Painters and Sculptors; A Second Series of Old Masters and New

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PAINTERS OF THE MODE IT is now many years ago that my indignation was stirred by the sneer of a well-known critic at the late Alfred Stevens, as a mere painter of feminine frivolity and fashionable clothes; and one constantly hears the same kind of criticism from those who judge of the value of a work of art by its subject rather than by its excellence. The truth is, that since there has been any art in the world many of the greatest artists have devoted their talents to the painting of beautiful women in the fashionable toilettes of the time, and that a history of the mode might be written which should be illustrated entirely by acknowledged masterpieces of art. When art has been really living it has occupied itself with the life of its own time; and as painters are no more than human they have generally found that the women of their time were a very considerable part of that life. They have liked them beautiful according to the taste of the moment, and they have liked them none the less for being well dressed. We know the ideal of feminine elegance in all ages of the world, and in all countries under the sun, from the records left us by the artists, and are informed as to the necklace of Pharaoh's daughter and the hairpins of the ladies of Japan. Even the monkish illuminators of the Middle Ages show the universal interest in head-dresses and stomachers, and can conceive of the Queen of Sheba no otherwise than as resembling the prettiest duchess of the neighbourhood. As the classical ideal is founded on the art of the Greeks and Romans, we are apt to forget that their art was not classic to them, but entirely local and contemporary, and that what we think of as drapery, as distinguished from costume, was simply the costume worn by the ladies of Greece and Rome. Tha...