Costume has a great deal to do with the choice of a subject, and this, no doubt, is the reason why the works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molière are such favorite hunting-grounds for artists. If the Prince of Denmark had been a modern heir-apparent, attired in a frock coat, tweed trousers, and a chimney-pot hat, or if Malvolio had worn the dress of an ordinary British butler, we should not often see them painted.
For one picture taken from Thackeray’s modern novels, we find dozens illustrating Tennyson’s “Idyls of the King,” or his “Holy Grail.”
Now, although the question of costume must always be an important factor in the selection of a subject, it ought not to be the only one. A picture should not be painted merely for the sake of the costumes. This seemed to me the principal fault in the large Austrian pictures of the International Exhibition; and I may add that it is a fault which is not altogether unknown in England.
There is one more class of subjects which I have not yet noticed, and that is the domestic or “genre” class; the pictures, in short, of every-day life. Pictures of this kind are much less dependent on a good choice of subject than those which illustrate some historical incident. They are generally prized for the brilliancy and harmony of their color, or for the delicacy of their execution; and if these qualities exist in a high degree, the subject is a minor consideration.
Still it ought to be a consideration, and in choosing subjects of this class you should prefer those which are typical of the personages you have to represent. If you attempt rustic pictures, not only should your figures look like peasants, but the subject should be thoroughly bucolic.
A dirty ploughman plodding wearily homeward along a muddy lane on a dull November evening seems commonplace and prosaic enough, and yet the subject would not be deficient in pictorial interest. It would be typical of the man’s hard and comfortless life. It would be in perfect harmony with his furrowed face, his bony limbs, and his stooping gait.
It would not only represent that particular ploughman in that particular lane, but it would give a true though mournful impression of farm-laborers generally.
I should much prefer for the subject of a picture, a common episode from the life of a laborer to an uncommon one.
Again, if I wished to represent the same man at home, I should endeavor, without exaggeration, to give the squalor of his surroundings, and should not, out of my inner consciousness, evolve an ideal peasant surrounded by a comely family, and looking (as Dickens has somewhere said) as if he had “spent his little All in soap.”
Artists understand pretty well nowadays that in painting rustic subjects, honesty is the best policy. The great success of the French painter, Millet, was due entirely to his uncompromising honesty of purpose, and to the unerring judgment with which he selected his subjects.