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ENTENTItE

RTIS

.^ifei._

HARRY QIJILTER

' YALE ^
CENTER' ^ for ^~
OBritis/^ ,
¦ Art '

Sententtce 2trtt5

Wilfred A. Flower,
tM^0Uthi4dhi Road,
/Cottmm, Bristol.

SA t5ri5tol.
ENTENTIi^ ArTIS

FIRST PRINCIPLES OF ART

FOR PAINTERS AND PICTURE LOVERS

BY

HARRY aUILTER M.A.

BAREISTER-AT-LAW

' There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh all things are ;
And it Cometh everywhere." Emerson

LONDON
Wm. ISBISTER Limited
56 LUDGATE HILL
1886
IThe Right of Translation is Reserved,]

NovELLO, Ewer & Co.,
Printers,
f 9 & 70, Dean Street, Soho,
London, W.

TO
CHARLES EASTON JOLLIFFE,
barrister, philosopher, and scholar,
THESE "SENTENTI^" ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED,
IN REMEMBRANCE OF
AN UNINTERRUPTED FRIENDSHIP OF MANY YEARS

THE DAYS WHEN WE WERE BOYS TOGETHER

'OLD COURT" OF "TRINITY.'-'

'^ Le seule guide en ce monde est la main d'un ami." — Alfred de Musset.

Contents*

page

(general precepts anb (Examples - - \
(EontemporarY Artists anb scljools of painting 99
Cecl^ntcal ^ints for Students anb 2tmateurs 26\
®Ib masters anb ScBjooIs of painting = 335

preface.

'TT^HESE pages contain the gist of all I have en-
deavoured to teach about pictures and painting
during the last ten years. For the detached form
which I have adopted, some explanation is perhaps
necessary. It is a very simple one. The experience
of many years' art criticism, has shown me that few
busy people now-a-days will take the trouble or give
the time necessary to follow out a connected and sus
tained argument on the subject of art ; but a theory,
or a part of a theory, compressed into a paragraph,
and shorn of all irrelevant surroundings, may, perhaps,
have some chance of gaining attention — if only it be
sufificiently short and clear, and have some kernel of
meaning. This, then, is what I have tried to do : to
compress a variety of art principles, all bearing upon
one theory, into a series of short paragraphs, and to
present each as sharply as possible, leaving out not
only all unessential matter, but even omitting, in
most cases, all the modifying clauses which would be

X PREFACE.
necessary to a complete statement ; my chief aim
having been to make people think for themselves about
art, and put them, if possible, in the road for thinking
rightly. I have chosen my subjects chiefly with this
view, and, first from one side and then from another,
attempted to prove by inference, suggestion, and
example, the connection between art and life, which
is now-a-days so entirely overlooked by one school, and
so vehemently denied by another. All that I have ever
written upon art has been written with this object —
to show that art was neither a plaything nor a dream ;
a morality nor an accident ; but an expression of life,
with all its varying emotions. Deep down in the
nature of man there lie, sometimes half hidden, cer
tain verities which are universal in their appeal,
immutable in their reality ; and it is to shadow forth
these in its unspoken language that art lives — lives to
express, as no other manifestation of humanity is
able, the triple connection of sense, spirit, and
intellect ; to give a voice at once to the passions, the
thoughts, and the beliefs of men, and justify with its
voiceless edicts, the changing, unchangeable story of
life.

PREFACE. xi
For all of us who care to listen, there are echoes of
its quiet voice murmuring in our ears, giving a rarer
beauty to the flower, and a deeper meaning to the face ;
hinting for ever at fuller records and more pregnant
interpretations than we can quite grasp, but corres
ponding to some need of our nature. Not to this
or that subject, or mode of interpretation, does art
bring her hinted story, but to every incident of nature
or life : her hand is powerful alike to arrest a cloud in
its passage —
Across the clear star-sown vault of heaven.
or touch with a new meaning into eternal beauty, a
mother's love, or a child's sorrow.
For art is but the record of truth, raised to some
higher level of feeling and insight by a human spirit,
and on its intimate and full correspondence with the
most subtle portions of our nature, depend its vitality
and its power. As Emerson has so finely said of the
artist — The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity ;
Himself from God he could not free,
He builded better than he knew,
The conscious stone to beauty grew.

xii PREFACE.
I do not seek here (or elsewhere) to elaborate any
metaphysical explanation of this reciprocity between
life and art ; the fact is sufificient ; one need not care
much to know why the sun is on fire, as long as
the sunshine falls. But one suggestion may be
thrown out upon the subject. If, as Mr. Matthew
Arnold once said, the need of expression is the
dominant one in man, we can easily understand that
art, which combines at once the expression of an
intellectual thought with a sensuous image, should
be powerful in its appeal to the corresponding
elements in our nature; but in addition to this, the
third phase of our life, that which we call for want of
a better word our spiritual consciousness, is also
expressed in art. From the spirit of the painter or
the sculptor, there somehow does pass into his work
those shadows of meaning for which we have no
name — " What we have all felt on summer Sundays
when the bells ring ; or at night when we cannot
sleep for the desire of living." Here our aspirations
and beliefs find a vent ; find also a secure resting-
place. Let the churches squabble as they will ; let
the free-thinker prove his denial of all religion up to

PREFACE. xiii
the hilt, it matters not to us ; we find in every hue or
line of a great picture, a subtle witness to the " some
thing which makes for righteousness''; a dogma
which no philosopher can attack, much less destroy ;
we find — as Emerson found when he first went
to Rome " and saw the pictures — that genius left
to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious,
and itself pierced directly to the simple and the true ;
that it was simple and sincere, that it was the old
eternal fact I had met already in so many forms —
unto which I lived' — that it was the plain you and
me I knew so well — had left at home in so many
conversations." So much for the general view of art which I hold
and seek to exemplify in these Sententias.
After ten years of impersonal and generally anony
mous writing, I may, perhaps, be pardoned if I say
here, in a few words, what my experience of
outspoken art criticism has been. It is briefly
this : That a writer who does not attach himself to
one special clique of critics, but endeavours to
stand alone and tell the truth all round, must suffer
so much from abuse and isolation, that he had

xiv PREFACE.
better break stones, or make screws. To the best of
my belief, I have never written a partial word of a
friend or an unjust one of an adversary, and I have
lived to see most of the friends I had in the art world
fall away from me, and never yet found a single
artist who did not, in his heart of hearts, think that it
was a great injustice to have his shortcomings pointed
out, as well as his merits praised. " Damn the
fellow ! why doesn't he back his friends ? " Ruskin
once happened to overhear someone say of himself;
and he left off, from that date, writing criticisms on
contemporary painters. That is what I have heard
many times directly and indirectly, during the last
decade ; and it expresses, as Ruskin said, the preva
lent idea of justice in the English mind. Let those
young writers who think themselves strong enough
to withstand such feelings be warned in time. They
may prevail, but the penalty is a hard one. For if
they have the sensibility to understand and appreciate
beautiful things, whether in art or literature, and if
they have the desire strong within them to help the
increase of such things in an outspoken way, they
will also feel most keenly the personal isolation in

PREFACE. XV
which they will be left, and the virulent animosities
which their work will produce. I have never deigned
to notice the many personal attacks made upon
me, but the habit of mind and feeling which
such misrepresentation and antagonism produce in
oneself is even worse than their outward effect, for
we can hardly do our work quietly and truly unless
there is a certain amount of peace within and without.
Unjust adversaries may not make you unjust; they
must make you bitter. Failure to effect your purpose,
even in such small matters as criticism, causes pain
in proportion to your conviction of its truth and
necessity ; and though you may still go on in the
right road, you do it slowly, with downcast head and
bitterness of heart.
After all, it does not much matter what the world
says of one ; and though it matters more that our
personal affections and sympathies should be withered
or stunted, even that may be borne silently. Sun
and sky, still remain, and the smell of grasses in the
spring, and the silence of summer's full-green life,
and the colours of the leaves in autumn. These
last for our pleasure ; and for heart and endurance.

xvi PREFACE.
one must take what strengh one can get from trying
after the best we know, from not failing ourselves.
One word more. Several journalistic critics have
lately accused me of "boasting" that I was an artist as
well as a critic. Let me say, once for all, that I make
no such claim. I have given some years of my life
to the study of pictures and to the technical processes
of art — for experience has convinced me that without
practical power of drawing and painting no real
knowledge of pictures is possible — but I by no means
claim to be considered an artist. Entirely from the
first has my work on painting been undertaken to
gain an adequate knowledge of the subject-matter,
and the methods of representation, of art; and for the
same purpose, as long as I continue to write upon
this phase of life, I shall continue also to study its
technical processes, and the natural facts and laws
which affect them.
I am told with authority, by a genial critic, that
such study is unnecessary, and that art criticism is a
very poor matter to which to devote the greater part
of a writer's efforts ; in reply to which I can only say,
that if I so thought, nothing would induce me to

PREFACE. xvii
undertake such writing at all. Art criticism, it is true,
is frequently trivial and objectless ; but that such is
the case is the fault, not of the subject, but of the
way in which it is regarded by those who undertake
it hurriedly, think of it lightly, and perform its duties
ignorantly or with partiality.
The White House,
Chelsea,
October, 1886.

(General Precepts anb
(Examples.

(general precepts anb (Examples.

" And between the heaven and the earth
a glad fleeting world stretched out its
short wings and livedj like myself, in
the presence of the infinite Father,
and from all nature around me flowed
sweet peaceful tones, as from evening
bells."— Richter.

W^

Y is it that those who will give time to yudgmentof titcttty£s
the understanding of a machine, a blue-
book, an essay, or a poem, expect to understand
a great picture at once and without effort ?
Surely thought and feeling expressed in the
language of colour and form, are not necessarily
more plain-spoken than when they are set down
in verbal language.
T X7E are often told now-a-days by the (so- A modem
^ • called) gesthetic school that we must look art^
for nothing in art but a sensuous pleasure, that any
admixture of intellectual or spiritual emotions are
departures from the province of art, and as such
to be reprehended. I lack patience to repeat such
a theory, or speak of it with common courtesy. B

Public taste.

4 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
The vital principle of art is its freedom, its
universal range over all the concerns of humanity.
The hues of a cabbage or the sufferings of a
Christ, are equally within its sphere ; nay, there
is nothing that man has ever dreamed, or hoped, or
feared, suffered, enjoyed, or sinned in, which is
not a subject-matter for art ; nor is there a single
aspect of the mind or spirit which has not, or may
not have, some analogue in form and colour. Let
the aesthetics take their " solid sensuous feelings,"
and welcome. We will not forget that that is but
¦ a part, and a comparatively unimportant fragment,
of man's nature, and will ask from our painter
a fuller record ; one that deals not only with our
bodies, but with our hearts, our minds, and
our souls.
npHE fashion of the day is to regard anything
-*- heroic or sacred as only a subject for
ridicule or weariness. In the same way as the
public enjoy and demand opera-bouffe upon the
stage, so do they demand and enjoy pictures of
a similar character — some subject that makes
no demand upon their intellect, no appeal to
anything higher than a little cheap sentiment.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 5
THERE are some men who hold modest Smallartists,
niches in the Temple of Fame, whose
tenure seems to be of the slightest, and to rest
less upon any actual achievement or quality of
their own than upon the sympathy and kindness
of others. Their reputation is of a wholly different
kind to that which is extracted grudgingly, by
main force of genius or toil of industry, from a
careless or unwilling public ; it is rather given
them as the best of gifts are given, freely as the
air and sunshine. With the admiration such
men excite there mingles a feeling of kindness
almost akin to personal regard, the result, perhaps,
of some subtle quality of sympathy or tenderness
in the brain and heart of the worker, be he poet,
painter, or musician. One would rather miss
some great statues from the Temple than these
little Tanagra figures (so to speak), which have
the savour of life and fancy about their rough
modelling, whose grace and beauty seem to have
a direct and easy relation with every-day life.
Most of us now-a-days could spare Racine, but
hardly the author of " Le Grenier " and " Le Roi
d'Yvetot," and we should miss Mr. Watts less
sharply than Charles Keene or Du Maurier. B 2

6 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Compre- HPO have within the frame of a canvas, or
hS'HSZ'VB' I
ness of ¦*• the marble of a statue, all the power and
all the feeling which one man had to give — this is
what a great piece of art implies, this is why many
pictures and statues of early times touch us more
keenly in their incompleteness than some later
works in their perfection.

A great T T THAT is the quiet speech of a great picture
^ ^ to us ; the after word, as it were, when
we have noted its first flush of beauty ? Is it not
something to this effect : " Look ! I am not
beautiful only as you have seen for arrangement
of line and colour, for perfection of form, for
superficial dramatic interest. I have done more
than this, have penetrated into the inmost
recesses of loveliness and meaning of my subject.
I have seen something there which you would
not have seen, heard words to which your
ear would have been deaf, and yet the sight
and the sound, were they not true?" Yes;
every great picture is a record not only of sight,
but of insight, and, perhaps, the ratio of its

SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

greatness is in direct proportion to the complexity
of its meaning. It may be that to say even one
thing perfectly, is to hint at all others.

I

NEVER like to attach a definite imaginative imagina tive work.
meaning to a work of art, for in proportion

to the true imaginativeness of a painting, are the
various ideas which are given to different minds.
A great picture is like a skeleton key, in that it
may have been made for a special purpose, and
yet will unlock many doors.

I HATE to hear a man or woman say " I Experi ence of
know nothing about pictures." They art and
life.
might as well assert that they knew nothing
about life. Have such folk never seen a green
field, or a blue sky, the waving of the grasses,
the sparkle of the leaves, or the waves tumbling
hurriedly, or creeping slowly over the shore ?
Have they never watched with sympathy the
enthusiasm of youth, the endurance of manhood,
and the patience of age ? Have they never felt
the grasp of a hand in friendship, or the touch of
a kiss in love ? For if such sights and such

SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

knowledge form part of their experience, they
should know not only something, but the most
vital portion of the domain of art.

Ruskin A LL great art is a true expression of life, and
notwith- /-\ PI 1 r
standing. ¦*¦ ¦»¦ life is very complex, very faulty, and otten
very base. The relation does not cease because
an artist chooses to represent that which is a
defect rather than a glory of humanity.

Public A S a matter of fact, little is to be hoped
taste, f\ "^
•*¦ ^ for just at present from a British public in
appreciation of good art. Cheap efforts of chia
roscuro and cheaper sentiment have so vitiated
the public taste, that there is little hope of any
comprehension of such work as the drawings
of the old masters. "What is there beautiful in
that ? " I once heard a fashionable lady ask her
daughter, pointing to Raphael's cartoon of the
Holy Family ; and the daughter, in the gracious
slang of the present day, could not " see much
in it."

I

SENTENTI/E ARTIS. 9
T is not our painters who are to blame, or, at ^«<^* "/
imagina-
least, not chiefly ; the painters are but trades- Hon.

men of a certain kind, who supply the wants of
their customers. It is the fashionable, enlightened
patrons of art who have produced this puling-
woman and playing-baby sort of picture, who
won't buy anything unless it is pleasant, trivial, and
pretty, as if their galleries were but big sweet
meat boxes, and must be stuck all over with
bright, meaningless colours and objectless forms.
And the dealers who minister to them are
even more reprehensible, since they do all in their
power to foster this foolish taste. There are a
couple of lines, pregnant with suggestion, in an
old artists' song, which used to be, and we
believe still is, sung by Academy students. It
refers to the way to make an unsuccessful picture
sell, and if all else fails, the student is directed to —
Rub it down
With madder brown
And sell it to a dealer.
Anyone who has had the least to do with
the artist fraternity knows well how this painting
of pretty pictures is forced upon artists by
the dealers and by the pubUc. As a rule,

10 SENTENTI/E ARTIS.
the artist worthy of the name has in him, at
first, " a strong voice which no one will hear,"
and to him in his unsuccess, frequently almost in
his starvation, enter the public and the dealer,
with the cry, " Why don't you work like other
people?" And, as his strength is, he resists for a
longer or a shorter time, and, perhaps, if he is
exceptionally brave or fortunate, he wins the day,
and revenges himself by painting a hundred times
at an exorbitant price the thing he likes best ;
but in by far the greater number of instances,
neglect, circumstances, friends, and dealers are
too much for him. He accepts a conventional
prettiness as his ideal, and so joins that ignoble
army of martyrs, who have killed, not themselves,
but the best portion of themselves.

f,^f' A ^^^¦'^^ ^^^ ^'^ painting, to be contemptible,
¦'¦^ must be in inverse ratio to its subject.

arms

Motives -nnHERE must be something "rotten in the
of work. I
-¦- state" of any artistic "Denmark" which
refuses to find motives for its work in the life,

SENTENTIjE ARTIS. 11
either joyful or sorrowful, elevated or sordid, of
the world around it. Nothing is more certain
than that picturesque little bits of scenery, and
pretty little dresses and mob-caps, are not the
subject-matter of great pictures. Nothing is more
certain than that the artist — if he be an artist at
all — must feel more, and not less, than those
amongst whom he lives ; and that when his work
is fitting mainly for the chromo-lithographer or
the publisher of Christmas cards, it will cease to
be work which is in the true sense worthy of the
doing. " Making stone dolls," as the great states
man said, is in itself a somewhat trivial occupa
tion ; and staining paper or canvas with blobs of
paint is open to the same condemnation, and may
be dismissed with equal contempt, unless it be
that the man who carves a statue, or paints a
picture, puts into it some of that ardour, that
energy, and that love, by which the work of the
world is carried on. The language of art has this
strange peculiarity, that though it is most fitly
applied to every-day matters, yet it describes
them in its own terms, and affords us the means
of expressing those qualities of the subject for
which our ordinary language has no equivalent

12 SENTENTIvE ARTIS.
words. The whole difference between base and
noble reahstic art is this, that the former shows
us the world and its doings as it might be seen
by the eyes of a brute or the lens of a camera ;
and the second shows it, as seen by those who
can grasp the finer threads of meaning, and
sympathise alike with the joys and the sorrows of
mankind.

^hHic"' A LTHOUGH an unsparing realist may,
ideals. a A. perhaps, in some measure dispense with
human sympathy and strong personal feeling, yet
an idealist without these can hardly expect to
win us to his view of the universe, as shown in
his paintings. If his ideal is not sympathetic
and emotional — well, pictorially speaking, he had
better have had none at all. For the best of us
feel that if we are to be taken to another world,
it should at least be a preferable one to that
which we live in.

Distinc- ¦rpHERE is a distinction which is not always
tion of \ ¦'
beauty. -»- sufficiently borne in mind by the artist, be
tween subjects which are beautiful in themselves.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 13
and those which are beautiful in spite of them
selves, as, for instance, the curvature of a leaf,
and the line of a breaking wave, and the aspect
of the same leaf when it is fallen and withered,
or the lines of the same wave when they have
been shattered upon a rocky shore. The last
kind of beauty being that which depends on the
circumstance under which the object is met with,
or the sentiment by which it is affected. And
especially in drawings of architecture is it neces
sary to keep this distinction in mind, since if it be
at all forgotten, the artist will almost inevitably
attempt to combine those contradictory elements,
to mar the grace which he should preserve, by
introducing hints of ruggedness and decay; and
weaken the force of things which derive their
beauty from their usefulness and their endurance,
by covering them with the thin mantle of the
picturesque. In other words, in the reproduction
of things which are ugly but useful, as in that of
those which are beautiful, the chief virtue con
sists in sincerity. For we gain by that in each
case the beauty which befits the subject, and if we
dare to express with perfectly literal truth any
series of facts which have a real connection with.

14 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
and significance to, the life of man, it is almost
certain that we shall render them interesting, since
the elements of use and of beauty are so closely
allied.
^s^- npHAT a thing is old, is in itself no reason for
^ admiring it. It may be a reason for the
feelings of affection, reverence, interest, and many
others, but no reason for admiration. That must
depend upon whether there be any intrinsic merit
in the thing itself, whether it has been skilfully
fashioned for its purpose, or well wrought, or
beautifully ornamented — but always upon some
thing else than its age.
Morality npHE attempt to connect a philosophy of life
-"- or a system of morality with'Jpictures, must
inevitably take away from them much of their
meaning and vitality. The teachings of art are
very shadowy lessons, given in a dim "Garden
of Proserpine," and replete with hints of meaning
which never blossom into full significance. "A
thing of beauty is a joy for ever," said Keats ; and
if he was right, is there any wonder that we
should feel indignant with the artist who weakens

SENTENTI^E ARTIS. 15
his "thing of beauty" by striving to endow it
with complex teachings, no matter how admirable ?
For by the very nature of the case, a true work
of art says different things to each man. Its
meanings are innumerable so long, and so long
only, as they are indefinite.

PERHAPS no purely artistic production — be Artistic quality of
it poem, statue, picture, or piece of music — work.
is capable of giving us the greatest pleasure, if we
can trace throughout a definite intention in its
production. If we seek to analyse our feelings
with regard to any perfect work of art, we shall
always find that the supremacy of the artistic
feeling over all other matters lies at the root of our
enjoyment. A great religious picture, no matter
how true its devotional feeling, is always an artistic
picture first, and one finds a curious sense of
incongruity in some early Christian paintings and
mosaics, where the religious element has been
enforced to the detriment of the artistic. One
wishes, so to speak, that the painter had said his
prayers before and after, but hardly at the same
time that he was painting.

16 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
i?jg-Ai«h'- ¦^r^HERE are artists of many kinds and every
mation of \
artists. ¦*- rank; and there are painters of many kinds
and every rank, who are hardly artists at all.
And hereby " hangs a tale." For it is apt to
happen that those who seek to lead the popular
judgment of art, mistake the good painter for the
great artist, and blame, as an artist, the man who
fails as a painter ; and so there come confusion,
and sometimes even " gnashing of teeth." It is
not sufficiently remembered that artistic excellence
must consist at least as much in habit of mind as
in habit of hand — that, like a poet, an artist " is
born, not made." And yet, without such remem
brance, the most trivial of our picture exhibitions
can hardly be estimated rightly; and so critics
fall constantly — I had almost said consistently —
into the error of taking good joiner-work for good
art, and bestow their praises upon that perfected
skill of hand which accomplishes all that it seeks
without hesitation or failure, rather than upon
painting which falls short of its aim, because of that
aim's worthiness. No "mute, inglorious Miltons"
are wanted in these days ; our Miltons must not
only be loquacious, but trained in the best graces
of elocution, and even then must curtail their epics

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 17
within the compass of a magazine article, or
people will not pause to listen. So it is that all
hesitating, imperfect utterance of deep thoughts,
whether in art or poetry, has gone, for the time at
least, " to the wall," and we have substituted as
our chief good, compositions which express, in a
clear, emphatic, and partial manner, some thought
which no man shall be too hurried, no woman too
frivolous, to interpret easily.

F

ROM a picture, as from a book, we gain but Limitation
. of pictures.
little more than we bring. If we have eyes,
we can read strange matters; but the meanings
lie, perhaps, as much in ourselves as in the work
before us. The greatest painter or poet in the
world can say nothing to a fool — cannot even,
rightly understood, speak to him at all.
THE pictures of late years which have had Two
pictures
any reference to our national life have been of tie
Thames.
few and inconsiderable, but to this rule, Mr. W.
L. Wyllie's work entitled " Toil, Glitter, Grime,
and Wealth on a flowing tide," must be quoted as
one of the rare exceptions. It depicted a scene
upon the Thames, just below the Pool, in which

18 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
the most prominent objects were some dark coal
barges and a fussy little steamer. The work by
its very antithesis reminded me of the " Old
Temeraire " — morning sunlight, instead of sunset ;
work doing, instead of work done ; black barges,
instead of the sea and wind whitened hull of the
old man-of-war ; the life of every-day peace, instead
of byegone war — these and other contrasts pre
sented themselves vividly. But in essentials, the
pictures were even more alike than in superficial
aspects they were opposed to one another. Each
depicted a significant bit of national life with truth,
beauty, force, and clearness ; each showed that
power of combining the aspect of nature with the
doings of men which is at the root of all great
landscape or sea-scape-painting ; and lastly, each
succeeded in making a scene significant and beauti
ful without in any way violating the facts of the
case. Mr. Wyllie had had the heart to feel and
the brain to understand that in a picture, as in
life, beauty may lie in unexpected places, and
depend no less upon contrast than harmony, and
so he had made the dark strength of his barges
beautiful, against the glittering sunshine of the
unstable water, and given to the rough forms of

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 19
his bargees, the true picturesqueness which is their
birthright; the freedom and power born of the sea
and wind, and of a life in which action is bereft of
uncertainty, though it is beset with danger. I can
imagine no higher praise for this picture than to
say that it might be worthily placed in our National
Gallery as a companion to the " Old T6m6raire."
It shows the life of the men who helped to make
the tradition of England, and it is difficult to see
why we should refuse that sympathy to the every
day labour and danger of the living that we
bestow so plentifully upon the vanished heroism
of the dead. In any case, Mr. Wyllie is to be
congratulated upon his achievement. He has
succeeded in giving one more disproof to the
doctrines of those shallow, morbid sentimentalists
who groan so loudly that modern life has nothing
picturesque or beautiful, and he has painted a
picture which, for truth of action, natural effect,
and vividness of delineation, may rank with any
painting of the present day.

N

0 doubt "the meanest flower that blows" Relative
importance
can give " thoughts which do often lie of subjects.

too deep for tears," but none the less is it an
c

20 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
unwholesome state of mind to be always looking
for tears, or even for interest, in "the meanest
flower that blows." On the whole, people should be
chiefly interested in other and more vital matters.
It is a good deal more important to know how a
human being is made, than a dandelion (even for
an amateur student) ; and a great tenderness for
cats and canary-birds has been frequently known
to go with strange indifference to the feelings of
men and women.

Gothic 'T^HE monotony of a Gothic town is of a
architec- I
ture in ¦*- more than ordinarily depressing quality.
Flanders. Perhaps it is the effect of the angular roofs and
windows, wearying to the eye as the diagrams in
a book of Euclid. Perhaps it is the low-browed
shops, the irregularly paved streets, the dull,
unrelieved brown and grey of the houses. But
for whatever reason, the effect is certainly dreary.
" The old houses are very interesting," says Mr.
Baedeker ; but they are not, to use an expressive
Americanism, gay. After an hour or two, one
takes them grimly, almost as a necessary evil ;
and morbidly wonders how such an impracticable

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 21
architecture ever came to be generally adopted.
The little restaurants too, with their deserted
rooms and sanded floors, are hardly inviting ; and
as the grey evening closes in, and the tall belfry
tower grows indistinct behind a veil of dull rain,
the forlorn impression deepens, and the tourist is
apt to feel that there is something to be said for
the Philistine companion who preferred to remain
in Brussels. So the ordinary tourist rarely
lingers here, and takes away with him little but
an impression of narrow crooked streets, tall
houses, which thrust jagged step-like gables
against the sky — cobble-stone pavements, which
hurt his feet and disturb his equanimity — and
smells of an intensity and variety rarely equalled
except in Venice.

WHATEVER is false about art, this is The per
ception of
certainly true — that all its greatest ex- great art.
amples are records, not so much of this or that
man's skill, as of the fact that in this or that
instance an artist felt some object or incident
more keenly, and with a heightened perception,
than those who had gone before him. Every now
c 2

22- SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
and then the power comes to some man of feeling
and putting on canvas some one special thing,
more perfectly than any one has done before.

"Babies," 'T^HE prevalent pictorial motive of our great
favourite I
subjects in ¦*- painters for the last two or three years
Academy. has been "babies," and our old friend the " British
matron " must have at least enjoyed this peculiarity
to the full in the Academy. There were, it is
true, about five nude figures in last year's
exhibition, but it would not be much of an
exaggeration to say that there were nearly five
hundred babies. Every variety of infantile healthi
ness or sickliness is displayed here. A new
" Liliputian warehouse " might be set up, with
shoes, socks, capes, frocks, and bonnets of these
Academic " innocents." There is, I notice, one
special kind of bonnet, like a miniature coal
scuttle, lined with pleated satin, which is a great
favourite with Academicians, and which they have
attained great skill in rendering. Shoes also,
particularly those with a strap and one button,
are, like Osric's " carriages, very dear to " their

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 23
" fancy," and short white socks are also success
fully treated in several instances ! It is remarkable
that in this, as of course in all the less important
branches of their art, the Academicians and
Associates surpass the outside artists. There are
not only a larger number of Academic babies, but
they are bigger, chubbier, and better dressed than
the others. The average toilet of one of these
favoured sucklings costs about twenty pounds, and
as it is invariably of spotless freshness, must be a
somewhat large item in the household expenses.
The great apostle of this new " cry of the
children " is one of the Associates, who had the
good fortune to discover, in a pictorial sense, the
universal attractiveness of the " millinery baby."
In about four years this excessively skilful artist
has created a new religion, one that could only
be described in a new "Sartor Resartus." Those
of our readers who remember the coloured plates
given away with the Christmas numbers of the
" Graphic " and the " Illustrated London News,"
will be able to appreciate the force of our words,
when we say that it seems likely that in a few
years infants of that order will be the chief staple
of our English art.

24 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.

Calm of "r)EOPLE have looked at the Parthenon, or at

r

ancient
art. -L drawings or models of that building, with
many different feelings, varying from admiration
to disgust; but probably no one ever looked at it
and thought that it was done in a hurry; and
this is equally true of all very great ancient art.
It is like the cloud in one of Sydney Dobell's
poems — " Immaculate, unhasting, undelayed."

Deteriorat- 'HpHERE is little doubt that long-continued
ing effect I
ofprofes- -*- professional work, though it educate hand,
eye, and brain, almost inevitably hardens the
heart. It is scarcely with the fervour of youth
that we love what we live by. A man and his
profession are like a married couple, who know
each other's faults as well as their virtues, "to
whom the god of the honeymoon is a god no more,
only a mortal like the rest of us" ; but to whom,
nevertheless, he or she is a dear mortal, taken
"for better — for worse." "The hand, of less
acquaintance hath the daintier sense," is certainly
true, if heart be substituted for hand ; for the dainty

sional

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 25
sense of the heart is habitually contemporary with
inexperience, as the taste for tarts is contemporary
with youth.
/^^ REAT ideals have not only great dangers, ^}S^
^-^ but many drawbacks, and not least of
these is the feeling of personal failure which must
generally accompany them. If a man sets the
work of Phidias before him as a standard, one of
his statues will, in his own eyes, differ so little
from another, in the comparison with the perfec
tion of his master, that he will hardly notice the
difference between comparative success and abso
lute failure. Always falling short of his own
standard, he will grow wholly indifferent to popular
opinion, and seeing the incompleteness of his
most finished work, he will hardly perceive more
deficiency in the unfinished.

T

HERE is one consolation, and that not of Success in
' art.

slight importance, which can be held out to
the unpopular worker who struggles hardily on
wards, without encouragement from friends or
patrons ; and that is, that the atmosphere of
patronage is, as a rule, a deadly one for art.

26 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
It does seem to appear an almost universal
truth in the history of art, that directly it has
become " laureate " in any particular case, its
powers begin to fail ; that you may have grand
pictures from the cloister and the garret, but
hardly from the palace — from hands weary with
labour, and hearts heavy with care and grief, but
scarcely from tenderly-nurtured bodies, and spirits
sunk in luxurious ease. Art reverses the fable of
the pelican, and requires her children to give their
life-blood for her sustenance.

A great A GREAT school of painting is impossible in
school of LX
¦^ ¦*¦ the present day, unless we can alter, first,
the artist's habits of mind ; secondly, society's
habits of mind ; thirdly, unless we can supply the
masses with an instinct which they do not possess ;
and fourthly, unless we can change the conditions
of modern life. If the age be "not an artistic one,
why, then, it is not an artistic age," to parody
" Hamlet," and no recipes for patronage or pupilage
will make it so. It is no good giving Mr. Burne-
Jones half-a-dozen dull pupils, in the idea that his
genius will communicate itself to them; and to

SENTENTIyE ARTIS. 27
talk about giving him or any other great artist
only pupils of genius, presupposes that you know
your man of genius when you have got him — a
thing which neither kings, people, nor persons of
artistic proclivities have ever yet done. Besides,
as a matter of fact, the pupil of genius is one who,
least of all, requires the training of one of his own
stamp. There is no good in sending Titian to
the studio of Giorgione, or Tintoretto to that of
Titian, they only (very often) get kicked out as
incapable, or else perverted into a style of work
which is not their own.

I

WAS speaking to a young artist the other The price
ofpictures.
day about an averagely bad picture which

he had painted, and for which he wanted a certain
number of hundred pounds. I happened to have
been present, practically speaking, from the very
inception of the work to its close, and I ventured
to remonstrate with him as to the price, saying
(we were very intimate), " You can't really think
it's worth all that." This was his answer: " My
dear fellow, a picture is worth what it will bring,
and how can you find out what it will bring

28 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
unless you put a big price on it. If it doesn't sell
at  (naming the exhibition), it will go to Man
chester, and there I shall ask so much, and so on,
and so on." Then I asked him this question:
" Do you really mean to tell me that the value of
a work of art is actually dependent upon the price
which any fool can be found to give for it ? " and
he said, " Yes ! " Well, here is the whole thing
reduced to its simplest terms : spoken or unspoken,
here is the determining idea in most artists' minds
at the present day. An idea, mind you, which is
not natural to them, but which has been carefully
planted and cultivated by their fashionable
patrons. In the old days they had a hard ado to
live, and despite ignorance and bad training (and
how great the ignorance, and how bad the training
were in England few people know) they gave us
their finest work ; but now with every advantage of
education, and every facility of life, there has come
also a maddening greed for money, no greater,
perhaps, than that of the rest of the world, but
less tolerable, inasmuch as it destroys the finest
essence of their work. Any one who knows what
it is to paint even a bad picture, honestly, knows
what an amount of study and mental strain are

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 29
involved in the process, knows that really no good
picture is ever paid for — if it is not done for the
love of it, it is never done at all.

TV IT OST people carry about with them a more Cmven-
¦*-'-^ or less conventional representation of view of
Nature.
what Nature is like in her various moods, and
when they see a picture, they straightway pull out
this conventional idea of theirs, and compare it
with the design ; if the two differ, then they say
the picture is wrong.

AFTER all," a clever man said to me one Uncer
tainty.
day, "it's only a matter of opinion. You
can't be sure that that combination of banners and
bunkum is a bad picture ; you only know that you
don't like it." And such a saying represents fairly
enough most people's opinion on art. They would
not have it in religion or morals or business matters
— would, in fact, probably insist that it would be
destructive of effort ; but in art they will have a
cultivated agnosticism, which says, " Nobody
knows anything about it — like what you please,
you can't be shown to be wrong."

30 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Schools of A CADEMIES and schools of painting possess
¦^^ valuable methods — worthless principles —
which is not, though it seems to be, a con
tradiction. The artistic wants, no less than
the artistic capacities, of succeeding ages, are
entirely different ; how should the principles
which produced an art fitting for the one be
capable of producing an art suitable to the other ?
If Leonardo da Vinci were alive at the present
day, he probably would paint scenes in a cafe,
instead of the crucifixion ; and we should find
Michael Angelo, very likely, sitting down in an
old-fashioned cottage-garden, and drawing flowers
and apple trees.

Frederick "\ /T R- WEDMORE'S Writing is pleasant, read-
^^¦^ able, suggestive, and a trifle unctuous,
dealing with men and things with a grace which
is sometimes tiresome, " going delicately,"
like Agag, amongst nouns and pronouns, adjec
tives and adverbs. Were we to write like this
author, we might say with pardonable ambiguity,
that the " scent and savour of these essays, the
very prose of them, are instinct with an archaic
fragrance, a breath wafted, as it were, from those

SENTENTI.E ARTIS. 31
windy places where amidst the still echoes of the
cloister murmur eternally the whispers of early
English writers. Very certainly the exquisiteness
of the medium is a little overpowering ; the author
fingers his subjects too fastidiously, and while he
spins his prose with the dexterity with which a
conjuror spins his plate, we wonder curiously at
the limited suggestiveness of his long-continued
effort — at the futility of the verbiage — at the very
aimlessness of it." This is a fair criticism on an
old offender, for Mr. Wedmore could write plain
English if he liked, the very vices of his style
testifying to his capacity for doing better. He
is like a child who says, I will be naughty, and
sticks its little finger in its eye defiantly. Had
Mr. Wedmore nothing to say, I could forgive
him taking so much pains to say it feebly and
finely, but in truth this is not the case. He has
a good deal to say, and a good deal that is fairly
worth hstening to. He does genuinely try to
understand an artist's work, and is frequently
successful, and when he will only allow himself
to speak out like a man, instead of doing a sort
of literary egg dance for his own delectation,
he is well worthy of attention.

32 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

figure art.

False ^ /^UR English water-colour painters habitually
^-^ indulge in an artificial figure art, which
fears to be true lest it should cease to be attrac
tive, and seeks to be romantic because it fears
to be commonplace. Their only object is the
pictorial one of getting pretty figures into pretty
attitudes, and so the result strikes the beholder
pleasantly the first moment it is looked at, and
then wearies and almost disgusts him afterwards
by its inanity and uselessness. These sham-by
idyllic painters fiddle about with their prettily-
clothed figures, in what they conceive to be
interesting situations, without the least true
feeling for either the human being or the nature
by which it is surrounded. If they could only be
made to see that they cannot make people feel
what they do not feel themselves !

The com- "\ TANY pictures which at first sight appear
movplace, \/l t. rr
¦^^¦^ to have what are called uninteresting and
even almost ugly subjects, are beyond denial in
their total effect both interesting and beautiful.
They are, as it were, melodies played upon a
simple instrument, by a hand that " waited for the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 33
heart's prompting," and come to us softened in
tone, like singing heard on a quiet evening as the
boat drifts down the stream, when words neither
wise nor witty in themselves become full of sug
gestion, by the silence and the distance through
which they reach us.

THERE are some qualities in the illustrator Bookillus-tration,
of another man's ideas which are requisite
beyond all others ; and the first of these seems to
be a suppression of the illustrator's personality,
at all events a subordination of it to the per
sonality of the author whose works he is about
to illustrate. Thus, for example, one does not
want Mr. Millais' idea of Trollope's characters,
so much as an embodiment of what Trollope's
own ideas were concerning them ; and it is quite
conceivable that a lesser artist may be a better
illustrator than a greater one, if only he possesses
this power of, for the moment, throwing himself
on one side, and entering entirely into the spirit
of the author on whom he is engaged. This
power is not only wholly or, indeed, chiefly one

34 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
of imagination, for imaginative power is one of
the most imperious faculties of which a man can
be possessed, and is hardly to be ridden with bit
and bridle along the plain high road of another's
making. I should prefer to call it rather the
power of imaginative sympathy, that is, of a
sympathy so intense as to create in the mind of
the artist a working out of ideas received in
another medium — that of prose — in a similar
way to that in which sympathy is understood to
be a working-out in one's own person of the pain
or pleasure suffered or enjoyed by another. The
danger that an illustrator, especially an illustrator
of fiction, is likely to fall into, is that in pro
portion to his sympathies or non-sympathies with
the especial scene or personage he is engaged
upon, he is likely to put more or less of his own
personality into the picture, and so become more
or less an illustrator of himself rather than of
his author. And in proportion to the value and
reality of the author's work, is the relative unim
portance of the illustrator's own ideas — that is, of
ideas which can be shown to owe their existence
rather to idiosyncrasies in his own character than
to those of the fictitious personages who have yet

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 35
become living beings to us through the genius of
their creator. And in proportion to the nearness
with which the book or the poem approaches to the
height of a perfect work of art, the need of
illustration grows less and less, till as, say in
" Hamlet," or "Vanity Fair," or " Middlemarch,"
or any other nearly perfect creation, we feel the
illustrator's function is most certainly purely
subordinate, and that if he gives us anything,
it should be merely the " Castle of Elsinore,"
"The Park of Sir Pitt Crawley," or the old wall
over which the apple trees still throw their
bunches of blossom, as in the days when Fred.
Vincy and Mary Garth first plighted their childish
troth " with the umbrella ring."

EXHIBITION of skill is tolerable in inverse Displayof skill.
ratio to the importance of the subject with
which it is concerned. If an artist paints only a
pot and a cabbage, he may exhibit his dexterity as
much as he pleases ; if he paints, say, as did the
Dutchmen, a kitchen interior, he may still do the
same, but he must not force it quite so much upon

36 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
our attention ; and so onwards, till when the
subject becomes one of intense interest, we find
that the skill shown should be veiled entirely. It
should never be thought of by the spectator,
though of course its effect is felt. Consequently,
when we see any large work of important interest,
of which the first prominent feeling is — What a
clever fellow this painter must be ! — it is an
almost invariable sign that he is little more than
a clever fellow — that he has never really "touched
the happy isles." I say " almost invariable," for
there are some pictures so stupendous in their
conception that the wonder how any man could
have had the genius and endurance to produce
them seizes us from the first — such works, for
instance, as the " Paradise" of Tintoretto, or the
" Last Judgment " of Michael Angelo.

Boldness, "TT^OLDNESS is intolerable in a picture, unless
J-^ it be irreproachable ; by which I mean
that the picture which appears to be roughly,
swiftly, or carelessly done, is offensive for that
very reason, unless it carries with it the impres
sion of being entirely right as far as it goes.

T

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 37
0 say of a painter's art, " Of course he's try- Painter's
•' criticism.

ing to imitate Rubens," is an easy word ;
and the label, even if not explanatory, is very
satisfactory to those artists who as yet have been
unable even to do that which they condemn.

o

NE of the most vicious and irritating forms irritatingcriticism.

of criticism, and one which is also un
fortunately most common, is that which picks out
some detail of a picture, and without regard to its
place and its subordination to other parts of the
composition, or scheme of colour, or light and
shade, maintains that it is wrong — that it could
not have looked like that. For the great majority
of people only know what may be called the crude
facts of nature, and only know even those apart
from one another. The modifying effects of ad
joining colours, and sunlight, and atmosphere, and
shadow; the subordination necessary to put the
various parts of the picture in their proper .place
and proper relation ; the manner in which cer
tain facts must be sacrificed in order to get the
full effect of other and more important matters —
all these things are, as a rule, to at least seven
D 2

38 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
people out of ten wholly unknown. Perhaps the
most extreme instance of this kind of criticism is
also the most common — in which an artist who
has spent all his life, we will say, drawing from
the figure, is accused of not knowing its propor
tions, and most frequently so by people who have
never seen an unclothed human being, without
turning their eyes away, in the course of their
lives.

Realism. T~) EALISM in art — pure realism at least — can
-'-^ only be justified in two cases — either when
the realism is devoted to some purpose of beauty or
when something of an epic quality is given to its
subject matter. The realism of a coarse, every
day incident, to which no element of pathos is
given, or with which no hints of meaning are
connected, is wholly unworthy as an aim of art.
The more prosaic are the subjects which a painter
selects, the more necessary is it for him to prove
that they, are not prosaic to him. Rightly under
stood, he throws down a challenge, saying, " Now,
if you can see it, this, too, is a subject for art."

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 39
This is where so much modern French painting
fails. It is wilfully, nakedly realistic, and there
it stops.

M

OST people feel that an artist should know ^"'^ "™^
^ * m art.

more of the beauty and meaning of
nature's moods than they do themselves. They
look to him, and rightly so, to preserve for them
that tradition of the supremely beautiful which,
in the cares of business and the struggle for
existence, they are too apt to forget. If it be true
that nature is really at all times and in all seasons
possessed of some special loveliness, we expect
the painter and poet to sieze hold of this fleeting
beauty, and make it perceptible to our grosser
eyes. And if there be " nothing in common
things too mean," nothing in common life too
trivial, to be ennobled by his touch, surely we have
a real ground for our disappointment and dissatis
faction if the artist's perception goes no further
than our own ; if, instead of seeking the rarer and
more fleeting forms of natural beauty, he is con
tent with tickling the fancy by pleasantly
arranged colours, or showing his own dexterity in

40 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
realising unworthy and vulgar subjects. " Just
look here," I once heard a young lady say in a
gallery; " look at this hansom-cab; isn't it wonder
fully clever?" But the fact is that we do not
want "wonderfully clever" hansom-cabs as the
subjects for pictures ; they are out of place, just
as much as they are on the stage — though,
indeed, if I recollect rightly, a drama once ran for
several months owing to the introduction of one.

Fred. \ T THY is it that a representation of a street
Walkers yX/
"Cook- ' ' at Cookham, with a few geese and a
ham,'''' stray waterman or so, lounging with an oar over
his shoulder down to the river, gladdens our
hearts, and, to take a prosaic view, fetches more
than £i,ooo at " Christie's " ?

True and 'T^HE true artistic frame of mind is that which
false I
artists. -*- sccs bcyoud its utmost efforts an infini
tude of beauty which can never be reached ; the
false, is that which feels that its powers are
greater than the requirements of the objects on
which those powers are to be exercised.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 41
'TpHERE is no excuse for a young artist's Repetition.
-*- repetition of himself; and yet one pea is
not more like its companions in the pod than is
the work which some contributors to our exhibi
tions do from year to year. There is, perhaps, a
little increase of technical skill, but in the main
the work is the work of repetition — art turned out
on a mechanical principle. And it is well that
this should be noticed and insisted on, especially
when, as in some particular galleries, the work is
mainly that of young artists ; for if these things
are " done in the green tree," what may be
expected "in the dry"? One readily finds
excuses for those who, having long toiled in the
public service, or for the public delight, repeat
themselves with somewhat less than their ancient
energy. We go to see Madame Celeste in the
"Green Bushes," and extend a kindly toleration to
the non-appearance of Mr. Sims Reeves ; but it
is another matter with the work of young men.
Only the gods can afford to " lie beside their
nectar " — those not yet admitted to the Olympus
of art must have many a hard struggle and long
day's labour ere they can take their ease in
such fashion. The fact is, that a very large

42 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
proportion of the works sent to our public exhibi
tions are done, not in the way that the artist
knows to be best, but in the way that he thinks to
be most pleasing to the public. Such is the
utterly uneducated state of English taste, especi
ally among the moneyed classes, who are the
chief picture-buyers, that a work of art can hardly
be sold unless it be in some way "sensational."
Thus the poor artist is generally driven from one
forced interpretation of nature to another, till he
at last discovers a blasted tree, a method of
painting bricks, a peculiar effect of light, or a
morbid strain of sentiment, which " hits the
public taste" ; and when that is done, his career
as an artist is over, and his fame has begun.
Steadily, from year to year, does he repeat for
Agnew or Vokins his blasted tree, his lighted
wave, his mouldering bricks, or his puling woman,
till in due time he soars into the empyrean of
artists, and writes R.A. after his name.

^"rT T^O not try and drive young artists into the
-*— '^ same round of thinking and painting as
their elder and more famous brethren. Let them

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 43
be crude as long as they are earnest, and exagge
rated while they remain sincere. Demand from
them their best work, but permit them to do it in
what " humour" they will. For all really great
art is of a revolutionary character, and its be
ginnings are always wont to seem impious to
the old priests of the Temple.

REMEMBER that an artist, like any other Deterio-rating
producer, has only a certain amount of effrct of
fashion
brain and energy, and by the very nature of his upon
... . -11 artists,
work, it IS an ever-varying quantity that he
possesses — trouble, or illness, or worry, may
incapacitate him for months together. What
becomes of his art if during the time when he
is practically incapable of doing any thing good,
he is forced by his style of life to be still
producing up to the high-water mark of previous
successes ? Well, what happens is what we see
iri the Academy every year, in every room. Men
who have painted one £500 picture one year,
think it necessary to paint another ,^500 picture
the next. Jones, who has once got £1,000, will
see the public and the picture-buyers at

44 SENTENTI^ ARTIS
Jericho before any of his precious paintings
shall be sold for ^£999 ios. Worse still, the
men who have made their successes, whose
reputation is secure, whose popularity is on the
increase, these men, we find, instead of seeking
to utilize their success for finer work, almost
invariably seeking only to make the most of the
present esteem in which their pictures are held ;
quickening their rate of production, taking less
pains about the execution of their work ; putting
into each successive picture less thought and
less feeling, till at last, stripped of every youthful
grace, earnestness, and aspiration, the crude,
artistic talent of the man stands revealed upon
the canvas, no longer seeking for fame, or caring
for achievement, but only clamouring for the
dollars which the public are holding out to him.

Popular JUDGMENT of art is mainly carried on by
judgment I j j
of art. J two classes — the first, by far the most
numerous, judging of pictures by the appeal which
is made to their sense of the pretty, the humor
ous, or the pathetic; while the second class, which
includes the whole body of artists, " their sisters.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 45
their cousins, and their aunts," are apt to leave
out of sight all else but technical merits. Between
these is a third class, who may be practically left
out of account ; who, without practical knowledge,
combine admiration of technique with a certain
hysterical sensitiveness to some of its excellencies,
and whose whole being is taught to quiver at
harmonies of colour, or throb in painful unison of
sympathy, with the varieties of a zig-zag, or the
sweep of a curve.

I

T seems a strange assertion, but it is proved ^'"' "f
modern
by experience to be a true one, that a large arii^ts.
number of modern painters, especially those of
foreign schools, not only fail in making their
pictures beautiful, but do not even seek to render
them so. To be accurate, archaeological, striking,
historical, sentimentally or dramatically interest
ing, extravagant, eccentric, tragic, laughable — all
of these are common aims. But pictures which
seek to extract the beautiful quality out of either
common-place or unusual things, are strangely
rare — are, so to speak, out of fashion. And I
might, were not such a proceeding somewhat

46 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
invidious, mention many English artists who have
never shown the least desire towards the ren
dering of beauty. This is even more common
amongst foreign artists than in those of our own
country ; and a walk round the Paris Salon, for
the first time, conveys no impression so clearly
as that the artists have entirely forgotten the
object of painting, in the course of learning to
paint.

