O'Clock."

Whistler.

emanated from him how fully he expressed his inner feelings in his works. And scattered here and there among his writings, concealed under a covering of such brilliant and satirical wit as has seldom been seen, we find his true ideas about art. Talking of the critic-writer, who had no technical knowledge of painting, he says: "Meanwhile the painter's poetry is "Ten quite lost to him; the amazing invention that shall have put form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result, he is without understanding; the nobility of thought that shall have given the artist's dignity to the whole says to him absolutely nothing." In the celebrated lawsuit, Whistler v. Ruskin, he was asked, "Do you say that this is a correct representation of Battersea Bridge?" "I did not intend it," he answered, "The "to be a correct portrait of the bridge. As to Gentle Art what the picture represents, that depends upon Enemies." who looks at it. To some persons it may represent all that was intended; to others it may represent nothing." Again he writes: "The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree or flower

of Making

Whistler.

or other surface he sees before him were an

artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features."

One of the finest appreciations of the Flemish and Dutch artists of the seventeenth century has been given by a modern French artist, 1820-1876. Eugène Fromentin, a painter of great technical skill, who shows himself also to be a very able critic and a very interesting and beautiful writer. He not only sees the exterior, but goes beneath to the painter's thought and ideas, and writing about Rubens, Rembrandt, and others, he allows us to see his own opinions

Belgium

about art. First see what he says about "the "The Old lost way" of modern painting: "All the Masters of fancies of the imagination, and what were called the mysteries of the palette, when mystery was one of the attractions of painting, Fromentin. give place to the love of the absolute, textual truth. Photographic studies as to the effects of light have changed the greater proportion

and Holland." Eugène

of ways of seeing, feeling, and painting. It seems as if the mechanical reproduction of what is, becomes to-day the highest expression of experience and knowledge, and that talent consists in struggling for exactitude, precision, and imitative force with an instrument. All personal interference of sensibility is out of place. What the mind has imagined is considered an artifice; and all artifice, that is, all conventionality, is proscribed by an art which can be nothing but conventional. There are even scornful appellations to designate contrary practices. They are called the old game, as much as to say an antiquated, doting, and superannuated fashion of comprehending nature, by introducing one's own into it."

In the following extracts from the same book, it must be remembered that it is not one of those merely literary critics that painters object to (and perhaps with some reason if they have no knowledge of art practically and so cannot discuss that phase) who is writing, but a thoroughly trained artist of well-known and high reputation, who gives his views about the spiritual side of art, and expresses

"The Old

his belief in the greatness of those pictures which show the ideas and feelings of the artist: "The glory of Rubens must be found in the world of the true through which he travels as a master, and also in the world of the ideal, that region of clear ideas, of sentiments and Fromentin. emotions, whither his heart, as well as his mind, bear him incessantly."

Masters of Belgium and Holland."

Eugène

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

"The art of painting is the indisputable witness of the mental state of the painter at the moment he held the brush."

"It is true that in the world of the beautiful two or three spirits can be found who have gone farther with a more lofty flight, who consequently have seen more nearly the Divine light, and the Eternal Truth. There are also in the moral world, in that of sentiments, visions, and dreams, depths into which Rembrandt alone has descended, which Rubens has not even perceived."

"In Dutch art, reputed so positive, among these painters considered for the most part as near-sighted copyists, you feel a loftiness and goodness of soul, a tenderness for the true, a cordiality for the real, which gives to their

works a value that the things themselves do not seem to have. Hence their ideality, an ideal a little misunderstood, rather despised, but indisputable for him who can seize it, and very attractive to him who knows how to relish it. No painting gives a clearer idea of the triple and silent operation of feeling, reflecting, and expressing. At times a grain of warmer sensibility makes of them thinkers, even poets on occasion."

Masters of

"Rembrandt, that morose and mighty "The Old dreamer, who seemed to be painting his

Belgium

land."

epoch, his country, his friends and himself, and Holbut who at bottom painted only one of the Eugène unknown recesses of the human soul."

Fromentin.

"Rembrandt is before all a visionary, and Ibid. there are in the depths of nature things that this pearl fisher alone has discovered. He was a pure spiritualist, an idealist; I mean a spirit whose domain is that of ideas, and whose language is the language of ideas."

"Jean

Millet.

Similarly J. F. Millet writes: "To have done François more or less work which means nothing is Peasant and not to have produced. There is production Painter." only where there is expression." "Men of Sensier.

Alfred