A Text-Book of the History of PaintingVan Dyke, John C.
History
A Text-Book of the History of Painting
Van Dyke, John C.
Painting -- History
art, especially in decoration.
Rossetti, an Italian by birth though English by adoption, was the type
of the Brotherhood. He was more of a poet than a painter, took most of
his subjects from Dante, and painted as he wrote, in a mystical
romantic spirit. He was always of a retiring disposition and never
exhibited publicly after he was twenty-eight years of age. As a
draughtsman he was awkward in line and not always true in modelling.
In color he was superior to his associates and had considerable
decorative feeling. The shortcoming of his art, as with that of the
others of the Brotherhood, was that in seeking truth of detail he lost
truth of _ensemble_. This is perhaps better exemplified in the works
of Holman Hunt. He has spent infinite pains in getting the truth of
detail in his pictures, has travelled in the East and painted types,
costumes, and scenery in Palestine to gain the historic truths of his
Scriptural scenes; but all that he has produced has been little more
than a survey, a report, a record of the facts. He has not made a
picture. The insistence upon every detail has isolated all the facts
and left them isolated in the picture. In seeking the minute truths
he has overlooked the great truths of light, air, and setting. His
color has always been crude, his values or relations not well
preserved, and his brush-work hard and tortured.
Millais showed some of this disjointed effect in his early work when
he was a member of the Brotherhood. He did not hold to his early
convictions however, and soon abandoned the pre-Raphaelite methods for
a more conventional style. He has painted some remarkable portraits
and some excellent figure pieces, and to-day holds high rank in
English art; but he is an uneven painter, often doing weak,
harshly-colored work. Moreover, the English tendency to tell stories
with the paint-brush finds in Millais a faithful upholder. At his best
he is a strong painter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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