Necessity 1 '' VERY art, and every branch of art, has its own
of preserv- I '
ing and ^~^ special qualities, which it should preserve
distin- , . Ill
guishing at any cost. These qualities, oi course, are held
qualities in Subordination to the principles which govern
art as a whole, and consist chiefly in making the
most of the special material and the special
opportunities which that material affords. It
comes to pass in this way that methods, which
would be intolerable in some branches of art, are
not only tolerable but right in others ; and that
the best way of working in any given medium, is
the way which preserves most carefully, and
exemplifies most clearly, that medium's essential
qualities. The best stained glass is not that

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 47
which seeks to possess all the gradations of colour
and subtleties of form and chiaroscuro which we
find in painting. The best woodwork is not that
which is carved in imitation of lace or drapery.
The best mosaic is not that which we need a
magnifying-glass to tell from brushwork. The
best etching does not seek to give the calculated
completeness of engraving ; and so on throughout
the list. Now, if we seek the essential difference
between water-colour and oil painting, we find
that it consists in the foundation of transparency;
that all the methods of the former are based upon
the manner in which one colour is seen through
another. It is perfectly true that there are opaque
colours in water-colour, and transparent ones in
oil ; but, broadly speaking, the reverse is the case.
Nor does this express the whole of the difference,
for in pure water-colour painting not only are our
colours transparent, but the foundation upon
which we lay them is a foundation of light, rather
than a foundation of darkness. It is the fact of
the transparency of the paints allowing this light
ground to shine through the colour which gives
its inimitable delicacy and sunny aspect to good
water-colour work. The light is, so to speak, made

48 SENTENTI.^ ARTIS.
for us before we begin, throughout the picture,
just as the light is made in the sky itself, and
shines through any number of encumbering clouds.
The system of purity, therefore, in water-colour is,
we may broadly say, the system of nature ;
whereas the practice in oils is the reverse. To
use the old studio formula, in the first we " load
our shadows and scumble our lights"; in the
second we " load our lights and scumble our
shadows."

Art for the T^AINTING in England has always hitherto
"upper h-^ ¦^
classes, -L been done from the point of view of the upper
and middle-class householder. We have had no
vivid representations of sorrow and suffering, lest
such people should be made uncomfortable. Our
pictorial peasants are such as they might be
delineated for election purposes — sturdy, honest
men, with money in their pockets and a smile
upon their broad faces — who carry a rosy child
with one hand, while they lift a mug of beer with
the other. There is literally no artist in England
who dares to tell us pictorially the truth about a

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 49
London rough or a Wiltshire labourer, in the way
that Fran9ois Millet told the truth about French
peasants.

SCULPTURE is, after all, but a "poor Painting's "poor
relation " of painting. It has no surround- relation."
ings of circumstance, no glory of colour, no melo
dramatic incident, no gilt frame to enhance its
attraction. The statue waits, as it were, in the
corridor outside our reception-rooms, and appeals
to us only by our purely human sympathy. For,
at the best, it rarely represents more than a
perfect human body, instinct with a single simple
emotion. And perhaps this is why the best sculp
ture never seems out of date, as even the best
paintings of old time are sometimes apt to appear.
If its relation to life, either to the life of beauty
or the life of feeling and thought, has ever been
real, it remains real for ever. " Once," as George
Eliot says, "the beauty of a woman's arm touched
a great sculptor's soul, till he wrought it so that
it moves us to this day, as it clasps the time-worn
marble of some headless trunk."

50 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Difficulty npHE passionate admiration of the beautiful,
of subject. I
-*- which causes so many students to attempt
subjects far beyond their powers, is one of the
most vital causes both of failure and of success in
art. Of failure, since the result of trying
vehemently to do what is beyond one's capacity
produces a revulsion of feeling of almost equal
intensity ; of success, since it is only by the
accumulation of, and the rising superior to such
failures, that work of real greatness is obtained.

Imitation. 'T^HE crucial defect of imitation, is that it must
-*- always be one of accidents rather than of
essentials, and that the work copied is more
frequently meritorious in spite, rather than
because of, these accidental characteristics. It
is not his smoothness and almost mawkish
sweetness which make Raphael's work so great ;
it is not the exaggerated limbs and muscles of
Michael Angelo's saints and sages which give
grandeur to that painter's work ; it is not the
reckless haste and magnificent carelessness of
Tintoretto which delight us ; but it is the
incommunicable inner spirit of the man in each

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 51
case which shines through and vivifies his work.
Imitation is, in fact, the one unpardonable sin
of painting. Out of every man we get, if he
produces fairly and honestly, what he has in him
to give ; but we cannot get the same things from
two men — and probably the very quality which
makes the work of the originator valuable, is,
so to speak, his personal equation, which must
be absent from the copy.

PORTRAIT-PAINTING is a bad pursuit for Portrait-
. . . . painting.
emotional artists, not only because it is a
mistake for one who has a distinct power of
touching our sympathies to confine himself to the
reproduction of any Tom, Dick, or Harry who
may pay for a portrait, but because it inevitably
results, save in very exceptional circumstances, in
his adopting a conventional manner, and turning
out Toms, Dicks, and Harries by the dozen.
This is the Nemesis of portrait-painting for an
artist, that it generally results in the destruction
of the sympathy which should be the very life-
blood of his art. For a painter's feeling is by its
very nature of a somewhat exclusive personal E

52 SENTENTI/E ARTIS.
kind, and destroying its personality destroys its
power; and there is no class of work in which the
personality of the painter must be so habitually
and sternly repressed as that of portrait-painting.

Idealism, "\ T O error is more vulgar, in every sense of the
-^ ^ word, than that of mistaking a prodigal
and elaborate invention for true imaginative
power. The misconception on this subject has
arisen from forgetting the fact that there is
in art an ideality which is base, as well as
one which is noble; the base ideality being that
of the man who alters nature, in wantonness,
in vanity, or in indolence, to satisfy his prejudices,
or gratify his vanity; whilst the noble idealist only
selects from amongst natural truths some which
appear to him to be immeasurably delightful —
and subdues or arranges all surrounding circum
stances, for the sake of emphasising them, and so
increasing their significance.

TheA cademy

'npHERE is no escape from this dilemma ;
-*- either the Academy is a private society,
and entitled to hang what rubbish it likes upon its

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 53
walls, and perpetuate what absurdities it chooses
in its councils ; or it is a public and natioi^al body,
which is being conducted for private benefit in an
unjustifiable manner. In either case, the present
position of the Academicians is an untenable one,
for, if the first is true, they must descend from
their pedestal to the same level as other private
societies, and renounce their lofty pretensions ;
and if the second is true, they are in the position
of directors managing a company for their own
benefit first, and that of the shareholders after
wards. It is really time that all this solemn
nonsense should cease, and that we should for the
future have a representative institution, which does
not in the first place exist for its own good, but
for that of artists and the public generally.

T

HERE is in the Gaul little if any of the French.
peculiar love for nature, qua nature, which

exists in England. A Gallic artist will paint a
brilliant effect of sunshine, or a grand effect of
storm, and paint it well ; he will even give us
quiet country scenes, if they are such that he can
arouse in himself any specific feeling, dramatic or
E 2

54 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
contemplative, by them ; but in few French
pictures with which I am acquainted has the
painter sat down to the deliberate reproduction of
nature, unmoved by any specific emotion or
dramatic conception, and only desirous to re
produce to the best of his power the facts before
him.

Ideal A N ideal creation is best reached by making
^ ¦*- dexterous use of existing truths. A Psyche,
for instance, is not characterised mainly by the
butterfly wings upon her shoulders, but by her
love, her innocence, and her childishness — her
curiosity, her beauty, and her sorrow. It is not
the superhuman attribute, but the human, the
right understanding of which will paint for us her
picture.

Historical 'TPHE genius which, in painting the history of
painting. I
¦^ the past, can make it live again, is as rare
in the artist as in the author, and for one Carlyle
or Froude, there are a thousand Robertsons or
Mrs. Markhams.

I

SENTENTI.^ ARTIS. 55
NTO the Slough of Despond of academic Academic
painting,
painting fall, year by year, dozens of our

young artists; it freezes their blood, and benumbs
their hands, and deadens their hearts ; till at last,
after years spent in studying the " grand style,"
in trying to bend half-a-dozen figures into a cir
cular line, and so on, they produce work which,
while it is accurate, with a maddening accuracy,
produces upon the mind of the spectator much the
same effect as the play of "Hamlet " might produce
if it were represented by silent pasteboard images
of the various characters, instead of by living
people.

N

0 picture is worth having unless it either Worth of a
^ ° pamting.

expresses some new or some true thing.
It may not be worth having even then ; but it
must be false and bad if it both fails in its truth
and is conventional in its subject.

WITH the best will in the world, no painter Necessary
subordtna-
can express all the details of nature, or tion,
even present all those which he selects with
perfect truth. The questions of "choice" and

56 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
"surrender " come in at every moment of a picture,
and the subordination of this or that part is not
the less certain, because it is, as a general rule,
instinctive and almost unconscious.

Insuffi- TT U MAN ITY can only be improved, taught, or
ciency of I I
beauty, -"- -¦- comprehended by humanity itself, by which
I mean, by those who acknowledge the imperfec
tions, as well as the achievements and beauties of
human life, and hence it comes to pass that an
artist who sets himself to be always beautiful —
first and chiefly — is not unlike a man who sets
himself to be always gay; his laughter must often
jar upon us, and there must be many truths which
he does not understand. His work becomes in
this respect, at least, not altogether human.
Quality ' i ""HE Very greatest art has always this quality
of the I
greatest ¦*- — it conveys, more strongly than any other
art. impression, the notion that the work could not
have been better or otherwise done. It has very
likely, as the French say, " the defects of its
qualities," but it has no other imperfection.
Whatever the artist appears to have intended, he
appears also to have accomplished.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 57
NOTHING is more common, or more irrita- Artistic "good
tmg, than for an artist to keep on telling boys."
us how clever he is. The pictorial Jack Horner,
for ever pulling a plum out of the pie of art, is
even worse than our old nursery acquaintance.
Still, as in the old nursery rhyme, our artistic Jack
Homers get the plums of the art pudding.

I

T seems as if some admixture with the rough- Msthetic

and-ready crude motives of the work-a-day
world was needed to preserve the due balance
between the emotional and intellectual faculties.
The cultivation of the aesthetic side of life ex
clusively or chiefly blinds the eyes to the simple
verities of life, and when the faculties are raised
to their highest power of sensitiveness it too
frequently results that they are used simply to
minister to sterile fancies or morbid passions.
Beauty is in some way like jam ; not good for
breakfast, lunch, dinner, and tea ; a little now and
then is best appreciated. A little ugliness, despite
Mr. Morris, is a desirable thing ; desirable not in
itself but for what it brings ; for its connection
with rough ugly deeds, and motives which we
cannot wholly disdain or ignore while we live in

L'lfe.

58 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
the world, which is made tolerable to us, not by
angels and heroes, but men and women of imperfect
nature, like ourselves. I confess that there was
to me a certain beauty in some ugly rooms that I
remember in my childhood which was in a way
inseparable from their ugliness. They represented
the mixed good and bad taste of people I loved,
and who seemed to me to be fitly represented
by such an environment. One could trace little
domestic histories in the pictures on the wall, and
even the chairs and tables had a special relation
to the household. Think for a minute whether
such ugliness is not more full of what really renders
life beautiful than the most perfect room ever de
signed by an aesthetic decorator ; for beauty is of
many kinds, and exists in the heart and its sym
pathies, as well as in the pleasures of the eye.

Painting HpHE slightest suspicion of clothes, the
of the I
-*- slightest suggestion of the idea, that this
human being has had her clothes stripped off by
the artist for the purpose of painting, is fatal to
work of this nature. And this, for a very simple
reason, that such a suggestion appeals to the

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 59
distorted sense of prudery and conventional
decency which is the offspring of our method of
civilisation. The offspring, if it be carefully
traced back to the historic cause, of the old, forced,
bestialism, monkish theory of the degradation of
the body, the ascetic notion, responsible probably
for more suffering than any other false theory
that the world has ever held.

w

E cannot jump from ugliness to beauty, but Connection
of painting
must climb from one to the other by the with life.

ladder of daily life.

M

OST of our knowledge of life, most of our Negative
ijtstvuc-
practical wisdom, is derived from those tiun.

who have stayed for a while at one or other of the
many cross-roads of action, thought, and feeling,
putting up a notice-board to warn travellers that
"this lane ends in a No Thoroughfare," and that
in such and such a field " trespassers will be
prosecuted." The Mosaic proportion of four
negative precepts to one positive injunction, holds
good to the present day. What thou shalt not do,
is now, as it always has been, more certain than
what thou shalt.

60 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Etching. T F an etcher is not an artist to the tips of his
-¦- fingers, he is (as an artist) nothing at all,
and his work passes by us quite unheeded. This
is just the one process in the whole world in
which we can pardon every imperfection, save
that of conventionality.

A well TTTHEN an artist deals with a well worn
worn VV
subject, * ^ theme, there are only two courses —
successful courses — open to him. One is to treat
it as all other men have done, and to rely upon
his transcendant powers to make the ordinary,
unusually fine ; the other, to select some new
interpretation which, by its ingenuity or beauty,
will throw new light upon the subject, or invest
it with fresh attraction.

T
mous art. j

Anony- JN the Smaller, less visited towns of Italy,
which are passed over with slight men
tion by Baedeker and Bradshaw, we may often
get an artistic pleasure which we miss in more
famous places. Perhaps it is the unexpected
ness of their humble possessions gives them a

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 61
unique value ; our minds are not on the stretch to
demand excellence, and are proportionately grate
ful when we find it hanging in some obscure
corner of church or gallery, unheralded by the
guide-book or the cicerone. But it is certain that
the feeblest fresco which we discover ourselves in
the midst of humble surroundings, the grimiest
blackened Virgin and Child, beneath which the
people have come and gone for generations, at the
corner of the busy street, is apt now and then to
stay us with an appeal almost personal in its
character. And this, I think, is because such
work, so placed, says indubitably, that it was not
made for purposes of pride or indolent pleasure,
or pecuniary reward, and, above all, was not
made to be isolated. Bad or good, it has had an
office to discharge, has been made to strengthen
or gladden humble people in their every-day life.

THE amateur is a good weathercock, pointing The
in the direction of popular interest ; a child
who repeats in the drawing-room what he has
heard upstairs from his nurse's lips. Occasionally
his babble is amusing ; often disjointed and

62 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
absurd ; always it is defective. But nevertheless,
the prattle conveys some notion of the general
nursery method of thought, and, as such, has a
certain value.

Discour- TN art, as in life, love of the just must
agement of I ^
bad work. -*- include hatred of the unjust ; and it is
as necessary to discourage all vicious or tricky
styles of painting as it is to encourage all sound,
good craftsmanship.

French ' I ""HE French love of generalization shows in
generall- I
zation of ¦*- their painters' method of work with regard
detail, to the details of a picture, which they will carry
as far as they think is required to help their
design, but they will never carry it as far as they
possibly can, for the sake of getting out of
each separate detail all the especial beauty therein
to be found.

imferfec- /CONVENTIONS, exaggerations, and omis-
tion. I ^'^ sions are forced upon every artist who dares
to take natural beauty or splendour for his subject ;

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 63
but the exaggerations of mere ignorance, dull con
ventionality, or bad drawing are one thing, and
the omissions or exaggerations of enthusiasm
and knowledge are another.

T

HE one damning sin of the British trades- The Brit-
 _ / r J • .i\ . ., . ish trades.
man (as tar as art is concerned) is that man.

his ideas of taste are governed by his ideas of
price.

T

HE one great distinction between true True and
and false imagination, or rather between agination.

imaginative art and imagination wandering loosely
in the fancy, is the clearness of vision, the fulness
of detail possessed by the seer.

nPHE effect of colour in a picture is some- Colour.
-^ thing like the pressure exercised by water.
We cannot say from what portion of the work
it chiefly proceeds, but feel its influence through
out.

64 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

Modern JX must be acknowledged that English oil
English I '' *=
art. -L painting is, on the whole, a very dull
matter just at the present time. The majority of
the pictures in our exhibitions are rather like a
young lady's novel — half an idea beaten out thin
into a metaphorical three volumes — the grammar
a little doubtful, the sentiment a little strained.
Almost a pity, one would think, that there is not
a pictorial Mudie for much of the work, who
would send us half-a-dozen pictures for a day or
two, and take them back the next week and send
us half-a-dozen more. For with the exception of
some good portraiture and a few quiet landscapes,
there is little in the prevalent style of subject and
method of treatment with which it would be
attractive to live continually. With very rare
exceptions, the pictures of the majority of English
painters at the present day are produced with
no other object than that of the celebrated green
spectacles in the " Vicar of Wakefield " — made
to sell at a fair to any fool who will buy them.

Greek 'TPHE best Greek sculpture is strangely im-
sculpture. I
-¦' personal. Not that it lacks character, but
that it expresses character in a sense of its own,

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 65
not followed out into by-ways and eccentricities.
It does not give us pollarded willows, trained
apple-trees, and grafted roses. Its motive, also, is
almost ascetic. Voluptuousness came in with the
inferior work of a later period.

T

HE old aesthetic Bohemia was a pleasant land Old and
New
enough, full of jolly fellows whose require- Boiicmia.

ments were simple, and who only cared to paint
and live their own life in their own way, irrespec
tive of (what they would have called) the duffers
round them ; neither very wise nor very witty,
they were at least honest, and though they
thought painting the best thing in the world, they
did not wish to elevate it into a religion, and
regulate by it their dress, their bed, their board.
But this new aesthetic Bohemia, which attacks us
alike in closet and on housetop, which won't leave
alone the dishes we eat, the clothes we wear, the
houses we live in, or the women we love ; which
condemns our old-fashioned tastes as vulgar, and
our old-fashioned amusements as coarse ; which
shrinks from sport with a shudder, and sneers at
most games as brutalizing ; lives on the past and

66 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
the future ; or, indeed, anywhere but the present ;
and which, when it takes its pleasure, does it so
sadly that we " can scarcely tell it from pain " —
this is a land which may be fair, but it is with a
fairness that is neither wholesome nor desirable.
Said the old circus-master to the manufacturer,
Mr. Gradgrind, in Charles Dickens's " Hard
Times," " Folks can't be alius a-reading,
Thquire, nor yet alius a-learning ; folks must be
amuthed. Make the best of us, Thquire, and
not the worst."

Alfred HpHIS artist, whom the world, especially the
Stevens. I
-'- world of the Royal Academy, despised
while he lived, and has forgotten since he died,
was a great — one of our greatest men. He had in
him the stuff of which all geniuses are made; and
we set him to design firegrates, and occasionally
allowed him to soar as high as a mantelpiece.
Let those who care for good decorative art,
if they ever wander so far east as the British
Museum, look at the little bronze lion which
sits on its haunches on the pillar of the low railing
which wards off ragged England from the massive

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 67
iron grilles surrounding the museum courtyard.
This — he is a Gothic lion, with a touch of the
Renaissance about him — is a bit of Steven's minor
work. And it is a curious thing in favour of the
universal way in which really fine decoration
appeals to people in general, that this little bit of
right good design is esteemed and appreciated by
nearly everyone who sees it, though not one in fifty
thousand knows who was the artist. Between
this, and his great work of the Wellington
Memorial, there are to be found designs and
sculptures by him of every degree of varying im
portance. But the style of the man's art is always
the same, no matter how great or how small its
scale, how elaborate or how simple its subject. It
was, like all great art, independent of its size ; the
little bronze lion, a foot and a-half high, is as broad
and simple in its treatment as if it were the statue
of Liberty (a hundred, or two, feet high), which
the French people gave to the Americans a year
or so ago, or the monument of Thorwaldsen.
Well, we chose to make Mr. Alfred Stevens
spend the best years of his life designing fire
grates for Hoole and Robson, of Sheffield, and
porcelain platters for London tradesmen. Why ?

68 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
Because he was an artist, and not a man of
business — because he would not spoil his work
to order — because his predilections in art were
not those which were fashionable at the time
he lived. But I should like to put it on record of
the officials who were in office at the time, as a
parallel instance to their economy in depriving our
public parks of their flowers, that when Stevens
was in the process of completing the Wellington
Memorial (which is the best piece of comme
morative sculpture ever designed by an English
artist), they, finding that the artist was behind
hand in the stipulated time, sealed up Stevens'
models in his studio, and got somebody else
to (partially) complete the work. The artist
remains almost unique in the history of modern
art, as one who, being capable throughout ' his
life of the greatest work, was habitually em
ployed in the smallest, and who nevertheless
remained patient, hopeful, and honest to the
end, caring for little else than to labour, to
hate shams and charlatans of all kind, and to
do with the utmost in his power what work
was entrusted to him. And so he died at sixty,
with few friends and less money ; and so his

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 69
magnificent memorial to our greatest warrior
remains unfinished to this day, since no one will
spend the two or three thousand pounds requisite to
cast its crowning figure — the figure for which
Stevens left a full-sized model. Satire is wasted
upon such a subject ; but it provokes a smile to
see six thousand pounds spent carting from one
place to another a monstrosity such as the statue of
the Iron Duke, which stood till lately at Hyde Park
Corner ; and to know that a third of that sum
would complete the finest piece of memorial
sculpture which we possess, and that it will never
be spent.

THERE seems to be coming over English Decadence
^ ^ of English
landscape painting a most lamentable landscape.
want of all largeness of impression, of all
grandeur of style. To take a little bit of
meadow, or woodland, or stream, and to fidget
it about with little spots of pretty colour, till
the whole is a sort of harmonious mosaic, is not
to paint landscape at all ; and this is what many
of our artists are tending towards, and what many
already do. F 2

70 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Modern " /^UR duty," said a great landscape painter
school of \ I
landscape. ^^^ to me One day, "is to see a little beauty,
represent it as well as we can, and die" — and it
would be hard to express more succinctly and
more correctly the feeling of the modern school.

The 'np RUE art is exactly like true feeling, of
Academic I
art. -^ which, indeed, it is one form of expres
sion ; and this is the reason why it must always
be unacademic, for academic art is but, in short,
the endeavour of a school to substitute principles
for feeling ; it is education, not by the heart and
spirit, but by the head alone ; it is the effort to
make an artist without considering that before
he is an artist he must be a man. That attempt
must fail, and this is the reason we have so few
true artists now-a-days.

Last cen- T f jg perfectly conceivable that the last
tury art. I •'
-*" generation were in the habit of leaning grace
fully upon a marble pedestal, in the midst of a
spacious landscape, and saw nothing absurd in the
connection of silk stockings and rustic scenery ;

SENTENTIjE ARTIS. 71
but the taste of the present age, though debased
in many respects, has at least one good character
istic, that it has revolted sternly against this
" buckle - and - powder " business in portraiture,
and will have none of it. We still fortunately
possess a high aristocracy, who trifle upon the
surface of creation ; but happily the chief office of
art in these days is not to recall the gloss of their
stockings, or the lace of their cravats.

ALLEGORICAL art, always a difficult weapon Allegorical art,
to handle, cuts its workers' fingers badly if
the actors in its drama are not equal to their
parts.

A

S a tree springs from the ground, as a human Relation
of parts in
being is one complete organism rather than a picture.

a random collection of limbs and trunk — so a picture
should have a definite growth and cohesion of its
parts throughout, no matter how varied may be
the subjects of which it treats. An irrelevant
line, or colour, or mass of light and shade, will
injure a design in exactly the same way that an

72 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
extra toe or finger would injure the shape of a
human body, or a branch jutting out in an un
fitting place that of a tree. In fact, in painting
as in life, the irrelevant and the superfluous are
invariably objectionable.

Land- A LMOST any one quality in landscape, grasped
scape. l-\
¦*• ^ at the cost of every other, will, with per
severance, make an artist's popular success, but
such achievement will not make him a great or
even a good artist.

Outline. T T is a curious fact with regard to the public
-•- appreciation of artistic works, that out
line pure and simple possesses hardly any attrac
tion to the ordinary sightseer ; and that though in
proportion to the amount of artistic knowledge,
the appreciation of the beauties of outline increase,
yet it hardly becomes more satisfying, and indeed
an artist's progress in art is commonly the history
of work first in incorrect outline, then in correct
outline, then in correctly shaded coloured outline,
and finally in form, expressed distinctly, but,
like nature, bounded by no outline whatever.

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 73
npHE body, after all, is but an expression The nude.
¦^ of the spirit — the clothes, so to speak,
which the spirit puts on for decency or con
venience when it enters the world. And the
painting of men and women in the nude is not
the painting them without clothes, but the
painting them without disguise, though we
express it in terms of the outer physical covering.
The fact to be studied lies, not on the outside nor
the inside of the body, but comprehends all that
which makes the body noble.

REFINEMENT, in the modern plutocratic Refi"^-ment.
sense of the word, is not what an artist
wants ; if his art is not refined naturally, the
surroundings of Turkey carpets and gold plate
will hardly render it so.

A^TATTS once said to me, when we were Watts'
' * speaking on this subject, that he " tried ofthenude,
his ' nude ' work " by comparing it with a cast of
an arm from one of Phidias' statues. As he put
it : " Whatever will not go with that is wrong in
treatment."

74 SENTENTI.*; ARTIS.

English npHERE is a vague feeling abroad that art
desire for I o o
"'''• -¦- is a good thing, and that therefore the
English ought to have it. But what it is that
we mean by " art " few of us understand.

View of 'T-^HAT of the ascetic is a morbid and hateful
the nude. I
^ view of the body ; but the athletic view,
at all events in painting, can only be regarded as a
comic one. This may be said to be the view of
academies, as machine-made artists generally
learn in a stolid manner the names and uses
of the various muscles, and then build up a
human being by putting the largest and roundest
specimen of each in its proper position ; this is
practically the way in which English students
were, as a rule, taught to paint from the life.

Artistic" T^O we want to make our houses into sepulchres
ouses. 11
^-^ of dead men's bones, just for the sake of
gratifying a desire to be called "artistic" ? What
is the use of putting an inartistic person into an
artistic house ? You might as well put a sprat
into a lobster-shell.

T

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 75
HE continual conflict between aim and A problem
of art.
means; the continual difficulty of appor

tioning merit between those who seek for little
save technical perfection, and those who regard
technical perfection with comparatively lukewarm
feelings, in the stress of lofty intellectual and
emotional conception ; this is one of the most
difficult questions which a writer upon art has
habitually to determine.

I

T is commonly thought and said that criticism The ideal
ciyt CYitic
is easy; let us consider what are the quali- I.— His

fications of a sound, adequate, and trustworthy
art critic. He should at least fulfil the following
conditions : — First, he should not be attached
especially to any one school of modern art;
second, he should have a practical knowledge
of the half-dozen chief methods in use at the
present day in picture-production — oil painting,
water-colour painting, pencil drawing, chalk
drawing, etching, and charcoal drawing; thirdly,
he should understand at least the first prin
ciples of decoration and modelling; and fourth,
he should have passed at least six months
in the practical study of anatomy. What I

alphabet.

76 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
niean by an effective knowledge of the above
subjects is the power of so understanding them as
to produce works in each medium of sufficient
quality to prove that the worker has understood
the capacities of his material, and appreciates the
right method of using it. It would be manifestly
unjust to require any very high standard of
proficiency ; and it may be fairly doubted whether
great proficiency in any one direction, even if it
were obtained, would not be detrimental to the
general power of appreciation which is one of
the critic's most necessary qualifications. It is
humanly certain that men possessed of the above
qualifications, and sufficient literary power to
employ them rightly, are to be found by hundreds
in London ; but there must be more than that
required for a writer on art.

II. npHE above is only the alphabet which he
His I
personal -¦- should have been taught ; whether he ever
qualities. put it to a reasonable use depends on quite other
and personal qualities. The first of these is the
one indicated by the old Terentian speech :
" Homo sum ; nihil humani a me alienum puto."

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 77
Each picture must, indeed, be in turn (like the
various ladies whom Mr. Gilbert's eccentric hero
meets in " Engaged ") " the tree upon which the
fruit of his heart is growing," and this, too, with
out conscious inconstancy. This, perhaps, would
not be so difficult, were it not that the sympathy
which is required from him can never be allowed
to get the better of his judgment. He is required
to be, as Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it,
"John's John, the real John, and other people's
John," all at the same time ; for he has to see what
John's idea has been, what John's reality is, and
what it appears to other people. Nor is this
altogether sufficient for the ideal critic, for he
must be as great an expert in emotions as is Mr.
Bryce-Wright in precious stones. He must know
the qualities of them, either in the rough or in the
cut and polished gem, their comparative values,
their defects and excellencies, and be able to
pick out the reality from a multitude of shams.
If he cannot do this, he is not a critic at all ;
and this quality is, like that of poetry, " born,
not made." One man has it, and another has not ;
and you may find a man with the true critical
faculty, drumming with a pint-pot upon a tavern

78 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
table, and utterly unable to give you a single
reason for his words, which are nevertheless —
right.

III. TF the critic is to be an accomplished one,
Hisaccom- I 1111 11.
plish- many things must be added to the above-
mentioned necessary qualifications. He must
know men and manners, not " in society " or
" out of society," but in the world at large. He
must have read much and thought more, and
travelled over the world as an observer rather than
a tourist. He must know how ancient civilisation
has produced the one of which he has practical
experience ; and how all art, like all knowledge, is
only an outgrowth from men's experience, emotion,
and suffering. He must have discarded any
hindrance to his clear sight all round him, and must
have pressed forward eagerly towards the light,
" even though it came through a chink in the
walls of the temple." And perhaps the most
necessary qualification of all is, that he must live
alone, not physically, but intellectually and emo
tionally, and must judge independently of his
friends or enemies.

A

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 79
ND his reward is that he must be content to iv.
His
appreciate, rather than to perform ; to sink reward.

his identity in that of his subject ; to oftentimes
wound his friends, and please his foes ; to condemn
while he sympathises, and judge while he praises ;
to hold the balance fairly between imagination
and realisation, ambition and humility, concep
tion and result ; to give technical skill its right
position, and noble meaning its proper place ; to
depress, where he would encourage, and irritate,
where he would please ; to be called a liar by
some, thought a fool by many, and be in turn
almost equally obnoxious to all.

I

T is quite true that in a statue the power of (^"at
sculpture.
depicting the given action and the healthy

development of the body helps the artist a
good way towards producing beauty ; but it does
not go far enough ; a certain amount of ideal
feeling and passion, and thought, all seem to be
required in a great statue, though how these
pass into the lifeless marble from the sculptor's
hands is a great mystery. Great sculpture, like
great painting, must always have its chief merit

180 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
uncatalogued and uncatalogueable ; it must always
be that which Emerson hints at, when he says of
the ancient sculptor and architect : —
The passive master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned.
* * * *
Himself from God he could not free ;
He builded better than he knew ;
The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Swiss TX7ILL the day ever present itself when
scenery. \/ \/
* ' Switzerland will be painted satisfactorily ?
At present it seems as if it only attracted, pictorially,
people with good clear heads and healthy con
sciences, who do not feel the hopelessness of
representing at all the grand features of mountain
scenery; and under whose skilful but commonplace
manipulations all the elements of mystery, terror,
and poetry disappear, and leave only a sort of bleak
picturesqueness, as coldly bright as March
sunshine.

View of O* OME artists have a stronger sense of art-
nature. ^N
*^-^ form and completeness than others, with
whom greed of acquisitiveness in the study

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 81
of facts is a marked characteristic ; but no one
who was in the habit of regarding nature as
" only a mine of materials " ever became a very
great, or a more than very clever, artist. It is
submission to the fascination of nature, in a
capable brain, which creates and sustains the
idealising faculty. It is doubtful if an artist con
sciously refers from nature to art in his best
moments — least of all an artist endowed with
great arranging and inventive power. Such m.en
as a rule prefer to be fascinated, and work straight
forwardly — like Michael Angelo and Turner- — in
the strength of their impressions.

w

E must surely look to great art for some- Mystery in
landscape.
thing more than a too jubilant realism ;

must find in it some kind of the " dream " as
well as of the " glory," and add a little of fancy's
tremulous light to the sunshine that glorifies sea
and shore. Painting, after all, is of a different
quality to mathematics ; a picture cannot be
judged by the strict rules that apply to quater
nions. However elaborately you paint the
shadows on the wall of the cave, to use Plato's
old simile, you will only depart further and further

82 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
from the truth, unless you remember that they
are but shadows after all. And the "pleasant
visions " that haunt us as we " gaze upon the
sea " would soon depart, if we lose all underlying
perception of its dangers and its mystery.

Depression TT is a curious thing how nearly all modern
of modern I
work. -*- landscape painting seems to depress its
best men. Hook and Brett being perhaps the only
exceptions. Brett is not depressed, because he is
not elated, but paints with a calm equanimity of
feeling and power, equally removed from either
elation or dejection. And as for Hook, the sea
breezes appear to keep him always fresh, or
perhaps it is that he repeats the feeling of earlier
years. But Alfred Hunt grows more and more
subdued in feeling year by year. Goodwin is
only at his best in mournful or tragic scenes,
and Boyce's patient work has more marks of
endurance than of joy. Legros's woodlands and
meadows are always tragic in their feeling, as,
indeed, are those of the whole mass of French
landscape artists ; and all our younger painters
seem to be sorrowful, almost in proportion as
they are in earnest.

SENTENTI.E ARTIS. 83
HERE are three effects of modern art. Depressionof modern
all having a common ground, notwith- art.
standing almost total dissimilarity of method
and aim — a ground of common dissatisfaction
and weariness with things. The first led Fred.
Walker to give ideal beauties to the simplest
scenes and figures of English peasant life; tne
second leads Mr. Burne-Jones to regretful aspira
tions for the old mediasval times ; and the third
impels Mr. Buhot into etching a worn-out cab
horse lying dead upon the snow, and a Parisian
lorette stepping daintily along the Place Breda.

T

HINK what it would be to see your servant, ^*f ,
artist s
not only strolling down Bond Street in view of the
amateur.

your cast-off clothes, but even nodding right and
left to your acquaintances. Something like this
is the emotion artists experience in regarding
amateur work. They probably think the amateur
a ridiculous travesty of themselves, and perhaps
also think that even a Philistine should be able
to see the difference between the rightful owner
of the clothes and the one who has merely
borrowed them.

84 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.

Method of 'T^HERE is no security for a painter in
work. I
-*- trying to work in any way but that
which comes naturally to him.

Artistic T EX artists, if they dream, at least have the
dreams. I
-*— ' irresponsibility of dreamland. Dreams
with a purpose are wholly intolerable. Fancy
Kubla Khan being improved by the addition of a
moral.

^kf>- npHERE are many other consequences m our
criticism. "^ Renaissance of greater importance than
the somewhat ludicrous discomfort to which many
respectable rich people have reduced their houses.
Father and mother would grow used in time to
tiles and dados, to coal-scuttles from which the
coals cannot be extracted, and plates whose position
has changed from the dinner-table to the drawing-
room ; to stained floors which chill them in winter,
and stick to their feet in summer ; to portieres
which conceal the doorway, but let in the draught,
and to the many minor inconveniences of aesthetic
domestic life. But what use can accustom, or what
advantage recompense, the parents whose children

SENTENTIyE ARTIS. 85
have been infected with that most dangerous, and
generally fatal disease, called " The Higher
Criticism " ? Think a little of the feelings of a
mother who takes her child to a picture gallery,
in the fond hope that she may " like to see the
pictures," and then hears her whisper in an awe
struck tone of " the secret of Leonardo," or the
sweet, sensuous existence of lovely harmonies of
tone, in the masterly music of Burne-Jones' work.
We know, or can guess, what would have happened
to such a child had she lived fifty years since.
But now, what is to be done ? We cannot
logically punish our children for talking this non
sense, for, strange as it may seem, there are many
men and women grown, still at large in society,
who talk and think, if their mental operation can be
called thinking, in a manner similar to that quoted
above. It is not only the men who have made
money and reputation by writing in this style
who are responsible for the spread of this
irredeemable bosh ; it is due in no sm.all measure
to the cultivated ignorance . of a certain set of
fashionable people, who seek to disguise the
vapidity of their thoughts beneath an affected
enthusiasm and a wordy obscurity. G 2

86 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.

Lives of x F there is any one fact in the history of art
great I
artists. -L more noticeable than another, it is that the
greatest artists have uniformly been men who
lived simple, kindly lives, generally as middle-
class citizens. Their best work has been done
in the open air, in sympathy with their sur
roundings, rather than in selfish isolation or
morbid exclusiveness. We may talk about art
being an inspiration and a noble dream and
a mysterious energy ; but the inspiration and the
dream are not those that come in the night,
but are rather derived from the cultivation of our
habitual sympathy, and a noble interpretation of
common things, which latter may be an illusion,
but even if it be so, it is of use, for it tends to
realise in nature the effect that it depicts in art ;
and, like Nelson's signal to the fleet, rouses the
desire to justify a high standard of conduct.
Healthy OOMETHING, ft is impossible to say what,
genius, "^\
*^^ that belongs to the artistic temperament,
is generally found to prevent either the success
sought for or the respect that should accompany
it ; or, if it makes shipwreck of neither fame nor
respect, yet it forms the cause of disaster still

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 87
more fatal to happiness, and spreads over repu
tation and honour a cloud of morbid sadness
which admits of little or no alleviation. Healthy
genius doubtless may exist ; but it is certainly
the rarest thing in the world, and all the con
ditions of modern life seem to be against its
development. We must " pay for everything,"
and mostly in proportion to its value ; calm
harmonious happiness and the highest genius
are rarely found together.

T

HE tendency is growing more and more Down ward ten-
marked among our young painters to be dency of
modern

satisfied with low aims, to substitute good work- art,
manship for high ambitions, to please the vulgar
rather than the select, to subdue their art to the
market rather than raise the market to their art ;
in a word, to manufacture pictures, rather than
to let pictures spring from a real love of beautiful
things and worthy objects ; and yet these men
have entrusted to them, above all others, the task
of keeping alive, in hand, under trust, the spirit of
beauty; they are, or should be, the guardians of —
The fire that burns for aye,
And the shield that fell from heaven.

88 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
And the best they can give us is a delineation of
a little bit of wave under a sunset sky ; a cold,
grey mist settling heavily over a dreary river ;
and such like little bits of landscape, hardly
larger in their scope than the corner of an alms
house garden.

Pre-Raph- HpHE excellent aphorism of William Hunt,
aelitism. I
-*- of Vermont, " Draw firm, and be jolly,"
might be recommended with great advantage, not
to the pre-Raphaelites alone, or indeed chiefly,
but to that class of young artists who have some
how succeeded the pre-Raphaelites, and arrived,
as Kingsley said, " on pre-Raphaelite principles,
at a very unpre-Raphaelite conclusion." For
assuredly, the " worship of sorrow " was never
one of the original motives of pre-Raphaelitism,
which indeed consisted in affirming the healthi
ness and beauty of all things, rather than the
doctrine that beauty and disease, joy and hysteria,
were convertible terms. Fancy the result of
saying to one of the beardless apostles of this
latest artistic cult, "Paint firm, and be jolly" —
can you not imagine the look of sad surprise
with which the words would be greeted,

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 89
if, indeed, they did not prove to be altogether too
great a trial for the sham enthusiast, and cause
him to fade away slowly and silently, as if in the
presence of a veritable " Boojum."

T

HE theory of pre-Raphaelitism raised the Pre-Rap)aelitism,
question whether ugliness existed at all

in natural scenes, actions, and emotions ; or, to
put the matter far more justly, it involved an
.assertion that the highest beauty had for
centuries been misunderstood, and sought for in
wrong directions. It effected much the same
thing in art as would happen in life if a youth,
educated in a Jesuit college, with the principles of
Machiavelli and the " Letters" of Chesterfield for
his only reading, had been suddenly set free to
roam the world at his pleasure, and given
"Sartor Resartus" as a guide to conduct. The
essence of pre-Raphaelitism was not so much to
question as to ignore the rules of art, to forget
that conventional modes of composition, chiaros
curo, and colouring had ever existed, to refuse
restriction to any class of subject, or any method
in treating it, and only stick hard and fast to one

90 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
great rule — that the artist was to paint things as
he saw them, events and actions as they would
have happened, or as they did actually occur.
What the movement would have accomplished,
had it succeeded, it is impossible to say ; but it is
certain that we owe to it, even in its failure,
nearly all the finest English art of the present
day. All Millais' finest works, all Holman
Hunt's, all Rossetti's, all Maddox Brown's, and
Burne-Jones', in oils ; Mason, Pinwell, Walker,
Boyce, and Goodwin, in water-colours ; all these
are (or, alas ! were) either founders or pupils of
this movement — disciples of the creed that beauty
resides in the heart and not in the head, and
cannot be set down in academic rules, nor even
learnt from pictures and statues.

Blake's " "\T0 one can ever design till he has learned
pre-Raph- IV
aelitism. -^ ^ the language of art, by making many
finished copies both of nature and art, and what
ever comes in his way, from earliest childhood.
The difference between a bad artist and a good
one is, that the bad artist seems to copy a great
deal, and the good artist does copy a great deal.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 91
To generalise is to be an idiot, to particularise is
the great distinction of merit." It will by this be
plainly seen that Blake was at heart a pre-
Raphaelite — the first of the pre-Raphaelites,
working under harder conditions, and some fifty
years ahead of his generation. Purity of design,
nobility of conception, were his aims ; who can
say that, with all his shortcomings, they were
aims unattained, or unjustified by the result ?

T

HERE are two great varieties of artistic Success m
° art.

success which must be carefully dis
criminated, if we would form a sound judgment
of any artist's work — the success which attends
some men from the very beginning of their
career, and which apparently depends more upon
favourable conjunctions of temperament and cir
cumstances than actual individual merit ; and
that success which is won more slowly and
painfully, in spite of obstacles, by unconquerable
though long-disputed strength of genius and
unwearied labour. And it is to be noticed that
the durability of the artist's reputation after
death is but too frequently found to be in an

92 SENTENTI^E ARTIS.
inverse ratio to his popularity whilst living — ^he
but too frequently toils only
To make a grave, and fall therein.
And we pile his pictures and statues above him
for a monument.

Msthetic HP HE notion that grew up some years ago, that
movement. I
-•- everyone ought to be aesthetic, and that
everyone who followed certain recipes could be
so, and gain healthy enjoyment of art by merely
living in a certain atmosphere, was one that
would scarcely have needed refutation, had it not
been the genuine expression, though in an ex
aggerated form, of the Philistinism of the earlier
part of the century. Still, at the bottom of the
sham sentiment and fashionable foolishness, which,
as it were, electro-plated the aesthetic movement,
there was a real desire for a little more beauty in
the surroundings of life, and perhaps even a wish
for a less material view of life itself. At all
events, both the male and female aesthete had
some faint notion of an ideal — not wholly selfish,
nor wholly base — and though this ideal was as
nebulous as the atmosphere of their boudoirs, it

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 93
was sufficient to prevent their being wholly
contemptible. Unlike Kingsley's maiden, they
did no " noble things," but dreamt "them all day
long" ; and though their dreams were irritating to
others — at least, when they issued in hysterical
action — they, in the end, worked a considerable
change. It would be difficult now for anyone,
even buying domestic furniture or utensils of any
sort, to avoid becoming possessed of a number of
objects which were really good in form or colour;
and the importation of really beautiful fabrics
and embroideries from the East has increased
enormously.

A N ordinary pure water-colour — I assert this
-^ ¦*- deliberately — is frequently looked upon by
the people who are now called "aesthetic" as some
thing too poisonous almost to mention, and they
would no more think of hanging one upon their
walls than of committing any of the seven deadly
sins. It is a literal truth that this school
absolutely detest such works as Cox's and De
Wint's paintings, and so perverted are their eyes
by the mixture of bright spots of colour on a dim

Mstheticschool.

94 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
background, amidst which they live, that they
cannot see the beauty of any colour unless it be
vivid in hue, and, on the whole, both rich and
sombre in effect. ' They can admire the beauty of
Burne-Jones, but not that of Velasquez ; they
worship Botticelli, but they do not care about
Tintoretto ; they love Walker, but they (in their
hearts) think Turner is over-rated, and that he
worked the wrong way.
English A FTER all, it is a greater triumph to extract
scenery. l-\
¦'¦ ¦*• beauty from our every-day homely scenes,
than from those of which every amateur sketcher
can feel the beauty. If a man paints mountains,
we want some added power of sympathy and
insight quite beyond ordinary powers, or else
our own experience of their loveliness goes far
beyond the painter's representation.
A type of ' I "'HERE is a certain type of water-colour
landscape I
art. -*- landscape art, which may be called for
brevity's sake the foreground type ; and in which
nature seems to have been peeped at through a
keyhole. The drawings of this kind remind me

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 95
of Dante Rossetti's poem of " The Woodspurge,"
which recounts how a certain gentleman suffered
much pain and sorrow, how in the midst thereof
he was sitting on the grass with his head bowed
down between his knees (which I may remark
parenthetically must have been a most uncom
fortable position), and how in after years all he
learnt by his travail was, that "the woodspurge
has a cup of three." In like manner, many of
these drawings of the above class seem to suggest
that the artist has with pain and labour learnt
only some one trivial fact, of not the slightest
consequence to himself or anyone else.

'T^HE English painters have one great merit, p**^","-^-"-^
-¦- It is that they alone of all the world landscape,
have really come face to face with nature,
resolved to see her and paint her as she is. In
England, with many artists at least, nature is
reproduced for you to the utmost of the painter's
power. If all that could be asked were absolute
fidelity to the things seen, there would be no need
to go any further than English water-colour art,
for there one can have meadow, hill, and stream.

96 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
painted with unflinching accuracy and care; there
a blue sky is indeed blue, and a green field green;
and so on to the end of the chapter. In so far as
landscape art is good, this is the reason.

Society L^ROM taking no interest in art whatever,
¦*- our nation, at all events the fashionable
portion of it, has suddenly discovered its incapacity
for performing the commonest action of daily life
without aesthetic assistance, and from the capes
of its footmen to the covers of its prayer-books,
society expresses its longing for the sweet sim
plicity of art. Happy society, to have discovered
a fresh subject to arouse its languid attention !
Happy art, to find itself condescendingly protected
by peers and plutocrats ! But still drawbacks
exist in most human movements, be they ever
so progressive, and if we carefully examine our
Renaissance, we shall find that it, too, is not quite
so perfect as it seems — that we have to paj- a
price, and no small one, for our artistic whistle.
To men of sober mind, and especially to those
whp are too slow, too bigoted, or too old-fashioned
to move with the fierce current, how intensely

SENTENTI.E ARTIS. 97
annoying, as well as astonishing, must it be to
live in the midst of a jargon which has grown up
suddenly, with a rapidity unheard of outside the
story of " Jack and the Beanstalk " ! Fancy a
respectable father of a family being regarded as
a " Philistine " by his more enlightened children,
or imagine what his feelings must be as he marks
his house gradually undergoing an artistic reforma
tion ; sees bit by bit his old-fashioned comfortable
furniture disappear, till at last he sits in a
wilderness of spindlelegged chairs and gimcrack
tables, with a brass fireplace which will not warm
him in front, bare stained boards beneath his
feet, and a distorted image of himself reflected
from a convex mirror, as a sarcastic commentary
on his own condition.

€onkmpoxavy 2lviists anb
Scl^ools of painting

H

Contemporary 2lrtists anb Scljools of
painting*

m

"J'ai dit le bien et le mal avec la mgnie
franchise. Je n'ai rien tu de mauvais,
rien ajoutS de bon ; et s'il m'est arriv6
d'employer quelque ornement indif
ferent, ce n'a jamais 6te que pour
remplir un vide occasionne par mon
defaut de meraoire." — Rousseau.

aSOn S pictures of English rustic life GeorgeMason.
display a power which is at once delightful

and peculiar to himself. His children stand and
run and play as no other children do that our
artists have painted; there is a reciprocity be
tween his figures and the landscapes in which
they are placed, which renders them mutually
serviceable. Perhaps the most special character
istic of his work, taken as a whole, is serenity
— an absolute conviction that the thing dis
played is sufficient. Occasionally a subject is
painted, such as " The Evening Hymn " or " The
Harvest Moon"; but more frequently there is no
subject, properly so called — nothing but a child
standing in a meadow, or a boy leaning on a stile ;
a girl driving her cattle home in the twilight, or
H 3

102 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
sitting in the shadow of the pine-woods. And yet
the flavour of these simple pictures is exquisite,
and as works of art, they will hold their own in
any company. Several causes may partly account
for this— of which the chief is that they give us
truly what is almost unknown in English paint
ing — the combination of figure and landscape ;
not landscape with figures in it, not figures with
landscape behind them, but the two in just rela
tion and subordination to each other. Again, they
are exquisitely graceful, and that with the kind of
grace which is more akin to dignity than elegance ;
which belongs to the Parthenon, rather than the
dancing academy. And lastly, the pictures show
throughout a colour faculty, which, though limited
in range, is, within that range, perfect. More
lovely harmonies in the minor key have never been
executed than those of Mason's pictures. But,
after all, these qualities are insufficient to account
for the charm which this painter exercises over
many minds, and in criticising his work it is even
more than ordinarily difficult to discover in what
this charm consists. It seems, however, to be
somehow connected with the innocence and sim
plicity of his children, youths, and maidens, with

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 103
the fact that he has really been able to grasp
pictorially all that makes childhood and girlhood
so beautiful- — the freedom of action, the pauses of
wonder, the moments of doubt, the grace of
gesture, and the outbursts of feeling — in fact, to
give expression to all that a fair, unthwarted life
might feel and show, when developing under
natural conditions. He has been blamed for
making his children too idyllic, for giving too
much classical grace to their movements ; but,
after all, what we call classical grace is little
more than the beauty which springs from the
free movements of a healthy body. The Greeks
were not taught to turn their toes out, or anything
of that sort, by an Athenian " Michaud."

