John Charles Van Dyke

“ Every great work of art is based in technical knowledge and has the skilled workman back of it. And many are the poets born by nature, yet lacking the accomplishment of verse. Did you ever read a great piece of prose or poetry written by a man ignorant of grammar and the rhythmical construction of sentences? Did you ever hear of a good piece of architecture built by a man who knew not plans, scales, and proportions? Did you ever see a great picture painted by a man who could not draw decently or lay color harmoniously? ”

“ A mere charcoal outline drawn by Degas gives us the reliefs, proportions, weight, and bulk of a human figure; a shadow with Giorgione or Rembrandt sums up the series of facts beneath it, and becomes suggestive by its very mystery and uncertainty; a blended blur of color by Whistler may bring to mind a heaving wave in mid-ocean better than all the drawn and tinted and “realized” waves of all the realists.
It is not the heaping of fact upon fact that flashes the truth upon us—at least not in art, though it may in logic or in law. Indeed, the accumulation of evidence often confuses. ”

“ Men and women they are truly, but the very noblest of the Italian race, the mountain race of the Cadore country—proud, active, glowing with life; the sea race of Venice—worldly wise, full of character, luxurious in power.
In himself he was an epitome of all the excellences of painting. He was everything, the sum of Venetian skill, the crowning genius of Renaissance art. He had force, power, invention, imagination, point of view; he had the infinite knowledge of nature and the infinite mastery of art. ”

“ The special pleas of painters, whether for realization or decoration or illustration, are, of course, to be heard and accepted in part; but we are not to believe in any one of them to the utter exclusion of the others. Each is excellent of its kind, so far as it goes; but in our final judgment of the work of art we may conclude that the sum of the whole is greater than any of its parts, and that truth to nature, individuality, imagination, pictorial poetry, decorative beauty, subject—all the elements—go to the making of what is called “great art.” ”

“ That is not surprising, for Titian (1477-1576) was the [114] painter easily first in the whole range of Italian art. He was the first man in the history of painting to handle a brush with freedom, vigor, and gusto. And Titian's brush-work was probably the least part of his genius. Calm in mood, dignified, and often majestic in conception, learned beyond all others in his craft, he mingled thought, feeling, color, brush-work into one grand and glowing whole. He emphasized nothing, yet elevated everything. In pure intellectual thought he was not so strong as Raphael. ”

“ TRUTH IN PAINTING Those people who go out into the highways of art crying, Haro! Haro! in the name of realism, would certainly gain their cause could numbers give them a verdict. They have always been in evidence; they have always made themselves heard. There never was a time when the mob was not hungry for realities, when artists were not harping upon “truth to nature,” when critics were not concerned about “the realistic tendencies of the age.” The interest in things as things and the art that hinges upon facts as facts were from the beginning. ”

“ He has always been an experimenter and an uneven painter, at times doing work of wonderful force, and then again falling into weakness. The solidity of nature, the mass and bulk of landscape, he has shown with a power second to none. He is fond of the sentiment of nature's light, air, and color, and has put it forth more in his later than in his earlier canvases. At his best, he is one of the first of the American landscapists. ”

“ There never was a time in the history of painting when the body of artists believed more thoroughly in their theme, their work, and themselves than during that early Italian time.
You can see this well exemplified in Orcagna—in his “Last Judgment” in Santa Maria Novella. The Madonna looking up at her Son is an embodiment of all the pietistic sentiment of the time. The figure is ill-drawn, stiff, archaic-looking; but in the white-cowled face what purity, what serenity, what pathos! The clasped hands seem moved in prayer; the upturned eyes look unutterable adoration. ”

“ Should we bring up the names of the other great masters of painting we should find that each one of them is remarkable for some quality of universal significance—Michael Angelo for his great command of form, Rubens for his great splendor of effect, Velasquez for his sense of vitality in the physical presence (Plate 13) , Raphael for his unity and his harmony.
The great men are remarkable for their breadth—the wide angle of their vision. They see, not differently from others, but they see more. Yet it is only a point of view, a limited outlook, and not by any means the total sum of truth. ”

“ Charm of color, the painter's taste in arrangement, light, air, setting, were his in a remarkable degree. He was not successful in large compositions, but in small pictures like those of the Rake's Progress he was excellent. An early man, a rigid stickler for the representation, a keen observer of physiognomy, a satirist with a sense of the absurd, he was often warped in his art by the necessities of his subject and was sometimes hard and dry in method, but in his best work he was quite a perfect painter. ”

