The History of Modern Painting Volume 1
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The History of Modern Painting Volume 1 By Richard Muther The History Of Modern Painting Volume 1 BOOK I THE LEGACY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CHAPTER I COMMENCEMENT OF MODERN ART IN ENGLAND IF the question arises, why modern art has been compelled to find expression for itself in a form different from that of the art of the earlier centuries, we must first call attention to the change that has taken place in the fundamental conditions of society. Formerly, the chief supporters of art were the two leading powers of Church and King. The most noted works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, of Velasquez and Murillo, of Rubens and Van Dyck, were executed either for the churches or for the reigning princes of their country. The patron of modern art is the citizen. The old culture of the clerics and aristocrats has been superseded by that of the middle classes, and the beginnings of modern art must therefore be sought in the country in which this class first developed its distinctive character—in England. England, as early as the eighteenth century, was already a land of citizens. At a time when there was to be found on the Continent acute mockery of what was old and outworn, conjoined with the most enthusiastic and joyous faith in the future, the great and wealthy England had established herself in the van of the new age. Here Voltaire saw with astonishment for the first time, when he arrived in London as an exile at the age of thirty-two, the free, open life of a great people; here he learnt to know a country where there is “much difference of rank, but none that is not based on merit; where one could think freely without being restrained by slavish terror.” Here was the idea of a modern free state already accomplished at a time when, upon the Continent, the thunderclouds of the impending storm hardly cast their first shadow. Here the notion of a united family life had first developed, upon the foundation of a civil order and security. Here, therefore, were first broken down those barriers around the territory of literature and art within which the spirit of the Renaissance had raised its wonderful flowers, and the road was begun along which the nineteenth century should advance. Simultaneously with the growth of the middle classes there arose the need for a domestic, practical literature. Books were required which people could read by their fireside, in the seclusion of the family circle, in country districts. For that, the stiff and antiquated poetry of courtiers and academicians, which had hitherto been poured out upon the world from France, was hardly suitable. To the cold Classicism represented by Pope, there succeeded in English literature—far earlier than was the case elsewhere—the delineation of what was immediately contemporary. At the same time that Mdlle. de Scudéry— when it was a question of describing the court of the Great King, the society of Louis XIV—felt herself bound to translate her theme into the antique and write a Cyrus, the English novel had taken its motives from actual life. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is the first book in which man and nature are depicted without the introduction of antique types or fairies; the first novel in which the details of real life are displayed, and what had been hitherto neglected is granted an exact delineation. At a time when people in other countries were occupied with representations of the antique, the English novelists had embarked on the intimacy of the family circle. After Richardson, who laboriously yet with animation described everyday life, followed Fielding, with his sharp observation, homely and humorous; then Goldsmith, with his serene outlook of untroubled equanimity, his unsurpassed miniatures; Smollett, with his crude and satirical character sketching; and the audacious and witty Laurence Sterne, whom Nietzsche has called the most “gallant” of all authors. At the same time tragedy, too, descended from the court and the nobility into the sphere of domestic life; showing that here too were significant fortunes and conflicts, which stories strike a truer human note than those of kings and heroes. Painting moved along the same road; and whilst in other countries, with the beginning of the century, the high, aristocratic art, which was the offspring of the Renaissance, gradually waned, the plebeian paintings of Hogarth laid the foundations of that art which prevailed in thebourgeois nineteenth century. English art had this advantage in playing a pioneering part, that it had no old traditions to stand in its way; it had no great past. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England had been content to offer hospitality to Holbein and Van Dyck, and to collect the works of foreign masters in her galleries. Her art sprang into existence suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and thence developed exclusively on native lines. Since the English could not lean either upon an old or a foreign model, nor enter into a round of subjects that had already been brought to perfection, they turned from the outset quite naturally into the road which was only to be trodden later by the other nations still in the bondage of tradition. They took up, to a certain extent, the thread which the Dutch, who appeared in the seventeenth century as the most modern people in art, had let drop: the progressive ideas of Holland had come over to England with the “glorious revolution,” with William of Orange and Queen Anne; whilst in Holland itself the French invasion of 1672 had caused a reaction to the courtly idea, against which the English took up an attitude of conscious and rigid protest. This opposition is clearly expressed by the English æsthetic writers. The most important name to be mentioned is that of Shaftesbury. Beneath the favour of the court in France, he says, art has suffered. We Englishmen live in an age in which freedom has arisen. Such a people does not require, in order that art may prosper, an ambitious king to breed, by means of his pensions, a race of flattering Court painters. Our civil liberty affords us a sufficient foundation, and our liberty leads us to absolute verity in art. Thus did Shaftesbury enunciate his leading æsthetic doctrine; it was his constant message, and it was constantly repeated with great emphasis: “All beauty is truth.” “The search after truth leads you to nature.” “Truth is the mightiest thing in the world, since it exercises sovereign rights over the creations of the imagination.” But what must art be in order to produce truth? “The strictest imitation of nature.” By this word Shaftesbury does not understand what we understand by the word “nature”; not, in the first instance, so much the nature surrounding us, in its outward manifestations, but, above all, an intimate human reality. Let the painter represent the reality of human inwardness. Still life, the animal world, landscape,—all that, Shaftesbury explains, is most valuable. But another and a higher life exists in man than in the beasts and the woods, and there is the true object of art. In no case should the artist proceed from external vision; for then he will obtain fashionable attitudes, theatrical unreality, or, in the most favourable instance, a formal, decorative embellishment. Of what value is that in comparison with a single real presentation of character? How insignificant would every external form seem in contrast to each single feature of this intimate manner! Here is the second characteristic of English painting. It proceeds neither, like that of the sixteenth century, from formulas, nor, like the Dutch, from the picturesque, but, like to the English novel of character, from an intellectual impulse; it strives not after beauty of form and physical, sensuous grace, but, in the first place, after intellectual expression. And from this there follows immediately a third trait. If art is to make the inwardness of man its subject, the artist cannot remain an indifferent portrayer. He will make great distinctions, will bring into prominence what is meritorious or censurable in every character—he will become a moralist. Only so can he conform to that last and highest function which Shaftesbury assigns to the painter. The liberty which the English nation had fought for in the “glorious Revolution” brought forth, in the course of years, while Shaftesbury was writing, a fruitful crop of dissoluteness and licence. The mortification of the flesh of the Puritans was followed by so violent a recrudescence of sensuality that it was as though the whole menagerie of the passions had been unchained. London swarmed with criminals; drunkenness was an epidemic. The moral idea awoke amongst the cultivated classes. Might it not be possible, with the help of education, for that to be overcome? And so Shaftesbury’s view of art comprised a third, and very dangerous, element; namely, that to fulfil the most serious mission of that culture which had ensued from the free and natural conditions in England—even in the realm of æsthetics—the painter, like the poet, must appear as the moral teacher of his age. Imagine an artist who fulfils these conditions and you have, as a result, Hogarth, with all his qualities and defects. What marks the greatness of Hogarth is his freedom from foreign and ancient influences. The eighteenth century came in as an academic age in art. Turning away from life, it spent itself in allegory and the imitation of typical figures that had been inherited from the Renaissance and petrified into academic work. Gods, in whom no one any longer believed, hovered, at least in paint, over a race which was without enthusiasm.