(A glossary for the opening of the R.A.)
An Artist is a person who paints what he thinks he sees.
An Amateur is a person who thinks he paints what he sees.
An Impressionist is a person who paints what other people think he sees.
A Popular Artist is a person who paints what other people think they see.
A Successful Artist is a person who paints what he thinks other people see.
A Great Artist is a person who paints what other people see they think.
A Failure is a person who sees what other people think they paint.
A Portraitist is a person who paints what other people don't think he sees.
A Landscape Painter is a person who doesn't paint what other people see.
A Realist is a person who sees what other people don't paint.
An Idealist is a person who paints what other people don't see.
The Hanging Committee are people who don't see what other people think they paint.
A Royal Academician is a person who doesn't think and paints what other people see.
A Genius is a person who doesn't see and paints what other people don't think.
A Critic is a person who doesn't paint and thinks what other people don't see.
The Public are people who don't see or think what other people don't paint.
A Dealer is a person that sees that people who paint don't think, and who thinks that people who don't paint don't see. He sees people who don't see people who paint; he thinks that people who paint don't see people who see; and he sees what people who don't paint think.
FINALLY
A Reader is a person whose head swims.
The art critics accredited to the daily Press, like their musical colleagues, could no longer be accused of lagging behind the modernist tendencies of the times: they aspired to be in the van of progress. In 1913 Punch burlesques the wonderful phraseology of The Times art critic in one of his "Studies of reviewers," which deals with the exhibitors at the Neo-British Art League. It may suffice to quote the appreciations of Mme. Strulda Brugh and Mr. Marcellus Thom. The method of the former, as illustrated by her "Pekinese Puppies," is contrasted with that of the Congestionist school in that she "deanthropomorphizes her scheme of pigmentation into nodules of aplanatic voluminosity":—
When therefore we have to assume a fluorescent reticulation of the interstitial sonorities, a situation is developed which might well baffle any but an advanced expert in transcendental mathematics. As a result the modelling of the puppies' tails is lacking in curvilinear conviction; their heads fail in canine suggestiveness, their fore-paws in prehensile subjectivity.
Mr. Marcellus Thom's "Sardine Fishers in the Adriatic," executed in "creosoted truffle stick," is a masterpiece of "suppressed but dignified antinomianism":—
Wonderful though the drawing and the interfiltration of coordinating paraboloids are, it is the psychological content of the picture rather than its direct presentative significance which affects the solar plexus of the enlightened onlooker. The whole atmosphere is summarized and condensed in a circumambient and oleaginous aura.... To do full justice to such a picture is unhappily beyond the resources of the most sublime preciosity. It demands the εσωτερικη πφλαρια of Theopompus of Megalocrania or even the intima desipientia distilled in the Atopiad of Vesanus Sanguinolentus.
