THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
Plate 1. — "The Sower," by Jean Frar^ois Millet.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vanderbilt Collection.
THE CLASSIC POINT
OF VIEW
SIX LECTURES ON PAINTING
DELIVERED ON THE SCAMMON FOUNDATION AT
THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
IN THE YEAR 1911
BY
KENYON COX
WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK * * * * MCMXI
.
p£ ATIQN
,, ;»,ViCE$
••• '••*
Copyright, 1911, by Charles Scribner's Sons
Published September, 1911
Reprinted November, 1911
PREFACE
IN the course of a life devoted to the study, the practice,
and the teaching of the art of painting I have, naturally,
arrived at some pretty definite conclusions as to the
nature of that art and of the problems involved in it —
some decided opinions as to what that art has been, is,
and should be. These opinions I have tried, however
imperfectly, to exemplify in my work and to inculcate in
my teaching. They have also, inevitably, colored what
I have written. But what I have written has, hitherto,
been casual and occasional — a discussion of this or that
master, a criticism of this or that particular work of art —
and the bases of my criticism, the fundamental ideas on
which it is founded, have had, for the most part, to be
taken for granted, or to be cursorily and incompletely
expressed. These papers have, moreover, been written
at long intervals, and for different purposes, and could
hardly be entirely consistent with each other. Some-
thing like a general point of view could, perhaps, be in-
ferred from them, and something like a consistent body
of doctrine made out, by the exercise of sufficient care
and sufficient intelligence; but such careful and intelli-
gent consideration as would be necessary could hardly
be expected of many readers.
I have therefore welcomed the opportunity afforded by the
[v]
invitation from The Art Institute of Chicago to deliver
the Scammon Lectures for igxz to draw up a definitive
credo — a detailed and explicit confession of artistic faith.
The following pages will, accordingly, be found to con-
tain a statement, as clear as I can make it, of what one
painter believes and hopes and fears with regard to
painting ; of what he takes to be the malady of modern
art, and of where he looks for the remedy for it. It would
be little less than miraculous if such a statement of be-
lief should contain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth. It must contain errors, and may contain
wrongheadedness. At least it is an honest attempt at a
contribution to the truth.
It has been said that the criticism of art by an artist is
never anything else than an apology for his own work.
This is so far true that the expression of opinions defi-
nitely held must be the expression of ideals consciously
striven for, but I should be sorry to have it thought that
my description of what painting should be is intended for
a description of what I suppose my own painting to be.
We moderns are all in the same boat together. We are
all lamentably ill educated, and we are all trying to make
up for the faults of our education by strenuous endeavor.
We paint as we can, and none of us can afford to have
the validity of his opinions judged by his success in
carrying them into practice.
KENYON COX.
[vi]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE CLASSIC SPIRIT 1
II. THE SUBJECT IN ART 36
III. DESIGN 77
IV. DRAWING 120
V. LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR . . . 158
VI. TECHNIQUE 196
[vii]
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. MILLET, "The Sower," Metropolitan Mu-
seum Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
2. POUSSIN, "The Testament of Eudamitas,"
Moltke Collection, Copenhagen .... 8
3. STEVENS, "Une Veuve," Ryerson Collection,
Chicago 16
4. GREUZE, "The Punished Son," Louvre . . 24
5. HOGARTH, "The Contract (Marriage A-la-
Mode)," National Gallery 32
6. VELAZQUEZ, "Surrender of Breda," Prado
Gallery 40
7. BLASHFIELD, "Washington Laying Down
his Commission," Court House, Baltimore 48
8. GIOTTO, "Death of St. Francis," Santa
Grace, Florence 56
9. PERUGINO, "The Virgin in Glory," Bologna 64
[ix]
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
10. LEONARDO, "The Last Supper," Milan . . 72
11. RAPHAEL, "La Disputa," Vatican ... 80
12. TITIAN, "The Entombment," Louvre . . 88
13. TINTORETTO, "Pallas Driving away Mars,"
Ducal Palace, Venice 96
14. RUBENS, "The Daughters of Leucippus,"
Munich 112
15. MILLET, "The Gleaners," Louvre . . . 118
16. HOLBEIN, "Erasmus," Louvre 124
17. INGRES, "Mme. Riviere," Louvre .... 130
18. COROT, "Dance of Nymphs," Louvre . . 136
19. WINSLOW HOMER, "The Gulf Stream," 142
Metropolitan Museum
20. BOTTICELLI, The Three Graces (fragment
of "Primavera"), Academy, Florence . . 150
21. MICHELANGELO, "Creation of Adam," Sis-
tine Chapel 156
22. REMBRANDT, "Lot and his Family" (draw-
ing) 162
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
23. VERONESE, "Venus and Mars Bound by
Cupid," Metropolitan Museum .... 170
24. FRAGONARD, "LesBaigneuses,"Lowire . . 176
25. DAVID, "The Oath of the Horatii," Louvre 182
26. PRUDHON, " L'Enlevement de Psyche,"
Louvre 188
27. INGRES, "Odalisque Couchee," Louvre . . 194
28. MILLET, " Peasant with Wheelbarrow " (etch-
ing) 200
29. Puvis DE CHAVANNES, "Rest," Amiens . 206
30. Puvis DE CHAVANNES, "The Song of the
Shepherd," Metropolitan Museum . . . 212
31. CORREGGIO, "Danae," Borghese Gallery,
Rome 218
32. REMBRANDT, "Dr. Faustus" (etching) . . 224
THE
CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
THE audience I hope to reach is made
up of two parts: of those young artists
who have, to some extent, the future of
American art in their hands, and of that
general public whose influence upon our
art, exercised through its patronage and
appreciation or its refusal of patronage
and appreciation, must be no less real
though less direct. In trying to express
such opinions and beliefs as are the re-
sult of thirty years' practice and study of
the art of painting I shall try to remem-
ber the general public in the manner of
what I have to say, avoiding technical jar-
[i]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
gon and striving to speak in the language
of all the world. But it is to the young
artists that I would especially appeal;
first, because it is more important that
they should be right; second, because there
is more danger that they will go wrong.
The public is in little danger. In general,
it is too conservative rather than the re-
verse. It listens, in a bewildered way, to
the hurly-burly of conflicting schools and
movements, tries to believe in the latest
discovery of the newest newspaper critic,
shrugs its shoulders, and buys an old-
fashioned picture that it can understand.
It may neglect true genius but it gives
little active encouragement to the sham.
The young artist is more easily led astray
by false lights. He sees countless experi-
ments, hears countless doctrines and
theories, listens to the exaltation of incom-
petence or eccentricity and to the pooh-
poohing of all quiet attainment. The more
ardent he is the more difficult he finds it
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
to keep his head. Why should he toil and
make slow progress toward an unattain-
able goal when so many short cuts to
notoriety, if not to fame, are opened be-
fore him ? Quick ! let him get something
before the public. It is much easier to find
a new way of being bad than to master the
old way of being good, and the new bad
thing is, at any rate, sure to be noticed. I
protest, it is wonderful to me that there
should any longer be such a thing as a stu-
dent of art, it has become so easy to be
hailed a master.
That there are serious students, however,
the existence of a few of our schools of
art sufficiently testifies; and it is to the
serious students of to-day, the serious
artists of to-morrow, that I especially
make my plea for the Classic Spirit.
The Classic Spirit is the disinterested
search for perfection ; it is the love of clear-
ness and reasonableness and self-control;
it is, above all, the love of permanence and
[3]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
of continuity. It asks of a work of art, not
that it shall be novel or effective, but that
it shall be fine and noble. It seeks not
merely to express individuality or emotion
but to express disciplined emotion and
individuality restrained by law. It strives
for the essential rather than the accidental,
the eternal rather than the momentary-
loves impersonality more than personality,
and feels more power in the orderly suc-
cession of the hours and the seasons than
in the violence of earthquake or of storm.
And it loves to steep itself in tradition. It
would have each new work connect itself
in the mind of him who sees it with all the
noble and lovely works of the past, bring-
ing them to his memory and making their
beauty and charm a part of the beauty and
charm of the work before him. It does not
deny originality and individuality — they
are as welcome as inevitable. It does not
consider tradition as immutable or set
rigid bounds to invention. But it desires
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
that each new presentation of truth and
beauty shall show us the old truth and
the old beauty, seen only from a different
angle and colored by a different medium.
It wishes to add link by link to the chain
of tradition, but it does not wish to break
the chain.
The Classic Spirit, as I understand it,
and wish to present it to you, has little
to do with the so-called "classic school"
founded by Jacques Louis David. Indeed
this spirit seldom was lacking in the art of
the world before his advent. Until the end
of the eighteenth century the stream of
tradition in the art of painting was con-
tinuous, and even the most powerful in-
dividualities and the most romantic tem-
peraments stood but little aside from it.
Michelangelo himself, the greatest of ro-
manticists, was a classic by one side of his
nature, and it was only that side that was
understood by his contemporaries or was
effective with them ; and even Rembrandt,
[5]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
strangely and imperiously as he modified
what he found there, searched the art of
the past for the foundations of his own.
These were the exceptions. The others,
even the greatest, were content to modify
slightly the tradition they had received
and to hand it down to their successors.
Giorgione and Titian enriched and broad-
ened the tradition they had received from
Bellini; Rubens studied their method,
founded his own "upon it, and in his turn
passed it on to Watteau and the eighteenth
century.
Then came the French Revolution, and
'' among the many things, good and bad, for
which it is responsible, one is the break-
ing short off of the traditions of painting.
David, a revolutionary in art as in poli-
tics, influenced by the imagined revival of
Roman ideals, invented an art founded
on antique sculpture — an art which con-
temned color, neglected light and shade,
destroyed technical beauty, and reduced
[6]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
even drawing to a kind of mechanical
correctness without life or accent — and by
his powerful character and great influence
imposed this art upon all continental
Europe. When the storm was over it was
only in the one country which had con-
tinuously stood out against the revolution
— it was only in England — that any
vestiges of the art of painting remained.
Prudhon, who had remained a real painter
in spite of David, died in 1823, and Gros,
who would have been a real painter if
he could, committed suicide. France was
given over to the Guerins and Girodets,
and in Germany they were producing car-
toons. Lawrence, with his clever but mer-
etricious echoes of Reynolds and Gains-
borough, and Constable, the preserver
of the landscape tradition, were the only
painters left.
Then began the long confusion of cross
currents and opposing forces which is the
history of modern art. For the first time
I?)
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
since art began there was no accepted
tradition, no authoritative guide; it was
every man for himself. The system of ap-
prenticeship, by which a painter learned
to practise his art in a recognized and
approved manner before making such
changes in that manner as his own tem-
perament and his own needs might sug-
gest, was gone; and if it could have been
revived there were no longer any masters
to take apprentices. The school, which
had succeeded to this system, taught only
a little drawing, and that of a purely
naturalistic kind. Before each individual
artist, for the last hundred years, there
has been the impossible and heart-break-
ing task of creating his art again from the
beginning; of finding out both what he
wanted to do and how he should do it;
of discovering and piecing together from
the study of nature and of the art of the
past, composition and drawing, light and
shade and color, even the nature of his
[8]
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THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
materials and the method of handling
them. Is it any wonder that modern art
has produced great talents but very few
masters ? Is it any wonder that we can
show nothing like the assured and abun-
dant production of the giants of the past ?
Is it any wonder that the record of modern
artists is so often that of failure and de-
spair; of modern art that of inconclusive
gropings, leading nowhere but into the
bog?
What has been generally known as the
Romantic Revolution in art was, so far
at least as painting is concerned, essen-
tially an effort to get back the traditions
which had been lost, to renew the connec-
tion with the past, to rediscover the art.
Its great leader, Delacroix, was a man of
ardent and romantic temperament, but he
had a great respect for the past and for
tradition, and it was a sound instinct that
led him to found his art upon that of
Rubens, the heir of the Venetians and the
[9]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
modifier of their manner to suit more
modern requirements. From Rubens,
through Watteau, was descended the
whole of the French eighteenth century,
and from Rubens, through Van Dyck,
the whole English School, then still sub-
sisting, though its greatest days were past.
If the old conditions could be restored at
all it would be by beginning again with
the great Fleming as the nearest source of
authentic tradition. In a splendid effort
to do this Delacroix spent his life, and he
produced many noble works in the course
of it, but in spite of such personal suc-
cesses, that life was, in the main, a failure.
He was praised and admired and made a
member of the Institute, but he could not
found a school with a stable tradition.
A similar attempt was made by the great
landscape painters, Rousseau and Corot.
They were both profound students of
nature, and the addition they made to
the world's stock of knowledge of natural
[10]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
aspects was so great that we are apt to
think of them as naturalists first of all. In
reality they were both of classic temper.
Rousseau founded his art upon Ruysdael
and Hobberria, Corot founded his upon
Claude and Poussin. Their effort was to
vitalize tradition and turn it to new uses;
to gain new knowledge but to crystallize
it in forms reminiscent of the past. Look
at any of their characteristic works and
you will feel, underlying the detailed study
of natural forms in Rousseau, underlying
the atmospheric mystery of Corot, a some-
thing which connects these modern pict-
ures with everything fine that had been
done before them. Modern as they are,
they are pervaded with the Classic Spirit.
But of all these "revolutionaries" the
most classically minded was precisely that
one who was considered the most revolu-
tionary of all, Jean Fra^ois Millet. This
"man of the woods," as his fellow pupils
in Delaroche's studio called him, this
[11]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
painter of peasants whom the critics of the
day thought a socialist and almost a bomb
thrower, was a conservative of conserva-
tives, a worshipper of that stern old clas-
sicist Poussin, the last practitioner of
"the grand style." So essentially classic
was he that, in the pages to follow, you
will find me citing him more often, in il-
lustration of my meaning, than any other
modern painter, unless it be that greatest
of the upholders of the official school —
Ingres.
For, during all the changes that have
passed over the art of France, the "school"
has subsisted, and still subsists, modifying
slowly its regimen, producing many re-
spectable painters if very few great ones,
supplying a training most imperfect, in-
deed, but the only thing resembling a
training of any kind that is to be had. To
the school the very men who have revolted
against it owe a great part of their effec-
tive force, and to the school, as a restrain-
[12]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
ing influence, we probably owe it that the
present state of the art is not more chaotic
and more hopeless than it actually is.
Of the destructive and disintegrating in-
fluences that have been brought to bear
on modern art, the most damaging was
probably the invention of photography.
In the old days the young artist learned
his art first, accepting the methods and
the formulae of his master, before he went
to nature that he might add his own obser-
vations to the inherited stock. Nowadays
he is set to study nature in the beginning,
being left to find his own conventions as
best he may. The result of this has been
greatly to increase the tendency of the
young artist to consider the exact imita-
tion of nature as the primary problem of
art. Photography seemed to show him, all
at once, what nature actually looks like,
and painting embarked on a long and
ruinous emulation of the camera. What
had been a natural and, in some respects,
[13]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
a healthy and necessary pre-occupation of
the student became the guiding principle
of a lifetime, and men thought not of how
to produce a beautiful picture, but of what
were the exact facts of the world about
them.
In England the result was the Pre-
Raphaelite movement, which finally trans-
formed itself into the aesthetic movement
of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, but not be-
fore it had destroyed what was left of the
older English school. Some part of the old
tradition still lingered there, and Etty,
though an artist of limited range, was a
sound and brilliant technician. He has
had no successor, and English art, since
the days of the Brotherhood, has been
drifting rudderless, like that of other coun-
tries.
In France the same desire for realism in-
fluenced a long line of men, from Courbet,
who, fortunately for us, was not so realis-
tic as he thought himself, to Bastien-Le
[14]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
Page. I was myself a student in Paris
when Bastien was making some of his first
great successes, and can look back, now,
with a certain amusement, at the exagger-
ated estimation in which we held him.
Here, it seemed to us, was the last word of
art — the consummation to which every-
thing had been tending. All progress in
art had been, we thought, a nearer ap-
proximation to the truth of nature — here
was the truth itself, as literal and as like as
the image at the back of a camera. The
exact portraiture of a particular peasant
woman in a particular hay-field under the
nearly unchanging light of a cloudy sky-
that being the only outdoor light in which
such detailed portraiture is possible —
what more could one ask ? Well, somehow,
one did ask more. Composition and line
and color and beauty of workmanship
continued to assert themselves as desirable
qualities, and by this time all the world is
pretty well agreed that pure naturalism is
[15]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
a failure. Now that some artists and some
critics are trying to prove that photog-
raphy may be an art we are ready for the
definite conclusion that art should not be
photographic.
Another manifestation of the naturalistic
tendency is what has usually been called
the impressionistic movement — that which
people are now beginning to call luminism.
What is essential hi it is an investigation
of the laws of light and an effort to invent
means of rendering the effects of natural
light upon objects. It is not necessary,
here, to go deeply into the question of the
nature or validity of these means, or the
measure of success attained. The im-
pressionists managed, at least, to call at-
tention to the existence of light and color
and to enliven the palette even of the
schoolmen. But the movement was scien-
tific rather than artistic, and the pictures
of its strongest man, Claude Monet, often
seem like a series of demonstrations rather
[16]
Plate 3. — "Une Veuve," from the painting by Alfred Stevens.
In the Collection of Mr. Martin A. Ryerson, Chicago.
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
than things of beauty created for human
delight. It is, really, only in this country
that the impressionistic formula has been
seized upon for its capabilities of beauty
and, in the hands of Hassam and others,
bent to the ends of decoration.
While all this intensive study of natural
fact and natural aspect was going on, there
were artists who revolted from it; artists
who cared more for art than for nature
and whose effort was for self-expression
rather than for the recording of observa-
tions. I shall mention but two of them,
men of widely differing temperaments and
achievements, because the nature and the
degree of their success and failure seem
to me symptomatic of the disease of nine-
teenth century art — Gustave Moreau and
James MacNeill Whistler. Moreau was a
man of intellect, a poet and a dreamer;
Whistler was pure painter, caring only
for the material beauty of his production,
and despising any literary implication.
[17]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
Both were entirely out of sympathy with
the art that was practised about them and
with the public to whom they must appeal.
Moreau shut himself up and produced in
loneliness and isolation a series of strange
works, often of great beauty but with a
taint of morbidity in them. Whistler
fought the world instead of flying from it,
and wasted in brilliant but futile contro-
versy half the strength that should have
gone to the creation of masterpieces. The
weakness of the one was a lack of balance,
of the other a lack of training ; of both, the
absence of any normal and right relation
to their public. How pitifully slight is the
production of either compared to the mag-
nificent fecundity of those old masters
who, secure in the possession of a sound
tradition and assured of a constant de-
mand for what they could do, poured
forth masterpiece after masterpiece with
the ease of a fruit tree bearing good fruit.
For it is only in our modern time that the
[18]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
unpopularity of the greatest artists has be-
come so proverbial that we are tempted to
think unpopularity a proof of greatness.
In the great days of art the artist under-
stood his public and his public understood
him, and together they produced those
works which we still admire. It is not till
the time of Rembrandt that we hear of
unappreciated genius, and even then
Rembrandt is the exception, not the rule.
It is this lack of relation between the
artist and the public that has created the
modern exhibition, and the exhibition,
necessary as it has become, is a necessary
evil. It has made art, what it should never
be, competitive, and has set each artist to
outshriek his rivals in the bid for public
notice. First it created those bastard forms
of art, the "gallery picture" and the "ma-
chine du Salon." Then it begat the sensa-
tional subject, and we had blood and
horror as our daily diet. When these be-
came too common to attract attention
[19]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
there was nothing left for it but eccentric-
ity of method; and that eccentricity has
become more and more extreme until it
has seemed that modern art is bent upon
emulation of -the Gadarene swine and is
rushing down a steep place into the sea.
Of some of the phases of ultra-modern
art I find it difficult to speak with fairness
or with any patience. I should wish to be-
lieve in a certain element of honest con-
viction in it and to accept the explanation
of its adherents that it is a revolt against
naturalism and an effort to get back the
abstract quality and expressiveness of lines
and colors, independently of their repre-
sentative character. If so, the pendulum
has swung as far to one side as it had
swung to the other. But there seems to me,
also, to be a vast amount of mere charla-
tanism among the Neo-Impressionists
and the Post-Impressionists, and an even
larger amount of sheer madness. Van
Gogh cut off his own ear when he failed
[20]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
to kill his friend Gauguin with a razor;
Toulouse-Lautrec had a keeper; several
others committed suicide or died in asy-
lums. And still the game goes on, until we
have men painting and exhibiting things
made up of outlines that look like the
drawings of a bad boy on the walls of an
outhouse and of flat masses of primary
colors arranged with no conceivable rela-
tion to nature. We have even had compo-
sitions in which the human figure is
represented by a series of triangles and a
portrait is symbolized by an arrangement
of cubes, and we have critics writing
books and articles to prove that this is the
real and vital art, the "art of the future."
It seems to me quite evident that any
further "progress" in this direction is im-
possible. We have reached the edge of the
cliff and must turn back or fall into the
abyss. It may be that such a turning back
is impossible. It may be that there is never
again to be a sane and vigorous art, firmly
[21]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
based on a sound tradition, appealing to
and understood by its public and produc-
ing naturally and without convulsion
something for which that public has a use.
But if such an art is to exist again it can
only be by the reversal of those tendencies
that have brought us to the present pass.
The scientific spirit, the contempt of tra-
dition, the lack of discipline and the exal-
tation of the individual have very nearly
made an end of art. It can only be restored
by the love of beauty, the reverence for
tradition, the submission to discipline and
the rigor of self-control. We must get back
to the permanent and the eternal — we
must regain the Classic Spirit.
This spirit has much more in common
with modern naturalism than with mod-
ern emotionalism and modern individual-
ism, though it is apart from either. It can
make room — has always made room — for
the study of nature. It recognizes that
painting is essentially an imitative art, and
[22]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
that its raw material is the aspect of the
external world. It can use any amount of
knowledge of this aspect, and it has no
toleration of ignorance or indolence; but
it also recognizes that painting is an art,
not a science, and that knowledge un-
assimilated and unsubdued to the ruling
purpose of art is useless and obstructive.
The primary business of painting is to
create a beautiful surface, beautifully
divided into interesting shapes, enlivened
with noble lines, varied with lovely and
harmonious colors. Its secondary business
is to remind the spectator of things he has
seen and admired in nature, and to create
^
the illusion of truth. The amount of actual
truth it shall contain will vary with the
purpose and the situation. Very little will
do for the ornamentation of a vase, but
an easel-picture may contain so much as
to seem — not to be — an exact record of
observed facts. If it break the connection
altogether and cease to suggest nature it
[23]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
may still be art but it will cease to be the
art of painting. On the other hand, the
amount of art it shall contain is constant.
