Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/342

 312 Painting. V. Subjects. The subjects which a painter may represent are only limited by his powers of vision. Even the so-called genre painter has a vast field of selection open to him, and may either degrade his art by recording trivial events or actions better forgotten, or ennoble it by immortalising scenes which will bring the thoughts and feelings of other times and other classes vividly before the mind of the spectator. A painter may be a landscape, a historic, a portrait, or what is called a genre painter. The term genre compre- hends all pictures with figures which are not historic, especially those in which the figures are smaller than life ; and also architectural, flower, and fruit pieces, and repre- sentations of what is called still life (i. e. dead game, fruit, flowers, etc.). And in any or all of these branches of his art two courses are open to the artist. He may adopt what is known as the grand or ideal style and attempt to express the highest idea conceivable of natural perfection, or he may choose the realistic or naturalistic style and exhibit things exactly as they are, without alteration or improvement. In landscape painting, the two phases open to the artist are the epic, when nature is seen in her highest moods, whether of action or repose, such as in the works of Turner and Claude Lorrain ; and the idyllic, when she appears in her simple every-day beauty, as depicted by Constable and Gainsborough. In historic and portrait painting we may perhaps recog- nise an ideal and a realistic school. For historic painting the suitable subjects are sacred, historic events, or dramatic scenes of stirring interest, in which the noblest human