Peonage

“ The pencil can do much, the pen everything; the Painter is imprisoned within a few feet of canvass, the Poet commands the horizon with an eye that circumnavigates the globe; even that glorious pageant, a painted Panorama, is circumscribed by bounds, over which imagination, feeling them all too narrow, is uneasy till she soars; but the Poet's Panorama is commensurate with the soul's desires, and may include the Universe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I replied, "that he confounded the operations of the pencil and the pen; that the serene and silent art, as painting has been called by one of our first living poets, necessarily appealed to the eye, because it had not the organs for addressing the ear; whereas poetry, or that species of composition which approached to it, lay under the necessity of doing absolutely the reverse, and addressed itself to the ear, for the purpose of exciting that interest which it could not attain through the medium of the eye." ”

“ The light and pleasing in form and color, in design and execution, distinguish the numerous works of our artist. No living painter excels her in dignity or in the delicate taste with which she handles the pencil. ”

“ Exquisite values and exquisite combinations are present in the masterpieces of every art. The sweet blending of musical tones which leads into a delicacy of overtones that no ear can distinguish; the subtle shadings of color in a painting, soft touches of pictorial harmony which can be felt more surely than they can be seen; tender curves in the most vigorous statue, and marble surfaces surging so slightly that their shadows scarcely linger ”

“ Discourse and action show man as he is, more directly than the play of [212] the muscles and the moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has command. Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light in the eye—music, by its subtle range of tones—can refine most delicately upon a single moment of passion, unravelling its subtlest threads.
But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure form? Because, by this limitation, it becomes a perfect medium of expression for one peculiar motive of the imaginative intellect. ”

“ Its music from thy face;
And word and mien, and step and look,
Are perfect in their grace.
And yet I love thee not: thy brow
Is but the sculptor's mould:
It wants a shade, it wants a glow,—
It is less fair than cold. ”

“ He of the brush may paint an exquisite picture, fine of line and detail; delicate in colouring, as in a miniature, a picture capable of bearing the closest scrutiny. Again he may pile the pigment upon his canvas as with a trowel, and those who view such work at close quarters will marvel how so much seeming roughness, lack of detail and carelessness can mean anything. But when this picture is viewed at a little distance, order comes forth from chaos; there is unfolded a landscape of surpassing loveliness. ”

“ When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw every thing, why draw any thing? ”

“ The painter's palette, charged with color, is the instrument with which he thrills a melody to the eye, even as the magniloquent organ or the sigh-breathing flute speak to the ear. And just as the compass of all instruments is constructed on the diatonic scale, so should the range of the palette depend upon the tinges of the spectrum.
While artists of a certain school pretend to imitate Nature, who paints literally with a pencil dipped in rainbow, they make use of a complication of tints, at which their goddess would shudder. ”

“ And why I have not before now finished the miniature I promised to Mrs. Butts? I answer I have not, till now, in any degree pleased myself, and now I must entreat you to excuse faults, for portrait-painting is the direct contrary to designing and historical painting, in every respect. If you have not nature before you for every touch, you cannot paint portrait; and if you have nature before you at all, you cannot paint history. ”

“ The painter blends colours to please the sense of sight; the musician studies harmonies of sound to please the ear; each appeals to but one of our imperfect senses, and yet we think much of them for so doing; we compliment them, and give them the appellation of artists. ”

“ In the free and spontaneous activity of musical conception, the composer may forget the words he is setting, as the painter may forget the subject he is painting in the fervour of plastic imagination; for the musician conceives not emotions, but modulations; and the painter conceives not actions, but gestures and attitudes. ”

“ Portrait-painting is the biography of the pencil, and he who gives most of the peculiarities and details, with most of the general character,—that is of keeping,—is the best biographer, and the best portrait-painter. ”

“ So with almost every pursuit—there is opportunity to exercise it in the world of spirits. The painter finds nobler themes for his pencil, more angelic faces for his canvas; and the desire to reproduce them as they appear is as intense there as it is here. ”

“ While their canvases present a simultaneous vision, each picture as a whole is incapable of creating a unified impression. A Cubist painting is, let us say, like the momentary blare of a hundred musical instruments all of which play consecutive bars. By approaching each performer in order and studying his particular notes, until every musical detail is learned, we might intellectually construct from our memory an impression of a related musical composition. But should the blare be repeated, even after our research, the music’s meaning would be no clearer than before. ”

“ The portrait painter makes us feel all this in his picture. The attitude is so dignified, the gesture so forcible, the countenance so expressive, that we are impressed at once with the dignity of his character. ”

