DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.31830#0043
and side by side with Etty spent evenings in tbe Academy Life
School. But it was only by degrees and slowly that he attained
to the expression of a personal vision of things in this newer style.
His hgures, too literally rendered, have an air of their Victorian
time about them, and do not cohere with their landscape setting.
He had not yet learnt (in his own excellent phrase) to “ transform
physical truth into musical truth.”
Probably most of the pictures of this transitional time were
destroyed by the fastidious artist. Careless of fame and success,
and unknown to the world, Calvert maintained his solitary pursuit
of perfection. The beautiful small oil-paintings, for which, with
his early engravings, he will be remembered, seem all to belong
to the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1883. Here
at last he found felicity.
The wave of neo-classicism had been at its height in his early
youth. But how different was Calvert’s approach to Hellenism
from that of the antique-collecting dilettanti or that of the
painters of classical compositions ! Among the poets he had
afhnities wuth Keats, though he seems to have cherished Landor
more; but his habitual mood is most akin, I think, to that of
Maurice de Guerin’s “ Le Centaure.” The votaries of classicism,
whether in the Renaissance or later periods, had been fascinated
by the radiance and harmony of the Hellenic genius; but they
looked on its manifestations from the outside, they ignored the
antique religion in which these were rooted and from which they
flowered. Calvert was one of those rare spirits for whom the
Greek myths meant something more than beautiful forms
animating beautiful stories; they were re-created in his
imagination and became mysteries devoutly to be pondered on.
Blake was driven to invent a Myth of his own, embodying his
conception of the world; Calvert was content to discover in the
old beliefs of Hellas his own reading of the human souPs relation
to the universe. The theme of his art was always “ the life we
love”; and this life he conceived in four phases, rising each out
of the other. First there is the Elemental Phase, associated with
the god Pan; “a conceived beginning of the human state in a
conceived beauty of the antique world, an elemental wildness and
wonder of man, finding himself in the midst of a beautiful order
of things . . . full of suggestiveness to his imagination of vital
power contained therein.” Next comes the Simple Phase,
27
School. But it was only by degrees and slowly that he attained
to the expression of a personal vision of things in this newer style.
His hgures, too literally rendered, have an air of their Victorian
time about them, and do not cohere with their landscape setting.
He had not yet learnt (in his own excellent phrase) to “ transform
physical truth into musical truth.”
Probably most of the pictures of this transitional time were
destroyed by the fastidious artist. Careless of fame and success,
and unknown to the world, Calvert maintained his solitary pursuit
of perfection. The beautiful small oil-paintings, for which, with
his early engravings, he will be remembered, seem all to belong
to the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 1883. Here
at last he found felicity.
The wave of neo-classicism had been at its height in his early
youth. But how different was Calvert’s approach to Hellenism
from that of the antique-collecting dilettanti or that of the
painters of classical compositions ! Among the poets he had
afhnities wuth Keats, though he seems to have cherished Landor
more; but his habitual mood is most akin, I think, to that of
Maurice de Guerin’s “ Le Centaure.” The votaries of classicism,
whether in the Renaissance or later periods, had been fascinated
by the radiance and harmony of the Hellenic genius; but they
looked on its manifestations from the outside, they ignored the
antique religion in which these were rooted and from which they
flowered. Calvert was one of those rare spirits for whom the
Greek myths meant something more than beautiful forms
animating beautiful stories; they were re-created in his
imagination and became mysteries devoutly to be pondered on.
Blake was driven to invent a Myth of his own, embodying his
conception of the world; Calvert was content to discover in the
old beliefs of Hellas his own reading of the human souPs relation
to the universe. The theme of his art was always “ the life we
love”; and this life he conceived in four phases, rising each out
of the other. First there is the Elemental Phase, associated with
the god Pan; “a conceived beginning of the human state in a
conceived beauty of the antique world, an elemental wildness and
wonder of man, finding himself in the midst of a beautiful order
of things . . . full of suggestiveness to his imagination of vital
power contained therein.” Next comes the Simple Phase,
27