THE MEANING OF PICTURES
THE MEANING OF PICTURES
CHAPTER I
TRUTH IN PAINTING
Those people who go out into the highways of art crying, Haro! Haro! in the name of realism, would certainly gain their cause could numbers give them a verdict. They have always been in evidence; they have always made themselves heard. There never was a time when the mob was not hungry for realities, when artists were not harping upon “truth to nature,” when critics were not concerned about “the realistic tendencies of the age.” The interest in things as things and the art that hinges upon facts as facts were from the beginning. For did not Apelles paint horses so realistically that other horses neighed at the sight of the picture? And did not Zeuxis deceive the birds with his painted grapes, and was not he himself deceived in turn by the painted curtain of Parrhasios? Admitting the stories to be greatly exaggerated, does not their very existence prove the liking for the realistic motive?
Indeed, the Greeks were accounted very good realists in the days of their late power. The Pergamon frieze, the “Samothracian Victory,” the “Dying Gaul” give the proof. And in earlier times they modelled and chiselled the Parthenon marbles so true to life that William Hazlitt based a theory of art upon them, maintaining that the aim of art was the imitation of nature and the finest art was simply the imitation of the finest nature. It was the realistic Roman marbles, founded upon those of Greece, that gave the first breath of inspiration to the painters of Italy. The Renaissance nature-study that went hand in hand with the study of the Greek was largely to enable the painters to reveal the model more completely, to draw a leg or arm or face more exactly, to place figures in an atmospheric envelope, to reproduce a likeness of the landscape background. If we examine the works of Fra Filippo, Botticelli, or Mantegna, we shall find that there was more of the earthly in their painting than the mystic face of the Madonna or the religious pathos of saints would disclose. They were intent upon the reality before them and evidently for the reality’s sake. They delighted in drawing a foot and placing it firmly upon the ground, in giving bulk, body, and weight to the figure, in painting flowers, leaves, and fruits with precision, in adjusting the exact relations of light-and-shade, in catching the right tone of color. It was all a close following of the model—a representation of nature itself or as near to it as they could attain.
But the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were far more rigid sticklers for the fact than the Italians. Their work was essentially a portrait of Holland and its people, as Fromentin has said, wherein faithfulness to the model was a primary consideration. From Hals and Rembrandt down to Van Mieris and Schalken every Dutchman considered an object as a plastic fact—a something not to be juggled with, but to be rendered as truthfully as possible. Indeed, it was the Dutchmen who set the pace for all the moderns in what is called realism. It was the five days upon a lady’s hand—a day to each finger—of Gerard Dou that suggested the ten days to a shoe-buckle of Meissonier. All the modern contingent of genre painters and students of still-life who paint things that “stand out” are but a growth from the Dutch. The tradition has been handed down unimpaired, losing none of its ancient positiveness, but rather gaining some latter-day exactness in the process of transmission.
For just now realism in art seems more of a desideratum than ever. And from the way the word “truth” is bandied about studio and gallery, one might think it the only thing worth having in artistic equipment. But we need not necessarily become either brow-beaten or bewildered by all this volume of talk about the real. For, bluntly stated, there is no such thing as absolute realism in art. The “real” is nature itself, and “truth” is merely the report of nature made by man. Some cattle and horses standing under a tree in a meadow are a reality, and your description or report of the scene, either in words, lines, or colors, would be the truth of the scene—that is, provided your description was accurate. Under no circumstances is the report made by producing the real things in evidence. It is practically impossible to do that in art. Any close attempt at doing it, or misleading one into thinking he sees reality, generally results in absurdity or repulsiveness. What, for instance, could be more hideous than the wax figure in the museum? Or what more dull than the modern battle-panorama where dummy-figures and painted figures mingle to make up the scene?
Art is far removed from such attempts. Instead of producing the real it merely implies or suggests the real by certain signs and symbols which we have agreed among ourselves to recognize as its equivalent. If, for instance, we attempt to bring to the mind of another the thought of water we do not get a glassful of it and place it upon the table to show what we mean. We simply say or write “water”—a word of five letters which bears no likeness or resemblance whatever to the original, yet brings the original to mind at once. This is the linguistic sign for water. The chemical sign for it, H2O, is quite as arbitrary, but to the chemist it means water again. And only a little less arbitrary are the artistic signs for it. The old Egyptian conveyed his meaning by drawing a zigzag up or down the wall; Turner in England often made the few horizontal scratches of a lead pencil do duty for it; and in modern painting we have some blue paint touched with high lights to represent the same thing. None of these signs attempts to produce the original or has any other meaning than to suggest the original. They are signs which have meanings for us only because we agree to understand their meanings beforehand.