Agnes Conway - The Book of Art for Young People
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Agnes Conway >> The Book of Art for Young People
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10 [Frontispiece: RED RIDING HOOD
From the picture by G. F. Watts, in the Birmingham Art Gallery
Page 197]
THE BOOK OF ART
FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
BY
AGNES ETHEL CONWAY
AND
SIR MARTIN CONWAY
WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
A. & C. BLACK, LTD.
4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.1
First published September 1909 as "The Children's Book of Art"
Reprinted in 1914, 1927, and 1935
Made in Great Britain.
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.
TO
MY LITTLE FRIENDS
AGNES AND ROSANNE
NOTE
My thanks are due and are cordially rendered to the Earl of Yarborough,
Sir Frederick Cook, and the authorities of Trinity College, Cambridge,
for permission to reproduce their pictures; to Lady Alfred Douglas
and Mr. Henry Newbolt for leave to quote from their poems; to Mr.
Everard Green, Somerset Herald, for all that is new in the
interpretation of the Wilton diptych; to Miss K. K. Radford for the
translation in Chapter VIII., and to all the friends who have helped
me with criticism and suggestions.
A. E. C.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY IN EUROPE . . . . 14
III RICHARD II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
IV THE VAN EYCKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
V THE RENAISSANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
VI RAPHAEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
VII THE RENAISSANCE IN VENICE . . . . . . . . 93
VIII THE RENAISSANCE IN THE NORTH . . . . . . 104
IX REMBRANDT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
X PETER DE HOOGH AND CUYP . . . . . . . . . 133
XI VAN DYCK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
XII VELASQUEZ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
XIII REYNOLDS AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . . 165
XIV TURNER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
XV THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . 188
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IN THE COLOURS OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTINGS
Red Ridinghood . . . . . . . . . . _G. F. Watts_ _Frontispiece_
Richard II. before the Virgin PAGE
and Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
The Three Maries . . . . . . . . . _H. Van Eyck_ . . . . . 48
St. Jerome in his study . . . . . _Antonello da Messina_ 65
The Nativity . . . . . . . . . . . _Sandro Botticelli_ . . 76
The Knight's Dream . . . . . . . . _Raphael_ . . . . . . . 85
The Golden Age . . . . . . . . . . _Giorgione_ . . . . . . 96
St. George destroying the Dragon . _Tintoret_ . . . . . . 102
Edward, Prince of Wales,
afterwards Edward VI. . . . . _Holbein_ . . . . . . . 111
A Man in Armour . . . . . . . . . _Rembrandt_ . . . . . . 126
An Interior . . . . . . . . . . . _P. de Hoogh_ . . . . . 134
Landscape with Cattle . . . . . . _Cuyp_ . . . . . . . . 141
William II. of Orange . . . . . . _Van Dyck_ . . . . . . 146
Don Balthazar Carlos . . . . . . . _Velasquez_ . . . . . . 161
The Duke of Gloucester . . . . . . _Sir J. Reynolds_ . . . 170
The Fighting Temeraire . . . . . . _Turner_ . . . . . . . 177
THE CHILDREN'S BOOK OF ART
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendid
story by a really nice person. There is not the least occasion for
the story to be true; indeed I think the untrue stories are the
best--those in which we meet delightful beasts and things that talk
twenty times better than most human beings ever do, and where
extraordinary events happen in the kind of places that are not at all
like our world of every day. It is so fine to be taken into a country
where it is always summer, and the birds are always singing and the
flowers always blowing, and where people get what they want by just
wishing for it, and are not told that this or that isn't good for them,
and that they'll know better than to want it when they're grown up,
and all that kind of thing which is so annoying and so often happening
in this obstinate criss-cross world, where the days come and go in
such an ordinary fashion.
But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I like
to listen to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would be
some one who could draw pictures for me while talking--pictures like
those of Tenniel in _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the
Looking-Glass_. How much better we know Alice herself and the White
Knight and the Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures
than even from the story itself. But my story-teller should not only
draw the pictures while he talked, but he should paint them too. I
want to see the sky blue and the grass green, and I want red cloaks
and blue bonnets and pink cheeks and all the bright colours, and some
gold and silver too, and not merely black and white--though black and
white drawings would be better than nothing, so long as they showed
me what the people and beasts and dragons and things were like. I could
put up with even rather bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don't
you know how good a bad drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend who
can make the loveliest folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintest
houses and trees, and he really can't draw a bit; and the curious thing
is, that if he could draw better I should not like his folks and beasts
half as much as I do the lop-sided, crook-legged, crazy-looking people
he produces. And then he has such quaint things to tell about them,
and while he talks he seems to make them live, so that I can hardly
believe they are not real people for all their unlikeness to any one
you ever saw.
Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like
that, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but
merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived,
every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a
kind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't
matter to us, which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that
matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture
is a nice one. There is a delightful old picture painted on a wall
away off at Assisi, in Italy, which shows St. Francis preaching to
a lot of birds, and the birds are all listening to him and looking
pleased--the way birds do look pleased when they find a good fat worm
or fresh crumbs. Now, St. Francis was a real man and such a dear person
too, but I don't suppose half the stories told about him were really
true, yet we can pretend they were and that's just what the painter
helps us to do. Don't you know all the games that begin with 'Let's
pretend'?--well, that's art. Art is pretending, or most of it is.
Pictures take us into a world of make-believe, a world of imagination,
where everything is or should be in the right place and in the right
light and of the right colour, where all the people are nicely dressed
to match one another, and are not standing in one another's way, and
not interrupting one another or forgetting to help play the game.
That's the difference between pictures and photographs. A photograph
is almost always wrong somewhere. Something is out of place, or
something is there which ought to be away, or the light is wrong; or,
if it's coloured, the colours are just not in keeping with one another.
If it's a landscape the trees are where we don't want them; they hide
what we want to see, or they don't hide the very thing we want hidden.
Then the clouds are in the wrong place, and a wind ruffles the water
just where we want to see something reflected. That's the way things
actually happen in the real world. But in the world of 'Let's pretend,'
in the world of art, they don't happen so. There everything happens
right, and everybody does, not so much what they should (that might
sometimes be dull), but exactly what we want them to do--which is so
very much better. That is the world of your art and my art.
Unfortunately all the pictures in the galleries weren't painted just
for you and me; but you'll find, if you look for them, plenty that
were, and the rest don't matter. Those were painted, no doubt, for
some one else. But if you could find the some one else for whom they
were painted, the some one else whose world of 'Let's pretend' was
just these pictures that don't belong to your world, and if they could
tell you about their world of 'Let's pretend,' ten to one you'd find
it just as good a world as your own, and you'd soon learn to 'pretend'
that way too.
Well, the purpose of this book is to take you into a number of worlds
of 'Let's pretend,' most of which I daresay will be new to you, and
perhaps you will find some of them quite delightful places. I'm sure
you can't help liking St. Jerome's Cell when you come to it. It's not
a bit like any room we can find anywhere in the world to-day, but
wouldn't it be joyful if we could? What a good time we could have there
with the tame lion (not a bit like any lion in the Zoo, but none the
worse for that) and the jolly bird, and all St. Jerome's little things.
I should like to climb on to his platform and sit in his chair and
turn over his books, though I don't believe they'd be interesting to
read, but they'd certainly be pretty to look at. If you and I were
there, though, we should soon be out away behind, looking round the
corner, and finding all sorts of odd places that unfortunately can't
all get into the picture, only we know they're there, down yonder
corridor, and from what the painter shows us we can invent the rest
for ourselves.
One of the troubles of a painter is that he can't paint every detail
of things as they are in nature. A primrose, when you first see it,
is just a little yellow spot. When you hold it in your hand you find
it made up of petals round a tiny centre with little things in it.
If you take a magnifying glass you can see all its details multiplied.
If you put a tiny bit of it under a microscope, ten thousand more little
details come out, and so it might go on as long as you went on magnifying.
Now a picture can't be like that. It just has to show you the general
look of things as you see them from an ordinary distance. But there
comes in another kind of trouble. How do you see things? We don't all
see the same things in the same way. Your mother's face looks very
different to you from its look to a mere person passing in the street.
Your own room has a totally different aspect to you from what it bears
to a casual visitor. The things you specially love have a way of
standing out and seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to any
one else. Then there are other differences in the look of the same
things to different people which you have perhaps noticed. Some people
are more sensitive to colours than others. Some are much more sensitive
to brightness and shadow. Some will notice one kind of object in a
view, or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others. Girls
are quicker to take note of the colour of eyes, hair, skin, clothes,
and so forth than boys. A woman who merely sees another woman for a
moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately
than a man. A man will be noticing other things. His picture, if he
painted one, would make those other things prominent.
So it is with everything that we see. None of us sees more than certain
features in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is only
those features that we should paint. We can't possibly paint every
detail of everything that comes into the picture. We must make a choice,
and of course we choose the features and details that please us best.
Now, the purpose of painting anything at all is to paint the beauty
of the thing. If you see something that strikes you as ugly, you don't
instinctively want to paint it; but when you see an effect of beauty,
you feel that it would be very nice indeed to have a picture showing
that beauty. So a picture is not really the representation of a thing,
but the representation of the beauty of the thing.
Some people can see beauty almost everywhere; they are conscious of
beauty all day long. They want to surround themselves with beauty,
to make all their acts beautiful, to shed beauty all about them. Those
are the really artistic souls. The gift of such perfect instinct for
beauty comes by nature to a few. It can be cultivated by almost all.
