Delivered to the Art students of the Royal Academy at their Club in
Golden Square, Westminster, on June 30, 1883. The text is taken from the
original manuscript.
IN the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you to-night I
do not desire to give you any abstract definition of beauty at all. For
we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of beauty in exchange
for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to isolate it in a formula
appealing to the intellect, we, on the contrary, seek to materialise it
in a form that gives joy to the soul through the senses. We want to
create it, not to define it. The definition should follow the work: the
work should not adapt itself to the definition.
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any
conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak
prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you
must not strip it of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it
in art.
While, then, on the one hand I do not desire to give you any philosophy
of beauty—for, what I want to-night is to investigate how we can create
art, not how we can talk of it—on the other hand, I do not wish to deal
with anything like a history of English art.
To begin with, such an expression as English art is a meaningless
expression. One might just as well talk of English mathematics. Art is
the science of beauty, and Mathematics the science of truth: there is no
national school of either. Indeed, a national school is a provincial
school, merely. Nor is there any such thing as a school of art even.
There are merely artists, that is all.
And as regards histories of art, they are quite valueless to you unless
you are seeking the ostentatious oblivion of an art professorship. It is
of no use to you to know the date of Perugino or the birthplace of
Salvator Rosa: all that you should learn about art is to know a good
picture when you see it, and a bad picture when you see it. As regards
the date of the artist, all good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of
Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—they are always modern, always
of our time. And as regards the nationality of the artist, art is not
national but universal. As regards archæology, then, avoid it
altogether: archæology is merely the science of making excuses for bad
art; it is the rock on which many a young artist founders and shipwrecks;
it is the abyss from which no artist, old or young, ever returns. Or, if
he does return, he is so covered with the dust of ages and the mildew of
time, that he is quite unrecognisable as an artist, and has to conceal
himself for the rest of his days under the cap of a professor, or as a
mere illustrator of ancient history. How worthless archæology is in art
you can estimate by the fact of its being so popular. Popularity is the
crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is
wrong.
As I am not going to talk to you, then, about the philosophy of the
beautiful, or the history of art, you will ask me what I am going to talk
about. The subject of my lecture to-night is what makes an artist and
what does the artist make; what are the relations of the artist to his
surroundings, what is the education the artist should get, and what is
the quality of a good work of art.
Now, as regards the relations of the artist to his surroundings, by which
I mean the age and country in which he is born. All good art, as I said
before, has nothing to do with any particular century; but this
universality is the quality of the work of art; the conditions that
produce that quality are different. And what, I think, you should do is
to realise completely your age in order completely to abstract yourself
from it; remembering that if you are an artist at all, you will be not
the mouthpiece of a century, but the master of eternity, that all art
rests on a principle, and that mere temporal considerations are no
principle at all; and that those who advise you to make your art
representative of the nineteenth century are advising you to produce an
art which your children, when you have them, will think old-fashioned.
But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic
people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours.
Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But
remember that there never has been an artistic age, or an artistic
people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been,
and will always be, an exquisite exception. There is no golden age of
art; only artists who have produced what is more golden than gold.
_What_, you will say to me, the Greeks? were not they an artistic people?
Well, the Greeks certainly not, but, perhaps, you mean the Athenians, the
citizens of one out of a thousand cities.
Do you think that they were an artistic people? Take them even at the
time of their highest artistic development, the latter part of the fifth
century before Christ, when they had the greatest poets and the greatest
artists of the antique world, when the Parthenon rose in loveliness at
the bidding of a Phidias, and the philosopher spake of wisdom in the
shadow of the painted portico, and tragedy swept in the perfection of
pageant and pathos across the marble of the stage. Were they an artistic
people then? Not a bit of it. What is an artistic people but a people
who love their artists and understand their art? The Athenians could do
neither.
How did they treat Phidias? To Phidias we owe the great era, not merely
in Greek, but in all art—I mean of the introduction of the use of the
living model.
And what would you say if all the English bishops, backed by the English
people, came down from Exeter Hall to the Royal Academy one day and took
off Sir Frederick Leighton in a prison van to Newgate on the charge of
having allowed you to make use of the living model in your designs for
sacred pictures?
Would you not cry out against the barbarism and the Puritanism of such an
idea? Would you not explain to them that the worst way to honour God is
to dishonour man who is made in His image, and is the work of His hands;
and, that if one wants to paint Christ one must take the most Christlike
person one can find, and if one wants to paint the Madonna, the purest
girl one knows?
Would you not rush off and burn down Newgate, if necessary, and say that
such a thing was without parallel in history?
Without parallel? Well, that is exactly what the Athenians did.
