The Manitou Lunette.E. H. Blashfield.
The Manitou Lunette.E. H. Blashfield.
The Manitou Lunette.E. H. Blashfield.
Story; rich men and women wished to decorate their palaces with scenes from the old Greek legends; while cities adorned their public buildings with allegorical subjects in which the pride they took in their own municipal life was set forth in figures, personifying the character of its greatness. Moreover, those were stirring times in which the rivalry between the cities and between the noble families led to constant wars and plottings. Men, beginning as nobodies, rose rapidly to power. Not, as they do to-day in our country, by using their brains and energy in the peaceful pursuits of industry and trade and learning; but through brute force, guided by brains that schemed to win by fraud and violence. So it was man that, as we say, cut the chief figure in these times; man’s power and woman’s beauty. Mankind was so interested in itself that it spared little thought for the beauty of nature. It is true that architects built noble houses on sites commanding beautiful views and laid out the gardens with fountains, trees and flowers. Even this however, was for the glorification of some man or woman. But the love of nature which leads artists to paint landscapes and the public to value such pictures is a different thing. In the love of nature man forgets himself; he is absorbed in the beauty of the natural world outside himself; he is fond of nature for its own sake.
It was not until the Seventeenth Century that artists began to study and paint the landscape in this spirit. When they did so, the landscape took thefirst place in their pictures, and the figures, if any were introduced, became the unimportant features, kept small and put in merely to enliven the scene. By this time landscape painting, as a subject distinct in itself, branched out into two directions—thenaturalisticand theformal. Thenaturalisticwas practised by the Dutch artists, who painted the out of door life and appearance of Holland so truthfully, that to-day when we look at their pictures we can see the meadows and streams, the mills and the farms, exactly as they were three hundred years ago. But the subject of natural landscape we will study later on.
The other kind of landscape I have calledformalbecause, instead of being drawn directly from nature, it was made up, like the Italian figure pictures, according to a rule or formula or convention. Just as in those pictures the figures were represented as grander and more beautiful than people usually are in real life, and were arranged for the purpose of a handsome composition in attitudes that people do not usually assume, so with the formal landscapes. The artists tried to make them more grand and imposing than ordinary nature, and composed them according to an artificial plan. They did not in their picture represent any real scene in nature, but built up a number of natural details into a composition, constructed on a geometric plan. And especially they introduced details of classic architecture; so that these formal designs are often calledclassiclandscapes.
If you turn to the illustration you will see at once that the artist has not represented the natural landscape. The very title,Dido Building Carthage, shows the classic influence. The subject is taken from Virgil’s Æneid, Book I, line 420. Turner, the great English artist, who in 1815 painted this picture, had never seen Carthage; nor had he ever seen any spot on earth like the one represented here. What he had seen was the work of Claude Lorrain, a French artist of the Seventeenth Century, who lived in Italy and invented this kind of landscape. Turner himself preferred to paint the natural landscape; but, since the people of his own day admired theclassiclandscape of Claude and his followers, he wished to prove that he also could paint like Claude, if he chose; and as well as the French artist. Therefore, when he died, he left this picture and another classic landscape,The Sun rising in a Mistto the National Gallery, on condition that they should be hung alongside of two by Claude Lorrain. So, while studying this picture we are really studying the principles on which Claude built up theclassiclandscape, and on which his followers worked for nearly two hundred years, until the love of nature won out and thenaturalisticlandscape took its place.
The geometric plan of this picture is very simple. You can discover it by joining the upper and lower opposite corners by two diagonal lines that cut each other in the center. This produces four triangles; of which the top is given to the sky, the bottom to the water, and the two sides to the land and buildings and trees. Sky and water occupy more space than the other two parts; but since the latter are filled with details of bold design, they attract extra attention, so that the balance between the full and empty spaces is kept true.
The balance is a harmonious one. You will perhaps realise better what this means if you think for a moment of a balance that is not harmonious; for instance of a pair of hanging scales, in one pan of which there is a flat round one pound weight, exactly balancing a pound of candy in the other pan. We should not call this a harmonious balance. If we examine why it is not, it will help us to understand the meaning of harmony in composition. The reason is that there is no relation between the box of candy and the one pound weight, except that each weighs the same. On the other hand, in the picture every detail has some relation to the other details, and all are related to the whole. The whole, in fact, is a woven mass of contrasts and repetitions, in exact relation; very much as a composition of music is made up of exactly related contrasts and repetitions of sound notes. Alter one of these and there will be a discord, unless some other notes are altered to restore the harmony. Similarly if the artist had altered the shape of one of the details in his picture, or its color, or its lightness or darkness, there would have been a discord in the effect of his picture; it would no longer present the appearance of perfect oneness. He would have to alter some other parts to restore the harmony.
