The Book of Art for Young People Part 1

The Book of Art for Young People.

by Agnes Conway.

NOTE

My thanks are due and are cordially rendered to the Earl of Yarborough, Sir Frederick Cook, and the authorities of Trinity College, Cambridge, for permission to reproduce their pictures; to Lady Alfred Douglas and Mr. Henry Newbolt for leave to quote from their poems; to Mr.

Everard Green, Somerset Herald, for all that is new in the interpretation of the Wilton diptych; to Miss K. K. Radford for the translation in Chapter VIII., and to all the friends who have helped me with criticism and suggestions.

A. E. C.

THE CHILDREN'S BOOK OF ART

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendid story by a really nice person. There is not the least occasion for the story to be true; indeed I think the untrue stories are the best--those in which we meet delightful beasts and things that talk twenty times better than most human beings ever do, and where extraordinary events happen in the kind of places that are not at all like our world of every day. It is so fine to be taken into a country where it is always summer, and the birds are always singing and the flowers always blowing, and where people get what they want by just wis.h.i.+ng for it, and are not told that this or that isn't good for them, and that they'll know better than to want it when they're grown up, and all that kind of thing which is so annoying and so often happening in this obstinate criss-cross world, where the days come and go in such an ordinary fas.h.i.+on.

But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I like to listen to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would be some one who could draw pictures for me while talking--pictures like those of Tenniel in _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking-Gla.s.s_. How much better we know Alice herself and the White Knight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures than even from the story itself. But my story-teller should not only draw the pictures while he talked, but he should paint them too. I want to see the sky blue and the gra.s.s green, and I want red cloaks and blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colours, and some gold and silver too, and not merely black and white--though black and white drawings would be better than nothing, so long as they showed me what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like. I could put up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don't you know how good a bad drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend who can make the loveliest folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintest houses and trees, and he really can't draw a bit; and the curious thing is, that if he could draw better I should not like his folks and beasts half as much as I do the lop-sided, crook-legged, crazy-looking people he produces. And then he has such quaint things to tell about them, and while he talks he seems to make them live, so that I can hardly believe they are not real people for all their unlikeness to any one you ever saw.

Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like that, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but merely ill.u.s.trated stories which, at the time those painters lived, every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a kind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't matter to us, which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture is a nice one. There is a delightful old picture painted on a wall away off at a.s.sisi, in Italy, which shows St. Francis preaching to a lot of birds, and the birds are all listening to him and looking pleased--the way birds do look pleased when they find a good fat worm or fresh crumbs. Now, St. Francis was a real man and such a dear person too, but I don't suppose half the stories told about him were really true, yet we can pretend they were and that's just what the painter helps us to do. Don't you know all the games that begin with 'Let's pretend'?--well, that's art. Art is pretending, or most of it is.

Pictures take us into a world of make-believe, a world of imagination, where everything is or should be in the right place and in the right light and of the right colour, where all the people are nicely dressed to match one another, and are not standing in one another's way, and not interrupting one another or forgetting to help play the game.

That's the difference between pictures and photographs. A photograph is almost always wrong somewhere. Something is out of place, or something is there which ought to be away, or the light is wrong; or, if it's coloured, the colours are just not in keeping with one another.

If it's a landscape the trees are where we don't want them; they hide what we want to see, or they don't hide the very thing we want hidden.

Then the clouds are in the wrong place, and a wind ruffles the water just where we want to see something reflected. That's the way things actually happen in the real world. But in the world of 'Let's pretend,'

in the world of art, they don't happen so. There everything happens right, and everybody does, not so much what they should (that might sometimes be dull), but exactly what we want them to do--which is so very much better. That is the world of your art and my art.

Unfortunately all the pictures in the galleries weren't painted just for you and me; but you'll find, if you look for them, plenty that were, and the rest don't matter. Those were painted, no doubt, for some one else. But if you could find the some one else for whom they were painted, the some one else whose world of 'Let's pretend' was just these pictures that don't belong to your world, and if they could tell you about their world of 'Let's pretend,' ten to one you'd find it just as good a world as your own, and you'd soon learn to 'pretend'

that way too.

