The Book of Art for Young People | Page 2

Landscape with Cattle . . . . . . Cuyp . . . . . . . . 141
William II. of Orange . . . . . . Van Dyck . . . . . . 146
Don Balthazar Carlos . . . . . . . Velasquez . . . . . . 161
The Duke of Gloucester . . . . . . _Sir J. Reynolds_ . . . 170
The Fighting Temeraire . . . . . . Turner . . . . . . . 177

THE CHILDREN'S BOOK OF ART

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Almost the pleasantest thing in the world is to be told a splendid story
by a really nice person. There is not the least occasion for the story to
be true; indeed I think the untrue stories are the best--those in which we
meet delightful beasts and things that talk twenty times better than most
human beings ever do, and where extraordinary events happen in the
kind of places that are not at all like our world of every day. It is so fine
to be taken into a country where it is always summer, and the birds are
always singing and the flowers always blowing, and where people get
what they want by just wishing for it, and are not told that this or that
isn't good for them, and that they'll know better than to want it when
they're grown up, and all that kind of thing which is so annoying and so
often happening in this obstinate criss-cross world, where the days
come and go in such an ordinary fashion.
But if I might choose the person to tell me the kind of story I like to
listen to, and hear told to me over and over again, it would be some one
who could draw pictures for me while talking--pictures like those of
Tenniel in Alice in Wonderland and _Through the Looking-Glass_.
How much better we know Alice herself and the White Knight and the
Mad Hatter and all the rest of them from the pictures than even from
the story itself. But my story-teller should not only draw the pictures
while he talked, but he should paint them too. I want to see the sky blue
and the grass green, and I want red cloaks and blue bonnets and pink
cheeks and all the bright colours, and some gold and silver too, and not
merely black and white--though black and white drawings would be
better than nothing, so long as they showed me what the people and
beasts and dragons and things were like. I could put up with even rather
bad drawings if only they were vivid. Don't you know how good a bad
drawing sometimes seems? I have a friend who can make the loveliest
folks and the funniest beasts and the quaintest houses and trees, and he
really can't draw a bit; and the curious thing is, that if he could draw

better I should not like his folks and beasts half as much as I do the
lop-sided, crook-legged, crazy-looking people he produces. And then
he has such quaint things to tell about them, and while he talks he
seems to make them live, so that I can hardly believe they are not real
people for all their unlikeness to any one you ever saw.
Now, the old pictures you see in the picture galleries are just like that,
only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but merely
illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived, every one
knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a kind of fairy
tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't matter to us,
which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that matters is
whether the story is a good one and whether the picture is a nice one.
There is a delightful old picture painted on a wall away off at Assisi, in
Italy, which shows St. Francis preaching to a lot of birds, and the birds
are all listening to him and looking pleased--the way birds do look
pleased when they find a good fat worm or fresh crumbs. Now, St.
Francis was a real man and such a dear person too, but I don't suppose
half the stories told about him were really true, yet we can pretend they
were and that's just what the painter helps us to do. Don't you know all
the games that begin with 'Let's pretend'?--well, that's art. Art is
pretending, or most of it is. Pictures take us into a world of
make-believe, a world of imagination, where everything is or should be
in the right place and in the right light and of the