The artistic intention must dominate every-
thing, control everything, mould every-
thing to its purpose. Its sovereignty must
be absolute and complete.
But so to control facts, and to bend them
to one's purpose, one must know them,
and know them vastly better than he who
merely copies them. There is a certain
kind of naturalism that is only less indo-
lent than the ignoring of nature. With a
good eye and a good deal of practice you
may copy a head or an arm, pretty well,
without much intellectual strain. To learn
that head or that arm, so that you shall be
able to distinguish the essential from the
accidental; so that you shall know what
is important in it, and to your purpose,
and what is not; to master it, in a word —
that is a man's work and takes the whole
of the man.
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
But if it is difficult to learn nature, as a
classicist should know it, it is even more
difficult to learn art. It is not merely that
we have, to-day, no authoritative tradition,
and must build one for ourselves. If we,
in this country, were entirely shut off from
the rest of the world and from all the art
that has been produced, we should, quite
naturally, set to work to produce an art of
our own, and we should produce it. It
might take a long time in the doing, but
we should do it, as every other people has
done. That sort of natural production has,
however, become forever impossible. Pho-
tography and modern means of communi-
cation have brought the ends of the earth
together and rendered all ages contem-
porary. We have become as familiar with
the art of Egypt and of Assyria as with
that of the nineteenth century, and the
art of Japan is no more strange to us than
that of England. We know all art, super-
ficially— we know no art thoroughly.
[25]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
We have all the traditions to study, and
we have none of our own. We can but pick
and choose, trying to disentangle the im-
portant and the universal from the unim-
portant and the local or temporary, to de-
cide what is proper and useful for us and
to neglect the rest. We can only hope to
make a tradition for ourselves out of many
traditions by a series of eliminations.
The task is a tremendous one and, as I
have said, I do not know whether it is pos-
sible of performance. But there are rea-
sons which lead me to believe that if the
thing can be done at all it is more likely
to be done here in America than any-
where else.
Because we are a new people the world
seems to expect of us a new art, radically
different in some strange way from the
art of older countries, and to be disap-
pointed at our conservatism. It seems to
me that precisely because we are a new
people our art might have been expected
[26]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
to be conservative. We have not yet had
enough of the old and fine things to be
wearied of them. We do not find it neces-
sary to strain our invention in the effort
to discover some new spice for a jaded
appetite. In this country it is only a few
critics who suffer from artistic indigestion
— the rest of the world is not yet tired of
hearing Aristides called the Just. We are,
in all things, at bottom, a conservative
people, but in nothing are we so much so
as in all matters concerning art. Our litera-
ture, our architecture, our painting and
sculpture are more conservative and less
influenced by fads and fashions than any
now going in the world. Of our great
public buildings it may be said, and it has
been made a reproach to them, that there
is nothing distinctively American about
them. Yet such buildings are produced
nowhere else, to-day, because everywhere
else, architects are striving to produce
something new. Here they are willing to
[27]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
do the obvious — the classic — thing because
the classic thing has not yet become obvi-
ous to us. If we go on doing the classic
thing in architecture until its language has
become natural and easy to us, there is a
possibility that we may begin to use it
originally, and to produce, almost without
knowing it, a national style. If we strive
for originality now, there is little hope
of anything better than the architectural
chaos that we have had so much of.
As with our architecture, so it is with our
painting. There is, already, something
like an "American School" of painting,
and the most notable characteristic of that
school is its conservatism. It is by no
means so conservative as I would have it,
or so free from the dangers which threaten
all modern art, but it is, on the whole, the
sanest and soundest school existing.
I have heard this conservatism of our
American artists attributed to a mere de-
sire of popularity, rather than to anything
[28]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
like a respect for law and for tradition on
the part of the artists themselves. If this
were true there would still be something
to be said in favor of it. The public is en-
tirely right if it demands sanity and sobri-
ety of the artist; and the artist is entirely
right if, without compromising his artistic
ideal, he strives to produce something
which the public wants. After all, why
should not art be popular? The greatest
art always has been so. The art of Phid-
ias was popular in Athens; the art of
Titian was popular in Venice; the art of
Raphael was popular in Rome and every-
where else, and has remained popular to
this day. Under proper conditions art
would always be popular, for the artist
would be one of the people, having the
same ideals and thoughts and feelings as
the public he served, and would, quite
naturally, express the mind of his public
as his public would have it expressed. I
do not say that all great art is popular —
[29]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
still less that all popular art is great. But
I do say that when art is not popular
something is wrong, either with the art
or with the public — or with both. And
when inferior art is popular it is be-
cause of the good in it, not because of
the evil.
But it is not true that the mere desire of
popularity — the commercial consideration
of what will sell — is at the bottom of the
comparative conservatism of American
painting. American painters are as sincere
and as earnest as any in the world, but
their sincerity and their earnestness are
not leading them to the search for novelty.
In all countries the ordinary painter, like
the ordinary man of any kind, takes the
easiest way. The mass of the painters of
this country, as of all countries, practise the
current methods of the time; but the ex-
ceptional men, instead of striving for some-
thing new, are trying to get back to some-
thing old. They are trying to get back
[30] '
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
composition and the monumental style;
they are trying to get back the expres-
siveness of the line; they are attempting
purity and beauty of color; they are even
trying to revive old technical methods,
underpainting in tempera and using glazes
again, which modern art had almost
tabooed.
I would not have you think there is little
to be done — if it were so I should not be
making this plea for the Classic Spirit.
There is very much to be done. Our art
is not only far below what an art should
be; not only far below what the art of the
Renaissance was ; it is still far below what
the art of France was in the earlier part of
the nineteenth century. But just as cer-
tainly, I believe, is it the best art now being
produced in the world, and the art, of all
now being produced in the world, that has
the most in common with the great art of
the past and the largest promise for the
art of the future.
[31]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
In the course of a trip to Europe, taken
last summer, the truth of this statement
was strongly impressed upon me. It is
true I saw little of modern painting, and it
was the study of older art that made me
feel the kinship to it of the art we are mak-
ing here. The more I saw of the great
masterpieces of the Renaissance the more
encouraged I felt as to the validity of the
best work I had seen at home, and the
more I found myself saying, "This is
what we, in America, have been trying to
do." For the other end of the comparison
I must call another witness — one out of
many. Last spring a very distinguished
American painter who has resided for
many years in France was temporarily in
this country, and was taken by a brother
artist to see the exhibitions of the Ten
American Painters and of the National
Academy of Design. The exhibition of the
Academy was, as it always is, crowded
and ill-displayed from lack of adequate
[32]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
galleries, and this lack of space and crowd-
ing had kept, as it always does, some of
our best artists from exhibiting at all. It
was a fair average display of current work,
not a selection of the best. Yet in the
opinion of this artist, fresh from years of
foreign residence, it was of an extraor-
dinarily high average of merit, which it
would be impossible to parallel, to-day, in
Paris. He was quite as enthusiastic as to
the smaller exhibition, saying again, that
such a showing of ten men would be im-
possible in Paris; to which the not too
boastful answer was: "We have twenty
others as good, here in America."
There is plenty of such testimony, if it
were necessary to cite it. We do not know
how good our art really is. We are, natu-
rally enough, afraid of our own judgment
and unable to believe that anything can be
really good until the world has said so in
unmistakable terms. To such of the gen-
eral public as will listen to me I would
[33]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
say-: patronize our own art. Patronize it as
discriminatingly and intelligently as possi-
ble, but patronize it. There is no other way
in which you can do so much good to art,
and, if you need a more personal motive,
there is no other way in which you are so
likely to get your money's worth.
To the young artist my message would
be somewhat different. To him I would
say: our art is, indeed, the best alive to-
day, but the best is but poor compared to
what has been or to what should be. Let
us strive to make it equal to any, and to
that end let us fill ourselves with the Classic
Spirit. Let us strive for perfection, recog-
nizing that perfection is only to be attained
by discipline and by self-control. Let us
think not what is new, but what is good;
not what is easy and attractive, but what
is eternally right. Let us attach ourselves
to what is noblest in the art of the past,
trying to understand the reason of its
nobility, and spend ourselves in generous
[34]
THE CLASSIC SPIRIT
emulation. Let us believe that passion
and personality will find their way into
our art, if we have them, and that it is a
poor and sapless individuality that can be
killed by a little hard work. Only in this
spirit can a great art be created. Only in
this spirit can a true school of painting
exist. If we have this spirit, I believe, there
is at least a chance that a great school of
painting may come to exist here in our
own country.
[SSJ
II
THE SUBJECT IN ART
THE idea that the subject of a work of
art is of no importance whatever has been
taught us so thoroughly and has become
so ingrained in us that it seems almost
necessary to apologize for mentioning
such a thing at all to a modern audience.
We have been so deeply impressed with
the truth — for it is a truth as far as it goes
—that it is the amount of art contained
in a given picture which counts, not the
matter on which that art is expended, that
we have concluded that any subject will
do as well as any other, and that there
are no distinctions of subject matter
worth considering. We have so completely
learned that a still-life by Chardin may be
better than an altar-piece by Carlo Dolci
[36]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
that we have forgotten to ask whether it
can be as good as Titian's "Entomb-
ment."
One may be quite prepared to admit that
the old rigid categories, by which a his-
tory painter was always superior to a
genre painter and any figure painter was
the better of any landscape painter, were
a trifle absurd. One may feel that the
French Academicians, admitting Watteau
to their membership only under the slight-
ing title of "Peintre des Fetes Galantes,"
were belittling a greater man than any of
themselves. One may welcome the mod-
ern conquest of freedom of choice as a
salutary victory for common-sense — a
victory which was, after all, only a re-
conquest; for the old masters made no
distinctions or specialties, every master
being simply a painter, and painting what
came his way, from an altar-piece to a
signboard. Yet a distinction as to nobility
of subject matter will still subsist. Some
[37]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
subjects will permit and demand the exer-
cise of greater powers than others, and
are, in so far as they do this, nobler sub-
jects. A man may paint a jug, a loaf of
bread and a dish of grapes and may show,
in doing so, such delicate perception of gra-
dations of light, such fine sense of color,
such mastery of surfaces and textures,
above all such a modest and pure spirit,
as shall mark him a true artist and make
him forever admirable and lovable. But
he cannot put into the rendering of such
a subject the lofty powers of design and
drawing that make the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel one of the wonders of the
world. You cannot make a Michelangelo
out of a Chardin, and you cannot exert the
powers of a Michelangelo on the subjects
of Chardin. It may be better to succeed
with Chardin than to fail in attempting
to be a Michelangelo, but the powers ex-
ercised by Michelangelo, and the sub-
jects which permit of the exercise of such
L38]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
powers, are eternally the nobler and the
more important.
The modern view was admirably ex-
pressed in a favorite saying of the late
Augustus Saint-Gaudens which has been
frequently quoted. "You may do any-
thing," he used to say, "it is the way you
do it that counts." As he meant it, the
saying is a true one, for he did not mean
that if you do a thing cleverly enough, with
great technical skill and command of
material, that alone will make it a great
work of art. He included sincerity, nobil-
ity of temper, high purpose, a love of
beauty and a love of truth, among the
elements of "the way you do it"; and he
would have placed mere virtuosity, how-
ever excellent a thing in itself, far below
these qualities in his scale of values. He
would have been the first to admit that
there is a sense in which the reverse of his
proposition is equally true. If the thing
done be noble it does not matter how it is
[39]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
done. If the picture or the statue have
dignity of conception and grandeur of
mass and line, if it conveys to you a sense
of imaginative grasp on the part of the
artist, if it arouses emotion and elevates
the mind, it may be ruggedly — almost
clumsily — executed; it may be entirely
devoid of surface charm and technical
dexterity and be none the less a work of
the highest art.
It will not be badly executed, for the feel-
ing of the artist, however right and noble,
can only be expressed by technical means,
and the means used must, necessarily, be
right means for the purpose of such expres-
sion. If he has conveyed his meaning it is
certain that he has sufficiently mastered
the language by which such meanings may
be conveyed. But it is by what he has said
and done that you judge him. How he has
said and done it may be a question of great
and absorbing interest to other artists and
to special students of art, but is, after all,
[40]
i
i
PQ
B
-3
C
S
THE SUBJECT IN ART
a subsidiary question to the world for
whom he works.
I can think of no better instance of what
I mean than the earliest of Jean Francois
Millet's great series of peasant pictures,
"The Sower" (PL l),nowin theVanderbilt
Collection at the Metropolitan Museum
of New York. Before he created it Millet
had painted a number of charming little
pictures of nude female figures, admirably
executed, supremely able in their way, by
no means to be despised, but not what he
wanted to do — not the expression of his
greatest powers. He wanted to paint an
Epic of the Soil, and the first book of it
was the sowing of the seed. The brilliant
technical method of his earlier work was
not suited to his present purpose; it was
too suave, too rich, too easy, to give the
impression of rugged strength and sim-
plicity that he wished to convey. He had to
invent a new handling and a new technical
manner, which he afterward developed to
[41]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
such perfection that, in his later works,
his mere painting is as wonderful as his
grand design and powerful drawing. But
in this first essay in the new manner he is
a little awkward, almost fumbling and
clumsy. It does not greatly matter. The
largeness of silhouette, the august gran-
deur of movement, the nobility of concep-
tion carry it off. The thing done is fine,
and any rudeness in the manner of the
doing becomes a matter of little impor-
tance.
This may seem like a question of treat-
ment rather than a question of subject,
but it is not entirely so. The two things
are intimately related. Millet could not
have given the same effect of nobility if his
subject had not been intrinsically noble.
Doubtless so great an artist was able to
elevate any subject by the largeness of his
treatment and the "three pears on a
plate or table" may well have been, for
a painter, such a revelation of his power
[42]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
as our own Wyatt Eaton found them.
Nevertheless, if Millet had painted noth-
ing but a series of such subjects he would
not have been the great master we know,
and some of his highest powers would
never have been exercised.
The highest subject for the exercise of
the greatest powers of a painter is the
human figure, nude or so draped as to ex-
press, rather than to conceal, its structure
and movement — the subject of the Greeks
and of Michelangelo — and this is the sub-
ject of all Millet's work. After the early
days he seldom did an entirely unclothed
figure, though his "Goose Girl Bathing"
is one of the most wonderful and beautiful
things in the world, but it was the nude
he was continually striving to express. In
the costume of his peasants he found long-
used garments taking the form of the body,
becoming almost a part of it, as he said to
Eaton, and "expressing even more than
the nude the larger and simpler forms of
nature."
[43J
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
The human figure, its bulk and form and
action, that was the subject of all his
works, but the more specific subjects of the
separate pictures were equally noble and
universal. Doubtless the academic makers
of categories would not have seen or under-
stood this. They would have classed him
as a painter of peasants with Jan Steen or
Ostade. But Millet has painted nothing
trivial or unimportant, no smokers or
card-players, no drinking in taverns or
dancing in rings. Every one of his great
pictures has a subject as old as mankind,
a subject of immense and eternal import
to the race. Plowing and sowing and reap-
ing, the hewing of wood and the drawing
of water, carding and spinning and the
making of garments, things in which all
mankind is interested and in which the
bulk of mankind always has been and
always will be occupied, these are his
subjects. Shepherds have watched their
sheep from the time before Abraham was,
as Millet's shepherds watch theirs, and
[44]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
mothers have fed their young or assisted
"The First Steps" since the Garden of
Eden. Fortunately for his purpose, the
life of the tillers of the soil had changed
but little and machinery had not yet in-
vaded the fields, and he was able to find in
the daily life of the people about him sub-
jects truly typical of the history of hu-
manity— subjects much more essentially
and eternally classic than the straddling
Greek and Roman warriors of those who
arrogated to themselves the title of classi-
cists.
I would by no means intimate that it is
the duty of every artist to attempt sub-
jects of the highest class. It is rather his
duty to choose such subjects as are suited
to his powers and give greatest scope for
the development of the qualities he pos-
sesses. He may paint genre or landscape
or portrait or still-life and be a true artist
whose work the world will cherish, for the
powers necessary to success in any of these
[45]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
fields are as rare as they are truly admira-
ble. Still, it is not true that all subjects
are alike, or that success with one kind of
subject is as good as success with another.
One may sincerely admire Frans Hals and
be sincerely glad that he painted what he
could do so well instead of trying to do
that at which he would certainly have
failed; one is not therefore, ready to rank
him with Michelangelo and above Raph-
ael. One may derive unalloyed pleasure
from the marvellous skill of Vollon and
yet be certain that the art of Millet is of a
higher kind. The different kinds of merit
proper to the different kinds of subject
can never be quite perfectly united — there
must always be some sacrifice, some-
where— but now and then, in the works of
the greatest masters, so much of technical
beauty and perfection is found united to
so much of grandeur of conception and
largeness of style that we may receive
from one work the largest possible sum of
[46]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
enjoyment. These are the world's unap-
proachable masterpieces.
But if the modern world has come to
think any subject as good as any other it
has made one very curious exception to
the rule. It has come to think what it calls
"the literary subject" an actual draw-
back, and to consider that the presence,
in a work of art, of what is called a " story"
is of itself enough to relegate that work to
an inferior rank. Yet how such an opinion
can have been arrived at, in view of the
history of art in all ages, is the greatest
of puzzles. For art, from its beginnings
among the cave men, has always told
stories; and its twin purposes of illustra-
tion and of decoration have always gone
hand in hand, illustration being generally,
in the mind of the artist as in that of his
audience, the more important of the two.
The Assyrian celebrated the prowess of
his kings in hunt or in battle and the
Egyptian recorded the whole life of the
[47]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
people upon the walls of royal tombs. The
art of Greece told the story of its gods and
heroes on every vase and on every temple
front, and the pediments of the Parthenon
recounted the legends of the birth of
Pallas and of the founding of Athens.
In like manner the art of the Renaissance
occupied itself, almost exclusively, with
the sacred story of the Old and New Tes-
taments or with the legends of the saints,
from the time that Giotto painted the
life of Francis at Assisi and the life of
Christ in the Arena Chapel until Raphael
spread his "Bible" upon the vaultings of
the Loggia of the Vatican. The greatest
work of its mightiest master, the most sub-
lime and awe-inspiring creation of all art,
was nothing else than the story of the
Creation and the Fall of Man, so told, with
such clarity and such power, as never
story, before or since, was told in colors.
Even the Venetians, those lovers of the
sumptuous and the decorative, the crea-
[48]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
tors of what we know as genre, could not
get on without a story to tell, and when the
story seems absent to us it is because it
has been lost, not because it was not there.
Titian's enigmatic picture which is tra-
ditionally known as the "Sacred and Pro-
fane Love" is now said to represent
"Medea and Venus," and Giorgione's
"Partie Champetre" and "Soldier and
Gypsy" are thought to be illustrations of
this or that Italian novel.
It may be that in these later instances
the story was a concession to the demands
of the public, and that while the ostensible
subject was the temptation of Medea by
Venus the real subject was the contrast
between a nude figure and a draped one.
It may be that Giorgione would have been
equally content with his idyllic dreams
had they no definite context in his mind or
in the minds of those for whom he painted.
It certainly was not so with the earlier
masters, and as certainly it was not so with
[49]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
that later master, Rembrandt. It is a com-
monplace of criticism that Dutch art told
no stories, and that the Dutch burghers,
for whom it was created, asked nothing of
it but the portraiture of themselves and
their wives or of their daily life and their
tame and comfortable country. The artist
who attempted more did so at his peril,
and Ruysdael paid for his love of rocks
and waterfalls as Rembrandt paid for his
love of stories, with poverty and discour-
agement. Yet Rembrandt was always tell-
ing stories. His public did not want them ;
it wanted nothing of him but portraits that
should be like; and when his portraits
ceased to be neat and obvious likenesses it
wanted nothing of him whatever. Yet he
painted stories over and over again, his
etchings are filled with stories, and, more
than all, his drawings, which the public
never saw, are one long series of illustra-
tions. He was haunted with stories from
which he could not escape and to which
[50]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
he returned again and again, illustrating
their every phase and turning and twist-
ing them in every aspect. There is the
story of Lot, the story of Joseph, the story
of Tobit, for each of which he made al-
most numberless drawings, and the story
of Christ, which is the subject of his great-
est etchings. He was a great painter, a
great master of light and shade, a portrait
painter who has excelled all others in the
rendering of the human soul behind the
features; but more than any thing else he
was a great story-teller, and his imagina-
tive grasp of a story and his power of so
telling it that it shall seem real and imme-
diate to us, as if it had actually happened
before our very eyes, is perhaps the most
wonderful of his many wonderful gifts.
So great has been the dominance of the
story in art that even the landscape paint-
ers of the seventeenth century, to whose
main purpose story-telling was in no way
necessary, nearly always put in a few fig-
[51]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
ures supposed to represent the charac-
ters in some legend, sacred or profane; and
the light and frivolous art of the eigh-
teenth century tells stories too, though the
stories may be as light and frivolous as the
manner of telling.
But if you wish to know how seriously
the telling of the story may be taken by
a great artist you must read the fragments
of criticism left us by that great nine-
teenth century classicist, Jean Fra^ois
Millet. In his letters, in the fragments of
his conversation recorded for us by others,
in his few formal announcements of his
beliefs about art, you will find hardly any-
thing else mentioned. For all he says about
them, such things as drawing, or color, or
the handling of his material, might as well
not exist. Apparently his whole mind is
concentrated on the story of the picture
and the manner of its telling — everything
else is of value only as it helps the clarity
and force of the expression. For him "Art
[52]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
is a language and ... all language is in-
tended for the expression of ideas." "The
artist's first task is to find an arrangement
that will give full and striking expression
to his idea." And again, "To have painted
things that mean nothing is to have borne
no fruit." Hear him discoursing on a
print, after his favorite master Poussin, of
a man upon his death-bed (PL 2) : "How
simple and austere the interior ; only that
which is necessary, no more ; the grief of
the family, how abject; the calm move-
ment of the physician as he lays the back
of his hand upon the dying man's heart;
and the dying man, the care and sorrow in
his face, and his hands . . . they show age,
toil, and suffering." Not one word about
anything else — all other things are but
means — the telling of the story is the end
and the essential. He has given us, in a
letter to a critic of art, a more formal pro- !
fession of faith — a brief statement of what
he thought fundamental in art and of the
[53]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF. VIEW
principles by which he was consciously
guided in his own work.
