Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
This is No. 118 of Everyman’s Library. A list of authors and their works in this series will be found at the end of this volume. The publishers will be pleased to send freely to all applicants a separate, annotated list of the Library.
This is No. 118 of Everyman’s Library. A list of authors and their works in this series will be found at the end of this volume. The publishers will be pleased to send freely to...
2. Part 2An institution like this has often been recommended upon considerations merely mercantile; but an Academy, founded upon such principles, can never effect even its own narrow pur...
3. Part 3How incapable those are of producing anything of their own, who have spent much of their time in making finished copies, is well known to all who are conversant with our art.
4. Part 4All the objects which are exhibited to our view by nature, upon close examination will be found to have their blemishes and defects. The most beautiful forms have something abou...
5. Part 5The great end of the art is to strike the imagination. The painter therefore is to make no ostentation of the means by which this is done; the spectator is only to feel the resu...
6. Part 6The great style stands alone, and does not require, perhaps does not so well admit, any addition from inferior beauties. The ornamental style also possesses its own peculiar mer...
7. Part 7One of the strongest-marked characters of this kind, which must be allowed to be subordinate to the great style, is that of Salvator Rosa. He gives us a peculiar cast of nature,...
8. Part 8When we have had continually before us the great works of art to impregnate our minds with kindred ideas, we are then, and not till then, fit to produce something of the same sp...
9. Part 9To find excellences, however dispersed; to discover beauties, however concealed by the multitude of defects with which they are surrounded, can be the work only of him who, havi...
10. Part 10As beauty therefore does not consist in taking what lies immediately before you, so neither, in our pursuit of taste, are those opinions which we first received and adopted, the...
11. Part 11In poetry or eloquence, to determine how far figurative or metaphorical language may proceed, and when it begins to be affectation or beside the truth, must be determined by tas...
12. Part 12In our inquiry after simplicity, as in many other inquiries of this nature, we can best explain what is right, by showing what is wrong; and, indeed, in this case it seems to be...
13. Part 13What I just now mentioned of the supposed reason why Ariadne has part of her drapery red gives me occasion here to observe, that this favourite quality of giving objects relief,...
14. Part 14Imitation is the means, and not the end, of art; it is employed by the sculptor as the language by which his ideas are presented to the mind of the spectator. Poetry and elocuti...
15. Part 15I have in a former discourse[20] endeavoured to impress you with a fixed opinion, that a comprehensive and critical knowledge of the works of nature is the only source of beauty...
16. Part 16I should be sorry, if what has been said should be understood to have any tendency to encourage that carelessness which leaves work in an unfinished state. I commend nothing for...
17. Part 17Those who steal from mere poverty; who, having nothing of their own, cannot exist a minute without making such depredations; who are so poor that they have no place in which the...
18. Part 18Though I have often spoken of that mean conception of our art which confines it to mere imitation, I must add, that it may be narrowed to such a mere matter of experiment, as to...
19. Part 19The forms and turnings of the streets of London, and other old towns, are produced by accident, without any original plan or design; but they are not always the less pleasant to...
20. Part 20It appears to me that such conduct is no less absurd, than if a plain man, giving a relation of a real distress, occasioned by an inundation accompanied with thunder and lightni...
21. Part 21I have strongly inculcated in my former discourses, as I do in this my last, the wisdom and necessity of previously obtaining the appropriated instruments of the art, in a first...
22. Part 22If the high esteem and veneration, in which Michael Angelo has been held by all nations and in all ages, should be put to the account of prejudice, it must still be granted that...
23. Part 23Verne’s (Jules) Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, 319 “ Dropped from the Clouds, 367 “ Abandoned, 368 “ The Secret of the Island, 369 “ Five Weeks in a Balloon and Around t...