Art
196 which we dwell.
Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, the so steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten painting teaches me the splendour of colour and the ex pression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to If he can draw every choose out of the possible forms. :
thing, why draw anything ? and then is my eye opened to the eternal picture which nature paints in the street,
men and
children, beggars and fine ladies, green, and blue, and grey; long haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, capped and based by heaven,
with moving
draped
earth,
in red,
and
and
sea.
A
gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same As picture teaches the colouring, so sculpture lesson. When I have seen fine statues, the anatomy of form.
and afterwards enter a public assembly, I understand When I have been well what he meant who said, I too see that reading Homer, all men look like giants." painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite "
all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. No mannerist made a gallery of art have I here these varied groups and diverse original single figures. Here is the artist himself improvising, grim and glad, at
advantage over
What
!
Now one thought strikes him, now another and with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude, and expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and easels, of marble and chisels except to open your eyes to the witchcraft of eternal art, they are hypo his block.
;
:
critical rubbish.
The
reference of
all
production at
common
last to
an Aboriginal
to all works of the that they are universally intelligible, that they highest art, restore to us the simplest states of mind, and are religious. Since what skill is therein shewn is the reappearance of the
Power explains the
traits