Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 8))

ON THE INFLUENCE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
ON OUR CONCEPTIONS OF NATURE.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, in his Discourses, says that our con-
ception of beauty is composed of three elements: the eternal,
invariable idea of nature; the fashion of the day; and the Greek
ideals. The Discourses, written more than one hundred years ago,
were addressed to an audience whose highest ideal of beauty was
the Greek and over whom classicism generally held such sway
that any departure therefrom was regarded not merely in the light of a heresy,
an insult to good taste, but even as being false to truth and to the very
appearance of nature. Sir Joshua was the first Englishman who had the
courage to break these trammels and to put into concise words the psychology
of the matter. From a study of English painting before his period it is
safe to say that the “ eternal, invariable idea of nature ” was that one of the
three elements which entered last and least into the make-up of the standard
of beauty and rightness in the mind of the painters. Their idea of nature
certainly was eternally invariable, though not of that cast to which Reynolds
referred and which we to-day recognize her to wear, but distinctly that which
was the fashion of the day—namely, a washed-out classicism conceived and
reconceived from the classic or from any paintings which might at that
moment have been the fashion.
Yet until Reynolds came all were satisfied, and beheld in these classic
distortions of a " brown fiddle” color the nature they loved. Strange as the
assertion may seem, it is only too true, and sad too, that not more than one
in a thousand of us, so-called intelligent human beings, sees with his own
eyes, but that the great majority of us invariably see through the eyes of
others, who again see as the fashion of the day dictates. So when Reynolds,
seeing nature more clearly than his contemporaries and more comprehensively
understanding her meaning, suddenly arose and put his thoughts on canvas
he became the fashion of the day. All swore by him as by truth, and in
order to succeed in the market the other painters had to paint as best they
could in his style.
Though Sir Joshua Reynolds added much to the first element of our
conception of beauty and truth —namely, to the ideas of nature, and
though, at the same time, he entirely altered the second element-
i.e., the fashion—yet he did little or nothing toward destroying the last
element, the Greek ideals. On the contrary, he studied the Greek and he
imitated and introduced the Greek into his paintings on every possible
occasion. Why was this? He was sufficient of a psychologist to see that,
even if both nature herself and her aspect as seen through paintings and
sculpture were potent influences in the make-up of a standard of beauty
and truth, it was nevertheless not at all necessary that the Greek ideals
should enter into any such abstract idea. For, if this were so, beauty must
have been unknown before the Greeks or during that whole period of
Italian art before the Renaissance, or in the Orient, etc. Why, then, did he

l9