So much has been achieved in painting, so much is to be learnt, that no artist, occupied as he must be with his own work, can have the necessary detachment of mind and the leisure to review impartially, and with proper appreciation, the history and practice of painting to the present day. The field is too wide. At most, he can give such rough conclusions as his own work, and the study of others’ work, has led him to form.

In the time of Sir Joshua Reynolds and for long after, hardly a painter earlier than Raphael was considered seriously; but now, and speaking roughly, since the days of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, which did so much for our art, we have learnt to know and to appreciate the great work of the earlier painters.

I think we may consider that extraordinary genius, William Blake, who was once a student of these schools, to be the real forerunner of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Writing in 1809, he draws attention to the clearness and beauty of the early Italian pictures, praising their precision and hardness, which he contrasts with the art of Rubens, Titian, and Rembrandt, whom he calls smudgers, blunderers, and daubers.

At about the same time, too, as the Pre-Raphaelite movement came the invention of photography, which has, I think, exercised a disturbing influence on our art; and a little later the art of the Japanese became known among us. So many theories are in the air to-day, so many courses are open to us, that it is more than ever difficult for the student to find his way; and though, knowing my own shortcomings, I feel strongly my inadequacy, I will do my best to give you such help as, were I a student in your place, I should wish to receive.

I imagine the intention of the Royal Academy in establishing this Chair was to supplement the teaching of the schools—the life class, which is a training of the hand and eye, the tools of the artist, so to speak—with some direction of the mind also, so that the student should be not only equipped with sound technical skill, but be put on the track of some direction, or at least given indications, which would help him to decide how he should apply his skill when he goes out into the world. For the artist’s education does not finish in the life class; it begins there.

In the old days, when there was the constant relation of pupil to master, theory and practice went hand in hand. The training was thorough, the best obtainable, but limited. An artist knew at most what a few others were doing round about him, and was, as a rule, content to develop himself on the lines of the traditions and with the instruction he had received. And so arose the “schools” of one place and another.

But to-day we are at once worse off and better. We have lost all tradition—almost the tradition of fine workmanship. With the exception of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, no moderns have attained the wonderful, almost miraculous, perfection and delicacy of execution which we find in the best old paintings—not achieved once or twice only, but steadily and consistently for a long period. But we are better off in that we have before us, brought into the open light of discussion and criticism, the whole practice of painting, for our admiration and guidance—and confusion; for our wider knowledge has brought uncertainty, and every man is a law unto himself. We are also under the disadvantage—if it is a disadvantage—of there being practically no direct commands for pictures, such as the Church or the great patron furnished in former days, which allowed the artist full liberty of expression under the restraint of a given idea.

We have long been without this; in fact, the varied developments of painting in the last century are owing to the freedom which artists enjoy, or I might say to the necessity which every artist feels himself under, to express his own feeling; and this accounts for the somewhat chaotic and confused impression which our big exhibitions produce, as a whole, in spite of so much excellent work.

Portraiture, which is vigorous and flourishing, and wall decoration, in which, thanks to the initiative of the late Lord Leighton, some essays are being made, are the only branches of our art that rest on the simple basis of direct demands. It is to be hoped that those who have the power will do all that is possible in the direction of encouraging fine decorative painting; for the conditions of decorative work are such as necessarily to develop the best faculties of the artist and the finest qualities of painting.

But I don’t want to paint my picture too black, or to imply that our painting is in decadence, for I think it is advancing; and although we live in times when everything is in the melting-pot, including the Fine Arts, we know that the instinct for beauty, and for its expression in the Fine Arts, is as natural and as necessary to our being as any other of our instincts, and that the cry of decadence is as old as the world itself. There is a comforting little story told by Lanzi in his book on Italian painting, of Orcagna the Florentine artist, who was living somewhere about 1320, at the very beginning of Florentine art. He gives it on the authority of a contemporary writer, Sacchetti, that one day Orcagna proposed as a question, Who was the greatest master, setting Giotto out of the question? Some answered Cimabue, some Stephano, some Bernardo, and some Buffalmacco. Taddeo Gaddi, who was in the company, said: “Truly these were very able painters, but the art is decaying every day.” And I think that Michelangelo said that in his time the arts were not much considered. So we may conclude that the relation of the artist to the world in general was always much the same as it is now. As in other departments of human activity, painters have done well or ill, as it has been given them to do; succeeding generations of artists have cherished their memories, or have forgotten them, according to the estimation in which they held their work.

