Identifier: fiftyyearsofmode00phyt (find matches)
Title: Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Phythian, John Ernest, 1858-
Subjects: Painting Painting
Publisher: London, G. Richards

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ubtle. His colour issimplified to a few clear, full, harmonious notes. The air,that which makes possible life in the Avorld, and creates itsbeauty—we are on old ground again—vibrates in everyscene, and the revealing light plays everywhere, at itsfullest, or minished through dimness towards dark. Nature,in these pictured psalms seems to say to us, Be still, andknow that I am God. The cattle are there, nature raisedto higher life than tree and flower. Man, higher still, isthere. Homer tunes his lyre by the edge of the sea, andshepherd calls to shepherd to come and hear his song. Thegods are there, they commune with men; and the shepherdParis gives the apple to the goddess of his choice, with thedire results of which the song of Homer told. The oldstories cannot die. They arose out of life, and life has notchanged so much that they are not still essentially true to it.These pictures, therefore, even though a Japanese would notknow who Paris and Aphrodite were, do more in their story-
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PAINTING IN FRANCE 227 telling than merely tap on the school satchel. The storyand the landscape are completely unified by art; each notmerely does no injury to, but explains and exalts the other. In such pictures as these, Realism, and some measure, atleast, of Impressionism, unite with a lofty Idealism. Wehave now for a brief while to observe Romanticism andRealism occupied with their own familiar tasks. The right to paint as they wished, and not as they werebidden, which Delacroix and those who fought with himhad won against Ingres and his fellow-classicists, was main-tained, with but little advance on new ground, by a numberof painters, some of whom lived until near the close of thecentury. Honore Daumier, who was born in 1808 and diedin 1879, powerfully aided Delacroix by caricatures whichwere really trenchant criticisms of the productions of theClassical school. It has already been said that he and theother draughtsmen of his time did much by their work inthat kind to enable pai

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