"The objects introduced in a picture,"
he says, "should not appear to be brought
together by chance, and for the occasion,
but should have a necessary and indis-
pensable connection. I want the people
that I represent to look as if they belonged
to their place, and as if it would be im-
possible for them to think of being any-
thing else but what they are. A work must
be all of a piece, and persons and objects
must always be there for a purpose. I wish
to say fully and forcibly what is neces-
sary, so much so that I think things feebly
said had better not be said at all, since they
are, as it were, spoilt and robbed of their
charm. But I have the greatest horror of
useless accessories, however brilliant they
may be. These things only serve to distract
and weaken the general effect."
The Classic Spirit, in its austerest form,
as it envisages the subject and its treat-
[54]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
ment, could not be more clearly expressed ;
and Millet's practice was strictly in accord
with his theories. His pictures are seldom
so specifically related to a written text as
are those of Rembrandt, but each of his
characters has a history and a station, and
"could never think of being other than
what it is." One of his very great works
is "The Woman Carrying Water," which
hangs beside "The Sower" in the Metro-
politan Museum. Of its purely artistic
merits I may have occasion to speak later,
but what Millet meant it to represent —
the story he had to tell — he has himself
put into words so perfectly that one must
quote him again.
He says: "I have tried to show that she
is neither a water-carrier nor yet a servant,
but simply a woman drawing water for
the use of her household — to make soup
for her husband and children. I have tried
to make her look as if she were carrying
neither more nor less than the weight of
[55]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
the buckets full of water ; and that through
the kind of grimace which the load she
bears forces her to make, and the blinking
of her eyes in the sunlight, you should be
able to see the air of rustic kindness on
her face. I have avoided, as I always do,
with a sort of horror, everything that might
verge on the sentimental. On the con-
trary, I have tried to make her do her work
simply and cheerfully, without regarding
as a burden this act which, like other
household duties, is part of her daily task,
and the habit of her life. I have also tried
to make people feel the freshness of the
well, and to show by its ancient air how
many generations have come there before
her to draw water."
Now, if I had told you that this was what
I read in the picture, you might imagine
that I had read into it what Millet himself
had never thought of putting there; but
you have the artist's own word for it that
this "literature" was intentional— was, in-
156]
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THE SUBJECT IN ART
deed, the main intention. You cannot
have that assurance often, and in the pict-
ure I am going to mention next you will
have to use your own judgment as to
whether or not I am right in my reading.
It is a picture owned by a collector in Chi-
cago, an exquisite work by a true painter
who, at the time it was painted, came
nearer to the quality of the old Dutch mas-
ters than almost any other modern has
done — it is Alfred Stevens's "Une Veuve"
(PL 3). It is, I say, exquisitely painted,
and would be delightful to look at if it had
no story whatever; but what I want you
to observe, now, is the way the story is
told. It dates from the sixties of the last
century, and the costume and the acces-
sories are of the period to which it belongs.
In an elegant interior, panelled in white
and gold, a pretty young widow in a vo-
luminous black gown leans back in the
depths of a red velvet divan, her hands
clasped in her lap with a gesture of ner-
[57]
vous indecision. On the slender-legged
stand beside her are a little silver bell, to
show that she is accustomed to being
waited upon, a bound book, and a couple
of paper-covered novels — just enough to
indicate a refined and rather unoccupied
existence. On the seat of the divan lies a
great bouquet of flowers in its wrapping
of white paper, and on the floor at her
feet is the envelope, seal uppermost, of the
note that has come with the flowers. The
story is very unlike Millet's. Its mixture
of sentiment and delicate irony is as dif-
ferent from Millet's simple earnestness as
the rank of this fashionable lady is dif-
ferent from that of Millet's peasant wom-
an. But the art of the telling is of the
same kind — there is the same clarity, the
same precision, the same reticence. "Per-
sons and things are here for a purpose"
and there is not one detail that is not neces-
sary, not one "useless accessory."
There are a number of Stevens's early
[58]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
pictures of much the same quality, and if
any one is tempted to think their fine
literary tact a matter of no moment, and
entirely beside the bargain, he had better
compare them with the same artist's later
works, in which the love of elegance deteri-
orates into a love of bric-a-brac and the
painter of genteel comedy becomes little
better than a very skilful master of still-
life.
I hope I have proved that much of our
modern scorn for the story-telling picture
is undeserved, and that there must be
something worthy of serious attention in
a side of art that has occupied the greatest
masters since the practice of painting be-
gan. Yet there must be some cause for that
scorn — there must be some reason why
the mere epithet "story-telling," applied
to a picture, has become a term of re-
proach. I think there are three main rea-
sons for this state of affairs : painters have
told stories that were too trivial ; they have
[59]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
told stories that, however important and
interesting in themselves, were ill-fitted
for pictorial narration; and they have,
partly because of this initial fault in the
choice of the story to be told, told stories
badly.
I have heard a little anecdote that illus-
trates pretty well one of these faults, as
well as the modern suspicion of any inter-
est in a picture other than the purely pic-
torial. A modern painter had painted a
girl resting upon the sea-steps of a Vene-
tian palace, and on the step below her he
had painted a little crab at which she was
looking. But his conscience troubled him
on the score of that crab, and he gravely
consulted a friend as to whether it ought
not to be painted out, as introducing too
much literary interest! Well, I laughed, at
first, when I heard the tale, but afterward
I found myself sympathizing with the
artist and his scruples. I could not swallow
that crab myself! And then it occurred to
[60]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
me that perhaps it was only the painter's
reason that was wrong. The crab was
not "too literary"; it was not literary
enough. The interest it introduced was a
slight and trivial one. As regards the girl
it was a "useless accessory" and the story
of the girl and her fatigue, or her idle
dreams, would have been better told with-
out it.
To be fitted for pictorial treatment a story
should have some degree of importance
and of universal interest, and it should be
such a story as may be told in lines and
colors, with no necessary reliance on the
written word, or on anything outside its
frame, for the explanation of its essential
features. Then it must be told "fully and
forcibly," without the frittering away of
interest on the unimportant. Even the
light stories of eighteenth-century French
art have something of this necessary uni-
versality— they appeal to a permanent, if
not a high, element in human nature. The
[61]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
stories of Michelangelo and of Millet are
of the most fundamental and universal
interest to mankind. The intelligibility
of a story may be greatly aided by the
degree in which it is well known to every
one, and Rembrandt's Bible stories, like
Michelangelo's myths of the Creation, are
greatly helped by this universal knowl-
edge, though his own genius for pictorial
imagination was his main reliance. It is
when we have, in art, stories that of them-
selves have little import, as with so many
modern English pictures ; stories that can-
not be told by the means at the disposal of
the painter, as often with Hogarth ; stories
that are poorly or falsely and melodra-
matically told, as with Greuze, that the
story-telling picture justifies our contempt
of it.
You have heard Millet describe Poussin's
manner of painting a death-bed scene
— now see Greuze's way of doing it in
"The Punished Son" (PL 4). Look at the
[62]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
daughter at the left whose child tugs at
her, note her gesture of despair and the
careful disarrangement of her fichu —
for, even in his most moral mood, Greuze
must always give a little spice for the
voluptuary. Look at the other daughter,
beyond the bed, at her wild excitement
and outstretched arm, as if she were dash-
ing a scorpion from the brow of the dying
man. Look at the attitudes of any of the
figures, and try to imagine for a moment
that you are a spectator of anything but
a theatrical performance. This is not
story-telling, or is story-telling only in the
sense in which we were reproached with
the habit in our infancy. It is telling lies.
And the jugs and warming pans and
crutches that clutter the floor are perfect
examples of useless accessories.
So much for how not to tell a story: for
an instance of the story that cannot be
told clearly in art we shall go to Hogarth.
He was a real painter, almost a great one,
[63]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
at his best, but he wanted to do more than
painting can properly do. So, in his series
of moral tales, he is forced to all sorts of
expedients to make his meaning plain. We
will take him at his best and most mature,
in the admirably painted "Marriage
A-la-Mode." The first scene represents
"The Contract" (PL 5), and the artist
wants to tell us all sorts of things. This is
a loveless marriage, so the contracting
couple are placed ostentatiously back to
back, although there is nothing for the
bridegroom to look at and he must smirk
at empty space. The bride is, for the same
reason, playing with her engagement ring
on her handkerchief, instead of leaving it
on her finger; and, as she is afterward to
have an affair with the young lawyer, he
is already flirting with her before both
families. The new house which is building
for the young couple is seen through the
open window and, lest you should think
it any other house, the parson is compar-
[643
Plate 9. — "The Virgin in Glory," by Perugino.
In the Pinacoteca, Bologna.
THE SUBJECT IN ART
ing it with the plainly lettered plan. The
father of the bridegroom has an actual
family tree to which he can point with one
hand while he points to himself with the
other, and the document which the bride's
father offers him is conspicuously labelled
"Mortgage." Even the contract must be
carefully held sidewise, as no one would
ever hold it, in order that the endorsement
may be read. Well, the story is certainly
told, but not by pictorial means. And
Hogarth cannot escape from this shoring
up and buttressing of his story by the
written word. In the second scene of this
same series we have the steward's packet
with the paper on top marked "Bill" in
large letters, and the book on the floor is
opened 'at the title-page — which, by the
way, is where a title-page never is — that
we may read "Hoyle on Whist," and know
what game was playing the night before.
The only alternative to this sort of thing,
if one insists on telling stories of this elab-
[65]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
orate sort, is to paint a picture which may
be fairly comprehensible after one has
read the catalogue, but which means any-
thing or nothing without its title.
It is the unfitness of many stories for
telling in the language of painting that
makes so many historical pictures alto-
gether unsatisfactory and dismal. Let us
suppose an American painter proposing
to paint the Signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation. Here is a subject of great
dignity — of overwhelming importance —
but how is its dignity and importance to
be expressed ? You will have a number of
people gathered about a table, and one
of them will be signing something, but un-
less you resort to a written label you have
no means of telling what that something
is. Even so, I have conceded too much.
Some one is writing something, but it may
be anything, from his signature on a State
paper to a washing-list, so far as you can
tell from the action itself. The best you
[66]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
can make of the subject is a portrait
group, like Rembrandt's "Syndics of the
Cloth Hall." As such it may be admirable,
but it will not be the Signing of the
Emancipation Proclamation except by
courtesy, call it what you please.
Or take another historical subject that
has actually been painted, "Washington
Crossing the Delaware." Here there are
more pictorial elements — the river with
its floating ice is a good subject for a land-
scape painter, and the boats with their
crews, in strong action, rowing or pushing
off the ice cakes, afford fine opportunities
for figure drawing. But can you tell what
went before this crossing or is to come
after it? Can you give any notion of the
real and essential meaning of the incident ?
And how are you to make your hero con-
spicuous among the crowd of other actors?
You can make him stand when others
are seated; you can wrap him in a blow-
ing cloak and give him an expression of
[67]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
brooding intentness; and you can relieve
his well-known profile against the sky and
put an American flag behind him. You
will have made it plain that your subject
is Washington crossing a river in the win-
ter, and perhaps the historical knowledge
of your audience may be expected to sup-
ply the rest — but you will have rendered
your picture immortally absurd.
So great is this difficulty of the historical
subject that I can recall only one instance
in the whole history of art where it is en-
tirely and satisfactorily overcome, Velaz-
quez's "Surrender of Breda" (PL 6). The
subject was, for once, admirably fitted to
expression in graphic art, and the artist
has, to use Millet's phrase again, "found
an arrangement that gives full and strik-
ing expression to his idea." It is the sur-
render of a town that is taking place, and
the character of the background makes it
sufficiently plain that the scene is in the
Low Countries — it is possible, indeed,
[68]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
that, to one who knows the region well
enough, the localization is even more
precise. The types and the costumes are
sufficient evidence that it is a Dutch com-
mander who is surrendering to a Spaniard,
and we do not need to recognize the por-
traits of Justin of Nassau and Spinola to
understand all that is necessary. To the
right a great horse, a few heads, and
twenty or thirty tall lances against the
sky figure the Spanish army. To the left
are the guards of the Dutch general with
their shorter pikes and halberds. Justin
bends low before his victor, who places a
kindly hand upon his shoulder, and be-
tween their dark figures is a shield-shaped
space of brilliant light in the midst of
which, and almost in the exact middle of
the picture, the key of the surrendered
city stands out sharply. It is the key of
the composition and of the story no less
than of Breda.
If the story to be told could often be ex-
[69]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
pressed as clearly and as fully as it is in
this instance, we should hear less objec-
tion to historical painting as a manner of
artistic production.
But it is just in the one situation where
there is a natural public demand for the
historical subject that that kind of subject,
particularly in this country, is most dif-
ficult to handle successfully. In asking
that our public buildings should be
decorated with paintings relating to our
own history our people are only asking
what every other people has asked from
time immemorial. Unfortunately our his-
tory is short, our modern costume form-
less and ugly, and American historical
subjects particularly unfitted for pictorial
and, especially, for decorative treatment.
I have said that the highest walk of figure
painting concerns itself with "the human
figure, nude or so draped as to express
rather than to conceal its structure and
movement," but the costume of the last
[70]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
three centuries lends itself little to such
treatment of the figure, and the painter
who cares greatly for the expressiveness
of the body will feel little attraction to belt
buckles and brass buttons. Again, mural
painting, from its association with arch-
itecture, is especially an art of formal and
symmetrical composition, of ihonumental
arrangements and balanced lines and
masses, and such composition necessarily
destroys all illusion of veracity in the de-
piction of an historical incident. Finally,
decoration demands sumptuous and bril-
liant, or, at any rate, studied and beauti-
ful, color; and too many of our historical
subjects afford little opportunity for this.
Thus a love for the human figure, a love
for monumental and truly decorative
composition, and a love for color, all tend
to lead our mural painters away from the
historical subject and toward an allegori-
cal, or rather symbolic, treatment, and
this tendency is strong almost in exact pro-
[71]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
portion as the artist affected by it is a real
decorator by temperament and training.
Nor is the tendency a new one ; it has ex-
isted since there was an art of painting.
The walls of Italy are covered with fres-
cos and the palace of the Doges is lined
with paintings, nearly all of which were
intended to have some historical implica-
tion, but there are, apart from the render-
ings of sacred narrative, relatively few
strictly historical pictures among them,
and these are seldom the most effective.
The most triumphantly decorative are
allegories, nai'f in the Spanish Chapel or
the ceilings of Pinturicchio, superb in
Veronese's "Venice Enthroned."
It is true that the strictly historical sub-
ject may, on occasion, be so treated as to
reduce its essentially undecorative char-
acter to a minimum. You may simplify it
in arrangement and, in some cases, arrive
almost at a monumental composition;
you may eliminate light and shade and
[72]
>
4
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C/2
THE SUBJECT IN ART
avoid strong contrasts and projecting
modelling; you may weaken its pictorial
character until it consents to stay on the
wall, and to do little harm to the architect-
ural ensemble, if it does no good to it.
But when all is done it will not be essential
decoration. You will still have to choose
between historical pictures which are, at
best, imperfectly and negatively decora-
tive, and have lost much of their force in
becoming so, and true monumental dec-
orations, perfectly suited to their place
and function, but symbolical rather than
real in their treatment of history.
If you believe — and I cannot see how
you can help believing it — that the first
end of a decoration is to decorate, there
can be no doubt which you will prefer.
The choice, once made, will carry with it
much more than an increase of decorative
beauty — it will greatly enlarge the scope
of the ideas you may express, and increase
the clarity and force with which you may
[73]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
express them. I chose, a while ago, to
illustrate the difficulty of the purely his-
torical subject, the theme of the Signing
of the Emancipation Proclamation, and
pointed out how it reduced itself, if realis-
tically treated, to a man writing at a table,
in the presence of a number of other men.
But admit the element of symbolism and
the difficulty vanishes at once. You may
paint "Lincoln Emancipating the Slave,"
in a way that shall be perfectly intelligible
to every one, and you may go further and
convey the whole meaning of the struggle
for freedom and suggest the vast up-
heaval of the Civil War by a use of alle-
gorical figures. Velazquez was particularly
happy, in his "Surrender of Breda," in
finding a subject suited to realistic ex-
pression and in finding, also, the exact
expression needed. But even that prince
of naturalists, when he would paint "the
Expulsion of the Moors," had to fall back
on allegory like all the world before him.
[74]
THE SUBJECT IN ART
From the point of view of expression as
from the point of view of form there is
really no alternative. We must admit the
symbolical or we must give up monu-
mental and decorative painting altogether.
To what degree the symbolical element
shall displace entirely the historical must
be a question, largely, of the temper and
ability of the artist. Some will feel most at
home in an atmosphere of pure symbolism,
where nothing shall hamper their sense of
beauty or intrude considerations of fact or
costume. Others will be able to include a
good deal of fact and costume without feel-
ing that it impedes their creation of deco-
rative beauty. In this style of partly histor-
ical, partly symbolic, art are two notably
successful works by American artists, one
in sculpture and one in painting, Saint-
Gaudens's "Sherman" and Blashfield's
decoration in the Baltimore Court House,
"Washington Laying Down his Commis-
sion" (PL 7). In the "Sherman" the
[75]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
contrast between the modern soldier and
the antique victory troubles some people
who would have felt no incongruity, prob-
ably, if the general had been a warrior in
fifteenth-century armor, or had worn the
habit of a Roman Emperor, though in
either case the mingling of fact and fiction
would have been the same. So swiftly is
time foreshortened as it recedes into the
past that Washington, in blue and buff,
seems naturally enough placed amid the
half -medieval, half -ancient, costumes of
the symbolical figures about him. They
are all removed from the present, which
is, for us, the only real, and seem equally
to belong to an ideal world. The effect of
the whole is sumptuously decorative, while
the larger implications of the story to be
told are much more clearly expressed
than they could be by a realistic represen-
tation of the scene that occurred at
Annapolis in 1783.
[76]
Ill
DESIGN
PERHAPS the greatest weakness of mod-
ern art is the relative neglect of what is
ordinarily called composition, or what I
prefer to call by the good old word design.
The word composition means, of course,
the putting together of the picture, and
seems to imply a more or less mechanical
assemblage of separately existing parts.
The word design conveys the finer and
truer idea of an original guiding thought,
a principle of unity, out of which the parts
and details of a picture are developed by
a natural and organic growth. You com-
pose a pudding or a black draught — you
design a work of art. Yet the word com-
position is a convenient one, and one so
[77]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
commonly understood that I shall use it
interchangeably with the word design.
Whatever it is to be called, that the thing
itself is rather out of fashion there can be
no doubt. Our tendency has been to exalt
the other parts of the art of painting at
the expense of this fundamental one of
design, and to decry and belittle composi-
tion as a thing of small or no importance.
Indeed, if one may believe all one hears,
its very existence has been denied; for a
well-known and justly admired American
painter has been quoted as telling his
pupils that "There is no such thing as
composition." If he ever said so, one is left
in doubt as to just what he can have
meant. It is possible that he intended to
say that there is no science of composition,
and no valid rules for it — that design is,
and must be, a matter of instinct and of
unconscious creative action on the part
of the artist. In that case, what is true in
his statement is equally true of drawing
[78]
DESIGN
and color and handling. In all these
things the business of the artist is to create,
and to leave to others the task of finding
out the reasons for the form of his crea-
tions. It is possible, in any art, to formu-
late principles to account for what has
first been done — it is impossible, by the
application of rules based on these prin-
ciples, to create a new and vital work.
This is not a reason for neglecting the
study of the masterpieces of art, for
ignorance was never yet creative. It is
simply the statement, in another form,
that the artist, however well trained, must
be an artist born, and work as the artist
has always worked.
It is possible, also, that what was meant
to be expressed was merely a personal
preference for informal and expressive
design over formal and monumental de-
sign; for the composition of the isolated
easel picture over the composition of the
great mural painting. If so, it was the ex-
[79]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
pression of a preference so common in our
time as to be nearly universal; a preference
which has caused us to place on the walls
of great public buildings pictures that
seem to defy rather than to enrich the
design of the surrounding architecture; a
preference which has led to the writing
of text-books on composition that include
in the list of their don'ts nearly all the
things which a study of the great masters
would inculcate as things to do.
Whatever else was meant, it is almost
inconceivable that a literal denial of the
existence of composition, or design, can
have been intended, for that would have
been the denial to the arts of the one thing
they have in common, of the one great
fundamental and unifying principle that
makes art art. Design is arrangement, is
order, is selection. Design is the thing that
makes a work of art a unit, that makes it
a whole rather than a hap-hazard collec-
tion of unrelated things or a slice of un-
[80]
DESIGN
assimilated nature. It does not merely
concern itself with great decorative com-
positions or arrangements of many figures
— it is necessarily present in the simplest
problems art can set itself. Suppose you
are to paint a portrait head. There will be
questions of drawing, of character and
expression, of light and shade and color,
of the handling of your material, to all of
which you must find answers; but before
you can consider any of these things, there
will be the initial question : where are you
to place the head on your canvas ? How
far from the top and the bottom, how far
from the left or right hand border? And
what is the shape of your canvas to be,
rectangular or circular or oval, and what
shall be the proportion of height to width ?
This is the fundamental problem of de-
sign, the problem of the division of space.
If you are going to do a little more of the
figure, other problems will come into play.
Shall you include the hands, and, if so,
[81]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
where shall you place them ? That is the
problem of the balancing of dominant and
subordinate masses. What is the general
silhouette of your figure, and where shall
it cut the borders of your canvas? That
is the problem of line. If you do not settle
it intentionally and well it will settle itself
accidentally and, in all probability, badly.
The problems of design are essentially the
same in everything you do; they only be-
come more complicated as the subject be-
comes more complex.
If you are to paint a still-life it is evident
that you must arrange the objects some-
how— they will not come together of them-
selves. You might, conceivably, begin a
portrait and wait for a happy accident —
a spontaneous pose of the sitter — to give
you the arrangement of the hands: you
cannot wait for the copper kettle and the
dead fish to place themselves agreeably.
And still less can nature or accident de-
termine your composition of a number of
[82]
DESIGN
figures, unless you rely entirely upon snap
shots. If you have any intention, any story
to tell, any idea to express — if it is no more
than the idea of a crowd — you must ar-
range your figures, well or ill. Even in
landscape painting of the most naturalistic
kind, where it is not uncommon to-day to
accept what nature gives, abdicating the
right to put in or leave out and retaining
only that right of choosing an agreeable
view which the photographer exercises
equally with the painter — even there,
though you may reproduce a natural
landscape as literally as you are able, you
must determine where to cut it off. You
must decide where to make the division
between your chosen matter and the rest
of nature which you reject, you must think
whether your material will go best onto
an upright canvas or an oblong one, and
what are to be its proportions and dimen-
sions. In that act you are exercising the
art of design. You cannot escape from de-
[83]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
sign; you cannot avoid composing. You
may compose badly but compose you
must.