In studying the picture to try and discover how the effect of harmony is produced we find ourselves studying the contrasts and repetitions of which it is composed. And, first the contrasts. One big one is the contrast of the architecture with everything else in the picture—the contrast of these quiet stately masses, which seem so firm and strong, compared with the shimmering surface of the water and the tremulous mistiness of the sky; the contrast also of their decided lines with the irregular spotting of the figures, and with the irregular masses of the trees and foliage. The big tree, although it is motionless in the quiet air, seems as if a breeze would stir it; the water has ripples of motion; some of the figures appear to be moving, while others are only still for the moment, and the sky—it is palpitating with the actual stir of the atmosphere, as the upper air gradually cools and draws up the warmer air from below, and this warmer air cools into mistiness. But the buildings stand immovable and solid. While all around them either moves or could move, they seem to suggest the force and permanence of what does not change. Or perhaps we may feel that grand as the buildings are, stately and magnificent, yet the sky is lovelier, for the buildings are limited to their one size and shape, while the sky seems a part of that which has no limits or boundaries. It draws off our imagination into the mystery of distance and of the unknown. So the impressions which the contrast of the architecture arouses are not only such as the eye can see, but such also as the imagination can feel. This, no doubt, is one of the secrets of the pleasure which so many people have found and still find inclassiclandscapes.
And now for another series of contrasts: those supplied by the lights and darks. In the original picture these contrasts would depend partly on the color of the various objects; but here, in the black and white reproduction, we may think of the pattern simply as one of very dark spots and very light ones, threaded together by others of varying depths of greyness. Again, what an important part the sky plays! It is a flood of light, against which everything forms a silhouette,[4]more or less dark, relieved by spots and streaks of light. The water, but for the pathway of reflection, is shrouded in shadow. Shadow, too, is wrapping itself round the tall building on the left, and slumbers drowsily among the trees on the opposite hill slopes. The artist, you will notice, has varied the distribution of shadows. On the left the gradation from very dark to very light is continuous. It is as if the first building struck a loud strong note, and the sound gradually diminished toward the distance. On the right, however, the foreground is lighter, and the dark gradually increases, swelling up, as they say in music, in acrescendoeffect and then passing in adiminuendofar off into the distance. In fact, on both sides of
Dido Building Carthage.J. M. W. Turner.
Dido Building Carthage.J. M. W. Turner.
Dido Building Carthage.J. M. W. Turner.
the picture the arrangement of dark and light is rhythmical. I have only touched upon the broad general plan of contrasted darks and lights, and must leave you to study for yourselves the intricate and subtle effects with which the picture abounds; for example, the fine threads and little dots of light and dark that form a tangle on the left bank; or, on the right, the mass of leafage in half shadow against which the trunk of the tree shows very dark. You know the old proverb about leading a horse to the water. I can draw your attention to these things, but I can not make you feel their beauty. I think, however, I can promise you, that, if you are sufficiently interested in what we are talking about to really study this picture, to explore carefully the lighter parts and peer into the shadows to see what lurks within them, its beauty will make itself known to you.
As I myself am examining a black and white reproduction of this picture, that lies before me while I write these lines, there is music coming from the next room. It has stopped, and I wish it would begin again; for music seems to fit in with the impressions that this picture stirs in my imagination. Nor is this merely a fanciful idea. Music is one art and painting is another. They are different, it is true, but yet are sisters with much in common. And why not? For they come from the same parents—the hand and the mind of man. And through the harmony of the light and dark of which this picture is composed there floats, it seems to me,the fancy of a melody. I think it comes from out the endless distance of that sky; gently floating toward us, and crooning over the objects in the foreground, as a mother murmurs a lullaby over her baby while it falls asleep. But it is not altogether crooning, for see that tree’s dark, round mass of tone! How it thumps itself into our notice, while its force spreads up the hill, and then leaps across the water, and stirs with a different kind of energy in the dark building on the left. There is nothing of the feebleness and the helplessness of a baby in this picture. It suggests rather, big and mighty effort, growing toward the time of rest. It is not the music of a lullaby I seem to hear, but the evening hymn of sturdy workers as they cease for a little from their toil.
