Part 7 (1/2)

But the clever child will not, or will only by force, consent to this discipline He finds otherhimself with his pencil somehow or another; and presently you find his paper covered with sketches of his grandfather and grandmother, and uncles, and cousins--sketches of the roo, and the country outside, and everything in the world he can set his eyes on; and he gets on, and even his child's work has a value in it--a truth which ; no one kno precious, perhaps, that portrait of his grandfather may be, if any one has but the sense to keep it till the time when the old man can be seen noin the Middle-Age spirit--the other in thestillin the evils which have resulted froardlessness of truth Consider, for instance, its effect on what is called historical painting What do you at present _? Now-a-days it ination, to portray soes, itthe acts of _their own_ days; and that is the only historical painting worth a straw Of all the wastes of time and sense which Modernism has invented--and they are many--none are so ridiculous as this endeavor to represent past history What do you suppose our descendants will care for our iinations of the events of for their oarriors as they fought at Marathon, had left us nothing but their iyptian battles; and suppose the Italians, in like manner, instead of portraits of Can Grande and Dante, or of Leo the Tenth and Raphael, had left us nothing but iinary portraits of Pericles and Miltiades? What fools we should have thought them! how bitterly we should have been provoked with their folly! And that is precisely what our descendants will feel towards us, so far as our grand historical and classical schools are concerned What do we care, they will say, what those nineteenth century people fancied about Greek and Roman history! If they had left us a few plain and rational sculptures and pictures of their own battles, and their own men, in their every-day dress, we should have thanked them ”Well, but,”

you will say, ”we _have_ left thereat battles” Yes, you have indeed, and that is the only historical painting that you either have, or can have; but you don't _call_ that historical painting You don't thank the men who do it; you look down upon the to the grand schools And yet they are the only true historical painters, and the only eneration, or on any other Wilkie was a historical painter, Chantrey a historical sculptor, because they painted, or carved, the veritable things and ht have been, or should have been But no one tells such men they are historical painters, and they are discontented hat they do; and poor Wilkie rand school, and ruin himself And you have had , by that grand school

There was Etty, naturally as good a painter as ever lived, but no one told hirand schools, and painted dances of nyood rave, a lost reat man, with as true an eye for nature as Raphael,--he stumbles over the blocks of the antique statues--wanders in the dark valley of their ruins to the end of his days He has left you a few outlines ofbehind round shi+elds Much good may they do you! Another lost mind And of those who are lost nah even to make themselves known, the poor pale students who lie buried forever in the abysses of the great schools, no account can be rendered; they are nu is, that of all these reat masters, there was _not one_ who confessedly did not paint his own present world, plainly and truly Ho of what he saw; Phidias carved what he saw; Raphael painted the men of his own time in their own caps and mantles; and every man who has arisen to e in their way, and doing the things he sa did Reynolds rise? Not by painting Greek wo Ladies this, and Ladies that, of his own ti Athenian follies, but London follies Who are the men who have e? I suppose the most popular painter of the day is Landseer Do you suppose he studied dogs and eagles out of the Elgin Marbles? And yet in the very face of these plain, incontrovertible, all-visible facts, we go on fro, in spite of which every one of these men has risen: I say _in spite_ of the entire reater nureatest There is not a living painter whose eht from his youth upwards, and hatever his eminence may be, has not suffered much injury in the course of his victory For observe: this love of what is called ideality or beauty in preference to truth, operates not only inus choose the past rather than the present for our subjects, but it makes us falsify the present e do take it for our subject I said just now that portrait-painters were historical painters;--so they are; but not good ones, because not faithful ones

The beginning and end of modern portraiture is adulation The painters cannot live but by flattery; we should desert theood portraiture; for in the striving after that which is _not_ in their model, they lose the inner and deeper nobleness which _is_ in their o, for the first ti ious man--and one who had suffered nity of his features and person depended upon the expression of serene, yet sole a feeble frathened hiay in countenance, idle in gesture; and the whole power and being of the man himself were lost And this is still more the case with our public portraits You have a portrait, for instance, of the Duke of Wellington at the end of the North Bridge--one of the thousand equestrian statues of Modernism--studied from the show-riders of the as in the saw-dust[38]

Do you suppose that was the way the Duke sat when your destinies depended on hi from the lips of his tired horse, and its wet limbs were dashed with the bloody slime of the battle-field, and he hirieved in his fearlessness, as he watched, scythe-stroke by scythe-stroke, the gathering in of the harvest of death? You would have done so iron, but nothing now

[Footnote 38: I intended this last sentence of course to apply to the thousand statues, not definitely to the one in ih tainted with the modern affectation, and the nearest exah audience, is the work of asculptor; and was indeed so far executed on the principles asserted in the text, that the Duke gave Mr Steele a sitting on horse-back, in order that his ht be accurately represented This, however, does not render the following reined that the action of the Duke, exhibiting his riding in his own grounds, would be different fro the course of a battle

