CCIII
Landscape has taken refuge in the theatre; scene-painters alone understand its true character and can put it into practice with a happy result. But Corot?
Oh that man's soul rebounds like a steel spring; he is no mere landscape painter, but an artist—a real artist, and rare and exceptional genius.
Delacroix.
CCIV
TO VERWÉE
There is an International Exhibition at Petit's now, and I am showing some sea-pieces there with great success. The exhibition is made up, with one or twoexceptions, of young men. They are very clever, but all alike; they follow a fashion—there is no more individuality. Everybody paints, everybody is clever.
Raphael THE MASS OF BOLSENA (Detail) Anderson
We shall end by adoring J. Dupré. I don't always like him, but he has individuality.
Too many painters, my dear fellow, and too many exhibitions! But you see, at my age, I'm not afraid of showing my pictures among the young men's sometimes.
Yet I hate exhibitions; one can hardly ever judge of a picture there.
Alfred Stevens.
CCV
There is something ... in those deities of intellect in the Sistine Chapel that converts the noblest personages of Raphael's drama into the audience of Michael Angelo, before whom you know that, equally with yourself, they would stand silent and awe-struck.
Lawrence.
CCVI
My only disagreement with you would be in the estimate of his comparative excellence in sculpture and painting. He called himself sculptor, but we seldom gauge rightly our own strength and weakness. The paintings in the Sistine Chapel are to my mind entirely beyond criticism or praise, not merely with reference to design and execution, but also for colour, right noble and perfect in their place. I was never more surprised than by this quality, to which I do not think justice has ever been done; nothing in his sculpture comes near tothe perfection of his Adam or the majesty of the Dividing the Light from Darkness; his sculpture lacks the serene strength that is found in the Adam and many other figures in the great frescoes. Dominated by the fierce spirit of Dante, he was less influenced by the grave dignity of the Greek philosophy and art than might have been expected from the contemporary and possible pupil of Poliziano. In my estimate of him as a Sculptor in comparison with him as Painter, I am likely to be in a minority of one! butIthink that when he is thought of as a painter his earlier pictures are thought of, and these certainly are unworthy of him, but the Prophets and Sibyls are the greatest things ever painted. As a rule he certainly insists too much upon the anatomy; some one said admirably, "Learn anatomy, and forget it"; Michael Angelo did the first and not the second, and the fault of almost all his work is, that it is too much an anatomical essay. The David is an example of this, besides being very faulty in proportion, with hands and feet that are monstrous. It is, I think, altogether bad. The hesitating pose is good, and goes with the sullen expression of the face, but is not that of the ardent heroic boy!
This seems presumptuous criticism; and you might, considering my aspirations and efforts, say to me: "Do better!" but I am not Michael Angelo, but I am a pupil of the greatest sculptor of all, Pheidias (a master the great Florentine knew nothing of), and, so far, feel a right to set up judgment on the technique only.
Watts.
CCVII
ITALIAN ART IN FLANDERS
As to Italian art, here at Brussels there is nothing but a reminiscence of it. It is an art which has been falsified by those who have tried to acclimatise it, and even the specimens of it which have passed into Flanders lose by their new surroundings. When in a part of the gallery which is least Flemish, one sees two portraits by Tintoret, not of the first rank, sadly retouched, but typical—one finds it difficult to understand them side by side with Memling, Martin de Vos, Van Orley, Rubens, Van Dyck, and even Antonio More. It is the same with Veronese. He is out of his element; his colour is lifeless, it smacks of the tempera painter; his style seems frigid, his magnificence unspontaneous and almost bombastic. Yet the picture is a superb piece, in his finest manner; a fragment of an allegorical triumph taken from a ceiling in the Ducal Palace, and one of his best; but Rubens is close by, and that is enough to give the Rubens of Venice an accent which is not of this country. Which of the two is right? And listening merely to the language so admirably spoken by the two men, who shall decide between the correct and learned rhetoric of Venetian speech, and the emphatic, warmly coloured, grandiose incorrectness of the Antwerp idiom? At Venice one leans to Veronese; in Flanders one has a better ear for Rubens.
Italian art has this in common with all powerful traditions, that it is at the same time very cosmopolitan because it has penetrated everywhere, and very lofty because it has been self-sufficient. It is at home, in all Europe, except in two countries; Belgium, the genius of which it has appreciably affected without ever dominating it; and Holland, which once made a show of consulting it but which has ended by passing it by; so that, while it is on neighbourly terms with Spain, while it is enthroned in France, where, at least in historical painting, our best painters have been Romans, it encounters in Flanders two or three men, great men of a great race, sprung from the soil, who hold sway there and have no mind to share their empire with any other.
