How To View Art

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THE AESTHETIC WAY

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In my recent article about the Whistler painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I admitted to being no expert in art appreciation. I now realize that was a needless confession.

Apparently, the amateur aesthete can abandon artistic authenticity.

According to the above cartoon by Du Maurier in Punch magazine,¹ the aspiring art-critic can instead project a supercilious air of superior knowledge simply by not looking at the paintings.

I should have known. Was it not I who alluded to the eponymous Mr Puff in Sheridan’s The Critic — a character who is so busy writing positive theatre reviews that he has no time to actually see the plays? And was it not Oscar Wilde who said of the Royal Academy that there are “so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people?”²

So try this next time you are at an art museum. Find the most famous painting in the room and stand with your back to it. People will naturally assume that it takes more than a mere Whistler or Velasquez³ to impress your expertise.

Have a care, though. With this bearing, you might feel a little insecure if the highlights tour shows up. In such cases, you might try wearing a monocle.

© John Cooper, 2024.

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Footnotes:

1. Wilde, who became associated with Punch characters such as Prigsby (on the left), had similarly taken to art criticism with reviews of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, and 1879. ↩︎
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 1. ↩︎
3. “Why drag in Velasquez?” said Whistler (see link: note 4.). ↩︎

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From Punch: May 14, 1882, 218.

THE GROSVENOR GALLERY
A lay of the Private View

The Grosvenor! the view that’s called private,
Yet all the world seems to be there;
Each carriage that comes to arrive at
The door, makes the populace stare.
There’s GLADSTONE, severe of demeanour,
It’s plain that the pictures don’t please;
And there, with’an aspect serener,
Her Highness, the Princess LOUISE.

The haunt of the’very aesthetic,
Here come the supremely intense,
The long-haired and hyper-poetic
Whose sound is mistaken for sense.
And many a maiden will mutter,
When OSCAR looms large on her sight,
“He’s quite too consummately utter,
As well as too utterly quite.”

The dresses! What thinks Mr. GILBERT,
Who’s given us some dainty designs,
Of folds like the dead leaf or filbert,
That fall in such Florentine lines.
I trow on the whole that there’s not a
Costume that looks better to-day,
Than wraps of a warm terra-cotta
Two elegant ladies display.

A frock that’s the tone of a tartlet,
A hat medievally wide,
Must startle our BURDETT-COUNTS-BARTLET,
Who’s here with his Baroness bride.
But come, we’ve the pictures to stare on,
And scarcely can see for the throng,
COUTTS-LINDSAY’s remarkable “Charon”—
Another good DORÉ gone wrong!

Here’s WHISTLER paints Miss Alexander,
A portrait washed out as by rain;
’Twill raise RUSKIN’s critical dander,
To find James is at it again.
The flesh-tints of WATTS are quite comic;
There’s HERKOMER’s chaos of stones;
But where is the great anatomic
Improver on Nature, BURNE-JONES?

A Grosvenor without him so strange is,
We miss the long chins and knock-knees,
The angel of bronze, who for change is
Tied up to the stillest of trees:
Limp lads with their belli capelli,
Mad maidens with love smitten sore,
Oh, shade of defunct Boticelli,
Burne-Jones comes to startle no more!

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