The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

And note too, if you please, that the disagreeable and unpleasant qualities of the individual crop out in painting as in social life. How many modern painters do we know whose works exhale the atmosphere of the Folies-Bergères and the Bal Bullier. Their subjects may be pure enough or refined enough; they may picture decent people, high life, and fashionable surroundings, and yet do it with an unwholesome mind and a tell-tale brush. There are painters (their names need not be mentioned) who cannot paint a lady without showing the cocotte, nor a gentleman without showing the blackguard, nor a child without showing a certain sophistication—a precocious knowledge of evil—altogether unhappy. The coarseness of Jan Steen or Brouwer may be passed over as incidental to his time. It is coarse, but neither vulgar nor immoral. But not so the brutality of the modern cosmopolite who boasts so openly in his pictures that he has no faith in the virtue of women nor the respectability of men.

And what vulgarity we see in every modern exhibition, whether held in Chicago, London, or Paris! Painters there are, born and bred no one knows where or how, who depict Oxford professors or statesmen with the air and attitude of flunkies, or duchesses with the smirk of shop-girls. And painters there are, too, who, assuming for their characters the elegance of luxury, paint pictures that seem to reek of perfumes, scented soaps, and manicured finger-nails. Such men seem to leave an unhappy impress upon the trees and mountains, and their point of view vulgarizes the blue sky. They may be very brilliant handlers of the brush—indeed they are often excellent craftsmen—but their vision is sadly warped and their minds are tainted. There are, for instance, few workmen more fascinating in craftsmanship than Goya. He could paint beautifully and convincingly, but when you go to Spain and see the mass of his painting you will be surprised at the blood and flame and brutality of it. The man’s mind, at times, was hideous, unearthly, poisoned with bitterness. On the contrary take the work of Carlo Dolci or Sassoferrato and you meet with super-saturated sentimentality and mawkishness. Neither was a bad painter for his age and people, but his mental attitude was lacking in force—perhaps had not enough brutality about it.

And human conceit exudes as readily from the painter’s brush as from the writer’s pen. You have no trouble in recognizing conceit in a book. It is only too apparent. And yet all that clever painting, that bravura of the brush, that elaborate flourish of the little men who try to make a great noise and attract attention to themselves, is mere pictorial conceit. And there is so much of it in modern painting. It seems sometimes as though the exhibitions were more than half made up of flippant displays of dexterity, which have no other aim than to show how very clever the painter can be and still avoid seriousness.

But I need not stop longer to discuss disagreeable characteristics in art. They are not our quest in any sense and they are referred to here merely to suggest anew that the man—be he weak or strong, good or bad, noble or ignoble, serious or flippant—eventually appears in his work. Individuality will speak out though the individual may not be aware of it.

And this is as it should be. The disagreeable personality misleads for only a short time. Eventually it is ignored in art as in social life. And that which is really good in painting is the better for the strong individuality behind it. The frank statement of personal feeling or faith, the candid autobiography, has added more to the real knowledge of life, and has done more to show people how to live, than all the long volumes of scientific history, of which we have enough and to spare in every library. When a person speaks of himself he knows his subject at least, and can speak of it truly; but when he speaks of dead-and-gone Alexanders and Cæsars, he is speculating in “perhapses” and “possiblys.” And so in painting, when a person paints what he individually sees and is impressed by, he is likely to produce something worthy of attention; but when he takes up some formula of truth laid down by a school or a camera he is merely repeating a something he has not seen, and simulating a feeling he has not known.

Even the positive assertion—the insistent assertion—of one’s own view is often welcome in art. I think we all like the self-reliance, the steadfastness of belief of the individual—assuming, of course, that he is right and not therefore merely obstinate. When Delacroix was opposed by the classic painters of his day because he saw nature in patches of color and light, instead of in outlines and linear extensions, he declared defiantly: “The whole world cannot prevent me from seeing things in my own way.” He insisted upon it that his “way” was a right way, even if different from that of Ingres. He was seeking to picture something peculiar to himself, in a manner entirely his own. Listen to him again: “I am at my window and I see the most beautiful landscape; the idea of a line never comes into my head. The lark sings, the river glitters, the foliage murmurs; but where are the lines that produce these charming sensations?” There you have the individual point of view, and in the 1840’s it was a very unusual view. It was the self-reliant quality of the man, which enabled him to discard the outworn conception of his contemporaries and create a something new; and it is largely by the creative faculty arising from the desire to say something new, that we distinguish genius from mediocrity or eccentricity.

For you know that people whom we call “queer” can be just as individual as others, and yet not accomplish anything of importance. There is an individuality of genius which consists in original impression and statement; and there is an eccentricity of foolishness which produces only the bizarre. It is not difficult, however, to distinguish between them. For, as we have already noted, true individuality is always creative. It builds up, has a definite aim, proceeds to a definite goal; whereas, eccentricity is disordered, disposed to be meaningless, inclined to produce brilliant fragments that have no connection with each other. We see the same qualities exhibited in the social characters of real life, and gossip says that such a man is a “genius” or that another is “eccentric.” It is by some outward manifestation or action, akin to expression in painting, that gossip arrives at its conclusion; and it is usually a correct conclusion.

Then, too, there are painters who lose their individuality—throw it aside to take up with the view of some other person who seems to have achieved more popularity. The majority of men break down in their ideals long before they are old. They may have possessed talent, and given voice to it in early years; but it has been unnoticed, perhaps unheard. They may have had impressions of their own; but perhaps they have not proved attractive to the masses, or have not received the immediate recognition to which their producers perhaps thought them entitled. Then they make the irretrievable mistake of trying to follow someone whose impressions seem to be in public demand. It may be that they follow Raphael or Titian or Velasquez; but no matter how good a painter they may choose for a model, they have already committed artistic suicide. No one in this world of ours ever became great by echoing the voice of another, repeating what that other has said. Are there not countless illustrations of this—illustrations by whole schools of painters and sculptors in the history of art? What was the art of Rome, following as it did the art of Greece? What was the art of those who followed Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio? What was the seventeenth-century art of France, following that of Italy? What was David and classicism, following ancient Rome? What is to-day the value of all these French peasants and Seine landscapes for which Millet and Corot set the patterns, and in the imitation of which America has contributed her modicum of strength? It is all a vapid and somewhat meaningless copying that may furnish canvases to hide a break in the wall-paper of a drawing-room, but as original art counting for naught. And why? Simply because it lacks in individuality—lacks in originality of aim and statement.

That last statement may be almost as fittingly applied to those who literally imitate nature as to those who imitate some other painter. It adds nothing to our store of knowledge, nothing to our appreciation of beauty, to have the painter reproducing line upon line and shade upon shade and color upon color the exact scene from nature. “A mere copier of nature,” says Sir Joshua, “can never produce anything great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions or warm the heart of the spectator.” The insistence upon fact crowds the man out of the picture. Individuality does not appear, except perhaps in a manner of handling which shows the artisan rather than the artist. The Denners and Meissoniers and Gerard Dous have no individualities that you can trace in their pictures. You know they were workmen and that is about all. Realism with them, as with all devoted followers of the “truth to nature” theory, is an attempt at eliminating the personal element, an attempt at approximating the working of a machine. Of course the attempt is never fully realized, but it may be carried far enough to destroy whatever might have been stimulating or exalted in the picture.