Fromentin.
CCVIII
I am never tired of looking at Titian's pictures; they possess such extreme breadth, which to me is so delightful a quality. In my opinion there never will, to the end of time, arise a portrait-painter superior to Titian. Next to him in this kind of excellence is Raphael. There is this difference between Raphael and Titian: Raphael, with all his excellence, possessed the utmost gentleness; it was as if he had said, "If another person can do better,Ihave no objections." But Titian was a man who would keep down every one else to the uttermost; he was determined that the art should come in and go out with himself; the expression in all the portraitsof him told as much. When any stupendous work of antiquity remains with us—say, a building or a bridge—the common people cannot account for it, and they say it was erectedby the devil. Now I feel this same thing in regard to the works of Titian;—they seem to me as if painted by a devil, or at any rate from inspiration; I cannot account for them.
Northcote.
CCIX
Raphael, to be plain with you—for I like to be candid and outspoken—does not please me at all. In Venice are found the good and the beautiful; to their brush I give the first place; it is Titian that bears the banner.
Velasquez.
CCX
Perhaps some day the world will discover that Rembrandt is a much greater painter than Raphael. I write this blasphemy—one to make the hair of the Classicists stand on end—without definitely taking a side; only I seem to find as I grow older that the most beautiful and most rare thing in the world is truth.
Let us say, if you will, that Rembrandt has not Raphael's nobility. Yet perhaps this nobility which Raphael manifests in his line is shown by Rembrandt in the mysterious conception of his subjects, in the profound naïveté of his expressions and gestures. However much one may prefer the majestic emphasis of Raphael, which answers perhaps to the grandeurinherent in certain subjects, one might assert, without being stoned by men of taste—I mean men whose taste is real and sincere—that the great Dutchman was more a born painter than the studious pupil of Perugino.
Delacroix.
CCXI
Rembrandt's principle was to extract from things one element among the rest, or rather to abstract every element in order to concentrate on the seizure of one only. Thus in all his works he has set himself to analyse, to distil; or, in better phrase, has been metaphysician even more than poet. Reality never appealed to him by its general effects. One might doubt, from his way of treating human forms, whether their "envelope" interested him. He loved women, and never saw them otherwise than unshapely; he loved textures, and did not imitate them; but then, if he ignored grace and beauty, purity of line and the delicacy of the skin, he expressed the nude body by suggestions of suppleness, roundness, elasticity, with a love of material substance, a sense of the live being, which enchant the practical painter. He resolved everything into its component parts, colour as well as light, so that, by eliminating the complicated and condensing the scattered elements from a given scene, he succeeded in drawing without outline, in painting a portrait almost without strokes that show, in colouring without colour, in concentrating the light of the solar system into a sunbeam. It would be impossible in a plastic art to carry the curiosity forthe essential to an intenser pitch. For physical beauty he substitutes expression of character; for the imitation of things, their almost complete transformation; for studious scrutiny, the speculation of the psychologist; for precise observation, whether trained or natural, the visions of a seer and apparitions of such vividness that he himself is deceived by them. By virtue of this faculty of second sight, of intuitions like those of a somnambulist, he sees farther into the supernatural world than any one else whatever. The life that he perceives in dream has a certain accent of the other world, which makes real life seem pale and almost cold. Look at his "Portrait of a Woman in the Louvre," two paces from "Titian's Mistress." Compare the two women, study closely the two pictures, and you will understand the difference between the two brains. Rembrandt's ideal, sought as in a dream with closed eyes, is Light: the nimbus around objects, the phosphorescence that comes against a black background. It is something fugitive and uncertain, formed of lineaments scarce perceptible, ready to disappear before the eye has fixed them, ephemeral and dazzling. To arrest the vision, to set it on the canvas, to give it its shape and moulding, to preserve the fragility of its texture, to render its brilliance, and yet achieve in the result a solid, masculine, substantial painting, real beyond any other master's work, and able to hold its own with a Rubens, a Titian, a Veronese, a Giorgione, a Van Dyck—this is Rembrandt's aim. Has he succeeded? The testimony of the world answers for him.
Fromentin.
