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HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES

HOW TO LOOK AT
PICTURES

BY
ROBERT CLERMONT WITT, M.A.

LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1903

First published, October, 1902.
Second edition, revised, December, 1902.
Reprinted, February and November, 1903.

CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

db)£ 103 W

TO
M. H. W.

PREFACE
THIS little book makes no attempt to be
original. It is intended for those who have
no special knowledge of pictures and painting, but
are interested in them, and find themselves from
time to time in public and private galleries and
exhibitions. It will, therefore, make no appeal to
the artist, the expert or the professional critic.
Much art-criticism at the present day is so deeply
erudite, or so special and scientific, that its in
fluence is necessarily limited to those among the
initiated who, after years of study and probation,
can enter fully into its mysteries, and are there
fore in no need of such simple suggestions as are
offered here.
In case it should be objected by readers of
more exquisite sensibilities that in these pages the
emotions excited by the beauty of pictorial art are
ignored, or treated in too homely and matter-of-
fact a manner, I would suggest that these more
subtle and fleeting impressions of beauty, these
aromas from another world, do not require to be

viii PREFACE
called forth by words, but come unbidden in the
fulness of time to every lover of pictures. More
over, recognising their pure essence and perfect
delicacy, I have feared to mar by description that
which no words can adequately render.
Hever, Kent, 1902.

CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
List of Illustrations  xi
Introduction  xiii
I. The Personal Point of View ... i
II. Considerations of Date  12
III. The Influence of Race and Country 21
IV. Schools of Painting  29
V. The Artist  37
VI. The Subject  46
VII. Historical Painting  53
VIII. The Portrait  59
IX. Landscape  71
X. Genre  86
XI. Drawing  94
XII. Colour  105
XIII. Light and Shade  117
XIV. Composition  128
XV. Treatment  138
XVI. Methods and Materials  148
Index  161

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frans Hals. Officers of the Guild of Arquebusiers. Haarlem 28
Velasquez. The Surrender of Breda. Madrid 53
Paul VERONESE. The Family of Darius. National Gallery 54
Filippino Lippi. Vision of St. Bernard. Badia, Florence 60
REYNOLDS. Portrait of Mrs. Siddons. } Dulwich Gallery 63
J- Facing one another.
GAINSBOROUGH. Portrait of Mrs. Siddons. J National Gallery 63
Van Dyck. Portrait of Lord Wharton. St. Petersburg 64
Jan van Eyck. Portrait of a Man with a Pink. Berlin 65
DtJRER. Portrait of Holzschuher. Berlin 65
GHIRLANDAIO. Portrait of an Old Man. Louvre 66
VELASQUEZ. Portrait of Philip IV. on Horseback. Madrid 66
WHISTLER. Portrait of his Mother. Luxembourg 68
Holbein. Portrait of Georg Gisze. Berlin 69
Giotto. Joachim among the Sheepcotes. Arena Chapel, Padua 71
CLAUDE. The Queen of Sheba. National Gallery 74
Turner. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. National Gallery 76
JACOB RUYSDAEL. The Windmill. Amsterdam 76
COROT. Landscape. Louvre 78
BOUTS. St. Christopher. Munich 81
CONSTABLE. The Hay- Wain. National Gallery 83
VERROCCHIO (?). Portrait of a Lady. Poldi-Pezzoli, Milan 96
TINTORETTO. Bacchus and Ariadne. Ducal Palace, Venice 112

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Tintoretto. The Marriage of Cana (double plate).
Salute, Venice 122
REMBRANDT. Woman taken in Adultery. National Gallery 123
De HOOGH. Interior. National Gallery 124
Terburg. The Peace of Munster. "| National Gallery 125
> Facing one another.
Orcagna (?). Coronation of the Virgin. J National Gallery 125
Michelangelo. The Temptation, Fall and Expulsion. Sis tine Chapel 130
Raphael. Parnassus. Vatican 131
RUBENS. The Lion Hunt. Munich 132
Jan STEEN. Family of the Painter. The Hague 133
Millais. The Carpenter's Shop. Private possession 133
Titian. Assumption of the Virgin. Academy, Venice 134
Sargent. Carmencita. Luxembourg jqy
Bellini. Altar-piece. Frari, Venice 160

INTRODUCTION
AMONG the most pathetic figures in the world must
be counted the men and women who may be seen
in any picture-gallery slowly circumambulating the four
walls with eyes fixed upon catalogue or guide-book,
only looking up at intervals to insure that they are
standing before the right picture. All unknowing they
falter on, achieving only fatigue of body and mind, with
a certain mournful satisfaction in a toilsome task nearing
accomplishment. Again and again they find themselves
looking at famous pictures without seeing them. They
are conscious that some wonderful power lies hidden
there, but they do not know the charmed word to release
it. They feel sure they should be interested ; at the
same time they know they are bored. Whatever appre
ciation they have is too capricious, too purely personal
to claim their confidence in its justice or intelligence.
Its principles cannot bear analysis, and are rudely
shaken under cross-examination. They do indeed deeply
honour the names of the great masters upon the picture-
frames ; some slight acquaintance with them inspires
reverence and respect, but where it goes beyond this it
is for the most part undiscriminating and unreasoning
hero-worship. The catalogue is of little use from this^
point of view. It merely gives the name and date of
the artist and possibly his school, or, if more ambitious
in its construction, some account of his life, with a bald,
prosaic description of the picture, a description, which

xiv INTRODUCTION
only emphasises the absence of what the weary seeker
after enjoyment hopes to find ready to his hand.
We long to feel at home in a collection of pictures,
instead of lost in a strange world and out of touch with
its inhabitants. Not a city of importance in Europe but
has acquired or is acquiring its picture-gallery. Not a
house or cottage but contains some form of pictorial art.
Yet there is little or no literature dealing with pictures
from the point of view of how to look at them. Elaborate
monographs of artists, philosophies of art, treatises on
aesthetics, exhaustive disquisitions on the various schools
of painting — all these exist in overwhelming abundance.
But they demand years of patient study. And indeed
there is no book written, or ever to be written, which will
suddenly transform the industrious and well-intentioned
reader into the just and experienced critic. The art of
seeing pictures is not contained in rules or formulae.
Books alone can no more teach how to see pictures than
how to paint them. And another and most powerful
deterrent to the careful consideration of pictures is
undoubtedly their vast multitude. The number of
works of the first order alone is indeed almost dis
couraging. A great gallery contains, perhaps, some
thousands of pictures, of which many hundreds are of
real merit. The difficulty of concentrating the attention
on any particular picture is one which even experienced
critics feel keenly, especially in a gallery where all is
new and strange. The eye wanders from the picture on
which it should be fixed to that which hangs close by,
above or below. Unfortunately exigencies of space and
expense render the proper hanging of pictures almost
impossible. There are few collections so well hung as
that in Trafalgar Square, and yet even there the frames
jostle one another so closely that the eye tends to pass

INTRODUCTION xv
on, leaving the mind, as it were, a picture or two behind.
There is no doubt that the enjoyment of even an
inferior picture hanging alone or in scant company in
the house of a friend is relatively greater than that of
a collection of masterpieces crowded together in a great
gallery. There are other difficulties arising from the actual
arrangement of pictures, especially in the great public
collections. The plan favoured in the more conservative
galleries of hanging together in one central room a
number of the most celebrated pictures without con
sideration of the schools to which they belong, a plan
adopted in the Salon Carre of the Louvre, the Tribuna in
the Uffizi and the Sala de la Reina Isabel in the Prado,
has many objections. In such a " Holy of Holies " the
opportunity of comparison with lesser works by the
same artists, or with the best works of lesser artists, is
lost, and the masterpieces tend to suffer from their very
uniformity of excellence. Again, the pictures are thus,
as it were, taken out of their context. An excellent
example of the practical working of this system with its
obvious drawbacks may be seen in the Louvre. Formerly
Van Eyck's small, gem-like Madonna with the Chancellor
Rollin used to hang inconspicuous and lost among the
larger masterpieces of other schools in the Salon Carre.
It has lately been removed to a small cabinet devoted
to works of the early Flemish school, where this marvel
lous example of minute and delicate painting asserts its
undoubted supremacy among its compatriots, hanging as
the centre of attraction and in the place of honour. On
the other hand, we have lost the opportunity of com
paring one of the finest masterpieces of early Flemish
painting with works occupying a like position in other
schools. The more modern system, followed in the

xvi INTRODUCTION
galleries of London and Berlin, and most of the great
European collections, of arranging the pictures accord
ing to their schools, and as far as possible in some
chronological order, offers obvious advantages to the
student. The rise and fall of schools, the gradual
evolution of individual genius, the connection between
master and pupil, may thus be easily traced.
It must also be remembered that a spacious well-
lighted gallery is not always the best setting for every
picture. Old pictures were not painted with an eye to
the uniform requirements of the modern picture-gallery,
where individual wants cannot possibly be considered.
Many were intended to serve as altar-pieces in the dim
religious light of church or cathedral, often indeed de
signed to fit into the architectural framework ofthe altar.
In some cases where the painter has consciously adapted
his picture to such a position, much of its effect is lost
in the cruel glare of a picture-gallery. Even so magni
ficent a work as Titian's Assumption appears compara
tively hard and crude in colour in its new home in the
Academy at Venice, though over the high altar of the
Frari Church, for which it was painted, the bright blues,
reds and yellows would have been mellowed and subdued.
Again, until but the other day how lost and purposeless
appeared the vast series of canvases designed by Rubens
for Marie de Medicis for the decoration of the Luxem
bourg, skied and scattered as they were about the long
corridor in the Louvre, failing to dominate yet contriv
ing to kill the surrounding crowd of smaller pictures.
Now, however, framed into the very walls of the spacious
Salle Rubens, specially designed for their sole recep
tion, they may be appreciated at their true value as one
magnificent and consistent scheme of pictorial decoration
rather than as a number of isolated units.

INTRODUCTION xvii
Many pictures, notably those of the Dutch School, on
the other hand, were painted to hang in the limited space
and moderate light of a dwelling-room. These are lost
on the large wall expanse of a high gallery lighted from
the top. To them the system now being introduced
wherever possible of small cabinets lighted by side win
dows instead of from the ceiling is admirably suited, care
being taken that the light on the picture is adequate and
falls from the side intended by the painter.
These are among the more obvious and practical diffi
culties which meet us at the outset, and bear only in
directly on the study of pictures. There are many other
points of view to consider in looking at pictures, which
need only to be suggested to appeal at once to the spec
tator. They in their turn suggest others. The stand
point widens, and the spirit of criticism is awakened.
Pictures which before we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see,
acquire an interest, a fascination for us that is in the
nature of a revelation. Our purely intellectual pleasure
in the puzzles and problems of pictorial art, its historical
and archaeological sides, grows to be of the keenest.
Wholly distinct from these our aesthetic delight in the
beauties of form and colour increases with each new dis
covery. Enjoyment follows hard upon understanding.
Every branch of the graphic arts gains a special and
peculiar interest. A collection becomes the meeting-place
of familiar friends and faces. With experience and
knowledge, each picture falls into its place in the mind,
is associated with others, suggests comparisons and
parallels and a sense of the essential unity of pictorial
art A feeling of mastery over a whole world of beautiful
forms and colours takes the place of impotent and vexa-

xviii INTRODUCTION
tious uncertainty. True, there are many pretty quarrels
to be picked. The critic who could say " I bite my
thumb at no man " is not easy to find, and when dis
covered he would no doubt prove to be unworthy the
title. But the controversial side of art-criticism, though
it has a peculiar fascination of its own, would be out of
place in these pages, which are intended to offer sugges
tions rather than to make converts.
There is no last word in art-criticism, or if there be it
remains unspoken. It is impossible to work out any
complete theory which will answer all questions and solve
all difficulties. Many of the problems that inevitably
arise must rest unsolved, the questions admitting of too
many different answers. It is merely proposed here to
set down some of the points of view which naturally
occur to the spectator who stands before a picture. No
attempt will be made to decide for the reader what
pictures should or should not be especially admired, but
rather to enable him to see pictures in the fullest sense
of the word, to understand and appreciate them, and to
decide for himself what are the worthiest objects of his
admiration. For it is the whole-hearted enjoyment which
comes with growing powers of appreciation that gives
painting, and indeed all art, its fascination for most of
us. Sympathy and whatever of the artist there may be
in each of us enables us to read something of our own
into the most perfect picture ever painted, something of
which even the painter never dreamed. Painting is no
dry-as-dust subject, a thing of museums, of value only
when carefully catalogued and classified, and to be studied
by the industrious apprentice with an eye to prospective
advancement. Art is no substitute for science, but
rather the adornment of life, completing what without it
were but imperfect.

HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
CHAPTER I
the personal point of view
THE personal point of view is naturally the first to
be touched upon. Criticism is as personal and as
various as the art of painting itself. In looking at a
picture the spectator's own temperament and ideals,
his education and experience will more than any other
factors influence his attitude towards it. And as these
vary indefinitely with every individual, it is vain to at
tempt to analyse them at length. There are, however,
some general considerations of interest.
The spectator may be either an artist by training and
profession, or a layman with no special knowledge of the
art of painting. Their points of view will almost
necessarily differ. Artist and layman see with other
eyes. They look for other things. The artist, in the full
consciousness of his greater experience in matters art
istic, is convinced of the essential superiority of the spirit
and letter of his criticism over the superficial reasoning
of the amateur. The layman quotes the ancient proverb
that onlookers see most ofthe game, and thanks God that
he at least is not prejudiced in favour of any one narrow
school or clique even as this artist. The antagonism is
as old as art itself. Speaking generally, the layman is io
B

2 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
the right. Disraeli's witticism that the critics are those
who have failed in literature or art contains but a grain
of truth. The best art-critics certainly have not been
artists. Ruskin, indeed, might have been either, but his
case is somewhat exceptional. Onlookers do indeed see
most of the game ; but only if they know the rules. The
great art-critic is as sadly to seek as the great artist, and
is almost as complex a being, He is born, not made.
Even his birthright, however, will not suffice without
wide and careful study. He must combine keen powers
of observation, judgment and discrimination with some
thing of the sacred flame and inspired enthusiasm of the
artist. But, short of this, there is a sense in which we are all
critics, in that we deliberately take upon ourselves to
pass in judgment the pictures which hang before us.
The point of view which generally first finds expression
is that of personal like or dislike, love or hate. It is
indeed the most rudimentary form of criticism, and yet
it contains something of the stuff of which criticism is
made. Representing as it usually does an unreasoned
and unintelligent personal prejudice in favour of any
particular picture or school, it is valueless. Based on
the other hand on experience, observation, careful com
parison and study, it becomes the last word of art-
criticism. Praise or blame should, therefore, be not the
first but the last point of view from which to regard
pictures. The desire to understand should precede the
wish to extol or condemn. Full understanding should
in its attitude be appreciative rather than condemnatory.
Tout comprendre est tout pardonner applies in art as in
morals, and although this habit of mind can be exagger
ated, may even lead to that " indifferent and tepid ap
preciation of all and sundry, especially if consecrated by

THE PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW 3
age," which in the end is destructive of the best interests
of art, the general tendency, at least among beginners, is
to err on the side of extreme severity and wholesale
condemnation. It is far easier to observe faults than
to recognise excellences. It is not always easy to re
member that even if the picture as a whole fails to
please, it may contain charming passages of colour or
subtleties of drawing which render it worthy of atten
tion. On the other hand, the first impression of a seem
ingly attractive ensemble may prove unable to bear closer
analysis. We do not, indeed, feel in sympathy with
every picture or even with every school of painting.
The personal equation is too strong for that. But we
can at least appreciate admirable qualities, whether in
technique or style, wherever they exist. Some pictures
there are to which, like certain books, we feel always
drawn, in whose presence we enjoy a peculiar sense of
intimacy and well-being. With these we like to live.
Such inclinations are purely individual. Other pictures
again, less intimate friends, are reserved for occasional
intercourse, being less well adapted for our daily wants.
But no such personal considerations can affect the ques
tion of the real value of a picture, though the test is too
often applied.
There are many to be found, especially among those
whose want of knowledge and experience is their sole
qualification to the title of unprejudiced critics, who
profess to have so high a standard that they will only
look at the few great masterpieces in each collection,
and entirely refuse to consider any picture falling short
of these. " Nothing is so painful to me," said Sainte-
Beuve, " as to see the disdain with which people often
treat commendable and distinguished writers of the
second order as if there were no room save for those of

4 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
the first." And the protest is equally applicable to art.
But if an attitude of undue severity is narrowing, the
blind and bigoted admiration of any one master or
school is equally fatal. The great artist is indeed often
a man of one idea, and that very fact the secret of his
greatness. But this is a peculiarity of the creative mind,
and where admiration is exaggerated and unbalanced in
the critic and excludes all other aspects of art, it can
only stultify, not strengthen. The critic of but one idea
is indeed poorly endowed for his vocation. Excellence
in painting as in all else is comparative. A moderate
picture hanging in a collection of vastly inferior works
often surprises and delights the eye, while if placed
among first-rate pictures it finds its true level. Yet even a
fifth-rate picture has always some one or more redeem
ing quality to the trained and practised eye. There is
scarcely a painting in any great collection, especially in
one so carefully chosen as our National Gallery, which
will not amply repay careful study.
Granting, then, that criticism must from its very
nature be personal, the question arises as to its value.
The much abused " It is a matter of Taste " expresses
the difficulty in its most popular form. This is not the
place to discuss the vexed question of authority in
matters of art. But a real difficulty undoubtedly exists
in the minds of many who have discussed and disputed
the merits of this or that work of art. Is A's opinion as
valuable as B's ? By what right does C profess to judge
between them ? And to whom does the ultimate appeal
lie ? The difficulty is one which must be faced. If my
personal opinion as to the merits of any given picture is
as valuable as that of my neighbour, independently of
whether either has studied painting in all or any of its
6ranches, then indeed there is no disputing about matters

THE PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW 5
of taste. The absurdity of this position is self-evident.
Again, it may happen that we have each of us devoted
a long lifetime to the consideration and observation of
pictures and yet differ widely in our estimate. Time
alone can decide. " The greatest art," says Symonds,
"communicates the greatest amount of satisfaction to
the greatest number of normal human beings throughout
the greatest length of time." And as a rough working
hypothesis this may serve our purpose, though it is far
from proving a principle of uniform and universal
application. The period of probation can indeed be no short one,
for the disturbing and strange vagaries of fashion are
overpoweringly strong. One generation applauds what
its successor despises. The heroes of the present are
disregarded when their vogue is past. Our verdict upon
our contemporaries may be reversed by those who come
after us. Our grandfathers admired the Italian painters
of the seventeenth century, Guido and the Carracci, and
cared nothing for the Primitives. We have reversed this
estimate, and the auction-room is the barometer which
records these changes of fashion. Phases and vogues of
this kind there must always be in which even the leaders
of opinion will seem unanimous for the moment. All
these come to the test of time. Slowly but surely the
artist finds his rightful place in the long roll of names.
The exaggerations and enthusiasms of each generation
fall into their true perspective. The dominating person
alities of our own country, our own day, take quite other
proportions when ranged alongside of the giants of
other countries, other centuries. The most irreconcilable
views resolve themselves into something like general
unanimity. Old disputes and antagonisms tend to
become buried in their own dust. And this growing

6 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
consensus of opinion applies not only to the greatest
masters but to the long list of names which rank after
them. Unanimity indeed is impossible, and our working
hypothesis, if too closely pressed, shows signs of giving
out. The truth is that, broadly speaking and subject to
the insensate changes of fashion, time does afford the
surest test of real merit. It is now universally admitted
that such men as Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo,
Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Turner were
artists of the most splendid genius ; that others like
Perugino, Luini, Memlinc, Teniers, Murillo and Hogarth
were painters of great power but of less extraordinary
attainments. It is only when we come to estimate the
comparative position of the individuals among their
peers that critics equally qualified to judge will be
found in hopeless disagreement. And this must always
be ; the personal element plays so considerable a part
with each of us. The enthusiast of realism will prize
Velasquez before Raphael. Those who care above all
for magnificent colour and exuberant vitality admire
Rubens more than Leonardo. To Titian we go for
grandeur and stately tranquillity, to Rembrandt for
mystery and character, to Turner for imaginative vision,
and according as we set store by these qualities we rank
their exponents in our Calendar.
Further, our own personal likings change with age
and increased experience. The idols of childhood and
youth have often fallen before middle age. This is due,
no doubt, to some extent to the growth of our powers of
criticism, but it is also largely temperamental and inde
pendent of the intellect. Fortunately the thought that
our judgment of our immediate predecessors and con
temporaries is by no means infallible need not dis-

THE PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW 7
courage. On the contrary, the need for careful judgment
is the more imperative. On the opinions of the past
and the present the verdict of the future will be founded.
The unknown artist of to-day may come to be one of
the greatest names. The idea adds dignity to the task
of judging our contemporaries. There is the more need
of bold and independent criticism which, without arro
gating to itself any finality, is prepared to stand by and
justify its judgments. Only with experience can the
confidence that comes of the sense of power and mastery
over the subject be attained. Courage in criticism is as
valuable as in art itself. There is no antagonism be
tween this courage and the authority which time and
study have sanctioned. Authority in contemporary art
is based on study of the art which has gone before as
well as on that of the present. For the wholly un
studied critic of modern painting to set up his horn
against the trained and experienced student is pre
sumption, not courage. But among those who have
qualified themselves to judge of pictures on which time
has not yet pronounced a final verdict, there is room for
the most fearless criticism. " To know what you prefer,"
said R. L. Stevenson, " instead of humbly saying 'Amen'
to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have
kept your soul alive." Honesty in criticism is terrified
by the bogey of Authority. But authority, with her
exclusive list of great names, is only terrible to those
who do not look into her title to the claim. We read
that a certain well-known art-critic has declared that
some one contemporary artist is the greatest master of
portraiture or landscape, of animal painting or still life,
the world has ever seen, or that the canvases of another
are unworthy of even the most passing attention. If we
know nothing of pictures or painting, we are fain to

8 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
admit that his opinion as an authority must necessarily
be of greater value than any we can offer in reply. But
its weight is chiefly the outcome of his experience, and
in so far as we can approach him in this we find that
this same authority is only a more enlightened intel
ligence and understanding than our own.
Great critical powers are of course far more than mere
study and experience. The true critic, we have seen,
has a genius or instinct for what is permanently beauti
ful in art which years of patient labour will not bring.
Taste has been admirably defined as Intuition plus
Experience. Intuition, unfortunately, comes not by
observation. Experience, in the fullest sense of the
word, is but slowly won. But apart from the exhaustive
study of art, which forms the life's work of the pro
fessional art-critic, there is a kind of novitiate in the
rudiments of art-teaching which robs authority of some
of its terrors, and gives courage and confidence to the
student. The trained eye, so essential to the critic, is
largely a matter of experience. It must not be thought
that too much stress is being laid upon study in discuss
ing the criticism of art. A picture is far more than an
exercise for the mind, a book written on a single page,
the coloured map of a moment, a lesson on canvas. A
great gallery is no mere dictionary of art, useful for
reference and study. If this point of view is emphasised
here, it is because without it the fuller understanding
and pure enjoyment of a picture is wellnigh impossible.
And herein the personal point of view has its fullest
scope. To arouse the powers of enjoyment, of abandon
ment to beauty as an end in itself, is the legitimate aim
of art. If we look at pictures to understand, it is that
thus we may come to enjoy them. It has been said
that there has come upon art something of excessive

THE PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW 9
earnestness and effort, out of harmony with its spirit.
Pater, one of the most naturally gifted and subtle of
modern critics, to whom the love of art was an instinct,
a passion, merely emphasised this view when he fanci
fully but bitterly complained of "people who would
never really have been made glad by any Venus fresh
risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old
Greece or Rome only because they fancy her grown now
into something staid and tame." Herein at least the
individual is unfettered, free to enjoy the fulness of
beauty wherever he can find it. He may find it, like
Flaubert, in the great masters of the past. "All I ask,"
he wrote, " is to retain the power of admiring the great
masters with that enchanting intimacy for which I
would willingly sacrifice all else." Or he may seek
it in the masterpieces of his own age, daring to direct
an enlightened and whole-hearted enthusiasm upon the
best he can discover, even though he may never hope to
hear his judgment finally confirmed.

CHAPTER II
CONSIDERATIONS OF DATE
GREAT art, it has been said, is for all time, and is
therefore independent of time. It is of all ages,
of every land. And if by this we merely mean that the
creative spirit in man which produces a picture or a
statue is common to the whole civilised world, inde
pendently of age, race and nationality, the statement
may stand unchallenged.
Looking more closely at the forms under which this
spirit manifests itself, there is indeed no end to their
variety, and yet each bears a very remarkable family
likeness to others produced in the same period and
environment. The fact may be verified by visiting any
gallery where pictures of many different centuries and
schools hang together. There are, indeed, pictures by
old masters which strike us by their singularly modern
appearance ; but this merely emphasises the truth of the
statement. Even the comparatively unpractised eye can
generally get within a hundred years of the age of a
picture, the acute critic within a decade, and perhaps one
of the first questions that suggests itself in looking at a
picture is this of the age in which it was painted. There
are probably more disappointments in the presence of
great and famous works of art through omitting to bear
in mind this obvious point of view than from any other
cause. All great art is, to a considerable extent, the

CONSIDERATIONS OF DATE n
outcome of its own age, and the circumstances under
which it was produced. It is through forgetting this
that we too often expect mature art of a period of tenta
tive endeavour, that we blame Memlinc for lacking the
vigour and freedom of Rubens, or Crivelli for the ab
sence of that breadth which characterised Tintoretto and
Veronese. Our standard must vary immediately, and
almost unconsciously, according as we are judging of a
Primitive of the fourteenth century, of a ripe work of
the high Renaissance, or of a painting by one of our own
contemporaries. Every age has its own artistic methods
and ideals, to which its painters give expression. The
painters of one age are interested in problems which are
neglected by another.
It is obvious that in art there is no law of continuous
progress and achievement. A period of development
and florescence is succeeded by one of decline. A gen
eration of giants gives place to a race of pigmies. The
course of art is rather that of a succession of cycles, in
which decay succeeds activity at more or less regular
intervals. A modern French critic has diagnosed the
rise of these movements in the art of painting as the
result of a number of artists being struck by the same
set of ideas. These men, finding that their thoughts and
impressions are shared by them in common with the
society in which they live, are encouraged thereby to the
greatest activity. After a time, however, art ceases to
be sincere and spontaneous, as the new inspiring ideas
which animated them and made the period great lose
their freshness and no longer express the general senti
ment. A period of imitation and repetition sets in, and
it is this that we call Decadence. Again, in course of time,
men grow weary of imitation. They launch out once
more in other directions, and a new movement begins.

12 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
But the new age does not necessarily work on the tradi
tions of the old, nor begin where the other left off. It
does not at the outset consciously gather up the threads
of all that has gone before. The difficulty experienced
by many minds in realising this fact is nowhere better
illustrated than in the story of the young artist who,
being asked whether he could surpass Fra Angelico,
replied that, considering all the progress which had been
made since then, the laws of perspective and the mysteries
of light and shade which had been mastered, and all the
work of subsequent generations, it would be no credit to
him if he could not aspire to paint better. " Reasonable,
but wrong," was the reply to this argument ; reasonable
because were painting a matter of rules and formulae,
developing on a line of continuous and unbroken pro
gress, the deduction had been a fair one ; wrong because
the whole history of art bears witness to its falseness.
This is not the place to discuss the vexed question
whether or no these successive cycles, these periods of
alternate rise and decline in the art of painting, when
viewed as a whole and from a distance, do or do not
make for continuity, for ultimate progress in the art. Is
a wider range of activity an advance on one which was
narrower, but in its technical qualities more uniformly
perfect? Does modern painting sum up all that has
gone before in the manner of a composite photograph
and add something of its own, or has it, in spite of its
broader vision, neglected and forgotten some of the
fundamental principles of pictorial art? Were the old
masters, with their obvious limitations both of matter
and manner, consciously rejecting what they conceived
to be beyond the reach of painting, or had they merely
failed to realise then the full scope and possibilities of
the painter's craft ? Has everything possible in painting

CONSIDERATIONS OF DATE 13
been attempted or achieved, or are there still new worlds
to conquer? Such are some ofthe questions that naturally
arise, questions to which almost every critic will give a
different answer. The periods of rise and fall are by no
means regular. The upward movement may, as in the
case of the Renaissance, take more than two centuries
to reach its culminating point. The period of decline,
in its turn, may be shorter or longer. In Italy there has
been no great art movement since the decadence of the
seventeenth century. German art lay fallow for centuries
after the decline of the school founded by Diirer and
Holbein. A whole wilderness of barren years separates
the great Dutch masters of to-day from their ancestors
of the seventeenth century. And this state of things is
due to the many disturbing elements — political, social
and religious — that come in from outside and prevent
the regular operation of the principles of action and re
action in art ideas. It seems impossible to maintain that
the crest of each wave is higher than that of its prede
cessor, though the advance of civilisation may perhaps
tend to shorten the periods of decline.
For most of us the history of painting begins with
those crude gaunt altar-pieces bearing the superscription
" Early Italian School," and ends with the current year's
exhibitions at Burlington House and the Salons. If ex
tremes meet, as it is said, it is surely not here. And
when the painting of all the intervening centuries is con
sidered, the necessity of judging of each in the light of
its characteristic excellences and defects becomes the
more apparent.
With the thirteenth century, and the rise of Giotto and
his followers in Italy, a wonderful awakening took place
in the world of art. A new tradition in painting was
formulated. A reaction set in against the dead and dying

14 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
superstitions of the past, and the revived activity in life
and thought created a new spirit in art, full of energy
and vitality, looking to the present rather than the past
for its inspiration. By the time the fourteenth century
was growing old, the movement had spread widely
throughout Italy. In drawing, perspective, composition,
colouring and chiaroscuro, the painters of this period
indeed had still almost everything to learn. The Ma
donnas and Saints of the early Florentine and Sienese
artists are often almost pathetic in their want of anatomy.
There is little or no modelling, and a total absence of
light and shade ; the flesh colours are purely conventional,
the draperies arbitrary. The scope of painting was
strictly limited. It was still wholly occupied with depict
ing the pains and penalties of ecclesiastical heterodoxy,
the dogmas of the Church, and the lives and adventures
of its Saints and heroes. It was still purely Christian,
and for the most part monkish. Moreover, it was still
subservient to the requirements of architecture.
In the fifteenth century, however, painting made the
most extraordinary advance. Not only in Florence and
Siena, but now in Umbria, Lombardy and Venice artists
were springing up with all the vitality and vigour of their
predecessors united to greatly increased technical know
ledge. Learning from successive failures, and striking
out in different directions, with fresh sources of inspira
tion, new materials and greater freedom of choice, they
pushed steadily on. The laws of perspective, unknown
to the fourteenth century, were gradually evolved and
applied. What Giotto had not even dared to attempt
in this direction, Uccello tried and Mantegna achieved.
The study of the nude, inspired by the sister art of
sculpture and the discovery of antique models, was pur
sued by such ardent students as Pollaiuolo and Signorelli.