That cultivation of all sorts of beauty in life is what many people
call civilization--the real art of living. To see beauty everywhere
in nature is not so very difficult. It is all about us where the work
of uncivilized man has not come in to destroy it. Artists are people
who by nature and by education have acquired the power to see beauty
in what they look at, and then to set it down on paper or canvas, or
in some other material, so that other people can see it too.
It seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape was
hardly perceived by any one at all. People lived in the beautiful
country and scarcely knew that it was beautiful. Then came the time
when the beauty of landscape began to be felt by the nicest people.
They began to put it into their poetry, and to talk and write about
it, and to display it in landscape pictures. It was through poems and
pictures, which they read and saw, that the general run of folks first
learned to look for beauty in nature. I have no doubt that Turner's
wonderful sunsets made plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoice
in the intricacy and splendour of their glory for the first time in
their lives. Well, what Turner and other painters of his generation
did for landscape, had had to be done for men and women in earlier
days by earlier generations of artists. The Greeks were the first,
in their sculpture, to show the wonderful beauty of the human form;
till their day people had not recognised what to us now seems obvious.
No doubt they had thought one person pretty and another handsome, but
they had not known that the human figure was essentially a glorious
thing till the Greek sculptors showed them. Another thing painters
have taught the world is the beauty of atmosphere. Formerly no one
seems to have noticed how atmosphere affects every object that is seen
through it. The painters had to show us that it is so. After we had
seen the effect of atmosphere in pictures we began to be able to see
for ourselves in nature, and thus a whole group of new pleasures in
views of nature was opened up to us.
Away back in the Middle Ages, six hundred and more years ago, folks
had far less educated eyes than we possess to-day. They looked at nature
more simply than we do and saw less in it. So they were satisfied with
pictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do without.
But painting does not only concern itself with representing the world
we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold. It
concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe.
Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy
play about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancy
get mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and
of fact, and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins.
The fancies of people are very different at different times, and you
can't understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the
fancies of the old painters. To do that you must know something about
the way they lived and the things they believed, and what they hoped
for and what they were afraid of.
Here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an old
account book. A certain Count of Savoy owned the beautiful Castle of
Chillon, which you have perhaps seen, on the shores of the Lake of
Geneva. But he could not be happy, because he and the people about
him thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars a
basilisk lived--a very terrible dragon--and they all went in fear of
it. So the Count paid a brave mason a large sum of money (and the payment
is solemnly set down in his account book) to break a way into this
hole and turn the basilisk out; and I have no doubt that he and his
people were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basilisk
was found. Folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that, must
have gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particular
emotion. A picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than it
would to us. So if we are really to understand old pictures, we must
begin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them,
and of the people they were painted for. You see how much study that
means for any one who wants to understand all the art of all the world.
We shall not pretend to lead you on any such great quest as that, but
ask you to look at just a few old pictures that have been found charming
by a great many people of several generations, and to try and see
whether they do not charm you as well. You must never, of course,
pretend to like what you don't like--that is too silly. We can't all
like the same things. Still there are certain pictures that most nice
people like. A few of these we have selected to be reproduced in this
book for you to look at. And to help you realize who painted them and
the kind of people they were painted for, my daughter has written the
chapters that follow. I hope you will find them entertaining, and still
more that you will like the pictures, and so learn to enjoy the many
others that have come down to us from the past, and are among the world's
most precious possessions to-day.
CHAPTER II
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY IN EUROPE
Before we give our whole attention to the first picture, of which the
original was painted in England in 1377, let us imagine ourselves in
the year 1200 making a rapid tour through the chief countries of Europe
to see for ourselves how the people lived. The first thing that will
strike us on our journey is the contrast between the grandeur of the
churches and public buildings and the insignificance of most of the
houses. Some of the finest churches in England, built in the style
of architecture called 'Norman,' one or more of which you may have
seen, date before the year 1200, as for example, Durham Cathedral,
and the naves of Norwich, Ely, and Peterborough Cathedrals. The great
churches abroad were also beautiful and more elaborately decorated,
in the North with sculpture and painting, in the South with marble
and mosaic. The towns competed one with another in erecting them finer
and larger, and in decorating them as magnificently as they could.
This was done because the church was a place which the people used
for many other purposes besides Sunday services. In the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the parish church, on week-days
as well as on Sundays, was a very useful and agreeable place to most
of the parishioners. The 'holy' days, or saints' days, 'holidays'
indeed, were times of rejoicing and festivity, and the Church
processions and services were pleasant events in the lives of many
who had few entertainments, and who for the most part could neither
read nor write. Printing was not yet invented, at least not in Europe,
and as every book had to be written out by hand, copies of books were
rare and only owned by the few who could read them, so that stories
were mostly handed down by word of mouth, the same being told by mother
to child for many generations.
