to imagine with any clearness
what his art will mean to those who never
knew the man. Certainly nothing he did
contains the whole of him, and it is hardly
possible that he should seem as important
to posterity as he does to us. His formal
education as an artist was brief and almost
accidental, undertaken in the spirit of
an intelligent amateur rather than in that
of an intending professional, and something
of that spirit he always retained. His pro
duction is rather desultory and fragmen
tary, as if he were interested in too many
things to be quite contentedly a painter.
He had an intense and highly trained

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
feeling for color and an oddly personal
and rather untrained feeling for form, and
these, combined with a mechanic's delight
in craftsmanship and a love for all niceties
of manipulation and tricks of the trade,
made him an incomparable designer of
stained glass. He had not only a great love
for and a great knowledge of the art of
the past and of all countries, but a curious
unscrupulousness in the way in which he
would utilize it in his own productions,
just as he would utilize the photograph or
the talents of his assistants. But if he took
anything he wanted anywhere he found it,
with the unconcern of the chief of a fif
teenth-century bottega, he gave to every
thing he took, as to everything he invented,
his unmistakable personal stamp. With his
great mural paintings, which are perhaps
the more important part of his work, I
shall have to deal later; but in his smaller
figure-pictures, his landscapes, his water-
color studies, there is always a beauty of
arrangement and of color, and beyond
and above these an indefinable, enigmatic
charm which is the artist himself.
In Thayer we have a striking instance of
an artist in whose art the personal point of
[225]

CONCERNING PAINTING
view — the personal conception of beauty —
seems to find expression independently of
and almost in spite of his technical methods.
There is such a conception of beauty;
but one almost doubts if the artist knows
clearly what it is, and one is certain that
he does not know how he expresses it.
His pictures are the result of a long series
of tentative gropings, and when the ex
pression sought for is found at last, it is
likely enough to be encumbered with the
detritus of a hundred preliminary attempts.
Still, the expression is found, the beauty
attempted has been attained, and the lack
of technical amenity becomes of secon
dary consequence. In his best things there
is a delicate modulation of color almost
without colors, a noble breadth of form and
of arrangement, above all a spiritual rather
than physical beauty in the faces, which
cause one to forgive and even to forget
the asperities and negligences of the execu
tion. Brush is a much more conscious workman,
a lover of and a striver after material per
fection. In his earlier work he followed
pretty closely the academic and rather
photographic realism of his master, Gerome,
[226]

From a Copley Print, Copyright by Curtis & Cameron, Boston.
Plate 26.— " Virgin Enthroned," by Abbott H. Thayer.
In the Collection of John Gellatly, Esq.

THE LOVERS OF TRADITION
though he had always a more romantic
and personal feeling. He has retained a
love for precision and definiteness, but has
shown more and more the influence of the
great Italians, both in composition and in
coloring. He is one of the foremost rep
resentatives, to-day, of that combination
of a respect for tradition with personal feel
ing and a thorough study of nature, of that
reticence and dignity and sense of measure,
which constitute the true classicism as op
posed to the false.

[227]

Ill
MURAL PAINTING IN FRANCE
AND IN AMERICA
The French people have never lost the
sense that painting and sculpture are the
natural allies of architecture, and that no
great building can be properly completed
until the painter has been called upon to
make it splendid within and the sculptor
to make it magnificent without. Every
public building has been the occasion of
commissions for decorative and monumen
tal paintings, and every painter has been
desirous of such commissions and has put
forth his best efforts to obtain and to exe
cute them. But just because mural paint
ing was taken for granted as the highest
ambition of every painter, and because
every painter was a mural painter upon
occasion, there has seldom been any clear
distinction in the mind of the artist or of
the public between mural painting and any
other kind of painting. Each artist has pro
duced his own kind of art whether he was

MURAL PAINTING
working upon a wall or within the bound
aries of a gold frame, and when a com
mission for a great decoration has fallen
into the hands of a painter especially fitted
for decorative work, it has been as often
a matter of good luck as of intelligent
choice. Much such a state of things worked
well in the Italian Renaissance, when all
art was primarily decorative. It has not
worked so well in a time when art has
become dominantly naturalistic. In Italy
men gradually took to putting into easel-
pictures what they had learned in the prac
tice of fresco-painting. In modern France
they have too frequently placed upon the
walls of buildings what they had learned
in painting small and isolated canvases.
But with the provision of abundant op
portunity painters of true decorative in
stincts were bound to find their proper
bent, and even those without any great
decorative aptitude might feel the necessity
for a greater gravity of style in monumental
art, as did Paul Delaroche when he devised
the balanced and formal composition of
his "Hemicycle" in the Ecole des Beaux
Arts, though he painted it in his usual
heavily naturalistic manner. Thus a dec-
[229]

