Chapter 3
What do you mean--that you have been working, but without success? Do you mean that you cannot get the price you ask? then sell it for less, till, by practice, you shall improve, and command a better price. Or do you only mean that you are not satisfied with your work? nobody ever was that I know, except J---- W----. Peg away! While you're at work you must be improving. Do something from Nature indoors when you cannot get out, to keep your hand and eye in practice. Don't get into the way of working too much at your drawings away from Nature.
_Charles Keene._
LXX
The purpose of art is no other than to delineate the form and express the spirit of an object, animate or inanimate, as the case may be. The use of art is to produce copies of things; and if an artist has a thorough knowledge of the properties of the thing he paints he can assuredly make a name. Just as a writer of profound erudition and good memory has ever at his command an inexhaustible supply of words and phrases which he freely makes use of in writing, so can a painter, who has accumulated experience by drawing from nature, paint any object without a conscious effort. The artist who confines himself to copying from models painted by his master, fares no better than a literatus who cannot rise above transcribing others' compositions. An ancient critic says that writing ends in describing a thing or narrating an event, but painting can represent the actual forms of things. Without the true depiction of objects, there can be no pictorial art. Nobility of sentiment and such-like only come after a successful delineation of the external form of an object. The beginner in art should direct his efforts more to the latter than to the former. He should learn to paint according to his own ideas, not to slavishly copy the models of old artists. Plagiarism is a crime to be avoided not only by men of letters but also by painters.
_Okio_ (Japanese, eighteenth century).
LXXI
I remember Dürer the painter, who used to say that, as a young man, he loved extraordinary and unusual designs in painting, but that in his old age he took to examining Nature, and strove to imitate her as closely as he possibly could; but he found by experience how hard it is not to deviate from her.
_Dürer_ (quoted by Melancthon).
LXXII
I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without Nature than with her; or, as they expressed it themselves, _that it only put them out_. A painter with such ideas and such habits, is indeed in a most hopeless state. _The art of seeing Nature_, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed. As for the power of being able to do tolerably well, from practice alone, let it be valued according to its worth. But I do not see in what manner it can be sufficient for the production of correct, excellent, and finished pictures. Works deserving this character never were produced, nor ever will arise, from memory alone; and I will venture to say, that an artist who brings to his work a mind tolerably furnished with the general principles of art, and a taste formed upon the works of good artists, in short, who knows in what excellence consists, will, with the assistance of models, which we will likewise suppose he has learnt the art of using, be an over-match for the greatest painter that ever lived who should be debarred such advantages.
_Reynolds._
LXXIII
Do not imitate; do not follow others--you will always be behind them.
_Corot._
LXXIV
Never paint a subject unless it calls insistently and distinctly upon your eye and heart.
_Corot._
LXXV
I should never paint anything that was not the result of an impression received from the aspect of nature, whether in landscape or figures.
_Millet._
LXXVI
You must interpret nature with entire simplicity and according to your personal sentiment, altogether detaching yourself from what you know of the old masters or of contemporaries. Only in this way will you do work of real feeling. I know gifted people who will not avail themselves of their power. Such people seem to me like a billiard-player whose adversary is constantly giving him good openings, but who makes no use of them. I think that if I were playing with that man, I would say, "Very well, then, I will give you no more." If I were to sit in judgment, I would punish the miserable creatures who squander their natural gifts, and I would turn their hearts to work.
_Corot._
LXXVII
Sensation is rude and false unless _informed_ by intellection; and, however delicate be the touch in obedience to remote gradation, yet knowledge of the genus necessarily invests the representation with perspicuous and truthful relations that ignorance could not possibly have observed. Hence--Paint what you see; but know what you see.
_Only paint what you love in what you see_, and discipline yourself to separate this essence from its dumb accompaniments, so that the accents fall upon the points of passion. Let that which must be expressed of the rest be merged, syncopated in the largeness of the _modulation_.
Boldly dare to omit the impertinent or irrelevant, and let the features of the passion be modulated in _fewness_.
Not a touch without its meaning or its significance throughout the courses. There is no disgrace, but on the contrary, honour, be the touches never so few, if studied. By determined refusal to touch vaguely, and with persistence in the slowness of thoughtful work, a noble style may be at length obtained: swift as sublime.
_Edward Calvert._
LXXVIII
I started on Monday, 25th August, for Honfleur, where I stayed till 5th September in the most blessed condition of spirit.
