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DEC 12 1900

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

The Educator-Fournal.

VOL. I.

DECEMBER, 1900.

NUMBER 5.

ON THE TEACHER'S STUDY OF PICTURES.

JOHN L. LOWES.

The layman's point of view, in art as in religion, has sometimes real value just because it is not professional. And perhaps there may be some suggestiveness in a few hints about picture study from the point of view of one whose work lies in another, though a kindred field. Suggestions only they will be, and that within the bounds, it is believed, of what is possible for teachers of even the smallest and most isolated schools, while not without wider possibilities for those with larger resources at command.

The first question asked is usually about books. One is inclined to divide books about art into two classes-books that are born, and books that are made. The first are not many, but they are alive. The second are growingly plentiful, and are apt to fall under Lord Bacon's category of "distilled books"-books that arise from a skillful squeezing of the original sources when they are not confessedly mere compilations or working manuals. Each class has its use, the second as the first. But the use of the second sort, to the exclusion of the first, constitutes an added element in what is already a growing menace to real culture, so far as that might otherwise arise from an appreciation of the best in art. For it is a menace, that we are seemingly coming to believe that study manuals and penny reproductions, together with a few better reproductions on the walls, will give us the essentials of what art has to give. It is just the old tendency in one more of its Protean forms the enthusiastic bias, to which we are peculiarly susceptible in our

schools, towards supposing that because a thing does much, it therefore does all that there is to do. That means another fad, and the psychology of fads, so far as they affect the schools, will never properly be understood until we duly recognize that eagerness of spirit which "tastes the fruit before the blossom falls"-a noble quality -but cheats us of the fruit by feeding us the buds. To study art simply as it is applied to decoration of the schools, is to defeat the very end the decoration is to serve. It is only when it is studied independently of those considerations, in its real and not its accidental relations, that it becomes enriching, and something else than a veneer. Culture can never be poured into the schools; it comes slowly, through the widening culture of the teachers. And that is why-since books on art are necessary evils, when most of the art itself is thousands of miles away books of the first class are a prime requisite.

What are they? They are the works of the great interpreters of art, who do for Michelangelo or Botticelli something of what a Booth or a Salvini does for Shakespeare, or a Von Bülow for Beethoven. We have learned to take Ruskin's obiter dicta with a large grain of allowance; but for infinite suggestiveness, for the contagion of a fine enthusiasm, for inspiration in the unfaltering quest of what is beautiful in art and life-for the two with him were never separate there is still no source to which we can turn with mor assurance than to his vivid pages. Chapters like those in the third volume of "Modern Painters" on Classical, Mediae

val, and Modern Landscape; like those in volume two on Typical and Vital Beauty, or on the Imagination Penetrative and the Imagination Contemplative; like that on the Two Boyhoods, in volume five, or the first seven chapters of the initial volume; chapters like that on St. Mark's, in "Stones of Venice," or almost any in the "Seven Lamps of Architecture" — work like this, while it may not give explanations, as a manual would, of any single picture that a teacher has to use, will give him something that all the manuals ever printed never can-an insight into what art means. And read in the light of this, whatever picture it may be that he has to study, will be instinct with new significance. For books on art are like teachers in this too-their office has been

"For the most, to say they so have seen; For the better, what it was they saw; the best

Impart the gift of seeing to the rest."

That is what Walter Pater does in those wonderful essays in his volume on "The Renaissance"-the essays on the School of Giorgione, the Poetry of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Luca della Robbia, and Winckelmann. That is what Maurice Hewlett does in such chapters from "Earthwork out of Tuscany" as the one with the fantastic title Of Boils and the Ideal (a Colloquy with Perugino), or that on the Soul of a Fact, or, for some of us, the Quattrocentisteria the story of How Sandro Botticelli saw Simonetta in the Spring. And even chapters like those from Mrs. Oliphant's "Makers of Florence," on the Angelical Painter, the Piagnoni Painters, and Michelangelo, have the high value that only loving sympathy can give. Nor has Lessing's "Laocoon" lost all its stimulus with time; and there is Symond's invaluable volume on the Fine Arts, in his "History of the Renaissance in Italy;" while studies such as Berenson's "Painters of the Renaissance" give the last word of modern criticism on the works of which they treat. And the claim that books of this class, as well as the indispensable histories, are not easily accessible to teach

ers can be no longer made in this state, thanks to the traveling libraries and the good judgment that selected them. Below are given the lists of the books that are gathered together in the two traveling libraries on the Fine Arts-the very books that teachers need, and usually can not Both libraries have been available Neither of them has On such a showing,

get.* since August, 1899. ever been borrowed. silence is golden.