CONCERNING PAINTING
orative tradition gradually arose in France
which reached its highest point in the work
of Baudry and Puvis de Chavannes, be
tween 1870 and 1880. Since that time it
has somewhat disintegrated under the bat
tering of modern realism and impressionism
while a similar tradition has been growing
up in this country, so that at the present
time mural painting is perhaps in a healthier
state here than there.
The beginning of this nineteenth-century
decorative tradition may be traced back to
the two great protagonists in the battle of
the Classicists and the Romanticists, Ingres
and Delacroix, each of whom put much
of his best effort into work destined for
a decorative purpose and each of whom
had an almost incalculable influence. There
is, however, very little decorative work by
Ingres actually in place. His "Apotheosis
of Homer" was painted for a ceiling but
has been replaced by a copy, the orig
inal hanging among his other pictures in
the Louvre, and the great wall-paintings
begun for the Due de Luynes at Dampierre
were never finished. But from the "Homer"
and the replica of "The Golden Age" we
[230]

MURAL PAINTING
can see how little he altered his habitual
style in applying it to mural painting.
Like Delaroche, he formalizes his composi
tion, but he makes no other change. No
other change was, indeed, necessary. His
art was founded on that of Raphael and,
to some extent, on that of the primitives.
It was an art of the line, in which there was
no mystery and little light and shade,
essentially a mural art like that of the
Italian frescanti. The only thing wanting
to make it well-nigh perfect as decoration
is greater fulness and beauty of color, and
that he could not have given by any effort.
His color is at its best when there is the least
attempt to use definite colors, and in this
respect his easel-paintings are more deco
rative than his "Apotheosis of Homer."
His pupil Flandrin, applying his master's
methods without his genius, produced a
series of paintings in the Church of Saint-
Germain-des-Pres which are grave, digni
fied, appropriate, and, withal, a little
commonplace and uninteresting.
There is a decorative strain of another
sort in the art of Delacroix, a strain derived
from Veronese and Rubens, and with him
the responsibility of monumental art acted
[231]

CONCERNING PAINTING
as a calmant, so that in his "Heliodorus"
and "Jacob and the Angel" in Saint Sul-
pice one is less impressed by his fiery
energy and exuberance than by the almost
classic restraint which holds them in check.
His powerful coloring is here subdued to
harmony with its gray surroundings, while
it loses little of its fulness and quality;
his restlessness of composition is kept
within bounds, and the result is a decora
tive style almost as noble as it is vigorous.
In the superb background of the "Jacob
and the Angel," Delacroix is one of the
first of the moderns to feel the decorative
possibilities of a broad and generalized
treatment of landscape forms.
If the qualities of these two decorative
manners could be united in the same work
— if one could have something of the sta
bility, the clearness, and the linear beauty
of Ingres conjoined with the emotional
power, the full coloring, and the love of
nature of Delacroix — one would have, in
such a combination, an almost ideal decora
tive style. Such a synthesis was attempted
by Theodore Chasseriau, and he seems,
from the little we know of his work, to have
very nearly succeeded in it. He was a pupil
[232]

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Plate 27. — "Peace," by Chasseriau.
Fragment of Decoration of Cour des Comptes, in the Louvre.
MURAL PAINTING
of Ingres, and he always retained something
of Ingres' s linear beauty and classic repose
mingled with a more passionate feeling
and a love for color which were the result,
or the cause, of his admiration for Dela
croix, and with a love of light and air in
which he was more modern than either of
his masters. He died at the age of thirty-
seven, in 1856, and his principal work,
the decoration of the stairway of the Cour
des Comptes, was destroyed during the
Commune. From the fragments of it which
remain one divines a genius that might
have anticipated the art of Puvis de Cha
vannes, which it profoundly influenced,
and that may well have had a real, if less
decisive, influence upon the art of Baudry.
The late Augustus Saint-Gaudens, de
signer and lover of decorative design if
ever artist was, had three great solar prints
made from photographs of monumental
paintings which he used as the principal
decoration, apart from his own works, of
his Cornish studios. One of them was
after Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam";
another after Raphael's "Jurisprudence"
from the Camera della Segnatura; the third
[233]

