THE DECORATIVE QUALITY
WE could easily settle, _ex cathedra_, this matter of art if our views
were the only ones to be considered; but, unfortunately, intelligent
people differ with us, and the painter himself is often our most
determined antagonist. The painter, in fact, has opinions of his own
about his pictures and he sometimes asserts them with no uncertain
voice. His most persistent assertion is that the picture should be
something decorative in form or color—be something beautiful to look
at—rather than something moral, intellectual, or narrative. But the
public, being differently minded, keeps insisting that the picture
should be something in subject or have some literary meaning; and,
consequently, it often misses the decorative altogether. So it is that
there is plenty of material for disagreement. The painter and his public
seem ever at swords’ points. Let us to-day review the case for the
plaintiff and to-morrow perhaps we can sum up for the defendant public.
It is true, to begin with, that the average person who takes an interest
in painting and attends gallery exhibitions often shoots wide of the
mark in his appreciations. He starts wrong by devoting too much
attention to pictures that have pretty faces and tell pretty stories. He
is over-fond of heroes and heroines, plots and tales, dramatic scenes
from history, or familiar characters in fiction. The ideal, whether in
figure, face or landscape, pleases him; and he does not object to a
laugh over the comic or the ludicrous. But he cannot abide coarse
peasants or fishermen in art; Dutch pictures with their tavern brawls
are not to his taste; and he persists in misunderstanding Italian people
dressed in modern garb and representing sacred characters. Anachronisms
of type, furniture, architecture, bother him beyond measure. The Madonna
and the Apostles were Jews and lived in Judea, and he wishes an
archæological report of the race, country, climate and soil. Of course,
he does not care for portraits by Velasquez with their outlandish
dresses, or large Flemish women by Rubens, or the “splashy” painting of
Dutch burghers by Frans Hals. In short the average person is devoted to
the pleasant subject in art and is continually asking of the picture:
What does it mean?
The view of the painter is very different from all this. He is not
interested in the pretty face. The Madonnas and Saints whether Dutch,
French, German, or Italian, do not interest him as Madonnas and Saints.
A figure, whether sacred or profane, is to him only a figure. As for the
pretty story, the ideal, the correct costume, he usually turns up his
nose at them. He is not always interested in what a picture means. Too
often perhaps he cares not a rap whether it means anything or not. His
question is first of all: What does it look? He wishes to know whether
that figure is well drawn, rightly placed, beautiful as form solely and
simply. Costume, whether right or wrong, is no great matter; but does
that Madonna’s robe make for graceful line, or play well as a spot of
color? The interior of a room has no significance architecturally. It
may be false to history; but does it make a good setting for the
figures, does it lend readily to light-and-shade, has it atmosphere
(Plate 27)? Finally, what is the result of the workmanship as a whole?
Has the painter handled his materials artistically, has he drawn his
figures effectively, has he arranged them compactly, has he brought his
lights-and-shades together truthfully, and has he fused his color-masses
harmoniously? If so he has produced a work of art, whether its subject
means much or means little.
[Illustration:
XXII. —HALS, The Jolly Man. Rijks Museum, Amsterdam.
]
The distinction which I would make is the old one between art as
representation and art as decoration. The Arabic numeral 8, for example,
conveys an abstract idea to the mind; but if you draw a series of linked
8’s thus: 888888888888888888 you will have something that conveys no
idea and yet _looks_ to the eye very like a graceful pattern for an
architectural frieze. The art which the “average person” seeks in a
picture-gallery represents an idea and has an expressive meaning, the
art which the painter seeks in a gallery _looks_ something and has a
decorative meaning. It need not be inferred that the two kinds of art
are incompatible with each other. On the contrary, they are closely
united, for great art is both expressive and decorative, and all art is
more or less decorative even when not expressive. Nor is it necessary to
say that one is better than the other. Perhaps it is the thing said
rather than the manner of saying that counts most with us; but what I
wish to insist upon just here is that the painter is first of all
devoted to the manner of saying, he is devoted to the decorative. We
look at his pictures and think how long he toiled over that conception,
how he walked the town, like Raphael, searching for that pretty face,
how he must have studied to verify all his archæological facts. But, no.
