Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/44

— 44 — That he could even appreciate Rembrandt as an artist is proved by his letter to the Rev. Dr. Trusler (16th Aug. 1799) to whom Blake writes alluding to paintings he had made for him: "You will have a number of cabinet pictures that will not be unworthy of a scholar of Rembrandt and Teniers, whom I have studied no less than Michael Angelo and Raphael". But Blake wanted with all the power that dwelt in him to bring back the art of painting in new correspondence with the world of imaginative and intellectual ideals. He considered as the greatest representatives of artists, who entirely neglected the intellectual and metaphysical meaning in art, those of the Venetian and Flemish schools. Here the evil had taken root which resulted in an entire absence of lofty ideas and poetical motives. It must not be forgotten at what a low ebb the English art of the beginning of the nineteenth century was, and how difficult a position Blake had taken up against the current ideas of conventionalism.

As landscape painters we find Callcott, Thomas Creswick, Stanfield and Frederick Lee, all good executants but not free from artificiality. Other painters are Fuseli (Füssli) and Benjamin West, who undoubtedly not without genius, stood under the several influences of Dutch, German, and Italian schools and produced not a single original, inspired picture with an intellectual grasp of the subject or a rendering of feelings neither melodramatic nor theatrical.

Sick of the correctly drawn, but highly conventional insipid genre pictures of the day Blake fell into another extreme and followed the rule that by far the principal aim of painting was to bring home to men intellectual or emotional truths, that for this purpose correctness in drawing, adherence to the natura evidence of the senses in colour and form might even be sacrificed. These principles found utterance in his violent criticisms on one hand and besides were expressed in the quaint and weird, often even grotesque, qualities of his pictures and drawings. Before everything else Blake's paintings want to express his ideas and in this he succeeded, perhaps because he really had ideas to express. Therefore his pictures, though full of