I

S Sir F. Leighton's work Greek, after all ? Sj> i^".
Leighton's
Think, for instance, of his "Music lesson," work.

a mother teaching her child to play some stringed
instrument. I am not going to say a word against
the beauty of this picture ; as a specimen of skil
ful painting, and as a piece of delicate colour, it
is a perfect feast for the eye ; that the delicacy
of the skin and its transparency of tint are too

104 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
great to be natural is, I conceive, exactly what
the artist intended — his reading of the fact that
what the Greeks sought in art was beauty. But
is this the right interpretation of what the Greeks
meant by "beauty"? Do those soft robes of
palest sea-green and blue, with their golden
embroideries, harmonise with what we know of
the stern simplicity of Greek art ? This waxen
rose-leaf complexion and these coral lips seem more
fitted for an eastern harem than for rocky Ithaca,
and the sentiment involved is essentially modern.
That is to say, no Greek would have considered
the scene a fit subject for art. It may be said, and
very likely will be, that this does not profess to
be a Greek picture, that you may ascribe it to any
country you please; but what I want to insist on
is, that the artist, in everything he has ever
painted, has made the chief objects of Greek art
his chief object — that is, "beauty " ; and that with
all his great powers of colouring and draughtsman
ship — and in both his powers are exceptionally
great — he has mistaken the way to attain his end:
and the reason is evident. The Greek knew
only of the beauty of perfect form and heroic
endurance. Take, for instance, the Venus of

SENTENTl/E ARTIS, 105
Milo, and the Laocoon ; into his admiration of
either of these a Greek could throw his whole soul.
Suppose he had been doubtful whether perfect form
was the most noble thing in the world. Suppose
that the mass of the people amongst whom he lived
certainly thought otherwise — do you think that he
could have produced the work he did? Well, if
not, what chance is there for a modern who seeks
to rival the Greek on his own ground, while he
feels — must inevitably feel — that he is pretending
all the time ? The purely sensuous element of
Greek art had, by the circumstance of the national
life and religion, various refining elements inextri
cably mingled with it ; for instance, perfection of
form with the Greeks was almost a sign of godhead.
So I come to this, that "beauty," of the Greek
ideal, cannot be produced by a modern artist,
amongst a people whose ideas of excellence have a
totally different basis from the old classical one;
and that all attempts to infuse into modern work
the spirit of ancient times must, from the very
nature of the case, be failures. A man must paint
with the spirit of the age he lives in, if he paints at
all ; all attempts at retrogression must necessarily
be failures; they remind one of George Eliot's

106 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
powerful picture of Mr. Casaubon, "groping
amidst the ruins of the past, with a farthing rush
light." The way in which Leighton errs, though
even in error he is greater than nine-tenths of his
contemporaries, is this — he has deliberately refused
the better part ; beauty and truth have come to him
as they came to Hercules in the old fable, and he
has rejected truth and chosen beauty, and the
consequence is that his pictures are dead and
cold, and have become more so year by year,
till now they are indeed (in the words emblazoned
round the academy galleries) —
Fair-seeming shows,
and nothing else. "A fine day, sir!" said a
newly arrived subaltern to his colonel when
he met him at morning parade at some Indian
station, and his chief answered, " Confound you,
sir, it's always a fine day here ! " This expresses
tersely the feeling with which everyone now looks
at the President's pictures. We know they will
be beautifully painted ; we know they will be
finely drawn and exquisitely modelled ; we know
that they will be absolutely pure in sentiment,
and that they will represent beautiful things
beautifully. But then, unfortunately, we know

SENTENTIyE ARTIS. 107
more, we know that the proportion of action and
passion in them will be very small ; we know that
all the rough excrescences of humanity, which are
dear to us, because they are familiar, will be
pruned away ; we know that we shall be taken
into a land "where it is always afternoon," where
we are " far from the beating of the steely sea,"
and where we must leave behind us all the
motives, fears, struggles, and hopes, of which our
lives are commonly made up.
A little while to live on honeycomb is pleasant.
But one tires of scented thyme.

T

HE charm of Mr. Burne-Jones' painting is Burne-
Jones.
the charm of spirit over matter, essence

over substance, soul over sense ; and its peculiar
flavour lies in this, that with a keen, almost
too keen, sense of the beauty of form in which
it resides, it is nevertheless the spirit of a scene
or of a person, which the artist seeks to depict ;
and it is not strange that, this being so, he
seldom succeeds in painting characters which
are alien to his own, for he can only conceive
one kind of spirit, and if he does not discern
that in his subject, his sitter, or his model.

108 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
he finds nothing at all. And this painter,
as he reveals himself in his work, is a strange
mixture, compounded of divers materials, and
having equally —
Bursts of great heart,
Foul slips in sensual mire.
It is curious that all his strength lies in this
contradictory combination. All his finest pictures
have had some trace in them of that purely
physical side of love, which he depicts in such
strange conjunction with its most immaterial
aspect. A painter who varies his subjects between
Swinburne's "Laus Veneris" and "the Annun
ciation," gives plenty of food for reflection to his
critics, and it is, as I have said, when he combines
the two, that this artist does his best work.
However, his " Fortune's wheel " has none of the
sensual element evident. It is an almost mono
chromatic design (some people would call it a har
mony in slate and gold colour), which attempts in
no way to render the physical truths of the scene,
but which takes advantage of the subject to obtain
a conjunction of beautiful lines, to display much
subtle drawing of the figure, and to depict a scene
which shall bear no relation to the coarse, hard-

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 109
and-fast motives and actions of the present day,
an illustration of —
All passes ; nought that has been is ;
Things good and evil have one end.
Can anything be otherwise.
Though all men swear all things would mend,
With God to friend ?
Regret and beauty, loss and love, desire and
weariness — these are the aspects under which the
world appears to Mr. Burne-Jones ; and even of
these he has no gospel to tell us — only under his
hands these things take a lovely shape, and their
most mysterious recesses are sounded to the bottom.
A morbid but beautiful art, strangely powerful in
its appeal to many of us ; expressing failure in the
loveliest way in which it could possibly be ex
pressed. An exact antitype in purity to the old
Grecian sculpture ; for the perfection we see here
brings no joy or peace to its possessors, who
have all lain, like Wolfedieterich's " Under the
Linden," and known that which makes life taste
less to them for the rest of their days.

M ACBETH'S work is always interesting and Robert
¦' Macbeth,
full of power, though it is hardly power a,r.a.
which has as yet found any definite aim, or been

110 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
trained to work so as to express its fullest result.
His most special praise is, that in a day when the
poor are generally regarded either in the light of
deserving objects for the exercise of the benevolent
virtues, or as a dangerous combination of explosive
materials which must be carefully avoided, he has
discovered that there is a third way of looking at
them, without feeling either pity or horror, but
simply taking them as they are : rough, coarse,
and without refined tastes or appearance, as also
without unnecessarily degraded tastes ; objects
neither for charity nor repression, but men and
women still, who, finding toil a hard necessity,
yet find it one which can be borne with cheerful
ness, when bodies are strong and young and
skies are blue, and the sun shines brightly, and
the waves ripple merrily to the shore. One
cannot help feeling a sympathy with Macbeth's
stalwart men and strong-limbed women, working
in the stoneyard, or cutting osiers in the fen, or
gathering in the potato harvest, or carrying in
the sardines at low water. There is a sort of anti-
electric light about them and their doings ; they
seem never to have heard of Edison or the School
Board, and yet to be none the worse.

M

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. Ill
ISS KATE GREENAWAY'S little daintily- Kate Green-
dressed figures are always attractive in away.
colour and quaintly pretty in design. They are on
the whole original work, though work which hardly
reaches to the level of serious art — as, indeed,
why should it ? There must be flies on the wheel
in painting, as well as society, and so long as they
are ornamental flies, we should be content.

DOYLE was in no sense of the word a RichardDoyle.
painter ; his methods of water-colour
painting were simply abominable — thin, scratchy
work of sharp colour and most unpleasant texture.
Colour which should be at the same time crude,
garish, and dirty, appears to be an almost im
possible combination of deficiencies; but very
frequently Doyle's was all three. His coloured
work consisted simply of good designs, tinted by
a man to whom the art of painting was unknown,
and whose sense of colour might have been gained
from a pantomime transformation scene. But
it was as a designer that he made his name, and
as a designer that his fame will last. His talent
was of a twofold kind, exactly described by the

112 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
words "fancy" and "fun." His sense of fun was
throughout original, wholesome, and unforced.
His fancy not only seemed inexhaustible, but he
would never rest till he had literally choked-up
every design with an almost inconceivable number
of figures and incidents. And after all, it is his
humanity which makes his work delicious. If he
had been unable to do Brown, Jones, and Robin
son, or equivalent work, he would never have
given us an elf or a fairy worth the looking at. If
he did not understand the world he lived in, at
all events through sympathy, if not through
knowledge, he could never have drawn the fairy
haunted dells and fields, or wound a net of laugh
ing goblins round the stalks of the mushrooms,
and under the shade of the daisies. For, if ex
amined closely, there is a strong humanity, a
strong individual character, about all Doyle's super
natural beings. They are little English men and
women, full of entertainment, spirit, and intrigue :
never did an artist paint supernatural beings with
so deliberate a belief in their vitality. Contrast his
fairies with those of Noel Paton, or Dore, or any
other modern artist who has designed illustrations
of similar subjects, and it will be seen that their

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 113
main differences is that they are such sturdy
English people, naturally full of fun, and fighting,
and practical jokes. We like them, because we
understand them, that is the gist of the matter.

THE contrast between the two artists is a Pinweii
very real and a very striking one — a con- Walker.
trast as old as the difference between the dreamer
and the doer. With all his delicate sense of
beauty — with all his tenderness of heart, and wide
sympathies for whatever was beautiful, tragic, or
suggestive in life — Frederick Walker was at
heart a Greek, rather than an Englishman.
Strength and beauty of life were his ideals, and it
may be doubted whether he ever painted a picture
which owed any considerable portion of its beauty
to a deeply felt thought. So it was that, always
fine in execution, he was finest when his subject
expressed one of those general truths which all
ages and people have felt since the dawn of the
social life. That labour, well and cheerfully done,
was a glorious thing, rather to be rejoiced over
than mourned for — that old age and youth, sorrow
and hope, rest and toil, are mingled inextricably

114 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
in the " almshouse " of the world — that " some
must laugh, and some must weep " — these are
the keynotes of his greatest pictures ; while
scarcely less great in their way are the numberless
small and highly finished water-colour drawings
which insist upon the beauty of a bed of tulips, a
red brick wall, a heap of fish, or some other little
portion of natural or artificial fact. None of the
shortcomings which are apt to attach to simple
realism are felt in his paintings, for his sense of
beauty was so keen and unerring that his subject
always justified his choice, and it is certain in art
that perfect beauty carries all the best meanings
with itself. But having said Walker was a Greek,
we must confess that he was to some extent a
dull Greek — dull, that is, in the sense of having
little or no imagination — or rather, his imagina
tion was of a very strictly limited kind, though
within its boundaries it worked with great ease
and vigour. Thinking quickly over Walker's
pictures with which we are acquainted, we cannot
remember at this moment one which showed that
he had more than the faintest sympathy with
poetry, or with any imaginative literature ; his mind
and his emotion were bounded by the modern Hfe in

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 115
which he lived, and the work he produced was of an
entirely similar kind. It was poetical in a way,
because human life, looked at with an eye which
subtracts from it all the ugliness, and adds to it
all the beauty of which it has any experience,
comes to be poetical in its effect ; but this was
only by the way, and was, we imagine, by no
means aimed at by the artist himself. If the
ordinary notion that genius is healthy in propor
tion as it accepts and makes the best of the facts
of everyday life be a true one — which, by the way,
it certainly is not — there never was any painter's
genius more healthy than Walker's, for he took all
his subjects and all his ways of looking at them
from the people round him. He is late nineteenth
century in feeling to the core ; and, indeed, it was
this which made Mr. Ruskin write that bitter
sweet letter to the "Times" apropos ofhis pictures.
And this brings us to the consideration of Pinwell,
and shows us the great difference between his
power and that of Walker, for if the above defini
tion be right, Pinwell was as unhealthy as Walker
was the reverse. If ever there was a dreamer of
dreams " born out of his due time," it was George
Pinwell, and his art is one of the most peculiar

116 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
which has marked modern days. It is indeed
a very strange, half-real, half-poetical world
with which he is concerned, and many of his
compositions are analogous, in the impression they
give to the spectator, to one of those old North-
country ballads which, commencing quietly with
a maiden seated at her spinning wheel, or a page
riding across the heather, end in shame and
death. Though rarely displaying the tragedy,
the artist gives us all its elements. One feels
that the love so commenced can, as Lawrence
once said, "scarcely end in happiness and honour,
even if it be not cut short by the dagger." As pre-
Raphaelite in execution as Walker himself, and
indeed almost more so, he is also what Walker
never was, pre-Raphaelite in feeling, and has
that faint half-sick straining after beauty which
marks the school. Pinwell was always thinking
about beauty, and Walker was always getting it —
therein lies the difference. But Pinwell saw and
sought for far more than Walker ever dreamed of as
existing. The "world of thought" in which Kil-
meny lived exists in each one of Pinwell's designs —
they are more than loVely pictures, they are stories
to anyone who cares to read them. Very certainly

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 117
they are morbid in their feeling, and very frequently
defective in their method ; but there hangs over
them that dimly seen but divine halo that divides
Shelley from Southey. They are the works of a
poet, to whom even common things have meanings
of mystery, and for whom beauty exists in the
working out of the imagination, rather than in the
faithful reproduction of beautiful things. This
leads to some of the designs being bizarre to a
degree which offends many worthy people, for it
is always an insult to tell your prosaic person that
he doesn't understand poetry, and to show him
pictorial poetry and tell him to admire it is at least
an equal offence. The class of critics who go to
see Mr. Irving as Mephistopheles, and never get
above depreciatory remarks as to the character
of — his legs — exist, in painting as well as
in acting; and for these, the shortcomings of
Mr. Pinwell's art will prevent it having arty
pleasures. But for those who can accept
an artist with the limitation which nature has
assigned to him, his attraction will always be very
great, and his fame will increase with time. It
will increase, because his designs go to the root
of the matter with which they are concerned — they
I 2

118 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
do not only touch its outside with deft fingers.
The poetry and the power in them are as real as
in Edgar Poe's " Raven," and like that irritating
bird, will be seen on earth " never more." It was
peculiar to the man, and sounded like music heard
upon the mountains — mournful, wild, and sweet.
When it was concerned with common everyday
life, it imparted an element of strangeness to the
most ordinary matters, and seemed to do so in
defiance, rather than in obedience, to the artist's
will.

Poynter. "TJOYNTER'S work is always, or nearly always,
*- classical in subject, but he is perceptibly
influenced in his treatment by the old Italian
masters, notably Michael Angelo. With an almost
considerable precision of drawing, he is, com
pared to Leighton, as a cart horse to a racer —
rough strength, instead of swiftness and symmetry.
If his subject requires graceful or delicate treat
ment, his work is unsatisfactory; if it needs
strength of colour and depth of feeling, it dis
tinctly fails; but if the artist takes a subject in
which mere accuracy of detail and power of com-

SENTENTI.^ ARTIS. 119
position are wanted, and in which his magnificent
drawing of the figure has full and varied expression,
he produces work which, though still cold and
academic, still producing less pleasure than
astonishment, rises to a height of skill which is
almost genius. The two pictures which he had
in the Paris Exhibition of 1878, "The Catapuft"
and "Israel in Egypt," are of this latter kind, and
in this latter work what I have said is particularly
exemplified. I have called this artist Greek in
form, and certainly his preference has been
hitherto for showing the beauty of form and action
rather than that of thought, and his subjects have
been chiefly what is called classical; but in the
same way that Leighton has failed to catch the
spirit of the Greek work, Poynter too has failed ;
he also is "groping with his rushlight." Study of
the antique at South Kensington and the academy,
admiration (and perhaps imitation) of Michael
Angelo, and continual grappling with difficulties
of complicated drawing, of attitude and action —
all these, joined to a firm hand, a clear eye, and
great industry, will do much; but they will not
bring to life again the grace, beauty, and uncon
sciousness of Greek art; as I said above, they

120 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
will give us its form, but not its spirit. I should
be doing this artist less than justice did I not
mention the great excellence of his portraiture
in water-colours. I know nothing in modern
portraiture in this medium which surpasses the
four or five women portraits exhibited by
Poynter in the first e.Khibition of the Grosvenor
Gallery. There was in them a mingling of
refinement and strength, and the colouring,
though rather subdued, was as admirable as the
drawing and composition.

^oid"''' A/^ /"ALKER'S " Old Gate " is a well-known
Gate." V V picture. It has been several times ex
hibited in London. In it are displayed in per
fection the qualities of sympathy and insight.
Here, in an autumn landscape, are contrasted,
and yet united into one chord of meaning, age and
youth, experience and innocence, sorrow and glad
ness, labour and rest. I am not exaggerating when
I say that these emotions and qualities are here
shown in the few figures of the widowed lady,
the playing children, and the tired labourer ; and
it is literal truth that they are combined into one

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 121
intense chord of feeling by the artist's genius.
Were I asked what this feeling was, I should
answer that the number of interpretations which
can be put upon an artist's work is no bad test
of his rank. But if asked what this picture said
to me, I should answer that it told me in another
form what all life tells me — that beauty is inde
pendent of culture and circumstance, that endur
ance and joy exist side by side, and that through
the " old gate " of life pass for ever —
Young heart, hot and restless,
And the old, subdued and slow,
that childhood has its joys, manhood its labour,
and age its endurance. A good deal, I dare say
you may think, to be said by a picture of an
autumn landscape and a few country people.
Well, believe me, in every great picture there
are manifold meanings, only to be discovered by
patient study. The work that presents to us one
definite phase of emotion, that pins us, as it
were, to only thinking one thing about it, is as
surely as possible an inferior work of art. And,
hard as it may seem, you cannot have a work of
art explained to you. Speaking roughly, nothing
worth the explanation can be explained.

122 SENTENTI/E ARTIS.
Tissot. npISSOT'S canvas glows wfth soft colour
-*- and pleasant form ; he prefers clouds
of lace and ribbons to the rags of the beggar or
the sackcloth of the saint, and instead of St.
Jerome in the wilderness, or Jacob sleeping on a
rock, he gives us softly-nurtured ladies pouring out
tea for Hyde Park" swells." " Swells " is a very
appropriate word, I may mention in this connec
tion, for there is always a suspicion of the "snob"
about Tissot's personages. Their purple has too
much of the Tyrian dye upon it, and their linen
forces itself upon one's attention, in somewhat
offensive quantity and brilliance. Indeed, in most
of his works, the only things that are real are the
dresses, and the abominably artificial atmosphere
of a certain style of society, which may be called
the new Gallic-English, the essential parts of
which are to dress like a French actress, and to
care for nothing under or above the sun. In
these works we find energy, truth, brain, heart,
and life all disappearing rapidly, and a talented
artist revelling in the spectacle, and painting the
result. But it is quite unquestionable that for
purely technical mastery of the colour of sun
light, and for brilliant arrangements in contrasted

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 123
sunshine and shadow, Tissot has but one rival
in England, namely Alma Tadema ; and that
his pictures, however vulgar in conception and
commonplace in subject, are always artistic. His
aim has been always to seek the picturesque in
modern life, taking modern life as he finds it.
One may justly complain of his apparent satis
faction with that kind of society — society which
has neither thought nor genius, and hardly even
possesses decency — but his work possesses such
excellence as modern life can give, when viewed
in that special aspect, and so it is a true work of
its kind.

npHIS painter's works are usually in the
-*- faintest and most delicate tones of yellow,
white, and blue, and gain all their beauty by the
skilful management and painting of the drapery,
and the perfect science with which the little
flashes of colour are introduced into the composi
tion. If any one cares to know what it is that
constitutes the great charm of Mr. Albert Moore's
work, he can discover by comparing any of these
pictures with the fragments of Grecian drapery to

Albert Moore.

124 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
be seen in the sculpture room at the British
Museum. He will find that the same elements of
beauty exist in both — service, to clothe the limbs
they cover; beauty, to reveal the main lines of
the form beneath the robes ; action, expressive of
what the body is doing ; flow and continuity of
line, subordinated to the above necessities, but
kept clearly in view throughout. And perhaps to
these there should be added perfect lightness, so
that however numerous or involved the folds, they
never seem to weigh the body down, or impede its
action.

Keene's 'TpHE foremost of Mr. Keene's artistic ex-
drawmgs I
in'Punch.' -»- cellencies is a strong grasp of character,
whenever that character in any way constitutes a
type rather than an individual. An Irishman, a
Scotchman, a drunken soldier, a cabman, an
artist, a barman, a maid-servant, or a pater
familias, a waiter, and, above all, a " commercial
traveller," have never been done so clearly, and,
on the whole, so truly, as in Mr. Keene's draw
ings. The designs also possess in the highest
degree that which is the greatest artistic merit in

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 125
works of this kind — they are perfectly simple and
easy in appearance. It is a luxury, to any one
who understands what drawing is, to turn from
the laboured and academic draughtsmanship of
Mr. Tenniel, from the Meissonier-like workmanship
of Du Maurier, from the involved accuracy and
tireless invention of Linley Sambourne's work, to
Mr. Keene's brilliant sketches, fresh as a spring
morning, and daring as a Cavalier's charge;
seeming to be conceived and executed without a
trace of headache or weariness. It should be
noticed how much of this effect is probably due to
Mr. Keene's power of representing continuous or
suddenly-arrested motion. His characters are
never posed in attitudes, but have taken up their
positions the second before they were put in the
picture, and will alter them the second after.
This sense of action extends to his treatment of
landscape, and there has hardly been, since David
Cox, an artist who expressed as clearly as does
Mr. Keene the vitality and constant movement of
country scenes. Considering the limited scope of
landscape background in drawings of this kind,
it can be said without fear of contradiction that
Mr. Keene's are of almost ideal perfection, being

126 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
both simple and bold in execution, brilliant in
effect, wonderfully subservient to the main purpose
of the picture, and yet thoroughly decorative. It
may interest student readers to know that these
apparently rough backgrounds are done by Mr.
Keene in his studio, from very elaborate and
detailed drawings from nature.

Rossetti. TA ANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI was by no
¦*-^ means, as his worshippers would have
us believe, a perfect artist. To the calm
perfection which marks the work of the
older artists he never attained. To the
last there were in his painting, his drawing,
and his manner of considering a subject many
peculiarities — it might almost be said conven
tionalisms — a trace, perhaps, if keenly examined,
of the amateur. What may be noted briefly in
this connection is, that these conventionalities
and deficiencies of his were in the main original
ones, and though, perhaps, something analogous
to them may be found in early Italian art, they
were in no sense of the word imitations of the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 127
practice of previous painters. The strange
physical peculiarities which many people find so
trying in Rossetti's women, are due by no means
to any defective knowledge on the part of the
painter, and still less to any deliberate affectation.
It is perfectly easy to find in his poetry, as it was
to see in his house and its furniture, that his mind
ran in a strange groove of mediaevalism ; and he
chose the type of womanhood, and accentuated
its peculiarities, which he found would best suit
the purpose of his art. If there is one thing more
certain about his paintings than another, it is that
their feeling is entirely natural and spontaneous. If
ever a "passive master lent his hand," that master
was Rossetti; and in looking at his work one is
chiefly possessed by the fact of its mastery over
the man who executed it. This is not the paint
ing of an Englishman of the present day, who is
looking to mediasval Italy and trying to paint like
its artists; it is the work of a man who in thought
and feeling (as half by birth) is Italian to the
core, and who has so saturated himself with the
literature, poetry, and religion of his countrymen
in ancient times, that his real life is more] that of
Florence in the fourteenth, than London in the

128 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
nineteenth century. It is interesting to compare
him with Mr. Burne-Jones, who "wears his rue
with a difference," and to endeavour to perceive
the discrepancies and similarities of their art —
and the great vital difference between them.
After the flrst great similarity that both painted
in a wonderful dream world of their own, the
way to which, Jones once told me, Rossetti had
opened to him, there is this difference, that Mr.
Burne-Jones is a painter of the present, who
regrets the past ; Rossetti was a painter of the
past, who ignored the present. By this I do not
mean that Burne-Jones takes his subjects from
the present, that is well-known not to be the case;
but when he paints his old-world themes, he does
so as a modern, with a half-sick regret that they
are past. But to Rossetti, they were not only
alive, but were the only verities living. And
this springs from the difference of what is sought
to be represented. The living artist is wedded to
the form of ancient life, as evidenced in the
dresses, the architecture, the quaintnesses of
movement, the peculiar half-allegorical way of
representing it which was adopted by the elder
Italian painters, and with all these things he

SENTENTIyE ARTIS. 129
seeks to make his canvas beautiful. But for the
spirit of the ancient life he has no sympathy,
his feelings are in their complication, their
weakness, and their regrets, essentially modern.
But Rossetti does not think about his ancient
life at all, does not even think very much about
making a beautiful picture. What he does
consider, is how to tell something as vividly
and completely as possible. That he does tell
it in terms of antiquity, is owing to his being
Rossetti. But with him truth means truth of
emotion, and if he can give that he will surrender
to it all else. He is perhaps the only painter in
the world who in the same picture deliberately
works on two totally different lines, the natural
and the conventional, and succeeds in combining
them without offence. The conventionalities
which he introduces are so dramatically and
emotionally natural, that the mind accepts them
frankly, and recognising their aid in expressing
the meaning of the picture, would not, if it could,
have any more consistent treatment. In a matter
like this a painter's method must be judged by its
results ; and if the result is beautiful, the justifi
cation is complete.

130 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

£« . T^HE "Mrs. Ponsonby de Tompkins" series
Mauner. I j r
-*- of Mr. Du Maurier, shows the artist
in his least favourable light. In truth, if we may
be pardoned for saying it, there is a hint in
this artist's social satires on the " snob," male
and female, the " lion," and the " tuft-hunter," of
the very thing he satirises. One feels a little, on
looking at his works, that clothes are, as a lawyer
would say, " of the essence of the contract " ;
that a certain amount of drawing-room glitter,
gas, exotics, stuffed couch, and grand piano is
necessary to existence, or, at least, that the artist
would have us think so. Coats and gowns fit too
well not to have had much thought bestowed
upon them. A young man in these drawings has
always been educated at Eton or Chrlstchurch ; a
young woman has a French dressmaker ; a child
never walks, even in the country, in anything but
high-heeled shoes and silk stockings. And so it is
that the satire frequently " rings hollow as it falls,"
and the knowledge which prompts it seems to
spring as much from sympathy as from aversion.
For Mr. Du Maurier, as he stands revealed by his
drawings in " Punch," belongs to the drawing-room
and Lord's cricket ground quality of artists, and

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 131
deliberately avoids all reference to those unfor
tunate individuals, whose boots are thick, whose
manners are rough, and whose ways are those of
folks " out of society." We do not mean to hint
any blame for this limitation, the artist does what
he can ; but it is the result of an ambition of this
kind, to display his weakness as well as his power,
and if we are asked to judge his work, it must be
judged by mental and intellectual deficiency as well
as artistic achievement. One can hardly write
or think of him without thinking of his great
predecessor, and when one does that the weak
ness of Du Maurier, as compared to Leech,
is singularly evident ; for Leech satirised and
laughed at the exaggerations of feeling and
passion, at the incongruities and contrasts of life
generally, and Du Maurier laughs — or rather
sneers — at the meannesses and narrownesses of
that artificial life which we call Society. As the
one was to nature — or at all events such nature as
the ordinary everyday life of men and women here
in England used to be — so is the other to that hot
house atmosphere which stretches from Curzon
Street to Belgrave Square. In another century,
people will go 'to Leech and laugh with him,

132 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
feeling no anachronism ; but to Du Maurier they
will only go as to a dictionary of the follies, and a
record of the costumes, of a bygone time. For
somehow the joke seems to have slipped out in
the telling (as Artemus Ward used to say, " I
must have left the laugh out of that!"), and
only a discreet society smile is given us in this
artist's pictures. So far he fails. And so far as
his characters are made gentlemen or ladies chiefly
by their well-fitting clothes, he fails also. His
strength, however, is partly allied to this failure,
for in recording a phase of life, such as that of
London Society at the present day, it is a
strength to sympathise with its clothes, to take its
comicalities seriously, to make a little discreet
amusement out of its minor eccentricities. It is a
day of small things which the artist sets himself to
illustrate, and his work in many respects is fitting
for its purposes. His observation is wonderfully
minute, his touch is wonderfully delicate ; his
satires compliment, while they rebuke and tickle
our prejudices, by the blame of extravagancies,
from which we feel that we are free. His
chief ideal is a well-dressed woman, his chief
loathing a coarse and ill-favoured snob ; the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 133
country to him means a fashionable watering-
place or neatly rolled tennis ground ; his children
walk with a maid, his footmen wear powder, his
maidservants might have sprung out of a door on
the O.P. side. All, in fact, is as it should be in a
well-regulated house, where "life and thought
have gone away, side by side," and only left
shadows of themselves, to eat and drink, and dress,
and dance and die.

I

T is curious to notice how sternly limited is Walter
Crane's
this clever artist's power, and how it designs,
utterly deserts him when he has to express
natural emotion. Though his figures are always
graceful and fanciful, they are so essentially
creatures of another world, that to see them
frowning, smiling, or weeping, only gives us a
sense of discordance. His designs show a vein of
decided artistic ability which is original, pleasing,
and in certain directions difficult to rival ; they
are strong in composition, rich in fancy, and very
painstaking in execution. Like a violinist who
performs on a single string, or a poet who writes
a long poem of which all the rhymes end in similar
K 2

134 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
sounds, they amuse for the moment and excite
great admiration, but we hardly require a repeti
tion of the performance ; or rather, we don't want
a concert, or an epic of a similar character.

Alma A FRIEND said to me once at a private
Tadema. t-\
¦'- •*- view of Alma Tadema's works, " What a
wonderful fellow he is ! He doesn't paint marble
and silver, he makes them." A shrewd remark this,
intended wholly in admiration ; and yet, perhaps,
hinting at the painter's chief defect. For the
question, after all, is whether we want silver and
marble made in a picture — whether we are willing
to pay the price for such manufacture ? The
price, that is, of the magnificent reaHsation, not
of the scene itself, but of the details — to derive
our pleasure from these outside truths, instead of
the more obscure verities of feeling and thought.
I wonder whether other people feel with me a
frequent impatience of these solid blocks of
marble, these elaborate perspective exercises, these
accurate archaeological details. Is it worth while
to be born in the nineteenth century in order to
ferret amongst the old clothes shops of ancient

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 135
Rome ? To be always endeavouring to build
up the outside of a departed£civilisation ? And
yet this artist has penetrated the secret of
beauty in marble and drapery to the uttermost.
His marble has all the beauty of which it is
capable — its strength, its solidity, its opacity in
shadow, its translucency in light, are all there ;
and, combined with these, too, is that appearance
of endurance and immovability, that sense of
defying time and change, which is, perhaps, of all
the other pictorial characteristics of marble, the
one which is most delightful. In these pictures
of Tadema, though I miss the soul of humanity
so often, we always gain the soul of lifelessness —
if such a phrase be permissible. His drapery has
not the abstract perfection of fold, and combination
of line, that is to be found, for instance, in Albert
Moore's best works ; but it is always such stuff as
could, and does, perfectly clothe a " limb, or hang
in a curtain," it is absolutely serviceable and
fitting for its purpose ; it takes its right place in
that perfect rendering of a scene, which is this
painter's substitute, and in some sense not an
unworthy substitute, for the higher qualities of the
imagination. The classical part of Tadema's

136 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
painting gives us hardly more than the outside
of ancient life ; but that outside is so perfect a
reproduction of antiquity, that it almost satisfies
us — almost, but not quite. To this remark
there is one broad exception, difficult to ex
plain shortly, and which will, I fear, sound as
a very harsh criticism. It is this, that though
in Tadema's works there is little or nothing
of the spirit of Greek art and life — nothing, that is
to say, of its unconsciousness, strength, and flaw
less beauty — there is there much of the spirit of
Roman art, of costly, luxurious degradation. I
do not say this without hesitation, but with the
firmest conviction of its truth, and I think I see
the reason for it — the social life of Paris and
London at the present day bears no slight re
semblance to the life of Rome in its decadence ;
the spirit of those degenerate classical times
differ little in essentials from one social phase
of modern life. It is in an unconscious faith
fulness to the nineteenth century, that Tadema
has caught the truth of the second. I feel in
clined to deny true imagination to Mr. Tadema.
Why? Because I should do to any man who
imagined the body and forgot the soul ; who gave

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 137
me the face of antique life, but not the heart. It
is not probable that if any of us had "audience with
Agrippa," or witnessed the death of Csesar, we
should think of the palace marbles first, and the
living emperor afterwards. To use a theatrical
image, the actors in this artist's paintings do not
"take the stage." Compare his work in this respect
with that of G6rome. In most of this painter's
works, if we examine them carefully, it will be found
that most of the effect depends upon the painting
of suddenly arrested action. In nearly every picture
there is a pause of action. We hold our breath,
as it were, to see what is coming next. We can
only point this out ; like many another incident of
art, it cannot be proved to those who do not feel it.

H

OLMAN HUNT'S work is the unsparing Holman Hunt.

record of a hand trained to the greatest
amount of patient skill, of an eye whose keen
ness is undimmed by any preference for a par
ticular class of fact, and by a heart which sees
and loves beauty in its own way, but still with
passionate intensity. And yet it is, at the same
time, work of a blundering strength, which

138 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
occasionally affronts us by its wrong-headedness.
Still, the more it is examined, the more
beautiful it becomes, and the less its faults grate
upon you. It is hardly doing justice to this
painter to call his work simply realistic, in the
ordinary sense of the term. At least, it would
be very hard to say where his realism stopped,
certainly not at a representation of the superficial
aspect of nature, for his pictures are full of subtle
undertones and hints of meaning, such as can
hardly be appreciated at first sight, but reveal
themselves coyly, like ocean flowers. Mr.
Holman Hunt's realism is of a kind that is
extremely hard to classify, modified as it is by
his personal peculiarities. With him, shadow
invariably means colour as well as darkness, and
he has no place in his scheme of painting for
shade, as opposed to, or in obscuration of,
colour. Now of all the difficulties which an
untrained eye finds in the right seeing of
natural fact, it is probable that the seeing of
colour in shadow is the greatest, and it is more
over the last triumph of a great painter. It
divides, as with the stroke of a razor, the work of
the colourist from that of the chiaroscurist. Very

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 139
early in life Mr. Hunt seems to have appreciated
this fact, and very many of his peculiarities, we
might almost say of his faults, come from keeping
this too constantly before him ; yet it is also respon
sible in no slight degree for his merits. Anyone
can see how easily this leads to exaggeration, but
it is less easy to understand that the exaggera
tions themselves are nearer to nature than the
conventions of other painters, and that with every
increase of education in colour, the eye would
grow to see it more in the way of Mr. Holman
Hunt, and less in the way of, say for instance,
M. Legros. Yet, in justice to other artists, it
must be admitted that a good deal of Mr. Hunt's
colour is undoubtedly untrue ; it is raised to a
pitch of sharpness to which the grey gradations
of nature rarely attain ; it is more the lurid light
of an oncoming storm than of ordinary sunshine.
Some defect, or rather, idiosyncrasy in the
painter's vision is probably the reason of this.

/^AINSBOROUGH, behind his convention- Gains-boroug.
and Reynolds.

V T ... 1.1 borough
^-^ alities, which, after all, were but the fruit and

of the time in which he lived, was a sincere and
singularly unaffected artist, lacking in all the

140 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
higher imaginative qualities, but simple and
strong wherever he was not forced into triviality
or affectation. Wherever he was not forced — for
it is difiicult to see how an artist could make a
simple unaffected picture of a fashionable lady of
the last century, who either insisted upon every
puff and furbelow, or wished to be painted as a
rustic maiden (with elaborately dressed hair),
scribbling verses upon the tree-trunks. Even in
the portraiture of these, however, Gainsborough
shows an amount of sobriety and solid English
commonsense which removes him very far from
his great rival, Reynolds. Sir Joshua had plenty
of imagination (not of the highest kind though),
and, at his best, great insight into character ; but
there was in much of his work a rather vulgar
and snobbish quality, delighting in misplaced
luxury of surrounding, and much given to sham
simplicity. Gainsborough, with but little imagi
nation and insight into character, has no trace
whatever of the affectation or vulgarities into
which Sir Joshua continually fell. It would be
nearer the mark to say that he read character
without any great desire to penetrate below the
surface. It was in portraying the outside which

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 141
charmed him ; he delighted chiefly in an unruffled
exterior. Never have women been painted so
well from a superficial point of view. The painter
seems to have loved their prettiness of face
and prettiness of attire, their sweetness, their
frivolity, and their grace with equal fervour ; and
with a bland, unconscious cynicism, he made
them all very much alike. His painting is, as
compared with that of Reynolds, both sombre
and stolid. It is, though infinitely dexterous,
plain to affectation ; the work of a practical,
one-idea'd man, who, though raised from poverty
to wealth by his industry and genius, always
remains at heart a son of the soil. The great
secret of his worth lies in this, that he was not
only a great artist, but a man, and essentially one
of ourselves. What little of the courtier overlaid
his character is easily scratched off, and beneath
it is to be found a quiet, practical artist — a rustic,
not a dweller in great cities, at heart a lover of
shade, rather than sunlight, of nature, rather than
artifice. On his landscapes ultimately his fame
will probably rest. His plainness, his sincerity,
his commonsense, and his artistic powers combine
to make his portraits valuable; and these pictures

142 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
will always remain fine, serviceable, dexterous,
honest pieces of work, of which any one might
well be proud ; but in them there is no quality of
genius ; unless it be the genius of gracefulness. But
when Gainsborough came to the painting of land
scape he found his real subject, and succeeded in
a way and to an extent that Reynolds could never
have attained. His character being in the main a
rustic one, born and bred in the provinces, and
but thinly overlaid with town prejudices, he
seems to have gone back every now and then, like
Antaeus, to his mother earth, and gained fresh
life and strength from the contact. In the best
Reynolds landscapes, one seems to smell the saw
dust, and see the oil lamps half-hidden beneath the
boughs ; but even in the most hasty smudges of
waving trees and rolling clouds which Gainsborough
dashed in behind his dukes and duchesses,
there is the scent of the flowers, and the fresh
ness of the winds. And, in his pure landscape
pictures, there is not only the superficial aspect,
but the real sense of the country, only known to
country folk : the quietude, the innocence, and
the security, the absence of fret, the simplicity
of intention, the fulness of meaning and delight

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 143
in even the simplest things. It is strange to
notice that though in the landscape backgrounds
which he continually introduces into his portraits
there is a wild rush of floating branches and
clouds, and a general aspect of unrest ; yet in
the pure landscape pictures the general impres
sion is one of peace. The word " solemn "
would be a fitting one to denote the character
of this branch of his work ; and there is a
curious element of unforced dignity which
Gainsborough's landscapes possess in a very
marked degree. Technically, of course, they are
in some ways infinitely inferior to the landscapes
of the present day. Their drawing is done upon
a vicious system of generalisation, which has
fortunately passed away; the clouds are invariably
painted in great rolling masses, the foliage is a
succession of loops and twirls ; the composition is
conventional to a degree ; and so on in many other
details. But when all these drawbacks are made,
there remains a body of work of which the nature and
the beauty survive all the imperfections of their
rendering ; pictures in which the rich, deep colour
is instinct with the freshness of the woods and
waters (for when Gainsborough paints landscapes

144 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
his colour almost invariably strengthens and
deepens in tone, grows at once more sombre and
more rich), in which almost every detail is bathed
in atmosphere, and each incident helps the main
impression. These Gainsborough landscapes are
not only lovely from a technical point of view,
but because they have sprung from the heart as
well as the hand. And in every splendid manifes
tation of the artist's power of painting, is to be
traced not only his technical skill, but his
sympathy and delight in the shadow and the
sunshine of his native land.
£>f /w/t npHE figure and landscape pictures of Hogarth,
painting. X Wilkie, and the elder Leslie, of Morland
and Reynolds, Gainsborough and Chrome,
Ward, Cotman, Cox, and De Wint, whatever be
their artistic ancestry, are in their result
distinctively and entirely English. A peculiar
plainness, which is almost brutality ; an atmos
phere of grey sky and fresh-smelling earth ; a
simple matter-of-factness and devotion to the
business in hand, overspread them all. They are
the work of a people not easily moved to new
ways, or turned aside from old ones ; not under-

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 145
standing very clearly, nor feeling very keenly, the
subtleties and power of art, but grasping many
of its deepest truths by single -mindedness,
persistence, and honesty. This atmosphere of
English life and thought is now no longer to be
found in our paintings; it is as dead as the
Pharaohs. It were easier for a modern English
man, under the influence of fashionable patronage
and society journalism, to paint like Van Beers
than Morland, like Carolus Duran than like Wilkie.
I do not here speak of painting in the technical
sense of the word, but rather of the motive and
mental atmosphere of the work produced. Our
art is no longer English ; it is no longer anything
in particular. It was stupid, pig-headed, narrow,
and ignorant, full of almost any bad quality one
likes to name ; but it was at the same time national,
unaffected, and sincere ; honest in its following of
tradition which it did not seek to disguise ; honest
in plainly picturing that national life amidst which
its painters lived.

'npHE art of Linnell is a difficult one to under- Linnell.
-*¦ stand, its faults and its perfections are
both so alien to modern schools of painting. Its

146 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
spirit is more akin to that of his pupil and fellow-
worker, William Palmer, of the old Water-colour
Society, than that of any other painter, though
something of the resemblance, which is very
marked, may perhaps be due to the fact of both
having received instruction from John Varley.
The influence of this latter master, especially in
the character of the drawing, is strongly traceable
in Linnell's pictures; but the likeness to Palmer
is more deep than any mere superficial resem
blance of style or details of treatment. It is
in the man himself and his method of regarding
the subjects of his art. Linnell was not,
perhaps, a poet, as Palmer was, nor did he
see the sky shining with such lights of crim
son, purple, and gold as did the painter of the
" Tityrus " and " Heaven's Gate " ; but he had
the same feeling for a landscape as a whole, the
same classical idea of what a landscape should
be, the [same way of combining figures, trees,
clouds, and skies to convey one dominant im
pression, the same broad manner, and the same
love of gorgeous colour and elaborate composition,
and this method of insight — or perhaps oversight
— led him to become a stylist in landscape, of the

SENTENTIjE ARTIS. 147
most marked kind. He probably imbibed much
of this from Varley, than whom, perhaps,
no great English artist ever painted more
artificial pictures. After all, it was the fashion
of the early part of this century, and no artist
born, as was Linnell, in 1790, could hope to
altogether escape therefrom. There is, not
withstanding, a healthy out-of-dooriness in his
works — a freshness and brightness that are more
of the fields than the studio. If they are not
nature, they are at least natural, and they are
singularly free from doubt and hesitation. This
is a sort of " Up, Guards, and at 'em " paint
ing, animated by the same spirit as that which won
the battle of Waterloo. They are hardly great art,
either in motive or technique ; there are in them
few of the finer qualities of imagination, and their
execution, though free, and frequently masterly, is
often heavy, and not seldom coarse. There is a
crudity of feeling in the pictures, too, that seems to
affect the colouring, which is always on the point
of becoming very fine, and which is almost always
ruined by some shortcoming, which seems to
have been wilfully inserted. Judged by modern
standards, his landscapes are deficient in human

148 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
sympathy; they are exclusively pictures of nature.
By this I mean not that they are what are called
realist pictures, but that they are reproductions of
nature, treated exclusively from the pictorial side,
as opposed to the real or the imaginative. They
are neither Turners nor Gainsboroughs, still less
are they Walkers, Corots, or Rousseaus. In
tensely interesting as reminiscences of a school
which has passed away, and which included in its
ranks the greatest landscapists that England has
ever had ; thoroughly good, pure, and healthy,
with old-world health and simplicity — pleasant
and fresh to look upon, and easy to understand ;
they are examples of a type of work which has
had its influence and said its say, whether for
good or evil, and which must be laid reverently to
rest, with this, the last of its professors.

Alfred A /TR- ALFRED HUNT'S dehcacy of manipu-
"^*-*- lation, and soft harmoniousness of colour,
will always make his pictures in some measure
attractive, but it is to be feared there is little
chance now of their ever gaining adequate strength.
He has fed his genius too long on the echoes of
Turner — too unsubstantial food even for genius.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 149
T^ORE was the most fertile and vivid designer Gn^tav
-*-^ that the world has ever known ; and of
the enormous majority of his works it may be
confidently asserted that, whatever their short
comings, they possess power, originality, and
vivid imagination. One of his most notable
characteristics was the absence in his art of all
quality of gentleness, an absence which may be
considered absolute, for when he strives to be
gentle, he only succeeds in being weak, and his
tenderness is either ludicrous or childish. Of
humour which is not fun, but grim and rather
savage in its intention, he has a great store, and
at the point where comedy touches burlesque he
is also powerful ; but of fun, such as it is
understood in England, he shows no trace. His
laughter is either coarse, with Rabelais, or mock
ing, with Voltaire ; there is an absinthe flavour in
his simplest jokes. His laughter indeed has little
human goodfellowship ; it scarcely seems to come
from a man of the same race as ourselves.
Like a fiend's laughter heard in hell,
Far down.
But perhaps its least human quality is neither its
scorn nor its cruelty, but a strain of exaggeration
such as that which produces the great pasteboard
L 2

150 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
heads which one sees at Christmas. It is im
possible to feel quite sure that there is any real
personality behind the outside appearance of
Dore's heroes and heroines ; they are beings of
no human race, transplanted from the land of
" Erewhon," and this impression is probably
deepened by finding that their creator cares little
or nothing what becomes of them. He stabs, or
slashes, or drowns them, with little ceremony and
no remorse. His genius was one which showed
an indifference to suffering, such as could hardly
be paralleled in the history of art ; he revelled in
the horrible, and conceptions of Dante's which
appear to most readers almost unbearable even in
words, were elaborated by him into designs, in
which no detail of their horror was omitted. No
doubt the painter was cruel by temper, and
occasionally in his cruelty this failing underlies
all his work. His sympathies were with the
" big battalions," and in some ways he might be
called the Carlyle of artists. But he was only an
irreverent Carlyle at the best of times ; he believed
in nothing, and nobody except himself. His vanity
and his power seem to have been almost equal ;
indeed, probably the one could not have existed

SENTENTIvE ARTIS. 151
without the other. At all events, he could never
have done half the work he did had he been able
to see his own shortcomings. As a painter, he
was in France, where they understand painting,
frankly a failure ; and his power in sculpture,
though real, consisted in ignoring rather than
fulfilling all the accepted requirements of the art;
in fact, his sculpture is illustration in the round,
just as his designs are illustrations in the flat.
And though London, with its customary ignorance
of art, sustained for ten years, and does sustain to
this day, a Dore Gallery, it would be difficult to find
a single person of cultivated judgment who regards
his pictures otherwise than as great scenic repre
sentations. The art of painting he never mastered
— did not even give it the " huit jours," which
Ingres said it required. The art of drawing, in
which he probably might have excelled, he grew
to disregard, from the fact of habitually exaggerat
ing all the details of his designs. It would be easy
to pick out some of his illustrations in which all
the relative proportions are entirely wrong — in
which, evidently, the artist has never stopped to
consider them. It is very hard to say what
his place will be in the future. He had a

Turner's
figures (2)

152 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
wider imaginative range in all subjects where
the gloomy, the terrible, the fantastic, or the
extravagant played leading parts, than any living
artist, and probably than any artist who ever did
live. But his power is singularly unsympathetic,
his conceptions are too uniformly unreal, not to
forfeit much of their power ; and for the delinea
tion of the simple aspects of humanity he shows
no capability. In fact, out of his fift}' thousand
designs, Dore has not left a single beautiful picture.
'T^HERE is frequently a good deal of absurd
-*- talk about the inadequacy of Turner's
figures ; and from one point of view, perhaps, the
talk may be substantiated. No doubt they are
frequently, if you detach them from their places in
the picture, anatomically incorrect and artistically
poor. But leave them where they are intended to
be, and it is impossible to deny that they absolutely
fulfil their artistic object, that they are essential
parts of the whole impression conveyed by the work
in which they exist. Nay, far more than that, they
are not only right in relation to the meaning of
the picture, they are right also' in relation to its
treatment. They take their proper places with

SENTENTI.E ARTIS. 153
regard to other portions of the drawing ; they are
suffused with atmosphere, and have that relative
subordination to the objects around them, which is
to be noticed in real life. Turner is still by the
great majority of the public distrusted, if not
absolutely disliked. Generally it will be found
that his figures are as good as there is any
necessity for them to be. That is to say, when
they are only inserted in a landscape for the
sake of forming patches of colour, or in order
to lead the eye from or to some other point in
composition, or to add to the general sentiment of
the scene, and increase its peace, its sadness, or
its brightness — that in this case they are often
carelessly drawn with a few rough touches ; but
when it is part of Turner's plan to show the
occupation and interest of the people in detail,
there is little left to be required. Indeed, though
the figures are always kept subordinate to the land
scape, as was necessary in Turner's scheme, yet
they are distinctly an integral part of his pictures.

