'There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.' In
writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting, you have only
to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. You sit down to your task,
and are happy. From the moment that you take up the pencil, and look
Nature in the face, you are at peace with your own heart. No angry
passions rise to disturb the silent progress of the work, to shake the
hand, or dim the brow: no irritable humours are set afloat: you have no
absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush,
no fool to annoy--you are actuated by fear or favour to no man. There
is 'no juggling here,' no sophistry, no intrigue, no tampering with the
evidence, no attempt to make black white, or white black: but you resign
yourself into the hands of a greater power, that of Nature, with the
simplicity of a child, and the devotion of an enthusiast--'study with
joy her manner, and with rapture taste her style.' The mind is calm, and
full at the same time. The hand and eye are equally employed. In
tracing the commonest object, a plant or the stump of a tree, you
learn something every moment. You perceive unexpected differences, and
discover likenesses where you looked for no such thing. You try to set
down what you see--find out your error, and correct it. You need not
play tricks, or purposely mistake: with all your pains, you are still
far short of the mark. Patience grows out of the endless pursuit, and
turns it into a luxury. A streak in a flower, a wrinkle in a leaf, a
tinge in a cloud, a stain in an old wall or ruin grey, are seized
with avidity as the _spolia opima_ of this sort of mental warfare, and
furnish out labour for another half-day. The hours pass away untold,
without chagrin, and without weariness; nor would you ever wish to
pass them otherwise. Innocence is joined with industry, pleasure
with business; and the mind is satisfied, though it is not engaged in
thinking or in doing any mischief.(1)
I have not much pleasure in writing these _Essays_, or in reading them
afterwards; though I own I now and then meet with a phrase that I like,
or a thought that strikes me as a true one. But after I begin them, I am
only anxious to get to the end of them, which I am not sure I shall do,
for I seldom see my way a page or even a sentence beforehand; and when I
have as by a miracle escaped, I trouble myself little more about them.
I sometimes have to write them twice over: then it is necessary to read
the _proof_, to prevent mistakes by the printer; so that by the time
they appear in a tangible shape, and one can con them over with a
conscious, sidelong glance to the public approbation, they have lost
their gloss and relish, and become 'more tedious than a twice-told
tale.' For a person to read his own works over with any great delight,
he ought first to forget that he ever wrote them. Familiarity naturally
breeds contempt. It is, in fact, like poring fondly over a piece of
blank paper; from repetition, the words convey no distinct meaning
to the mind--are mere idle sounds, except that our vanity claims an
interest and property in them. I have more satisfaction in my own
thoughts than in dictating them to others: words are necessary to
explain the impression of certain things upon me to the reader, but they
rather weaken and draw a veil over than strengthen it to myself. However
I might say with the poet, 'My mind to me a kingdom is,' yet I have
little ambition 'to set a throne or chair of state in the understandings
of other men.' The ideas we cherish most exist best in a kind of shadowy
abstraction,
Pure in the last recesses of the mind,
and derive neither force nor interest from being exposed to public view.
They are old familiar acquaintance, and any change in them, arising
from the adventitious ornaments of style or dress, is little to their
advantage. After I have once written on a subject, it goes out of my
mind: my feelings about it have been melted down into words, and _then_
I forget. I have, as it were, discharged my memory of its old habitual
reckoning, and rubbed out the score of real sentiment. For the future
it exists only for the sake of others. But I cannot say, from my own
experience, that the same process takes place in transferring our
ideas to canvas; they gain more than they lose in the mechanical
transformation. One is never tired of painting, because you have to set
down not what you knew already, but what you have just discovered. In
the former case you translate feelings into words; in the latter, names
into things. There is a continual creation out of nothing going on.