And if the demands of design are funda-
mental they are also universal. It is not
only your lines and masses that must be
composed, but your light and shade, your
color, your very brushmarks must be ar-
ranged ; and the task of composition is not
done until the last touch has been placed
upon the canvas, although, for the sake of
convenience, the term composition, or de-
sign, is generally limited to the arrange-
ment of lines and masses, the arrangement
of the other elements of the picture being
considered separately.
As design is the underlying and unifying
principle of every work of art, so it is the
classic principle, par excellence, the prin-
ciple which makes for order and stability
and clarity and all that the classic spirit
holds most dear. It is conservative in its
nature, and tends to preserve the old
[84]
DESIGN
molds even when new matter is put into
them. It holds on to tradition and keeps
up the connection with the past. It
changes, but it changes more slowly than
almost any other element of art. Great
and original power of design is more rare
than any other of the powers of an artist
and a radically new form of design is very
nearly inconceivable. Artists will make
a thousand new observations of nature
and almost entirely alter the contents of a
work of art before they make any but
slight changes in the pattern in which it is
cast; and in all the history of painting the
men are but a handful who have made any
material addition to the resources of the
designer. If in our own day we seem to
have cut loose from tradition and to have
lost our connection with the great design
of the past it is not because we have sud-
denly acquired a surprising degree of de-
signing power and are inventing a new
and modern art of composition, but be-
[85]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
cause most of us have forgotten altogether
how to compose and are trying to get on
without any design at all ; the result being
bad design and mere chaos. Wherever, in
modern art as in the art of the past, you
find an artist of real power of design — and
we have had such — you find the note of
classicism, of respect for tradition, of con-
nection with everything fine and noble
that has gone before.
This conservatism of design follows
naturally from the fact that it is not imita-
tive of nature, and is therefore unaffected
by the investigation of natural appear-
ances. It is, of course, founded on natural
laws — on the laws of sight and on the laws
of the human mind — but it is only acciden-
tally and occasionally that it is directly in-
fluenced by anything outside itself. The
naturalistic temper will, as it has done at
various times, lead to the neglect of com-
position : it will not lead to new discoveries
in composition. The study of anatomy
[86]
DESIGN
revolutionized and greatly enriched the
drawing of the human figure; the study
of natural light and color has added some-
thing to the resources of the painter, if it
has also subtracted something from them ;
the only study that has ever greatly helped
the designer is the study of design as it has
been practised before him. To look long
at the great compositions of the master
designers of the world; to try to find in
them, not hard and fast rules of what to
do and what to avoid, but the guiding
principles on which they are built; to
steep one's self in tradition ; and then to set
one's self to invent new forms which shall
be guided by the principles and contained
within the boundaries of the old — that is
the only way to study design. It is pre-
cisely because design must be studied in
this way, because it makes for tradition
and continuity and leads away from a too
exclusive study of nature, that, from the
classic point of view, for which I speak,
[87]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
the study of design is the most salutary
discipline possible in this too naturalistic
age. If I could have my way in the train-
ing of young artists I should insist upon
their spending a good deal of time in the
study and designing of pure ornament,
not that they might learn the "historic
styles" — though that, too, would have its
advantages — but that they might learn
how independent fine design is of its con-
tent and how slight may be the connec-
tion between art and nature.
In all design concerned with the beauti-
fying of surfaces, as painting is, from the
simplest treatment of ornament to the
most complicated of naturalistic pictures,
the ends to be sought and the means of
attaining these ends are the same. First,
there is the division of the whole space to
be treated into a number of smaller spaces,
or masses, which shall be agreeable in
their relation to each other and of inter-
esting and beautiful shapes. Some of these
[88]
DESIGN
spaces will be filled with minor divisions
and enriched with details, while others
will be left comparatively simple, like the
background of ornament, and we have
thus that balance of filled and empty
spaces which is one of the great beauties
of fine design. Some one of the masses will,
by size, by position, or by isolation, some-
times by all three means, be made more
important than the others, and this prin-
ciple of subordination will be carried
throughout the design, each mass which
is subordinate to the principal one having
other attendant masses subordinated to it.
After the division of space comes the
unification by line. The whole composi-
tion will be bound together by a series of
lines, either the edges of the masses or
interior lines within them, and these lines
will not only be agreeable in themselves
but will be so arranged as to lead the eye
easily and without jar or fatigue, from
one mass to another, bringing it finally to
[89]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
rest on the dominant mass of the com-
position. And these lines will have char-
acters of their own, entirely apart from
anything they may represent. Horizontal
lines will suggest repose, vertical lines will
suggest rigidity and stability, curved lines
will convey the idea of motion; and the
curves will differ among themselves, some
being soft and voluptuous, others resilient
and tonic.
In the use of these primary elements of
composition a number of subsidiary prin-
ciples will come into play: The principle
of balance, either of like subordinate
masses either side a central dominant,
which is symmetrical and monumental
composition, or of unlike masses at dif-
ferent distances from an ideal centre,
which is free or pictorial composition,
though the Japanese use it in ornament:
the principle of repetition, the extreme
form of which is the continuous frieze or
border, but which is constantly used in
[90]
DESIGN
pictures: the principle of contrast, the
straight line making the curve seem more
graceful, the curve making the straight
line seem more uncompromising and more
rigid.
The structure of the design being thus
formed it will be enriched and re-enforced
by the use of light and dark and by the
use of color. In a simple panel of orna-
ment, for instance, the filled spaces, that
is the ornament itself, will be either dark-
er or lighter than the ground or empty
spaces; or they will be of a different col-
or from the empty spaces, without any
greatly marked difference of value. Or
the filled spaces may be both lighter and
darker than the ground, as they would be
in sculpture in relief. The dominance of
the most important mass may be increased
by making it the lightest or the darkest
or the most powerfully colored mass, or
by giving it the sharpest contrast of light
and dark; and however this is done cer-
[91]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
tain of the subsidiary masses will be given
a secondary importance by a less marked
use of the same means.
So far the process is identical, whether
the content of the design is pure orna-
ment or a great figure painting, but as
we approach the free design of the easel
picture a new element comes into play.
Ornamental design is design in two di-
mensions only, and decorative painting
always tends to retain, or to return to, two
dimensional composition. But in propor-
tion as painting becomes desirous and
able to convey the illusion of space it
begins to compose in the third dimension
also. The things it represents have not
only an elevation but a ground plan, and
the ground plan must be as thoroughly
designed as the elevation. The distances
of one mass from another in the direction
of the depth of the picture must be as
carefully proportioned as the vertical and
lateral distances, and the lines traced up-
[92]
DESIGN
on the ideal ground plan must be as
beautiful as those visible upon the vertical
surface.
These are, as well as I can explain them
in brief compass, the immutable principles
of design: few in number, but admitting
of so much variety in their application
that all the great compositions that have
ever been made have not begun to ex-
haust the possible combinations — there
is room for an infinite number of fine
compositions, still. The extent to which
these principles govern the work of the
great designers is almost incredible until
one has convinced one's self of it by pro-
longed study. Their scope is co-extensive
with the work, and in the masterpieces of
design there is absolutely no room for
accident. Every smallest detail, each fold
of drapery, each leaf in each smallest
spray of leafage, is where it must be, and
is of its proper form and inevitable size to
play its part in the symphony of design.
[93]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
It could no more be somewhere else or of
some other shape than a note could be
of another pitch in a musical composition.
Any change in it would change the char-
acter of the whole. Designs of this perfec-
tion are rare, of course, but they exist;
and in some of the compositions of Raph-
ael and Veronese you could not change
so much as a tendril of hair or a ring on a
finger without loss.
The design of early and primitive artists
is, naturally enough, extremely simple
and formal. From Giotto to Raphael there
is only a very gradual enrichment of a
manner of composition which remains
essentially the same. The pictures of this
time are almost exclusively of two types:
the narrative composition, devoted to the
telling of Gospel stories or to the lives of
the Saints; and the devotional composition
or altar-piece.
The narrative composition, in early
work, tends to the condition of the frieze
[94]
DESIGN
or bas-relief. The figures are apt to be in
profile and are nearly always in one plane,
and they are rather isolated without much
connection into groups. With all its sim-
plicity this form of design is capable of
great expressiveness, and, from its very
limitations, is admirably fitted for archi-
tectural decoration. It was perhaps, in-
voluntarily that the work of Giotto was
so unfailingly decorative, for the simplic-
ity of division and the composition on one
plane were inevitable at the stage of
development which the art of painting had
then reached. But the dignity and the
inventiveness, within the limits of what
was then possible, are the master's own.
There have been more complete painters
than Giotto, because there have been great
men who came at periods of fuller ripeness
in their art; but there have been few artists
of greater essential power as designers.
Again and again he found the best ar-
rangement for the telling of his story, and
[95]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
settled the lines on which his successors
were willing to work for a century or
two. Such a composition as his "Death of
St. Francis" (PL 8) remains to this day
as simple and noble in its great lines
and masses as anything that has been
done and it would be hard to better it
except in detail, or even to better its de-
tails without losing something of its
majesty.
The devotional picture, the purpose of
which was not to tell a story but merely to
present objects for worship, descends from
the Byzantine ancona, and was, at first,
made up of a number of separate panels,
framed together into a great altar-piece.
There would be a Madonna and Child in
the middle panel, probably on a larger
scale than the other figures, and rows of
saints on either side, each in its own
niche. The first step in advance amounted
to little more than removing the interior
divisions, leaving the figures much as they
[96]
Plate 13. — "Pallas Driving away Mars," by Tintoretto.
In the Ducal Palace, Venice.
DESIGN
were, even to the greater size of the cen-
tral figure. Except for the elimination of
this discrepancy in size there was little
further development of this form of com-
position until Raphael took hold of it, but
its essentially architectural character was
appreciated, and it was applied to other
than religious subjects. It became, espe-
cially, and has remained to this day, the
natural form of composition for the lu-
nette, or semicircular space, with its great-
est height in the middle, where the central
figure would come. But, in altar-pieces or
decorative allegories, you may yet see, in
the work of Perugino (PL 9) , how the sub-
sidiary figures stand in a row, each almost
as much alone as if it still had its own
frame around it. Meantime the narrative
composition had become richer and more
complex, and the two forms met in Leo-
nardo's "Last Supper" (PL 10), half nar-
rative, half devotional, where the apostles,
instead of sitting more or less equidistant
[97]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
from each other, are played about into
groups of three and bound together with
interlacing lines of arms and draperies. It
is the first complete and fully perfected
instance of formal design in modern
art.
Then came Raphael, the greatest master
of formal design that the world has seen,
and gave us the still unequalled models
of decorative composition. His fecundity
and variety are astonishing. In one room,
the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican,
he has given us the perfect examples of
composition for the circular medallion,
the rectangular panel, the semicircular
lunette, the segmental lunette, and the
pierced lunette, or lunette with an opening
cut through it ; and in the second of these
chambers of the Vatican are two other
pierced lunettes, entirely different and
equally admirable, the "Mass of Bolsena"
and the "Deliverance of Peter." Besides
these he has shown us, in Santa Maria
[98]
DESIGN
della Pace, how to design a frieze inter-
rupted by a central arch and, in the
Farnesina, how to design a series of tri-
angular pendentives; while a multitude
of Madonnas and other pictures of smaller
size are, almost invariably, masterpieces
of composition. Yet he has introduced few
absolute novelties, the chief of these being
a strictly limited use of the third dimen-
sion. He still composes laterally instead of
composing in de Ui, but, in the "Dis-
puta" (PL 11), he has for the first time
thrown the centre of his composition back
and advanced the sides, achieving an effect
as if the lunette had become a great semi-
dome or apse. It is as architectural as
composition in the flat, but while it defi-
nitely limits it also enlarges the apparent
space and gives one breathing-room and
a consequent sense of ease and enhanced
well-being. Further than this it is danger-
ous for purely decorative design to go,
and composition in depth rarely has gone
[99]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
much further in the hands of true deco-
rators.
This whole composition, the earliest
and the most formal of Raphael's great
frescoes in the Vatican, is perhaps the
most perfect of any for its decorative and
symbolic purpose, and it is worth a little
study to see how he has designed it much
in the same way that a designer of orna-
ment might fill the same space. The most
important object in the picture, from the
point of view of the story he had to tell,
is the Host upon the altar, for the real
presence in the celebration of the Mass is
the central doctrine of Catholic theology.
It is a small object and cannot be given
predominance by size — it must attain it
by position and by isolation. He places its
little circle. in the midst of a broad band
of empty space, the only one, which ex-
tends from one end of the design to the
other, and just at the level of the spring
of the arch, so that the whole composition
[100]
DESIGN
radiates from it as from a centre. Below
it is the church on earth, above it the
heavenly host — it dominates earth and
heaven. Immediately above is the figure
of Christ, in a great circular glory, with
the Virgin and John Baptist on His right
and left hands and the first and third Per-
sons of the Trinity above and below Him
—a compact group of great size and im-
portance, yet a less important centre than
the Host because less isolated. From this
group sweeps to right and left the great
semicircle of Apostles and Prophets,
seated upon the level clouds, and this
semicircle is repeated, higher up, by that
of the Angels. Below are Popes, Bishops,
Cardinals, poets, Fathers of the Church,
disposed in two great, wedge-shaped
masses, narrowing toward the central rect-
angle of the altar; and the presence of a
door at one end of the wall has led to the
introduction of balustrades at either cor-
ner which happily echo this rectangle,
noil
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
making it the apex of a triangle in the
ground plan, while the long, horizontal
lines of the steps and pavement give sta-
bility and repose to the whole design.
So far, it is all formality and geometrical
planning; but now the element of variety
enters. It is very slight in the upper por-
tion of the composition, only the leaning
sidewise of St. Stephen breaking the uni-
formity of the rank of Saints; but it is
almost infinite below — figures standing,
sitting, kneeling, leaning, gathering into
clumps and scattering again, their heads
forming an intricate and ingenious sky-
line, yet always controlled by some hid-
den principle of unity, line balancing line
and mass answering to mass by subtle and
hardly discoverable conformities. Each
group — each single figure almost — is as
wonderful in its design as the great whole
of which it forms a part. I could point out
some of these minor felicities of arrange-
ment, but it would take too long, and the
[102]
DESIGN
student will get more out of the effort to
find them for himself. And, long as I have
studied the picture, I by no means under-
stand it all, nor do I hope ever to do so. I
only know that it is supremely right and
perfect, altogether and forever satisfying.
I shall not attempt to analyze any other
composition in such detail as this. My
object is to show what design is, in one
great example, and to set you to looking
for it in other works of art. And you will
find it in places where at first you would
not think of looking for it. The splendor
of Venetian color and the richness of
Venetian light and shade have so blinded
us to the presence of anything else in the
works of Titian and Tintoretto that it is
only after special study that one realizes
their power of design. But if you will look
over any of the old-fashioned histories of
art which are illustrated with cuts in little
more than outline, and bad outline at that,
you will find that, after color and light and
[103]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
shade have been eliminated, and drawing
denatured, there remains an indestructible
element in the work of these men which an-
nounces, at the first glance, the presence of
a master. That element is, and can be,
nothing but design. It is more usually the
free design suited to easel-painting — a form
of art virtually invented by Giorgione—
but is none the less masterly and complete
on that account. Take, for example,
Titian's "Entombment" (PL 12) and see
how the lines of the figures encompass the
dead Christ; how every arm and hand and
fold of drapery is played into a series of
curves that sympathize with and accent-
uate the helpless droop of that dead body;
how absolute and inevitable is the spacing
within the frame; how impossible it would
be to alter the smallest detail without de-
stroying the harmony of the whole. Or
take Tintoretto at his best, in the wonder-
ful "Pallas Driving away Mars" (PL 13)
and see how everything in the picture re-
[104]
DESIGN
inforces and lends added strength to the
push of the goddess's arm. And for an
exquisite bit of contrast, see how the stiff
straightness of Pallas's lance relieves and
yet enhances the luxuriance of the curves,
noting, at the same time, how the different
angles of the two lances, as if sprung from
a common centre like the spokes of a
wheel, set everything swinging over to the
right and send Mars tottering out of the
picture faster, even, than his own attitude
would carry him. This is design, and de-
sign of the best. As for Veronese, who
added to all the other Venetian qualities
a gayety of feeling and a brilliancy of
workmanship which tend still more to
disguise the underlying structure, he is,
whether for formal and monumental or
for free and fantastic composition, second
only to Raphael, if he is second to any one.
He is a decorator born, and the decorator,
whatever his other gifts, is always pre-
eminently and fundamentally a designer.
[105]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
Since the time of these great sixteenth
century masters there has been no new
discovery in design. Its principles have
been differently applied and have been
applied to various purposes, but there has
been no addition to the resources of the
designer. Rubens, with all his giant-like
strength and almost appalling abundance
and fecundity, was by essential temper
a classicist and a lover of tradition; only
his was a classicism modified by and
appropriate to his age, an age of the
Baroque in architecture and of luxurious-
ness in life. In every part of his art he
founded his practice upon that of his
predecessors, and his composition is the
composition of the great Venetians rend-
ered a little looser, a little more florid. The
straight line is almost entirely banished,
the curved lines are more redundant and
less severe, and have a strong tendency
to the double, or S-shaped, curve, while
the whole pattern is more irregular and
[106]
DESIGN
picturesque. None the less is it a pattern,
complete and self-contained, as inevitable
in the logical connection of the parts with
the main idea of the whole as one of Ra-
phael's. Such grasp of composition as
forces every limb of every one of the
myriad figures in the small "Last Judg-
ment" into its predestined place in the
huge, if sprawling design — for the design
is huge though the canvas is small — is
almost disconcerting.
During the same years in which Ru-
bens was producing his Baroque classi-
cism a classicist of a very different sort was
at work in Rome. For Poussin, a man of
cold temper and powerful intellect, the
colorists did not exist. He founded his
style on Raphael and, above all, on the
study of the antique, and his composition
is severe almost to baldness, but grandly
expressive. Being more in harmony with
his age, Rubens was immensely the more
influential of the two. His composition,
[107]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
with slight modifications, becomes the
composition of the whole of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, while in
such splendid pieces of bravura as the
"Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus"
(PL 14) or the Medici series in The
Louvre, we have the model of almost
everything that Delacroix produced. Ru-
bens is the fountainhead of modern art—
Poussin has had few disciples. The great-
est of these is Jean Fra^ois Millet, whose
description of his favorite master's "Tes-
tament of Eudamitas" you have already
heard.
Of Millet's own design, as austere as
Poussin's and as .expressive, no better ex-
ample could be given than "The Glean-
ers " (PI. 15). It is design reduced to the
barely necessary, purged of all luxury or
superfluity, the naked expression of one
idea and no more. The field is divided
into two broad bands by the horizon line,
at about two-thirds of the height of the
[108]
DESIGN
canvas, and the long sky line is broken
only at the left by the simple mass of the
wagon and the straw-stacks. Wholly
within the lower division are the three fig-
ures, two of them forming a compact
group, the third a little apart yet so near
that a single sweeping curve would unite
the three. The two are bent double to
reach the ground, and their lines repeat
each other almost exactly. The third is
standing, but so stooped that the line of
her body recalls and sympathizes with the
stronger lines of the other two. That is all;
but these few elements are placed with
such perfect sense of weight and balance,
the relations of the large and simple spaces
to each other and to the enclosing bor-
der are so admirably right; the bounding
and connecting lines are so noble and so
expressive that nothing more could be
asked for. Different as he was from Millet
in every fibre of his artistic nature, it is
by much such simple divisions of space
[109]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
and such economy of line that Whistler
produces his finest effects. The design of
both men is at the antipodes of the over-
flowing abundance and richness of that of
Rubens; yet the severe and the luxurious
are equally legitimate forms of design.
Which one will prefer is a matter of tem-
perament and of occasion — of what one
has to do and of what one likes doing.
The great masters of design in portrai-
ture, among the old masters, are Raphael,
who was as wonderful as a portrait painter
as he was as a decorator, and Holbein.
Holbein also, as we know from a few
paintings and many woodcuts, was a great
figure designer, but, in his strongest years,
he was permitted to produce little but por-
traits. These portraits, even the slightest
drawings, are unfailingly perfect in de-
sign. The head is always in just the right
spot on the canvas, the hands are at just
the right distance from the head, the
division of space between the figure and
[110]
DESIGN
the background is always agreeable, the
bounding line of the figure is always beau-
tiful and always cuts the edge of the pict-
ure in the right place and at the right
angle. Some of them are much more
elaborate than others; but take one of
the simplest of them, the incomparable
"Erasmus" (PL 16) of the Louvre, and
you will find it as admirable and perfect
as a design as it is as a rendering of char-
acter— I do not know how to praise it
more highly than that.
But the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury saw a master of design as great as
any that ever lived, and I do not know
but that some of the portraits of Ingres are
the most complete and perfect examples
of design as applied to portraiture in the
whole range of art. For a design appropri-
ate to and almost miraculously expressive
of character and bodily habit it would be
difficult to find anything approaching the
"M. Bertin"; while for a design beautiful
[in]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
in its own right, rich, elaborate, gracious,
yet with a lofty and serene austerity in its
pure beauty, I know not where to find a
parallel for the exquisite portrait of Mme.
Riviere (PL 17) short of those Greek gems
of which its oval form, no less than its
artistic quality, reminds us.
I spoke, awhile ago, of design as pre-
eminently the conservative and classic
element in art. In no branch of art is this
more true than in the painting of land-
scape. Landscape painting is a compara-
tively modern form of art, and modern dis-
coveries concerning light and atmosphere
have so transformed our view of nature
that, were it not for this element of design,
which has no naturalistic origin, modern
landscape painting would have been in
danger of losing all touch with the past
and thereby losing, also, that power of
evoking memories of former pleasures
which is one of the great pleasure-giving
resources of all art. Fortunately the first
[112]
Plate 14. — "The Daughters of Leucippus," by Rubens.
In the old Pinakothek at Munich.