IN the preceding chapters we have been studyingformal, orconventional, composition. We have seen how the artists arrange their groups of figures and the position and gestures of each figure according to a rule or formula or convention, the basis of which is a geometric plan, on which they build up a balance of repetitions and contrasts. And we have noted that these formal compositions are artificial arrangements; that the figures are not grouped as you might expect them to be in real life, nor in positions that men and women usually assume. And these formal compositions we have seen were also called,classic; the last example being theclassic landscapein which nature has been made to look more grand by the addition of features of classic architecture.
We reach now another principle of composition. It is the arrangement adopted by the artist, whose motive is to make his picture represent nature naturally; so I call itnaturalistic composition. But, as we have noted before, the artist is not satisfied merely to represent nature; he wishes in the first place to make his picture a thing of beauty. Natureis not always beautiful; so he selects from nature and arranges his subject in such a way, that we shall not only recognise how true the picture is to nature, but feel also how beautiful it is as a work of art. Its beauty, you see, is founded, not upon a formal plan, but on its truth to nature.
Here for example, isThe Sowerby the French artist, Jean François Millet. If we have ever seen a man scattering grain, we recognise at once the picture’s truth to life. But Millet’s intention was not only to make us know what the man is doing, but to create an impression on our minds that shall make us feel a sense of beauty, through the way in which the picture represents the incident. As a young man, Millet had studied the examples of Greek and Roman sculpture in the Museum of the Louvre in Paris, and learnt through them the classic principles of composition—the balance obtained by rhythmical repetition and contrast. And these principles, as we shall see presently, are applied to this figure ofThe Sower. I hope to show you that this is the secret of the picture’s beauty. Although theactionof the figure inside the shabby clothes is quite natural, themovementis rhythmical. In fact it represents a mixture of theclassicaland thenaturalisticmotive.
Firstly, thenaturalistic. We know at a glance what the man is doing. The forms in the picture, the colors, the light and shade, make an impression on the eye which is immediately telegraphed to one of the centers of the brain. The result is that we know the picture represents a man in a field sowinggrain, while from the color and light in the sky, and the shadows creeping over the field, we know that it is twilight.
This direct thought stirs us to further thinking; for we recall that laborers start for their work in early morning, so this one has probably been toiling all through the day. But we notice that his actions are still vigorous, he should be tired, yet he is working as sturdily as at any time during the day; perhaps with even more energy, in order that he may finish sowing the field before the darkness comes. In fact, the arrangement of forms, colors, and light and shade has made a strong impression on the thinking part of the brain, stirring us not only to observe, but to draw conclusions. And this, of course, is what Millet meant that it should do.
But this was not all that he intended. Most people of his day must have thought it was; for nearly all the critics, or persons who are supposed to be able to judge of the value of a picture, and nearly all the connoisseurs, who are supposed to be able to appreciate its beauty, turned up their noses and shrugged their shoulders. “This is horrible!” they exclaimed. “A common laborer in his dirty clothes, doing his miserable work. Ugh! how vulgar! This is not art; for art should be concerned with beauty. Why does not the fellow paint some beautiful girl in beautiful draperies? Phew! Take the picture away, it smells of the farm.”
You see they confined their criticisms and appreciation to what the picture was about—its subject;and because they did not like the subject, they condemned the picture. They got no further thanknowingandthinking, they did not permit themselves tofeel. But it was on their feelings also that Millet wished to make an impression. Through the arrangement of line, form, color, and light and shade he sought to stir that other part of the brain to which messages are telegraphed by the senses, with a result that we are made tofeel. Let us analyse the composition; and see how it illustrates the principle that we have been discussing of balance, and rhythmic repetition, and contrast.
We will begin with the latter. Note, then, how the sloping line of the field cuts across the picture. This diagonal line is contrasted with the perpendicular sides of the picture, and with the upright direction of the figure of the man. It forms, however, another contrast; it divides the light from the dark. The sun has gone down behind the slope; so that, while the sky is still luminous with a lovely glow, the ground is in shadow, dreary and heavy looking. So, too, the figure of the man. The light is at his back, so that what we see of him is shrouded in gloom. Against the gloom of the ground his figure shows comparatively indistinctly, but the upper part stands very sharp against the light. There is a strong contrast between its heaviness and gloom and the lovely radiance of the waning light; while down below the figure looms out of the gloom and heaviness, as if it were a part of them that had gathered into definite shape. Yes, though his headmay stand against the sky, the man is part of the earth.
