Elisabeth Luther Cary

“ We see clearly enough the angry jaws, the curled tail, the weight of the attacking beast falling on the head of its victim, dragging it toward the ground. Nothing is slighted or compromised. We see even the gash in the flesh made by the panther's claws and the drops of blood trickling from the wound. But we have to thank Barye's instinct for refined conception that these features of the work do not claim and hold our attention which is absorbed by the vital line, the gracious sweep of the contours, the lovely surface, and the omission of all irrelevant and unreasonable detail. ”

“ Against Boecklin's followers, whose minds are more or less befogged by their lack of appreciation of paint as a means to an end, we must place Wilhelm Truebner who is a clear thinker and a great painter, with more warmth than Liebermann and with a reticent color sense, a feeling for expressive form, a love of reality, and no apparent desire to re-invent the grotesque. His elegance of line in itself sets him apart from most of his compatriots, and his knowledge of how to extract from his color scheme its essential beauty is greater than that of most modern painters, whatever their nationality. ”

“ And only less delightful than these glimpses of the natural world are the recurring portraits of half-grown boys and girls, all different and all lovable. The sweetness of adolescent beauty had for Morris an irresistible appeal, and while his characters have little of the psychological charm inseparable in real life from dawning qualities and undeveloped potentialities, they are as lovely as the morning in the brightness of hair, the slimness of form, the freedom of gesture with which he endows them. ”

“ This is the best art, and who can deny that it is good for us all that it should be at hand to stir the emotions; yet its very greatness makes it a thing to be handled carefully, for we cannot always be having our emotions deeply stirred: that wearies us body and soul; and man, an animal that longs for rest like other animals, defends himself against that weariness by hardening his heart and refusing to be moved every hour of the day by tragic emotions,—nay, even by beauty that claims his attention overmuch. ”

“ In striking contrast to this group are the balcony pictures in which women of ripe aggressive beauty lounge gracefully in the open-air rooms with the same freedom of pose as within doors, haughty yet frank, opulent, languid yet animated, flowers that could have bloomed nowhere else than under a scorching sun.
Then there is the group of dancers and actors and singers in each of which we find the adroit mingling of the artificial with the real, and the appreciation of the fact that with the people of the stage much that is artificial to others becomes their reality. ”

“ Declaring that work could and should be lovely, he demonstrated in his own life how intensely one man loved it. He fought for the principle of art with the ardour other men have shown in fighting for the principle of political liberty. He held himself bound to justify his theories in his own action, and while it would be absurd to claim for him complete consistency and freedom from error in even this, it certainly guided him safely past the quicksands of empty and inflated rhetoric by which the expressed philosophy of his own great masters is marred. ”

“ As we observe the lion fastening his teeth in the flesh of the boar, the bear grappling with his human slayer, and the energy and determination of the creatures at bay, our thought involuntarily bridges a chasm of four centuries and calls up the image of the Barye bronzes in which are displayed the same detachment of vision, the same absence of sentimentality, the same vigor and intensity if not quite the same strangeness of imagination. ”

“ In Morris’s world we should all be very happy if we were like Morris. He was not very happy in our world, yet perhaps he managed to get out of it as much of the joy of doing as it can be made to yield to any one man. His Socialism, from one point of view, was certainly a tremendous failure, but no other side of his life visible to the public at large showed so plainly his moral virtues, his generosity, his sincerity, his power of self-sacrifice, his effort toward self-control. ”

“ In the little history, more or less authenticated, of his eventful youth is the key to his charm as an artist, a charm the essence of which is freedom, an easy, informal way of looking at the visible world, a light abandon in the method of reproducing it, an independence of the tool or medium, resulting in art which, despite its minuteness of detail, seems to "happen" as Whistler has said all true art must. ”

“ His way was not the way of compromise, and he seriously believed that if “civilisation” could be swept out of the path by a revolution which should destroy all class distinctions and all machinery and machine-made goods, which should do away with commercialism and strip the world to its bare bones, so that men could start afresh, all equal and all freed from the superfluities of life, there would grow up a charming communism in which kind hearts would take the place of coronets, and cheerful labour the place of hopeless toil. ”

