Pictorialism

“ Pictorial-ness, yes; that, when it becomes a wonderful vision of all things, is the ‘Spirit of the Universe.’ The pictorial attitude is not a good one for one’s continuous life, but for a season it transports one out of reality. ”

“ They have degraded the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of the same subject. They have always done so and will always do so. But while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must be pictorial always. For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen.
And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate the critic. ”

“ You are not to look at that picture as an actual representation of facts, for it comes under the same category of dream visions, aspirations, and we have nothing very distinct except the sentiment. If the painting is bad—the writing, the language of art, it is a pity. The picture is then not so good as it should be, but the thought is there, and the thought is what the artist wanted to express, and it is or should be impressed on the spectator. ”

“ On this same power of make-believe or imagination are founded the two other fine arts, sculpture and painting. Their proper purpose is not to produce exact imitations, but what the artist strives to bring out is the idea that strikes the beholder. Thus there is often more real art in a caricature done with a few strokes of the pencil, or in a rough image hacked out of a log, than in a minutely painted portrait, or a figure at a waxwork show which is so like life that visitors beg its pardon when they walk up against it. ”

“ This delightful lesson leads me to ask, what is painting but an imitative art—an art that is to realize, not to feign. Then some dream that every man who will not submit to long toil in the imitation of nature, flies up, becomes a phantom, and produces dreams of nonsense and abortions. He thinks to save himself under a fine imagination, which is generally, and almost always in young men, the scapegoat of folly and idleness.”... “There has never been a lay painter, nor can there be. ”

“ By what art or mystery, what craft of selection, omission or commission, does a given picture of life appear to us to surround its theme, its figures and images, with the air of romance while another picture close beside it may affect us as steeping the whole matter in the element of reality? It is a question, no doubt, on the painter's part, very much more of perceived effect, effect after the fact, than of conscious design—though indeed I have ever failed to see how a coherent picture of anything is producible save by a complex of fine measurements. ”

“ Conscious, then, of a new demand, of an added interest to be satisfied, the amateur of pictures turns from the imitative canvas to those paintings which appeal more widely to his familiar experience. Justly, he does not here forgo altogether his delight in the painter's cunning of hand, only he requires further that the subjects represented shall be pleasing. It must be a subject whose meaning he can recognize at once: a handsome or a strong portrait, a familiar landscape, some little incident which tells its own story. ”

“ In our age, for various reasons (social, commercial, economic) , the specialised and purely pictorial painter is dominant. His aims and methods influence other arts and crafts, but by no means advantageously as a rule; since, unchecked by judicious ideas of design, attempts are made in unsuitable materials to produce so-called realistic force, and superficial and accidental appearances dependent on peculiar qualities of lighting and atmosphere, quite out of place in any other method than painting, or in any place but an easel picture. ”

“ An artist was copying it, and producing certainly something very like a fac-simile, yet leaving out, as a matter of course, that mysterious something that renders the picture a miracle. It is my present opinion that the pictorial art is capable of something more like magic, more wonderful and inscrutable in its methods, than poetry or any other mode of developing the beautiful. ”

“ The Impressionism that dominated the pictorial art of the later years of the nineteenth century was largely a modified and very delicate imitation. Breaking with conventions as to how things are supposed to be—conventions mainly based not on seeing but on knowing or imagining—the Impressionist insists on purging his vision from knowledge, and representing things not as they are but as they really look. He imitates Nature not as a whole, but as she presents herself to his eyes. It was a most needful and valuable purgation, since painting is the art proper of the eye. ”

“ The representation, the "Interior" in itself, has no value for him, except in so far as its space can be exhibited as the recipient of tone and colour: the pictorial symbol, as the medium of his need for expression, is everything to him; the object, the thing and its shape, are nothing. Thus the cautious painter of "The Frosty Morning" becomes an artist; thus the thing [Pg 161] he paints is transformed into spiritual significance, its shape becomes pictorial symbol; and the technique, which before was carefully veiled, changes to the boldest impressionism. ”

“ Nor is this to be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art, in which so few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the incongruous and irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and mystified a subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind and healthy senses as any other department of human knowledge. Half the want of appreciation of pictures arises from ignorance, not of the principles of Art, but of the elements of Nature. Good observers are rare. ”

“ Pictorial art is the handwriting of a nation, the signature, the autograph; it is not the mere cross-mark of a clown, nor the imprint of the thumb of a savage. It is not superseded by the Great Seal, for it represents even more than the decisions of law-makers. It puts into tangible form the affections and restraints of a people in varying but ever just balance. ”

“ We have now to discuss the efforts of the savage to represent. Here, again, we have to consider the purpose which animates him, and the materials which are at his service. His pictures have a practical purpose, and do not spring from what we are apt, perhaps too hastily, to consider the innate love of imitation for its own sake. In modern art, in modern times, no doubt the desire to imitate nature, by painting or sculpture, has become almost an innate impulse, an in-born instinct. ”