His greatest effort has perhaps gone out in the endeavor to make his
tones harmonize, to get his drawing right, to hold his picture together
in its planes, and make it one united impression of beautiful form and
color.
You perhaps fancy that this contention for the decorative on the part of
the painter is some fad of modernity. If you have that idea pray dismiss
it, for it has no basis in fact. The decorative sense goes back to the
dawn of history. It was the very first sign of the art instinct in
Primitive Man. Just how it originally came to the surface would be
difficult to determine. Years ago Schiller put forth a theory which has
been accepted by Mr. Herbert Spencer and others to the effect that it
arose through the play-impulse; and that art in its early significance
was merely the result of man’s superfluous energy—something done for
pleasure in an idle hour. That is to say, the Stone Age man ornamented
his weapons of the chase and his domestic utensils with color and line
because he had too great a supply of animal spirits. And the safety
valve where his spirits blew off was art! We are to infer then that the
decorative came into existence through man’s delight in form and color
and because he had nothing better to do. The theory is ingenious but not
wholly convincing. It is quite as reasonable to argue with Mr. Whistler
that when the so-called Primitive Man set out for the chase in the
morning there was some weak or crippled brother of the tribe who had not
enough animal spirits to join the band, and was left behind with the
women to do camp work. He could not draw bow or fight and so it is
possible that he was put to work at making weapons, carving implements,
moulding, decorating, and baking pottery. He was at first no doubt an
awkward workman; but as his hands became more deft and his senses more
acute he rounded shapes and forms with growing grace, and put patterns
upon bowls and knife-handles with more justness of balance and
appropriateness of design.
It is interesting to observe that almost at the start this primitive
artist recognized the problem of adapting design and color to a given
space—a problem that is to-day continually up for solution in every
studio in the country. He recognized that the body of an ordinary vase,
for instance, was capable of receiving one sort of a design—an open,
free pattern perhaps,—the neck of it required something like a
narrow-band pattern, the top or cover required a circular pattern. It
was not long before our primitive artist found that the secret of good
decoration lay in filling given spaces symmetrically; and that the sense
of order, harmony, and proportion were necessities of his craft. He
found the same problem staring him in the face when he left his pottery
and its geometrical designs and began scratching the outlines of animals
and men upon weapons or flat surfaces of stone. He had to adapt his
figures to his space—adapt them rhythmically, decoratively. If the space
happened to be a dagger-handle then the figures were necessarily of
diminutive size or represented in horizontal attitudes; if the space
were a shield then the figures had to carry the action around the centre
in rows perhaps; if it were an upright panel of clay or stone then the
figures were required to stand at full length and fill the space from
bottom to top. The adaptation of design and color to prescribed space
was (and is) the primary requisite of good decoration; and the early
artist was accounted a success or a failure just in proportion as he
accepted or rejected this requisite.
[Illustration:
XXIII.—BONIFAZIO VERONESE, Moses Saved from the Nile. Brera, Milan.
]
Centuries after the period of Primitive Man—no one knows how many
centuries—when civilization had become established on the banks of the
Nile, we find pottery, household utensils, weapons of warfare,
furniture, embroideries, walls of temples and walls of tombs, all
covered with patterns, figures, and colors. The carvings and paintings
are better in execution, but not unlike those of more barbaric times.
And the artist here in Egypt, like his predecessor in the Stone Age, is
concerned with filling spaces decoratively. To be sure the king in his
chariot surrounded by his bowmen, the flying enemy, the files of
prisoners bearing tribute, the convocation of the gods, the scenes from
royal and humble life, are all records of history, religion, or custom.
The painter is saying something, illustrating something, with his
figures and groups and colors; but how careful he is that he shall say
it gracefully, pleasing the eye as well as the mind. The composition
usually runs in long tiers or bands and the spaces are filled with
standing or moving figures. The open spots about the figures are dotted
with accessory objects, such as palms, fruits, implements,
cartouches—all decorative in form or color. Everywhere in the Egyptian
temple the hieroglyphs appeared in bands and rows—a text explanatory of
the subject, but introduced in such a manner that no space in the
picture should look empty or wanting in balance.
