CONTENTS

Chapter I. Truth in Painting.—Theory of realism—The old masters as realists—And the Dutch painters—Absolute realism impossible—The real and truth defined—Art a series of signs—Recognizing the convention—In poetry, music, and painting—Grasping the artist’s intention—Realism merely the elaboration of the sign—Millet vs. Meissonier—Attitude of the realists—Kinds of truth—The camera vs. the human eye—Individual truths—National truths—Universal truths—Great art universal in scope—Greatness as shown in Rembrandt, Titian, and Velasquez—Art truths both great and small—Millet vs. Gérôme—Truth by suggestion—Michael Angelo and Shakespeare—The truth of history—And of archæology—The truth of art—The law of sacrifice, Velasquez vs. Bonnat—Realism not the sum-total of art—But its value not to be denied[1]
Chapter II. Individuality or the Personal Element.—The personal equation—Variations in handwritings—Different points of view—Different views of landscape—Sketches of the model in the class-room—Variations in portraiture—Difference between the camera and our eyes—Individual styles in literature—And in art—Personal qualities of the painter in his work—Carpaccio and Bellini—Michael Angelo in the Sistine—Rembrandt in his pictures—Giorgione, Correggio, Corot, Raphael, Titian—Dürer’s “Christ on the Cross”—The disagreeable personality in art—Vulgarity, brutality, and insipidity—Conceit in painting—The insistent personality—Eccentricity vs. individuality—The lost individuality—The copyist and the realist—The academic pattern—Impersonal art—Great art above laws and formulas—Something more to painting than individuality and realism[31]
Chapter III. Imagination of the Artist.—The act of seeing—Perception—Unconscious seeing—Colors as seen by the ancients—Seeing the model—Necessity of imaginative seeing—The imagination as ordinarily employed—As employed in portrait painting—The distorted view—The camera vs. the eye of the artist—Michael Angelo in the Sistine again—Tintoretto’s distortions—Claude Monet’s lights—Impossibility of creating anew—The imagination separating a part from the whole—In poetry and painting—In coins, marble, and bronzes—The combining imagination—Inspiration vs. composition—All the great masterpieces have been composed and labored over—Goethe’s “Faust”—“The Ancient Mariner”—Turner’s marines and Venetian scenes as flights of imagination—Imagination of Paolo Veronese—Tintoretto’s “Ariadne and Bacchus”—His Scuola San Rocco pictures—Ruskin’s explanation of them—Fancy—The serious vs. the clever in painting—The fantastic—The bizarre—Caricature and the grotesque—The bombastic and baroque[60]
Chapter IV. Pictorial Poetry.—The argument for poetry in art—Ideas suitable for different arts—Confusion of mediums of expression—Pictorial poetry not literary poetry—Painting deals with forms and colors, not sound—Millet’s “Angelus”—The division of the arts—The time limit in painting—The picture cannot disclose time—What is pictorial poetry—Literary and pictorial themes—Writers who paint with words—Spenser, Shakespeare, Scott, Matthew Arnold—Limits of pictorial expression—“Feeling” in art—Sentiment and emotion, how suggested—Feeling in literary poetry and in music—Also in painting—Religious feeling of early Italians—Fra Angelico, (Benozzo) Gozzoli, Botticelli—Sincerity of Carpaccio and Bellini—Feeling for life, light, and color with Giorgione and Correggio—The pathos of Rembrandt—And of Millet—The peasants of France and Holland—Their beauty of character—The poetry of landscapes, of sea views, of interiors—Indefiniteness of the pictorial thought—The picture not a good vehicle for abstract ideas—But well fitted for emotional expression—Poetry in the means of expression[87]
Chapter V. The Decorative Quality.—Disagreement between the painter and the public—The “average person” in the gallery—The painter in the gallery—Art as representation vs. art as decoration—The artist devoted to the decorative—Art has always been decorative—Origin of painting—In the Stone Age—Primitive man as artist—The artist in Egypt—In Assyria and Greece—Filling of space on Greek coins—The Gothic Age and decoration—Giotto, Masaccio—Line-composition with Raphael and Michael Angelo—Light-and-shade composition with Leonardo, Correggio, Giorgione—Color-composition with Titian and Paolo Veronese—Art history explained on purely technical grounds—Titian and his ideas in art—The Decadence and why it came—Lack of technical skill—Why art flourished in the Seventeenth Century with Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velasquez—The decorative in modern art—Revision of technical methods by Millet, Manet, and Monet—Advance of painting with new discoveries—The spontaneity of art—Materials and the craftsman in literary art—Absence of the decorative in Walt Whitman and Holman Hunt—The lasting value of the decorative—The “Venus of Milo” and Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love”—And Shakespeare again[114]
Chapter VI. Subject in Painting.—Art for the artist—The voice of the public in the work of art—The old masters working for the Church—Various views of art held by artists—Partisan views and their advocates—Extravagant views in literature—Mr. Whistler on painting—Advocates of the decorative only—The meaning of pictures again—The subject cannot be omitted—Mr. Whistler’s marines—“Patriotism” in painting—Velasquez, Rembrandt, Frans Hals all show it—All painting must illustrate something—Historical painting—Whistler and Monet illustrating the social history of their time—The illustrative quality of Italian art—Whistler’s “White Girl” vs. Palma Vecchio’s “Santa Barbara”—The Dutch as subject painters—The historical landscapes of Claude and Turner—The story in painting—Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love” once more—The silly incident and the degradation of painting—How the old masters worked upon given subjects—The subject in the “Sistine Madonna”—The subject in painting to be treated illustratively—Catholicity of taste—Education—Many elements united in “great art”—Conclusion[139]