“ In order to give the likeness and correct drawing, the face and bust and hands of portraits are taken by the lens, and then enlarged to the size of an ordinary water-colour sketch, which the artist colours and finishes off in the form of a vignette portrait, by a few free washes of the brush. It is almost impossible to tell these exquisite works of art from an ordinary water-colour, but that the drawing of the face and hands is beyond the human draughtsman’s power. ”

“ It does not end until he has recorded that subject in some permanent form, such as a painting, a drawing, or a celluloid negative. In the recording, or treatment, the painter tries to improve the composition of his subject. He changes the curves of the vase and the flower somewhat in order to obtain a more definite unity. He softens the emphasis in one place and heightens it in another. He balances shape against shape. He swings into the picture a rhythm of line and tone which he hopes may express to some beholder the harmony which he, the artist, feels. ”

“ Of course, the Painter, whose eye is trained to look into the texture of surfaces, sees all more readily. I am looking up to rough crags, and enormous bulges, where the recent fracture would seem to have an almost painful sharpness to the touch. Where the surfaces have been for a time exposed to the weather, they have the flesh-finish of a statue. Along the lower portion, where you see the glassing effects of the waves, there it resembles the rarest Sèvres vase, or even pearl itself, so exquisitely fine is the polish. It is almost mirror-like. ”

“ Could painting extend itself into time and present singly and in sequence the visions of objective nature, dramatically synthesised with colour and line, it could perhaps influence people to emotion in the way music does. ”

“ Momentary masses of clouds, especially the heavier ones, of stormy skies, will be fixed by two or three unstudied strokes of a pencil; and figures and dress, in the most agreeable attitudes and folds, leave traces that a very ordinary hand might speedily make his own or, what is still better, enable him with these elements to use the assistance of the best artist he can find in every line of painting, and, by the help of these, give to each the utmost possible perfection ”

“ One painter is distinguished by his exquisite finishing. He toils day after day to bring the veins of a cabbage leaf, the folds of a lace veil, the wrinkles of an old woman’s face, nearer and nearer to perfection. ”

“ First of all, painting has the power, through color and line as such, to express the purely musical emotions; this we demand of painting just as we demand music of verse: without word-music, there is no poetry, no matter how high the theme; so without color and line music, no matter how skillful the representation or how noble the subject, there is no picture. Painting may give little more than this. In much of still-life painting, for example, the values attached to the objects represented are borrowed from the music of the medium. ”

“ A flat canvas will not discourse music like the board of a piano. Forms and colors may talk very eloquently to the eye, but they say nothing to the ear. The old division of the arts made over a century ago by Lessing is still acceptable to-day. The fine arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting address the sense of sight; the fine arts of music and literature address the sense of hearing. Therefore, let us assume that such thoughts, ideas, or emotions, poetic or otherwise, as a painter may wish to express in painting should be primarily pictorial by addressing the sense of sight. ”

“ The excellence of portrait-painting, and we may add even the likeness, the character, and countenance, as I have observed in another place, depend more upon the general effect produced by the painter, than on the exact expression of the peculiarities, or minute discrimination of the parts. The chief attention of the artist is therefore employed in planting the features in their proper places, which so much contributes to giving the effect and true impression of the whole. ”

“ Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our plastic arts, and especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a corner. I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys, and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But the gallery stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it becomes frivolous. ”

“ Portrait painters now depend for their effect on the mere accidents of the entourage; on dress, on landscape, even on broad hints of a man's occupation, putting a plan on the engineer's table, and a roll in the statesman's hands, like the old Greek who wrote 'this is an ox' under his picture. ”

“ And one of the chief delights which any one who really enjoys painting finds in that art as distinct from sculpture is in this exquisite inlaying or joiner's work of it, the fitting of edge to edge with a manual skill precisely correspondent to the close application of crowded notes without the least slur, in fine harp or piano playing. ”

“ Thus, again, sculpture aspires out of the hard limitation of pure form towards colour, or its equivalent; poetry also, in many ways, finding guidance from the other arts, the analogy between a Greek tragedy and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a relief, of French poetry generally with the art of engraving, being more than mere figures of speech; and all the arts in common aspiring towards the principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art, the object of the great Anders-streben of all art, of all that is artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities. ”

“ The work of all court and portrait painters is but the recording, that is, the illustration, of human vanity; and the work of all subject painters is but the recording, that is, the illustration, of great and important events; while landscape painting, a modern invention, is only more or less glorified topography. ”

“ Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. The instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts: a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation, is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process. ”

“ The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which make up the ever-changing “landscape with figures” amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. ”

“ One might ask what would be the result if a painter were to attempt to convert a purely imaginative picture into a portrait, and, in addition to altering the face and the lines of the figures, were to put in a number of accessories to please the patron's taste, and also to accept suggestions from the sitter as to changes in the colour-scheme. ”