Fifteen Discourses

by Sir Joshua Reynolds

The most careless reader of these Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds will be struck by their frequent slighting and depreciatory allusions to the great Venetian colourists, and by the almost passionate note of warning sounded in them against the teaching and influence of these masters. The school of Venice is always referred to by Sir Joshua as the “decorative” school; “mere elegance” is defined as its principal object, and its “ornamental” character is affirmed to be totally inconsistent with any achievement of the first order. Tintoret and Veronese are selected for especial condemnation. “These are the persons who may be said to have exhausted all the powers of florid eloquence to debauch the young and inexperienced.” They have turned many painters “from those higher excellences of which the art is capable, and which ought to be required in every considerable production.”

If we seek more particularly the ground of Sir Joshua’s dislike of the Venetians, we shall find it in the fact that that school was, as he says himself, “engrossed by the study of colour to the neglect of the ideal beauty of form.” Ideal beauty of form constituted, in Sir Joshua’s view, the only possible really noble motive in art. He never for a moment, in criticism and theory, admitted the possibility of colour constituting such a motive. Colour, in his judgment, remained always a quite secondary and merely decorative affair, while the true greatness of the painting depended entirely on its excellence as a study of form. In one of his letters to the Idler he pushes this view to such a length, and so entirely confines the idea of beauty to form, and form alone, that he actually asserts that the colour of a thing can have no more to do with its beauty than its smell has.

If it were an ordinary critic who wrote and reasoned thus, we should pass by his judgments as indicative merely of a totally defective colour sense. But to suppose that Reynolds, of all men, was defective in this respect would be absurd. The extraordinary thing about him is that no sooner had he passed from the lecture-room to his own studio than he proceeded to demonstrate in his work his own intense appreciation of that insidious school of colour against which he was never tired of warning his hearers. He was himself one of those victims whom Tintoret and Veronese had “debauched.” He had stayed in Venice but a few weeks, in Rome two years, and yet the example of the Venetians had made incalculably the deeper impression upon him. With all the force of his judgment and reason he approved the teaching of Michael Angelo, but with a warmth which had more of emotion in it he adored the great colourists. Into the examination of the methods by which these had obtained their effects he threw himself with an energy which amounted to downright excitement, and to his thirst for information sacrificed even the paintings that so allured him, rubbing and scraping away, as we are told, the impasto of several valuable pictures in order that he might investigate the composition of the successive layers of colour. His own ceaseless experiments in colour effects and the use into which he was led of refractory pigments, resulting too often in the cracking or peeling of his pictures, are a further testimony to the hold which, entirely against his will, Venice exerted over him. He recognised it himself even while he submitted to it. In the last words addressed by him to the Academicians there is a pathetic consciousness of what he seems to have felt as his own disloyalty in not sticking in practice to that greatness which his reason always assured him was pre-eminent. He could claim to be an admirer only, not a follower, of Michael Angelo. “I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities and to the taste of the times in which I live. Yet,” he exclaims contritely, “however unequal I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again I would tread in the steps of that great master; to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man.”

In practice devoted to Venice, in theory despising her; in practice ignoring the great Florentines, in theory strenuously upholding their ideals: such are the contradictions one meets with in Sir Joshua Reynolds, and certainly his judgments, and these lectures in which they are contained, will never be rightly understood until a clue to these contradictions be found.

Let us remember, in the first place, that down to the eighteenth century the native art of England had been essentially an art of form. The great Gothic creative epoch had exhibited its energy and power in architecture and sculpture alone. No great school of painting arose in the North to vie with the varied and rich productions of the builders and sculptors of that age. Such colour as was used was used in a subordinate or, to use Sir Joshua’s word, a “decorative” sense—to enrich, that is, and add a brilliance to form. But it was in form only, whether structural, as in the great cathedrals, or statuesque, as in the innumerable and beautiful figures and effigies which adorn or repose in them, or expressed in the carved likeness of flowers and foliage and animals and birds—it was in form, I say, only that the Gothic genius displayed its real power and initiative.

