Art Principles Part 19

[a] _The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals._

NOTE 10. PAGE 23

Reynolds evidently had little faith in original genius. Addressing Royal Academy students, he said[a]:

You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply the deficiency. Nothing is denied to well-directed labour; nothing is to be obtained without it.... I will venture to a.s.sert that a.s.siduity unabated by difficulty, and a disposition eagerly directed to the object of its pursuit, will produce effects similar to those which some call the result of natural powers.

On another occasion Reynolds observed of Michelangelo[b]:

He appears not to have had the least conception that his art was to be acquired by any other means than great labour; and yet he of all men that ever lived, might make the greatest pretensions to the efficacy of native genius and inspiration.

Gibbon said that Reynolds agreed with Dr. Johnson in denying all original genius, any natural propensity of the mind to one art or science rather than another.[c] Hogarth also agreed with Reynolds, for he describes genius as "nothing but labour and diligence."

Croce says that genius has a quant.i.tative and not a qualitative signification, but he offers no demonstration.[d] Evidently he is mistaken, for the signification is both quant.i.tative and qualitative. It is true that what a Phidias, or a Raphael, or a Beethoven puts together is a sum of small beauties, any one of which may be equalled by another man, but he does more than represent a number of beauties, for he combines these into a beautiful whole which is superior in quality and cannot be estimated quant.i.tatively. We may possibly call Darwin a genius because of the large number of facts he ascertained, and the correct inferences he drew from them, but we particularly apply the term to him by reason of the general result of all these facts and inferences, this result being qualitative and not quant.i.tative. Croce probably took his dictum from Schopenhauer, who, however, represented degrees of quality as quant.i.tative,[e] which is of course confusing the issue.

[a] Reynolds's Second Discourse.

[b] His Fifth Discourse.

[c] Gibbon's _Memoirs of my Life and Writings_.

[d] _aesthetic._

[e] Essay on "Genius."

NOTE 11. PAGE 32

It is often observed by advocates of "new" forms of art that the work of many great artists has been variously valued at different periods--that leaders of marked departures in art now honoured, were frequently more or less ignored in their own time, while other artists who acquired a great reputation when living, have been properly put into the background by succeeding generations. For the first statement no solid ground can be shown. In painting, the artists since the Dark Age who can be said to have led departures of any importance, are Cimabue, Giotto, the Van Eycks, Masaccio, Lionardo, Durer, Giorgione, Raphael, Michelangelo, t.i.tian, Holbein, Claude, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Watteau, Reynolds, and Fragonard. All of these had their high talents recognized and thoroughly appreciated in their lifetime. In sculpture the experience is the same, for there is no sculptor now honoured whose work was not highly valued by his contemporaries. So with poetry, but before the invention of printing and in the earlier days of this industry, poetry of any kind was very slow in finding its way among the people.

What might seem nowadays to have been inappreciation of certain poets was really want of knowledge of them.

There is more truth in the a.s.sertion that many artists who had a high reputation in their lifetime are now more or less disregarded, though it does not follow from this that there has been a reversal of opinion on the part of the public, or a variation in the acuteness of aesthetic perception. Generally we find that these artists very properly held the position they occupied in their time and country, and if they do not now stand on exalted pedestals it is only because we compare them with men of other periods and places, which their contemporary countrymen did not do, at least for the purpose of establis.h.i.+ng their permanent position in art. Carlo Maratta for instance was celebrated in Italy as the best painter of his country in his time, and even now we must so regard him, but his contemporaries as with ourselves did not place him on so high a level as his great predecessors of the sixteenth century, and some of the seventeenth. A special reason why many of the seventeenth century artists of Italy have fallen in public esteem may be found in the fact that they excelled mostly in the production of sensorial beauty, paying little attention to intellectual grace, and the ripening of general intelligence as time goes on makes us more and more sensitive to beauty of mind.

NOTE 12. PAGE 34

There have been many definitions of "Impressionism" given, but they vary considerably. Professor Clausen describes it as the work of a number of artists whose interest is in recording effects of light, seeking to express nature only and disregarding old conventions.[a] Mr. D. S.

MacColl says that an impressionist is[b]

a painter who, out of the completed contacts of vision constructs an image moulded upon his own interest in the thing seen, and not on that of any imaginary schoolmaster.

This definition is insufficient by itself, but the writer makes his meaning clearer in the same article when he says:

Impressionism is the art that surveys the field, and determines which of the shapes and tones are of chief importance to the interested eye, and expresses these and sacrifices the rest.

