“Well,” says the questioner, “it cannot be much of a picture if the trees are done so badly that no one can tell what they are.”
Our Philistine was no doubt wrong, but, at the same time, the work would have been all the better, and would have lost none of its imposing grandeur if the specific characters of the trees had been given with greater care.
I am glad to note that almost all modern landscape-painters are fully alive to the fact that a tree is not merely a tree, but a particular species of tree, and that the species can be thoroughly indicated without in any way lessening the grand character of the work.
To return to draperies and costumes.
The artists of the Byzantine and Romanesque periods used to paint their heads of a conventional and very ugly type, without any attempt at individuality, and bestow all their care on the draperies, nimbi, and accessory parts, often enriching their work with real jewels.
This fashion, which was rampant in the Byzantine period, began to wane in the fourteenth century, but lingered on almost till Leonardo da Vinci’s time.
During what may be called the golden age of art (that is, from Leonardo’s time down to Poussin’s) the proper balance of finish between flesh and drapery seems to have been well observed, but in the last century (especially in this country) the artists of the time reversed the practice of the old Byzantine painters; that is, they painted the heads of the sitters as well as they could, and left the dress and accessories to be put in by their assistants.
Bad as the flesh-painting was, the treatment of the dress was still more slovenly and inartistic. The apologists for this style of work say that the head is everything in a portrait, and that no one cares about the dress and background, but this was certainly not the opinion of the old masters. To take a familiar example. Is not the head of Gavartius greatly improved by the exquisitely-painted frill which surrounds it? Or, again, is not the life-like flesh in Bordoni’s female portrait rendered still more life-like by the gorgeous color and masterly execution of the crimson dress?
Our National Gallery teems with examples of the same kind, where judicious finish of the accessory parts assists rather than mars the effect of the flesh-painting.
I do not wish to be understood as insisting that in all cases the dress and background should be as much finished as the heads, but there is a great difference between unfinished work and bad work, and it is this difference which the advocates for neglecting accessories seem unable to understand. I do not find fault with a certain charming unfinished portrait group by Rubens in the Louvre, because the accessory parts are merely indicated, but I should find fault with it if they were clumsily and inartistically painted. The kind of work I am protesting against is that which is often noticeable in portraits of the Gainsborough and Lawrence schools, where the shoulders and hands are quite shapeless, and the folds of the dress utterly impossible.