Assyrian art tells us the same tale. The alabaster slabs that lined the
palace walls of Nineveh were all cut of one size, and the colored
bas-reliefs upon them picturing warriors, chariots, horses, dogs,
hunting scenes, battle scenes, and sacred scenes conformed to that size.
Trees and city ramparts and rivers were used as accessory objects, and
often the cuneiform inscriptions ran across them and held them together
like a veil of atmosphere. With Greek art this decorative
filling-of-space reached its highest point in the ancient world. You
cannot to-day take up a red-figured vase, a silver coin, or an engraved
gem without being conscious that the artist’s first thought was how to
fill the given space effectively. There is little attempt at fitting a
round stone into a square hole. The whole surface of the vase, the coin,
or the gem is covered with a regard for the general form of the space
decorated. A Greek coin almost always shows good decorative effect,
because the disk is completely filled with a round profile; an American
coin usually shows poor decorative effect because the space is not
filled with one large object, but is huddled full of small dates,
figures, stars, liberty-caps, and shields. The Greek die-sinker is
influenced solely by decorative appearance, whereas the American
die-sinker or his employer wants to tell you on a ten-cent piece all
about the constitution, the flag, and the magnificent freedom and
general excellence of the greatest republic on earth.
Not alone with small objects was the Greek a decorative workman. The
wall-paintings, the sculpture, the architecture, all exemplified his
skill in space-filling. It was no mere accident that the figures in the
highest part of a Parthenon pediment were shown standing, and that they
were seated or reclining in the lower angles. There was a pedimental
form to fill with figures, and Pheidias would not have been Pheidias had
he not placed the figures so that they would fill the space gracefully,
easily, and with no loss of dignity in their attitudes. Just so with the
Parthenon frieze of Athenian youths on horseback. How gracefully they
ride! And how well adapted the moving train of horsemen to the long,
lane-like frieze that conducts them around the temple. It is obvious
enough that the sculptor had to consider the field upon which he worked,
and he had to fill it so that it would first of all be beautiful to the
eye.
The step from ancient to modern art is a long one, but the decorating
motive did not die with the Greeks. The Gothic age had perhaps more need
for it than the age of Pericles. When painting began to rise in Italy,
the chief patron of it was the all-powerful Church. At that time artists
were not artists, in name at least. They were mechanics, members of
trades-unions called guilds, and were hired to do certain kinds of work
like carpenters, masons, stone-cutters, and other mechanics. The painter
at that time was often a layer of colors, a gilder of altar-pieces, a
modeller in clay, a hewer of marble, a goldsmith, a frame-maker—all in
one. When the church was built he was called in to decorate it—that is,
to make it beautiful to look at, attractive in appearance. There were
certain architectural spaces—ovals, triangles, squares, panels—certain
recesses in the apse, the dome, the ceiling, that had to be filled with
carvings, designs, pictures. He filled them, and he was praised or
criticised as he filled those spaces decoratively or otherwise. He was a
decorator pure and simple. Then came Giotto. The same kind of spaces
needed filling, but Giotto filled them better than his predecessors. His
decorative sense was larger, his taste in color more refined; and he
could draw a figure nobler and with more flexibility as regards its
muscular play and action. Painting advanced with a bound. It did not do
so because of Giotto’s subjects, because he painted the traditional
Church themes like those before him; but because Giotto was, for his
time, a great craftsman.
A hundred or more years later came Masaccio. Art was once more pushed
suddenly forward, for Masaccio rounded the archaic line, drew drapery
with ease, fathomed the tones of colors, gave light-and-shade,
perspective, values. Then another hundred years to Michael Angelo and
Raphael. With these two last-named artists drawing reached a great
height. It could not at that time be carried further, and no painters in
Florence were so famed for drawing and composition as Michael Angelo and
Raphael. They filled space quite perfectly with lines and forms. (Plates
21 and 28.)