With every stroke of the brush a new field of inquiry is laid open;
new difficulties arise, and new triumphs are prepared over them. By
comparing the imitation with the original, you see what you have done,
and how much you have still to do. The test of the senses is severer
than that of fancy, and an over-match even for the delusions of our
self-love. One part of a picture shames another, and you determine to
paint up to yourself, if you cannot come up to Nature. Every object
becomes lustrous from the light thrown back upon it by the mirror of
art: and by the aid of the pencil we may be said to touch and handle
the objects of sight. The air-drawn visions that hover on the verge of
existence have a bodily presence given them on the canvas: the form
of beauty is changed into a substance: the dream and the glory of the
universe is made 'palpable to feeling as well as sight.'--And see! a
rainbow starts from the canvas, with its humid train of glory, as if
it were drawn from its cloudy arch in heaven. The spangled landscape
glitters with drops of dew after the shower. The 'fleecy fools' show
their coats in the gleams of the setting sun. The shepherds pipe their
farewell notes in the fresh evening air. And is this bright vision made
from a dead, dull blank, like a bubble reflecting the mighty fabric of
the universe? Who would think this miracle of Rubens' pencil possible
to be performed? Who, having seen it, would not spend his life to do
the like? See how the rich fallows, the bare stubble-field, the scanty
harvest-home, drag in Rembrandt's landscapes! How often have I looked
at them and nature, and tried to do the same, till the very 'light
thickened,' and there was an earthiness in the feeling of the air! There
is no end of the refinements of art and nature in this respect. One
may look at the misty glimmering horizon till the eye dazzles and the
imagination is lost, in hopes to transfer the whole interminable expanse
at one blow upon the canvas. Wilson said, he used to try to paint the
effect of the motes dancing in the setting sun. At another time, a
friend, coming into his painting-room when he was sitting on the
ground in a melancholy posture, observed that his picture looked like a
landscape after a shower: he started up with the greatest delight,
and said, 'That is the effect I intended to produce, but thought I had
failed.' Wilson was neglected; and, by degrees, neglected his art to
apply himself to brandy. His hand became unsteady, so that it was only
by repeated attempts that he could reach the place or produce the effect
he aimed at; and when he had done a little to a picture, he would say to
any acquaintance who chanced to drop in, 'I have painted enough for one
day: come, let us go somewhere.' It was not so Claude left his pictures,
or his studies on the banks of the Tiber, to go in search of other
enjoyments, or ceased to gaze upon the glittering sunny vales and
distant hills; and while his eye drank in the clear sparkling hues and
lovely forms of nature, his hand stamped them on the lucid canvas to
last there for ever! One of the most delightful parts of my life was
one fine summer, when I used to walk out of an evening to catch the last
light of the sun, gemming the green slopes or russet lawns, and gilding
tower or tree, while the blue sky, gradually turning to purple and gold,
or skirted with dusky grey, hung its broad marble pavement over all,
as we see it in the great master of Italian landscape. But to come to a
more particular explanation of the subject:--
The first head I ever tried to paint was an old woman with the upper
part of the face shaded by her bonnet, and I certainly laboured (at) it
with great perseverance. It took me numberless sittings to do it. I have
it by me still, and sometimes look at it with surprise, to think how
much pains were thrown away to little purpose,--yet not altogether in
vain if it taught me to see good in everything, and to know that there
is nothing vulgar in Nature seen with the eye of science or of true
art. Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the
spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object. Be this as
it may, I spared no pains to do my best. If art was long, I thought that
life was so too at that moment. I got in the general effect the first
day; and pleased and surprised enough I was at my success. The rest was
a work of time--of weeks and months (if need were), of patient toil
and careful finishing. I had seen an old head by Rembrandt at Burleigh
House, and if I could produce a head at all like Rembrandt in a year, in
my lifetime, it would be glory and felicity and wealth and fame enough
for me! The head I had seen at Burleigh was an exact and wonderful
facsimile of nature, and I resolved to make mine (as nearly as I could)
an exact facsimile of nature. I did not then, nor do I now believe,
with Sir Joshua, that the perfection of art consists in giving
general appearances without individual details, but in giving general
appearances with individual details. Otherwise, I had done my work the
first day. But I saw something more in nature than general effect, and
I thought it worth my while to give it in the picture. There was a
gorgeous effect of light and shade; but there was a delicacy as well as
depth in the chiaroscuro which I was bound to follow into its dim and
scarce perceptible variety of tone and shadow. Then I had to make
the transition from a strong light to as dark a shade, preserving the
masses, but gradually softening off the intermediate parts. It was so
in nature; the difficulty was to make it so in the copy. I tried, and
failed again and again; I strove harder, and succeeded as I thought.
