All these have no kind of concern with it and that is why I insist on calling my works “arrangements” and “harmonies.” This is pure music as distinguished from airs-commonplace and vulgar in themselves, but interesting from their associations, as, for instance, “Yankee Doodle,” or “Partant pour la Syrie.”Īrt should be independent of all clap-trap-should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. On F or G they constructed celestial harmonies-as harmonies-as combinations, evolved from the chords of F or G and their minor correlatives. Beethoven and the rest wrote music-simply music symphony in this key, concerto or sonata in that. I should hold it a vulgar and meretricious trick to excite people about Trotty Veck when, if they really could care for pictorial art at all, they would know that the picture should have its own merit, and not depend upon dramatic, or legendary, or local interest.Īs music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of colour. Not even the popularity of Dickens should be invoked to lend an adventitious aid to art of another kind from his.

market!īut even commercially this stocking of your shop with the goods of another would be indecent-custom alone has made it dignified. They say, “Why not call it ‘Trotty Veck,’ and sell it for a round harmony of golden guineas?'-naïvely acknowledging that, without baptism, there is no. Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp. All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because the black was wanted at that spot. My picture of a “Harmony in Grey and Gold” is an illustration of my meaning-a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell. Why should not I call my works “symphonies,” “arrangements,” “harmonies,” and “nocturnes'? I know that many good people think my nomenclature funny and myself “eccentric.” Yes, “eccentric” is the adjective they find for me.

Art rag