Contemporary with Michael Angelo and Raphael lived Leonardo da Vinci. He
was an excellent draughtsman but you do not often hear him spoken of as
such. His fame rests largely upon his discovery and mastery of
light-and-shade. Here was something new with which to fill space. It
made no difference that at this time painting often came down from the
apse and the ceiling and spread itself upon canvas and wooden panel to
make what we to-day call the easel-picture. The decorative motive was
not lost sight of for a moment. Leonardo was just as solicitous that the
panel should be decoratively beautiful as the wall fresco, and he made
it beautiful by his mystery of light-and-shade, by his figures and
colors. He was for Florence the perfect craftsman, and many students
followed his initiative. Then came Correggio at Parma (Plate 8) and
Giorgione at Venice (Plate 24), varying the use of light-and-shade and
making of it a magnificent background upon which to weave colors. These
three men for Italy perfected and completed the decorative use of
light-and-shade, and you will always hear them spoken of as the masters
of chiaroscuro, the inventors of composition by masses of light and
dark.
One moment more to the school of Venice! You will remember that from her
infancy Venice was a trader with the East. She was the carrier by sea,
the broker, between Europe and that realm of Mahomet lying back of
Constantinople which has never known any other art than colored
ornament. This Moslem empire and its color-glamour had its influence
upon the Venetians through their ships and traders, and when the
painters began the fabrication of altar-pieces and mosaics for the
Venetian churches it was not line or form or light or shade that
primarily interested them. It was color—the color of the old decadent
Eastern world—to which they were devoted. The Bellinis began it, their
pupils Giorgione and Titian made it glorious, Paolo Veronese gave it
final brilliancy and splendor. (Plates 5 and 14.) Again the height was
reached. Space-filling at Venice was done primarily by masses of color,
and to-day you will always hear the Venetians spoken of as the great
colorists in art.
Now have you noticed that I have given you, in this little outline of
art-history, the names of the great masters in painting? Have you
noticed that the rise of that greatest school of all, the Italian, can
be adequately explained on purely decorative grounds? Art was great in
Italy primarily because the Italians were great technicians, great
decorators, great space-fillers. If you will turn back and read their
lives, their adventures, and their quarrels among themselves you will
discover that they were not wholly absorbed by the Madonnas and Holy
Families and the religious sentiment of art. Many of them had piety and
strong belief, and some of them had neither the one nor the other. The
subjects were dealt out to all of them alike by the Church; but the
manner in which they should be painted was something taught in the
_bottega_ of the master, something dictated in each case by the space
(the wall or altar) which had to be decorated.
Even the pietists like Fra Angelico were not free of obligation to the
decorative. Nor did a single one of them ever wish to be free. Whether
they believed in religion or not, whether they had pietistic sentiment
or not, they all believed in the beauty of good form and good color. If
you will look again at Andrea del Sarto’s Holy Families you will see
little holiness about them or in them. They are only Florentine people
posed in traditional attitudes, with Andrea’s wife enacting the part of
the Madonna. But they are not wanting in decorative charm. Andrea knew
how to fill space if not how to paint soul, and it was because he did
fill space beautifully in the convent of the Annunziata that his
townspeople called him “the faultless painter.” No one ever referred to
him as “the faultless thinker” or “the faultless sentimentalist” or “the
pietistic painter.”
If you will look again at the pictures of Titian you will see only
handsome, well-fed, richly robed Venetians. Their brows are not burdened
with Christian ecstasy nor their faces furrowed with classic thought.
There is little to them but fine form and fine color. And yet I venture
to think that Titian, taking him for all in all, was the greatest
painter known to history. It was by and with such men—men devoted to the
material and technical side of their art—that Italian craftsmanship rose
step by step through three hundred years of severe training until the
Renaissance height was reached and great art was the result. The
pictorial voice of Italy would never have been heard in this world had
it not been for the decorative skill of the workman, the craftsman of
the Renaissance, the man we to-day call a technician. And from beginning
to end the first consideration of Italian art was not religion, nor
nature, nor the ideal nor the classic, but rather the making of a
beautiful decoration by the use of lines, lights, shadows, and colors.
[Illustration:
XXIV.—GIORGIONE, Madonna and Saints. Cathedral, Castelfranco.