And so, when we find ourselves in the presence of great works of the past—in the presence, one might say, of the thought of great men made visible to us, it is well that we should put aside, as far as we can, our own preoccupations and theories, and try and read their thought, and see how far we can gain from them confirmation, strength, and support for ourselves.

For one result of the wider appreciation of the older men is that our own work is brought sharply up against them; and when we find that a work of our own time may lose its freshness and interest in a few years, while the older works still hold us with an increasing charm, must we not see that we may have something to unlearn as well as to learn? There is no doubt that greater knowledge only serves to confirm and to extend our admiration for the work of the past, and this must lead every thoughtful student to question much that is practised to-day. We should try to reach some firm ground, some fixed principles that we can hold in common with the old painters.

I wish to direct your attention to-day to some of the Early Italian painters, but I do not propose to take you systematically through the history of any of the different schools. Some knowledge of the kind is very necessary, and no doubt in early days it was the duty of the painting professor to give this instruction. But we must remember that in those days communication between nations was difficult. There were no national collections, and there was little or no literature on artistic subjects generally available; while to-day we have readily accessible to us, not only—thanks to the Royal Academy—our Old Masters Exhibitions, but an enormous and admirable body of literature, covering the whole field of painting, which, as I have reminded you, is now very fully explored. Indeed, I almost think that too much attention is given nowadays to the minutiæ of criticism; but still, we should be very grateful to those writers whose learning and patient enthusiasm are devoted to the service of our art, who have done so well a necessary work, which practising painters could never be expected to do. It is a hopeful sign of the interest taken in the Fine Arts to-day that it is not only possible, but profitable, to produce such works, and I earnestly recommend you to make as much use of them as you can.

But I should advise you not to go to work systematically, and to take it as a task; not to grind through the different schools, and then thank goodness you’ve done with it; not to puzzle yourselves too much in trying to reconcile contradictory excellences, for things will make themselves clear to you as you go on. I should recommend you to go through a picture-gallery as one seeking the face of a friend in a crowd, and to let yourselves be led on by your sympathies. If you admire the work of a man, find out all you can about him; see his work as much as you can, especially his beginnings,—always look out for beginnings,—and try to get at his drawings and studies, which you can readily see either in photographs in your library, or in the Print Room at the British Museum, where there is a magnificent collection of original drawings. So I must leave the detailed study of the Old Masters to your own goodwill.

But there are problems in painting—the main points of pictures—which appeal only or mainly to artists, and on this ground I hope that my remarks may be of some service to you.

Painting, as we know it, may be said to begin with the Early Italians, for but little remains of the painting of the ancients, and we have no example of their finest work, though we may infer, from the merit of such works as the Græco-Egyptian mummy-portraits of the second century A.D.—ordinary journeyman painters’ work, no doubt, and of no pretension—that the ancients were as great in their painting as in their sculpture. There are several of these portraits in the National Gallery. But, for us, the Italian Primitives are the starting-point. We do not perhaps realise how great were the earliest men of all—Giotto and the other inventors, the men who took the first steps forward, who discovered perspective and foreshortening, realising not only length and breadth, but depth in their pictures, and giving nature in its three dimensions—the men who first expressed form by the use of shadow. Although these things are commonplaces to us, we can still learn much from the study of the early men; but I do not propose now to do more than touch on the work of two early painters—not of the earliest time, but still of the beginning—Fra Angelico and Masaccio, an idealist and a realist. They both lived in Florence (Angelico from 1387 to 1455, Masaccio from 1401 to 1446), and rank among the great artists of the world.