CONCERNING PAINTING
was Paul Baudry's "Pastoral Music" from
the Foyer of the Paris Opera-House. The
mere collocation of names is significant of
the estimation in which he, with others,
held an artist whom it is now somewhat
the fashion to decry.
Baudry was one of the most brilliant
pupils of the schools and had taken the
Prix de Rome at the early age of twenty-
two. In Italy he fell under the spell of the
great masters of the Renaissance and
studied deeply the art of Leonardo, Titian,
Correggio, and, above all, of his chosen
master, Raphael-. He had already produced
some of the finest portraits and some of
the most beautiful paintings of the nude
to be found in modern art, and had made
some essays in monumental decoration,
when his great opportunity came to him
in the award' of the commission for the
work in the Opera. One would have said
that a painter of such accomplishments,
a painter whose style was already so classic
and so charming, had nothing to do but
to paint upon the ceiling of the great
Foyer what he habitually painted else
where. Baudry himself did not feel so
confident. He wished that his work should
[ 234 I

Plate 28.— "The Flaying of Marsyas, " by Baudry.
Foyer of the Opera, Paris.

MURAL PAINTING
be truly monumental and truly decorative,
and he was willing to give any amount of
work and study to the perfection of a
decorative style. In 1864 he went to Rome
to prepare himself for his great task by
making a series of full-sized copies from
Michelangelo's frescos of the Sistine, in
1868 he went to London to copy Raphael's
Cartoons, and in 1870 to Italy again, still
bent on his investigation of the grand
style of the Renaissance masters. His great
work was finally completed in 1874 and was
received with astonishment and delight.
In size alone the series of paintings in
the Opera forms perhaps the most colossal
scheme of decoration carried out by one
man since the great days of Italian art,
but it is the high intellectual and artis
tic character of the work that most concerns
us. Baudry's color is always pleasing, if
not very profound; his light and shade,
while strong enough to bear juxtaposition
with Gamier' s rather overloaded archi
tecture, is subordinate; his main reliance
is on linear composition and on significant
drawing. Of decorative design on a monu
mental scale he is more nearly the master
than Ingres or than any of the moderns.
[235]

CONCERNING PAINTING
In the nice balance of his filled and empty
spaces, the elegance of his silhouettes, the
binding and weaving of lovely lines, he is
unfailingly felicitous. His pattern is al
ways perfect, and it is always perfectly
related to its surroundings and perfectly
expressive of the sentiment of the subject
in hand. No one has composed better since
Raphael and Veronese, and one can think
of no other modern who would deserve the
fellowship or could survive the comparison
which Saint-Gaudens instituted. As to
Baudry's drawing, if he had not Ingres's
passionately purified line or Millet's mas
sive solidity and structure, he was yet a
master draftsman, every line being full
of knowledge and intelligence, of elegance,
and of that clarified expressiveness which
we call style. In the great single figures
of the Muses there is a much softened
reminiscence of his studies of Michel
angelo, but in general his types are more
like Raphael's though with a crisper and
more nervous accentuation of the bony
structure and a certain air which is not
only French but Parisian.
Baudry's later work grows ever lighter
and gayer in color, more brilliant and
[236]

MURAL PAINTING
delightful in handling, but there is a cer
tain loss in monumental gravity of com
position. His "Glorification of the Law"
seems almost too joyous a work for a law-
court, but the "Rape of Psyche" at Chan
tilly is delicious in its rococo gayety and is
admirable in its rendering of light and air.
One is curious to know what he would
have made of the commission for the Life
of Jeanne d'Arc in the Pantheon, where
he would have met Puvis de Chavannes on
Puvis's own ground. He never did more
than make some preliminary studies for
this work, but he seems, from all accounts,
to have been contemplating something in
the style of mediaeval illumination — per
haps not unlike what Boutet de Monvel
afterwards made of the same subject.
His fame must ultimately rest on his
paintings in the Opera, which constitute
one of the greatest and most successful
schemes of architectural decoration in ex
istence, perfectly suited to their surround
ings and entirely in harmony with the uses
of the building. Because his art is eclectic
and intellectual rather than spontaneous
and emotional, because it is idealistic rather
than naturalistic, and classic and imper-
[237]

CONCERNING PAINTING
sonal rather than individual, it is not
highly prized to-day. Whenever the pen
dulum of public taste swings back from
modern naturalism and modern individual
ism to a recognition of classic standards —
as it must inevitably do sooner or later
and as I believe it will do sooner rather
than later — he will again be recognized for
what he is, a great artist and one of the
legitimate glories of the French school.
Puvis de Chavannes was thirty -two years
old when Chasseriau died, and the two
young men had been intimate, though they
quarrelled before the death of the elder of
them. We are informed, also, by La Farge
that Puvis kept to the end of his life certain
of Chasseriau's drawings and studies. Cer
tainly the influence of Chasseriau is un
mistakable in the earliest of Puvis's im
portant decorations, those in the Museum
at Amiens. The first of these, "War" and
"Peace," were not painted for their places
but were rather experiments in the forma
tion of a decorative style. They were ex
hibited in the Salon of 1861, when the art
ist was thirty-seven years old, and no one
seems to have any clear idea of what his
[238]

