Roger Fry

“ Naturally, such a vision would never force a man to discover the means by which to record its experiences, and here comes in the connexion between applied and pure art. For, just as the man of applied science, having no particular passion for truth, applies the results, discovered by those who have, to some ulterior social end, so Mr Sargent has known how to use for his purposes the discoveries of pure art. ”

“ No man who was mainly an artist could have, so to speak, "delivered the goods." No artist could have treated one after another of all these members of the family with almost equal success, with such certainty of keeping to standard. His sensibility would have led him, here into some more penetrating and curious inquiry, there it would have been rebuffed altogether. From an artist, questions of composition and design would demand more anxious research. He could not have been satisfied as Mr Sargent was with a mere general adequacy of presentment. ”

“ We praise a great doctor though he has added nothing to the knowledge of truth, and we should praise a great applied artist though he has given us no new glimpse of beauty. Therefore, although Mr Sargent is already more fully represented than any living and almost any dead artist in our national collections, I for one welcome the bequest by which the National Gallery becomes the trustee of Sir Asher Wertheimer's fame. ”

“ A sort of cart track of indefinite outline and great width wanders vaguely across the plain and now and then the train overtakes—it does overtake, but not with éclat—the ubiquitous Spanish donkey trotting steadily along beneath a load as big as itself, its two saddle baskets on either side and a huge peasant behind on its haunches. Where they can be going and why, seems in this wilderness utterly unimaginable. ”

“ The air is loud with the chorus of their innumerable bleatings. Herds of swine too come down and a stray pig will gallopade wildly about with the swineherds after him with long whips, his shrill squeals answering their gruff objurgations. A pleasant and lively place enough if a gusty wind doesn't bring clouds of dust in with the sheep from the bare uplands. ”

“ I had used "practitioner in paint" as a term of abuse, comparing it with the honourable title of artist. I had failed to see that just as there is need both for pure and applied science so there is need for both pure and applied art, and that the art of Mr Sargent is eminently and entirely of the latter kind. It is art applied to social requirements and social ambitions. ”

“ A rich man has need of a lawyer's professional skill to enable him to secure the transmission of his wealth to posterity, and a rich man, if he have the intelligence of Sir Asher Wertheimer and the luck to meet a Sargent, can, by the latter's professional skill, transmit his fame to posterity. ”

“ Mr Sargent has not the distinctively artistic vision—he has, one might say, no visual passion at all, scarcely any visual predilections—he has rather the undifferentiated eye of the ordinary man trained to its finest acuteness for observation, and supplied with the most perfectly obedient and skilful hand to do its bidding. ”

“ Wherever, as in the West Front or round the North Door, the use of sculpture is indicated, it is of course of an incredible intricacy and multiplicity, with elaborate arabesques of animals chasing one another along cornices and in the hollows of mouldings. The carving is wonderfully sharp and precise and of great technical brilliancy—the Spaniards of the sixteenth century must have got up earlier than they do now to have carved such vast areas of stone with so incredibly minute and rich a sculptured surface. In effect it is the creation of a surface that is aimed at. ”

“ One small cluster of Mediterranean pines raises its long bare trunks out of the baked yellow earth at the station of Caspio and for the rest nothing; nothing to break the evenness of the surface and no apparent reason why there should be stations or villages and nothing to show how any one supports life there. ”

“ PEOPLE, i. e. people without motors, do not, I believe, go very frequently to Salamanca. Even commercial travellers, so one of them told me, funked it because of the quite peculiar cussedness of its railway communications. Still every other day a goods train condescends to trail behind it a few decrepit carriages from Medina del Campo which is the general junction for Spain west of Madrid. ”

“ They sit on a hill a little apart from the town and their court is an inviting spacious grassy place enclosed on all sides by a two-storeyed cloister of simple, but very delicate, late Gothic design. Their chapel is of the same date and its architect adopted Hontanon's genial idea of a Gothic interior with dome. I guess it to be a little later than the Cathedral, for the Renaissance forms are more clearly marked and even the mouldings of the arches approximate to Classic forms. ”

“ The charge of heresy was always so easy to bring and so hard to refute that so striking a figure could hardly fail to be the object of attack. Consequently he found himself one day transferred from his professional chair at Salamanca to the Inquisition prison at Valladolid. ”

“ It requires rare gifts indeed to make such a record—a keenness of eye, a skill of hand, and a transparent honesty of purpose that do not often occur to this degree. The record is indeed so well made that it will always be legible, and what is to be read therein will have an ever increasing historical interest. ”

“ Indeed this Church and the very similar, though larger, one of S. Esteban provoke one to wonder why the peculiar and ingenious compromise which Hontanon had hit upon, did not develop to its ultimate logical conclusion. Why, having got so far, no one ever built a classic building with pointed arches. Why they did not try the possibility of keeping the great structural facilities for vaulting of the pointed arch. ”