There I worked with my head, with my eyes, harvesting effects in the mind; then, going over everything again, I called up within myself the figures desired for the completion of the composition. Once I had evoked all this world from nothingness, and envisaged it, and had found where each thing was to be, I had to return to Paris to ask for nature's authorisation and make sure of my advance. Nature justified me, and, as she is kind to those who approach her reverentially, gave me of her grace without stint.
_Puvis de Chavannes._
LXXIX
I wish to tell you, Francisco d'Ollanda, of an exceedingly great beauty in this science of ours, of which perhaps you are aware, and which, I think, you consider the highest, namely, that what one has most to work and struggle for in painting, is to do the work with a great amount of labour and study in such a way that it may afterwards appear, however much it was laboured, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not. And this is a very excellent beauty. At times some things are done with little work in the way I have said, but very seldom; most are done by dint of hard work and appear to have been done very quickly.
_Michael Angelo._
METHODS OF WORK
LXXX
Every successful work is rapidly performed; quickness is only execrable when it is empty--small. No one condemns the swiftness of an eagle.
To him who knows not the burden of process--the attributes that are to claim attention with every epocha of the performance--all attempt at swiftness will be mere pretence.
_Edward Calvert._
LXXXI
I am planning a large picture, and I regard all you say, but I do not enter into that notion of varying one's plans to keep the public in good humour. Change of weather and effect will always afford variety. What if Van der Velde had quitted his sea-pieces, or Ruysdael his waterfalls, or Hobbema his native woods? The world would have lost so many features in art. I know that you wish for no material alteration, but I have to combat from high quarters--even from Lawrence--the plausible argument that _subject_ makes the picture. Perhaps you think an evening effect might do; perhaps it might start me some new admirers, but I should lose many old ones. I imagine myself driving a nail; I have driven it some way, and by persevering I may drive it home; by quitting it to attack others, though I may amuse myself, I do not advance beyond the first, while that particular nail stands still. No man who can do any one thing well will be able to do any other different thing equally well; and this is true of Shakespeare, the greatest master of variety.
_Constable._
LXXXII
To work on the _Ladye_. Found part of the drapery bad, rubbed it out, heightened the seat she sits on, mended the heads again; did a great deal, but not finished yet. Any one might be surprised to read how I work whole days on an old drawing done many years since, and which I have twice worked over since it was rejected from the Royal Academy in '47, and now under promise of sale to White for £20. But I cannot help it. When I see a work going out of my hands, it is but natural, if I see some little defect, that I should try to mend it, and what follows is out of my power to direct: if I give one touch to a head, I give myself three days' work, and spoil it half-a-dozen times over.
_Ford Madox Brown._
LXXXIII
In literature as in art the rough sketches of the masters are made for connoisseurs, not for the vulgar crowd.
_A. Préault._
LXXXIV
It is true sketches, or such drawings as painters generally make for their works, give this pleasure of imagination to a high degree. From a slight, undetermined drawing, where the ideas of the composition and character are, as I may say, only just touched upon, the imagination supplies more than the painter himself, probably, could produce; and we accordingly often find that the finished work disappoints the expectation that was raised from the sketch; and this power of the imagination is one of the causes of the great pleasure we have in viewing a collection of drawings by great painters.
_Reynolds._
LXXXV
I have just been examining all the sketches I have used in making this work. How many there are which fully satisfied me at the beginning, and which seem feeble, inadequate, or ill-composed, now that the paintings are advanced. I cannot tell myself often enough that it means an immense deal of labour to bring a work to the highest pitch of impressiveness of which it is capable. The oftener I revise it, the more it will gain in expressiveness.... Though the touch disappear, though the fire of execution be no longer the chief merit of the painting, there is no doubt about this; and again how often does it happen that after this intense labour, which has turned one's thought back on itself in every direction, the hand obeys more swiftly and surely in giving the desired lightness to the last touches.
_Delacroix._
LXXXVI
Let us agree as to the meaning of the word "finished." What finishes a picture is not the quantity of detail in it, but the rightness of the general effect. A picture is not limited only by its frame. Whatever be the subject, there must be a principal object on which your eyes rest continually: the other objects are only the complement of this, they are less interesting to you; and after that there is nothing more for your eye.
There is the real limit of your picture. This principal object must seem so to the spectator of your work. Therefore, one must always return to this, and state its colour with more and more decision.
_Rousseau._
LXXXVII
ON PROTOGENES
He was a great Master, but he often spoil'd his Pieces by endeavouring to make them Perfect; he did not know when he had done well; a Man may do too much as well as too little; and he is truly skilful, who knew what was sufficient.
