UNIVERSITY LITERARY SOCIETY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18895, 22 June 1923, Page 7

UNIVERSITY LITERARY SOCIETY.

The fortnightly meeting of the Otafeo University Literary Society on Wednesday night was addressed by Mr R. Donn on. the subject of “Pictures.” Mr Donn said that art in various forma was a constant factor in our everyday lives, and pictorial art was one of the forms that gave us the greatest and most continual pleasure. We could and should have pictures on the walls of our homes—pictures that we could appreciate and that meapt something to us. Rut we could not learn to appreciate cur small pictures properly until wo knew something of - the great pictures of the greatest artists jn the history of painting. Very few of those pictures were accessible to us in this country except in the. form of small reproductions, but they were to be seen in the great galleries of England and the Continent; and when we visited those galleries we should know at least a little about the masterpieces in them, we should be able to recognise an old friend here and there, and. we should at all costs be above the level of the tourists who gazed blandly at a wall of pictures and said, "I can see nothing in them,” or of Uiose who spent their time in the galleries of Italy talking Paris scandal. We know something of what ''composition” :in a picture meant, continued M f Bonn, and be able to realise the difference between' a picture end a photographic reproduction. Ruskin, even though he was the champion of Turner, had done an immense amount of harm to British art by advocating this slavish imitation of Nature. The purpose of a picture was not to perpetuate the likeness of a landscape or even of a person, but through the landscape or the figure* to express the artist's own feelings. To give a definition of a picture was almost impossible, but the test of a good picture on the wall of one’s room was this: “Can I look at it always and never tire bf.it; can I go back to it every day and find something new?” ' Mr Donn then traced briefly the history of early pictorial art. The Egyptian specimens were mostly fairly primitive. The Greeks had left very few examples, but they were wonderfully good and wonderfully living. After the Greek period came the early Christian influence, which dominated art and in many ways hampered nta development; the Byzantine Church, using pictuers largely as a means of teaching its illiterate people, established conventjbhs and bound painters down by its traditions so that their work was invariably stiff and formal. In the fourteenth century the emancipation began, with Cimbue, Dussio, Giotto, and others. They turned to Nature instead of tradition, they watched men and landscapes, and they, went and painted them. Several other factors helped the progress of art from the old, lifeless, decorative style to the new, living, sepaking one. First, the science of perspective was applied to painting, and artists how to indicate distance and relative positions in their pictures. Then light and shade came in. It was curious how the earlier . artists,, like .all young children, had no idea of showing different degrees of lighting Towards the end of the Italian period'great stress was laid on composition; in fact, it was overdone and too much attention was paid to tho arrangement of the parts of a. picture in lines and curves. Finally, more interest was taken in landscapes, even when they were only backgrounds, and they were painted 'more carefully and with greater resemblance to Nature. It was in that direction that modern British painting had developed.. To-day we had practically discarded the old story picture. Mr Donn went on to talk of individual pictures, coloured reproductions, reproductions of which were thrown on the screen with the epidiascope. There was a. long series of examples of the early Italian masters, followed by a few of Velasquez, the great Spanish “painters’ painter,” und one or two of Turner, the “father of British watercolour.” At the close of the meeting Mr Dona was accorded a hearty vote of thanks.