American art and American art collections Volume 2; essays on artistic subjects by the best art writers - Walter Montgomery, Paperback

• Release Date   5/21/2012
• ISBN-13   9781236406422 | 978-1-236-40642-2
• ISBN   1236406427 | 1-236-40642-7
• Format   Paperback
• Author(s)   Walter Montgomery
• This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 Excerpt: ...forcibly to represent emotional vision, and therefore a lack in the full presentation of the poetic principle. Poetry is the vision of reality. When John saw the vision of the Apocalypse, he saw it. He did not see emasculation, or weakness, or gaseous representation. He saw things, and those things represented an idea.... "Among the French artists it is that we find the best work's of art. Millet is one of those artistic angels whose aim was to represent pure and holy human sentiments,--sentiments which speak of home, of love, of labor, of sorrow, and so on. Many of his pictures, indeed, display weaknesses to which minds like his are at times peculiarly liable, as though the strength of flesh and blood had overcome the power of the spirit. But he is the very first in that class of painters who reproduce such sentiments in their paintings. and in his paintings do we find the highest of these sentiments. Meissonier is a very wonderful painter, but his aim seems to be a material and not a spiritual one. The imitative has too strong a hold upon his mind. Hence even in his simplest and best things we find the presence of individualities which should have had no place, because they are really outside of the idea or impression which he intended to convey. That idea which came fresh into his mind from the scene which he saw, why should he not have reproduced in its original purity unalloyed by the mixture of those individualities? Even in his greatest efforts there is not that power to awaken our emotion which the simplest works of a painter like Decamps possess. There every detail of the picture is a part of the vision which impressed the artist, and which he purposed to reproduce, to the end that it might impress others. and every detail has been subordinate...