DESIGN
great innovators in modern landscape
were lovers of the past, and master de-
signers. The detailed study of natural
forms, the mystery of atmospheric effect,
the glow of color or the delicate rendering
of gradations of light were, with Rousseau
and Corot, but the clothing of a pattern
which was traditional and classic. It is this
persistence of pattern which gives their
work its air of permanence and finality—
which makes it a part of the art of the
world and of all time. With Corot (PL 18),
especially, the classic feeling was so strong
that his pictures give you echoes of every-
thing noble and lovely that has been done,
of Titian and Giorgione, fathers of land-
scape painting, no less than of the severe
grandeur of Poussin and the clear grace
of Claude.
And it is this conservative, and pre-
servative, element of design that will save
such of the work of the successors of Corot
and Rousseau as the world shall per-
[113]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
manently enjoy. Monet and his friends
have undoubtedly made some discoveries
about natural light and the means of rep-
resenting it in painting — discoveries not
so new perhaps, or so important as they
thought them, but still discoveries — and
in so far as they have done this, they have
been of use to those that shall come after
them, as the naturalists of the fifteenth
century, with their studies of anatomy and
perspective, were serviceable to their suc-
cessors; but in so far as they have neg-
lected design they have forgotten to be
artists and contented themselves with be-
ing investigators. For without design there
may be representation, but there can be
no art.
This tendency to a comparative neglect
of design, to allowing representation to
become an end instead of a means, to
making what should be an embroidery
of light and color take the place of the
structure that should underlie the em-
[114]
DESIGN
broidery — a tendency which is the com-
mon temptation of the modern painter —
is particularly insidious and dangerous to
the painter of landscape. He finds the
rendering of natural effect so difficult
and so absorbing that he can think of
nothing else, and nature is so beautiful
that she usurps, for him, the place of art.
He is apt to be, in the first place, one to
whom light and color mean more than
line and mass, or he would have chosen
figure painting as his vocation, and he has
not the figure painter's dominating neces-
sity to compose somehow, well or ill. As
most of his work, nowadays, is done in
the open air, he must paint rapidly while
the effect lasts, and has no time for pon-
deration and delicate balancing of mass
against mass and line against line. He
habituates himself to taking snap-shots
at things as they fly, satisfied if he can
capture any reflection of the beauty of
the scene before him, and contents himself
[115]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
with so much thought of composition as
goes to the determination of what frag-
ment of nature he may include within his
frame.
The more to be admired are those paint-
ers whose native sense of design is so
powerful as to give distinction and a clas-
sic grace even to their sketches from
nature. One such, who has almost ceased
to paint without ceasing to be an artist, is
Charles A. Platt. First an etcher, then a
painter of distinction, a member of the
Society of American Artists, and now of
the National Academy of Design, and a
winner of the Webb Prize, he has pro-
duced a series of landscapes which, for
elegance of line, dignity of spacing and
beauty of arrangement are unique in our
art. Some day, his pictures will be appre-
ciated at their worth. Meanwhile, he has
had to turn to another form of art and, as
was the case with the great artists of the
Renaissance, the same mastery of design
[116]
DESIGN
that was so notable in his painting, has
given him an assured place in the kindred
art of Architecture.
Such refined design as Mr. Platt's has
always been rare, but our art is not with-
out other examples of the compatibility
with the modern point of view of a real
faculty for design. Even among the most
forthright and least reflective of our
painters — among those who seem to have
placed truth far above beauty and with
whom a certain almost violent effective-
ness has taken the place of all subtler
qualities — even in this muscular school of
landscape there are different degrees of
designing power; and it is, more than any-
thing else, the possession of this power —
the ability to give to each picture, no mat-
ter how instantaneously seen or swiftly
rendered, the consistency of a pattern —
that places such men as Gardner Symons
and George Bellows above their compan-
ions.
[117]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
But the strongest instance of such com-
patibility is the work of the great painter
we have lately lost, Winslow Homer (PL
19). A modern of the moderns, so original
that his art seems, at first sight, to have
no connection with any other, such an
independent observer that he has painted
whole series of things seen by no one else,
he was yet essentially a designer, and it is
his design that gives his work its authority.
He was hardly a draughtsman, at least
so far as the drawing of the human fig-
ure is concerned ; he was rarely a colorist,
in the full sense, and was often content
with little more than black and white; he
was still less an accomplished craftsman.
What he had was an extraordinary vigor
and originality of observation, which pro-
vided the substance of his works, and an
equally original and vigorous design which
gave them their form. Almost every work
of his contains a new and striking pattern
to which every detail is subordinated — a
[118]
DESIGN
pattern as new and as striking as the
material it moulds, and admirably suited
to the expression of that material. It is
his powerful design, even more than his
clearness of vision, that makes him the
great artist he was — the greatest we have
had in America and one of the greatest
of the latter part of the nineteenth century
in any country.
[119]
IV
DRAWING
THE conception and treatment of the
subject make up the purely intellectual
part of painting: design is the purely
artistic or musical part of the art. With
the present subject we reach the consid-
eration of those elements of painting
which are partly representative or imita-
tive of nature, and which, on that account,
have been most affected by the modern,
naturalistic temper. That temper, which
has led to indifference as to subject and
neglect of design, has profoundly modified
our conception of the representative ele-
ments of art; and this modification has,
perhaps, been greatest as regards drawing.
WTe still retain some idea of color as a
means of artistic expression, and still
think of a colorist as something more than
[120]
DRAWING
one who imitates with exactness the colors
of nature : we have come to think of draw-
ing as a mere matter of accurate observa-
tion, and of the draughtsman as one with
a trained eye and hand who can "take a
measure or follow a line." To get things
of the right sizes and shapes — our notion
of drawing has reduced itself nearly to
that; and so we have become contempt-
uous of draughtsmanship as a thing neces-
sary, indeed, in some degree, but not par-
ticularly meritorious. Finding that even
this kind of drawing takes long training
to acquire, we have supposed that it re-
quires nothing else, and have considered
it a thing, like spelling, to be learned by
any diligent person, rating the ability to
draw as low in reckoning the achievement
of a painter as we should the ability to
spell in summing up the work of a poet.
If it were true that "any one can learn
to draw," this would be an odd excuse
for those who have manifestly failed to do
[121]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
so: but it is not true, even of the limited
kind of drawing we are considering. Any
one who has ever had any connection with
a school of art must know that it is only
a very small proportion of the students
who ever attain to any tolerable pro-
ficiency in drawing — who ever learn to get
an approximation to the right sizes and
shapes of things. To get these sizes and
shapes with anything like real accuracy
and delicacy requires so rare an organiza-
tion that the possession of that alone is
almost a passport to immortality. There
is more to Holbein and Terborch, Metsu
and Vermeer than their impeccable and,
apparently, colorless draughtsmanship—
their drawing is not so unaccented, so un-
tinged by personality, so purely natural-
istic as it looks — but even their accuracy
is inimitable and their refinement the
despair of any one who would attempt to
imitate them. Their drawing is by no
means merely photographic, though it
[122]
DRAWING
often seems more accurate than the pho-
tograph itself, but even photographic
drawing is so difficult that the world is
full of painters to-day who have given up
working against the camera and are try-
ing to work with it — who have found that
they cannot draw like a photograph and
are letting photography do their drawing
for them.
If there were no more to drawing than
accuracy of imitation — than that "plac-
ing" of things which we too often accept
for it — such a method might answer. But
drawing is a great expressional art and
deals with beauty and significance, not
with mere fact. Its great masters are the
greatest artists that ever lived, and high
attainment in it has always been rarer
than high attainment in color. Its tools
are the line and so much of light and
shade as is necessary to convey the sense
of bulk and modelling, anything more
being something added for its own beauty
[123]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
and expressiveness, not a part of the re-
sources of the draughtsman. Its aims are,
first, to develop in the highest degree the
abstract beauty and significance possessed
by lines in themselves, more or less inde-
pendently of representation ; second, to ex-
press with the utmost clearness and force
the material significance of objects and,
especially, of the human body. According
as one or the other of these aims pre-
dominates we have one or the other of the
two great schools into which draughtsmen
may be divided. These schools may be
typified by the greatest masters of each,
the school of Botticelli, or the school of
pure line; the school of Michelangelo, or
the school of significant form. Between
these lie all the law and the prophets. Of
course no artist ever belonged entirely
and exclusively to either school. It is al-
ways a matter of balance and the pre-
dominance of interest. Even a Botticelli
tried to put some significant form inside
[124]
Plate 16.— "Erasmus," by Holbein.
In the Louvre.
DRAWING
his beautiful lines, and even Michel-
angelo gave thought to the abstract beauty
of his lines apart from the significant form
they bounded. To some extent apart from
either school is the most difficult drawing
of all to understand or to describe, the
drawing of Rembrandt.
We are all so much, and so inevitably,
bound by the conventions of our own time
that to many an art student of to-day it will
seem little less than absurd to call Botti-
celli a draughtsman at all. He could not
foreshorten a leg or an arm, but drew
them always at full length, exercising great
ingenuity, at times, in so arranging his
groups as to permit of this full length
treatment. His use of light and shade is
very restricted and he never gives the il-
lusion of solidity and detachment from
the background. His figures are attenu-
ated, never very certain in their structure
and articulation, and often faulty in pro-
portion. The modern student, from the
[125]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
height of nearly five centuries of further
study, looks down with amused superior-
ity, conscious that all those things which
were impossible for Botticelli are com-
monplace now, and within the power of
every one. And yet the student is no more
than a student whose work is not worth
the paper it is drawn on — the master re-
mains the master, as unique and unap-
proachable to-day as in his own time. The
student can place things better — unless
he is a rare genius, he will never draw one
thousandth part so well.
A group which shows Botticelli at his
best, yet with all or nearly all his short-
comings from our modern point of view, is
that of the three Graces from the picture
called "Primavera" (PL 20). It is flatter
than many of his works, the indication of
modelling being reduced to the lowest
terms, but this is of no consequence what-
ever. In this kind of art the indication of
modelling might be entirely eliminated,
[126]
DRAWING
leaving the result as flat as Greek vase
painting, with no detriment to the essen-
tial quality of it. There is no foreshorten-
ing, the avoidance of it in the complicated
arrangement of the arms being very notice-
able. Even the feet are not foreshortened,
and, in one of the figures, the toes are
turned out beyond the possibility of nat-
ure in the effort to avoid this difficulty.
But study this lovely arrangement of
lovely lines; learn, if you can^, to appreci-
ate their flow, their subtlety, their vitality,
and inimitable grace, the sense of move-
ment and of life that they convey ; observe
the delicate stiffness, as of flower-stalks,
in the lines of the figures, the swiftness, as
of living flame, in the curves of hair or
filmy drapery; feel the passionate inten-
sity of the artist, controlled by rigid dis-
cipline and refined taste, as his hand fol-
lows in its daintiest modulations and
finest contrasts this melody of pure line —
then you may begin to understand why
[127]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
he is the greatest master of linear drawing
in our Western art. For myself, I should
rate him the greatest in all art, placing
him above even the best that China and
Japan have done in a branch of art in
which China and Japan have always
excelled.
The drawing of Michelangelo is entirely
different from this. He came at the end of
a long succession of artists who had striven
to master the significance of the human
figure, and he resumed everything they
had learned. He is almost too fond of fore-
shortening, using it sometimes, one sus-
pects, merely to display his mastery of it;
and his drawing is so far from flat that it
depends more on modelling and on interior
markings than on the contour. He is a
draughtsman, not a chiaroscurist or a
colorist, therefore he does not drown his
forms in light and shadow or lose his
edges in the mystery of atmosphere, but
you may see many a drawing of his in
[128]
DRAWING
which the form is hatched into existence
with pen or crayon lines like the strokes
of a sculptor's chisel, everything being de-
termined except the final outline. He
cared little for mere correctness, indulging
in any exaggeration that would enhance
the sense of bulk and structure which he
wished to convey, and the habit of exag-
geration grew upon him while the restraint
of direct study from nature operated less
and less, so that in his latest paintings the
human figure becomes swollen into some-
thing almost monstrous, however titanic
in its expression of energy. To have him
at his best you must take him not only be-
fore the "Last Judgment" but before the
Prophets and Sibyls — you must take him
in the great central panels of the Sistine
Ceiling. There, in such a composition as
the " Creation of Adam " (PL 21) , you have
the highest reach of constructive figure
drawing, as in the "Primavera" you have
the standard of pure linear expression,
[129]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
There is magnificent line in this fresco,
also, the sweeping movement of the
Creator and his attendant spirits being
attained in the only way in which motion
ever has been attained in painting — by
composition of line. But all that can be
told by line — even the difference between
the energetic, pointing finger of the Al-
mighty and the limp hand of the half-
awakened Adam — is subordinate to the
realization of these two figures as solid ob-
jects in space, to the expression of their
structure as human bodies made of bone
and muscle, and of the stresses and inter-
actions of these bones and muscles as
affected by position and movement. What
particularly concerned Michelangelo was
the roll of Adam's mighty thorax upon
his pelvis ; the forcing upward of his right
shoulder on which his weight rests, and
the elongation of the left pectoral by the
stretching of the arm; the strain on the
muscles of the neck caused by the turn of
[130]
Plate 17.—" Madame Riviere," by Ingres.
In the Louvre.
DRAWING
the head, and the swelling and flattening
of thigh and calf in the bent leg. As an
ideal yet real presentation of the human
figure, magnificently explicit in the ren-
dering of all significant detail, but from
which everything accidental or insignifi-
cant has been purged away, there is noth-
ing like this in painting, and nothing in
any art except the sublime figures from
the pediment of the Parthenon.
But why all this interest in the human
body? Well, in the first place, because
the great figure artists are made so, and
nothing else seems to them so beautiful
or so significant. And because meanings
and intentions can be conveyed by figure
drawing that can be conveyed in no other
way. These movements and stresses of
the figure communicate themselves to
you, and you feel them in your own body,
thereby attaining a sense of power and
freedom you are never likely to get from
anything else; and they put you into the
[131]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
mood of the being who displays them and
make you, by the state of the body, di-
vine the state of the soul. For, in the hands
of a master, the body is infinitely more
expressive than the face, and the art of
figure drawing is one of the most intellect-
ual and expressional of the arts.
All drawing proceeds in one or both of
these two ways, yet the drawing of Rem-
brandt seems, at first, to proceed by
neither. In his paintings everything is
so drenched in light and shade that both
drawing and color almost cease to exist.
His manner of drawing is better studied
in his etchings or in his sketches in pen or
crayon. It is a very personal manner, as
is everything else about this extremely
personal and romantic artist. He seems
to care nothing about line for its own sake,
and one cannot imagine his arranging a
bouquet of beautiful lines as Botticelli
would do. He seems to care even less for
pure form, and his studies of the nude
[132]
DRAWING
are misshapen, ill-articulated, hideous
in the extreme. Yet with an extraordi-
narily sure instinct he selects so much of
line as shall convey a sense of movement,
so much of form as shall suggest a mental
state, while with every touch he is implying
the light and shade that shall afterward
envelop the whole. In the hands of the
great genius who invented it, this kind of
drawing is amazingly expressive. With the
merest shorthand of blots and scratches he
makes you understand just what his char-
acters are doing and how they are feeling
— he can show you, for instance, the la-
menting of Lot (PL 22) as he leaves his
home under the guidance of the earnest
angel, the sadness of the daughters and
the unconcern of the maids, even the
angry unreconcilableness of Lot's wife,
who does not wish to go and will surely
look back. In his hands such drawing
may be called the drawing of spiritual
significance; but, like all romantic and
[133]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
personal geniuses, Rembrandt is a bad
model, and his method, in the hands
of lesser men, becomes little more than
picturesque draughtsmanship — the draw-
ing of effect, rather than of form, of the
accidental rather than of the essential—
a lower kind than any other except the
merely academic or the merely naturalistic
and photographic.
The sense of pure line being nearly the
rarest gift of our Western artists, most of
the drawing our art has produced has
been rather of the Michelangelesque type
than of the Botticellian, and a great deal
of it has been directly descended from
Michelangelo himself. Raphael, the great
designer and decorator, modified Michel-
angelo's drawing to suit his decorative pur-
pose and passed on his modification as the
model of academic draughtsmanship. His
line is not particularly living, his struct-
ure not especially realized, but his draw-
ing is admirably suited to its role in his
(134]
DRAWING
design, attracting no attention to itself
and allowing full play to the decorative
effect of the whole. His followers imitated
it, without having the qualities that ex-
cused it, and produced an empty and un-
interesting thing which, under the author-
ity of his great name, they long imposed
on the world.
The Venetians simplified drawing for the
sake of color as Raphael simplified it for
the sake of decorative effect. To them the
detailed rendering of anatomical forms
was of less importance than the broad
glow of lighted flesh, and they amplified
the forms and omitted the accents to at-
tain that breadth of effect which is one
of the conditions of the finest color. Yet
they were by no means the poor draughts-
men that they have generally been con-
sidered. Even in Titian there are great
beauties of form side by side with negli-
gences and weaknesses. Tintoretto's draw-
ing was somewhat too schematic and
[135]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
diagrammatical but, colorist and chiaros-
curist as he was, he had an extraordinary
sense of swift and expressive line and is
one of the great masters of movement.
Indeed his weakness is to have too much
movement, his figures darting and tum-
bling about until one longs for a little sta-
bility and repose. As for Veronese, at his
best, his drawing, in its large and simple
masses, is almost as fine as any one's. His
amplified forms are yet nobly structural,
his strong sense of movement is controlled
by a fine decorative placidity, his types are
elevated yet full of character directly ob-
served from nature. By taking the struct-
ural drawing of Michelangelo and broad-
ening and simplifying it for the sake of
color and decorative effect he has arrived
at something very like the Greek con-
ception of form, and it would be hard to
find in modern art anything more essen-
tially classic than the drawing of such
figures as the Venus in the picture (PL 23)
[136]
DRAWING
now in the Metropolitan Museum of New
York — an antique torso transformed to
palpitating flesh and blood.
Meanwhile the direct followers of Mich-
elangelo, much less intelligent, had exag-
gerated his exaggerations, without under-
standing his meaning, and had created the
baroque style of Pontormo and Daniele
de Volterra, on which, and on direct
study of the great master, Rubens founded
his style of drawing. For there is no
greater illusion than the commonly held
idea that Rubens's drawing was what it
was because he painted baggy Flemish
women ; and to hold his models responsible
for what he did from them would be as
unjust to Helena Fourment as a similar
assumption in the case of Rembrandt
would be libelous on poor Hendrickje
Stopfels. No, Rubens's manner was de-
liberately adopted and reflected an ideal,
however little it appeals to us, as firmly
and consciously held as that of Michel-
[137]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
angelo or that of Raphael. His drawing
was developed from that of Michelangelo
in the same wTay as his composition was
developed from that of the Venetians, by
giving greater luxuriance to the curves and
by an especial accentuation of the double
curve. His drawing, like his composition,
is made up of S's, and to a critic who found
fault with the bandy legs of one of his
figures he replied with a calm demonstra-
tion that this line was in accord with all
tradition. His style is neither naturalistic
nor personal and romantic, but essentially
classic and traditional. His florid and
somewhat flaccid line is characteristic of
the whole baroque period, and, somewhat
weakened and prettified, becomes the
keynote of the rococo also and of the
draughtsmanship of Boucher and Fra-
gonard (PL 24) . The simpering shepherd-
esses of the Frenchmen are unlike enough
to the overabundant nymphs and god-
desses of the robust Fleming, but while
[138]
DRAWING
the type has grown anaemic and slender,
the line has become even more flowing
and decidedly less functional.
It was against this overblown and some-
what decadent art that David directed his
revolution. Unfortunately his effort for a
purer taste only led him to a lifeless imita-
tion of second-rate antique sculpture, not
to any really vital or expressive drawing,
while he succeeded only too well in de-
stroying the old sense of color and the old
mastery of technique. One of his earliest
successes, the cold and pompous "Oath of
the Horatii " (PL 25), remains the best
he could do — his later work is still colder
and more empty. Among the artists of the
age of pseudo-classicism which David
inaugurated there was but one real clas-
sicist, and that one was the only one who
escaped from David's influence and was
long treated with contempt and neglect.
Prudhon's manner of painting was founded
on Correggio, his conception of form
[139]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
was, what David's was not, truly Greek.
He was a master of pure and beautiful
line, and, consequently, of the suggestion
of motion — he was, above all, a master
of large and simple masses and of delicate
and subtle modelling. His types are not
heroic like those of the great Venetians,
but, since the great Venetians, there has
been nothing lovelier than the recumbent
torso of his Psyche (PL 26), and perhaps
there has been nowhere in painting any-
thing more imbued with the spirit of the
lighter art of the antique world.
Since Prudhon, there have been but two
great draughtsmen, Ingres and Millet,
and these two are of radically different
types: Ingres the master of line and of
pure beauty, Millet the master of mass
and of expression.
The drawing of Ingres is not especially
structural. He who has been called "The
impeccable draughtsman" is by no means
without faults of articulation, and even
[140]
DRAWING
when he is correct in his expression of
structure and function he is not particu-
larly interested in these things. It is, above
all, the line itself that interests him — the
line in its own beauty and for its own
character. Yet he has little of the feeling
for movement of such a master as Botti-
celli— his line does not dance or flow. He
seldom attempts action in his figures,
and is not very successful when he does
attempt it. His line is static, and what he
expresses, by choice, is repose — a repose
so fixed that it seems eternal. His "Source"
will stand so forever while the water from
her urn trickles through her fingers — his
"Odalisque" (PL 27) will lie forever on
her cushions, scarce breathing lest a breath
disturb her reverie. In his portraits there
is something of the passionate precision
of Holbein, and the apparent coldness of
his studies of the nude is the coldness of
intense concentration, colorless because
white hot. If his contours are fixed and
[141]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
rigid — frozen, as it were, into immobility
— it is because only so could their infinite
subtlety and beauty be displayed. If the
"Odalisque" had one particle more possi-
bility of movement you could never per-
ceive how wonderful are those long curves
of back and arms, how slight the varia-
tions of direction that mark the junctures
of the muscles or the transitions from the
bony to the fleshy planes. Like his com-
position, his drawing is set for all time
into a crystalline perfection. There was
never anything like it before, there can
never be anything like it again. It is unique
and incomparable, like the design of
Raphael or the grandeur of Michelangelo.
