HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES.*
EVERY artist when he shows his pictures is familiar with the person who says : " Of course I don't know anything, and can't criticise, but I know what I like." As a rule those who utter this stereotyped phrase are among the most critical and prejudiced of people. They set up the small Standard of their personal prejudice, and reject as incomprehensible and absurd all that is not under their banner. If anything could enlarge the views of these people it would be the book before us. Throughout the author shows not only a most extensive knowledge of pictures, but a wide sympathy with all schools, old and new. The kind of people just referred to may know what they like, but as a rule they are singularly perverse in trying to find the object of their affection. People who look in a picture for scientifically accurate representations of natural facts often persist in searching for them in the works of the primitive Italians. So it is the practice of many who are deeply touched by the idealism of those early painters to resent as an injury to themselves the beauties of Terburg or Tiepolo.
If we wish to be successful in our intercourse with pictures, as with men, we must accept them as they are. We must get our minds into a receptive state so that we can enjoy the diverse painters of many lands and ages,—take what each offers, so long as it is good of its kind. In the cultivation of this width of outlook Mr. Witt's volume should largely assist. The author divides his work into chapters, dealing with the influence of date and country upon art as well as the separate consideration of colour, composition, and drawing, and many other subjects. Mr. Witt in his preface says that his book makes no appeal to the artist or expert. We feel sure, how- aver, that a great many, both artists and experts, could derive benefit from the wisely comprehensive attitude of the author. Many modern painters seem to consider that art, as far as they are concerned, existed only within the last sixty years. Because landscape painters can now represent truth of natural structure and atmospheric effect in a way unthought of in the past, it is by no means certain that they cannot learn from the ancients. It matters not whether a picture be an English landscape of to-day or a Madonna of the guattrocento, both must obey one absolute law ; that is, both works, regard- less of subject, must make an harmonious pattern within the enclosing lines of the frame. Too often now we see pictures which seem to be mere peep-holes upon an isolated scrap of landscape. A wall of a modern exhibition often looks as if a panorama had been cut up and the pieces framed. In learning the truth about natural effect we have forgotten a great deal about the necessity of a picture being a pattern. Many a landscape painter whose work is hung at the Academy might study composition among the early Tuscans and Venetians at the National Gallery. There he will see how the painters in the past made the boundaries of their pictures part of the pattern. To produce perfect harmony the lines of a picture must not only harmonise with each other, but with those of the frame. There is another class of persons whose attitude towards the past requires adjustment. We refer to those who use the great works of the ancients chiefly as a means of belittling the achievements of the present. In reference to this we will quote some ex- cellent sense from Mr. Witt's chapter on "Considerations of Date" :- "The common tendency to judge of all art, especially of the art of the present, by comparing it with previous art often results in ignorant and prejudiced antipathy to all innovation or originality. This tendency, however, based on what has been well termed the traditional spirit of the public,' is due not so much to excessive study of the history of the development of art, but to the prevail- ing idea that between the art of the old masters and that of our own contemporaries there exists a hard-and-fast line of demarca- tion ; that the so-called • old masters' are on a different level from the beat masters of to-day, belong indeed to another category. Nothing is further from the truth. Much of the worship of the old is intellectual cowardice begotten of ignorance. The old • Hato to Look at Pictures. By Robert Clermont Witt. London: G. Boll and Sons. 15s.] masters are not always good. The halo with which they are sur- rounded is often unjustified. Many old pictures dating from the best periods are not to be compared with the productions of modern mediocrity. For in the same way that many of the finest works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have been destroyed by misadventure, so accident has preserved for us others of quite inferior value. Painting in its broadest aspects pre- serves from age to age a real continuity. Styles may alter, but the essentials remain The painters of to-day will be the old masters of to-morrow. And so it comes that there is no phase of modern painting, however startling in its novelty, however audacious and revolutionary in its originality, which cannot be paralleled among the most universally respected of these same old masters.' Giorgione was in his way as revolu- tionary as Menet, Rembrandt as Whistler, Hogarth as Mader Brown. Whenever tradition, and only tradition, has been the watchword of painting, art has declined, until the inevitable re- action sets in and experiment takes its place."
The chapters dealing with the more technical branches of the subject, such as colour, composition, and drawing, are full of information which should be of the greatest use to the lay- man. Here he will learn what painters mean by truth of "tone," and other important things. We cannot help wishing that Mr. Witt had devoted some space to what Mr. Berenson has aptly called " space composition." It is the key to the effect produced by many masterpieces, notably those of the Umbrian painters. Composition deals with the harmonious disposition of objects ; space composition with harmony of the intervening spaces. Also we could wish that the two different classes of artistic impulse had been considered more definitely. We refer to the purely creative, as distinguished from the illustrative, genius. Coleridge describes the former in the following lines :—
"I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
O Lady ! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live, Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold of higher worth Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd, Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth."
This is the mental attitude of Michelangelo and Leonardo, and at the present time of Watts. The illustrator is inspired by the " outward forms," real or imagined, as represented by Raphael, Pinturicchio, and Abbey. The recognition of this essential difference in mental attitude is of ten a great help in getting into sympathy with a painter and his works.
In some ways, the chapters on " The Subject" and " Treat- ment " are as interesting as any in the book. In the former the advice to painters to care more, and to the public less, for subject is certainly sound. The public too often expects a picture to be a painted story, and not a work raising pictorial emotion. The artist is apt to forget that art must raise human emotion as well. From the chapter on " Treatment " we quote a passage on the imitation of Nature which is worth the consideration of those people whose only standard of excellence is the resemblance a picture has to Nature, a pro- ceeding which converts a work of art into a scientific docu-
ment :-
"Painting is after all a deception, a trick, a convention by which objects in three dimensions are represented in terms of two only, by means of line, colour, and light and shade. He imitates Nature in the sense that he takes natural forms for his models. Indeed, were it to be desired, complete imitation of Nature is not to be attained in paint, if alone for the fact that the vast discrepancy in actual brilliance between the brightest pigments and the hues of Nature can never be overcome. . . . . . It is strange that the misconception of art as a slavish imitation of Nature should have taken so strong a hold of men's minds. It is a fallacy hard to dispel. Burger expressed the whole truth when he wrote : 'In the works which interest us the authors substitute themselves, so to speak, for Nature. However commonplace the natural material may be, their perception of it is special and rare.' " With this quotation we must take leave of this book, which we have read with great pleasure. It shows that the author has both wide sympathy and knowledge, and it cannot but be largely helpful to those who wish to increase their interest in pictures. A better Christmas gift for people who are dimly "fond of pictures," but who regret that they " know nothing
about them," could not be found.
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