CCXII
The painting of Flanders will generally satisfy any devout person more than the painting of Italy, which will never cause him to shed many tears; this is not owing to the vigour and goodness of that painting, but to the goodness of such devout person; women will like it, especially very old ones or very young ones. It will please likewise friars and nuns, and also some noble persons who have no ear for true harmony. They paint in Flanders, only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill, and saints and prophets. Their painting is of stuffs—bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reasonableness or art, without symmetry or proportion, without care in selecting or rejecting, and finally, without any substance or verve; and in spite of all this, painting in some other parts is worse than it is in Flanders. Neither do I speak so badly of Flemish painting because it is all bad, but because it tries to do so many things at once (each of which alone would suffice for a great work), so that it does not do anything really well.
Only works which are done in Italy can be called true painting, and therefore we call good painting Italian; for if it were done so well in another country, we should give it the name of that country or province.As for the good painting of this country, there is nothing more noble or devout; for with wise persons nothing causes devotion to be remembered, or to arise, more than the difficulty of the perfection which unites itself with and joins God; because good painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty. This painting is so rare that few are capable of doing or attaining to it.
Michael Angelo.
CCXIII
All Dutch painting is concave: what I mean is that it is composed of curves described about a point determined by the pictorial interest; circular shadows round a dominant light. Design, colouring, and lighting fall into a concave scheme, with a strongly defined base, a retreating ceiling, and corners rounded and converging on the centre; whence it follows that the painting is all depth, and that it is far from the eye to the objects represented. No type of painting leads with more certain directness from the foreground to the background, from the frame to the horizon. One can live in it, walk in it, see to the uttermost ends of it; one is tempted to raise one's head to measure the distance of the sky. Everything conspires to this illusion: the exactness of the aerial perspective, the perfect harmony of colour and tones with the plane on which the object is placed. The rendering of the heights of space, ofthe envelope of atmosphere, of the distant effect, which absorbs this school makes the painting of all other schools seem flat, something laid upon the surface of the canvas.
Fromentin.
CCXIV
In Van Eyck there is more structure, more muscle, more blood in the veins; hence the impressive virility of his faces and the strong style of his pictures. Altogether he is a portrait-painter of Holbein's kin—exact, shrewd, and with a gift of penetration that is almost cruel. He sees things with more perfect rightness than Memling, and also in a bigger and some summary way. The sensations which the aspect of things evokes in him are more powerful; his feeling for their colour is more intense; his palette has a fullness, a richness, a distinctness, which Memling's has not. His colour schemes are of more even power, better held together, composed of values more cunningly found. His whites are fatter, his purple richer, and the indigo blue—that fine blue as of old Japanese enamel, which is peculiar to him—has more depth of dye, more solidity of texture. The splendour and the costliness of the precious things, of which the superb fashions of his time were so lavish, appealed to him more strongly.
Fromentin.
CCXV
Van Eyck saw with his eyes, Memling begins to see with his soul. The one had a good and a right vein ofthought; the other does not seem to think so much, but he has a heart which beats in a quite different way. The one copied and imitated, the other copies too and imitates, but transfigures. The former reproduced—without any preoccupation with the ideal types of humanity—above all, the masculine types, which passed before his eyes in every rank of the society of his time; the latter contemplates nature in a reverie, translates her with imagination, dwells upon everything which is most delicate and lovely in human forms, and creates, above all, in his type of woman a being exquisite and elect, unknown before and lost with him.
Fromentin
CCXVI
BRUGES, 1849
This is a most stunning place, immeasurably the best we have come to. There is a quantity of first-rate architecture, and very little or no Rubens.
But by far the best of all are the miraculous works of Memling and Van Eyck. The former is here in a strength that quite stunned us—and perhaps proves himself to have been a greater man even than the latter. In fact, he was certainly so intellectually, and quite equal in mechanical power. His greatest production is a large triptych in the Hospital of St. John, representing in its three compartments: firstly, the "Decollation of St. John Baptist"; secondly, the "Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine to the Infant Saviour"; and thirdly, the "Vision of St. John Evangelist in Patmos." I shall not attempt any description; I assure you that the perfection of character and even drawing, the astounding finish, the glory of colour, and, above all, the pure religious sentiment and ecstatic poetry of these works is not to be conceived or described. Even in seeing them the mind is at first bewildered by such godlike completeness; and only after some while has elapsed can at all analyse the causes of its awe and admiration; and then finds these feelings so much increased by analysis that the last impression left is mainly one of utter shame at its own inferiority.
Van Eyck's picture at the Gallery may give you some idea of the style adopted by Memling in these great pictures; but the effect of light and colour is much less poetical in Van Eyck's; partly owing tohisbeing a more sober subject and an interior, but partly also, I believe, to the intrinsic superiority of Memling's intellect. In the background of the first compartment there is a landscape more perfect in the abstract lofty feeling of nature than anything I have ever seen. The visions of the third compartment are wonderfully mystic and poetical.