Well, the purpose of this book is to take you into a number of worlds of 'Let's pretend,' most of which I daresay will be new to you, and perhaps you will find some of them quite delightful places. I'm sure you can't help liking St. Jerome's Cell when you come to it. It's not a bit like any room we can find anywhere in the world to-day, but wouldn't it be joyful if we could? What a good time we could have there with the tame lion (not a bit like any lion in the Zoo, but none the worse for that) and the jolly bird, and all St. Jerome's little things.

I should like to climb on to his platform and sit in his chair and turn over his books, though I don't believe they'd be interesting to read, but they'd certainly be pretty to look at. If you and I were there, though, we should soon be out away behind, looking round the corner, and finding all sorts of odd places that unfortunately can't all get into the picture, only we know they're there, down yonder corridor, and from what the painter shows us we can invent the rest for ourselves.

One of the troubles of a painter is that he can't paint every detail of things as they are in nature. A primrose, when you first see it, is just a little yellow spot. When you hold it in your hand you find it made up of petals round a tiny centre with little things in it.

If you take a magnifying gla.s.s you can see all its details multiplied.

If you put a tiny bit of it under a microscope, ten thousand more little details come out, and so it might go on as long as you went on magnifying.

Now a picture can't be like that. It just has to show you the general look of things as you see them from an ordinary distance. But there comes in another kind of trouble. How do you see things? We don't all see the same things in the same way. Your mother's face looks very different to you from its look to a mere person pa.s.sing in the street.

Your own room has a totally different aspect to you from what it bears to a casual visitor. The things you specially love have a way of standing out and seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to any one else. Then there are other differences in the look of the same things to different people which you have perhaps noticed. Some people are more sensitive to colours than others. Some are much more sensitive to brightness and shadow. Some will notice one kind of object in a view, or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others. Girls are quicker to take note of the colour of eyes, hair, skin, clothes, and so forth than boys. A woman who merely sees another woman for a moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately than a man. A man will be noticing other things. His picture, if he painted one, would make those other things prominent.

So it is with everything that we see. None of us sees more than certain features in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is only those features that we should paint. We can't possibly paint every detail of everything that comes into the picture. We must make a choice, and of course we choose the features and details that please us best.

Now, the purpose of painting anything at all is to paint the beauty of the thing. If you see something that strikes you as ugly, you don't instinctively want to paint it; but when you see an effect of beauty, you feel that it would be very nice indeed to have a picture showing that beauty. So a picture is not really the representation of a thing, but the representation of the beauty of the thing.

Some people can see beauty almost everywhere; they are conscious of beauty all day long. They want to surround themselves with beauty, to make all their acts beautiful, to shed beauty all about them. Those are the really artistic souls. The gift of such perfect instinct for beauty comes by nature to a few. It can be cultivated by almost all.

That cultivation of all sorts of beauty in life is what many people call civilization--the real art of living. To see beauty everywhere in nature is not so very difficult. It is all about us where the work of uncivilized man has not come in to destroy it. Artists are people who by nature and by education have acquired the power to see beauty in what they look at, and then to set it down on paper or canvas, or in some other material, so that other people can see it too.

It seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape was hardly perceived by any one at all. People lived in the beautiful country and scarcely knew that it was beautiful. Then came the time when the beauty of landscape began to be felt by the nicest people.

They began to put it into their poetry, and to talk and write about it, and to display it in landscape pictures. It was through poems and pictures, which they read and saw, that the general run of folks first learned to look for beauty in nature. I have no doubt that Turner's wonderful sunsets made plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoice in the intricacy and splendour of their glory for the first time in their lives. Well, what Turner and other painters of his generation did for landscape, had had to be done for men and women in earlier days by earlier generations of artists. The Greeks were the first, in their sculpture, to show the wonderful beauty of the human form; till their day people had not recognised what to us now seems obvious.

