Charles L. Barstow

The Story of Painting

The pictures that follow are grouped according to the kind of subject, or according to the different kinds of painting, as they are often divided in histories of art. But in each group, the pictures are given in the order in which they were produced, and, taken in connection with the descriptions of the paintings themselves, show something as to how painting has grown and developed. This will be noticed especially in the section devoted to landscapes.

The two tables which follow, contain, besides the artists whose pictures are given in the book, a few other really great names—names of men whose pictures we could not include because our book must be short.

From these tables we see that up to the sixteenth century only Italy had done much worth noting. Even that was very crude compared with what came soon after. For in the sixteenth century Italy produced all at once a number of the world's greatest men, including Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Leonardo da Vinci.

In the seventeenth century other countries produced the great artists. The great Dutch painters, Franz Hals and Rembrandt, the great Spanish painters, Velasquez and Murillo, and the great Flemish painters, Rubens and Van Dyck, were born and did their immortal work. The French, too, afterwards to do so much for art, began to be known in this century through Claude Lorrain and Watteau. We might call these two centuries, the sixteenth and seventeenth, the Golden Age of Painting.

In the second table we see that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scene again shifted, and that France, England and America produced the greatest work, but that there were important men in other countries.

There are reasons, however, why first one country and then another took a leading place in art.

Great painting is likely to be produced where special encouragement is given to it. This usually happens when countries have become rich and prosperous, where there are opportunities for artists to beautify fine palaces, public buildings and princely homes and where the great mass of the people have become educated to a real enjoyment of works of art.

This is not the condition in our own day. "We are 'long' on education here in America," says John La Farge, "but we are 'short' on that culture founded on a feeling for beauty, the first step to the attainment of which is a knowledge of the beautiful pictures that have been created for our delight in the last five hundred years." And President Eliot said in an address to teachers: "Drawing is as necessary, I was going to say, for all the purposes of life, as language; but as a matter of fact, drawing is a better mode of expression than language."

So much has the study of pictures been neglected among us that this seems strange to us. We now think with wonder of those times when all the people of a town would gather about a studio or when thousands thronged to a church or convent to see a new painting by a master.

The people then knew the meaning and felt the beauty of great art although they could neither read nor write. They were truly taught by it.

A Cavalier By permission of Franz Hanfstaengl, New York City.

(See the chapter on Meissonier, pages 122-133, of whose work this picture is a well-known example.)

Chronological Table

Chronological Table