216 THE STONES OF VENICE

what more it liked for itself, and grow oaks, or olives, or apples, out of the few dashes of colour at its leisure. On the other hand, Hobbima, one of the worst of the realists,¹ smites the imagination on the mouth, and bids it be silent, while he sets to work to paint his oak of the right green, and fill up its foliage laboriously with jagged touches, and furrow the bark all over its branches, so as, if possible, to deceive us into supposing that we are looking at a real oak; which, indeed, we had much better do at once, without giving any one the trouble to deceive us in the matter.

§ 25. Now, the truly great artist neither leaves the imagination to itself, like Sir Joshua, nor insults it by realization, like Hobbima, but finds it continual employment of the happiest kind. Having summoned it by his vigorous first touches, he says to it:“Here is a tree for you, and it is to be an oak. Now I know that you can make it green and intricate for yourself, but that is not enough: an oak is not only green and intricate, but its leaves have most beautiful and fantastic forms, which I am very sure you are not quite able to complete without help; so I will draw a cluster or two perfectly for you, and then you can go on and do all the other clusters. So far so good: but the leaves are not enough; the oak is to be full of acorns, and you may not be quite able to imagine the way they grow, nor the pretty contrast of their glossy almond-shaped nuts with the chasing of their cups; so I will draw a bunch or two of acorns for you, and you can fill up the oak with others like them. Good: but that is not enough; it is to be a bright day in summer, and all the outside leaves are to be glittering in the sunshine as if their edges were of gold: I cannot paint this, but you can; so I will really gild some of the edges nearest you,* and you can turn

* The reader must not suppose that the use of gold, in this manner, is confined to early art. Tintoret, the greatest master of pictorial effect that ever existed, has gilded the ribs of the fig-leaves in his “Resurrection,” in the Scuola di San Rocco.²

¹ [For list of references to Hobbima in Modern Painters, see Vol. III. p. 592 n.]

² [See again below, Venetian Index, p. 414.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]