The Amateur in Art

Extract

We had been talking about the recent exhibitions and everybody agreed that it was a melancholy thing to see how men who had begun as real and sincere artists had, for obvious reasons, become purveyors of popular pictures. Another spoke of the work of a gifted and restless politician who was known to be in his spare moments a slashing painter of landscape. From this we came by a natural transition to amateurs generally and their ways.

Alison, the poet, contended strongly for the essential superiority of the amateur as a sort of aristocrat who was entitled to special consideration because he worked from inspiration while others worked by routine. Look at the daily articles, the weekly reviews, the annual novels. Look at the painters. ‘Look’ he said, ‘at the average production here and abroad, at the Academy, the galleries, the Salons. Routine work without inspiration. Potboilers. Things done, not because they had to be done, but because something must be done. Fellows always at it—starve if they didn’t, I am afraid, some of them. (Alison has a substantial income of his own). How can you have freshness of vision, spontaneity, sincerity the things that make Art vital? How does the fun of the thing come in? No fun at all, drudgery. You know, Howard, what Schiller said about the element of play in Art—a sort of sublime—or at any rate charming—play in which we escape from the trammels of everyday life. . .