John Singer Sargent, Çoşku, 1882, T.ü.y.b. 237 cm × 352 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
Theodore Child: Art and Criticism, Monographs and Studies[1]
PREFACE
The following monographs and studies have been collected and published in a volume in the hope that they may be of use and of interest to the many refined minds which are seeking guidance or confirmation in their theoretical or effective admiration of works of art. Their chief merit, supposing that they have merit at all, is the fact that they are free from verbiage. In art criticism, in the opinion of the writer, the qualities to be most desired and esteemed arc sympathy, delicacy of observation and appreciation, and intelligent, reasoned, anti lucid admiration.
The appreciative and the creative intellect have certain points in common. No one can ever be taught to sec nature, to feel nature, and to express it. The painter of genius will show you how he applies his brush, saying: “See how I do it; go and do likewise, and may God help you!” And if God does not help you, your painting will not be worth talking about. The really great painters arc their own masters; they arc men of rare and special temperament, and through this temperament they look at Nature and see beautiful personal visions such as none have ever before beheld. Artists of this high rank arc born at rare intervals in the course of the world’s history; they fix their visions in color or in marble, and then disappear forever, carrying away with them the secrets of their mysterious intellectual and visual processes.
The first aim of the painter is beauty, or, so far as the portrait is concerned, at least character; the only model and the only standard is Nature, and the whole theory and practice of painting is subordinated to the largest and the most difficult of all the arts, namely, learning to see. Nor is the summum of art the literal imitation of Nature. The finest human model, the most charming landscape, cannot be well imitated except it be interpreted by the intelligence of the artist. A strong intellect is the inseparable condition of the strong artist; for, given the sensibility of eye, the sentiment, the passion, or, in other words, the special temperament and “intimate” personality of the artist, the rendering of his visions of Nature demands the exercise of the highest intellectual qualities of analysis and selection.
Painting is not a mystery; a man of average intelligence can learn to paint with a certain degree of excellence, just as he can learn conic sections or soap-boiling. And so there are multitudes of painters who produce colored images for the delight of the crowd. There are bad pictures in abundance. The critic has absolutely nothing to say about these bad pictures; they have their raison d’étre, inasmuch as they satisfy the demand of an artistically ignorant public for colored wall ornaments. Many of these painters of bad pictures are famous; they earn, I am told, splendid incomes; they even receive the honor of royal patronage. This is only just: they are themselves of the majority, and they paint for the joy of the majority; but their simple minds have never comprehended the multiplicity of problems which the great painter has to solve, the intelligence, the subtlety of analysis, and the delicacy of rendering which he must put into his work. The appreciation of these qualities demands, furthermore, a certain initiation on the part of the spectator, a natural sensitiveness of eye, intensified by observant exercise, which it is impossible to ask of a modern democratic public. Those who have not studied pictures and sculpture, those who have not reflected over the arts of the painter and the statuary, can have but a superficial enjoyment of their works. They are naturally satisfied with the gross and the approximate, and the mere resemblance delights them; but the efforts of the great artist remain unintelligible to them, and the results he obtains are at best only half understood. The artist who respects himself and his art will paint first of all to satisfy himself, happy if he find a score or two contemporaries who really appreciate him. It is from this point of view alone that criticism seems to have a raison d’étre, in that one intellect can deal with the product of another intellect.
The aspects of Nature are innumerable, and her beauty inexhaustible. All that we ask of the artist is to look at Nature respectfully, and to express his vision with all the daintiness or strength of his temperament; and if to his reverent and rare eye Nature reveal herself in some new phase of beauty, and if his hand succeed in expressing that vision in all the truth and splendor of form and color, he will have accomplished the most difficult thing in the world, namely, to create beauty and the joy that it gives.
Theodore Child, April, 1891.
[1] Child, T., Art and Criticism, Monographs and Studies, Harper & Brothers Franklin Square, New York: 1892
