A Child's Guide to Pictures

by Charles H. Caffin

So far I have tried to explain the impressionist’s point of view. Now let us consider his way of rendering what he sees. The whole secret of it is the part which light plays in the appearance of things. Manet and the other impressionists, among whom Claude Monet and Whistler are the most important, see every thing, as Vermeer did, enveloped in light. But they have gone further than he.

They have studied much more closely the ever varying qualities of light, as it differs according to place and season and even time of day. Monet has painted a series of pictures the subject of every one of which is the same haystack. At least that is how some people might describe them. But, if they enter into Monet’s point of view, they would say that the real subject is not the haystack but the effect of light upon its surface, and, as the effect of light is different in every case, none of the pictures are similar to one another. Each represents a separate fugitive expression of light. Monet, in them and other pictures, has recorded with extraordinary subtlety the impression presented to his eye. For Monet’s impressionism was also naturalistic.

Whistler, on the other hand, with no less subtlety, rendered also the impression that the things seen had made on his imagination. He was an idealistic impressionist. He painted, for example, a number of night-scenes, or “nocturnes,” as he called them. The actual objects in them are of less importance than Monet’s haystack, because in the dim light of twilight or night they are only faintly visible. Whistler did not wish us to be aware of the form of the bridge, or the boat, the sea and shore, or whatever the objects may be. He wished us to be conscious of them only as Presences looming up like spirit-forms in the mystery of the uncertain light. Such nocturnes as Battersea Bridge and the sea-shore picture, Bognor-Nocturne, appeal to us like Rembrandt’s Visit to Emmaus. Just as the latter’s forms were humble, so the bridge itself is an ordinary sort of structure, and the sea-shore and the boats are without any unusual distinction. Yet in each case the scene has been idealised through the mystery of light, and appeals to our spiritual imagination. After two hundred years Rembrandt’s new principle of idealisation, founded upon the abstract beauty of light instead of on the abstract perfection of form, has been accepted by modern artists.

To a greater or less degree all artists, whether naturalists or idealists, who are painting in the modern spirit have been influenced by Monet and Whistler. The example of these two has spread far and wide the study and rendering of light. But, while their followers agree in this motive, they are independent in their points of view. There are some whose point of view, like Monet’s, is objective. They are content to render the impression made upon their eyes. But, as their eyes see differently from Monet’s, their pictures are different from his. Each is the record of a separate personality. Equally, while others, like Whistler are subjective, recording the impression produced upon their minds, their pictures vary according to the character and quality of their separate minds. In fact, in later times, a notable feature of painting is its diversity of motives and points of view.

Let me try to explain this. Ever since the American and French Revolutions, there has been a gradually increasing interest in what we call individuality. The main object of these revolutions was to establish the right of each and every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the idea of government now is to give every individual the chance of making the most of his or her possibilities. Your teachers, for example, are not running their classes as machines; they are trying to make a personal study, so far as possible, of each one of you, in order to help you to develop your particular individuality. For a long time this has been the principle of education and government. The result is that there has been a universal increase in individuality, since numbers of people who had some special possibility have had a chance to develope it. To-day, in fact, there is probably nothing that counts more than individuality. This being so it is natural that we should look for it in art. And, if we do, we shall find it.

In former times there were “schools of art.” In Italian art, we speak, for example, of the Florentine School, the Venetian School, the Roman School; or we speak of the Flemish School, and Dutch Schools and so on. In each case the artists, living in a certain city or country, had sufficient resemblance among themselves in their motives and methods of painting to produce a certain separate style. So, to-day, if an expert sees an old picture, he is able to say at once and, more often than not correctly, that it belongs to such and such a school.

But an expert of a hundred years hence, when he sees our modern pictures, will not speak of Schools. He may see at once that the picture is by an American, a German, or a French artist, for difference of race and habit of life and thought do still stamp in a general way the pictures of each separate country. But even within the limits of any one country there are as many varieties of motive and point of view as there are individuals.

So in modern times, more than ever before, there is an individual, personal note in pictures, just as there is in books. The artist makes the picture an expression of his own personal feelings. This is one reason why modern pictures are inferior to the old ones in grandeur and dignity. The older ones were not only larger in size, as a rule, but they were impersonal, like a fine building is. The architects who designed the Capitol at Washington put their own personal expression into it. But we do not feel it, as we look at their work. On the contrary, it is the impersonal, monumental dignity of the work that impresses us. But in most modern pictures, instead of what is impersonal, we receive a distinct impression of intimacy, of sharing the artist’s feeling. And it is the expression of this that we not only look for but enjoy discovering. We often speak of it as the sentiment of the picture.

This sentiment may be of all sorts and shades of feeling, “from grave to gay, from lively to severe.” It may be romantic in spirit, appealing to us through the suggestion of what is weird and surprising; it may be full of the tenderness or of the trumpet call of poetry; it may invite us to gentle reverie, or stir in us a profound and poignant emotion. But I have said enough to point your way.

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