can but look with folded arms. The dwellers in
the charmed world of Greek mythological fancy came on tiptoe to the
borders only of the daily life of that age.
The still-life painter has to do with fact, and for many other subjects
also the fact alone is sufficient. It is generally so in portraiture
where rendition of externals is attempted, but the portrait may suggest
revery and reflection, or, by _intimate accessory,_ provoke a discursive
movement in thought.
The realist is a man of drawing and how to do it, of paint and putting it
on, of textures and technique; he is a painter; and stops with that. But
the maker of pictures would step to another point of sight. He would so
aim as to shoot over the hilltop. He would hit something which he cannot
see.
Suggestion is both technical and subjective. There is suggestion of
detail, of act and of fact. In producing the effect, instead of the
detail, of a bunch of grass or a mass of drapery, we substitute suggestion
for literalism.
Fortuny, as a figure painter, was master of this art, his wonderful
arrangements of figures amongst drapery and in grasses bearing evidence.
Here, out of a fantastic crush of color, will be brought to view a
beautifully modelled hand and wrist which connect by the imagination only,
with the shoulder and body. These however, are ready to receive it and
like other parts of the picture are but points of fact to give
encouragement to the quest for the remainder. The hide and seek of the
subject, the "lost and found" in the line, the subsidizing of the
imagination for tribute, by his magic wand stroke were the artifices by
which Fortuny coquetted with nature and the public, fascinating the art
world of his day.
Fortuny, however, never took us beyond the bounds of his picture. It was
his doctrine that avoidance of detail was artful; that to carry the whole
burden when imagination could be tricked into shouldering some of it was
fool's drudgery. Millet, who was his antipode as a clumsy handler of his
tools, declared himself fortunate in being able to suggest much more than
he could paint.
In one of the competitions at the Royal Academy in England, the prize was
awarded to that rendering of the expression of Grief which showed the face
entirely covered, the suggestion being declared stronger than the fact.
In the realm of suggestion however the landscape artist has much the wider
range. Who has not experienced the fascination of
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