Fernand Khnopff, Gerard Brown, Léonce Bénédite, Marion H. Spielmann, Richard Muther and John Van Dyke

“ But Denmark is a leaner land than Holland, less moist and more thinly inhabited, so that its art lacks the comfortable self-satisfied character of Dutch art. It betrays rather a tremulous longing, a pleasing melancholy and delight in dreams, a trembling dread of contact with coarse and stern reality. It was only for a time, early in the ’seventies, that a touch of cosmopolitanism affected Danish art. The phase of grandiose historical painting and anecdotic genre was experienced there, as in every other country. ”

“ As to landscape, no class of painting has been busier, more alive or more productive. It has overflowed into every other channel of art, giving them new spirit and a new life. It has led the van in every struggle and won every victory. Never was army more numerous or more various than that of the landscape painters, nor more independent. All the traditions find representatives among them, from Paul Flandrin to René Ménard. Naturalists, impressionists, open-air painters, learned in analysis or potent in invention. ”

“ The spirit of the early Cologne school, and in the main of that of Flanders, is idyllic and devotional, but the artists of the latter school achieve extraordinary force and precision in their representation of the facts of nature. They are, moreover, the first painters of landscape, for in their hands the gold background of the medieval panels yields place to a rendering of natural scenery and of effects of distance, minute in details and fresh and delightful in feeling. ”

“ Whereas the arts of architecture and sculpture, though they have found in the modern era new fields to conquer, yet grew to their full stature in ancient Hellas, those of music and painting remained almost in their infancy till the Renaissance. It was only in the 16th and 17th centuries that painters obtained such a mastery on the one hand over the forms of nature, and on the other over an adequate technique, that they were able to create works in which truth and beauty are one and the artistic speech exactly expresses the artistic idea. ”

“ Denmark resembles Holland in this: that in both, nature presents little luxury of emphasized colour or accentuated majesty of form. Broad flats are everywhere to be seen—vague, almost indefinable, in outline. Danish art is as demure and staid as the Danish landscape. As in Holland, the painters make no bold experiments, attempt no pretentious subjects, no rich colouring, nothing sportive or light. Like the Dutch, the Danes are somewhat sluggishly tranquil, loving dim twilight and the swirling mist. ”

“ Spain is a somewhat barren land in modern art. There painting, although active, is blind to life and to the treasures of art which lie unheeded in the road. Only one artist, Agrasot, during the ’seventies painted pictures of Spanish low life of great sincerity; and much later two young painters appeared who energetically threw themselves into the modern movement. One was Sorolla y Bastida, by whom there is a large fishing picture in the Luxembourg, which in its stern gravity might be the work of a Northern painter; the other was Ignacio Zuloaga, in whom Goya seems to live again. ”

“ Painting in the Modern Schools.—The history of the art has been presented here as an evolution, the ultimate outcome of which was the impressionist painting of 17th-century masters such as Rembrandt and Velazquez. In this form of painting the artist is only concerned with those aspects of nature which give him the sense of pictorial beauty in tone and colour, and these aspects he reproduces on his canvas, not as a mere mirror would, but touched, pervaded, transfigured by his own artistic personality. ”

“ And round the loud and showy individuality of Courbet—healthy, nevertheless, and inspiring—a group was gathered of men less judicious, but more stirring, more truculent, thoroughly original, but not less reverent to the old masters than they were defiant of contemporary authorities. They were even more ardent for a strong technique, but the masters who attracted them were the Dutch, the Flemish, the Venetians, who, like themselves, had aimed at recording the life of their day. ”

“ Whilst there is something prosy and homely about Danish art, that of Sweden displays nervous elegance and cosmopolitan polish. Simplicity is in her eyes humdrum; she prefers light and brilliant notes. There, a naturalness and simplicity allows us to forget the difficulties of the brush: here, we chiefly receive the impression of a cleverly solved problem. There, the greatest moderation in colour, a soft all-pervading grey: here, a cunning play with delicate tones and gradations—a striving to render the most difficult effects of light with obedient hand. ”

“ It is when objects and groups of objects have taken on themselves this pictorial beauty, which only the artistically trained eye can discern, that the modern painter finds himself in the presence of his “subject,” and he knows that this magical play of beauty may appear in the most casual and unlikely places, in mean and squalid corners, and upon the most ordinary objects of daily life. ”

“ Zettel’s landscapes are almost too markedly Swiss in colour and conception. Julius von Kollmann worked a long time in Paris and London, and acquired, in intercourse with the great foreign painters—notably Carrière and Watts—an exquisitely refined taste, an almost hyperaesthetical sense for discreetly toned-down colour and for the music of the line. In Friedrich König, M. von Schwind’s romantic vein is revived. Even the simplest scenes from nature appear under his hand as enchanted groves whispering secrets. Everything is true and, at the same time, dreamy and mysterious. ”

