“They say, ‘Why not call it “Trotty Veck,” and sell it for a round harmony of golden guineas?’ naively acknowledging that without baptism there is no ... market!’”[32]
And farther on he said:
“As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or color.
“The great musicians knew this. Beethoven and the rest wrote music,—simply music; symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that.
“On F or G they constructed celestial harmonies,—as harmonies,—combinations evolved from the chorus of F or G and their minor correlatives.
“This is pure music as distinguished from airs,—commonplace and vulgar in themselves, but interesting from their associations,—as, for instance, ‘Yankee Doodle’, or ‘Partant pour la Syrie.’
“Art should be independent of all clap-trap, should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or er, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”[33]
And concerning the portrait of his mother, which nearly every one admires for the subject while few pause to consider the color, he wrote:
“Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an ‘Arrangement in Gray and Black.’ Now, that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?”[34]