Sorry.
But so it is. The art critic himself wants it to tell a story, and so
does the artist. Each would rather die than admit it, but if you set
either walking, with no one to watch him, down a row of pictures you
would see him looking at one picture after another with that expression
of interest which only comes on a human face when it is following a
human relation. A mere splash of colour would bore him; still more a
mere medley of black and white. The story may have a very simple plot;
it may be no more than an old woman sitting on a chair, or a landscape,
but a picture, if a man can look at it all, tells a story right enough.
It must interest men, and the less of a story it tells the less it will
interest men. A good landscape tells so vivid a story that children (who
are unspoilt) actually transfer themselves into such a landscape, walk
about in it, and have adventures in it.
They make another complaint against the public, that it desires painting
to be lifelike. Of course it does! The statement is accurate, but the
complaint is based on an illusion. It is you and I and all the world
that want painting to imitate its object. There is a wonderful picture
in the Glasgow Art Gallery, painted by someone a long time ago, in which
a man is represented in a steel cuirass with a fur tippet over it, and
the whole point of that picture is that the fur looks like fur and the
steel looks like steel.
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