“ To give back nature just as she is seen, in a purely pictorial aspect, is the final achievement of the painter’s craft, but as the differences of tone and colour on which pictorial beauty depends are extremely subtle, so it is only by a skill of touch that seems like the most accomplished sleight of hand that the required illusion can be produced, and in this way the actual handling of the brush assumes in modern painting an importance which in the old days it never possessed. ”

“ The artist still demands that nature shall inspire him with her beauty, but he has learned that this beauty is so widely diffused that he may find it anywhere. It was a profound saying of John Constable that there is nothing ugly in nature, for, as he explained it, let the actual form and character of an object be what it would, the angle at which it might be viewed, and the effect upon it of light and colour, could always make it beautiful. ”

“ Throughout all the earlier epochs of the art that painter had concerned himself not with nature as a whole, but with certain selected aspects of nature that furnished him with his recognized subjects. These subjects were selected on account of their intrinsic beauty or importance, and as representing intrinsic worth they claimed to be delineated in the clearest and most substantial fashion. In the 17th century, not only was the world as a whole brought within the artist’s view, but it presented itself as worthy in every part of his most reverent attention. ”

“ Every painter of worthy ambition, who had entered into the spirit of his craft, would desire to do all he could “on the fresh,” and would be satisfied with, and indeed glory in, the conditions and limitations of the noble technique. Masaccio, even at the beginning of the 15th century, is remarkable for the amount of fine pictorial effect he secured without reliance on retouching. It was second-rate artists, like Pinturicchio, who delighted to furbish up their mural pictures with stucco reliefs and gilding and to add touches of more brilliant pigments than could be used in the wet process. ”

“ Mantegna learnt from Donatello a statuesque feeling for form, and from Uccello a scientific interest in perspective, while, acting on the stimulus of his first teacher, he devoted himself to personal study of the remains of antique sculpture which were common in the Roman cities of north Italy. Mantegna built up his art on a scientific basis, but he knew how to inspire the form with a soul. His own personality was one of the strongest that we meet with in the annals of Italian art, and he stamped this on all he accomplished. ”

“ The whole motor force of the time lies in the expression, under various aspects, of real life. This it is which has given such a soaring flight to the two most primitive forms of the study of life, landscape and portraiture. Portraits have in fact adopted every style that can possibly be imagined: homely or fashionable, singly or in groups, by the fire or out of doors, in some familiar attitude and the surroundings of daily life, analytically precise, or synthetically broad, a literal transcript or a bold epitome of facts. ”

“ There is as great a difference between Danish and Swedish art as between Copenhagen and Stockholm. Copenhagen is a homely provincial town and life is confined to home circles. In Stockholm we find the whirl of life and all the elegance of a capital. It has been styled the Paris of the North, and its art also wears this cosmopolitan aspect. Düsseldorf, where in the ’sixties most painters studied their art, appeared to latter-day artists too provincial. ”

“ Böcklin has no ancestor in the history of art; no stroke of his brush reminds us of a leader. No one can think of tracing him back to the Academy of Düsseldorf, to Lessing, or Schorner, as his first teacher. Even less can he be called an imitator of the old masters. His works are the result of nature in her different aspects; they have not their origin in literary or historical suggestion. The catalogue of his conceptions, of landscape in varying moods, is inexhaustible. But landscape does not suffice to express his resources. ”

“ However classical he may appear, yet it is only the old yearning of the Germani for Hesperia—the song of Mignon—that rings throughout his works; the longing to emerge from the mist and the fog into the light, from the humdrum of everyday Life into the remote fabulous world of fairydom, the longing to escape from sin and attain perfect innocence. ”

“ In beauty, in grace of line, in composition, we can imagine works of Apelles, of Zeuxis, of Protogenes, excelling even the efforts of the Italian painters, or only matched by the finest designs of a Raphael or a Leonardo. In the small encaustic pictures of a Pausias there may have been all the richness and force we admire in a Chardin or a Monticelli. ”

“ The Painting of the Sixteenth Century: the Mastery of Form.—If we examine a drawing of the human figure by Raphael, Michelangelo, or Correggio, and compare it with the finest examples of Greek figure design on the vases, we note at once that to the ancient artist the form presented itself as a silhouette, and he had to put constraint on himself to realize its depth; whereas the moderns, so to say, think in the third dimension of space and every touch of their pencil presupposes it. ”