The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

XX.—GÉRÔME, Napoleon before the Sphinx.

If we move to the north, passing the splendid achievements of Titian, Tintoretto, Palma, and Paolo Veronese, passing the mysticism of Dürer and the intense humanity of Holbein, passing the radiant splendor of Rubens and the courtly elegance of Van Dyck, we shall come eventually to Holland and to those Dutchmen whom the academicians declared had no style. There we shall find the arch-heretic, Rembrandt, who had nothing of Greek form and academic composition, and yet possessed what was worth far more—deep human feeling. His characters are only poor Dutch peasants; his Christ is a forlorn, bare-footed, frail-bodied outcast; his back-grounds are generally squalid, ill-lighted interiors. There is no splendor of architecture, no glamour of wealth, no fair Italian valley with a deep-blue sky above it. His materials for making the pictorial poem were slight enough; but never a picture was painted with so much poetic pathos as that little “Supper at Emmaus” in the Louvre. The intense sympathy of Rembrandt going out to the poor and oppressed all his life, went out above all others to that One who was poor and despised—the lowly One who taught the gospel of love. No one can look upon any of the peasants of Rembrandt without being conscious of the man’s deep feeling. His technique, of course, is marvellous; but so is his insight and his capacity to feel. If it were not so we should gain little pleasure from his subjects.

Have you never wondered what it is in art that makes a painter’s interpretation of a scene more agreeable than the scene itself? If you had a few sheep, a French peasant, a straw-thatched cottage, and a barren plain you would have the materials for a Millet picture. Suppose you lived in a fine country place, how long would the cottage stand near you before you had it torn down, or the shepherd and sheep roam your lawns before you had them driven off by dogs? You would not care for them, they would not be beautiful, they would not even be interesting after the first day. Why is it then that you pay thousands of dollars for a picture of the shepherd and his sheep to hang in your drawing-room, when you would not have the originals within gun-shot? Is it not that the materials have something added to them? Are they not helped in their representation by the painter’s insight and his capacity to feel?

Rembrandt saw a deeper meaning in his commonplace materials than you or I. He saw that under the tattered gaberdine of the Amsterdam Jew beat the heart and throbbed the brain of all humanity. The Jew was typical of universal suffering—an epitome of humanity, and at the same time an exemplar of inhumanity. And think you there is no force, no nobility in the uncouth, heavy-set peasant of Holland? Can you not see the stamp of character in the deep-marked face and the labor-worn form? Can you not see that the man is self-made, made strong by hardships; that he has been developed and brought to maturity through adversity? It is this beauty of character that Rembrandt is bringing to your notice. And can you believe that there is no charm in the low-lying land of the Dutchman—the land where clouds roll out to sea by day, and fogs drift inland by night? Can you not see that here, too, is something developed through adversity, that this domain has been wrested from the sea and turned into flower-spattered meadows, fields of grain, ranks of polders, groves of trees? Have not man and country a peculiar beauty of their own—a beauty of character?

And how different is it with the peasantry of France? These gleaners in the fields as they bend forward to gather the stray stalks, how fine they are in their great simple outlines, how substantial in body, how excellent in motion (Plate [4])! And see how they harmonize with the coloring of the stubble and fit into their atmospheric place, so that they are of a piece with the foreground, background, and sky—cemented, blended into one, by the warm haze of a July afternoon. Is then this flat space of stubble under the burning summer sun, this bare treeless field, “La belle France” which every Frenchman and many a foreigner raves about? Yes; only doubly intensified. This is the substance and the solidity of France—the yielding, arable soil that makes the wealth of France. And this sower moving silently in the shadow of the hill, moving with such rhythmic motion, tired and worn yet swinging and sowing—the sun gone down and twilight upon him, yet still without a murmur, without a falter, swinging and sowing the grain—is this the brave Frenchman whose kith and kin fought at Marengo and Waterloo? Yes; only doubly intensified. He is the brawn and muscle of France—the original producer, the planter and sustainer of the race. Has he, who has so labored, so wrestled with stubborn circumstance and wrought success from meagre opportunity, has he not a character of his own that may be called beautiful in art? And the land he has broken and made so productive, the soil that he sprang from and is so intimately associated with, has it not a character of landscape peculiarly its own and again pictorially beautiful?

