254 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

rashness which no example can warn, or through apathy which no hope can stimulate, for Mr. Eastlake has alike withdrawn licence from experimentalism and apology from indolence. He has done away with all legends of forgotten secrets;¹ he has shown that the masters of the great Flemish and early Venetian schools possessed no means, followed no methods, but such as we may still obtain and pursue; but he has shown also, among all these masters, the most admirable care in the preparation of materials and the most simple consistency in their use; he has shown that their excellence was reached, and could only have been reached, by stern and exact science, condescending to the observance, care, and conquest of the most minute physical particulars and hindrances; that the greatest of them never despised an aid nor avoided a difficulty. The loss of imaginative liberty sometimes involved in a too scrupulous attention to methods of execution is trivial compared to the evils resulting from a careless or inefficient practice. The modes in which, with every great painter, realization falls short of conception are necessarily so many and so grievous, that he can ill afford to undergo the additional discouragement caused by uncertain methods and bad materials. Not only so, but even the choice of subjects, the amount of completion attempted, nay, even the modes of conception and measure of truth are in no small degree involved in the great question of materials. On the habitual use of a light or dark ground may depend the painter’s preference of a broad and faithful, or partial and scenic chiaroscuro; correspondent with the facility or fatality of alterations, may be the exercise of indolent fancy,

¹ [Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, “believed as confidently in the Venetian secret, as ever alchemist did in the philosopher’s stone. We ourselves were acquainted with an old painter, a pupil of West’s, who in his latter days had devoted himself to repairing pictures, and who possessed portraits by both Titian and Rubens, which he said had belonged to Sir Joshua, and parts of which, to obtain this wished-for secret, had been scraped or rubbed down to the panel, to lay bare the under-paintings or dead colourings. It was this search for the Venetian secret-this constant course of experiments in his pictures, that has caused so many failures” (R. and S. Redgrave: A Century of Painters, 1890, p. 50). For an expression of a view in some respects opposite to that of Reynolds, see Millais’ “Thoughts on our Art of To-day” (in M. H. Spielmann’s Millais and his Works).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]