Randall Davies

“ If it be to represent life—to give us an image of man—to exhibit the workings of his heart—to record the good and evil of his nature—to set in motion before us the very beings with whom earth is peopled—to shake us with mirth—to sadden us with woeful reflection—to please us with natural grouping, vivid action, and vigorous colouring—Hogarth has done all this—and if he that has done so be not a painter, who will show us one? ”

“ When we think of the cultured Rubens, brought up in the atmosphere of Courts, and studying for years among the finest paintings and painters in Italy, and compare him with this low, ignorant fellow, who had never been outside the Netherlands, do we not find his genius still more amazing? Nowadays we see a portrait by Hals surrounded with the finest works of the greatest painters in all times and in all lands, and see how well it stands the comparison. ”

“ This picture has been more extolled than any by Antonio. He has evidently copied nature to the utmost of his power, as we see more especially in one of the archers, who, bending towards the ground, and resting his bow against his breast, is employing all his force to prepare it for action; the veins are swelling, the muscles strained, and the man holds his breath as he applies all his strength to the effort. All the other figures in the diversity of their attitudes clearly prove the artist's ability and the labour he has bestowed on the work. ”

“ More will flock to the study of art than genius sends; the hope of profit, or the thirst of distinction, will induce parents to push their offspring into the lecture-room, and many will appear and but few be worthy. The paintings of Italy form a sort of ornamental fringe to their gaudy religion, and Rome is the general storeshop of Europe. The arts owe much to Popery, and Popery owes much of its universality to the arts. The French have attained to a sort of foppish magnificence in art; in Holland, selfishness is the ruling passion, and in England vanity is united with selfishness. ”

“ Everything in the picture is spontaneous, and one can see that it is a pledge of friendship given by one artist to another; there is nothing here of that artificial arrangement that spoils commissioned portraits even when they are the work of a painter as independent as Velasquez was. One feels here the assurance of an artist who knows that his work will be understood by his friend in the spirit in which it was executed. ”

“ The greater number of Hobbema's pictures are as much characterized by a warm and golden tone as those of Ruisdael by the reverse; his greens being yellowish in the lights and brownish in the shadows—both of singular transparency. In pictures of this kind the influence of Rembrandt is perhaps perceptible, and they are superior in brilliancy to any work by Ruisdael. While these works chiefly present us with the season of harvest and sunset-light, there are others in a cool, silvery, morning lighting, and with the bright green of spring, that surpass Ruisdael's in clearness. ”

“ For while it is undoubtedly true that the more one knows about the history of painting in general the greater will be the appreciation of the various excellences which tend to perfection, it is absolutely ridiculous to suppose that only the learned in such matters are capable of deriving enjoyment from a beautiful picture, or of expressing an opinion upon it. In the first place, the picture is intended for the public, and the public have therefore the best right to say whether it pleases them or not—and why. ”

“ At the same time it would be useless to deny that Van Dyck's principal claim to his place among the greatest masters rests chiefly upon portraiture. The point I wish to make is that portrait painting never yet made a great master, but that none but a great master ever became a great portrait painter; and so long as we are only permitted to see the particular achievement of the artist in our public galleries, so long is it likely that we shall continue to be flooded with mediocre likenesses of fashionable people by painters whose highest or whose only achievement they constitute. ”

“ This unusual tenderness of feeling is probably also the origin of the legend that Memling was taken into the Hospital of S. John at Bruges—where he painted most of his masterpieces—as a sick soldier after the battle of Nancy. In feeling for beauty and grace he was more gifted than any painter except Hubert Van Eyck, and this quality, conspicuous amid the somewhat ugly realism of most of his contemporaries, has ensured him perhaps a little more popularity than is rightly his share. ”

“ He who would call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque painter would in my opinion do him very little honour, for sure it is much easier, much less the subject of admiration, to paint a man with a nose, or any other feature of a preposterous size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of man on canvas. It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe, but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause that they appear to think. ”

“ He appears to have been by nature or by inclination long-sighted, and he is never so happy as when painting distance, either along the banks of a river or looking out to sea. This extended gaze taught him something of atmosphere that few painters beside himself ever acquired, and helped him to the mastery of tone which appears to have influenced so many of his followers, as for example Van de Velde in the painting of sea-pieces. ”

“ In their technical ability to present the life-like portrait of a real man, we can place Rembrandt, Velasquez, Hals, and Van Dyck on pretty much of a level; if we had Van der Geest, Montanes, the Old Pole and the Laughing Cavalier all in a row, we should find there was not much to choose between them for downright realization. But while in the work of Velasquez we see the working of a fine and sensitive appreciation of his friend's personality, and the most exquisite realization of what was before him, in that of Rembrandt we seem to see less of the Pole and more of Rembrandt himself. ”

