THE MISERIES OF AN ARTIST

Otago Witness, Issue 2369, 27 July 1899, Page 54

THE MISERIES OF AN ARTIST

In the Magazine of Art for June Mr G. A. Storey, A.R.A., thus compares the position of tho artist and the photographer. The passage occurs in an article on ""is Photography Among the Fine Arts?" :

But without assuming for artists generally the greatness which is only attained by the few, still, even with those less gifted, theirs is the work of human hands guided by observation and intelligence, and feeling ancl taste --intelligence, perhaps, that frequently eras, feeling that is earnest but often capricious, and taste that is not always good taste: co that art is necessarily full of faults and shortcomings, and yet with all its imperfections it is a labour of love ; it springs from the heart and the brain, and enlists our sympathies because it is human. And then mark the toil, the sacrifice— the rubbing out as well as tho painting- in—the sorrow, the joy, the faults, and the virtues ; how human it all is. "Even in the case of indifferent and unsuccessful painters there is something touching about the work — the hope deferred, the dream dissolved, the agony of despair. Many a poor painter has done himself to death because his heart was broken. He could not realise his ideal, or he felt he was incapable of the task he had undertaken.

Ah ! you don't know the bitterness of soul that an unsuccessful painter suffers; you spurn him, you treat him with contempt, but this is nothing to the grief at his heart, that he has failed to reach the goal for which he set out with so much gladness. You don't know the tears he sheds when he is alone, you don't know the poverty that strikes him down, and the shame of it. " I doubt whether the photographer is quito so sensitive; besides, he can laugh at criticism ; you may find fault with his work, but it does not break his heart ; he may break his negative and make another, but he does not. I think, hang himself, as many a. poor deluded slave of the brush has done?"