English art

“ How different the conditions when we turn to consider English Art, as it stands to-day: "The whole current of human life setting resolutely in a direction opposed to artistic production; no love of beauty, no sense of the outward dignity and comeliness of things, calling on the part of the public for expression at the artist's hands ”

“ But whilst our active ranks have suffered diminution by one death only within the year, two justly conspicuous men have fallen in the wider field of English art, both of them men of marked and distinctive personality—both painters, both, to me, deeply interesting. ”

“ Nor is it strange that a world of more reasonable motives should urge this subtle poet—whose head is carried of purpose, and by love, among the clouds—to turn his back on that grimy, matter-of-fact England, and set his face toward those southern regions where Art makes daily food, and where he may trail his robes without the chafings of law or custom. ”

“ It may be said of all modern art in whatever land we follow its story, that its master currents flow in the direction of portrait and landscape, and it was in these twin streams that the English school, when a century later it came into being, was destined to prove its acknowledged supremacy. ”

“ And, the commonplace character of so much of our English painting seems to me due to the fact that so many of our young artists look merely at what we may call ‘ready-made beauty,’ whereas you exist as artists not to copy beauty but to create it in your art, to wait and watch for it in nature. ”

“ This spiritual breath of the nation in all its activities through centuries is the breath of its literature, there embodied in its finer being and applied to the highest uses for the civilization and culture of the nation by truth and art. In English literary history, and in its men of genius taken individually, the positive or the romantic may predominate, each in its own moment ”

“ The picture is typical of contemporary art, which is nearly all conceived in the same spirit, and can therefore have no enduring value. And if by chance the English artist does occasionally escape from the vice of subject for subject's sake, he almost invariably slips into what I may called the derivative vices—exactness of costume, truth of effect and local colour. ”

“ If you ask nine-tenths of the British public what is the meaning of the word æsthetics, they will tell you it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado; and if you inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will hear something about an eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness in drawing were the chief objects of art. To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education. ”

“ The foregoing examples by no means include all the instances of how English painters, as a result of the liberal space allotted them and the lavish encomiums heaped upon them by the Encyclopædia Britannica's editors, are unduly expanded into great and important figures. A score of other names could be mentioned. From beginning to end, English art is emphasized and lauded until it is out of all proportion to the rest of the world. ”

“ I don't know what is meant by French art and English art and American art; those seem to me mere cataloguers' and reviewers' and tradesmen's names, representing preoccupations utterly foreign to the artist. Art is art in every country, and the novel (since Bonus mentions that) is the novel in every tongue, and hard enough work they have to live up to that privilege, without our adding another muddle to the problem. The reader, the consumer, may call things as he likes, but we leave him to his little amusements. ”

“ But the French and the German public approximate more to the English—as is natural—than do their respective artists. I use the word literary as it has often been used by others in characterizing the popular art-criticism of the time—and in England much of the professional criticism also—to denote a prominence given to the subject, the idea, the story—l'anecdote, as a French critic calls it—over the purely painter's work of a picture. It denotes the theory that a picture is not first to please the sense, but to catch the fancy or the intellect or to touch the heart. ”

“ The prominent position they then occupied before the American public made their example and opinions of great importance with their countrymen, and undoubtedly contributed to suggest one of the most characteristic traits of American art, that is, the tendency to make art a means for telling a story, which has always been a prominent feature of English art. May we not also trace to English literature the bias which unconsciously led our painters to turn their attention to landscape with a unanimity that has until recently made our pictorial art distinctively a school of landscape painting? ”

“ At all periods, therefore, even during the early Victorian period, which we are now taught and believe to be the most ghastly period through which English art has passed, the art in vogue has been what the public have admired, and have been ready to pay for, and most emphatically what they have been taught and brought up to consider good art. ”

“ For this reason, if an English and a French painter shall each take the same scene, and that a wholly foreign one, say an Oriental group, although the subject be a foreign subject and identical in each canvas, you can discern at once that one picture is English, the other French in treatment. Each artist has stamped upon his work the impression of the influences of the people to which he belongs. ”

“ And observe in what points our English pair succeed, and in what they fall short. They fall short in architectonicé, in the highest power of composition, by which painting accomplishes the very uttermost which it is given to painting to accomplish; the highest sort of composition, the highest application of the art of painting, they either do not attempt, or they fail in it. ”

“ Yet a pleasant little corner of their own they certainly merit, representing, as they do, a characteristic contemporary phase of popular taste, and of artistic activity, essentially English. Whatever may be thought of their intrinsic value as works of art, there is no denying their special appeal of pictorial prettiness and sentiment and of dainty decorative charm. ”

“ The genre painters of this country have mainly drawn their subjects from our national poets and prose writers and the every-day life of Englishmen, sometimes verging on the side of triviality, but on the whole including pleasing works, which, as it has been well said, "bear the same relation to historic art as the tale or novel does to history." ”

“ The seventeenth century was a great period for famous painters, and the presence of numerous excellent foreign artists in England influenced the attitude of society among the higher classes towards art. ”