CONSIDERATIONS OF DATE 15
Pagan ideals and modes of thought came to rival and, in
some cases, temporarily displace those of Christianity.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries too, con
temporaneously with this great advance in Italy, the art
of painting took root in Germany among the masters of
Cologne, and at the same time blossomed forth in
unexpected vigour and beauty in the Netherlands.
Flemish art, under the brothers Van Eyck, Roger van
der Weyden and Memlinc, seemed to need no years of
infancy. From what has come down to us we gather
that its earliest efforts were bold and confident, its
methods elaborate and accomplished. It led the way
in portraiture and landscape, leaving Italy for the
moment far behind in these directions.
In the sixteenth century the advance was even more
rapid and far more general. Italy, which had given
birth to the movement, retained her pride of place, and
Italian art now reached its fullest maturity. It was a
century of marvellous activity and masterly achieve
ment. It might almost seem as though nothing in
painting remained to be learned. Never had colour been
so boldly and successfully used as by the great Venetian
painters Giorgione and Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.
The perfect draughtsmanship of the Florentine masters,
Leonardo and Michelangelo, Raphael and Andrea del
Sarto, had never before been equalled. In the North
Diirer and Holbein inaugurated a Renaissance in Ger
many at the same time that the great Italian masters
beyond the Alps were in their fullest and most splendid
activity. The seventeenth century witnessed a complete change
in the distribution of artistic achievement. Italy, the
first to rise, was the earliest to decline. She no longer
produced, though she still continued to influence. Light-

16 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
ness and grace became triviality and affectation. Strength
and grandeur degenerated into heaviness and dullness.
Germany too seemed to have outlived her own art.
But the Netherlands, with Rubens and Van Dyck,
enjoyed a renaissance the more brilliant in that it
coincided with the almost total eclipse of Italian art,
and Holland gave birth to a school of painters at whose
head stand Hals, Rembrandt and Ruysdael. At the
same time France, which had hitherto concerned herself
more with the patronage of Italian art than with founding
a school of her own, gave to the world a style of paint
ing born of classical traditions, initiated by Claude and
the Poussins. In this century too Spain, though hitherto
almost unknown in the world of painting, brought forth
two artists of widely different genius in Velasquez and
Murillo ; Velasquez, the father of modern painting,
Murillo, distinguished by far less originality but possessed
of no little charm.
With the advent of the eighteenth century Italian
painting, with the exception of such painters of the
second rank as Tiepolo and Canaletto, Guardi and
Longhi, had almost ceased to be. Spain has but Goya's
name on her roll of fame ; Germany, Flanders, Holland
not one painter of first-rate importance. France, with
Watteau and Fragonard, elaborated the art of cultured
artificiality on its most charming side, while Chardin
sought his inspiration in homely effects of domesticity
and still life. And now, when painting elsewhere seemed
to have exhausted its resources and lost all spontaneity,
England for the first time advanced into the arena, and
under Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough enjoyed a
late renaissance of her own.
Lastly, in the nineteenth century, the age of industry
and commercial activity, we find a general revival of the

CONSIDERATIONS OF DATE 17
art of painting throughout Europe. The tendency of
nineteenth-century art has been to assert its independ
ence of the centuries that preceded it, to rely no longer
on a tradition with which the times were out of touch,
to look forward rather than back, to learn from nature
rather than from the old masters. Hence its chief
characteristic is its endless diversity, its almost unlimited
scope, the fearlessness with which it attacks problems
unassailed by the painters of any other age. Hence,
too, the difficulty of formulating its tendencies, a diffi
culty enhanced by the close proximity to our own
contemporaries which forbids our seeing them in true
perspective. With such fluctuations from century to century it is
clear that our standard must vary proportionately. It
is not that we can feel equally in sympathy with the
products of every age. Our individuality is too strong.
Moreover, each age has its peculiar manner, its own
triumphs and failures, its characteristic excellences and
defects. You do not ask perfection of draughtsmanship
or modelling of the fourteenth century, mature landscape
art of the fifteenth, advanced realism in style or subject
of the sixteenth. You do not go to the seventeenth
century for deep religious feeling, or to the eighteenth
for naivete' and natural charm. But the sense of dis
appointment and flagging interest that is so often ex
perienced in looking at pictures does not arise from our
consciously demanding certain qualities and character
istics of any given century and resenting their absence,
but rather in our not knowing what each century has to
offer, and therefore failing to recognise whatever special
excellence it may possess. It is true in the presence of
a great picture we often feel its beauty, its power over
us, without a thought of when, where or by whom it was
C

18 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
painted. We do not even ask these questions, and cer
tainly we neither know nor care to learn their answers.
The function of painting is not to exercise the intellect,
but to please the eye. This is true, but it is not the
whole truth. There are many pictures which cannot do all
this for us, pictures that the eye would pass by but that
the mind bids it pause and look again. Moreover, even
where we linger most willingly under the sensuous spell
of beauty, our knowledge does not freeze or contract
our aesthetic appreciation. On the contrary, the student,
the connoisseur, is your true enthusiast. He sees farther
and tastes longer.
And thus fully to understand a picture we must try
to see it with the eyes of the painter's own age, to
recognise in his art what were his objects, his ideals,
and what the ideals and qualities most revered and
prized by his contemporaries. It is when we come to
see that every picture should, to some extent at least, be
regarded in the light of the time in which it was painted
that it becomes clear why the mere imitation of the
style of a past age can never produce a great work of
art, and the many attempts made of late years, to paint
pictures after the manner of Diirer, Holbein, Van Eyck,
Filippo Lippi or Gerard Dou are doomed to failure
from the outset. The fate of those who thus look back
is that of Lot's wife. It is not that the mannerisms and
methods of a painter cannot be in part reproduced and
even the touch of time rendered again with some exact
ness, but the life of the picture will be but seeming, the
interest forced and false, and the result altogether lacking
in all the freshness and spontaneity which form the
charm of the old master. Pictures, even by the most
gifted modern artists, produced by such a process, are
mere ohantoms of the Middle Ages. Moreover, these

CONSIDERATIONS OF DATE 19
imitators, it has been well pointed out, " have sought to
transfer to their pictures not only the beauties but the
defects of their great models, forgetting that early
masters attract us not on account of their meagre draw
ing, hard outlines, erroneous perspective and conven
tional glories, but, on the contrary, in spite of these
defects and peculiarities." The truth is that " the most
valuable lesson of the past teaches an artist to use the
best methods of that past to execute what he wishes to
paint, but to wish to paint what he himself sees and
feels." There is one point which cannot be insisted on too
strongly in dealing with these questions of chronology
in painting. 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 tend
ency, 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 prevailing idea that between the art of
the old masters and that of our own contemporaries
there exists a hard and fast line of demarcation ; that
the so-called " old masters " are on a different level from
the best masters of to-day, belong, indeed, to another
category. Nothing is further from the truth. Much of
the worship of the old is due to intellectual cowardice
begotten of ignorance. The old masters are not always
good. The halo with which they are surrounded 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 pre-

20 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
served for us others of quite inferior value. Painting in
its broadest aspects preserves 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 about 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 revolutionary as Manet, Rembrandt as
Whistler, Hogarth as Madox Brown. Whenever tradi
tion and only tradition has been the watch word of paint
ing, art has declined, until the inevitable reaction sets
in and experiment takes its place.

CHAPTER III
THE INFLUENCE OF RACE AND COUNTRY
ALMOST as important a question as the date of the
picture is the nationality of its painter. Whistler
indeed has poured scorn upon this idea of nationality,
maintaining that art is cosmopolitan. " There is no such
thing as English art," he has told us ; " we might as well
talk of English mathematics." The paradox is brilliant
but the analogy fallacious. The influence of nationality,
of physical and political conditions has indeed been
somewhat unduly emphasised, especially by the French
critic and philosopher, Henri Taine. But it is obvious
that the life, character and history of a nation must be
to no small degree reflected in its art. Art is inevitably
the expression of external conditions, modified though
they be by the genius and personality of the artist. The
painter's inspiration must ultimately be derived to a
large extent from what he sees and hears around him in
daily life and from the traditions which he has imbibed
from childhood. These he reproduces with more or less
of exactness, according to his own temperament and
habits. As a rule he takes what is nearest and therefore
most familiar. The heavy, phlegmatic type of the native
of Holland and the physical features of his country, with
its low, level pastures intersected with canals, are faith
fully portrayed in Dutch art. So too the sunny skies of
Italy, the regular, classical features of her people and the

22 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
gracious beauties of her landscape are reflected in Italian
painting. But even before we come to the characteristics of
nationality, characteristics peculiar to a country or
people, there are certain broader distinctions that have
had a very real influence on the art of painting, especially
during its early history. Such are the distinctions that
at once suggest themselves between the art of Northern
and that of Southern Europe. These are due to causes
of infinite variety, differences of race, climate, history
and physical features, which cannot fail to influence the
art in which they are mirrored.
Roughly speaking, the North of Europe is peopled by
a Teutonic, the South by a Latin race. The reserved,
intellectual Teuton differs as much from his vivacious,
sensitive Latin cousin as the gray mists and clouds of
the North from the brilliant sunshine and clear skies of
the South. The Teutonic nature is reflective rather than
imaginative, and less developed upon the sensuous side
than the Latin. This does not imply that it is less ab
sorbed in the problems of art than the other, but only
that it approaches them from a different side. These
differences in temperament and character between the
Teutons of the North and the Latin-speaking races of
Southern Europe are so marked in the literature and
manners of each that it would be strange if they were
not emphasised in their art. Nor are they confined to
the peoples alone. They are as pronounced in the
climatic and physical conditions under which they live.
In the North the climate is generally cold and damp,
the atmosphere hazy. Long sunless periods accustom
the eye to prevailing tones of gray. Figures are not as
it were silhouetted against a background of clear sky,
but are seen rather as broad masses of colour and light

INFLUENCE OF RACE AND COUNTRY 23
and shade, losing themselves in a haze of atmosphere.
Climate has its effect even upon the medium employed
by the artist. Fresco-painting is almost unknown in
the North, where the damp atmosphere rapidly destroys
all but the most carefully protected pictures. So far
from exposing them to the open air, it has even been
thought necessary to cover those in our National Gallery
with glass, in spite of the grave disadvantages of such a
rourse. In the South this is in many respects changed. A
warmer, sunnier climate and dry atmosphere make fresco
suitable even for open courts and cloisters. Many such
paintings have retained their original freshness for cen
turies. Moreover, in the South and especially in Italy
the traditions of a classical past, whose remains were
scattered over the length and breadth of the country,
exercised an influence profound and enduring. The
study of the nude was a passion in the country most
suited for it by nature. This classicism seems to have
affected the painting of the North but little, until in the
seventeenth century Italian influence carried it all over
Europe. The classical spirit of the South was mani
fested also in the idealising tendency which characterises
Italian art as compared with the greater realism of the
North. The principles of selection and generalisation
were little understood in Germany and the Netherlands,
where a tendency to insist upon particular detail rather
than general decorative effect characterised painting
throughout the earlier period of its history.
But even within these broader and more general
aspects of the art of North and South there are essen
tially national characteristics distinguishing the art of
one country from that of another. These again apply
especially, though not entirely, to the art of past genera-

24 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
tions, and are more clearly to be traced the further we
go back in the history of painting. They depend upon
the social, political and religious characteristics of the
country, upon its types, customs and dress, its physical
features, landscape and architecture. The traveller pass
ing from one country into another, even from one province
into another, is struck by the marked differences of type
that meet him as he crosses the frontier. In the past
these physical differences were accentuated by far greater
diversity of dress and mode of life than in these days of
levelling civilisation. Yet even to-day we can easily
distinguish English from German, in spite of their com
mon Teutonic origin, or French from Italian, though both
be of Latin race. Although the painter may modify
the types among which he lives, he seldom escapes en
tirely from them. They are as enduring as language
itself. We may detect them in any gallery where pic
tures of different nationalities are hung. Without guide
or catalogue it is often easy simply from the types por
trayed to decide whether a picture be Italian, Flemish,
Spanish or English. No one could mistake one of Jan
van Eyck's plain-faced, high-browed Madonnas for any
but a Flemish burgher's wife, a class to this day singu
larly devoid of grace or beauty. Again, how essentially
Spanish are Murillo's dark-skinned, black-eyed beggar
boys ; and who could mistake the graceful and elegant
types of Reynolds, Gainsborough and Romney, for any
but well-born English men and women ? In Italy, indeed,
compounded as she was of many units, the distinction is
carried even further. The Florentine differed from the
Venetian as though the two cities had varied, not only
in forms of government and history, but even in nation
ality itself. We have but to compare the blonde, massive
types of Titian or Palma's models with the slender forms

aNFLUENCE OF RACE AND COUNTRY 25
and more intellectual features portrayed by Botticelli,
Ghirlandaio or Leonardo. Every country has its own
ideal or type of beauty, which its artists help to define.
Even in their religious pictures the Italian and Flemish
masters chose their models from the men and women
among whom they lived. In Filippo Lippi's Annuncia
tion in the National Gallery the Virgin and the Angel
Gabriel are simply a Florentine youth and maiden of
his day, perhaps somewhat idealised. Indeed, Filippo's
Madonna is often merely the portrait of his own wife, and
Ghirlandaio's frescoes teem with portraits of distinguished
contemporaries. Equally distinctive of each country are the physical
features of its landscape and the prevailing style of
architecture. The hedge-rows, orchards and green pas
tures, the thatched cottage and Gothic church, the rolling
clouds and fitful gleams of sunshine are as characteristic
of England as are the cypress and olive, the vineyards,
the tall slender campanile, the blue skies and clear
horizons of Italy. Perugino's landscape backgrounds
with their steep blue slopes and winding valleys are as
truly representative of the hill country about Perugia as
are Constable's leafy lanes and homesteads of his beloved
Eastern counties. Equally typical are the bare rocks
and snowy peaks of the grim Spanish Sierras introduced
into the backgrounds of Velasquez and Goya, while
Masaccio and Memlinc have perpetuated the tall, steep
houses and high gables of their native Florence and
Bruges. But nowhere perhaps more than in Dutch art
do we feel how great a part the physical features of the
country have played. The Dutch masters of the seven
teenth century, Van Goyen, De Koninck, Hobbema, Van
der Heyden, set themselves with characteristic directness
to reproduce every aspect of their low-lying, level pasture

26 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
lands, intersected by silvery waterways and studded
with windmills, their prim red-brick houses and vast
whitewashed churches. And it was but natural that this
nation, once mistress of the high seas, should have pro
duced also a great school of marine painters.
Equally important in its influence on art was the
religion of the country. Modern painting is indeed but
little affected by this consideration. Never has art been
more independent of religion than at the present day.
But its early history proves how profoundly painting
was affected not only by the tenets, but also by the
forms and ceremonies of the prevailing creed. Herein
again some of the broader distinctions between North
and South may be traced. The religion of Northern
Europe is for the most part, though with some notable
exceptions, Protestant ; that of the South, Roman
Catholic. In exclusively Catholic countries like Italy
and Spain, it is natural that the views of that Church
should prevail in their art. The Church deeply colours
the life of the people. Its teaching has always made
a deliberate and powerful appeal to the senses and
emotions. Painting first arose as the handmaid of a
Church which preached and taught by its pictures. The
Southern mind was stored to the full with legends of
the innumerable saints of the Roman Calendar. Even
when their virtues and saving powers were no longer
respected, their stories and attributes remained familiar.
Every church contained numerous altars, above each of
which it was the desire and pride of the pious to raise a
masterpiece. Thus Church pictures were everywhere in
demand, and some of the finest altar-pieces of the
Italian Renaissance were executed to the order of
wealthy prelates or ecclesiastical bodies, or at the com
mand of one of the great noble families for the adorn-

INFLUENCE OF RACE AND COUNTRY 27
ment of private chapel or public hall. In the same
manner, too, the walls of chapel or cloister were covered
with frescoes, which should serve the double purpose
of instruction and decoration. For the architectural
arrangement of the churches of the South, with their
endless series of chapels, small windows and abundant
unbroken wall-space, gave opportunities to painting un
paralleled in the Gothic architecture of the North, with
its mullioned windows filled with stained glass and
its altarless aisles. In the same way the pageants
organised by the ecclesiastical and civic authorities to
celebrate the great religious festivals not only accustomed
the eye to appreciate the spectacular effect of masses of
vivid colour, but when reproduced on wall or canvas
still further tended to identify Latin Christianity with
the art of painting.
By the time Holland and England had begun to
develop their national schools of painting, the Reforma
tion had swept over Europe, cleaving its religious life
into two distinct divisions. The Reformed Church had
little sympathy with the art of painting, was indeed
more than half suspicious of it as an ally of the Roman
faith. The ascetic creed of Calvin forbade any appeal
to the senses through the medium of music or painting.
As a natural result of this feeling, scarcely a suggestion
of religious inspiration exists either in English or Dutch
art. In both countries painting developed independently
of the Church, without its encouragement, but free from
its restricting influence. Art patronage in these countries
was secular, not ecclesiastical. Their peoples affected
no interest in the old monkish tales of the Saints or the
legends of the Madonna. It is no wonder then that art
was directed into other channels and took other forms,
and that portraiture, landscape and genre became the

28 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
most characteristic and therefore the most favoured.
Instead of altar-pieces, we find huge life-size portrait-
groups of the Dutch Guilds and Corporations, Regent
pictures, as they are called. The finest series, that
from the hand of Frans Hals, now adorning the long
Municipal Gallery at Haarlem, represents the officers
of the guilds of Arquebusiers grouped round their
banqueting tables in all the bravery of gala uniform and
ceremonial. These are as peculiarly Dutch as the Fites
galantes of Watteau and Lancret, in which elegantly
dressed noblemen and ladies dance minuets on the green
turf or foregather about a marble fountain, are charac
teristically French.
Thus, in choice of subject, in methods of treatment,
even in such matters as the size of pictures, differences
of nationality have been clearly marked, and as each
has been the outcome of the special genius and require
ments of the nation that produced it, success has never
attended the deliberate adoption of the characteristics
of one country by the artists of another. The Italian
masters and their successors, the Flemish painters of the
seventeenth century, were chiefly employed in covering
huge wall-spaces or canvases with scriptural, allegorical
or mythological subjects. It was only towards the
sixteenth century that easel pictures for private houses
came into favour in Italy. The Dutch ^masters used the
smallest possible panel or canvas on which to depict the
portraits, the landscapes and genre scenes, for which a
great demand had arisen.
Vain attempts have been made from time to time to
counteract these national and climatic influences. Many
of the Flemish artists of the sixteenth century, Mabuse,
Bernard van Orley and a host of others, abandoned their
native art and flocked to Italy to study that of Rome.

INFLUENCE OF RACE AND COUNTRY 29
The results were deplorable from the first. They lost
the habits of careful drawing and observation of their
predecessors, and gained only in their place an ex
aggerated melodramatic style that may be recognised
at once as the result of an alien influence ill-assimilated.
In the same way the huge allegorical and classical
pictures of our English academic painters, Haydon,
Barry and Fuseli, obviously modelled on Correggio,
Raphael, Michelangelo and the great Venetians, are
far more ridiculous than sublime. It is as though the
artists were attempting to converse in a language wholly
foreign to them.
To-day differences of nationality have almost ceased
to influence art. Facilities of travel have practically
annihilated them. An English artist may find his
teacher in Paris and his model in Venice. Two centuries
ago, if a painter travelled, it was to Rome, as to the
one artistic Mecca. Now he goes everywhere, to Paris,
Munich, the East, to study, copy and assimilate what
ever influences cross his path. Photography and modern
processes of reproduction have increased this denation
alising tendency. The change was strikingly illustrated
at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. In the Louvre, grouped
according to their respective countries, the Italian,
Flemish, Dutch, German, French and English pictures
need no description to identify their nationality. In the
Grand Palais of the Exhibition the names of the same
nations appeared over the doors of their respective
rooms, but in many cases the most acute critic would
have been unable to restore a wandering canvas to its
own country. Art from this point of view has indeed
become cosmopolitan.
One other consideration, inseparably associated with
the idea of locality, has more influence upon our estimate

30 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
of pictures than is generally understood, the milieu in
which they are seen. The growth of great representa
tive collections, embracing the works of every country,
every school, tends to dull our appreciation of this fact.
A picture is happiest in the country in which it was
painted. An Italian picture is always something of a
foreigner in England or Germany. In Florence it is
difficult to tune one's mind to enjoy the fine Dutch and
Flemish pictures in its galleries. Indeed only when we
have seen the pictures that still remain in their own
country can we fully appreciate those in exile.

CHAPTER IV
SCHOOLS OF PAINTING
PICTURES are commonly classified according to
Schools. We speak of the Schools of Italy and
Spain, of the French and Dutch Schools of painting,
including in these general terms a great variety of
achievement. The word " School " as applied to painting
is, however, used in many other senses, sometimes illogical
and always confusing unless the precise meaning attached
to each is kept in view. We talk of the English School,
the Florentine School, the School of Rubens, the Pre-
Raphaelite School, the Impressionist School, the Barbizon
School, and finally of a " School-picture." It is obvious
that here this same hard-worked term is applied in at
least three different senses. School may imply either a
geographical division, a personal influence direct or in
direct, or a group of artists who have adopted certain
definite aims or characteristics.
In its first and most familiar sense, then, the word
School implies a geographical limit, usually though not
exclusively coextensive with national divisions, and in
dependent of considerations of time. It is as natural
to speak of the French School or the English School of
painting as of French or English literature. Nationality,
as we have seen, plays as important a part in art as in all
other departments of life. This is the broadest use of
the term School in its geographical sense. For within

32 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
the general limits of nationality, there are many minor
divisions based on locality, especially in countries where,
as in Italy and Germany, a number of distinct political
units existed side by side. In the Middle Ages, the
great period of her artistic energy, the term Italy was
merely a geographical expression, and the label " Italian
School " may be attached to many pictures which, though
they bear a certain family likeness, have little in common.
Thus, when we come to differentiate between the School
of Tuscany and that of Umbria, or between the Sienese
and the Venetian Schools, we are using our geographical
distinction in a narrower sense to imply a district or
town. Local as well as national characteristics, as we
have seen, are most strongly marked in Italian art. Only
a few miles separate Florence and Siena, both in the
province of Tuscany. Yet Florence betrays in her art
that eager spirit of scientific inquiry which ever possessed
her, while the art of Siena, devoid of science, was full of
passionate religious fervour and flowing grace. Still
more pronounced is the difference between Florentine
and Venetian art. Even in Dutch art the painters group
themselves into schools according to the cities in which
they worked. We speak of the Schools of Haarlem,
Leyden, Amsterdam or Utrecht, though these cities are
scarce a Sabbath day's journey apart. The English, or
more properly speaking the British School, being later
in date, has fewer local subdivisions, though even here
we differentiate between the Schools of Norwich, Newlyn
and Glasgow, each with its distinct characteristics. In
this case, however, the distinction is perhaps rather that
of chosen aim than of unconsciously expressed local
idiosyncrasy. Another sense in which the word " School " is used is
to express the personal influence of some great artist

SCHOOLS OF PAINTING 33
upon his pupils and imitators. The School or Atelier
system has in our day almost disappeared. True, we
speak of the School of Burne-Jones or Carolus-Duran,
yet meaning something much less definite than when
under the terms School of Giotto or School of Rembrandt
we sweep in a whole host of unknown and nameless
artists, consciously working on given lines. In the
Middle Ages, when the artist was less an individual than
a member of a guild with its fixed rules to which he was
bound to conform, the painter had but little scope for
originality unless he possessed more than the ordinary
share of talent. A young painter in the natural course
of events was apprenticed to an artist of standing and
repute, and put to such menial tasks as the grinding of
colours or the preparing of panel or fresco for his master's
use. In time small unimportant commissions were in
trusted to him, which he would execute under direction
and supervision, the master himself perhaps adding the
finishing touches. A strong family likeness must natur
ally appear in the works of these pupils, painting under
one influence and bound by the traditions of a common
training. The more gifted and independent would, how
ever, assert their individuality, and in time set up their
own studios and form their own schools.
Thus the atelier of Giovanni Bellini was the great
training-school for Venetian artists of the fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries. To his school belonged Titian,
Giorgione, Catena, Basaiti, Bissolo and a host of lesser
luminaries. Of these, Titian and Giorgione, who possessed
genius of the highest order, passed beyond the Bellinesque
traditions and formed new ones of their own. They may
be said to belong to the School of Bellini only in the
sense that from him they received the elements of their
art. Indeed it is often suggested that in his turn,
D

34 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
Giorgione's poetical spirit was not without its influence on
the master himself. But painters like Basaiti, Bissolo and
a crowd of others we may strictly include in the School
of Bellini. As his assistants, they even signed their
works with his name, and this with no fraudulent intent,
the signature merely implying that the picture came from
the atelier of the Capo-scuola. Many a picture display
ing distinct Bellinesque characteristics, yet too poor in
execution to be assigned to any known pupil, is simply
labelled " School of Bellini," and falls into the category
of "School-picture," a convenient term to designate a
picture suggesting a master's influence but not to be
attributed directly to him or to any one of his known
pupils. Criticism is active in assigning these waifs and
strays to some newly discovered painter, of whom often
little but the name is known.
Rubens had a large school of pupils and assistants,
who took their part in almost every great work that came
from his studio. It is only in his very early pictures
that we see pure Rubens, unadulterated by assistants'
work. His fame once made, commissions poured in, and
anyone who has merely strolled through the galleries
of the Louvre, Munich, Vienna and Antwerp must realise
how impossible it were for all these acres of canvas to be
the work of one pair of hands. We can only wonder at
the brain that could produce so rapidly and the powerful
personality that so impressed itself upon others and made
them work for him. The system was so openly acknow
ledged that a sliding scale of payment came into use, so
much for a picture or portrait entirely by the artist him
self, less where he had painted only the head, and still
less where he had merely furnished the sketch and added
some finishing touches.
The influence of his master may generally be traced

SCHOOLS OF PAINTING 35
in an artist's work. It never passes wholly out of his
style, though often left far behind as the pupil realises
his own powers. Many points which puzzle us in look
ing at a great painter's work can be traced to some
mannerism or habit adopted from his master in the im
pressionable years of youth. The pupil may surpass his
master, as Leonardo surpassed Verrocchio, and Reynolds
the prosaic Hudson ; or the teacher may always remain
as far above the pupil as Raphael towered over Giulio
Romano, or Rembrandt over Bol, Eckhout and Gerard
Dou. But the long chain of master and pupil can often
be traced for many generations, and the pedigree of such
a School as that of Florence drawn with considerable
accuracy from Giotto through Masaccio and Ghirlandaio
to Michelangelo. But artistic pedigrees are seldom so
simple or pure. Cross-currents indeed often disturb the
flow of influence. They may come in from altogether
foreign sources, as when some pupil, leaving his native
city, establishes himself in a new country or city under
alien influences, whereby his pupils in their turn will dis
play a double origin. So English painting was influenced
by the German Holbein, the Flemish Van Dyck and his
successors Lely and Kneller, who preceded the more
purely English School of the eighteenth century.
The third sense in which the term School is used is to
imply some common characteristic or definitely chosen
aim uniting a group of painters, often of different nation
alities. In this sense we speak of the Eclectic, the
Romantic, the Pre-Raphaelite Schools. The Eclectic
School arose in Rome and Bologna in the seventeenth
century with the decline of Italian art. All spontaneity
in painting had spent itself. Painters now set themselves
to imitate the works of the great masters, Raphael,
Michelangelo and Correggio. Accepting their names as

36 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
embodying the noblest achievement in painting, these
Eclectics set themselves to select such characteristics
from each great master as seemed most worthily to re
present him, and by combining these to produce a whole
which should be at least as worthy as the sum of the
component parts. From Raphael they selected perfec
tion of drawing, from Michelangelo grandeur of concep
tion and mastery of anatomy, from Correggio striking
effects of light and shade. It was indeed the apotheosis
of conventionality. The only result, it has been said, of
this desire to resuscitate the dead was to kill the living.
In this sense also we speak of the Romantic School
which arose in France in the nineteenth century in re
action against the prevailing severe, classical style, and
the Pre-Raphaelite School in England, which also threw
down the glove to the Academy and dared to defy the
accepted traditions of generations.

CHAPTER V
THE ARTIST
AS we have seen, the painter may be regarded as one
of the units forming a nation at a particular period
in its history, and also as a member of a school of artists.
But ultimately it will be his own individuality, his personal
genius that more than any of these will determine the
place he is to hold in the world of art.
To ascertain wherein lies the special individuality of a
painter is almost as difficult a problem as to analyse his
peculiar charm. We may find a clue to it, however, by
comparing the work of some artist with that of his con
temporaries, more particularly those of his own school.
Certain characteristics will be found in all, some of which
may perhaps be traced to a common master. These
being deducted, so to speak, from the work of the indi
vidual, what remains will represent his own personal
style, or to use a current expression, his subjectivity.
This fact is summed up in the well-known saying of
Buffon, which applies to art as well as to literature : " Le
style, c'est l'homme."
The new scientific criticism associated with the name
of Morelli is based on these principles, and has been
applied with great minuteness to the study of early
Italian painting. Just as every individual has his own
distinctive handwriting, every author his favourite words
and expressions, so every painter has his own character-

38 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
istic manner of rendering form, by which his works may
be distinguished from others of the same school. Certain
forms of hand and ear, of drapery and landscape back
ground are peculiar to each early artist, who on the other
hand, in his types and general conception, differs but
little from his master and fellow-pupils. Thus Filippo
Lippi's broad type of hand and ear, Paris Bordone's
peculiar crumpled folds of drapery, Giulio Romano's full,
fleshy upper lip are a kind of stamp, differentiating them
from artists whom in other respects they closely resemble.
In modern painting of course, with its greater realism, this
test would not apply at all. It is only by a process of
comparison and elimination that we can estimate the in
dividual contribution of a painter to the art of his day.
However closely he may follow in the footsteps of some
older painter or even of a contemporary, if he be worthy
the name of artist, his personality cannot fail to impress
itself on his art.
A striking example ofa painter standing out above his
contemporaries, and advancing almost at a bound so far
beyond them as to leave them out of sight, is' that of Velas
quez. His predecessors and contemporaries were men of
little note. Herrera and Pacheco but for their good fortune
in having been his early masters would scarcely claim
recognition. Beyond the fact that Velasquez enjoyed the
patronage of a rich and powerful Court and the personal
friendship of its sovereign, neither his circumstances nor
surroundings seemed to promise greatness, and this makes
his achievements the more remarkable.
It is in connection with this question of individuality
in art that the problem of personal influence inevitably
arises. The influence of some painters over their con
temporaries and successors has been overpoweringly great
either for good or evil as the case may be. It is true that

THE ARTIST 39
some of the greatest artists, Michelangelo for instance,
have had few if any direct pupils associated with them,
yet their influence has been none the less profound. On
the other hand the influence of such great masters as
Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens, each of whom
stood at the head of a large school, can scarcely be
exaggerated. Of all these, Raphael's perhaps has been
the most far-reaching, though not entirely for good. Of
an intensely assimilative nature, he seized and perfected
all the best qualities of those with whom he came in
contact, yet without sacrificing his own individuality. It
is this perfection of style united to the marvellous fertility
of his invention, which makes up his power and charm.
While he lived to supply the ideas, his pupils seem to
have caught something of his spirit. When he was dead,
there being no possibility of improving upon the technical
perfection of his art, and his creative power being no
longer available, his followers fell into empty imitation.
The name of Raphael has always been one to conjure
with, but the true Raphael has been too often obscured
by the so-called Raphaelesque. And in the same way
the followers of Michelangelo, unable to comprehend the
true spirit of his genius, sought to surpass him by exag
gerating his defects.
The influence of a great artist survives in his works
long after he himself is dead. We can trace that of
Titian in many of the pictures of Van Dyck, Delacroix
and Watts. Rembrandt's works inspired, besides his
immediate followers, Reynolds, Wilkie, Lenbach and
Israels. We can feel the impress of Rubens in Watteau,
Hogarth, Bonnington and Stothard. And in thus con
sciously assimilating the influence of a great master
there is no plagiarism, no petty pilfering, unworthy of
an artist

40 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
Some light may be thrown on the artist's work by the
consideration of his life and character. It is not that his
painting necessarily reflects his life, or that his character
is any criterion of his art, in spite of Michelangelo's
theory that good Christians always paint good and
beautiful figures. There are far too many exceptions to
the rule. No one would imagine that such a painter as
George Morland, who devoted himself almost exclusively
to pictures of peaceful, country existence, farmyard and
stable scenes breathing the very spirit of rural domes
ticity, had spent the greater part of his life in towns,
and that even in such atmosphere it had been noted
for wildness and excess. And it is almost as great a
surprise to find that Turner, one of the greatest land
scape-painters the world has ever seen, should have been
London-born and bred, and have passed his best years
within its dingy confines. Vasari roundly accuses Peru-
gino of irreligion, and yet no painter of any age has
succeeded in conveying the spirit of Christianity with
greater delicacy of sentiment. Other instances equally
striking might be quoted to prove the opposite. When
we remember the repulsive faces in Adrian Brouwer's
pictures and the frequency with which he represented
tavern-brawls we are not surprised to hear that he him
self died young in consequence of his excesses. And
do not Fra Angelico's visions of heaven testify to a life
devoted to its contemplation ? It were, however, idle to
dogmatise on such a subject, and dangerous to argue
from even the most tempting analogies.
But in looking at pictures there is no doubt that
questions often suggest themselves bearing upon the life
and character, the circumstances and surroundings of
the painter. What led him to choose the subject of his
picture, to treat it as he has ? Was it the spontaneous

THE ARTIST 41
outcome of his genius, owing nothing to any picture
before it, like Rembrandt's Night- Watch at Amsterdam
or Giorgione's Sleeping Venus in the Dresden Gallery?
Was his motive ambition or rivalry, as when Sebastian
del Piombo executed his Raising of Lazarus in the
National Gallery to surpass the Transfiguration upon
which Raphael was engaged, or Turner painted with
Claude's masterpieces before his mind ? Was it to obey
the commission of some rich patron, as were Raphael's
frescoes in the Vatican, painted for that tyrant of artists,
Pope Julius II.? Did he paint as Rembrandt painted
towards the end of his life, to keep his creditors at bay
and provide for his family, or like Rubens and Reynolds
for huge fees that even so could not drive the crowd of
fashionable sitters from the door? Did he dash it in
red-hot in a fine frenzy of inspiration as Tintoretto or
Frans Hals would seem to have worked, or was it as
with Leonardo the result of long years of toil, painted
touch upon touch, with intervals of irresolution and
despair before the end was achieved and the brush laid
down ? Did the subject of his picture form slowly in the
painter's brain, built up piece by piece as the careful
studies and drawings of many masters would lead us to
suppose, or was it a glimpse of some scene in street or
field that painted and framed itself, as it were, in a flash
across his mind ? Only thus could Whistler and Claude
Monet have seized the impressions they delighted to
depict. The subject once selected, the further question arises
how far the artist's individuality has made itself felt.
All great pictures bear the unmistakable stamp of the
personality that created them. It is far more than a
mannerism, more even than a strongly pronounced style.
The painter may allow much of himself to come into

42 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
his work or little, and according as he is personal or im
personal we may judge of the man within and behind
the artist. Some there are, especially painters of portraits,
who so absorb themselves in their sitters that their own
identity remains almost hidden. With others it is the
reverse. We seem to see the artist as well as the sitter
when standing before a portrait by Lotto or Andrea del
Sarto, Rembrandt or Van Dyck, Gainsborough or Watts.
We need no biography to tell us of the sternness of
Michelangelo, of Raphael's blithe serenity, that Hals was
a fellow of infinite merriment, Rubens a cavalier, Rem
brandt a visionary, Van Dyck a courtier and man ofthe
world, Reynolds a scholar.
How extraordinarily complex are the personalities of
some of the greatest masters, how perfectly simple those
of others. Michelangelo was architect, sculptor, painter,
poet, and supreme in all. Leonardo excelled as painter,
sculptor, architect, engineer, chemist and man of letters.
Rembrandt is as famous for his etching as for his paint
ing. How simple, on the contrary, and indeed in a
sense limited both in style and character, are such early
artists as Lorenzo di Credi or Carpaccio, and later the
Dutch genre-painters Jan Steen and van Ostade, Metzu
and Dou, who were content to paint again and again the
same subject in the same surroundings with but slight
variation of incident or detail.
No one can fail to have observed, both among painters
of the present as of the past, how closely the pictures by
each master resemble one another ; how the artist, as it
were, forms a peculiar style of his own which shows
itself in every work no matter what its subject may be.
In this he is following out his own individual way of
emphasising a truth or presenting a new point of view.
Giorgione's romantic treatment, Rembrandt's mysteries