MURAL PAINTING
work before this time had been like. When
they were acquired for the decoration of the
great staircase hall of the Amiens Museum
the artist was so delighted that he painted
two other great canvases, "Work" and
"Rest," and presented them to the Mu
seum. These were painted in 1863, and he
was afterward commissioned to complete
the series by the "Ave Picardia Nutrix"
of 1865, and the "Ludus Pro Patria,"
which was not finished until 1880 and is
in his later and fully matured style. It is
in these early works, from 1861 to 1865,
that one must study the origins of Puvis's
art. He had been in Italy and had been
deeply impressed by Piero della Francesca
and others of the more masculine among
the primitives, but a comparison of photo
graphs is all that is necessary to show how
deeply he bears the impress of Chasseriau.
This is to be seen in the "War" and
"Peace" and even more distinctly in the
"Work" and "Rest" and in the "Ave
Picardia Nutrix," works planned for the
places they occupy and painted in a lighter
key than the "War" and "Peace," which
were rather decorative Salon pictures than
true decorations. It is to be seen in the
[239]

CONCERNING PAINTING
sentiment and the manner of composing,
in the classical landscape settings, above
all in the clear and beautiful drawing of the
figures, a drawing descended through Chas
seriau and Ingres from that of Raphael.
There are certain female figures in these
paintings as beautiful as any that have
been done by any one. In these works
Puvis is already in possession of a noble
and admirable decorative style, and though
he was to do more personally characteristic
work, it is doubtful if he ever did anything
in all respects better.
The modifications of this earlier style
which led to the gradual formation of
Puvis's later manner are the result of two
tendencies which might seem contradic
tory, but which Work together in a strangely
harmonious way — a growing primitivism
and a growing modernity. The primitiv
ism shows itself in a constant simplification
of both composition and drawing. The
composition is thinned out, the figures
more widely spaced, the lines more and
more reduced to verticals and horizontals,
the lines of stability and repose. At the
same time all detail is eliminated from the
drawing of the figures, the contours be-
[240]

Plate 29.— "The Sacred Wood," by Puvis de Chavannes.
At Lyons.

MURAL PAINTING
come almost without accent, and within the
contours everything is flattened, light and
shade and modelhng being reduced to the
minimum necessary for the expression of
the chosen attitude. The modern tendency
is marked by the growing importance of
the landscape and the more intense study
of light and air. In some of his later work
the landscape becomes the predominant
element, and the "Summer" and "Winter"
of the Paris Hotel de Ville are landscapes
with figures, and very admirable land
scapes rather than true figure compositions.
Of Puvis in his great central manner,
Puvis in his best and most characteristic
style, the "Sacred Wood" at Lyons is per
haps the finest example. It is a long land
scape, the horizontals of pool and shore
broken by the verticals of a fragment of
Greek architecture and of a multitude of
slender tree-trunks, the evening sky, with
its tender crescent moon, visible only by
reflection in the quiet water. On the flower-
sprinkled sward stand or recline some
dozen figures, women and children, some
in a loose group, others more scattered,
while above, in level line of flight, two
others are returning to this chosen spot
[241]

CONCERNING PAINTING
"dear to the Arts and the Muses." The
figures are beautiful with the beauty of
archaic Greek sculpture, entirely simple
in their forms yet with all necessary points
of structure felt rather than seen, and the
scant draperies have as few folds as those
of Giotto. There is little binding together
of the design, almost every figure being so
far isolated as to seem at full length, and
these figures are almost as vertical as the
tree-trunks or as horizontal as the pool. It
is an art profoundly calculated in its ab
stinence and nothing could more consum
mately express an endless stability, an
eternal peace.
In still later work the tendency to sim
plification of form and to naturalism of
landscape treatment carries Puvis farther
and farther from his earlier methods. From
figures austerely simplified in drawing he
comes to create figures that are not drawn
at all — figures not only angular and awk
ward but, at times, quite impossible,
wrongly put together and out of joint, or
mere approximate silhouettes without sub
stance. On the other hand, his landscape
gets better and better — a landscape sim
plified and clarified to fit it for decorative
ends, but increasingly modern and natural-
[242]