The wrinkles in Rembrandt were not hard lines, but broken and
irregular. I saw the same appearance in nature, and strained every nerve
to give it. If I could hit off this edgy appearance, and insert the
reflected light in the furrows of old age in half a morning, I did not
think I had lost a day. Beneath the shrivelled yellow parchment look of
the skin, there was here and there a streak of the blood-colour tinging
the face; this I made a point of conveying, and did not cease to compare
what I saw with what I did (with jealous, lynx-eyed watchfulness) till
I succeeded to the best of my ability and judgment. How many revisions
were there! How many attempts to catch an expression which I had seen
the day before! How often did we try to get the old position, and wait
for the return of the same light! There was a puckering up of the lips,
a cautious introversion of the eye under the shadow of the bonnet,
indicative of the feebleness and suspicion of old age, which at last we
managed, after many trials and some quarrels, to a tolerable nicety.
The picture was never finished, and I might have gone on with it to the
present hour.(2) I used to sit it on the ground when my day's work was
done, and saw revealed to me with swimming eyes the birth of new hopes
and of a new world of objects. The painter thus learns to look at Nature
with different eyes. He before saw her 'as in a glass darkly, but now
face to face.' He understands the texture and meaning of the visible
universe, and 'sees into the life of things,' not by the help of
mechanical instruments, but of the improved exercise of his faculties,
and an intimate sympathy with Nature. The meanest thing is not lost upon
him, for he looks at it with an eye to itself, not merely to his own
vanity or interest, or the opinion of the world. Even where there is
neither beauty nor use--if that ever were--still there is truth, and a
sufficient source of gratification in the indulgence of curiosity and
activity of mind. The humblest printer is a true scholar; and the best
of scholars--the scholar of Nature. For myself, and for the real comfort
and satisfaction of the thing, I had rather have been Jan Steen, or
Gerard Dow, than the greatest casuist or philologer that ever lived.
The painter does not view things in clouds or 'mist, the common gloss of
theologians,' but applies the same standard of truth and disinterested
spirit of inquiry, that influence his daily practice, to other subjects.
He perceives form, he distinguishes character. He reads men and books
with an intuitive eye. He is a critic as well as a connoisseur. The
conclusions he draws are clear and convincing, because they are taken
from the things themselves. He is not a fanatic, a dupe, or a slave; for
the habit of seeing for himself also disposes him to judge for himself.
The most sensible men I know (taken as a class) are painters; that is,
they are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about
them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds. From
their profession they in general mix more with the world than authors;
and if they have not the same fund of acquired knowledge, are obliged
to rely more on individual sagacity. I might mention the names of Opie,
Fuseli, Northcote, as persons distinguished for striking description
and acquaintance with the subtle traits of character.(3) Painters in
ordinary society, or in obscure situations where their value is
not known, and they are treated with neglect and indifference, have
sometimes a forward self-sufficiency of manner; but this is not so much
their fault as that of others. Perhaps their want of regular education
may also be in fault in such cases. Richardson, who is very tenacious of
the respect in which the profession ought to be held, tells a story of
Michael Angelo, that after a quarrel between him and Pope Julius II.,
'upon account of a slight the artist conceived the pontiff had put upon
him, Michael Angelo was introduced by a bishop, who, thinking to serve
the artist by it, made it an argument that the Pope should be reconciled
to him, because men of his profession were commonly ignorant, and of no
consequence otherwise; his holiness, enraged at the bishop, struck him
with his staff, and told him, it was he that was the blockhead, and
affronted the man himself would not offend: the prelate was driven
out of the chamber, and Michael Angelo had the Pope's benediction,
accompanied with presents. This bishop had fallen into the vulgar error,
and was rebuked accordingly.'
Besides the exercise of the mind, painting exercises the body. It is a
mechanical as well as a liberal art. To do anything, to dig a hole in
the ground, to plant a cabbage, to hit a mark, to move a shuttle, to
work a pattern,--in a word, to attempt to produce any effect, and to
_succeed,_ has something in it that gratifies the love of power, and
carries off the restless activity of the mind of man. Indolence is
a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be
happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive
tendencies of the human frame; and painting combines them both
incessantly.(4) The hand is furnished a practical test of the
correctness of the eye; and the eye, thus admonished, imposes fresh
tasks of skill and industry upon the hand. Every stroke tells as the
verifying of a new truth; and every new observation, the instant it is
made, passes into an act and emanation of the will. Every step is
nearer what we wish, and yet there is always more to do. In spite of the
facility, the fluttering grace, the evanescent hues, that play round the
pencil of Rubens and Van-dyke, however I may admire, I do not envy them
this power so much as I do the slow, patient, laborious execution of
Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea del Sarto, where every touch
appears conscious of its charge, emulous of truth, and where the painful
artist has so distinctly wrought,
That you might almost say his picture thought.