No doubt they had thought one person pretty and another handsome, but they had not known that the human figure was essentially a glorious thing till the Greek sculptors showed them. Another thing painters have taught the world is the beauty of atmosphere. Formerly no one seems to have noticed how atmosphere affects every object that is seen through it. The painters had to show us that it is so. After we had seen the effect of atmosphere in pictures we began to be able to see for ourselves in nature, and thus a whole group of new pleasures in views of nature was opened up to us.

Away back in the Middle Ages, six hundred and more years ago, folks had far less educated eyes than we possess to-day. They looked at nature more simply than we do and saw less in it. So they were satisfied with pictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do without.

But painting does not only concern itself with representing the world we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold. It concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe.

Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy play about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancy get mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and of fact, and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins.

The fancies of people are very different at different times, and you can't understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the fancies of the old painters. To do that you must know something about the way they lived and the things they believed, and what they hoped for and what they were afraid of.

Here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an old account book. A certain Count of Savoy owned the beautiful Castle of Chillon, which you have perhaps seen, on the sh.o.r.es of the Lake of Geneva. But he could not be happy, because he and the people about him thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars a basilisk lived--a very terrible dragon--and they all went in fear of it. So the Count paid a brave mason a large sum of money (and the payment is solemnly set down in his account book) to break a way into this hole and turn the basilisk out; and I have no doubt that he and his people were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basilisk was found. Folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that, must have gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particular emotion. A picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than it would to us. So if we are really to understand old pictures, we must begin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them, and of the people they were painted for. You see how much study that means for any one who wants to understand all the art of all the world.

We shall not pretend to lead you on any such great quest as that, but ask you to look at just a few old pictures that have been found charming by a great many people of several generations, and to try and see whether they do not charm you as well. You must never, of course, pretend to like what you don't like--that is too silly. We can't all like the same things. Still there are certain pictures that most nice people like. A few of these we have selected to be reproduced in this book for you to look at. And to help you realize who painted them and the kind of people they were painted for, my daughter has written the chapters that follow. I hope you will find them entertaining, and still more that you will like the pictures, and so learn to enjoy the many others that have come down to us from the past, and are among the world's most precious possessions to-day.

CHAPTER II

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY IN EUROPE

Before we give our whole attention to the first picture, of which the original was painted in England in 1377, let us imagine ourselves in the year 1200 making a rapid tour through the chief countries of Europe to see for ourselves how the people lived. The first thing that will strike us on our journey is the contrast between the grandeur of the churches and public buildings and the insignificance of most of the houses. Some of the finest churches in England, built in the style of architecture called 'Norman,' one or more of which you may have seen, date before the year 1200, as for example, Durham Cathedral, and the naves of Norwich, Ely, and Peterborough Cathedrals. The great churches abroad were also beautiful and more elaborately decorated, in the North with sculpture and painting, in the South with marble and mosaic. The towns competed one with another in erecting them finer and larger, and in decorating them as magnificently as they could.

This was done because the church was a place which the people used for many other purposes besides Sunday services. In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the parish church, on week-days as well as on Sundays, was a very useful and agreeable place to most of the paris.h.i.+oners. The 'holy' days, or saints' days, 'holidays'

indeed, were times of rejoicing and festivity, and the Church processions and services were pleasant events in the lives of many who had few entertainments, and who for the most part could neither read nor write. Printing was not yet invented, at least not in Europe, and as every book had to be written out by hand, copies of books were rare and only owned by the few who could read them, so that stories were mostly handed down by word of mouth, the same being told by mother to child for many generations.

The favourites were stories of the saints and martyrs of the Catholic Church, for of course we are speaking now of times long before the Reformation. The Old Testament stories and all the stories of the life of Christ and His Apostles were well known too, and just as we never tire of reading our favourite books over and over again, our forefathers of 1200 wanted to see on the walls of their churches representations of the stories which they could not read. Their daily thoughts were more occupied with the Infant Christ, the saints, and the angels, than ours generally are. They thought of themselves as under the protection of some saint, who would plead with G.o.d the Father for them if they asked him, for G.o.d Himself seemed too high or remote to be appealed to always directly. He was approached with awe; the saints, the Virgin, and the Infant Christ, with love.