MURAL PAINTING
istic in its forms and increasingly beautiful
and truthful in its light and color. But at
any stage of his evolution Puvis is always
a decorator and always fits his work per
fectly to its surroundings and keeps it
mural in its character. His paintings seem
to grow out of the wall rather than to be
arbitrarily placed upon it. The one ex
ception is in the case of his decorations in
the Boston Public Library. He never saw
the building, and failed to understand the
architect's drawings or to realize from
small samples what would be the effect of
the splendid masses of yellow marble that
there surround his work. It has taken our
own painters a long time to learn that
there is such a thing as a sumptuous style
of decoration, fitted for the ornamentation
of magnificent architecture. Puvis, in his
old age, could hardly be expected to change
his manner entirely, and to create a style
which should harmonize with its new en
vironment as perfectly as that which he
had formed in a lifetime of effort harmo
nized with the cold gray walls of the Pan
theon. From Puvis de Chavannes is descended
what one may almost call a school of nat-
[243]

CONCERNING PAINTING
uralistic decoration — a school which hav
ing learned from him the decorative value
of pale tones comes to rely entirely upon
this paleness of tonality for its decorative
character and to abandon almost entirely
that gravity of design and balanced com
position and that generalization and ideal
ization of form which have always been
essential elements in monumental art. Cazin
is even more the landscape-painter than
Puvis himself, and indeed most of us know
him mainly as a landscape-painter pure
and simple, but he produced some charm
ing decorations in which his delicate color
ing and idyllic feeling make up for the lack
of monumental design. Degas's character
ization of him as "The Puvis of the dwell
ing-house" marks with perfect precision
his relation to the greater master. One
could live long with his pictures and always
find them pleasing and refreshing, but one
would not wish to place them in a temple or
a court of justice. Besnard took a still longer
step toward naturalism, and in his paint
ings in the Ecole de Pharmacie gave a cer
tain decorative value, by the fresco-like
paleness of his colors, to a series of frankly
and even painfully realistic subjects. To-
[244]

MURAL PAINTING
day Henri Martin is painting for the walls
of public buildings great compositions of
realistic subjects in which the whole ap
paratus of impressionistic division of tones
and pointillist technic is employed to
achieve the only unity which is any longer
thought necessary to decorative art, the
unity of hght.
During all this time of the rise and decline
of a decorative style in France the old
French idea that any painter may become
a mural painter by the simple process of
mounting his pictures on a wall has, un
happily, persisted. In the Pantheon, be
side the works of Puvis, are placed the
academic insipidity of Cabanal and the
powerful and almost brutal realism of
Bonnat, and one of the most important
positions has been assigned to a painter
as hopelessly undecorative in every fibre
as Detaille. Of all the artists there engaged
in a sort of frantic competition the only
one who can at all sustain the forced com
parison with Puvis is Jean Paul Laurens,
whose heavy color and realistic form are
saved by a certain nobility and gravity
of composition. The only thing that ties
together the work of so many men of con-
[245]

CONCERNING PAINTING
tradictory ideals is the repetition of a
border which was supplied by the profes
sional decorator Galland, not one of them
— not even Puvis himself — being sufficiently
an ornamentalist to design a border of his
own. In spite of the very great talent of many
of the artists employed upon it — in spite
of the fact that it contains, in the work of
Puvis, some of the noblest of modern
decorations — one would be inclined to con
sider the Pantheon as one of the worst
decorated buildings in the world, did not
one remember that final triumph of hig
gledy-piggledy, the Paris Hotel de Ville. It
would seem that all the painters in France
have been given their lodging in that un
happy building, three or four of them,
wretched bedfellows, quarrelling for each
room, and not the most modern of com
posers could emulate the cacophony of the
sounds they emit in their conflict. So
limited was the space and so great the
competition for commissions that, in one
great hall, the very piers that support the
roof have been, as it were, painted out, each
pier being covered on its four sides by four
realistic landscapes, and nothing but a nar-
[246]

MURAL PAINTING
row gilt moulding being left to mark its
function. We have made some blunders in
decoration in this country, but we never
have done, and I trust we never shall do,
anything so bad as that.
Before 1892 there had been sporadic
attempts at the mural decoration of public
buildings in this country. The first of these
was the decoration of Trinity Church in
Boston by John La Farge, done in 1876;
the second was the painting by William
Morris Hunt in 1878 of his two lunettes
in the State Capitol at Albany, "The Flight
of Night" and "The Discoverer." Hunt
painted his decorations directly upon the
stone walls, and they are now hidden from
sight by changes in the building. Trinity
Church has been so darkened that La
Farge's paintings are nearly invisible. It
is thus very difficult to form any clear idea
of these pioneer works, but though La
Farge's pictures in Saint Thomas's Church
in New York have been destroyed by fire
other things remain, including his greatest
work, "The Ascension of Christ," in the
Church of the Ascension in the same city.
La Farge had received his artistic educa-
[247]

