Identifier: fiftyyearsofmode00phyt (find matches)
Title: Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Phythian, John Ernest, 1858-
Subjects: Painting Painting
Publisher: London, G. Richards
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
, for hisown part, to disregard all the arbitrary rules in vogue in ex-isting schools, and to seek his own road in art by that patientstudy of nature on which the great masters had foundedtheir sweetness and strength of style. How he set himselfto work out this theory we may learn from a statement ofhis own regarding his picture The Hireling Shepherd. Ina letter to the present writer, he said : My first object as anartist was to paint, not Dresden china bergers, but a realshepherd, and a real shepherdess, and a landscape in fullsunlight, with all the colour of luscious summer, withoutthe faintest fear of any landscape painters who had renderednature before. There are probably few people sufficiently interested inthe subject to give it serious thought who do not think thatthis picture would have been more beautiful had Mr.Holman Hunt paid more regard to precedent. Nature mayteach design, but she only carries the teaching part way;the pupil must go to a finishing school—perhaps he had
Text Appearing After Image:
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD 27 better have other teachers as well as nature all the time—ifhis education is to be complete. And if and when Mr.Holman Hunts pictures are wanting in beauty, it is chieflybecause he has trusted too much to nature as a teacher ofdesign. Not that he could wholly escape from precedent.His art is better than his creed. In this very picture it iswhere he abandons his creed that design enters, as inthe determination of the positions of the sheep and of thetrees so as to form lines that will lead up to the figures andharmonise with their bounding lines. If and when Mr.Holman Hunts pictures fail in beauty, it is because more orless of the recorded fact escapes from his design: the pic-ture is not an aesthetic whole. To adapt what the curatesaid about his egg, the picture is only good in parts. Thisis especially true with regard to colour; there is often muchbeautiful harmonising of colour as well as loveliness of indi-vidual tints; but often no colour-scheme

Note About Images