HOUSES AND GARDENS 



held to be that which creates the most convincing illusion of reality ; and the 

 artist who, giving up the impossible ideal involved in competing with Nature 

 uses his subject as a field for an arrangement of colour, is generally misunder- 

 stood and often condemned. For those who can refrain from abusing what 

 they do not understand are unfortunately represented by a very small 

 minority. 



CHAPTER TWENTY TWO 



PICTURES 



T would be interesting to inquire how far the art of picture 

 painting is coincident with the decline of Art in its widest 

 interpretation, representing the last stronghold of the artist 

 driven from the service of life behind the gilded pale of the 



picture frame, where he dreams in a little shadow world all his 



own. It is curious to note in the daily newspaper that the concerns of art 

 are dealt with in a separate column applied to the discussion of pictures. And 

 these "Art Notes" seem to bear such an insignificant place in the record of life 

 which the newspaper presents. In the ages when art was a vital part of the 

 national existence, how inadequate such a classification would have appeared ! 

 Then there was hardly a thing which the hand of man could do or his brain 

 conceive which was not an expression of unconscious art. It is true we have 

 now the art of the shops, but it is a spurious art, crushed under the iron 

 heel of commercialism. 



If art is then to become again an all-pervading influence instead of the 

 concern of a few dilettante connoisseurs, it must reconstruct the old conception 

 of its scope. Primarily it will be concerned with buildings and their adorn- 

 ment, and here the picture falls into its proper place as the decoration of the 

 wall. As such it can no longer be an isolated product. The picture painter 

 will be the first to admit that the beauty of the picture as a whole depends on 

 the relation of its parts ; but if the relation of one colour to another is so 

 important, the logical inference is that the picture itself must depend for its 

 beauty on its place in the scheme of things. And so one finds in the earlier 

 ages of painting the painter at his best was a wall decorator. As Ruskin has 

 said, " There is no existing highest order Art but is decoration. The best 

 sculpture yet produced has been the decoration of a temple front the best 

 painting, the decoration of a room. Raphael's best doing is merely the wall- 

 colouring of a suite of apartments in the Vatican, and his cartoons were made 

 for tapestries. Correggio's best doing is the decoration of two small church 

 cupolas at Parma. Tintoret's of a ceiling and a side wall belonging to a 

 charitable society in Venice ; while Titian and Veronese threw out their noblest 

 thoughts, not even on the inside, but on the outside of the common brick and 



5 1 