CONCERNING PAINTING
tion in Paris at a time when the influence
of Delacroix was paramount with the
younger men, and his work is of the Dela
croix tradition. He had known Chasseriau
but had little sympathy with the strain of
classicism which Chasseriau had inherited
from Ingres. If he had ever seen the work
of Puvis he showed no trace of its influence.
The "Ascension" is the most formal and
monumental of all his compositions, which
are generally rather irregular and pictur
esque, and in spite of its lack of severity
in form and even of certain distinct errors
in drawing it is a noble and impressive
work. Its main reliance, as ever with its
author, is on his powerful and harmonious
coloring, in which he has no modern rivals,
and on an original and beautiful use of
landscape. He is not only the earliest of
our mural painters, and the trainer of
several of those who have since attained
distinction, but he is likely to remain one
of the greatest.
But the beginning of the general move
ment toward mural painting in this coun
try — a movement which has since attained
considerable proportions — is due, more than
to any other man, to Francis D. Millet.
[248]

Copyright by John LaFarpe. ..
Plate 30. — "The Ascension," by John LaFarge.
In the Church of the Ascension, New York City.

MURAL PAINTING
As Director of Color at the Chicago
Exposition in 1892 he called in a number
of painters to add their contributions to
the creation of that "great white city"
which proved such an educational stimulus
to the appreciation of architectural beauty
and dignity. Hardly one of these men had
ever had the opportunity to attempt mural
painting, and several of them have since
found that their bent is in other directions.
But though some were not decorators by
nature and none were decorators by train
ing, they all fell to work with energy and
enthusiasm, and their achievement was
sufficient to convince architects and public
that, henceforth, no monumental scheme
of architecture could be complete with
out the aid of the mural painter. The
decoration of the Library of Congress, the
Boston Public Library, the Appellate Court
in New York followed in rapid succession,
and to-day the decoration with paintings
not only of State capitols and court-houses
but of banks, hotels, and even private houses
of any luxury has become a fixed habit.
Such an amount of work carried out in a
few years by painters without experience
[249]

CONCERNING PAINTING
in decoration for architects equally inex
perienced, in a country without traditions
and without great examples handed down
from the past, must inevitably contain
faults of judgment and of execution. The
astonishing thing is that the faults have
not been graver and more frequent, and
that they have been so rapidly corrected.
In the decoration of the Appellate Court of
New York, the same mistake was made as
in the decoration of the H6tel de Ville of
Paris, but with much less distressing results.
The decoration of the main court-room
was intrusted to no less than six painters,
and as a result the room is certainly over-
decorated, each painter having felt bound
to plan an important figure composition
in the space assigned him even though,
had he had control of the whole work,
he would have placed there nothing more
important than ornament. But the six
artists made a serious effort to harmonize
their work, each making some sacrifice of
his personal ideas for the benefit of the
total effect, and the effort met with a sur
prising degree of success. If the room is not
what it should be, it is far from the hodge
podge of some of the rooms in the Hotel
[250]

MURAL PAINTING
de Ville, and the lesson of its partial failure
has been learned. To-day no American
architect of standing would ask two painters
to co-operate in the decoration of one
room, all the paintings in any one room
being intrusted as a matter of course to one
artist, and even a general supervision of the
plain and ornamental painting being ac
corded to him.
A similar facility has been shown in the
correction of their individual errors by
particular men. When Edwin A. Abbey and
John Sargent were given commissions for
mural paintings in the Boston Public Li
brary, the one was the first of American
illustrators, the other, as he still is, the
first of living portrait-painters. In Mr.
Abbey's paintings in that building there is
a lack of relation in scale and in tone be
tween the pictures and their surroundings,
and even between one picture and an
other, which renders even their fine draw
ing and painting nugatory as decoration;
while Mr. Sargent betrayed a curious
hesitation as to the appropriate manner of
working out such a task and combined
modern naturalism in the frieze of the
"Prophets" with an extreme archaism in
[251]