Rossetti.
CCXVII
VAN DYCK
Van Dyck completed Rubens by adding to his achievement portraits absolutely worthy of his master's brush, better than Rubens' own. He created in his own country an art which was original, and consequently he has his share in the creation of a new art. Besidesthis he did yet more: he begot a whole school in a foreign country, the English school—Reynolds, Lawrence, Gainsborough, and I would add to them nearly all the genre painters who are faithful to the English tradition, and the most powerful landscape painters issue directly from Van Dyck, and indirectly from Rubens through Van Dyck. These are high claims. And so posterity, always just in its instincts, gives Van Dyck a place apart between the men of the first and those of the second rank. The world has never decided the exact precedence which ought to be his in the procession of the masters, and since his death, as during his life, he seems to have held the privilege of being placed near the throne and of making a stately figure there.
Fromentin.
CCXVIII
VELASQUEZ
What we are all trying to do with great labour, he does at once.
Reynolds.
CCXIX
Saw again to-day the Spanish school in the Museum,—Velasquez, a surprising fellow! The "Hermits in a Rocky Desert" pleased me much; also a "Dark Wood at Nightfall." He is Teniers on a large scale: his handling is of the most sparkling kind, owing much of its dazzling effect to the flatness of the ground it is placed upon.
The picture of "Children in Grotesque Dresses," in his painting-room, is a surprising piece of handling. Still he would gain, and indeed does gain, when he glazes his pictures. He makes no use of his ground; lights and shadows are opaque. Chilliness and blackness are sometimes the result; and often a cold blue or green prevails, requiring all his brilliancy of touch and truth of effect to make tolerable. Velasquez, however, may be said to be the origin of what is now doing in England. His feeling they have caught almost without seeing his works; which here seem to anticipate Reynolds, Romney, Raeburn, Jackson, and even Sir Thomas Lawrence. Perhaps there is this difference: he does at once what we do by repeated and repeated touches.
It may truly be said, that wheresoever Velasquez is admired, the paintings of England must be acknowledged and admired with him.
Wilkie.
CCXX
VELASQUEZ
Never did any one think less of a style or attain it more consummately. He was far too much occupied with the divining of the qualities of light and atmosphere that enveloped his subjects, and with stating those truths in the most direct and poignant way to have time to spare on mere adornments and artifices that amuse us in the work of lesser men. Every stroke in Velasquez means something, records an observation. You neversee a splodge of light that entertains you for a moment and relapses intochicas you analyse it; even the most elusive bits of painting like the sword-hilt in the "Admiral Pulido" are utterly just, and observed as the light flickers and is lost over the steel shapes. No one ever had the faculty of observing the true character of two diverse forms at the same time as he did. If you look at any quilted sleeve you will feel the whole texture of the material and recognise its own shape, and yet under it and through it each nuance of muscle and arm-form reveals itself. It is no light praise, mind you, when one says that every touch is the record of a tireless observation—you have only to look at a great Sir Joshua to see that quite half of every canvas is merely a recipe, a painted yawn in fact, as the intensity of his vision relaxed; but in a Velasquez your attention is riveted by the passionate search of the master and his ceaseless absorption in the thing before him—and this is all the more astounding because the work is hardly ever conceived from a point of view of bravura; there is nothing over-enthusiastic, insincerely impetuous, but a quiet suave dignity informing the whole, and penetrating into the least detail of the canvas.
There is one quality Velasquez never falters in; from earliest days he is master of his medium; he understands its every limitation, realises exactly how far his palette is capable of rendering nature; and so you are never disturbed in your appreciation of his pictures by a sense that he is battling against insuperable difficulties, severely handicapped by an unsympathetic medium; but rather thathere is the consummate workman who, gladly recognising the measure of his freedom within the four walls of his limitations, illustrates for you that fine old statement, "Whose service is perfect freedom."
C. W. Furse.
CCXXI
ON GAINSBOROUGH
We must not forget, whilst we are on this subject, to make some remarks on his custom of painting by night, which confirms what I have already mentioned,—his great affection to his art; since he could not amuse himself in the evening by any other means so agreeable to himself. I am indeed much inclined to believe that it is a practice very advantageous and improving to an artist: for by this means he will acquire a new and a higher perception of what is great and beautiful in nature. By candlelight not only objects appear more beautiful, but from their being in a greater breadth of light and shadow, as well as having a greater breadth and uniformity of colour, nature appears in a higher style; and even the flesh seems to take a higher and richer tone of colour. Judgment is to direct us in the use to be made of this method of study; but the method itself is, I am very sure, advantageous. I have often imagined that the two great colourists, Titian and Correggio, though I do not know that they painted by night, formed their high ideas of colouring from the effects of objects by this artificial light.
