ILLUSTRATIONS
| Millet: | ||
| 1. | ["The Goose Girl,"] Saulnier Collection, Bordeaux | Frontispiece |
| facing page | ||
| 2. | ["The Sower,"] Vanderbilt Collection, Metropolitan Museum, New York | 46 |
| 3. | ["The Gleaners,"] The Louvre | 50 |
| 4. | ["The Spaders"] | 54 |
| 5. | ["The Potato Planter,"] Shaw Collection | 58 |
| 6. | ["The Grafter,"] William Rockefeller Collection | 62 |
| 7. | ["The New-Born Calf,"] Art Institute, Chicago | 66 |
| 8. | ["The First Steps,"] | 70 |
| 9. | ["The Shepherdess,"] Chauchard Collection, Louvre | 72 |
| 10. | ["Spring,"] The Louvre | 74 |
| Raphael: | ||
| 11. | ["Poetry,"] The Vatican | 112 |
| 12. | ["The Judgment of Solomon,"] The Vatican | 114 |
| 13. | [The "Disputa,"] The Vatican | 116 |
| 14. | ["The School of Athens,"] The Vatican | 118 |
| 15. | ["Parnassus,"] The Vatican | 120 |
| 16. | ["Jurisprudence,"] The Vatican | 122 |
| 17. | ["The Mass of Bolsena,"] The Vatican | 124 |
| 18. | ["The Deliverance of Peter,"] The Vatican | 126 |
| 19. | ["The Sibyls,"] Santa Maria della Pace, Rome | 128 |
| 20. | ["Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami,"] Gardner Collection | 130 |
| John S. Sargent: | ||
| 21. | ["The Hermit,"] Metropolitan Museum, New York | 136 |
| Titian: | ||
| 22. | ["Saint Jerome in the Desert,"] Brera Gallery, Milan | 142 |
| Saint-Gaudens: | ||
| 23. | ["Plaquette Commemorating Cornish Masque"] | 182 |
| 24. | ["Amor Caritas"] | 196 |
| 25. | ["The Butler Children"] | 206 |
| 26. | ["Sarah Redwood Lee"] | 208 |
| 27. | ["Farragut,"] Madison Square, New York | 212 |
| 28. | ["Lincoln,"] Chicago, Ill. | 214 |
| 29. | ["Deacon Chapin,"] Springfield, Mass. | 216 |
| 30. | ["Adams Memorial,"] Washington, D.C. | 218 |
| 31. | ["Shaw Memorial,"] Boston, Mass. | 220 |
| 32. | ["Sherman,"] The Plaza, Central Park, New York | 224 |
ARTIST AND PUBLIC
I
ARTIST AND PUBLIC
In the history of art, as in the history of politics and in the history of economics, our modern epoch is marked off from all preceding epochs by one great event, the French Revolution. Fragonard, who survived that Revolution to lose himself in a new and strange world, is the last at the old masters; David, some sixteen years his junior, is the first of the moderns. Now if we look for the most fundamental distinction between our modern art and the art of past times, I believe we shall find it to be this: the art of the past was produced for a public that wanted it and understood it, by artists who understood and sympathized with their public; the art of our time has been, for the most part, produced for a public that did not want it and misunderstood it, by artists who disliked and despised the public for which they worked. When artist and public were united, art was homogeneous and continuous. Since the divorce of artist and public art has been chaotic and convulsive.
That this divorce between the artist and his public—this dislocation of the right and natural relations between them—has taken place is certain. The causes of it are many and deep-lying in our modern civilization, and I can point out only a few of the more obvious ones.
The first of these is the emergence of a new public. The art of past ages had been distinctively an aristocratic art, created for kings and princes, for the free citizens of slave-holding republics, for the spiritual and intellectual aristocracy of the church, or for a luxurious and frivolous nobility. As the aim of the Revolution was the destruction of aristocratic privilege, it is not surprising that a revolutionary like David should have felt it necessary to destroy the traditions of an art created for the aristocracy. In his own art of painting he succeeded so thoroughly that the painters of the next generation found themselves with no traditions at all. They had not only to work for a public of enriched bourgeois or proletarians who had never cared for art, but they had to create over again the art with which they endeavored to interest this public. How could they succeed? The rift between artist and public had begun, and it has been widening ever since.