“ After them came another painter, of greater skill and power. He was not so boyish in his enthusiasm as Carpaccio, but Theocritus in love with pastoral nature never had so much feeling for the pure joy of living as Giorgione. His shepherds seated on a hill-side playing and singing, in a fine landscape and under a blue sky, make up a picture far removed in spirit from theology, philosophy, science, war, or commerce. The world of action is forgotten and in its place there is Arcadia with sunlight and flowers, with beautiful women and strong men. ”

“ There is a disposition on the part of artists to tell stories, to encroach upon the sentiment of literature, to paint with a dry brush in harsh unsympathetic colors, to ignore relations of light-and-shade, and to slur beauties of form. The subject seems to count for more than the truth of representation, or the individuality of view. From time to time artists of much ability have appeared, but these form an exception rather than a rule. The men to-day who are the great artists of Germany are less followers of the German tradition than individuals each working in a style peculiar to himself. ”

“ It is matter of no importance whether he wears linen or woollen or cotton, whether his blouse has buttons upon it or not, whether his face is clean or not. The all-pervading truth of the picture lies in the swinging form of the sower, and to keep your attention upon that he omits everything else. The figure is but a suggestion, a something that stands as an equivalent for that man whom Millet thought should be recognized for his patience and fortitude of spirit, his nobility and dignity in the hard labor of life, his fine pictorial qualities as seen against the background of his native heath. ”

“ Occasionally in such men as Botticelli and Mantegna we see a following of sculpturesque example—a taking of details and even of whole figures—but the general effect of the antique marbles was to impress the painters with the idea that nature was at the bottom of it all. They turned to the earth not only to study form and feature, but to learn perspective, light, shadow, color—in short, the technical features of art. True, religion was the chief subject, but nature and the antique were used to give it setting. All the fifteenth-century painting shows nature study, force, character, sincerity ”

“ Everyone knows that love in real life may do a good deal of sighing and sobbing, but it does not burst forth into song. The opera is a most palpable convention, and the flow of music, which so beautifully suggests the depths of passion and the heights of romance, is but an arbitrary symbol of reality. Recognize this and you have taken the first step toward the understanding of art; fail to recognize it and art must always be a closed book to you. You will not perceive the artist’s intention. ”

“ In painting, though there were some portraits and allegorical scenes produced during the Gothic period, the chief theme was Bible story. The Church was the patron, and art was only the servant, as it had been from the beginning. It was the instructor and consoler of the faithful, a means whereby the Church made converts, and an adornment of wall and altar. It had not entirely escaped from symbolism. It was still the portrayal of things for what they meant, rather than for what they looked. There was no such thing then as art for art's sake. It was art for religion's sake. ”

“ You may make a novel landscape perhaps by shutting out the sky with a high sky-line, or you may make an angel by adding bird wings to a human form; but you cannot make an absolutely new form or create one thing that has not some basis in human life or experience. To be sure, you may bring to mind the image of a character in fiction or poetry—Sir Galahad or Roland of Brittany or Amadis de Gaul, for instance—but after all your image is based upon some previous memories of knights in armor. ”

“ He was not a painter who could do things enthusiastically or excite enthusiasm in the spectator. There was too much of rule and precedent, too much regard for the traditions, for him to do anything strikingly original. His brush-work and composition were more learned than individual, and his color, though usually good, was oftentimes conventional in contrasts. Taking him for all in all he was a very cultivated painter, a man to be respected and admired, but he had not quite the original spirit that we meet with in Gainsborough. ”

“ Painting is no mere servant of literature, whose duty it is to illustrate rather than create. There is no reason why the painter, looking at the river Teviot, should not see poetry in it as well as the writer. Delacroix not only could but did see it. Turner saw the same kind of romantic sentiment as Scott in all the rivers he ever pictured. Daubigny saw it less romantically, but with more of the real charm of nature, along the banks of the Marne; and Claude Monet has certainly shown us many times the poetry of light, color, and rushing, dancing water on the Seine. ”

“ The Van Eycks led the way, and painters like Bouts and others, though Dutch by birth, became Flemish by adoption in their art at least. When the Flemish painters fell to copying Italy some of the Dutch followed them, but with no great enthusiasm. Suddenly, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Holland had gained political independence, Dutch art struck off by itself, became original, became famous. It pictured native life with verve, skill, keenness of insight, and fine pictorial view. Limited it was; it never soared like Italian art, never became universal or world-embracing. ”

