Arts

“ The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought within us, and with the world of sense around us—with what we know, and see, and feel intimately. They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature. ”

“ The Web.—Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. ”

“ All these, properly called Arts, but not Fine Arts, are pursuits in which the hand of man and his head go together, working at the same instant.
Then FINE ART is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. ”

“ Even thus the spirit, immersed in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is the artist's function. ”

“ All the Fine Arts have it for their highest and more legitimate end and purpose, to affect the human passions, or smooth and alleviate for a time the more unquiet feelings of the mind—to excite wonder, or terror, or pleasure, or emotion of some kind or other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Upon a thorough mental culture sit gracefully, and quite at home, philosophy, history, poetry, eloquence, music, painting—all in literature and the arts that can refine the taste, refresh the heart, and lead the fancy captive. ”

“ AND now we come to that great and important subject, the Fine Arts, which day by day are becoming more appreciated and find a rapid increase of patrons. It is true that there are some who do not regard Art as an essentiality, and who are even indifferent to it as an ornament. ”

“ Certain arts, such as sculpture, painting, and architecture, have been named the fine arts by some man who had not learned to look inward, and see what an infinitely finer art is any that attempts to fashion the human soul. The pastor's and the teacher's arts, which are in essence one, though the tyranny of language forbids calling them the fine arts, may be given even a nobler title ”

“ And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. ”

“ And so the art of painting has its correlative science of painting, involving laws of optics, and of form; the art of sculpture, its correlative science of sculpture, involving the science of human anatomy, &c.; and each one of the literary arts has its correlative science—the art of verse its science of verse, the art of prose its science of prose. ”

“ These obvious observations on the importance of the Arts, lead to the question so often discussed, and at no time more important than ours—on the causes that raised them at various times, and among different nations—on the means of assisting their progress, and how to check their decay. ”

“ FINE ARTS, the name given to a whole group of human activities, which have for their result what is collectively known as Fine Art. The arts which constitute the group are the five greater arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry, with a number of minor or subsidiary arts, of which dancing and the drama are among the most ancient and universal. ”

“ It is intended to contribute to the advancement of science, by presenting to the contemplation of the artist and the connoisseur, specimens of the most esteemed works of the best masters, ancient and modern, both in painting and in sculpture; and by diffusing in a novel and interesting form a knowledge of what for ages has been appreciated and enthusiastically admired, instil into the mind of the mere indifferent observer a taste for the polite arts. ”

“ I have used the word art not in the sense merely of fine art, but in the sense of all liberal and disinterested practical work; and the excellent performance of that work demands certain qualifications which are common to all the arts as well as peculiar to the methods and materials of certain particular arts and crafts. ”

“ Of all these arts the end is not use but pleasure, or pleasure before use, or at least pleasure and use conjointly. In modern language, there has grown up a usage which has put them into a class by themselves under the name of the Fine Arts, as distinguished from the Useful or Mechanical Arts. (See Aesthetics and Fine Arts.) Nay more, to them alone is often appropriated the use of the generic word Art, as if they and they only were the arts κατ’ ἐξοχήν. ”

“ Some day the world will awaken to the fact that there are other great arts besides architecture, painting, and sculpture; already there is a suspicion abroad that music, poetry, and the drama{266} are arts also and not merely vehicles for the expression of temperament, and there is even a preliminary waking of the subconsciousness which threatens to confess that ritual and ceremonial have been, and may be again, a great fine art in the same sense. ”

“ Except where they visibly influence each other, I avoid dealing with the greater arts, leaving them to the study of the learned in each special branch.
All art, however, throws reflected lights, and gleaning in the track of those authors who have preceded us, we often pick up valuable hints which we accept, and make use of them gladly. ”

“ Thus, while the three arts are each limited to their own special functions, they, at the same time, would appear to assimilate from each other what is lacking in themselves, and so contribute to the complete artistic harmony. ”

“ It is unnecessary, in an educational view, to divide the arts by the employment of the terms “useful” and “fine;” for the fine arts can only exist legitimately where the useful arts have paved the way. In a harmonious development the artist will enter on the heels of the artisan. ”

“ The arts, I take it, are a means of giving expression to the emotional side of this mental activity, intimately related as it often is to the more purely intellectual side. The more sensual side of this feeling is perhaps its lowest, while the feelings associated with the intelligence, the little sensitivenesses of perception that escape pure intellect, are possibly its noblest experiences. ”

