The meaning of pictures

by John C. Van Dyke

Two hundred years of this meretricious art followed the downfall of the Renaissance. During those centuries painting in Europe lay barren, save in some exceptional spots. It flourished in Holland with Rembrandt; it flourished in Flanders with Rubens; it flourished in Spain with Velasquez. Why did it flourish? If I were searching the entire history of painting I could not name for you three greater technicians than Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velasquez. With Titian, they are the great masters of the craft. Art always flourishes in the hands of the skilled craftsman; it always languishes in the hands of the unskilled craftsman. And it is necessary to insist upon it again that all these men were workmen, working with the decorative sense uppermost. They were artists, too—artists who expressed great thoughts, sentiments, and emotions, particularly Rembrandt; but they never would have been artists, they never would have represented any fact or thought worth considering, had they not been, first of all, decorative workmen.

But you may say we have changed all that. The painter in those days was only a court dependant—a varlet of the king—not different from cabinet-makers, stone-cutters, and other mechanics; but to-day he is an independent citizen, a creative genius, a teacher of mankind, an influencer and moulder of public opinion. Yes; but the picture is still the picture. And custom may change the painter’s skin, but not his nature. He is still a skilled workman at heart, or at least would be such. And his main aim is decorative craftsmanship. Modern painting gives it proof. It is said, and truly enough, that art has advanced in this century. Why has it advanced? Simply because it has taken hold of the old technical and decorative problems, and tried to better them. In France, Ingres was doing his best to draw like Raphael, when Delacroix came to the front with a new kind of drawing. Instead of line he substituted the patch of color, and made the outer rim elastic, movable, life-like. Corot, Rousseau, and the landscape painters; Courbet, Millet, and Manet, the genre painters, helped complete it. Art under them rose rapidly, and the truth of nature was more nearly approximated.

But the light was too dull, the shadows too black. A new man came to the front to revise and re-edit the light-and-shade of Leonardo, Correggio, and Rembrandt. That man was Monet, the so-called impressionist. He changed the whole pitch of light by transposing the scale, and giving both lights and darks a higher register. And has not the rich deep color of the old Venetians been revised too? Look about you at the high keys of color that greet you in every modern picture exhibition. Claude Monet, whom people smiled at a dozen years ago, but are now calling a genius, is responsible for this high scale of color and light. He has transformed the whole decorative aspect of landscape painting, by studying the intermixture and play of pigments. We are now seeing colors in art that approximate, at least, the colors of nature; and they are just as beautiful decoratively as the old ones, only we are not yet accustomed to them.

Painting advances, breaks out new sails, and enters upon new seas with such new knowledge of materials. And of course some of the energy put into the study is to enable the painters to show a truer life and nature than ever before; but we are not to forget that there is beauty also in the new pitch of light and color and that the painter is using them with a decorative purpose. Indeed it would be easy to demonstrate that no present-day painter begins upon an oval, a square, a triangle of wood or canvas, without first planning how to fill that space gracefully with forms, lights, and colors. These nineteenth-century painters have had few wall-spaces to fill, but it has already been suggested that the decorative tradition has descended to them, and that they are as considerate about filling a panel or canvas as ever the old men were considerate about filling an apse or spandrel.

XXV.—REYNOLDS, Lady Cockburn and Family. National Gallery, London.