H

INE has been painting the Sussex Downs H- ^•
'^ ° Hme.

for a generation and a half, and painting
them in a way which no one else has eyer

154 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
equalled. "Gentle" is the word which always
comes to one's mind in connection with this
painter ; his work is as quiet as Gray's " Elegy."
He loves peace, declining day, and solitude, and
extracts from them all the material of his art.
For the rest he is, technically speaking, the
most skilful of manipulators, and in this respect
resembles no one so much as Copley Fielding,
with whose painting, indeed, Hine's work has
much in common. It is however too quiet to
show well in exhibitions amongst the forced and
slap-dash work with which it is surrounded, and
this true artist is consequently neglected — almost
forgotten.
Legros, 'HpHE work of Legros may be described as the
¦*- refinement of roughness ; the impression
of a subject is given with marvellous facility,
rather than a copy of it ; but this impression has
nothing of the misty vagueness which English
impressions are apt to have ; it is perfectly
resolved, sharp, and definite. And the drawing
can only be expressed] by a paradox ; in it there
is nothing right, and nothing wrong ; truth
and error are equally absent. Why is this ?

SENTENTI.^ ARTIS. 155
Partly because many mechanical errors are elimi
nated by the master's knowledge and control of
his material — a mastery which, so far as it goes,
is singularly complete ; and partly that the subject
matter of his work is not anything which out
siders can tell much about. Legros does not
care for his subjects a bit — nothing could
frequently be more unlike its original than his
"two hour" heads; but what he does care for
is some expression which he receives from the
subject, which takes definite shape in his mind,
and alters, not as in the work of Watts, the
expression or meaning of the face, but its absolute
outlines. The famous dictum of Jeffrey upon
Wordsworth's poems might be well imagined to
be murmured by the artist, as he looks' at the
models for his pictures. He seems to feel in
relation to each of them, " this won't do." It is
not that the face or figure gets taken hold of by
the transforming power of the artist's ingenuity,
but that he starts with a set conception of what
his subject is, and paints that, and one of the
consequences is that he has never created a
character of any kind ;['^his people have no person
ality whatever; whenever his compositions possess

156 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
real interest, it arises from the realisation of an
abstract feeling. This is what gave the " Mort
d'un Vagabond " its intensity of dreary power ;
this it is also which prevents his portraits, even
in etching, from possessing the slightest interest ; —
hard, clear work, with no suspicion of trick about
them ; they are wonderfully drawn, and manly
and simple in execution ; but they are not
Manning, or Gambetta, or whoever it may chance
to be, but etchings of heads by Legros. In no
sense of the word is Legros a popular painter,
and he never could be popular. He looks
habitually in his pictures on the grey side of life ;
its miseries and struggles attract him rather than
its sunshine and gay dresses; and, indeed, he may
almost be said to form the exact antitype of
Tissot, representing the inward miseries, as the
latter does the outward attractions, of civilisation.
Hayes, T^ DWIN HAYES' seascapes are remarkable
-*— ' for their splendid draughtsmanship of boats
and shipping, their studied composition, the
somewhat conventional form of his waves, and
the grey freshness of his atmosphere. An old
fashioned painter this, no doubt, lacking much

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 157
of modern scientific accuracy ; working, too, to a
great extent on recipe, and after long practice,
seeing all scenes too much through the same spec
tacles, but with much to be said for his work. It
is manly and strong, and — best merit of all in a
picture — it is pictorial. This was the secret of
many an early landscape painter's pleasantness
and power. They not only painted well, but they
painted easily, and they produced works which,
despite innumerable errors, were pictures, not
bits of pictures.

¦R. LONG can never get down below the '^ong.
skin, so to speak, of his subject ; he
gives us a coloured superficies, representing this
or that scene, and we straightway say " How
very nicely coloured this superficies is ! " But
no one ever cares the least for the action of the
figures so represented. The ancients did not
indulge in fashion plates ; but if they had, they
would have been little different to Mr. Long's
paintings, save that they could scarcely have
possessed the same quantity of minute detail.
Mr. Long's work, in fact, though that of a

158 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
painstaking, conscientious artist, lacks the first
elements of pictorial interest. His large beauties
of Jewish and Assyrian types possess no whit
of interest, for they owe their origin to no
conception of the artist which imperiously de
manded embodiment, but are simply lay figures
on which to hang his qualities of antiquarian
research and careful painting. The one excuse
that could exist for these gigantic pictures of
bygone times, would be if their execution were
due to an intense desire on the part of the artist
to represent some scene which he had vividly
conceived, and which he felt to possess more
of beauty and interest than anything of ordinary
occurrence. If this truth were clearly perceived by
artist and public there would be an end of these
lifeless reproductions of an unfelt antiquity. It
seems ungracious to find fault with works which
display so much elaboration and patience. But
in truth, on looking at Mr. Long's pictures, one
is reminded of King James's retort to his old
Scotch nurse, when she preferred an impossible
request for her son's advancement : " I'll mak'
him a baronet if you like, Lucky, but the De'il
himsel' canna mak' him a gentleman." So one

SENTENTI.S; ARTIS. 159
feels about Mr. Long — that the Academy may
have made him an R.A., but that no number of
Academies can ever make him an artist.

M

R. GREGORY does not care what he Mr. Gregory.
paints, or how he paints, or what you

think of it ; and the result is naturally almost
an insult to the looker-on ; but the " stuff " is
there. Insolent, eccentric, and violent, genius
stripped of every attractive quality, and appar
ently almost despised by its possessor, but genius
still- Even the light that led astray
¦Was light from heaven.

S IGNOR COSTA'S work is in one quality Signer
1 • 11-11 Costa.
which it possesses extremely like the
works of ancient art, and that is in its perfect
exemption from haste. It has a placidity which
is born neither of dulness nor of indifference, but
rather of the serenity of power, and apparently of
a life at ease with itself. It seems like the work
of a happy man, whose art is a joy to him rather

160 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
than a perpetual striving after the impossible — of
one who lives not so much above or below, as
removed from the life of the present day ; and
who looks at the individual joys and sorrows
round him with the passionless perception of a
god, rather than the painful sympathy of a fellow-
creature. This is at once his strength and his
weakness ; his strength, insomuch as it enables
him to concentrate his energies on giving an
atmosphere of beauty to all his works, and pre
vents him from introducing, and perhaps even
from seeing, discordant details ; his weakness,
because it hinders his pictures from having that
strain of real meaning which can only be given
by those who fight in the arena, instead of looking
down from the gallery. One grows weary some
times of his delicate iteration of pleasant things,
and turns with great relief to the few rougher and
stronger works, where Signor Costa has expressed
a sentiment of less sweetness. His art has a
reticence, a purity- of speech, and an absence of
all attempt at gorgeousness, which would be
ascetic, did it not take such evident delight in its
own form of sensuousness ; and one of its most
marked characteristics is a certain limitation of

SENTENTIvE ARTIS. 161
scale and impression, like that which we derive
sometimes from an old maid's speech. The
painter disdains many things, if " disdain " is not
too strong a word to apply to his gentle rejection,
which, like Fred. Vincy's look at the cold break
fast-table, shows " a polite forbearance from all
signs of disgust."
TT E can hardly be called a landscape painter Boyce.
¦*- -^ at all, though his work has always given
and will always give me the greatest pleasure. He
is a landscape miniaturist, and should never
paint save for the panel of some precious little
casket, which might be handed reverently round
for inspection, like a Limoges enamel or a Petitot
snuff-box. The slope of a meadow, the rough
stone wall and thatched roof of a barn ; a few
trees, some shining masses of foliage : these are
the subjects in which Boyce chiefly delights — and
these he renders with a peculiar charm.

H

ALF the interest of Mr. Bastian Lepage's Bastian Lepage's
work lies in the fact that his art strikes portraits.

us as being different from that of our own painters,

162 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
that his endeavours are bold and made in various
directions, and that he manages to give even to
his failures an air of having only failed because he
was trying to do so much. If there be such a
thing as the " beaute du diable " in a painter's
work, it is to be found in that of this artist. The
best ofhis early portraits were imitations, and very
good imitations, of Holbein. The features are
painted in the same smooth, even manner, the
details of dress and background are flat, quiet, and
yet elaborate, the whole face of the sitter has that
curiously flattened look familiar to. any one who
knows Holbein's work, and the whole picture is
painted with the very minimum of light and shade,
either in the figure or the background, the latter
of which is frequently entirely conventional. They
are not portraits which show penetration into the
sitter's character, like those of Watts, nor do they
bring the sitter prominently before us, as in the
works of Hall, and in a less degree, of Ouless. They
are not strong in design, quite the contrary ; nor do
they quite succeed in being works of colour, though
occasionally they are wonderfully delicate. They
are not large either in size or method, nor are
they bold in manner of work. Their chief merit

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 163
is a very peculiar one, inasmuch as it was one
(the principal one) of Holbein's merits, and is also
the great help of every caricaturist who has ever
lived. This is the power of individualising, so to
speak, the sitter and his garments, making the
latter part and parcel of the former's character.
Looked at on one side, this is great art, insomuch
as it brings out people's characters more vividly
than almost any other talent will do; but after all,
we do not get much more out of the portrait than
we should if it were a coloured photograph. It
seems as if M. Lepage has the power of suppressing
his own individuality entirely, and painting with
that of his sitter ; at least in no other way can one
explain the curious diversity of feeling which per
vades his portraits. It is hardly dramatic power
that he shows, for it never seems to take shape in
definite action ; but he manages to somehow rid
himself of all personal feeling, and to turn himself
into an artist's photographic apparatus.

T

HIS picture is a true man's work, struggling, Holman
failing, and succeeding in various ways "Triumph

and proportions, and certainly having in it that
M

of the In
nocents,'

164 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
firm impress of a human soul, that tendency to
struggle towards the light, which makes nearly
all sincere effort beautiful, despite its partial
failure. Every picture painted in this way, with
the utmost of the artist's strength, and the keenest
of the artist's emotions, results in a definite gain
to the world. In the best sense of the words, there
fore, many defects notwithstanding, this is a great
religious picture. It is great in its actual definite
achievement, its vivid, if not fine colour, its mastery
of natural fact, its successful presentation of its
subject, its originality of conception, its vigorous
drawing, and in the patient, unwearied skill and
thought which are evident in every tint and every
line. It is great because it is the record of a man's
endurance in high aims, and his conquest over
numberless difficulties ; it is great because it is
not produced from devotion to the idols of the
market, and in deference to popular favour. And
it is religious, not only in the consecration of its
subject, but because its artist has given every
power of his mind and body to do it justice, and
because every touch on its canvas owes its love
liness not only to the painter's skill, but to his
striving after fidelity to nature, man, and God.

M

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 165
R. BRETT'S sea-paintings are remarkable HenryMoore nnd

for their minute faithfulness to detail, Brett.
their wonderful clearness of atmosphere, their
sharp, unfaltering execution, their brilliancy of
light, and their general strength of effect. He
can paint a boulder sticking in the sand, till one
longs to pluck it out therefrom, or to sweep the
sand away from its base. He can make the waves
blaze in sunlight on his canvas, till the picture
almost seems to radiate light, rather than to
absorb it. He can paint a stretch of sea that has
something of the grand extent of the ocean itself
about it. But his works display a total want of
one element that nearly all great painters have
shown- in their pictures — the element of mystery.
Every one knows the trite reason for disliking
Lord Macaulay's writings — "he was so con
foundedly cocksure of everything." A sympa
thetic person finds something of the same
quality in Mr. Brett's pictures; he is, in the fullest
meaning of the term, "cocksure of everything."
There is nothing in nature he does not under
stand, there is little he cannot do; there are no
depths beyond his perception, no height beyond
his reach. He enjoys nature heartily, but some-
M 3

166 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
what in the same way that a schoolmaster
witnesses his pupils' performances in a Greek
play ; there is no mystery in the plot to him, the
most difficult "chorus" is "plain sailing." Even
so, one may fancy, does this artist sit down
with easel and paint-box before Dame Nature's
grandest efforts, saying to her with calm convic
tion, " Do your best, you can't surprise, or surpass
me." To go from Brett to Moore is like going'from
a treatise by Todhunter to a poem by Coleridge ;
an exchange of definite and accurate form, and
brilliant certainty of reasoning, for a shifting
panorama of half-defined forms and half-suggested
thoughts. It may be doubted what that extra
ordinary poet means by, say, Kubla Khan, but
not that he means something ; his feelings may
perchance be morbid and undefined, but, at least,
he feels. So it is with Moore. It is difficult to
say whether the terror or the mystery of the sea
appeals to him most strongly, but certainly his
habitual mood in painting, symbolises either one
or the other. His poetry is like that of the old
English alliterative poets, not to be explained by
rule or confined within the bonds of metre, but
ne\'ertheless genuine poetry. The defectiveness

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 167
of Mr. Moore's painting is as that of alliterative
verse —
Unkingly, unhappy, he went his ways homeward,
bears about the same relation to perfect poetry, as
Mr. Moore's works do to perfect painting. Beau
tiful, but occasionally formless — with much feel
ing, but grafted upon imperfect knowledge, and
met at every turn by the barrier of imperfect
technical skill — such are Mr. Moore's paintings of
the sea. But at least they always confess their
imperfection ; they confess a beyond which they
cannot attain. This criticism is true now, only
of Mr. Moore's earlier work, concerning which it
was written ; the painter has, at the present day,
overcome many of the deficiencies above noticed.

'npHE figures in Mr. Marks' pictures are Stacy
-*- instinct with life, and with a certain in
dividuality which he generally contrives to
portray. Not exactly art, and not exactly nature,
this painter's works occupy a place of their own
in that queer, debatable land in which life is a
series of comic incidents, or affords opportunities

168 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
for quaint representation. Mr. Marks is one
of those artists who, starting with high, if not
the highest, promise, have never advanced a
single step beyond it, and paint no better to-day
than when they first roused Academic admiration
twenty-five years ago. His pictures always seem
something like Dickens's books; they say," Come,
and laugh with me at these people I'll show
you " ; but the laughter leads to nothing, and
leaves us just where we were before.

LinfoT" QI^ JAMES LINTON'S work shows a quaHty
^^ very rare in English contemporary painting,
and that is the dignity of the painter's aim. He
may be wrong in considering that the impersonal
and undramatic style of art of which he produces
so many examples is the best form, but there can
be no question that in so thinking he surrenders
boldly all mean methods of attractiveness — that
he gives up almost all chance of vulgar popu
larity ; and that by relying entirely upon the
power of his artistic skill, he takes up a position
which, if he is successful at all, will render his
success as certain five hundred years hence as it

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 169
is now. The difference between painting and
smudging is very commonly lost sight of by the
public, but here, at least, is a painter who aims
at the most perfect technique which he can
obtain, who bases his work upon that of the old
Italian and Spanish masters, and who does
actually succeed in giving us something not alto
gether unworthy of such an ideal. Mr. Linton's
great praise is that at a period when art in
England has become almost a matter of com
merce, when the best of our painters have fallen
completely under the influence of this commercial
spirit, he has had the^strength to rise superior to
the temptation to spoil his art in order to fill his
pockets. Be this work of Mr. Linton's good, bad,
or indifferent, it is at least the best which he could
do. There is a transparent honesty of intention
about it ; it demands serious consideration if
only because of its freedom from trick, and
its deliberate and long sustained endeavour.
Possibly, we say to ourselves as we look
round the gallery, this is the work of a man
whose current of imaginative life runs slowly.
These knights in armour, and priests in vest
ments, and princes in robes of honour, and

170 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
long - limbed damsels in cashmere and bro
cade, are but half alive ; their creation has
been arrested almost at the sea-anemone point.
There is in truth a lack of individuality in most
of these figures, almost like that which we find
after death in the face of one whom we have
known and loved. And it is, perhaps, this lack
of personality which even more than the absence
of cheap modern sentiment has made most people
pass by Mr. Linton's work with comparatively
little attention. The artist has fallen into a
strange error — an error so strange, that merely to
state it appears to us to be sufficient to ensure its
recognition. He has fancied that great painting
in the past owed everything to its form and
nothing to its spirit. He has thought that
because the works of these old masters were so
technically perfect, the whole secret of art lay in
technical perfection. He might as well have
fancied that scholarship was all that was
necessary to write a poem. Art is like a creed ;
it lives, despite every absurd and incongruous
element, while its followers believe in it ; it dies,
despite every improvement, when that belief fades
away. A picture is not a pudding, in which so

SENTENTI^E ARTIS. 171
many ingredients, mixed with care, produce the
required result ; it is much more like the seed
which you put in the ground, having carefully
prepared the place for its reception, and dig
about it and water it, and then, as Ruskin once
said, " God sends the rain and the sunshine ; and
in good time, if you are lucky, you get your
picture or your artist."

T

HERE is a curious defect in most English English
war paintings — the utter absence of all painting.

military spirit. They have no grasp of the
situation as a whole, but are made up of
individual details and incidents, correct in them
selves, but as powerless to represent the spirit
of war as it would be to make a Napoleon
out of all his generals. Besides the reticence,
the parochialism of English art, is opposed
to any attempt to reproduce the ghastly inner
life of battle and suffering. We like to have
our conflicts painted with as little reminder of
their real nature as possible, and so we get from

172 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
our artists a sort of Easter Monday warfare, such
as Mr. Crofts shows us, or a sentimental rendering
of special incidents, such as made Miss Thompson
famous. It is impossible, therefore, to care very
greatly for Mr. Crofts' compositions, accurate and
painstaking though they be. They are not of the
essence of the subject, and it is one which must
be represented in essentials, if it is to attract us at
all. There is no personality about the actors in
his incidents ; the various figures have as little
life as the figures in a panorama or the characters
in a young lady's novel ; though they are wounded,
we do not care for their suffering ; though they
are conquering, we do not share their victory.
Mrs. Butler's art is chiefly deserving of commen
dation for the amount of life in the action of her
horses. She is in other ways uncertain, senti
mental, and frequently even clap-trap ; but she
can paint the action and the spirit of a horse and
its rider with great ability. Looked at as repre
sentative of war, her pictures are simply futile :
they are coups de theatre from beginning to end ;
looked at as pictoral renderings of purely emotional
feeling connected with war, they have considerable
truth. The vein of sentiment they disclose is thin

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 173
but genuine ; it is surface gold and needs but little
washing. Perhaps, on the whole, the moral and
meaning of such painting are more adapted to
" Miss Skimperton's Academy for young ladies "
than they are for men. We cannot quite believe
in these renderings of the most painful facts of
civilisation.

THE defects which appear to be inseparable The Scotch
school,
from the works of the Scotch school, are
coarseness and lack of meaning. In almost all
the pictures of the Scotch painters of to-day, there
is to be found a facility of rendering landscapes up
to a certain point, and an utter inability to go any
farther. Looking at their works, one sees not the
compositions of men who are struggling intensely
hard with infinite beauty, but rather those of
artists whose souls have grown so dead to all the
finer shades of loveliness, that their hand is able to
produce with the greatest ease everything of which
their heart approves. Their painting is fresh and
bright, and at first sight, perhaps, even pleasing,

174 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
with the freshness and brightness of a sketch by a
master-hand ; but once try and get behind the first
vivid impression of sunshine, or shadow, or inci
dent which the work portrays — and behold, you
find — nothing. The evil done by the attractive
scene-painting qualities of the Scotch artists (men
of great power and ability in a thoroughly tricky
and unsafe way) has been very great, for it has
substituted, at all events for the time, the habit of
painting little brilliant, semi-theatrical effects, for
that of painting nature as a whole. Compare the
works, for instance, of Messrs. Peter Graham and
MacWhirter with that of any of our earlier land
scape painters, such as De Wint, or Cox, or
Turner, and you will find that one of the greatest
differences lies in the range of vision. The
old English artists, whether they painted sun or
shade, wind or rain, almost invariably opened out
to the spectator a series of atmospheric planes, so
numerous and so deftly depicted, as to be some
times (as in the case of Turner) practically infinite.
The Scotch schools, on the other hand, almost
invariably arrange their landscapes much in the
same manner as a stage manager groups his
actors — the principals first, and the rest nowhere.

SENTENTI.^ ARTIS. 175
The ability of these artists, great as it is, has
taken the direction of one special point in the
landscape, has been impressed by that, and has
failed to perceive the subordinate matters which
are necessary to the composition of a great
landscape. And this is the real reason for their
popularity — because it is within everyone's capa
city to perceive the beauty and striking effect
of sunlight and shadow, say, upon a patch of
moorland or the side of a mountain ; but it
needs close acquaintance with both nature and art
to appreciate the truth and beauty of landscape
which deals with nature as a whole, and which
possesses something of the infinity of beauty with
which atmosphere and sunlight can surround even
the commonest scene.

TO dwellers in the noise and bustle of London, The idyllic
. . quality of
amongst the thousand jealousies, enmities. Mason's
and falsities of Metropolitan life, there is some
thing inexpressibly refreshing in these pictures of
an uncomplicated, unthoughtful, rustic world. We
ask ourselves with pleasure which is " almost

176 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
pain " — Do people really live such lives as these,
deep in the heart of the country ? are there really
lanes down which wander at twilight hand-in-hand
the girls of the village, singing the "Evening
hymn," or where the shy lovers linger, amid the
shadows and brightness of the " Harvest moon " ?
Mr. Mason takes us to Arcadia; that is his power,
and his secret is that his Arcadia is not too remote,
nor too impossible. If his peasants are more simple,
more graceful, and more poetic than experience
teaches us, they are at least not so in any conven
tional manner ; they do not ape the graces of the
" garish town," they .borrow no sham sentiment,
and are indebted to no Sunday-school teacher.
Jn truth, they are just a little too sympathetic and
graceful for the average, but seen, as he shows
them to us, in the twilight, we can almost believe
in their existence ; they are, at all events, such as.
they should be, if not such as they are. And of
one thing we may at least be proud, that the work
is in its essentials thoroughly English. Something
of beauty may have been gained by the painter
during his stay in Italy, some flow of robe, or twist
of handkerchief may remind us of the Campagna,
but the atmosphere of the painter's work is wholly

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 177
and entirely that of his country. His pictures are
little colour-cameos of English life, in which,
through the crust of ignorance and superficial
ugliness, the painter has penetrated to the fact
that our skies, fields, and trees are still as beauti
ful, and the sports and labours of our people to
day as poetical as any that exist " across the
sea," or that can be found in former years.
All honour to him that in a short artistic life he
preached so hopeful a gospel ; we have enough
pessimists in art to render it very necessary.
Here at least is something in painting which
savours neither of the boulevard nor the casino,
but is as fresh as the air on the Sussex Downs,
and as national as a Jingo poem.

T

HE taste of the time has changed; amuse- Art of
Spain and
ment has taken the place of pleasure ; Italy.

for instance, ten people will go to laugh at
" H.M.S. Pinafore" for one who will care to see
Irving's " Hamlet." I grant you, too, that the
artists are scarcely responsible for this change of

178 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
feeling (though I believe they have had their
share in producing it), but I still say they are to
blame, and more to blame in Italy and Spain
than in any other countries ; they have fallen
from a greater height to a lower depth. The real
treasures of mankind are few in number, and of
one of these, artists are the guardians. Directly
they cease to be leaders of popular feeling (or, in
certain times, protestors against it), directly they
do but become the mouthpiece through which
the hollow public bawl, their mission is lost,
their duty is neglected, and their skill is of no
avail. And this is, indeed, the case with Spain
and Italy at the present day ; they have lent
themselves to the degradation of art, with so
much success, that they have absolutely destroyed
it in its most congenial sphere. The Italian
peasant is a picture, and the Spanish sailor,
brigand, bull-fighter, is an artist by nature, if
only in the way he flings his nets across his
shoulder, or ties his scarf around his waist ; but
the art of these countries is the most intolerable
mass of false colouring and affected sentiment,
which I believe the world has ever seen ; at all
events, I know of no parallel to it. Fortuny was

SENTENTIvE ARTIS. 179
probably as original a genius as any that the world
has ever known, and no less so in the shortcomings
than in the successes of his work. With a power
of drawing detail as marvellous in its way as
that of Meissonier — nay, really more marvellous,
because attained seemingly without effort— he
could, nevertheless, habitually leave at least half
of his work hardly begun. With a power and
ease of composition, which I have never seen
equalled amongst modern painters, he habitually
disdained to compose at all, and threw his figures
together with an insolence of neglect that can
hardly be expressed in words. There would be —
as, for instance, in his picture of the Alhambra^ —
a little bit glowing like a jewel in the middle of
the picture, finished with the most delicate
minuteness, and all around it a bare plastered
wall and paved floor, destitute alike of interest
and beauty. He would paint a woman's figure
with such delicacy of contour and light and
shade as hardly to be surpassable, and he would
surround it with a mass of coarsely daubed dull
green paint, representative of absolutely nothing.
There is a picture by him of a Bedouin Arab on a
horse, against a white wall ; man and horse

180 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
certainly not more than four inches high, in
which every detail of horse and man is rendered
with a fidelfty, and yet a breadth, which, as I
have said above, can only be compared to that of
Meissonier, without the labour. That is the great
attractiveness of the man's work, it looks so easy.
It is hard to persuade oneself that anyone
could not produce similar results. Another very
peculiar characteristic of it is its almost perfect
use of bright colour. Sense of the inmost beauty of
colour (in gradation of tint), Fortuny, I believe,
had little or none ; but it seems to have been
positively impossible for him to use wrong colour
in combination. He puts the brightest of all
bright tints together— azure against emerald and
gold against rose — he heaps them one upon
the other in a reckless prodigality of strength —
and yet he is invariably justified by the result.
To me, these pictures of his (and I happen to
have had the opportunity of living in the same
house with a very celebrated one for several
years, during which time I studied it thoroughly)
are stupefying in their contradiction to all my
preconceived notions of art, and I can compare
them with nothing that existed previously. That

SEN'TENTI^ ARTIS. 181
the man, despite his genius, was all wrong
with himself and his art, I do not think any
one would doubt for a moment; but as to
referring his work to predecessors and a school, I
cannot do it. The effect of this work on the mind
of the Italian and Spanish artists seems to have
been almost immediate : probably followed di
rectly on its recognition in Paris, where the
artist's paintings sprang at once into extraordinary
popularity. Always ready for the eccentric and
the bizarre, the style of Fortuny was the very
one to captivate the French mind ; and to this
day his reputation is greatest in Paris. But the
Italian and Spanish artists saw simply the facility
and beauty of the work — saw the perfect mastery
over bright colour, attained apparently without
effort, and with little labour ; saw that if colour
could be so manipulated, the subject-matter of
the picture was of but little importance ; and
that if they could master the secret of the work,
they might go on producing ad infinitum, without
the exercise of thought ; and so, missing in their
narrow interpretation what was undoubtedly the
fact, that Fortuny's genius was great, and his
pictures wonderful, not because of his method, but
N 2

182 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
in spite of it, they set themselves deliberately to
work to copy his eccentricities, in the hope of
sharing his fame. Such is an exceedingly weak
and imperfect, but I believe in the main correct,
view of the rise of the Fortuny school in painting,
that school which at present includes all the more
popular artists of Italy and Spain. I do not know
how to bring the style of the pictures vividly home
to you. Try to imagine a world where there is
no sunlight or shade, but .on everything a ghastly
glare (such as the gas companies tell us is the
result of the electric light), and then try to
imagine crowds of people in dresses of the most
varied hues, moving rapidly about, intent on
nothing. Banish from their faces every trace of
emotion, nobility, or thought ; fill in the back
ground with emerald trees, azure sky, and clouds
of dust, and then you will have a typical picture
of this school. It is the old story of Croesus,
after all ; the artists have gained their wish, the
only thing wanting to complete their triumph was
the one essential that they never thought of
acquiring. They have produced Fortunys by the
dozen, by the thousand ; but they are Fortunys
only in their errors. The method and the trick

SENTENTI.^ ARTIS. 183
have been learnt more or less successfully, but
the light of genius which redeemed them both, is
for ever wanting.

EVEN we English, with our stolid intention Englishand
of painting what we see, our national re- German
art.
ticence, and our blind belief in the beauty of our
own country and its social customs, are perhaps
nearer the artistic goal than the Germans. At
least, all our great pictures are not produced by
an elaborate quasi-scientific process ; our painting
may be — nay, it is — dull ; it is but rarely pedantic.
The modern oil paintings and frescoes at Munich,
Diisseldorf, and Berlin, are such as could only
have proceeded from a nation which cultivates the
scientific as opposed to the artistic spirit; the
ease and pleasantness of art are for the most part
banished from German painting, over which every
where spreads darkly the shadow of the school
master.

B

URNE-JONES' pictures are not unwhole- Bume-jfones.
some, save for those who take them for

guides to the right aims of life, who admire

184 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
their moral and intellectual defects as well as
their artistic virtues. These designs are per
fectly pure in intention, and almost perfectly
beautiful ; but there can be no doubt that there
runs through all of them a feeling of unsatisfied
longing, a sort of atmosphere of — " Come, let us
take hands, and look kindly upon one another, for
life is short and death is near, and little is worth
the doing." It is good that in a civilisation like
ours, where we are surrounded by scientific and
sanitary ugliness of manifold descriptions, there
should suddenly spring forth an artist whose
whole work is suffused with a beauty almost
painful in its intensity ; but it is bad, bad to the
core, that the weary longing and languid sweet
ness of these flower-like faces, should ever be
mistaken for the expression that is fitting for a
man or woman, or as the reflection of the thoughts
by which a life should be shaped.

The Salon HpHE chief contrast between the Salon and
and the I
Academy. -*- the Academy is this — that the former
with all its errors, which are very numerous and
very great, is still the work of men who have in

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 185
their hearts the right feeling for art, even when
they fail to grasp its expression ; and the second
is the work of those who do not in their hearts
care for art or understand its power. And in
each case the real moving agency is the way
in which the nation thinks, for it is the nation
which moves the artists as well as produces
them ; and you can no more have a body of good
artists when all right feeling for art has been lost,
or is yet unborn in the hearts of the people, than
you can have fruit and flowers from a tree, without
the sun and air which nourish its growth.

William

TTTTY was, at his highest, the finest flesh
-*— ' painter who has lived since the time of
Titian, besides being a great colourist. He was an
artist in whom the artistic faculty was so strongly
developed, that even in his most careless and
sloppy work (and he could be more careless and
more sloppy, when he tried, than even Rubens
himself), there is that redeeming quality of fine
art, which somehow, Mr. Ruskin notwithstanding,
justifies any work. One looks at Etty's pictures
and says, " Yes, it's a bad subject, and it's vulgarly

186 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
treated; there's not a trace in it of the painter
having thought anything about the meaning of his
subject, or having striven to endow it with any
ideal qualities; but, nevertheless, there is on the
work of this vulgar, reckless painter, the genuine
stamp. This artistic coin, however battered and
defaced, came originally from the mint of genius."
George ' I ''HERE is in England still living one genuine
Tin- I
worth's -L workman sculptor, who occupies very much
sculpture, the same social place as he might have done
centuries ago in Niirnberg or Verona. An artist
of definite and unmistakable genius, full of ener
getic action and individual expression, he remains
a simple workman at some Lambeth pottery works,
without the slightest desire to become known as a
fashionable artist. Visitors to the Royal Academy
may have occasionally noticed in the hall where
are the turnstiles and the programmes, some of
this man's work. Compositions in high relief of
many figures — always scriptural in their subjects,
and very rough and realistic in their treatment —
they are, perhaps, chiefly remarkable for the spirit
of dogmatic and clearly defined belief which they
betray. Those who are acquainted with the work

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 187
of the early German sculptors will recognise at
once the similar spirit which animates Tinworth's
designs — the boldness, simplicity, and actuality
of the compositions being identical in both cases.
Tinworth is, no doubt, a genuine and talented
artist, but he is an anomaly at the present time.
A sculptor who is content to remain a workman ;
an artist who tries to make his art expressive of
vital truths ; a man who believes in his religion
with the simplicity of a child and the energy of a
fanatic ; all of these are strange qualities to-day,
and, perhaps, in some way fatal ones, at least for
the possessor's success in his artistic development.
His very virtues will probably prevent him carrying
his work any farther than he does at present ; if it
became more perfect it would become absurd ; it
is only while it remains childlike in its execution
that we can condone its simplicity of thought and its
frankness of expression. It is a sort of Dr. Watts's
hymn in clay, and would never bear elaboration.

T

HE first thing that strikes a visitor to a Foreign
1 1. • 1 r galleries.
French gallery, is the amount of art, and

the deficiency of beauty, in the mass of the works.
In a German exhibition, it is the industry and the

188 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
knowledge which are evident, while both the art
and the beauty are deficient. In Italy and Spain,
again, we have a glittering outside splendour,
dashed on with apparent power and real reckless
ness, which is productive of an almost painful
impression, much as if one were to see an actor's
robes flung hastily over a dissecting-room table.
When, however, one goes into an English gallery
now-a-days, the fact that strikes one most, amidst
many discordant notes, is the ignorant, blind,
pathetic, but still most real, striving after beauty —
or if beauty be too strong a word to use in this
connection, let us call it "prettiness" — which our
countrymen seek. The Englishman does want to
make a pretty picture ; the Frenchman knows he
will succeed in making a picture, and does not
care whether it is pretty or not ; and the German
has learnt how to make pictures, and, given such
and such elements, thinks that the picture must
result — only it does not, sometimes.

The im- T T is easy to sneer, and perhaps even easier
pression- I •'
ists. -L (-0 laugh, at many of the pictures of this
new school ; indeed, an unconscious humour is
perhaps one of its most salient characteristics.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 189
But it is worth noting that when one has exhausted
nearly all available terms of reproach upon the
pictures in question ; when one has called them
(and with perfect justice) wilfully exaggerated,
insolent, and artificial ; when one has derided the
mud which they give us for colour, and the
darkness which they substitute for sunshine ; when
one has scorned their lack of motive, lack of clear
ness, and lack of defined drawing, there is still one
great merit left, and that is, that they are not dull.
They may be artistically vicious, but they are not
stupid ; they may be ugly, but they are not
conventionally pretty ; they may be cheap and
tricky, but they are not turned out entirely "to
order," in the same old lines as thousands of
others. This goes for a good deal. And indeed,
were the average of English painting to be fairly
represented by the " Ask Mamma " and " Don't
tease Baby " class of pictures, the temptation
would be considerable to seek for an artistic
salvation in these grimy and shadowy regions. But
their vital deficiency lies in their habitual disregard
of delicacy both in form and colour, and in their
substituting for this a dramatic quality which is
really rather literary than artistic.

190 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

Mrs. T OOK at which one of Mrs. Butler's pictures
Butler. I
¦^^ you will, and you will find the same
amount of vivid picturesque rendering of incident,
the same power of depicting smartly momentary
action, the same inability to grasp the meaning of
war as a whole. Her one quality is essentially
limited to the delineation of one sentimental
phase of some combat, and whenever she tries to
paint anything in which the whole scope of the
fight has to be rendered she invariably fails.
Rightly understood, this clever painter is not a
battle painter at all, but a delineator of the entou
rage of battles ; of the glee with which English
lads fought at Waterloo, of the sorrowful effect of
war as seen on the morning after the battle, and
so on through the whole range of picturesque or
emotional incidents which she can fancy as ac
companying war. Her power is individual and
personal rather than general ; her incidents are
her pictures, rather than accessories to them.

Carl npHE great qualities of Mr. Carl Haag's work
Haag. I
-¦- may be summed up briefly in the follow
ing : — Keenness of sight, certainty and accuracy

SENTENTIyE ARTIS. 191
of hand, and a high, though not the highest, sense
of the beauty of colour. He may be called the
Tadema of the desert ; for he has done for the
Arabs, temples, and sands of Egypt .and Asia
Minor, an almost similar work to that which
Tadema has done for Rome of the decadence.
He has made desert life, both in its warlike and
peaceful phases, live again for modern Cockneys,
in just the same way as Alma Tadema has repro
duced the life of Rome ; and he has strangely
failed, just where Tadema himself has failed, in
endowing any of his characters or scenes with
more than a superficial vitality, and more than a
conventional interest. His figures — Armenian
priests, Nubian camel-boys, or Anglo-Saxon
heroes — are wonderfully executed, are, indeed,
almost marvellous in their infinity of detail and
patience of work, but, artistically, they are not
worth the paper they are painted upon. They
have neither sympathy nor insight, nor grace nor
interest. They are not alive ; they never could
live. But get Mr. Carl Haag away from his
studio, with its Eastern trappings and artistic
accessories, and set him down with his face to a
ruin and his back to a sand-heap, an5'where you

192 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
like from Palmyra to the Parthenon, and he will
do such a drawing for you as is really hard to
characteriseforbeauty, completeness, and strength.

Watts. J SAY that Watts is true to the spirit of Greek
-*- art, rather than to its form, and I can
well fancy that in this many people will
utterly disagree with me. Nor can I convince
them. The intensely religious character of the
best Greek art is well 'known, but I doubt whether
any people have thought of the predominance of
this in Watts's painting. Yet it is evident enough,
only its religion seems not to be fixed upon a solid
foundation of belief, but to be desirous to find out
some point on which all may agree. Such, if I
mistake not, was the meaning of the painter's
large work, " Dedicated to all the Churches."
And to me, much of the unconscious beauty of
Greek art is reproduced in Watts's work. The
picture, for instance, of the Dove's Flight from the
Ark, exhibited some years since at the Royal
Academy, had this element, and it appears in
nearly all the artist's portraits. Again, two of the
most striking elements in Greek art are simplicity.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 193
both in aim and in the means employed to produce
the desired effect, and of both these elements
Watts's works have a large share. Lastly, there
is one idea which runs throughout Greek art, and
may be traced most plainly in all their poetry — that'
is, the inevitableness of fate, the comparative insig
nificance and impotence of human passions when
confronted by " necessity." In many of Watts's
pictures is this thought expressed, notably in the
two which have been exhibited in the Grosvenor
Gallery — " Love and Death " and " Time and
Death." For these, and many other reasons
which I need not further dwell upon, I call Watts
a painter of the spirit as opposed to the form of
classical art, though I do not seek to conceal the
fact that the underlying sadness of his work has
no parallel in that of ancient times. As much as
is possible to us, in these later times of change,
of the simplicity and earnestness of Grecian work,
has been preserved by this painter. English
lovers of art seem never to have clearly under
stood how sternly limited were the qualities of
Mr. Watts's painting. Now, rightly understood,
this master has never been a master at all in the
science of painting, but has won his way over the

194 SENTENTI.^ ARTIS.
stubborn material -in which he worked, step by
step, having to fight hard for each individual
success, failing often, yet upheld by the strong
consciousness of something within him which was
above failure — something which made even his
failures precious. More than any other artist of
these modern days (except, perhaps, the too early-
dying Pinwell) have there been about Mr. Watts's
pictures, the traces of the imperfections as well as
the gifts of genius. Over his work " shadows
of the prison-house " have lingered still ; his best
friends have never felt certain whether the next
picture from his easel would be a success or a
failure. A great draughtsman, whose power is
often hidden by the imperfection of his painting ;
a colourist by divine gift, who frequently changes
the colour of his picture, and yet does not get it
to his liking after all ; a poet whose conceptions
seem to grow the more confused the more atten
tion they receive ; a portrait painter, whose power
of penetration seems to depend exclusively upon
sympathy with his subject, and which occasionally
deserts him altogether, Mr. Watts presents
us with the almost unique spectacle of a first-
rate artist whose powers can never be properly

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 195
estimated, because they contradict themselves.
What he might have been under proper training,
had there been such a thing in England as
training for an oil painter, one can hardly imagine.
What he is, one hardly knows.

LOOKING at Mr. Richmond's men and Mr. Rich-
mond s
women, and their anatomical develop- classical
pictures.
ments, produces a feeling of thankfulness that in
the present day the abdominal muscles are covered
by at least two layers of cloth and linen, and no
longer withdraw our attention from more interest
ing concerns. In much the same way in which an
ambitious tradesman combines carefully three or
four Latin and Greek words into one unutterably
hideous compound signifying hair-oil or tooth-
powder, so does Mr. Richmond, with great care
and industry, take all the muscles, veins, limbs,
&c., of a human being, and build up in front of us
something — not a man. His compositions are
hardly pictures, can hardly grow to be pictures with
any amount of added finish ; they are to pictures
much what a Spanish olla is to a dinner at Vefours
— something, that is, which has all the elements

196 SENTENTIvE ARTIS.
of good eating, but cast into the pot anyhow,
stewed to rags, and then a little rancid oil
poured over the whole. Mr. Richmond is a clever
young artist who is always trying mad experi
ments ; whereas, if he would employ his time in
learning to paint he might do really good work.
At present his oscillation between different styles,
and his contentment with his own performances,
prevent him from being anything but a clever
trifler. Since this was written, this artist has
practically abandoned his large classical works
and taken to portrait painting, in which he has
achieved considerable success.

Turner's T T will be found, on examining Turner's works,
colours. I
-*- that they are almost without exception
founded upon the three primary colours. He
either paints a blue picture, a yellow picture,
or a red picture. In the blue pictures, he rarely
admits any brighter colours than a yellowish or
reddish-brown, in the yellow and red pictures, his
foliage is almost invariably bluish-grey and dull
blackish-green. And, secondly, he does not use
bright green, because he does not need it in any

SENTENTI/E ARTIS. 197
way, for, in nine cases out of ten, in Turner's fore
ground foliage the colours used are yellow and
brown, and these graduate with the blue of the
distance, through pale, greenish -yellow, and
greenish-grey. The yellow, red, and blue he
would have somehow in his landscape, and if
he could get them in no other way, he did it by
making his trees, figures, grass, and rocks the
first two colours, and his distance, or sky, the
third.

A 1 7ILLIAM POOLE had rather a curious Poole.
' ' reputation in his lifetime ; probably his
work puzzled the public, from its unlikeness to
the general run of the paintings with which it
was shown. The pictures which are annually
exhibited at the Royal Academy, consist, briefly
speaking, of three classes : one of costume, one
of domestic sentiment, and one of more or less
realistic landscape ; and to none of these did Poole
belong. He was a survivor of the old times when
there was " high " art and " low " art, and his
work smacked much of the style of Maclise and
Etty. Not that any likeness is intended to be
0 2

198 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
suggested between the works of these masters, of
whom one was probably the worst colourist (for a
painter of any repute) that the English school has
ever had, and the second was one of the best.
But Poole's work in some ways combined the
traditions of both men. He looked at his subjects
in a way which combined realism and tradition,
and in his earlier days it is probable that he chiefly
imitated Maclise. His chief glory was a strange
power of touching nature with a hand which
subdued her details to a special purpose, without
making them either conventional or untrue ; and
entwined with this, was a power of imparting a
touch of fairy influence to his landscapes, so that
every rock, tree, and cloud helped the suggestion
of "strange matters," and, as it were, smoothed
the way, for the introduction of supernatural or
fantastic figures. It is difficult to sum up his
place as a painter, because he worked in a depart
ment of art, that of imaginative landscape, which
scarcely a single living artist attempts — Albert
Goodwin is the only notable exception. As a figure
painter he was somewhat of a failure, and for very
simple reasons — his drawing, though careful, was
weak ; and very often bad ; and he had little, if

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 199
any, power of portraying character in the faces of
his characters; they are, almost without excep
tion, tame and spiritless, and lacking in individu
ality. But the power and dignity he lacked as a
painter of figures, he abundantly possessed in his
treatment of landscape ; and the expression and
poetry which we seek in vain from his prophets
and patriarchs, we find almost invariably in his
treatment of trees, cliffs, and valleys. Common
place in one direction, he was almost a genius
in another; and if he lighted his humanity with a
rushlight, he cast a splendid glow of the " light
that never was on sea or shore " over all his
landscape creations. This special praise belongs
to him, that having been elected to Academic
honours, he never faltered in his pursuit of the
highest art he could conceive, and that in a school
of painting, in which to attempt great things was,
and is, the rare exception.

T

HERE is in Palmer's work a curious naivete, Samuel
Palmer.

which seems sometimes to verge almost
upon childlikeness. A painter whose habit of mind
is evidently one of the most intense earnestness

200 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
and humilfty, he nevertheless treats and selects
his subjects with a daring indifference to the
possibility of their adequate representation, which
is of rare occurrence even with Turner himself.
No doubt he owed much to Claude, more to
Milton, and much also to his master, Linnell,
and it was "probably the influence of the latter that
gave to his work that charm of simplicity and joy
in natural things which is evident throughout his
paintings. For, though he walked with nature
much after the fashion of Blake — seeing the visible
universe only as a veil to the spiritual — he never,
like Blake, lost sight of that veil's beauty, nor ever
ceased to try and make it manifest. No doubt,
he too had visions of angels at every sunrise, and
dreamt of Greece and Syria, whenever the sun set
upon English meadows. But in whatever celestial
light he saw the grove and stream apparelled, he
still remembered that it was earth, not heaven,
that he was painting, and men, not spirits, that
he was painting for. It seems somewhat of a
contradiction to say that any pictures can echo
in form and colour, at one and the same time, the
splendid and somewhat involved picturesqueness of
Milton, and the straightforward simplicity of the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 201
English of the Bible'. And yet it is certainly
true of Mr. Palmer's best work, that both these
elements live therein side by side, along with a
style which is at once peculiar, gorgeous, and in
tricate, which rejoices in the most varied harmonies
of colour, and treats the various forms with which
it is concerned, from an idealistic point of view.

O IXTY or seventy years ago two influences ^"-^ "¦"-'^
'^^ were doing their best to ruin the art of
England, and these were the influences of the
romantic and the picturesque, which had practi
cally reigned supreme in England since the time
of Claude ; but, fortunately for art, their day was
over, and their fall was rendered certain by two
men who, within a very short period of each
other, made two important discoveries, or rather
re-discoveries. Joseph Mallord William Turner,
discovered that " the sun shone," and David Cox,
that "the wind blew." Strange as it may seem,
in a short time these simple natural phenomena,
which had existed unsuspected and yet plainly
evident during all periods of art, overthrew
the ruined castles, classical aqueducts, dancing

202 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
nymphs, and scowling brigands — banished them,
it is to be hoped, for ever, to that limbo " where
all dead things lie dead." Of course there was a
struggle, and a fierce one ; and the professors and
disciples of the old order said all manner of witty
and bitter things at the expense of those who
were foolish enough to believe that nature could
have a place in art. Nevertheless, Turner and
Cox, two single-minded, and fortunately very im
perturbable men, went on painting the sun, and
the wind, and the rain, in spite of ridicule
and neglect of their works, till at last popular
recognition came, and their opponents ceased to
trouble them.

B'i,ket ¦OIRKET FOSTER'S art was essentially a
Foster. i~^
-*-^ popular one, and rather modelled itself
upon the public taste, than strove to lead that
taste in any new direction. Its prototype may be
seen in the landscape annuals of the early part of
the century, and in the vignette frontispieces and
elaborate steel engravings which used to be an
indispensable accompaniment to every gift-book.
Not that Mr. Foster did not introduce into this

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 203
style of drawing and composition many new and
delightful qualities. On the contrary, it was his
introducing such new life into the matter that
helped to keep this special traditional form of com
position still alive. The peculiar charm of his work
for the public of some five-and-twenty years ago,
lay in the fact of its affording them an easy tran
sition between the old school and the new. For his
art partook almost equally of the characteristics of
both. Anyone who will take the trouble to com
pare Mr. Foster's river scenes with those of
Turner, or his sea scenes with those of Stanfield,
can hardly avoid being struck by the similarity in
style of composition that exists among so many
differences. It may be doubted whether there is
any living English artist who can rival in this
respect the work of this painter. His composition
is not only pleasant in its effect, but possesses an
ease which is very rare. Though artificial to the
last degree, it has much of the apparent careless
prodigality of nature and accident, and it is only
on a careful examination that we discover how
elaborately the figures have been grouped, the
incidents of the landscape chosen, the skies,
clouds, trees, and fields arranged, and the light

204 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
and shade selected for the purpose of concentrating
the picture. But, plainly speaking, Mr. Foster's
work is more attractive, than real in feeling.
His landscapes smile at one much in the same
way that Mr. Carker used to "flash his teeth"
at every fresh acquaintance, and perhaps con
tain an almost equal amount of insincerity.
They are too uniformly bright and pretty ; the
land looks like Kilmeny's land of thought,
where " the sun ever shone and the wind
never blew " ; the flowers are always in blossom,
the children in good spirits, the old women
at the cottage doors, have clean caps and
tidy aprons, the old men touch their hats to the
squire, and are innocent of tobacco and beer.
Even the bright beauty of the sky has a touch of
the same thinness of perception about it ; the
forms of the clouds are most delicate and varied,
but have no strength, no solidity, and no majesty;
the rain cloud ever falls with a sort of purple
luxuriance, as if Rimmel were raining Ess Bouquet
on a favourite actress. Mr. Foster's work will
not be judged by the special excellence of any one
of his pictures, or even of any group, but will be
estimated from the point of view of what he did

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 205
to encourage illustration for books, of a simple
and healthy, though superficial character. His
drawings are unsympathetic too, both from their
lack of contrast, and from their purely recording
character ; but they are neither ignorant nor inane,
and, as far as technical skill of hand can go, they
are thoroughly accomplished. The method of
painting is a curious one, of mingled body and
transparent colour, but it is carried out with really
marvellous skill, and the drawing which results
is, from its own point of view, equally excellent.
Really fine colour and really subtle drawing, are
not to be found in Mr. Foster's works, and could
hardly have been expected ; but the colour is as
delightful as mere prettiness and variety of tint
can make it, and the drawing is minute and
careful. The art shown in them is good and
intelligent workmanship, but it never quite rises
to the level of genius.

