A picture which at a little distance gives thoroughly the character of the fish, game, or flowers it is intended to represent, will be much more masterly and artistic if the scales of the fish, the feathers of the birds, and the petals of the flowers are not individually studied with microscopic care, but treated in a broad, suggestive manner.
In a painting so handled the loss of a few minute details is more than compensated by greater freshness of color, and the charm inseparable from a rapid and dexterous execution.
If it were possible to combine the two qualities, if we could get breadth and brilliancy united with minute finish, it would even then be doubtful whether the picture would be any the better for the additional pains bestowed upon it.
In looking at pictures, we require to be deceived only up to a certain point, and the whole question depends on where to fix that point. In to-night’s lecture I intend to investigate this subject, and to extend my remarks to other kindred questions connected with the finish of a work of art.
All writers and lecturers on art are pretty well agreed that excessive finish is undesirable. I mean such finish as one sees in Bellini’s portrait of the Doge, where each individual hair is painted, and where every wrinkle or pimple is studied as though it were of the utmost importance.
There is, however, a kind of finish of an infinitely more objectionable kind than Bellini’s.
If Bellini elaborated small details to an extensive extent, they were at any rate thoroughly and honestly studied. His minute, delicate work always had a laudable object, whether it were the exact rendering of a stray hair or the microscopic modelling of the wrinkles about the eyes. But the finisher of whom I am now speaking has no object, beyond smoothness.
Bad proportions and gross errors in drawing are nothing to him provided he gets a smooth, uniform surface. Like the old-fashioned provincial drawing-master, who taught oils, water-colors, and Poonah painting, smoothness and finish are with him synonymous terms.
Probably most of you are happily ignorant of the lost art of Poonah painting and drawing, and I certainly do not mean to waste our time in describing it. It will be sufficient to say that the process was almost entirely mechanical, and that the results exhibited the maximum of smoothness combined with the minimum of art.
It used often to be taught in young ladies’ schools. It would be both invidious and unjust to compare the work of any Academy student with these inane productions, but I wish to warn you, as I have often warned you before, against confounding “finishing” with mere polishing.