Angelico painted in Florence, in Orvieto, and in Rome. There are a number of his frescoes in the monastery of St. Mark, in Florence, little pictures on the walls of the cells and passages. They are remarkable, apart from the directness and simplicity of their execution, for their deep religious feeling. It seems as if Angelico must have had a distinct vision of the scene he was painting in his mind, for his paintings convey to us the feeling or sentiment of his subject more strongly than anything else. We are not concerned with the people of his pictures as individuals, nor with their dresses, or the general setting of the scene, except so far as it serves to express the subject. And it is, I think, because of his preoccupation with the subject that his execution is so straightforward and expressive. There is no cleverness, but he does just what he wishes to do, with beautiful and expressive drawing and very simple, clear colour. The sentiment of his landscape is, like that of all the early painters, very serene; like the clear light before sunrise in summer.

There is no trace of posing in his figures; they have an unstudied grace, and there is even in their movements something of the little awkwardnesses that we notice in the movements of children. And, though they are very human and touching, there is something about them different from ordinary people—something remote and apart from the world. They seem to exist for the picture only, and to have had no past history, no experience of life.

His pictures affect one as do things seen in a dream, and we accept his visions without questioning details which, if they were not somehow wrapped in his sentiment, would make us smile at their childishness. The little arcade under which the Virgin sits, in the picture of the Annunciation (one of the most beautiful of his works), is so low that she could hardly stand upright in it; but it does not matter, nor do the little toy trees and towns and towers that we find in his pictures. They are symbols only, and we do not question their details; nor are we conscious, in Angelico’s work, of the model as an individual.

But in the work of Masaccio we are conscious of the individual models throughout, and of the interest of portraiture. He was one of the first, if not the first, to get beyond the early conventions of drawing and of light and shade, and to understand drawing in the sense in which it is understood to-day. We can see this in his frescoes in the Church of the Carmine, in Florence. The figures of Adam and Eve, for example, are drawn with an accuracy and truth to nature—to the nature of his models—which is convincing. And there is a portrait of an old man by him, in the Uffizi, drawn with the most absolute assurance and accomplishment. The modelling is so close and true that a sculptor could model a bust from it. This portrait is, like the paintings in the chapel, executed in fresco; and, as we know, this means that the work must be done rapidly, and with certainty, as no alterations are possible. It seems to me that these works of Masaccio are as well done as they could possibly be.

These frescoes of his in the church were felt to be so far in advance of anything till then done, that they became the school and pattern for all the young Florentine artists, and Masaccio’s chapel is one of the starting-points of the Renaissance. Raphael and Michelangelo both studied there, and one may trace there the origin of the composition of some of Raphael’s cartoons, and even some of his figures, as the St. Paul, are taken bodily from these frescoes. Masaccio’s work shows interest in expression of form and character rather than in sentiment. One can imagine that one kind of subject would come as readily to him as another, but one cannot imagine Angelico painting anything but his own visions.

What is the charm of the early artist’s work—a charm which fuller knowledge only strengthens—in those who have once felt it? It is, I think, partly owing to the impression which these pictures give us of a simpler state of life. We see good, honest, simple souls taking part, without excitement or surprise, in miraculous events. We feel with perhaps a little touch of envy that man was a little nearer to the angels than he is to-day; it is very doubtful if he actually was, but that is the impression. Then there is their great charm as paintings: their wonderful simplicity, and untroubled ease of execution. We never can admire too much the delicate, clear lighting, and it is doubtful if in any later work, with all our added knowledge, the sense of tranquil daylight—not the illusion of daylight—is given as well as in these early works. There are no cast shadows—when painters began to see shadows their troubles began—to take our attention from the sensitive, firm, and expressive lines of their drawing. How beautiful is their broad, simple modelling, and their masses of fine colour and beautiful plain spaces, enhancing little passages of extreme richness! One can go again and again to them with increasing wonder and delight. And when we come to the later generation—to the painters who were living just before the year 1500—we reach a period that to me is the most interesting and beautiful of Italian painting, although its highest development was yet to come. But think of the men then working! Da Vinci, Botticelli, Pollajuolo, Piero di Cosimo, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, Mantegna, Bellini, Crivelli, and a host of others.