WHERE the essence of his subiect is Samuel
•¦ Prout.
beauty, Prout habitually fails ; where it
is picturesqueness, he almost invariably succeeds.
He is not a colourist, because he lacks the two

206 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
great requisites of nature which make an artist
a colourist — he neither rejoices in fulness of
colour, nor in its gradation. His sense of light
and shade is, in the masses of his pictures, both
delicate and true ; his lines are perfectly assured
and accurate to his intention ; last, but not least,
he loved what he painted, in a quiet, methodical
sort of way. He did not enter into the heart of
his subject, for he had but little feeling for the life
of the cities in which he worked ; his Venetians,
Frenchmen, and Bavarians are all much the
same, and only of equal significance in his
picture with the piled-up fruit of the market-place.
But he did feel that these old buildings were
beautiful, and ought to be drawn, and it is
quaintly pathetic to think that he was all his life
trying in vain to express his delight in them. In
vain, I say, for that is the key to Prout's work.
Simple, honest, and industrious, full of artistic
qualities of various sorts, there is yet absent from
it the vivifying element — it makes no definite
appeal to our sympathies. That there lived a
man who devoted his life to making interesting
pictorial notes in France, Germany, and Belgium ;
that he worked hard and well ; that he possessed.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 207
finally, if not by nature, a facility of draughts
manship little short of marvellous, and mastered
a method of expression marvellously fitted for the
subjects he chose — this is all that one can gather
from the works of Prout. One cannot say that any
light has been cast upon beauties which might
otherwise have been overlooked ; nor that the
real beauty of the subjects depicted has been
satisfactorily understood ; still less can one say
that Prout has brought home to us any ideal con
ception, or indeed that he thought any such
conceptions existed. "Inthe main," says Swin
burne, " we get out of every man what he has in
him to give." And, briefly put, all that Prout had
to give was a faithful but superficial record of the
more picturesque portions of mediaeval cities, and
his works are now chiefly valuable as records of
what those old buildings and unrestored fortresses
and cathedrals were like, half a century ago.

M

R. LAWSON'S landscapes, wherein do they Cecil
Lawson.
differ from those of contemporary painters?

What is the peculiar flavour, artistic, moral, or
mental, which they possess ? At this season.

208 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
similes drawn from eating and its results occur
most readily to our minds; and to choose the
simplest of them, it may perhaps be allowed me
to say that Mr. Lawson's landscapes smack of
indigestion. It is thirty or forty years since
Tennyson, putting an old truth in a pleasantly
new shape, said that —
Every man who walks the mead,
In bud, or blade, or bloom may find,
According as his humours lead,
A many suited to his mind.
But he never told us the other half of the problem,
which is, that for many people the bud, blade, and
bloom have no meaning at all, and that, for a good
proportion of others, the meaning is never
sufficiently recognised to produce a vivid im
pression. For these last, the web is tangled (as
George Eliot tells us in the passage which
describes Romola's meditation before her flight
from Florence) — "No radiant angel comes across
the gloom for them ; they never see angels, nor
hear perfectly clear messages." Of such was
Mr. Lawson, speaking of his artistic capacity ; a
man " who believed falsities as well as truths, and
did the wrong as well as the right"; a man of
capacity, too unregulated to be called talent.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 209
and hardly of sufficient quality to be styled
"genius"; of intuition, which just paused before it
became sympathy ; of great industry, which often
wasted itself in trivialities. In much of his work
we seem to hear the echo of some "clear message,"
and catch a last glimpse of the fleeting, " radiant
angel"; but before we can catch another sound or
sight, both have passed away. Will this, I
wonder, be thought an overstrained account of
the general impression conveyed by Mr. Lawson's
work ? A too " liberal adaptation " of a possible
fact ? If it be, I can only say that I know no
other way of describing the peculiar strength and
weakness of this artist, than by saying that he
was always seeing and seeking after truths which
he was not capable of fully delineating. Two
outside characteristics of his work, visible to any
one who looks at it even carelessly, are its grasp
of a landscape as a whole, and its curious ming
ling of ideality and realism. This is least of all the
painting which is suited to chromo-lithography.
Its delightful qualities depend upon very subtle
gradations of colour, and a certain mystery of im
pression, which would defy reproduction, except
perhaps in the most skilful line engraving.

210 SENTENTI.^ ARTIS.

''9^'?" "^TTHAT I chiefly gain from the designs of
Hunt. V V William Hunt, is the notion of a secure
life, fenced in from great perils, as it was debarred
from great aims ; narrowly but faithfully loving
the sweet country, which yet it had not breadth
of heart or intellect fully to understand ; only
rejoicing in what superficial brightness lay easily
to be perceived in the fresh faces of healthy boys
and girls — the varied hues of flower or fruit. It
is impossible to conceive this old water-colour
painter as of a man troubled with many doubts,
or subject to many passions ; or even as being, in
any ordinary sense of the word, of the temperament
of genius, unless indeed it be true, that genius is
only the power of taking infinite pains. In his
greatest work — as, for instance, the picture of the
listening stable-boy — there is no slightest hint of
any real insight into the nature of his subject, or
thorough sympathy with it. The work is glorious
in its mastery of broken colour, and the figure is
full of humour, but nothing more. If that stable-
boy ever had a moment when he was not laughing,
drinking, eating, or sleeping. Hunt never saw it,
nor does he give the spectator a notion of any
thing of the kind. So too with his still life

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 211
designs of fruit and fish, and bud and flower.
They are most exquisite in gradation, most
lovely in hue, and (generally, not always) most
natural in arrangement, but give no idea of any
prevalent feeling in the artist's mind with regard
to them — such as, for instance, can be traced
in the works of Fred. Walker, called " The Fish
Shop " and " The Cottage Garden." To sum up
Hunt's work, it is that of a patient, honourable,
but withal narrow-minded man, dwelling con
tentedly in one groove, and finding quiet satisfaction
in so doing ; probably getting up at the same time
every morning, and drinking the same glass of
gin and water every night ; never quarrelling with
his neighbours nor neglecting his duties ; one of
those, in fact, in whom the great strength of
England consists, who find it possible to " live
faithfully hidden lives."

T^E WINT mastered a certain sombre harmony D Wint.
-¦— ^ of tone and depth of colour, and to this
harmony and depth he surrendered ungrudgingly
the green fields, the skies, and the golden sunlight
of nature. Look where you will through De Wint's

212 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
work and you will look for a green field in vain.
Long stretches of calm water, with grey skies, and
perhaps some dull cattle or dark masses of
trees, make up the subjects of his pictures;
and it is noticeable that as, with Cox, the great
beauty of nature was to be found in rolling masses
of cloud and strong breezes, so De Wint finds it
in undisturbed peace. But despite this limi
tation, he was one of our very greatest land
scape painters. More thoroughly even than
Cox had he mastered the secret of unadorned
nature ; and he penetrated the beauty and signifi
cance of country life. In his work all trace of
the sham picturesque is sought in vain ; he sur
renders nothing to conventional prettiness. And
yet surely few other English painters have ever
produced pictures'which are so rightly to be called
beautiful, and it is notable that the feeling of the
dark expanses of moor and common, the farm
yards and shady lanes of his pictures, is more
akin in spirit to the conception of landscape
painting by the old masters, than in any other
modern artist's work. It is well to remember
that, with Linnell and Cox, he was not a member
of the Royal Academy.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 213
TT may be said of Stothard that it was stothard,
-^ beyond everything else his feeling for the
beautiful which carried his work through. He
painted execrably at the best of times, as far as
handicraft went ; and his drawing is frequently
little better than a caricature ; but in all his work
there is an exquisite sense of grace, and feeling for
beautiful things, which spreads over the entire
picture, and renders it delightful.

THERE is a considerable analogy to be found Foster and
Gilbert,
between the works of Mr. Birket Foster
and those of Sir John Gilbert. Both began their
career in a rather slack period of water-colour
art, the period, that is, when the old school of
Cox and De Wint had done its best work, and the
new school had not yet arisen. Both worked
chiefly for the wood-engravers ; and both did for
them, and for book illustration generally, thorough
" yeoman's service," for which English art will
always owe them a great deal. Both, too, were
splendidly " insular," in their subjects, and in their
sympathies ; and if Gilbert drew the burly baron,
his sweetheart, his men-at-arms, and his castle,
P 2

214 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Foster followed suit, and completed the picture
by painting the green lanes and fields, bright
skies, and leafy trees of — as yet — unmanufacturing
England. Both were optimists in their own ways,
and both were rather intense than wide in their
sympathies. For Gilbert, a man had a broad
back and strong arms, and a square seat on a
horse ; and a woman had a dark, lovely face, and
softly-curved limbs, and looked up into her pro
tector's face with gentle confidence. For Birket
Foster, a green field had so many details of
hedgerow, blades of grass, surrounding trees, and
a gate to let out the cows at ; and the oxen, and
sheep, and village children, and any other animals
that happened to pass that way, were all simple,
comprehensible, and thoroughly comprehended
quantities, which could be set down in black and
white, or in colours, as so many pounds of unkilled
meat, so many bundles of skins, so many qualities
of youth, health, innocence, ignorance, and pretti
ness. What difference lay between the two artists
in the mental aspect of their work, was chiefly in
the superior tender-heartedness of the figure-
painter, the presence in his work of a sort of
chivalrous feeling for weakness and strength, the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 215
protection necessary for the one and the right
use to be made of the other, which is missing
in the landscape artist. But the work of
both is founded upon the conception of nature
as a pretty, picturesque plaything ; and they
possess neither the rough truth of the old
school of water-colour painters, nor the thought
and delicate beauty of the new. No one who
knows what English men and English homes are
truly like, will believe in Birket Foster's cottages
and cottagers ; and no one now-a-days can care,
off the boards of Drury Lane Theatre, for Sir
John Gilbert's theatrical war.

TV yr R. BUNNEY was for many years resident in Mr. Bun-
Venice, and was originally induced to go to
Italy by the influence of Mr. Ruskin, in whose
college of St. George he had studied drawing.
After staying for some years in various parts of
Italy, Mr. Bunney settled himself at Venice, and
then for the remainder of his life painted the archi
tecture, the boats, and the aspects of sky and water,
which make Venice the strangest, and perhaps
the loveliest city in the world. The Venetians

216 SENTENTI^E ARTIS.
called him indifferently " The old man," or " The
painter wfth the big beard," and most English and
American tourists who went to Venice for any
time, became acquainted with the painter and his
work, and used him as a sort of unofficial guide
to those inner beauties of the city which are
scorned by " Bradshaw," and omitted by the
voracious and accurate, but somewhat irritating
" Baedeker." He was a kindly, courteous old man
(old before his time, for he looked seventy at least,
and was only fifty-five when he died), whose great
delight was to get someone to whom he could show
his favourite bits of architecture, and to whom he
could talk of Ruskin and Turner, the " Stones of
Venice," and the delight of getting up to paint the
sunrise ; which he told me he had done every
morning for ten years or so. There was some
thing almost idyllic in the manner he used to
wander about, sketchbook in hand, through the
rough, hurried Venetian life ; and if one rose
somewhat earlier than usual, and strolled into the
Piazza about five on a summer's morning, one was
pretty certain to find the old man sitting patiently
before his big canvas of St. Mark's, and adding
detail to detail, till the brain reeled at his industry

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 217
and patience. Not a little pathetic is it to think
that he lived to finish this, his great picture, but
died before it reached England for exhibition.

M

RS. ALLINGHAM exhibfts, as a rule, Mrs.Al-lingham.
small sunny landscapes, revelling in blue

skies, green fields, and golden corn-sheaves ; her
little figures are fitter for a world of poetry than
for this common work-a-day world, and clothed, as
are her landscapes, in the brightest hues that her
pencil can depict. As for her treatment, it is
delicate and minute to a fault, full of delicate
gradations and lovely colouring ; if it errs at all,
erring like Moore's poetry, on the side of over-
sweetness — cloying us, as it were, with beauties
of nature and life, till we feel as if it would be a
happy relief to stand under the gusty pines on
some dark winter's night, and listen while —
The hoary Channel
Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.

ALFRED PARSONS' work is the delicate Alfred Parsons.
work ot a strong man ; of one who does
not feel very much about his art save from its

218 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
technical side. But he has learnt his business ;
rare thing to be able to say of an English painter.
He knows the limits of art — at all events, the
limits of his own art — and does not seek to trans
cend them. Within these bounds his pencil works
happily, dexterously, and exquisitely. It is literally
true that wayside wood and flower have never
been drawn, even by the pre-Raphaelites, with
the mingled truth, grace, freedom, and artistic
feeling which Mr. Parsons habitually gives to them.

Vicat 1\ /f R. VICAT COLE'S idea of nature is one
c°^^- IVI 1 ¦ 1 11
¦*-'-^ which used to be very prevalent among
painters some fifty or sixty years ago. All the
old landscapes of that time are worked much on
the same lines as those of this artist ; all treated
and composed after a sort of recipe for picturesque
ness, such as an eloquent writer not long ago
suggested we had lost the secret of. Not a bit of
it. Mr. Cole has the secret and makes use it
freely, and marvellously well. His pictures are
always pretty and well composed and smoothly
painted, and what more would the most fastidious
person want ?

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 219
/'^ONCEIVE the martyrdom it must have been wnua
^--^ to one of Blake's temper, full of ardent
convictions, and assured of his mission to redeem
art, to have to earn his bread by engraving such
subjects as " H.R.H. the Princess Royal and her
four sisters at their morning amusements," or "A
lady in full dress," with another " in the most
fashionable undress now worn." For at one time
Blake's was almost the only voice which upheld
the true dignity and self-sufficiency of art. Hear
what he says in reference to Sir Joshua Reynolds'
" Dedication to the King." " Royal hberality ! " he
exclaims, "liberality! We want no liberality, we
want a fair price and a proportionate value, and a
general demand for art. Let not that nation
where less than ' nobility ' is the reward pretend
that art is encouraged by the nation. Art is first
in intellect, and ought to be first in nations."
Strong words these for an age of Royal High
nesses at their morning amusements, and general
court salve for all the ills of humanity ! Small
wonder that the court and the polite world
would have none of such a terribly plain speaker
of very unpleasant truths ; in whose drawings,
as in whose words, there was no trifling with

220 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
ornamental accessories. All Blake's design is
clear, sharp, energetic, and almost austere, telling
the story in its own way, without deference to
tradition or the feelings of the spectator. And it
is only when we come to realise its marvellous
expressiveness, its unequalled fertility of in
vention, and the way in which it always strikes
home to the heart of the matter, that we
realise its greatness. The meaning of the
designs is frequently involved to a degree, but
their execution and their decorative qualities are
absolutely unique in their frankness and force.
Whether it be worth while to enter again upon
the much vexed question of his sanity may
well be doubted. The world must get a more
satisfactory definition of madness and health
before that question can be settled. But it may
be noticed that in this man the eccentricity, mad
ness, or whatever it may be called, was consistent
with unsparing and persistent labour, and a quiet,
frugal life. If his visions did nothing else, they
consoled him amidst the world's neglect, and
while he was suffering under many an unmerited
insult.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 221
T ET US seek to estimate Landseer's true Landseer.
-* — ' place amongst animal painters. First
of all we see clearly, on thinking over his
pictures, that although he had great range as an
animal painter, he achieved by no means the same
success with every kind. Undoubtedly his dogs
and his stags are the achievements upon which
his enduring fame will last — "The Old Shepherd's
Chief Mourner" and " Dignity and Impudence,"
on the one hand, and " The Challenge," " The
Combat," and " The Sanctuary," on the other.
And of these, too, the dog pictures are certainly
the finer. The peculiar genius of Landseer, the
one point in which he has never been rivalled,
was the power he possessed of giving to his canine
subjects, all the expression of the human person
ality. The face of the bloodhound in " Suspense "
is almost as representative of anxiety and sup
pressed emotion, as the face of a human being
could be, and many other pictures could be quoted
in a similar manner. And thus he gained for
animal painting a new interest by connecting it,
in a manner which the most superficial could
appreciate, with human life. Striking as are the
analogies in many cases between the moods,

222 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
tempers, and characters of animals and those of
mankind. Sir Edwin was the first to discover them,
at least upon canvas ; and of the zeal and ability
with which he worked this rich field of labour, any
catalogues of his works will show. Fidelity,
courage, dignity, humility, braggadocio, fun, and
pathos — are not all these and many other human
virtues and failings to be found engrafted upon
the faces of his dogs, and is it not this quasi-
humanity which gives to his pictures their greatest
charm ? When he deserted this "line of country,"
his hand always comparatively failed him ; in it
he was supreme, the Columbus of the dog's
character. Even here, however, he was very
unequal in the power of his pictures, owing to his
excessive love of antithesis ; he carried the
humanity of the dog so far that it occasionally
jarred upon us ; it was as if the animal had been
dressed for exhibition and had escaped from a
neighbouring circus.

John A/fR- COLLIER is the best matter-of-fact
Collier's \j I
portraits. painter next to Mr. Ouless, and holds
that position less for the general merit of his

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 223
brush-work, than for his general aim, straightfor
wardness of execution, and a certain knack of
hitting off his sitter, and, metaphorically speaking,
giving him a cheerful slap on the back, before he
says, like a shampooer in a Turkish bath, " Next
man ! " In this case, it is next man or next woman,
for Mr. Collier paints both equally well ; and his
women portraits are, as a rule, especially happy.
He draws well too, anything which he has put
plainly before him.
TV /TR. HERKOMER as an artist is somewhat Herkomer.
¦^*-^ commonplace in all his perceptive facul
ties ; but gifted with an artistic faculty which is as
wide in its scope, as it is shallow in its feeling,
and imperfect in its exercise : he has hitherto
done nothing badly, and nothing altogether well.
His is, if not a catch-penny art, at all events a
catch-many-pounds art, and no other artist of
a genuine kind has produced so much work on
which the impress of the market influence was
stamped so clearly. From figure painting to
modelling, from etching to mezzo-tinting, from
miniature painting to water-colour, from por
trait to domestic drawing, from landscape to

224 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
bill-designing, he has passed with a facility as
fatal, as its results were, in one sense, desirable ;
and in all, the work has been above the average,
and beneath the best. Strong but coarse,
ambitious yet slovenly, penetrating yet shallow,
pleasant yet irritating, he has brawled through
the domain of art, as a mountain stream brawls
through the pleasant meadow lands that lie under
the shadow of the great hills.

Mr. IV/fR- BOUGHTON has become afavourite
Boughton. IvI
^^¦^ With a certain section of our picture-loving
public, from the fact of his possessing a power
which is peculiarly rare in English art. This is
the power of getting his work into "tone " — i.e.,
that peculiar harmoniousness of effect which is
rare in English, nearly universal in French,
painting. This power is probably due to his
Parisian schooHng. It is a great and indis
putable merit, but it is not one which enables its
possessor to understand or to judge of design ;
and, as a matter of fact, this artist's work has
never shown much capability of the purely

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 225
decorative kind — that is, of making any given
space beautiful by disposition of hue and colour,
apart from sentimental or humorous interest.
His drawing of the human face is probably his
weakest point. His strongest one is a rather in
definable quaintness of colouring and composition,
that makes his works look half like nature, and
half like a scene from an op6ra-bouffe. The atmos
phere and surroundings are always carefully
studied, and so little characteristic is the scene
that whether he paints an English village or a
Dutch one we have much the same feeling, just as
a " super " on the stage looks a " super," whether
he has got a red cap on as a Neapolitan fisher
man, or a blue one as an English sailor. His
art is essentially an art of costume, whether
costume of nature or of habit, and most frequently
in his pictures both are combined. A cultivated
landscape, fenced here and there with coloured
palings, and dotted with red-tiled houses ; a group
of prettily costumed girls or picturesquely ragged
labourers, a touch of sentiment, generally of the
comedy-drama kind — such as these are the
materials of Mr. Boughton's pictures, exactly
analogous in painting to Mr. Anthony Trollope's

226 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
novels, in so far as they are always received with
pleasure, interpreted without emotion, and left
without any deep regret.
Leech. ' I "'HE kind of humour which Leech embodied
-*- in his drawings — that peculiar, hearty,
genial, easy laughter, at all things in heaven and
earth — is becoming every day a rarer phenomenon,
and threatens soon to be ranked with other
bygone eccentricities of behaviour.

Hook. \/{^- HOOK'S mind is apparently as simple
-^'^-*- as could be desired. He has neither the
dogmatic realism of Brett, nor the half-melancholy
poetry of Moore. One phase of sea-life and
fisher-life pleased him many years ago ; he has
done nothing good since that has not been a varia
tion upon the same theme. The Kingsley of
artists, he insists that English fishermen are bluff
of aspect, kindly, brave, and happy. The seas he
paints are what the traditional seas of England
should be, fresh with tumbling waves and fretted
foam, rough enough to be boisterous, and calm
enough to be safe, and overspread with broken

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 227
skies of cloud and sunlight. Even as Kingsley
had little more than one special theme, and
shouted " God and a good digestion " in his
disciples' ears, so Hook seems to find his only
panacea for human ills, and his only answer to
human questions, in fresh breezes and green water
— and perhaps he is right after all.

M

UCH of Mr. Morris's earlier work belongs P!>il-,Morns.

to the modern idyllic school, and depends
entirelyfor its attractiveness upon hitting a peculiar
kind of false sentiment — or perhaps I should rather
say, of sentiment which is neither false nor real, but
hangs undefined in the air about the picture, like
the melancholy of an autumn evening. One never
quite knows whether Mr. Morris intends us to
laugh or cry over his work ; probably he does not
know himself, but he certainly intends to make us
sentimental rather than critical. He subdues all
his details to the surrounding atmosphere, and, so
to speak, runs all his notes of colour and feeling
together till they are indistinguishable. It would
be almost as erroneous to say that his pictures are
beautiful as that they are ugly — to call them either

228 SENTENTI/E ARTIS.
pathetic or humorous. One thing is certain, and
that is that they are not dull. Whatever their
defects may be, they are not those of tediousness.
Since the above was written, this clever painter
has taken to producing innumerable pictures of
very much dressed-up babies.

North, TV T ORTH was one of the contemporaries of Fred.
•^ ^ Walker, to whom that artist owed much, if
report be true, of his scheme of colour. He might
have been one of our most popular landscape
painters, but years ago settled in Algeria, and
will henceforward do little but that tangled misty
wealth of green foliage and falling roseleaves,
which we know so well. For now, even when he
paints England, it has a flavour of his Algerian
home. Still, no more delicate draughtsman of
natural beauty is at present living than this
painter, and there used to be in his pictures an
exquisite poetical quality, in comparison with
which, even Walker himself seemed rough and
unfeeling. The student of Enghsh art should
look at the illustrations to Jean Ingelow's poems,
for examples of North's best landscape work.

H

SENTENTI.^ ARTIS. 229
OLBEIN'S "Court" portrafts are mostly Holbein's
portraits.
done in black chalk, and partly coloured.

I must confess that I do not derive much pleasure
from this series. They are probably faithful
representations of the nobles and ladies of the
court of Henry VIIL, " in their habit as they
lived " ; but they are little more interesting as
pictures than the celebrated collection of Scottish
kings at Holyrood, all of which are said to have
been painted by one man from one model. They
seem to be "laureate" work — Pegasus, in the
lightest of harness, drawing to order, and only
desirous of " getting through " as soon as pos
sible ; even the little bits of colour appear to be
thrown in more to please the sitter than because
the picture gained by their introduction. Clever,
splendidly drawn, and evidently faithful, of course,
they are ; and there is a grave manliness about
most of the faces, in which one fancies one
can trace the painter's individuality. They are
useful, too, to remind one that men and women
were then pretty much the same as now, in all
essential points. But, when all this has been said
in their praise, the fact remains that we cannot
look at or think of them as pictures. Holbein's Q 2

230 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
one great merit in these is that he paints his model
as the model was — soberly and truly. He is not a
great genius, like some of the Italian masters ; he
does not go down to the inner depths of a man's
nature, and give us a face in which a life's history
is compressed, as Kingsley once said of Venetian
and Florentine portraits ; but he . sees a good
deal of character, and reads it attentively : he
sees that his model likes a certain kind of chain
and collar, or ruff or fur cloak, or whatever it is,
and he gives him that in the picture, and he does
his best to paint it well. Never, perhaps, was
there a man, certainly never a painter, with less
of affectation in his nature. You might look
through his pictures in vain for a single tricky
effect or strained attitude. And his portraits are
in some ways more actually representative of the
sitters, than even the great pictures of the
Venetian and the Florentine schools, the chief
reason for which extra individuality being that,
before Carlyle, Holbein had written a " Sartor
Resartus," or, more correctly, had mastered the
" Philosophy of clothes." And in his portraits,
no detail of the man or woman's sartorial
environment is left obscure or unrecorded.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 231
/^F our three greatest portrait painters, the ^ortrai-
^-^ following are, perhaps, the chief pecu- Watts,
Millais,
liarities : Sir John Millais gives us three great and
..... . Holl,
quahties in a picture — acute observation, unsym
pathetic, yet kindly — like a surgeon's habitual
mood — magnificent colouring when at his best,
and an indefinable something of rendering, that, for
lack of a better word, one calls artistic power.
Give this artist a subject where the surface beauty
of form is very marked, or the surface interest of
feature is very strong, and he will make a great
picture of it, somehow or other. Miss Eveleen
Tennant and Mr. Gladstone are within his power,
but only the surface aspects of both. Mr. Millais
is not a comedian or a tragedian in his portrait
painting, but essentially an actor of the cup-and-
saucer style of play, and this though he once
painted "The Huguenot" and "The Vale of
Rest ! " If it were sufficient to paint the outside
of a man exquisitely, without any trace of that
inner life which " raises us from the level of the
brutes, to be only a little lower than the angels,"
then he would be the first portrait painter in
England, perhaps even in the world. But it is
not sufficient; a man or a woman is not a coloured

232 SENTENTI/E ARTIS.
superficies of cloth and silk and skin ; and so it is
that in Millais' finest portraits we miss something
which is essential to our complete satisfaction.
Mr. Frank Holl is the most powerful, and in some
ways one of the best portrait painters of the
Academy, as he is one of the most original — an
" Israels" of the middle classes. He is distinctly
a tragedian, his very mildest pictures savour of
the " dagger and the bowl." I have seen
portraits (and fine portraits, too) by him, of
most estimable people — deans, and masters of
colleges, &c. — who never had a wrong thought in
their lives, but to whom Mr. Holl has given such
a don't-meet-me-on-a-dark-night kind of look,
that one almost felt that he must, in the course of
his painting, have discovered some dreadful secret
in those apparently blameless breasts, such
" damnable faces " have his sitters shown. Por
traiture which strikes the spectator in this way
is by no means necessarily the best, or even the
most true. The result is got by an exaggeration,
very possibly an unconscious exaggeration, of two
or three leading traits ; the work is really on the
very verge of caricature ; it is a man seen in
a flash of lightning, not seen and painted after

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 233
intimate knowledge. Nevertheless of its kind it
is wonderful ; and there is a breadth of conception
and massive method of painting in these portraits
of Mr. HoU's which renders them very impressive.
In every case, he seems to snatch at the main points
of his sitter's character ; it is the fine intellectual
and moral gradations that are wanting, as are the
finer gradations of light and shade; probably both
are inconsistent with the general aim of the
painter. But look upon Mr. Watts' work in
portraiture — the first thing to be seen is absolute
self-effacement. Each portrait suggests a mood,
but not a mood of the artist, but of the sitter;
it is half a picture of the outward man, and half
of the inward spirit. It is not brilliant character-
painting of superficial details ; it is not character
seen by a lurid light, as in Frank Holl's portraits;
but it is an endeavour to represent the man and
the woman in their entirety — flesh, spirit, &c.
For every sitter that Mr. Watts paints is a
problem that he tries to solve.

M

R. OULESS is at the head of the matter- Mr, Ou
less s
of-fact class of English portraiture, his portraits,
painting is fine and strong, with a keen eye

234 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
for the details of a face, and perhaps its general
expression, as distinguished from the character of
the sitter. Such are the chief merits of Mr. Ouless's
work, to which must be added a dignity of attitude
and surroundings which sometimes sinks into
" propriety." Not that propriety is not a good
thing in its way, only that its way is not artistic.
Mr. Ouless's city gentlemen sit stolidly in their
office chairs, or by their library tables ; his judges
wear their judicial scarlet robes and horsehair
wigs, and most judicial look, his country squires
stand with their guns under their arms in their
most correct country " get-up " of velveteen and
gaiters. The work is painstaking, accurate, and
even powerful in a way, but when everything is
said in its favour that can be said, this portrait
painter must be confessed to be hardly an artist.
Beauty of idea is never attempted by him, of
imagination he seems to be wholly destitute, and
his colour, though fresh, is singular in its
uniformity, and hardly of sufficient delicacy to be
called good. He is above all our painters the
official artist ; the mayor, the alderman, the
judge, and the master of foxhounds alike sit to
him with success.

I

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 235
N no country of the world can there be EnglishPortrai-

found at present a body of artists who can
surpass those of our own land in pure portrait
painting — I mean in the presentation of the
actual personality of the sitter. The French
beat us when it comes to making a portrait into
a picture, by which I mean adding to the likeness
of the sitter some dramatic interest, or some
picturesque adjunct. The Diisseldorf School are
perhaps on the whole better skilled in actual
manipulation of paint, and do not show the
" slobby " style of impaste, of which there is
at present so much in English painting. The
Antwerp and Brussels Schools have a greater
mastery of drawing, and a cleaner, more vivid,
and more skilful method of expressing light and
shade. The Italians and the Spanish will
touch off a likeness with a vivacity of colouring
and a sharpness of effect, which do not come
easily to us dwellers by " the steely sea " ; but in
none of these schools can there be found portrait
painting which equals that of Millais in colour;
of Watts in insight and dignity ; of Holl in a pre
sentation (almost too vivid to be pleasing) of the
sitter's actual appearance, with every superficial

236 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
characteristic of his face and figure emphasised,
till the result is less a picture than a man
flattened out on a canvas. These three artists
stand alone — masters each of a special style, in
which they have no rival. But hardly below
their work in many respects, though of very
different merit, come the steadfast, strong— almost
judicial — portraits by Ouless, lifting his subjects
into something much too bright and good for
human nature's daily food ; and the somewhat
hard veracity of Mr. E. J. Poynter, which is yet
consistent with, and indeed always accompanied
by, an endeavour, fairly successful, to give classical
grace and dignity to the subjects of his work,
and in which the details of dress and background
are invariably painted with the most self-denying
industry, and utter absence of tricks of effect.

French HpHE love of the abstract may be seen in the
compared I
to English -*- landscape of the French painters, perhaps
art, even more distinctly than in their figure compo
sitions. For realistic landscape there is no
Frenchman in the world who can touch men like
Holman Hunt and Brett, in the oil school, or

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 237
Boyce and Poynter in the water-colour; but, on the
other hand, the landscape personality, so to speak,
of Corot and many of his disciples has no rival in
English art of the present day. Certain of this last
mentioned artist's suggestive pictures strike the
eye with absolute pain, so vivid is the impression
which they can convey of loneliness and desertion ;
while others have all the airy brightness of a spring
morning, or a delicious sense of peacefulness and
repose. Again, other national characteristics step
in and mark the different styles. Gifted with a
steady industry and common sense (which seem to
be the distinguishing gifts of the Briton as compared
with the Gaul) our home artist sits down to the
unflinching reproduction of what he sees, and
carries out that design with more or less ability,
according to his honesty of purpose and his skill
of hand. But the foreigner, while no less honest
in his intention, and possessed for the most part
of a far more thorough training in art, has no
sooner began his picture than it straightway
becomes his master, and his active imagination
begins to play here and there upon the natural
facts, till thousands of details are lost in the grand
transforming process which takes place, whereby

288 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
a field with a few cows in it, a girl at a cottage
door, or a man paddling a boat across a stream in
the twilight, becomes a little poem on the master's
canvas. Of course, this is only one aspect of French
landscape art, and we have omitted all mention
of the great classical and historical element;
but we have chosen the above for illustration
because it allows the best comparison with
the works of our artists, for alas ! of historical
painting, properly so called, we have little or
none. But one fact must be clearly borne
in mind, and that is, that though it-may be allowed
to the artist that he is right in neglecting the
minute realisation of detail if he finds that it will
interfere with his pathetic, or humorous, or
peaceful conception, yet it can never be granted
that he is at all right, or, indeed, anything but
utterly and unbearably wrong, when he, besides
neglecting natural fact, begins to falsify it. We
may excuse him, for instance, for casting his
picture into such a shade as will obscure all but
the masses of the foliage, or all but the shining
surface of the water ; but never for painting a tree
in full daylight as a confused blotch of colour, with
out the spring of its boughs and the curve of its

SENTENTI.E ARTIS. 239
leaves. So it is that the French practice is apt to
lead to such untrue and wretched results, because
the artists find themselves at every turn incom
moded by an almost infinite series of natural facts
which they have not learnt to master. The English
practice at present gives in many cases all the
materials of a picture without the vivifying spirit,
which would make "the dead bones live," while
the French gives a picture which is expressive
enough as far as it goes, but which is generally
restrained to a very limited interpretation of
nature, from the artist's incapacity to fully repre
sent her. After all, the French nation takes a
wider sweep in its art than the English — all
its crudities, follies, and occasional repulsiveness
notwithstanding. Perhaps this is seen more
especially in its genre painting. Often garish,
immoral, extravagant, and bizarre, it neverthe
less covers the whole ground of its subject-
matter ; its limitations are no other than those of
the artist's own creating. In England — well, in
England it is otherwise. The handwriting on the
wall of Mrs. Grundy startles all our painters at
their feast ; before her pale shadow they tremble
in despair. For in very truth we English are an

240 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
hypocritical nation, and must be respectable in
outward seeming, whatever lies hidden in our
hearts. No bold, indecently unclothed forms for
us, either in art or literature. And so comes the
orange peel and water instead of wine, and every
one " makes believe a good deal," and finds the
vintage superb. Between the French school of
morality, half of whose paintings smell of the
theatre or the casino, and the work of our own
Frith, an Englishman who tries to ignore all the
painful and irregular side of life, and paint society
as if it were a Sunday school treat, there is surely
some medium in which an artist might go smoothly
and not less safely. " Que diable ! we are men, and
not school-girls," as Lawrence makes one of his
characters say, and artistic speech need neither
be demorahsing nor pernicious, because it touches
on all the subjects which form a part of our life.

The qua. /'^NE of Mr. Watts' most peculiar character-

[ity of yj

Watts' ^-^ istics, is the sense of impersonal sadness
which attaches to so much of his work. This
feeling is an extremely subtle one, and is entirely
distinct from the morbid reiteration of individual

SENTENTIjE ARTIS. 241
grief which is so common in modern art, and of
which the work of Josef Israels is a good example.
Mr. Watts' painting is rather a pictorial render
ing of that verse of Omar Khayyam which preaches
the mournful origin of all beauty : —
Men say that never blows so red
The rose, as where some buried Cassar bled.
And every coronal the garden wears
Dropped in her lap from some once lovely head.
Not that the painter wishes to express a philosophy
so mournful, but that, unconsciously to himself,
the motive of his work is, as it were, reflected from
that contemplative spirit, which is, as Gregg
said in "The Enigmas of Life," "a blessing
or a curse, according as it is linked with a
cheerful or a melancholy temperament."
^^ T~;^ VERYONE is saying all good things" of Progressof
-'— ' the progress of art in England just England,
now, and we disbelieve (at least, partly dis
believe) in the truth of the saying. A tremendous
impetus has been given to art industries, and
in proportion to their previous stagnation they
have leapt forward at a bound, and every
society that can be formed to produce art is

242 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
formed throughout the kingdom, and yet painting
is not progressing in anything save technical
excellence. Our landscape painting, which forty
years ago led the world's art, has crossed the sea,
and is only to be found in France ; the nearest
approach to Constable and Cox is to be traced in
Daubigny and Rousseau. Turner has not only
left no equal, but not even a successor ; and
De Wint, one of the greatest, as well as one of the
most English of our painters, has no rival to-day.
The pre-Raphaelite influence, which might have
given us a splendid modern type of figure painting,
is dying quickly day by day, and nothing is taking
its place ; and even the domestic art of such men
as Wilkie and Mulready was better and truer in
feeling, as well as more splendid in execution,
than the women and the babies which have taken
its place. As to still life painting, the only
substitute we have for old William Hunt is a
Frenchman named Fantin, who paints our roses
and chrysanthemums as if they had just tumbled
out of a cocotte's bonnet. Go and look round the
National Gallery or South Kensington, and then
see if you can talk about our progress in art.
Why, old Chrome himself was a better landscape

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 243
painter than any who is living now, and we have
not, out of all our hundreds of genre painters, one
who can touch the work of Wilkie or the elder
Leslie.

w

/HEREFROM does the French artist derive French art.
his undoubted dramatic capacity ? The

answer seems to be a perfectly clear one — "From
his national life." For, first of all, it is to be
noticed that, not in painting only, but in every
branch of art does this capacity exist. Sculpture,
design, acting, music alike show it, not to mention
literature, where it is, perhaps, most marked of all.
There can be no doubt that in everything of this
sort the English are far inferior to the French.
There seems to be a curious kind of morbid self-
consciousness which possesses our Englishmen on
the stage, which has its counterpoint in our litera
ture and in our art. Our art, especially, never
becomes sufficiently possessed with itself; it has
to be condensed, because, unlike Phryne, it never
dares wholly to unveil. How different it is in ¦
France ! There the power of forgetting self
appears to be almost universal, and though it leads
to strange eccentricities, sometimes even worse
R

244 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
things, yet, as a rule, what a free, wholesome life
it gives to art itself! Look at the French sculp
tures, and compare Carpeaux's group before the
new opera house, with any modern English sculp
ture, with our dead classicalities and modern
peculiarities. Why, the group is alive ! The
dancers absolutely reel in delirious excitement —
there is all the difference between a living man
and a dead one. We do not say it is a group to
be approved of, we do not mean that it is the sort
of thing we should like our English artists to pro
duce ; but its crowning merit, its freedom from
conventional representation, its thorough grasp
of the facts of the case and reproduction of its
sculptor's spirit, are entirely admirable.
Rossetti's npHIS picture represents a woman " found "
¦"Found," I
-*- in London by her quondam lover, after
many a year of shameful life. He is holding her
hands and looking down towards her ; she has
shrunk away from his touch and gaze, and is
crouching against a low wall. In the back
ground is a bridge over the river ; to the left a
half-seen churchyard ; by the side of the man
stands, not without its added touch of terrible

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 245
meaning, a cart with a netted calf bleating
piteously. The time is early morning, and the
bridge and distance are blue and misty ; the
whole picture is pale and cold in its effect of
colour. The chief interest centres in the face of
the woman, and it is the extraordinary power
which Mr. Rossetti has shown in this portion of
the picture which renders it so supremely in
teresting. It is an idyll of London life, such as
few artists would have cared to grapple with,
painting the naked truth with no extenuating
circumstances, and many of those who see it are,
no doubt, excessively shocked at being brought
face to face with such a scene. But it is a fitting
corollary to its painter's poem of " Jenny " — it is
the last word which was needed to render that
story complete. In very truth, Mr. Rossetti has
been able to imprint on a woman's face, seen in
one supreme moment, traces of all the gay, reck
less, shameful, shameless, horrible life she has led
since first she lay amongst " the blown grass " in
the meadows —
And wondered where the city was.
It is all here — past innocence and present guilt,
and almost forgotten love and honour, struggling R 2

246 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
to drown memory that will not die, and shame,
and terror, and despair. Not a pleasant picture,
but one which goes to the root of the matter with
which it deals ; one which is, as Ruskin once said
of a somewhat similar painting by Mr. Holman
Hunt, " powerful to meet full in the front the
social evil of the age in which it is painted ; to
waken into mercy the cruel thoughtlessness of
youth, and subdue the severities of judgment into
the sanctity of compassion." Looking at this pic
ture, at the poem of "Jenny'' and "The Last
Confession," and at the ballads of " Rose Mary "
and " 'Twixt Holmscote and Hurstcote," and
" Sister Helen," we touch, I think, upon the
real strength of Rossetti, a strength which under
lay all his eccentricities and weaknesses. He
never paltered with the facts of the case, no
matter how terrible ; but in the life of others,
as well as in his own, cut down to the truth.
No wonder he gave offence to the decorous,
and was a stumbling-block to the shallow.
What do either want with unpleasant facts, told
in the barest and least conventional terms ? And
Rossetti's frankness reached almost to the verge
of cynicism ; he spared others no more than he

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 247
did himself. But still, throughout it all, and
despite the curious garb in which he disguised his
meaning, it always was truth at which he aimed ;
the nature of the man was sincere throughout.
In an age when painters have few beliefs, and
hold those very lightly, this man scarcely stirred
a step in art except in obedience to his own in
spiration, and was strong enough, despite all his
failings, to modify the practices, if he did not
actually change the creeds, of half the artists of
his time. To him, as we have said, Millais owed
his poetical inspiration, and his most beautiful
pictures were painted under that influence ; to
him Holman Hunt was even more indebted ; from
him, though soon able to strike out a line for
himself, sprang Mr. Burne-Jones, fully equipped
for the fight, like a second Minerva, from the
brain of a second Jove ; to his early friendship
with William Morris of Oxford, when he went
there to paint the frescoes in the Union, we pro
bably owe the determining impulse which set the
author of the " Earthly Paradise " on the road to
that decoration which has changed the look of
half the houses in London, and substituted art for
ugliness all over the whole kingdom ; and to him

248 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
certainly, if we could trace it back, we owe,
almost equally with Ruskin, the growth of the
feeling that art was more than a mere trade,
and that an artist has duties to himself and
his art, as well as to his pocket and his
public. For his fame it is perhaps unfortunate
that he did not confine himself to poetry, or that
he did not begin painting earlier, study it more
rigorously, and confine himself to it more entirely;
but for the world at large I doubt whether he
could have done, being what he was, better work.
He was to all young artists and young writers a
tower of strength, a light to encourage them to
despise conventions, and to give up their lives to
their art. He was, in fact, a standing protest
against the " idols of the market " — an influence
that "made," as Arnold would say, "for artistic
righteousness." In the minds of hundreds of
young men, who never even saw him, there lurked
a satisfaction, that down at Chelsea a man was
living, painting and writing, without caring a
brass farthing what anyone thought of his works,
and though I do not wish to defend the universal
morality or wisdom of such indifference, I do mean
to assert that it is the one temper that produces

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 249
good artistic work. The difficulties under which
a young artist, be he painter or poet, labours are
so enormous, the circumstances of the age are so
much against his profession, and the confusion of
counsellors is so great, that unless he can shut his
ears to it all, and possess his soul in patience, it
is a thousand to one against his producing first-
rate work. It was not the comparative isolation
of Rossetti's life which produced his shortcomings,
though no doubt it narrowed his range of sym
pathies ; it was his persistent dwelling upon one
idea, and the unfortunate coincidence which gave
him a model of a physical type which exact!)-
fitted the artistic peculiarities of his temperament.
The conjunction of these circumstances forced
him into one groove of thought, and held him there
like a vice ; and there are few things more pathe
tically evident about a modern painter, than the
way in which he struggled, and struggled in vain,
to free himself from the chain of feeling and
thought which his own hands had bound round
him. But his influence was scarcely the less for
his personal shortcomings — they proved him
human even to his simple enthusiastic disciples,
and they were of the kind that bring pity rather

250 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
than contempt, for they were as much the result
of idosyncrasy and misfortune, as of misconduct —
from the first the man with all his genius could
scarcely have been successful or happy from the
ordinary point of view. What place in the history
of art and literature his achievements will even
tually hold it is difficult even to surmise, but one
or two points may be confidently asserted. In
the future Rossetti will stand less as the painter-
poet than as the leader of the great artistic
movement of England in the nineteenth century,
his work will be regarded and prized more for
what it effected, than for its intrinsic merit. As
we get a little further removed in time from the
controversies which have raged round the modern
schools of poetry and painting, it will be seen that
his was the central figure of the combat, his
hand raised the standard round which the foe-
men rallied. Two or three only of the poems
are likely to survive the taste of the present
day, and of these "Jenny" is far the most
important, and will always stand as a statement,
in singularly strong and beautiful words, of that
problem of womanhood, for which, as yet, no one
has found a solution. " The Last Confession" is.

SENTENTIyE ARTIS. 251
psrhaps, the most complete of all the poems, but
it touches on no such universal chord as that
with which "Jenny" is concerned, and is in
teresting chiefly as a study of morbid love and
jealousy ; and all the other poems, beautiful as
they are, will we fear be neglected in future years,
if only because of their dependence upon a special
phase of feeling which is not one with which most
readers have any sympathy. They are not too
egoistic to last, but they are egoistic in too unusual
a way, and the strangeness of their form, natural
as it was to the man who wrote them, will
probably seem in after years half affected and
half incomprehensible. It is a crowning mis
fortune for a poet, when his chances of immortality
are being considered, that men should read him
less for what he says than for what may be called
the atmosphere of his verse — when he pleases our
senses without stirring our sympathies. This is,
to a certain extent, the case with Rossetti. The
young, the healthy, and the brave may delight in
his writing for its music, and even find a half
pleasure in its iteration of grief. But it is im
possible that they should sympathise with the
work as a whole ; the cry of pain is too continuous,

252 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
too long sustained, followed out into too many
various directions. It comes across us, that
though the poet was sincere, his poetry is not ;
that these fancies which, wherever they begin, end
only in the grave, are not the realities of life and
action, and have no true bearing thereon. And
the consequence is that one grows into a habit of
listening to him much as one does to the prattle of
a child — glad when he says anything wise, witty,
or beautiful, but attaching little or no importance
to the thread of his discourse. And the place of
his painting is even harder to determine. Many
artists would tell us that it is not painting at all,
and from one point of view they would be right.
But is this really the question ? Another age may
deny that the modern French school are painters,
or that there is any painting save that of Germany
and the Low Countries, or it may erect some new
standard, or return to some old one which is now
forgotten. Who shall decide what is and what is not
painting, if we once leave the broad track of beau
tiful colour applied to a canvas so as to produce a
beautiful result ? And if the decision can be
made so as to exclude the work of which we are
talking, we should have to consider whether, if

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 253
this be not painting, it is not something else than
painting which we require. It is, at all events,
Art. There is no doubt of that ; and in the best
examples it possesses three qualities, which are
excessively rare to find in combination. It is at
once passionate, poetical, and refined, and defies
the spectator to associate it with ideas of manu
facture. Such as it is, the work has evidently
grown from its author's character, like a flower
from the earth, and bears scarcely a trace of
another's influence. Its hope of immortality lies
in this fact. Copies die, but for originals, however
imperfect, there is always hope. It is, I imagine,
as unlikely that future generations will understand
its meaning as it is that they will care to follow
out the curious life and character of its author ;
but the qualities of imagination and passion, and
the technical perfection of the colouring, will
probably secure it a place in the history of art.
For as poems in colour, the world has seen nothing
finer since the days of Titian. And it has moreover
one strange quality which will, perhaps, do more
to ensure its life than any actual merit, which is
that it opens out to all who regard it carefully a
new and lovely world.

254 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
Rossetti's T T was said once by a writer anxious to make
sense of I
beauty. -*- out a case against the pre-Raphaelite school
of modern poetry, that one of the chief character
istics of Rossetti's verse was its sensuality, and
certain quotations were given to prove this.
Time has effectually disposed of that charge, and
the misrepresentations on which it was founded
have been adequately confuted ; but it has hardly
been sufficiently noticed, that the real ground of
the accusation is due to the fact of the poet-
painter being unable to dissever his pictorial from
his poetic faculty. He habitually thought (if
such an expression is allowable) in terms of
painting. He could not dissever his most
purely intellectual ideas from colour and form,
and it is the intrusion of these facts into
his poetry, in places where they are unex
pected and unnecessary, that gives to hasty
readers and superficial critics such a wrong im
pression. And in the same way as he charges a
poem with more colour and form than it can well
bear with reference to its special subject, so does
he charge his pictures with a weight of idea which
their form and colour scarcely realise, and in both
he calls upon the spectator to be, at once the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 255
witness and the interpreter of his work. From
this there results in his poetry the following effect
— that he is at his finest, when he has to tell
some plain story, or exemplify some comparatively
simple thought, the insertion into which of
physical facts will heighten the meaning rather
than jar upon it ; or in verses which treat in
tellectual ideas from a purely sensuous basis; such,
for instance, as in those sonnets which are con
cerned with the passion of love. When, however,
he seeks to treat either a purely intellectual or a
purely spiritual subject, he fails almost inevitably,
and that apparently in painting as well as in
poetry. Like Antaeus, if he is held off the earth too
long, his strength fails him. It is this painter
like quality which makes his verse so puzzling,
for in idea it is, almost without exception, of a
singularly pure and intellectual character. Turn
from his verse to his painting, and the same
curious contradiction is forced upon our attention.
We find continually in his pictures, where the
painter's individuality is most manifest, that the
reproduction of the sensuous part of his subject
is, so to speak, interfered with by the strange,
half refining, half abstract, quality of his intellect.