CONCERNING PAINTING
the painting of the lunette and the vaulting.
That both men saw their error is shown in
their subsequent work. At the other end of
the same hall that contains his "Proph
ets" Mr. Sargent has since placed an
entirely harmonious and sumptuous piece
of decoration in a style which may be
called modernized Byzantine. In the capitol
at Harrisburg Mr. Abbey has produced a
series of paintings which are no longer
splendid illustrations but mural paintings,
properly planned for their relations to
architecture. Each new decoration is a new problem,
and it may be that it is because of the
different nature of the problems set them
by our architects that our mural painters
have from the first relied more upon formal
design than has been common in France.
They have seldom had such free wall spaces
at their command as determined the style
of Chasseriau and Puvis; rather they have
had to paint lunettes, pendentives, friezes,
or wall-panels so situated and surrounded
as to impose a formal treatment. They
have not been called in to decorate walls
left bare by the architect, as happened so
[252]

MURAL PAINTING
often in the Renaissance and as has fre
quently happened in France, but rather to
fill certain gaps left for them in a carefully
planned scheme of architectural adorn
ment. It may be also that the lack of that
habit of painting on a large scale so com
mon in France has helped them to think
of mural painting as something different
from the making of pictures, and to feel
that it requires a different kind of com
position. For whatever reason, it is certain
that they have produced relatively few
enlarged easel-pictures, and few, even, of
the freer sort of decorative compositions,
and have tried to relate their work to its
setting by an architectural symmetry of
arrangement. This tendency has been pro
nounced from the beginning. It is clearly
marked in three out of the four lunettes
in the Walker Art Building at Bowdoin
College, painted in 1894, and in most of
the decorations of the Library of Congress,
painted in 1896. It dominates the work
of men as different from each other as
Edward Simmons, Henry O. Walker, and
Elihu Vedder. Mr. Walker, indeed, has
confined the symmetrical arrangement to
the charming and delicate painting en-
[253]

CONCERNING PAINTING
titled "Lyric Poetry," at the end of his
corridor and marking its axis, and has judi
ciously varied the composition of the small
lunettes on either side wall, but all of Mr.
Simmons's lunettes of "The Muses" are
formally balanced, and Mr. Vedder, in his
powerful representations of good and bad
government, has secured a remarkable va
riety without a single departure from a fixed
symmetry. That this formality of design
is not adopted by our mural painters
because of a special love of formality for
its own sake, but from a sense of archi
tectural propriety, is shown by the way in
which they have escaped from it whenever
it seemed allowable to do so. Not one of
them but has welcomed the opportunity
for a free composition when the architec
tural arrangement permitted of it, but in
their freer as in their more formal work
they have shown a power of designing in a
truly monumental manner which is rather
uncommon, to-day, in France and which
hardly exists elsewhere.
In its reliance upon formality of design
the art of our mural painters is more nearly
allied to that of Baudry than to that of
Puvis, but in the earlier work of most of
[254]

Froul a Thistle Print, Copyright Detroit Photographic Co.
Plate 31.— "Lyric Poetry," by Henry O. Walker.

MURAL PAINTING
them the influence of Puvis is to be felt in
an extreme paleness of tone and a tendency
to the use of blue and violet shadows.
Gradually they have learned that such
tones, admirable in their proper place, are
rarely in harmony with the rich woods or
marbles of many of our public buildings.
Gradually they have learned that insuffi
cient lighting or thirty feet of intervening
air will tone down the strongest color, and
that if the design be truly decorative the
fullest coloring, and even a considerable
degree of chiaroscuro, will not interfere
with a sufficient degree of mural flatness.
They have consulted Raphael and Veronese
and our own La Farge, they have filled and
enriched their compositions, painted silks
and brocades and armor — above all, they
have increased the fulness and power of
their color until they have produced work
of sufficient depth and vigor to hold its
own against the most magnificent sur
roundings. A decoration by Puvis used to
look thin and poor when shown in the Salon
and to reveal its tranquil beauty only when
it was placed upon the wall for which it was
intended. A modern American decoration
is more likely to look overcolored and
[255]

CONCERNING PAINTING
violent when strayed among other pictures,
and to need the subduing influence of
shadow and distance to transform its vivid
ness into a chastened splendor.
Having been led to base their decorative
style upon a study of the great Italians,
our mural painters have learned from them
something of their noble generalization of
form, and a few have made at least an
approach to a grand and monumental style
of drawing. Many have learned to appreci
ate the importance of ornament, and show
in this or that work a knowledge of archi
tectural and ornamental forms, while an
increasing number would be quite capable
of planning the entire decoration of a build
ing. Perhaps no one else has shown the
capacity of H. Siddons Mowbray for plac
ing figure-painting of a high order in a
setting of appropriate ornamentation, after
the manner of Pinturicchio, but one could
name others who only need the opportu
nity to demonstrate a similar ability.
If America has produced no mural painter
of such lofty talents as Puvis de Chavannes
or Paul Baudry, she has yet, within twenty-
five years, developed a whole school of
mural painters such as exists nowhere else
[256]

Copyright by E. H. Blashfield.