Reynolds.
Gainsborough THE CHILDREN AND THE BUTTERFLY Mansell
CCXXII
ON REYNOLDS
Damn him! how various he is!
Gainsborough.
CCXXIII
I shall take advantage of Sir John's[3]mention of Reynolds and Gainsborough to provoke some useful refutation, by stating that it seems to me the latter is by no means the rival of the former; though in this opinion I should expect to find myself in a minority of one. Reynolds knew little about the human structure, Gainsborough nothing at all; Reynolds was not remarkable for good drawing, Gainsborough was remarkable for bad; nor did the latter ever approach Reynolds in dignity, colour, or force of character, as in the portraits of John Hunter and General Heathfield for example. It may be conceded that more refinement, and perhaps more individuality, is to be found in Gainsborough, but his manner (and both were mannerists) was scratchy and thin, while that of Reynolds was manly and rich. Neither Reynolds nor Gainsborough was capable of anything ideal; but the work of Reynolds indicates thought and reading, and I do not know of anything by Gainsborough conveying a like suggestion.
Watts.
[3]Sir John Millais.
[3]Sir John Millais.
CCXXIV
I was thinking yesterday, as I got up, about the special charm of the English school. The little I saw of it has left me memories. They have a real sensitiveness which triumphs over all the studies in concoction which appear here and there, as in our dismal school; with us that sensitiveness is the rarest thing: everything has the look of being painted with clumsy tools, and what is worse, by obtuse and vulgar minds. Take away Meissonier, Decamps, one or two others, and some of the youthful pictures of Ingres, and all is tame, nerveless, without intention, without fire. One need only cast one's eye over that stupid, commonplace paperL'Illustration, manufactured by pettifogging artists over here, and compare it with the corresponding English publication to realise how wretchedly flat, flabby, and insipid is the character of most of our productions. This supposed home of drawing shows really no trace of it, and our most pretentious pictures show as little as any. In these little English designs nearly every object is treated with the amount of interest it demands; landscapes, sea-pieces, costumes, incidents of war, all these are delightful, done with just the right touch, and, above all, well drawn.... I do not see among us any one to be compared with Leslie, Grant, and all those who derive partly from Wilkie and partly from Hogarth, with a little of the suppleness and ease introduced by the school of forty years back, Lawrence and his comrades, who shone by their elegance and lightness.
Delacroix.
CCXXV
THE ENGLISH SCHOOL
I shall never care to see London again. I should not find there my old memories, and, above all, I should not find the same men to enjoy with me what there is to be seen now. Perhaps I might find myself obliged to break a lance for Reynolds, or for that adorable Gainsborough, whom you are indeed right to love. Not that I am the opponent of the present movement in the painting of England. I am even struck by the prodigious conscientiousness that these people can bring to bear even on work of the imagination; it seems that in coming back to excessive detail they are more in their own element than when they imitated the Italian painters and the Flemish colourists. But what does the skin matter? Under this seeming transformation they are always English. Thus instead of making imitations pure and simple of the primitive Italians, as the fashion has been among us, they mix with this imitation of the manner of the old schools an infinitely personal sentiment; they put into it the interest which is generally missing in our cold imitations of the formulas and the style of schools which have had their day. I am writing without pulling myself up, and saying everything that comes into my head. Perhaps the impressions I received at that former time might be a little modified to-day. Perhaps I should find in Lawrence an exaggeration of methods and effects too closely reminiscent of the schoolof Reynolds; but his amazing delicacy of drawing, and the air of life he gives to his women, who seem almost to be talking with one, give him, considered as a portrait-painter, a certain superiority over Van Dyck, whose admirable figures are immobile in their pose. Lustrous eyes and parted lips are admirably rendered by Lawrence. He welcomed me with much kindness; he was a man of most charming manners, except when you criticised his pictures.... Our school has need of a little new blood. Our school is old, and the English school seems young. They seem to seek after nature while we busy ourselves with imitating other pictures. Don't get me stoned by mentioning abroad these opinions, which alas! are mine.
Delacroix.
