The Mind of the Artist | Page 4

he is studying, the tediousness of painting
and the passion for painting, all the shades of his nature, even to the
lapses of his sensibility, all this is told by the painter's work as clearly
as if he were telling it in our ears.
Fromentin.
XVI
The first merit of a picture is to feast the eyes. I don't mean that the
intellectual element is not also necessary; it is as with fine poetry ... all
the intellect in the world won't prevent it from being bad if it grates
harshly on the ear. We talk of having an ear; so it is not every eye
which is fitted to enjoy the subtleties of painting. Many people have a
false eye or an indolent eye; they can see objects literally, but the
exquisite is beyond them.
Delacroix.

XVII
I would like my work to appeal to the eye and mind as music appeals to
the ear and heart. I have something that I want to say which may be
useful to and touch mankind, and to say it as well as I can in form and
colour is my endeavour; more than that I cannot do.
Watts.
XVIII
Give me leave to say, that to paint a very beautiful Woman, I ought to
have before me those that are the most so; with this Condition, that
your Lordship might assist me in choosing out the greatest Beauty. But
as I am under a double Want, both of good Judgment and fine Women,
I am forced to go by a certain Idea which I form in my own Mind.
Whether this hath any Excellence of Art in it, I cannot determine; but
'tis what I labour at.
Raphael.
XIX
I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never
was, never will be--in a light better than any light that ever shone--in a
land no one can define or remember, only desire--and the forms
divinely beautiful--and then I wake up with the waking of Brynhild.
Burne-Jones.
XX
I love everything for what it is.
Courbet.
XXI
I look for my tones; it is quite simple.

Courbet.
XXII
Many people imagine that art is capable of an indefinite progress
toward perfection. This is a mistake. There is a limit where it must stop.
And for this reason: the conditions which govern the imitation of nature
are fixed. The object is to produce a picture, that is to say, a plane
surface either with or without a border, and on this surface the
representation of something produced by the sole means of different
colouring substances. Since it is obliged to remain thus circumscribed,
it is easy to foresee the limit of perfectibility. When the picture has
succeeded in satisfying our minds in all the conditions imposed on its
production, it will cease to interest. Such is the fate of everything which
has attained its end: we grow indifferent and abandon it.
In the conditions governing the production of the picture, every means
has been explored. The most difficult problem was that of complete
relief, depth of perspective carried to the point of perfect illusion. The
stereoscope has solved the problem. It only remains now to combine
this perfection with the other kinds of perfection already found. Let no
man imagine that art, bound by these conditions of the plane surface,
can ever free itself from the circle which limits it. It is easy to foresee
that its last word will soon have been said.
Wiertz.
XXIII
In his admirable book on Shakespeare, Victor Hugo has shown that
there is no progress in the arts. Nature, their model, is unchangeable;
and the arts cannot transcend her limits. They attain completeness of
expression in the work of a master, on whom other masters are formed.
Then comes development, and then a lapse, an interval. By-and-by, art
is born anew under the stimulus of a man who catches from Light a
new convention.
Bracquemond.

XXIV
The painter ... does not set his palette with the real hues of the rainbow.
When he pictures to us the character of a hero, or paints some scene of
nature, he does not present us with a living man in the character of the
hero (for this is the business of dramatic art); nor does he make up his
landscape of real rocks, or trees, or water, but with fictitious
resemblances of these. Yet in these figments he is as truly bound by the
laws of the appearance of those realities, of which they are the copy
(and very much to the same extent), as the musician is by the natural
laws and properties of sound.
In short, the whole object of physical science, or, in other words, the
whole of sensible nature, is included in the domain of imitative