Plate 32.—" Minnesota as the Granary of the World.
In the Minnesota State Capitol.

MURAL PAINTING
— painters who are extremely capable and
efficient; who have formed a distinctively
decorative manner in design, in drawing
and coloring, and in the use of ornament;
who have, in fine, made mural painting
their profession and have learned their
trade. In the course of my attempt to de
scribe the evolution of this school I have
had to mention the names of half a dozen
of them; I could easily name as many more
of equal standing, but as I could do no
more than name them, I shall confine
myself to some mention of the chief of
them all, the man who, since the death of
La Farge, is the recognized head of the
profession. Edwin H. Blashfield was one of the paint
ers called in by Millet to decorate the
domes of the Liberal Arts Building at
Chicago, and he demonstrated his ability
for such work by finding far the best solu
tion of the difficult problem which was
there set for so many raw hands. Since
then he has been in constant demand by
architects and building committees, and he
has probably produced as much important
work as any two of his fellows. He has
seen the whole of the evolution we have
been tracing and he has been, in his own
[257]

CONCERNING PAINTING
person, a large part of it. By his ability
and intelligence, by the elegance of his
style, by his constantly increasing mastery
of color, by the inevitable fitness of his
work for its place, he has earned the con
fidence of his employers. By all these things
and by a beauty and sentiment which ap
peal to the great public no less than to the
small, he has earned the right to be the
last artist named in this review of mural
painting in France and in America.
In many fields America has been develop
ing a native art, independent of that of
other countries — an art inherited, indeed,
from the past but modified by American
temperament and suited to American needs
— an art, whether or not the public and the
critics have become aware of it, not inferior
to any other now extant. In no field have
American artists more decisively taken
their own way than in this of mural paint
ing, in none have they produced an art
more their own. And perhaps that which is
most characteristically American in this
art is its conservatism, its discipline and
moderation, its consonance with all great
and hallowed traditions — in one word, its
classicism.
[ 258 ]

Books of Importance to the Lover of Art

ART MUSEUMS AND SCHOOLS
Four Lectures by G. Stanley Hall, Kenyon Cox, Stockton
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Contents : " Museums of Art and Teachers of English," by
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fessor Tonks.
By KENYON COX
CONCERNING PAINTING
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The Six Scammon Lectures, delivered at Chicago in 191 1, con
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LANDSCAPE PAINTING
By BIRGE HARRISON
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PROMENADES OF AN
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Books of Importance to the Lover of Art

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WHAT IS ART ?
STUDIES IN THE TECHNIQUE AND CRITICISM
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ART FOR ART'S SAKE
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THE MEANING OF PICTURES
31 full-page illustrations $1.25 net
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STUDIES IN PICTURES
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Books of Importance to the Lover of Art

FRENCH ART:
CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
AND SCULPTURE
By W. C. BROWNELL. $1.50 net
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The Same Beautifully illustrated, $3. 75 net
APOLLO. By SALOMON REINACH
AN ILLUSTRATED MANUAL OF THE HISTORY OF ART
THROUGHOUT THE AGES
From the French by Florence Simonds
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THE FINE ARTS. By c. b. brown
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ESTIMATES IN ART
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Illustrated $1.50 net
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Books of Importance to the Lover of Art

GENERAL HISTORY OF ART
Each volume $1.50 net 500 illustrations. 4 in color
A series covering the general history of every country
in the world, from the earliest times until to-day, written
by the most representative authorities in the various
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ART IN SPAIN
By MARCEL DIEULAFOT
OF PARIS
The Art- of Spain discussed and analyzed concisely in
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ART IN FLANDERS
By W. MAX ROOSES
DIRECTOR OF PLANTIN-MORETUS MUSEUM. ANTWERP
A clear, concise account of the history of Flemish Art
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ART IN EGYPT
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DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF ANTIQUITIES IN EGYPT
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ART IN FRANCE
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INSPECTOR OF FINE ARTS IN THE CITY OF PARIS
"The first complete history of French art ... a. remarkably suc
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ART IN NORTHERN ITALY
By CORRADO RICCI
DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF FINE ARTS AND ANTIQUITIES
OF ITALY
"A valuable and well-written description of that wonderful treasure-
field of art." — New York Architect.
ART IN GREAT BRITAIN AND
IRELAND
By SIR WALTER ARMSTRONG
DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND
"Altogether the best summary that has ever been published of the
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OTHER VOLUMES TO COME

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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