“ Then they make the irretrievable mistake of trying to follow someone whose impressions seem to be in public demand. It may be that they follow Raphael or Titian or Velasquez; but no matter how good a painter they may choose for a model, they have already committed artistic suicide. No one in this world of ours ever became great by echoing the voice of another, repeating what that other has said. Are there not countless illustrations of this—illustrations by whole schools of painters and sculptors in the history of art? What was the art of Rome, following as it did the art of Greece? ”

“ They are full of life, intelligence, sympathy; they have fascination of manner, winsomeness of mood, grace of bearing. We see this in his best-known work—the Mona Lisa of the Louvre. It has much allurement of personal presence, with a depth and abundance of soul altogether charming.
Technically, Leonardo was not a handler of the brush superior in any way to his Florentine contemporaries. He knew all the methods and mediums of the time, and did much to establish oil-painting among the Florentines, but he was never a painter like Titian, or even Correggio or Andrea del Sarto. ”

“ Simply because it lacks in individuality—lacks in originality of aim and statement.
That last statement may be almost as fittingly applied to those who literally imitate nature as to those who imitate some other painter. It adds nothing to our store of knowledge, nothing to our appreciation of beauty, to have the painter reproducing line upon line and shade upon shade and color upon color the exact scene from nature. “A mere copier of nature,” says Sir Joshua, “can never produce anything great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions or warm the heart of the spectator.” ”

“ With Dürer and Holbein German art reached its apogee in the first half of the sixteenth century, yet their work was not different in spirit from that of their predecessors. Painting simply developed and became forceful and expressive technically without abandoning its early character. There is in Dürer a naive awkwardness of figure, some angularity of line, strain of pose, and in composition oftentimes huddling and overloading of the scene with details. There is not that largeness which seemed native to his Italian contemporaries. ”

“ How absolutely honest and unabashed she looks! This is not the Madonna of Sorrows, not the pathetic Madonna of Botticelli; but a purely human mother, proud of her boy—a mother and not ashamed. And the little cherubs playing on musical instruments at the foot of the throne, how child-like they are with their serious faces, their little fat cheeks and round childish legs! Everything in and about the picture tells you of the sane, healthy mind and art of Giovanni Bellini. ”

“ Though of diminutive scale his work has the largeness of view characteristic of genius, and the skilled technic of a thorough craftsman. Terburg was a travelled man, visiting Italy, where he studied Titian, returning to Holland to study Rembrandt, finally at Madrid studying Velasquez. He was a painter of much culture, and the keynote of his art is refinement. Quiet and dignified he carried taste through all branches of his art. In subject he was rather elevated, in color subdued with broken tones, in composition simple, in brush-work sure, vivacious, and yet unobtrusive. ”

“ And so in painting, when a person paints what he individually sees and is impressed by, he is likely to produce something worthy of attention; but when he takes up some formula of truth laid down by a school or a camera he is merely repeating a something he has not seen, and simulating a feeling he has not known.
Even the positive assertion—the insistent assertion—of one’s own view is often welcome in art. I think we all like the self-reliance, the steadfastness of belief of the individual—assuming, of course, that he is right and not therefore merely obstinate. ”

“ As a portrait-painter he is more widely known than as a figure-painter. Nevertheless he did many canvases like The Tapestry Weavers and The Surrender at Breda, which attest his remarkable genius in that field; and even in landscape, in genre, in animal painting, he was a very superior man. In fact Velasquez is one of the few great painters in European history for whom there is nothing but praise. He was the full-rounded complete painter, intensely individual and self-assertive, and yet in his art recording in a broad way the Spanish type and life. ”

“ Look about you at the high keys of color that greet you in every modern picture exhibition. Claude Monet, whom people smiled at a dozen years ago, but are now calling a genius, is responsible for this high scale of color and light. He has transformed the whole decorative aspect of landscape painting, by studying the intermixture and play of pigments. We are now seeing colors in art that approximate, at least, the colors of nature; and they are just as beautiful decoratively as the old ones, only we are not yet accustomed to them. ”

“ What was the 55art of those who followed Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio? What was the seventeenth-century art of France, following that of Italy? What was David and classicism, following ancient Rome? What is to-day the value of all these French peasants and Seine landscapes for which Millet and Corot set the patterns, and in the imitation of which America has contributed her modicum of strength? It is all a vapid and somewhat meaningless copying that may furnish canvases to hide a break in the wall-paper of a drawing-room, but as original art counting for naught. ”

