Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Handbook to the National Portrait Gallery, 1872
Portrait painting may be said to stand at the head of all the various departments of painting. Of these it is the most difficult, because the most intellectual; but in its results is the most satisfactory. The historical painter arranges his groups, dresses, and incidents according to correct authorities, and trusts to a bold fancy or to the suggestions of friends for a judicious disposition of his characters. The painter of genre obtains his situation or incident, also by suggestion; and as the little scene tells its own story on the canvas, the painter is so far assisted. Landscape painting, indeed, if the artist goes beyond mere imitation of trees, and fields, and skies, requires a higher intellectual operation; namely, the discovering the moods and humours of nature, the mystery which gives the charm to some landscapes, which is independent of sunlight or shadow, with other influences to which the undefined poetry of the scene is owing. This piercing behind the veil to read the mind of nature is a high, intelligent operation, but one far lower than reading the mind of man behind the mask of the human face. The most vulgar of vulgar errors is the belief that perfect imitation is art. It is, in fact, the lowest and easiest shape of artistic success. It is in the Spirit of the Chinese tailor, who reproduced the patch or stain on the pattern given him to work from. Any copy of an objectthat has life will always be unfaithful, because wanting life, which is certainly not supplied by the conventional stare or hard gaze of the average portrait. For this reason a photograph is outside art, as well as a plaster cast, and the like. A terra-cotta casting might fall within the same category; but the artist gives a few touches here and there, transfers a part of his own feeling to it by a little free handling and moulding, and from that moment it acquires a certain life, and becomes artistic. The operation of ordinary commercial portrait painting is founded on some such vicious principle. The sitter is laboriously and faithfully copied, with his face and dress. There is not time to learn the character, habitual expres sion, and other familiar marks and tokens, which would require either long acquaintance or that brilliant intuition which belongs only to real genius. Such is, indeed, beyond the price that can be afforded for the average picture. Again, supposing some attempt to be made at catching expression and character, it is only an expression called up by the painter's order, as when he gives the hackneyed direction, smile now think of something pleasant. This curious air of unreality is further aided by the conventional attitude so much in favour with sitters and painters. 'if some unsophisticated stranger from a barbarous country, unfamiliar with portraits, were called on to state what attitude of daily life the gentleman standing by the pillar and red curtain was supposed to represent, or what the half-length smirking from the canvass was doing, he would be puzzled to answer. The only intelligible solution, which would be the real one, is, that he was standing there to be looked at, that he was conscious of this operation, and that the attitude of his mind, as well as of his body, both revealed the same impression. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com