[e] Essay on "Genius."
[NOTE 11. PAGE 32]
It is often observed by advocates of "new" forms of art that the work of many great artists has been variously valued at different periods—that leaders of marked departures in art now honoured, were frequently more or less ignored in their own time, while other artists who acquired a great reputation when living, have been properly put into the background by succeeding generations. For the first statement no solid ground can be shown. In painting, the artists since the Dark Age who can be said to have led departures of any importance, are Cimabue, Giotto, the Van Eycks, Masaccio, Lionardo, Dürer, Giorgione, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Holbein, Claude, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Watteau, Reynolds, and Fragonard. All of these had their high talents recognized and thoroughly appreciated in their lifetime. In sculpture the experience is the same, for there is no sculptor now honoured whose work was not highly valued by his contemporaries. So with poetry, but before the invention of printing and in the earlier days of this industry, poetry of any kind was very slow in finding its way among the people. What might seem nowadays to have been inappreciation of certain poets was really want of knowledge of them.
There is more truth in the assertion that many artists who had a high reputation in their lifetime are now more or less disregarded, though it does not follow from this that there has been a reversal of opinion on the part of the public, or a variation in the acuteness of æsthetic perception. Generally we find that these artists very properly held the position they occupied in their time and country, and if they do not now stand on exalted pedestals it is only because we compare them with men of other periods and places, which their contemporary countrymen did not do, at least for the purpose of establishing their permanent position in art. Carlo Maratta for instance was celebrated in Italy as the best painter of his country in his time, and even now we must so regard him, but his contemporaries as with ourselves did not place him on so high a level as his great predecessors of the sixteenth century, and some of the seventeenth. A special reason why many of the seventeenth century artists of Italy have fallen in public esteem may be found in the fact that they excelled mostly in the production of sensorial beauty, paying little attention to intellectual grace, and the ripening of general intelligence as time goes on makes us more and more sensitive to beauty of mind.
[NOTE 12. PAGE 34]
There have been many definitions of "Impressionism" given, but they vary considerably. Professor Clausen describes it as the work of a number of artists whose interest is in recording effects of light, seeking to express nature only and disregarding old conventions.[a] Mr. D. S. MacColl says that an impressionist is[]
a painter who, out of the completed contacts of vision constructs an image moulded upon his own interest in the thing seen, and not on that of any imaginary schoolmaster.
This definition is insufficient by itself, but the writer makes his meaning clearer in the same article when he says:
Impressionism is the art that surveys the field, and determines which of the shapes and tones are of chief importance to the interested eye, and expresses these and sacrifices the rest.