]
I am aware that you regard all this as decidedly heterodox, and possibly
you may think I am distorting the facts to make a point in argument. But
no. I am stating the artist’s contention, giving his idea of the
development of art—the view held by the ancients and still upheld to-day
by the moderns. But let me ramble on a little further, and consider this
matter negatively. You know that with Raphael, Michael Angelo, and
Titian art in Italy reached its climax, and that after them came that
deluge known to history as the Decadence. But why was there a decadence?
What caused it? Nothing more nor less than that the followers of the
great men came to regard craftsmanship as something of a trick to be
readily picked up, and failed to study with the severity of the early
men. They thought to be technicians without labor, to gain facility
without skill, to produce great pictures without knowledge. Their
predecessors had achieved _technique_, and the followers thought they
had nothing to do but help themselves to the result without bothering
about going to the fountain-head. So they tried to combine certain
line-effects of Raphael with Titian’s color and Correggio’s
light-and-shade. Of course this attempt at a unity of technical
excellences was an absurdity. Then, too, they began to think that the
sublime or sentimental subject was worth more than good workmanship, and
that Michael Angelo’s greatness lay in his mystery-haunted figures, as
Raphael’s in his round-faced Madonnas. So they began copying these
features, too. And as a result there appeared the ponderous scowling
Titans of Salviati and Vasari, the sugary, empty-headed Madonnas of
Carlo Dolci and Sassoferrato. They could not draw or paint like the
great masters, because their hands had not been thoroughly trained; they
could not design decoratively, because their taste had become corrupted;
they could not think effectively, because they were following other
people’s ideas rather than their own. No wonder there was decadence. It
would have been very strange had there been anything else.
Two hundred years of this meretricious art followed the downfall of the
Renaissance. During those centuries painting in Europe lay barren, save
in some exceptional spots. It flourished in Holland with Rembrandt; it
flourished in Flanders with Rubens; it flourished in Spain with
Velasquez. Why did it flourish? If I were searching the entire history
of painting I could not name for you three greater technicians than
Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velasquez. With Titian, they are the great
masters of the craft. Art always flourishes in the hands of the skilled
craftsman; it always languishes in the hands of the unskilled craftsman.
And it is necessary to insist upon it again that all these men were
workmen, working with the decorative sense uppermost. They were artists,
too—artists who expressed great thoughts, sentiments, and emotions,
particularly Rembrandt; but they never would have been artists, they
never would have represented any fact or thought worth considering, had
they not been, first of all, decorative workmen.
But you may say we have changed all that. The painter in those days was
only a court dependant—a varlet of the king—not different from
cabinet-makers, stone-cutters, and other mechanics; but to-day he is an
independent citizen, a creative genius, a teacher of mankind, an
influencer and moulder of public opinion. Yes; but the picture is still
the picture. And custom may change the painter’s skin, but not his
nature. He is still a skilled workman at heart, or at least would be
such. And his main aim is decorative craftsmanship. Modern painting
gives it proof. It is said, and truly enough, that art has advanced in
this century. Why has it advanced? Simply because it has taken hold of
the old technical and decorative problems, and tried to better them. In
France, Ingres was doing his best to draw like Raphael, when Delacroix
came to the front with a new kind of drawing. Instead of line he
substituted the patch of color, and made the outer rim elastic, movable,
life-like. Corot, Rousseau, and the landscape painters; Courbet, Millet,
and Manet, the _genre_ painters, helped complete it. Art under them rose
rapidly, and the truth of nature was more nearly approximated.
But the light was too dull, the shadows too black. A new man came to the
front to revise and re-edit the light-and-shade of Leonardo, Correggio,
and Rembrandt. That man was Monet, the so-called impressionist. He
changed the whole pitch of light by transposing the scale, and giving
both lights and darks a higher register. And has not the rich deep color
of the old Venetians been revised too? Look about you at the high keys
of color that greet you in every modern picture exhibition. Claude
Monet, whom people smiled at a dozen years ago, but are now calling a
genius, is responsible for this high scale of color and light. He has
transformed the whole decorative aspect of landscape painting, by
studying the intermixture and play of pigments. We are now seeing colors
in art that approximate, at least, the colors of nature; and they are
just as beautiful decoratively as the old ones, only we are not yet
accustomed to them.