The technical perfection of the early work is one of its great beauties. Much of it was in fresco, which from its conditions requires—to take one quality alone—very fine draughtsmanship. And in tempera painting, which was employed for panels and small work, the same preliminary planning as in fresco had to be gone through, although it was, I believe, possible—I have had no practical experience of tempera painting—to work more than once over the same surface. But, as a rule, and as we can see by studying these works, the colour was put on sweetly and quickly, and the draperies were painted, often with one plain tint of colour over a preparatory monochrome, and this accounts for the beautiful quality of the paint; for we know that when the colour is put down clearly and untouched, it is fresh and untroubled.

Until the time of Masaccio, no attempt was made to gain richness or relief by the opposition of light to dark. All was in an even light, and richness was obtained by the local colours of draperies, ground, sky, etc. It is a style of painting admirably suited to the decoration of buildings, because of its clearness and formality.

But I think that the older painters’ ideal was always the representation of nature—even, if possible, to the point of imitation or illusion; and we know that the invention of oil painting was welcomed as giving, in this direction, a greater range to the artist. And yet one may feel that the unconscious and naïve representation of nature by the older men was better—in that it was truer to the spirit of nature—than the self-conscious imitative work of later times.

I should like to touch on the question of the picture as a decoration; in our times a distinction is made between painting which is decorative and painting which is pictorial, which is, I think, an unfortunate distinction, and one which should not exist: for all pictures should decorate the walls or places on which they are placed. That this distinction should exist is perhaps our own fault, in forgetting, as we do sometimes, that a picture should be agreeable to the eye in its colours and masses; the good old painters never forgot that. And a picture that has only cleverness of execution, or interest of anecdote, will soon cease to charm; while a picture may be feeble, and even childish, in its execution, yet if its masses and colours are well arranged, it will always give pleasure to the eye.

But I do not think it is possible to draw the line, and say at what point of imitation or of realism a picture ceases to be decorative and becomes pictorial; for when a picture was painted on a wall, it was intended to bring the scene into the presence, if possible, of the spectators in the room.

In the House of Livia, among the ruins on the Palatine Hill, are some rooms with the painted decorations still on the walls. One room is painted with architectural openings in the walls, through which we see landscapes and figures, the intention being to give the idea of space outside.

And there are many other instances to be seen, especially in Italian churches, where we find paintings in which the real architectural features of the building are imitated in paint, and continued into the picture, to make a scene for it, as in the small refectory of the monastery of St. Mark in Florence. This is a vaulted room. At one end is a painting of the Last Supper, by Ghirlandajo. A bay of the vaulting is continued in perspective into the painting, and the colour of the vaulting is matched, so as to suggest that the scene passes in our presence. The same device is employed by Leonardo in his Last Supper. And the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is planned in this way. Michelangelo has joined painted mouldings to real ones,—one cannot tell where,—and has built up in paint from them a great structural framework into the ceiling, and on this he has placed his figures.

And we see the same plan carried on until, in later times, it falls into the worst possible taste, as in those decorations where a ceiling will be covered with painted flying figures, with the leg of the nearest one actually modelled in relief, and projecting over the enclosing moulding! And the lamentable part of it is that it is very skilfully done.

We can, I think, draw a little generalisation from this. It seems as if in the artist’s mind the desire to express his subject and the desire to display his skill are conflicting tendencies. When these are in perfect balance we get the finest work. When the desire for expression is the stronger, we get sincere and beautiful, but imperfect and immature work, as in the case of the early Primitives. But when the desire for the display of skill is the stronger, we get cleverness, affectation, and decadence.