“ In dealing with the arts, each separate contrivance occupies a larger share of our attention, to the exclusion of any comprehensive survey of them as a whole. The arts present themselves to our mental vision on a larger scale, and we view them analytically; we are as it were in the brickmaker’s yard seeing each brick turned out of hand, whereas in dealing with language we see only the finished building ”

“ Whether their exertions are directed to painting, or the sister arts, architecture and sculpture, the first thing they must impress upon their minds, and engraft upon every shoot of their fancy, is that of the appropriate character, by which the subject they are about to treat, is distinguished from all other subjects. ”

“ This may perhaps become clearer if we consider more in detail one of the separate arts, selecting the most widely symbolic of all, the art that is most clearly made of the stuff of life, and so able to translate most truly and clearly into beautiful form the various modalities of life. ”

“ In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other. ”

“ The manifold subjects which I saw treated by artists awakened the poetic talent in me: and, as one easily makes an engraving for a poem; so did I now make poems to the engravings and drawings, by contriving to present to myself the personages introduced in them, in their previous and subsequent condition, and sometimes to compose a little song which might have suited them; and thus accustomed myself to consider the arts in connection with each other. ”

“ I shall endeavor to show that the objects of the useful arts are characterized by the simple geometrical forms which belong to inanimate beings; that those of the ornamental arts are characterized by the delicate, bending, varied, and contrasted forms of living beings; and that those of the intellectual arts are, in their highest efforts, characterized chiefly by thinking forms, as in gesture, sculpture, painting, or by functions of mind actually exercised, in oratory, poetry, music. ”

“ That the bogus arts are easier to appreciate, appeal to low and mixed emotions, and jeopardize the purity of both the great and the minor arts.
That the lively arts as they exist in America to-day are entertaining, interesting, and important. ”

“ And even in those arts which are notable for their expressive values, poetry, fiction, drama and painting, the appeal of form, as in the plot of a drama, or the structure of an ode or it sonnet is still very high. ”

“ On the contrary, it provides a foundation for works of the imagination—a basis for that spirituality which is the fruit of the happy conjunction of a multitude of material conditions evolved from the humblest as well as the noblest of the useful arts—a basis without which the beautiful arts could never exist. ”

“ There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts. ”

“ The useful arts derive their laws and limitations predominantly from the objective world. The fine arts derive theirs more largely from the subjective world. 3. The useful arts, therefore, partake of the uniformity of physical law, with its consequent monotony, so much felt in work. The fine arts, on the other hand, permit of more novelty and variety, as experienced in play. ”

“ There are three great arts in this world—singin', hand-paintin', and last but not least, speakin'. I try my hand at all of them except hand-paintin', and I wish to impress on all you scholars what a joy it is to oneself and one's friends to have mastered one of these muses. ”

“ However, these particular affinities are lost in proportion as the works of these three kinds of art rise to a greater elevation, and it is a natural and necessary consequence of their perfection, that, without confounding their objective limits, the different arts come to resemble each other more and more, in the action which they exercise on the mind. ”

“ In the first place, these six arts exist for the purpose of expressing ideas. In the next place, painting is without movement, its descendants, drama and dance, inherit movement, the one from literature, and the other from music. ”

“ Form a taste of painting, sculpture, and architecture, if you please, by a careful examination of the works of the best ancient and modern artists; those are liberal arts, and a real taste and knowledge of them become a man of fashion very well. ”

“ It is with books, music, painting and all the arts as with children—only those live that have drained much of their author’s own life into them. ”

“ Out of these urges have arisen the pictorial and plastic arts, architecture, music, the dance, science, and philosophy, providing outlets, occupations and professions that have colored and shaped many aspects of civilized living. ”

“ The Fine Arts will also form an interesting portion of this division. The object will be, in a few popular histories, to trace the origin, rise, and progress of Sculpture, Painting, Engraving, Music, &c., and their influence on mankind. ”

“ That there are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which uses, another which makes, a third which imitates them? ”

“ It is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of those arts. ”

“ The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. ”

“ Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life? ”

“ Thus, on the one side, the peculiar character of art would consist in the movement of the emotions and in the satisfaction which lies in this movement, even in fear, compassion, in painful pathos and shock—that is to say, in the satisfying engagement of the emotions and passions, and to that extent in a complacency, entertainment, and delight in the objects of art, in their representation and effect ”

“ It seemed, in fact, a new development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the fine arts. ”