A moment ago I spoke of the picture as being like a melody. It will suggest to some imaginations the blitheness of a spring-song. The fact that a painting may sometimes seem to have the tunefulness or harmony of music I have already mentioned in a previous chapter. The reason is that painting and music, although different arts, have certain elements in common. Later on, when we shall speak of color, I shall try to suggest to you the correspondence between sound notes in music and color notes in painting. But for the present I will remind you of an element, common to both arts, of which we have already spoken—rhythm. In Raphael’s Jurisprudence, I pointed out to you the rhythm of movement in the figures. It flows through the forms of the figures in rippling, wave-like lines of direction. But nothing of that sort is apparent in Vermeer’s picture. There are repetitions and contrasts in the arrangement of the full and empty spaces; but they represent rather a pattern of spots; we are not conscious of any rhythm of line. Then, in what does the rhythm consist?
If you think of that line of Tennyson’s—“Waves of light went over the wheat,” you may perhaps discover for yourselves the kind of rhythm in this picture. To give you time to think it out, before I tell you, let me ask you, if you have noticed that in a flower-bed in the garden a number of blossoms of different colors will “dwell together in unity,” but if you pick some of these and bring them indoors and begin to arrange them in a vase, the colors will seem to clash. That they do not appear to clash in the flower bed is because the out-of-door light envelopes everything, soothes the violence of the colors and brings them all into an appearance of harmony. Similarly in this picture, the light streaming through the window brings all the different spots of color into a single harmony of effect. They are no longer separate and independent, but drawn together and united by the veil of lighted atmosphere. Of this again, we will speak when we reach the subject of color.
But the rhythm of this picture, in what does it consist? Yes, in the movement, not of form, but of light. Uniting all the colors into a single harmony, it flows in and out through the lighter and darker parts of the composition; sometimes in a broad sweeping flood, as on the wall; sometimes in little pulses of movement, as it leaps from point to point; now losing itself in the hollow of a shadow, then reappearing in the gleam of a fold; all the while streaming through the picture in a continuous ebb and flow. In fact, as we study it, we gradually find that the light does for the parts of this composition what the lines of direction did in Raphael’s—it unites them in a rhythmic movement.
Do not be disturbed, if at first reading these words convey little meaning to you; or if at first sight you do not feel the rhythm of the composition. It is there, however, and some day, if you are really going to be a student of pictures, you will feel it yourself.
For the present, if you will accept my word for it, I wish you to understand that this rhythmic effect of out-of-door light represented a new motive in painting. The Italians of the great period did not see it. It was the discovery of the Dutch realists, those artists of Holland in the Seventeenth Century, whose study was the real appearances of nature and life.[6] Their pictures were not as grand as the Italians’; for they were small in size, and were not built up on the magnificently formal plan that gives such a dignity and distinction to the Italian pictures. Nor are their subjects so heroic and impressive. They represent only the facts of every day life. Yet they have a great beauty of their own, because they rely on the inexhaustible beauty of light.
It is on this same beauty that after two hundred years artists of our own day are relying. They have gone back to the example of Vermeer and the other Dutch artists, and are applying it to the study of similar subjects. They are painting nature as it shows itself to them in its envelope of lighted atmosphere.
CHAPTER XI
THE NATURALISTIC LANDSCAPE
WE come now to the other arm of the Y, about which we spoke in a previous chapter. Landscape had been used as a background to the figures, until in the Seventeenth Century some artists began to make it the chief subject of their pictures. But no sooner was landscape painting practised as a separate art than it branched into two directions. We followed one of these and saw how Claude Lorrain invented the formal, or classic landscape; taking bits of nature, some from one place, some from another, and building them up into an artificial composition, which he made more grand by the addition of classic architecture. It was not unlike the way in which a handsome house is built; the materials,—stone, wood, marble, and so on—are brought together from various places, hewed to certain shapes designed by the architect, and then put together according to the rule or formula of building. The main difference is that, though the classic landscape does not represent any actual spot in nature, it still bears a resemblance to nature. But it is nature worked over by the fancy of man, and improved according to his own idea of what is beautiful. The artist did not paint nature because he loved it as it is but because it furnished him with material for making a handsome picture. And this picture-making use of landscape continued to be popular with artists and the public well on into the Nineteenth Century.
Meanwhile the other branch of landscape painting had been started in the Seventeenth Century by the Dutchmen. They, as we have seen, were interested above everything in themselves, their own lives and surroundings. This was the state of mind of the whole people, and the artists gave expression to it in their pictures. They too, were picture-makers, who by their skill of painting and their love of beauty made their pictures beautiful works of art. But the subjects that they represented were seldom imaginary ones. They painted what they actually saw; and with so much truth that their art has been called an art of portraiture. They made portraits of people, portraits of the outdoor and indoor life, and portraits of their towns and harbors, and of the country that surrounded them. So, by comparison with the formal or classic landscape, we may call their landscapes naturalistic, for they represented nature as it actually appeared to their eyes.
But their art died with them. As soon as Holland had secured her independence, her artists began to travel to foreign countries, especially to Italy. There they set themselves to imitate the great Italians, and so far as landscape was concerned, joined in the popular taste for the classic kind. It was not