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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great artists fashion their art after their own thoughts, and that which they love the best or feel the deepest speaks out from the canvas until at last we recognize the poet in his poem, the sculptor in his marble, the painter in his picture.
These qualities of individuality in art are much like the same qualities in real life, and we may perhaps fancy in the picture that which we find admirable in the personal acquaintance. For instance, the traits of frankness and straightforwardness which we all love in a friend, are they not just as apparent in Carpaccio the painter? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ What then is realism in art—this drawing of eyes that follow you about the room, lips that seem parted as if to speak, and hands that you could shake? What is this painting of pots and pans to be picked up, and cows that walk out of the canvas? ”

“ In the ordinary acceptation of the word the imagination is little more than the image-making power—the ability to see a thing in the mind’s eye. We all of us have the power in some degree and can summon up scenes out of the past at will, travelling fair lands that we have not known for years, and seeing faces that have long been shut away in the grave. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whistler, for instance, was given the sense of color, light, air, and the power to produce the glamour and the mystery of these in harmonies, symphonies, nocturnes—all of them decorative things lovely to look upon. Let us by all means admire them and love them; but we should not allow ourselves to think that this alone is art, and all the products of the other men but so much rags and scrap-iron. ”

“ 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. ”