William Holman Hunt

“ Pictorial art is the handwriting of a nation, the signature, the autograph; it is not the mere cross-mark of a clown, nor the imprint of the thumb of a savage. It is not superseded by the Great Seal, for it represents even more than the decisions of law-makers. It puts into tangible form the affections and restraints of a people in varying but ever just balance. ”

“ Italy, of course, has its great artists figuring in glorious dignity. Germany, Spain, Belgium, Holland, are all acknowledged in full academic richness. A compartment is generously given to poor England, and here the artist shows ingenious invention with charitable indulgence. The cupola of St. Paul's Cathedral appears as the background of a sleeping youth who personifies the Art genius of the nation; at his ear is the mouth of a trumpet with which Genius, hovering above, is preparing to awaken him. ”

“ You recognize a Chinese article by the device it has upon it; the barbarous extravagance and self-assertion of the Celestial Empire serve as a striking example of what with attention we see in more modest form on the face of every product from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Italy, early Germany, and Holland. You identify each invention, whether it be a temple, a statue, a painting, an ornamental panel, a coin, a bust, or a jar containing perfumes, as the one particular nation's work, distinct at first sight from all others, just as the penmanship of one friend from another's is clear. ”

“ To do this I must demonstrate how in all times there have been evils that have been inherent in the society in which Art has arisen, that a proportion of these have grown and accumulated about her while she has been overcoming other ills, and that she has often, like Herakles, perished from the poison robe craftily furnished by the vanquished.
What is eternally precious is the sublimated message that purifying time has left of the artist's soul. To discover this refined element, and with it to chasten their own developing faculties, is what all true sons of Art have to do ”

“ The Parisian artist does not cultivate that power which thrills the spectator's heart for the sorrows or joys of an actor in the picture's drama, by stamping the children of men as, although clouded, yet truly sons of heaven. His figures may be of true proportion and of standard colour, but with these merits achieved the master stops short of all attempt to possess his figures of a charm, beauty, and personality commanding love. I might say—if to convey a meaning it were permissible to exaggerate—that the spectator looks on but with the coldness felt at the acting of marionettes ”

“ It is time to take alarm, and to set our faces against its use of the weapons of knightly art; for if we yielded these we should be handing over our nation and every precious attainment of the civilized world, with all that is dearest—perfected only by long past effort—to ruin and chaos, and the prejudice once blindly entertained against Art would be more than justified. ”

“ What has been the great want throughout my term of observation has been the due cultivation of Art knowledge by the rulers of our land, and by those who direct and control public taste. There should be no insuperable obstacle to affording the cultivation wanted. I have striven to prove that Literature and Design are prompted by the same spirit; it follows that a good taste in Literature should need little to make it an infallible judge of the sister Art, but it does want that little, and we have but too many examples to show that, for want of it, serious disgrace has fallen upon our nation. ”

“ Indeed, Art as seen in a decorative design is often infinitely higher than it is in a painted canvas; Art expressed in form and colour embraces every kind of design, every manufactured shape, for the humblest as well as those intended for the most royal purposes. When there is no sense of national design in common utensils, you may be sure that the art of pictures is not in a healthy condition. ”

“ Men impatient for personal éclat, pecuniary profit, or immediate honour, more than for the advancement of a great purpose, have their minds entangled by the delusive surroundings of the art of the past; they take the baser conditions of life which are chronicled in the histories of the eminent, not as the survivals of barbarism or the accidents of the epoch, but as the mark of the divine afflatus.
Above all interest to idlers is the desire to pass without effort as the crowned genius; it is easy to adopt the faults of the great, and triflers do not fail in this imitation. ”

“ The American, when asked his opinion of our climate, said, 'I don't call yours a climate at all, I call it a collection of samples.' Well, our Art at this period is a collection of samples, and some of the stormiest, like some of our meteorological disturbances, come from across the Atlantic, not bearing the pure odour of that earth on which our kindred found safety from persecution, but accompanied by all the perfumes of Paris, where young professors go whirlwinding in what they call study for a time, to their great destruction. ”

“ I wish we had more time to treat of the Art of England. It had a noble beginning in the reign of Henry III, which all may learn by reading Flaxman's Lectures and Stothard's illustrated volume on the paintings in the old Palace of Westminster destroyed by fire in 1834. The Scotch War of Independence, with all its troubles, was succeeded by the wars in France of a hundred years, which, with the York and Lancaster contest, managed to engage the energy of the nation until the Reformation troubles were at hand. We take our struggles for freedom—or what may be made to figure as such—very ruinously. ”

“ The will of our nation declares itself in no timid fashion, and no one in the world would gainsay the verdict that in most purposes it has shown a leading spirit to which all other nations pay respect. Yet no acknowledgement did our forefathers ever gain from abroad for their unpretentious Art. I leave out of count any change in the estimate of it by other peoples that may have found expression in the last twenty years, simply because no judgement of the passing day can be looked upon as a fixed one—external influences too often rule these ephemeral decisions ”

“ If it is fit to sustain these feelings—and the Art of previous nations did all this in their time and manner—it were a sore disgrace to be careless of it. If it is not a champion for truth and for trust in the Eternal Father, it will become the toy of the idle, and it will perish with them, unmourned and disgraced for ever, to be trodden under foot of the race that is to be. ”

