Birge Harrison

“ We all admit also that art is personality—that nature is only the crude material from which art is made. This crude material must be fused in the alembic of the human soul, mixed with the alloy of temperament, and colored with the artist's personality before it can be poured out into the final mould and receive the name of art. It is the artist's personality, in other words, that makes the art. And just according to the beauty or the individuality of his temperament will be the beauty or the individuality of the artistic result. ”

“ The time is no longer when the figure painter can look down upon the landscape painter, when the painter of vast historical compositions has his special place reserved for him at the head of the board, while the painter of mere portraits must be content with a seat below the salt. It is the intrinsic beauty of the work itself that decides its value, and neither the size of the canvas nor the character of the subject counts. ”

“ In the meantime all our æsthetic experience points to the fact that the new beauty does not destroy our love or appreciation of the old. A picture by Rembrandt or Velasquez meets to-day with as much admiration as if the "luminarist" or the "symbolist" school had not arisen. A thing that is once truly beautiful is always beautiful; and the painters of to-day can remain calmly confident that if they are true to their own ideals and to the spirit of their times, their output will be accorded the same meed of praise by future generations that we to-day give to the work of the old masters. ”

“ It will not do for Americans to make Oriental rugs or Japanese color-prints; and we have all seen and deplored the Japanese attempt to assimilate and reproduce our own occidental art—have shuddered indeed at the brilliant and hollow shell without a soul. Is it not enough for us to admire without attempting to imitate, to surround ourselves with the beauty of all ages and all peoples while calmly pursuing the type of beauty which it is given to us to see as none others have been able to see it? ”

“ Art, be it remembered, is a thing of infinitely slow growth, each school building upon the foundations prepared by its forerunners, each generation adding its mite to the general store of knowledge and experience.
The English portrait men of the same period, for instance, although fine painters, simply followed in the tracks of the old masters. There is nothing especially original in the canvases of Reynolds, Gainsborough, or Romney. But this little band of landscapists, with no artistic parents, with no predecessors to point out the way, suddenly evolved a totally new art out of thin air. ”

“ When I try to draw aside the veil, and peer into the mists of the future, I seem to see another art, less material, more akin to the pure spirit of music; an art stripped of all that is gross and material; an art in which abstract beauty alone shall rule. In this new art values may very possibly be unnecessary, and all will be stated in terms of beautiful color. ”

“ In many cases, and not infrequently in the case of some truly great painter, the fifty-year mark is chalked up against him before the scales fall utterly from his eyes and he is able at length to look out straight before him with a vision that is clear and unobscured. Take my word for it, technique is not the difficult thing in art. Any reasonably capable youth can readily master all of the technical problems in existence in a few short months, but it requires many a long and weary year to learn to see. ”

“ To every energetic people there comes sooner or later a time of great material prosperity; it may be as the result of successful wars, of territorial expansion or of commercial supremacy. Whatever the cause, this period of prosperity is invariably accompanied by a tremendous mental stir and awakening, and this, in turn, is followed by a magnificent outburst of art, which lasts for fifty, or maybe a hundred years, and dies away as it came.
Now, if ever in the history of the world conditions have been ripe for the birth of a great art movement, they are so in America to-day. ”

“ If we look always for beauty we shall come at last to find it in the most unexpected places and under many strange garbs. But the true vision means not only the power to see and to recognize beauty, but the power to see it stripped of all vulgarities and inessentials; the power to see the soul of the thing and to grasp its essential beauty. For any landscape has a soul as well as a body. ”

“ But a picture that is good in all these respects being weak and unsound in values, will nevertheless be a poor picture. Values might be compared to the skeleton in a human figure, which depends for its beauty upon the exquisite curves of the rounded limbs, the silken sheen of the hair, and the color of eyes and lips and blushing cheeks. Remove the skeleton, and the whole fabric of beauty falls to earth a shapeless mass. Moreover, values are one of the few things in art that can be learned by almost any one who is gifted with ordinary eyesight ”

“ THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ART [1]
We hear with increasing frequency to-day the statement that art is universal and without a country; that, being the record of abstract beauty, it cannot be confined within stated geographical limits; that the terms "French art," "English art," etc., are therefore absurd. Art is art tout bonnement, and that is all there is to it.
According to these critics, the mere fact that a man with the temperamental sense of beauty chances to be born in France or in Holland does not necessarily make him a French or a Dutch painter. ”