In the one case the colours seem breathed on the canvas as if by magic,
the work and the wonder of a moment; in the other they seem inlaid in
the body of the work, and as if it took the artist years of unremitting
labour, and of delightful never-ending progress to perfection.(5) Who
would wish ever to come to the close of such works,--not to dwell on
them, to return to them, to be wedded to them to the last? Rubens, with
his florid, rapid style, complains that when he had just learned his
art, he should be forced to die. Leonardo, in the slow advances of his,
had lived long enough!
Painting is not, like writing, what is properly understood by a
sedentary employment. It requires not indeed a strong, but a continued
and steady exertion of muscular power. The precision and delicacy of
the manual operation, makes up for the want of vehemence,--as to balance
himself for any time in the same position the rope-dancer must strain
every nerve. Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an
appetite for one's dinner as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by
riding over Banstead Downs. It is related of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that
'he took no other exercise than what he used in his painting-room,'--the
writer means, in walking backwards and forwards to look at his picture;
but the act of painting itself, of laying on the colours in the
proper place and proper quantity, was a much harder exercise than this
alternate receding from and returning to the picture. This last would be
rather a relaxation and relief than an effort. It is not to be wondered
at, that an artist like Sir Joshua, who delighted so much in the
sensual and practical part of his art, should have found himself at a
considerable loss when the decay of his sight precluded him, for
the last year or two of his life, from the following up of his
profession,--'the source,' according to his own remark, 'of thirty
years' uninterrupted enjoyment and prosperity to him.' It is only those
who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to brood
incessantly on abstract ideas, that never feel ennui.
To give one instance more, and then I will have done with this rambling
discourse. One of my first attempts was a picture of my father, who was
then in a green old age, with strong-marked features, and scarred
with the smallpox. I drew it out with a broad light crossing the face,
looking down, with spectacles on, reading. The book was Shaftesbury's
_Characteristics_, in a fine old binding, with Gribelin's etchings. My
father would as lieve it had been any other book; but for him to read
was to be content, was 'riches fineless.' The sketch promised well; and
I set to work to finish it, determined to spare no time nor pains. My
father was willing to sit as long as I pleased; for there is a natural
desire in the mind of man to sit for one's picture, to be the object of
continued attention, to have one's likeness multiplied; and besides his
satisfaction in the picture, he had some pride in the artist, though he
would rather I should have written a sermon than painted like Rembrandt
or like Raphael. Those winter days, with the gleams of sunshine
coming through the chapel-windows, and cheered by the notes of the
robin-redbreast in our garden (that 'ever in the haunch of winter
sings'),--as my afternoon's work drew to a close,--were among the
happiest of my life. When I gave the effect I intended to any part of
the picture for which I had prepared my colours; when I imitated the
roughness of the skin by a lucky stroke of the pencil; when I hit
the clear, pearly tone of a vein; when I gave the ruddy complexion of
health, the blood circulating under the broad shadows of one side of
the face, I thought my fortune made; or rather it was already more
than made, I might one day be able to say with Correggio, '_I also am a
painter!_' It was an idle thought, a boy's conceit; but it did not make
me less happy at the time. I used regularly to set my work in the chair
to look at it through the long evenings; and many a time did I return to
take leave of it before I could go to bed at night. I remember sending
it with a throbbing heart to the Exhibition, and seeing it hung up there
by the side of one of the Honourable Mr. Skeffington (now Sir George).
There was nothing in common between them, but that they were the
portraits of two very good-natured men. I think, but am not sure, that I
finished this portrait (or another afterwards) on the same day that the
news of the battle of Austerlitz came; I walked out in the afternoon,
and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man's cottage
with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again. Oh for
the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come
over again! I could sleep out the three hundred and sixty-five thousand
intervening years very contentedly!--The picture is left: the table, the
chair, the window where I learned to construe Livy, the chapel where my
father preached, remain where they were; but he himself is gone to rest,
full of years, of faith, of hope, and charity!