DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61291#0048
34
GAINSBOROUGH
table “ with bits of stone, dried herbs and pieces
of looking-glass, which he magnified and im-
proved into rocks and trees.” This quaint re-
velation of his own inaptitude as a critic of
landscape work, and of the subterfuges to which
the student of nature resorted at that time, the
President followed up by dwelling on Gains-
borough’s habit of painting by candle-light,
which he characterized as a very advantageous
and improving practice. He strongly advised
his hearers to follow also Gainsborough’s plan
“of forming all the parts of his picture together,
the whole going on at the same time in the same
manner as nature creates her work.”
This halting judgment, with its excursions into
side issues and unimportant details, contained
one remarkable assertion, betraying a consider-
able want of acumen in the painter-critic, for he
said: “Gainsborough did not look at nature
with a poet’s eye. . . . He saw her with the eye
of a painter”—a distinction without a difference,
for it is to the poet alone, whether he voices
his genius in words or in pictorial form, that
nature reveals her secrets.
Constable, who was the greatest of Gains-
borough’s immediate successors and, as already
pointed out, to some extent his heir, struck a
GAINSBOROUGH
table “ with bits of stone, dried herbs and pieces
of looking-glass, which he magnified and im-
proved into rocks and trees.” This quaint re-
velation of his own inaptitude as a critic of
landscape work, and of the subterfuges to which
the student of nature resorted at that time, the
President followed up by dwelling on Gains-
borough’s habit of painting by candle-light,
which he characterized as a very advantageous
and improving practice. He strongly advised
his hearers to follow also Gainsborough’s plan
“of forming all the parts of his picture together,
the whole going on at the same time in the same
manner as nature creates her work.”
This halting judgment, with its excursions into
side issues and unimportant details, contained
one remarkable assertion, betraying a consider-
able want of acumen in the painter-critic, for he
said: “Gainsborough did not look at nature
with a poet’s eye. . . . He saw her with the eye
of a painter”—a distinction without a difference,
for it is to the poet alone, whether he voices
his genius in words or in pictorial form, that
nature reveals her secrets.
Constable, who was the greatest of Gains-
borough’s immediate successors and, as already
pointed out, to some extent his heir, struck a