PAINTER 



PAINTING 



695 



Painter, WILLIAM, author of the Palace of 

 Pleasure, was most probably a Kentishman, and 

 born about 15'25. He seems to have been master 

 of Sevenoaks school about 1560, but early next 

 year became Clerk of the Ordnance in the Tower, 

 with a stipend of eightpence a day. He kept this 

 post all his days, married, seems to have had a 

 somewhat easy standard of honesty, grew rich, and 

 bought lands. He made his will in 1594, and died 

 probably soon after. In 1566 he published the 

 first volume of The Palace of Pleasure ' beautified, 

 adorned, and well furnished, with Pleasant Histories 

 and Excellent Nouells selected out of divers good 

 and commendable authors;' the second volume, 

 'containing manifold store of goodly Histories, 

 Tragical matters, and other Moral argument, very 

 requisite for delight and profit,' followed in 1567. 

 Of the first volume the principal source was the 

 Heptameron ; of the second, Bandello, through the 

 medium of the French translations of Boaistuau 

 and Belleforest ; but, in the definitive edition of the 

 whole work ( 1575), to both parts stories were added 

 from Boccaccio, Ser Giovanni, and Straparola. 

 These last two at least he must have taken directly 

 from the Italian. Painter's work became exceed- 

 ingly popular, and indeed was the main source 

 whence many dramatists drew their plots. Even 

 in almost all Shakespeare's comedies we see the 

 prevalence of the convention in early English 

 comedy in favour of Italian plots, names, and 

 places. Aschani in the Scholenmster denounces 

 the 'bawdie stories . . . enchantments of Circes, 

 brought out of Italie, to marre mens maners in 

 England,' and there can l>e little doubt that here 

 lie points directly at Painter, though he does not 

 name his liook. Painter's English is easy and un- 

 atl'ected, but lacks the dignity the reader expects 

 of an Elizaliethan. His book is the largest work 

 in prose between the Morte Darthur and North's 

 Plutarch, but its real importance is that it intro- 

 duced into our literature many of the best novels 

 of Boccaccio, Bandello, and Margaret of Navarre. 



Joseph Haslt- wood edited an admirable edition in 1813 

 (2 vols.) ; a later is that by Joseph Jacobs (3 vols. 1890). 



Painter's Colic. See LEAD-POISONING. 



Painting. It is convenient to divide this 

 slight sketch of the history of painting into two 

 sections, the first dealing with the technical, and 

 the second with the intellectual, history of the art. 



(1) The Technical History of Paint in f/. The 

 im|K>rtance of technical conditions in the fine arts 

 is due to their influence upon the action of the 

 mind. For example, fresco-painting, if genuine, 

 requires both speed and decision, oil-painting per- 

 mits deliberation and correction almost without 

 limit. Water-colour occupies, as to hurry, a posi- 

 tion between the two. A technical facility allures 

 the mind in certain directions, a technical difficulty 

 impedes it, and a technical impossibility, like an 

 insurmountable obstacle, diverts its energy into 

 another channel. Each art has its own educational 

 influence on the artist who practises it. Albert 

 Diirer was an engraver with the burin, and he 

 carried the strictness and precision of the burin 

 into his painting ; Rembrandt was an etcher, and 

 he painted with an etcher's freedom ; Turner was a 

 water-colour painter, and his practice in oil bears 

 evidence of his other skill. Fresco was painted 

 either from drawings or from pure imagination. 

 Tli" d'-liln>ration possible in oil has led to painting 

 from the life, with its consequences of increased 

 reality, better knowledge, and more perfect truth. 

 Tlip improvement in water-colour has done for 

 landscape what oil has done for the figure. As 

 water-colour dries quickly it is convenient for 

 sketchin" from nature, so that modern landscape- 

 painters nave beeii induced to study more in colour 



than their predecessors, a practice which has brought 

 about a revolution in landscape-painting by taking 

 it from the studio and the gallery into the open air. 



The extreme importance of technical conditions 

 may be made still clearer by a reference to the 

 sister arts. With the burin in his hand, the most 

 impetuous of men must be disciplined by the instru- 

 ment itself till he becomes cautious, careful, and 

 methodical. A sculptor may love marble, but he 

 does not sketch or invent in it ; he sketches in 

 wax or clay. Bronze can be cast into the most 

 picturesque forms, but the granite of Egypt im- 

 posed a severe simplicity. 



Painting was not, in its origin, an independent 

 art. It was employed in subservience to sculpture, 

 to architecture, and to primitive engraving quite 

 unconnected with printing. Rude idols were 

 coloured in imitation of life, or rude outlines in- 

 cised in stone or wood were filled up with spaces of 

 colour sharply separated and clearly distinguished. 

 The outlines might also be themselves painted and 

 then filled up with colour. Painting was separated 

 from sculpture and engraving long before it was 

 separated from hard and definite linear drawing. 

 The connection of painting with the hard line is 

 always evidence of a primitive condition of the art, 

 either simple-minded as in early work, or affected 

 in modern work as an archaic fancy, or continued 

 for decorative reasons. 



The earliest painting known to us is that of the 

 ancient Egyptians, a kind of distemper or water- 

 colour with dissolved gum. They bad a sufficiently 

 well-supplied palette. White, a light yellow, a 

 duller yellow, light red, dark red, light blue, green, 

 brown, and black appear to have constituted their 

 list. As for the chemical nature of these pigments, 

 pure chalk supplied a white ; -the Egyptians were 

 acquainted with a vegetable yellow ; they were 

 familiar with the ochres; cinnabar was to be had in 

 Ethiopia; their blue was powdered blue glass, itself 

 stained with copper, and when mixed with yellow 

 it supplied a green. Black was easily obtained 

 from animal charcoal and other materials. It is a 

 misunderstanding of Egyptian art to criticise it as 

 a representation of nature ; that was rendered im- 

 possible by ignorance of perspective and other 

 technical deficiencies. It was intended to be at the 

 same time a record and a decoration, and it effectu- 

 ally answered both purposes. It is much too primi- 

 tive to be artistic in the modern sense, and in fact 

 the Egyptian painters were not artists but work- 

 men subjected to authoritative direction and to an 

 excessive division of labour. Their drawing was 

 manually skilful, but limited by want of knowledge ; 

 their colouring was simply decorative. 



The remains of Assyrian painting are much less 

 abundant than those of Egyptian, though it appears 

 from the evidence of travellers that the Assyrians 

 must have painted extensively upon internal wall- 

 surfaces covered with plaster, and also upon tiles 

 built together so as to make more or less extensive 

 compositions. The little that we know of Assyrian 

 and Babylonian painting leads to the conclusion 

 that it was technically not more advanced than 

 that of Egypt, and resembled it in being a record 

 and a decoration rather than an imitation of nature. 

 Outlines were still strongly marked and adhered to, 

 and spaces were coloured flatly, almost as we colour 

 them in heraldic painting. The painting of those 

 early times is, in principle, much the same as that 

 now employed upon playing-cards. 



The supreme position o! Greece in the art of 

 sculpture has strongly predisposed many critics in 

 favour of her painters, and it has long been 

 believed that if we could see their works we should 

 admire them as we now admire Greek statues of 

 the age of Pericles. There are, however, very 

 good reasons for believing that Greek pictures, 



