Great Artists and Their Works: By Great Authors

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Marshall Jones Company, 1919 - 267 Seiten
The prime purpose of this book is to present, in small compass, clearly reasoned opinions of men who have treated the philosophy of art not less with simplicity of language than depth of understanding -- novelist and essayist not less than professed critic. A further purpose is to present a brief series of most brilliant descriptions of specific and famous works of art, architecture, sculpture, and painting, by men whose names are synonyms for all that is brilliant. Considered as a whole the collection centres upon a single point, namely, increase of appreciation and love of art behind which, said Rossetti, lies "passionate emotion," and the condition of which is "fundamental brain work." It is a book about men who live, eternal, in their buildings, pictures, sculptures. It is a book by men who have, for the most part, already eternalized themselves in their writings. - Foreword
 

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Seite 17 - Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful — as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony. To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano.
Seite 245 - And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle.
Seite 169 - The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Here is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.
Seite 109 - ... sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, — interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back...
Seite 117 - FORGET six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small and white and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green...
Seite 105 - ... nests in the height of them, and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the Eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea-shell.
Seite 176 - Rembrandt is popular,* but nobody cares much at heart about Titian ; only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they — the consent of those who, having sat long enough at his feet, have found in that restrained harmony of his strength there are indeed depths of each balanced power more wonderful than all those separate...
Seite 169 - Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of...
Seite 14 - If I say that the greatest picture is that which conveys to the mind of the spectator the greatest number of the greatest ideas, I have a definition which will include as subjects of comparison every pleasure which art is capable of conveying.
Seite 57 - The subterraneous pipes conveyed an inexhaustible supply of water; and what had just before appeared a level plain might be suddenly converted into a wide lake, covered with armed vessels, and replenished with the monsters of the deep.

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