Connoisseur

“ CONNOISSEURS.
To form a judgment of pictures, it seems reasonable, no doubt, that the connoisseur should be acquainted with the original subjects. Yet how many persons, who have scarcely seen more of nature than the Parks and Kensington Gardens, give their opinions of the beautiful landscapes of the Poussins and Claude, and venture their criticism on their faults! ”

“ A connoisseur standing before the picture of a great master will regard it as a whole. He knows how to combine instantly the scattered parts into the general effect; the universal, as well as the individual, is to him animated. ”

“ To the connoisseur of human nature, the suggestion that all children be reduced to similarity is as dreadful as the suggestion to the connoisseur of art that all pictures and intaglios be turned out identical, by a uniform factory process. ”

“ To the connoisseur it will form a guide to facilitate his acquaintance with the peculiar styles, and their varieties, of the great masters; a species of knowledge which it is difficult to convey, although of the greatest importance to possess. ”

“ The fellow who calls me a connoisseur of art and pretends to mean it, may be surely as crooked as a dog’s hind legs. I told him I did not like such art-stuff, which is usually favored by retired people. ”

“ If, therefore, in the course of this inquiry, we can show that there are rules for the conduct of the artist which are fixed and invariable, it follows, of course, that the art of the connoisseur, or, in other words, taste, has likewise invariable principles. ”

“ The connoisseur in music, in painting, in architecture, in poetry, in medals, etc., experiences sensations of which the vulgar have no comprehension; the discovery even of a fault pleases him, and makes him feel the beauties with more animation. It is the advantage of a good sight over a bad one. The man of taste has other eyes, other ears, and another tact from the uncultivated man ”

“ Thus it is the further change has come about that critics of art-production no longer have an eye simply to the education of taste, or are intent upon the illustration of such a sense. The connoisseur, or art-scholar, has taken the place of the man, or judge of artistic taste. The positive side of art-scholarship, in so far as it implies a sound and exhaustive acquaintance with the entire embrace of what is distinctive and peculiar in a given work of art, we have already maintained to be a necessary condition of artistic research. ”

“ Though a connoisseur might have applied to the features of the girls some more expressive epithet than that of mere plainness, they boasted of ruddy cheeks, and sparkling eyes, and healthful forms, that many a pale-looking belle might have envied. ”

“ If we simply try to wallow in beauty, we are using it sensually; while if on the other hand we aim at correctness of taste, which is but the faculty of sincere concurrence with the artistic standards of the day, we come to a sterile connoisseurship which has no living inspiration about it. It is the temperate use of beauty which we must aim at, and a certain candour of observation, looking at all things, neither that we may condemn if we can, nor that we may luxuriously abandon ourselves to sensation, but that we may draw from contemplation something of the inner light of life. ”

“ His claim is the same as that made in our Art of Interior Decoration; the connoisseur is one who has passed through the schooling to be acquired only by contact with masterpieces,—those treasures sifted by time and preserved for our education, in great art collections. ”

“ But, on the other hand, there is a class of connoisseurs on whom that which affects the heart is entirely lost, and who can only be gained by the appropriateness of the means; a strange contradiction resulting from over-refined taste, especially when moral culture remains behind intellectual. This class of connoisseurs seek only the intellectual side in touching and sublime themes. ”

“ My joy, my rapture, at works of art when they are true, when they are immediate and speaking expressions of Nature, afford the greatest delight to every collector, to every dilettante. Those, indeed, who call themselves connoisseurs, are not always of my opinion; but I care nothing for their connoisseurship when I am happy. Does not living nature vividly impress itself on my sense of vision? ”

“ These things are matters of taste, on which I have the misfortune to differ with the connoisseurs. Not feeling bold enough to venture on defending myself against the masters who are teaching me to appreciate High Art, I can only look away from the upper part of the picture, and try if I can derive any useful or pleasant impressions from the lower half of the composition, in which no supernatural event is depicted, and which it is therefore perfectly justifiable to judge by referring it to the standard of dramatic truth, or, in one word, of Nature. ”

