The Higher Life in Art

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THIRD LECTURE I HAVE chosen to continue with the story of Jean Fran9ois Millet because of his bringing a vision of emotional art fit to balance the record of Delacroix with whom I began. Delacroix was Millet's first and only admiration among modern painters, notwithstanding their very opposite points of...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THIRD LECTURE I HAVE chosen to continue with the story of Jean Fran9ois Millet because of his bringing a vision of emotional art fit to balance the record of Delacroix with whom I began. Delacroix was Millet's first and only admiration among modern painters, notwithstanding their very opposite points of view, their extremely opposite training - fcnd education, their social views, and a distinct antithesis, or opposite of character. You can see that if I can fall back on the admiration of such a man, I cannot have exaggerated what I told you yesterday. I cannot have exaggerated Father Corot's statement, that the other man (Delacroix) was an eagle, and he himself was but the small bird twittering in the clouds; or his astonishment at Delacroix's painting, which we now have here, the Amende Honorable. In a way it is impossible to analyse. He has given the type of the Gothic interior building. It is taken from an original, but it resembles it in no way. It is, as it were, a type of allGothic buildings of the late period. It was this which amazed Corot, who said, What a terrible man he is. For Delacroix had passed beyond the limit even of Corot's long experience in the methods by which a man, when he does a work of art, gives a type, not a mere representation of a single fact, but a representation of all the facts that have happened or may happen. Now these two men, Delacroix and Millet, extremely different in their natures, who used the most divergent technique, in many cases could not be more apart. But it is one of the characteristics of this group of men (whom we misname the Barbizon, or Fontainebleau, men), that their scheme of ideas could be different, and yet that they could recognise a common bond of union. In the work of Delacroix Millet could see the proper...