Right away, is there nothing in this to make us feel? Millet, at any rate, had often felt the poignancy of contrast, in his own life and in the lives of others. He had known what it was to see his wife and children short of food, to have his own stomach empty, while his mind was full of beautiful ideas, and his cottage full of pictures, that some day men would buy, but not yet. He had seen little bright faced children standing at the open grave of the father or the mother; the happy young bride at the altar, and among the congregation the young widow; and evening after evening, as the darkness fell, the lonely figures in the field, toiling out their short lives, whilst behind them spread the everlasting beauty of the sunset, and a few miles off in Paris, where he came from, the lights were gleaming and people were making ready for pleasure, though there too, as he knew from his own experience, people starved. Yes, it is through experience that we learn to feel deeply, and it is to experience that the contrast of this picture appeals.
When we recognise that by this contrast of light and darkness, Millet sought to express the dreary routine, day in day out, early and late, of the peasant’s lot in a world where nature is so beautiful, and there can be so much beauty in life, we may imagine to ourselves what would be the effect of raising or lowering the diagonal line. To have given more lighted space, would have made the figure standout too prominently so that it would have dominated the scene, and the scene itself would have seemed too spacious. Velasquez, in his equestrian portraits, kept the horizon line low, so thatPhilip IV, for example, or his minister,Olivarez, is made to appear a very important person in a very large world. But Millet wished us to feel the lowliness of the peasant, bound close to the earth in very narrow surroundings. Again, to have raised the horizon line, would have destroyed the balance between light and darkness, which now is absolutely true. This balance suggests a feeling of repose; shall I say of acquiescence in the necessity of the contrast? For Millet did not consider himself a reformer whose work is to set things right and to do away with contrasts; but an artist, whose aim was to harmonise the contrasts and to find some balance between the lights and darks of life; just as Stevenson out of his weakness and strength made his life a beautiful one.
And now let us study the lines of the figure. In the first place you will agree that they enclose a form which is unmistakably that of a man sowing grain. It was necessary for Millet to arrange the lines, in some way that should convey this impression. But there are many other ways in which they might have been arranged, so as to obtain this result. For in the act of sowing a man takes many positions and any one of these would have done, if all the artist had desired was to make usknowthat the man was sowing. But Millet wished to do more.
As a boy he toiled in his father’s fields, so he had
The Sower.J. F. Millet.
The Sower.J. F. Millet.
The Sower.J. F. Millet.
a fellow-feeling for the peasants; and as he watched them, day after day laboring so faithfully, he found a big idea in their work. It was something like this—work is necessary, and to do our own share of it as well as we can is the big thing for each of us. And the oldest work of all and the most necessary is the growing of the wheat. To-day the seed is laid in rows by machine-drills; but in Millet’s time it was scattered by hand, just as it had been since man began to sow. This sower, then, that he watched was a descendant of a long line of sowers, stretching back to the beginning of civilisation; and still in the fields of Barbizon he was doing his humble share of the world’s necessary work. Millet felt the bigness of this idea; and in his imagination the man was no longer Jacques or Jean—a sower; he became “The Sower,” a type—a big heroic type. Then, as Millet felt him to be, so he set to work to paint him, choosing such lines as would convey this big feeling to us. Observe, first, the balance of the figure: how the weight of the body is planted almost equally on both feet. If you try to put yourself in the position, you will find that you can raise neither foot without moving the body. If you wish to raise the back foot, you must move the body forward till the weight is on the right foot; or, if you would raise this latter, you must move the body back till the weight is over the left foot. The center of gravity or of mass runs down through the body and between the legs. Now sway your body backward and forward a few times, and then bring forward the left leg in front of theright, so that the position of the feet is reversed. Now sway again forward and backward. I ask you to do this that you may feel how freely the body moves in this position. And I ask you to stride, that you may feel that the position in the picture is only a momentary one, leading on to a natural advance. For this perfect poise of the body on the feet is not a stationary one, that in time will seem stiff, but part of a moving one, that has the freedom and the naturalness of life. And the movement is a swift one. We can feel it is so from the length of the stride; for it is only when you are moving quickly, that you can take long strides, and still preserve the balanced, rhythmic swing of the body.
