Corot declared he preferred the low sweet music of early dawn and to him there was enough variety in it to keep him employed as long as he could paint; but the thralldom of an artist who follows in the groove of a bygone success because if he steps out of it the dealer frowns and will not handle his work, is pitiable, exposing to view year by year the remonitory canvas with such slight changes as newness demands. It would be a healthier sign in art if the press and public would applaud new ventures when it was clear that an artist, thereby, was seeking to do better things and perhaps find himself in a newer vein. But variety in art it is maintained need not come of variety in the individual but of a variety of individuals. So Van Marke must paint cows, and Jacque sheep and Wouvermanns must be told by the inevitable white horse, and have the mere mention of the artist’s name mean the same sort of picture every time. This aids the simplification of a many-sided question. The public, as Mr. Hamerton declares, hates to burden itself with names; to which might be added that it also hates to differentiate with any single name. A good portraitist in England one year exhibited at the Royal Academy a wonderfully painted peacock. The people raved and thereafter he was allowed to paint nothing else. Occasionally it is shown that this discrimination is without reason, as many men rise above the restriction. The Gainsborough portrait and landscape are equally strong, the works of painters in marble, and sculptors who use color, have proved a surprise to the critics and an argument against the “specialty.”
There are two degrees in the subversion of the natural fact.
If, for example, under the rule in physics, the angle of incidence being equal to the angle of reflection, it be found that a cloud in the sky will reflect into water too near the bottom of the picture, a painter’s license may move it higher _in its vertical line;_ but if the same cloud is made to reflect at an angle several degrees to right or left, the artist breaks the simplest law of optics. The painter’s art at best is one of deception. In the first case the lie was plausible. In the second case any schoolboy could have “told on” the artist.