THE ARTIST 43
of light and shadow, Gainsborough's feathery touch,
Corot's low-toned harmonies, Burne-Jones's ascetic types
characterise their work, so that when walking through a
gallery we can often recognise by whom each picture
has been painted. At the same time due appreciation
of this personality in style should discourage the pecu
liarly unhappy practice of contrasting the excellences
of one painter with the faults of another, a comparison
which is only unjust to both artists.
Some few painters there are whose fame is greatly
enhanced by their great rarity and the little we know of
them. The fact that but one or two works from his
hand are known to exist will often give an artist a
prominence he scarcely deserves. Modern research is
continually bringing to light some obscure and forgotten
painter in whom our interest is as much antiquarian as
artistic. Another point of view in connection with the artist
and his picture is that of the period in his career at
which he painted it. Was it a work of his youth, pro
duced before his style was fully formed, or was it born
later of a ripe experience? The artistic life of every
painter divides itself into periods according to the im
portant events and influences that mould it. We may
often recognise them without difficulty in his work.
Yet many a master between the outset and the termina
tion of his activity has produced pictures so totally dis
similar, that but for a certain individuality of style it is
hard to believe they are from the same hand. The first
period is, as a rule, the pupil stage, when the influence of
his master is the strongest in his art. The pupil lacks
the confidence even if he possesses the power of giving
his individuality full scope. The manner and even the
mannerisms of his master are ever present to his mind,

44 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
and reproduce themselves, perhaps unconsciously, in his
pictures. With growing experience his own style be
comes formed, and after a period of full maturity often
shows signs of failing powers and eyesight. There is
no better illustration of the gradual growth of the
artist's power to its fullest development than in the
Municipal Collection at Haarlem, where Hals's seven
large portrait-groups hang side by side the whole length
ofthe main gallery. They date from 1616 to 1665, thus
covering half a century of the painter's career. Here
we may note his style becoming broader and bolder, the
colouring at first more daring and then again less pro
nounced, the posing and arrangement less and less con
ventional, and the whole treatment freer and more
masterful. Rembrandt, whether as painter or etcher, is
another striking example of marked and rapid develop
ment in style, and it is often difficult to believe that the
finished closely-painted pictures of his early years, such
as the Presentation in the Hague Museum, can be by
the same hand that produced the Bathsheba in the
Louvre, or the broadly conceived and vigorously exe
cuted portraits of the Syndics in Amsterdam. There
are indeed some few remarkable exceptions to the
rule that the painter tends to grow broader in style
as he advances. The later works of Gerard Dou — his
famous Femme hydropique in the Louvre and his Jeune
mere at the Hague, painted towards the close of his life
— are perhaps the most highly finished of his pictures.
How closely the periods of development in an artist's
career correspond with changes in his surroundings is
illustrated in the work of Van Dyck. His first period as
pupil and assistant of Rubens at Antwerp shows him
strongly under this overpowering influence. His por
trait of Van der Geest in the National Gallery, painted at

THE ARTIST 45
this time, used actually to be attributed to Rubens, and
has only lately been correctly ascribed to the pupil.
His second period opens with his visit to Italy, where he
painted that magnificent series of Genoese portraits
which betray the influence of Titian, and for some years
after his return to Antwerp the spell of Italian colour
and distinction possessed him. The last period is that
of his sojourn in England as painter to our King
Charles I. and the court of gallant Cavaliers and their
fair ladies, where his natural instinct for elegance and
refinement found full expression. So far did the gay
painter associate himself with the spirit of his adopted
land, that his series of English portraits in no wise
suggest a foreign origin.
Just as in certain years of his life an artist may pro
duce most of his finest work, so too he will have his
most inspired and successful moments. And the obvious
fact that his work will vary in quality — good, better and
best — has been adduced to prove the fallacy of arguing
that a disputed work must not be attributed to a famous
artist on the ground that it is not good enough for him.
Yet surely the test is as fair as any other ; it is a
question of degree. Given a great reputation based
upon works of undoubted authenticity and splendid
merit, it is as reasonable to suppose that the artist would
not have been responsible for an absolutely inferior pic
ture though superficially in his manner, as to reject the
attribution of a masterpiece to a worthless artist on the
ground that he could never have risen to such heights.
At the same time even the greatest painters have their
comparatively uninspired moments, and to expect no
thing but masterpieces from an acknowledged master is
to court disappointment

CHAPTER VI
THE SUBJECT
PICTURES are more often looked at from the point
of view of the subject they represent than from
any other. It is so frequently the first consideration to
enter the mind of the spectator that it is idle to regard
it as of little or no consequence. At the same time
there can be no doubt that the importance of the subject
is often absurdly exaggerated, and it is equally certain
that it tends to diminish in proportion as our aesthetic
appreciation increases.
In early art the subject was from necessity the first
consideration for both painter and public. Painting
had other purposes to serve besides the aesthetic.
Pictures were painted to preach and teach, to warn and
encourage, to tell stories and record events. An altar-
piece destined for a particular chapel must depict some
scene from the life of the saint to whom the building
was dedicated. Frescoes upon the wall of Municipal
Palace or Council Chamber would naturally represent
some special diplomatic or military triumph of the city,
or an allegorical conception of its Government. Later,
when easel pictures were designed for the adornment of
private houses and painting became so cheap as to be
within the reach of even the middle classes, the artist
was free to paint whatever he desired, limited only by

THE SUBJECT 47
the size of his panel or canvas and the nature of his
medium. To-day the tendency is rather to undervalue the
importance of the subject as such, to insist upon the
supreme value of its treatment, and to lay stress upon
the fact that any subject, however trivial, ugly, even
revolting, may in the artist's hands be transformed into
a thing of beauty. Carried to its extreme such appeal
to the senses through form and colour alone, without
reference to the intellect, would differ but little from
that made by a wall-paper or a fine piece of em
broidery, both often beautiful in colour and design.
But the intellectual or moral interest cannot be wholly
lost sight of in a picture, which is not merely an arrange
ment of lines and colours, beautifully and harmoniously
combined, and pleasing the eye by their order and
variety. All art is essentially human, and must appeal
to what is conveniently if illogically termed the human
side of our nature. To do so it must represent a sub
ject of human interest. It is a question of compromise.
There is no doubt that an exaggerated importance has
often been attached to the mere subject. Even the
paradox that to the public a picture is interesting
in proportion as it is antipictorial scarcely goes too
far. The first question then to ask ourselves, when looking
at a picture, is whether the subject be treated pictorially.
Has the artist set himself to paint a picture, and not
merely to illustrate a subject by copying a model ? Has
the subject passed through the fire of his imagination ?
If it fail under this test it fails in everything essential,
a fact which cannot be too strongly insisted upon. A
picture is no picture unless it be pictorial. As applied
to modern art especially this truism is constantly over-

48 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
looked by those who begin by criticising pictures and
end in buying them. We cannot therefore wonder if
even the painter tends to lose sight of this principle or
consciously abandons it for a more lucrative and success
ful practice, for to paint pictorially demands the most
intimate knowledge of nature, not to be come by without
patient study. Much modern painting fails because it
is illustrative and nothing more, because in telling a
story it forgets to please the eye, because it appeals to
sentiment alone, and has no sensuous or aesthetic charm,
no true artistic beauty. There is no need to multiply
examples. Each year's Academy is full of such pictures,
possessing perhaps some suggestion of pathos, humour
or even dramatic intention, but failing in all else.
In painting then, the subject, though of interest and
importance, is not the primary consideration. Taking
a wide view of painting, the achievements of its greatest
periods bear this out. When painting has accomplished
most the mere subject has occupied the artist least.
In periods of artistic mediocrity it comes again into
prominence, as though seeking to make us forgetful of
shortcomings in treatment and technique.
What then are these pictorial qualities which a picture
must possess? Obviously qualities of line, colour and
chiaroscuro, and their ordered and harmonious disposi
tion. Besides these there is the actual manipulation of
the colours, what has been called " the interest of pure
paint," which appeals so strongly to the modern critic
and too little to some modern painters. With these
means at his command the painter approaches his sub
ject. His treatment of it will depend on his own
temperament and training. How unimportant may be
the subject he selects we have already seen. Look at
some genre piece of the best Dutch period. It may be

THE SUBJECT 49
almost devoid of intellectual interest and possess no
moral significance whatever. The painter was as con
scious of the fact as is the spectator of to-day, but he
chose his subject not for its interest or importance, but
because he saw its pictorial possibilities, and seized the
opportunity of depicting some beautiful effect of light,
some harmony of colour, some felicity of composition,
some grace of line. As such it made a picture for him,
and a picture, an object of pleasure for the eye, it will
always remain, though it be after all but a ragged
beggar or the interior of a tradesman's shop that he
paints for us. Look at some picture by A. van Ostade
of a village inn, where a group of rough peasant fellows
sit drinking at their ease. The panel glows with rich
though subdued colouring, the tone is exquisitely quiet
and harmonious, the composition marvellously skilful.
The incident is an everyday one, common enough in
Holland as elsewhere. Van Ostade did not seek to
attach any sentimental interest to his group, nor to
excite our sympathy for what he at least must have
considered a harmless form of relaxation. The subject
is his servant. But something in this commonplace
theme caught his eye, delighted his colour-sense, and in
his hands became a picture. Contrast with this the
comparatively unpictorial treatment of many English
and German genre pictures, in which it is evident that
the artist's chief aim is to tell a story, and to tell it as
charmingly and sympathetically as he is able. The
subject is his master. He conceives it in his mind
and then sets himself to paint a group to illustrate it,
under the mistaken belief that painting is literature
masquerading in disguise. His picture may have an
intellectual, perhaps a moral interest, but it too often
lacks the sensuous charm which is the essence of pictorial
E

SO HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
art. In a word it is unpictorial. We feel this strongly
when looking at the genre scenes by Collins, Newton
and Leslie in the South Kensington Museum ; still
more in the Museum at Brussels where are exhibited
the pictures of that "philanthropic ranter" Antoine
Wiertz. But admitting the subject of a picture to be of
comparatively slight importance it is nevertheless often
of considerable interest. The choice of subject is very
much a matter of the age in which the artist paints.
Every age requires a range of subjects peculiar to itself,
and within these again the dictates of fashion play a
part. Broadly speaking the subjects demanded in the
fourteenth century were legends of Saints and Madonna,
and scenes from the Old and New Testaments. The
next two centuries added to these last allegorical and
mythological extravagances, illustrations from the poets
and, above all, portraiture ; while in the seventeenth,
landscape and genre subjects and portraiture took the
place of the older religious painting. The eighteenth
century was the age of portraiture and historical paint
ing, while the nineteenth, insatiable and all-embracing,
appears to have taken the whole world for its province
and made all subjects its own. There would seem to be
nothing on the face of the earth which the painter has
not at some time or another chosen to paint. Every
age is represented, every country, every race, every
season, every hour of day and night. Hardly a story
has been told in prose or verse that has not been retold
a hundred times in paint.
But although such wealth of subject is at his disposal,
the painter's choice therein is limited by his powers.
Turner was right to avoid as far as possible figure paint
ing in which he was fully aware of his weakness. The

THE SUBJECT 51
custom of two artists collaborating in the painting of a
single picture arose either from the one painter's conscious
want of ability in some particular direction or from his
recognition of his collaborator's conspicuous pre-eminence
therein. Collaboration was a recognised practice in the
Netherlands. Even Ruysdael and Hobbema employed
figure painters to relieve their landscapes. Rubens col
laborated with Jan Breughel and Snyders, Cuyp with
Van der Neer, Wynants with Adrian Van der Velde.
Some painters indeed were masters of every kind of
subject. Rembrandt was one of these giants ofa hundred
hands. Rubens was equally at home with religious
pictures, court scenes, battle-pieces, landscapes, portraits,
classical and allegorical themes.
Yet for all this wealth of material to choose from, artists
have often painted subjects which at first sight might
appear the most unpromising. But for his strong artistic
instinct and wonderful colour-sense, Rembrandt could
never have made a picture out of so ghastly a subject
as the Anatomy Lesson at the Hague, or his Flayed Ox,
seen perhaps in some butcher's shop near his home
there. It is in allusion to Rembrandt that Mr. Colvin
has pointed out the significance of the fact that this
great Dutch master " succeeded in making as wonderful
pictures out of spiritual abjectness and physical gloom
as the Italians out of spiritual exaltation and shadowless
day." How far all subjects are equally suited to pictorial
treatment is a question too wide to be attempted here.
The tendency of the inferior painter is to attract attention
by the sensational nature of his subject rather than by
the mastery of its treatment. Indeed, many artists have
sometimes erred by representing scenes either so painful
or so coarse that the taste is offended, however skilful

52 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
the rendering and treatment. The tortures and torments
of Saints and Martyrs rendered with faithful realism by
the old Flemish painters, and in melodramatic effusive
ness by the later Italians illustrate this, in the same way
as the exquisitely painted panels of vulgar scenes by the
great Dutchmen Brouwer and Jan Steen. Indeed, the
whole Dutch School is an example of the triumph of
pictorial skill over subject. The types are nearly always
ugly, sometimes even grotesquely deformed ; yet the
pictures produced are often masterpieces of painting,
delighting the eye by their colour and appealing to us
by their warm sympathetic treatment of life.
For all the variety of subject at the painter's command,
broadly speaking it may be said that all pictures fall into
certain well-defined groups, and each of these again into
smaller subdivisions. Charles Lamb has laughingly
pointed a warning finger at " that rage for classification
by which in matters of Taste at least we are continually
perplexing instead of arranging our ideas." The danger
lies rather in arguing by analogy from one class to
another than in the classification itself.
The three principal groups under which subjects may
be classified are Historical, Landscape and Genre ; while
Historical pictures may be again subdivided into strictly
Historical, Religious, Mythological and Allegorical, and
Portraits. It is not contended that this division is a
strictly scientific one. Nor will it be found that every
picture falls directly and naturally under one of these
headings. On the contrary, pictures will readily suggest
themselves that seem to be on the borderland of two or
even three groups, but exceptions like these leave the
whole principle of classification quite unaffected.

n:

CHAPTER VII
HISTORICAL PAINTING
IN Historical painting it is inevitable that the subject
represented should play an important part. By its
associations, by its appeal to the memory or the emotions
it should contribute an element of human interest for
which the picture as a work of art is the richer. But
even here to illustrate an incident is not the sole object
of the historical painter. It is not his aim to focus into
a moment of vision the pages of a book of history or
biography, as in a kind of artistic shorthand. The
painter and the historian have this indeed in common
that each presents and perpetuates some great or small
event of interest ; but here the likeness ends. The painter
has not merely to chronicle facts, but to present them in
such pictorial fashion as will appeal to the eye and the
imagination. The first group of Historical subjects will include all
pictorial representations of historical scenes and events,
past or present. It embraces such pictures as Veronese's
Family of Darius at the feet of Alexander, The Surrender
of Breda by Velasquez, Terburg's Peace of Munster,
Copley's Death of Chatham, Makart's Entry of Charles V.
into Antwerp and the Diamond fubilee Procession. Thus
the painter will select a subject from contemporary
history, a scene of which he may even have been an eye
witness, or from a past which he must reconstruct for

54 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
himself from descriptions and his own imagination.
Veronese chose the humiliation of the Persian monarch
less for the interest he felt in its historical significance
than for the opportunity it gave him to depict a scene of
gorgeous colour and pageantry. It was not the triumph
of Greek civilisation over the Barbarian that inspired him,
but the vision his imagination conjured up of a royal
family in robes of state before a victorious general and
his staff. Little did he care for historical accuracy of
costume or mise-en-scene. The wife and daughters of the
Persian king are no Orientals in flowing draperies, but
golden-haired Venetian ladies attired in the costume of
the sixteenth century, and the setting is an Italian palace.
In this Veronese was only following the dictates of his
art. Most painting representing past events is full of the
frankest anachronism. This is equally striking in the
religious painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
It is quite usual to find saints of every age and country
gathered round ,the Madonna, or assembling at the foot
of the Cross ; and the city of Jerusalem or Bethlehem is
often represented by the gabled houses and pinnacled
walls and towers of the painter's own town.
Historical painting may thus be so only in name, or in
the sense that it records the life, architecture and costume
of the painter's own country and period rather than of
the one he is ostensibly portraying. For a painter is not
an antiquarian. We value historical accuracy less than
more purely artistic qualities. At the same time modern
painters like Leighton and Alma Tadema have combined
antiquarian research and fastidious accuracy of detail
with artistic presentment. In the eighteenth century the
old anachronisms were inverted. The prevailing taste
was entirely classical. Painters in quest of the Grand
Style insisted that the figures of contemporary statesmen

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HISTORICAL PAINTING 55
or warriors should be clad in Greek or Roman costume.
In the battle-pieces of Gerard and Girodet the soldiers
of the Napoleonic Empire are represented as Roman
warriors armed with spear and shield instead of musket
and pistol, and posed in heroic attitudes, suggestive
rather of statuary than of the modern battlefield. It was
West who, in his Death of General Wolfe, painted in
1768, first dared in defiance of the prevailing artistic
canons to dress his heroes in modern regulation uniform.
This innovation created not only a scandal but an artistic
revolution. It was indeed significant of the new era of
naturalism which succeeded to the pseudo-classical re'gime.
Historical painting includes, besides strictly historical
scenes, all religious, mythological and allegorical subjects.
It is difficult to estimate how much of its inspiration
painting owes directly to the Bible. There is scarcely
an incident either in Old or New Testament or in the
Apocrypha lending itself to pictorial treatment, which
has not been rendered again and again by successive
artists with infinite variety. Until our own time almost
every such scene had its traditional mode of representa
tion, generally more or less faithfully followed.
Religious subjects were, for the most part, produced
before the seventeenth century, at a time when painting
was still closely allied to the Church. Mediaeval painters
received most of their commissions from churches and
monasteries, where sacred subjects alone were permissible.
Consequently every collection of their pictures is full of
renderings of the Madonna and Child, legends of Saints
and of the Monastic Orders, scenes from the Passion,
visions of Heaven and Hell. Archangels and Apostles,
Saints and Martyrs, whose uniform sanctity of expression
might have caused serious embarrassment to the faithful,
were distinguished by their historical or legendary attri-

56 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
butes. The four Evangelists may be recognized by their
emblems — the angel, the lion, the bull and the eagle.
St. Catherine of Alexandria stands beside her broken
wheel, St. Laurence carries his gridiron, St. Nicholas of
Bari his golden balls, St. Francis is known by his brown
habit and the stigmata, St. Dominic by the black and
white dress of his Order and the lily he often holds, while
the central figure is generally the Madonna enthroned
with the Christ-child. The whole Christian Hagiology
passes before us in robes of state. The types may vary
endlessly, but the traditional forms and composition
are preserved with astonishing pertinacity to the very
end of the fifteenth century. The Venetian painters of
the Renaissance did indeed evolve a new and less formal
setting for the religious picture in the Santa Conversa
zione. Dispensing with throne and architectural back
ground they paint the Virgin and attendant Saints
gathered picnic-wise under pleasant trees in charming
landscapes. Such pictures, frank representations of
Italian life ofthe day, are sacred only in name.
From the Old Testament those incidents were generally
chosen which corresponded with the teaching of the
Church, or anticipated that of the Gospels. In the wall-
frescoes in the Sistine Chapel the whole scheme is based
on the representation of type and anti-type, Pintorrichio's
Circumcision of the Sons of Moses facing his Baptism of
Christ, Cosimo Roselli's Moses receiving the Law on
Mount Sinai over against his Sermon on the Mount. A
favourite subject was the story of the Creation and Fall
of Man, which, like that of St. Sebastian's Martyrdom,
gave to early painters the rare opportunity of depicting
the nude.
In our own day, indeed, there has been something of
a return to favour of this class of religious subject, char-

HISTORICAL PAINTING 57
acterised, however, by the abandonment of traditional
forms and naive anachronisms, and aiming rather at
literal and historical accuracy of type and setting. Such
pictures as those of Tissot are interesting to the anti
quarian and Biblical student, but as artistic productions
they are of little value. For the most part the kind of
artistic temperament which in the fifteenth century would
have chosen to depict the Annunciation, Crucifixion or
Assumption is now directed towards allegorical or
mystical subjects in which the artist seeks to embody in
sensuously beautiful form some definitely moral or meta
physical idea.
Subjects taken from Greek and Roman mythology
have been appreciated for their pictorial possibilities by
imaginative painters of all times and countries. The
amours of Jove, the labours of Hercules, the trials of
Psyche, have proved a perpetual source of inspiration.
The highly cultured Italian of the Renaissance, with his
passion for antiquity, delighted to represent the loves
and hates, the exploits and escapades of Gods and God
desses, the adventures of Nymph and Dryad, Centaur
and Satyr. This passion has since spread to every land,
and still inspires a considerable part of modern art, which,
however, instead of searching the classics for fresh incid
ents, seeks rather to retell the oldest myths in the most
modern way.
Allegorical subjects found favour somewhat early in
the history of painting, though the difficulty they offered
of representing intelligibly a more or less obscure idea
confined them to the simplest forms. Ambrogio Loren-
zetti's great allegorical frescoes of Good and Bad Govern
ment in the Town Hall at Siena, with the gigantic figure
symbolising the Government of that city, surrounded
by female forms personifying Peace, Justice and other

58 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
virtues, explains its elaborate intention by the aid of
lettered scrolls. Giotto's allegories of Hope and Despair,
fustice and Injustice, Faith and Inconstancy in the Arena
Chapel in Padua are so much simpler and more direct
that they do not need their inscriptions to make their
meaning clear. The exact interpretation of Botticelli's
Allegory of Spring, in the Academy at Florence, still
baffles the art historian. The allegories of the Venetian
painters Veronese and Tintoretto centred for the most
part round their native city. Venice is represented
everywhere as a beautiful woman in gorgeous robes, at
tended by symbolic figures of arts and industries, or
celebrating diplomatic or military triumphs. Rubens
often selected purely allegorical subjects for some of his
greatest canvases. His great Marie de Medicis series in
the Louvre shows him attempting to combine historical
with allegorical treatment. The eighteenth century saw
the culmination of this love of allegorical expression.
The vast canvases showing the apotheosis of this or that
monarch, lifted in pompous ecstasy heavenwards, with
virtues supporting the royal person and the Muses sing
ing his praises or chronicling his achievements, have no
imaginative beauty to atone for their faults of execution.
In modern painting allegory is chiefly used by artists
with either spiritual or else merely mystical tendencies.
Watts's allegories of Love and Life, Hope, Mammon,
Love steering the Boat of Humanity are treated with
simplicity of design and a fervour of feeling which pro
claim the preacher behind the artist.

CHAPTER VIII
THE PORTRAIT
PORTRAITURE, though included under historical
painting, is so important and universal as to demand
rather fuller consideration. As a distinct branch of
painting it is as old as the art itself. From the days of
the ancient Egyptians at least we can discern a craving
on the part of the individual that his features shall be
perpetuated by the skill of the painter no less than by
the cunning of the sculptor. This very human instinct
it is that accounts for the rise of a class of artists who,
like Scott's Dick Tinto, " levy that tax upon the vanity
of mankind which they cannot extract from their taste
and liberality."
The fine portrait heads discovered in much of their
original freshness upon the mummy cases of seventeen
centuries ago, of which examples may be seen in the
National Gallery, express feelings common to every
age, though the power to embody them in paint has
often been wanting. When we come to the Middle
Ages we find the Italians of the fourteenth century
painting types rather than individuals. Every artist
for a century after Giotto adhered to a certain facial
type. The power of differentiating individuals which is
the basis of all portraiture first made its appearance in
art in a subordinate form. The painter when represent
ing a group of figures in the background of some religious

60 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
picture would often introduce his own portrait or that of
some distinguished friend or contemporary. To this
fact we owe the existence of many of the most precious
early portraits, including those of Dante and his friends
in the Bargello at Florence attributed to Giotto. This
practice became quite usual in the fifteenth century.
Benozzo Gozzoli and Botticelli introduced portraits of
the chief members ofthe Medici family into their pictures
of the Adoration of the Magi, while Ghirlandaio peopled
his frescoes with Florentine celebrities and beauties of
the day. In one of the frescoes of the Last judgment at
Orvieto, Signorelli represented himself and Fra Angelico,
who had previously painted in the same chapel, as
spectators. In the North too, Hubert van Eyck intro
duced his own portrait and that of his brother Jan
among the Just Judges on the wing of his great Ghent
Adoration. Again, it was not unusual for the donor of an altar-
piece to commemorate his own piety by stipulating that
his portrait, and even those of his wife and family, should
be incorporated in the picture which he was offering to
appease Holy Church or some exacting patron saint.
Familiar instances of these religious pictures with the
donor will readily suggest themselves. Perhaps the
earliest occurs in the altar-piece painted by Giotto for
Cardinal Stephaneschi, now in the Sacristy of St. Peter's.
In some instances the donor would appear inconspicu
ously in a corner of the picture, as in Filippino's Vision
of St. Bernard in the Badia at Florence ; in others he
plays an actual part in the scene, as where Memlinc
painted Brother John Floreins kneeling before the Child
in the Adoration of the Magi at Bruges, or Carpaccio
represented the Doge Mocenigo in his votive picture in
the National Gallery. Sometimes the whole family of

FILIPPINO LIPPI

Alinari phoio\

VISION OF ST. BERNARD

[Badia, Florence

THE PORTRAIT 61
the donor is introduced either in the centre or upon
the wings, as in Holbein's Madonna of the Burgomaster
Meyer at Darmstadt, or in the great triptych of the
Nativity by Hugo van der Goes, now in the Uffizi.
Even Rubens painted on the wings of the altar-piece
commissioned by Nicholas Rockox at Antwerp the
portraits of the patron and his wife.
The custom of painting the individual for his own
sake without other pretext soon found general favour,
and some of the earliest mediaeval portraits that have
conne down to us date from the fifteenth century and are
the work of the Italian and Flemish masters, Uccello,
Ghirlandaio, Piero della Francesca and Gentile Bellini,
and of Jan van Eyck and Memlinc. Many of these
early Italian portraits are in profile, clear cut against a
dark background, suggesting the influence of the portrait
medals of the period. The difficulties of the full or
three-quarters face were not attempted until somewhat
later, Mantegna's portrait of Cardinal Scarampi at
Berlin, painted about 1460, being perhaps the earliest.
The Flemish portrait heads on the other hand were
generally painted either in full or three-quarters face.
The art of portraiture made great advances in the
sixteenth century, becoming now free to develop un
fettered by exigencies of composition and space. The
" New Manner " with its greater breadth and fluency
made itself felt. We no longer find the somewhat stiff
representation with firm hard outlines and general tight
ness of execution, but a more natural, lifelike rendering,
fuller modelling, greater naturalism of flesh-painting.
The spirit of portraiture accorded well with that of the
Renaissance, with its insistence upon individuality and
craving for fame and immortality. Thus it came about
that the introduction of portraits into historical and

62 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
religious pictures, so common in the fifteenth century,
was gradually abandoned by later artists in favour of the
independent portrait. The older practice was not, how
ever, entirely given up. Titian and Veronese, supreme
masters of portraiture, used it also to enhance the interest
of their altar-pieces and religious pictures by introduc
ing celebrated contemporaries. In Titian's Pilgrims oj
Emmaus in the Louvre, Charles V. and Philip II. figure
in the parts of Pilgrim and Servitor, and among the
guests and musicians in Veronese's Marriage of Cana in
the same gallery appear Francis I., Mary of England
and other notabilities, besides the painter himself with
Titian and Bassano. Even in our own day this practice
is not unknown. Millais echoed the old tradition when
he brought portraits of friends and relations, his father,
the two Rossettis, F. G. Stephens and others into his
Lorenzo and Isabella in the Liverpool Gallery. Besides
thus introducing famous personages a painter often took
himself or his wife and children as his models. Filippo
Lippi, Andrea del Sarto and Rubens continually painted
their wives in the part of Madonna or Saint. Rembrandt's
poverty and waning popularity towards the close of his
life obliged him to paint himself and members of his
family in lieu of other models. In the absence of com
missions artists can always resort to painting their own
portraits, and this perhaps accounts for Rembrandt's
numerous versions of his own features.
In painting a portrait there are two considerations, its
likeness to the original and its artistic effect. The first
involves the question of Truth, the second that of Beauty,
and on his power of combining them depends the painter's
success. It is no little that is demanded of him. He
must be able to make a pleasing picture of the plainest
face, and yet the picture must be so close to the original

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MRS. SIDDONS

THE PORTRAIT 63
that nothing of the sitter's individuality is lost. The
question of truth must be tested by independent eyes,
for the sitter can never be an adequate judge of his own
likeness. But he must do more than faithfully reproduce
the colour of hair or eyes, the contours of cheek and chin,
the texture of face and hands ; he must be something of
a psychologist to read the character, the very soul in the
face. He must interpret, not merely copy. And to
achieve beauty as well as truth his own genius will come
into play, his own individuality will be acting upon that
of his original. Thus the personality of painter and of
sitter will be in perpetual balance, and on their nice ad
justment the quality of the picture will depend. It is
just because of this part played by the artist that no two
painters ever see or present their model in exactly the
same manner, any more than they will describe the same
event in the same words. The portrait, therefore, be
comes the individual interpretation of a man or woman,
not a mere facsimile, such as a photograph can offer.
A good example of this may been seen in the vari
ous renderings by some of the greatest artists of the
eighteenth century of the famous actress Mrs. Siddons.
In Sir Joshua Reynolds's pictures in Grosvenor House
and the Dulwich Gallery, she is represented as the Tragic
Muse, half woman, half goddess, posed in a magnificent
attitude suggestive of Michelangelo. In the National
Gallery we have two renderings of her, one by Gains
borough, one by Lawrence, but no two portraits could
be more dissimilar in their whole conception and feeling.
Gainsborough's Mrs. Siddons reflects something of that
dignified melancholy which distinguishes all his portraits
and is the direct impress of his own temperament. The
portrait by Lawrence is conceived in a far less intellectual
vein. The flesh-tints are brilliant, and the face has much

64 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
of that seductive charm which in his hands was apt to
degenerate at the cost of character into mere prettiness.
Here then we have three portraits of one woman, all of
them faithful likenesses yet all different, and this differ
ence is due to the personality of each artist as he inter
preted the form he saw before him through the medium
of his own imagination.
But while it is true that a portrait reflects something
of its painter, the degree in which he will render the in
dividuality of his model varies greatly. Some portrait-
painters have been unable to escape from a type of their
own and read into every face their preconceived ideal.
As a result there is a strong resemblance between all
their portraits. Van Dyck gave something of his own
natural elegance and distinction to every sitter, to Flemish
burgher as to English nobleman. Look only at the
hands in his portraits and you will find them always
small and delicate with long tapering fingers. It is sel
dom that he took the trouble to individualise them.
They may perhaps give the painter's idea of what hands
should be, but they are not those of his sitter. Romney
went even further in this almost mechanical repetition.
In many of his portraits the lack of individuality is woe
fully apparent. His women are all sisters, his men
cousins at the farthest, the same shaped eyes, the same
curling lips do duty in countless faces like so many
studio properties. There are always of course certain
obvious points of resemblance between portraits of the
same period, that depend to a great extent on superficial
and accidental likenesses of dress and attitude, the
fashion of wearing the hair, or the kind of background
chosen. But with many of these highly subjective
painters, it is a matter of type rather than of fashion.
In some portraits, on the other hand, it is clear that

VAN DYCK

PHILIP LORD WHARTON

[St. Petersburg

IAN YAN 1SYCK

Haiifstajtgl photo]

MAN WITH A PINK

[Berlin

DURER

H auf stdngl photo] [Berlin
PORTRAIT OF HOLZSCHUHER

THE PORTRAIT 65
the sitter has been viewed impersonally, objectively. The
artist has aimed at representing faithfully what he saw
before him, though in the actual painting he must always
retain his own methods. The earlier portrait-painters
as a rule aimed more directly at fidelity to nature than
those of a later period. Consider for a moment such a
portrait as that of Jan van Eyck's Man with a Pink in
the Berlin Museum, so wonderfully etched by Gaillard.
Every crowsfoot and wrinkle, every crease and furrow
left by time or thought is reproduced with almost micro
scopic accuracy. We see every detail of face and hands
as we should see them in the original if we peered closely
into them, taking in but a small portion of the surface at
a time. The full-length portraits of Arnolfini and his
Wife in the National Gallery by the same artist illustrate
a like relentless fidelity to the original. This plain
woman and her gaunt figure of a husband stand there
exactly as they stood to be painted. Diirer and Holbein
show something of the same fidelity, the same scru
pulously fine handling. In Diirer's portrait of Michael
Wolgemut in the Munich Gallery the unseen window-
bars of the room are reflected in the pupils of the eyes,
and in that of Holzschuher in the Berlin Museum, you
can almost count the hairs of the long flowing locks.
Among the great portrait-painters, perhaps none has
kept the individuality of his sitter more sternly before
him than Velasquez. Look only at his Admiral in the
National Gallery or the Lady with a Fan in the Wallace
Collection. These searching portraits make their originals
realities for us as though we had seen them in the flesh.
The portraits of Rembrandt and Hals too are superbly
individualised. It would seem that this fidelity to nature might lead
to the neglect of what is, after all, the essential in a por-
f

66 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
trait as in every picture, that it please the eye by some
quality of beauty. It might be objected that while in
portraiture, if anywhere, the subject is of primary im
portance, if the original be ugly, mean or deformed, the
picture can never become a great work of art or satisfy
the natural desire for beauty. From this point of view
the most that could be expected of such a portrait is that
it should be of historical or personal interest as reminis
cent of the sitter. If this reasoning were correct, the
head of an old man with hideous bulbous nose, surpass
ing even that of Cyrano, could not fail to repel the eye.
Yet this is exactly Ghirlandaio's subject in his wonderful
portrait in the Louvre of an Old Man looking lovingly
down upon his grandson, a portrait which wins and
charms by its refinement and sweetness of expression.
We cannot helpbelievingit to have been afaithful likeness.
We know that it makes a beautiful picture. Velasquez
puts the matter beyond all doubt in his portraits of
Philip IV. and Innocent X., the king's perhaps the cold
est and least sympathetic face known to secular history,
the Pope's one of the most crafty in the whole line
of Pontiffs. Yet there are no finer portraits, no more
splendid works of art in the history of painting. Even
his Court Dwarfs, thickset, stunted abortions, with
heavy animal faces, compel admiration as pictures, as
do Rembrandt's old Jewish shop-keepers, suspicious,
greedy, mean if the painter has read their character
aright, but transformed by the magic of his brush to
marvels of art.
We have seen that the Flemish and German portrait-
painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rendered
with faithful and minute accuracy the features of those
who sat to them, producing portraits of striking realism
and characterisation. The great Italian painters of the

