“During these moments,” says John La Farge in his “Considerations on Painting,” “are not the spectators excusable who live for the moment a serene existence, feeling as if they had made the work they admire?”
The argument then is that the master painter is one who selects the subject, takes precious care that its foundation quantities and qualities are furnished and then hands it over to any one to finish. That it falls into sympathetic hands is his single solicitude.
“It requires two men to paint a picture,” says Mr. Hopkinson Smith, “one to work the brush and the other to kill the artist when he has finished his picture and doesn't know it.”
PART III - THE CRITICAL JUDGEMENT OF PICTURES
“With the critic all depends on the right application of his principles in particular cases. And since there are fifty ingenuous critics to one of penetration, it would be a wonder if the applications were in every case with the caution indispensable to an exact adjustment of the scales of art.”—Lessing's Laocöon.
CHAPTER XIII - THE MAN IN ART
“Art is a middle quality between a thought and a thing—the union of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human.”[16]
For the every-day critic much of the secret lies in the proposition art is nature, with the man added; nature seen through a temperament. Nature is apparent on the surface of pictures. We see this side at a glance. To find the man in it requires deeper sight.