The Modern Painters

“ In an age which was prouder of its antiquarian knowledge than of its own achievements, which recognised the faithful imitation of the method of all past periods, the mere performance of a delicate task, as the highest aim of art, these genre painters were the first to portray the actual man of the nineteenth century; the first to desert museums and appeal to nature, and thus to lay the foundation of modern painting. ”

“ By crediting the distinctly second-rate moderns with qualities they have only absorbed from greater men, and by misunderstanding the animating ideals of today’s painting, he presents so disproportionate and biased a history that the entire significance of modern art is lost. England, France and Germany possess critics who feel the grandeur but miss the meaning of the new ideals, and their books and articles, while crediting the modern painters with vitality, go little beneath the surface. ”

“ Henceforth it was not possible to think of painting as a thing of mere dilettantism, serving only to minister to the trivial demands of the taste of the hour. He proved to the world that at every season when art has held a dominating place its spirit has been fast linked [126] with the heart and life of the people; and the deep earnestness which in Modern Painters he brought to the task of historical criticism found a ready reflex in the more serious and concentrated intensity of feeling which coloured the work of men of the younger school. ”

“ With none of these difficulties is the historian of modern art confronted. The painters of the nineteenth century have very seldom forgotten to attach a name and date to their works, and the circumstances of their lives are related with an accuracy that was, earlier, rarely the lot of the foremost men in history. It is all the more difficult, face to face with such a chaos of pictures, to discover the spiritual bond which connects them all, to construct a building out of the immense supply of accumulated bricks, the piled-up mass of rough material. ”

“ But the old panacea is never without effect: in all periods when art has overlived its bloom and falls into mannerism it is met by a strong cross-current of realism pouring into it new life-blood. In painting, nature had been made artificial, and it was time for art to be made natural. Painters still strayed in the past, seeking to awaken the dead, and give life once more to history. ”

“ The Old Masters painted in a low key, but they probably never thought that some day their pictures would look as they do now. The modern painters try to produce a quality that has nothing to do with art, they cater to the taste of certain art patrons that have a liking for old-looking things. ”

“ The Modern Painters, we know, could never be really completed at all, because he was attracted by all manner of irrelevant and collateral issues. In later years his incapacity for consecutive writing becomes bewildering. ”

“ It does not follow however that these particular ideals of the art have inspired modern painters as a body. No one who visits the picture exhibitions of the day, or even our galleries of older art, will fail to note that a good deal of modern painting since the 17th century has been academic and conventional, or prosaically natural, or merely popular in its appeal. ”

“ The historical motive, as such, was with them only a pretext for launching forth into flashing orgies of colour, according to the example, which they followed merely in externals, of the Venetian and Flemish masters. They knew, as genuine painters, that only in the pigment on their palette slumbers that power of exciting emotion by means of which the art of painting touches the chords of men’s souls. ”

“ The painter, therefore, has the choice of either working out the isolated character of some one distinct class of scene, or of bringing together a multitude of different elements, which may adorn each other by contrast.
I believe that the simple and uncombined landscape, if wrought out with due attention to the ideal beauty of the features it includes, will always be the most powerful in its appeal to the heart. Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power. ”

“ The great creations of the painters, in modern times as well as in the ancient, are those which represent the human figure in its ideal excellence,—which of course implies what is most perfect, not in any one man or woman, but in men and women collectively. Hence the greatest of painters rarely have stooped to landscape painting, since no imaginary landscape can surpass what everybody has seen in nature. ”

“ But if a really great painter, thoroughly capable of giving substantial truth, and master of the elements of pictorial effect which have been developed by modern art, would solemnly, and yet fearlessly, cast his fancy free in the spiritual world, and faithfully follow out such masters of that world as Dante and Spenser, there seems no limit to the splendor of thought which painting might express. ”

“ To name all the modern painters who are con324scientiously battling against formalism and the dry-rot of the academies would be impossible. The field is too broad: the activities are too numerous. Few civilised countries have escaped the insistence of the new impetus. By some painters the new methods are adopted tentatively and by degrees. Others fly to the latest phases of art and move forward with the epoch. Today there are numerous representatives of all the movements from Impressionism to Synchromism. ”

“ Now we should like to see our artists working out, with all exertion of their concentrated powers, such marked pieces of landscape character as might bear upon them the impression of solemn, earnest, and pervading thought, definitely directed, and aided by every accessory of [Page 424] detail, color, and idealized form, which the disciplined feeling, accumulated knowledge, and unspared labor of the painter could supply. I have alluded, in the second preface, to the deficiency of our modern artists in these great points of earnestness and completeness ”

“ In a general way all the lesser modern painters, by their feverish activities, expositions and pamphleteering, have, despite their inherent lack of genuine importance, kept the world conscious of the fact that it is in the midst of a great æsthetic upheaval, that new forces are at work, that the older order is being supplanted. ”

“ It should be recollected, however, that it is much easier to copy or follow, when the path has been marked out, than to invent or discover; and hence that the glorious productions of the "Prince of modern Painters," form no criterion by which to judge of the merits of those of the "Father of modern Painters." The former had "the accumulated wisdom of ages" before him, of which he availed himself freely; the latter had nothing worthy of note, but his own talents and the wild field of nature, from which he was the first of the moderns who drew in the spirit of inspiration. ”

