“Umph!” returned Rossetti. “Yes, I should think devilish surprised to see what Turner had made of them.”
On one point he was always absolutely emphatic.
“A picture,” he used to say to me, “is a painted poem, and those who deny it have simply no poetry in their nature.” It was, I think, the absence of this quality that made him intolerant of the work of artists like Albert Moore.
“Often pretty,” he said, “pretty enough, but sublimated café-painting and nothing more.”
But he could be unstintedly generous in his praise, as he was searching and even scathing in his criticism. Of Millais he once said to me:
“I don’t believe since painting began there has ever been a man more greatly endowed with the mere painter’s power.”
And of Burne-Jones, not once, but often, he spoke in terms of the warmest and highest praise.
“He has oceans of imagination,” he used to say, “and in this respect there has been nobody like him since Botticelli.” And then, reverting to his favourite maxim, he added in those round and ringing tones that seemed at once to invite and to defy contradiction: “If, as I hold, the noblest picture is a painted poem, then I say that in the whole history of art there has never been a painter more greatly gifted with poetic invention.”
Of Leighton he was wont to speak with genuine respect and sincere appreciation. There was only one point, and that concerned not the character but the manners of the graceful and accomplished President, on which he was not quite tolerant.
“Leighton,” he said one night, “is undoubtedly one of the most gifted and accomplished creatures of his time. There’s scarcely anything which he can’t do, and can’t do well. He has, besides, a very high sense of duty which I know to be sincere, and even as a painter he undoubtedly deserves to some extent the position he occupies, but as to manners——”