Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 12))

a human being in whom the color-sense is undeveloped, who can see only
black and white. In Velasquez this evolution (picture-writing to photogra-
phy) culminates, nor is it possible to accept any of the modern painters as
having of their own intelligence gone one step further, for although there may
be occasional paintings by Whistler or Monet which are still more photo-
graphic, yet, unfortunately for our argument, both Whistler and Monet had
access to the results of photography, and it is quite impossible to determine
how much they may have been under its influence, and even unconsciously
copied it. In Velasquez, then, we find the painter who in his practice first
foreshadowed photography, and his portrait of Don Philip, Figure X, looks
almost as if it were the work of the camera. The head and background are
very camera-like, but on the hands, dress, dog and accessories are endless
little touches, little scraps of explanatory writing, little remnants of a past
form of expression.
However, neither the Italians nor Velasquez seem fully to have realized
that their landscapes were in a much lower state of evolution than their
figures, and it was left to the moderns to rid the landscape art of its picture-
writing qualities — it was the efforts of Constable and Turner, of Corot and
Monet that carried it to its present state.
The art of landscape-painting may or may not have reached its ultimate
development in the direction of light-painting; but that Velasquez touched
the high-water mark in figure-work and portraiture (photographically) seems
to be indicated by the fact that during the last two centuries, try as the
painters would, even with the aid of photographs, they have but rarely been
able to equal him. In fact, figure-painting seems to have arrived at such
photographic perfection that instead of its making any advance, there have
been no end of retrograde movements, most notable among them being
those of Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Puvis de Chavannes — the last-named
retrograding as far as Giotto. Now, the art of these three painters, and that
of many others of a similar character, is continually held up by certain
art-critics as proof that, for a long period, art — evolving, as it has, photo-
graphicward — has been developing in an evil direction; and that these
modern “ pre-Raphaelite ” painters stand as a vehement protest against this
modern degradation. Significantly enough, art-critics of this class always
stumble over Velasquez, Moroni, etc., and try to get by their photographic
work by advancing the not very scientific argument: “Oh, well! now really,
you know, you are not going to speak of Velasquez and photography in the
same breath, are you ? Velasquez and Moroni stand alone, by themselves,
you know,” and so on. My answer is that Burne-Jones, Rossetti and
Chavannes are cases of atavism; and that the large majority of art-critics,
being literary men and having inherited a literary rather than pictorial atti-
tude toward nature and art, have also to an extent inherited the savage
picture-writing conceptions, and are in consequence incapable of judging that
art from which the picture-writing element has been eliminated. This
particular construction of the brain of the average art-critic, by the way, also
accounts for his incapability of seeing art in photographs.

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