I must also make a most definite exception in favor of Marochetti, who seereat sculptor; and whose statue of Coeur de Lion, though, according to the principle just stated, not to be considered a _historical_ work, is an _ideal_ work of the highest beauty and value Its erection in front of Westminster Hall will tend more to educate the public eye andwe have done in London for centuries

April 21st, 1854--I stop the press in order to insert the following paragraph from to-day's _Ti a nu down the cast which was placed in New Palace Yard of the colossal equestrian statue of Richard Coeur de Lion Sir C Barry e believe, opposed to the cast re up of the statue itself on the sa During the day the horse and figure were reht the pedestal was demolished and taken away_”]

131 But the time has at last co can well be more extraordinary than the way in which the men have risen who are to do it Pupils in the sa precisely the sa a tiree in disliking to copy the antique statues set before them They copy them as they are bid, and they copy them better than any one else; they carry off prize after prize, and yet they hate their work At last they are admitted to study from the life; they find the life very different from the antique, and say so Their teachers tell them the antique is the best, and theythemselves that they like the life, and that copy it they will They do copy it faithfully, and their masters forthwith declare them to be lost men Their fellow-students hiss them whenever they enter the room They can't help it; they join hands and tacitly resist both the hissing and the instruction

Accidentally, a few prints of the works of Giotto, a few casts from those of Ghiberti, fall into their hands, and they see in these so intensely and everlastingly true They examine farther into the reater part of what I have laid before you to-night; they form themselves into a body, and enter upon that crusade which has hitherto been victorious And which will be absolutely and triureat mistake which has hitherto prevented the publicwith them must soon be corrected Thatto recur to the _principles_ of the early ages, these es This notion, grounded first on some hardness in their earlier works, which resulted--as it ht and earnest effort to paint nature as in a looking-glass, was fostered partly by the jealousy of their beaten conorance of the whole body of art-critics, so called, connected with the press No notion was ever more baseless or more ridiculous It was asserted that the Pre-Raphaelites did not draell, in the face of the fact, that the principal member of their body, from the time he entered the schools of the Acadeiven as prizes for drawing It was asserted that they did not draw in perspective, by men who they; it was asserted that they sinned against the appearances of nature, by men who had never drawn so much as a leaf or a blossom from nature in their lives And, lastly, when all these caluan to be forced uponbelief that the style of the Pre-Raphaelites _was_ true and was according to nature, the last forgery invented respecting theraphs You observe how completely this last piece of malice defeats all the rest It adh only that itso

But it e to their opponents to produce a Pre-Raphaelite picture, or anything like one, by theraph

132 Let me at once clear your minds from all these doubts, and at once contradict all these calumnies

Pre-Raphaelitis truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature, and froround is painted to the last touch, in the open air, froure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of so person Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner And one of the chief reasons for the violent opposition hich the school has been attacked by other artists, is the enormous cost of care and labor which such a system demands from those who adopt it, in contradistinction to the present slovenly and iination is necessarily trusted to, by always endeavoring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened, rather than as it ht_ have happened The variousout its principles, so theirin the effort to make their memories so accurate as to seem like portraiture, and their fancy so probable as to seem like memory]

133 This is the main Pre-Raphaelite principle But the battle which its supporters have to fight is a hard one; and for that battle they have been fitted by a very peculiar character

You perceive that the principal resistance they have to make is to that spurious beauty, whose attractiveness had teet, or to despise, the more noble quality of sincerity: and in order at once to put them beyond the power of temptation from this beauty, they are, as a body, characterized by a total absence of sensibility to the ordinary and popular forracefulness; while, to all that still lower kind of prettiness, which regulates the disposition of our scenes upon the stage, and which appears in our lower art, as in our annuals, our commonplace portraits, and statuary, the Pre-Raphaelites are not only dead, but they regard it with a conteust This character is absolutely necessary to them in the present time; but it, of course, occasionally renders their work coressive, and more authoritative--which it will do--they will enlist into their ranks men ork, mainly, upon their principles, and yet eenerally attractive, and this great ground of offense will be reain: you observe that as landscape painters, their principles round work; and singularly enough, that they may not be tempted away from this work, they have been born with comparatively little enjoyment of those evanescent effects and distant subli but a daring conventionalism portray But for this work they are not now needed Turner, the first and greatest of the Pre-Raphaelites, has done it already; he, though his capacity eh he would sorounds, paint the spots upon a dead trout, and the dyes upon a butterfly's wing, yet for the in at that very point where the other branches of Pre-Raphaelitism become powerless