Painting advances, breaks out new sails, and enters upon new seas with
such new knowledge of materials. And of course some of the energy put
into the study is to enable the painters to show a truer life and nature
than ever before; but we are not to forget that there is beauty also in
the new pitch of light and color and that the painter is using them with
a decorative purpose. Indeed it would be easy to demonstrate that no
present-day painter begins upon an oval, a square, a triangle of wood or
canvas, without first planning how to fill that space gracefully with
forms, lights, and colors. These nineteenth-century painters have had
few wall-spaces to fill, but it has already been suggested that the
decorative tradition has descended to them, and that they are as
considerate about filling a panel or canvas as ever the old men were
considerate about filling an apse or spandrel.
[Illustration:
XXV.—REYNOLDS, Lady Cockburn and Family. National Gallery, London.
]
But I fancy you are ready to stop me by protesting that these motives
are too material, too mechanical. You will perhaps insist that true art
is above all this petty planning, squaring, measuring, space-filling;
that genius knows not method, and that the ideal out-soars the base
materials that would hold it down to earth. There are those who believe
that inspiration dictates with the voice of an angel and that the hand
of the poet or painter but obeys the voice; there are those who believe
there is no labor or plan or design or foundation in the work of art.
And it is true that oftentimes painting and poetry appear so effortless
that we think them spontaneous and unpremeditated. But those are always
the works that have been slaved over the most. Every great work of art
is based in technical knowledge and has the skilled workman back of it.
And many are the poets born by nature, yet lacking the accomplishment of
verse. Did you ever read a great piece of prose or poetry written by a
man ignorant of grammar and the rhythmical construction of sentences?
Did you ever hear of a good piece of architecture built by a man who
knew not plans, scales, and proportions? Did you ever see a great
picture painted by a man who could not draw decently or lay color
harmoniously? We are quite right in admiring the feeling, the
enthusiasm, yes, the inspiration, if you prefer that word, of some great
violinist over his instrument; but we should not forget the training of
the hand, the many years of dealing with the material that made
enthusiasm and feeling possible. How much of them should we have heard
had the hand remained untrained? Shelley’s poetic thoughts, yes, but
Shelley’s sense of melody, his knowledge of rhythm, his general mastery
of words and sentences, gave them meaning to the world. And so, too,
while we admire Tintoretto’s fertility of resource and his bounding
imagination we should not overlook the fact that it was his absolute
skill of hand, his knowledge of line and light and color, that made an
idyl of the “Ariadne and Bacchus” and an epic of that great maëlstrom
composition the “Paradise.”
Materials, craftsmanship, the decorative sense which requires that a
man’s work shall be interesting in itself, are the very bases of art;
and we often go astray in our judgments by not considering them. We have
with us to-day one of the best literary technicians of the nineteenth
century—Mr. James the novelist. It can hardly be contended that he is a
very popular novelist. We sometimes read outbreaks in newspaper or
magazine columns to the effect that he is not much of a story-teller,
has not much of a plot. That is the complaint of the average person in
the picture-gallery when he stands face to face with a Whistler
nocturne. He wants what the artist does not care to paint. Mr. Whistler
and Mr. James are both very well acquainted with the pretty face and the
romantic story, but they choose to ignore them. The average person may
read a novel by Mr. James and keep asking: What does it mean? but if Mr.
James were at his elbow and disposed to ask questions he would certainly
inquire: How does it read?
It may be admitted, if you please, that the insistence upon the
decorative use of language with Mr. James or with Mr. Swinburne is
excessive. And so, too, the followers of Mr. Whistler, if not the leader
himself, may be thought to refine color and mystify tone and shadow into
a meaningless fog of pigments. Any principle, however good in itself,
may be rendered ridiculous by extravagance in its application. But the
followers of the decorative are not the only ones who go beyond the
normal. Painters who are given to “ideas in art” oftentimes fly to the
other extreme and neglect the decorative altogether. Mr. Holman Hunt,
for example, will hardly be accused of not having enough ideas and
meaning in his Palestine pictures, and just as certainly he will not be
accused of pandering to the decorative. His drawing, coloring, painting,
surfaces, are anything but pleasing. Nor does anyone doubt that Walt
Whitman has put forth some poetic ideas as great as any in American
literature, but the form in which he has sent them forth is far enough
removed from the rhythmical. You read him and question perhaps whether
he is a great poet or a solemn impostor just because he trusts his
thoughts to bad drawing, crude coloring, and incoherent composition,
just because he dispenses with the decorative.