“ In confidence that I shall be justified in what cannot but appear as severe condemnation of a school, powerful while it is still in fashion, I submit my verdict on the latest phase of modern Art, and on that of all past imaginative design, to the impartial world, and give my reasons for the course which in sequel I respectfully submit for the consideration of the University. ”

“ To those who delight not in either the moral or the physical beauty of any sight or sound they see or hear, the chivalry that made the sentinel at Pompeii die at his post, the heroism that makes a sailor in the night dive into the black and tumbling waters to save a fallen comrade, are sheer folly; to them the nightingale's song is without charm; the illumination of the setting sun on the expanse of a goodly earth does not make them turn their eyes, or if they do declare themselves moved, it is from conventional example ”

“ Many of my compeers in the profession have lately spoken to me with the greatest anxiety of the influences in operation, of a kind injurious to wholesome taste, and to the future of English Art, and they have deplored the increasing assumption on the part of perfectly untrained and self-elected guides who trifle with the honest dictates of reason in the young devoting themselves to the career. ”

“ The taste was not a transient one. No visitor to Paris can fail to see that blood is regarded as a standard enrichment of a painting. This is natural to a people who fight duels about trifles, and who treat war as though it were a virtue to find occasion for it; with such a passion it would be impossible that the Art should be of generally pure and ennobling character. ”

“ Phryne and Antinous, the sculptor's models, were honoured in the minds of onlookers more than was the idealized glory of the statues. When the fullest excellence possible under the reigning philosophy had been embodied, the artist's soul could gain no further afflatus, and his heart died, and was buried for a thousand years ”

“ Many painters abroad proclaim that the less students look at the antique and the old masters the better for them, declaring that the past can teach nothing; they are, surely, like quacks who, disdaining the teaching of the past world's wisdom, without the training directed by patient study, undertake to minister to suffering humanity. The law in extreme cases steps in to punish the medical pretender, but in Art his fellow is left altogether unchecked. ”

“ Only by this extra activity of mind is a man strong enough for self-surrender. A king is greater than a tyrant, a general more than a devastator, a judge higher than an exact lawyer, a scientist of fuller insight than a microscopist, and an artist of larger mind than a mere skilful manipulator.
To this higher class it was that Professor Romanes, in recognizing that there is still an outside region to those mysteries fathomable by the profoundest human investigation, proved himself to belong. ”

“ The fashionable dogmas of theorists encouraging the belief that Art is a profound mystery, needing the guidance of experts fluent in theories and phrases to persuade that what commends itself to the unprejudiced as right is wrong, and what presents itself to the uninitiated as vulgar and barbarous is perfection, do undoubtedly intimidate the diffident and cause confusion and despair in the minds of persons otherwise altogether competent to exercise judgement on the question. ”

“ Such uninspired beings must publish a philosophy of their own; they teach that natural beauty is imaginary, from habitual association, that moral beauty exists not, that all creatures should follow selfish impulse, that there is no right, no wrong, and that egotism will work out the best end; these men have no instinct of selection; they may be versed in the catch phrases of Art, but they are not artists. ”

“ The antidote to false taste is stronger than its poison. With extensive examples of the Art of all peoples and periods before us, and the knowledge that each was national, and with sound recognition of what is base and enervating in literature, no educated man should despair of understanding our Art; but he must be prepared patiently to silt away delusive sophisms. The first step towards this end should be to supply certain graduates of the Universities with a radical knowledge of the sciences employed in Art, to qualify them for the development of a good judgement. ”

“ The narrow-minded are to be found in every pursuit, in none more at this period than in Art, and I speak primarily not of my branch of it alone, but of that larger region, in which the human mind conveys original thought or fancy to others, of which Art in form and colour is only a part. ”

“ I protest against this, for it ruins the purest and best of Art under heaven, where, under the happiest circumstances, the career of an artist (for want of that patronage which continental governments give) must be a hard one. It is not a case of reciprocal emulation, for no other country welcomes English artists in return, and certainly in arts we have nothing to gain from continental masters. ”

“ Neither altogether could they destroy Art living in builded forms; but the arts of painting and sculpture are personally costly to conduct, and without a nation's care for the matter, the Art must die out, and many quiet years of a new generation are needed to revive native ability. ”

“ It is yet clear that to the Bavarian artist, as also to his public, England so far had done nothing, and it is no exaggeration to say that abroad our nation has never been regarded as artistic. This verdict of our neighbours has been no doubtful one. With what we know it would be an affectation of deference not to declare that the charge against our forerunners was ridiculous, but it had a ground in the want of Government patronage, and it has consequences of a serious kind in affecting the minds of those who take the world at its own valuation. ”

“ The fact of its contempt for precedents invites supervision and care ere justifying the destructive course; and when these are acting it will be seen that many of the hasty judgements proposed would have been disastrous, and that modernity itself has been on its trial and found wanting. The doctrine supported by it in this day seems indeed insidiously degrading. We are in a world in which all things act and re-act on one another, and Art can never be indifferent and hold itself aloof from the vital movement ”