We have spoken of the poise of the body on the legs; now let us note the action of the right arm. The action, I need hardly say, begins with taking a handful of grain from the bag; then the arm is swung back to the right to its full extent, and then again brought back to the bag. Between these two points—that of the bag and that of the full extent—the arm is poised in motion, just as the action of the body was poised between the backward and forward motion of the legs. We can feel that the arm is moving, and, at this instant it is moving backward, for our own experience when we walk and swing our arms naturally is that each arm goes back as the leg on that side goes forward. The man’s arm will reach its furthest point backward when he brings his full weight on the right foot. In a word, the poise of the arm and the poise of the leg correspond.They present an example of repetition of balance. It is enforced, you will observe, in the composition by the arm being made parallel to the direction of the backward leg. This is another instance of repetition; and there are still others: the repetitions of the waist line, the shoulders, and the hat brim; of the bandage on the left leg, the line from the shoulder through the thigh, the apron, hanging over the arm, and of the echo, as it were, of these, in the tail of the distant ox and the arm of the driver. These repetitions, and others that you may discover for yourself, help to bind the composition together and also to make it rhythmic.
And now for contrast, we have noted the big one made by the diagonal line, dividing the composition into light and dark. Let us note those appearing in the figure. First there is the big contrast of the figure’s own diagonal line from the shoulders down through the right leg. It is contrasted most forcibly with the sides of the picture, the horizon line, and the direction of the right arm and the left leg. The latter are practically at right angles to the figure—strongest of all contrasts of line. It is to all these vigorous contrasts that the energy and assertion of the figure are mainly due. But there are other contrasts in the figure. Do you notice that the swing of the arm brings the trunk of the body, or the torso, as it is called, along with it? Swing your own arm and you will find your torso following its direction. If the man’s arm were to reach its full extension, his left shoulder would appear and his torso wouldfront us nearly full. If his hand should reach the bag, the right shoulder would come forward until the torso would be seen almost in profile. However, neither of these extremes is presented. The swing of the torso is poised between the two. But do you observe that the swing of the torso and arms is across the path of direction of the swing of the legs? While they swing forward and backward, the arms and torso swing alternately from right to left and left to right.
Imitate this action with your own body, step forward briskly with a swinging stride and at the same time swing your arms and torso. If you feel the exhilaration of the action as I think you will, you will realise that it is the wonderful way in which Millet has suggested this contrast of the swing, that makes the action of the figure so stirring. By the contrast of its lines, it expresses energy; by the contrast of swing, so free, so rhythmic, so vigorous, it lifts us to enthusiasm.
But finally observe the position of the head and the direction of its gaze. While below it the torso and arms swing from side to side, the head is fixed, leaning a little forward in the direction of the onward movement, its eyes firmly set on what is ahead. Within the head is the brain which directs all the action of the figure. But the face is shadowed over, and through the shadow the features appear coarse and heavy. We feel that the brain, though prompting the man to do his work to the utmost, is after all a dull brain, in pitiful contrast to the vigor ofthe body. Heroic though the figure is in the grandeur of its free, swift movement, as grand, if you will take my word for it, as a Greek statue, yet it is but that of a humble peasant, unconscious that he is doing aught but that which he has to do.
There you have the idea as it presented itself to the imagination of Millet!
“The Sower” is a striking illustration of the point with which I started this book; that the beauty of a picture does not depend upon the subject, but upon the way it is represented.
INThe Sower, by Millet, we found that, though the composition was naturalistic, it was based upon the classic principle of rhythm of line. We shall not discover this principle in the present picture of aYoung Woman Opening a Window. The arrangement of the figure and its surroundings is simply natural.
The picture is by Johannes Vermeer[5]of Delft, so called because this town in Holland was his birthplace and the scene of his life’s work. Born in 1632, he is one of those famous Dutch artists of the Seventeenth Century, of whom I have already spoken. We were talking of landscape painting and mentioned that in this century the art branched out in two directions. Landscape up to that time having been used as a background for figures, became then an independent art, cultivated for its own sake; and the artists treated it in two ways. On the one hand, some applied the principles of geometric composition to an artificial building up of bits of nature into what is called the formal, or classic landscape; while other painters represented the natural landscapenaturally. These latter were the Dutchmen, who treated figures also in the same realistic spirit. That is to say, whether they painted portraits or figure pictures or landscapes, their aim was to represent the actual subject as they really saw it. They did not substitute an artificial arrangement for the natural appearance of people and things; nor did they try to obtain beauty by altering and improving upon nature. Their motive or purpose was to render the beauty that is actually in nature. So, for the most part, they chose subjects of familiar every day life.