256 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
This is especially evident in his treatment of the
form of the human body, in which he has two
methods, both adapted to the same end, or rather,
perhaps, both unconsciously tending to the same
end. One is to leave out as much as possible all
detailed drawing, to suffuse the whole body in a
mist of colour, in which no modelling of flesh or
structure of bone is clearly visible. The other
method is to accentuate those portions of the
body or the features which best help to express
emotion, and so to use and arrange them as to
produce a definite emotional idea. The long
necks in which so many 'of his female figures
rejoice, the slender hands with fingers turning
round one another, the heavy curved lips, and all
the other physical peculiarities to be traced in his
works, are all due to the passionately sensuous,
but equally passionately intellectual, nature of
Rossetti ; they are the record of a man whose
sense of beauty was always being disturbed by his
sense of feeling. It is, when all is said and done,
this sense of beauty upon which his great praise
must be founded, and it is the ultimate test by
which a painter must be judged. Artists may tell
us that this detail is impossible, and that that is

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 257
absurd ; the moralist may preach that there is
here too morbid an insistance upon one idea ; the
general public may deplore the lack of their much
loved catch-penny subjects ; and the Philistine
may laugh at the eccentric form in which Mr.
Rossetti's ideas are produced. But if the net
result is beautiful, if the one idea is truly and
finely expressed, the chief aim of the painter has
been achieved ; and the world, which is only un
just for a brief space — too often, alas I the space
of a life-time — will not let the work die. This is
the rock upon which so many artists, especially
so many English and French artists, split ; their
pictures are so frequently possessed of every merit
save that one which alone would justify their
existence. And in this respect the subject of my
criticism is entitled to be considered as a supreme
artist. In some of his works, especially in his
later ones, when the fatal influence of chloral was
beginning to wither his powers, there are distor
tions and even uglinesses such as can scarcely be
condoned, and it is impossible to help regretting
that, throughout a great part of his life, the
influence of one woman's face should have been
so great as to appear in all his chief characters —

258 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
now as Proserpine, now as the Virgin Mary, and
so throughout the range of his poetical fancies
and the old legends with which he occupied his
pencil. But when all these deficiencies are sub
tracted or allowed for, there remains a series of
pictures which have such marvellous glory of
colouring, such intensely vivid feeling, and such
beauty of detail, that I at least know not where
to find their parallel. They are living, breathing
poems, at once so delicate and so strong, so
passionate and so pure, as to appear to be the
last word possible upon their various subjects.
Take, as an example of this, the picture of the
painter's wife, done after her death, and entitled
" Beata Beatrix." The subject is simple enough
— a three-quarter length figure of a woman,
whose head has fallen slightly backward upon
her shoulders in sleep, which we feel will soon
be that of death. Fluttering in front of her is
a crimson bird, bearing a poppy in its mouth ;
behind her a sun-dial ; while in the distance of
the Florentine streets stand Dante and the Angel
of Love watching. " Descriptions of pictures,"
as some one says, " are stupid things at the
best " ; but here they seem to me even more

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 259
than usually inadequate. No amount of des
cription could convey any hint of the intense
and beautiful peace which marks this painting.
It is like that of summer woods at early dawn,
before the first bird has begun to sing, and the
last star faded. Nor is it only that the face
and its expression are perfect ; the whole picture
tells its story with an emphasis only the more
clear because of its intense quietude. Like the
whisper of a great actress, we hear and feel the
weight of every syllable. And technically it is as
fine as it is emotionally, for curiously enough in
this, probably his finest picture, Rossetti shows
little or none of that wilfulness which is so
frequently present in his works. The drawing,
if not very markedly good, is unobtrusive and
unobjectionable; the disposition of the drapery
(always a strong point with this artist) is
simplicity and dignity itself, the position full
both of grace and suggestion, and represented
with the utmost ease ; while of the colouring
it is impossible to speak in terms of too high
praise. The picture is suffused with a misty
sunshine, and all the hues therein are somewhat
low in tone ; but into their transparent depths s

260 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
the eye looks down and down as through the still
waters of a lake ; and the effect of the whole is
that of some very marvellous piece of quiet
music played at a great distance.

Cecf^ntcal faints for Sfubmts
anb ^mat^urs.

S 2

Cecljnical faints for Students anb
Amateurs.

Z

' Nothing is so easy as to make things
look fine on paper; we should never
forget that : there is a great difference
between high-sounding generalities
and laborious details." — Disraeli.

^tCCtt living artist once said to me most Choice of
art as a
truly, " If you don't feel that being the profession.
most humble member of the artistic fraternity, is
better than being the most successful member of
any other, you will never do any good as an
artist." IT is the simplest truism that there cannot Ways of
CI- feac/ '
be two ways of teaching art, though art.
there may be a hundred or a thousand different
methods of acquiring its technical qualities. The
mechanical use of the brush or the pencil can
be learnt almost as securely, though not as
swiftly, as the use of the needle ; and the

264 SENTENTI^ ARTIS
necessary education for the eye or hand can be
given by the study of almost any class of objects,
though some, no doubt, will produce the effect
more quickly and easily than others. But the
facts which lie, so to speak, at the root of art
itself, which form the groundwork upon which
all right delineation of Nature must proceed,
are immutably the same, for all classes and all
times. If the amateur does not learn these,
he really learns nothing. Drawings are not
made by recipe, like puddings, but are made
by the application to special instances of general
truths of form and colour, and laws of perspec
tive and gradation, light and shade, tone and
value, of composition, emphasis, and subor
dination. No recipe can ever be given which
will include the effect of all these in their
application to even the simplest subject ; and
all methods of instruction which pretend to teach
any such formula for producing pictures are
not only worthless in themselves, but have this
added and terrible vice, that while they render
the student incapable of doing anything good
himself, they render him equally powerless to
appreciate any right-doing in others.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 265
EVERY one who cares for pictures, or for Seeingcorrectly,
natural beauty in the sense of wishing
to reproduce it, may, if he chooses to give the
time, and go to work in the right way, attain
to a reproduction of Nature which shall be a
real delight to himself, and even, as far as it goes,
a pleasure to his friends. But this is not to be
done by paying for any number of lessons, be
the master ever so skilful. It is to be done only
by continual study of natural fact and natural
laws, by gradually educating, not only the hand,
but the brain, the eye, and the heart, and bringing
all of these to bear upon your work. It is in
this latter respect, as a rule, that the amateur
fails so dismally and so inexcusably ; he fails
not so much for want of skill as for want of
effort. The labour required for seeing correctly
is definite and real, and is seldom given by
amateurs. And yet art is the result, in the first
place of seeing rightly, and in the second of feeling
rightly about what is seen. And in so far as
amateur art is good, it is because it partakes
of the qualities which are admirable in pro
fessional art; and when it is bad, it is because
of its failing to possess those merits.

266 SENTENTI.^; ARTIS.
Relations, QUINCE the first obstacle that one who
*^ desires to study any form of drawing or
painting has to contend with is undoubtedly his
relations, let us say a few words upon their
probable conduct. If they are of the rare but
pleasant kind who encourage the young beginner
none the less because he is one of their own kin,
they may be left, with a blessing on their heads,
so Jong as they do not complicate their kindness
with advice. But should they do this, the student
must, if he is desirous of not wasting his time,
refuse from the first to listen to their precepts.
Not because they are relations or friends, but
because it is necessary for every one who is setting
to work in art to be a law to himself, or at all
events to have but one legitimate and adequate
master. If you go following Tom or Nelly's ideas
of painting, or take in ideas of colour from your
maiden aunt, or copy sporting subjects from your
bachelor uncle, either from love of their personality
or respect for their intelligence, you are wasting
time entirely, and preparing for yourself difficulties
in the future similar to those which you might
feel in making a freehand drawing after you had
been accustomed to use tracing-paper. For the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 267
first beginning of art, whether for amateur or pro
fessional, is freedom. You must run alone, even
if you stagger and fall in the attempt, from your
first moment. But having got rid of their advice,
let us go a step further and get rid of their appro
bation. Perhaps this is even more fatal than their
blame. For in the first place they seldom care,
save for you personally, and in the second place
they seldom know. And in the third place, if they
both know and care, they will probably be silent.
For in this last resort, they will be certain that
the less that is said about a student's work the
better. " Continuez, jeune homme," is what
Carolus Duran says to his pupils when they have
done an exceptionally good piece of work : per
mission to labour is the only reward which a
student should receive. Does this seem hard ?
Do you require encouragement ? Do you want
to show results ? That is a fatal error — an error
common, alas, to almost every amateur. The
whole world of Nature is just beginning to talk to
you ; it is the greatest boon, rightly understood,
for your little personal world to be silent while you
learn the new language.

268 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Para- A WORD about paraphernalia. The tradi-
phernalia. r-\ , , , .
¦'¦ ¦*- tional burnt stick and whitewashed wall,
which is all that some of the great artists have
had to begin with, though it sounds somewhat
exaggerated, is nevertheless a type of the right
way for the beginner to set to work. The
simpler your means the better ; and even if their
simplicity involves much limitation, it will be no
drawback for some time to come. Many of the
finest drawings in the world have been done with
a simple pen and a wash of ink ; and even if you
haven't a paint brush, with a pen, a penknife,
and the end of your forefinger, you can get nearly
any effect in light and shade that you are likely to
want. I confess for my own part that the
pleasure of rubbing ink into an outline with the
finger is very great, and the triumph when you
have attained with these blundering means any
thing near your intention, is dehcious in pijjpor-
tion to its difficulty. And this, and cgrresponding
limitations of material, not only hardens your
spirit, and makes you fruitful of resource, but it
takes away one considerable difficulty which
beginners are wont to experience. It prevents us
losing the way in the choice of implements and

SENTENTI/E ARTIS. 269
colours. If there's only a big brush to do the
fine and broad strokes with, one can hardly help
learning to use it both broadly and delicately ; if
we have only one colour in our paint box, we soon
learn how varied is the range of effects which we
may gain from it alone, and how to use it to the
greatest advantage.

K

NOW that you cannot learn to paint in Cennini's
pupil,
less time than that which I shall name to

you. In the first place you must study drawing
for at least one year, then you must remain with
a master at the workshop for the space of six
years at least, that you may learn all the parts
and members of the art ; to grind colours, to boil
down glues, to grind plaster (geno), to acquire the
practice of laying grounds on pictures, to work in
reliefj^and to scrape (or smooth) the surface, and to
gild"; afterwards to practise colouring, to adorn
with mordants, to paint cloths of gold, and paint
on walls for six more years, drawing without
intermission on holy days and work days." * * *
"And if you don't study under some master, you
will never be fit for anything, nor will you be

The road
to art.

270 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
able to show your face among the masters."
Some slight modification of detail is necessary
now-a-days in the above advice, but its spirit is
entirely and absolutely right.

npHERE is no short road to drawing and
¦^ painting, any more than there is a short
road to any other branch of knowledge. Art is
not a matter of recipes, but the expression of
knowledge and feeling in a certain form. You
may partially have the knowledge without the
faculty of expression ; and then you have an
artistic nature, without being an artist. But no
amount of education in what may be called the
language of art will, by itself, make you capable
of producing its literature, or even understanding
it. Indeed, the more you come to regard painting
as a matter of tradition, the further you are likely
to get from being able to see anything in pictures,
except more or less perfect examples of traditional
practice. And if this habit be once fully acquired
there is no chance of its possessor gaining an}'
true knowledge of art.

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 271
nPAKE what material you can get most readily Materials.
-¦- and afford most easily, and, when you have
taken it, don't stint its use. Have plenty of
material by you, no matter how humble be its
kind. Never think when you are using paint,
canvas, or paper, of how long your paints will
last, or how many sheets of surface you are using.
The worst drawing is worth the canvas or paper
it's done on. Take a new sheet and start fresh
when you begin again. It is better to work from
the first upon an easel, no matter of how rough a
kind, if only because it helps you to acquire steadi
ness of hand, from the impossibility of resting
your hand upon the paper or canvas on which you
are at work. Besides, with an easel you can,
either standing or sitting, more easily see the effect
of what you are doing ; you do not have the con
tinual looking up and down from your work to
your desk, and vice versa.

WATER-COLOUR drawings before Turner Water-
colour
were rarely more than tinted outlines. The drawings
• 1 1 • before
notion of these tinted drawings was undoubtedly Turner,
that there was not enough strength of tint in water-

272 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
colours to give the finished effect of an oil picture,
and so a light and shade drawing was practically
all that the artist aimed at, the tint being passed
over after this light and shade drawing was com
pleted. This seems to have been' as much owing
to the wretched character of the colours in use as to
any other reason, and it is impossible not to
imagine, that had the artists of that day been
furnished with the brilliant tints which were soon
to be manufactured, the " tinting or staining "
would have died a natural death much sooner
than was really the case. In 1780, Thomas and
William Reeves produced their cake water-colours
for the first time, and it is a curious fact that.
though the Society of Arts adjudged their silver
palette to these manufactures, yet up to 1783
there does not appear to have been a pure colour
manufactured, the nearest to the three primaries
being Indian red, indigo, and yellow ochre. Con
sequently it would have been impossible to paint a
blue sky, or a bright green field, and we gain some
little idea of the reason why nature at this time
was always reproduced in such Quaker guise.
Another great difficulty at that time was the
paper, which seems to have been either of the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 278
kind known now as sugarloaf, a rough brown
surface, or a hard white cartridge, which was
only partially absorbent, and on which the colour
dried in spots and patches. Then came the
Messrs. Whatman, who did for the manu
facturers of papers what Reeves had done for
colour ; and from that time to the present, im
provement has followed improvement, till the
artist can now procure every tint imaginable in a
soft and convenient state for working, and lay it
upon paper of every conceivable shade.

IT is worth while for the student to note Secco, tempera,
that in old days "' tempera " was not and
fresco,
identified with "secco," but was the general name
for any vehicle used in painting. It is " fresco "
and " secco " which are properly opposed to each
other, and "fresco" is, shortly put, painting on
walls or other surfaces when the plaster ground is
wet ; and " secco," painting on it when it is dry.
In "fresco" no "tempera" was used; in "secco"
the " tempera " was generally made of white and
yolk of eggs, sometimes of the yolk only. Cennino
Cennini, who wrote about 1427 (the date as given

Decora tion,

274 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
in Mrs. Merrifield's translation is inaccurate,
being only that of a copy of original MS.),
apparently was very fond of the latter " tempera "
and says it is good for everything, and "you
cannot use too much of it, but it would be wise
to take a middle course." " Secco " painting had
two distinct uses: the one to retouch "fresco"
{i.e., when it was dry), the other to execute pictures
(i.e., all paintings not made upon walls). The
necessity of retouching "fresco" was caused by
the fact that many colours could not be used
without a " tempera." Even pictures in those
early times had a plaster ground carefully laid
upon their linen cloth, which itself was tightly
stretched over a smooth wooden panel. All the
artificial colours which are, speaking crudely, the
brightest, could only be used in " secco " painting.
In later times, according to Cennini, the less an
artist retouched his work in " secco " the more
expert he was considered to be.

T T THAT is wanted in decoration, using the
' * word in the restricted sense of panels in
furniture or in architecture, is chiefly beauty of

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 275
line and beauty of colour. For instance, it is not
decoration of a door to put ugly pictures (no
matter how clever or how interesting each may be)
in its panels, or even to put there pretty pictures
which have no fitness for the place, or relation to
one another. What has to be considered is the
door as a whole, and the way in which colours
and lines may be used to make it beautiful. The
object is, not to withdraw the eye from the fact of
there being a square or an oblong panel to fill ;
but rather to make your design confess, as it were,
at every turn that the panel is square or oblong,
and yet show, nevertheless, that square, or oblong,
or whatever shape may be chosen, can be
rendered beautiful by the ingenuity of the artist.
First to confess the limitation, then to surmount
the restriction ; this is the ideal of good design for
an arbitrarily enclosed space. At present, there
are not half-a-dozen decorative artists in England
who have thoroughly mastered the above simple
fact. THE first and chief requisite of a house is House
furniture
that it should be a place to live in — per- —the
T • 1 111 ¦ . (Esthetic,
haps, I might also add, a place to die in. Now,
T

276 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
life cannot be entirely passed in twilight con
templation of artistic objects belonging to another
age. To be life at all, there must come into it
some energy of production in the present, some
interest in the affairs of others. But what
energy could exist, what work be done, in these
aesthetic rooms, where people creep in and out
in the coloured silence, and murmur under their
breath of Leonardo and Donatello ?

Colour of T T is notable throughout the work of the great
-*- colourists of the Venetian and Florentine

tlte old
masters.

schools, that it is excessively rare to meet with
tertiary colours disposed in such masses as to form
the keynote of the picture ; and though more com
mon, it is still rare to find that this keynote is not
struck by a primary colour. In modern painting,
this practice is commonly reversed.

Djcora- T T 7HENEVER natural forms or objects are
tion of V V
pottery, ^ * represented upon pottery, they should be
rendered conventionally ; that is to say, no
attempt should be made to trespass upon the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 277
province of painting by showing the whole mass
of facts connected with the natural object, but
only to seize such main facts as may be effectively
reproduced in the special material, and are
suitable for the object which is to be decorated ;
and if in such selection we choose so well as to
get the spirit of the thing represented, we have
good conventionalism.

I

T is comparatively easy to be harmonious Useoj
tertiary
when nothing brighter than tertiary tints colours.

are used. But the exclusive dealing with such
colours is certain to entail upon an artist not only
a very limited choice of subject, but to ultimately
render him incapable of seeing true colour at all.
The effect is like that produced by wearing
blackened spectacles for a few years ; they are very
soothing to the eye, and all objects seen through
them are nice and harmonious in their inky tones;
but their use is hardly likely to increase the power
of seeing clearly and truly — and to gain such
power is one of an artist's hardest tasks. So,
again, to look at every object in the twilight, is
a comparatively simple way of avoiding all the
T 3

278 SENTENTIjE ARTIS.
subtleties of outline and tint revealed in the light.
Yet thus are the two greatest difficulties of art
evaded by a certain school of modern painters.

Imitation, T^ ECAUSE we do not want a bird as elaborately
not falsity Pj
of decora- -"— ' painted on the panel of a wardrobe as in a
.tive work, . . . , r , . , , ,
picture, it IS not therefore necessary that it should
not be rightly painted as far as it goes. The truth
is, that nearly all art is decorative art, the
difference being only in the degree. For instance,
the art that is required to cover a water-bottle or
a wardrobe, should have for its chief character
simplicity of form and colour ; and so, in infinite
gradation, real decoration progresses till it cul
minates in the grand fresco at the end of a
Venetian palace or a Roman chapel, and you
have Tintoret or Michael Angelo for your furnish
ing upholsterer.

The uses of i^OR the vast majority of people there is no
-*- road to genuine pleasure in art of other
kind than that which a child gets from a pretty
picture-book, except by undergoing the experience

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 279
of failure. The most stupid student who has
ever tried for a month to paint what he saw in
nature, will reach a better understanding of, and
have a more real delight in any good representation
of her, than the most cultivated expert in the
world, whose knowledge is only of styles, and
documents, and historical differences. The latter
man, as a rule, is wholly incapable of telling a
good picture from a bad one, though he is fre
quently capable of naming definitely the hand
by which either was produced.

" 'TpONE " is, as nearly as can be expressed
-*^ shortly, the right relation of the various
shades used in a picture ; but so far from this
being the whole of art, as some people appear to
believe, it is hardly the beginning ; and if art can
be said to consist in leaving off just where the
difficulties begin to occur, there is little difficulty
in being an artist, and no merit. But what on
earth is the good of " tone " in a picture or a man,
if there's nothing else ? Anyone could paint in
good tone who painted only in grey and white, or
grey and black, or any other neutral colours.

Tone.

280 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Light and Y^YERYTUl'NG has, properly speaking, a
shade. |i
-*— ^ light side and a dark side, and one of the
first and most necessary pieces of art education
is to learn to see this. In nine amateur drawings
out of ten, objects are drawn rather in plan, than
as they appear to the eye.

Unre- TF you Want to draw, you must do a lot of
cognised I
work, -*~ work which won't be recognised, except
by those who have undergone similar labour, and
then you will find out how many things there
are which go to make a picture. Up to a certain
point, everything is paint on paper or on canvas ;
carry it a degree further, and it is a marble
column, a woman's dress, or whatever you want
to paint. The labour that changes one to the
other never shows, and is always there.

Amateur TNCREDIBLE as it may sound, the amateur
indiffer- I
ence. -^ does really care less for his subject than
the average artist. It is not the ignorance nor
the incapacity of the lady or gentleman student
which tries the instructor, but it is their extra-

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 281
ordinary wilful obstinacy, the way in which he
or she comes dawdling down to the river, the
mountain, or the forest, with a head full of other
things, and a heart empty, and languidly takes
out a brush and sucks it, while gazing vacantly
at the scene selected. Strange as it may seem,
it has rarely been my experience to find an
unprofessional drawing from Nature in which the
faults were not caused chiefly by the laziness or
the carelessness of the student, rather than by
his incapacity. Speaking crudely, one may say
of those who make sketches, that it is only artists
who try to do them as well as they can. The
amateur, as a rule, with a tenth of the pro
fessional's capacity, and a hundredth of his
precedent education, devotes a languid attention
for a few minutes' time, and is then surprised at
the poorness of the result. The truth is that, as a
rule, with these half-and-half people, effort ceases
when difficulty begins. As long as their blotted
colour looks pretty upon the paper or the canvas ;
so long as no part of their subject forces their
own incompetence upon their attention ; so long,
in fact, as they can either evade or shut their
eyes to all the real obstacles in their picture, they

282 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
will go on swimmingly enough. But let the sun
shine a little too warmly, or the wind blow a little
too hard ; let the ground be damp beneath their
feet, or the flies buzzing about their head, or a
little dust or sand spotting their paper and mixing
up with their colours ; let them come to a mass
of clouds which wants careful drawing, or some
boughs which are waving in the wind, or some
foreground grass, whose spears and blossoms
cannot be indicated with a smudge — and behold,
up shuts the colour-box, and down comes the
white umbrella, and the fainthearted practitioner
returns home with a sketch which he " had no
time to finish." How sick every artist gets of
that phrase. It is almost worse than its corres
ponding one, " it only took me half-an-hour, you
know."

Expression T~) EMEMBER that what you are seeking, in
of subject. l\
¦*- ^ the first instance, is simply to express your
subject ; that every touch which does not aid
that expression, necessarily obscures it. An
irrelevant touch in a drawing, or one which is put
without special intention, is like a superfluous or

SENTENTI.E ARTIS. 283
half-understood word in a sentence. And if there be
many such, the whole work becomes unmeaning.
Besides which, the materials of painting are
always delicate ones, and will not bear rough
treatment ; they are like irritable people, and must
not be teased or worried. If paint is stirred about
on the palette, or the paper, or the canvas, it soon
loses all the freshness of its colour quality, it
approaches nearer and nearer to mud. Note
also, that the surface on which you work is in
one sense a colour, and almost the most precious
of your colours. It will work for you, or against
you, according as it is treated ; if you destroy its
purity, it is hardly possible not to lose the bril
liancy of your painting. The most salient point,
probably, of old English water-colour painting
was the use which the artists made of this paper
ground for obtaining brilliancy. It is not too
much to say, that its presence is felt throughout
their pictures; pictures in which the truth of
atmospheric effect has never yet been rivalled in
the history of art ; and though this is not the case
to the same extent in oil-painting, even there, if
you lose the first freshness of the paint on the
canvas, you weaken the effect.

284 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Trans- HpHE only unique quality of water-colour
parency of I ./ ti ^ ./
water- -*- drawing, the only quality which can never
colour. in any way be rivalled by oil-painting, is its trans
parency, its preservation throughout, of the surface
on which it is executed. Not a pin's point of this
surface may be visible, but the mind must per
ceive that it is there behind the colour, though
— and this it is important to notice — the fact must
never appear obtrusively. It is this system of
water-colour painting which is the one artistic
discovery of the English nation. It was originated
and worked out to the greatest perfection, entirely
by Englishmen, in England, though now, owing
to the action of the Royal Academy, it is nearly
extinct.

Beauty of T OVELINESS does not lie so much in this or
subject. I
-*— ' that subject, as in the way of regarding it.
Keep your heart in advance of your head, and you
will never be at a loss for material. By this I
mean, never let mere executive dexterity become
the first thing. Let it rather toil wearily up the
slope, which your heart surmounts almost by a
wish.

T

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 285
HE essence of good decoration is, that it Essence of
decoration.

should spring from thorough artistic feeling
and perception, and be grounded upon a full and
accurate knowledge of natural forms. And the
second indispensable quality is that it should be
true as far as it goes, no matter how short a way
that may be. For instance, if in designing a
flower, we choose to omit all accident of light and
shade, and local colour, we may do so, and it may
still be a good design ; but we have no right to
alter the proportions of its leaves or the number
of its petals. Any art which stops deliberately
short of nature, but yet does not falsify it, may
thus be decorative in the right meaning of the
word ; but art is not decorative because it is
painted on gilt wood, or because it suggests
nothing in the world save the ignorance of its
creator.

THE greatest drawback to amateur art is, as Lack of
meaningin
a rule, that it means nothing. Incom- amateur work.
plete, poor, and erroneous as is its technical side,
the spiritual part is perhaps on even a lower level.
Moreover, if the technical speech is at all attained.

286 SENTENTIjE ARTIS.
how rarely is it the case that it is used for any
intelligible purpose. We are all prone to forget,
I think, that there is little object in being able to
reproduce upon paper any scene or action what
ever, unless something else is gained beyond the
mere reproduction. If an image is produced
which only repeats a visual impression, and that
poorly (as must always be the case), without
enforcing either the significance or the beauty of
what has been seen, without bringing it into some
connection with our sympathies, and enabling us
to see more in it the next time than we saw before,
we can hardly call it a work of art.

Economy, 'T^O improve nature is not to interpret her, and
-^ for beginners in painting it is interpretation
which is necessary. Out of the many thousand
meanings which Nature offers, the student must
select one.

Drapery, "VT7HAT is, or rather what should be, the
* ^ chief characteristics of a good " study "
of drapery by an eminent artist ? There are three

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 287
things which have to be considered; the first is
the arrangement of the drapery in graceful lines
and folds — the second, the expression of the form
on which the drapery hangs — the third, the definite
drawing and expression in clear light and shade of
each separated fold. In these three things all
good studies of drapery agree, whether their treat
ment has been done in the broadest possible
manner, or is as involved as that of Mantegna,
Titian's, Veronese's, Tintoretto's, or Leonardo's
works ; all teach us that confused drawing of the
folds, or carelessness of arrangement, or conceal
ment of the form beneath, are bad qualities in the
execution of drapery.

npHE great defect of William Morris's designs, Morris's
-*- regarded as decoration, is their lack of """
spontaneity and ease. They are beautiful, it is
true, but with an involved intricate beauty, from
which we gain pleasure, but hardly rest or satis
faction. They seem to have been much laboured
over, both in thought and execution, and not to
have, as it were, sprung into being from a hand
accustomed to fuller work.

288 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Etching. T^TCHING has to depend almost entirely
-*— ' for its attractions upon the suggestion
of some clear, forcible impression, and can call
to its aid none of the resources of colour to con
ceal its deficiency of imagination. If you could
make any kind of artist by machinery and the
South Kensington school, the last sort which you
would be able to manufacture is an etcher, for
really fine etching is as free and easy as is the
chat between old chums at midnight over the
smoking-room fire, and bears the same relation to
painting, as does that of conversation to a formal
speech, lecture, or sermon. The great contrast
between British and foreign etchings is the
absence from the latter of that indefinable, but
indubitable sense of propriety which marks the
former. We "wear our rue with a difference,"
there can be no doubt about that ; we are rather
like workmen in their Sunday clothes, or, better
still, like an Eton schoolboy, disguised in
corduroys and highlows, striving to be careless
and kick his limbs about freely, but conscious of
six centuries of ancestors, the paternal mansion,
and the all-round collar which he has left behind
him. We take our etching " sadly," like our

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 289
pleasure ; and, like amateur actors in their first
piece, are painfully conscious of our arms and
legs, and more than half convinced that we are
making fools of ourselves. An etching, in the
ordinary sense of the word, is a sketch upon a
material which is capable of being corroded by
the application of acid ; and its peculiar qualities
of richness depend upon several causes, of which
the principal are the peculiar shape of the etched
line, the differences in depth which can be
obtained by leaving the plate a longer or shorter
time in the acid, the size and shape of the tool
employed, and what is technically called the
" bur." This last is the edge of copper which is
raised by the scratching of the needle employed to
draw the design. Those qualities which are
peculiar to the etched line are chiefly softness,
richness, and freedom, and are obtained fully only
upon one metal — copper. Each variety of medium
and mode of reproduction, has a distinctive ex
cellence of its own ; and it is only while working
in the manner by which such excellence is to be
obtained, that the specialist is working rightly.
It is not right, but wrong, for an etching to
attempt to rival a steel engraving ; it is not right,

290 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
but wrong, to elaborate a rough material, such as
charcoal, to a pitch when it may be compared to
a delicate one, such as brush or pencil. Etching
is an art which is essentially limited in its range,
emphatic in;;_its diction, and partial in its truth ;
which is happier in the gloom of a doorway than
in the glow of the sunshine ; and turns with a
pleasant blindness from whatever in nature or
man is of perfect beauty or noble thought, to
linger with a vain kindness over the dark shadows
of some city alley, or the broken timbers of a
disused barge.

Spanish X X THAT shall we say of modern Spanish and
ian art, V V Italian painting ? Over these petty, pretty
futilities of art and life, we yawn drowsily —
they are duller than a Gaiety burlesque when
Terry and Miss Farren are away. Indeed, they
are something like one — plenty of coloured dresses,
a good deal of bosom and short skirt, bright
artificial light and pretty faces, a glitter of silk
and jewel, a Babel of meaning ; the result — a
headache. In paintings of this kind nothing is

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 291
true but the adroitness of the artist, and his
intention to conjure your money out of your
pocket.

T F a painter who has by necessity a limited Colour
-*- scale of colours, tries to paint a scene
where he has colours plus sunlight, he must
necessarily reconcile himself to having some
" demonstrable errors " in his picture ; but that
is surely no reason why he should ignore the
most vital facts he has to record (or perhaps it
would be more fair to say transpose), on the chance
that by so doing his painting will be more
technically correct. It is a matter of fact that
Turner disliked green trees and green meadows,
and seldom painted either that colour when he
could help it ; but after all, he would have been a
greater man if he had done so. Whatever he did
was right, we have almost come to acknowledge
that much ; but it by no means follows that a
system of colouring which could be justified by
his example would be the best. Pictures are not
painted so as to be mathematically accurate in
their relations of tone, but apparently so.

232 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Rusk'in. /^NE of Ruskin's greatest defects, in so far as
^^ his teaching influences artists, is that he
banishes the personal element in their work. His
method of observing nature, and his almost impos
sibly high standard of technical skill and micro
scopic fidelity, are, perhaps, in some measure
responsible for this. But the main motive is
probably that he inculcates a definite method of
looking at nature — he puts a moral bias into the
work. Art, however, is in itself neither moral
nor immoral, religious nor anti-religious. Again,
many phases of feeling, common and attractive to
the great mass of humanity, are as much a dead-
letter to this great art teacher, as Sanskrit to an
Islington cabman. And it is his incapacity to
understand such feelings, and their influence upon
men, which leads to his impatience with that
erring, imperfect, but withal genuine art, which
looks upon nature and mankind from the point of
view of error, rather than of perfection. He
understands that a picture should declare the
glory of God, but hardly that it should denote the
frailty of man. And all those attempts at com
bining natural beauty with the commonplace
endeavours,, failures, and emotions of mankind.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 293
which form the great part of modern art, are to
him endeavours which are wasted.

w

ATTS once told me that owing to his Colour [technical).
method of preserving or restoring the

purity of the ground of his pictures, he found
that when they were varnished some years after
they had been finished, they had not only acquired
tone, but become actually more brilliant than
when they were painted.

w

E might often wonder most at the things The
, . , Ifi amateur's
which occur every day, for the common- conceit.

place is frequently more astounding than the
marvellous. What, for instance, can be more
surprising than the everyday experience, that 'the
amateur should expect to do, without earnest
work and sustained effort, what the professional
strains after, often in vain, his whole life long — to
do, in a word — good work ? U 2

294 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Know- 1~^0 not draw what you know, but draw what
ledge 11 ¦'
versus -*-^ you See. The beginning of all painting
sight, , .
from nature, is the substitution for realities (of
form and colour) of a shorthand language, in which
half the details are omitted, and the remainder
expressed in a more or less coventional way.

intention, I

Vaiueof y WOULD rather, for student work, see the
worst attempt at doing a subject, than a
comparatively successful drawing in which the
pupil showed no determining impulse — in which
there was, plainly speaking, no object. And this,
because right feeling in art is precedent to right
doing ; and the person who has something to say
and wants to say it, in art, as in other matters of
life, will no doubt find a means of utterance, no
matter how stammering may be his original
language. But out of your fluent speaker, who
cares and seeks for nothing save speaking, what
vital word can ever proceed ?

Water- T T TE come now to the question whether
colour V. y y . . 1 1 1
oil paint- ^ ^ water-colour IS more suitable to the
ills'- student than that of oil painting. And here

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 295
I am sorry to say I find myself opposed to
nearly all art teachers with whose opinions I
am acquainted. I admit the superior facility
with which in water-colours a slight sketch can
be made in a few minutes, and just tinted with
the help of a little box which will go in the
waistcoat pocket. I acknowledge that it is at
once less cumbrous, less costly, less troublesome,
less pretentious, and likely to be more pleasing
in its results, than any amateur work in oil.
But, holding as I do the opinion that all student
work is important, not so much for what it pro
duces, as for the instruction it gives in seeing
nature, and understanding the works of artists —
it appears to me that, a student's time being
necessarily limited, and as it is excessively im
probable he will be able to master both methods,
it is most important he should select the one in
which the great majority of the world's finest
pictures have been executed — the one to which
all the merits of water-colour are, in comparison,
"as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto
wine." Nor is this all ; for the most elementary
qualities of good painting can be emphasized in
an oil sketch, in a manner which is impossible

296 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
in water-colour. It is difficult to explain this
shortly, but it results from the fact that it is
comparatively easy in oils, from the very nature
of the medium, to put on at once a mass of
colour, of the requisite strength and form. The
colours do not run into one another, but lie side
by side, and may be joined or altered in shape
without great difficulty. The effect is obtained,
so to speak, at once, and a good oil sketch rarely
needs strengthening. The medium is more tract
able, and will stand comparatively rough handling
without losing its brilliancy ; and there are many
other considerations of like kind. No doubt there
is a great deal to be said on both sides of the
question, and it is necessary, if the student
sketches in oil, that he should do a consider
able amount of minute work in pencil or pen-
and-ink, in order to keep delicacy of form and
minuteness of detail well before his eyes. If
he does this, however, it is scarcely possible
but that he will escape some of the most crying
vices of ordinary unprofessional painting. He
is little likely to be weakly, washily pretty; the
temptations are all the other way. The sham
picturesque is the last subject which will come

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 297
easily to him, nor will he find it help his work
to encumber it with a mass of irrelevant details.
The facility' with which all sorts of intricate forms
can be drawn on paper and tinted with a brush
has no analogue upon canvas for a beginner, who
is almost forced thereby to take broad, simple
subjects. Of course such a student will be, to a
certain extent, like a youngster in a riding school,
riding, without stirrups, on a rough raw-boned
charger, and getting a good deal knocked about
in the process. There is another thing too — a
bad oil sketch is such a gruesome thing, it speaks
with such a loud, insistent voice, that it is impos
sible to praise it, and so it is little likely to be
stuck in a book, or shown round to admiring
friends.

XT 0 student's painting is in a progressive Progress.
^ ^ state, unless it is in one of continual
failure; for the work of a pupil which does not
betray its incompleteness daily, must be work
which is only a repetition, in more or less varied
form, of the few facts which he has already
mastered.

298 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

Discour- 'T^^HE student should not be too miserable when
agement, I • n i •
-*- some brutally-outspoken friend tells him
that his work is abominable. The truth is that
work must be abominable, if it is ever going to be
good. If you are trying to scale the mountains,
you must be weary and footsore, and feel as if
your last bit of strength were deserting you, long
before you reach the top. Accept the present
worthlessness of your work; it is only one of the
"labour pains" which you suffer to learn your
business. Don't look at each drawing to see if it
is " good," but only to see if it is in any way
"better." As Louis Stevenson said, and as many
a wiser man has said before him in other words —
" To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, and
the true success is to labour."

Beginning TAETERMINE to put down exactly what the
to work, II r,\
-•— ^ eye sees, and no more. That, or some
approach to that, is possible for every one, and if
done, must result in giving to the drawing in
terest, and probably a certain amount of beauty.
Try in looking at your subject to see it as if you
were the first person who had ever lived.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 299
AT EVER paint what comes easiest, but what Success
^^ is most difficult. One learns nothing failure,
from success, but much from failure. Besides,
you will find, on going back to the subject you
thought easy — after trying, no matter how un
successfully, to do harder work — that you have
probably, in the old days, missed some of its most
vital qualities, and that it isn't so easy after all
as you used to think.

ONE main fault of drawing-master instruction Drawing-master
is that it cultivates the habits of thought- instruc tion,
lessness and recklessness, under various attractive
titles: "breadth," "generalisation," "indications
of form," "blotting in a tree," "washing in a
sky," and so on. All such phrases are not only
veils for ignorance, but each of them puts a
distinct stumbling-block in the way of the student.
Till he has become convinced of their absolute
futility, his progress is impossible.

PERSPECTIVE is the bread of art; you Perspec tive.
cannot make a satisfactory meal, nor even
a wholesome one, of it and nothing else — but you

300 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
can hardly get through the simplest meal (or
drawing) without it. And perspective does not
only apply, as many amateurs apparently think,
to rectilinear objects, but to objects of every
shape.

Brush- TTOR a student, the simpler his brushwork is
work. r"'
-•- the better. Don't stir the colour into a
puddle, either on the palette or the paper. Try
and put the colour in its right place at once, and
leave it there.

Mass and ''11/1" ASS" and "Value" are very important
-*-'-*- matters, but even these may be over
rated occasionally, as they are in the French
schools of painting. For we find that many
artists, who think the most of these qualities,
are frequently blind to all the beauty of pure
colour, and to many of the delicacies of detail in
form.

T

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 301
HE amateur is like a child straying at will The
amateur.
through pleasant gardens; here picking a

flower, there idling in the sunshine; here tumbling
into a ditch and getting stung with nettles. The
flowers he gathers wither in his hot, unskilful
hands; his wanderings have no aim ; his falls little
importance. But all are part of that education in
life which, after all, is the only thing for which
we live. The imperfection of the work he pro
duces is not the measure of his success or failure
— that must be sought in the habit of mind and
eye which his futile attempts induce ; in his
comprehension, through personal shortcoming,
of the achievements of others.

AFTER the nude figure, the most beautiful Trees and
shrubs.
and the hardest thing in the world to draw
is a tree or any part of one, and in boughs and
leaves the student can find the best subjects for
learning to draw, but this does not apply to
shrubs, which may perhaps be called artificial
trees. A shrub is, as a rule, a bad thing in a
picture, because its growth has usually been
artificially controlled ; because it is commonly

3f2 SENTENTIjE ARTIS.
crowded up with a lot of others, so that one can
rarely see its structure ; because it is generally
nothing but a uniform mass of colour ; because it
is almost invariably, in modern gardens, incon
gruous, artificial, and evidently placed in the
position it occupies for purposes of pride, rather
than of use or enjoyment. All subjects of this kind
are bad for artistic purposes ; and the same
reasoning, if you follow it out, will be found to
apply to most of the matters that should be
avoided in painting.

Choice of ^ ¦ "^HE choice of a subiect is the hardest matter
a subject, I
-*- of all to a beginner ; and little help can be
given to him for such choice, except by negations.
Don't take forty square miles of country, and,
consequently, don't get upon a hill to try and do
a distant view. Don't take a subject in which
the details are many and intricate, and in which
the effect depends upon complicated effects of
light and shade. Avoid all subjects which glitter,
because they are both intensely difficult, and rarely
satisfactory. Do not choose a subject which has

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 303
no foreground, nor one which has nothing else.
Avoid mountains, ruins, plantations, lakes, and
modern architecture.

T T UMILITY maybe carried too far. An ex- Humility.
¦*- -*- quisitely finished study of some unim
portant object, does not necessarily show a truer
sense of the limitation of its maker's artistic
capabilities than many a rough and wholly im
perfect landscape, in which a student has
struggled, though unsuccessfully, to render some
of the broader characteristics of nature. A con
siderable personal experience of those who do
leaves, and stones, and twigs, and shells, and
little bits of doorway, has led me to the con
clusion that such methods of study tend to
conceit, as they certainly tend towards losing
sight of the broader truths of mass, value, com
position, and colour. Nature is, it is perfectly
true, a mosaic ; but she never appears as such to
any human being, save when he, as it were,
focuses a microscope upon a single square inch of
her beauty.

304 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Advance * DVANCE in art is of a kangaroo character;
m art. L\ °
¦^ ^ we progress by leaps, after long intervals
of apparent stagnation. The work shows no sign
of improvement for weeks together ; then all of a
sudden we find that it has. not been wasted — that
we have exhausted the possibilities of failure in
this, or that, or the other respect — and that for
the future we shall be able to avoid all traps and
pitfalls of that special kind.

Fitness of /^\ EJECTS divorced from their natural sur-
place. II ^-^ roundings rarely make good pictures, or even
subjects of study, unless they are subsidiary parts
of some general intention, or unless the purpose
for which the divorce has been made, is recognised
at once as being a justification. The old fal
lacious prescription for making a picture of " still
life," by heaping together masses of flowers, or
fruit, or miscellaneous bric-a-brac, is an instance
of this ; for a picture is not made beautiful by having
in it a jumble of beautiful things. It is made
beautiful by consistency, fitness, significance, and
the adaptation of means to a definite end.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 305
1 ¦"'VERY subject which is really attractive to Uglin
-* — ' the person doing it, is so far a good one.
There is no more blighting influence in art than
that of the teachers who lay down hard-and-fast
rules as to the picturesque and the reverse.
Perhaps one of the greatest causes of the triviality
and dulness among unprofessional drawings, is
that the amateurs frequently buy their subjects, so
to speak, where they buy their colours. They
never try to paint the things they care about, but
only the things they have been taught to think
they ought to care about ; as if art were a plum-
pudding that could only be made up of suet, and
raisins, and candied peel. For ugliness is a
relative and compound matter, just as much as
beauty; and is affected by association, and juxta
position, and fitness, and accidents of light and
shade.

T

HERE are two chief classes of art Two
classes of
amateurs ; of which the first and most amateurs.

numerous includes those who think that drawing
can be taught in an Abracadabra, and painting
in a Fi-fo-fum. The second class consists of

306 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
those who think that the alphabet of art con
stitutes the whole of its literature, or, at all
events, all the literature of which they are
capable : from this second class is to be expected
nothing but isolated details of nature, on each
of which an equal amount of microscopic labour
has been bestowed.

Amateurs advan

' ^ I "'HERE is no reason why the amateur
tages, -*- should not see and feel as rightly as the
professional, if he will seek for the right way
of doing so. But the expression of his thought
and feeling must invariably be inadequate. In
deed, in some ways the unprofessional student
has even an advantage, for his work is rarely
thwarted by pecuniary obstacles, rarely modified
by considerations of what is popular and likely
to sell. There is no excuse for his being dull
or mechanical in painting, since the whole world
is before him where to choose — since he need
never choose a subject for which he does not care.

Burne- "^TET in art, as in other and greater matters,
Jones' 1 . .
failures, "*- it is Only failure that teaches. No one
who can go on quite bravely and sincerely making

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 307
mess after mess from Nature, but comes to the
time when, he does not quite know how it is,
he makes messes no longer. Somehow from the
failure grows up the fruit. I remember Burne-
Jones saying to me, some years ago, on this
subject, apropos of the designing and arranging
of drapery, that he had tried to do it vainly for
nearly two years, day after day, till one morning
the sun shone, the earth cracked, the flowers
bloomed, and he could design drapery for ever.

" T CAN'T do figures," used to say the irrational Shivering
I on the
-¦- members of my drawing club, " and so I brink.
won't try " ; as if " doing figures " was a God-sent
gift, that came down from heaven in a basket.
It is this shivering on the brink of any little
deeper water than ordinary which prevents pro
gress. Bad swimmers in their depth can always
manage to keep up an appearance if they leave
one toe on the ground, but will never learn to
swim. Let them flounder about a little in deep
water, and get it down their throat and up their
nostrils, and after a certain time of spluttering
and gasping, and striking out wildly with both

308 SENTENTI/E ARTIS.
arms, they will probably learn to take care of
themselves. The right frame of mind for any
ordinary student, when he sits down to reproduce
a bit of Nature, is one not far removed from
terror — not very different from what our imperfect
swimmer might feel if suddenly flung into deep
water. Let him nevertheless take heart ; he is
travelling the road that every artist in the world
has travelled before him, for there is that grand
compensating law, that the greater the native
genius, the further removed is the goal of attain
ment. The best painter is, as a rule, more
dissatisfied with his work than the worst. Painting
was never easy yet, except to those who were
incapable.
Praise and /~^ IVE anything else, but don't part with
blame, V T • i • <¦ i ¦ i i
^~— ^ incomplete bits of yourself till they are
worth having ; it's best to keep what you produce
in the workshop. Resist the temptation also to
look too much on what you have done. Do it
with heart and brain to the utmost of your
power — there's something wrong if you don't feel
washed-out after each drawing ; but don't look at
it all day and night ; and the next day, take down

SENTENTIyE ARTIS. 309
the shutters afresh, put a new bit of goods in the
window, and forget all about yesterday's sample.
Drawings look much better in gilt mounts, or
framed neatly, but the drawings themselves are
no better — leave them as they are, for the present
at all events. I would not have you refuse to
show your work to any one who wishes to see it —
that's making a mystery of the matter which the
thing is not worth. But I would have you be
sure first that they do wish to see it, and then I
would have you show it, taking as little as
possible of the praise or blame bestowed, and
desiring neither. If your heart is in your work
you will soon come into this frame of mind.
Most random praise is an impertinence, though
that hardly prevents our finding it sweet. Think
how foolish it would seem if, when you were
learning a foreign language, some one who
perhaps knew a few words of it, and possibly
none at all, were to ask you to pronounce the
syllables you were acquainted with, and compli
ment you on your acquirement. You are learn
ing now the universal language of Art, which great
men in all times have spent their lives in
acquiring — do you want to hear the irresponsible

310 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
compliments of any one while you are master
ing its alphabet, or even in the midst of its
declensions ?

Ruskin's /"ANE of the many minor results of Mr.
influence. I i
^-^ Ruskin's teaching, even upon those who
utterly repudiate it, has been the substitution of
a narrow naturalism for a conventionalism, which,
though frequently exaggerated and misused, had
nevertheless great elements of worth and beauty.
The English school of landscape has practically
been destroyed by the too vivid recognition of
its early errors, and the consequent rebound to
a still more fatal mistake. For a great landscape
picture is something inevitably different from an
unaltered view of nature ; and the painters of
to-day, seeing with their greater opportunities
and increased knowledge much of the short
comings of their predecessors in truth of detail,
and their over-regard for traditional treatment,
have practically left off their work where the
others began ; have collected their materials, but
left them unshaped and chaotic. It is strange
that Ruskin, who penetrated so many of Turner's
secrets, never really grasped the fact of his

SENTENTIyE ARTIS. 311
essential conventionalism, and never seems to
have perceived that conventionalism of a certain
kind has been at the root of all great landscape
art. But it is partially explicable by the influence
of the special character of the great writer's
religious opinions, and his insistence on its having
a real logical connection with his art doctrines.
REMEMBER that in any natural scene, Perspec tive.
there is a landscape of the sky, as well as
a landscape of the earth, and that, though the
latter may be sometimes flat, the former is
always round. Round objects in a hollow vault
cannot be expressed by thin ungradated washes
of colour. The same rules which apply to the
perspective of terrestrial objects, apply also to
that of aerial ones, and if violated, produce the
same results. The ordinary amateur forgets
this, and becomes Japanese in the upper part of
his picture.
T OCAL colour is obscured by distance and Distance,
¦* — ' altered by sunlight, almost as much as it
is hidden by shadow. A red coat a mile off is
almost grey.

812 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

Nearness, /^EJECTS which are near, display more
^-^ texture, as well as more detail, than those
which are further off.

Solidity, A N egg, a man's head, and a tree, are all,
•^ ^ broadly speaking, round objects, though
the first is smooth and white, and the two last-
mentioned coloured and irregular. There is no
more reason why you should neglect to have
the spherical form of trees or of a person's head
clearly expressed in your drawing, than there is
why you should omit the roundness of a ball or an
egg. Only, as a rule, the amateur fastens on the
easily seen features of nose and eyes, or bough
and leaf, and does not notice nor think about
the delicate gradation which gives the effect of
solidity, and which makes, as the French would
say, the object in question " turn."
Shape, A NY object, or any part of nature, has a
•^ ^ definite shape, if it be only the shape of a
mass of colour, light or shade. Every stroke of
the drawing which does not set down some
definite shape, or some portion of a definite shape.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 313
must inevitably be entirely wrong. Nature is not
made up of strokes, or blots, or little scrabbles in
various directions, like worms wriggling, but of
masses. Nor is there a border round objects, as
a rule. They simply end where others begin,
such and such a mass relieved by its value, as
well as its colour and form, against such another.

