Produced by Ron Swanson
[Frontispiece: RED RIDING HOOD
From the picture by G. F. Watts, in the Birmingham Art Gallery
Page 197]
THE BOOK OF ART
FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
BY
AGNES ETHEL CONWAY
AND
SIR MARTIN CONWAY
WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
A. & C. BLACK, LTD.
4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.1
First published September 1909 as "The Children's Book of Art"
Reprinted in 1914, 1927, and 1935
Made in Great Britain.
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.
TO
MY LITTLE FRIENDS
AGNES AND ROSANNE
NOTE
My thanks are due and are cordially rendered to the Earl of Yarborough,
Sir Frederick Cook, and the authorities of Trinity College, Cambridge,
for permission to reproduce their pictures; to Lady Alfred Douglas
and Mr. Henry Newbolt for leave to quote from their poems; to Mr.
Everard Green, Somerset Herald, for all that is new in the
interpretation of the Wilton diptych; to Miss K. K. Radford for the
translation in Chapter VIII., and to all the friends who have helped
me with criticism and suggestions.
A. E. C.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY IN EUROPE . . . . 14
III RICHARD II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
IV THE VAN EYCKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
V THE RENAISSANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
VI RAPHAEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
VII THE RENAISSANCE IN VENICE . . . . . . . . 93
VIII THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH . . . . . . 104
IX REMBRANDT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
X PETER DE HOOGH AND CUYP . . . . . . . . . 133
XI VAN DYCK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
XII VELASQUEZ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
XIII REYNOLDS AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . . 165
XIV TURNER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
XV THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . 188
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IN THE COLOURS OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTINGS
Red Ridinghood . . . . . . . . . . _G. F. Watts_ _Frontispiece_
Richard II. before the Virgin PAGE
and Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
The Three Maries . . . . . . . . . _H. Van Eyck_ . . . . . 48
St. Jerome in his study . . . . . _Antonello da Messina_ 65
The Nativity . . . . . . . . . . . _Sandro Botticelli_ . . 76
The Knight's Dream . . . . . . . . _Raphael_ . . . . . . . 85
The Golden Age . . . . . . . . . . _Giorgione_ . . . . . . 96
St. George destroying the Dragon . _Tintoret_ . . . . . . 102
Edward, Prince of Wales,
afterwards Edward VI. . . . . _Holbein_ . . . . . . . 111
A Man in Armour . . . . . . . . . _Rembrandt_ . . . . . . 126
An Interior . . . . . . . . . . . _P. de Hoogh_ . . . . . 134
Landscape with Cattle . . . . . . _Cuyp_ . . . . . . . . 141
William II. of Orange . . . . . . _Van Dyck_ . . . . . . 146
Don Balthazar Carlos . . . . . . . _Velasquez_ . . . . . . 161
The Duke of Gloucester . . . . . . _Sir J. Reynolds_ . . . 170
The Fighting Temeraire . . . . . . _Turner_ . . . . . . . 177
THE CHILDREN'S BOOK OF ART
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendid
story by a really nice person. There is not the least occasion for
the story to be true; indeed I think the untrue stories are the
best--those in which we meet delightful beasts and things that talk
twenty times better than most human beings ever do, and where
extraordinary events happen in the kind of places that are not at all
like our world of every day. It is so fine to be taken into a country
where it is always summer, and the birds are always singing and the
flowers always blowing, and where people get what they want by just
wishing for it, and are not told that this or that isn't good for them,
and that they'll know better than to want it when they're grown up,
and all that kind of thing which is so annoying and so often happening
in this obstinate criss-cross world, where the days come and go in
such an ordinary fashion.
But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I like
to listen to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would be
some one who could draw pictures for me while talking--pictures like
those of Tenniel in _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the
Looking-Glass_. How much better we know Alice herself and the White
Knight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures
than even from the story itself. But my story-teller should not only
draw the pictures while he talked, but he should paint them too. I
want to see the sky blue and the grass green, and I want red cloaks
and blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colours, and some
gold and silver too, and not merely black and white--though black and
white drawings would be better than nothing, so long as they showed
me what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like. I could
put up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don't
you know how good a bad drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend who
can make the loveliest folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintest
houses and trees, and he really can't draw a bit; and the curious thing
is, that if he could draw better I should not like his folks and beasts
half as much as I do the lop-sided, crook-legged, crazy-looking people
he produces. And then he has such quaint things to tell about them,
and while he talks he seems to make them live, so that I can hardly
believe they are not real people for all their unlikeness to any one
you ever saw.
Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like
that, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but
merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived,
every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a
kind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't
matter to us, which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that
matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture
is a nice one. There is a delightful old picture painted on a wall
away off at Assisi, in Italy, which shows St. Francis preaching to
a lot of birds, and the birds are all listening to him and looking
pleased--the way birds do look pleased when they find a good fat worm
or fresh crumbs. Now, St. Francis was a real man and such a dear person
too, but I don't suppose half the stories told about him were really
true, yet we can pretend they were and that's just what the painter
helps us to do. Don't you know all the games that begin with 'Let's
pretend'?--well, that's art. Art is pretending, or most of it is.
Pictures take us into a world of make-believe, a world of imagination,
where everything is or should be in the right place and in the right
light and of the right colour, where all the people are nicely dressed
to match one another, and are not standing in one another's way, and
not interrupting one another or forgetting to help play the game.
That's the difference between pictures and photographs. A photograph
is almost always wrong somewhere. Something is out of place, or
something is there which ought to be away, or the light is wrong; or,
if it's coloured, the colours are just not in keeping with one another.
If it's a landscape the trees are where we don't want them; they hide
what we want to see, or they don't hide the very thing we want hidden.
Then the clouds are in the wrong place, and a wind ruffles the water
just where we want to see something reflected. That's the way things
actually happen in the real world. But in the world of 'Let's pretend,'
in the world of art, they don't happen so. There everything happens
right, and everybody does, not so much what they should (that might
sometimes be dull), but exactly what we want them to do--which is so
very much better. That is the world of your art and my art.
Unfortunately all the pictures in the galleries weren't painted just
for you and me; but you'll find, if you look for them, plenty that
were, and the rest don't matter. Those were painted, no doubt, for
some one else. But if you could find the some one else for whom they
were painted, the some one else whose world of 'Let's pretend' was
just these pictures that don't belong to your world, and if they could
tell you about their world of 'Let's pretend,' ten to one you'd find
it just as good a world as your own, and you'd soon learn to 'pretend'
that way too.
Well, the purpose of this book is to take you into a number of worlds
of 'Let's pretend,' most of which I daresay will be new to you, and
perhaps you will find some of them quite delightful places. I'm sure
you can't help liking St. Jerome's Cell when you come to it. It's not
a bit like any room we can find anywhere in the world to-day, but
wouldn't it be joyful if we could? What a good time we could have there
with the tame lion (not a bit like any lion in the Zoo, but none the
worse for that) and the jolly bird, and all St. Jerome's little things.
I should like to climb on to his platform and sit in his chair and
turn over his books, though I don't believe they'd be interesting to
read, but they'd certainly be pretty to look at. If you and I were
there, though, we should soon be out away behind, looking round the
corner, and finding all sorts of odd places that unfortunately can't
all get into the picture, only we know they're there, down yonder
corridor, and from what the painter shows us we can invent the rest
for ourselves.
One of the troubles of a painter is that he can't paint every detail
of things as they are in nature. A primrose, when you first see it,
is just a little yellow spot. When you hold it in your hand you find
it made up of petals round a tiny centre with little things in it.
If you take a magnifying glass you can see all its details multiplied.
If you put a tiny bit of it under a microscope, ten thousand more little
details come out, and so it might go on as long as you went on magnifying.
Now a picture can't be like that. It just has to show you the general
look of things as you see them from an ordinary distance. But there
comes in another kind of trouble. How do you see things? We don't all
see the same things in the same way. Your mother's face looks very
different to you from its look to a mere person passing in the street.
Your own room has a totally different aspect to you from what it bears
to a casual visitor. The things you specially love have a way of
standing out and seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to any
one else. Then there are other differences in the look of the same
things to different people which you have perhaps noticed. Some people
are more sensitive to colours than others. Some are much more sensitive
to brightness and shadow. Some will notice one kind of object in a
view, or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others. Girls
are quicker to take note of the colour of eyes, hair, skin, clothes,
and so forth than boys. A woman who merely sees another woman for a
moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately
than a man. A man will be noticing other things. His picture, if he
painted one, would make those other things prominent.