This picture, for example, represents simply a glimpse of home life, of a Dutch girl in well-to-do circumstances. Perhaps the artist intended to make a portrait of her; probably his intention was only to paint a genre picture, that is to say, an incident of every day life. Not so much, however, for the sake of representing the incident, as of making it contribute to a subject of abstract beauty. How he has done this I hope we shall see presently. Meanwhile, I want you to grasp the distinction between simply representing an incident, as you or I might have seen it, if we had been present, and Vermeer’s motive of using the incident as a peg on which to hang some beauty of light and color and texture. I mean, it was the beauty of light and color and texture that made him pleased to paint this picture; and probably he would have been just as pleased if some other girl had been standing there, or some other objects had been spread upon the table.
Perhaps a familiar example will illustrate thisdistinction. Two people start off for an afternoon’s walk. One sets out because he wishes to call upon a friend who lives on the other side of the wood. To pay this call is the object of his walk; for the friend is building a new house. As he walks along he is busy wondering how far it is advanced, whether the plasterers have finished their work; and as he returns home he is thinking about the house he has seen and how he himself, when he builds a house of his own, will plan it differently. In fact, the incident of his friend’s being engaged in building is what interests him, and has been throughout the afternoon the motive of his walk. His companion, on the other hand, agrees to go along with him, not so much because he is interested in the house, although he is to some extent, but mostly because he loves a walk. He enjoys the exhilaration of the exercise; he is fond of the wood through which they have to pass. He will have a chance to hunt for the first signs of spring—the early skunk-cabbage, the shy peep of the violet through the dead leaves underfoot, the rose blush of the maples overhead, the piping and flicker of the first bird-arrivals and so on. The real motive of his walk is the joy of exercise and of the beauties met with on the way. Visiting the house was but an excuse.
There is the same distinction among painters. To some the representation of the incident is the main thing; to others, the rendering of the beauties which it involves. Vermeer, like the other Dutch artists, of the Seventeenth Century, belonged to the latter
Young Woman Opening a Window.Johannes Vermeer.(Property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Young Woman Opening a Window.Johannes Vermeer.(Property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Young Woman Opening a Window.Johannes Vermeer.
(Property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
class. Since, however, his subject is the peg on which he hangs his arrangement of light and color, let us begin by examining it.
A young woman is standing between a table and a window. With one hand she opens the casement while the other grasps the handle of a brass pitcher that stands in an ewer of the same material. Perhaps she is going to water some flowers that are outside on the window sill. Her costume consists of a dark blue skirt, buff-colored bodice, and a broad collar and hood-like cap of thin white linen. The table is covered with an oriental cloth, on which is a yellow jewel case, while over the blue chair lies a cloak of lighter blue. On the gray wall hangs a map. This and the table cloth may remind us, that the Dutch of that period, although they were fighting for their political liberty against Spain, found means to build ships and carry on trade across the sea with far distant countries. Possibly the girl was the daughter of some sea-captain or prosperous merchant.
Anyhow the picture, beside being a beautiful painting, is very interesting to us to-day as an illustration of the domestic life of a Dutch girl of some two hundred and fifty years ago. And the same interest belongs to all the old genre pictures. They make the past still alive to our eyes; just as the genre pictures painted to-day will show some future generation how we lived. But this, I repeat, was not Vermeer’s first thought. On the other hand, I do not wish you to think that he was not himselfinterested in the subject of his picture. He was, I am sure; but in another way. He, no doubt, arranged the figure with great care and carefully selected and grouped the surrounding objects. But, in placing the girl, he did not try to get the graceful lines that Raphael, for example, would have imagined. Vermeer’s desire was to keep the pose and gesture natural. In this he was simply following the general motive of the artists of his country and of that time. But his own particular motive in representing the girl in the act of opening the window was that the clear outside light might stream in at the back of her figure and blend with the dimmer light of the interior.
I said that we would study the kind of beauty that this picture possesses; and it is to be found in the rendering of the light. The Italians, busy with their grand classic compositions, would not have thought of this. Their motive was the beauty of form, arrayed in beautiful draperies, and so arranged that the figures should produce beautiful patterns of line and form. To make a motive of the beauty of natural light was a discovery of the Dutch.