“ To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility. ”

“ So there are connoisseurs who give you the subject, the grouping, the perspective, and all the mechanical circumstances of a picture; but never say a word about the expression. The reason is, they see the former, but not the latter. There are persons, however, who cannot employ themselves better than in taking an inventory of works of art (they want a faculty for higher studies,) as there are works of art, so called, which seem to have been composed expressly with an eye to such a class of connoisseurs. ”

“ All connoisseurs amongst you, and even amongst us, agree in despising our enchanted, or supernatural scenery; which, they say, is trifling, absurd, extravagant, abounding in conceits and boyish tricks; that operating chiefly by surprize, it has little or no effect, after a first or second inspection, and consequently can afford no pleasure to the owner: yet our best Artists, who have no excessive reverence for the decrees of connoisseurs [29] , and who think the owner is not the only person to be entertained, often introduce it ”

“ The heavy tan of his face and the grip of his jaw would spoil almost anybody for a beauty man, I suppose, but he had fine eyes and his mouth was all right, and he had a head that you’d like to stand off one side and look at, with hair that seemed to lift and wave with every breath of wind, and when he smiled you felt somehow that he’d saved that particular smile for you. ”

“ Notwithstanding this, a great point is gained already by the intervention of taste in the operations of the will. All those material inclinations and brutal appetites, which oppose with so much obstinacy and vehemence the practice of good, the soul is freed from through the aesthetic taste; and in their place, it implants in us nobler and gentler inclinations, which draw nearer to order, to harmony, and to perfection; and although these inclinations are not by themselves virtues, they have at least something in common with virtue; it is their object. ”

“ A taste or a temperature sensation may be pleasant or unpleasant, but has no meaning, either by itself, as a color or a tone has, or through association, as a word has. It has no connection with the life of feeling or of thought. Its chief significance is practical—sweet invites to eating, cold impels to the seeking of a warm shelter, touch is a preliminary to grasping. All the so-called lower senses are bound up with instincts and actions. Of course sights and sounds have also a significance for instinct—the color and form and voice of the individual of the opposite sex, for example. ”

“ There was a delicacy of finish in her features—in the nose and the lips especially—a sensitive changefulness in the expression of her eyes (too dark in themselves to be quite in harmony with her light hair) , and a subtle yet simple witchery in her rare smile, which atoned, in some degree at least, for want of complexion in the face and of flesh in the figure. Men might dispute her claims to beauty—but no one could deny that she was, in the common phrase, an interesting person. ”

“ The judgement, as I observed, perceives the truth of the object, the imagination its beauty; they may be said to relate to each other, in the perception of an object of taste, as a luminous polish does to the substance from whence it proceeds: the substance can exist without its polish, but the polish cannot exist without its substance. The perception of taste seems to me, if I may so express myself, to be illusive, but not erroneous; in a word, to exist in our idea of true honour, i.e. in the polish, lustre, or ornament, of true virtue. ”

“ There was in the old times a freshness, a softness, an ever-varying and yet ever-remaining tenderness of beauty in her face, the charm of which it is not possible to express in words, or, as poor Hartright used often to say, in painting either. ”

“ But the Canzoniere, which he thought quite inferior to his paralysing epic on the Second Punic War, is immortal because it is the first record of all the secret melancholy of a human soul—a soul full of wistful desires and subtle changefulness, with an exquisite feeling for beauty and a poignant sense of the fleeting nature of all fair things—a soul, indeed, possessing all the delicate sensitiveness which we are accustomed to regard as characteristic of modernity. ”

“ Now and again a new sensation is made by some eccentric genius, as it were, dragging a weird aesthetic red herring across the fashionable artistic scent, and diverting attention to side tracks in artistic development, often mixed with morbidity, or, as a change from the pursuit of superficial and ephemeral types of beauty, debased and revolting types and loathly subjects are drawn under the pictorial limelight and analysed. ”