The drawing of Millet, on the other hand,
is little concerned with pure line; it occu-
pies itself with bulk and action, with the
expression of bodily strains and tensions
and the resistance to weights. It is de-
scended from the drawing of Michelangelo,
and is the most effective drawing of this
[142]
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DRAWING
kind since that of the great Florentine,
but it proceeds differently. Millet's figures
are generally clothed, and could not show
Michelangelo's particularity of articula-
tion, even if their creator desired them to
do so. But in his drawing, as in his com-
position and his way of telling a story,
Millet remains the great eliminator. He
never worked from nature, but he ob-
served a given action again and again,
drew it over and over until he had mas-
tered what was essential in it, gave that
essence with supreme force and clearness
and gave nothing else. More than any
other artist since the great Greek sculptors
he achieved the typical, so that an action
once studied by him is given its true and
eternal expression and is not to be done
again. His sower is The Sower, now and
forever, and his "Woman Drawing Wa-
ter" carries her buckets as buckets have
been and must be carried since the begin-
ning of the world.
[143]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
How constantly he was preoccupied with
the exact notation of a weight, and the
amount of resistance determined by it,
may be shown by many passages in his
letters. You have heard how anxious he
was that his "Woman Drawing Water"
should "look as if she were carrying nei-
ther more nor less than the weight of the
buckets full of water." In the exact ex-
pression of this weight by the tension of
the arms and the dragging down of the
shoulders, in the erectness of the body be-
tween its equal burdens, in the slow and
shuffling walk enforced by the action, he
has achieved a monumental majesty; and
his figure looks as permanent as an
Egyptian colossus. But hear him again,
explaining the picture in the Chicago Art
Institute, "The New-born Calf." "The
expression of two men carrying a load
on a litter," he says, "naturally depends
on the weight which rests upon their
arms . . . this simple fact is the whole
[144]
DRAWING
reason of the . . . solemnity" which his
detractors thought absurd but which is,
in truth, the great merit of the picture. It
is the logical and inevitable result of a
large and typical rendering of the action,
and Millet made his two peasants carry
the calf, "as if it were the Ark of the
Covenant" because that is the way men
do carry a weight. He could even give to
a man wheeling a barrow-load of dung
(PL 28) all the solemnity and grandeur of
style of one of Michelangelo's prophets.
Millet and Ingres are, in their several
ways, capital examples of what great
drawing is. For examples of what it is not
one may go to almost any of their succes-
sors. Since Millet a hundred artists have
painted peasants, but, for lack of his large
comprehension of form, they have pro-
duced nothing but trivial anecdotes, or
sentimentalities, or snapshot photographs
of accidental and momentary conditions.
Since Ingres a hundred artists have tried
[ 145 ]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
to continue the traditions of the school,
but have produced nothing better than
the academic literalism of Gerome or the
sweet insipidity of Bougereau. The draw-
ing of Bougereau, with its superficial cor-
rectness and its entire lack of functional
expression; with its hands which never
grasp anything and its feet which never
support any weight; with its apparent
idealization which amounts to no more
than the prettifying of studio models—
this is the drawing most trying to the soul
of any one capable of understanding what
real draughtsmanship is ; yet it is precisely
this drawing that people will persist in
supposing the thing desired by those of us
who raise our voices against the formless-
ness of impressionism.
Almost all the drawing of the mid-
nineteenth century was sheer naturalism
and so is the larger part of what we still
have. With the exception of Baudry, who
had a real feeling for structure and action,
[146]
DRAWING
and of Leighton, who sometimes achieved
a large nobility of type, most of the aca-
demic painters did little more than clothe
an accurate transcript of ordinary nature
with a certain specious elegance, while
the non-academic painters only left out
the elegance. For the students of light and
color drawing became but a disagreeable
necessity, as for the virtuosi it is a mere
regulation of the shapes and sizes of the
brush strokes with which all things are
represented. In this country we have, in
George De Forest Brush, a lover of the
line, and among our mural painters one
or two have tried to attain to style. But,
for the most part, the conception of draw-
ing as anything more than the accurate
placing of things has disappeared.
Against this literalism there was bound
to be a reaction, but when it came it did
not take the form either of the significant
draughtsmanship of Michelangelo and Mil-
let or the linear beauty of Botticelli and
[147]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
Ingres. It began with Puvis de Chavannes
and took the form of a decorative simpli-
fication of the figure in the line of that
adopted by Raphael, but gradually pushed
much further. In the earlier work of Puvis
there are figures of great beauty that Raph-
ael himself might not have disowned—
figures in which the simplification of nat-
ural forms has proceeded no further than
to give a certain dignity of style and to ele-
vate the result above the mere imitation of
a given model. Such figures as those in the
mural painting at Amiens called "Rest"
(PL 29) are beautiful examples of what
decorative draughtsmanship should be,
the variation from nature being just suf-
ficient to avoid the literal and to fit them
for their role in a poetic and decorative
composition. But the austerity of Pu vis's
temper was not satisfied and, in later work,
we find him emulating the primitive paint-
ers of Italy, drawing figures that resemble
those of Giotto in their blocky simplicity,
[148]
DRAWING
and attaining thereby something of Giot-
to's architectural solemnity of effect. In
his latest work he seems to me to lose his
grip on drawing altogether and to produce
figures that are out of joint and wrongly
put together, or that cease to be figures at
all and become mere spaces of pinkish
color (PL 30). His feeling for arrange-
ment and spacing and his use of a beauti-
ful if limited color scheme still save him,
and he remains a decorator; but he has
ceased to be a draughtsman.
The only credible account I have seen of
some of the latest aberrations of modern
art is that they are an attempt to carry still
farther what Puvis had already carried too
far: to bring about the entire dissociation
of abstract line and mass from representa-
tion; to make art altogether "subjective,"
reflecting nothing but the whim of the
artist and having no connection, except
in the artist's consciousness, with any-
thing outside itself. For models we are to
[149]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
go back of Giotto and even of the Byzan-
tines, and found our practice on that of
savage peoples, Hottentots, or Alaskan
Indians, and by way of remedying the
evils of too much naturalism we are to
destroy altogether what the world has
loved as art. In the hands of young Pa-
risian students, bitten by the desire of
notoriety, this programme has produced
results unspeakable and almost unbeliev-
able, more hideous, morally and materi-
ally, than any of the savage art it emulates.
It is root and branch work, certainly, but
this short method with naturalism will
not answer. The remedy is far worse than
the disease. It is time that the Classic
Spirit should protest, in the name of right
reason, that if art is not a mere imitation
of nature no more is it sheer irresponsi-
bility and the unregulated exploitation of
individuality. The art of painting is an
art of arrangment of lines, spaces, and
colors which shall express the artist's
Plate 20.— "The Three Graces" (Primavera), by Botticelli.
In the Academy, Florence.
DRAWING
mind while suggesting and recalling the
aspects of nature; and if it is not art with-
out that arrangement which removes it
from literalism, it is not painting without
such degree of imitation as shall give the
necessary suggestion. In the most perfect
works of art the expressive and the imita-
tive elements are so intimately combined
that it is impossible to separate them, and
one knows not whether the work is more
admirable for its beauty and expressive-
ness or for its truth. In inferior works the
one or the other character predominates,
but if both are not present in some con-
siderable degree the work ceases to be of
any importance. Of the two extremes, the
self-abandonment to mere expression is
the more dangerous, for that way lie ec-
centricity and madness ; and the most pro-
saic picture ever painted by the most
prosaic Dutchman is far more like the
greatest art than is the rabid self -exploita-
tion of these modern savages.
[151]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
I should not have felt it necessary to treat
this, so-called, post-impressionist move-
ment with any seriousness — feeling sure
that the mere flight of time must settle its
business, and that without long delay-
were it not that, at the present moment,
a number of critics, some of whom have
earned by intelligent work the right to be
heard, are trying to convince themselves
and the public that it is vital and impor-
tant. With some of them their state of mind
seems to be the result of long occupation
with primitive art, which has so accus-
tomed them to finding beauty of line or
mass where there is little naturalism that
they cannot see these qualities where they
are combined with a knowledge of nature.
They imagine that Matisse and his fol-
lowers have rediscovered the line because
there is evidently nothing else in their
work; forgetting that the great and really
difficult task is to draw beautifully and
expressively without drawing falsely, and
[152]
DRAWING
that it is of no advantage to the abstract
beauty of a figure that its joints should
bend the wrong way, or that it should have
no joints at all but resemble something
between a block of wood and a jelly-fish.
For others there is no such excuse, and
one can only imagine that they are fright-
ened by the long series of critical blunders
that has marked the nineteenth century,
and are determined, this time, not to be
caught napping. Nearly all our greatest
painters — and some that are, perhaps,
not quite so great as we are just now in-
clined to think them — have been first
misunderstood and abused as mere ec-
centrics. It was so with Millet and with
Corot, it was so with Monet and Whistler ;
and in each case the unhappy critics had
to reverse themselves and, in some cases,
to swing to the other extreme and over-
praise as they had overblamed. Here is
a set of men whose art is so crazy that
anything which formerly seemed eccentric
[153]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
pales to bourgeois commonplace in the
comparison. What so natural as to assume
that these, too, are great men, and to take
the inevitable step at once, and as grace-
fully as possible? Their only answer to
criticism is to assume an attitude of
superiority and to say, smilingly and con-
descendingly, "Of course you could not
be expected to understand." Let us hasten
to show that we are not so stupid as our
brothers of the past. If we do not under-
stand either, at least we can exercise the
virtue of faith, which has been defined
as believing what one knows to be untrue.
In the tales of Hans Christian Ander-
sen one may read how a certain monarch
was supposed to be possessed of a suit of
clothes of extraordinary richness and
beauty but quite invisible to all unintelli-
gent and stupid people. The King himself
had never seen them, but as long as others
believed in their existence he kept his
mouth shut and received with compla-
[154]
DRAWING
cence the glory which came to him as their
possessor. The Prime Minister and the
Lord Chamberlain and the members of
the Privy Council were all equally blind
to these wonderful garments, but each
thought the others saw them, and so they
joined in a chorus of praises, lauding the
magnificence of the stuff, the splendor of
the embroidery, and the perfection of the
cut. Even the little page boys solemnly
gathered up nothing, and pretended to
carry the tails of the robe which they
thought must certainly be there if only
they were bright enough to see it. At last
it was determined that his Majesty should
walk in public procession through his
capital, that every one might have an
opportunity to behold the wonderful
clothes. There were heralds and trum-
peters, making a great noise with their
trumpets, and knights and men at arms
and judges and clergy, and, at last, under
a canopy, the King himself, walking very
[155]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
grandly with his head in air and followed
by the three pages that bore the invisible
train. And the people all rubbed their eyes
and each one said to himself, "Dear me!
Am I so stupid? I really can't see any-
thing"; and then they all shouted, "Long
live the King and his incomparable
clothes!" But presently the procession
passed by a place where there stood a tiny
boy in the street; and the boy, not being
old enough to know better and, perhaps,
not having been well brought up, spoke
right out in a loud voice, saying: "But
he hasn't got anything on!" And then-
well, then every one suddenly saw that his
Majesty was walking through the streets
in his shirt.
Now it may be my own lack of intelli-
gence that prevents my seeing the wonder-
ful garment of art worn by some of the
latest exponents of modernism. The rich
stuff and the splendid embroidery, which
others assure me they see, may really be
[156]
3?
U
I
s
DRAWING
there and I may be too blind or too stupid
to perceive it. But if the gods made me
stupid it rests with myself to be honest;
and so I can only cry, with the little boy
in the street: "They have nothing on!
They have nothing on!"
[157]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
THE several elements of the art of paint-
ing are so intertwined, and run into and
out of each other in so complex a manner,
that it is very difficult to deal with any one
of them separately and without reference
to the others. One cannot speak of the
treatment of the subject without reference
to design, or of design without reference
to drawing; still less can one separate the
consideration of light and shade from that
of color, for, in painting of any ripeness of
development, each of these elements is
profoundly modified by the other. They
are, as it were, the warp and woof of a
united texture which overlies and en-
riches the structure of design. And, again,
the very words light and shade mean a
number of different things for which we
[158]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
need, but have not, clearly differentiated
terms. The vocabulary of our language,
in matters of art, is singularly limited;
and, while it has been somewhat enriched
of recent years, it has also been confused
by using old words in new senses, so that
we are little better off than before. Per-
haps we can best begin by separating light
and shade into three forms which, how-
ever, more or less overlap and run into
each other and can seldom be entirely
separated. We shall call them light and
dark, which is an element of design;
modelling, which is an element of draw-
ing; and light and shadow, or true
chiaroscuro, which is a nearly indepen-
dent element of painting and tends in its
fullest development to obscure or obliter-
ate all the others.
You have light and dark, in its simplest
form, in Greek vase painting, in which
there are either light figures on a dark
ground or dark figures on a light ground,
[159]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
the division into light and dark being
merely an accentuation of the primary
division into filled and empty spaces and
having nothing to do with light and shad-
ow or even with modelling. But if, in-
stead of working in two tones, the artist
works in polychromy, it is evident that,
without any modelling or light and shad-
ow, he may have as many different de-
grees of light and dark as there are dif-
ferent colors in his scheme, each color
having its own place in a scale of light
and dark without regard to its special
quality as color. Here we approach the
old and best sense of that much abused
word "values," which has come to mean
so many things that it now means next
to nothing. As Fromentin used it, it signi-
fied the degree of light or dark, on a scale
from black to white, of any object in a
picture, considered as a whole, without
regard to its own light and shade. Now,
into this painting in flat colors, which have
[160]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
their necessary values, you may introduce
a certain amount of that light and shade
which makes modelling without altering
the essential nature of your work, each
space of color retaining its complete in-
dividuality as a space of blue or white or
red and its own value in the scale of light
and dark, the lights and shades within
its boundaries being quite subordinate.
This is the usual condition in primitive
painting and is the condition to which, as
we shall see, classic and, especially, dec-
orative painting tends, for several reasons,
to return. But if, in the desire to procure
the illusion of solidity and of the existence
of figures or objects in free space, you
push the degree of light and shade in
individual objects much further, an en-
tirely new condition results. The dif-
ference between the light and the shadow
on a given object may become greater
than the difference between the value of
that object as a whole and that of another
[161]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
object near it, and the lights of the two
objects are bound together as light and
their shadows as shade. The result is a
new pattern, overlying and cutting across
the original linear pattern, and more or
less independent of it. In its fullest devel-
opment this true light and shadow be-
comes so predominant that the original
linear pattern ceases to have any impor-
tance and the original scheme of separate
or local colors is absorbed in the color,
whether warm or cold, of the light, and
the contrasting color of the shadow.
Finally, as distance and open air are at-
tempted, all colors, all values, and all light
and shade are modified by atmosphere
and the influence of the sky, color and
chiaroscuro mingle and confound their
identities, and dance from end to end of
the canvas transcending all bounds and
absorbing everything into themselves.
It is late in the history of painting before
light and shade progresses beyond the
[162]
:iuj^ I
iW
a
a
en
5
PH
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
stage of modelling. Leonardo da Vinci has
always been considered an innovator in
light and shade, and a great chiaroscurist,
yet he did little more than complete the
modelling of his figures, making them look
like figures in the round where earlier men *•
had been contented with figures in relief. **"
Both Michelangelo and Raphael were con-
tented to rest here, and so, for the most
part, were their followers and imitators.
Even much later, painters like Caravaggio
and Ribera — the tenebrists, as they were
called — only darkened the shadows to "
blackness, exaggerating and vulgarizing
their modelling without substituting light
and shadow for it as a distinct element of
expression. The first painters to use light
and shadow, in its fullness, as an over-
lying pattern, independent of the linear
pattern under it, were Correggio and the
Venetians; and even with them the orig-
inal linear pattern maintains its impor-
tance, so that an outline drawing of one of
[163]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
their pictures always gives an idea of the
essential nature of the design, though it
robs it of its richness. With Rembrandt
we reach the stage of fully developed
chiaroscuro absorbing or overriding every-
thing else, so that an outline drawing of
one of his compositions is almost incon-
ceivable and, if attempted, would give
no idea of the real picture because omit-
ting the thing on which he principally
relies for his effect.
In the hands of its especial masters light
and shade is a powerful means of poetic
and imaginative expression. With Correg-
gio (PL 31) the glow of light on a shoulder
or a bosom, the soft veil of shadow on a
woman's side, act as mitigants to a too
voluptuous ideal, and remove his creations
into a realm of dreamy enjoyment where
is no conscience and no responsibility —
nothing but an endless lotus-eating calm.
With the tempestuous Tintoretto every-
thing is changed. Light and shade be-
[164]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
comes lurid, fantastic, full of wild energy.
He bars his figures with unexpected and,
sometimes, unaccountable cast shadows;
his light comes from anywhere and no-
where and brings out a head or arm into
sharp relief and throws a body into deep
shadow. His original design is crossed and
recrossed by another one of light and
darkness which everywhere contradicts it
and yet greatly enhances its effect. With
Rembrandt light and shadow become the
only things of consequence, and express,
as nothing else could, his strangely poetic
mind. With them he can reveal the spirit-
ual and create the supernatural, he can
place you in presence of a miracle or make
you see the human soul.
One of the most acute of present-day
critics * has maintained, in a recent book,
that the art of imaginative design is de-
pendent on the use of contours and the
avoidance of "chiaroscuro and modelling
* Bernard Berenson. A Sienese Painter of the Francis-
can Legend, Dent., 1909.
[165]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
in the round," because modelling "never
allows us to forget our bodies." It seems
to me that Mr. Berenson's exclusive de-
votion to Italian art has made him
strangely forgetful of Rembrandt, and that
his error is also, in part, due to a confusion
of two things which, as I have tried to
show, are essentially different: modelling
and true chiaroscuro. Modelling does, in-
deed, insist upon the body — true chiaro-
scuro conceals it. In its fully developed
form, light and shadow becomes mystery,
absorbs substance as well as line, and be-
comes the one means for the expression
of the otherwise inexpressible. It is not in
the work of any Sienese linealist, nor
even hi the work of any Oriental, that
religious emotion and the awe of the
supernatural have been most truly trans-
lated into the terms of art; it is in the
painting of "The Supper at Emaus" and
the etching of "Dr. Faustus " (PL 32).
But just because light and shade is so
[166]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
mysterious and so absorbing, because
it tends to take the place of design and
drawing and even color, it is a dangerous
tool. It requires a great imaginative genius
to make what it gives us a fair exchange
for what it takes away. In the hands of
smaller men than Rembrandt — and even
in his when, for the moment, his imagina-
tion is in abeyance — it degenerates into a
rather paltry picturesqueness — an insist-
ence on the accident of lighting rather
than on the nature of the thing lighted.
The true lover of either form or color will
always keep it in subordination to other
things, using it as an ornament to his
work, not as the substance of it.
Even after Rembrandt there was one
more step for light and shade to take, and
that step it took in the latter part of the
nineteenth century. That step was to
unite itself with color so that the two were
no longer distinguishable, to bend both
to the rendering of natural light in the
[167]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
open air, and to make light the only real
subject of painting, the objects which
reflect it being no longer of any individual
interest. The impressionist movement,
which effected this step, was undoubtedly
of some service, and the step itself was,
to some extent, an advance. It brought
back into art the element of color when
that element was sadly needed, for most
modern color, through exact imitation of
studio effects and through the decay of
technical knowledge, had become cold and
muddy; and it discovered things about
natural effects of light which may prove
useful to future masters who shall have
thoroughly assimilated them and can
employ them without undue insistence on
their importance. Its great defect was its
neglect of art; for color, even more than
drawing, requires that art shall control the
study of nature, and that things shall be
done for the purpose of expression, not
merely for the love of imitation.
\ 168 1
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
But even as science, impressionism was
not wholly new. Its greatest discoveries
are supposed to be the colored shadow,
especially the blue or violet shadow, and
the use of broken color instead of united
tones. In both of these discoveries it had
been anticipated. Leonardo shows us, in
his note-books, that he had not only ob-
served the blue^shadow but was perfectly
aware of its reason, and he has written
long passages of description of natural
effects that are as acute in observation of
the action of light and atmosphere as if
they were the work of a painter of to-day.
The colored shadow and the broken tone
were the common property of all good
colorists, the only difference between the
best of the old work and the best of the
new, in that respect, being that the old
painters were more particular that their
method of securing the broken tone should
not be obvious and should not interfere
with the beauty of their surfaces. And
[169]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
the blue shadow itself had been painted
by Vermeer. Indeed this extraordinary
painter had anticipated many of the most
modern devices for representing light and
atmosphere, including that manner of
painting in minute dots which has been
given the name of pointillism.
Leonardo not only gives us his observa-
tions of natural effects — he gives us his
reason for not using them in his art.
There are several long passages among his
notes describing the effects of foliage as
seen by transmitted and reflected light, in
which the blue surface lights, the yellow-
ness of transparent leaves seen from below,
and the mottling of these leaves by the
shadows of other leaves which come be-
tween them and the sun, are considered
with great particularity. And then comes
this warning: "Never represent leaves
as though transparent in the sun, because
they are always indistinct" And again:
"The structure of such a leaf is indis-
[170]
Plate 23. — "Venus and Mars Bound by Cupid," by Veronese.
Property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
tinct, and the imitation of it is to be
avoided." There speaks the true classic
spirit. The structure is indistinct, and no
amount of illusion will compensate, to the
true classicist, for the lack of clarity and
for the lack of structure. Impressionism,
which makes light its only subject, and
ruthlessly sacrifices clarity and structure
in the interest of illusion, is acceptable in
inverse proportion to the essential beauty
and interest of the objects represented.
It may be admirable in still-life, where no
one cares about the objects themselves.
They are glorified by the light rather
than made insignificant by it. It is not
for nothing that so many of the best can-
vases of the moderns are pictures of still-
life, and it is the modern study of light
and color for its own sake that is respon-
sible for the doctrine that still-life is as
good a subject for art as any other. It is,
indeed, a better subject than any other
for this kind of art, for it entails less loss
[171]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
to set against the gain. In the treatment
of landscape impressionism may still be
tolerable, because light naturally plays
a great role in landscape painting; but
no painter who cares for the anatomy of
earth or the growth and life of trees will
ever be quite satisfied with it. In figure
painting it is intolerable. In its hands the
human figure, the most beautiful and the
most interesting thing in all the world, is
merged in the landscape, as the landscape
itself is lost in the light that falls upon it,
and man himself becomes no more than
an accident among other accidents. If
Leonardo could not bring himself to paint
a leaf "transparent in the sun," what
would he have said to some of our modern
pictures in which the glorious human
body, that miracle of nature, becomes no
more than a surface on which the pattern
of the leaf-shadows may trace itself
as on a smooth stone? Still less could he
have endured to see it made a lay figure
[172]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
for the study of cross lights, red on one
side and blue on the other as if it stood
between a chemist's bottles.