They were artists, you see, and therefore in love with beauty. But they confined themselves, almost entirely, to real subjects of every day life, and accordingly had to find out the beauty that may be in these familiar things. And it was not long before they learned how much the beauty of things depends upon the light in which they are seen.
Before we go any further in our study of thepicture, let us see if we cannot be sure of this from our own experience. Whether you live in a city or in the country, how differently you feel when you start out in the morning, according as the day is fine or not. Under a bright sky everything takes on a cheerfulness that is communicated to our own spirit. Let the sky become downcast and the appearance of objects becomes dulled. Often too, some familiar object that we have passed time and time again without particular notice, suddenly attracts us. How beautiful! we exclaim. If we try to discover the reason of the beauty, we shall find very likely, that it is due to some effect of light. It need not be a bright light, on the contrary, it may be a soft light, such as wraps itself around objects like a gauzy veil, when the sky is thick with vapor. Do you remember that line of Tennyson’s—“Waves of light went over the wheat”? He had been watching a field of wheat, spread out smoothly like a pale golden carpet in the yellow sunshine. Suddenly, a soft breeze passes over it, and as the stems bend their heavy heads of grain, and recover themselves, ripples of light travel across the field. The poet notes it in his memory, for a future poem. So, if we use our eyes, we may note countless examples of the beauty which is added to the simplest things by light. In fact, the changing effect of light will correspond to the changing expressions that pass over the human face.
The Dutch artists, as soon as they became really interested in the nature and life around them,quickly recognised this fact, and made it the chief motive of their pictures. They were no longer satisfied with mere realism; that is to say, to make the figure and the objects around it look as real in the pictures as they did in actual reality. They sought to render the expression of which these objects were capable, under the influence of light. If you do not understand this I think you will, if you place a bunch of flowers in some dark corner of the room, look at it a little while, and then move it to the window. Now, as the light falls upon the flowers and shines through the petals, the whole bunch is transfigured. It has taken on a new appearance of beauty. Like a face that has suddenly lighted up with an expression of happiness, the flowers seem alive with radiance. They too, have their expression and it will change with the changing of light. For look at them again toward evening, when the light is low, and their faces, not less beautiful, will show a quite different expression.
Now the light which streamed in at that window in Delft, when Vermeer painted this picture, was a very cool, pure light; one would say, from seeing the original picture, a morning light in Spring, it is so pure and fresh and fragrant. Yes, one can even feel the fragrance of its freshness, so exquisitely has the artist suggested to us the impression of the lighted air that steals into the room, filling it with purity. See, how it bathes the wall; even the bare gray becomes radiant; how it gleams on the girl’s shoulder, and filters through her cap, making it inparts transparent, so that one sees the background color through it. Note also, how it roams among the objects in the room, caressing the under part of the girl’s right arm, bringing out the softness and plumpness of her left wrist; splashing the ewer and touching the pitcher, the table cloth, and other details with glints of sparkle, like notes of gladness in a melody of tender freshness.
Even in the reproduction one can feel the freshness that pervades the room, and the delicate quality of the lighted atmosphere that envelopes the figures and fills every part of the scene. I mean, that not only is this effect of light visible to our eyes, but it also stirs in us a sentiment or feeling of gladness and refreshment. Still more will the original, if you have a chance of seeing it in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, where, though a very small picture, it is one of the gems of the collection. For there you will feel also the effect of the color, yellow, gray, and various hues of blue. They are all cool colors, the blues especially, and very pure in hue, which increases the sensation of freshness.
A moment ago I spoke of the picture as being like a melody. It will suggest to some imaginations the blitheness of a spring-song. The fact that a painting may sometimes seem to have the tunefulness or harmony of music I have already mentioned in a previous chapter. The reason is that painting and music, although different arts, have certain elements in common. Later on, when we shall speak of color, I shall try to suggest to you the correspondence between sound notes in music and color notes in painting. But for the present I will remind you of an element, common to both arts, of which we have already spoken—rhythm. In Raphael’sJurisprudence, I pointed out to you the rhythm of movement in the figures. It flows through the forms of the figures in rippling, wave-like lines of direction. But nothing of that sort is apparent in Vermeer’s picture. There are repetitions and contrasts in the arrangement of the full and empty spaces; but they represent rather a pattern of spots; we are not conscious of any rhythm of line. Then, in what does the rhythm consist?
