On art and artists

There exists a school of æstheticism which laughs contemptuously at the mere sight of this superscription. Art having a mission! What utter nonsense. A person must be a rank Phi...

The Netherlanders, a free people, were the first to know an art other than the traditional one. In Flanders and Holland, writers, and especially painters, began to speak no long...

In Meunier’s work there is a unity from which he seldom digresses. He lived in a Belgian district of coal-pits and smelting furnaces, in the very midst of rough labourers who pa...

If an artist has, from some especially vivid intuition and active association of ideas, found and embodied an anthropomorphic likeness which is very strikingly clear, imitation...

Of the numerous suggestions of an artistic, moral, and psychological nature that were the outcome of this unique exhibition, the deepest and most abiding—at least for me—was tha...

I am afraid I must likewise be guilty of heresy in respect of another great man; but Delacroix, too, fails to justify the idolatry people have displayed and, to some extent, sti...

Corot did not belong to the forestmen of Barbizon, but he was the founder of their religion of light. Th. Rousseau shares with him the silkiness, and approaches him in the down-...

Monet’s joy in light becomes with P. M. Renoir an affectation. He has not the simple love of truth of his comrade. He falls into exaggeration which betrays conscious purpose and...

Literary landscape, on which I have already briefly expressed my views in treating of Sisley, is that which traditionally goes under the names of historical, heroic, ideal, or a...

His supersensitiveness is expressed not only in his revel of colour; it is also curiously and graphically revealed in the impressions which he feels of the appearance of women,...

After the war was over, he resumed his orthodox studies at the Academy, and became a pupil of Cabanel. It exhibits a good testimony of the power of resistance in his nature that...

He got his faded, spectral colours by imitating the fresco painters of the Quattrocentro. His ideal of picturesque beauty united in inseparable association the stateliness of th...

The _salons_, the art exhibitions, are in our time the annual marts of success for painters. In these they have to seek fame and its train-bearer—payment in cash. In these they...

He is more and more breaking himself of the habit of regarding living models, and allows himself to be hypnotised by the Præ-Raphaelite magic lantern. We might wish for an Orphe...

Cézanne has one thing in his favour which prepossesses us for him, _i.e._, his uprightness. It is his nature that ugliness has for him an attraction. He sees only what is abnorm...

Commissioned by a rich banker, he painted for the Marseilles Savings Bank a monumental triptych which he called “Labour.” He assigns views of Marseilles—certainly treated with g...

Emile Wéry, a young and fortunate man of talent, began his career with a great success. His view of an Amsterdam canal made a sensation, and gained the great prize at the “Salon...

Rodin has overstepped, in his Balzac Memorial, which he first exhibited in 1898, the very extensive limits within which his silly aberrations might have been borne. Master Shall...

Towards this Gate of Death move, on the right and left, groups, each of seven persons, whom the artist has striven honestly, yet without real success, to fashion in various shap...

The decorator amused himself in devising unheard-of enamels. He modelled vessels of smooth, supple plant-forms—calabashes, melons, cucumbers, mamillaria-cactuses, bulging or fal...

Vain _amour propre_, swaggering, conceited vanity and cunning “pushfulness” are the motives that far too often guide the artist’s brush or chisel. The coarse vulgarity of the me...