“ In this picture of Nicholas Bruyningh we cannot escape from the merry careless temperament. We cannot as in the early portrait of Saskia linger in dalliance over charming accessories and beautifully discriminated textures until we reach by moderate degrees the eloquence of the profoundly studied face. Bruyningh's face is like the "tirade" of a French play—it is rendered at white heat and in one inconceivably long breath. Its significance is so intensified as to produce a profound feeling in a sympathetic spectator. ”

“ Lastly, I am so confident that this equality will be gained that I am prepared to accept, as a consequence of the process of that gain, the apparent disappearance of what art is now left us, because I am sure that that will be but a temporary loss, to be followed by a genuine new birth of art which will be the spontaneous expression of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people. This, I say, is the art which I look forward to, not as a vague dream, but as a practical certainty, founded on the general well-being of the people. ”

“ In the finished bronze the lion is calmer and in obvious possession of the field. The fierce claws pushing out from their sheathing, the eyes that seem to snarl with the mouth, the massive paw resting on the serpent's coiled body combine to give a subtle impression of certain mastery, and the serpent is unquestionably the victim and defendant in the encounter. It is by such intuitive reading of the aspect of animals of diverse kinds, that Barye awakens the imagination and leads the mind into the wilderness of the untamed world. ”

“ His greatest gift was not so much the ability to produce art, artistic though he was in faculty and feeling, as it was the ability to make people see the difference between the kind of beauty to which his eyes were open and the ugliness commonly preferred to it. Nothing is so convincing as to see a man accomplish with his own hands what he has declared possible for anyone to accomplish. Morris’s continual illustration of his theories was perhaps more useful in awakening interest in just the matters which he had at heart than any more patient pursuit of an ideal less readily achieved. ”

“ Obviously, Miss Cassatt has come into the full possession of her art and is no longer constrained by the struggle, sharp and hard as it must have been, with her exacting method—a method that has not at any time permitted the sacrifice of truth to charm. Since art is both truth and charm, record and poetry, there is a great satisfaction in watching the flowering of a positive talent, after the inevitable stages of literalism are passed, into the beauty of intelligent generalization. ”

“ So complex is human life, that even this seemingly most reasonable answer may turn out to be little better than an evasion. For I suppose the best art to be the pictured representation of men’s imaginings: what they have thought has happened to the world before their time, or what they deem they have seen with the eyes of the body or the soul; and the imaginings thus represented are always beautiful indeed, but oftenest stirring to men’s passions and aspirations and not seldom sorrowful or even terrible. ”

“ There is nothing in the plain refined features that cries out for recognition of a temperament astutely divined. They have the calm repose that indicates entire lack of self-consciousness, no quality is unduly insisted upon, there is neither sentimentality nor brutal realism in the handling, the sitter simply lives as naturally upon the canvas as we feel that she must have lived in the world. [Pg 116] It is for such sweet and logical truth-telling, such mild and strict interpretation, that we must pay our debt of appreciation to Fantin, the painter of ideal realities and of actual ideals. ”

“ Art had for him an almost single meaning, namely, the beauty produced by humble workers as an every-day occurrence and for every day’s enjoyment, art by the people and for the people. So individual that he will never be forgotten by those who have once seen him and heard his voice raised in its inevitable protest, he nevertheless preached a kind of communism in which any high degree of individuality must have been submerged. ”

“ Outside the room in the open court kneels the Angel of the Annunciation and by his side kneels St. Emedius, the patron of Ascoli, with a model of the city in his hands. These figures are realistic in gesture and expression, interested, eager, responsive, filled with quick life and joyous impulse. The richly embroidered garment of the angel, his gilded wings, his traditional attitude, neither overpower nor detract from the vivid individuality of the beautiful face so firmly yet so freely modeled within its delicate hard bounding line. ”