. Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent . t is inharmony with the dramatic intention. If we take thesubject along with the art; if we enter into the feeling thatled him to paint Tlie Last of England, or Cordelias Portion,or Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, or Jesus WashelhPeters Feet, we shall find that the art does suit the poetry is not artless, much less inartistic; norare Madox Browns paintings. Only the art is not smoothand conventional; nor can it always be detached from thesubject and enjoyed apart. But to ask this is to beg thewhole question : to say tha
. Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent . t is inharmony with the dramatic intention. If we take thesubject along with the art; if we enter into the feeling thatled him to paint Tlie Last of England, or Cordelias Portion,or Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, or Jesus WashelhPeters Feet, we shall find that the art does suit the poetry is not artless, much less inartistic; norare Madox Browns paintings. Only the art is not smoothand conventional; nor can it always be detached from thesubject and enjoyed apart. But to ask this is to beg thewhole question : to say that painting is wholly a matter ofcolour and light, of tones and values, and that no expres-siveness must interfere with harmonious sweep and curve ofline. Carried to its logical extreme this would mean that aportrait painter ought never to paint any but a conventionallyhandsome man or beautiful woman. Painting would haveto forswear facts altogether, or emasculate them. Which isprecisely what some people seem to be intensely anxiousthat it should THE LAST OF ENGLAND FORD MADOX BROWN THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 151 Work and The Last of England were the only pictures ofimportance by Madox Brown of which the subjects weretaken from contemporary life. Hogarth, when he determinedto be something more than a mere imitator of the oldmasters, found in the life about him material for almost allhis pictures. The reformers of the mid-nineteenth centurytreated their own time with comparative neglect. In this,as we have seen, the movement differed from the realisticmovement in France. There are those who consider theattempt to picture times gone by little more than wasteof energy; who say that in the future people will not careto know what a painter in the nineteenth or twentiethcentury thought about the appearance of people and thingsin this, that, or the other century before or after Christ. Iwill content myself by saying that it seems to me this isquite likely not to be the case. If
Size: 1508px × 1658px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublish, booksubjectpainting
