Final advice.
And now we must end the chapter with the final advice to the student to study deeply all good examples of the great artists whose work we have noted, and to leave all others alone. By and by the student will find that he is in a position to compare the good with the bad, then will it be time enough for him to look at the second-rate work, much of which contains fine passages here and there and special merits of its own; but these cannot be appreciated until the student has considerable knowledge, and that is only to be obtained by a serious study of nature and of the work of the best masters here cited.
Barometer of naturalism.
Finally, we think we have shown that “Naturalism” has been the watchword of all the best artists, and that, after all, there are but few artists in any age. Many painters and modellers and sculptors there be, but artists are few indeed. One point which has impressed us in the inquiry into naturalistic art is the curious regularity with which so-called “imaginative” painters have appeared and made reputations for themselves in the after-glow, so to speak, of the setting sun of naturalism. It would appear that painters who have lived in an age of strong men have got fairly staggered by the good naturalistic work of their age, and have instinctively felt that, being no match for the great masters on their own lines, that their only way to fame and fortune is by eccentricity, and in assuming a superior tone of culture by the production of allegorical or classical inanities. The uneducated of their own generation, thoroughly tired of a naturalism whose aim they have never understood, hail with delight any novelty or new departure, and they praise puerility and falseness of colour as colour, false drawing as idealizing, conventional composition as original, the conventional and modern treatment of draperies beneath which no anatomy is discernible as an idealized and poetic treatment of drapery, and finally, in the subject of the picture they often mistake sentimentality for sentiment and sentiment for poetry. Thus these weaker men rise to fame, and many follow where they lead. But the generation which gave them fame dies, and a new generation, which has forgotten the triumph of the naturalistic masters of the past generation, wearies of them, and naturalistic work is again appreciated. The story of art seems to us like the mercury in a barometer, ever oscillating upwards and downwards, ever up towards the acme of naturalism, and ever down towards the abyss of conventionality and classicism. If we mentally map out the readings of this barometer on a chart, we shall find naturalism triumphant as the apex of each curve, whilst in the ascending curve will be found the strugglers towards naturalism, and in the descending curve the fallers away from naturalism. |The masters.| On the apices of these curves will be found triumphant the masters, such as the sculptors of the Egyptian lions, the sculptors of the Assyrian lion-hunts, Pheidias, Van Eyck, Durer, Holbein, Da Vinci, Titian, Velasquez, Donatello, Rembrandt, De Hooghe, Corot, Millet, Gainsborough, and Whistler.
CHAPTER III.
PHENOMENA OF SIGHT, AND ART PRINCIPLES DEDUCED
THEREFROM.
Introduction.
Having thus demonstrated that the best artists have always tried to interpret nature, and express by their art an impression of nature as nearly as possible similar to that made on the retina of the human eye, it will be well to inquire on scientific grounds what the normal human eye really does see.
The argument.
Our contention is that a picture should be a translation of a scene as seen by the normal human eye. That the impression will vary with individuals, there is no doubt, for the artist will see subtleties never dreamed of by the commonplace or uneducated eye, and his aim will, of course, be to portray those subtleties in his picture, and hence one source of individuality in a work, another being in the way in which it is done. Our task now shall be to examine into the physical, physiological and psychological properties of sight, and to arrive at a conclusion, in so far as science allows us, as to how the normal eye does see things. The student will do well to read Chapter II. of Book III. of Dr. Michael Foster’s “Text Book of Physiology,” as well as the matter on the eye in Ganot’s Physics, before going any further in this chapter, for we do not wish to go over ground which has been occupied previously, our aim being to give a view from the artistic standpoint of the physical, physiological, and psychological properties of eyesight. We will, then, proceed to consider how well we see external nature, that is, within what limits, for we never see her exactly as she is, as we shall show.
Optic nerves.