“ And everywhere and always, on hill and dale, on rock and tree, so long as light endured there must also be the rainbow attenuated and diminished in power, it is true, but with its three primary and prismatic colors, locking and interlocking, shifting and shimmering and playing across one another in an iridescent dance of color that was, or should be, always clearly visible to the eye of the trained artist. ”

“ It is a simple platitude to say that an artist can always paint as much as he sees. All of the fumbling, and struggle, and hard work connected with a picture comes of the effort to see just a little more, just a little better. Technique truly is mere child's play. It is a question, moreover, if too much technique is not a serious handicap to any artist—if indeed it does not tend to degrade him to the level of the mere handcraftsman. ”

“ The mood has been rendered—the message has carried, and we do not stop to consider the phraseology.
But, as I have before intimated, each painter must look at all times out of his own eyes, and not through the eyes of his brother. In fact, in the modern scheme of things, the artist is the last rank individualist to survive. For him the merger and the combination spell ruin. Again we insist, and insist yet once again, that the very essence and marrow of art is personality. Any surrender of personality, therefore, can lead only to one goal—the abyss of artistic worthlessness. ”

“ Now, if I am not much mistaken, the form of beauty which appeals to us as it has appealed to no other race in any other epoch of the world's history is the poetry of out-of-door nature, her mystery, and her ever-varying and shifting moods. Surely in this wide field there remains to us a sufficient latitude of choice both as regards the subjects we shall paint and the manner in which we shall render our impressions. It is always open to us to choose our direction. ”

“ We lose rather than gain in power by forcing the note, and a picture in which the whole scale from black to white should be employed would be absolutely without atmosphere, and without charm. It would indeed be a crudity and a horror, from which we would flee with hands on high. The whole beauty of a canvas depends often on the wisdom with which we make this choice of key—whether our picture is pitched in the upper, the middle, or the lower register, and whether we use a limited or an extended scale. ”

“ The low horizon line is peculiarly essential when the principal motive of the picture is found in the sky itself—some vast composition of rolling clouds, some gorgeous sunburst radiating its luminous streamers athwart the canvas, some castle in the air towering up and up to the zenith. In this case, a mere line of land is often sufficient—enough to give the dark and solid value that lends light and air to the upper reaches of the sky. ”

“ Vision! the key to the door of art; the power to see with the eyes of the soul! as necessary to the artist as faith to the true believer. We have been talking of color, vibration, refraction, drawing, and so on—all so much useless lumber if a painter have not the one divine gift. I once knew an artist who had all these technical things at his finger tips ”

“ If the infant Sargent or Whistler had been marooned with a savage tribe and brought up beyond the furthest confines of civilization, what would their art have amounted to? We may presume that they would have carved the totem pole just a little more cleverly than their savage mates, or have given the idol's features a twist more of deviltry or of intelligence. But this would have been the limit of their performance, for art is the child of time and of precedent. It inherits the ages; but unless the artist comes into his inheritance, he is helpless. ”

“ But I will never do you the unkind service of putting you in the way to imitate a technique which, though serviceable to me personally, could no more fit your æsthetic needs than would an old coat of mine fit your bodies. Remember that art is nature as the artist sees it, and it is no more possible for two human beings to see nature in the same way than for the same two people to have exactly similar features. As our brains vary, so does our point of view. ”

“ If by some dreadful catastrophe all the art of the world should suddenly be destroyed and all knowledge of it blotted from the minds of the survivors, it would require ten thousand years for humanity to recover the lost ground. As an artist is dependent upon the past, it is evident that he must strive to see and to study all of the past art that he can find—to feed his mind constantly upon it. ”

“ Drawing is the grammar of art. As grammar is the framework on which all good literature is built, so drawing is the foundation of all good painting. It is no more possible to imagine a great picture with crude and incompetent drawing than it is to think of a great sonnet whose grammar should be uncouth and halting. Like grammar, also, drawing is not a virtue to be extolled in a picture, but an essential to be demanded. ”

“ Nevertheless, it is quite possible that, in the very changed conditions of our civilization, there may lurk wonderful and hitherto unsuspected opportunities for our future artists, and especially our figure-painters. There is certainly a strange picturesqueness in some of our modern steel mills, with their cyclopean forces at work against backgrounds of whirling steam and glowing furnace. Even our sky-scrapers have an unusual beauty of their own, and the sky-line of lower New York is far from being ugly or uninteresting. ”