We must realise this difference before we can well understand a picture painted in the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth centuries, nor can we look at one without feeling that the artist and the people for whom he painted, so loved the holy personages. They thought about them always, not only at stated times and on Sundays, and never tired of looking at pictures of them and their doings. It is sometimes said that only Catholics can understand medieval art, because they feel towards the saints as the old painters did. But it is possible for any one to realize how in those far-off days the people felt, and it is this that we must try to do. The religious fervour of the Middle Ages was not a sign of great virtue among all the people. Some were far more cruel, savage, and unrestrained than we are to-day. Very wicked men even became powerful dignitaries in the Church. But it was the Church that fostered the impulses of pity and charity in a fierce age, and some of the saints of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such as St. Francis of a.s.sisi and St. Catharine of Siena, are still held to be among the most beautiful characters the world has ever known.

The churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Florence were lined with marble, and a great picture frequently stood above the altar.

It is difficult to realize to-day that the processes which we call oil and water-colour painting were not then invented, and that no shops existed to sell canvases and paints ready for use. The artist painted upon a wooden panel, which he had himself to make, plane flat, and cut to the size he needed. In order to get a surface upon which he could paint, he covered the panel with a thin coating of plaster which it was difficult to lay on absolutely flat. Upon the plaster he drew the outline of the figures he was going to paint, and filled in the background with a thin layer of gold leaf, such as is to-day used for gilding frames. After the background had been put in, it was impossible to correct the outline of the figures, and the labour of preparing the wooden panel and of laying the gold was so great that an artist would naturally not make risky attempts towards something new, lest he should spoil his work. In the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey there is a thirteenth-century altar-piece of this kind, and you can see the strips of vellum that were used to cover the joins of the different pieces of wood forming the panel, beneath the layer of plaster, which has now to a great extent peeled off.

The people liked to see their Old Testament stories and the stories from the Life of Christ painted over and over again. They had become fond of the versions of the tales which they had known and seen painted when they were young, and did not wish them changed, so that the range of subjects was not large. The same were repeated, and because of the painter's fear of making mistakes it was natural that the same figures should be repeated too. Thus, whatever the subject pictured, a tradition was formed in each locality for the grouping and general arrangement of the figures, and the most authoritative tradition for such typical groupings was preserved in Constantinople or Byzantium, from which city the 'Byzantine' school of painting takes its name.

Before 1200, Byzantium had been a centre of residence and the civilizing influence of trade for eighteen centuries. It had been the capital of the Roman Empire, and less civilized peoples from the north had never conquered the town, destroying the Greek and Roman traditions, as happened elsewhere in Europe. You have read how the Romans had to withdraw their armies from England to defend Rome against the attacks of the Goths from the north, and then how Britain was settled by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes, who destroyed most of the Roman civilization.

A similar though much less complete destruction took place in Italy a little later, when Goths and Lombards, who were remotely akin to the Angles and Saxons, overwhelmed Roman culture. But next to Constantinople, Rome had the best continuous tradition of art, for the fine monuments of the great imperial days still existed in the city. In Byzantium the original Greek population struggled on, and continued to paint, and make mosaics, and erect fine buildings, till the Turks conquered them in 1453. The Byzantines were wealthy and made exquisite objects in gold, precious stones, and ivory. While they were painting better than any other people in Europe, they too reproduced the same subjects and the same figures over and over again, only the figures were more graceful than those of the local Italian, English, and French artists, who in varying degrees at different times tried to paint like the Byzantine or Greek artists, but without quite the same success. So long as there was no need for an artist to paint anything but the old well-established subjects, and so long as people desired them to be painted in the old conventional manner, there was little reason why any painter should try to be original and paint what was not wanted. But in the thirteenth century a great change took place.

