No, you must be prepared to find in well painted pictures, all sorts of conditions of not seeming to be finished; all kinds of different styles, coarse, refined, bold, dashing, reticent, and tender, brilliant, and modest; almost as many different styles and conditions as there are painters. For a painter’s use of the brush is an expression of his own individuality and life, as well as of the life and character of the subjects he represents.
I have already told you Whistler’s definition of “finished.” It is perhaps too much a product of his own personality to be of general service. One more applicable to all kinds of painters and pictures is the following. An artist has finished his picture, when he has succeeded in making it express the feeling that inspired it. This will include Whistler’s definition, and also the practice of a Titian, a Rubens, or a Velasquez, whose brush strokes are visible to this day, as witnesses of the living growth of their conceptions.
Further it will include many pictures that to your eyes seem unfinished. They look like sketches, and, therefore, you think, cannot be considered as a finished picture. But go slowly with a thought of that sort. As you advance in appreciation you will find that many a drawing of a few lines only, and many a little picture, composed of a few touches of color, have in them more of the living growth of feeling, more of the charm of abstract beauty than thousands of so-called finished pictures, in which the original feeling, if there were any, has been submerged in an ocean of trivialities.
CHAPTER XVIII
SUBJECT, MOTIVE, AND POINT OF VIEW
AT the beginning of our talks, you may remember, I told you I should not have much to say about the subjects of pictures. For I wished at the start to make you realise, that what a picture is about is of much less importance than the way in which the subject is treated. A fine subject may be treated in such a way as to make a very bad picture, while a good picture may be composed of a subject in which one is not particularly interested. In fact, I wished to help you to look at a picture first and foremost as a work of art; a thing beautiful in itself because of its composition of form and color; beautiful in an abstract way, that is to say, apart from the ideas suggested by the subject. My aim has been to try to teach you to admire a picture in an abstract way, as you admire a Japanese or Chinese vase, simply and solely for its beauty of form and color.
This is not the usual way. Most people begin by taking interest in the subject of a picture, and very many never get any further in their appreciation. On the other hand I felt that, if I could once get you interested in the abstract qualities of a picture, you would be started right, and that your interest in the subject would be sure to follow after. So our talk about subject has been put off until now.
Pictures are sometimes sorted into groups according to their subject. There are religious pictures; pictures of myths and legends or imaginary subjects; portraits; landscapes; historical pictures, like Washington crossing the Delaware; genre pictures or scenes of every day life; still-life subjects, representing flowers and fruits, dead birds, beasts and fishes, and objects of man’s handiwork; decorative subjects and mural paintings. But this grouping does not settle the matter, since each of these subjects can be treated in more than one way. How it is treated depends upon the motive and point of view of the artist.
So, the simplest way to grasp this matter of subject is first of all to find out what is meant by an artist’s motive and point of view. As usual, let us start with dictionary meanings of these words and then see their application to what we are discussing.
Motive, then, is that which causes a thing to move, which impels it. What is the motive power of that train? Is the power that moves it steam or electricity? What is the motive of any particular artist, the force which impels him to adopt a certain method or to work in a certain direction?
Point of view on the other hand, is the point at which a person stands to view something. You may watch a procession in the street from the point of view of a window. But the word is more often used, not of where your body stands, but of where your mind stands. According to our birth and bringing up; that is to say, as the result of what we inherit from our forebears, and have acquired by education and experience, we each have our own point of view. For example, you will not hesitate to say that your point of view is American. You read about the Panama canal. You are not only interested, but proud, because Americans are digging it. If the French, who began it, were carrying on the work, your interest in it would be less and your pride nil. When you travel abroad, at any rate for the first time, you will not be able to help making critical comparisons between the way they do things in Europe and at home. You will be apt to see everything from the point of view of an American. Your point of view is the result of your being what you are. And it is the same with an artist. Being what he is, and what he cannot help being, he has his own particular personal point of view. Being what he is, he also has his own individual motive. Through the union of motive and point of view, he sees things in his own way and in his own way is impelled to represent them.