The favourites were stories of the saints and martyrs of the Catholic
Church, for of course we are speaking now of times long before the
Reformation. The Old Testament stories and all the stories of the life
of Christ and His Apostles were well known too, and just as we never
tire of reading our favourite books over and over again, our
forefathers of 1200 wanted to see on the walls of their churches
representations of the stories which they could not read. Their daily
thoughts were more occupied with the Infant Christ, the saints, and
the angels, than ours generally are. They thought of themselves as
under the protection of some saint, who would plead with God the Father
for them if they asked him, for God Himself seemed too high or remote
to be appealed to always directly. He was approached with awe; the
saints, the Virgin, and the Infant Christ, with love.
We must realise this difference before we can well understand a picture
painted in the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth centuries, nor can
we look at one without feeling that the artist and the people for whom
he painted, so loved the holy personages. They thought about them
always, not only at stated times and on Sundays, and never tired of
looking at pictures of them and their doings. It is sometimes said
that only Catholics can understand medieval art, because they feel
towards the saints as the old painters did. But it is possible for
any one to realize how in those far-off days the people felt, and it
is this that we must try to do. The religious fervour of the Middle
Ages was not a sign of great virtue among all the people. Some were
far more cruel, savage, and unrestrained than we are to-day. Very
wicked men even became powerful dignitaries in the Church. But it was
the Church that fostered the impulses of pity and charity in a fierce
age, and some of the saints of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catharine of Siena, are still
held to be among the most beautiful characters the world has ever known.
The churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Florence were
lined with marble, and a great picture frequently stood above the altar.
It is difficult to realize to-day that the processes which we call
oil and water-colour painting were not then invented, and that no shops
existed to sell canvases and paints ready for use. The artist painted
upon a wooden panel, which he had himself to make, plane flat, and
cut to the size he needed. In order to get a surface upon which he
could paint, he covered the panel with a thin coating of plaster which
it was difficult to lay on absolutely flat. Upon the plaster he drew
the outline of the figures he was going to paint, and filled in the
background with a thin layer of gold leaf, such as is to-day used for
gilding frames. After the background had been put in, it was impossible
to correct the outline of the figures, and the labour of preparing
the wooden panel and of laying the gold was so great that an artist
would naturally not make risky attempts towards something new, lest
he should spoil his work. In the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey
there is a thirteenth-century altar-piece of this kind, and you can
see the strips of vellum that were used to cover the joins of the
different pieces of wood forming the panel, beneath the layer of
plaster, which has now to a great extent peeled off.
The people liked to see their Old Testament stories and the stories
from the Life of Christ painted over and over again. They had become
fond of the versions of the tales which they had known and seen painted
when they were young, and did not wish them changed, so that the range
of subjects was not large. The same were repeated, and because of the
painter's fear of making mistakes it was natural that the same figures
should be repeated too. Thus, whatever the subject pictured, a
tradition was formed in each locality for the grouping and general
arrangement of the figures, and the most authoritative tradition for
such typical groupings was preserved in Constantinople or Byzantium,
from which city the 'Byzantine' school of painting takes its name.
Before 1200, Byzantium had been a centre of residence and the
civilizing influence of trade for eighteen centuries. It had been the
capital of the Roman Empire, and less civilized peoples from the north
had never conquered the town, destroying the Greek and Roman traditions,
as happened elsewhere in Europe. You have read how the Romans had to
withdraw their armies from England to defend Rome against the attacks
of the Goths from the north, and then how Britain was settled by Angles,
Saxons, Jutes, and Danes, who destroyed most of the Roman civilization.
A similar though much less complete destruction took place in Italy
a little later, when Goths and Lombards, who were remotely akin to
the Angles and Saxons, overwhelmed Roman culture. But next to
Constantinople, Rome had the best continuous tradition of art, for
the fine monuments of the great imperial days still existed in the
city. In Byzantium the original Greek population struggled on, and
continued to paint, and make mosaics, and erect fine buildings, till
the Turks conquered them in 1453. The Byzantines were wealthy and made
exquisite objects in gold, precious stones, and ivory. While they were
painting better than any other people in Europe, they too reproduced
the same subjects and the same figures over and over again, only the
figures were more graceful than those of the local Italian, English,
and French artists, who in varying degrees at different times tried
to paint like the Byzantine or Greek artists, but without quite the
same success. So long as there was no need for an artist to paint
anything but the old well-established subjects, and so long as people
desired them to be painted in the old conventional manner, there was
little reason why any painter should try to be original and paint what
was not wanted. But in the thirteenth century a great change took place.
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