GHIRLANDAIO

PORTRAIT OF AN OLD MAN

[The Louvre

VELASQUEZ

Laurent photo] [Prado, Madrid
PHILIP IV. ON HORSEBACK

THE PORTRAIT 67
Cinque-Cento carried the art still further. They insisted
less on reproducing every line and wrinkle, every hair,
with minute exactness, but painting with greater breadth
and freedom they combined a masterly rendering of
character with a splendour of decorative treatment un
known to the earlier painters. Raphael's Pope Leo X.,
Titian's Man with a Glove in the Louvre, Lotto's
soul-searching portraits, Tintoretto's Doges, Veronese's
Grandees rank among the masterpieces of the world.
They were succeeded by the painters of the North, and
in the seventeenth century the greatest names are to be
found in the ranks of the Dutch and Flemish masters.
Rubens and Van Dyck indeed link themselves with their
southern predecessors, combining in their portraits some
thing of the vigorous realism of the North with the free
dom and splendour of the great Italians. In Holland
there being no demand for religious art painters were
free to gratify to the full the desire of the republican
burghers to see themselves perpetuated in paint. Par
ticularly in demand were the life-sized portrait-groups,
representing the members of guilds or governors of
hospitals and almshouses, which are now such a striking
feature of Dutch picture-galleries.
Towards the eighteenth century portrait-painters, with
few exceptions, lost all sense of individuality, likeness or
sincerity. In England the foreigners Lely and Kneller
and their followers deliberately conventionalised the art
of portraiture, and in their search for what they falsely
conceived to be beauty lost all desire for truth. The
collection of Court Beauties of the time of Charles II.
and William III. at Hampton Court by these two artists
illustrates how entirely the power to individualise had
been lost. The faces have neither character nor expres
sion. There is an unvarying likeness between them that

68 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
strikes the observer as false and absurd. So low had the
art of portraiture sunk by the middle of the century that
the painters, mere hacks, working on purely mechanical
lines, earned the contemptuous title of " face-painters."
They were indeed craftsmen rather than artists, and
craftsmen with little technical skill. Many of these sorry
performers were unable to paint anything but the face,
and had to employ " drapery men " who made a regular
trade of painting in the dress and accessories. Private
houses are full of these meaningless portraits, whose only
claim to interest is personal to the descendants. So
stereotyped had the art of portraiture become, that we
can well believe the story of the face-painter who found
it so difficult to break with the prevailing custom of
painting a gentleman with his hat under his arm that,
when required to represent him wearing his hat, he added
a second in the orthodox position. These mechanical
traditions were at last broken by Hogarth and the great
English painters of the eighteenth century, who again
raised portraiture to the dignified position of a fine art.
The best works of Reynolds and Gainsborough take rank
with the greatest portraits of any age. Elegance, refine
ment and grace of a quality unknown since the days of
Van Dyck are their chief characteristics. Above all in
their delineation of beautiful women and children do these
masters of the classical period of English art stand pre
eminent. Modern portrait-painting is distinguished by its extra
ordinary versatility. The names of Millais, Watts,
Herkomer, Whistler, Sargent, Fantin-Latour, Carolus-
Duran and Lenbach suggest the variety of treatment
which has marked the portraiture of the last century.
Perhaps the recent development of the science of photo
graphy has tended to deprive the mere face-painter of

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GEORG GISZE, MERCHANT OF THE STEELYARD

THE PORTRAIT 69
his vocation, while enhancing the dignity of the portrait-
painter's art.
In looking at portraits it is interesting to note with
what infinite variety painters have treated the back
ground. Some have posed their models among the sur
roundings which belong to them, as Van Eyck painted
Arnolfini and his wife standing in their own dwelling-
room at Bruges. Holbein shows us Georg Gisze the
merchant in his counting-house with scales, pen, ink and
ledger at his side, and the astronomer Nicholas Kratzer
with all his scientific instruments about him. In his
portrait of Lord Heathfield in the National Gallery,
Reynolds depicted in the background the Rock of
Gibralter lost in the smoke of artillery, in allusion to
the memorable siege at which the general had won fame
and honour. Sargent poses his women of fashion in
the setting of elegant drawing-rooms. Other portrait-
painters boldly adopt the simplest backgrounds, either
lighter or darker in tone than the face of the model.
Velasquez loved to throw up his figures against a lumin
ous atmospheric space ; Rembrandt encircles them in a
halo of shadow ; Diirer used a simple brown background
slightly darker than the high lights of the face. Holbein
when he dispensed with elaboration of detail adopted a
plain warm blue or green ; Titian and the Venetians a
strong vibrating black, forcing the head into high relief.
Some painters of the German School chose backgrounds
of decorative tapestry or stencilled design, sometimes
inscribing thereon the names of the person represented.
With many of the Italians, and after them with Van
Dyck and his School, the background became a matter
of pure convention and the use of gray marble pillar
and red curtain almost a matter of course. From a
very early date landscape, either alone or with archi-

70 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
tecture, was used for a background. Memlinc and
his contemporaries painted exquisite little glimpses of
country seen through open Gothic windows behind their
portraits. Later even landscape backgrounds became
conventionalised, and instead of a vista of actual country,
Van Dyck, Reynolds and Romney brushed in a mere
suggestion of trees and clouds, a scenic effect broadly
treated, to give the impression of distance and therefore
to enhance that of relief.

GIOTTO

[Art'ia Chapel, Padua
TOACHIM AMONG THE SHEEPCOTES

CHAPTER IX
LANDSCAPE
IT was comparatively late in the history of civilisation
that natural scenery began to be appreciated for its
beauty, and valued by the painter for its pictorial possi
bilities. The earth must be conquered and subdued
before it can be enjoyed. Not until the Renaissance
did men really become conscious that the world they
lived in was fair to look upon. The longing to gaze
over a wide panorama, which in the fourteenth century
prompted Petrarch to ascend a mountain simply for the
sake of enjoying the view from its summit, is one of the
first symptoms of awakening interest in landscape. So
novel a proceeding suggested nothing short of madness
to his contemporaries. A mountain was to them only
a stronghold against the enemy, or a tiresome obstacle
to communication.
Like portraiture, landscape first appears as an incident
in religious pictures, introduced merely as a decorative
background to set off and relieve the figures, or to
suggest that the scene takes place out of doors. A
straight stem, topped with a few large flatly drawn leaves
for a tree, impossibly shaped rocks against a flat blue
sky, served in early art to suggest a landscape. Such
is the landscape of Giotto's fresco of Joachim among the
SJieepcotes at Padua, where the introduction of a flock
of small sheep, somewhat wooden in drawing, emphasises

72 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
the pastoral character of the scene. The same kind of
landscape does service in the early frescoes of the
Pisan Campo-Santo, and in countless paintings of the
Giotteschi. But before long an advance was made on these primi
tive, almost symbolical methods. Masaccio shows him
self a pioneer in this as in all other branches of painting.
He was the first of the Italians to observe the shapes of
mountains and to render the effect of distance. His
frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, though
injured and faded, proclaim him a master of atmospheric
perspective. The landscape no longer stands up like
a wall behind the figures, as in Uccello's diagrammatic
Battle oj St. Egidio in the National Gallery. But the
Florentines were too much interested in the human form
to spare any enthusiasm for pure landscape. According
to Leonardo, Botticelli contemptuously averred that a
palette of colour thrown against the wall would leave
a stain sufficiently defined to represent a landscape.
Perugino indeed, for all his Florentine traditions, stands
high as a painter of landscape. His wide expanses of
sunlit golden valley give to his pictures that serene,
dreamy charm which is their most pleasant quality.
He was one of the earliest to realise the beauty of a
distant horizon, the depth and spaciousness of the sky,
the diffused mellow light of a warm afternoon, char
acteristics which two centuries later constituted the
peculiar charm of Claude and Cuyp.
It was at Venice, however, that landscape-painting
developed most rapidly. Giorgione and Titian treated
it with new and fuller appreciation. In Giorgione's
beautiful little Tempest with Gypsy and Soldier in Prince
Giovanelli's collection, the stormy landscape is fully as
important as the small figures, and we find ourselves

LANDSCAPE 73
wondering whether the landscape was painted for the
figures or the figures introduced to enhance the effect
of the landscape. Titian's Noli me tangere in the
National Gallery gives the same impression, and here
indeed the figures are the least satisfactory part of the
picture. In his great St. Peter Martyr, which was
destroyed by fire last century, the landscape must have
been of consummate beauty. Even Bassano, who with
Titian has sometimes been called the father of land
scape-painting, because, unlike most of his predecessors,
he worked from nature, never painted a landscape with
out figures and animals. In their treatment of landscape
the Italians never forsook that instinct for decorative
effect, that insistence upon beauty at all costs, which
characterises all their art. Realism in landscape was
never their aim, nor would a realistic landscape have
been at all in keeping with their ideally beautiful figures.
It was otherwise in the North, where landscape
played an important part from the first. The Van
Eycks' Ghent altar-piece showed a true appreciation of
landscape, and great skill in rendering its features, from
the blue mountains of the distance to the flowers that
bejewel the grass, and the hedge of roses and vine. The
Flemish painters realised too the beautiful effect of a
landscape with its sinuous and flowing lines seen through
the rigid framework of architecture. We find this con
trast in Jan van Eyck's Madonna in the Louvre, and
Van der Weyden's Madonna with St. Luke in Munich.
Yet it was a wholly new departure when artists like
Patinir, Diirer and Altdorfer set themselves to paint
landscape entirely and whole-heartedly for its own sakej
aiming at truth to nature rather than at purely decor
ative effect. Patinir's landscapes indeed are often hard
and even unpleasant in colour, as well as grotesque in

74 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
their primitive, childish drawing of fantastic rocks and
mountains. But to him perhaps belongs the honour of
being the first to paint an independent landscape.
Diirer's water-colour landscapes, which seem to have been
sketches made out of doors, testify to an intimate ap
preciation of natural scenery and true love of colour.
Altdorfer's little Landscape with St. George in the Munich
Gallery shows wonderful freshness, and true delight in
the rendering of forest foliage.
But it was not until the seventeenth century that
landscape-painting became really important. That
century witnessed the rise of two great Schools which
were to dominate landscape art for generations to come,
the School of so-called Ideal or Classical landscape
headed by Claude, and the Naturalistic School, of which
the Dutch painters were the pioneers. The rival schools
hang side by side in every great collection. There is
no mistaking the landscapes of Claude, with their glowing,
golden skies and radiant, sunlight effects, their summery
atmosphere, their stately pagan architecture. Be their
ostensible subject mythological or biblical, Egeria and
her Nymphs, or The Marriage oj Isaac and Rebecca, all
breathe the same spirit. St. Ursula embarking with her
Maidens, or the Queen of Sheba setting forth on her
visit to Solomon, mere puppets in a magnificent sea
port, whose waters ripple at the base of lofty classical
temples, are only introduced to give a touch of life
to the scene, and perhaps a title to the picture. It
was under the influence of Italy and Italian skies
that Claude's genius developed, an influence which
gradually mastered him. To enjoy the studied and
formal composition of these idealised landscapes, we
must frankly accept them as beautiful and elaborate
arrangements, the result of a deliberately chosen point

<X

LANDSCAPE 75
of view. That Claude and his followers were incapable
of a more literal and realistic rendering of nature were
no fair inference. No modern art student could display
greater keenness in observation than the great Italianised
French master, who spent long days and nights studying
the scenery of the Roman Campagna. The distinction
is not between what the rival schools could or could
not do, but what each wished and set out to do. The
atmosphere of Claude's landscape is that of an Italian
garden with its straight walks, clipped edges, marble
fountains and symmetrical groves, beautiful in its ar
tificiality, but neither challenging nor losing by com
parison with the informal beauty of an English lane
or wooded upland.
Claude's contemporary, Gaspar Poussin, never quite
succeeded in catching his charm, though his landscapes
are often grand and impressive. Claude's style found
many imitators, who during a century and a half de
graded classical landscape by their feeble, tasteless and
bombastic productions. Even our own painter Wilson,
the English Claude, fell into the error of trying to Ital
ianise every scene he painted. The story is told of how,
being commissioned by George III. to paint a picture
of Kew Gardens, he sent the king an elaborate classical
scene, in which all suggestion of Kew was lost. The very
names of Wilson's pictures indicate the classical spirit in
which he worked. It has been said of him that he had
the fixed idea that the Creator had only made nature to
serve as a framework for the Grief of Niobe, and as a
vehicle for classical architecture.
Turner was the last and greatest exponent of Claudian
tradition. As Hamerton says, he took up Claude's
idealism and made it an idealism of his own. He cer
tainly regarded himself as the rival of the earlier master,

76 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
as may be seen at the National Gallery, where, in ac
cordance with the terms of his will, two of his pictures
hang side by side with two by Claude, challenging com
parison. . But Turner's range was far wider than that of
the older master, though it never included the intimate
pastoral scenes so typical of English landscape. It has
been remarked that he never painted an English hedge
row. Yet in the Turner room at the National Gallery we
may see him in every one of his many phases, from the
dark heavy seascapes of his youth to such glittering
phantasies of his maturity as Ulysses deriding Polyphemus,
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and The Bay oj Baiae.
While the classical tradition of landscape was de
veloped in the South by Claude and the Poussins, there
was forming in the North of Europe a school which was
to exercise quite as great an influence on future art.
The Dutch painters, with that strong naturalism which
characterised all their art and unfettered by any tradi
tions of a classical past, set themselves to reproduce the
physical features of their native country. With Van
Goyen, Hobbema, the Ruysdaels, Cuyp, De Koninck,
William Van der Velde, we find the landscape beauties
of Holland interpreted with exquisite feeling and techni
cal skill, avenues of poplars, wide level plains dotted
with church towers and windmills, quiet silvery canals,
green water-meadows, broad estuaries with shipping,
under many skies, by moonlight or at dawn, in summer
green or winter's snow, as the painters saw them and
felt them, and loved to see and feel them. Yet for all
their study of nature, Dutch landscape pictures, with
their bronze greens and prevailing brown tones (some
times the effect, as in Van Goyen's pictures, of the panel
showing through the thin paint), lack that freshness of
green and those lively effects of sparkle and glitter

r-i

Pi o X

a

LANDSCAPE 77
which the modern landscape artist understands so well.
Some indeed among the Dutchmen, the brothers Both
and Berchem, were Italian and classical rather than
Dutch and naturalistic in intention, deliberately forsak
ing their native country for Italy and Italian skies.
Again, the pine-clad slopes and wild mountain torrents
of Everdingen and Jacob Ruysdael have a foreign origin.
Everdingen was wrecked on the coast of Norway and
spent some time painting the rugged beauties of that
country, and his pupil Ruysdael, though he had never
been there, frequently painted Norwegian scenery.
In England, landscape in common with other branches
of painting scarcely existed until the eighteenth cen
tury, when Wilson and Gainsborough opened the long
series of English landscape-painters. Gainsborough,
upon a foundation of early study of nature and some
acquaintance with Dutch landscape art, built up a
magnificent style of his own, sometimes stately and
decorative, recalling Rubens or Watteau, at others ex
pressing the quiet, intimate charm of English woodland
scenery. But it was in the nineteenth century that
modern landscape art was born. It has indeed been said
that in the province of landscape, the works of the old
masters seem like the exercises of pupils in comparison
with the perfection of modern art. For now to the
faithful rendering of the outward forms of nature is
added an intimate appreciation of her every mood, a
close personal relationship between the artist and his
subject, in complete independence of past tradition.
Constable, the father of this new ideal of landscape art,
declared that whenever he sat down, pencil or brush in
hand, before some chosen scene, his first care was to
forget that he had ever seen any picture. Realising that
the beauty of landscape is largely dependent on the

78 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
play of light in sky, on trees and ground, he was the
first to render the effect of the glitter and sparkle of
sunshine on foliage, the sense of quivering movement in
the air and the vivid tones of nature. Constable's art
worked a revolution both in England and France. Directly
descended from him are the Barbizon painters, Rousseau,
Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, Dupre, the glory of the modern
French School. Living in the heart of the forest of
Fontainebleau, each worked out his personal impression
of the natural beauties around him. There is little in
common between their work beyond this personal and
intimate love of nature. They painted from no fixed
rules, but each, according to his temperament and the
mood of the moment, recorded what he saw. This is
the essential characteristic of modern landscape art, this
penetrating beyond the outward form to the very soul of
nature, as personally revealed to the artist.
Again, in the care and skill with which the painter
now seeks to interpret and distinguish the characteristics
of time and season, as also in the infinitely greater
diversity of the moments of time selected, has modern
landscape-painting advanced. In some of the land
scapes of the old masters it is impossible to speak with
any certainty as to the season of the year or the hour of
day they are intended to suggest. Until the nineteenth
century nearly all landscapes seem to have been painted
in the full foliage of late summer. Winter is only re
cognisable by the presence of snow and ice. The tender
hues of spring or the brilliant tints of autumn are seldom
represented. Noonday light with its comparative ab
sence of shadows was generally preferred, and it is but
seldom that sunrise or sunset effects were attempted.
In modern painting far more is achieved in variety of
lighting. The glare of noon is now justly considered

O
Pio
u

LANDSCAPE 79
the worst not the best light for landscape-painting. So
much of the beauty of landscape is due to the play of
light that by it even the dullest view may be transformed
into radiant beauty. The modern painter is often content
to rely for his effect upon this alone. All hours of day
are now seen to have their special and peculiar beauties
and artistic possibilities. Whistler, it has been said, con
quered even the night. Modern painting has made night
and day, dusk and dawn her own. It is all of a piece
with this greater realism that these subtleties of lighting,
thesefine distinctions of time, should be diligently pursued
and faithfully reproduced. The water-colour painters,
indeed, from the very nature of their medium, were in
this respect in advance of the painters in oil. The speed
with which water-colour can be used without long pauses
to allow the pigments to dry, as in oil-painting, make
it peculiarly suitable for catching fleeting atmospheric
effects, momentary beauties of cloud and sunshine.
But apart from the development of landscape-painting,
we may further consider other points of view that often
suggest themselves in looking at landscape art. The
painter may aim at elegance and grace of composition
rather than at naturalistic treatment. Claude, indeed,
often painted a landscape that never existed, or at least
is wholly incapable of identification. Turner, a close
observer of nature, took the greatest liberties with his
subject, omitting, exaggerating, transposing as he pleased.
His picture of Kilchurn Castle in the Highlands is a
famous instance of his fearless exaggeration. The out
lines of the hills against the sky are not only varied
indefinitely from the rather monotonous original, but are
raised to the height and dignity of mountains with the
same superb assurance. And in this picture Turner
goes even further ; he entirely transforms the shape and

80 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
position of the ruined castle on the shore of the lake,
though it gives its name to the picture. Sometimes, on
the other hand, the painter strives to render the features
of the landscape as closely and accurately as possible, as
though his object were topographical as well as aesthetic.
The artist may indeed chance upon a piece of natural
scenery that needs neither arrangement nor modification
to form a picture, house or tree, road and bridge being
so disposed that they fall directly into the painter's
scheme without alteration. But this is not often the
case. A landscape usually requires the selective hand of
the artist to adapt it to pictorial form. And however
closely the painter may keep to his subject, he has his
own individual manner of seeing things in landscape as
in portraiture, and no two painters will see alike. At
the same time, every painter identifies himself more or
less with some particular kind of scenery. It may be
vast and wide-stretching, the landscape of Rubens, of De
Koninck, of Turner, or as with Hobbema, Constable and
Corot, small in outlook and intimate. It may be
mountainous and terrible, the landscape of Switzerland
or Norway, or level and smiling as in England and
Holland. But grand scenery is by no means necessarily
the most pictorial. Salvator Rosa grappled with its
problems, yet often achieved nothing but stupendous
pomposity. Turner succeeded with the Alps and Apen
nines, but, with the exception perhaps of Segantini, no
other has dared so much as attempt the superb natural
beauties of lofty mountains.
Again in colour, landscape pictures vary, we have
seen, from the warm browns of the old masters to the
brilliant and tender greens of modern painting. Compare
one by an old Dutch painter with its prevailing tones of
brown — brown rocks, brown grass, brown trees — with one

THIERR

Ha>i/st,-ingl /•/„•/„} {Munich
ST. CHRISTOPHER

LANDSCAPE 81
of the modern French School. In tone and colour the
contrast is complete, and no one can doubt which is
nearer to nature. These brown tones, often deepened
by dark varnishes and changes in the pigments, gave
rise in the eighteenth century to a firmly rooted con
vention of landscape art. The green tints of nature
were too often translated into the brown tones of an old
Cremona fiddle. No landscape was considered complete
without its brown tree in the foreground. When Con
stable defied these conventions and painted grass and
trees green as he saw them, he was taken to task by Sir
George Beaumont, the great connoisseur of the day, for
having omitted that artistic absurdity the brown tree,
and even the painter's explanation that he had painted
none because he found none in nature must have sounded
to that age something of a splendid paradox. From his
time the prevailing brown has given way to the sunlit
greens, yellows and pearly grays found in nature herself.
The problems of light and plein air which engross the
modern painter admit of no conventional colouring.
Perhaps in nothing is the skill of the landscape-
painter more put to the test than in his rendering of the
effects of distance. Foreground, middle distance and
background should lead into one another, and carry the
eye instinctively and without shock over the whole
scene. The early painters found difficulties in these
transitions and sometimes ignored them altogether. In
so charming a picture as Bouts's St. Christopher, the
right wing of an altar-piece at Munich, the artist has
shown great skill in his rendering of the blue river, its
ripples crested with white foam, and of the yellow
sunset-sky reflected in the water. He has realised that
the distance must not be as clear and bright as the
foreground. But he has not been able to modulate, and
G

82 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
there is no real middle distance. The brown rocks in the
forefront of the picture meet the blue rocks in the back
ground, and the water fades abruptly without transition.
There is a peculiar charm in a landscape that carries the
eye into unmeasured distances, where all definition of
form is merged in mysterious haze. It is the charm of
Perugino, of Claude and of Turner, whose pictures
satisfy and delight the eye with this feeling for infinite
space. We often notice when looking at a landscape-painting
how artfully the painter has contrived that the lines of
the background emphasise and repeat those of the
figures, trees and buildings of the foreground, bringing
them together and making for unity of effect. Even
where the lines are not actually repeated, foreground and
background must be related to one another either by
likeness or effective contrast. Painters like Cuyp and
Troyon perfectly understood this necessity, and when
they painted their favourite cattle large and prominent
in the foreground they would insure a wide and spacious
view in one part of the landscape to give the proper
sense of space and absence of restraint. The effect is
often enhanced by the use of a low, level horizon.
Almost all painters have realised the value of intro
ducing figures in their landscape scenes. Indeed, as we
have seen, at one time the figures, however small and
inconspicuous, gave a pretext for the landscape, and often
furnished a name for the picture. Entire absence of life
in a landscape is comparatively rare. Even a flight of
birds in the sky suggests some movement to relieve the
passivity of nature, which without a sign of life is apt to
be monotonous in art as well as in reality. Sometimes it
happens that the landscape-painter has little or no skill
in drawing figures. Turner's are sometimes woefully

LANDSCAPE 83
clumsy and inadequate to their magnificent setting.
We know that among the Dutch painters it was a
recognised practice to employ a skilled figure-painter to
supplement the deficiencies of the landscape artists.
Such a division of labour would be impossible in a
modern impressionist landscape, where the figures form
an integral part of the whole scheme and are not merely
introduced to give it life. In much the same way the
presence of some building, farmhouse or windmill, helps
to express the true proportion of the scene as well as to
add an element of human interest for which the fairest
landscape ever conceived may be the richer. Many
great landscape-painters have introduced architecture
into their pictures, be it the woodland cottage of Hob-
bema, the farms and homesteads of Constable, the
stately classical piles of Claude or the fantastic palaces
of Turner.
Beyond this many painters have made architecture
their subject to the exclusion of all else. The pictorial
effect of architecture pure and simple may be appreciated
in the Italian scenes of Canaletto and Guardi, in the
ruined temples of Robert, in the church and street views
of the Dutch masters Berckheyde, Van der Heyden,
Peter Neefs and De Witte in the seventeenth century,
and of Bosboom in our own day. Canaletto and Guardi's
Venetian street and canal scenes have not only pictorial
but archaeological interest, as recording the appearance
of famous buildings, many of which are now swept away.
Canaletto excelled in elaborate composition and accurate
perspective. To his pupil Guardi we look rather for
charm of colour and atmospheric effects. Of the Dutch
architectural painters some devoted themselves to street
scenes and the exterior of churches and houses, often
with the added charm of a waterway flanked by avenues

84 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
of trees. Others delighted in spacious church-interiors
which afforded equal scope for fine perspective and
delicate treatment of light and colour. In our own
country David Roberts and Prout are pre-eminently
distinguished as painters of architecture.
Reference has already been made to the painting of
the sky in landscape pictures. The first step was the
substitution of a blue sky graduated to the horizon for
the gold backgrounds in common use until the four
teenth century and even later. The painting of sky and
clouds is indeed a vital part of landscape art. Do the
heavens frown or smile ? Are they placid, or is there a
sense of wind or at least of fresh air ? Is the sky trans
parent, light-reflecting, neither papery, heavy nor opaque ?
Do the clouds float, suspended as it were in the blue, or
sail majestically by with proper sense of pomp and
circumstance? Has the painter fully rendered their
very texture, making them neither woolly nor wooden,
nor lacking the fullness of form by which they bulk
large in the sky, conferring dignity upon the whole
scene? Compare the heavy marbled clouds of Patinir
with the luminous silvery skies of Teniers. The superb
effects of clear, rain-washed skies, throwing into stronger
relief the black passing thunder-cloud, were especially
beloved by Ruysdael and Constable ; while for a bright,
transparent firmament stretching cloudlessly into infinite
regions of azure space Claude has never been surpassed.
The part played by the sky in a landscape is more or
less important, according as the line of horizon be low or,
as in many modern pictures, so high that but a narrow
band is seen above it. A low horizon gives greater
space and distance, and affords scope for interesting and
varied sky effects.
Marine painting or seascape must be considered as a

LANDSCAPE 8 5
branch of landscape art. It developed side by side with
landscape-painting proper. It is but seldom that we
find the sea introduced into early pictures even into the
background, though lakes and rivers are of frequent occur
rence. There is indeed a little picture in the National
Gallery by Niccol6 da Foligno with a view of the sea in
the distance. But it was in Holland that marine painting
first began to play an important part, for the sea was
both the glory and the menace of this low-lying naval
power. What more natural than that a school of sea
painters should arise under Van Goyen, De Vlieger,
William Van der Velde and Van der Cappelle ? They
painted placid coast-scenes for the most part, fishing boats
and ships of war at anchor, with strong feeling for light
and reflections upon the smooth surface of water. Back-
huizen delighted in storms and shipwrecks, risking his
life in an open boat to study the effects of lofty waves
and perilous seas. Turner's early sea-pieces, the Ship
wreck, Calais Pier and Fishing Boats in a Breeze, exhibit
much the same spirit, while in his quiet harbour scenes
and waterways flooded with golden light, painted in
rivalry with Claude, it is the placid beauty of deep, still
water on which he dwells. Since Turner's time the sea
has been painted in all its many moods. Courbet in
his Wave in the Louvre has rendered the overwhelm
ing power and majestic curves of a single great rolling
breaker. Mesdag and Henry Moore delight in expanses
of ocean, with or without hint of land. The Cornish artists
paint the sea from the shore. Indeed modern marine
painting, like modern landscape, knows no limit to what
it dares attempt.

CHAPTER X
GENRE
GENRE pictures form the last of our three groups.
The development of modern painting has certainly
rendered them the most numerous, and perhaps the
most popular class, though from their very nature they
occupy a less elevated position in the art of painting.
The term Genre is used loosely enough to cover a mul
titude of pictures and artistic sins. It extends over so
wide a field because the term is used not only in re
ference to the actual subject, but to the manner in which
the picture is treated. From the point of view of sub
ject merely genre-painting includes all those pictures
which do not attempt to represent special individuals or
particular incidents, but types of people and ordinary
events, such as are of continual and perhaps daily
occurrence in actual life. The subjects depicted are
common rather than uncommon, trivial rather than im
portant, A soldier handing a dispatch to his officer, a
child playing with its doll, a group of men carousing at
an inn, a number of schoolboys engaged in snow
balling, a woman puzzling over a love letter are all
typically genre subjects. Again, pictures of so-called
still life, arrangements of household utensils, flower
and fruit pieces, may be conveniently grouped under
this head. With Genre, too, animal-painting must be
considered. Thus from the point of view of subject,

GENRE §7
genre pictures will depict homely scenes and events,
tell merry or sad stories, illustrate passages from books
or plays, point a moral or perpetuate a joke, in fact be
either domestic, anecdotal, literary, dramatic or merely
fanciful. On the other hand, pictures which at first sight and
from the point of view of their subject alone would
appear to belong to some other class may be considered
as genre on account of the spirit in which they are
treated. A purely religious or historical subject may
be painted in such a homely matter-of-fact way, that it
almost becomes a genre picture. This genre manner of
painting may be found long before a purely genre sub
ject was ever thrown upon a canvas. In its early days
painting was too serious a business, with too many
important tasks to accomplish, to busy itself with sub
jects so trivial as a child's grief over a broken jug or the
bargainings of a vendor of herrings. Thus the begin
nings of genre-painting must be sought in the minor
incidents in the religious pictures of early art, in the
frescoes and altar-pieces of Florentine painters like Ghir-
landaio and Andrea del Sarto, of the Venetians Crivelli,
Carpaccio and Bassano. How homely and intimate is
Ghirlandaio's treatment of the Death oj S. Fina in the
beautiful fresco at S. Gimignano. In Crivelli's Annun
ciation in the National Gallery, the little bed-chamber ol
the Virgin, with its shelves over the bed stocked with
bottles, plates and books, inevitably suggests the genre-
painting of a later date, when these accessories would
have been in themselves sufficient material for a picture.
In his Dream oj St. Ursula in the Venice Academy,
Carpaccio shows the same interest in the everyday
domestic side of life, treating it with perfect simplicity
and candour, quite in the genre manner. We are less

88 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
surprised to find touches of genre in the more homely
religious pictures of the northern painters. In an early
German rendering of the Birth of the Virgin in the
Munich Gallery, the domestic details of the scene have
been elaborated with peculiar zest. The careful German
housewife is giving out the linen from a well-stocked
chest, two nurses superintend the child's bath, testing its
temperature, while a maid pours in boiling water from a
saucepan. But it was in the seventeenth century that genre first
became a really independent branch of painting. Pure
genre was the particular contribution of the painters
of the Netherlands. A homely people delighted in
homely subjects. A somewhat phlegmatic and material
race knew no craving for the mystical or the obscure,
demanded no works of high religious significance,
indeed their strict Calvinistic tenets permitted none.
Their houses were small and their pictures must be
small accordingly. The wealthy bourgeoisie of Holland
delighted in that genre style of painting which has been
well described as the very bourgeoisie of art. The Nether
lands was indeed the land of genre-painting at its
highest. Rembrandt treated religious scenes in a purely
genre manner. Van Ostade, Brouwer, Terburg, Metzu,
Jan Steen, Gerard Dou, Peter Breughel, Teniers, and a
hundred other artists of their time, were all strictly genre-
painters, whose like the world has never seen again. Van
Ostade and Brouwer painted the dark interiors of taverns,
peopled by drinking, brawling boers, and rendered them
with incomparable vigour and realism. Teniers treated
indoor and outdoor scenes of daily life with equal
mastery. Terburg and Metzu loved rather the sumptu
ous splendours and substantial luxury of elegant domes
ticity in their own more civilised surroundings. Jan

GENRE 89
Steen excels by his perennial gaiety and frank pleasure-
loving moods. Dou delighted in marvellously delicate
finish and harmonious colouring. Nicolas Maes touches
the tender and pathetic chord of human life, but it is
true sentiment not false sentimentality with which he
makes his appeal. Vermeer and De Hoogh revel in
effects of sunlight flooding parlour or paved courtyard.
But in the case of all these masters of genre, Jan Steen
perhaps excepted, it is useless to look for any great in
dividuality of expression or characterisation. They did
not attempt to give it or value it if found. They painted
ordinary men in ordinary situations, not heroes in a
moment of crisis. Their subjects were those which spoke
most directly to the spectator. They demanded no
knowledge of history or archaeology, no religious belief,
no book-learning. They appealed to the common man
and woman with intimate confidence, and they did not
appeal in vain. George Eliot has emphasised this power
of the Dutch masters in a familiar passage : " It is for
this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight
in many Dutch paintings which lofty-minded people
despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these
faithful pictures of a monotonous, homely existence
which has been the fate of so many more of my fellow-
mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence,
of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn
without shrinking from cloud-borne angels, from pro
phets, sibyls and heroic warriors to an old woman bend
ing over her flower-pot or eating her solitary dinner,
while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of
leaves, falls on her mob-cap and just touches the rim of
her spinning wheel and her stone jug, and all those
cheap common things which are the precious necessaries
of life to her."

