The wine-god is represented in infancy, nursed by the nymphs and fauns of Eubœa, and fed not on milk but on the juice of the grape. "The picture makes one thirsty to look at it – the colouring even is dry and adust. The figure of the infant Bacchus seems as if he would drink up a vintage – he drinks with his mouth, his hands, his belly, and his whole body. Gargantua was nothing to him" (Hazlitt: Criticisms on Art, p. 33).
40. LANDSCAPE: PHOCION
"The work of a really great and intellectual mind, one of the finest landscapes that ancient art has produced"75 (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. i. § 8), – its excellence consisting in the perfect harmony of the landscape with the subject represented, and thus marking the painter's sense of the dependence of landscape for its greatest impressiveness on human interest. In the foreground to the left is Phocion "the good" – the incorruptible Athenian general and statesman, contemporary with Philip and Alexander the Great, of whom it is recorded that he was "never elated in prosperity nor dejected in adversity," and "never betrayed pusillanimity by a tear nor joy by a smile." He wears an undyed robe, and is washing his feet at a public fountain, the dress and action being thus alike emblematic of the purity and simplicity of his life. In entire keeping with this figure of noble simplicity is the feeling of the landscape in which "all the air a solemn stillness holds." In detail, however, Ruskin finds the picture deficient in truth – false, indeed, both in tone and colour (see ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 5).
41. THE DEATH OF PETER MARTYR
For the legend, see under 812 – a more pleasing version of the same subject. The man was afterwards regarded as a martyr and canonised; and here, too, notice that he is made to see the angels as he dies.
42. A BACCHANALIAN FESTIVAL
A realisation of the classic legends of mirth and jollity, precisely in the spirit of Keats's ode On a Grecian Urn—
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
"This masterpiece, conceived in the manner of Titian and imbued with the spirit of the antique, full of life, and incomparable for its qualities of drawing and painting, is perhaps the most beautiful work which Nicolas Poussin ever painted, and, with the 'Bacchanalian Dance' (No. 62), is among the most valued possessions of the National Gallery" (Poynter: The National Gallery, ii. 104).
43. CHRIST TAKEN DOWN FROM THE CROSS
A sketch for a composition which Rembrandt etched and also drew. The drawing is in the British Museum. This sketch was formerly in the possession of Sir Joshua Reynolds, at whose sale it was bought by Sir George Beaumont.
44. A BLEACHING GROUND
This little picture, which dates from the earliest days of the National Gallery, was for many years obscured with dirt and not exhibited to the public. It has recently been cleaned, and shows one of the painter's favourite subjects – the bleaching grounds in the neighbourhood of Haarlem. Before the discovery of chemical means of bleaching linen, these were a great source of income to the town. Linen was brought here from all parts of the continent to be bleached, and then went back as Dutch linen or Holland.
45. THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY
Rembrandt Harmensz – called also Van Rhyn, "of the Rhine," from having been born on the banks of that river – has a place apart by himself in the history of painting. He is the greatest genius of the Dutch School, and one of the six supreme masters of the world. He is also one of the most distinctive and individual of them all. In what, let us ask, do the genius and the individuality of Rembrandt consist? In the first place, his mastery of the resources of painting, within the sphere and for the ideals he chose for himself, is surpassed by no other artist. "It will be remembered," said Millais, "that Rembrandt in his first period was very careful and minute in detail, and there is evidence of stippling in his flesh-painting; but when he grew older, and in the fulness of his power, all appearance of such manipulation and minuteness vanished in the breadth and facility of his brush, though the advantage of his early manner remained. The latter manner is, of course, much the finer and really the more finished of the two.76 I have closely examined his pictures at the National Gallery, and have actually seen, beneath that grand veil of breadth, the early work that his art conceals from untrained eyes – the whole science of painting. And herein lies his superiority to Velazquez, who, with all his mighty power and magnificent execution, never rose to the perfection which, above all with painters, consists in ars celare artem" (Magazine of Art, 1888, p. 291). "Rembrandt," says Sir Frederic Burton, "would have been unparalleled had he treated nothing but frivolous subjects"; but, in the second place, "the artist was a poet and a seer." He was a seer in his penetration into the mind of man; a poet in his perception of a special kind of beauty. His portraits have "an inward life that belongs to no others in a like degree." It is as a painter of character that he shows himself supreme, bringing out the personality of his sitters in their gestures and attitudes, and in the peculiarity of bearing and expression stamped upon them by temperament and habits. From his dramatic action and mastery of expression, Rembrandt has been called "the Shakespeare of Holland." In his religious subjects, the originality of his mind and power of his imagination are also conspicuous. "He gives," says Ruskin, "pathetic or powerful fancies, founded on real Scripture reading, and on his interest in the picturesque character of the Jew." In all subjects alike, "he moves us by his profound sympathy with his kind, by his tragic power, by his deep pathos, by his humour, which is thoroughly human and seldom cynical." What he held up to nature – and herein is Rembrandt's individuality most marked – was the dark mirror. "He was," says Leighton, "the supreme painter who revealed to the world the poetry of twilight and all the magic mystery of gloom." "He was in the mystery," says Burton, "that underlies the surface of things." "He accosts with his dark lantern," says Fromentin, "the world of the marvellous, of conscience, and the ideal; he has no master in the art of painting, because he has no equal in the power of showing the invisible." "It was his function," says another critic, "to introduce mystery as an element of effect in the imitative arts." "As by a stroke of enchantment Rembrandt brought down a cloud over the face of nature, and beneath it, half-revealed, half-hidden, her shapes met the eye in aspects full of new suggestion."77 In the technical method by which Rembrandt worked out his ideal he is the great master of the school of chiaroscuro – of those, that is, who strive at representing not so much the colours of objects, as the contrasts of light and shade upon them. "If it were possible for art to give all the truths of nature it ought to do it. But this is not possible. Choice must always be made of some facts which can be represented from among others which must be passed by in silence, or even, in some respects, misrepresented… Rembrandt always chooses to represent the exact force with which the light on the most illumined part of an object is opposed to its obscurer portions. In order to obtain this, in most cases, not very important truth, he sacrifices the light and colour of five-sixths of his picture; and the expression of every character of objects which depends on tenderness of shape or tint. But he obtains his single truth, and what picturesque and forcible expression is dependent upon