But if modern literalism has produced
colorlessness, so that a modern gallery
seems filled with chalky and muddy and
blackish pictures, from which the splen-
dor and the subtlety of true color are alike
absent; if the impressionistic study of
color has obliterated form and structure
without attaining the fullness of decorative
beauty; yet the way out is not by following
the post-impressionists into the denial of
all connection with nature and the erect-
ing of subjective emotion as the only
standard. In color, as in form, we come
back to the fundamental truth that paint-
ing is a representative art, and that while
its version of nature is a heightened and
glorified one it is not a denial of natural
law. In its greatest magnificence we yet
demand of color that it shall give us an
illusion of truth; we ask of it that its
[173]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
variations from the actual shall not be
perceived — indeed that they shall serve
to heighten the sense of reality. To paint
trees red and grass purple may be good
heraldry, but such fancies have no other
place in the art of painting than that of
the blue boars and the green lions that
used to decorate the signs of way-side inns.
Nor does this demand for a certain con-
formity to nature in itself impose any
great privation upon the artist. If he
needs a note of red, for the completion of
his color-harmony or the expression of his
emotion, he has only to introduce into his
picture some object which may conceiva-
bly be red. If he wants a green or blue or
purple it is not impossible to find objects
of those colors. One of the great uses of
drapery to the painter is that it allows of
the introduction of any desired color into
the general harmony of colors. But this
sort of conformity to nature in the local
color of objects introduced, while it may
[174]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
be sufficient for painting of a very primi-
tive kind, is only the beginning of the
conformities imposed upon painting of
a more fully developed order. We must
have, also, some sufficient recognition of
the laws of light, some knowledge of the
relation of the color of lights to the color
of shadows. We must have, above all, a
structure of light and dark, or of light and
shade, underlying our color if we would
prevent our color from being merely
chaotic and elevate it to the plane of true
decoration. As every color has its value
as light or dark there will necessarily be
some arrangement of light and dark
accompanying any scheme of colors, but
if the colors are selected and arranged
for their quality as color only, leaving their
effect as light and dark out of the account,
that arrangement will be hap-hazard and
therefore bad. It is necessary to weigh
each particle of color for its value as well
as for its chromatic effect, whether this
[175]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
value is intrinsic in the color or is the
effect of light and shade, and to see that
the whole pattern of light and dark is as
carefully and thoroughly organized as the
pattern of color. It is for this reason that
the term "values" has been so extended
as to cover even the differences of light
and dark caused by modelling, and it is
for this reason that the study of values has
come to be considered of such vast im-
portance. The thing was equally impor-
tant before it received its modern name,
and it remains equally important whether
the scheme of light and dark is naturalistic
or decorative — whether it is copied from
something seen or 'invented for its own
beauty. It is his lack of a feeling for
values — that lack of a sense for the
amount of light or dark included in his
colors, which permits him to make a sun-
set cloud darker than the sky it rests in—
that makes the color of Turner so spec-
tacular and unsatisfactory. It is, even
[176]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
more than the lack of form, the lack of
a sense for values that reduces the color
of Monticelli to a sort of unmeaning
gorgeousness.
The perfect union of color and of values
— each smallest fragment of the picture
fulfilling its double function as a step in
the scale of light and dark and as a note
in the harmony of colors — produces that
great unifying influence in a picture which
we know as tone ; and I know of no more
wonderful instance of perfect tone than
that of the greatest work of the greatest
of artists, who has yet been thought of as
anything but a painter and a colorist
—Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel. Here is a space to be painted
which has been estimated at ten thousand
square feet, and the design is said to con-
tain three hundred and forty-three figures ;
yet this vast scheme, which had, more-
over, from the conditions of fresco paint-
ing, to be executed a bit at a time and
[177]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
without retouching, is held together from
end to end with a perfection of unity as
great as that of a tiny canvas by Terborch
or Metsu. And this effect is produced by
most subtle and beautiful means. The
whole central portion of the ceiling, with
its stories of the Creation and the Fall of
Man, is based upon a chord of gold and
violet. The lights, which are mainly the
illuminated masses of the flesh, are of a
thousand tints of grayish yellow or pale
orange; the darks, which are made by
the draperies, are reddish violet; the gray
blue of sky forms the general half-tone.
Occasionally there is a blue drapery, but
the lights of it are pale yellow, the local
color subsisting only in the shadows. As
you descend from this central portion to
the pendentives and the lunettes the color
grows richer and fuller; you have deep
blues and greens and rich reds, but always
there is the golden light modifying the
local tones, the full-colored shadow look-
[178]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
ing violaceous by reason of the contrast.
The effect of the whole is so rich, so
harmonious, so right in the relations of its
parts and in the relation of the whole to
its surroundings, so perfectly in air and
so lacking in heaviness, that, when I first
saw it, I forgot, for the time, the stupen-
dous design and marvellous draughtsman-
ship in admiration for its glory of color
and painter-like mastery of tone. Con-
sidering the overwhelming difficulty of
the task, I know of nothing else in the .>
world comparable to this as a display of
the highest powers of the colorist.
It is the perfect notation of values, the r
union of the exact degree of light or dark
with the exact quality of warm or cold
color necessary to the place where it occurs,
which gives the sense of color to many a
picture of grayish or brownish tone in
which positive colors hardly exist. It is
this which makes the silvery grays of
Correggio's "Danae" so lovely and so
[179]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
colorful that they can confront even the
glowing hues of Titian without fear. It is
this which gives us the illusion of color
in Rembrandt, even when he introduces
nothing in his pictures but variations of
golden brown. It is his mastery of values,
even more than the intrinsic beauty of his
cold hues, that makes Vermeer so pre-
cious. It is mastery of values that makes
Corot, at his grayest, a master of color.
But it is not only such gray or brown
pictures that possess tone — the richest
and most splendid canvases of Titian and
Giorgione possess it also, and in equal
measure, and they possess it through this
same double service of each particle of
pigment as a part of a comprehensive
scheme of color, and as a part of an
equally comprehensive scheme of light
and dark. This scheme of light and dark,
which is the framework on which the
color is woven, is in their works, to some
extent, conventional and decorative rather
[ISO]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
than strictly naturalistic. The flesh, for
instance, is almost always lighter than the
sky, which is the reverse of what usually
happens in the open air; and it is so in
order to give the human figure that domi-
nance in the pictorial scheme which its life
and its importance to the mind give it
in our consciousness. It is one of those
cases, and there are many such in art,
where a convention produces the effect of
truth more completely than would an
exact compliance with the actual. But if
the values of these Venetian masterpieces
are not quite nature's values, they are
none the less profoundly studied; and as
every good Venetian picture has a linear
design that will retain its air of mag-
nificent mastery when the composition is
stripped to its bare bones by old-fashioned
wood-engraving, so it has a muscular
structure of light and dark that is still con-
summate when photography has robbed
it of its colors. Put some of the later
[181]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
pictures of Turner and most of the mod-
ern impressionistic works to the same
test, and you will have little or nothing
left. They have no blood and bone under
the skin of surface beauty — their irides-
cence is that of a blown bladder.
Such grasp and knowledge of both light
and shade and color as is necessary to the
attainment of harmony by the way of true
tone is difficult of acquisition, and it is
not to be wondered at, human nature
being what it is, that various short cuts to
harmony have been attempted and various
forms of false or artificial tone invented.
It was the desire to attain to an artificial
harmony, and to something that might
answer for tone, without the necessity
of too much thought or labor, that led
to the once well-nigh universal use of
bitumen. It used to be spread over the
whole surface to be painted upon, and
painted into while it was wet, so that it
mixed itself in some degree with all the
[182]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
colors on the canvas, acting as a sort of
mechanical harmonizer and taking the
place of knowledge in preventing false
contrasts and crudity. This use of bitu-
men has been frequently lamented be-
cause of its impermanence — because it
led to blackening and cracking and, in
some cases, almost to the sliding off the
canvas of the picture painted upon it. It
seems to me truly lamentable because it
was false art in the first place, and inevi-
tably vitiated the color of the artists who
indulged in it. It was easy — fatally easy —
and art made easy is always art made bad.
The day of bitumen has passed — one of
the last artists to base his work upon it
was Munkacsy, whose pictures are fast
blackening into invisibility upon the walls
of our museums — and we might look
upon our escape from it with some com-
placency were it not for the fact that other
means of mechanical harmonizing are
still employed. I do not know whether
[183]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
there are still any papers published of the
sort which used, not so long ago, to give
instructions to amateurs whereby they
might produce works of art without any
knowledge of nature. They used to con-
tain recipes something like this: for the
flesh use light red, yellow ochre and white
with — here was the invariable part — with
"a little ivory black to give it tone." It
sounds naive enough, put in that simple
way, and yet that recipe of "a little ivory
black" as a "universal harmonizer" was
one of the things on which no less a per-
son than James McNeill Whistler relied
for the production of his delicate sym-
phonies. In the hands of a hundred imita-
tors and followers it has become almost
the only thing relied on, and instead of a
little ivory black it has become a good
deal.
Take another instance. In the old bitu-
minous days all shadows were brown,
and the acceptance of that rule saved a
[184]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
vast deal of trouble. Then the impression-
ists discovered that some shadows are
blue. The logical result should have been
a new impulse toward the thorough study
of the real color of shadows. The actual
result, in many cases, has been merely
to install blue instead of brown, as a
thought-saver and time-saver. "All shad-
ows are blue," says the young painter
who thinks himself modern, and troubles
no more about them, but paints them blue
where they would, in nature, be brown or
orange or anything but blue. As a "uni-
versal harmonizer," if we are to have such
a thing, I confess to preferring bitumen,
for the warm tones of those days were
at least more agreeable to the eye than
the icy tones of these.
Finally, there is the harmony by attenua-
tion, the use of pale and faded colors, the
reign of universal half-tone, inaugurated
by Puvis de Chavannes. As he first used
it, in the decoration of cold, gray build-
[185]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
ings, it was admirably suited to its pur-
pose, and his dead tones seemed a part of
the stone and plaster that surrounded
them. In other situations it was not so
successful, even where he used it himself
—his decorations in the Boston Public
Library never seem to me to mate with the
yellow marble of that splendid interior—
and in the hands of others it became only
one more case of the universal harmonizer.
This time it was a little, or a good deal,
of white "to give it tone." As confession is
good for the soul, I may admit that the
influence of Puvis was so dominant, when
I began to have decorative commissions
to fill, that it carried me away, for a time,
into this harmonization by paleness. I
hope I have learned something since those
days, and if I had my two lunettes in the
Library of Congress to paint again the
result, whether better or worse, would be
something very different from the ghosts
of paintings I actually placed there.
[186]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
All of these methods are really confes-
sions of weakness — they are efforts to
avoid difficulties instead of conquering
them. The ideal is to paint with the full
palette and, on occasion, with the full
strength of the palette, and to harmonize
the result by sheer knowledge : knowledge
of the laws of light and shade ; knowledge
of the harmonies and contrasts of colors;
knowledge of the relations of the color
of light to the color of shadow. Nothing
but long study will give a pa niter this
knowledge. The laws of color cannot be
written in any form precise enough to help
him greatly. A competent master, if there
were such, might greatly shorten the road
for him by practical advice and demon-
stration, but even he could only start the
student upon the right road. A natural
gift is indispensable to begin with, but that
will carry one no farther in color than it
would in drawing. Years of work, years of
discipline, years of observation of art and
[187]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
of nature — that is the only recipe. The
only universal harmonizer is "brains, sir."
While it is true that good color is based
upon a scheme of light and dark or light
and shadow, and that true tone is only to
be attained by a perfect adjustment of
color to values, yet in proportion as color
is the dominant preoccupation of the
artist it manifests a tendency to assume
the superior position and to relegate light
and shade to the inferior place. It tends
to revert toward the primitive condition,
in which each space of color kept its own
quality throughout, unsullied by shadows ;
and while it admits and relies upon light
and shade it insists that this element shall
be so subordinated that it shall never dis-
guise the quality of a given color as color.
However rich the variations within their
borders, red must yet be red, from one end
to the other, and blue, blue; and if there
are a dozen different reds, scarlet and
crimson and rose will be scarlet and crim-
[188]
Plate 26. — " L'Enlevement de Psyche," by Prudhon.
In the Louvre.
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
son and rose through each variation of
shadow and half-tone and high light and
no one will be confusable with any other.
This persistence of the local color through
all conditions of light or shadow or reflec-
tion is a quality of all true colorists, but
it is perhaps most astonishing in the work
of Veronese and is one of the things that
make him, on the whole, the most accom-
plished painter that ever lived. He can
do anything with color or with light and
shade, can throw whole figures into cast
shadow, can reverberate reflections from
one color to another, can strike a brilliant
golden high light onto a mantle of violet
silk ; yet the true local color of each object
is never in doubt. From the deepest shad-
ow to the highest light it preserves its
identity and is immediately distinguish-
able from every other color near it. What
the primitives achieved by the omission
of modulation he achieves with the fullest
modulation.
[189]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
In Veronese, also, you will find the best
example of another habit of the great
colorists which connects their practice
with that of the primitives. In primitive
painting a given color was shaded, in so
far as it was shaded at all, with more of
the same color, a blue drapery being
simply a little deeper blue in the shadows
than in the lights, and this method pro-
duced a crystalline purity of tint hard to
attain in any other manner. As cEiaro-
scuro began to be studied this simple
manner was abandoned, shadows became
darker and heavier, and gradually ab-
sorbed all local colors, leaving them visible
only in the lights. But the colorists found
that all those things in nature which were
loveliest in color were colored in the
shadow rather than in the light. Look into
a rose and see how the color, which is so
faint as to be almost imperceptible on the
edges of the outer petals, grows deeper
and richer as you dive into its heart. Look
[190]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
at the sky, on a clear day, and see how
it is gradated from the pale horizon into
a pure and ever purer blue as you ap-
proach the zenith. Look at a ruby and see
how from the fiery high light it darkles
into fuller and fuller red. This is the way
that nature produces beautiful color, and
this is the only way man has succeeded in
producing it. The painter must know
enough to modify this condition by such
graying of cast shadows, such modula-
tions of half-tones, as s.hall maintain the
illusion of natural effect, but if he would
give all the pleasure by his color that
color is capable of giving he must, in the
main, base his procedure on that of the
primitives, coloring his shadows and at-
tenuating his lights rather than coloring
his lights and graying his shadows.
If the purity and beauty of individual
hue is largely dependent on the subordina-
tion of light and shade and on this intensi-
fication of color in the shadow, it is also
[191]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
largely dependent on the technical method
of painting. The most striking proof of
this is found in comparing the coloring
of our painters in water-color with that of
our painters in oil. On going into an ex-
hibition of water colors the first impression
will be that the painters, good and bad,
are all working in color. On going into an
exhibition of oils the first impression is
apt to be that every one is painting in mud
or in chalk. It is not a question of the
ability of the painters. Some of the water
color painters are certain to be mediocre
artists, and some of the oil painters are
sure to be men of very great talent ; yet in
this one matter of beautiful and pure color
the water colorists will maintain their ad-
vantage. What is even more conclusive,
you will find the same man working in
both mediums and producing clear and
lovely results in the one and heavy opac-
ity in the other. The contrast is no longer
so striking as it used to be, because, alas,
[192]
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
our water color painters are more and
more abandoning the unique advantage
of their material and imitating the muddi-
ness of modern oil painting, but the con-
trast is still there.
In one of his lectures to the students
of the Royal Academy, some years ago,
Mr. George Clausen noticed this superior
beauty of water color, and the reason for
it, saying: "if you put a simple wash of
color on paper it is always beautiful, be-
cause of its transparency." But he failed
to draw what seems the natural conclu-
sion from it. After some account of the
ways in which the older painters secured
an equivalent effect in oils, he goes on:
"But these paths are outside the track
of most artists to-day ... we are more
literal ... we feel that it may be possible
to paint with our first and main reference
to nature as we see it around us and . . .
to claim still that beauty of color may be
found also in the plain aspect of visible
[193]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
things." The real meaning of which is,
that while splendid or lovely color has
been secured in oil painting in the past
and is secured in water color to-day, we
must still go on muddling and missing it.
Why must we? Having once admitted
that a great part of the quality of fine
color is dependent on transparency, why
should we not go back to some one of the
methods of the older painters by which
transparency was secured ?
There are several such methods which
will call for consideration and be dis-
cussed, presently, in some detail. They are
being studied, here and there, in this coun-
try, as are all the other problems of color.
The late Louis Loeb was studying the use
of glazes over a monochromatic founda-
tion, and making great progress in the
direction of rich and full color at the time
of his death. A number of other American
painters are pursuing similar investiga-
tions, and some of those that paint di-
[194]
3 £
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o- 5
W a
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0)
LIGHT AND SHADE AND COLOR
rectly, and without particular method, are
constantly increasing the force and fulness
of their palettes. They are still a small
minority, but they are having their effect,
and the walls of our exhibitions are yearly
gaining in richness of color. I hope and
believe that when the American school of
painting is fully developed it will prove to
be a school of colorists.
(195)
VI
TECHNIQUE
TECHNIQUE — I dislike the word but can
find no precise equivalent for it — is that
element of the art of painting which
has the least reliance upon the observa-
tion of nature. The subject of a picture
may be some place or event actually seen
by the artist ; the design may be suggested
by something in nature or may even be
wholly copied from some felicitous nat-
ural arrangement; the drawing, the light
and shade, the coloring, however modified
by the artistic intention, must be more or
less imitative or representative. Nature
may decide for the artist what he shall
paint, but she has no voice in determining
how he shall paint it. The means at the
artist's disposal, the tools he uses and his
[196]
TECHNIQUE
methods of employing them, are decided
by the history and traditions of his art.
On the purely technical side a piece of
painting is good or bad as any other piece
of craftsmanship is good or bad, accord-
ing as it employs its tools and materials
to the best advantage and for the intrin-
sic beauty of the material result, making
a skin of oil paint as beautiful as it can
be made.
But modern art has almost entirely lost
the feeling for beautiful workmanship, as
well as the knowledge of how to produce
it. Of all the traditions of painting which
were destroyed by the pseudo- classic
revolution the technical tradition was the
most thoroughly annihilated; and the
modern artist has had to experiment and
guess in the effort to rediscover the ad-
mirable methods of the older masters,
or to muddle through without any method
at all, relying upon the closeness of his
observation of nature to take the place
[197]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
of any mastery of his materials. We have
even so far forgotten what real technical
beauty is, that if any man paints with a
big brush and a certain swagger of hand-
ling we hail him, at once, as a master of
technique, though every particle of his
color may be muddy and heavy, though
his rendering of form may be cursory and
insufficient, though his canvases be un-
pleasant in their surface, though his pict-
ures, from end to end, are but rough
approximations to anything the painters
of the past .would have thought satis-
factory. A parade of what we call "direct-
ness" and "frankness," and a "looseness"
often noi to be distinguished from slack-
ness, have come to be almost the only tech-
nical qualities we admire.
This modern method of direct painting
which has become wellnigh universal—
a method in which everything, design,
drawing, light and shade and color, is
produced at once and with the fewest pos-
[198]
TECHNIQUE
sible brush strokes — implies the assump-
tion of a mastery little less than colossal.
It is based, originally, upon the practice
of two real masters, Velazquez and Frans
Hals, but, it seems to me, upon a mis-
reading of their work. Hals, at times,
comes nearer to justifying modern prac-
tice than does Velazquez. He has the
reputation of having been a hard drinker
and there are pictures of his that look al-
most as if they might have been painted
in a drunken frenzy, so meaningless
and disorganized are his slashing brush
strokes. There are also works painted
late in life when, apparently, he had lost
his skill of hand and almost his sureness
of eye, which are fumbling and nearly
formless, and which maintain their inter-
est because of the vast acquired knowl-
edge that the old man could not lose.
But in the execution of Hals at his best,
it is not his freedom that is most remark-
able, it is his extraordinary precision.
199
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
Every touch is exactly right in shape and
position, in value and in color, to render
with utmost accuracy the object repre-
sented, whether it be a human head or a
bit of still-life. That these touches appear
to have been placed on the canvas at high
speed increases the wonder, but the won-
der itself is in their certainty. If I had a
pupil who was bitten with the mania of
looseness, and was trying to run before
he could walk, I should like to place him
before one of the inimitable shooting-
guild pictures at Haarlaem and bid him
look at the character of the heads and
hands, at the clear distinction of bony and
fleshy planes, at the consummate natu-
ralistic draughtsmanship ; and I should say
to him: "When you can draw like that
we will talk of painting." I should ask
him to observe the rendering of the sword
hilts and halberds, of the dishes and
glasses, of the pattern on a cut-velvet
doublet, perfect in its repetition through
[200]
Plate 28. — "Peasant with Wheelbarrow," from the etching by Millet.
TECHNIQUE
every inch of surface, absolute in its per-
spective as it runs in and out among the
folds; and I should say to him: "when you
can compass that precision, by any means,
you may begin to attempt it with free
touches." Then I should like to show him
certain little panels by the same master,
a few inches square, and make him see
the beautiful, flowing, translucent pigment
and ask him to produce one square inch
of such a surface before he went further.
Finally, I should take him to see that won-
derful portrait of an old lady, belonging
to Mr. Morgan, in the Metropolitan Mu-
seum and ask him to try to copy the inde-
cipherable modelling of the head; to try
to paint the ruff with its perfect simplicity
and the entire regularity of its plaitings, in
their proper foreshortenings, as they turn
into the shadow; to make any approach
to the quiet unity of light and color,
the impeccable tone of the whole canvas.
I think that, after a few such lessons, he
[201]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
would be less content with what passes
for "technique" to-day.
As for Velazquez, his coolness and lucid-
ity, his absolute freedom from ostentation
or any display of virtuosity, his serious-
ness and his completeness are among his
most obvious characteristics. Fortunately,
in his case, we have his early work and
can be sure — where, in the case of Hals,
we can only guess — by what steps he at-
tained his ultimate mastery. There are
several of his quite early pictures in exist-
ence, little more than still-life studies, ex-
ercises in the representation of natural
facts and appearances. They are rather
hard, rather dull and commonplace,
closely studied and thoroughly finished,
the work of a good honest sudent, no
more. Then we have the early portraits,
simple in arrangement, quiet, almost
timid in execution, but fine in character
and beautiful in tone. It is only little by
little that he reaches the superb freedom
[202]
of the accomplished master. I should say*
to my hypothetical pupil: "begin where
Velazquez began; take the steps he took;
and, if you are able, we shall be glad
to have you leave off where he left off."
But even in the hands of these* masters
the "direct method" of painting had its
drawbacks as well as its virtues — was
suited to some purposes and not to others.
