Genre painting

“ He had a ready appreciation of art, and probably, with a taste for imitating art, he supposed himself to have the real thing essential for an artist, and after hesitating for some time which style of painting to select—religious, historical, realistic, or genre painting—he set to work to paint. ”

“ What we want of art depends, not only on comparison between works of art belonging to the same genre, but on comparison of the purposes of different genres, indeed of the different arts themselves. What we want of painting depends upon what we want of sculpture; what we want of poetry depends upon what we want of painting and music. We compare picture with picture; but equally we compare picture with statue and poem. We do not want the sculptor to try to do what the painter can do better, and vice-versa ”

“ The gray and stern arches, the hitherto colorless sky of the art temple, now take the azure hue of the heavens, while hovering cherubs look down from their cerulean depths; the relievos glow, and color defines, as it etherealizes, the works of man. Painting, at first absorbed in the plastic arts, scarcely begins to show symptoms of life until she is fully born, and living in her own distinctive form! As that power which develops the almost infinite variety of forms is to the universe, so is painting with its ever ready and vivid canvas to the temple of art. ”

“ The human form, the world around us, the works of man's hands, are represented in painting, not for their own sake merely, but with a view to bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness of the spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have been impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, can represent more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtler intricacy. Through colour, it can play, like music, directly on powerful but vague emotion. It is deficient in fulness and roundness of concrete reality. ”

“ To this power the painter of genius directs his aim; in this sense he studies Nature, and often arrives at the end, even by being unnatural, in the confined sense of the word. The grand style of painting requires this minute attention to be carefully avoided, and must be kept as separate from it as the style of poetry from that of history. ”

“ Though it be allowed that elaborate harmony of colouring, a brilliancy of tints, a soft and gradual transition from one to another, present to the eye, what an harmonious concert of music does to the ear, it must be remembered, that painting is not merely a gratification of the sight. ”

“ To animate painting by qualities purely sensual, to make a lavish display of the gorgeous splendor of brilliant stuffs, rich brocades and velvets, and gold and silver plate, to paint in glowing rosy hues and amid voluptuous surroundings the plumpness of naked flesh, aroused his indignation and his repugnance as if such art were a desecration. ”

“ This magical result of appearance can, however, be carried to such a pitch, that in contrast to it the exhibition of content becomes a matter of indifference, and painting tends to pass over, in the mere charm and perfume of its colour tones, and the contrast, fusion, and play of their harmonies, into the art of music, precisely as sculpture, in the elaboration of its reliefs, tends to associate itself with painting. ”

“ But we have no painter whose art is so unequal: in all his works there is absolute freedom, freshness, and originality; his scheme of color is altogether his own, full of luminousness and purity; but he is weak in technique, and thus he alternately startles us by the brilliance, beauty, and suggestiveness of one painting, and the palpable failure to reach the desired end in another. ”

“ Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy. Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more multiform. ”

“ But the æsthetic faculty was thus stimulated into activity with results which tended to develop art in all its forms of carving, modelling, sculpture, and painting. An appreciation of colour, not merely for personal adornment, but in its artistic application—alike as a decorative art, and as the means whereby natural objects can be presented with vivid truthfulness to the eye,—is widely diffused; though the mastery of form by the modeller or sculptor long precedes that of chiaroscuro, or aerial perspective. ”

“ Colour and shadow, aërial perspective and complicated grouping, denied to sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, have their own significance, their real relation to feelings vaguer, but not less potent, than those which find expression in the simple human form. To painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensible by sculpture. ”

“ Painting is not a mere music of color and line expressive of abstract and objectless emotions alone, but a poetry, which, through the picturing of objects to which emotions are attached, renders the latter concrete and definite. Not mere feeling, such as a color or a line by itself can convey, but feeling in the presence of nature, which can be expressed only when color and line are made into a recognizable image of nature, is the substance of painting. ”

“ PIGMENTS
The question of the medium in which the painter shall execute his pictures is an affair of temperament. Each artist must consult his own feelings in this matter and select the medium which is to him the most sympathetic. To-day, there are practically but three systems of painting in common use, tempera having gone out of vogue, and fresco having very wisely been discarded in favor of better and sounder methods. The three remaining methods are, of course, pastel, water-color, and oil. ”

“ It is not in the style he lays the ink that the poet finds the expression, its thickness or its thinness bears no resemblance to his soul, but the intimacies of a painter’s genius are expressed in the actual substance of his paint and in the touch with which he lays it. So in painting the mysterious virtue arises which among painters is called “quality,” a certain beauty of surface resultant from the perfection of method. ”