_Apelles._
FINISH
LXXXVIII
A picture must always be a little spoilt in the finishing of it. The last touches, which are intended to draw the picture together, take off from its freshness. To appear before the public one must cut out all those happy accidents which are the joy of the artist. I compare these murderous retouchings to those banal flourishes with which all airs of music end, and to those insignificant spaces which the musician is forced to put between the interesting parts of his work in order to lead on from one motive to another or to give them their proper value.
Re-touching, however, is not so fatal to a picture as one might think, when the picture has been well thought out and worked at with deep feeling. Time, in effacing the touches, old as well as new, gives back to the work its complete effect.
_Delacroix._
LXXXIX
A picture, the effect of which is true, is finished.
_Goya._
XC
You please me much, by saying that no other fault is found in your picture than the roughness of the surface; for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance, and what a judge of painting knows an original from a copy by--in short, being the touch of the pencil which is harder to preserve than smoothness, I am much better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind, than to see an eye half an inch out of its place, or a nose out of drawing when viewed at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smelt offensive, than to say how rough the paint lies; for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture.
_Gainsborough._
XCI
The picture[2] will be seen to the greatest advantage if it is hung in a strong light, and in such a manner that the spectator can stand at some distance from it.
_Rembrandt._
[Footnote 2: Probably the "Blinding of Samson."]
XCII
Don't look at a picture close, it smells bad.
_Rembrandt._
XCIII
Try to be frank in drawing and in colour; give things their full relief; make a painting which can be seen at a distance; this is indispensable.
_Chassériau._
XCIV
If I might point out to you another defect, very prevalent of late, in our pictures, and one of the same contracted character with those you so happily illustrate, it would be that of the _want of breadth_, and in others a perpetual division and subdivision of parts, to give what their perpetrators call space; add to this a constant disturbing and torturing of everything whether in light or in shadow, by a niggling touch, to produce fulness of subject. This is the very reverse of what we see in Cuyp or Wilson, and even, with all his high finishing, in Claude. I have been warning our friend Collins against this, and was also urging young Landseer to beware of it; and in what I have been doing lately myself have been studying much from Rembrandt and from Cuyp, so as to acquire what the great masters succeeded so well in, namely, that power by which the chief objects, and even the minute finishing of parts, tell over everything that is meant to be subordinate in their pictures. Sir Joshua had this remarkably, and could even make _the features of the face_ tell over everything, however strongly painted. I find that repose and breadth in the shadows and half-tints do a great deal towards it. Zoffany's figures derive great consequence from this; and I find that those who have studied light and shadow the most never appear to fail in it.
_Wilkie._
XCV
The commonest error into which a critic can fall is the remark we so often hear that such-and-such an artist's work is "careless," and "would be better had more labour been spent upon it." As often as not this is wholly untrue. As soon as the spectator can _see_ that "more labour has been spent upon it," he may be sure that the picture is to that extent incomplete and unfinished, while the look of freshness that is inseparable from a really successful picture would of necessity be absent. If the high finish of a picture is so apparent as immediately to force itself upon the spectator, he may _know_ that it is not as it should be; and from the moment that the artist feels his work is becoming a labour, he may depend upon it it will be without freshness, and to that extent without the merit of a true work of art. Work should always look as though it had been done with ease, however elaborate; what we see should appear to have been done without effort, whatever may be the agonies beneath the surface. M. Meissonier surpasses all his predecessors, as well as all his contemporaries, in the quality of high finish, but what you see is evidently done easily and without labour. I remember Thackeray saying to me, concerning a certain chapter in one of his books that the critics agreed in accusing of carelessness; "Careless? If I've written that chapter once I've written it a dozen times--and each time worse than the last!" a proof that labour did not assist in his case. When an artist fails it is not so much from carelessness: to do his best is not only profitable to him, but a joy. But it is not given to every man--not, indeed, to any--to succeed whenever and however he tries. The best painter that ever lived never entirely succeeded more than four or five times; that is to say, no artist ever painted more than four or five _masterpieces_, however high his general average may have been, for such success depends on the coincidence, not only of genius and inspiration, but of health and mood and a hundred other mysterious contingencies. For my own part, I have often been laboured, but whatever I am I am never careless. I may honestly say that I never consciously placed an idle touch upon canvas, and that I have always been earnest and hard-working; yet the worst pictures I ever painted in my life are those into which I threw most trouble and labour, and I confess I should not grieve were half my works to go to the bottom of the Atlantic--if I might choose the half to go. Sometimes as I paint I may find my work becoming laborious; but as soon as I detect any evidence of that labour I paint the whole thing out without more ado.
