ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2927, 20 April 1910, Page 81

ART AND ARTISTS.

HOGARTH: HE LOOKED FACTS IN THE FACE. "Time only will decide," said Hogarth, "whether I was the best or the worst face painter of my day." At last Time has decided, and most emphatically in favour of the man,who inscribed on the palette of the keen and weighty self-portrait in the National Gallery the "Line of Beauty and Grace." Recognition of Hogarth's genius has increased surely and rapidly during the last decade. For long he was accounted merely a skilled anecdotist, a trenchant satirist. Whistler, on the other hand, though he himself was a leader in the anti-subject crusade, held Hogarth to be sovereign among artists of the British school. Condemning in no measured terms the "phizmongers" of his day, Hogarth, instinctively, and with that integrity, intellectual and emotional, which contributes so potently to his art, united beauty and significance, character and inward grace, in a way that genius'only can compass. The best of his portraits, the best of his subject pictures, are animate, no less as thoughts and feelings exquisitely vestured, than as objectively realised human documents. Hogarth looked facts frankly in the face; dramatically, penetratively, he juxtaposed vice and virtue;, life for him was not a merely pretty promise path. Yet in picture after picture he reveals a sense of compassionate understanding. Daily News. EXPRESSING VISIONS. Every great artist sees visions, and his perfection in techinque is the means of expressing those visions. Beauty is not obvious, and the will has to be exercised to retain the sense of it. It means digging deeper and deeper to the heart of a subject, which when recalled is in the nature of a revelation, opening up a new world of ideas. This age of rush is not favourable to the development of that form of deep feeling. Prehistoric man, the vast designers of Greece, the earliest of Italian artists, Rembrandt, Blake, and Millet, seem to supply, in an almost infinite degree, the simple approach towards the depth of feeling. Without desiring to disparage today's efforts, I may say that they seem to me somewhat experimental. In no sense do they contain the whole truth, nothing probably but a small portion of it, which as art moves —and it must move on—may be serviceable to some great man when he appears, who will gather up all the fragments, control them, and join them together. Then, again, might appear the genius who in the palm of his hand might mould all Nature together, and create something analogous to the great age of Phidias in Greece and Michael Angelo in Florence. Any new art which disregards every antecedent will be as inefficient as if we tried to create an entirely new religion or a new morality.—Sir William Richmond, R.A.-

The artist is the delineator and master oTaftsman of sounds, verses, or shapes. He sees images of perfection transcending any visible object and impelling a desire to create. This power of seeing visions can neither be killed nor cultivated. It is in solitude that the spirit speaks, and by the sincere study of nature- and tradition that the craftsman succeeds. —Sir Win, Richmond. R.A.

There are many wealthy connoisseurs ■who buy works of art not for their intrinsic merit, but for what is supposed to be their authenticity. They buy a picture or a statue, in fact, as they might buy a letter of a famous man, merely because it is the handiwork of someone famous. —Times. The old Latin tag that "Ars est celare artem" is out of fashion, but no stronger proof of Raphael's greatness can be found than" that in these days, when portraiture Is the most living branch of painting his portraits are ranked among the highest, just as in other days some or other of .his other works, early or late, have always placed him among the greatest.—Adolf Paul Oppe. _ ~ As a piece of worldly wisdom, I could recommend to collectors that when in doubt about a puzzling picture they shoulci attach to their possessions Rome wholly obscure and despised name. How happy will the critic be to announce his discovery that "instead of the worthless dauber to whom it is attributed, we have here a genuine example of that little-known master, hitherto not recognised at ,his true worth" etc. ! —LawTence Binyon, in the Saturday Review. _ ' ; . , , , . The Italian Primitives had no desire to make their pictures look like life. Art to them was consolation, a dream of a happier world, the curtain of the unseen lifted and found to be radiant. They strove to express what they felt, not what they saw. A gold sky to them was quite as natural asa sky of blue, and the landscapes in which they set their prettv angels and placid, holv women were always serene, hills with little zig-zag ascending paths to bright, unearthly cities; and below blue lakes and waterways that they loved to make flowing to the horizon —the open gate. —C. L. Hind, in the London Evening News. •'■ ■■"•■" i Rembrandt's hold on form was always closely dependent on the thino- seen rather than "on any inner ideal of plastic logic, and was thus, with all its tremendous possibilities of intimacy, a little untrustworthy. Consistency of other kinds—consistency of tone and consistency of emphasis—he was always a little too ready to palter with, if by so doing he could endow his work with a closer allusivenees —making 1 of it a convention less finely ordered, perhaps, but with a fuller resemblance to the thing represented. An extraordinary technical cleverness may disguise for the layman this slight want of technical probity, but with Rembrandt there was always a tendency for the human to take precedence of the artistic interest. —Athenaeum. "Velasquez had some imitators, hut he did not form a school. For this reason when we speak of the School of Madrid since Velasquez we do not mean a school of his imitators, but of pointers who flourished in Madrid at a later date, some | of whom imitated him, but others kept j aoart not to be considered in i that light.' Velasquez is the great figure j of he school, which he-raised to that rank J by his own talent and renown. He first adopted a broad and sympathetic manner; I he made it possible for those who followed • him to attain to a sane and masterly execution, even if, by his dominant personality, he sometimes destroyed the j origin&litv of the talent of those with whom he woi'ked.—Aureliano de Bernele y Moret. '