EVER since the appearance of Mr. Robert C. Witts How to Look at Pictures, the book and its title have inspired imitations, with or without acknowledgment. How to Judge of a Picture , by Professor Van Dyke, and The Appreciation of Pictures, by Mr. Russell Sturgis, both American echoes of the original work, soon followed. Close on their heels in almost indecent haste, and also by an American, comes the English edition of Mr. Caffins volume How to Study Pictures . It too is obviously based?title, preface, introduction, and choice of illustrations?on How to Look at Pictures. The plagiarism is naked and unashamed, and even in the three pages of bibliography no hint of the fact escapes. Professor Van Dykes work indeed appears in the list of general authorities, but Mr. Sturgis, though a compatriot, is also ignored. So severe is the struggle for existence.
Regarded as a frank imitation however the book is well enough of its kind. The author, who is the American editor of the Studio , has confined himself to considering fifty-six painters whose names he contends are pivotal ones by reason of what these artists accomplished or of their influence upon others. Adapting the parallel method he proceeds to deal with these painters in pairs, look on this picture and on this , and thus to present a survey, or birds-eye view of the whole field of painting. One may well doubt whether so much could possibly be achieved even from the vantage seat of the Recording Angel within the limits of some few hundred pages. But the system of parading these pivotal painters before the reader in pairs like a gigantic crocodile is certainly open to objections even from the students own point of view. It may appeal to those who are already initiated in the mysteries of art but must surely tend to confuse the beginner. Moreover the pairs are so curiously assorted. As boys in the great school of painting in many cases they would certainly not have chosen to walk out together. Nor is there any intelligible system on which the usher could have ordered them to form files. They seem to have been chosen indiscriminately as apposites or opposites. Cimabue and Giotto as the oldest, the model boys in the school, of course lead the way, master and pupil no doubt having much in common, for the one developed from and amplified the other; so too with Masaccio and Mantegna, pioneers of realism in Florence and Padua, or Sargent and Whistler, to come to modern times. On the other hand the yoking together of such obvious opposites as Titian and Holbein, Hobbema and Claude Lorraine, Constable and Turner, David and Delacroix is bound to result in vigorous and instructive discussion if not actual strife. But what are we to say of such ill-assorted couples as Raphael and Wohlgemuth, Rembrandt and Murillo, Courbet and Boecklin? What indeed is Wohlgemuth doing in a galère which already includes both Dürer and Holbein and omits all the Dutch genre-painters, Vermeer, Terburg, and. Steen? Can it be due to the patriotic wish to illustrate the work of the master from an American collection, the Death of the Virgin, here ascribed to him, being in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston? How, too, can Piloty or Jules Breton be fairly taken as pivotal names in the history of art?
--The Saturday Review, Vol. 102