“ It is to be feared that the hopes which are at present being built upon color-photography are doomed to like disappointment—for the simple reason that the photographic lens in no way resembles the lens of the human eye. The very fact that it is a more perfect instrument is against it. It gives us scientific facts; and scientific facts are generally artistic lies. Art has nothing to do with things as they are, but only with things as they appear to be, with the visual not the actual, with impressions, not with realities. ”

“ Even our buildings have deteriorated—at least from the artist's point of view; for the comfortable villa farmhouse of the present day does not cling lovingly to the soil and become part of the environing landscape, as did the spreading, low-hung buildings of our fathers. And so, to quench the eternal thirst for beauty, we must needs return once more to kindly nature, whose beauty is exhaustless and everlasting. ”

“ As landscape art in its highest expression is a synthetic grouping of masses of delicate and beautiful color, this kind of drawing is that which is made for the landscape painter's special needs. It allows full scope for the true rendering of character in all the principal forms, and at the same time it lends itself to the large and noble vision—for, even in drawing, the true painter must always see big. ”

“ This emotional attribute of color is keenly felt even in a work of art as devoid of any intellectual appeal, as a Turkish rug or a Japanese ceramic; but when color is used purposely to enhance and offset some poetic mood of nature, as in a Venetian sunset by Gedney Bunce, or a spring morning by Corot, its poignant charm is overpowering and irresistible. ”

“ If he never falls to any depths of despair, neither does he rise to any heights of glory; and if he is never supremely miserable, on the other hand he is never supremely happy. He is simply the good, honest bromide; the very salt of the earth, if you will, and its balance-wheel; but never by any conceivable possibility could he be an artist. Your present depression is simply the price that you pay for the immense joy which is yours during the full tide of creative production. So take your medicine like a man. ”

“ An out-door picture-motive is complicated indeed if it cannot be divided into four or five dominant values. If these are understood, and painted with sympathetic truth, it is astonishing how little detail it requires to complete the picture—the trunk of a tree, a few scattered leaves, the curve of a road, and the trick is turned. Always leave something to the imagination of the beholder. A picture is often complete long before you suspect it. ”

“ Its soul is the spirit of light—of sunlight, of moonlight, of starlight—which plays ceaselessly across the face of the landscape, veiling it at night in mystery and shadow, painting it at dawn with the colors of the pearl-shell, and bathing it at mid-day in a luminous glory. ”

“ I then and there made up my mind that if it ever came my turn to instruct young students I should endeavor to teach them those things for which we painters of the older generation had to grope blindly for years, unaided and in the dark—things which are of equal value and importance in a picture with good drawing, good composition, and good color, but which, for some reason, have never been taught in the regular art schools. ”

“ One thing, however, must not be lost sight of. When the picture is intended to deliver a message—to convey some poetic or strongly dramatic "mood" of nature, the unreserved use of quality may lead to the pitfall of the double motive. But when the character of the subject is quiet and idyllic, the sensitive appreciation of surface beauty on the part of the artist and his dexterous manipulation of pigment to secure it is not only legitimate but practically mandatory. Some of the most enduring works of beauty in painting owe their charm almost wholly to this one thing. ”

“ We must have "vibration" in a picture, it is true, because without vibration there can be no light, but may it not be possible to secure the necessary vibration without loss of "quality," that charm of surface with which we would not willingly part?
There are many, many paths by which the problem may be approached. Indeed, one of the chief delights of the art of painting lies in the fact that each artist does, and of necessity must, invent his own technique; for his personal technique is an inalienable part of the personal vision which makes his art his own. ”

“ It is a scientific fact, for instance, that trees are green, and yet it is only under the rarest combination of favoring circumstances that a tree is really green to the visual sense. It is much more likely to be pearly-gray or royal-purple or rich amber or sapphire-blue, according as it happens to be seen under the pale effulgence of dawn, the shimmering blaze of noonday, the golden glow of sunset or the azure mystery of night. ”

“ And in a way the painters would be right; for without temperament no man can be an artist; but temperament alone will not suffice. If I were myself asked to supply a formula for the making of an artist, my receipt would be, one part genius and nine parts hard work. I sometimes glance back to my student days and wonder what has become of all the clever and brilliant chaps over whose easels the rest of us were used to hang in awe and admiration. ”