Books of the second class-such as (to name a few by way of illustration) Burrage and Bailey's School Sanitation and Decoration; Wilson's Picture Study in Elementary Schools; the Riverside Art Series; the monograph on Art Decoration in Schoolrooms, in the Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Education, 1895-96, Vol. 2; or the discussions in Vols. LX and LXI of the Reports of the Massachusetts State Board of Education are well known to teachers, and need not be further discussed here. It is, however, on the teacher's study of the pictures themselves, as an essential preliminary to any right appreciation of them by the pupils, that the emphasis needs to be laid. nothing short of genuine study on the teacher's part-study that is both patient and loving-will bring that sort of disciplined enthusiasm which alone will keep the movement from resulting further, on the one hand, in a heterogeneous covering of walls with pictures bad and good, in the belief that in the very presence of a picture is some magic influence; and, on the other, in an equally heterogeneous massing of dead fact about the artists and their work.

For

And, first, a word about the study of the individual picture. I am not sure that the best thing a true teacher of art could

Indiana Traveling Library, No. 21.-Summer Holidays, Child; Legends of the Madonna, Jameson; History of Arts, Vols. 1-2, Luebke; Schools and Masters of Painting, Radcliffe: Stones of Venice, Vols. 1-3, Ruskin; Modern French Masters, Van Dyke; History of Sculpture, Marquand and Frothingham: Lives of the Painters, Vols. 1-4, Vasari (Blashfield-Hopkins edition) Indiana Traveling Library, No. 22-Art and Criticism, Child: Short History of Art, De Forest; Sacred and Legendary Art, Vols. 1-2, Jameson: Memoirs of Italian Painters, Jameson; Schools and Masters of Sculpture. Radcliffe: Modern Painters, Vols. 1-5. Ruskin; History of Painting, Van Dyke: History of Architecture, Hamlin; Art for Art's Sake, Van Dyke.

do for those of us who want really to know pictures, would not be to follow Agassiz's example in the case of Dr. Jordan and the fish, and leave us alone, day after day, with one great picture and nothing else. For what we first need to learn, is how to let an object-be it picture, poem, flower, or fish-speak its own message. You can climb up over the wall into a picture; you can break your way into it, if you will; but the only door into its meaning is the long and patient dwelling upon every feature of the picture itself, until-as a great naturalist said of things so treated in another field-it shines. If we talked less about "throwing light on pictures," and waited oftener before them until they grew luminous from within themselves, we should be twice blessed—we should know the picture as in no other way, and we should discover in ourselves new powers and capabilities of which we did not dream. For in studying a picture, or a poem, or an animalcule, we find our deepest self by first giving up ourself-by listening, instead of speaking-and then this richer self stands ready to know the very object that enriched it, and the endless action and reaction has set in by which the life of the spirit grows. That is how a picture or a poem, or an organismeducates; in this, true science and true art are absolutely at one. The first thing to do with a picture is just what Keats sugrests for a poem-to "wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it," until it "serves as a starting-post toward all the two and thirty Palaces." To have had one picture thus grow luminous with meaning, is worth more than all the artificial light a dozen books can give.

But even more suggestive is the carrying of the process one step further, to the comparison of picture with picture. Just as the very life of nature study lies-to take one phase out of a hundred-in the comparison of plant with plant, or animal with animal, until one sees how each one is adapted to its own environment; just as our school readers may be made endlessly interesting, instead of deadly dull, by grouping together all they have to offer