According to C. Mauclair, an acknowledged authority on impressionism, the impressionist holds:

Light becomes the one subject of a picture. The interest of the objects on which it s.h.i.+nes is secondary. Painting thus understood becomes an art of pure optics, a seeking for harmonies, a species of natural poem, entirely distinct from expression, style, drawing, which have formed the main endeavour of preceding painting. It is almost necessary to invent a new word for this special art, which, while remaining throughout pictural, approaches music in the same degree as it departs from literature or psychology.[c]

What can be said of so amazing a declaration? The arts of painting and music do not, and cannot, have any connection with each other. They are concerned with different senses and different signs, and by no stretch of the imagination can they be combined. Seeing that musical terms when used in respect of painting by modern critics are almost invariably made to apply to colour harmonies, we may infer that a confusion of thought arises in the minds of the writers from the similar physical means by which colour and sound are conveyed to the senses concerned. But this similarity has nothing to do with the appreciation of art. The aesthetic value of a work is determined when it is conveyed to the mind, irrespective of the means by which it is so conveyed.

According to La Touche it was Fantin Latour who invented modern impressionism. Braquemond relates that La Touche told him the following story.[d] He (La Touche) was one day at the Louvre with Manet, when they saw Latour copying Paolo Veronese's Marriage at Cana in a novel manner, for instead of blending his colours in the usual way, he laid them on in small touches of separate tones. The result was an unexpected brilliancy ("papillotage imprevu") which amazed but charmed the visitors.

Nevertheless when Manet left the Louvre with La Touche, he appeared anything but satisfied with what he had seen, and p.r.o.nounced it humbug.

But Latour's method evidently sunk into his mind, for a few days later he commenced to use it himself. Thus, added La Touche, was modern impressionism unchained. The date of this visit was not given by La Touche, but 1874 was subsequently suggested. This account does not fit in with the statement of MacColl that when Monet and p.i.s.sarro were in London during the siege of Paris, the study of Turner's pictures gave them the suggestion of these broken patches of colour.[e] If this be true Monet must have antedated Manet in the application of isolated tones.

D. S. Eaton a.s.serts that in the Salon of 1867, there was exhibited a picture by Monet which was ent.i.tled Impressions,[f] and from this arose the word "Impressionist"; but Phythian says that the word resulted from Monet's "Impression, soleil levant," exhibited in 1874 at the Nadar Gallery in Paris with other works from Le Societe Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, et Graveurs. Phythian adds[g]:

Thus, unwittingly led by one of the exhibitors, visitors to the exhibition came to use the word "impressioniste," and within a few days a contemptuously unfavourable notice of the exhibition appeared in _Le Charivari_ under the heading "Exposition des Impressionistes." It was not until the lapse of several years that the name came into general use. The painters to whom it was applied disowned it because it was used in a depreciatory sense. Eventually however, unable to find a better one, they adopted it.

Another origin of Impressionism is given by m.u.t.h.e.r. He says[h]:

The name "Impressionists" dates from an exhibition in Paris which was given at Nadar's in 1871. The catalogue contained a great deal about impressions--for instance, "Impression de mon pot au feu,"

"Impression d'un chat qui se promene." In his criticism Claretie summed up the impressions, and spoke of the Salon des Impressionistes.

But the real origin of impressionism must be sought earlier than 1871, for in 1865 Manet exhibited his Olympia in the Salon des Refuses. This picture did not represent what was understood as impressionism ten years later, but it led the way towards the establishment of the innovation, in that it pretended that healthy ideas and n.o.ble designs were secondary considerations in art. Certainly Manet could not descend lower than this wretched picture, and in this sense his subsequent work was a distinct advance.

[a] Royal Academy Lectures.

[b] Article on "Impressionism," _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 11th Edition.

[c] _L'Impressionism, son histoire, son esthetique, ses maitres._

[d] _Le Journal des Arts_, 1909.

[e] Article on "Impressionism," _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 11th edition.

[f] _Handbook of Modern French Painting._

[g] _Fifty Years of Modern Painting._

[h] _History of Modern Painting_, vol. iii.

NOTE 13. PAGE 35

The reason given by impressionists for the juxtaposition of pure colours is that the natural blend produced is more brilliant than the tone from the mixed colours applied, but it is pointed out by Moreau-Vauthier that the contrary is the case. He says[a]:

We find in practice that the parent colours do not, with material colours, produce the theoretical binaries. We get dark, dull greens, oranges, and violets, that clash with the parent colours.

To make them harmonize we should be obliged to dim these material colours, to transform them, and consequently to lose them partly.

[a] _The Technique of Painting_, 1912.