CCXXVI
There are only two occasions, I conceive, on which a foreign artist could with propriety be invited to execute a great national work in this country, namely, in default of our having any artist at all competent to such an undertaking, or for the purpose of introducing a superior style of art, to correct a vicious taste prevalent in the nation. The consideration of the first parts of this statement I leave to those who have witnessed with what ability Mr. Flaxman, Mr. Westmacott, and the other candidates have designed their models, and with respect to the style and good taste of the English school. I dare, and am proud, to assert its superiority over any that has appeared in Europe since the age of the Caracci.
Hoppner.
CCXXVII
(Watts is) the only man who understands great art.
Alfred Stevens.
CCXXVIII
There is only Puvis de Chavannes who holds his place; as for all the others, one must gild their monuments.
Meissonier.
CCXXIX
PRUDHON
In short, he has his own manner; he is the Boucher, the Watteau of our day. We must let him do as he will; it can do no harm at the present time, and in the state the school is in. He deceives himself, but it is not given to every one to deceive themselves like him; his talent has a sure foundation. What I cannot forgive him is that he always draws the same heads, the same arms, and the same hands. All his faces have the same expression, and this expression is always the same grimace. It is not thus we should envisage nature, we who are disciples and admirers of the ancients.
L. David.
CCXXX
ON DELACROIX
Delacroix (except in two pictures, which show a kind of savage genius) is a perfect beast, though almost worshipped here.
Rossetti (1849).
CCXXXI
Delacroix is one of the mighty ones of the earth, and Ingres misses being so creditably.
Rossetti (1856).
CCXXXII
ON DELACROIX
Must I say that I prefer Delacroix with his exaggerations, his mistakes, his obvious falls, because he belongs to no one but himself, because he represents the spirit, the time, and the idiom of his time? Sickly, too highly strung, perhaps, since his art has the melodies of our generation, since in the strained note of his lamentations as in his resounding triumphs, there is always a gasp of the breath, a cry, a fever that are alike our own and his.
We are no longer in the Olympian Age, like Raphael, Veronese, and Rubens; and Delacroix's art is powerful, as a voice from Dante's Inferno.
Rousseau.
CCXXXIII
A DELACROIX EXHIBITION
Feminine painting is invading us; and if our time, of which Delacroix is the true representative,has not dared enough, what will the enervated art of the future be like?
Only paintings are exhibited just now. Two rooms scarcely hold his riches; and when one thinks that there are here but the elements of Delacroix's production, one is bewildered. What strikes one above all inhis sketches is the note of nervous, contained intensity, which during all his full career he never lost; neither fashion nor the influence of others affected it; never was there a more sincere note. Plenty of incorrectness, I grant you, but with a great feeling for drawing. Whatever one may say, if drawing is an instrument of expression, Delacroix was a draughtsman. A great style, a marvellous invention, passion expressed in form as well as in colour, Delacroix is typically the artist, and not a professor of drawing who fills out weakness and mediocrity by rhetoric.
Paul Huet.
CCXXXIV
COROT'S METHOD OF WORK
Corot is a true artist. One must see a painter in his home to have an idea of his merit. I saw again there, and with a quite new appreciation of them, pictures which I had seen at the museum and only cared for moderately. His great "Baptism of Christ" is full of naïve beauties; his trees are superb. I asked him about the tree I have to do in the "Orpheus." He told me to walk straight ahead, giving myself up to whatever might come in my way; usually this is what he does. He does not admit that taking infinite pains is lost labour. Titian, Raphael, Rubens, &c., worked easily. They only attempted what they knew; only their range was wider than that of the man who, for instance, only paints landscapes or flowers. Notwithstanding this facility,labour too is indispensable. Corot broods much over things. Ideas come to him, and he adds as he works. It is the right way.
Delacroix.
CCXXXV
From the age of six, I had the passion for drawing the forms of things. By the age of fifty, I had published an infinity of designs; but all that I produced before the age of seventy is of no account. Only when I was seventy-three had I got some sort of insight into the real structure of nature—animals, plants, trees, birds, fish, and insects. Consequently, at the age of eighty I shall have advanced still further; at ninety, I shall grasp the mystery of things; at a hundred, I shall be a marvel, and at a hundred and ten every blot, every line from my brush shall be alive!
Hokusai.
CCXXXVI
It takes an artist fifty years to learn to do anything, and fifty years to learn what not to do—and fifty years to sift and find what he simply desires to do—and 300 years to do it, and when it is done neither heaven nor earth much needs it nor heeds it. Well, I'll peg away; I can do nothing else, and wouldn't if I could.
Burne-Jones.