90 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
The example thus given in Holland spread through
out Europe, and every country where painting has
flourished has her genre-painters of note. Italy pro
duced Longhi, the Hogarth of the South, a master of
real merit. Standing entirely alone and by far the
greatest of French genre-painters is Chardin, whose
quiet restful art seems almost out of touch with the arti
ficiality of the eighteenth century. His Grace bejore
Meat and Mere laborieuse in the Louvre show him the
equal of even the greatest of the Dutchmen. How
mawkish and shallow appears the meretricious Greuze
by the side of Chardin's dignified simplicity and re
ticence. But this period in France was dominated by a
style of genre as different in character from that of
Holland as is the Gallic temperament from the Dutch.
Watteau, Lancret and Fragonard painted no ruddy-
faced women in homely garments, occupied with culinary
and domestic pursuits, no elaborate green-grocers' or
poulterers' shops, but in their place elegantly dressed
ladies and gentlemen of the Court, dancing elaborate
minuets in satin shoes or feasting from exquisite china
upon the greensward of some aristocratic chateau. If
this be genre it is idyllic genre. As different again and
more nearly allied to the genre of Holland is the style
of Meissonier, " the Dutch little master," as his friends
called him. Although in colour he cannot compare with
the best of the Dutch painters, Terburg and Metzu, in
minute delicacy of execution he is scarcely inferior. In
Spain Murillo, the contemporary of the Dutch masters,
brought genre into fashion with his peasant boys and
street arabs, broadly and vigorously handled. Even
Velasquez in his salad days produced Bodegones or
kitchen scenes, an Old Woman cooking Eggs and Two
Young Men at a Meal. Goya's genre was either diabolic

GENRE 91
in character or else painted in the elegant style of the
contemporary French School. Modern genre-painting
in Spain is represented by the fashionable Fortuny, a
painter of specious brillance and true southern love of
colour and display.
English genre-painting begins with Hogarth, who
treated art in the didactic spirit of the moral reformer.
With a painter of less splendid genius this standpoint
would inevitably have spelt ruin to his art ; but Hogarth
was an artist before he became a reformer, and his fine
series of Marriage a la Mode and The Rake's Progress are
far from being mere sermons in paint. Hogarth's mantle
fell upon Wilkie, who, however, painted without the
earlier artist's didactic intention. Wilkie, the Scottish
Teniers, as he has been called, consciously sat at the
feet of his great Dutch and Flemish predecessors, and
often painted with a work of Teniers or Van Ostade on
an easel beside him. A glance at his pictures The Blind
Fiddler and The Village Festival reveals how much he
owed to earlier masters. The tendency of English
genre in the direction of story-telling is here already
strongly marked. The history of nineteenth-century art
in this country is largely the history of its genre-painters,
of whom we can merely mention Mulready, Leslie,
Frith, Orchardson and Alma Tadema.
Judging from the annual exhibitions of modern paint
ing in London, Paris, Munich and Vienna, it would
appear that genre is the most popular art of the day.
In England at least it holds almost undisputed sway,
especially in the form of anecdotal or literary genre in
its feeblest and most sentimental aspect. Pictures of
this class are produced in their thousands by painters of
little or no artistic power, who seek to atone by the
obvious prettiness of the incident for deficiency of skill

92 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
and commonplace rendering. The best genre-painters
never stoop to this device. The greatest care nothing
whether they paint a pretty scene or not, since of any
they can make a beautiful picture. For in genre-paint
ing, as we have already seen, the subject is of less
importance than the manner in which it is treated.
This is especially the case in pictures of still life. There
may be but little to interest or please the unseeing eye
in a group of common household utensils and fruit
placed together upon a table; but of these unpromising
materials true artists like Chardin and the Dutchmen
De Heem, Heda or Kalf will by skilful arrangement, by
bringing out unobserved subtleties of light and colour,
by heightened contrasts and harmonious composition,
produce a true work of art. The painter of natures
mortes requires but the simplest materials, a few copper
or brass pots and pans, a loaf of bread, a piece of raw
meat, some pewter or earthenware kitchen utensils, with
fruit or vegetables. Such subjects are naturally most
effective when treated on a small scale. Vast canvases
of dead game and fruit, such as those of Snyders, can
scarcely fail of monotony, the very insignificance of the
subject falling far short of the heroic proportions of its
representation. Their merit lies almost exclusively in
their brilliant technical qualities. A still-life picture
should be like a jewel burning and glowing with colour
and reflected light.
In flower-painting, the materials, instead of being the
humblest and simplest, are the most beautiful and com
plex. Here too the artist's powers of selection and
arrangement will be called into play. In the faithful
rendering of the form and texture of blossom and leaf
the Flemish artists Jan Breughel and Seghers are un
surpassed. Yet the stiff grouping and cold, hard colour

GENRE 93
often rob their pictures of real charm and naturalism. In
seizing upon the essential beauties of natural forms, in
freer and less studied arrangements of foliage, in lighter
and more graceful rendering, European flower-painters
have been left far behind by the artists of Japan.
Finally a word must be found for a class of painters
who have chosen to devote themselves to the painting of
animals. As might be expected in a land of pastures,
many of the Dutch artists excelled in the painting of
cattle. Pre-eminent among them are Cuyp, Paul Potter,
Adrian Van derVelde, Karel du Jardin and Weenix, while
Hondecoeter has no rival in the poultry-yard. Rubens
and Snyders in Flanders are noted for their vigorous
representation of animals in motion. In our own time
animal-painting has become an important and independ
ent branch of art. In France the names of Courbet,
Troyon and Rosa Bonheur, in England those of Morland,
Landseer, Briton-Riviere and Swan readily suggest them
selves. The animal-painter must render the character
istic movements and attitudes of the brute beast, as well
as the texture of skin or fur. Above all he must catch
the true animal expression and not fall into Landseer's
error of giving a sentimental, almost human look to his
dogs and horses. The scope of the animal-painter has
been greatly extended by travel and photography since
the days when Diirer drew and engraved his famous
rhinoceros from hearsay and the slight pencil drawing
made by an eye-witness of this quite unfamiliar animal.

CHAPTER XI
DRAWING
THE simplest and most obvious method of represen
tation in pictorial art is by the use of outline. To
test this we have only to look at some example of early
painting, in which light and shade and atmospheric effects
are either entirely wanting or are still so elementary
and subordinate that they scarcely play any part in
the whole. The childhood of art is represented by the
prehistoric cave-dweller scratching in outline upon the
rock with a sharp flint the familiar forms of reindeer and
mammoth. These early beginnings may be likened to
the first efforts of a child drawing figures of men and
horses in the simplest and most conventional outlines.
It is a further step when these boundary lines are filled
in with flat washes of colour, a stage corresponding to
the beginnings of the art of painting. Originally the
graphic arts concerned themselves with two dimensions
only, length and breadth, and outline was quite able to
express these. Even when the representation of a third
dimension, depth, came to be insisted on, outline still
played an important part in producing, by means of
linear perspective, the effect of solidity.
In speaking of drawing, the word is of course not used
here in its limited sense of representation in a particular
medium, pen, pencil or charcoal, but in its broader sense
as a means of expressing form. It is convenient for the

DRAWING 95
moment to consider the actual drawing of a picture apart
from its colour or light and shade, for, however intimately
they are bound up together in theory, in practice we are
perfectly clear of our meaning when we speak of the
drawing of a picture being good or bad, accurate or care
less. It is impossible indeed actually to separate form
from colour, since in painting form is expressed in terms
of colour. Yet if its colour be eliminated, as in a photo
graph, the drawing of the picture will be laid bare. A
painter may be a good colourist and at the same time a
bad draughtsman, or on the other hand he may spoil
a finely drawn design by crude, disagreeable colouring.
It is the greatest masters who unite a fine sense of form
with a strong instinct for colour. Drawing is indeed the
foundation of pictorial art, from its early days of carv
ing a rude figure on a stone to the perfect mastery
over the most intricate forms which we find in modern
art. By the term drawing we mean more than the mere
rendering of the outline of objects, a man or a mountain
silhouetted against the sky. Drawing includes the defini
tion of every detail of form within those boundary lines,
the rendering of the shape of every feature, of the hair,
of the draperies, of every rock and tree. It covers the
painter's feeling for the shapes of things, their solidLy,
their roundness or squareness, the way they bulk before
him, even their character so far as this depends upon
their shape.
The use of outline to define form is one of the conven
tions of the painter's art. It is true that in nature no
such thing as a line exists. Forms melt into each other
by imperceptible gradations. Indeed it has often been
contended that in pictorial art drawing is nothing but
the result of differences of colour, and that lines are

96 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
merely successions of points at which coloured surfaces
meet. The end of one colour, said Leonardo, is only the
beginning of another, and ought not to be called a line.
Theoretically speaking, this is true, and mature art at
least both sees and draws in masses of colour and light
and shade rather than in lines. If we examine a picture
by Rembrandt, Velasquez, Reynolds or Turner, we find
no lines separating one form from another. The shapes
of things are defined by patches of colour, not harshly
juxtaposed, but with their edges broken or blurred. Art
can, of course, reproduce nature only by means of some
convention, and a well-defined outline is the most obvious
means of indicating form. In early Italian art the actual
drawing of the picture was of first importance, colour
being used almost as an afterthought in a flat, conven
tional manner, to fill in the outlines. Indeed the Floren
tine painters never freed themselves from a certain
hardness of line. Before beginning to paint a picture,
it was usual for them to draw on the prepared ground,
often with pen and ink, every detail of figures, draperies,
background and ornament. In such pictures as Filippo
Lippi's Annunciation and Botticelli's Mars and Venus,
both in the National Gallery, this hard, firm outline may
easily be seen. The profile portraits of Verrocchio and
other Florentine painters are tightly confined within
sharply cut outlines, silhouetted against a dark back
ground, producing an effect of comparative flatness.
Many of Holbein's portraits show the same characteristic.
If he can relieve his flesh colour against the dark mass ol
the sitter's hair or hat he is content, but where it falls
against a light background he is not above emphasising
the form by a strongly-defined black line. The colouring
of the picture is simple, and plays, as compared with the
drawing, especially of the features, but a minor part;

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DRAWING 97
indeed we have only to compare a painting by this
master with one of his chalk-drawings to understand how
little is due to the colour. Compare these with pictures
by Titian, Correggio, Veronese, Rubens and Rembrandt,
where we scarcely ever find strong outlines. Indeed
where they do occur, as, for instance, in the figure of the
Madonna in Titian's Assumption, they are the work of
the restorer and not of the master. Colours blend into
one another instead of being sharply separated and in
closed within boundary lines. In either case a particular
aspect of beauty is obtained.
Many pictures owe their permanent value in art and
their chief charm in our eyes to the peculiar feeling for
line which the artist possessed, and to his skill and facility
in draughtsmanship, just as others please by richness or
harmony of colour, or the delicacy of their effects of light
and shade. It has been said that every special virtue a
painting may possess is relative to its other virtues. Such
pictures as Mantegna's Triumph oj Julius Caesar at
Hampton Court and Signorelli's Pan in the Berlin
Museum charm the eye in the first instance by their
wonderful feeling for line. Botticelli's Pallas and Centaur
in the Pitti and his Calumny in the Uffizi, with their
delicate, sinuous curves, appeal in the same manner.
Ingres's La Source in the Louvre shows great sensi
tiveness to the subtle lines of the nude figure, though
even its warmest admirers cannot approve his hard colour
and expressionless features. David's reclining figure of
Madame Re'camier shows exquisite beauty of line, and
many of Leighton's and Burne-Jones's pictures, claim
and win our admiration by the same quality.
Drawing is one of the first points of view from which
a picture is usually regarded, and therefore one of the
earliest to be criticised. We are all so familiar with the
H

98 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
forms of natural objects, and especially of the human
figure, that a grave error in their representation strikes
us at once, though trifling faults of detail are often over
looked. It is far otherwise with colour, and still more
so with light and shade. The most flagrant incongruities
of colour and tone go unnoticed because the eye of the
spectator is not trained to perceive them. In a picture
representing a nude figure there would be ten critics to
notice that the drawing of the shoulder or leg was care
less or incorrect for one who would observe the faults
in the colouring of the flesh or falseness of tone. While,
therefore, many painters are distinguished by the excel
lence of their draughtsmanship, there are others who,
whatever merits they may possess as colourists or chiar-
oscurists, fail sometimes conspicuously in this respect.
Their figures seem to stand shakily, as if a push would
upset them. The feet, though touching the ground, do
not rest upon it. The limbs appear puffy and clumsy.
In early painting inexperience and lack of knowledge
account for much. In other cases, even in comparatively
modern times, want of training and inadequate study of
the human figure are sufficient explanation.
Sometimes indeed it happens that good draughtsmen
deliberately sacrifice absolute correctness of drawing in
quest of elements of beauty that appeal more forcibly to
them, as where to gain decorative effect or dignity and
grandeur the painter exaggerates the height of a figure,
or uses his artist's licence to bring its lines into harmony
with his design. This is especially the case with painters
pre-eminent for their strong feeling for beauty of line.
Botticelli has already been mentioned as illustrating this
feeling. But his long, slender figures in the Allegory oj
Spring are physically impossible, though no one would
question their fine decorative qualities. He used the

DRAWING 99
human figure as so much pattern from which to weave
his designs, disregarding structural possibility. So, too,
the drawing of Giorgione's Sleeping Venus in Dresden is
perhaps not absolutely correct. The right foot should
be visible, though as its appearance would break the
exquisitely flowing and sinuous lines of the reclining
figure, which again harmonise with and repeat the gently
rising mountain slopes behind, the painter has deliberately
suppressed it.
But it is to inexperience, lack of knowledge or care
lessness that inadequate draughtmanship must generally
be attributed. No one can be surprised to find faults
and weaknesses of drawing in early painting. To the
primitive masters the drawing of certain parts of the
human figure, especially the hands and feet, presented
almost insuperable difficulties. They scarcely ever suc
ceeded in making them anything but wooden and lifeless
in appearance. Claw-like extremities or stiff angular
fingers are painfully common until comparatively late in
Italian art. The drawing of the feet is still more peculiar.
This was, of course, due partly to ignorance of anatomy
and perspective, partly to tradition. As time went on,
the substitution of the living model for the almost sym
bolic treatment which had gone before, and an acquaint
ance with the laws of perspective and anatomy, brought
greater sureness and accuracy of draughtsmanship.
In our day painters receive in the life-school so
thorough a grounding that faulty drawing is unusual.
Modern draughtsmanship is generally fluent and facile,
if not always close and searching. Shaky figures and
boneless, invertebrate forms which do not really stand
upon their legs are scarcely the faults of this generation.
The modern artist who has had a good training has
hardly to think of his drawing as a difficulty to be over-

ioo HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
come, though a subtle and refined instinct for form is
always confined to the greatest. The problems of the
proportions of the figure, the relative size of head, trunk
and limbs, problems which Leonardo and Diirer worked
out experimentally with elaborate diagrams and formulae,
have become the mere rudiments of the painter's art.
Even the difficulties of representing men or animals in
motion are no longer as great as before. The observations
made by instantaneous photography have contributed
largely to greater accuracy, though not necessarily to
greater beauty. For instance, we now know exactly how
the legs of a horse actually move according to the gait
or speed ofthe moment, and accuracy on so comparatively
trivial a matter is not unnaturally insisted upon when
there is no longer any excuse for error.
The drawing of the human figure must necessarily
depend to a considerable extent on a knowledge of
anatomy. To the artist anatomy has often been a fetish;
to the layman it has as often proved a bugbear. The
explanation would seem to be that anatomy, like per
spective, is to be regarded as an aid to correct and
beautiful drawing, and not as an end in itself. When
Antonio Pollaiuolo, one of the first enthusiasts for the
science, painted his great St. Sebastian in the National
Gallery, he not unnaturally laid undue emphasis on the
muscular construction of the figures, purposely represent
ing them in every attitude of violent strain. The secrets
of anatomy were then in the nature of discoveries, and
as a pioneer the painter desired to display his labori
ously acquired knowledge. Michelangelo's intimate
familiarity with the human figure as a sculptor showed
itself strongly in his painting, and this sculptor-painter's
figures, whether nude or draped, invariably suggest a
wholly ideal state of physical development and muscu-

DRAWING 101
larity, which in his hands alone escaped exaggeration
and brutality. His prophets, sibyls and youths on the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, brawny, massive, colossal,
inspire only awe, and convey the idea of marvellous,
restrained power. His followers, Daniele da Volterra
and his like, copied and exaggerated this muscularity
and colossal treatment, but wholly failed to realise the
inherent majesty and grand self-composure of Michel
angelo's nudes.
The German and Dutch painters rarely attempted the
nude, completely concealing the form under heavy drap
eries. Yet even in such cases some knowledge of the
structure of the human form is essential. Although the
body is entirely covered by drapery, the spectator should
be conscious of its presence underneath. A finely drawn
figure, however elaborately draped, must be as carefully
constructed as a nude ; indeed many painters make nude
studies of all their figures, adding the draperies after
wards. The draughtsman must indicate the roundness
of the arm under the sleeve, the position of the limbs
under the draperies. It is all the difference between the
living form and the lay figure. In this some of our great
painters, Reynolds and Romney, occasionally failed.
Reynolds's well-known ignorance of anatomy, which none
regretted more bitterly than the painter himself, was no
doubt largely responsible for his indifferent modelling of
hands and limbs.
The treatment of draperies in all their infinite variety
is in itself a test of good draughtsmanship. Draperies
may add dignity to the figure or emphasise the sense of
movement; they may be simple or elaborate, broadly
rendered or broken into minute folds. Compare the vol
uminous fretted folds in pictures of the Flemish painters
or of Lucas van Leyden and Diirer, with the broad simple

102 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
masses used by the Venetians, or the slight, clinging
draperies of Leighton and Albert Moore, which suggest
every line and curve of the figure beneath.
The question of linear perspective, so important an
element of drawing, demands rather fuller mention. Even
the untrained eye is quick to observe any flagrant faults of
perspective in a picture. Linear perspective is the means
by which the appearance of solid objects and their
relative distance from the eye can be rendered on a flat
surface. Drawing is itself a convention, by which objects
of three dimensions, height, breadth and depth, are re
presented on a surface of two only, height and breadth.
The third dimension, depth, is indicated by means of
perspective. Perspective is both natural and scientific,
a matter of eye and a matter of mathematical rules and
formulae. Before the discovery of its laws in the fifteenth
century, painters had to trust entirely to the eye. Some
times their perspective was correct, almost as it were by
accident, but really owing to their careful copying of
nature ; more often it was grotesquely incorrect and im
possible, and this fact gives primitive pictures much of
their quaintness and lack of reality. The ground seems
to stand up as a solid wall ; the roofs slope at impossible
angles ; parallel lines fail to converge. The point of
sight being often too high, we seem to look down into
the picture, while the architecture seems to topple for
ward ; or, in the case of an interior, the room slopes up,
and objects on a table look as though they were slipping
off it. In the pictures of Giotto and his School the
architecture is absurdly out of proportion to the size of
the figures. These unfortunate giants could never inhabit
the pigmy houses provided for them. The Florentine
painter Uccello was one of the first who, obviously dis
satisfied with the results of trusting to correctness of eye

DRAWING 103
alone, set himself to work out the principles of perspective.
Just as some of his contemporaries became enthusiastic
students of the science of anatomy, so he sought to dis
cover the key to the mysteries of " that beautiful thing
Perspective." His Battle oj St. Egidio in the National
Gallery shows the result of his studies, and illustrates
both the problems and the difficulties of the science. But
nothing can be further from reality than the result
achieved by this pursuit of scientific realism. Again,
the difficulty of representing a recumbent figure, seen
end-on, by means of foreshortening baffled the worthy
Uccello for all his devoted study. We have only to
compare his fallen soldier depicted thus in this picture
with Mantegna's Dead Christ in the Brera to appreciate
the later artist's triumph over the difficulty. In his
mastery over perspective and foreshortening Mantegna
was rivalled only by his successor Correggio, whose
painted cupola in the Cathedral at Parma is a tour
de jorce. So far is the illusion carried by means of
violent foreshortening that it is almost as though the
roof were lifted off, and we could look above and beyond
it into a sky peopled with flying figures.
Some of the greatest masters of design have deliber
ately transgressed the rigid laws of perspective. Even
Raphael did not consider himself strictly bound to ob
serve them when a particular effect was at stake, and it
has often been pointed out that in his School oj Athens
in the Vatican there are two vanishing points, one for
the architecture, another for the figures. The same
criticism is made of Veronese's Marriage oj Cana, in
which also the capitals of the Doric columns are extra
ordinarily incorrect. A more modern instance of glar
ingly false perspective is the ceiling in one of Hogarth's
engravings in the series of The Idle Apprentice. In point

104 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
of fact no painter works with these scientific principles
consciously before him. They are in the background of
his mind, and, relying on his trained eye, he draws with
just sufficient correctness of perspective for his purpose.
Consequently, if we apply the principles of perspective
in all their mathematical rigidity, many pictures which
perfectly satisfy the eye will be found wanting. As
Ruskin said of Turner, who was Professor of Perspective
at the Royal Academy, he did not even know what he
professed, and probably never drew a single building in
true perspective in his life ; he drew them only with as
much perspective as suited him.

CHAPTER XII
COLOUR
WHEN looking at pictures it is not generally their
colour that first attracts the ordinary spectator's
interest. His attention is turned to the significance of
the subject and the drawing of the picture before he
seriously observes its colour. The reason may be found
largely in the difficulty and resulting want of confid
ence in understanding it. Questions of colour seem
so technical, so scientific in comparison with other con
siderations. We do not feel that we can evolve a per
fectly satisfactory theory or explanation of them out of
our inner consciousness. We may like or dislike the
colouring of any particular picture, we may condemn it
as impossible, or praise it for its brilliance, but it is with
a half uneasy feeling which shrinks from cross-examina
tion and avoids particulars or analysis. And yet colour
is of the very essence of painting. We have seen that,
theoretically speaking, it includes form, and is therefore
the basis of drawing. In the same way, as we shall see,
it is inseparably bound up with chiaroscuro or light and
shade. There is no need to do more than touch upon the
scientific or physiological side of the question of colour
in considering it as one of the chief elements of beauty
and interest in a picture. It will be enough to start with
the familiar fact that colours are the result of rays of

106 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
white light falling upon various substances or pigments,
each of which has the property of absorbing some of
these rays and reflecting others. Thus red paint absorbs
all other rays except red ones, which it reflects ; violet
absorbs all except violet rays, and so on. But in practice
the effect is infinitely more complicated, because no
substance can ever be completely isolated, and each
gives not only its own peculiar red or green or violet
rays, but also reflections from all adjoining substances.
Further, each colour has its contrasting or complementary
colour, green being the complementary of red, orange of
blue and yellow of violet. Thus after looking intently
for a few moments at a patch of red on a white ground,
the eye sees more or less distinctly that the red patch is
surrounded by an aureole of its complementary, and on
turning immediately to a plain white ground a patch of
green is distinctly visible, an experiment familiar through
the popular advertisement of Pears' Soap.
Again, where there are two colours side by side, each
surrounded by its complementary, these complementary
colours will, by mixing where they meet or overlap, again
produce a new combination. We have said that the eye
sees these complementary colours more or less distinctly,
because their distinctness actually depends on the
presence of a white ground on which alone the comple
mentary colour can be clearly perceived, and even then
only after somewhat prolonged fixing of the eye.
Another simple effect of the laws of optics concerns
the spectator as much as the painter. When going
round a gallery with notebook or catalogue, the colour
ing of the pictures will appear more brilliant from the
fact of continually looking up from the white paper.
There are two further elementary laws to be borne in
mind, that complementary colours when placed side by

COLOUR 107
side heighten one another, while colours which are not
complementary placed side by side diminish one another.
Thus blue placed by the side of its complementary orange
appears more intensely blue because it receives the addi
tion of the blue which is the complementary of orange.
These few laws are mentioned here only to emphasise
the complexity of the problems that meet the colourist.
As stated in the form of scientific principles they are
comparatively modern discoveries, almost of our own
time ; but their practical importance was fully realized
centuries before, and Giorgione, Veronese and Rubens
obeyed them none the less implicitly that they had not
yet been formulated. Nor must it be thought that the
artist of the present day paints his pictures by the light
of these rules. For him they are largely negative ; he
knows that if he paints a red skirt below a blue bodice
the brilliance of both colours will be diminished, while
a green field will appear less green against a blue sky.
These same principles are unconsciously respected by
every woman who chooses the colour of her dress with
reference to her complexion. As Eastlake pointed out,
" Flesh is never more glowing than when compared with
red, never ruddier than in the neighbourhood of green,
never fairer than when contrasted with black, nor richer
or deeper than when opposed to white."
Since the beginning of painting in the Middle Ages
the use of colour has advanced through many stages, from
the simple conventional colouring of the early fresco-
painter to the highly elaborated and realistic treatment
of our own day. Go in the National Gallery from the
Florentine room to the Venetian, from the Venetian to
the Dutch, the Spanish or the English. What different
colour-impressions we get from each ; gay, glowing,
sombre or cold. Leaving all other considerations out of

108 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
sight, compare from this point of view of colour alone
pictures by Fra Angelico, Titian, Rembrandt, Hogarth
and Claude Monet. Wherein lies the difference between
these painters ? Partly, perhaps, in the different colours
they used, but chiefly in the manner in which they used
them. Primitive painters like Fra Angelico worked with few
colours, keeping each distinct from the other. In paint
ing a blue robe they would use paler blue for the high
lights and a deeper blue for the shadows, regardless of the
surrounding colours with their reflections and counter-
effects. They relied almost entirely upon flat surfaces of
simple colour, often in sharp, even crude contrast, with few
shadows and few dark tones. Their colours are generally
wonderfully transparent and pure, the masses pleasantly
disposed ; but for all their charm we cannot help feeling
that here colouring is expressed in far simpler fashion than
can be found in nature. The sky is of a uniform blue, behind
brown rocks and dark green trees, whose foliage is often
defined with touches of gold. Figures in bright green,
crimson, blue or purple dresses, sometimes shot with gold,
wearing richly gilded halos and ornaments, are grouped
in more or less formal arrangement. The frequent use
of gold in itself gives an appearance of unreality. The
effect may be pleasing, though wholly unlike nature.
But it was as near nature as the artists could approach.
We cannot believe that Fra Angelico or Memlinc were
deliberately and of set purpose simplifying the complex
shades and tints of nature, as is often done by the
decorative painters of our own day, and the truth is
rather that their complexity as yet baffled the artist's
skill. In Italy, Carpaccio, Benozzo Gozzoli and Perugino,
and the German and Flemish painters Schongauer, Diirer
and Van der Weyden, charm us by the brilliance and

COLOUR 109
purity of their colour rather than by its subtlety or truth.
Yet a certain hardness, a want of blending is the more
noticeable to us, who can contrast it with the maturer
colouring of their successors.
Again, many of these early painters, as we have seen,
knew little of atmospheric or aerial perspective, by
means of which the effect of distance on colour is
expressed. They painted distant objects as brilliant as
those in the foreground, disregarding the fact that,
according as things recede from the eye, they become
not only smaller but changed in colour, generally faded
and dulled by the intervening veil of atmosphere, until
at last they are lost in a haze of blue. The distance in
such pictures is generally defined and airless. A simple
test of this blurring of colour by distance may be found
in watching a red cart or tram receding down a long
street. Its colour becomes little by little fainter and
dimmer, and at last it is impossible to see that it is
actually a bright red, though our knowledge that it is
so sharpens our eyes and perhaps helps to deceive them.
The temptation to the painter then is to paint a distant
red cart red, because of his knowledge that it would so
appear if close at hand. This effect of distance on
colour came only gradually to be understood. Land
scape backgrounds were rendered indeed with rather
less of precision and minuteness than foreground or
middle distance, and with somewhat paler colouring,
but the actual changes of colour by distance were only
realised in the sixteenth century.
The question of aerial perspective is intimately con
nected with that of tone. In painting a picture it is not
enough for the artist to imitate faithfully the actual colour
of each object within his range of vision, the bright blue
of the sky, the intense green of the grass, the huntsman s

no HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
scarlet coat. Each of these colours he might copy with
the utmost fidelity, but his canvas would present a
series of pictures, not a picture, for there would be no
unity, no connection, truth perhaps of isolated tints, but
no general truth of colour. This, we have seen, was the
mistake of all early painters. Tone, a word continually
on the lips of modern artists and critics, implies the
relation of all the colours to each other as determined
by the amount of light which each reflects, or, to use a
scientific term, the " value " of the colour in the scheme
of the whole. The artist knows that a huntsman's coat
is of a bright and glowing scarlet, but the knowledge
will serve him nothing. He must actually forget it, and
consider the scarlet coat merely as a colour patch,
whose intensity and brilliance, whose very hue is deter
mined relatively to its surroundings. It may appear as
a dark patch against a brilliant sky, or as a brightly
lighted spot or mass of warm colour in sombre surround
ings. Put a piece of red geranium against a gray wall
with the light in front of it, and then hold it up against
the bright sky. In the first case it will appear a bright
red ; in the second it will look almost black, all its
colour faded when opposed to the brilliant light behind
it. It is the painter's business to observe these modifica
tions of local colour, and in seeking truth of effect to
attain it by accepting no colour as absolute, but to
regard the scene before him as an area of lighted space,
in which every colour is seen in its relation to the other
colours and to the whole. A colour that is out of tone,
too brilliantly lighted or too strong in proportion to the
rest of the picture, should affect the eye just as a false
note in music hurts the ear. Colour values are to the
painter what harmonies are to the musician. Strict
truth of tone is the aim ofthe modern colourist, who looks

COLOUR in
back to Velasquez and the Dutchmen rather than to the
more purely decorative colourists of the Renaissance.
Splendour of colouring is not produced merely by
the use of brilliant local colours. There is all the
difference in the world between colours and colour,
between a number of bright, unblended tints promiscu
ously spotted together in a kind of patch-work, and a
consistent colour-scheme. In nature objects do not appear
as simple masses of hard and uniform colour, but are
broken into subtle gradations of endless variety, every
tint borrowing something from its neighbour, every
surface displaying reflections and counter-reflections,
every colour exerting its influence by relation or con
trast. The gradual realisation of these facts prepared
the way for the first great colourists, Titian, Veronese
and Correggio in the South, Rubens and Rembrandt in
the North. The change was no sudden one. We may
trace in Venetian art the gradual development of colour
in the work of Giovanni Bellini and his pupils Giorgione
and Titian, greater breadth and freedom, increased bold
ness and more perfect harmony proclaiming the " New
Manner." What is it then that distinguished the Venetian as a
colour-school above all others of that time? Chiefly
this, that in addition to their warm and brilliant tints
they further bathed everything in a flood of rich golden
light. It was frankly a convention. It is but seldom
that the world glows as in their pictures. Nor indeed
did they always employ brighter colours or a larger
choice of colours than other painters ; on the contrary,
they made frequent use of black, which is rarely found
in early art. Tintoretto's paradox that black and white
are the most beautiful colours is comprehensible before
such pictures as Titian's Man with a Glove in the

112 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
Louvre, or Moroni's Lawyer in the National Gallery.
It is only the great colourists who understand that
black and white do not imply absence of colour. The
black of velvet, silk or brocade, as the Venetians painted
it, is as vibrating and rich, as luminous and satisfying,
as any crimson or purple. Equally many of them
gained their finest effects by means of a few colours
only, a simple palette. In Titian's Crowning with Thorns
in the Munich Gallery he has used only four colours,
black and white, red and orange ; yet the effect is rich
and striking, and if the tints used in many a picture of
splendid colour-effect be counted, they will often prove
but a poor half-dozen. Typical examples of the
opulence of Venetian colouring are Titian's Presentation
oj the Virgin, Bordone's Fisherman presenting the Ring
oj St. Mark to the Doge and Tintoretto's Miracle oj St.
Mark, all in the Academy at Venice. The brilliant
crimsons, yellows and blues are harmonised in a flood of
golden light. In colour Paul Veronese differs in some
respects from his Venetian contemporaries, and obtains
equal brilliance by other means. He delights in cool
blues and grays where Titian used warm browns and
reds, and the light in which he bathes his colours
suggests the silvery effect of early morning rather than
the glowing gold of sunset. We find these same silver
harmonies in many of Tintoretto's pictures, notably in
his wonderful Bacchus and Ariadne in the Ducal Palace,
the cool shimmering light of which contrasts curiously
with the golden glow of his Miracle oj St. Mark.
Moretto also uses these cool gray or silver tones.
Rubens, the inheritor of the Venetian tradition, stands
almost alone in the North for the boldness and originality
of his colouring. No one painted with greater fearless
ness and self-confidence. He saw colour in everything,

COLOUR u3
and used it with the greatest audacity and decorative
effect, delighting in warm yellows, browns, crimsons
and even scarlet, a colour rarely used by the Venetians.
Passing from his sumptuous canvases to the quieter
pictures of his Dutch contemporaries we again find a
strong feeling for colour, but differently expressed.
Rembrandt at the head of the School is as individual as
Titian or Rubens. With him, as with Tintoretto and
Correggio, colour and vigorous yet subtle chiaroscuro
are inseparably bound up. In his pictures local colouj
is often lost in depths of luminous shadow. Broadly
speaking, the chief characteristic of Dutch colouring is
its fidelity and truth to nature. Not one of the Dutch
painters but was a colourist, and this feeling for colour
redeems many a coarse and unpleasant scene, and com
pensates for the frequent lack of beauty of face and
form. The little genre scenes of Metzu, Terburg and
De Hoogh are often gems of exquisite and harmonious
colour, with something of the brilliance of enamel.
Nothing can surpass the faultless colouring, deep, rich
and glowing of Terburg's Trumpeter handing a Dispatch
in the Hague, or De Hoogh's Interior oj a Dutch House
in the National Gallery. In their painting of satin,
velvet or fur, it was not only the colour but the very
texture of the material they succeeded in reproducing.
Terburg's white satin is as marvellous as De Hoogh's
black velvet.
When we compare the pictures of such colourists as
Titian, Correggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Gains
borough, Turner, Delacroix, we find no two alike in their
use of colour, though all are more or less true to nature.
The great colourist never indeed aims merely at truth to
nature, though his colour is always suggested by her.
It has been said that colour may be either brilliant or
I

114 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
harmonious, but is always sufficiently like nature if it
does not offend the spectator. Truth is not the last
word in colour. It is not a matter of truth but of feeling.
That colour can at times come perilously near the verge
of extravagance and exaggeration may be seen in some of
Turner's work. His most splendid effects are sometimes
frankly impossible, atmospheric paradoxes, the dreams
of his studio inspired by nature. He seizes upon sunset
hues which in reality last but a fraction of a moment,
and throws them in splendid profusion upon his canvas.
Yet it would be hard to say that the whole effect is so
unlike nature as to offend the eye, or that it is not
justified by its beauty. It is the privilege of the artist
to see farther than the rest of his fellows. Turner's
reply to the lady who complained that she could not find
in nature all the colours he had painted in his pictures,
"Don't you wish you could, madam?" is based on a
fuller understanding ofthe painter's province than was the
criticism. Perhaps more is to be learned of the magic of
colour in nature from Turner, especially in his water-
colours, than from any other painter.
It is a common mistake to suppose that fine colour is
necessarily gay, or that the best colour-effects are always
the most striking. Turning from the pictures painted in
the pure unbroken tints of the early Italian or Flemish
masters to those of our own day, there is at first sight a
loss of brilliance. In so far as this is due to the modern
painter's greater feeling for truth of tone, the loss is more
than compensated, but it sometimes happens that this
modern practice of painting in broken tints leads in un
skilful hands to a certain smeariness, producing a dirty
or muddy effect of colour. One of the aims of the
English Pre-Raphaelite painters, disgusted with the
brown, sad colouring of their contemporaries, was to ob-

COLOUR 115
tain truth to nature by the use of purer colour. Returning
to the methods of the primitive Florentine and Flemish
masters, they faithfully matched the local colour of every
object in their pictures, sacrificing, however, unity of
effect and achieving in consequence only partial truth.
Even among quite modern painters there are some who
like Leighton, have never freed themselves from this
" tyranny of local colour." Again, the colour of a picture
is often called brilliant when it is really tawdry, dull be
cause it is quiet, exaggerated when it is merely bold.
Pictures of the East, with their unfamiliar scale of colour
and lighting, are apt to strike the untravelled spectator
as crude and unnatural. In the same way, hot, violent
tints are mistaken for rich, warm colour, while cool, pearly
tones appear to some cold and lifeless. As fine effects
have been gained by the use of the colder colours blue
and gray as by the admittedly warmer reds, yellows and
orange. It is well known that Gainsborough painted
his famous Blue Boy in the Duke of Westminster's
collection as a challenge to Reynolds, who had declared
that a picture could not be made out of a cold colour
while we get the effect of a hot summer day from many
a modern landscape painted in a key of blues, grays and
greens, without one touch of warm red or yellow.
In nothing, perhaps, does an artist show his personal
genius for colour more than in his painting of flesh.
There is every variety of complexion in art as in nature,
from the healthy, ruddy flesh of Rubens to the green
anaemic faces of Burne-Jones, from Giorgione's brown-
faced Shepherd and his golden-limbed Venus to the pink
and white waxen creations of Netscher and Van derWerff.
In the painting of flesh the Venetians and Correggio
are still unsurpassed. We find in them for the first time
not only the colour, but the actual texture of warm living

n6 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
flesh. There is no finer flesh-painting in the world than
Correggio's Antiope in the Louvre. In many pictures by
the Venetians and Rubens we find admirable contrasts
between the fair skin of the women and the brown sun
burnt faces and limbs of the men. In Titian's Holy
Family in the National Gallery the Madonna and Child
are admirably set off by the swarthy shepherd boy who
kneels before them. This rich flesh-painting is in strik
ing contrast with the hard, brick-red flesh of Giulio
Romano and the Carracci, the greenish grays of Bor-
gognone or the brown of Leighton's nudes. Rubens's
magnificent rendering of flesh may be studied in all his
pictures. Here too he followed the Venetians, adding
to their lustre and brilliancy something more of warm
red. As Guido Reni said, he surely must have mixed
blood with his colours. He made frequent use, too, of
crimson shadows, under eyes, nose, chin, and between
the fingers. In this he was followed by Van Dyck and
the English painters Reynolds and Romney, who some
times even defined the features with a red line.