about birds (Bryant's Water-Fowl with Celia Thaxter's Sandpiper, for instance),

or

flowers (Herrick's Daffodils with Wordsworth's), or the sea (Tennyson's Shell with The Chambered Nautilus), or any of a dozen other things; just as the wider study of literature grows full of fresh life as we see how variously Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth touch the same effects of cloud, or wave, or sunlight, or Tennyson and Browning, Thackeray and George Eliot, Stevenson and Kipling deal with the same problems of the human soul; so also picture study grows in richness in a thousand ways when this same principle is invoked. And the spiderspinning of art talk out of one's own insides, to which we are all so fatally liable, would at least be made unnecessary by the safe, sane hold upon the objective that this sort of study gives. It is practicable study, too. The very best imported photographs, four by five inches, by Alinari, Sommer, Naya, and others, can be had unmounted for fifteen cents apiece, or $1.50 a dozen. For my own part, I believe a dozen of these are of more real value for purposes of study, as well as for the nucleus of a collection, than the one hundred and fifty penny pictures to be had for the same amount. For with pictures as with books, it is not so often the many cheap ones, quickly and easily acquired, that really and deeply influence the taste, as it is the few of the best, the slow and loving accumulation, it may be, of many years. For art is long-though we do seem trying hard to forget the fact. Yet, with their limitations clearly understood and frankly admitted, such reproductions as the Earl Thompson penny blue-prints (sometimes from the very best negatives), the Perry pictures, the Harpers' penny black and white prints, or the Witter penny pictures, have their use.*

Let me make clear, then, if possible, a few of the ways in which this sort of study

The Extract from Catalogue of Braun's Carbon Prints. -(Braun, Clement & Co., 249 Fifth Ave., New York), to be had for 50 cents, contains 360 small, but very clear and distinct reproductions of famous works of art, could be used by teache's, and where other material is not available for such comparative work as is above suggested. Its data on artists and their work are also valuable. The imported photographs referred to, may be had of C. H. Dunton & Co., 298 Boylston St., Boston, and others.

may be carried on; still keeping in mind the teacher's rather than the pupil's needs. Place side by side, for instance, a dozen pictures by the same artist Millet, or Rembrandt, or Leonardo, or Corot. By dwelling upon this larger group as one has previously dwelt upon the individual pictures, feature after feature appears as common to them all. Now it is something so obvious as the single type of subjects, as in Millet, Jules Breton, or Corot; now some distinctive handling of line, as when one sees the flow of lines into each other in Raphael's work, the opposition of line to line in Michelangelo a contrast so richly suggestive of the different attitudes of the two men towards life; now some favorite play of light and shadow, as in Rembrandt, or charm of lucid air, as in Corot; now some touch so slight as the characteristic treatment of drapery one sees in Botticelli's strangely clinging, often flower-embroidered robes; now some individual touch in the background, such as Leonardo's fondness for rocks and the effects of moving waters, Fra Angelico's for the bare walls and corridors of his beloved San Marco, Perugino's for the ridged outlines of his Umbrian hills, crowned with or sheltering his own home towers and battlements-as are Dürer's with the many-windowed roofs of Nürnberg. Or it may be some figure that appears and reappears-in Tenier's tav

ern

scenes, the head peering through the windows; in Wouverman's battle pieces, the ever-present white horse; the daughters of Palma Vecchio, in Titian's canvases; the dark, proud face of his wife, in Andrea del Sarto's Madonnas; in Botticelli's women-Pallas, Venus, the Spring, the Virgin Mother-the features of Simonetta. And as one studies, subtler likenesses come out, revealing little habits of thought, glimpses of how the world embodies itself to the artist's soul, touches even of his inmost character, until we come to feel something of the man himself behind his work. And when, after getting that, we go still further, and this time compare man with man-Raphael with Michelangelo, Bellini with Carpaccio, Millet with Jules Breton - each throws back light upon the other; clearly

marked types appear; and the world of art begins to open up to us in vistas hitherto undreamed of. More than that, there is developed what is virtually a new sense

the feeling of the artist's individuality. It used to be, during Reinecke's administration of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, that at the Wednesday rehearsals the order of the printed program was never followed. The result was a magnificent discipline in recognizing for oneself whose music, at any given time, was being played; until by and by, before the orchestra had gotten far beyond the opening bars, even though the composition were unknown before, one learned with confidence to say: That is Haydn, or Schumann, or Goldmark, or Brahms. It is this same intimate sense of the painter's individuality, as the informing spirit of all his work-a sense which books can never give-that comes at last from dwelling long and patiently upon his pictures.

