Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/302

 Of Painting.

Our pleasures from pictures are very nearly related to those of imitation, which, as observed above, take up a considerable part of our childhood; and the several playthings representing men, houses, horses, &c. with which children are so much delighted, are to be considered, both as augmenting and gratifying this taste in them.

To this it is to be added, that as the ideas of sight are the most vivid of all our ideas, and those which are chiefly laid up in the memory as keys and repositories to the rest, pictures, which are something intermediate between the real object and the idea, and therefore in cases of sufficient likeness more vivid than the idea, cannot but please us by thus gratifying our desire of raising up a complete idea of an absent object. This an attentive person may observe in himself in viewing pictures.

The surprise and contrast which arise in children, upon their seeing persons and objects present in their pictures, which yet they know to be absent, by striking the mind with the impossible conception of the same thing in two places, are probably the sources of considerable pleasure to them.

To these causes let us add the gay colours, and fine ornaments, which generally go along with pictures; and we shall have the chief sources of the pleasures which painting affords to young persons, and to those who have not yet been much affected with the various incidents of life, and their representations, or acquired a taste and skill in these things.

For, after this, the pleasures arising from pictures are quite of another kind, being derived from the same sources as those that belong to the scenes, affections, and passions represented, from the poetical descriptions of these, from the precise justness of the imitation, from ambition, fashion, the extravagant prices of the works of certain masters, from association with the villas and cabinets of the noble, the rich, and the curious, &c. &c.

The nature of the caricatura, burlesque, grotesque, picturesque, &c. may be understood from what is delivered in other parts of this Section, concerning laughter, wit, humour, the marvellous, absurd, &c. to which they correspond.

Painting has a great advantage over verbal description, in respect of the vividness and number of ideas to be at once excited in the fancy; but its compass is, upon the whole, much narrower; and it is also confined to one point of time.

The representations of battles, storms, wild beasts, and other objects of horror, in pictures, please us peculiarly, partly from the near alliance which the ideas suggested bear to pain, partly from the secret consciousness of our own security, and partly because they awaken and agitate the mind sufficiently to be strongly affected with the other pleasures, which may then be offered to it.