CHAPTER XIII
LIGHT AND SHADE
LIGHT and Shade, or Chiaroscuro, is in nature almost
inseparable from colour, and the painter can hardly
see them apart. But from the point of view of the spec
tator of a picture, as opposed to that of the artist, chiar
oscuro may fairly be considered separately.
Strongly defined light and shade is by no means
necessary in pictorial art. Pure line drawing and purely
decorative painting have little of it. The artists of Japan,
whether working in black and white or in colours, achieve
the most astoundingly successful rendering of solid form
without the use of shadows. It is the tradition of Japan
ese art to rely solely upon outline and flat colour to
express form. Greek vase-painting is also shadowless
and flat. Early fresco-painting and some of the most
successful mural painting of modern times consists in the
use of broad flat masses treated decoratively with little
modelling or relief. But European painting relies on the
help of light and shade wherever modelling or the effect
of projecting and receding masses is required. The use
of light and shade is indeed the basis of all modelling
and all relief. By its means the subtlest and most deli
cate gradations of form may be rendered, even to the
different planes upon flat surfaces.
In its narrower but more generally accepted sense, the
term chiaroscuro is used to express the broadest and

n8 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
strongest effects of light and shadow over the whole pic
ture. After mentally eliminating line and colour, we
can judge how far the effect is obtained by the distribu
tion and the proportion of the light and shadow, always
bearing in mind that it is only at some little distance
from a picture that its scheme of chiaroscuro can be
adequately appreciated.
Reynolds, when travelling in Italy as a student, was
especially interested in the chiaroscuro of the great
Venetian masters and jotted down in his notebook his
own method of studying these effects detached from all
other considerations. "When I observed," he writes,
" an extraordinary effect of light and shade in any picture,
I took a leaf out of my pocket-book and darkened every
part of it in the same gradation of light and shade as the
picture, leaving the white paper untouched to represent
the light, and this without any attention to the subject,
or to the drawing of the figures. By this means you
may likewise remark the various forms and shapes of
those lights, as well as the objects on which they are
flung, whether a figure or the sky, or a white napkin,
animals, or utensils, often introduced for this purpose
only. . . . Such blotted paper held at a distance from
the eye will strike the spectator as something excellent
for the disposition of light and shadow, though it does
not distinguish whether it is a history, a portrait, a land
scape, dead game or anything else ; for the same prin
ciples extend to every branch of the art."
Whether we use the term chiaroscuro in its wider or
its more limitedsense, the question is always one of grada
tions of light. All colour is modified by the degree
of light or shadow falling upon it, as we noticed in the
case of the red geranium held first against the light and
then against a gray background. The amount and pro-

LIGHT AND SHADE 119
portion of light or shade in a picture will of course depend
upon the choice of the painter. He may consciously
disregard chiaroscuro almost entirely to give an impres
sion of flatness. He may emphasise and exaggerate it
beyond nature by the artificial devices of the studio,
cutting off the light entirely on one side and concentrat
ing it forcibly elsewhere. Any portrait will show the
way in which it has been employed. If the light falls
from the side the shadows cast by the features will be so
disposed as to give the due sense of relief, but they
will differ from the deep shadows under eyes, nose and
chin cast by a top light such as Hoppner, Raeburn and
Lawrence continually used to obtain an easy and forcible
effect of relief and modelling. Or he may prefer full
outdoor effects, with the sunlight distributed broadly over
the whole or falling fitfully from behind heavy clouds,
touching near or distant objects with its gleams.
We find examples of every method of chiaroscuro in
a picture-gallery. Early pictures, especially those of the
Florentine School, show the very simplest treatment of
light and shade. This is partly due to the fact that the
painters were accustomed to cover large wall-surfaces
where, whether in mosaic or fresco, a broad flat treatment
is the most effective. Just as a wall-paper with a pattern
in high relief offends the eye, so wall-painting requires
only so much relief as will make it intelligible. Giotto,
skilled observer as he was, did not attempt to give the
effect of light and shadow caused by the fire in his fresco
of St. Francis bejore the Soldan in S. Croce at Florence.
The blazing fire is represented as a dark mass against a
lighter background, casting neither shadow nor reflection.
In some early German pictures the flames of burning
' candles are mere touches of gold giving no suggestion of
light. The Madonnas and Saints ofthe primitive Tuscan

i2o HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
painters live in a shadowless world of their own. Where
chiaroscuro is attempted it is generally quite arbitrary,
the light falling from different sides with no pretence to
consistency. The Venetian and Flemish painters employed a more
vigorous chiaroscuro from the beginning, and the oil
method which was introduced in the fifteenth century
lent itself to broader effects and greater depth of shadow.
The " New Manner " of the sixteenth century, as Vasari
justly termed it, consisted largely in a greater unity of
light and shade, a stronger feeling for modelling and
relief, by means of which a far closer semblance to nature
was obtained. With many artists chiaroscuro came to
be no longer merely an aid to the representation of form
but a source of aesthetic effect, an end in itself. The
great chiaroscurists, Leonardo, Correggio, Tintoretto and
Rembrandt, deliberately sought and found beauty in new
and daring effects of light and shade. Compare them
with their predecessors and the contrast is striking. In
stead of being uniformly distributed, the light is broken
up so that but a fraction of the picture receives it, while
the rest is in half shadow or deep, impenetrable gloom.
According to Reynolds the practice ofthe later Venetians
appeared to be to allow not above a quarter of the pic
ture for the light, including both principal and secondary
lights, another quarter to be kept as dark as possible
and the remainder in half shadow. " Rubens," he re
marks, " seems to have admitted rather more light than
a quarter and Rembrandt much less, scarcely an eighth ;
by this conduct Rembrandt's light is extremely brilliant,
but it costs too much, and the rest of the picture is
sacrificed to this one object."
The gradual appreciation of the aesthetic value of
chiaroscuro opened out new and wider possibilities for

LIGHT AND SHADE 121
pictorial art. By its means, objects and scenes, however
fair in themselves, are endowed with an added halo of
romance and beauty. Early art, in which everything was
clear, hard and defined, knew nothing ofthe mystery-pro
ducing power of effects of half light and deep obscurity.
High lights gained an added brightness from contrast
with deepest gloom. Shadows were found to be not
black masses but luminous and full of colour. The in
fluence of reflections, direct and indirect, on colour began
to absorb attention. Painting gained both in scope and
complexity. These were not the discoveries of one
generation or of a single school, but little by little the
search into the mysteries of light and shade by the
pioneers of chiaroscuro could not fail of its effect upon
the art of painting. Leonardo, as Vasari narrates, not
content with his darkest shadows, laboured constantly to
discover the ground tone of others still darker, to the
end that the light might thus be rendered yet more
brilliant. The mysterious, unearthly effect of his Vir
gin oj the Rocks in the Louvre is the result of this
strong contrast between the bright light that illumines
the faces and the deep obscurity of the surroundings.
Unfortunately his use of deep shadow was not without
its baneful influence on contemporary painters like Fra
Bartolommeo, who in their endeavour to emulate Leon
ardo's effects of relief blackened their shadows to the
everlasting detriment of their pictures. To Leonardo
also is attributed the first deliberate adoption of indoor
or studio light, with its carefully prearranged effects.
Tintoretto went further, and to gain greater effect
often made use of artificial light. His habit was to
model little figures in wax or clay, placing them after
wards in a box with a lighted candle in order to study
their chiaroscuro. In his hands light and shade became

122 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
powerful instruments of dramatic expression. Many of
his finest works at Venice, the Bacchus and A riadne in the
Ducal Palace, the Annunciation in the Scuola di S. Rocco
and the Marriage oj Cana in the Salute, owe their chief
beauty to the vigorous and forceful chiaroscuro. Indeed
many of Tintoretto's pictures depend entirely for their
effect on his peculiar treatment of light and shade, in
which local colour is entirely drowned. In the Bacchus
and Ariadne the silvery light plays over the figures and
gleams on the naked flesh with subtle and delicate
transparency. The complicated and effective lighting
in the Marriage oj Cana especially excited the interest
of the youthful Reynolds. " This picture," he writes in
his notebook, " has the most natural light and shadow
that can be imagined. All the light comes from the
several windows over the table. The woman who stands
and leans forward to have a glass of liquor is of great
service ; she covers part of the tablecloth so that there
is not too much white in the picture, and by means of
her strong shadows she throws back the table and makes
the perspective more agreeable. But that her figure
might not appear like a dark inlaid figure on a light
ground her face is light, her hair masses with the ground,
and the light of her handkerchief is whiter than the
tablecloth." If Tintoretto uses light to produce dramatic
effect, and Leonardo to enhance the subtle mystery of
his creations, with Correggio it is the chief source of
beauty, softening and sweetening all it touches. He is
the Italian Rembrandt in his feeling for chiaroscuro, but
a Rembrandt converted from gloom to sunshine, joyous,
youthful, serene.
The use of a forcible and striking chiaroscuro was
carried beyond all legitimate limits by the followers and
imitators of the great Italian chiaroscurists, who in their

TINT

Anderson photo]

THE MARRiA,

rxn, i iu

GE OF CANA

[Salute, Venice

REMBRANDT

Hanfstdngl photo]

WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY

[Xational Gallery

LIGHT AND SHADE 123
endeavours to outvie their predecessors made for them
selves a world of theatrically contrasted light and dark
ness, peopled by grandiose, superhuman giants. Cara-
vaggio is the head of these painters of extravagant
effects, who earned for themselves the name of the
" Tenebrosi," or Painters of Darkness. The Spanish
painter Ribera, too, who founded his art on Correggio
and Caravaggio, painted powerful and interesting effects
of light and shade, which give his pictures a peculiar
interest. But in less capable hands the strong shadows
used to enhance the effect of brilliant lighting ceased to
be luminous, vibrating and full of colour, and became
cold, black and heavy. Vigorous chiaroscuro degener
ated into mere melodrama.
It is when we come to Rembrandt that the whole
mysterious beauty of ehiaroscuro, with its power to lend
a charm and dignity to the meanest subject, is revealed.
In the work of his mature years he uses a system of
inclosed radiance, the light breaking as it were from
masses of deep and luminous shadow to fall keenly on
some particular object. This rich envelope of golden-
brown, transparent shadow added a new glory to the
masterly characterisation and sure modelling of his
figures. No one before him had succeeded in so sub
duing the powers of day and night and bidding each
perform its appointed part in pictorial effect. Does
Rembrandt's brilliance of light really cost too much, as
Reynolds suggests ? How is it possible to accede to the
proposition in the face of such masterly treatment as is
displayed in the Woman taken in Adultery in the National
Gallery, the Pilgrims oj Emmaus in the Louvre, the
Raising oj the Cross in Munich, and the vast series of
portraits of his middle and later periods, in which the
light is focussed upon the most important passage in the

i24 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
picture ? Rembrandt's peculiar and personal treatment
of chiaroscuro naturally excited a host of followers and
imitators. It is largely owing to his influence that the
Dutch School is renowned for striking and poetical treat
ment of light. De Hoogh and Vermeer of Delft are
almost modern in their treatment of light and shade.
De Hoogh furnishes his simple, almost bare interiors with
golden sunlight and rich colour. Vermeer delights in cool
tones, blues and grays, and the effect of light pouring in
through latticed window on wall and furniture. The same
mysterious magic redeems the somewhat vulgar scenes of
Adrian van Ostade and Brouwer, lifting them into the
realm of beauty.
Artists were not slow to perceive that by means of
light and shade every subject could be rendered interest
ing and beautiful. Reynolds's reply, when at the height
of his fame he was asked how he could bear to paint
the ugly cocked-hats, bonnets and wigs of his own time,
" They all have light and shadow," must have seemed
obvious enough to the great artist who, as a youth, had
darkened the leaves of his pocket-book as he sat at the
feet of Tintoretto and Veronese in Venice. Even more
have the painters of still life, of household pots and
pans, the implements and contents of the larder, proved
that nothing is really common or unclean where observa
tion and sympathy combine to perpetuate it in the form
of art.
Allusion has been made already to the veil or envelope
of atmosphere intervening between the object and the
eye. The nature or quality of this envelope depends
on the amount of light upon it. This in its turn is
determined by such considerations as the natural purity
of the air, the time of day, the season of the year.
According as the light is pure and white or tinged with

DE HOOGH

,H anf si dngl photo]

INTERIOR

[Xational Gallery

LIGHT AND SHADE 125
colour, the general effect will be cool or glowing. The
light of early morning is perceptibly colder and more
silvery than the golden illumination of late afternoon.
Again, the lighting of a picture may be natural or
artificial, the light of the studio or of the open air, and
its influence upon near or distant objects must be cor
rectly rendered. Truth of tone, or correct colour-value,
for it is the same problem in another form, depends on
the careful analysis and due appreciation of light, for
tone is a question of the quantity of light reflected by
any given colour, which proves how intimate is the con
nection between colour and chiaroscuro.
Light is the great unifying element in a picture. By
consistent rendering of light and shade all the parts of
the picture are brought into perfect relationship. Com
pare such a picture as the Coronation oj the Virgin in
the National Gallery, ascribed to Orcagna, with its tier
upon tier of saints and martyrs rising one behind the
other, with Terburg's Peace oj Munster in the same col
lection. In the work of the Florentine there are no
subtle gradations of tone, the light is inconsistent, being
uniformly distributed over the foremost and most distant
figures. Those in the background are as brightly lighted
as those in the foreground. In a word, there is no
general scheme of light, each figure has been considered
by itself. In Terburg's Peace oj Munster, on the con
trary, there is a well-considered scheme of light, a de
finite light-centre, to which every tone in the picture is
related. He distinguishes with marvellous delicacy of
tone the subtle differences between the figures in front
and those behind and at the sides, giving to each its due
proportion of light. The picture is a whole, not an
aggregation of parts.
It is this recognition of the unity of chiaroscuro which

126 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
characterises modern art, and is the special heritage
bequeathed by Velasquez to his artistic successors of to
day. Only by regarding the scene before him as a whole
can a painter attain unity of ensemble. With Velasquez
this unity was a paramount consideration. He never
looked at one part of the subject he was painting with
out keeping in mind the general impression of the whole,
the impression made upon the eye by a first glance. In
this he differed from the older masters, the Venetians and
Rubens, who sought unity only by means of line and
decoratively disposed masses of colour, and practically
ignored consistency of lighting and the finer subtleties
of tone. Titian even went so far as to paint figures in
full sunlight against a sunset sky. But there is painter's
as well as poet's licence, and even in Watteau's most
beautiful park and garden scenes the lighting is never
that of the open air.
It was in revolt against the general use of the subdued
artificial light of the studio and in favour of more natural
light effects, that a school of painters arose in France
some thirty years ago, and has since found sympathisers
in every land. The Plein-airists, as they are called, in
sisted on painting nature in the open air, and would hear
nothing of studio landscapes. Intensely sensitive to
momentary changes of light, which obviously require
great rapidity of execution, they succeeded in arresting
and perpetuating effects unknown within doors, where
the light remains long unchanged and is comparatively
unaffected by considerations of hour or weather. The
movement was directed in the first instance against the
practice of painting landscapes almost entirely within
doors, and consequently under conditions of light and
atmosphere which could not possibly exist in nature.
Even in winter the glass studios of the Plein-airists

LIGHT AND SHADE 127
admit as nearly as possible the full light of the open air.
Above all, they set themselves to interpret directly the
effect of strong sunshine upon natural objects, its power
of swallowing all local colour in .a uniform silver haze.
It was a step still further in advance when the principles
of plein air were applied to indoor subjects. This new
conception of light accounts no doubt, to some extent
at least, for the absence in a collection of modern
pictures of the low tones characteristic of the old
masters. The general impression is distinctly brighter,
even when we allow for the darkening influence of time.
This more rational lighting of modern painting is indeed
a revolution from the stereotyped "gallery tones" of
the eighteenth century, but it needed all the artistic
courage of a Constable or a Manet to break down a
tradition so depressing and absurd.

CHAPTER XIV
COMPOSITION
IT often happens when standing before a picture
which appears to be well drawn and pleasantly
coloured, that we are conscious of something wanting.
There seems to be no true centre, no rest for the eye,
which loses itself in a maze of detail but gains no sense
of unity or coherence. This is probably because the
picture is not well put together, the various elements
not combined so as to produce one perfect whole ; in a
word, the composition is faulty. For the painter, like the
musician, has certain materials which, by skilful arrange
ment, he converts into a work of art. The musician deals
with sounds, the painter with form and colour. And in
both cases the work of art, be it symphony or picture, is the
result of the harmonious combination of these elements.
It is not enough that it should contain passages of un
doubted beauty, if these be scattered and disconnected.
A painter needs more than good draughtsmanship and a
fine feeling for colour. He must also possess that sense
of decorative proportion, of balance and unity, which
prompts him to treat his picture as so much pattern, to
weave his forms and colours into a well-considered scheme,
in which all the parts are related to each other and to the
whole. Many pictures lack this consistent disposition
of their component parts, with the result that we have,
as it were, on one canvas several pictures, but no picture.

COMPOSITION 129
The painter has thought more of each part, the morceau,
than of the whole effect.
Unity of composition is attained by several means, of
which, as we have seen, harmonious line and consistent
chiaroscuro are the most important. The lines of a
composition may repeat each other or be in direct
contrast, but in either case they must be intimately
related and lead up to the centre of the picture. Some
pictures are knit together entirely by means of interlacing,
harmonising lines, and though the scheme of light may
be elementary and the colour spotted on almost as an
afterthought, unity of composition may still be preserved.
The composition of most modern pictures is chiefly an
affair of the careful distribution of light, the painter seek
ing consistency of chiaroscuro and truth of tone before
all else.
Unity of action is also an important factor in good
composition. There should be only one centre of interest,
one principal figure or group, to which the rest of the
picture is subordinate. This unity of action was entirely
disregarded by many of the early painters, who in their
desire to tell a story graphically often introduced several
scenes into the same picture. This is done with curious
effect in the fresco of The Church Militant in the Spanish
Chapel of S. Maria Novella in Florence, where the
different incidents are not only piled on the top of each
other, but the figures even vary in size to suit the exig
encies of space. In Masaccio's fresco of The Tribute
Money in the Brancacci Chapel three distinct incidents
are narrated, though in this case without losing unity of
pictorial effect, the middle group of Christ and his
Apostles forming a true centre for the picture. Even
Raphael in his Transfiguration makes two distinct
centres, the scene of the actual Transfiguration on the
K.

130 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
mountain and below, and, curiously enough in greater
prominence, the secondary incident of the healing of the
demoniac. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michel
angelo represented the Temptation, Fall and Expulsion
from the Garden of Eden in one compartment. Though
in such composite pictures unity of action is sacrificed,
harmony of line and careful distribution of the masses
help to preserve unity of composition. In Michelangelo's
fresco the graceful lines of the figures draw the whole
together, and there is no sense of isolation or restlessness.
In the centre is the tree, from one side of which the
tempter stretches out an arm to Eve, while Adam reaches
for the fruit. On the right the avenging angel drives
the guilty pair from Eden. The two groups, both
composed of the same figures, balance one another
perfectly, and the outstretched arms of the angel, the
tempter and Adam link together the three principal
masses. A somewhat similar difficulty confronts the painter of
a portrait-group, where no sitter will consent to take a
subordinate position. As we have seen, this problem
had to be faced by the Dutch painters, when called upon
to portray the members of some corporation or guild.
To paint half a score of figures in a group may not be
difficult, but where each insists on individual considera
tion and equal prominence pictorial unity becomes well-
nigh impossible. Many of these Regent pictures are
nothing but charts, maps of faces, as it were. But the
best artists, Hals and Ravesteyn, overcame the difficulty,
and by skilful grouping and clever lighting contrived to
infringe neither their patrons' wishes nor their own sense
of harmonious composition.
This difficulty of grouping several figures together was
evaded by some ofthe early Italians, notably the Vivarini

COMPOSITION 131
and Crivelli, who painted each figure of an altar-piece on
a separate panel, uniting them afterwards in one common
frame. In these " Anconas," where each figure appears
in a separate framework, unity of composition is not
attempted. Each saint is an independent being, bearing
but the most superficial relation to any other. Gradually,
however, the framework between the figures was done
away with, and definite attempts at harmonious grouping
were made.
It is obviously easier to compose a picture of few and
simple materials, of but one or two figures, than to give
coherence to a crowded scene. Yet even a picture of a
single figure, a portrait, may be well or ill composed. It
may crowd the frame, giving an uncomfortable sense of
cramped space, or by being placed too much on one side
or too high the figure may lose balance, and the picture
seem lop-sided or top-heavy. How admirably some
portraits seem to fit their frames, without a feeling of
either emptiness or crowding. Velasquez has wonderfully
contrived to make us feel the depth of space surrounding
the figure in his portraits. It sometimes happens that a
painter, having begun his picture, feels that his subject
is confined by the size of the canvas, and to meet this
adds strips on either side to give a greater sense of space.
The fresco-painter has no such opportunity. The size
and shape of his wall-space are unelastic, and his picture
must be composed to fit them. Raphael's Parnassus and
Mass oj Bolsena in the Vatican are so finely composed
that we scarcely realise how awkward were the spaces
the painter was called upon to fill, a door cutting through
the middle, leaving two difficult corners. Again, his
designs in the spandrels of the ceiling of the Farnesina
may well be studied as triumphs of spacing. But apart
from the peculiar difficulties affecting the fresco-painter,

132 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
the actual composing of even a single figure needs ex
perience and knowledge of space-effect. We should
have a sense of limitation and discomfort if, when design
ing a stooping figure, the artist so composed it that it
would be impossible for it to stand upright, or in the
case of a figure in suspended action there were no room
for the completion of the movement.
Still greater is the difficulty before the artist who has
to give unity to a complex, crowded scene, to bring order
out of disorder, and this without giving the impression
of too elaborate arrangement or painfully acquired effect.
For this kind of composition Rubens had a perfect instinct.
At first sight his Lion Hunt in Munich gives an impression
of wild disorder, horses, men and lions in a tangle of
limbs and weapons. This is, of course, the artist's in
tention, a consciously sought effect of chaos, in which in
reality there is perfect order and harmony. His Battle
oj the Amazons in the same gallery, and his Kermesse
in the Louvre, are extravagantly crowded scenes with
figures in every variety of attitude admirably composed,
though with little apparent effort. In all the maze of
figures the effect is never confused. In such large
elaborate compositions the artist has always to bear in
mind the fact that a picture must make an effective im
pression at the first glance. There must be some centre
on which attention is instinctively focussed. Afterwards
the spectator may unravel the intricacies of the compo
sition, and enjoy the inter-relation of all the parts. It
is here that Tintoretto's great Paradise in the Ducal
Palace fails. There is too much for the eye to take in
at a glance, and no point of vantage on which it can rest
in the welter of figures. The general impression is one
of scattered confusion.
As illustrating the different means by which painters

X

H<a
H 0
>

COMPOSITION 133
achieve unity of compositon, we may compare the ap
parently careless, natural grouping of such pictures as
Jan Steen's Family oj the Painter at the Hague, The
Haymakers of Bastien - Lepage or Millais's Carpenter's
Shop with the formal symmetrical arrangement of Mem-
line's St. John Altar-piece, Raphael's Sposalizio or Titian's
Assumption. In the first instances the composition ap
pears easy and unpremeditated. There is no attempt at
symmetry, and the impression made by the pictures is
one of spontaneity and truth to life. We can well believe
that Jan Steen painted his picture from what he saw in
the parlour of his own inn, where he and his friends were
making merry. The Haymakers is a lifelike representa
tion of a man and woman resting from their labours
under the glare of the noonday sun. The scene in the
Carpenter's Shop, where the whole interest centres round
the child Christ, who has hurt his hand on a nail, is one
that the painter might have observed for himself in some
modern workshop. How differently it would have been
treated by one of the old masters ! But for all the
apparent ease of grouping in such pictures, a little re
search will in every case reveal the painter's care for order
and balance. In well-composed pictures every detail is
arranged with a view to the whole, every figure, every
attitude duly considered, and often the most apparently
natural composition is the result of infinite study and
reflection. By way of testing the composition, take away
or transpose a single figure and the effect will often be
irretrievably marred ; add another, and the result may
be to spoil the whole balance of the picture.
When we turn to the second group of pictures our
impressions are quite different. Instead of natural group
ing we find formal, orderly arrangement, and often
perfect symmetry. In the Sposalizio the group of the

134 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
Virgin and her maidens on the left is repeated on the
right by that of Joseph and the disappointed suitors.
In the middle stands the high priest, who joins the hands
of bride and bridegroom, and the temple behind, with
the steps leading up to it, completes the well-balanced
composition. The reason for this formal arrangement is
not far to seek. Such pictures as these were painted to
hang in a definite place, to form part of the decoration
of some church, where, from over high altar or side-
chapel, they could be advantageously seen by the wor
shippers. Under these circumstances it is evident that
the painter is not free to compose his picture independ
ently of all considerations beyond his personal taste. A
picture painted for a definite position must be designed
to harmonise with its surroundings ; in a word, architec
tonic conditions must be fulfilled. The main lines of the
composition must repeat and carry on the lines of the
building, or consciously contrast with them to give
variety. It is essential that something of the symmetrical
proportions of the architecture should find an echo in the
picture painted to adorn it, that the painter should bring
the grouping of the figures within his frame to some
extent into harmony with the lines and masses without.
When Titian composed his great Assumption for the
high altar of a church in Venice, he little dreamed that
one day the picture would be removed from its setting
and hung in a picture-gallery, where its intention and
decorative fitness are lost and forgotten. He instinctively
adopted a less formal arrangement for an easel picture
intended to hang upon the wall of a private palace, as
was the Bacchus and Ariadne now in the National Gal
lery, where the composition is irregular and unbalanced
almost to confusion.
The fresco-painter in particular is bound by considera-

TITIAN

Brogi photo]

[Academy, Venice

COMPOSITION 135
tions of the building he is called upon to adorn. He
too must design his pictures so as to obtain the best
effect from the place where they will be most frequently
seen. For this purpose the simplest composition is often
the best, and a careful arrangement of lines tells better
than elaborate effects of colour or chiaroscuro. Leon
ardo's Last Supper is not only a magnificent composition
in itself, but is admirably designed for the end-wall of a
spacious refectory, where as they sat at meals the monks
could see the long table of the picture forming, as it
seemed, part of the room itself, and, like the high table
in a college hall, slightly raised above the rest. It was
obviously convenient for this purpose to range the
Apostles on the far side of the table, facing the room,
with Christ in the middle ; and to vary this long line the
painter has broken it into four groups, uniting them,
however, with consummate skill through the expressive
action of the hands. Veronese's Marriage oj Cana in
the Louvre, and his Feast in the House oj Levi in the
Venice Academy, though not frescoes, were painted for
a similar position, and much of their purpose is missed
where they now hang among other pictures in a gallery.
Correggio's desire to annihilate the architectural limits of
the dome in the Cathedral of Parma, to pierce it, as it
were, and make the spectator believe he was gazing up
into space, was a bold device on the part of the painter,
a tour de jorce of perspective and composition, which in
any other hands could scarcely have hoped to succeed.
The antithesis of this kind of illusory composition is
one often found in Venetian churches, where the painter
by a trick of perspective makes a flat ceiling appear
elaborately vaulted.
With regard, however, to the formal grouping of the
old Italian pictures, it is only fair to remember that in

136 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
many cases the artists were following old-established
traditions of composition favoured by the Church, from
which they but gradually escaped to a more individual
conception. Not until after studying some of the early
sculptured reliefs and mosaics is it possible to realise
how closely the painters of the Renaissance adhered to
the designs of their predecessors. The traditional com
position of the Baptism oj Christ, as it may be seen in
mosaic in the Baptistery of St. Mark at Venice, was
repeated with little change until the sixteenth century.
Christ stands in the river in the middle of the picture, on
one side St. John the Baptist from a rocky bank pours
water over his head, on the other kneel three little angels
holding Christ's garments. So Giotto rendered this
incident in the Arena Chapel at Padua, and even Bellini
kept to the old arrangement in his altar-piece at Vicenza,
adding, however, a beautiful mountainous landscape set
ting and a luminous sky. Again, the customary com
position of the scene of the Transfiguration varied little
from the sixth century to the sixteenth. Duccio's little
Transfiguration in the National Gallery is scarcely less
Byzantine than its prototypes, and even Raphael two
hundred years later repeated the same grouping with but
slight alteration. New subject-matter alone called forth
the artist's powers of invention and arrangement. When
Giotto painted the legend of St. Francis in twenty-eight
scenes on the walls of the Upper Church at Assisi, he
had no older models to turn to. No painter before him
had translated the well-known story into pictorial form,
and created a traditional rendering to be copied with
little variation for centuries to come. Giotto was obliged
to compose for himself, and with wonderful skill he
designed these dramatic though simple scenes, grouping
his figures in the most expressive attitudes and uniting

COMPOSITION 137
them in some common interest. Again, when mytho
logical and historical subjects came into fashion, there
existed no established forms to follow, and artists were
forced to originate their designs.
In many pictures it will be found that the composition
can be inclosed within some simple and geometrical
figure, such as a triangle or pyramid. Sometimes, indeed,
it seems based upon the use of two such figures of
different dimensions. Fra Bartolommeo was the first who
deliberately adopted the pyramidal form of composition
to gain grand monumental effect. Nearly all his altar-
pieces are designed on this principle. Raphael borrowed
it from him, as we see in La Belle Jardiniere and many of
the pictures of his second period. Titian uses it with
supreme effect in his Entombment in the Louvre, and
Giorgione, though in a somewhat irregular form, in his
Fete ChampHre in the same gallery. By the seventeenth
century pyramidal composition had become almost a
canon of art in Italy, and was repeated to weariness by
Raphael's imitators. The pyramid, indeed, like any other
regular figure, gives a sense of rest to the eye, and carries
with it a suggestion of strength and dignity. Even in
the less formal compositions of the Dutch masters and
of modern painters the grouping is often arranged some
what on the lines of an irregular pyramid. Hogarth in
deed in his "Analysis of Beauty" recommended it as
the best form of composition.

