A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke was Released a century past. Nowadays it features the contemporary reader not just potted, interval critiques of significant artists, but also an outstanding insight into just how aesthetics shift from generation to generation. John Charles Van Dyke's evaluations of a few work will surprise the current reader, particularly his attitudes towards several modern artists that obtained quite conflicting reactions from several quarters if their work was first exhibited.
The publication deals with the European heritage. It makes no explanations for this. At the moment, non-European artwork was possibly less well known in Western circles that were critical. Maybe also, it had been considered as inferior, maybe even merely because it wasn't European in origin. However, Van Dyke does provide us a working differentiation which excludes most non-European artwork from his poll, which of the gap between monitoring and expression. Just what aims at saying, for van Dyke at least, is most worthy of the tag"art". Somehow ancient Egyptian art makes it to the oeuvre, likely because it was represented in museums which were close at hand and available.
Two painters particularly illustrate the distinction in treatment involving van Dyke's era and our own, El Greco and Alma-Tadema. Thus a figure currently considered a exceptional stylist and visionary barely figures in this article. Alma-Tadema, whose academicism and detail may now offer outline and epitome of this ancestral Victorian England that toyed euphemistically together with all the sensual can be disregarded. And among those very few English painters to be elevated to the peerage, Frederick Leighton, did not impress Professor Van Dyke. Neither, it appears, did Albrecht Durer.
Central to Van Dyke's aesthetic is a decision regarding whether the painter not merely signifies, interprets and expresses, but also constructs a painting. Mere reality is not enough, it appears, life requiring the ability of an architect or editor to leave its own expertise communicable. It's interesting to reflect how little or much we still appreciate this component of aesthetics in the current painting.
A number of Van Dyke's observations will entertain. Franz Hals, we understand, dwelt a somewhat poor life. William Blake was barely a painter in any respect. A Dutchman is credited with the faint praise of becoming a exceptional painter of poultry. Matthew Maris is famous for being a recorder of dreams and fantasies in contrast to the significant things of the planet, although Turner is disregarded as eccentric and extravagant, qualities which now might enhance instead of diminish his standing.
However, Van Dyke's book remains an intriguing, enlightening and fulfilling read, despite its distance in modern thinking. He's particularly strong in his overview descriptions of the distinct Italian universities of the late Gothic and Renaissance eras. It's more than helpful to be aware of how these city states were in the time and just how small they were able to affect one another. Much has changed, but there is much that's not.
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