ROUGHLY speaking, if you look at a land- Turning
to or from
scape in the direction of the sun, its colour the sun.
is more or less invisible. If you turn your back
towards the sun, the reverse is the case. If
therefore your picture is to depend upon colour,
you must look away from the light ; and this is
in nineteen cases out of twenty the best thing
to do.

T3 OUGHS, no matter how wavy and slight, Drawmg
-*~^ or how gnarled and twisted, are seldom or
never disjointed or weak. Each portion of them
depends on another, and may be traced, in its
dependence and in its general line of spread, to
the parent trunk.

814

SENTENTIiE ARTIS.

Leaves and branches.

Drawing trees.

Elaboration, not
finish.

T EAVES are not independent of branches,
¦* — ' yet it is a common amateur way to draw
the outside form, and lay the branches of the tree
upon it. The shape of a tree, however, is made
up of masses of leaf and branch, each having a
distinct relation to the other, and each expressive
of its growth, its character, and its spherical
nature. A LEAF has a definite shape. Draw it if
"'¦ ^ you are near enough to see it ; a group of
leaves has also a definite shape, which is clearly
perceptible when the individual leaf is not.
When you cannot see either the leaf or the group
at the distance, you may still see that the tree
forms itself, as a rule, into masses which have
relation to its growth, which indeed express its
growth, to any understanding eye ; and these it
is you have to set down. Trees are not made
by splodging about with browns and greens
and yellows, in little patches without definite
intention. NOR will any amount of rubbing and scrap
ing give you the texture of a rock or other
object, if you can't make its form clearly per-

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 315
ceptible by your gradated light and shade.
Elaboration of work is not finish. Many
minutely stippled-up drawings are, in the true
sense of the word, utterly unfinished. For finish
is not putting more work into a drawing, but
more fact. A complicated means of expressing
any natural fact or pictorial incident is, other
things being equal, inferior to a more simple
means. It is a weakness to use two lines where
one would represent the object equally well.
There is another side, too, to this question, for
all added labour upon a drawing or picture tends
to obscure the individuality of the artist, and to a
certain extent to take away from the impulse of
the work. And so, unless there is a definite gain
in completeness or beauty produced by the ela
boration of the idea, the work loses both on the
sides of ease and motive.

T

HE trunk of a tree is not stuck in the Relationof trees to
ground ; but holds it as the fingers hold the ground.

glass. It may be said, in fact, that the two are
parts of the same organism — connections, at all
events, by marriage.

316 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
splodges. /COMPLACENCY is generally found with
^-^ neatness, and generally arising from having
mastered, more or less fully, some inferior system
of drawing. For if one believes that a splodge of
green for a field, and a splodge of purple for a
mountain, and a little blue slopped here and there
on a piece of white paper for a sky, and other
similar renderings of nature, are sufficient for the
purposes of art ; then, when one has acquired the
small amount of skill necessary for putting such
splodges in their right place, there is every reason
why one should be complacent. With every added
sketch done upon such a system, the mental and
physical eye gets duller, and grows to have less
power of perceiving the minutiae of form, and
colour, and chiaroscuro. And with every added
sketch, the hand grows more capable of its
mechanical practice, and produces with greater
ease a splodge of the required shape and colour.

Definite T T THEN you are not certain of what to do to a
intention V/V/ . , , . ..... r i
necessary. * ^ drawing, do nothing. Nothing is so fatal a
bar to future work as the habit of splodging about
indefinitely. And, on the other hand, the habit of

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 317
putting down no touch or line without a clear
perception of the end which you intend to gain
thereby, is the most wholesome habit in the world,
and one which must inevitably result in progress.
Part of the pleasure which is given by a good
sketch is that whoever sees it perceives the utmost
carrying out of this definite intention, the con
tinual selection between twenty or thirty different
matters, and the clear undisguised presentation of
the one chosen.
THOUGH it may be carried too far, there is Ordinary
scenes,
no doubt that the habit of drawing from
subjects which are not at first sight attractive is
the greatest help, in after years, in educating the
eye to see the beauties of ordinary scenes and
circumstances. And remember that it is ordinary
scenes and circumstances from which the artist
must, as a rule, extract the material for his pictures.
Think of the great painters of English landscape
and their finest works, how trivial and common
place seem their character. Gainsborough's
" Crossing the Stream," Constable's " Mill," David
Cox's "Hayfield," De Wint's "Cornfield," Tur
ner's " Frosty Morning," such are the names of five

318 SENTENTI.^ ARTIS.
of the greatest landscapes that English painters
have ever produced. Indeed, go a step further,
and look at Old Chrome's "Mousehold Heath " in
the National Gallery, and notice how a magni
ficent picture can be made out of nothing but a
sweep of moorland and a stormy sky.
Good in HpHE difficulty of subject, which is taught in
everything, I
-*~ no book, and rarely touched on by any
art-instructor, must be faced from the very first-
Each of us must learn to discover for himself what
it is which appears to him to be beautiful, and
what are the qualities in a scene which appeal to
his imagination, or his feeling. Subject is really
the diet of painting, and must be regulated accord
ing to the personal wants of the painter. But it is
strange to discover how seldom any subject which
is unartificial does not afford distinct opportunities
for artistic purposes. The student, I think, should
not be in a hurry to devote himself to one given
class of work ; he will soon learn to know what it
is for the rendering of which he cares most ; and,
till then, it is no bad way for him to take without
grumbling whatever lies in his way, as a subject
of study.

SENTENTI.E ARTIS. 319
NEATNESS is one of the greatest vices of Neatness
sometimes
amateur work. Not that it is in itself a hind
rance,
either a good or a bad thing ; but that it shows
the worker to have been occupied with irrelevant
matters. For neatness is essentially one of the
leisurely virtues, valuable chiefly in lives and
occupations of an unimportant kind. When every
faculty of brain and hand is being brought into
play upon a work of art, there is no time left to
consider dabs of paint upon the coat-sleeve, or
whether a few drops of varnish are or are not spilt
upon the floor. For the mind refuses to work at
the same moment freely and restrictedly, and if
you fix it upon the small outside impedimenta of
your occupation, you take away so much of the
power which you require for the occupation itself.
A LL things out of their usual place are gener- Objectsout
^ ^ ally unfitting for pictures, unless their unsuitable,
incongruity is useful for some definite purpose.
For instance, cut flowers, plucked fruit, shells,
and in general all objects which have an accus
tomed place in nature, make bad subjects for
pictures when divorced from that position. But
it by no means follows that they therefore make

320 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
bad portions of subjects ; that a plate of fruit may
not be most delightful in some genre composition ;
that flowers will not help the beauty of a woman's
dress, or perhaps the significance of her gesture,
and so on. What the student has to consider is
whether he has sufficient object to gain in depriving
flower or shell or fruit of its natural surroundings,
and to take care that, if he has not, he paints it
where he finds it in nature. It is a mere matter
of common sense after all; for to take anything
from its entourage without a motive is to deprive
it of meaning, and to deprive it therefore, in most
cases, of its beauty. For the least part of the
beauty is that of the thing itself, independent of ¦
all relations.
Careless- /^CARELESSNESS is still less tolerable than
^-^ neatness, for carelessness in painting is
incompatible with any genuine attempt to paint
well. A work of art may sometimes be produced
swiftly, but never by chance. And though the
finest and quickest lines and bits of brushwork
are frequently the best, they are never so swift as
not to be done with deliberate purpose, and with
the utmost strain of the worker's power.

ness

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 321
NO matter how limited may be an amateur's Necessity
of a sub-
powers, it always lies within them to select ject, no
. , matter
a subject which has some definite meaning. No how
.,,.,. ... simple.
matter how simple his object may be, it is essen
tial that it should exist. If the motive is only to
tell the colour of the grass on a certain slope of
hillside, or the movement of clouds on a given
afternoon, or the circling lines of water in the
stream, or the straining of a bough in the wind,
or the plunge of a ship in the waves, it is still
quite sufficient. For — and I think this is a con
sideration which does not often occur to amateurs
— the minds of people who look at and care for
pictures, soon grow to be eminently sympathetic,
if only they have the least chance of feeling sym
pathy. The eye seeks, unconsciously to itself,
for the slightest hint of the painter's intention;
and the mind, getting hold of such a trace of
meaning, follows it out eagerly, and sympathises
with the failure, or glories in the success, with an
almost personal emotion. I don't know that
there is to be gained from ordinary pictures by
inartistic people a greater pleasure than that of
the beholder saying to himself, " Yes, I see what
the artist was trying to do." And the reverse is

322 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
as certainly the case. The perception of the no-
meaning in a picture causes a revulsion against it
of great intensity. " What on earth have you
dragged me into this gilt frame for," we seem to
ask of the artist, " if you had nothing to tell me
when you got me there? "

But the Y^ UT if the student must beware of having no
should be -L^ subjcct, he must be careful also not to
u simple
one. render his drawing too complicated, nor to over
burden it with attempted subtleties of meaning.
His motive should always be a simple one, simple
in proportion to the paucity of his powers, and,
speaking broadly, should refer to some of the
ordinary facts of life or nature. For there is no
such thing as commonplace motives in art, apart
from the way in which they are treated. There
is nothing commonplace in the ordinary human
affections and natural objects of the world, unless
they are seen through a vulgar mind or eye.
"Who ever saw an ugly woman look unattractive
when she was kissing her child ? " as Wilkie
Collins says somewhere. There is this advantage

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 323
in what is called the commonplace, that it appeals
to every one. Do it in the least degree rightly,
and you have for your audience not the Upper
Ten alone, but those of every estate.

THE best result that can be obtained, by the Result of
Amateur
great majority of amateur students, is not work.
the capacity to do drawings of more or less in
ferior quality themselves, but to gain sufficient
knowledge of the subject-matter, methods, and
principles of art, to enjoy the work of great artists,
and see its true relation to the world at large.
Not only does this produce a pleasure of far wider
scope than the gratification of mere personal
vanity, but it is one of those productive feelings,
which tend by their very existence to increase the
amount and the power of good art. If the
enormous body of amateurs in England were to
work from this standpoint, their influence not only
upon all who knew them, but upon our painters,
would be simply incalculable. We should hear no
more from the artists those bitter words, which are
so frequent in the present day, concerning amateur

324 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
work ; nor should we have from the artists a litter
of those cheap pictures which rely for their attrac
tion upon flashy renderings of nature, or cheap
tricks of sentiment.

Apparent /^^ EJECTS appear round to the eye, because
solidity II . ,. ,
of objects. ^-^ of the gradation of hght upon their surface.
This rule applies to everything in nature, and it
therefore is impossible to indicate form without
attention to this gradation. It applies equally to
the slope of a down and the shape of a teapot.
Painting is not tinting a flat surface, but gra
dating a flat surface so that it appears to project
or retreat, or to be of whatever form is required.

agement.

Discour- /^NE obstacle which is likely to check the
^^ beginner and greatly discourage him'
must be noted carefully. And that is, that if he
attempts, as I urge him to attempt, never to exe
cute a drawing without a definite intention to tell
some story, no matter how simple or how short,
he will at first suffer grievously for his inability.

SENTENTI.<E ARTIS. 325
He will find himself incapable of saying the
smallest thing clearly ; he will, to use common
language, feel like a bigger fool every day. I
remember speaking to a great artist once about
the difficulty of learning to draw animals in
motion, and his telling me how he had learnt to
do it. " There is only one way," he said, " you
can't attempt to do the whole thing at once, you
must do it piecemeal. Say you want to do a
dog running, you must watch till you get one
going the way you want, and seize what part of his
action you see most clearly — say the line of his
back, or the angle of his hind-leg, or the pose of
his head, or whatever it is. Stick that down in
your note-book, and nothing else ; and watch him
again till you get another morsel of action, and so
on day after day till you have got all the facts of
the matter. Then you can begin to put your
running dog together." Well, something in this
way must a beginner think of doing his subject,
and he must be content if he can get only a very
little bit of it in this or that rendering ; let him
get that little bit as clear as possible, and not be
disheartened at the incompleteness or failure of
the whole. Y 2

326 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.

tion of I
work. -•-

^niToJ^ ''y^HE only confidence with which a young
man can leave his work, is the con
fidence of not being able to carry it further.
There never yet was an artist in this world,
worthy of the name, who wilfully neglected
the facts of his painting, save when the render
ing of such facts was inconsistent with the
purpose he had in view, or impossible in the
time at his disposal.

Praise. 'HpHE amateur student should distrust all
-¦- praise, for the simple reason that it is
rarely that those who have sufficient knowledge
to know a bad drawing from a good one, will
come across his path. He should distrust
it again, because it is seldom that to any
adequate judge an ordinary amateur drawing
can give anything but pain ; and again, because
those who really know and wish to help beginners,
will always speak more of the places in which
they have failed, than of those in which they
have succeeded. He should distrust it most of

SENTENT^E ARTIS. 127
all when it comes from relations or friends.
The first, indeed, are probably the worst judges
in the world.

THERE is no excuse for an amateur student's L^ick of
interest in
work, so far as subject is concerned, being amateur work,
dull. Literally, the world is all before him where
to choose, and he has nothing to do but select for
reproduction the subjects he cares for most. But
frequently such students are entangled in a web
of their own contriving, and the only things they
see in art are reflections, more or less feeble, of
their own indifference. If they cared how the
rain fell, or the wind blew, or the trees glowed in
autumn; how the Lowland lassie loved " in her
ain degree," or "the laird married the lady"; if it
was anything to them how the curves of a woman's
arm varied from the shoulder to the elbow, or how
the foaming water circled back along the sand, to
the feet of the breaking wave ; if they knew and
felt how even mist and gloom have a beauty of
their own, hardly inferior to that of sunshine ;
if they had ever delighted, in fact, in a single one
of the phenomena of nature, or the phenomena of

328 SENTENTI.E ARTIS.
feeling, we should have no more conventional
mantel-borders, or decorated milking-stools, for a
very long time. " Love what you paint, and
paint what you love," old William Hunt said ;
and the work done in this spirit is certain to
have some merit, no matter how poorly it may
be executed.

A
subject. ^ ^ easier, an amateur for the more difficult
subject.

choice of

The time A DRAWING is not good in proportion to
¦'¦ ^ the amount of time which has been spent
on it (other things being equal), but in proportion
to the amount of effort which has been compressed
into the time employed. Amateur drawings, I
think, should always be done at white heat, in a
mood between fear and triumph ; and, directly
there is a conscious slackening of the interest,
should be discontinued. Work done in this way,
no matter how technically imperfect, is never
altogether worthless. It represents either the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 329
success or failure, ignorance or knowledge, ability
or shortcoming, of a definite human being, and on
these matters speaks clearly. Long hours of
patient industry, no doubt, are necessary also ;
but these are not to the point in the present
instance, in which I am speaking chiefly with
reference to sketches made from nature.

T

HE light and shade is generally weak Light and
... shade.
and inconsistent in amateur work, because
it is generally introduced after the form of the
object has been delineated. As a rule, an
amateur endeavours to draw an object first,
and put the light and shade on to it after
wards ; and, as in most natural objects, the
light and shade is an integral part of their
form — at all events, of their form as appears to
the eye at any given moment — the result is wrong.
T N painting interiors, remember that, as a rule, interiors.
-*- they are lighted from the outside — by the
window. I frequently see amateur drawings, in
which the outside landscape is the darkest portion
of the picture.

330 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Covering T~) EMEMBER, you can't get any value into
the paper. \\
-*- ^ your work until you have covered up your
paper or your canvas. Patches of untouched
ground showing here and there in a drawing, are
utterly destructive to its relative tones.
Finish. 'npHERE is no such thing as finish in amateur
*~ work. It is impossible to finish a wrong
thing. We may leave it off; that is different.
The word is an inapplicable one altogether. All
that an amateur can do in the way of finish in a
drawing, is to leave therein no error for which he
can discern a remedy. This precept, I am tempted
to add from long experience of amateur propen
sities, should be written in letters of gold. " Shall
I finish this?" "Oh, but ft's not finished!"
" Of course, it's not finished yet." How many
times have we not heard such excuses ? Do your
work as well as you can, and let it stand, confess
ing that it's imperfect, but yet not wilfully so ;
and be quite sure you never tell anyone who
knows anything about pictures, much less your
master, whether it's "finished" or not. The
drawing talks about that, though in a tongue
which is to you probably inaudible.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 331
T T is quite easy to be taught too much to learn Teaching.
¦*- anything. It is no use having taken all the
prizes, if you can't do anything with them, or
rather with the formulas, by acquaintance with
which you gained them.

mon ama
teurerrors.

DULNESS; because interest is not taken Some com
mon ^¦^'^-
in the subiects of the painting^. '^"''
2. Self -consciousness ; manifest in altering
nature, under the idea of improving her.
3. Content ; preferring the beaten track for its
ease and safety, to any less-tried path which might
lead to failure, and thence to success.
4. Blindness ; looking at nature through pre
conceived notions, instead of open eyes.
5. Conceit ; finding few subjects sufficiently
important. 6. Half-heartedness ; thinking that painting
does not need much effort, but is only a pleasant
occupation. 7. Cowardice — i.e., fear of making a mess, spoil
ing a piece of paper, and being laughed at by
ignorant people.

332 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Amateurs. Tp amateurs could paint difficult subjects as
-'- well as artists, either the amateurs would be
geniuses or the artists " duffers," probably both.
What the amateur can do, is to catch now and
then some fleeting phase of beauty, of which the
artists have, perhaps, missed the significance or
forgotten the value. Some little tiny pebble from
the shore of life, curiously marked or beautifully
coloured.

Failure 0/ A S a rule, the amateur fails, not from want
amateurs, j-\ . , .,,
-*¦-*- of skill so much as from want of effort.
The labour required for seeing correctly, is a
definite and real one, and will rarely be given
by those whose method of life is to pay other
folks to see for them.

Sirjoshua f ¦ ^fjE reason why Sir Joshua's essays have
"Lectures ±- remained for so long a text-book for
on paint
ing-" students, is that, whatever may be their defects of
detail, they tend to kindle that enthusiasm, and
to enforce that completeness of study, which are
more necessary for a student than any hard-and-
fast method of work. It does not much matter

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 333
whether a young man, when he begins to paint,
ranks Tintoret above Raphael, and Carpaccio
above Bellini, or Titian above Correggio — but
what does matter is that he should feel reverence
for the great men who have preceded him in his
art, and should try to walk a little in their
footsteps. The teaching which holds out to a
student no sanction, except that of his own
caprice, is, of all others, the most enfeebling.
A modern French artist, for instance, now-a-days
teaches his pupils the whole art of painting, in
six or sixty lessons— but even when the student
has learnt these lessons thoroughly, unless he
has some enthusiasm or reverence to guide him,
he is very much like a sailor set adrift in a
perfectly equipped ship, but bound nowhere.

o

NE of the effects of Mr. Ruskin's teaching One of
Ruskm s
upon amateurs is to concentrate their effectsupon
attention too much upon the accuracy of their amateurs.
own work; for the great object of the amateur
draughtsman, generally speaking, is, or ought to
be, to gain a general appreciation of art notions,
difficulties, and veracities, and this is not to be

334 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
obtained by the acquisition of any amount of accu
racy in the representation of inanimate nature.
We may be quite sure that if it were possible for
a human being to live entirely in a world of buds
and flowers, he would not have been constituted
with the passions, desires, and emotions of which
we know, and we may be equally sure that if we
habitually repress in art every feeling that we
carry about in our daily life, our work will bear
the impress of this repression very plainly. Nor
should we say to ourselves, " We know so well
what art is, that we know we shall never be capable
of it ; and so the best thing is for us to do as well
as we can the small things of which we are
capable." These are both fallacies, and the last is
the worst of the two.

(Dlb Ulaskvs anb Scl^ools
of painting*

®Ib ViXaskxs anb Scijools of painting.

c

' Thus the new in art is always formed
out of the old. The genius of the
Hour sets his ineffaceable seal upon
the work, and gives it an inexpressible
charm for the imagination." —
Emerson.

t)C very first quality of all good art is Value of
old
perfection, by which I mean, not that pictures.

absolute perfection which so few, if any, artists
ever attain, but perfection from the point of view
of the worker, the sign that he has not left his
work while he considered it incomplete. In this
sense, a sketch or a study may rightly be called
as perfect as a picture ; but no picture, no matter
how complex or elaborate, can be called perfect,
while there is any part which the artist has
neglected, or rendered with carelessness. This is
the crying sin of nine-tenths of the art of the
present day, proceeding no doubt from the
hurry of life, the keenness of competition, and the
supposed necessity for rapid production. Go into
any gallery of old pictures you like (it need not

338 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
necessarily be a good one), and take any example
at random, and note how the one universal fact
which will distinguish it from modern work will
be its quietness of impression, its absence of all
personal splash, hurry, and excitement.
Pre-Raph- T^ERHAPS the secret of pre-Raphaelitism
aelitism, w"^
-*- is in its freedom from convention. It
was not only the intense feeling, the patient
industry, the unwearied skill that was thrown
into their productions by Giotto, Ghirlandajo,
Perugino, Angelico, and many others — and in no
existing pictures is there so intense a perception
of simple forms of beauty as in theirs — but that,
without any body of rules to help them, these
men, each in his own way, strove only to render
as beautifully as possible the incidents and
symbols of the religion which he believed. And
so it was that art, entwined with the real life
of the painter, engaged in depicting what was
as dear and real to him as his heart's blood,
grew simple, earnest, and impressive, and above
all unconscious, not seeking its reward as art,
but as a worthy representation of things worthy
to be represented.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 339

C^ ORREGGIO modified everything he painted Correg-
^-^ into a curve, whether it was a limb, or a drapery,
tree, or a bit of drapery. It is no exaggeration to
say that you can look through all his studies, and
not find a single straight line or sharp angle.
Compare his studies of drapery with those of
Leonardo, and you will at once discern the
difference. Drapery, with Correggio, is treated
according to the principles of high art — broad-
sweeping curves, showing the outlines of the
figure beneath. By Leonardo and Veronese,
despite the personal peculiarities of each, it is
treated simply as drapery. I leave the reader to
decide for himself whether he 'prefers the thing
as it is, or the thing as it is not.
CLEAR expression of a great subject — that Michael
Angela's
was Michael Angelo's idea of good paint- definition,
ing. I 'don't know that we have found out a better
since the days when he decorated the Sistine
Chapel, with that idea as his ruling one.
SOME of the most beautiful architecture "Lom-
!¦ ,1 1 ,-M • • . , bardic
of the early Christian centuries (700 — architec-
1400 A.D.) was the Lombardic, at once the most
z

840 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
marked and the most composite of all styles.
It is at once frugal and rich, simple and intri
cate, solid and light ; it uses every variety of
tower and cupola and dome, which the inge
nuity of man can conceive ; the Roman arch,
the Byzantine dome, the Arabian minaret
are all mingled together in bewildering and
yet delightful variety. Something between
mosque, basilica, and temple are these Lom
bardic churches, with their tiled domes covered
with white and green, and red and black tiles,
the square hexagonal or circular towers, their
architraves, courses, capitals, and cornices of
sculptured brick. I daresay a skilled architect
could give an explanation which would account
for all these peculiarities, but I confess that
I know of none, and get my enjoyment of this
architecture mainly from the pleasure of sur
prise. It was the work of a people, who only
had clay in some form as their materials, and
were consequently put to the full stretch of their
ingenuity to get the utmost possible variation
of its form and colour ; and it has that peculiar
charm of a simple thing elevated to dignity by the
earnestness and ability of the worker.

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 341
THE greatest condemnation of all the works The Dutch
School.
of the Dutch School, with a few notable
exceptions, is due to their showing little desire
for beauty, or regret for its absence. It is not
that the subjects of alehouse or kitchen are
necessarily unlovely, but that they become so if
there is not sought in them some quality of
beauty other than the mere glitter of the firelight
on the pewter drinking-mugs and copper sauce
pans. Every now and then, in these Dutch
pictures, one gets a glimpse of the contented home
life led by sober housewives a century or so ago,
and follows it with quiet interest ; but for the
most part, the artists do not seem to have cared
much more for the life of the home, than for the
life of history and legend, but simply to have
sought, in dull preference, such subjects as would
most easily afford them fit themes for the exercise
of their skill ; it is true that their skill grew
to be so exquisite that, to this day in our wonder
and admiration, we almost excuse its want of
object. Still, when all is said and done, the fact
remains, that from a painter something more is
to be looked for than contented delight in the
phenomena of light and shade ; nor, if there be
z 2

Venetian
painting.

342 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
added to this the perfect delineation of the shape
of common household objects, or the details of
ordinary domestic life, can he be conceived to
have adequately fulfilled his office.

T T is not merely the technical qualities
-*- which strike the student of painting
so strongly in the works of the Venetian
artists ; but it is that extraordinary quality of
dignity which their portraits possess. It is the
luxury, the pride of life, the sumptuousness, and
the largeness of conception which mark all
their pictures. Their women are born to an
inheritance of splendour, their men to an inhe
ritance of power.

Age not 'T^O the greatmajority of unthinking people,what-
a merit in I
itself. ¦'- ever has been sanctioned in former times is
more admirable than any reform, however needful ;
and the class of folk who speak most frequently of
the " old masters" with bated breath, admire them
for their age rather than their mastery. It is the
commercial recognition of this fact which has

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 343
stocked the picture dealers' shops, and most of the
important houses of England, with thousands of
spurious pictures.

WE see with pleasure when we look at the saints Homelycharacter
and virgins of the great Flemish painters, of Flemish
painting.
that they are simply portraits of the peasants or
citizens whom we might meet to-day in field or
street' — these virgins, with the big, broad foreheads
and full-lidded eyes, with tall solid figures and
stiff gestures and placid homely faces ; who sit
upon their thrones as a poor tenant might occupy
the corner of a chair in the squire's drawing-
room — are but the women one sees everywhere in
Flemish towns on market days, who walk in from
the surrounding country in long black cloaks and
narrow bordered muslin caps. A strong, tall, and,
as a rule, good-looking race, though their beauty
is of a stern and rather hard-featured kind ; their
deep grey or brown eyes still untroubled with
modern fretfulness or speculation. Such as they
are to-day, we find them in the old pictures by
Van Eyck or Memling, who stuck them bodily into
their pictures without alteration.

344 SENTENTIjE ARTIS.

Dutch sea T X is a curious thing that the Dutch artists,
pamtmg. I
-*- who painted calm water so finely, should
have been almost without exception unable to
paint a rough sea. Their waves are, compared
with those of the best English painters, the
merest of puddle-brewed storms — they look like
dirty ditch-water beaten up with a hay-rake.
And indeed this feeling of quietness runs through
the whole of Dutch landscape painting.

A chapel. ¦'TpHERE is a little chapel which stands in
-^ an orchard and vineyard, where currants
and apple trees, acacias and pines, almonds and
poplars, are all mixed together in a confusion of
greenery. It is simply a barn-shaped building
with a gable roof, absolutely undecorated in any
way whatever outside, unless a round arched
door, with the mouldy remains of a very small
fresco above it, can be called decoration. The
entrance is at the west end of the building, which
is lighted from the south side only by six light,
narrow windows. The gable roof scarcely pro
jects beyond the walls, and gives to the chapel
a similarity to the box-like constructions which

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 345
children draw to represent a house. Yes, if we
may rightly call a thing ugly which was con
structed for a special purpose, and which has
fulfilled that purpose fairly well for about six
hundred years, the Scrovegni chapel at Padua
may be called ugly. Yet, inside, every square
inch of its walls is covered with frescoes of
priceless worth and inestimable beauty — the very
finest, freshest, and best works by Giotto — so we
will not grumble at the plainness of the building,
or at its position in the quaint garden-close,
where flickering shadows from the acacias make a
network on the gravel path, and from behind the
chapel rises the humming of the custodian's bee
hives. We will only say that Enrico Scrovegni,
plain citizen of Padua, six hundred years ago, did
well when he wished to honour the Virgin by
giving her a rough, homely building, with
common everyday surroundings, and making it
inside one splendid history of her life.

T

HERE is by Van Eyck at Bruges an Van
Eyck's
" Enthronement of the Virgin," with a picture.

saint on one side and a priest on the other. The
saint, though a magnificent piece of painting, is

346 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
not an interesting one ; and the Virgin herself
differs little from the mild-mannered lady
who is generally cast for this part in Flemish
pictures. But the priest is an important per
sonage, of as marked an individuality as one of
Dickens's characters ; and becomes almost a
personal friend to those who pay two or three
visits to the picture. He is a stout, curiously
wrinkled, flabby-faced man, with a bald head and
a triple chin, small pig-like eyes half opened, and
heavy pendulous cheeks. Good humour, good
living, and a little cunning self-interest have
puckered and wrinkled his face into a thousand
creases ; and he has just got into his splendidly
embroidered robe of office, and is doing his
devotion with a sort of perfunctory air, such as
one may see to this day in almost every one of
the Bruges churches. A wonderful piece of Zola
like painting, no less admirable for its character
than for the magnificence of its technique.

Early T7*EW people, I think, realise how complete
Christian I""'
pictures, *- was the domination of the church over
art and artist for several hundred years (from the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 347
sixth to the twelfth centuries). Not only did it
raise a barrier against all representations of
secular strength and beauty, and bodily vigour,
but even when the unfortunate painter was fairly
at work on a permitted (or rather prescribed)
religious subject, he was forbidden to render it in
any way human or interesting, by using his
powers of original conception and modification.
Hardly a variation, grouping, or introduction of
a -figure was allowed in the treatment of the
religious histories ; and for centuries St. John and
the Virgin stood in the same attitude at the right
hand and the left of the cross, while Christ,
between them, upon the cross, with erect head
and widely-open eyes, gazed upon the spectator
with aspect, as Crowe says, " either placid or
menacing." The priesthood absolutely forbade
all expression of pain upon the Saviour's face, up
to the close of the eleventh century.

I

SOMETIMES wonder whether the cufti- Roman
, Mosaics.
vated people who speak in such despairing

terms of the hopeless ugliness of the nineteenth
century, would not, had they lived in the time of

348 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
Giotto (circa 1266 A.D.), have referred with eulogy
and regret to the old Roman mosaics and
Byzantine paintings. Surely they would have
contrasted their beauty, sanctioned by ages of
tradition, with the innovating tendencies of the
shepherd painter, and prated of the decadence of
art which actually admitted the portraits of living
people into the most sacred pictures, and vul
garised holy subjects by the introduction of
personages who looked glad or sorry, or surprised,
just as they might have done in life itself.

Basilicas, TV TAN Y of the peculiarities of early Christian
^^-*~ architecture, some of which survive to
the present day, had their origin in old municipal
buildings, which were hurriedly adapted to the use
of the church. A basilica originally was a kind
of town hall of the ancient Romans ; and the
courts of justice were held in an apse or tribune
at its upper end, while the main body of the in
terior was in its width separated^ into three parts
by two rows of columns. A transept was added to
this building to give the cruciform shape, and
subsequently the churches built were formed on

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 349
this model. These somewhat rough barrack-like
buildings were encrusted by the Christian architects
with fragments from the demolished Pagan
temples, the marble blocks of which were sliced
into thin slabs, the new builders frequently
cutting clean through the older sculptural work;
and from this beginning in haste slowly grew up
the method of incrustation, the use of coloured
marbles, the proportions and arrangement of
churches, and all the variety and intricacy with
which Eastern magnificence adorned this archi
tecture. The lavish use of gold, the narrow
windows (necessitated by the fierce Eastern sun
shine), and the intricate symbolism employed in
the whole decoration of the building, all marked
the Christian architecture of Byzantium.

THE development of landscape painting was Growth of
. , , Landscape.
an extraordinarily slow one. From its
rise, in the time of Giotto, say in 1266, A.D., for
two hundred years, trees were still painted as a few
groups of leaves, shown up by a dark ground. It
was not till the time of Raphael that this practice
was abandoned, and even then, and for long after-

3.50 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
wards, the practice of making a uniformly blue
background for the distant part of the landscape
was steadily maintained. For landscape, in
deed, the Italian mind had but little sympathy,
and the first germ of landscape painting in which
the modern spirit can be traced, is in the early
German work of Diirer and his immediate pre
decessors. Diirer especially appears to have had
that love for individual details of nature, which
marks some of the best modern pictures.

Flemish T^LEMISH painting stands in an intermediate
and Dutch M r b
painting. -*- position, as far as its social and religious
character is concerned, between the art of Italy
and the art of Holland. One sees the prevail
ing influence of the church conspicuous throughout
the whole of Italian painting in its best periods,
and, indeed, never more conspicuous than when
the belief of the people was rapidly becoming
undermined. In Flemish art one sees rather
the influence of religion than that of the priest
hood ; there is a sturdiness about it which is a
truly national characteristic, and as far as the
technical qualities are concerned, one sees the

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 351
comparative homeliness and simplicity of the
artist's mind, leaning more and more to the literal
reproduction of his subject, but not yet finding a
sufficient delight in the merely artistic pleasure
which was so soon to surpass all other objects in
the minds of Dutch painters. To the Fleming,
his subject is still a good deal, though he forms
it out of the material which lies nearest to him.
In the typical Dutch painter, the subject was
nothing, except in so far as it afforded him an
opportunity to display his skill.

n^HROUGHOUT all the degradation of art Subjects.
-*- in the early centuries of the Christian
era, there was one good principle to which artists
clung fast. Though their treatment had been
restricted by convention, and their subjects
limited by rule, they still held that pictures should
represent things worthy to be represented. This
has disappeared since these early days, in our
more enlightened civilization. We no longer care
much what we paint ; how we paint it is all we
think that matters. Is this indeed true ? Is one
subject as good as another ? Will a Bradshaw's

352 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
guide to nature do as well as Milton, or an
American interviewer's report of mankind be a
perfect substitute for Shakespeare ? And if we
want in literature something more than accuracy
of execution and smartness of intelligence, do we
not want it even more in the region of art ?

sculpture.

Pisano's TT is a notable fact in the history of art,
-*- that Nicola Pisano, who did in sculpture
a somewhat similar work to that of Giotto in
painting, was born almost at the same time
(1260 and 1266). He, like Giotto, rejected the
Byzantine formalism, and though his work was
affected more directly by the influence of antique
sculpture, there is therein a considerable trace of
naturalism, especially noticeable in the vigorous
gestures of his figures. What is certain, how
ever, is the anti-ascetic spirit of his work ; its
recognition of other elements in man than the
religious and spiritual influences. In fact, all later
schools of sculpture and painting may be said to
have started from these two men, Giotto and
Pisano ; they broke up the ice of tradition.

I

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 353
T is told of Cimabue (in an old MS. commen- cimabue's"pride."
tary on Dante, written in the time of Giotto —

at any rate, before 1330) that if he found a fault
in his work he would destroy it, and also that he
knew more of the " noble art of painting than any
other man " of his time. It is the best painters
and not the worst who condemn their own work,
and are the most severe judges of imperfection.
The old commentator blames Cimabue severely
for this ; and a few years ago I heard a similar
commentator severely blaming one of our greatest
artists (Mr. Watts), because he would not part
with a portrait which did not come up to his
standard of good work. History repeats itself,
and all really great artists, I think, feel in this way
about their work, and all little artists and people
who do not care truly for art, misunderstand the
cause of their action.

WHOLLY independent of the character of Italian
their subjects, and the difference of the Flemish
painting.

way in which the painters of Italy, Holland, and
Flanders conceived their pictures, the quality
which gave the power and truthfulness to Italian

354 SENTENTI^E ARTIS.
art was only another side of that which gave the
strength and beauty to Flemish painting. The
Italian first understood, and first revealed in
painting, the truths of colour, light, and shade,
and the capability of the human face for the
expression of emotion or spiritual thought. As
Ruskin says of the Roman and Florentine schools,
these were the things they set themselves to do,
and in the right doing of which their strength
consisted. That they clothed them in certain
traditions of the church, and gave their imagina
tions a freer rein than was possible to men of less
ardent temperament was, after all, only an accident
of their time and country. The Flemish painter
turned his perceptions of natural beauty and
natural truth into a more restricted channel. He
may be fairly accused, perhaps, of seeing little
beyond the bounds of his own house ; but, like
many other short-sighted persons, his power of
vision was very strong within its limited range,
and in the calm, steadfast, almost cow-like glances
which he turned upon this or that very ordinary
matter, he discovered qualities and details of
every sort which touched upon the home life, till
from his canvases there seems to emanate to-day

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 355
a peace and security which are without parallel
in the fervid, passionate splendour of Italian
painting. CONSIDERING that in Giotto's time the ^.''imailife m
introduction of animal life into pictures Giotto's
work.
was entirely new ground, it is extraordinary what
an amount of incident of this kind is to be found
in his various works. Puppies, donkeys, horses,
camels, sheep, and oxen are all frequent subjects,
and are all treated with sympathy and com
prehension. There is a fresco at Assisi of the
birth of Christ, in which the two donkeys, poking
their heads over the manger, have just their
characteristic expression of happy and placid
stupidity; and there is a little puppy in one of
the lower sculptures on the Campanile at Florence
(by the same artist), who watches the sheep
defiling past him, with a grave consideration (in
which sense of responsibility mingles with a sense
of humour) worthy of Caldicott himself.

THE fact remains, all modern progress not- The old
masters.
withstanding, that one learns more, and
gets greater pleasure out of even an indifferent 2 A

366 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
painting of earlier times, than from the most minute
realism of to-day, or the most reckless example of
the fashionable blottesque school, wherewith
modern painters smear their way to "emolument
and obHvion." And this is true, not only of the
" old masters," but even of the " old pupils," who
are also " masters " to us. At least, their work
was faithfully done, that is half the secret ; and
though the subjects were so few, the manner in
which they were treated betokened a broader, as
well as a simpler, view of life. Even the sorriest
" Virgin and Child " of those byegone days shows
something of the full endeavour of its awkward
artist, and struggles, not altogether in vain, to
reveal to us, in its inarticulate language, something
of truth and beauty. Above all, there is in early
Italian pictures an absence of that self-conscious
ness, that desire for applause and self-exhibition,
which is the most prevalent mark of the present
century. Was it the religious faith or the social
life that has spread such a covering of peace and
silence over the works of these dead-and-gone
painters, till even their battle-pieces and martyr
doms have a stillness and quietude, like that of
a mountain tarn at sunset ?

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 357
THERE is a peculiar monotony of colour Canaietti.
which afflicts many of Canaletti's works,
and makes us wish that he would not be so
dreadfully accurate, so prosaically correct. This
painter always reminds me of facts delivered with
dry emphasis by a school governess — " Don't you
forget another time. Miss Brown, that there are
exactly three hundred and seventy-two windows
in the palace of the Escurial," and so on ad
infinitum. So, when Canaietti gives us detail
after detail in some of his pictures, one longs
to cry, " Stop, for pity's sake, and show us
that you are a human being, if only by one little
mistake."

THE Northerner, in fact, used his art in a One dif
ference
different fashion to his Southern rival ; betweenNorthern
it was for use more than display, for a broom and
, , , Southern
rather than a banner. Quaint little domesticities painters.
and details are continually peeping out in the
paintings of Germany and Flanders, to find any
parallel with which in Italian art we must go
back to its very earliest days. For in the time
df the finest Italian painting, there is little if
2 A 2

358 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
any trace of intimate relationship between the
painter and the every-day domestic life of his
time, which is the very keynote of Flemish art.
Even Giotto and the Giottesci, and, speaking
broadly, all the pre-Raphaelite painters, strive
to be simple, as it were, of malice prepense.
Simplicity was to them less a national and,
therefore, natural quality, than a revolt against
the strained traditions which had been bequeathed
to art by Byzantium. In Flemish work, however,
this simplicity is wholly unconscious, and springs
from the painter's inability to conceive his art in
any other terms than that in which he conceived
his life. Neither an emotional, a dramatic, nor
an intellectual people, the Flemings held fast with
a devotion that was intense in proportion to the
scantiness of its subject-matter, to the facts which
they saw around them, and the truths which they
comprehended.

Human T T THEN an old Greek made a perfect statue,
element in \\/
landscape, ' ' he made it (so at least says one school of
sestheticians) with absolutely no feeling save that
of enjoyment of its beauty; all other meaning, all

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 359
other emotion, was unnecessary. He wished
simply to produce a beautiful thing ; he produced
it, and it was good. But it is a very curious thing
to note, though a little consideration will convince
any art student of the truth of the fact, that there
has never been in the world a great school of
landscape painting, or even a great landscape
painter, whose motive has been restricted in like
degree to the beauty, pure and simple, of nature.
Landscape painters have continually sought beau
tiful scenes, and painted them with more or less
ability; but the greater the man, the more in
dividual, the more personal to himself, and to men
in general, have been his pictures. And so truly is
this the case, that the rank of great landscape
painters might almost be determined by reference
to this fact alone. Beauty sought per se in land
scape has always hitherto destroyed itself; and
people have turned ignorantly but determinedly
from the compositions of snowy Alps, clustered
vines, and deep-blue waters of Italy, to gaze upon
David Cox's muddy lanes, sheltered by dark trees,
beneath whose shadow the peasants plod wearily
homeward; or on a picture of some bleak expanse
of rain-beaten moorland, across which a belated

360 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
traveller struggles in the teeth of the wind. With
all their artificiality, Claude and Salvator under
stood this truth thoroughly — indeed, Claude
almost over-valued its importance.

Pleasure npHERE is an illumination of the Flemish
derived ¦
from -L school, probably of the late fourteenth or
missal
painting, early fifteenth century, called " The Crucifixion,"
which shows traces of real feeling for nature,
especially in the landscape behind the cross, and
is most sunnily bright and beautiful. The figures,
too, have that clinging to truth, which is so
noticeable in a good deal of the Flemish work,
seeming to say to you, "Thus, or at least something
in this way, must the thing have happened — this
is our idea of it." This exactness and simplicity
of conception, which is to be found in nearly all
the early religious paintings, and especially those
which, as for instance, those in the majority of
missals, were actually the work of monks, lies at
the very root of the pleasure which art gives to
the spectator, and seizes hold of the mind with a
force exactly proportioned to its own intensity.
We may say to ourselves that these men were

SENTENTI/E ARTIS. 361
mistaken, that their view of things is ludicrous in
its ignorance and simplicity, their drawing is in
fantile, and their perspective absurd ; and yet
when we have said all this, and said it truly, we
shall still find that their pictures have for us lost
none of their power or their attraction ; and so
we go away, somewhat fretfully perhaps, with a
puzzle which we cannot solve ; or after many
struggles with so heterodox a doctrine, we come
to the conclusion that perhaps it was to the
way in which the painter regarded his subject
that the influence of his work was due. And the
latter is true. As George Eliot says of Thomas
a Kempis, so it is with those illuminations and early
Italian paintings — their power is owing to the fact
that they were painted by " hands, that waited
for the heart's prompting ; they are the chronicles
of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and
triumph — not written on velvet cushions, to teach
endurance to those who are treading with bleeding
feet on the stones. And so they remain for all
time, a lasting record of human needs and human
consolations, the works of those who, ages ago,
felt and suffered and renounced ; in the cloister,
perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head.

362 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
with much chanting and long fasts, and with a
fashion of speech different to ours ; but under the
same silent, far-off heavens, and with the same
passionate desires, the same strivings, the same
failures, the same weariness."

St. Mark's, 'HpHE representations of this church extend
Venice. I '^
-*- over a period of 400 years ; and curiously
enough the first, or, at all events, the first
with which I am acquainted, and the last,
are the two best. The earliest of these was the
picture by Gentile Bellini, painted somewhere
about 1490, which shows the cathedral with all
the ancient gilding and the original Byzantine
mosaics above the doorways, which have long
since vanished. The second is Miss Clara Mon-
talba's picture, exhibited a few years ago in the
Royal Academy, which showed the cathedral
standing in a flood of golden light against a
hazily bright sky. During the 400 years between
these pictures, St. Mark's has been drawn by an
equal number of artists — but these records have
been almost uniformly unsuccessful as pictures.
And from Canaletti's harsh Scottish accuracy to

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 363
Ruskin's gentle and delicate minuteness, artists
have always either failed in seeing its beauty, or
given up the attempt to reproduce it except in
isolated details.

T

HERE are, speaking roughly, four distinct Ways of
treating
ways in which sculptors and painters the nude.

have treated the representation of the nude figure.
I. The Egyptian; 2. The ancient Greek; 3. The
later Greek and Roman; and 4, The Italian of the
Renaissance. The first had a canon of proportion
that never varied, minor details and personal
characteristics being invariably omitted ; the work
of the second was based on the most perfect
knowledge, but was somewhat generalised in
minor characteristics ; the work of the third was
equally scientific, but less natural, it tended
towards over-elaboration, and lacked the simpli
city of the last-mentioned — an element of volup
tuousness had crept in with increased luxury of
life ; the fourth was work based upon intimate
knowledge of details, and insisted upon those de
tails throughout — insisted upon them for their own
sake. But it had lost the perception of the

364 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
naturalness of the earlier work; it represented very
beautifully human forms without clothes, but felt
that there was something unnatural, or at least
unusual, in such subjects. These four schools may
be expressed roughly as —
I. The symbolic.
2. The natural.
3. The artificial.
4. The anatomic.

Older 'TPHERE is an absence of self-consciousness
painters. I
-*^ in the works of the older painters, of
which our younger artists seem to have lost the
scent. The old man sits down to make a picture,
and, rightly or wrongly, at the close of his work,
a picture is made ; the young man — full of talent,
originality, and science — nine times out of ten,
nowadays, does not give himself the trouble to
make a picture at all, but puts a study,
or the result of a series of studies, upon the
canvas, and leaves the spectator to make the
most he can of it ; and in good work, in most
cases, that is not much. While painting in
England was probably never so good as at

SENTENTI.E ARTIS. 365
the present moment, art was probably never
so poor. There is an obtrusiveness, and, as a
schoolboy would say, a " cockiness " about the
most popular English painting of the present day,
which is hardly to be paralleled in the history of
art. Even the astounding impudence of the clever
young French student is less irritating, because it
is more naive, and because it does, in most cases,
show that the life school has, broadly speaking,
taught him his business.

THE most celebrated Memlings in the Mem- ling's
world, perhaps, are those on the panels " Chasse
de Ste.
of a small elaborately carved and gilded shrine, Ursule."
preserved where it was painted, in the hospital
of St. John at Bruges, and having for their subject
the story of St. Ursula. This " Chasse de Saint
Ursule " is a series of eight panels, and its small
carved shrine, I suppose, contains some relic of
the holy St. Ursula. These paintings are very
marvellous in several respects, especially in the
grouping of masses of figures, each wrought
with the utmost intricacy of detail, and with
an apparent power in the painter of realizing the

866 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
utmost minutiae, even in scenes where he must
really have worked from imagination. The colour
is, when compared to the colour of Van Eyck,
rather of the missal-painting order, though of its
kind singularly beautiful, having a clear richness
of quality like that of a darkened Fra Angelico.
But the great pleasure of the series, to most
people, will undoubtedly lie in the marvellous
rendering of character and expression in the
various faces, on a scale so minute as to seem
almost incredible. To my thinking, the religious
element is in these works almost entirely wanting ;
at all events, the pleasure which they give is in
no way dependent on that sentiment. However,
even plate-spinning, when it is carried to a certain
extent, gives intense satisfaction ; and surely no
plate-spinning in the world was ever so dexterous
as this handling of Johannes Memling's. Nay,
there is a greater satisfaction to be derived from
them than this mere delight in their skill, for
there is evident throughout the series a rich quality
of humour and perception of character, which
gives to each panel and each character therein
an intense reality. Memling does not only say
to us " Thus and no otherwise did the affair take

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 367
place," but " there are the very people who carried
it out ; I knew every Tom, Dick, and Harry of
them."

I DON'T know that an artist, or a lover of Bruges.
art, whose time and money were a little
hmited, could do better than go for a fortnight to
Bruges. It is cheap, quiet, accessible in a dozen
hours or so from London, and full of interest.
Not to mention Gothic architecture and old
Flemish paintings, carved panel-pieces of churches
of the Holy Sepulchre, or any other of the
" objects of attraction dear to the heart of
Murray " ; the surroundings of the town are full
of pleasure, of which, perhaps, one gets the
greater part from the canals, which in places re
call Venice vividly. There is a curious double
circle of these round the town, the outer one of
which affords as pleasant a walk as could well be
conceived. Imagine a long, continually changing
curve of water, bordered by tall ash and poplar
trees, and dotted at irregular intervals with great
grey stone gates, generally in the form of a large
double tower and archway between, through

368 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
which one catches sight of a street leading to
the interior of the town. Imagine continual
windmills, green banks of turf, irregular masses
of red-tiled house and grey tower, and occasional
peeps down a long vista of canal, stretching away
into the surrounding country — for these canals
sometimes run from the gateways without a
curve or bend for miles to break their long per
spective. To the little village of Dam, for
instance, which is upon one of them, about four
miles from Bruges, there is only one slight
deviation, scarcely sufficient to hide its houses
from any one standing on the bridge at Bruges.
The description of any of these canals applies to
all — a huge avenue of trees on one side, and a
broad towing-path on the other; and on both
sides wide stretches of flat agricultural country,
chiefly growing wheat and flax. This flax in
dustry, by the way, is not altogether a pleasant
one for the pedestrian, since, after the flax is cut,
it has to be steeped in the waters of the canal,
and then spread out upon the fields to dry, at
which time it smells abominably. Dam is a
quaint little village enough, more Dutch than
Belgian, in which a great disused Hotel de Ville

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 369
alone remains as a sign of former prosperity.
This buildnig is now turned into an hotel, or at
least into a place where you can have a cup of
coffee in a great bare kitchen, with huge beams of
carved wood, and a fireplace as big as a bathing
machine. The old Flamand in charge shows you
the pair of tongs, ten feet long, and one or two
other antiquities of a mild nature, and is perfectly
content with two or three sous, or indeed with
nothing at all; for Dam is "out of the track of
ships," not mentioned in any guide-book, and
seldom visited by a tourist.