“ But other artists finish for the impression's sake, not to show their skill, nor to produce a smooth piece of work, but that they may, with each stroke, render clearer the expression of knowledge. And this sort of finish is not, properly speaking, so much completing the picture as adding to it. It is not that what is painted is more delicately done, but that infinitely more is painted. This finish is always noble, and, like all other noblest things, hardly ever understood or appreciated. ”

“ Thus it was that the ready-made and more easily intelligible shapes and figures of a world long buried out of sight, with which men believed themselves to have an elective affinity, at first seemed to the artists to have an infinitely greater value than the new forms which were in the throes of birth. Painters became Classicists because they had not yet the courage to venture on the ground where the century itself was going through a process of fermentation. ”

“ We gather then on the whole, that a painter in the Great Style must be enthusiastic, or full of emotion, and must paint the human form in its utmost strength and beauty, and perhaps certain impossible forms besides, liable by persons not in an equally enthusiastic state of mind to be looked upon as in some degree absurd. ”

“ Painting could not decline, for it had not reached any eminence; the exquisite arts of illumination and glass design had led to no effective results in other materials; they themselves, incapable of any higher perfection than they had reached in the thirteenth century, perished in the vain endeavor to emulate pictorial excellence, bad drawing being substituted, in books, for lovely writing, and opaque precision, in glass, for transparent power ”

“ Our practical failures in coloring are merely the necessary consequences of our prolonged want of practice during the periods of Renaissance affectation and ignorance; and the only durable difference between old and modern coloring, is the acceptance of certain hues, by the modern, which please him by expressing that melancholy peculiar to his more reflective or sentimental character, and the greater variety of them necessary to express his greater science. ”

“ But even those hosts who choose well will be farther distinguished from each other by their choice of nobler or inferior companies; and we find the greatest artists mainly divided into two groups,—those who paint principally with respect to local color, headed by Paul Veronese, Titian, and Turner; and those who paint principally with reference to light and shade irrespective of color, headed by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Raphael. ”

“ The completion of a work of the importance of the "Modern Painters," which has occupied in its production the thought and a large portion of the labor of fourteen years, is an event of more interest than it often falls to the lot of a book to excite; but when, as in this case, the result shows the development of an individual taste and critical ability entirely without peer in the history of art-letters, the value of the whole work is immensely enhanced by the time which its publication covers. ”

“ The Modern Painters is easily first among all the English works that treat of painting. Its full merit can hardly be appreciated until we realise how daringly original it was; and to realise this is difficult, because of the very success of Ruskinism. The young graduate of Oxford preached a new gospel, and set himself in opposition at once to the established canons of art-criticism, and to the established philosophy of his time. ”

“ I conceive him to be the most powerful painter whom the world has seen, and that he was prevented from being also the most perfect, partly by untoward circumstances in his position and education, partly by the very fulness and impetuosity of his own mind, partly by the want of religious feeling and its accompanying perception of beauty ”

“ Their palette has become co-ordinated and rationalised. Their composition is founded on the human body in movement. And their colour, in its plastic sense, takes into consideration space, light and form. These factors represent their technical assets. With these painters comes into being an art divorced from all the entanglements of photography, of piecemeal creation, of inharmonic gropings, of literature and of data hunting. ”

“ Now, in cases like these especially, as we observed before of general nature, though it is altogether hopeless to follow out in the space of any one picture this incalculable and inconceivable glory, yet the painter can at least see that the space he has at his command, narrow and confined as it is, is made complete use of, and that no part of it shall be without entertainment and food for thought. ”

“ A technical instinct, which is in itself art, delights in investing musical instruments, golden and silver vessels, fruit and other eatables, glasses and goblets, coverings of precious work, gauntlets and armour, all imaginable petit-riens, with an artistic magic, in recognising and executing pictorial problems everywhere. After the transition from historical and genre painting had been made to painting proper there once more appeared great painters of still-life in France as there did in Chardin’s days. ”

“ For centuries painting has been342 reared on a false foundation, and the criteria of æsthetic appreciation have been irrelevant. Painting has been a bastard art—an agglomeration of literature, religion, photography and decoration. The efforts of painters for the last century have been devoted to the elimination of all extraneous considerations, to making painting as pure an art as music. But so widespread is the general ignorance regarding art’s fundamentals that the modern men have been opposed at every step. ”

“ The greater his powers became, the more the mind of the painter was absorbed in their attainment, and complacent in their display. The early arts of laying on bright colors smoothly, of burnishing golden ornaments, or tracing, leaf by leaf, the outlines of flowers, were not so difficult as that they should materially occupy the thoughts of the artist, or furnish foundation for his conceit ”

“ But, to add Examples to Precepts, he discourses of the Modern Painters, and making a Description of their best Works, he takes occasion to observe, what is there found most excellent, and to shew, how they have put in practice the Rules of Art. ”

“ Not less did all three show themselves true painters by preferring 388 rightness of observation and truth and delicacy of reproduction to anecdote and richness of invention, and by feeling the need of painting figures in their real surroundings. Instead of the conventional velvet and brocade stuffs, and the folios everywhere and nowhere in place, the settles and the brass caskets, there was a naturally painted fragment of reality, authentically reflecting the whole atmosphere of the period. ”