In the room of the Parthenon marbles, in the British Museum, you will see
a marble shield on the wall. On it there are two figures; one of a man
whose face is half hidden, the other of a man with the godlike lineaments
of Pericles. For having done this, for having introduced into a bas
relief, taken from Greek sacred history, the image of the great statesman
who was ruling Athens at the time, Phidias was flung into prison and
there, in the common gaol of Athens, died, the supreme artist of the old
world.
And do you think that this was an exceptional case? The sign of a
Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art, and this cry was
raised by the Athenian people against every great poet and thinker of
their day—Æschylus, Euripides, Socrates. It was the same with Florence
in the thirteenth century. Good handicrafts are due to guilds, not to
the people. The moment the guilds lost their power and the people rushed
in, beauty and honesty of work died.
And so, never talk of an artistic people; there never has been such a
thing.
But, perhaps, you will tell me that the external beauty of the world has
almost entirely passed away from us, that the artist dwells no longer in
the midst of the lovely surroundings which, in ages past, were the
natural inheritance of every one, and that art is very difficult in this
unlovely town of ours, where, as you go to your work in the morning, or
return from it at eventide, you have to pass through street after street
of the most foolish and stupid architecture that the world has ever seen;
architecture, where every lovely Greek form is desecrated and defiled,
and every lovely Gothic form defiled and desecrated, reducing
three-fourths of the London houses to being, merely, like square boxes of
the vilest proportions, as gaunt as they are grimy, and as poor as they
are pretentious—the hall door always of the wrong colour, and the windows
of the wrong size, and where, even when wearied of the houses you turn to
contemplate the street itself, you have nothing to look at but
chimney-pot hats, men with sandwich boards, vermilion letter-boxes, and
do that even at the risk of being run over by an emerald-green omnibus.
Is not art difficult, you will say to me, in such surroundings as these?
Of course it is difficult, but then art was never easy; you yourselves
would not wish it to be easy; and, besides, nothing is worth doing except
what the world says is impossible.
Still, you do not care to be answered merely by a paradox. What are the
relations of the artist to the external world, and what is the result of
the loss of beautiful surroundings to you, is one of the most important
questions of modern art; and there is no point on which Mr. Ruskin so
insists as that the decadence of art has come from the decadence of
beautiful things; and that when the artist cannot feed his eye on beauty,
beauty goes from his work.
I remember in one of his lectures, after describing the sordid aspect of
a great English city, he draws for us a picture of what were the artistic
surroundings long ago.
Think, he says, in words of perfect and picturesque imagery, whose beauty
I can but feebly echo, think of what was the scene which presented
itself, in his afternoon walk, to a designer of the Gothic school of
Pisa—Nino Pisano or any of his men: {206}
On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line of brighter
palaces, arched and pillared, and inlaid with deep red porphyry, and
with serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding
troops of knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and
shield; horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming
light—the purple, and silver, and scarlet fringes flowing over the
strong limbs and clashing mall, like sea-waves over rocks at sunset.
Opening on each side from the river were gardens, courts, and
cloisters; long successions of white pillars among wreaths of vine;
leaping of fountains through buds of pomegranate and orange: and
still along the garden-paths, and under and through the crimson of
the pomegranate shadows, moving slowly, groups of the fairest women
that Italy ever saw—fairest, because purest and thoughtfullest;
trained in all high knowledge, as in all courteous art—in dance, in
song, in sweet wit, in lofty learning, in loftier courage, in
loftiest love—able alike to cheer, to enchant, or save, the souls of
men. Above all this scenery of perfect human life, rose dome and
bell-tower, burning with white alabaster and gold: beyond dome and
bell-tower the slopes of mighty hills hoary with olive; far in the
north, above a purple sea of peaks of solemn Apennine, the clear,
sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up their steadfast flames of
marble summit into amber sky; the great sea itself, scorching with
expanse of light, stretching from their feet to the Gorgonian isles;
and over all these, ever present, near or far—seen through the leaves
of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds in the Arno’s stream,
or set with its depth of blue close against the golden hair and
burning cheek of lady and knight,—that untroubled and sacred sky,
which was to all men, in those days of innocent faith, indeed the
unquestioned abode of spirits, as the earth was of men; and which
opened straight through its gates of cloud and veils of dew into the
awfulness of the eternal world;—a heaven in which every cloud that
passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every ray of its
Evening and Morning streamed from the throne of God.
What think you of that for a school of design?
And then look at the depressing, monotonous appearance of any modern
city, the sombre dress of men and women, the meaningless and barren
architecture, the colourless and dreadful surroundings. Without a
beautiful national life, not sculpture merely, but all the arts will die.