“ He is the brawn and muscle of France—the original producer, the planter and sustainer of the race. Has he, who has so labored, so wrestled with stubborn circumstance and wrought success from meagre opportunity, has he not a character of his own that may be called beautiful in art? And the land he has broken and made so productive, the soil that he sprang from and is so intimately associated with, has it not a character of landscape peculiarly its own and again pictorially beautiful? ”

“ Art was once more pushed suddenly forward, for Masaccio rounded the archaic line, drew drapery with ease, fathomed the tones of colors, gave light-and-shade, perspective, values. Then another hundred years to Michael Angelo and Raphael. With these two last-named artists drawing reached a great height. It could not at that time be carried further, and no painters in Florence were so famed for drawing and composition as Michael Angelo and Raphael. ”

“ You will perhaps insist that true art is above all this petty planning, squaring, measuring, space-filling; that genius knows not method, and that the ideal out-soars the base materials that would hold it down to earth. There are those who believe that inspiration dictates with the voice of an angel and that the hand of the poet or painter but obeys the voice; there are those who believe there is no labor or plan or design 133or foundation in the work of art. And it is true that oftentimes painting and poetry appear so effortless that we think them spontaneous and unpremeditated. ”

“ The realist believes that nature is above all, the most beautiful of all beauties, and that the best the painter can do is to copy her in all humility of spirit. The academician believes that the academic rule—the consensus of tradition as to what constitutes beauty in art—is better than any one painter’s eyes and hand, and that the best the moderns can do is to follow the greatest of the ancients, namely, the Greeks. But we have seen the impossibility of absolute realism in art and we can imagine the futility of copying an art of the past to be applied to a people of the present. ”

“ Correggio at Parma was not materially different from Giorgione as regards the spirit of his art. His religious characters were only so in name. He never had the slightest sympathy with the melodramatic side of the Christian faith and could not depict the tragic without becoming repulsive; but he saw the beauty of women and children in landscape and he felt the splendor of sunlight and shadow and color (Plate 8) . There is no mystery or austerity or solemnity or intellectuality about his characters. They are not burdened with the cares of the world ”

“ A picture of the field of Gravelotte or the palace at Versailles might serve as an illustration of the political history of France; but a wheat stack and a row of poplars by Monet, a 149wood-chopper or a gleaner by Millet, why do they not equally well illustrate the social and agricultural history of France? There is really no point where one can stop. Everything that can be recognized at all in a painting is more or less illustrative of history, fact or incident. ”

“ That their work, with all its cleverness of hand and keenness of vision, is somewhat mechanical—lacking in inspiration—may suggest that clearness of view is not the only 63requisite of art. It is, no doubt, a valuable accomplishment with any painter, and yet if the picture tells only a tale of facts it has fallen short of the highest aim. Keen eyes and a clever hand will not take the place of that vital quality of all great art—the imagination of the artist. For the imagination is, perhaps, the very essence of artistic seeing. ”

“ They disregard in a measure the local truths and aim at the general truths—at things essentially true for all humanity. Our Shakespeares and Platos and St. Pauls survey the world from mountain tops. From these vantage points their perspective is far-reaching, their view of the world expansive. They see and grasp the essentials, the basic elements, the foundations of things. It is this, for one thing, that makes the art of Titian so superlatively great. What wonderful men and women people his pantheon! What types they are of manhood and womanhood! ”

“ They have not imagination of their own, so they imitate the imaginative utterances and styles of others. Not one but many styles of many men are thus brought together in a conglomeration that may deceive the groundlings into thinking it genuine poetry; but the judicious soon find out its true character. Of course, all imitators try to imitate the inimitable individualities. The Montgomerys and the Tuppers aspire to no less than Shakespeare and Milton. Just so in pictorial art. Vasari, Guido, the Caracci reached out for the imaginations of Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio. ”

“ This Moslem empire and its color-glamour had its influence upon the Venetians through their ships and traders, and when the painters began the fabrication of altar-pieces and mosaics for the Venetian churches it was not line or form or light or shade that primarily interested them. It was color—the color of the old decadent Eastern world—to which they were devoted. The Bellinis began it, their pupils Giorgione and Titian made it glorious, Paolo Veronese gave it final brilliancy and splendor. ”