Modern Painting

George Moore
Modern Painting

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Modern Painting, by George Moore
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Title: Modern Painting
Author: George Moore
Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8162] [This file was first posted on
June 23, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MODERN
PAINTING ***

E-text prepared by Eric Eldred, Marc D'Hooghe, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

MODERN PAINTING
By
GEORGE MOORE

TO SIR WILLIAM EDEN, BART.
OF ALL MY BOOKS, THIS IS THE ONE YOU LIKE BEST; ITS
SUBJECT HAS BEEN THE SUBJECT OF NEARLY ALL OUR
CONVERSATIONS IN THE PAST, AND I SUPPOSE WILL BE THE
SUBJECT OF MANY CONVERSATIONS IN THE FUTURE; SO,
LOOKING BACK AND FORWARD, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO
YOU.
G. M.

_The Editor of "The Speaker" allowed me to publish from time to time
chapters of a book on art. These chapters have been gathered from the
mass of art journalism which had grown about them, and I reprint them
in the sequence originally intended_.
_G. M._

CONTENTS.
WHISTLER CHAVANNES, MILLET, AND MANET THE FAILURE
OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ARTISTIC EDUCATION IN
FRANCE AND ENGLAND INGRES AND COROT MONET,
SISLEY, PISSARO, AND THE DECADENCE OUR
ACADEMICIANS THE ORGANISATION OF ART ART AND
SCIENCE ROYALTY IN ART ART PATRONS PICTURE
DEALERS MR. BURNE-JONES AND THE ACADEMY THE

ALDERMAN IN ART RELIGIOSITY IN ART THE CAMERA IN
ART THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB A GREAT ARTIST
NATIONALITY IN ART SEX IN ART MR. STEER'S EXHIBITION
CLAUDE MONET NOTES-- MR. MARK FISHER A PORTRAIT BY
MR. SARGENT AN ORCHID BY MR. JAMES THE WHISTLER
ALBUM INGRES SOME JAPANESE PRINTS NEW ART
CRITICISM LONG AGO IN ITALY

WHISTLER.
I have studied Mr. Whistler and thought about him this many a year.
His character was for a long time incomprehensible to me; it contained
elements apparently so antagonistic, so mutually destructive, that I had
to confess my inability to bring him within any imaginable
psychological laws, and classed him as one of the enigmas of life. But
Nature is never illogical; she only seems so, because our sight is not
sufficient to see into her intentions; and with study my psychological
difficulties dwindled, and now the man stands before me exquisitely
understood, a perfect piece of logic. All that seemed discordant and
discrepant in his nature has now become harmonious and inevitable;
the strangest and most erratic actions of his life now seem natural and
consequential (I use the word in its grammatical sense) contradictions
are reconciled, and looking at the man I see the pictures, and looking at
the pictures I see the man.
But at the outset the difficulties were enormous. It was like a
newly-discovered Greek text, without punctuation or capital letters.
Here was a man capable of painting portraits, perhaps not quite so full
of grip as the best work done by Velasquez and Hals, only just falling
short of these masters at the point where they were strongest, but
plainly exceeding them in graciousness of intention, and subtle
happiness of design, who would lay down his palette and run to a
newspaper office to polish the tail of an epigram which he was
launching against an unfortunate critic who had failed to distinguish
between an etching and a pen-and-ink drawing! Here was a man who,
though he had spent the afternoon painting like the greatest, would
spend his evenings in frantic disputes over dinner-tables about the
ultimate ownership of a mild joke, possibly good enough for _Punch_,
something that any one might have said, and that most of us having

said it would have forgotten! It will be conceded that such divagations
are difficult to reconcile with the possession of artistic faculties of the
highest order.
The "Ten o'clock" contained a good deal of brilliant writing, sparkling
and audacious epigram, but amid all its glitter and "go" there are
statements which, coming from Mr. Whistler, are as
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