The first principle for the painter is to acquire a personal mode of feeling and thinking, and the second that he should find an adequate and personal method of expressing himself. The painter must choose his method. If he has only the old themes to paint the old forms will suit him well enough—portraits and single figures, landscapes and marines, cattle pictures and still life—but if he has anything special to say, he must find for himself a special and unique form of expression. The only criterion is beauty.
CHAPTER V
ON LIGHT AND TONE PROBLEMS
In his "Art in the Netherlands," and his various books on Italian art, H. Taine has maintained that the hand of the mediæval painter was largely guided by optical sensations. And, following this rather suggestive, than conclusive, trend of argument, we will readily perceive that the peculiar lighting conditions of those days, the semi-darkness of the interiors, the play of sunlight dying in the obscurity of shadows, and the absence of strong artificial lights have done much to disclose to the genius of a Titian and a Rembrandt the manifold harmonies of chiaroscura, of colouring, modelling and emotion. The tallow candle, the oil lamp, the torch and the open fire-place were the only artificial light appliances known to the Middle Ages, and they were all only like solitary rays of light in universal darkness. Illumine a room by night, by placing a candle on the table or on the floor, and judge for yourself. The effects obtained, no doubt, would appear to you as weird and picturesque. The flickering light is uncertain, the shadows are intensely dark and pronounced, almost crude and vacillating, as if engaged in a continual combat with light. The contrasts are startling, yet not discordant, the vague train of light mingled with shadows accentuate only a few places with vivid spots, perchance the polished surface of a piece of furniture, a glass or pewter mug on the table, the collaret or jewelled belt of some fair lady. The eye is led to noticing gradations of obscurity, the darkness grows animated with colour and form, and we see the objects as through a glaze of Van Dyke brown.
No wonder that the painter of the Middle Ages, having become sensible to the beauty of transparent darkness and the brilliant passages of light, dared to unite extremes and to show every form and colour in its full strength. The vagueness of chiaroscural effects was the great modifier which enveloped all adjacent objects in clair obscure and tempered them with a warm and mellow radiance.
How different are the conditions in our time. There are no more Schalcken or Rembrandt effects. We have succeeded in banishing darkness from our homes. We have become very sanitary, we want light and air, the walls of houses are built less substantial, and through the increased largeness and transparency of panes, the daylight streams in with dazzling vehemence. It penetrates into the remotest nooks and corners. Even at dawn the shadows are only vaguely dark, of an uncertain and mixed bluish grey. Lenbach, the portrait painter, realized this deficiency, and found it necessary to construct a special studio, where the light was only sparingly admitted through deep casements, and where the sitters for his old-master-like interpretations of modern characters were placed far away from the windows.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum, New York
LADY IN GRAY.