No man is great enough to carry on all the
elements of painting at the same time and
achieve equal and entire success in all. If
design and drawing and color are to be
attained with the one set of brush strokes,
and without separate consideration, some
or all of these elements will suffer. Neither
Velazquez nor Hals was pre-eminently a
designer; neither was, in the full sense, a
colorist. Both were admirable draughts-
men as far as the correct placing and shap-
ing of things is concerned, but neither of
them had any conception of that higher
drawing which is an intellectual art. Velaz-
[203]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
quez was the greater man of the two and
comes nearer to attaining the great quali-
ties of other schools. His "Surrender of
Breda" is a nearly perfect composition for
its purpose, but he could not succeed in
another kind of art. His "Coronation of
the Virgin," placed beside even a second-
rate picture of the great Italian period, is
commonplace both in the design and in
the types and the manner of drawing.
Hals hardly composed at all and his big
portrait groups are put together anyhow.
Velazquez, while he could not attain to
the full beauty and glory of color, was a
master of tone and even his largest works
are admirably harmonized. Hals was
capable of great beauty of color in pas-
sages, but his larger pictures are seldom
quite perfectly in keeping. In his later
days he abandoned color almost alto-
gether and relied entirely upon the just-
ness of his values to give effect to nearly
monochromatic canvases. In a word, their
[204]
TECHNIQUE
methods were suited only to the purposes
of an almost purely naturalistic art — an
art occupying itself with the rendering of
objects and effects immediately before the
eye. And even so, there is one thing that
to my mind, they could never perfectly
render — the opaque color and the flowing
or slashing stroke can never give quite the
look of the human body, with its subtle
modelling, its broad surfaces, its glowing
lights and shadows, its peculiar irradia-
tion and inner light. Correggio and Titian
could render thes$ qualities of flesh, not
Velazquez or Hals.
It is, of course, precisely because Velaz-
quez and Hals were so entirely naturalistic
in temper that their methods have so in-
fluenced our naturalistic age. To a genera-
tion almost entirely absorbed in the effort
to render the thing seen, their example
could hardly fail to be decisive. But the
example has been a very dangerous one.
Even our most brilliant virtuosi have
[205]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
never been able to combine the brilliancy
of these masters with their solidity and
sanity. In the hands of the rank and file
of modern painters the attempt has led
to lamentable results. The obsession of
the big brush has led to the attempt to
use it where a smaller one was obviously
called for, to the omission of all forms less
than an inch wide, and the reduction of
ears to jug handles and of the human face
to a diagram. The desire of freedom and
looseness has led to the stroke which is
slashing whether it is right or wrong and
which, in the worst examples, comes to
represent nothing but so much paint. The
attempt to do everything at once leads to
doing nothing well. We paint at the thing
rather than paint it, fail and repaint, often
without waiting for the first painting to
dry, make alterations, put darks where
lights were or lights where darks have
been, or lay one 'coat of nearly the same
color over another. Where dark goes
| 206]
I
I
Sj
c
I
_
"s
s
TECHNIQUE
over light the paint cracks. Where light
goes over dark it becomes translucent,
with time, and the dark becomes visible.
Where the same color is twice laid the re-
sult is heaviness and muddiness. In our
effort at what we mistakenly call technique
we have forever lost all true technical
beauty.
I do not think this is an over-strong state-
ment of the faults of technical method in
the average modern portrait or figure
painting. Among the landscape painters,
especially, though some figure painters
practise it also, there is another kind of
technique which seems to have come to
us, directly, from the practice of Dupre,
but of which the ultimate ancestor is
Rembrandt — the technique of heavily
loaded pigment and of extreme rugosity
of surface. Rembrandt is the first master
who ever used anything that we should
now call heavy loading of paint, for the
richest surfaces of the Venetians were only
[207]
heavy enough for solidity. Rembrandt
himself had an admirable thin technique
which he applied when he was merely
painting what he saw — the lucidity and
beauty of surface in such a canvas as "The
Gilder" is inimitable — and even in such
a work as the wonderful "Orphan," in
the Art Institute of Chicago, the loading
is within bounds and the surface is all of
a piece. But he had a love for glitter,
which lead to heavily projecting high
lights, and he needed rough surfaces to
take his glazes. As he grew older and
more absorbed in his dreams his handling
grew rougher and less precise and his
loading is pushed to greater and greater
extremes. In some of his late work, mar-
vellous as it is in imaginative power, full
as it is of humanity and of sympathy, I
must confess that the actual painting is,
to me, extremely disagreeable.
Just what Dupre gained by his heavy
loading it is difficult to see. In comparison
[208]
TECHNIQUE
with the beautiful fluid touch of Corot or
the jewel work of Rousseau his pictures
reek of paint. But he is far outdone by
some of our moderns, and we have land-
scapes that look like a bit of studio wall
covered with the palette-scrapings of a
generation of art students, and arms and
legs built out into high relief but looking
none the rounder for it — things in which
the pigment, instead of being made into a
lovely surface, is thrown at us in raw and
hideous masses.
Finally, we have a kind of technique
invented in our own day — the hatching
and dotting of impressionism. It was
created for a special purpose, the render-
ing of the vibration of brilliant light, and
so far as it answers its purpose and is
applied to subjects appropriate for the
display of light for its own sake, it is
justified. But the last time I was in the
impressionist mom of the Luxembourg
Gallery it struck me not only that the
[209]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
pictures there were spotty and rough, the
surface unpleasant to look at as a sur-
face, but that they did not even give any
illusion of light. They were pale, not
luminous, and their rough surfaces had
caught and held the dust. They were
dingy and forlorn; their glory had de-
parted. And across the Seine, in the gal-
leries of the Louvre, were pictures four
hundred years old that seemed only the
richer and more glowing for the centuries
that had passed over them, and pictures
older still that looked as fresh and brilliant
as if just painted.
Unfortunately, we know too little of the
methods of the past to be able to discuss,
with any profit, that soundness of work-
manship which has kept the panels of
Van Eyck fresher than almost anything
which has been produced since. We can
admire the clear beauty of the color, the
exquisite surface, the incredible elabora-
tion of detail which is yet consistent with
[210]
a large general effect — we can be sure that
the reputed inventor of oil painting knew
more about the proper use of his materials
than any of his successors — but we do
not know what his materials were nor
how he used them. And we know little
more about the wonderful craftsmanship
of the earlier Italian painters. We can
see that there is a marvellous skill of hand
in the pure, fair modelling and delicate
drawing of Angelico ; a miracle of training
in the incisive goldsmith-work of Man-
tegna; but we have no notion of how we
should go to work to imitate them.
In all good technical methods of painting
there are three things aimed at: soundness
and permanence of workmanship ; beauty
of surface; purity and richness of color.
Probably the perfection of primitive tech-
nique is forever unrecoverable, and in the
matter of a sound and permanent manner
of painting we can go no farther than to
avoid certain things. We can refuse to use
[211]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
certain pigments that are notoriously
fugitive; we can avoid mixing certain
colors that chemically affect each other;
we can refrain from repainting until the
under coat of paint is thoroughly dry.
And we can be sure that, other things
being equal, the less paint we have put
upon the canvas the less likelihood there
is of disastrous alterations. But we can
profitably study the sesthetic quality of
the workmanship of various masters and
of various schools, trying to understand
what they thought beautiful in surface
and how they secured fulness of color,
that we may secure as much of these
things as possible in our own work.
And, first, let us consider that bugbear
of the modern painter — hardness. To say
that a picture is hard is of itself sufficient
condemnation in our eyes, yet nothing
seems more certain than that hardness
was, with some of the masters, a virtue
deliberately sought for. Mantegna's draw-
[212]
Plate 30. — "The Song of the Shepherd," by Puvis de Chavannes.
Property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
TECHNIQUE
ings, made with a pen, are much less pre-
cise, much less definite, than the paintings
he made from them. He consciously strove
for a hardness with his brush which his
pen would not give him. And, indeed,
if there is a hardness which is not beauti-
ful it is usually because it is not hard
enough. There is little dignity in the hard-
ness of wood or the hardness of leather
— there is much in the hardness of bronze
or the hardness of crystal. Only if one is
to cast things in bronze or carve them in
basalt, they should be worthy the imper-
ishable material. The hardness of Hol-
bein's wonderful enamel is an essential
and necessary part of its beauty. The
gem-like perfection of line and of com-
position in Ingres's portraits calls for a
gem-like hardness of execution. If these
things were less hard they could not seem
so permanent — so immortal. The only
reason to fear such hardness as this is
that one has nothing to say which is
[213]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
worthy of such expression. Such defini-
tion is cruel, and exposes the least empti-
ness of thought, the smallest and most
momentary hesitation. It may be well for
most of us to take refuge in a little merci-
ful vagueness; but let us admit this as
a concession to human weakness, not
plume ourselves upon it as on a virtue.
Technical beauty has been attained in
various less strenuous ways, but nearly
all good technical practice has been based
on two considerations: First, that it is
necessary to attend separately to the dif-
ferent elements of painting if any of them
are to be carried to perfection; Second,
that it is necessary to provide, in some
form, for transparency if color is to attain
its highest effectiveness. When a beam of
light falls upon a surface of, let us say,
red paint, some of it is absorbed, and the
red rays predominate in what is reflected
back to the eye, but a great many of the
other rays are also bent back by the re-
[214]
TECHNIQUE
sisting surface and the red is confused
with other colors. When a beam of light
traverses a piece of red glass virtually
all but the red rays are absorbed and the
eye receives a sensation of pure red. When
paint is laid thinly over an opaque, re-
flecting surface, the light traverses the
color to the surface below, is reflected
from that, and passes through the pigment
to the eye as if it passed through colored
glass. This is, nearly enough for our pur-
pose, the scientific reason for the use of
transparent color. But there is a separate
reason for the use of the light ground. As
oil paint grows older it tends to darken,
but it also tends to grow more translucent.
If there is a dark ground under it this
translucence intensifies its darkness — if
the ground is light it counteracts it.
Primitive technique provided for the
separate consideration of the elements of
painting, and for the transparency of
color, in the simplest manner. Composi-
[215]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
tion and drawing were exhaustively stud-
ied in the cartoon. This wras then traced
upon a perfectly smooth and wrhite surface
with very delicate lines. Light and shade
had hardly to be considered at all. The
various parts of the picture wrere painted
thinly upon the white ground, each bit
finished before the next was begun, and
when the last bit of the ground was cov-
ered the picture was complete. It was
nearly the method of pure water color,
though with a little more use .of semi-
opaque pigment, and had all the lumi-
nosity and beauty of water color. It is
probably the most permanent method of
painting ever invented, and its only
weakness is its unfitness for full effects
of light and shade. It is apparently the
method employed by Holbein, and it was
revived by the English Pre-Raphaelites.
I do not know who invented what, after
its greatest practitioners, we may call
the Venetian technique, nor when and
[216]
TECHNIQUE
how it was developed from the primitive
manner. We can only take it, as it was
used by the great masters, and try to
understand its nature and the reasons for
its use. It is especially suited to the expres-
sion of full and strong chiaroscuro united
with pure and beautiful color, and was
practised by Correggio, wherever he got
it, as well as by Titian and Tintoretto. In
this manner of work the cartoon ceased
to be made, and composition, drawing
and light and shade were created with the
loaded brush upon the canvas, leaving the
color to be considered alone, at the end.
Of course there was more or less prelim-
inary sketching and drawing, but light
and shade had become so important that
it modified everything else and the final
drawing could not be decided upon with-
out it. This preliminary underpainting
was, as nearly as we can tell, practically
monochromatic, and was made of little
more than black, white and red, Titian
[217]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
using more red while Correggio and
Tintoretto used more black and white. It
was solid, opaque, and with some graining
and roughness of surface, though never ex-
cessive in its loading. Over this ground the
true color surface was laid thinly, at first
in united, transparent washes or glazes,
later with modifications of semi-opaque
as well as transparent color. The under-
painting, in this method, could be worked
at as long as necessary, could be recon-
sidered and modified until design and
drawing and light and shade were entirely
fused and entirely satisfactory, without
danger to the color, which could be given
undivided attention when the time came
to study it. In this underpainting the
modelling of the flesh could be pushed to
the utmost degree of refinement, while
draperies could be brushed in with the
greatest freedom. When it was completed
it answered the purpose of the old white
ground in giving a cold reflecting surface,
[218]
TECHNIQUE
over which the color could be laid purely
and sweetly, while its granulation of sur-
face gave crannies for the glazing colors
to lie in or ridges for opaque draggings
to catch upon, thus providing for that
breaking of different colors on the surface
which impressionism has achieved in a
more brutal manner.
In this manner was achieved the glowing
beauty of the earlier canvases of Titian,
the lovely silvery tone of Correggio. It
is, perhaps, the most perfect method of
painting ever invented and has been used
by many painters of different schools,
while other methods have been developed
through modifications of it. Van Dyck
used it in much of his best work, Reynolds
used it, or an attempt at it, and so did
Turner. The delicious pearliness of Ver-
meer is based upon an underpainting of
black and white or even of blue and white,
so cold is it at times. The only defect of
the method is that it is slow, requiring
[219]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
long periods of drying, especially if the
underpainting is done in oil. In the Vene-
tian work the underpainting was prob-
ably done in tempera — a kind of water
color — and as the use of tempera declined
the purely Venetian manner could not
answer the purpose of one who wished to
paint much and quickly. Indeed the work
of Tintoretto, so much of which is ruin-
ous, shows that it was never a manner
which lent itself to hasty production.
For these reasons, that most fecund of
painters, Rubens, deeply steeped in the
traditions of the great Venetians whom
he reverenced, invented a modification of
their manner by combining it, to some
extent, with the old Flemish primitive
method. He used the smooth white ground
of the primitives, preferring a panel to a
canvas even in large works, and on this
ground he laid his monochrome founda-
tion, reducing it to extreme thinness, so
that the effect of the ground is everywhere
[220]
TECHNIQUE
retained and his monochrome is almost
more transparent than opaque. Upon this
foundation he spread his final painting in
great flowing washes of semi-opaque color,
dragging in last of all his sharp high lights
of loaded pigment. As he grew older and
more certainly master of himself and his
great stores of knowledge his handling
grew ever lighter and swifter, his pigment
more tenuous and delicate, until he came
to paint almost with vapor, only his
high lights having any ponderable sub-
stance. To those who are inclined to think
thinness of pigment the sign of timidity,
and to imagine that heavy loading of paint
is a mark of virile strength, the example
of this most robust of painters may be
recommended for painful consideration.
The Dutch painters of the seventeenth
century reduced Rubens's monochrome
to a purely transparent rubbing, and
painted into it with opaque and semi-
opaque pigment. Van Dyck painted in
[221]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
Rubens's manner when he did not paint
in the pure Venetian method. Watteau
learned his art of Rubens, and as all the
French eighteenth century derives from
Watteau and all the English eighteenth
century from Van Dyck, the influence
of Rubens was predominant in the tech-
nique of painting until David swept the
whole art away as unregarded rubbish.
It was easier, in considering the develop-
ment of technical methods, to pass over
the work of one of the greatest of tech-
nicians who had very little influence on
that development, greatly as his work has
always been admired by all competent
judges of painting. Veronese was never
properly a Venetian. He was a mature
artist of great reputation before he went
to Venice, and he came of a school with
a long tradition of its own. Also, he was a
decorator, accustomed to canvases of vast
size, and to a clearer and lighter key of
color than that of the true Venetian school.
[222]
TECHNIQUE
I have never seen anything to convince me
that he employed the true Venetian tech-
nique, even in the painting of flesh, and
I am sure he did not employ it in the paint-
ing of draperies. It is not so easy to say
how he did paint as how he did not, and
in his own handiwork his methods are
used with such discretion and such va-
riety— are so hidden behind the result —
that they seem undecipherable. In the
work of his pupils and assistants, how-
ever, the process, or some of it, is more leg-
ible ; and we have a written account of it,
lamentably brief, to be sure, based upon
the statement of his son. In the first place
he must have had some sort of pretty
thorough drawing upon his canvas, though
this is not mentioned in the description
we have of his method. I am inclined to
think that it must have been a rub-in, a
frotte, in pretty full light and shade, and
I am sure that it must have fixed all the
important details of the picture. Such
[223]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
composition as his, extending to the small-
est folds of drapery, was never accom-
plished by leaving anything of importance
to the invention of the moment. Over this
drawing he laid his masses of local color
in half-tone, we are told — these half-tones
being "laid in opaque color." Whether
these masses of half-tone had any model-
ling I do not know, but if they were laid
pretty thinly and evenly over a strong
frotte, enough of that frotte would show
through them to answer all necessary
purposes. Upon this preparation he struck
in both his lights and his shadows, "leav-
ing the middle tint visible everywhere
between them, as it was first prepared."
In painting in the lights he used a light
yellow rather than white, because yellow
has much greater carrying power and
luminosity than white, and its chromatic
quality, as yellow, is quite lost at a short
distance. The shadows were, undoubtedly,
re-enforced with pure, transparent, glazing
[224]
Plate 32. — "Dr. Faustus," from the etching by Rembrandt.
TECHNIQUE
colors. These lights and shadows, with the
original middle tint, or local color, be-
tween them, are sharply to be distin-
guished in the work of Veronese's imita-
tors. In his own work they are fused
together into the most brilliant, rich and
varied surface imaginable. He never
makes any display of virtuosity, but for
mere ease and accuracy of touch he sur-
passes the most expert of the Northern
painters while his work is vastly superior
to theirs in decorative beauty and classic
grace.
I have described this manner of painting
at considerable length because it seems
to me best fitted of any for our modern
needs. Indeed it comes pretty near to our
modern "direct method" except that it is
far more systematic, allowing, as all good
methods do, of the separate study of the
different elements of the art, and provid-
ing for transparency and the breaking of
color. The composition, the drawing, and
[225]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
the great masses of light and shade are
first fixed in the preliminary frotte. The
arrangement of colors and the great color
balance of the whole picture are settled in
the painting in middle tint. In the final
execution there is nothing to think of but
the brilliancy of rendering and the quality
of color in detail. The transparent re-en-
forcement of the shadows gives them great
fulness and purity of color, while the
breaking of the lights, with a crumbly
.touch, over the middle tints gives the
necessary vibration and the necessary
graying of surface without any diminution
of the force of pure color. It is a method
which lends itself admirably to large
decorative work which must be done with
some rapidity, but I do not see why it
is not equally applicable to smaller and
more realistic pictures.
Neither here nor elsewhere in this vol-
ume, however, am I concerned to give
precise recipes, and I can no more tell any
[226]
TECHNIQUE
one how to paint than how to draw or to
color. What I wish to do is rather to call
attention to the qualities of art that we
have lost sight of in our work of to-day
and that we must set ourselves to recover
if we would bring painting to anything
like its ancient perfection and dignity.
Of these qualities craftsmanship is not
the least and is one of the most neglected.
If I can make you see that technical
beauty exists, and that it cannot be at-
tained without thought and method, I
shall have fulfilled my purpose.
There have been many good methods
of painting — there may, conceivably, be
as good methods yet to be invented —
but all good methods have these two things
in common : they are methodical and they
are economical. To paint well, in any
manner, one must know from the first
touch what the result is to be, and one
must place no touch on the canvas that
is not a necessary step toward the attain-
[227]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
ment of this result. Every brush stroke
that does not lead to the desired end leads
away from it. Every particle of pigment
that is not used is worse than wasted, it is
obstructive. It is matter out of place, which
is the best definition I know of dirt. It
may be that the method employed will call
for heavy loading, but it must be heavy
loading where it is needed and because it
is needed. It must be as precisely regu-
lated as the thinnest film of glazing or of
scumbling. There is, in good painting,
no room for accident and no cure for a
blunder. It may be patched, and more or
less concealed — it cannot be remedied.
To paint well, technically, is to have pro-
found knowledge both of the process and
of the result desired; is to have perfect
foresight and perfect skill; is to be both
craftsman and artist. It is first of all to
be a composer, a draughtsman, a colorist,
and then, as a crowning grace, to be a
technician, a master of one's tools.
[228]
TECHNIQUE
And now, if I have at all succeeded in
my effort to show what the art of painting
is and has been; if I have given any no-
tion of what it means to choose a subject
intelligently and treat it largely, nobly,
and with imaginative grasp of its signifi-
cance; what it means to compose a picture
thoroughly, so that no detail of it shall
escape from the control of the guiding
principle of design ; what it is to draw with
expression, with style, and with precision,
and to clothe design and drawing with
color at once beautiful and true; what it is,
and how difficult, to produce mere mate-
rial beauty of pigment and of surface— if , I
say, I have at all succeeded in this you
will begin to suspect that it is no easy road
I am pointing out and that it takes more
than a cheerful self-confidence, a couple of
years in an art school, and a palette and
brushes to make a painter. The way of
classicism and conservatism is no safe
path for the timid and unenterprising, and
[229]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
he who attempts it will find that he will
need all, and more than all, the energy,
the determination, and the individuality he
possesses. He will have to go over and
through obstacles, not around them. He
will have to hew his way through thickets
that have grown up from long neglect. He
will have to eschew all tempting by-paths
and short cuts. And he will have, for the
most part, to go alone, stubbornly hold-
ing to his direction while the crowd goes
the other way.
What the classic ideal asks of an artist
is no less than a thorough mastery of all
that is known of the aspects of nature and
all that is known of the processes of art,
and it requires this merely as a prelimi-
nary equipment for creation and for self-
expression. The task of acquiring such
mastery is almost appalling in its mag-
nitude, but at least there is little danger
that he who is capable of an approxima-
tion to it will have no personality to ex-
[230]
TECHNIQUE
press. And there is this encouragement
for us, that the thing has been done, and
therefore may be done again. It is the
failures that are discouraging. When one
sees exhibitions and galleries full of pict-
ures, the work of able men who have
spent their lives in fruitless effort and have
left nothing that will live, one falls into a
profound despair of ever doing better than
they. But one has only to see one mas-
terpiece— even one bit of honest and
beautiful work — and hope revives. If
he could do it, why not I ? And the great-
est masters of all have the divine priv-
ilege of making the task seem positively
easy.
To the serious young artist I would say:
Fix your eye on the highest, gird yourself
for the journey, and God speed! If you
fall by the way you may at least fall face
forward. And it may be that even you
may reach the goal. It may be that you,
[231]
THE CLASSIC POINT OF VIEW
too, may find yourself, in the end, among
that small but glorious company whose
work the world will cherish and whose
memory the world will not let die.
[232]
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