A
Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke was published a
century ago. Today it offers the modern reader not only potted, period critiques
of important artists, but also a remarkable insight into how aesthetics change
from generation to generation. John Charles Van Dyke’s assessments of some work
will surprise today’s reader, especially his attitudes towards some
contemporary artists who received rather hostile reactions from some quarters
when their work was first exhibited.
The
book deals with the European tradition. It makes no excuses for this. At the
time, non-European art was perhaps less well known in Western critical circles.
Perhaps also, it was regarded as somehow inferior, perhaps also merely because
it was not European in origin. But Van Dyke does offer us a working distinction
that excludes most non-European art from his survey, that of the difference
between observation and expression. Only that which aims at expression, for van
Dyke at least, is worthy of the label “art”. Somehow ancient Egyptian art makes
it into the oeuvre, probably because it was also represented in museums that
were close at hand and accessible.
Two
painters in particular illustrate the difference in treatment between van
Dyke’s age and our own, El Greco and Alma-Tadema. El Greco is hardly mentioned
as a figure in sixteenth century Spain, his achievements apparently being
regarded as rather localised on Toledo. Thus a figure now regarded as a unique
stylist and visionary hardly figures in this text. Alma-Tadema, whose
academicism and detail might today offer summary and epitome of the staid
Victorian England that toyed euphemistically with the erotic is also dismissed.
And one of the few English painters to be raised to the peerage, Frederick
Leighton, also did not impress Professor Van Dyke. Neither, it seems, did
Albrecht Durer.
Central
to Van Dyke’s aesthetic is a judgment as to whether the painter not only
represents, interprets and expresses, but also constructs a painting. Mere
reality is never enough, it seems, life requiring the skill of an editor or
architect to render its experience communicable. It is interesting to reflect
on how much or little we still value this aspect of aesthetics in today’s
painting.
Some
of Van Dyke’s observations will at least entertain. Franz Hals, we learn, lived
a rather careless life. William Blake was hardly a painter at all. A Dutchman
is attributed with the faint praise of being a unique painter of poultry.
Matthew Maris is criticised for being a recorder of visions and dreams rather
than the substantial things of earth, while Turner is dismissed as bizarre and
extravagant, qualities that today might enhance rather than diminish his
reputation.
But
Van Dyke’s book remains an interesting, informative and rewarding read, despite
its distance from contemporary thinking. He is especially strong in his summary
descriptions of the different Italian schools of the late Gothic and
Renaissance eras. It is more than useful to be reminded of how independent
these city states were at the time and how little they managed to influence one
another. A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke
remains, then, an essential read for anyone interested in the history of art.
Much has changed, but then there is much that has not.
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