But I fancy you are ready to stop me by protesting that these motives are too material, too mechanical. You will perhaps insist that true art is above all this petty planning, squaring, measuring, space-filling; that genius knows not method, and that the ideal out-soars the base materials that would hold it down to earth. There are those who believe that inspiration dictates with the voice of an angel and that the hand of the poet or painter but obeys the voice; there are those who believe there is no labor or plan or design or foundation in the work of art. And it is true that oftentimes painting and poetry appear so effortless that we think them spontaneous and unpremeditated. But those are always the works that have been slaved over the most. Every great work of art is based in technical knowledge and has the skilled workman back of it. And many are the poets born by nature, yet lacking the accomplishment of verse. Did you ever read a great piece of prose or poetry written by a man ignorant of grammar and the rhythmical construction of sentences? Did you ever hear of a good piece of architecture built by a man who knew not plans, scales, and proportions? Did you ever see a great picture painted by a man who could not draw decently or lay color harmoniously? We are quite right in admiring the feeling, the enthusiasm, yes, the inspiration, if you prefer that word, of some great violinist over his instrument; but we should not forget the training of the hand, the many years of dealing with the material that made enthusiasm and feeling possible. How much of them should we have heard had the hand remained untrained? Shelley’s poetic thoughts, yes, but Shelley’s sense of melody, his knowledge of rhythm, his general mastery of words and sentences, gave them meaning to the world. And so, too, while we admire Tintoretto’s fertility of resource and his bounding imagination we should not overlook the fact that it was his absolute skill of hand, his knowledge of line and light and color, that made an idyl of the “Ariadne and Bacchus” and an epic of that great maëlstrom composition the “Paradise.”

Materials, craftsmanship, the decorative sense which requires that a man’s work shall be interesting in itself, are the very bases of art; and we often go astray in our judgments by not considering them. We have with us to-day one of the best literary technicians of the nineteenth century—Mr. James the novelist. It can hardly be contended that he is a very popular novelist. We sometimes read outbreaks in newspaper or magazine columns to the effect that he is not much of a story-teller, has not much of a plot. That is the complaint of the average person in the picture-gallery when he stands face to face with a Whistler nocturne. He wants what the artist does not care to paint. Mr. Whistler and Mr. James are both very well acquainted with the pretty face and the romantic story, but they choose to ignore them. The average person may read a novel by Mr. James and keep asking: What does it mean? but if Mr. James were at his elbow and disposed to ask questions he would certainly inquire: How does it read?

It may be admitted, if you please, that the insistence upon the decorative use of language with Mr. James or with Mr. Swinburne is excessive. And so, too, the followers of Mr. Whistler, if not the leader himself, may be thought to refine color and mystify tone and shadow into a meaningless fog of pigments. Any principle, however good in itself, may be rendered ridiculous by extravagance in its application. But the followers of the decorative are not the only ones who go beyond the normal. Painters who are given to “ideas in art” oftentimes fly to the other extreme and neglect the decorative altogether. Mr. Holman Hunt, for example, will hardly be accused of not having enough ideas and meaning in his Palestine pictures, and just as certainly he will not be accused of pandering to the decorative. His drawing, coloring, painting, surfaces, are anything but pleasing. Nor does anyone doubt that Walt Whitman has put forth some poetic ideas as great as any in American literature, but the form in which he has sent them forth is far enough removed from the rhythmical. You read him and question perhaps whether he is a great poet or a solemn impostor just because he trusts his thoughts to bad drawing, crude coloring, and incoherent composition, just because he dispenses with the decorative.

Now you will please not understand me as saying that it makes no difference what you say if you but say it well, or that the setting is nobler or better than the gem itself. It is not necessary to rush to either extreme of statement. Some artists there be who make sweeping claims for the decorative, and so far as they themselves are concerned they are doubtless in the right. That is to say, form and color, in graceful combinations, make one kind of painting; but we need not straightway conclude that it is the only kind of painting. It has been suggested already that music and poetry may have something more to them than melodious sounds that fall sweetly on the ear; and that painting may have another mission than that of pleasing the eye with sensuous lines and colors. The ultimate end of painting is perhaps the expression of emotional feeling; and I am not now contending for superlative and final art in the Persian-rug picture made up of subtle lights and tones of colors. But it may be reasonably insisted that it is better for the picture—no matter what its ulterior meaning—that it should first of all be pleasing to the eye and decoratively attractive. Certainly that is the way all the great artists of the world have thought and wrought, from the man of the Stone Age who first decorated pottery to the American of to-day who is concerned with filling space upon panel or canvas.