The artist is capable of being stimulated to artistic expression by all things seen, no matter what; to him nothing comes amiss.  Great pictures have been made of beautiful people in beautiful clothes and of squalid people in ugly clothes, of beautiful architectural buildings and the ugly hovels of the poor.  And the same painter who painted the Alps painted the Great Western Railway.

The visible world is to the artist, as it were, a wonderful garment, at times revealing to him the Beyond, the Inner Truth there is in all things.  He has a consciousness of some correspondence with something the other side of visible things and dimly felt through them, a “still, small voice” which he is impelled to interpret to man.  It is the expression of this all-pervading inner significance that I think we recognise as beauty, and that prompted Keats to say: 

     “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

And hence it is that the love of truth and the love of beauty can exist together in the work of the artist.  The search for this inner truth is the search for beauty.  People whose vision does not penetrate beyond the narrow limits of the commonplace, and to whom a cabbage is but a vulgar vegetable, are surprised if they see a beautiful picture painted of one, and say that the artist has idealised it, meaning that he has consciously altered its appearance on some idealistic formula; whereas he has probably only honestly given expression to a truer, deeper vision than they had been aware of.  The commonplace is not the true, but only the shallow, view of things.

[Illustration:  Plate II.

DRAWING BY LEONARDO DA VINCI FROM THE ROYAL COLLECTION AT WINDSOR

Copyright photo, Braun & Co.]

Fromentin’s

     “Art is the expression of the invisible by means of the visible”

expresses the same idea, and it is this that gives to art its high place among the works of man.

Beautiful things seem to put us in correspondence with a world the harmonies of which are more perfect, and bring a deeper peace than this imperfect life seems capable of yielding of itself.  Our moments of peace are, I think, always associated with some form of beauty, of this spark of harmony within corresponding with some infinite source without.  Like a mariner’s compass, we are restless until we find repose in this one direction.  In moments of beauty (for beauty is, strictly speaking, a state of mind rather than an attribute of certain objects, although certain things have the power of inducing it more than others) we seem to get a glimpse of this deeper truth behind the things of sense.  And who can say but that this sense, dull enough in most of us, is not an echo of a greater harmony existing somewhere the other side of things, that we dimly feel through them, evasive though it is.

But we must tread lightly in these rarefied regions and get on to more practical concerns.  By finding and emphasising in his work those elements in visual appearances that express these profounder things, the painter is enabled to stimulate the perception of them in others.