“ Collins’s odes is more generally characteristic of his genius. In one place we discover his passion for visionary beings:
In another we behold his strong bias to melancholy:
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Then appears his taste for what is wildly grand and magnificent in nature; when, prevented by storms from enjoying his evening walk, he wishes for a situation,
And through the whole, his invariable attachment to the expression of painting:
It might be a sufficient encomium on this beautiful ode to observe, that it has been particularly admired by a lady to whom nature has given the most perfect principles of taste. ”

“ The action of the body is quick with naturalness, and yet the disposition of every part, even to such a detail as the fingers, reveals the shrewd arrangement of a choicely refined taste—an instinctive taste, operating almost unconsciously, with a frank, boyish impulsiveness, high spirited and not without a spice of mischievous humour. ”

“ And every now and then a fragrance is wafted to our inner senses as we read some simple story which is to us as a breath of the clover, bringing us a message of sweetness and beauty, and going straight to our hearts with the power that belongs to the secrets which lie hidden at our lifers core. ”

“ Her complexion, pale as my father’s when she is neither speaking nor moving, has in a far greater degree than his the tendency to flush, not merely in moments of agitation, but even when she is walking, or talking on any subject that interests her. Without this peculiarity her paleness would be a defect. With it, the absence of any colour in her complexion but the fugitive uncertain colour which I have described, would to some eyes debar her from any claims to beauty. And a beauty perhaps she is not—at least, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. ”

“ Among the susceptibilities, the emotions of taste have always been distinguished, and treated of as a peculiarly distinct class. Why is it that certain objects of sight, and certain sounds or combinations of sound, awaken emotions more than other sights and sounds? Why do the perceptions of the eye and ear so much more powerfully affect the mind than those of the other senses? ”

“ We must bear in mind that, according to Condillac, the statue confined to one sense will believe itself the sensation, that is, it will think that it is the odor, the sound, or the taste, according as the sense of smell, hearing, or taste, is the sense in exercise; for which reason, if a surface enter into the sensation of sight, the statue ought to believe itself a colored surface. ”

“ The sensualist has by self-indulgence, blunted the edge of feeling, and it is impossible for him to experience this delicate sensation of exquisite delight,—this marvellous assurance that here and now, face to face, stands the One for whom all time shall be merged into a Song of Love, and upon whom all the sweetest thoughts of imagination shall be brought to bear for the furtherance of mutual joy! ”

“ In those trains which are suggested by objects of sublimity or beauty, however slight the connexion between individual thoughts may be, it will be found, that there is always some general principle of connexion which pervades the whole, and gives them some certain definite character. They are either gay, or pathetic, or melancholy, or solemn, or awful, or elevating, &c., according to the nature of the emotion which is first excited. ”

“ In the poet’s address to Humour in this ode there is one image of singular beauty and propriety. The ornaments in the hair of Wit are of such a nature, and disposed in such a manner, as to be perfectly symbolical and characteristic:
Nothing could be more expressive of wit, which consists in a happy collision of comparative and 144 relative images, than this reciprocal reflection of light from the disposition of the jewels. ”

“ Each with its Cone of Ether, its desire to control the breath of his life, its determination to do his breathing for him, to push the Cone down over him, looms above him and above all in sight, before he speaks—before he is able to speak. ”

“ Why certain bright colours and certain sounds should excite pleasure, when in harmony, cannot, I presume, be explained any more than why certain flavours and scents are agreeable; but assuredly the same colours and the same sounds are admired by us and by many of the lower animals. ”

“ Anon, the errant channels are united in one current—life assumes a purpose, a direction—but the waters are yet pure, and mirror on their face the thousand forms and flashing colors of Creation's beauty—as happy boyhood, rapidly perceptive of all loveliness, gives forth, in radiant smiles, the glad impressions of unfaded youth. ”