“ Dr Muther, in his History of Painting, observes that perhaps it is only possible to understand Rembrandt by interpreting his pictures not as paintings but as psychological documents. "A picture by Rembrandt in the Dresden Gallery," he says, "represents Samson Putting Riddles to the Philistines; and Rembrandt's entire activity, a riddle to the philistines of his time, has remained puzzling to the present day.... As no other man bore his name, so the artist, too, is something unique, mocks every historical analysis, and remains what he was, a puzzling, intangible, Hamlet nature—Rembrandt." ”

“ The nose, with its beautiful and delicately roseate nostrils, seems to be alive. The mouth, wonderful in its outline, shows the lips perfectly uniting the rose tints of their colour with that of the face, and the carnation of the cheek appears rather to be flesh and blood than only painted. Looking at the pit of the throat one can hardly believe that one cannot see the beating of the pulse, and in truth it may be said that the whole work is painted in a manner well calculated to make the boldest master tremble. ”

“ It cannot be denied that excellence in the department of the art which he professed may exist without them, that in such subjects and in the manner that belongs to them the want of them is supplied, and more than supplied, by natural sagacity and a minute observation of particular nature. If Gainsborough did not look at nature with a poet's eye, it must be acknowledged that he saw her with the eye of a painter ”

“ Lastly, there is the famous—or, may we say, now more famous than ever—portrait of Mona Lisa. "Whoever wishes to know how far art can imitate nature," Vasari writes, "may do so in this head, wherein every detail that could be depicted by the brush has been faithfully reproduced. The eyes have the lustrous brightness and watery sheen that is seen in life, and around them are all those rosy and pearly tints which, like the eyelashes too, can only be rendered by means of the deepest subtlety ”

“ Gerard Terburg, born at Zwol 1608, died 1681, learned painting under his father, and when still young visited Germany and Italy, painting numerous portraits on a small scale, and occasionally the size of life. But his place in the history of art is owing principally to a number of pictures, seldom representing more than three, and often only one figure, taken from the wealthier classes, in which great elegance of costume, and of all accompanying circumstances, is rendered with the finest keeping, and with a highly delicate but by no means over-smooth execution. ”

“ They seem to be endowed with a spirit of something beyond painting itself, and in the presence of The Last Supper or the Mona Lisa the babble of conflicting opinions on questions of style, technique, and what not is silenced.
Similarly, in writing of Leonardo's pictures, every one of which is a masterpiece, it seems superfluous to say even a word about what the whole world already knows so well. ”

“ But for the effects of the Renaissance in Italy in the fifteenth century it is questionable whether painting would ever have spread as it did in the sixteenth and seventeenth to Spain and France. But by the close of the fifteenth century such enormous progress had been made by the Italian painters towards the realisation of human action and emotion in pictures, that from being merely an accessory of religious establishments, painting had become as much a part of the recognised means of intellectual enjoyment of everyday life as music, sculpture, or even the refinements of food and clothing. ”

“ In the National Gallery we have three characteristic examples, fortunately on a smaller scale, namely, the S. George on a white horse, which, with its greyish flesh tones and the blue of the princess's mantle, is cooler in tone than the generality of his pictures; Christ washing the Disciples' Feet, and the very beautiful and radiant Origin of the Milky Way, purchased from Lord Darnley in 1890. At Hampton Court a still finer example, The Nine Muses, is so discoloured by age and hung in such a difficult light that it is impossible to enjoy its full beauty. ”

“ The painters—I do not allude to the humble-minded only, but to those of an ambitious turn, and many of this sort there are—the painters who worked in company with Raphael lived in perfect harmony, as if all bad feelings were extinguished in his presence, and every base, unworthy thought had passed from their minds.48 This was because the artists were at once subdued by his obliging manners and by his surpassing merit, but more than all by the spell of his natural character, which was so full of affectionate kindness, that not only men, but even the very brutes, respected him. ”

“ In any age or under any circumstances Frans Hals would have seemed a remarkable painter, but to measure his extraordinary genius to its full height we must try to realise what those times and those circumstances were. In Florence and Venice, as we have seen, there were great schools of painting, and in Florence especially, the whole city existed in an atmosphere of art. ”

“ In this the equal delicacy of the sentiment and of the painting combine to effect a little masterpiece of Louis Quinze art. It is simple and natural, and entirely free from the besetting sins of so slight a picture triviality, affectation, empty prettiness, or simply silliness. In its way it is perfect, and for that perfection is for ever reserved the popularity which we find temporarily accorded to pictures like Frith's Dolly Varden or Millais' Bubbles. ”

“ Few artists since the fifteenth century have been able to do so much in so many different branches; for besides his beautiful compositions and pictures, which have added to the knowledge and celebrity of the English School, he modelled like a sculptor, carved ornaments in wood with great delicacy, and could make an architectural design in a fine taste, as well as construct every part of the building. ”

“ It is absolutely necessary that a painter, as the first requisite, should endeavour as much as possible to form to himself an idea of perfection not only of beauty, but of what is perfection in a picture. ”