“ The channels by which all noble imaginative work in painting should touch, and do touch the soul, are not those of the truths of life, nor metaphysical truths. But that pictorial charm which does not depend on any literary reminiscence for its effect on the one hand, nor is yet a mere result of communicable technical skill on the other, comes of a certain inventive and creative handling of colour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every effort has been made to isolate it as an independent form of art, to confine it to “easel painting” on panel or canvas, or to wall decorations conceived after the same fashion and on the same lines, to reduce it to certain schools and individuals and localities; in a word, to make it a highly specialised form of personal expression, like lyric poetry or theological heresy. This is to miss its essential character and deny its primary function.
Painting is the use of colour and the composition of lines and forms for sheer joy in this{220} particular kind of beauty ”

“ This is the point at which art reaches its highest mark: when to the primitive strength and simplicity of early art are added the infinite refinements and graces of culture without destroying or weakening the sublimity of the expression.
In painting, the refinement and graces of culture take the form of an increasing truth to natural appearances, added bit by bit to the primitive baldness of early work ”

“ But what is art in painting! Is all poetry and sentiment in a painting to be expressed by the actual handling of the colours, the process of handling and the mechanism of brushwork! Can all the poetry be contained in the objects themselves and the way they are painted? It has become the fashion of artists to say that they are painters, not artists.
Now what do they mean by this? What is a painter? A person who can handle the brush and who knows colour, or, in other words, who masters the tool of his trade. And what is an artist? The term artist is not limited to one profession. ”

“ The arts which employ any of these senses must satisfy their bias, however much they may appeal to higher faculties; nothing which rankly offends them can by any possible means be made beautiful. Thus painting must be charming in color, and music in tone; and certain colors and tones are charming for no deeper reason than that which makes certain foods palatable.
The interest in perception [3] assumes special prominence in the great visual art of painting. ”

“ The explanation of this fidelity to one theme of representation in an art which was the very furthest removed from any hieratic prescriptions, in an art which was perpetually growing—and growing more human and secular—must be sought for, I think, in no peculiarities of spiritual condition or national imagination, but in two facts concerning the merely technical development of painting, and the results thereof. ”

“ Moreover, painting, itself the product of a much greater interest in colour than Antiquity had known, forced upon men's attention the important influence of colour upon form. For, although the human being, if we abstract the element of colour, if we do it over with white paint, has indeed the broad, somewhat vague form, the indecision of lines which characterises antique sculpture ”

“ It represents a return to the art of painting for painting's sake. Every art, [Pg 77] may it be music, poetry, dancing, sculpture or painting, has its own peculiar technique, which the technically ignorant person cannot appreciate. Poetry which has no formal conventions is inconceivable. And, in a similar manner, painting has the charm of texture and brushwork, the charm of how the paint is actually put on and displayed on the canvas. The æsthetic satisfaction derived from an art is in exact proportion to one's knowledge of the art's technique. ”

“ But while the great, the practical use of line and color followed parallel lines with sound and got farther and farther away from imitative features, the art of painting, as it is commonly called, developed in just the opposite direction, it became more and more imitative, until of late years it would seem that the last word has been said in the reproduction of natural objects and natural light and color effects. ”

“ Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central motive. We receive from it the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act.
To produce such effects at all requires all the resources of painting, with its power of indirect expression, of subordinate but significant detail, its atmosphere, its foregrounds and backgrounds. To produce them in a pre-eminent degree requires all the resources of poetry, language in its most purged form, its remote associations and suggestions, its double and treble lights. These appliances sculpture cannot command. ”

“ His art knew little preference, and for that reason it often lacked the higher sense of composition that painters, differently though perhaps not so greatly gifted, can command for their work. And so it was that the spiritual appeal of his painting varied extraordinarily according to the degree in which the theme had inspired him, and even more according to the measure of support which he received from the chosen model before his eyes. ”

“ They are however, a most important convention—one that is practically indispensable to a painter—for it is upon sound values that pictures depend for their solidity and their convincing power. Good painting, after all, is a matter of analysis and synthesis; and we painters are so used to picking nature to pieces, studying her in detail, considering the undertones by themselves, for instance, while we hold the overtones in abeyance, that we find no difficulty in separating the chiaroscuro from the color, and temporarily assuming a color-blindness if we have it not. ”

“ They were seeking effects of line, light, color—mere sensuous and pictorial effects, in which religion and classicism played secondary parts. They believed in art for art's sake; that painting was a creation, not an illustration ”

“ When I try to draw aside the veil, and peer into the mists of the future, I seem to see another art, less material, more akin to the pure spirit of music; an art stripped of all that is gross and material; an art in which abstract beauty alone shall rule. In this new art values may very possibly be unnecessary, and all will be stated in terms of beautiful color. ”

“ As the light, with its ceaseless variety of tints and hues, is the most spiritual element of nature, and as the eye is the most spiritual of man’s senses, so painting, as concerned about these, is the most spiritual of the arts, and the one with which the symbolical spirit readily associates itself. Painting directs itself wholly to the eye, whereas sculpture appeals indeed to the eye, but only as the necessary medium for satisfying the corporeal sense and feeling. ”