And this phase of the study can be carried further still. Listen to illustrate once more from a kindred field-to a Beethoven recital, in which are given, for example, one of the earlier sonatas, and the first concerto; then one of the Fidelio overtures, and such a sonata as the Apassionata; then one of the last five sonatas, or a movement from the Ninth Symphony. If one have ears to hear, there will be a revelation, through the growing fullnessof the music, of the development of a mighty spirit-the same development one feels in reading through Shakespeare's early comedies, sparkling and sunny, into the stress of the histories, and on through the deeps of the great tragedies, to the peace of the Tempest and the Winter's Tale. Now development no less splendid can be traced, I know, in Rembrandt's work, as one sees it spread out before one in a great gallery; and I believe that some. sense of it often can be gained by arranging in their order, so far as possible, the pictures of the various periods of any master's work.

Still another study of this sort can be made. If a Haydn sonata should at once be followed by one of Beethoven's first sonatas; if after Weber's Oberon overture should be played immediately one of Wag

ner's earlier operatic preludes; in each case one could readily detect the master's influence upon the follower's early work. And if side by side with Raphael's youthful paintings one place examples of his master Perugino, the common features will stand out so vividly-as, for instance, in the Marriage of the Virgin in the Brera at Milan-that one could almost confuse the pupil's with the master's hand. And as one keeps adding Raphael's maturer work, it is possible to watch the growing individuality obliterate the traces of the earlier influence. To take another instance, Fra Lippo Lippi was Botticelli's master, and he in turn Filippino Lippi's; and there are few more fascinating studies than to place beside each other the works of those three men (such as the two Holy Families and the Madonna that hang together in the Prometheus Chamber of the Pitti Palace), and trace the handing down. of influence-in certain indescribable effects of drapery, in the choice of backgrounds, in the very expression on the haunting faces of the child-angels with which all three love to surround their wistful-faced Madonnas. To translate dry facts like the statement that A was the pupil of B, into living, breathing figures such as these, is to add new joy to life. Once more, I am writing for teachers. Much of this work can be done, of course, by children; but it is only the teacher who has steeped himself in it for its and his own sake, who will know what and what not to give to them. The main thing is that through it his own life has been enriched. For those old portfolios of drawings and engravings from the great Italian and Dutch masters that still are to be seen in Goethe's house in Weimar, and appear and reappear in so many loving references through the pages of his conversations, gave him, I think, no more delight or inspiration, as he pointed out to Eckermann the differences between Poussin and Claude Lorraine, or the source of some effect in Rubens or in Ruysdael, than we may gain from such collections as every one of us can make.

If we pass to grouping, not by artists, but by subjects, the possibilties are endless. The very interest of life grows

largely out of the way in which different men meet the same situation. How the New England poets-Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant-met the common problem of slavery, and how it served as a touchstone for the character of each; how the great novelists, from Fielding down to Kipling, treat the idea of love; how Shakespeare's women differ from those of Tennyson-these and scores of similar questions gain their attraction from our instinctive desire to know how the same influence reacts on different natures. And art is full of just such opportunities. The Annunciation: how did it appeal to Leonardo, and to Fra Angelico, and to Lorenzo de Credi, and to Andrea del Sarto-to take four pictures that lie before me. The attitude of Mary-here proud, here meek and lowly, here with a gesture of ineffable surprise; the varying types and postures the figures of the angel show; the suggestions, endless in their interest, of the settings of the scene-these and a host of other differences invite to a study that fairly glows with life. And

to compare in this creative way the varying treatments of such common themes as the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Marriage at Cana, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Supper at Emmaus-to take a single class of subjectswould be to oven up to most of us another world. Now it will be the differences between the Netherlands and Italy, between north and south, as when, for instance, we contrast Jan Steen's conception of the Marriage .t Cana with that of Veronese, or Holbein's Madonna of the Burgomaster Meyer with Corregio's Saint George Madonna. Now it will be the difference between two periods, as when we set beside Bellini's or Botticelli's or Francesco Francia's Madonnas, whose eyes see visions of another world, the bold-eyed Magdalenes and Marys of Corregio and Titian-a difference in which lie latent the forces that divide the modern from the mediaeval world. Gather up all the pictures from the old masters - Florentine, Umbrian, Venetian, German, Dutch -in which a bit of landscape forms the background, and study them; then place beside them landscapes such as those of

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