The Gentle Art of Making Enemies: As Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been Prettily Spurred on to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by an Undue Sense of Right

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Putnam, 1904 - 340 pages
 

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Page 3 - For Mr Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
Page 125 - Art should be independent of all clap-trap — should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works " arrangements " and
Page 103 - Therefore Is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake us: we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness.
Page 141 - 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 brings forth from chaos glorious harmony.
Page 142 - And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us - then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite...
Page 113 - To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.
Page 114 - The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter — perfect in its bud as in its bloom — with no reason to explain its presence — no mission to fulfil — a joy to the artist — a delusion to the philanthropist — a puzzle to the botanist — an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.
Page 126 - The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer.
Page 32 - What greater sarcasm can Mr. lluskin pass upon himself than that he preaches to young men what he cannot perform ! Why, unsatisfied with his own conscious power, should he choose to become the type of incompetence by talking for forty years of what he has never done ! Let him resign his present professorship, to fill the chair of Ethics at the university.
Page 144 - Through his brain, as through the last alembic, is distilled the refined essence of that thought which began with the Gods, and which they left him to carry out. Set apart by them to complete their works, he produces that wondrous thing called the masterpiece, which surpasses in perfection all that they have contrived in what is called Nature; and the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos than was their own Eve.

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