CHAPTER XV
TREATMENT
IT must be obvious, even to the most casual observer,
that painters appear to see the world of form and
colour from which they derive their material in many
different ways, from infinitely varying points of view,
and record their observations in every conceivable man
ner. One seems to regard his canvas as a mirror in which
he strives to reflect with unswerving fidelity and care
the things around him, whatever they may be. Another,
apparently treating nature as a storehouse, selects such
familiar objects and scenes as appeal to him and invests
them with a beauty and distinction all his own. Yet
another gives us fanciful unfamiliar effects suggestive of
dream-life rather than of the everyday world around us.
And the question inevitably arises whether all these
ways of looking at nature and of painting her are proper
to the painter's art. What does he seek to attain ? What
means may he employ ? With the limitations imposed
by his medium how far can he hope to succeed ? And
with the answers to these questions a number of much-
abused terms are bound up — Realism, Idealism, Classic
ism, Naturalism, Impressionism — which are convenient
enough to express certain broad tendencies or points of
view, but fail at once if used as labels in a rigid system
of picture classification.
One of the first questions to occur to most people in

TREATMENT 139
looking at a picture is whether or not it resembles nature.
Should not every picture resemble, even imitate nature,
and if so, how closely can it do so ? This is rudimentary
criticism, but none the less of real importance.
In a sense all painting must from the necessity of the
case imitate nature, but equally of necessity it can only
do so to a limited extent. Painting is after all a decep
tion, 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. The painter
imitates nature in the sense that he takes natural forms
for his models. But there, strictly speaking, imitation
ends. 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. Even if colour photography were perfected
its imitation of nature would be but partial. And further,
the fact that the artist is a human being, not a machine,
an individual with strong tastes and sympathies, implies
that personal interpretation of nature which is the very
essence of pictorial art. It is strange that the misconcep
tion 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 percep
tion of it is special and rare."
When discussing portraiture and landscape we noticed
that no two artists see the same thing alike and conse
quently never render it in exactly the same way. Even
such a consideration as that of short or long sight has its
Influence in this assertion of individuality. It may be

140 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
that, giving full rein to his fancy, the painter seeks rather
to emphasise and develop those qualities and character
istics in his subject which most appeal to his own sym
pathies. These may tend strongly in one direction, in
that of an intensely emotional and personal interpreta
tion rather than in faithful and detailed reproduction of
what his eyes record. His training, the influences about
him may predispose him to such imaginative treatment.
His mind may be stored with images nobler, more in
spired than those of his fellow-men. He may see with
the eyes of the poet and invest all that he paints with the
glory of his vision. His quest may be the unattainable
in art, and his triumph to approach it ever so distantly.
Such is the attitude of the Idealist. On the other hand,
the painter may consciously strive to reproduce the
objects and scenes before him exactly as they appear to
his eye, omitting nothing, altering nothing, concealing
nothing in his quest after truth. This point of view is
that of the Realist.
Every artist is inevitably something of an Idealist as
well as something of a Realist. The terms cannot be
mutually exclusive. We often hear it said that a subject
has been treated realistically or in a spirit of idealism,
and it is a common practice to divide all painters into
two great classes, Idealists and Realists. This division
once accomplished to the satisfaction of the would-be
critic, his next step will almost inevitably be to consider
either the one or the other as the only true exponents of
art. Yet each merely represents a different point of
view from which art may be regarded. Even in so far
as these terms represent opposite tendencies, misunder
standing has arisen through the confounding of quite
alien issues. In the minds of many Idealism is associated
with religious art, and applies to the spirituality of a

TREATMENT 141
Perugino or an Ary Scheffer, quite overlooking the
intensely realistic treatment of religious subjects by a
Roger van der Weyden or a Holman Hunt. Others
connect it with moral teaching, oblivious of the fact that
Hogarth was both the greatest moralist and the sternest
realist of his time. Others again confuse it with the
sentimentality of a Carlo Dolci or a Greuze, or with the
artificiality of a Le Brun or an Overbeck. In the same way
Realism has become popularly identified with sensualism
and vulgarity, with ugliness and deformity, heedless of
the fact that it is connected with an attitude of mind, a
point of view, and not with choice of subject.
However misleading such associations, there is cer
tainly a great deal in the history of painting to account
for their prevalence. Raphael expressed the true spirit
of Idealism when he declared that he drew men and
women, not as they were, but as they ought to be. This
became the aim of the artists who succeeded him, but
their forms were too often empty and exaggerated, de
void alike of natural truth and of ideal beauty. It came
to be generally accepted as a principle that nature was
always imperfect, weak or over-minute, and must be
corrected by art. Reynolds, who was deeply imbued
with Italian Idealism, declared that " the great artist will
leave it to lesser men to paint the minute discrimina
tions which distinguish one object of the same species
from another, while he, like the philosopher, will consider
nature in the abstract." Working in this spirit, many
painters had no desire for searching truth to nature, but
deliberately generalised everything they painted in the
full belief that so they would achieve great art. These
principles were often reduced to an absurdity by the
would-be heroic painters of the eighteenth century in
England and France. We find David, in his great pic-

i42 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
ture of Ugolino and his two sons perishing of starvation
in prison, investing the dying figures with the most per
fect classical forms and proportions, well furnished with
flesh and muscle, and carefully posed according to the
ideas of composition accepted in his day. This bastard
idealism, though the very negation of truth to nature,
was yet widely removed from the true idealism of the
great imaginative painters of all times.
Idealism then in painting, taking the word in its
broader sense, implies the free poetical interpretation of
nature even at the sacrifice of literal truth. And indeed
the demonstration of naked truth is never the sole aim
and end of art. The idealist goes beyond it, sees farther,
penetrates deeper into the soul of nature, his vision is
more beautiful, more complete than ours. There is in
deed admittedly a point at which want of truth to nature
becomes a fault, and the most daring painters have at
times exceeded even the painter's licence. But short of
shocking the spectator who possesses some power of
imagination, by the presentment of something entirely
unfamiliar even to his mind, this want of truth will not
in itself detract from the beauty of a picture. It has been
remarked with justice that but seldom in the history of
painting has the exaggeration of untruthfulness, whether
in form or colour, lost all that it had sought to win by
splendour of effect and boldness of treatment. One ex
ception must indeed be made in pleading this only
secondary importance of truth to nature. When Turner
imagined a castle for his Rivers oj France and called it
the Chateau of Amboise, it mattered little that it was so
different from the real castle of that name as to be prac
tically unrecognisable. But with a portrait it is different.
It is not that the mere copying of nature is sufficient
here any more than in a landscape, but it is essential

TREATMENT 143
that the portrait should resemble the original. Even
such irreconcilable Classicists as David and Ingres, de
voted as they were to the pursuit of what was to be more
beautiful, more sublime than nature, fully recognised the
need for a more natural style, a greater realism in their
portraits. In direct contrast with the aim of the idealist is that of
the painter who desires to reproduce faithfully what he
sees, and values truth of effect more than imaginative
qualities. The extreme of realism is reached when the
effect achieved is that of a trompe Fail, an illusion,
cleverly contrived to cheat us into believing that art is
nature, a painted surface a solid form. This trick,
which from the days of Zeuxis has found its admirers, is
successful only in proportion as it is inartistic. For, as
we have seen, imitation of nature is not the intention
of art. Even so great an artist as Veronese painted a
number of these trompe I ceil in a villa near Castelfranco,
which he was decorating for a Venetian nobleman. As
you enter the hall, a page in the costume of the six
teenth century, slashed doublet and trunk hose, looks
inquiringly at you from behind a half-open door. It is
a moment before you realise that door and page exist
only in paint. From a gallery running round one of the
rooms, two ladies and a dog look down on the visitor.
Again, ladies and gallery are but the result of skilfully
manipulated paint on the flat wall. These illusions,
designed by the great Venetian painter in a spirit of
play, can obviously not be taken seriously. The sternest
realist understands the limits of his art, and knows that
truth to nature is merely a comparative term.
Truth in art has almost as many aspects as in morals
or philosophy. The painter may understand it as truth
of general effect, possibly to the neglect of truth of

144 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
detail. A forest glade, a wide landscape, an interior
with figures may be painted as they look when regarded
as a whole in a momentary glance, before the eye has
time to take in details. On this side of truth to nature
Impressionism lies. The Realist of broad effects and
the modern Impressionist aim at truth of aspect or
impression before all else. Their object is to represent
their impression of a scene received at a given moment,
to record what they actually see rather than what by
reasoning and closer examination they know. They
paint appearances, not facts. The ordinary man looks at
nature in the light of certain preconceived ideas, founded
upon conventional standards of some kind, any departure
from which is heresy. "To such the grass is always
green, the sky blue, and those distant details which his
memory helps to define, he honestly thinks he is actually
seeing with his naked eye." The realist of impression
rejects all such foregone conclusions, and is not afraid to
paint grass purple if, owing to the peculiar effect of light
or shadow, it so appears to him, though he knows it to
be in fact green. Nor does he deliberately select the
finest scenery or models and paint them only when they
are beautifully illuminated or composed. To him truth
is beauty in a very wide sense. And so he often
chooses what are to the spectator at first sight un
familiar and unlovely phases of nature, seized at random
and painted as they actually appear, not as the chromo-
lithographist or photographer might arrange them. It
is this seizing and rendering of the more fleeting and
unfamiliar aspects of nature that shocks many people
who see for the first time the pictures of Whistler, Manet,
Claude Monet and the many painters who work in their
traditions. But the very fact that a picture strikes the
inexperienced eye as impossible and untrue is often

TREATMENT 145
mereiy evidence that it represents some aspect or mood
of nature which the spectator has never had the power
of seeing for himself. It often happens that a momentary
effect of sunlight on cloud or hill appears strange and
unnatural even in nature. It will be still more so when
transferred to a picture, and it is not to be wondered at
that one who has not seen it in nature will scarcely
credit it in art.
In the same way as there is a realism of general effect,
so is there also a realism of detail. The painter who
treats his subject minutely and with elaborate detail is
equally with the other seeking truth, but it is truth of
fact and not truth of appearance. A modern critic has
expressed it as the attempt to reproduce the appearance
of things " seen as it were through a microscope, and
afterwards painted at the proper distance more by
memony of details previously discovered than by actual
sight." The minute painting of detail in many Flemish
and Italian pictures illustrates this attitude. When we
look into a room we do not see everything at once. If
the eyes be opened for a second only and then closed
again, they receive but an impression more or less
definite of the general effect. But if we look carefully
round on every side, into every corner, making notes of
the shape and colour and lighting of every single object
within our range of vision, and then paint them as
accurately as we can, the result will certainly be realistic.
But such minute realism of detail is too often obtained
at the sacrifice of the broader aspect of truth, truth of
general effect.
For instance, the English Pre-Raphaelites, Holman
Hunt and Millais, in the fervour of reaction against the
vague generalisation of contemporary art, and following
in the footsteps of their Italian predecessors of the
L

146 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
fifteenth century, deliberately emphasised and even ex
aggerated accuracy of detail and truth of local colour.
When Millais paints a heap of straw on the ground in
the corner of his Return oj the Dove he does not give
the actual effect it would produce on the eye in that
position, but paints it as if the whole attention were
concentrated upon each wisp at a time. It is the same
with his colouring. Every patch of local colour is
painted as it looks independently of the whole effect.
In such pictures the eye can never lose and find itself
again, and pictorial unity is sacrificed to the excessive
elaboration of each part. This tendency is carried to
excess in Holman Hunt's Shadow oj Death at Man
chester, where even the shavings on the floor are rendered
with a realism as minute and searching as it is weari
some to the eye.
Such conscientious and unswerving fidelity demands
a treatment equally minute and painstaking. Minute
treatment may indeed be combined with breadth of
effect, as in the best Dutch masters, Terburg and
Metzu. Their delicacy and perfection of finish can
hardly be surpassed, yet the detail does not force itself
into notice. Meissonier's finish is almost of the same
quality. The brush strokes are so minute as to be
scarcely perceptible. Yet there is nothing niggling.
The best of this scrupulously fine painting pleases as
much by its beautiful texture and richness of colour as
by its delicacy and sureness of technique. But this is
not always the case. Gerard Dou, for example, often loses
more than he gains by his extreme minuteness. Carried to
excess the result seems laboured and affected, as if the
painter cared more for skill of hand than for artistic
presentment. He is said to have spent days painting
only the handle of a broomstick. Peter van Slingelandt's

Manscll photo]

[Luxembourg, Paris

CARMENCITA

TREATMENT 147
work claimed to stand the test of a magnifying glass.
He boasted that one of his small pictures occupied him
three years, one month being devoted exclusively to the
ruffles and frills of a single figure. The result is marvel
lous, but it is not art.
In the strongest contrast is the bold execution of
those painters who have sought above all to give breadth
of effect by dashing and vigorous brushwork. Hals,
Rembrandt, especially in his maturity, Velasquez and
Sargent display a sureness of eye and hand as remark
able as anything in the Microscopic School. The sense
of power over the medium is even more apparent. The
brush-marks are there for all to see just as the painter
dashed them on with swift, nervous certainty. How
audacious the handling in Sargent's Carmencita ! There
is strength and virility in such treatment that no other
can suggest, and as fine a sense of completeness, of
consummate achievement as is known in art. Hals's
Laughing Cavalier is a magnificent example of vigorous
brushwork combined with wonderful delicacy in the
working out of the pattern of the dress. To gain the
whole effect of such pictures, the spectator must stand
at some little distance, when the patches and splashes of
colour fall each into its due place in the general scheme.
As Rembrandt remarked to some one who was looking
too closely into one of his paintings, pictures are intended
to be looked at, not smelled.

CHAPTER XVI
METHODS AND MATERIALS
MANY people who constantly visit galleries and
even possess collections of their own, take little
or no interest in the technical processes by which a
picture is built up. Some indeed regard this side of
painting as " scarcely superior to cookery." And indeed
from the point of view of aesthetic enjoyment, there is
no need to know exactly how a work of art has been
produced. To others again, and especially to the
painter, a considerable portion of his pleasure comes
from this very consideration. As he alone fully under
stands, so he is perhaps alone able fully to appreciate
the difficulties with which the artist has had to contend
and his success in overcoming them. He will know
exactly how each effect has been gained. Sometimes
this technical side of painting may occupy the painter-
critic too much, almost, it would seem, to the exclusion
of aesthetic pleasure, but certainly as a rule it is too little
understood by the layman.
The effect of a picture is largely determined by the
materials used in painting it. As far as modern painting
is concerned, most people can readily distinguish between
oil, water-colour and pastel. But this elementary ex
perience is of little use in a study of old pictures, painted
before the discovery of these now well-known methods.
In painting a picture the artist has to decide not only

METHODS AND MATERIALS 149
what pigments he will employ, but also the ground
on which they are to be painted, and the medium by
which he will apply them. These grounds or founda
tions are either of wood, canvas, plaster or copper ; the
mediums employed various animal and vegetable oils
and resins, and water.
Several references have been made to fresco-painting,
especially in connection with Italian art. Much of the
Italian painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
was executed directly on the plastered walls of churches,
monasteries and palaces. This method is obviously
suitable only in comparatively dry climates ; hence its
almost exclusive connection with Italy. Even the
Venetians found it impracticable in the damp air of
their lagoons, and in its place used canvas stretched into
wooden frames fastened on the walls. In true fresco,
buon jresco, as the Italians call it, the colours, moistened
with water, are painted on to a damp plaster ground,
previously prepared on the wall. As this dries, a
chemical process takes place, by which the colours are
firmly bound in with the plaster, the painting thus be
coming an integral part of the wall itself. As in this
true fresco the work must be done while the plaster is
still damp, the painter prepares only so much of the
wall-surface as he thinks he can paint in one day, at the
end of which he scrapes away any plaster that is still
uncovered. The next day he lays another expanse ad
joining the surface already painted. It is possible in
some frescoes, even by means of photographs, to detect
these joints in the plaster, and thus to estimate how
much the painter was able to accomplish in one day.
In Michelangelo's Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel, it is easy to see where the painter left off after
each sitting. From its very nature fresco-painting

150 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
demands broad, rapid treatment and great sureness of
hand. Nothing can be altered when once the plaster
has dried, unless indeed the artist entirely destroys his
work, scrapes away the painted ground and lays a fresh
one. Painters who were not sufficiently skilful to finish
their work in one sweep, as it were, added afterwards
touches a secco, when the plaster was dry. These
additional touches were added in tempera.
In the Middle Ages, before the introduction of an oil
medium, tempera was universally used for altar-pieces
and easel pictures, and even afterwards was not entirely
discarded. In this method the ordinary medium for
mixing and applying the colours was yolk of egg, and it
is in this sense that Vasari uses the term tempera. The
colours were laid upon prepared panels, and were after
wards varnished. If fresco requires broad, rapid, effective
treatment, tempera lends itself to minute delicacy of
touch, refinement and finish. The medium being one
that dries rapidly, the colours are usually stippled on
with fine sable brushes, in a succession of small strokes.
Hence a certain dryness of effect and a want of depth,
the colours not flowing and blending as in oil-painting.
The permanence of the egg medium is one of its great
advantages. Many pictures dating from four centuries
ago appear as fresh and brilliant as though painted only
yesterday. It was not until the fifteenth century that oil-painting
came into general use. For centuries painters, aware of
its valuable qualities, had experimented with oil as a
medium, but its thickness and clumsiness as compared
with other mediums had always seemed to render it un
suitable for fine work. Yet tempera had its drawbacks
also, in its very quality of dryness and want of flow.
The discovery of an oil medium sufficiently refined to be

METHODS AND MATERIALS 151
used in the most delicate painting belongs not to Italy
but to the North, and was due to the Flemish painters
Hubert and Jan van Eyck. It is, however, more than
astonishing that the first picture which has come down
to us in the new medium should display such perfect
mastery of handling. The great altar-piece of the Adora
tion oj the Lamb shows no trace of inexperienced or
tentative technique. The colours are warm and trans
parent, with a depth and gloss unknown to tempera-
painting. It is clear that the difficulties inherent in the
use of the new medium had been already overcome.
What Van Eyck's discovery actually was remains a
puzzle even to this day. He seems to have produced,
by a mixture of certain oils and resinous substances, a
medium which dispensed with the use of a final varnish,
being medium and varnish in one. To render this suffici
ently quick-drying and colourless was perhaps the most
important of the problems he managed to solve. The
Flemish artists painted on carefully prepared panels,
overlaid with a white ground. Their method was to paint
in the picture in grisaille with tempera, finishing it with
transparent glazes of oil colour.
This northern method was in due course introduced
into Italy by Antonello da Messina towards the end of
the fifteenth century. Already Domenico Veneziano,
Baldovinetti and Piero della Francesca, in their experi
ments with various vehicles, had attempted the use of
an oil medium. Veneziano's Enthroned Madonna and
Piero's Nativity, both in the National Gallery, are
painted in oil, and the old legend of Castagno's murder
of Veneziano for the sake of obtaining this secret points
to the interest shown by Italian painters in the great
question. Antonello's innovation worked a revolution in
Italian art. The Italians, and especially the Venetians,

152 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
used a more solid impasto than did the artists of the
North, who painted somewhat thinly. The Venetians
also preferred canvas or linen to wooden panels. As a
ground canvas offers many advantages over wood. It is
more easily obtainable, can be of any size and does not
crack. Even its slight roughness of texture may be of
use to the painter, who sometimes covers it so thinly
with paint that the rough surface below is distinctly
visible, just as the Dutch painters on panel would often
allow a hint of the brown wood to show through the
semi-luminous paint of sky or sea. The life, breadth
and freedom displayed in the painting of the sixteenth
century had been impossible without the introduction of
this new method. Michelangelo alone among his con
temporaries refused to work in oil, pronouncing it a
method fit only for women, but time has scarcely justified
this opinion.
Different as the modern oil picture is from a tempera-
painting, and even from the old Flemish method in
that the varnish is generally applied over the finished
picture, it is by no means easy in every case to deter
mine the medium used in old pictures. Even experts
hesitate to pronounce decidedly on some examples, such
as Bellini's Blood oj 'the Redeemer -in the National Gallery,
which seem to lie on the borderland between the oil and
the older egg medium. The fifteenth century was in this
respect a period of transition, the old method being
gradually discarded in favour of a new one not as yet
perfectly understood. Morelli himself says that in many
cases it is impossible to say confidently what particular
colours or varnishes the painter has made use of, nor
even to decide whether the picture is painted entirely in
tempera or finished with glazes of oil. But, generally
speaking, there is a sufficiently marked difference between

METHODS AND MATERIALS 153
the careful, minute and precise method of a typical term
pera picture and the freer, more flowing effect of oil-
painting. Compare, for example, in the National Gallery,
Filippo Lippi's Annunciation and St. John and Saints
and Crivelli's Annunciation, all in tempera, with the pic
tures by Andrea del Sarto, Titian and Veronese. Here
the distinction is marked and offers no question. The
early Flemish oil-paintings, on the other hand, are as
minute and delicate in execution as anything in tempera,
but their greater flow and luminous depth, and the absence
of small brush-marks, abundantly illustrate the difference.
Even after oil came into universal use as a medium,
tempera was used by many artists for the underpainting,
in the Flemish manner. Oil-painting indeed may be
either transparent or opaque, applied in thin washes or
glazes of transparent colour, allowing the underpainting
to show through, or directly in thick masses of solid
colour, giving a texture that suggests Gandy's ideal of
rich cream or cheese.
Every painter has his own manner of actually laying
the colours on the ground. Some pictures present a
perfectly even surface, others show hills and dales of
solid paint. Either manner may be used effectively or
the reverse. How exquisite in the fineness of their tex
ture and quality are the little pictures of Terburg, how
dull and lifeless the smooth waxen surface of Van der
Werff or Denner ! What character do the works of
Rembrandt and Constable derive from their rough,
rugged texture, the irregularities of surface cunningly
contrived to catch the light and to cast almost imper
ceptible shadows ! The coarse, unpleasant texture of too
many modern pictures is the result, not of deliberate in
tention, but of an inadequate appreciation of the actual
beauties of paint.

154 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
Water-colour only came into general use in the nine
teenth century, and is almost exclusively associated with
English painting, though French and Dutch artists are
now beginning to adopt it, and it was known to Diirer
and van Ostade. It is the most transparent of all medi
ums. The colours are merely washed on, the paper being
left almost white for the high lights, though to-day many
painters rely also on body colour. Owing to this trans
parency and its rapid-drying qualities, water-colour, as
we have seen, is peculiarly adapted to catch every passing
atmospheric or light effect, the most delicate and subtle
nuances of tone, and it is enough to glance at the work
of such classical exponents of water-colour as Cozens,
Turner, Girtin, Cotman, Varley, David Cox and De Wint
to realise to what infinitely various treatment the medium
lends itself.
Pastel, now a very fashionable method, is perhaps the
least durable of all. It is as opaque as water-colour is
transparent, its most beautiful qualities, as seen in the
works of its great exponent, John Russell, being its
velvety look, bloom and dull softness. These are lost
by painters who fall into the error of treating pastel as
they would oil colour, thus missing the characteristic
beauties of both. From the fact of its dryness, so little
medium being mixed with the colours that they remain
in powder, pastel pictures are inclined to be sensitive to
movement or jar.
In painting, as in all art, good craftsmanship is essential
to success. An artist may be filled with noble ideas and
fine inspiration, but if his hands refuse to obey the
prompting of the mind, his good intentions can never
take beautiful and permanent shape. His reputation
will ultimately depend not more on his natural genius,
his artistic sense, than on his sureness of eye and tech-

METHODS AND MATERIALS 155
nical skill, his actual power over his materials. These are
only to be gained by prolonged and severe training.
Some possess these acquired qualities alone, and remain
craftsmen to their dying day. Others, more artistically
endowed, fail from lack of experience in technical mat
ters, and their power is wasted in even more pitiful
fashion. An artist's fame depends ultimately on the
permanence of his work, and permanence can only be
insured by knowledge, practice and good workmanship.
Accident and ill-usage may indeed spoil or destroy the
most carefully executed painting. The older a picture,
the greater the risks it has run. But time is not the
worst enemy to painting. Many a picture dating from
the fourteenth or fifteenth century is in better condition
to-day than others of a much more recent date. Some
of Reynolds's paintings perished almost in the artist's
lifetime. Many of Turner's are already practically
wrecks. And yet these are but a hundred years old,
while innumerable Flemish and Italian pictures of the
fifteenth century are in perfect preservation, despite the
many vicissitudes of weather, dirt and travel they have
endured. It is wonderful how much ill-usage a soundly
painted picture, can stand, without complete deteriora
tion. Who would believe that Jan van Eyck's portrait
of his wife was discovered in the fish market of Bruges,
completely concealed by dirt? Michelangelo's unfin
ished Entombment in the National Gallery was rescued
from a somewhat similar situation and sold in Rome for
a mere song.
Apart, however, from accident, the life of a picture
depends on the way it is painted, on the materials used
and the care taken to insure their endurance. A painter
who uses bad pigments, untried mediums or ill-seasoned
panels can scarcely expect his pictures to last. In such

156 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
matters of craftsmanship the modern world, for all its
science, is behind the Middle Ages, when technical skill
and excellence of materials were justly insisted on as
essential to painting. The long apprenticeship to be
served before it was possible to qualify as a master-
painter helped to insure a high standard, an apprentice
ship not alone in the actual art of painting, but in the
preparation of the materials used, the grinding of the
colours, manipulation of the medium and the laying of
the ground. The artist thought it no shame to be his
own colourman. These preliminaries are seldom under
taken by the painter of our day. There are no guilds
to enforce the application of sound materials and work
manship. It is said of Gerard Dou that, when preparing
his colours, in order to insure their purity, he made the
windows of his studio air-tight to exclude dirt, entered
slowly to raise the minimum of dust and waited for it to
subside before venturing to take out his palette and
brushes. The modern artist buys his pigments and var
nishes ready made, with often the most scanty know
ledge of their chemical properties and probable changes.
Will the paintings of our day, such indeed as from the
purely artistic point of view shall survive the verdict
of time, endure for centuries as have those of Titian,
Correggio and Rubens, or, to go even further back, of
Angelico, Roger van der Weyden and the Van Eycks ?
If permanence be one of the conditions of artistic fame,
it would seem that modern painters care far less for
reputation than did their predecessors of old. The glory
has departed from many of Turner's most brilliant works,
because of his carelessness in the preparation of the col
ours he used and his extraordinary mixture of methods.
Supreme master as he was of both oil and water-colour,
he sometimes used both mediums in the same picture,

METHODS AND MATERIALS 157
treating oil in the manner of water-colour. We cannot
wonder that his canvases are faded and cracked. Yet who
would maintain that Turner was callous to fame, Turner
whose will if nothing else proved his ambition to be
remembered by posterity ?
Other pictures have suffered and even perished because
the painters experimented with their materials, using un
tried pigments and varnishes. The wreck of Leonardo's
Last Supper is chiefly due to his having painted it on the
wall in oil instead of fresco, with the result that even his
pupil Lomazzo declared it to be already completely
ruined. The colour of his Mona Lisa has already con
siderably faded. Reynolds's works have suffered from
the same reckless experimenting. There are compara
tively few of his pictures that have not either darkened,
faded or cracked. His Holy Family, which formerly
hung in the National Gallery, has been withdrawn on
account of its ruined condition. A wit of the day, whose
portrait Sir Joshua had painted with such fugitive pig
ments that it faded almost immediately, avenged himself
for this premature decease in the well-known epigram :
Painting of old was surely well designed
To keep the features of the dead in mind,
But this great rascal has reversed the plan,
And made his picture die before the man.
This deterioration was largely the result of a liberal
use of bitumen, that " plague of pictures," so much relied
on by painters of that day both in England and France.
Many of the pictures of the eighteenth century have
suffered from the use of this as of other dangerous pig
ments. The deep shadows which now seem opaque,
black and heavy, were once luminous, reflecting instead
of absorbing light. Even comparatively brilliant colours
lose their brightness, go in as it were, vivid landscape

158 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES
greens changing to dull indigo or even black, delicate
flesh tints to a heavy brown, the whole picture becoming
untoned. Whether or not they avail themselves of it,
there can be no doubt that, with the advanced knowledge
of chemistry that prevails in our day, painters have
every means of determining, before using their pigments
and mediums, exactly how each will behave, which are
permanent, which fugitive, which mutually destructive.
The lapse of centuries has proved that it is not safe in
oil-painting to correct a mistake or make an alteration
by covering it thinly with paint. In time, the under
painting will work through to the surface, and the alter
ation stand revealed. Such corrections or pentimenti,
as the Italians called them, may be seen in several
pictures in the National Gallery, notably in Antonello
da Messina's Salvator Mundi, where the position of the
hand has been altered, and in Gainsborough's Musidora,
in which a superfluous leg is distinctly visible.
Time, which can thus betray the artist's original in
tention, plays a varying game with pictures, mellowing
and maturing some, aging and spoiling others by
blackening or fading. Unlike architecture, painting is
never beautiful in ruin. Yet the tender hand of time
may often bring into harmony colours which, when fresh,
perhaps seemed crude and glaring. Where the work
manship is sound, time tones and ripens, however piti
lessly it may operate where it is bad. It is not, however,
just to attribute the dusky appearance of all old pictures
to the effects of time. No paintings could be blacker in
tone than those of Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco
at Venice. We know from Vasari that they were so,
even when newly painted. To fresco-paintings, indeed,
the lapse of years is never kind, often exposed as they
are to the effects of damp and changes of temperature.

METHODS AND MATERIALS 159
It is, perhaps, true to say that more pictures have been
spoiled by restoration, whether in the form of cleaning or
repainting, than from any other preventible cause. Skil
ful and tactful restoration may indeed give back to a
picture something of its first freshness and beauty, but it
is often far better to leave well and even ill alone, or at
least to do the minimum of doctoring. Where a picture
has been repeatedly covered with coat upon coat of dark,
heavy varnish, or has been begrimed with the smoke of
altar candles or the dirt of the sacristan's broom, much
can be done to remove them without injury to the paint
ing. On the other hand, it too often happens that in so
doing some of the delicate transparent surface-glazes
are carried away, leaving the picture raw and flayed, and
where pictures are painted with an oil varnish, in the old
Flemish method, cleaning spells certain injury, for the
varnish is actually part of the picture. Some of the
pictures even in the National Gallery have been thus
over-cleaned, greatly to their detriment.
Worse, however, than any over-cleaning is the drastic
repainting which many pictures have suffered ; the care
ful retouching of parts that have been rubbed or cracked
is legitimate enough, but the restorer seldom stops here.
In some cases he daubs over the picture so completely
as to alter its whole appearance. It is very little La-
guerre has left us under its disguise of new paint of
Mantegna's superb Triumph oj Julius Caesar, now a ruin at
Hampton Court. Such so-called " restoration " is worse
than criminal. Unfortunately the picture-restorer is but
rarely an artist, and not always a man of taste and sym
pathy. In many cases in the great galleries the coarse
repainting, especially of the eighteenth century, which
disfigured so many fine pictures, has been again re
moved, but enough may still be seen to show how com-

160 HOW TO LOOK. AT PICTURES
mon the practice had become and how pitiful the
results. Lastly, a word may be said as to the framing of
pictures. We are gradually breaking loose from the
modern tradition of massive gilt frames for all and
sundry, a tradition to which the Royal Academy, how
ever, with characteristic conservatism, still clings. The
fashion seems to have been initiated in England by
Lawrence, who as its President was certain of a follow
ing ; and gradually the narrow, unobtrusive, but well-
designed frames used in the eighteenth century were
superseded by a more showy style. To-day the suitable
framing of a picture is rightly considered of great im
portance, as contributing to the decorative effect of the
whole. In this we are returning to the practice of the
Renaissance, when the frame was often in its own way as
beautiful in design as the picture set in it. Without in
any way drawing attention from the picture, the ex
quisite old blue and gold frames in which such pictures
as Mantegna's San Zeno Altar-piece and Bellini's Frari
Madonna are set add immeasurably to the beauty and
dignity of the pictures within. Most of the great
galleries have now returned to the original manner of
framing old Dutch pictures in heavy black or brown
frames, just as we see them hanging on the wall in
Vermeer and Metzu's interiors. A Dutch genre picture
looks out of place in a gilt frame, the quieter setting
suiting it far better.

wpqI — I
z >c3

auw

INDEX
NOTE. — The situation and number of every picture mentioned in
the text will be found under the name of the painter.

Academy, The Royal, 13, 36,
48, 104, 160.
Allegories, 57, 58.
Alma Tadema, 54, 91.
Alps, 80.
Altdorfer, 73.
Landscape with St. George
(Munich, No. 288), 74.
Amsterdam, 32; Pictures at, 41,
44,76.
Anachronism, 54, 57.
Anatomy, 100, ioi, 103.
Ancona, 131.
Andrea del Sarto, 62, 87, 153 ;
as draughtsman, 15 ; his
portraits, 42.
Angelico, Fra, 12, 40, 156; his
colour, 108 ; portrait of, by
Signorelli, 60.
Animal painting, 86, 93.
Antonello da Messina, 151.
Salvator Mundi (National
Gallery, No. 673), 158.
Antwerp, 34, 44, 45 ; picture at,
61.
Apennines, 80.
Apsley House, Picture at, 90
(see under Velasquez).
Architecture, 14, 27, 83, 84, 102,
134-
Arena Chapel, Padua, 58, 71,
136.
Arnolfini, Portrait of, 65, 69.

Arquebusiers, Guild of, 28.
Assisi, 136.
Atelier system, 33, 34.
Authority, 4, 7.
Background, Treatment of, 25,
69,71, 84, 109.
Backhuizen, 85.
Badia, The, Florence, 60.
Baldovinetti, 151.
Baptistery, St. Mark's, Venice,
Mosaics in, 136.
Barbizon School, 31, 78.
Bargello, Florence, 60.
Barry, 29.
Bartolommeo, Fra, 121, 137.
Basaiti, 33, 34.
Bassano, 73, 87 ; portrait of, 62.
Bastien-Lepage. Haymakers (Luxembourg,
No. 8), 133.
Beaumont, Sir George, 81.
Beauty in art, 62.
Bellini, Gentile, 61.
Bellini, Giovanni, 1 1 1 ; as head
of a school, 33, 34.
Altarpiece (Frari, Venice),
160 [Illustration].
Baptism (Sta. Corona, Vi
cenza), 136.
Blood of the Redeemer (Na
tional Gallery, No. 1233),
152.