And this being so, the nature of the contributions which the Gothic nations were to make to pictorial art might almost, perhaps, have been foreseen. Drawing rather than painting gave them the effects they sought, and the art of wood engraving became in their hands a natural and popular mode of expression. The powerful black line of the graver was found to be extraordinarily effective in delineating mere form, and accordingly in this new art, first started in Europe about the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Gothic races, however hopelessly behind in delineation by colour, took the lead. They treated it, indeed, quite frankly, not as a pictorial but as a sculptural representation. That is to say, they ignored aerial perspective and effects of light and shade altogether, and made no attempt to produce the illusion to the eye of a represented scene or landscape. On the other hand, each figure, or object, or animal was outlined with extraordinary clearness and force, as if it were being designed for a carving in relief. One has but to turn from the sculptured work in wood or stone to the wood engravings of the same period to recognise the similarity in spirit between the two, and realise how thoroughly genuine a product of its age the art of engraving was. It carried on the Gothic temper and characteristic view of nature and life. It loved the same direct and literal statements, and its sole preoccupation was how to express them with as much matter-of-fact precision as possible and invest them with all the air of positive realities. Moreover, the art, as it was developed in the North, betrays the same strong popular sympathies that run through all Gothic art. The same perception belongs to it of the significance and interest of all homely objects and scenes, and it loves to depict in the same way the details of the life and labour of the common people. And if it cannot give to these things the actual reality of concrete form, it still endeavours to attain this end so far as can possibly be done by outline. Its instinct is always to treat its subjects as things, never as appearances.

Wood engraving, then, carries on directly the great Gothic movement, and is part of that movement. It continues to apply to life that measure of form which had hitherto so completely satisfied the Northern nations, but which was soon to satisfy them no longer. Moreover, although this splendid Gothic outburst of formative and structural art by degrees waned and spent itself, yet still it remained the only aspect of art of which the North had cognisance. The influence of the Renaissance was for long accepted in the North as a structural influence only. In England painting remained a dead letter, and on the Continent the only notable school which arose, the Dutch school, was remarkable for just the characteristics which had always distinguished Northern art—a love of the facts of common life and a close, exact, and literal representation of form. In short, if we were to take our stand in the middle of the eighteenth century we should find stretching behind us the long history of an art which had developed with unexampled vigour all the resources of form, but which had never been really warmed and suffused by any great conception of the value of colour. This was the atmosphere and world of art into which Sir Joshua was born, and of which his criticism is the outcome.

I will ask the reader now, in this brief survey of ours of the currents that are carrying us on to the moment of Reynolds’s life and influence, to turn his eyes southward to Italy, where he will perceive an altogether new element in art gathering head and preparing to exert an influence contrary to the old influence of form over the rest of Europe.

I have always thought myself that, as the intellectual and matter-of-fact qualities of the Western mind are especially embodied in form, so the emotional and sensuous qualities of the Eastern mind are embodied, or find expression, in colour. However that may be, it would seem to be certain that a conception of the possibilities of colour quite unknown in Europe previously was gradually introduced into Italy during the centuries which ensued between the collapse of classic Rome and the rise of the Gothic nationalities by Byzantine artists and architects arriving from Constantinople and the Eastern empires. This new use of colour, contributed by the East, and which was to take deepest root wherever the influence of the East had been most firmly established, is, moreover, quite easy to understand and define. Gothic colour was used, as I have said, subordinately to form and as one of form’s attributes, its range and limits being exactly defined by the body of those objects it belongs to. Oriental colour, on the other hand, is used quite differently. Instead of being handled by form, it is handled by light and shade, and with the help of light and shade it is at once enabled to overcome the limitations of form and to develop a rich and ample scheme of its own extending through the whole composition. The marks of colour used in this sense are, I believe, invariably these two: (1) It always employs its warmest and richest hues; (2) it always melts away the edges and exactitudes of form, and suffuses them all in a universal sunny glow.

It was in the interiors of their mosaic churches, swathed in mellow gold, inlaid with rich colours, and always deeply and darkly shadowed, that the Byzantine architects best embodied this Oriental conception of colour effect, and the whole of Italy was to some extent warmed by their glow. But it was in Venice, where the influence of the East was always paramount, and where the most splendid of all these mosaic churches glowed and glittered in the midst of the city, that the example had strongest and most definite effect. Here it grafted itself and bore fruit, and in the city which for so many centuries had sucked nourishment from Eastern sources there arose in due time a school of painting in which all the great characteristics of Oriental colour are exhibited.