“ But at the same time there might be a great future before any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems at present, to take literature, as if every form of human expression had been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the satire, the narrative, the letter, the diary, conversation, all embalmed in art. But there is probably some other medium possible which will become perfectly obvious the moment it is seized upon and used. To take an instance from pictorial art. At present, colour is only used in a genre manner, to clothe some dramatic motive. ”

“ Selection of what is fitting as an art subject means experience. The “ungrateful” subject and bad composition are therefore likely to mark the nouveau in picture making—the student fresh from the atelier with accurate drawing and true color and who may be full of promise, but who has become tangled with what the French term the soujet ingrat. Every artist has studies of this sort which contain sufficient truth to save them from being painted over as canvas, and most painters know the place for such—the storeroom. ”

“ Thus by the magic of pictorial design our vision is caught and so controlled that a single glance, sweeping the picture in the direction ordained by the artist, gives us a definite feeling of movement. ”

“ Our whole conception of the scope and possibilities of art turns upon the view we take of the artist’s means of expression. Are we to regard pictorial art as a medium for imaging and recording the visible facts of the physical world, or as symbols of states of consciousness? ”

“ Like a true painter, he sees a picture in everything he studies. Perhaps it would be truer to say that he sees the picture, the one which for the time being has taken possession of his imagination and to which he is willing to sacrifice even truth, or at least some portion of truth, rather than to permit the integrity of his mental picture to be impaired. This pictorial sense is one of the sources of the greatness and of the less than greatness in his work. It gives to each of his canvases a distinct æsthetic charm ”

“ He realized that art was an expression of life itself, that pictorial art was an expression of life’s satisfaction at her passions become incarnate. All expression is self-revelatory. Pictorial art, then, is the self-revelation of life herself looking into her soul and upon her forms. ”

“ The very illusory powers of photography serve to define the true sphere of art, which is a product of the human mind as well as of the eye and hand.
There is another form of pictorial appeal which has, owing to the association of art with commercial enterprise, attained such vast proportions as to count as a popular education of the eye—for good or for evil. I mean the pictorial poster, which might be said to be the most original flourishing and vigorous type of popular art existing, and the only popular form of mural painting. ”

“ It is not only a portrait, but a picture, and it arouses even in the profane spectator something of the painter’s sense, the joy of engaging also, by sympathy, in the solution of the artistic problem. There are works of which it is sometimes said that they are painters’ pictures (this description is apt to be intended invidiously) , and the production of which I speak has the good-fortune at once to belong to this class and to give the “plain man” the kind of pleasure that the plain man looks for. ”

“ The result of sitting for several hours at such a banquet of drollery, of poring over so many caricatures, of catching the point of so many jokes, is a kind of indigestion of the visual sense. This is especially the case if one happens to be liable to confusions and lapses of memory. Every picture, every pleasantry, drives the last out of the mind, and even the figures we recall best get mixed up with another story than their own. The early drawings, as a general thing, are larger than the late ones; we believe that the artist was obliged to make them large in order to make them at all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The message of impressionism is light, as the effort of the early painters was to secure light, the quest of all the philosophies. The impressionist calls upon every part of his work to speak of light, the middle tint, the high lights and the shadow all vibrating with it. From the decorative point of view alone, the picture, as a surface containing the greatest amount of beauty of which the subject is capable is more beautiful when varied by many tones, or by few, in strong contrast, than when this variety or contrast is wanting. ”

“ We must remember that a detailed pictorial representation, especially if it is colored, gives to the eye a full presentment of a scene and so favors a particularly clear and vivid imaginative realization. It is probable, too, that the abstract mode of representation in pictorial art, as compared, say, with that of the stage, hardly counts for the child's perception. Even the ordinary adult, innocent of artistic aims and methods, is wont, when gazing upon a painting, to lose all count of the picture as such, his consciousness being focused for the intense imaginative realization of its meaning. ”

“ The painter, who is, like most of the figures in these pigmy caricatures, very scantily clothed, is occupied with the portrait of another, who, by the rather exaggerated fulness of the gathering of his toga, is evidently intended for a dashing and fashionable patrician, though he is seated as bare-legged and bare-breeched as the artist himself. ”

“ The drawings are merely the chance results of leisure moments; and Our Artist, in essaying to convey a ray of information through the glasses of humor, has simply multiplied with printers' ink his pocket-book of sketches, which, although caricatures, are exaggerations of actual events, jotted down on the impulse of the moment, for the same sort of idle pastime as may possibly lead the reader to linger along its ephemeral pages. ”

“ Pictorial art being the most popular because more intimate, direct, and immediately concerned with the aspects of life, is perhaps more sensitive to such changes of thought and sentiment than other forms of art. This accounts in a great measure for the constantly-shifting point of view of the painter in dealing with the aspects of nature, for instance, if we compare the work of one age, or one school with another, or examine the differences of treatment by different individual artists. ”