M

162 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES

Berchem, 77.
Berckheyde, 83.
Berlin, xvi ; pictures at, 61, 65,
69, 97.
Birth of the Virgin, Early Ger
man School (Munich, No.
23), 88.
Bissolo, 33, 34.
Bitumen, 157.
Bodegones, 90.
Bol, Ferdinand, 35.
Bologna, 35.
Bonheur, Rosa, 93.
Bonnington, 39.
Bordone, Paris, his types, 38.
Fisherman presentingthe Ring
of St. Mark to the Doge
(Academy, Venice, No. 320),
112.
Borgognone, 116.
Bosboom, 83.
Both, 77.
Botticelli, quoted, 72 ; his types,
25-
Adoration ofthe Magi (UfEzi,
No. 1286), 60.
Allegory of Spring (Academy,
Florence, 80), 58, 98.
Calumny (Uffizi, No. 11 82), 97.
Mars and Venus (National
Gallery, No. 915), 96.
Pallas and Centaur (Pitti
Palace, Private Apart
ments), 97.
Bouts, Thierry.
St. Christopher (right wing of
altarpiece, Munich, No.
109), 81 [Illustration].
Brancacci Chapel, Florence, 72,
129.
Breughel, Jan, 51, 92.
Breughel, Peter, 88.
Briton-Riviere, 93.
Brouwer, Adrian, 40, 52, 88, 124.
Bruges, 25, 69, 155 ; pictures at,
60, 133-
Brussels, 50.

Burger, quoted, 139.
Burlington House, 13.
Burne-Jones, 33, 43, 97, 115.
Cabinets, xvii.
Calvin, 27, 88.
Campagna, The, 75.
Canaletto, 16, 83.
Cappelle, Van der, 85.
Caravaggio, 123.
Carolus-Duran, 33, 68.
Carpaccio, 42, 108.
Dream oj St. Ursula (Acad
emy, Venice, No. 578),
87.
Madonna with Doge (National
Gallery, No. 750), 60.
Carracci, The, 5, 116.
Castagno, 151.
Castelfranco, 143.
Catalogues, xiii.
Catena, 33.
Catherine, St., of Alexandria, 56.
Chardin, 16, 92.
Grace before Meat (Louvre,
No. 93), 90.
La Mere Laborieuse (Louvre,
No. 91), 90.
Charles IL, Court Beauties of
the time of, 67.
Charles V., Portrait of, 62.
Church Militant, 7%«(Sta. Maria
Novella, Florence), 129.
Classical landscape, 74-76.
Classicism, 23, 74, 138, 143.
Classification of pictures, 52.
Claude, 16, 41, 72, 74-76, 79, 82,
83, 84, 85.
Egeria and her Nymphs (Na
ples Museum, vi. No. 32
bis), 74-
Embarkation of St. Ursula
(National Gallery, No. 30),
74-
Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca
(National Gallery, No. 12),
74-

INDEX

163

Queen of Sheba (National Gal
lery, No. 14), 74 [Illustra
tion].
Climate, 22, 23, 149.
Clouds, 84.
Collaboration, 51, 83.
Collins, 50.
Cologne, 15.
Colvin, Sidney, quoted, 51.
Complementary Colours, 106,
107.
Condition, 155.
Constable, 25, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84,
127, IS3 ; quoted, 77.
The Hay- Wain (National
Gallery, No. 1207), 83 [Il
lustration].
Continuity in painting, 20.
Copley. Death of Chatham (National
Gallery, No. 100), 53.
Cornish painters, 85.
Corot, 43, 78, 80.
Landscape (Louvre, No. 141
bis), 78 [Illustration].
Corporation pictures, 28.
Correggio, 29,35,36,97, in, 113,
115, 120, 122, 123, 156.
Antiope (Louvre, No. n 18),
116.
Frescoes (Cupola, Cathedral,
Parma), 103, 135.
Cosmopolitanism in art, 21, 29.
Cotman, 154.
Courbet, 93.
The Wave (Louvre, No. 147 a),
85.
Cox, David, 154.
Cozens, 154.
Credi, Lorenzo di, 42.
Crivelli, n, 131.
Annunciation (National Gal
lery, No. 739), 87, 153.
Cuyp, 51, 72, 76, 82, 93.
Cycles of art, 11, 12.
Dante, Portrait of, 60.

Darmstadt, 61.
Daubigny, 78.
David, 143.
Madame Ricamier (Louvre,
No. 199), 97.
Ugolino (Museum, Valence),
141, 142.
Decadence, n.
Delacroix, 39, 113.
Denner, 153.
Diaz, 78.
Disraeli, quoted, 2.
Dolci, Carlo, 141.
Dominic, St., 56.
Dou, Gerard, 18, 35, 42, 88, 89,
146, 156.
Femme Hydropique (Louvre,
No. 2348), 44.
Jeune Mire (Hague, No. 32),
44.
Drapery, treatment of, 101, 102.
Drapery-men, 68.
Dresden, Pictures at, 41, 99, 1 1 5.
Duccio. Transfiguration (National
Gallery, No. 1330), 136.
Dulwich Gallery, 63.
Dupre', 78.
Diirer, 13, 15, 18, 65, 93, 100,
101, 108, 154: his back
grounds, 69 ; his landscape,
73, 74-
Portrait of Holzschuher (Ber
lin, No. 557E), 65 [Illustra
tion] .
Portrait of Michael Wolge-
mut (Munich, No. 243), 65.
Dutch art, xvii, 13, 21, 25, 27,
28, 29, 30, 32, 52, 67, 76, 80,
83, 89, 101, in, 113, 124,
130, 137, 152, 154-
Dyck, Van, 16, 35, 39, 42, 67,
68, 116; his backgrounds,
69, 70 ; periods of develop
ment, 44, 45 ; his portraits,
42, 64.
Portrait of Lord Wharton

164 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES

(Hermitage, St. Petersburg,
No. 616), 64 [Illustration].
Portrait of Van der Geest(Na-
tional Gallery, No. 52), 44.
Easel pictures, 28, 46, 134, 150.
East, The, 29, 115.
Eastlake, quoted, 107.
Eckhout, 35.
Eclecticism, 35, 36.
Eliot, George, quoted, 89.
English art, 21, 27, 29, 32, 35,
68, 154.
Ensemble, The, 126.
Envelope, The, 124.
Evangelists, Emblems of the,
56.
Everdingen, 77.
Eyck, The brothers Van, 15,
151, 156 ; portraits of, 60.
Adoration of the Lamb (St. Ba-
von, Ghent), 60, 73, 151.
Eyck, Hubert Van, 151.
Eyck, Jan Van, 18, 61, 151;
his types, 24.
Madonna with Chancellor Rat
lin (Louvre, No. 1986), xv,
73-
Man with a Pink (Berlin, No.
525A), 65 [Illustration].
Portrait of Arnolfini and his
Wife (National Gallery,
No. 186), 65, 69.
Portrait of his Wife (Aca
demy, Bruges, No. 2), 155.
Face-painters, 68.
Fantin Latour, 68.
Farnesina, The, Rome, 131.
Fashion, 5.
Fetes-Galantes, 28.
Flaubert, quoted, 9.
Flemish art, 15, 25, 28, 29, 30,
52,66,67,73, 101,114,115,
M5, IS', 155-
Flesh-painting, 107, 115, 116.
Floreins, Portrait of John, 60.

Florence, 14, 25, 30, 32, 35 ;
pictures in, 58, 60, 61, 67,
72,97,98, 119, 129.
Academy, 58, 98.
Badia, 60.
Bargello, 60.
Brancacci Chapel, 72, 129.
Sta. Croce, 119.
Sta. Maria Novella, 129.
Pitti Palace, 67, 97.
Uffizi, xv, 60, 61, 97.
Florentine art, 14, 15, 72, 87, 96,
115, 119.
Flower-painting, 92, 93.
Fontainebleau, Forest of, 78.
Foreshortening, 103.
Fortuny, 91.
Fragonard, 16, 90.
Framing, 160.
Francis I., Portrait of, 62.
Francis, St., 136.
Frari Church, Venice, xvi, 160.
French art, 28, 29, 81, 91, 154.
Fresco-painting, 46, 117, 131,
134, 149, 15°, IS8.
Frith, 91.
Fuseli, 29.
Gaillard, 65.
Gainsborough, 16, 43, 68, 113;
his landscapes, 77 ; por
traits, 42 ; types, 24.
The Blue Boy (Duke of West
minster), 115.
Musidora (National Gallery,
No. 308), 158.
Portrait of Mrs. Siddons (Na
tional Gallery, No. 683), 63
[Illustration].
Gandy, 153.
Genoese portraits (Van Dyck),
45- .
Genre-painters. Dutch, 42, 48, 49.
English, 49.
German, 49.
Genre-painting, 48-50, 86-93.

INDEX

165

Gerard, 55.
German art, 13, 29, 66, 101,
119.
Ghent, St. Bavon, 60, 73, 151.
Ghirlandaio, 25, 35, 61.
DeathofSta. Fina (Collegiata,
S. Gimignano), 87.
Portrait of an Old Man
(Louvre, No. 1332), 66 [Il
lustration].
Gimignano, San, 87.
Giorgione, 20, 33, 42, 1 1 1 ; as
colourist, 15, 107, 115.
Fite Champetre (Louvre, No.
1136), 137-
Shepherd with Pipe ( H ampt on
Court, No. 101), 115.
Sleeping Venus (Dresden, No
185), 41, 99, US-
Tempest with Gypsy and Sol-
<&Vr(PrinceGiovanelli, Ven
ice), 72.
Giotteschi, 72.
Giotto, 13, 14, 33, 35 ; his per
spective, 102 ; types, 59.
Allegories (Arena Chapel,
Padua), 58.
Baptism of Christ (Arena
Chapel, Padua), 136.
Frescoes (Upper Church, As-
sisi), 136.
Joachim among the Sheepcotes
(Arena Chapel, Padua), 71
[Illustration].
Portrait of Dante (Bargello,
Florence), ascribed to, 60.
St. Francis before the Soldan
(Sta. Croce, Florence), 119.
Stephaneschi Altarpiece (Sa
cristy, S. Peter's), 60.
Giovanelli Collection, 72.
Girodet, 55.
Girtin, 154.
Gisze, Portrait of Georg, 69.
Glasgow, 32.
Goes, Hugo van der.
Nativity (Uifizi, No. 1525), 61.

Gold, use of, 84, 108, 119.
Goya, 16, 25, 90.
Goyen, Van, 25, 76, 85.
Gozzoli, Benozzo, 108.
Adoration of the Magi (Ric-
cardi Palace, Florence), 60.
Grand Style, The, 54.
Greuze, 90, 141.
Grosvenor House, Pictures at,
63, US-
Guardi, 16, 83.
Guido Reni, 5 ; quoted, 116.
Guilds, Dutch, 28.
Haarlem, 28, 32, 44.
Hague, Pictures at the, 44, 51,
H3, 133-
Hals, Frans, 16, 41, 42, 65, 130,
147.
Arquebusiers (Haarlem Mu
seum, No. 87), 28, 44 [Illus
tration].
Laughing Cavalier (Wallace
Gallery, No. 84), 147.
Hamburg, Picture at, 53.
Hamerton, quoted, 75.
Hampton Court, Pictures at,
67, 97, H5, 159-
Hands, Painting of, 64, 99.
Haydon, 29.
Heathfield, Portrait of Lord,
69.
Heda, 92.
Heem, De, 92.
Herkomer, 68.
Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Pic
ture at, 64.
Herrera, 38.
Heyden, Van der, 25, 83.
Hobbema, 25, 51, 76, 80, 83.
Hogarth, 6, 16, 20, 39, 68, 108,
141 ; his Analysis of Beauty,
137-
Idle Apprentice (Engraving),
103.
Marriage a la Mode (National
Gallery, Nos. 113-118), 91.

i66

HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES

The Rake's Progress (Soane
Museum), 91.
Holbein, 13, 15, 18, 65, 96; his
backgrounds, 69 ; influence
on English painting, 35.
Madonna of Burgomaster
Meyer (Darmstadt), 61.
Portrait of Georg Gisze (Ber
lin, No. 586), 69 [Illustra
tion].
Portrait of Nicholas Kratzer
(Louvre, No. 2713), 69.
Holzschuher, Portrait of, 65.
Hondecoeter, 93.
Hoogh, De, 89, 113, 124.
Interior of a Dutch House
(National Gallery, No. 834),
113 [Illustration].
Hoppner, 119.
Hudson, 35.
Hunt, Holman, 141, 145.
ShadowofDeath{Ma.nchester, No. 31), 146.

Idealism, 138, 140-143.
Ideal landscape, 74.
Imitation of past styles, 18.
Impressionism, 138, 144.
Impressionist School, 31.
Individuality of artist, 41.
Influence, 35, 39.
Ingres, 143.
La Source (Louvre, No. 422),
97-
Innocent X., Portrait of, 66.
Israels, 39.
Italian art, 15, 16, 22, 25, 28, 29,
3o, 32, 37, 52, 59, 66, 73,
114, 145, 151, 155.
Italian School (early), 13, 96.

Japan, 93, 117.
Jardin, Karel du, 93.
Julius IL, 41.

Kalf, 92.
Kensington Museum, South, 50.
Kew Gardens, 75.
Kneller, 35, 67.
Court Beauties of Williamlll.
(Hampton Court), 67.
Koninck, De, 25, 76, 80.
Kratzer, Portrait of Nicholas, 69.
Laguerre, 159.
Lamb, Charles, quoted, 52.
Lancret, FStes galantes of, 28,
90.
Landseer, 93.
Latin race, 22.
Laurence, St., 56.
Lawrence, 119, 160.
Portrait of Mrs. Siddons
(National Gallery, No. 785),
63-
Le Brun, 141.
Leighton, 54, 97, 102, 115, 116.
Lely, Sir Peter, 35, 67.
Court Beauties of Charles II.
(Hampton Court), 67.
Lenbach, 39, 68.
Leo X., Portrait of Pope, 67.
Leonardo, 6, 35, 41, 100, 120,
121, 122; quoted, 72, 96;
complex personality of, 42 ;
as draughtsman, 15 ; his
types, 25.
Last Supper (Sta. Maria delle
Grazie, Milan), 135, 157.
Mona Lisa (Louvre, No. 1601),
157-
Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre,
No. 1599), 121.
Leslie, 50, 91.
Leyden, 32.
Lippi, Filippino.
Vision of St. Bernard (Badia,
Florence), 60 [Illustration].
Lippi, Filippo, 18, 62 ; his types,
Annunciation (National Gal
lery, No. 666), 25, 96, 153.

INDEX

167

St. John and Saints (National
Gallery, No. 667), 153.
Liverpool, 62.
Lomazzo, 157.
Lombardy, 14.
London. Burlington House, 13.
Dulwich, 63.
Hampton Court (see under).
National Gallery (see under).
Soane Museum (see Hogarth),
9i-
South Kensington Museum,
50.
Tate Gallery (see Watts),
58.
Wallace Gallery, 65, 147.
Longhi, 16, 90.
Lorenzetti, Ambrogio.
Frescoes of Good and Bad
Government (Palazzo Pub-
blico, Siena), 57.
Lotto, Lorenzo, 42, 67.
Louvre, xv, 29 ; pictures in the,
xv, xviM34, 44, 51, 58, 62,
66, 67, 73, 78, 85, 90, 97, 103,
III, 112, Il6, 121, 123, I32,
135, 137, 157-
Lucas van Leyden, 101.
Luini, 6.
Luxembourg, Pictures in the,
xvi, 68, 133, 147.
Mabuse, 28.
Madox Brown, 20.
Madrid, Prado, xv ; pictures in
the, 53, 66.
Maes, Nicolas, 89.
Makart. Entry of Charles V. into Ant
werp (Hamburg, No. 454),
53-
Manchester, 146.
Manet, 20, 127, 144.
Mantegna, 14.
Altarpiece(Sa.n Zeno, Verona),
160.

Dead Christ (Brera, No. 273),
103.
Portrait of Cardinal Sca-
rampi (Berlin, No. 9), 61.
Triumph of Julius Caesar
(Hampton Court), 97, 159.
Maria Novella, Santa, Florence,
129.
Marine painting, 84, 85.
Masaccio, 25, 35, 72.
The Tribute Money (Bran-
cacci Chapel, Florence), 129.
Medici, Portraits of the, 60.
Meissonier, 90, 146.
Memlinc, 6, n, 15, 25, 61, 108 ;
his backgrounds, 70.
Adoration of Magi (Hospital
of St. John, Bruges), 60.
St. John Altarpiece (Hospi
tal of St. John, Bruges),
133.
Mesdag, 85.
Metzu, 42, 88, 90, 113, 146,
160.
Michelangelo, 6, 29, 35, 36, 40,
42, 100, 101, 152 ; complex
personality, 42 ; as draughts
man, 15 ; his frescoes, Sis-
tine Chapel, ioi, 149 ; his
influence, 39.
Temptation, Fall, and Expul
sion (Sistine Chapel), 130
[Illustration].
Entombment (National Gal
lery, No. 790), 155.
Microscopic School, The, 147.
Milan. Brera, 103, 133-134.
Poldi-Pezzoli, 96.
Sta. Maria delle Grazie, 135,
157-
Millais, 68, 145 ; portrait of his
father, 62.
Carpenter's Shop (Mrs. Beer),
133 [Illustration].
Lorenzo and Isabella (Liver
pool, No. 337), 62.

i68

HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES

Return of the Dove to the Ark
(Oxford University Gallery,
Combe Bequest), 146.
Mocenigo, Portrait of Doge, 60.
Monet, Claude, 41, 108, 144.
Moore, Albert, 102.
Moore, Henry, 85.
Morceau, The, 129.
Morelli, 37, 152.
Moretto, 112.
Morland, George, 40, 93.
Moroni. Portrait ofa Lawyer (National
Gallery, No. 742), 112.
Mosaics, 136.
Mountains, 80.
Mulready, 91.
Munich, 29, 91 ; pictures at, 34,
65,73,74,88, 112, 123, 132.
Murillo, 6, 16, 90 ; his types, 24.
Mythological subjects, 57.
Naples, 74.
National Gallery, xiv, xvi, 4, 107 ;
pictures in the, 25, 41, 44,
53, 54, 59, 60, 63, 65, 69,
72, 73, 74, 76, 83, 85, 87,
91, 96, 100, 103, 112, 113,
116, 123, 124, 125, 134, 136,
151, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158,
159-
Nationality in Art, 21-30.
Naturalism, 55, 138.
Neefs, Peter, 83.
Neer, Van der, 51.
Netherlands, 15, 16, 23, 51, 88.
Netscher, 115.
Newlyn, 32.
New Manner, The, 61, in.
Newton, 50.
Niccold da Foligno.
Triptych (National Gallery,
No. 1 107), 85.
Nicholas, St., 56.
North and South, 22-23, 26-
Norway, 77, 80.
Norwich, 32.

Oil Painting, 150-153, 158.
Old Masters, 19.
Orcagna, ascribed to.
Coronation of the Virgin (Na
tional Gallery, No. 569),
125 [Illustration].
Orchardson, 91.
Orley, Bernard van, 28.
Orvieto, 60.
Ostade, Adrian van, 42, 88, 91,
124, 154; his tavern scenes,
49-
Outline, 94-97.
Overbeck, 141.
Oxford, Picture at, 146.
Pacheco, 38.
Padua, Arena Chapel, 58, 71,
136.
Palma Vecchio, his types, 24.
Paris, 29, 91.
Exhibition, 1900, 29.
Louvre (see under).
Luxembourg (see under).
Parma Cathedral, 103, 135.
Pastel, 154.
Pater, Walter, quoted, 9.
Patinir, 73, 74, 84.
Pentimenti, 158.
Perspective. Aerial, 72, 81, 109-110, 125.
Linear, 14, 102-104.
Perugia, 25.
Perugino, 6, 40, 108, 141 ; his
landscapes, 25, 72, 82.
Peter's, St., Rome, 60.
Petersburg, Picture at St., 64.
Petrarch, 71.
Philip II., Portrait of, 62.
Philip IV., Portrait of, 66.
Photography, 29, 68, 95, 100,
139-
Piero della Francesca, 61, 151.
Nativity (National Gallery,
No. 908), 151.
Pintorricchio. Circumcision of Sons of Moses,

INDEX

169

and Baptism of Christ (Sis-
tine Chapel), 56.
Piombo, Sebastian del.
Raising of Lazarus (National
Gallery, No. 1), 41.
Pisa, Campo-Santo, 72.
Pitti Palace, Pictures in the, 67,
97-
Plein-air, 81, 126, 127.
Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 14.
St. Sebastian (National Gal
lery, No. 292), 100.
Potter, Paul, 93.
Poussin, Gaspar, 75.
Poussins, The, 16, 76.
Prado (Madrid), xv; pictures in
the, 53, 66.
Pre-Raphaelites, 31, 35, 36, 114,
115, 145-6.
Primitives, 5.
Prout, 84.
Raebum, 119.
Raphael, 6, 29, 35, 36, 42, 141 ;
as draughtsman, 15 ; his in
fluence, 39.
Frescoes (Farnesina, Rome),
131-
La Belle Jardiniere (Louvre,
1496), 137-
Mass of Bolsena (Vatican),
131-
Parnassus (Vatican), 131 [Il
lustration].
Portrait of Pope Leo X. (Pitti,
No. 40), 67.
School of Athens, (Vatican),
i°3, 131-
Sposalizio (Brera, No. 270),
133-134-
Transfiguration (Vatican Gal
lery), 41.
Ravesteyn, 130.
Realism, 38, 138, 141, 143-146.
Recamier, Portrait of Madame,
97-
Reformation, 27

Regent pictures, 28, 67, 130.
Religion in art, 26-27.
Rembrandt, 6, 16, 20, 33, 35, 39,
41, 42, 51, 65, 66, 69, 88, 96,
97, 108, in, 113, 120, 122,
123, 124, 147, 153 ; his back
grounds, 69 ; periods of de
velopment, 44 ; portraits of
himself, 62 ; quoted, 147.
Anatomy Lesson (Hague, No.
146), 51.
Bathsheba (Louvre, No. 2549),
44.
FlayedOx (Louvre, No. 2548),
Si-
Night Watch (Amsterdam,
No. 1246), 41.
Pilgrims of Emmaus (Louvre,
No. 2539), 123.
Presentation in the Temple
(Hague, No. 145), 44-
Raising ofthe Cross (Munich,
No. 327), 123.
Syndics (Amsterdam, No.
1247), 44.
Woman taken tn Adultery
(National Gallery, No. 45),
123 [Illustration].
Renaissance, The, 13, 57, 61, 71,
in, 136, 160.
Restoration of pictures, 159.
Reynolds, 16, 35, 39, 41, 42, 68,
96, ioi, 115, 116, 123, 155,
157; his backgrounds, 70;
quoted, 118, 120, 122, 124,
141; his types, 24.
Holy Family (formerly in
National Gallery), 157.
Portrait of Lord Heathfield
(National Gallery, No. 111),
69.
Portrait of Mrs. Siddons
(Grosvenor House and Dul-
wich Gallery, No. 318), 63
[Illustration].
Ribera, 123.
Robert, Hubert, 83.

170 HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES

Roberts, David, 84.
Rocco, Scuola di San, 122,
158.
Rockox, Portrait of Nicholas,
61.
Romano, Giulio, 35, 116; his
types, 38.
Romantic School, 35, 36.
Rome, 28, 29, 35, 155.
Doria Gallery, 66.
Farnesina, 131.
St. Peter's, 60.
Sistine Chapel (see under).
Vatican, 41, 103, 131.
Romney, 101, 1 16 ; his back
grounds, 70 ; his types, 24,
64.
Rosa, Salvator, 80.
Rosselli, Cosimo.
Moses receiving the Law on
Mt. Sinai and The Sermon
on the Mount (Sistine
Chapel), 56.
Rossettis, Portraits ofthe, 62.
Rousseau, 78.
Rubens, 6, 11, 16, 31, 39, 41, 42,
44,51,62,67,77,80,93,97, 107, in, 112, 113, 115, 116,
120, 126, 156 ; as head ofa
school, 34, 39.
Battle of the Amazons (Mu
nich, No. 742), 132.
History of Marie de Medicis
(Louvre, Nos. 2085-2108),
xvi, 58.
Kermesse (Louvre, No. 21 15),
132.
Lion Hunt (Munich, No. 734),
132 [Illustration].
Rockox Altar-piece (Antwerp,
Nos. 307-311), 61.
Ruskin, 2.
Russell, John, 154.
Ruysdael, Jacob, 16, 51, 77,
84.
Windmill (Amsterdam, No.
1233), 76 [Illustration].

Sainte-Beuve, quoted, 3.
Sala de la Reina Isabel, Prado,
xv.
Salle Rubens, Louvre, xvi.
Salon Carr6, Louvre, xv.
Salons, The, 13.
Salute, Venice, 122.
Santa Conversazione, 56.
Sargent, 68, 69, 147.
Carmencita ( Luxembourg, No.
315), 147 [Illustration].
Scarampi, Portrait of Cardinal,
61.
Scheffer, Ary, 141.
Schongauer, 108.
Scott, Sir Walter, quoted, 59.
Seascape, 84-85.
Segantini, 80.
Seghers, 92.
Siddons, Portraits of Mrs., 63-64.
Siena, 14, 32 ; picture at, 57.
Sienese art, 14, 32.
Sierras, 25.
Signorelli, 14 ; portrait of, at
Orvieto, 60.
Pan (Berlin, No. 79A), 97.
Sistine Chapel, 56, 101, 130, 149.
Sky, Painting of the, 84.
Slingelandt, Peter van, 146.
Snyders, 51, 92, 93.
Soane Museum, Pictures in the,
91-
Spain, 16, 26, 90, 91.
Spanish Chapel, The, Florence,
129.
Steen, Jan, 42, 52, 88, 89.
Family of the Painter (Hague,
No. 169), 133 [Illustration].
Stephaneschi, Cardinal, 60.
Stephens, F. G., Portrait of, 62.
Stevenson, R. L., quoted, 7.
Still Life, 86, 92, 124.
Stothard, 39.
Style, 37.
Surface of a picture, 153.
Swan, 93.
Switzerland, 80.

INDEX

171

Symonds, J. A., quoted, 5.

Taine, Henri, 21.
Taste, 4, 8, 52.
Tate Gallery (see Watts), 58.
Tempera, 150-153.
Tenebrosi, The, 123.
Teniers, 6, 84, 88, 91.
Terburg, 88, 90, 113, 146, 153.
Peace of Munster (National
Gallery, No. 89), 53, 125
[Illustration].
Trumpeter handing a Dis
patch (Hague, No. 176), 1 13.
Teutonic race, 22.
Tiepolo, 16.
Tintoretto, 11, 41, 58, 120, 121,
122, 124; as colourist, 15,
113; at SanRocco, 122, 158;
portraits of Doges, 67 ;
quoted, in.
Annunciation (Scuola di San
Rocco), 122.
Bacchus aud Ariadne (Ducal
Palace, Venice), 112, 122
[Illustration].
Marriage of Cana (Salute,
Venice), 122 [Illustration].
Miracle of St. Mark (Aca
demy, Venice, No. 42), 1 12.
Paradise (Ducal Palace, Ven
ice), 132.
Tissot, 57.
Titian, 6, 33, 39, 45, 72, 97,
in, 126, 153, 156 ; his back
grounds, 69 ; as colourist,
15, 108, 112, 113; portrait
of, 62 ; his types, 24.
Assumption (Academy, Ven
ice, No. 40), xvi, 97, 133,
134 [Illustration].
Bacchus and Ariadne (Na
tional Gallery, No. 35), 134.
Crowning with Thorns (Mu
nich, No. 1 1 14), 112.
Entombment (Louvre, No.
1584), 137-

Holy Family (National Gal
lery, No. 4), 116.
Man with a Glove (Louvre,
No. 1592), 67, in.
Noli me Tangere (National
Gallery, No. 270), 73.
Pilgrims of Emmaus (Louvre,
No. 1581), 62.
Presentation of the Virgin
(Academy, Venice, No. 426),
112.
St. Peter Martyr (destroyed
by fire), 73.
Tone, 109-m, 125.
Transfiguration, The, 136.
Tribuna, Uffizi, xv.
Trompe Pail, 143.
Troyon, 82, 93.
Truth in art, 62, 1 14, 143.
Turner, 6, 40, 79-80, 82, 83, 96,
104,113, 154,155,156, 157;
his figures, 50, 82 ; quoted,
114; rivalry with Claude,
4i, 75-
BayofBaiae( National Gallery,
No. 505), 76.
Calais Pier (National Gallery,
No. 472), 85.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
(National Gallery, No. 516),
76 [Illustration].
Fishing Boats in a Breeze
(National Gallery, No. 813),
85.
Rivers of France, 142.
Shipwreck, The (National
Gallery, No. 476), 85.
Ulysses deriding Polyphemus
(National Gallery, No. 508),
76.
Tuscany, 32, 119.
Types, National, 24-25.

Uccello, 14, 61, 102-103.
Battle of S. Egidio (National
Gallery, No. 583), 72, 103.

172

HOW TO LOOK AT PICTURES

Uffizi, xv ; Pictures in the, 60,
61, 97.
Umbria, 14, 32.
Unity, Pictorial, 125, 129, 146.
Utrecht, 32.

Valence (see David), 141-142.
Values, no, 125.
Varley, 154.
Vasari, quoted, 40, 120, 121, 150,
158.
Vatican, 41, 103, 131.
Velasquez, 6, 16, 38, 96, in, 126,
131, 147; his backgrounds,
25, 69 ; bodegones, 90 ; his
dwarfs, 66 ; portraits of
Philip IV., 66.
Lady with Fan (Wallace
Gallery, No. 88), 65.
Old Woman cooking Eggs
(Sir F. Cook), 90.
Portrait of an Admiral (Na
tional Gallery, No. 131 5),
65.
Portrait of Innocent X. (Rome,
Doria Gallery, No. 113), 66.
Portrait of Philip IV. (Prado,
No. 1066), 66 [Illustration].
Surrender of Breda (Prado,
No. 1060), 53 [Illustration].
Two Young Men at a Meal
(Apsley House), 90.
Velde, Adrian Van der, 51, 93.
Velde, William Van der, 76, 85.
Venetian art, 15, 29, 32, 33, 56,
69, 87, 102, in, 112, 113,
115, 116, 120, 126, 149, 151,
152.
Veneziano, Domenico, 151.
Enthroned Madonna (Na
tional Gallery, No. 1215),
151.
Venice, 14, 29, 58, 72, 122, 124.
Academy, Pictures in the, xvi,
87,97, 112, 133, 134, 135.
Baptistery, St. Mark's, 136.

Ducal Palace, Pictures in the,
112, 122, 132.
Frari Church, xvi, 160.
Giovanelli Collection, 72.
Salute, 122.
Scuola di San Rocco, 122, 158.
Vermeer, 124, 160.
Verona, San Zeno, 160.
Veronese, Paul, 11, 58, 67, 97,
112, 124, 153; as colourist,
15, 107, in.
Family of Darius (National
Gallery, No. 294), 53, 54
[Illustration].
Feast in the House of Levi
(Academy, Venice, No. 203),
135-
Frescoes (Villa Maser, near
Castelfranco), 143.
Marriage of Cana (Louvre,
No. 1 192), 62, 103, 135.
Verrocchio, 35, 96.
Portrait of a Lady (Milan,
Poldi Pezzoli, No. 21), as
cribed to, 96 [Illustration].
Vicenza, Santa Corona, 136.
Vienna, 34, 91.
Vivarini, The, 130.
Vlieger, De, 85.
Volterra, Daniele da, 101.
Wallace Gallery, Pictures in the,
65, 147.
Water-colour, 79, 154.
Watteau, 16, 39, 77, 113, 126;
Fites Galantes of, 28, 90.
Watts, 39 ; his portraits, 42, 68.
Hope (Tate Gallery, No. 1640),
58.
Love and Life (Tate Gallery,
No. 1641), 58.
Love steering the Bark of
Humanity (Exhibited Royal
Academy, 1902), 58.
Mammon (Tate Gallery, No.
1630), 58.
Weenix, 93.

INDEX

173

Werff, Van der, 115, 153.
West. Death of General Wolfe (Ken
sington Palace), 55.
Westminster, Duke of, 63,
"5-
Weyden, Roger van der, 15, 108,
141, 156.
Madonna with St. Luke (Mu
nich, No. 100), 73.
Whistler, 20, 41, 68, 79, 144 ;
quoted, 21.
Portrait of the Painter's Mo
ther (Luxembourg, No.
324), 68 [Illustration].
Wiertz, Antoine, 50.

Wilkie, 39, 91.
Blind Fiddler (National Gal
lery, No. 99), 91.
Village Festival (National
Gallery, No. 122), 91.
William III., Court Beauties of
the time of, 67.
Wilson, 75, 77.
Wint, De, 154.
Witte, De, 83.
Wolgemut, portrait of Michael,
65.
Wynants, 51.
Zeno, San, Verona, 160.
Zeuxis, 143.

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Now Ready

VELASQUEZ. BURNE-JONES.FRA ANGELICO.
WATTS.ROMNEY.WATTEAU. HOLMAN HUNT.
HOLBEIN.REYNOLDS.LEIGHTON.

GAINSBOROUGH. HOGARTH.
ALMA TADEMA.
RAPHAEL.CORREGGIO.GREUZE. MILLAIS.MURILLO.
MILLET. LANDSEER.

Bell's Handbooks OF THE
GREAT MASTERS
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The following Volumes have been issued
BERNARDINO LUINI. By George C. Williamson, Litt.D.
VELASQUEZ. By R. A. M. Stevenson.
ANDREA DEL SARTO. By H. Guinness.
LUCA SIGNORELLI. By Maud Cruttwell.
RAPHAEL. By H. Strachey.
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SODOMA. By the Contessa Lorenzo Priuli-Bon.
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MEMLINC. By W. H. JAMES WEALE.
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA. By W. G. Waters, M.A.
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In preparation
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MICHAEL ANGELO. By Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, M.A.,
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^