_Millais._
XCVI
I think that a work of art should not only be careful and sincere, but that the care and sincerity should also be evident. No ugly smears should be allowed to do duty for the swiftness which comes from long practice, or to find excuse in the necessity which the accomplished artist feels to speak distinctly. That necessity must never receive impulse from a desire to produce an effect on the walls of a gallery: there is much danger of this working _un_consciously in the accomplished artist, _consciously_ in the student.
_Watts._
XCVII
Real effect is making out the parts. Why are we to be told that masters, who could think, had not the judgment to perform the inferior parts of art? (as Reynolds artfully calls them); that we are to learn to _think_ from great masters, and to perform from underlings--to learn to design from Raphael, and to execute from Rubens?
_Blake._
XCVIII
If I knew that my portrait was still at Antwerp, I would have it kept back for the case to be opened, so that one could see that it had not been hurt by so long a time spent in a case without being exposed to the air, and that, as often happens to colours freshly put on, it has not turned rather yellow, thereby losing all its first effect. The remedy, if this has happened, is to expose it repeatedly to the sun, the rays of which absorb the superfluity of oil which causes this change; and if at any time it still turns brown, it must be exposed afresh to the sun. Warmth is the only remedy for this serious mischief.
_Rubens._
EFFECTS OF TIME ON PAINTING
XCIX
The only way to judge of the treasures the Old Masters of whatever age have left us--whether in architecture, sculpture, or painting--with any hope of sound deduction, is to look at the work and ask oneself--"What was that like when it was new?" The Elgin Marbles are allowed by common consent to be the perfection of art. But how much of our feeling of reverence is inspired by time? Imagine the Parthenon as it must have looked with the frieze of the mighty Phidias fresh from the chisel. Could one behold it in all its pristine beauty and splendour we should see a white marble building, blinding in the dazzling brightness of a southern sun, the figures of the exquisite frieze in all probability painted--there is more than a suspicion of that--and the whole standing out against the intense blue sky; and many of us, I venture to think, would cry at once, "How excessively crude." No; Time and Varnish are two of the greatest of Old Masters, and their merits and virtues are too often attributed by critics--I do not of course allude to the professional art-critics--to the painters of the pictures they have toned and mellowed. The great artists all painted in _bright_ colours, such as it is the fashion nowadays for men to decry as crude and vulgar, never suspecting that what they applaud in those works is merely the result of what they condemn in their contemporaries. Take a case in point--the "Bacchus and Ariadne" in the National Gallery, with its splendid red robe and its rich brown grass. You may rest assured that the painter of that bright red robe never painted the grass brown. He saw the colour as it was, and painted it as it was--distinctly green; only it has faded with time to its present beautiful mellow colour. Yet many men nowadays will not have a picture with green in it; there are even buyers who, when giving a commission to an artist, will stipulate that the canvas shall contain none of it. But God Almighty has given us green, and you may depend upon it it's a fine colour.
_Millais._
C
I must further dissent from any opinion that beauty of surface and what is technically called "quality" are mainly due to time. Sir John himself has quoted the early pictures of Rembrandt as examples of hard and careful painting, devoid of the charm and mystery so remarkable in his later work. The early works of Velasquez are still more remarkable instances, being, as they are, singularly tight and disagreeable--time having done little or nothing towards making them more agreeable.
_Watts._
CI
I am painting for thirty years hence.
_Monticelli._
CII
Sir John Millais is certainly right in his estimate of strong and even bright colour, but it seems to me that he is mistaken in believing that the colour of the Venetians was ever crude, or that time will ever turn white into colour. The colour of the best-preserved pictures by Titian shows a marked distinction between light flesh tones and white drapery. This is most distinctly seen in the small "Noli Me Tangere" in our National Gallery, in the so-called "Venus" of the Tribune and in the "Flora" of the Uffizi, both in Florence, and in Bronzino's "All is Vanity," also in the National Gallery. In the last-named picture, for example, the colour is as crude and the surface as bare of mystery as if it had been painted yesterday. As a matter of fact, white unquestionably tones down, but never becomes colour; indeed, under favourable conditions, and having due regard to what is underneath, it changes very little. In the "Noli Me Tangere" to which I have referred, the white sleeve of the Magdalen is still a beautiful white, quite different from the white of the fairest of Titian's flesh--proving that Titian never painted his flesh white.