“ Such art carries a beautiful and enduring lesson, whether the scenes it represents are German or French, English or American. In these visions of the simple and joyous life of the country, we are brought, as it were, face to face with Nature, to enjoy her sweetest and most beneficent influence. ”

“ We should learn that in the seventeenth century this style of poetry—sometimes called the romantic—was succeeded by another and very different [6] fashion in poetic composition, introduced into England in imitation of continental and classical models: that this new style of versification—ignoring nature and making everything subservient to art—was purely artificial, characterized by "an oratorical pomp, a classical correctness, a theatrical dressing, abundance of moralizing" ”

“ Present State of British Art.—It is owing either to a mistaken theory of elevated art, or to the want of models in nature, that the English are hitherto without any painter of serious historical subjects, who can be placed in the first rank of genius. Many of the pictures of modern artists have shown a capacity for correct and happy delineation of actual objects and domestic incidents, only inferior to the masterpieces of the Dutch School. ”

“ The art is in the main English {viii}art, as English as the timber in which it is wrought, and deserves the attention of all English-speaking people the world over, who inherit equally with ourselves the good things that remain from the England of old.
This book, like the others in the series, owes much of any value it may possess to the generous and ready co-operation of many lovers of mediæval art. For photographs and drawings the writer is indebted to the Rev. ”

“ I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty. ”

“ One can imagine what an infinity, what variety and richness, of details it should contain.
Our subject presents, at the same time, another kind of interest more elevated and not less alluring. Here each Art appears in its different phases and in its diversified progress. It is a history, not alone of the Arts, but of the epoch itself in which they were developed; for the Arts, regarded in their generality, are the truest expression of society. They speak to us of tastes, of ideas, of character: they exhibit us in their works. ”

“ What we hear most valued in the picture, we often find the most neglected in the book,—namely, the composition; and this, simply because in England painting is recognized as an art, and estimated according to definite theories; but in literature we judge from a taste never formed, from a thousand prejudices and ignorant predilections. We do not yet comprehend that the author is an artist, and that the true rules of art by which he should be tested are precise and immutable. ”

“ Whose quiet stars may see thee and be glad.
I do not love thee!—yet, I know not why,
Whate'er thou dost seems still well done, to me:
And often in my solitude I sigh
That those I do love are not more like thee!
I do not love thee!—yet, when thou art gone,
I hate the sound (though those who speak be dear)
Which breaks the lingering echo of the tone
Thy voice of music leaves upon my ear.
I do not love thee!—yet thy speaking eyes,
With their deep, bright, and most expressive blue,
Between me and the midnight heaven arise,
Oftener than any eyes I ever knew.
I know I do not love thee! ”

“ Given a literature, a philosophy, an art, or a branch of art, what is the attitude of mind that produces it? What are its sufficing and necessary conditions? What, for instance, causes England in the sixteenth century to acquire a dramatic poetry of the first rank, or Holland in the seventeenth century a painting art of the first rank, without any of the other branches of art simultaneously bearing equally fine fruit in the same country? ”

“ I have spoken of poetry, but all the other modes of art produce similar effects in their degree. The races and nations whose senses are naturally finer, and their sensuous perceptions more exercised, than ours, receive the same kind of impressions from painting and sculpture: and many of the more delicately organized among ourselves do the same. All the arts of expression tend to keep alive and in activity the feelings they express. ”

“ Culture after culture, epoch by epoch, are laid bare as in [pg xxix] geologic strata,—mediæval tale and history, humanistic form, the Shakespearian age, Puritan, Cavalier, man scientific, reforming, reborn into a new natural, political, artistic world, man modern; and in every layer of imagination and learning lies, whole and entire, a buried English age. It is by virtue of its copiousness that English literature is so representative, both of man's individual spirit in its restless forms of apprehension and embodiment, and of its historic formulation in English progress as national power. ”

“ It is only of late, and chiefly by a superficial imitation of foreigners, that we have begun to use the word Art by itself, and to speak of Art as we speak of Science, or Government, or Religion: we used to talk of the Arts, and more specifically of the Fine Arts: and even by them were vulgarly meant only two forms of art, Painting and Sculpture, the two which as a people we cared least about—which were regarded even by the more cultivated among us as little more than branches of domestic ornamentation, a kind of elegant upholstery. ”

“ You must speak dearly for the Parisian, and simply for the peasant. One will accuse you of a lack of local color, and the other of a lack of elegance. But I shall be listening too, and I am trying to discover by what means art, without ceasing to be universal, can penetrate the mystery of primitive simplicity, and interpret the charm of nature to the mind. ”

“ It is the British way to take the second-rate in every art and scout the best. Write a book poorly and feebly, and it passes. Write the same thing powerfully and well, and the cry is—It's improper! It's just the same thing in painting. ”

“ By the originality and vigour of the spiritual life and of the emotion of which the work is an expression, together with its power of impressing these characteristics on the reader. All art is the expression of some emotion, and has for its object the production of emotions. The deeper a signet gem is cut, the sharper, the clearer are the outlines in wax. The deeper the impression in the soul of the artist, the clearer, the more forcible is its artistic expression. ”

“ IT is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting ”