[23] See The Life and Letters of John Constable, by C. R. Leslie, R.A., pp. 343, 349.
[24] See J. Morley's Rousseau, Vol. I, pp. 85, 86: "According to his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man wrote at this time escaped him." And p. 146: "Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics." And p. 147: "We need not quote passages from Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are to be found in every chapter."
[25] Geschichte der Malerei, Vol. III, p. 175.
[26] Modern Art, Vol. I, p. 140.
[27] Ibid., p. 138: "What his fatherland neglected was taken over by the Continent. Strange as this neglect may seem, the rapidity with which Europe assimilated Constable is even more remarkable. The movement began in Paris.... France needed what Constable had to give.... The young Frenchmen saw the traditional English freedom with eyes sharpened by enthusiasm."
When one now adds to these influences, the steady rise of the power of the bourgeoisie in Europe, from the seventeenth century onward, and, as a result of this increasing power, an uninterrupted growth in the art of portrait painting—a growth that attained such vast proportions that it cast all attainments of a like nature in any other age or continent into the shade—one can easily understand what factors have been the most formidable opponents of Ruler-Art in the Occident, since the event of the Renaissance.
After all that I have said concerning the principles of Ruler-Art, it will scarcely be necessary for me to expatiate upon those elements in portrait painting which are antagonistic to these principles; for when you think of portrait painting as it has been developed by the claims of the bourgeoisie in Europe, you must not have Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in mind. Neither must you consider that portrait work in which, by chance, the artist has had before him a model who, in every feature of face or of figure, corresponded to his ideal; nor that in which the artist has been able to allow himself to exercise his simplifying and transfiguring power. Otherwise some of the best of Rubens' and Rembrandt's work would of necessity come under the ban which we must set upon by far the greater number of portraits.