Well, as regards the religious feeling of the close of the passage, I do
not think I need speak about that. Religion springs from religious
feeling, art from artistic feeling: you never get one from the other;
unless you have the right root you will not get the right flower; and, if
a man sees in a cloud the chariot of an angel, he will probably paint it
very unlike a cloud.
But, as regards the general idea of the early part of that lovely bit of
prose, is it really true that beautiful surroundings are necessary for
the artist? I think not; I am sure not. Indeed, to me the most
inartistic thing in this age of ours is not the indifference of the
public to beautiful things, but the indifference of the artist to the
things that are called ugly. For, to the real artist, nothing is
beautiful or ugly in itself at all. With the facts of the object he has
nothing to do, but with its appearance only, and appearance is a matter
of light and shade, of masses, of position, and of value.
Appearance is, in fact, a matter of effect merely, and it is with the
effects of nature that you have to deal, not with the real condition of
the object. What you, as painters, have to paint is not things as they
are but things as they seem to be, not things as they are but things as
they are not.
No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions of light and shade,
or proximity to other things, it will not look beautiful; no object is so
beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. I
believe that in every twenty-four hours what is beautiful looks ugly, and
what is ugly looks beautiful, once.
And, the commonplace character of so much of our English painting seems
to me due to the fact that so many of our young artists look merely at
what we may call ‘ready-made beauty,’ whereas you exist as artists not to
copy beauty but to create it in your art, to wait and watch for it in
nature.
What would you say of a dramatist who would take nobody but virtuous
people as characters in his play? Would you not say he was missing half
of life? Well, of the young artist who paints nothing but beautiful
things, I say he misses one half of the world.
Do not wait for life to be picturesque, but try and see life under
picturesque conditions. These conditions you can create for yourself in
your studio, for they are merely conditions of light. In nature, you
must wait for them, watch for them, choose them; and, if you wait and
watch, come they will.
In Gower Street at night you may see a letter-box that is picturesque: on
the Thames Embankment you may see picturesque policemen. Even Venice is
not always beautiful, nor France.
To paint what you see is a good rule in art, but to see what is worth
painting is better. See life under pictorial conditions. It is better
to live in a city of changeable weather than in a city of lovely
surroundings.
Now, having seen what makes the artist, and what the artist makes, who is
the artist? There is a man living amongst us who unites in himself all
the qualities of the noblest art, whose work is a joy for all time, who
is, himself, a master of all time. That man is Mr. Whistler.
* * * * *
But, you will say, modern dress, that is bad. If you cannot paint black
cloth you could not have painted silken doublet. Ugly dress is better
for art—facts of vision, not of the object.
What is a picture? Primarily, a picture is a beautifully coloured
surface, merely, with no more spiritual message or meaning for you than
an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass or a blue tile from the wall of
Damascus. It is, primarily, a purely decorative thing, a delight to look
at.
All archæological pictures that make you say ‘How curious!’ all
sentimental pictures that make you say, ‘How sad!’ all historical
pictures that make you say ‘How interesting!’ all pictures that do not
immediately give you such artistic joy as to make you say ‘How
beautiful!’ are bad pictures.
* * * * *
We never know what an artist is going to do. Of course not. The artist
is not a specialist. All such divisions as animal painters, landscape
painters, painters of Scotch cattle in an English mist, painters of
English cattle in a Scotch mist, racehorse painters, bull-terrier
painters, all are shallow. If a man is an artist he can paint
everything.
The object of art is to stir the most divine and remote of the chords
which make music in our soul; and colour is indeed, of itself a mystical
presence on things, and tone a kind of sentinel.
Am I pleading, then, for mere technique? No. As long as there are any
signs of technique at all, the picture is unfinished. What is finish? A
picture is finished when all traces of work, and of the means employed to
bring about the result, have disappeared.
In the case of handicraftsmen—the weaver, the potter, the smith—on their
work are the traces of their hand. But it is not so with the painter; it
is not so with the artist.
Art should have no sentiment about it but its beauty, no technique except
what you cannot observe. One should be able to say of a picture not that
it is ‘well painted,’ but that it is ‘not painted.’
What is the difference between absolutely decorative art and a painting?
Decorative art emphasises its material: imaginative art annihilates it.
Tapestry shows its threads as part of its beauty: a picture annihilates
its canvas: it shows nothing of it. Porcelain emphasises its glaze:
water-colours reject the paper.
A picture has no meaning but its beauty, no message but its joy. That is
the first truth about art that you must never lose sight of. A picture
is a purely decorative thing.