T T 7ITH0UT lingering long over the historical Decorative
* " part of the question, there is little doubt
that in the first instance all art was decorative.
The art of the savage, which consisted in
painting his face and his tomahawk, was pure
decorative art, and for many centuries art
remained dedicated to similar purposes, even
though making in the meantime enormous strides
in skill and beauty. The Egyptian carvings on
rockhewn temples, or the gigantic statues which

370 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
4
still mark the places where Thebes and Karnak
once stood, are as purely decorative art as that
of the North American Indians ; there is in
them no sign of beauty being sought for its
own sake, but only as a supplement to archi
tecture and religion. A temple wall was bare —
the priests covered it with the deeds of the
god to whom the place was dedicated ; a statue
of the deity was required — and it was carved and
erected there ; and so on throughout the various
departments. How long this lasted it is difficult
to say — there seems to be considerable doubt
whether the whole art of Greece was not originally
intended only for decorative purposes ; certainly by
far the greater and nobler portion was subsidiary
to the service either of the home or the temple.
But from the days of the greatest supremacy of
Rome downwards, art gradually lost more and
more of its decorative character, and gained a
vantage ground of its own. No longer subsidiary
to the service of architecture or religion, it grew
day by day of more importance, till we find it cul
minating in the days of Venetian glory, in Titian
and Tintoretto. But as art advanced thus from
infancy to manhood, a change took place in

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 371
it similar to that which takes place in a
human being, and it became gradually self-
conscious, and with this self-consciousness came
its fall. Gradually painters and amateurs, and
workers in metals, began to lose confidence
in their individual efforts, or rather lost the
desire for individual effort and fresh departures,
in their admiration for the perfection of those
who had preceded them. There is thus no
authority for the term " decorative art " in olden
days, as all art then was decorative. For
instance, the most magnificent picture that Tin
toretto ever designed was painted to measure,
to fill the end of the great council chamber in the
Doge's Palace at Venice, and the picture is of
an awkwardly irregular shape, to allow space for
the two doorways at the end of the hall. So
also you have Veronese painting the ceilings of
the Pitti Palace, and Michael Angelo's " Last
Judgment," and Raphael's " Madonna," both
painted for the Sistine Chapel at Rome, the
first remaining there to this day. And this is
" decorative art " as it used to be. It is only
when true feeling for the higher kinds of art
has disappeared, that the subordinate kinds of
2 B

372 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
decoration are so excessively valued as they are
to-day, and are so entirely divorced from what
we usually call " pictures."

tion.

Subordi- ¦HpHERE is a kind of conventional ornament
nate forms |
of decora- -»- which is dependent upon the function
which the ornamented object will have to fulfil,
and the material of which it is made. The true
rule for this is to admit as much beauty, and
of such a nature as is consistent with the con
ditions. For instance, if the place of the object
in question is to be entirely subordinate, the
simplicity of the ornament should be pro
portionately unobtrusive ; and so, if the office
be lowly, should the ornament be plain and
serviceable (i.e., not easily damaged by use).
To take an example, it would not be advisable
to put an elaborate design on the legs of a chair,
or the border of a housemaid's pail.

Ornament, ^ I "'HE Mcmnous of Egypt and the gods of
-*- Greece, the frescoes of Michael Angelo and
the pictures of Raphael, are all due to the first

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 373
decorative impulse, which scratches a rough repre
sentation and variation of lines upon a spear, a
vase, or a cottage. If you go back to the first
forms of any nation's art, you come inevitably
upon this combination of zig-zags and spirals and
straight lines. We find it in the early forms
of Syrian and Greek art ; we find it in Persia,
India, and China ; we find it existing to this
day amongst the tribes of North American Indians,
and the South Sea Islanders. And it must be
remembered that these primitive forms of decora
tion, no matter how sternly limited in their
scope, are always good. The secondary forms
into which they developed are sometimes good
and sometimes bad, but whenever we get back
to the earliest manner, we get back to one which
contains no element of bad art, which is never
vulgar, never affected, never wrong, but does its
work, no matter how incompletely, with distinct
success ; that is to say, that purposing to decorate,
i.e., to improve the appearance of some given
object, it always does so improve it. From the
study of these forms, can be deduced most, if not
all, of the great principles of decorative composi
tion, such, for instance, as those of repetition, of
2 B 2

374 SENTENTIiE ARTIS.
alternation, of filling in a space, &c. ; all of which
may be studied at South Kensington, and all of
which were understood, or at all events practised,
quite as truly by artists in the time of the
Pharaohs, as in the time of Victoria. Wherever
we get an academy or a school of art, we get a
formula for these principles ; we get long historic
and metaphysical explanations of why this should
be so, and we come after all to the sublime con
clusion, that it is so, because it is ! Symmetry,
series, and contrast, that is the essence of orna
ment, says one ; opposition, alternation, and
repetition, says another ; but why the essence
of ornament should reside in such forms, or
whether it does so reside independent of other
laws, none of them can tell us. One thing
is certain, that you may have ornament (so-
called) which contains the qualities of symmetry,
series, and contrast, and many others, with
out being true ornament at all. And in fact,
this definition, or any definition that can be
given of ornament, only applies to those elemen
tary forms, which really, like a syllogism,
contain the principles which they are supposed
to prove.

T

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 375
AKE some reeds and a bird and a red sun. Modem recipe for
and arrange them in the following manner : decoration.

First, put the reeds side by side, vertically upright,
and leave some space between them ; balanced
upon the extreme part of the centre reed, place the
red sun, half the size of your design ; and in the
exact middle of this, with wings extended horizon
tally, place your bird. This represents some
people's idea of " decorative art."

T

HE favourite colour for hangings now is sage Msthetic
decora-
green, or dusky Indian red. These colours tion:

are neither beautiful nor ugly in themselves; but
they form harmonious combinations with the blue
china, which is fashionable, not, mind you, because
it is beautiful, but because it goes well with the
other decorations. Well, when we have got
blue china and sage green hangings, it is evident
that our furniture must not be light in colour,
which would be discordant, or too sombre in
effect, lest it should be gloomy. We therefore
compromise by painting the furniture black, and
enlivening it with a little gold. So now we
have — all for the sake of harmony — green

376 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
hangings, black and gold furniture, and blue
china. But we cannot get the whole value out
of this harmony till we contrast it with little spots
of pure colour — spots which will, as it were, make
the harmony visible ; so we look about for some
objects which will give us what we want. There
is no lack of such — little bits of Venetian glass,
a parasol from Japan, a gilt Buddha from India,
a Chinese lantern, a Persian rug, an Anatolian
plate and a Moorish bowl — we seize them, one
and all. The Japanese parasol goes helter-skelter
into the fireplace ; the Persian rug is hung care
fully against the door, or placed on the table ;
the Anatolian plate sticks, as in some aesthetic
conjuring trick, against the wall ; the lantern
twinkles faintly between shaded curtains ; and the
Venetian glass decorates an etagere above the
mantelpiece, from the centre of which looks down
with infernal calm, the Buddha, contemplative of
the whole scene !

What A ND in comes the poor matter-of-fact business
papa /-\
thinks. ¦'• ¦*¦ man, from his chambers or counting house,
and finds a touzle-headed wife, in long indefinite

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 377
garment girded round the waist with a silk
sash from Liberty's, sitting in the coloured silence
of her aesthetic chamber, " like an owl in an
ivy bush." What wonder if he remembers
his Lucretius, and murmurs under his breath,
" Tantum religio (artis) potuit suadere malorum."
Bah ! let him open the windows, and pull the rug
off the door ; put a chop on his Anatolian plate,
and some toddy into his Venetian glass ; use the
Buddha for firewood ; give the parasol to his child
to play with ; and bestow the Chinese lantern on
the nearest Guy Fawkes ; then, when he's taken
his wife to, have her hair dressed, they can go
together to the National Gallery, and look a little
at Titian, and Raphael, and Bellini, and Velas
quez ; yes, and also at our own Mulready, and
Wilkie, and Turner, and get a better notion of
what art really is — a help, not a hindrance, to
life.

I

T is a most pernicious error to suppose that a Neutral
colours.

mass of neutral colour can be " rich-look
ing." Never in this world has there been or can

378 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
there be such an effect from such a cause.
" Restful " it may be, in the same sense as that
in which the tired eye looks gratefully into the
darkness of night, but rich, never. You can only
gain rich colour by the contrast of pure and
secondary colours, or their gradation and har
mony; and to speak of ungradated neutral tints
being rich, is less accurate than to talk of a
convict being well-dressed. A neutral colour may
be explained roughly as a colour without any
colour at all ; and it only gains what beauty it
can ever have from being associated with little
bits of pure tint, or from being linked with
harmonious masses of secondary hue. Even
then, the beauty gained is more the enhance
ment of the pure, or the secondary colour, than
that of the neutral tint. This is, of course, why
neutral tints are so good to hang pictures upon.
They make the colour in the picture look well, and
they do not obtrude themselves. But the great
sign of a good decorator would be his capability
of doing without neutral tints ; his skill would
be in proportion to the quantity of pure and
strong colour which he could combine so as to
harmonise.

A

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 379
S to colour of walls, dismiss from your mind (Colour of
walls.

all that you have ever heard as to one colour
being suitable for a dining, and one for a library,
and one for a drawing-room ; that's all spurious
tradition, tradition of the shopkeeper. The
colour must depend on a thousand things, but not
on whether you eat in the room, or talk in it ; one
colour is as good as another for these purposes.
What we generally want is a soft, dark kind of
paper or tint, that will throw up the pictures, and
relieve the eye. What colour is best for this is a
disputed question. I am inclined to think that for
the old school of water-colour drawings, the tint
should be delicate and not too dark, perhaps a light
olive-green would be as good as any. For a body
colour drawing, a photograph, or an oil painting,
nothing looks so well as red ; but it is an exces
sively difficult colour to get the right shade of, and
is not suitable to a very light room. Some shades
of dead blue are very beautiful, and form, with dark
green hangings, one of the most pleasing har
monies of colour that you can have ; but when
ever you put colours so nearly allied together, you
must be very sure of having the right shade, or
the effect will be hideous. As in everything else.

380 SENTENTIyE ARTIS.
if you once leave the beaten track of conven
tionality, you must be a law to yourself, and dare
failure on your own responsibility. I think, as a
rule, light blues and yellows are not advisable,
unless the room is_^a very small one ; they have a
cold, cheerless look in large quantities. For the
same reason, French grey and salmon colour are,
for the most part, to be avoided.

Doorways. Q* PEAKING of doorways, I could never under-
*^ stand how it was that no one has ever of
late years revived the old arched door that used
to be so common in postern gateways. Surely
any arch would be preferable to the square lintel
so universal at present, besides giving opportunities
for infinite variation and adornment, whereas the
present doorway hardly admits of any softening or
decoration, except on the door itself.

House T F your house is to be really well furnished, it
furnish- I
ing, -*- must be done by degrees ; the furniture must,
as it were, grow up round you in the place where

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 381
it is needed, till the whole becomes complete, like
a well-fitting design in mosaic, every piece alike
complete in itself, and necessary to the harmony
of all the rest. This is so simple a fact, that I
should have thought it would have been apparent
to everyone, did I not know by painful ex
perience that houses are hardly ever furnished in
this manner. It is a common thing, when
speaking of old-fashioned houses, to say that no
house really seems as if it had been inhabited till
people have lived and died there. What is the
meaning of this saying ? It is quite easy to see.
The house is bought and furnished, and the people
live in it ; gradually, as years go on, one useless,
or cumbrous, or hideous, or badly-made piece of
furniture after another falls into bad repute or
decay, and is replaced by another more suitable
(because by this time the people have learnt
to know what they really want) ; and this
process goes on from year to year, till the place
gradually assumes that home-like look, which
comes from everything in it being in harmony
with the rest, and fulfilling some special function,
be it useful or ornamental. So we have the
large library bookcase where it's wanted, and the

382 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
card-table here, and the baby's chair there, and
the mother's work-basket in the corner near the
fire, and the ornaments Fred, brought home from
India on the mantelboard, and each alike is
entwined with some special service and affection,
perhaps even with some sacred memory.

Comfort- TT may be a very daring and paradoxical
able and I
artistic "^ assertion, but I venture to say that a house
TU Yftt tti YS cannot be artistically furnished, unless it is com
fortably furnished. So far from comfort being
inconsistent with art in house decoration, it
is necessary to it ; and the first great maxim
of decoration for any practical person to keep
in his mind, is this — to reject, without hesitation,
any style of furniture which is not thoroughly
comfortable. He will find his reward in many
ways, not only by his own increased joy in
living in a house whose furniture is adapted to
its purposes, but in the increased enjoyment of
his friends, who will admire his sense and taste
far more from a substantial armchair, than from a
ricketty spindle-legged one. If you furnish a
room to live in — say in the " Queen Anne style,"

SENTENTIiE ARTIS. 383
dear to the heart of the decorator — it is just as
incongruous for you to sit there in a nineteenth
century dress, as it is for you to put in a Georgian
sideboard, and no more.

TT is essentially a mistake to suppose a book- Bookcases.
-^ case is out of place in any room ; on the
contrary, there is nothing furnishes a room like a
bookcase, and plenty of books in it.

SAY a workman has succeeded, as to do him China
ornaments,
justice, the modern workman does frequently
succeed, in reproducing exactly in china the colours
and shape of a parrot, and has hung it on a gilt
hoop, and you can have it in your drawing-room
complete. What more can we want ? We want
the impossible. We want the constant ruffling
and pluming of the feathers ; we want the know
ing turn of the head to right and left ; we want
even the shrill, inharmonious cry. And the more
perfect the imitation of the outward form and
colour are, the more we require the circumstances

384 SENTENTI^ ARTIS.
which we are accustomed to associate with them.
It is out of all our range of experience — out of
everyone's range of experience — that a parrot
should sit for ever mute and motionless ; and this
being so, the reason resents the misspent labour
which has given with so much toil a deceptive
reproduction of a bird, which directly it ceases to
be deceptive, becomes incongruous.
The new ' | ""HE poor old world, hypochondriacal as ever,
morality. I
-*- after running about for six thousand years
from one physician to another, and seeking for
some remedy for its restlessness and heart hunger,
is still crying, with Oliver Twist-like pertinacity,
" for more," and her latest specific is that of art.
Her moralists and wise men are now solemnly
sitting in judgment upon this poor rustic maiden,
ignorantly suspected of witchcraft, and, like
James I., will soon proceed to boil her, "in order
that," as Victor Hugo says, " by tasting the broth
they may say ' This was a witch,' or ' was not.' "
For both those who attack and those who defend
art are beginning to do so on high intellectual
and moral grounds, and we are seriously asked to
believe that she is capable of making the body

SENTENTI^ ARTIS. 385
healthy, the spirit holy, and intellect keen. Alas!
what is this but the old disease in a new shape,
the latest form of Abracadabra for the salvation
of humanity ? War and philosophy and religion
have each had their turn at the great problem,
and now poor little art, with her dainty limbs
and wondering blue eyes, lost in vague dreams
of the beautiful, is seriously set down at the
examiner's table, given half a sheet of paper,
and asked to write clearly all she knows on the
question. No wonder the poor girl is bewildered,
feels half inclined to cry, half to run away. Can
we not fancy her saying to her judges, " Kind
sirs, I meant no harm. I never tried to do more
than please folks. The world is very fair and
yet very sad, and in both its sadness and its
beauty I feel a sympathy. And what I feel I try
to show you. But that is all. If you come to
me wearied with the struggle of life, I will meet
you with pictures of a fair world, in which even
sorrow is beautiful, and wherein even trivial
actions of daily life shall shine brightly. But I
have no formula for this, and can give you none.
I can help you to rest, but not to act. I can
refresh you after the fight, not arm you for it."

(Bcneval 3nbex.

Academic Art, p. 70.
Academy, False position of,
P-52-
Academic Painting, Harden
ing effect of, p. 55.
Academy, Salon and, p. 184.
(See pp. 183, 187, &c.)
Academic view of the Nude,
see pp. 73, 74.
Advance in Art, Kangaroo
character of, p. 304.
.ffisthetic Decoration, an
aesthetic drawing - room, p.
375. (See p. 275.)
.ffisthetic Life, necessity of
ugliness, p. 57.
iEsthetic Moveiaent, Theory
of, p. 92. Value and results
of, p. 93. (See pp. 27s, 375.)
.ffisthetic School, dislike of
pure water - colour, p. 93,
Painters admired or disliked
by, p. 94. {See pp. 275, &c.)
Age, no reason for admiration,
p. 14.
Aim of Modern Artists, p. 45.
Allegorical Art, Difficulty of
handling, p. 70.
Allingham, Mrs., character of
her work, p. 217.
Alma Tadema, p. 134.
Amateurs, Capabilities of, com
pared with professionals,
p. 332. (See pp. 301, 306.)
Amateur, The, definition of,
value of, pp. 61, 301. (See
pp. 306,332.)
Anonymous Art, p. 60.

Art for the Upper Classes,
p. 48.
Artistic Dreamers, not to be
disallowed, p. 84.
Artistic " Good Boys," p. 57.
Artistic Houses, Preposterous-
ness of, p. 73. (S«ep. 375.)
Artistic Quality of 'Work,
artistic feeling prior to defi
nite motive for production,
P- 15-
Artist's view of the Amateur,
The, contemptuous feeling
of, p. 83. (See pp. 301, 306,
&c.)
Babies, favourite subjects in
Academy, p. 22. (See p.
227.)
Beginning to work. First rule,
p. 298.
Blake, 'William, Difficulties of,
p. 219. (See p. 25.)
Blake's pre Raphaelitism,
p. 90. (See p. 338.)
Boldness, intolerable unless
irreproachable, p. 36.
Book Cases, use as furniture,
n. 383-
Book Illustration, Requisite
qualities for, p. 33. Di
minished need for, in great
literary productions, p. 35.
(See pp. 151, 205.)
Boughton, G. H., quality and
subjects of his art, p. 224.
Boyce, Miniature style of,
p. 161. (See pp. 82, 90, 235.)

GENERAL INDEX.

387

Brett, Moore and, charac
teristics of, p. 165. Com
pared with Moore, p. 166.
(See pp. 82, 226, 235.)
British Tradesman, his ideas
of taste, p. 63.
Brushwork, Hints to students,
p. 300-
Bunney, painting St. Mark's,
Venice, p. 215. (See p. 362.)
Burne-Jones, character and
moral effect of his work, pp.
107, 183. Failures of, p. 306.
(See pp. 26, 83, 85, &c.)
Butler, Mrs., character of her
art, p. igo. (See p. 172.)
Calm of Ancient Art, p. 24.
(See p. 337.)
Canaletto, monotony of his
colour, p. 357. (See p. 362.)
Cennini's Pupil, p. 269.
China Ornaments, Misplaced
ingenuity of, p. 383.
Choice of Art as a Profession,
p. 266.
Choice of a Subject, directions
for, p. 302. (See pp. 351,
322).
Cole, Vicat, composition of his
pictures, p. 218. (S^ep. 201.)
Collier, John, qualities of his
portraiture, p. 222.
Colour, its effect in a picture,
p. 63. Necessary errors of
painters with limited scale
of, p. 2gi. Relations of tone
in a picture, p. 2gj.
Colour of the Old Masters,
rare use of tertiary colours,
p. 276. (See pp. 377, 378.)
Colour of Walls, Rules for,
p. 37g. Hanging pictures,
p. 380. (See pp. 377, 378.)
Common Amateur Errors,
their nature and results,
p. 331. (See pp. 280,306.)

Completion of Work, Neces
sity of, p. 326.
Comprehensiveness of Great
Art, as evinced in early
works, p. 6. (See p. 24.)
Conventional view of Nature,
carried about by people, p. 29.
Costa, quality of his work,
p. 159. Relation to actual
life, p. 160. (See p. 103.)
Covering the Paper, Necessity
of, p. 330.
Cox and Turner, Revolution in
English art caused by, p.
201. Their initial difficulties,
p. 202. (See pp. 81, g4,
&c.)
Crane's Designs, Walter, cha
racteristics and quality of,
p. 133. (See p. 33.)
Crofts, Ernest, character of
his paintings, p. 172.
Decadence of English Land
scape, Signs of the, p. 6g.
(See p. 82.)
Decoration, House, modern
recipe for, p. 375. Subordi
nate forms of, p. 372.
Decoration of Pottery, neces
sity of conventionalism, p.
276.
Decorative Art, Antiquity and
universality of, p. 35g. Pro
gress and culmination, p. 370.
Decoration of panels, p. 274.
Ideal of good design, p 275.
Only valued highly at expense
of higher forms, p. 371. (See
p. 285, &c.)
Definite Intention Neces
sary, p. 316.
Depression of Modern Work,
sadness of landscape art,
p. 82. Its tone of dissatis
faction, p. 83. (See pp. 69,
236)-
2 C

388

GENERAL INDEX.

Deteriorating Effect of Pro
fessional 'Work, p. 24. Of
Fashion upon Artists, p. 43.
De "Wint, characteristics of, p.
174. (See pp. 93, 144, &c.)
Difficulty of Subject, increased
by its beauty, p. 50. (See
pp. 302, 351, &c.)
Discouragement, necessarily
felt by beginners, p. 324.
Not to be felt at failures of
student work, p. 298. (See
P- 91. 325)
Discouragement of Bad
'Work, Necessity of, p. 62.
Display of Skill, when toler
able, p. 35.
Doorways, arches preferable to
square lintels, p. 380.
Dor6, Gustave, character of
his work, p. 149. His book
illustrations, p. 151. (See
pp. 33, 112.)
Downward Tendency of
Modern Art, Signs of,
p. 87. (See pp. 41, 32,
&c.)
Doyle, Richard, character and
subjects of his work, p in.
(See p. 33.)
Drapery, Essentials of good,
p. 286. Correggio's, Pecu
liarities of, p. 339. (See p.
I23-)
Drawing Boughs, Hints for,
P- 313-
Drawing Master Instruction,
Main faults, p. 299.
Drawing Trees, Observations
on, p. 314.
Du Maurier, his "Punch"
drawings, p. 130. Compared
with Leech, p. 131. Truth
to London life, p. 132. (See
P- 33-)
Dutch Painting, Flemish and.
Characteristics of, p. 350.

Dutch School, character and
subjects, p. 341. Artistic
insufficiency of, pp. 344,
33°-
Dutch Sea Painting, Love of
quietness in, p. 344.
Early Christian Pictures,
Characteristics of, p. 347.
Economy, in selection from
nature, p. 298.
Elaboration, not Finish, defi
nitions of both, p. 314.
English and German Art,
Comparison of, p. 183. (See
pp. 184, 187.)
English Battle Painting, De
fects of, p. 171. Work of
Crofts, p. 172. Mrs. Butler,
P- 173-
English Desire for Art,
Ignorance of, p. 74. (See
p. 44.)
English Portraiture, Charac
teristics of, Millais, Holl,
'Watts, p. 235. (See p. 51).
English Scenery, Duty of
painters of, p. 97. (See p. 6g.)
English 'War Paintings,
Character of, p. 171.
Essence of Decoration,
Definition of, p. 285.
Etching, Characteristics of, p.
288. English compared to
foreign work, pp. 288-9. Error
of imitating other methods
of reproduction in, p. 289.
Limitations of, p. 290. Pri
mary necessity of artistic feel
ing in, p. 288. Technical
process of, p. 289. (See pp.
60, 289, &c.)
Etty, William, character of
his work, p. 185. (See p.
I97-)
Experience of Art and Life,
p. 7.

GENERAL INDEX.

389

Expression of Subject, hints
on technical work, p. 282.
Faculty of English Land
scape, its peculiar fidelity
to nature, p. 95. (See pp.
6g, 94, &c.)
False Figure Art, of English
water-colour painting, its
lack of feeling, p. 32. (See
pp. 41, 64, &c.)
Finish, Impossibility of, in
amateur work, p. 330. (See
V- 314-)
Fitness of place, error of paint
ing objects divorced from
their natural surroundings,
p. 304. (See p. 302.)
Flemish Painting, Italian and.
Characteristics of, p. 353.
Flemish and Dutch Painting,
Characteristics of, p. 350.
Foreign Galleries, charac
teristics of those of France,
Germany, Spain, Italy, Eng
land, p. 187. (See pp. 183,
184.)
Fortuny, Influence of, p. 182.
Foster, Birket, popularity ofhis
art, p. 202. His composition,
p. 203. His book illustrations,
p. 204. (See pp. 33, 214,
&c.)
Foster and Gilbert, subjects
and character of their work,
p. 213. False conception of
nature, p. 214. (See pp. 33,
202, &c.)
Fred. Walker's " Cookham,"
p. 40. (See pp. 83, go, &c.)
French Art, Dramatic capacity
of, p. 243. Compared to
English Art, love of the
abstract in landscape, p. 236.
Characteristics of the Eng
lish landscape painter, p. 237.
Of the foreign one, p. 238.

Morality of French and Eng
lish art, p. 23g. (See pp. 8,
82, 236, 243, &c.)
French Generalisation of
detail, p. 62.
French Landscape, lack of
love for nature, p. 53.
(See p. 243, &c.)

Gainsborough, pp. 139, 144, &c.
Gainsborough and Reynolds,
character of Gainsborough,
p. I3g. Compared with Rey
nolds, p. 140. Characteristics
of, p. 141. Landscapes, p. 142.
(See pp. 317:355. &c.)
German and English Art,
p. 183.
Gerome, p. 137.
Gilbert, Sir John, Foster and,
characteristics of, p. 213.
Book illustrations of, p. 214.
(See pp. 33, 151, 205.)
Good in Everything, to be
discovered by study, p. 318.
Gothic Architecture in Flan
ders, Impressions of, p. 20.
Great Picture, A, p. 6.
Great Sculpture, Necessity of
ideal feeling in, p. 7g. (See
pp. 24, 64.)
Greek Sculpture, Impersonal
character of, p. 64. (See
pp. 6, 24, log.)
Greenaway, Kate, character of
her work, p. in.
Gregory, E. J., Recklessness
and genius of, p. i5g.
Growth of Landscape, as
shown in works of Giotto,
Raphael, Durer, p. 34g.
Haag, Carl, qualities of his art,
p. igo. (See pp. 123, 125.)
Hayes, E., quality of his work,
p. 156. (See pp. 144, 145.)
2 0 2

390

GENERAL INDEX.

Healthy Genius, Rarity of,
p. 86.
Herkomer, Hubert, variety of
his work, p. 223.
High Aims, dangers of, p. 25.
High "Art" Criticism,
Absurdities of, p. 84.
Hine, H. G., character of
his work, p. 153.
Historical Painting, Rarity of
genius for, p. 54.
Holbein, Hans, Court Por
trait of, characteristics of,
p. 229. (See p. 51.)
Holl, Frank, realism of his
portraits, p. 233. Portraiture
of, compared with Millais
and 'Watts, p. 231. (See
p. 235, &c.)
Homely Character of Flemish
Painting, Pleasure derived
from, p. 343.
Hook, J. C, Character of,
p. 226. (See p. 82.)
House Furniture, Esthetic,
p. 275. To be gradually
accumulated, p. 380. (See
P- 375-)
Human Element in Land
scape, p. 358. More neces
sary than beauty, pp. 359,
360.
Humility, not resultant from
study of unimportant objects,
p. 303. (See p. 302.)
Hunt, Alfred, character of his
work, p. 148. (See p. 82.)
Hunt, Holman, character of
his work, p. 137. Realism
the cause of his defects,
p. 139. "Triumph of the In
nocents," various beauties of,
p. 163. (See pp. go, 163, 235.)
Hunt, William, Character and
life of, as evinced in his
paintings, p. 210. (See pp.
88, 242, 328.)

Ideal Art Critic, his alphabet,
p. 75. Personal qualifica
tions, p. 76. Accomplish
ments, p. 78.
Ideal Creations, reached by
means of existing truths,
p. 34. (See p. 52.)
Idealism, distinguished from
invention, p. 52. (See p. 38.)
Idyllic Quality of Mason's
Painting, p. 175. (See pp.
100, 102.)
Imaginative Work, its many
meanings to different minds,
p. 7. (See p. 38.)
Imitation, not falsity of decora
tive work, p. 278. The one
unpardonable sin of painting,
p. 50.
Imperfection, only pardonable
to enthusiasm, p. 62.
Impressionists, The defects
and virtues of, p. 188.
Insufficiency of Beauty, de
fects of an artist who sets
himself to be uniformly beau
tiful, p. 56. (See p. 358.)
Interiors, Hints for the painting
of, p. 329.
Irritating Criticism, of igno
rant people, p. 37.
Israels, Josef, p. 240.
Italian and Flemish Paint
ing, Connection between,
p. 353. (See pp. 350, 367, &c.)
Italian Art, Spanibh and, re
semblance to a Gaiety Bur
lesque, p. 290.
Italy, Art of Spain and, p. 177.
Decadence of, p. 178. For
tuny's work, p. 179. Its re
sults, p. 181.

Judgment of Pictures not to
be formed at once, p. 3. (See
p. 44.)

GENERAL INDEX.

391

Keene, Charles, characteristics
of his work, p. 124 ; compared
with Tenniel, Du Maurier,
Sambourne, p. 125. (See
pp. 35, 151, 205.)
Knowledge versus Sight.
Painting from nature, a
shorthand language, p. 294.
Lack of Imagination in
English Art, Prevalence,
signs, and results of, p. g.
Lack of Interest in Amateur
Work, a cause of failure,
P- 327-
Lack of Meaning in Amateur
Work, Prevalence of, p. 285.
Landscape, Success attained
by grasping any one quality
in, p. 72.
Landseer, Sir Edwin, his true
place, p. 221.
Language of Art, The, p. 3.
Last Century Art, its devotion
to details of dress, p. 70.
(See p. i3g.)
Lawson, Cecil, character of
his landscapes, p. 207. (See
pp. 81, 83.)
Leaves and Branches, Charac
teristics of, p. 314.
Leech, John, sense of humour,
p. 226. (See pp. 5, 124.)
Legros, A., qualities of his art,
p. 154. Impersonality of his
portraits, p. 155. (See p.
I39-)
Leighton, Sir F., character of
his art, p. 103. Greek idea
of beauty, pp. 104-105. Un
natural beauty ofhis figures,
p. 106. (See p. 118.)
Lepage, Bastien, character
istics of his portraiture, p.
161. Compared with Holl,
Watts, Millais, p. 162.
(See p. I2g.)

Light and Shade, Weakness
of, in amateur work, p. 280.
Wrong method of, p. 329.
(See p. 280.)
Limitations of Pictures, p.
Linnell, characteristics of his
art, p. 145. Compared with
Palmer, p. 146. Relation to
actual life, p. 148. (See pp.
210, 212.)
Linton, Sir J. D., technical
qualities of his art, p. 168.
Character and subjects of,
p. 169.
Lives of Great Artists,
Characteristics of, p. 86.
Lombardic Architecture,
Beauties of, p. 339.
Long, Edwin, character of his
work, p. 157.
Low Aims in Art, duty of
an artist to reveal special
beauties of nature, p. 39.
(See pp. 9, 285, 327.)

Macbeth, R. W., character of
his art, p. log.
Marks, Stacy, character of
his art, p. 167.
Mason, George, character and
subjects of his painting,
p. 100. Relation to actual
life, pp. 103, 175.
Mass and Value, Proper
estimation of, p. 300.
Materials, Advice regarding,
p. 271.
Maurier, Du, pp. 5, 125, 130.
Memling's " Chasse de Saint
Ursule," p. 365.
Method of Work, The most
natural, the safest, p., 84.
Michael Angelo's Definition
of Good Painting, p.
339-

392

GENERAL INDEX.

Millais' Portraits, compared
to those of Watts and Holl,
p. 231. (See p. 235.)
Modern English Art, Dulness
of, p. 64. (See pp. 9, 19, 41.)
Modern Recipe for Decora
tion, Details of, p. 375.
Modern School of Land
scape, their feeling and mo
tive, p. 70. (See pp. 6g, 82.)
Modern Theory of Art, p. 3.
Moore, Albert, charm of his
work, p. 123. (See pp. 64,
103, 123.)
Moore, Henry, Brett and,
character of, p. 165. Virtues
and defects of, p. 166. (See
pp. 82, 226, 235.)
Morality in Art, mistake of
endowing a painting with one
definite meaning, p. 14.
Morris, Phil, qualities of his
painting, p. 227. (See p. 22.)
Morris's Designs, 'William,
Qualities of, p. 287.
Motives of 'Work, not to be
sought among trivialities,
p. 10. (See pp. 9, 19.)
Mystery in Landscape, prin
cipal element of its charm,
p. 81.
Nearness, Effect of, p. 312.
Neatness sometimes a hind
rance, reasons why, p. 319.
Necessary Subordination, p.
55-
Necessity of a Subject, rea
sons for, p. 321.
Negative Instruction, more
definite and frequent than
positive instruction, p. 59.
Neutral Colour, Fallacy of de
pending upon, for good effect,
p. 377. (See p. 277, &c.)
New Morality, The, character
istics of, p. 384.

North, character of his work,
p. 228.
Nude, The, the body the soul's
outward expression, p. 73.
(Se^pp. 73,74-)
Objects out of place, Unsuit-
abilityof, p.320. (See p. 304.)
Old and New Bohemia,
Characteristics of, p. 65.
Old English Painting, Honest
character of, p. 144.
Older Painters, their superi
ority to present methods,
p. 364. (See p. 24, &c.)
" Old Gate, The," F. Walker,
p. 120.
Old Masters, Causes of pleasure
derived from, p. 355. Colour
of, p. 276. (See pp. 24, 276,
364.)
One difference between
Northern and Southern
Painters, p. 357.
One of Ruskin's effects on
Amateurs, being satisfied
with easy subjects, p. 333.
(See pp. 8, 292, &c.)
Ordinary Scenes, Result of
studying, p. 317.
Ornament, Antiquity and
universality of, p. 372. De
velopment of, p. 373. No
definition of possible, p. 374.
(See pp. 274, 369, &c.)
Ouless's Portraits, Character
istics of, pp. 222, 233, 235.
Outline, Unsatisfactoriness of,
p. 72.
Painter's Criticism, often re
sultant from conscious in
feriority, p. 37.
Painting's " Poor Relation,"
quality of sculpture com
pared with painting, p. 49.
(See pp. 24, 64, &c.)

GENERAL INDEX.

393

Palmer, Samuel, character
istics of his art, p. igg. (See
p. 146.)
Paraphernalia, necessities for
a student, p. 268.
Parsons, Alfred, qualities of
his work, p. 217.
Perception of Great Art, all
great works of art records of
heightened perception of
some individual, p. 21.
Perspective, applicable to
aerial objects, p. 311. The
bread of art, its universal
application, p. 28g.
Pictures of the Thames, Two,
description of, p. 17.
Pinwell and Walker, Contrast
between, p. 113. Greek ideal
of Walker's art, p. 114.
Character and subjects of
Pinwell's art, p. 115. Pre-
Raphaelitism of, p. 116.
Actual relation to nature, p.
117. (See pp. 40, 83, 90,
194, &c.)
Pisano's Sculpture, Qualities
of, p. 352.
Pleasure derived from Missal
Painting, earnestness of
early illuminative work, p.
360. (See pp. 343, 353, 365,
&c.)
Poole, character and subjects
of his art, p. 197.
Popular Judgment of Art,
three classes by whom car
ried on, p. 44. (See p. 3.)
Portrait Painting, bad pur
suit for emotional artists,
p. 51.
Poynter, character and qualities
of his art, p. 118. His
portraiture, p. 120. (See pp.
64, 103, 235.)
Praise and Blame, to be dis
regarded by students, p. 308.

Praise, to be distrusted from
friends, p. 326. Unnecessary
for the student, p. 327. (See
pp. gi. 298, &c.)
Pre-Raphaelitism, Theory of,
p. 89. Results of, p. go.
Characteristics of Pre-Raph
aelite old masters, p. 338.
(See pp. 355, Sec)
Price of Pictures, The, p. 27.
Problem of Art, A, p. 75.
Progress, no student's work
progressive unless perpetu
ally faulty, p. 2g7. (See p.
2g8.)
Progress of Art in England,
Doubtful signs of, p. 241.
Prout, qualities of his work, p.
205. Actual value, p. 207.
Quality of Greatest Art, per
fect fulfilment of the artist's
original intention, p. 56.
(See p. 6.)
Quality of Watts' Work,
its impersonal sadness, p.
240. Compared with that of
Israels, p. 241. (See p. 192.)
Quotations from —
CoUins, Wilkie, p. 322.
Dobell, Sidney, p. 24.
Eliot, George, pp. 40, 106,
208, 361.
Gilbert, W. S., p. 77.
Gregg, Percy, p. 241.
Holmes, O. W., p. 76.
Hugo, Victor, p. 384.
Keats, John, p. 14.
Khayyam, Omar, p. 241.
Stevenson, Louis, p. 2g8.
Swinburne, p. 207.
Realism, where justifiable, p.
38. (See p. 52.)
Refinement, to be sought in
essentials rather than sur
roundings, p. 73.

394

GENERAL INDEX.

Relation of Parts in a Picture,
necessity of their definite
growth and cohesion, p.
71-
Relation of Trees to Ground,
P- 315-
Relations, their hindering effect
on the student, p. 266.
Relative Importance of Sub
jects, error of seeking for
interest in unimportant sub
jects, p. 19. (See pp. 9, 10,
&c.)
Repetition, Prevalence and
inexcusableness of, p. 41.
(See p. 64.)
Result of Amateur Work, as
it should be, p. 323.
Reynolds, Gainsborough and,
comparison of, p. 139. Their
portraiture, p. 144. (See pp.
332, &c.)
Reynolds' Lectures on Paint
ing, their effect and value,
P- 332.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, pp.
139, 144, 132.
Richmond, W. B., qualities of
his art, p. 195.
Right estimation of Artists,
technical skill usually mis
taken for artistic power, p. 16.
(See p. 25.)
Road to Art, necessity of com
bining artistic feeling with
practical education, p. 270.
Roman Mosaics, p. 347.
Rossetti, D. Gr., mediaeval
character ofhis mind and art,
p. 126. Compared to Burne-
Jones, p. 128. "Found,"
Qualities of, p. 244. His
influence, pp. 247 to 253.
Sense of Beauty, Character
istics of, p. 254. " Beata
Beatrix," p. 258. (See pp.
90, 107, &c.)

Ruskin, main defects of his
teaching, p. 292. Influence,
Disastrous effect of, p. 310.
Hisart perceptions hampered
by his religious views, p.
3"-
Ruskin notwithstanding p. 8.

Saint Mark's,'Venice, Pictures
of, since 1490, p. 362. (See
p. 215.)
Salon and the Academy,
The, contrast between, p.
184. (See pp. 187, 256,
&c.)
School of Painting, those of
one age unsuited to another,
p. 30.
Scotch School, The, vital de
fects of, p. 173.
Secco, tempera, and fresco,
distinctions between, p. 273.
Seeing correctly, Necessity of,
p. 265.
Shape, necessity of defining, p.
312.
Shivering on the Brink, timid
ity of amateurs, p. 307.
Small Aims, to be contemptible,
must be in inverse ratio to
their subjects, p. 10.
Small Artists, their position,
estimation, and value, p. 3.
Society Art, fashionable
aestheticism, p. 96.
Solidity, rotundity of various
objects, p. 312.
Spain and Italy, Art of,
177. Decadence of, p. 178.
Fortuny's work, p. 180. Its
results, p. 182. (See p.
290.)
Spanish and Italian Art, re
semblance to a Gaiety
burlesque, p. 290.
Splodges, Result of, p. 316.

GENERAL INDEX.

395

Stevens, Alfred, his lions at
the British Museum, p. 66.
Wellington Memorial, p. 67.
Poverty and death, p. 68.
(See p. 25.)
Stothard, his feeling for beauty,
p. 213.
Subjects, Choice of good, p.
351. Should be a simple one,
observations on, p. 322.
Success and Failure, Lessons
of, p. 299. (See p. 91.)
Success in Art, generally
result of poverty rather than
popularity, p. 25. Two
varieties of, p, 91.
Swiss Scenery, Unsatisfactory
representations of, p. 80.
Tadema, Alma, realism of his
marble painting, p. 134.
Lifelessness of liis work, p.
135. (See pp. 103, 123.)
Teaching, possibility of being
taught too much, p. 331.
Time of Work, The, work not
good in proportion to time
expended, p. 328.
Tinworth's, George, Sculp
ture, Characteristics of, p.
186.
Tissot, character of his art, p.
122. Relation to actual life,
p. 123. (See p. 236, &c.)
Tone, Definition and insuffi
ciency of, p. 27g.
Transparency of Water-
Colour, Its unique quality,
p. 284.
Trees and Shrubs, Drawing of,
p. 301.
True and False Imagination,
Definition of, p. 63. (See
PP- 38, 52.)
Turner, fitness of place of his
figures, p. 152. His colour,
p. 196.

Turner, Cox and. Revolution in
English art caused by, p.
201. Their initial difficulties,
p. 202. (See pp. 81, 94,
&c,)
Turning to or from the Sun,
Effect of, p. 313.
Two Classes of Amateurs,
P- 305-
Type of Landscape Art, A,
the " foreground type," p.
94-
Ugliness, Not definable, p. 305.
(See p. 347.)
Uncertainty, agnosticism of
most people on art-subjects,
¦ p. 2g.
Unpleasantness of Subject,
not necessarily a defect in
painting, p. 8.
Unrecognised Work, a neces
sity in student work, p.
2S0.
Use of Tertiary Colours,
deteriorating effect upon
perception of true colour,
p. 277.
Uses of Failure, to enable
comprehension of really
great art, p. 278.
Van Eyck's Picture, Remarks
on, p. 345. (See pp. 343,
366.)
Value of Intention, greater
than success of execution,
p. 294.
Value of Old Pictures, their
quiet perfection, p. 337.
Venetian Painting, Splendour
of, p. 342. (See p. 24.)
View of Nature, as talien by
great artists, p. So.
View of the Nude, The athletic,
p. 74. (See p. 73;)

396

GENERAL INDEX.

'Walker, Pinwell and, contrast
between, p. 113. Greekideal
of Walker's art, p. 114. Cha
racter and subjects of Pin
well's art, p. 115. Pre-Ra
phaelitism of, p. 116. Rela
tion to nature, p. 117.
Water-Colour v. Oil Paint
ing, for student's work, p.
294. Qualities of each, p. 296.
Water Colour Drawings
before Turner, Limitations
of, p. 271. Improvement in,
P- 273-
Watts, G. F., his scriptural
paintings, p. 192. True
Greek character of his art,
p. 193. Technical failures
of, p. 194. Treatment of the
Nude, method of working.

p. 73. Portraiture of, com
pared to Holl and Millais,
pp. 231, 235. His method
of preserving colour, p. 293.
(See pp. 73, 74, 155, &c.)
Ways of Treating the Nude,
characteristics of, four
schools, p. 363. (See pp. 73,
74-)
Ways of Teaching Art, no
definite recipes for, 263.
Wedmore, Frederick, qualities
ofhis writing, p. 30.
Well-worn Subject, A, Ways
of treating, p. 60.
What Papa thinks, p. 376.
Worth ofa Painting, p. 55.
Young Artists, not to be forced
into old grooves, p. 42.

3nbex of 5ir lists.

Allingham, Mrs., p. 217.
Angelico, Fra, pp. 338, 366.
Angelo, Michael, pp. 30, 36,
50, 81, 118, 119, 278, 339,
371.373-
Bellini, pp. 333, 362, 377.
Blake, William, pp. go, 200,
2ig.
Botticelli, p. g3.
Boughton, G. H., p. 224.
Boyce, pp. 82, go, 161, 235.
Brett, John, pp. 82, 165, 226,
235.
Buhot, p. 83.
Bunney, 'W., p. 215.
Burne-Jones, E.,pp. 26, 83, 85,
90, 94, 107, 126, 183, 247.
Butler, Mrs., pp. 172, igo.
Caldicott, p. 355.
Canaletto, pp. 357, 362.
Carpaccio, p. 333.
Carpeaux, p. 244
Cennini, pp. 269, 273.
Chrome, Old, pp. 144, 242, 317.
Cimabue, p. 253.
Claude, pp. 200, 201, 359.
Cole, Vicat, p. 218.
Collier, John, p. 222.
Constable, pp. 242, 317.
Corot, pp. 148, 237.
Correggio, pp. 333, 33g.
Costa, p. i5g.
Cotman, p. 144.
Cox, pp. g3, 125, 144, 174, 201,
212, 213, 242, 317, 35g.
Crane, 'Walter, p. 133.
Crofts, Ernest, p. 172.
Daubigny, p. 242.
De Wint, pp. g3, 144, 174, 211
213, 242, 317.

Donatello, p. 276.
Dore, Gustave, pp. 33, 112,
149.
Doyle, Richard, p. in.
Du Maurier, pp. 5, 125, 130.
Duran, Carolus, pp. 144, 267.
Durer, p. 350.
Etty, William, pp. 185, 197.
Fantin, p. 242.
Fielding, Copley, p. 154.
Fortuny, p. I7g.
Foster, Birket, pp. 202, 213.
Frith, p. 240.
Gainsborough, pp. 139, 144,
148,317.
Gilbert, Sir John, p. 213.
Gerome, p. 137.
Ghirlandajo, pp. 338.
Giorgione, p. 27.
Giotto, pp. 338, 345, 348, 349,
352, 353, 355, 358.
Goodwin, pp. 82, go, ig8.
Graham, Peter, p. 174.
Greenaway, Kate, p. in.
Gregory, E. T., p. 159.
Haag, Carl, p. 190.
Hayes, Edwin, p. 156.
Herkomer, Hubert, p. 223.
Hine, H. G., p. 153.
Hogarth, p. 144.
Holbein, pp. 162, 22g.
Holl, Frank, pp. 162, 232, 235.
Hook, T. C, pp. 82, 226.
Hunt, Alfred, pp. 82, 148.
Hunt, Holman, pp. go, 137,
163, 235.
Hunt, William, pp. 88, 210,
242, 328.

398

INDEX OF ARTISTS.

Ingres, p. 151.
Israels, Josef, p. 240.
Keene, Charles, p. 5, 124.
Landseer, Sir Edwin, p. 221.
Lawson, Cecil, p. 207.
Leech, John, pp. 131, 226.
Legros, pp. 139, i54- • ,
Leighton, Sir Frederick, pp.
103, 118.
Leonardo, pp. 30, 85, 276, 287,
339-
Lepage, Bastien, p. 161.
Leslie, pp. 144, 242.
Linnell, pp. 144, 200, 212.
Linton, Sir J. D., p. 168.
Long, p. 157.
Macbeth, R. W., p. 109.
Maclise, p. 197.
Macwhirter, p. 174.
Madox-Brown, p. 90.
Mantegna, p. 287.
Marks, Stacy, p. 167.
Mason, George, pp. 90, loi,
175- .
Meissonnier, pp. 125, 179.
Memling, pp. 343, 365.
Millais, Sir John, pp. 33, 90,
232, 235, 247.
Millet, J. F., p. 40.
Montalba, Clara, p. 362.
Moore, Albert, pp. 123, 135.
Moore, Henry, pp. 166, 226.
Morland, p. 144.
Morris, Phil, p. 227.
Morris, W., p. 287.
Mulready, pp. 242, 377.
North, p. 228.
Ouless, pp. 162, 222, 233, 235.
Palmer, Samuel, pp. 146, 149.
Parsons, Alfred, p. 218.
Paton, Sir Noel, p. 113.
Perugino, p. 338.

Phidias, pp. 25, 73.
Pinwell, G. J., pp.90, 115,194-
Pisajio, p. 352.
Poo^, p. 197.
Poynter, pp. 118, 235, 237.
Prout, p. 205.
Raphael, pp. 50, 333, 349, 371,
372, 377-
Reynolds, Sir J., pp. 139, 144,
332.
Richmond, 'W. B., p. 195.
Rossetti, D. G., pp. 90, 95,
126, 244.
Rousseau, pp. 148, 242.
Rubens, pp. 37, 185.
Salvator, p. 359.
Sambourne, Linley, p. 125.
Stanfield, Clarkson, p. 203.
Stevens, Alfred, p. 66.
Stothard, p. 213.
Tadema, Alma, pp. 123, 135,
191.
Tenniel, John, p. 125.
Tintoretto, pp. 27, 36, 50, 94,
278, 287, 333, 370, 371.
Tinworth, George, p. 186.
Tissot, p. 122.
Titian, pp. 27, 185, 253, 287,
333. 370. 377-
Turner, pp. 81, 94, 148, 152,
174, 196, 200, 201, 203, 216,
242, 271, 287, 310, 317, 377.
'Van Beers, p. 144.
Van Eyck, pp. 343, 345, 366.
¦Varley, p. 146.
¦Velasquez, pp. 94, 377.
Veronese, pp. 287, 339, 371.
Walker, Fred., pp. 40, 83, go,
94, 113, 120, 148, 211, 228.
'Ward, p. 144.
Watts, pp. 5, 73, 15s, 162, 192,
232, 235, 240, 293, 353.
Wilkie, pp. 144, 242, 377.
'Wyllie, p. 17.

/V

1728

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