Now you will please not understand me as saying that it makes no
difference what you say if you but say it well, or that the setting is
nobler or better than the gem itself. It is not necessary to rush to
either extreme of statement. Some artists there be who make sweeping
claims for the decorative, and so far as they themselves are concerned
they are doubtless in the right. That is to say, form and color, in
graceful combinations, make one kind of painting; but we need not
straightway conclude that it is the only kind of painting. It has been
suggested already that music and poetry may have something more to them
than melodious sounds that fall sweetly on the ear; and that painting
may have another mission than that of pleasing the eye with sensuous
lines and colors. The ultimate end of painting is perhaps the expression
of emotional feeling; and I am not now contending for superlative and
final art in the Persian-rug picture made up of subtle lights and tones
of colors. But it may be reasonably insisted that it is better for the
picture—no matter what its ulterior meaning—that it should first of all
be pleasing to the eye and decoratively attractive. Certainly that is
the way all the great artists of the world have thought and wrought,
from the man of the Stone Age who first decorated pottery to the
American of to-day who is concerned with filling space upon panel or
canvas.
[Illustration:
XXVI.—CLAUDE LORRAINE, Flight into Egypt.
]
And this decorative motive, which was the first consideration, remains
to the last the most enduring feature of art. The history of a marble or
a picture may be lost; its subject or theme may be forgotten; what it
meant or signified to a past generation may be incomprehensible to a
present generation; but what it _looks_ is substantially the same for
all times and all peoples. What, I wonder, makes the glory of the “Venus
of Milo”—the fact that she is a Venus? It has been gravely questioned,
is still questioned, just what character that figure is intended to
personify; but it has never been doubted that it is a wonderful piece of
line and form—something beautiful to look upon. What makes the glory of
Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love”? There is nothing either sacred or
profane about it; the title is a misnomer—something attached to the
picture long after the painter’s death—and no one knows what Titian
intended to say in the picture. But is the picture less beautiful for
that? It is a splendid panel of form and color; any name or no name
could not render it less splendid. Its decorative quality is quite
perfect. All those altar-pieces, frescoes, and mosaics in the Italian
churches—how much meaning have they and their sacred subjects for the
unbelieving art-lover of to-day! Very little indeed; but how beautiful
they are to look upon just as pictures! (Plates 23 and 27). Who really
cares to-day for the characters of Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth as compared
with the deathless language of their decorative setting! Who does not
care for Shakespeare’s jewelled sentences!
It is the common experience of art-lovers that the more they study
pictures the more certainly do they lose interest in the theme or
narrative illustrated. The historical or poetical incident portrayed
fades into insignificance beside well-drawn forms and impressive schemes
of color. No one who knows much about painting ever looks twice for the
meaning of a Watteau or a Lancret group. The only meaning of it lies in
its vivacity and gayety expressed in color and handling. Even where the
meaning is important, as in Reynolds’s “Lady Cockburn and Family” (Plate
25) or Leighton’s “Summer Moon,” it is not possible to overlook or
ignore the intertwining and blending of the group in both form and
color, which makes it so attractive decoratively.
Such in brief is the artist’s view of art. It is firmly based upon the
decorative, though all artists do not advocate it to the extinction of
every other feature of the painting. On the contrary there are many who
believe in sentiment, feeling, and emotional expression as the final
aim. And some there are who stickle for the value of history,
archæology, and story, as others for the value of the natural and the
real. Indeed, there are several kinds of painting, representing several
different points of view, and if we would cultivate catholicity of taste
we should consider them all. There is a large body of intelligent people
in this world who are even heretical enough to believe that art has some
value as illustration; and since we have given the painter’s contention,
perhaps it would be as well that we now state the case for the other
side.
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