So it is with everything that we see. None of us sees more than certain
features in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is only
those features that we should paint. We can't possibly paint every
detail of everything that comes into the picture. We must make a choice,
and of course we choose the features and details that please us best.
Now, the purpose of painting anything at all is to paint the beauty
of the thing. If you see something that strikes you as ugly, you don't
instinctively want to paint it; but when you see an effect of beauty,
you feel that it would be very nice indeed to have a picture showing
that beauty. So a picture is not really the representation of a thing,
but the representation of the beauty of the thing.
Some people can see beauty almost everywhere; they are conscious of
beauty all day long. They want to surround themselves with beauty,
to make all their acts beautiful, to shed beauty all about them. Those
are the really artistic souls. The gift of such perfect instinct for
beauty comes by nature to a few. It can be cultivated by almost all.
That cultivation of all sorts of beauty in life is what many people
call civilization--the real art of living. To see beauty everywhere
in nature is not so very difficult. It is all about us where the work
of uncivilized man has not come in to destroy it. Artists are people
who by nature and by education have acquired the power to see beauty
in what they look at, and then to set it down on paper or canvas, or
in some other material, so that other people can see it too.
It seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape was
hardly perceived by any one at all. People lived in the beautiful
country and scarcely knew that it was beautiful. Then came the time
when the beauty of landscape began to be felt by the nicest people.
They began to put it into their poetry, and to talk and write about
it, and to display it in landscape pictures. It was through poems and
pictures, which they read and saw, that the general run of folks first
learned to look for beauty in nature. I have no doubt that Turner's
wonderful sunsets made plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoice
in the intricacy and splendour of their glory for the first time in
their lives. Well, what Turner and other painters of his generation
did for landscape, had had to be done for men and women in earlier
days by earlier generations of artists. The Greeks were the first,
in their sculpture, to show the wonderful beauty of the human form;
till their day people had not recognised what to us now seems obvious.
No doubt they had thought one person pretty and another handsome, but
they had not known that the human figure was essentially a glorious
thing till the Greek sculptors showed them. Another thing painters
have taught the world is the beauty of atmosphere. Formerly no one
seems to have noticed how atmosphere affects every object that is seen
through it. The painters had to show us that it is so. After we had
seen the effect of atmosphere in pictures we began to be able to see
for ourselves in nature, and thus a whole group of new pleasures in
views of nature was opened up to us.
Away back in the Middle Ages, six hundred and more years ago, folks
had far less educated eyes than we possess to-day. They looked at nature
more simply than we do and saw less in it. So they were satisfied with
pictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do without.
But painting does not only concern itself with representing the world
we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold. It
concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe.
Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy
play about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancy
get mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and
of fact, and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins.
The fancies of people are very different at different times, and you
can't understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the
fancies of the old painters. To do that you must know something about
the way they lived and the things they believed, and what they hoped
for and what they were afraid of.
Here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an old
account book. A certain Count of Savoy owned the beautiful Castle of
Chillon, which you have perhaps seen, on the shores of the Lake of
Geneva. But he could not be happy, because he and the people about
him thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars a
basilisk lived--a very terrible dragon--and they all went in fear of
it. So the Count paid a brave mason a large sum of money (and the payment
is solemnly set down in his account book) to break a way into this
hole and turn the basilisk out; and I have no doubt that he and his
people were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basilisk
was found. Folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that, must
have gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particular
emotion. A picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than it
would to us. So if we are really to understand old pictures, we must
begin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them,
and of the people they were painted for. You see how much study that
means for any one who wants to understand all the art of all the world.
We shall not pretend to lead you on any such great quest as that, but
ask you to look at just a few old pictures that have been found charming
by a great many people of several generations, and to try and see
whether they do not charm you as well. You must never, of course,
pretend to like what you don't like--that is too silly. We can't all
like the same things. Still there are certain pictures that most nice
people like. A few of these we have selected to be reproduced in this
book for you to look at. And to help you realize who painted them and
the kind of people they were painted for, my daughter has written the
chapters that follow. I hope you will find them entertaining, and still
more that you will like the pictures, and so learn to enjoy the many
others that have come down to us from the past, and are among the world's
most precious possessions to-day.