XXI.—MICHAEL ANGELO, Delphic Sibyl. Sistine Chapel, Rome.

Millet and Rembrandt knew this truth of character in both man and nature, and often they must have thrown down their brushes in despair of ever telling it; but knowing it so well and feeling it so deeply, they could not choose but leave the mark of their feeling in their pictures. And they produced great democratic art—the assertion that all beauty does not lie in the straight nose, the Apollo mouth, and the Apoxyomenos form; and that poetry is not alone the tale of classic heroes and mediæval marauders. The man, though rag-patched, may be a king; the land, though no Arcadian grove, is still the great productive mother-earth. Shall we have an aristocracy solely of wealth, or an aristocracy solely of birth? May there not also be an aristocracy of character?

I have said that this poetic feeling in art found its way into many subjects. The examples given are but a handful from that vast world of life from which the painter is privileged to draw; and you must not infer that it has to do with religion and the pathos of humble life alone. Corot, for instance, never painted anything that expressed either. His was the poetry of light (Plate [9]) as Rousseau’s the poetry of the forest and Daubigny’s the poetry of the meadow and the river-bank (Plate [16]). And are there not pæans of beauty unmixed in the voyaging clouds of Constable, the serene blue skies of Courbet, the silvery mists of Maris, the stormy coasts of Winslow Homer? A portrait by Gainsborough (Plate [19]) or Van Dyck (Plate [18]), an interior by Van der Meer of Delft or Pieter de Hooge, a Venetian scene by Guardi or Bunce, a battle or shipwreck by Delacroix, a tiger and a serpent by Barye, may any or all of them be poetic. The poetry is in the man, not the subject. Whatever the poet sees, if it appeals to him emotionally, may start that train of feeling which evitably creeps into the canvas—creeps in just as when one is in a gay or sad mood his gayety or sadness will tinge the current of his playing or his singing or be apparent in his conversation.

Again let me repeat that the thought in pictures, whether poetic or otherwise, is seldom so definite or precise as in literature. Meissonier in his “Napoleon in 1814” wishes to tell you of the Emperor’s defeat, but the only way he can do it is to paint a man on horseback alone on the brow of a hill with a gloomy, set face and a dark sky. It is suggestion rather than realization. Gérôme is one of the best story-tellers with the paint-brush of the present times, but what does he mean by his “Napoleon before the Sphinx” (Plate [20])? Evidently a contrast has been thought of—a contrast between the tiny figure on horseback and the colossal head looming above the desert sands—but what precisely does the contrast mean? Is this the modern world against the whole vast past? Is it France, the latest of nations, conquering Egypt, the earliest of nations? Or is this little man on horseback the intellectual force, the Œdipus of the West, come at last to Egypt to solve the riddle of the Sphinx? You see the actual thought is not so accurately read. Again, I am disposed to think that in Mr. Watts’s “Love and Death” the little god upon the doorstep falling back among the flowers before the great outstretched arm of Death means that into every house where love and joy and flowers have been supreme, the spectre of death must sooner or later enter. But I do not know that Mr. Watts had quite that idea when he painted the picture. It is because the thought in painting is always more or less indefinite as compared with literature that so many different meanings are read into or out of celebrated pictures. Art-critics and historians are still explaining Titian’s “Venus Equipping Cupid” and Botticelli’s “Allegory of Spring.” Pictorial language is not like the vernacular of speech; it is not even written so that all alike may comprehend its spirit. At best it is a sign language that permits of varying interpretations, and it is not by any means the best medium of conveying abstract ideas from one mind to another. But like music it is very responsive to emotional feeling and conveys the poetic mood or sentiment, sometimes with great force.