If you think of that line of Tennyson’s—“Waves of light went over the wheat,” you may perhaps discover for yourselves the kind of rhythm in this picture. To give you time to think it out, before I tell you, let me ask you, if you have noticed that in a flower-bed in the garden a number of blossoms of different colors will “dwell together in unity,” but if you pick some of these and bring them indoors and begin to arrange them in a vase, the colors will seem to clash. That they do not appear to clash in the flower bed is because the out-of-door light envelopes everything, soothes the violence of the colors and brings them all into an appearance of harmony. Similarly in this picture, the light streaming through the window brings all the different spots of color into a single harmony of effect. They are no longer separate and independent, but drawn together and united by the veil of lighted atmosphere. Of thisagain, we will speak when we reach the subject of color.
But the rhythm of this picture, in what does it consist? Yes, in the movement, not of form, but of light. Uniting all the colors into a single harmony, it flows in and out through the lighter and darker parts of the composition; sometimes in a broad sweeping flood, as on the wall; sometimes in little pulses of movement, as it leaps from point to point; now losing itself in the hollow of a shadow, then reappearing in the gleam of a fold; all the while streaming through the picture in a continuous ebb and flow. In fact, as we study it, we gradually find that the light does for the parts of this composition what the lines of direction did in Raphael’s—it unites them in a rhythmic movement.
Do not be disturbed, if at first reading these words convey little meaning to you; or if at first sight you do not feel the rhythm of the composition. It is there, however, and some day, if you are really going to be a student of pictures, you will feel it yourself.
For the present, if you will accept my word for it, I wish you to understand that this rhythmic effect of out-of-door light represented a new motive in painting. The Italians of the great period did not see it. It was the discovery of the Dutch realists, those artists of Holland in the Seventeenth Century, whose study was the real appearances of nature and life.[6]Their pictures were not as grandas the Italians’; for they were small in size, and were not built up on the magnificently formal plan that gives such a dignity and distinction to the Italian pictures. Nor are their subjects so heroic and impressive. They represent only the facts of every day life. Yet they have a great beauty of their own, because they rely on the inexhaustible beauty of light.
It is on this same beauty that after two hundred years artists of our own day are relying. They have gone back to the example of Vermeer and the other Dutch artists, and are applying it to the study of similar subjects. They are painting nature as it shows itself to them in its envelope of lighted atmosphere.
WE come now to the other arm of the Y, about which we spoke in a previous chapter. Landscape had been used as a background to the figures, until in the Seventeenth Century some artists began to make it the chief subject of their pictures. But no sooner was landscape painting practised as a separate art than it branched into two directions. We followed one of these and saw how Claude Lorrain invented the formal, or classic landscape; taking bits of nature, some from one place, some from another, and building them up into an artificial composition, which he made more grand by the addition of classic architecture. It was not unlike the way in which a handsome house is built; the materials,—stone, wood, marble, and so on—are brought together from various places, hewed to certain shapes designed by the architect, and then put together according to the rule or formula of building. The main difference is that, though the classic landscape does not represent any actual spot in nature, it still bears a resemblance to nature. But it is nature worked over by the fancy of man, and improved according to his own idea of what isbeautiful. The artist did not paint nature because he loved it as it is but because it furnished him with material for making a handsome picture. And this picture-making use of landscape continued to be popular with artists and the public well on into the Nineteenth Century.
Meanwhile the other branch of landscape painting had been started in the Seventeenth Century by the Dutchmen. They, as we have seen, were interested above everything in themselves, their own lives and surroundings. This was the state of mind of the whole people, and the artists gave expression to it in their pictures. They too, were picture-makers, who by their skill of painting and their love of beauty made their pictures beautiful works of art. But the subjects that they represented were seldom imaginary ones. They painted what they actually saw; and with so much truth that their art has been called an art of portraiture. They made portraits of people, portraits of the outdoor and indoor life, and portraits of their towns and harbors, and of the country that surrounded them. So, by comparison with the formal or classic landscape, we may call their landscapes naturalistic, for they represented nature as it actually appeared to their eyes.
But their art died with them. As soon as Holland had secured her independence, her artists began to travel to foreign countries, especially to Italy. There they set themselves to imitate the great Italians, and so far as landscape was concerned, joined in the popular taste for the classic kind. It was not