Let us here refresh our memories of what we may have read of that delightful saint, Francis of a.s.sisi. He was born in 1182, the son of a well-to-do n.o.bleman, in the little town of a.s.sisi in Umbria, and as a lad became inflamed with the ideal of the religious life. But instead of entering one of the existing monastic orders, where he would have been protected, he gave away every possession he had in the world and adopted 'poverty' as his watchword. Clad in an old brown habit, he walked from place to place preaching charity, obedience, and renunciation of all worldly goods. He lived on what was given to him to eat from day to day; he nursed the lepers and the sick. Ever described as a most lovable person, he won by his preaching the hearts of people of all cla.s.ses, from the King of France to the humblest peasant. He wrote beautiful hymns in praise of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and had a great love for every living thing. The birds were said to have flocked around him because they loved him, and we read that he talked to them and called them his 'little sisters.' An old writer tells this story in good faith:

When St. Francis spake words to them, the birds began all of them to open their beaks and spread their wings and reverently bend their heads down to the ground, and by their acts and by their songs did show that the holy Father gave them joy exceeding great.

Wherever he preached he made converts who 'married Holy Poverty,' as St. Francis expressed it, gave up everything they had, and lived his preaching and roaming life. St. Francis himself had no idea of forming a monastic order. He wished to live a holy life in the world and show others how to do the same, and for years he and his companions worked among the poor, earning their daily bread when they could, and when they could not, begging for it. Gradually, however, ambition stirred in the hearts of some of the followers of Francis, and against the will of their leader they made themselves into the Order of Franciscan Friars, collected gifts of money, and began to build churches and monastic buildings. At first the buildings were said to belong to the Pope, who allowed the Franciscans to use them, since they might not own property; but after the death of St. Francis, the Order built churches throughout the length and breadth of Italy, not of marble and mosaic but of brick, since brick was cheaper; but the brick walls were plastered, and upon the wet plaster there were painted scenes from the life of St. Francis, side by side with the old Christian and saintly legends. This sudden demand for painted churches with paintings of new subjects, stirred the painters of the day to alter their old style. When an artist was asked to paint a large picture of St. Francis preaching to the birds, he had to look at real birds and he had to study a real man in the att.i.tude of preaching. There was no scene that had ever been painted from the life of Christ or of any saint in which a man preached to a bird, so that the artist was driven to paint from nature instead of copying former pictures.

Let us now read what a painter who lived in the sixteenth century, Vasari by name, wrote about the rise of painting in his native city.

Some learned people nowadays say that Vasari was wrong in many of the stories he told, but after all he lived much nearer than we do to the times he wrote about, and it is safer to believe what he tells us than what modern students surmise, except when they are able to cite other old authorities to which Vasari did not have access.

The endless flood of misfortunes which overwhelmed unhappy Italy not only ruined everything worthy of the name of a building, but completely extinguished the race of artists, a far more serious matter. Then, as it pleased G.o.d, there was born in the year 1240, in the city of Florence, Giovanni, surnamed Cimabue, to shed the first light on the art of painting. Instead of paying attention to his lessons, Cimabue spent the whole day drawing men, horses, houses, and various other fancies on his books and odd sheets, like one who felt himself compelled to do so by nature. Fortune proved favourable to his natural inclination, for some Greek artists were summoned to Florence by the government of the city for no other purpose than the revival of painting in their midst, since the art was not so much debased as altogether lost. In this way Cimabue made a beginning in the art which attracted him, for he often played the truant and spent the whole day in watching the masters work. Thus it came about that his father and the artists considered him so fitted to be a painter that if he devoted himself to the profession he might look for honourable success in it, and to his great satisfaction his father procured him employment with the painters. Thus by dint of continual practice and with the a.s.sistance of his natural talent he far surpa.s.sed the manner of his teachers.

For they had never cared to make any progress and had executed their works, not in the good manner of ancient Greece, but in the rude modern style of that time. Cimabue drew from nature to the best of his powers, although it was a novelty to do so in those days, and he made the draperies, garments, and other things somewhat more life-like, natural, and soft than the Greeks had done, who had taught one another a rough, awkward, and commonplace style for a great number of years, not by means of study but as a matter of custom, without ever dreaming of improving their designs by beauty of colouring or by any invention of worth.