On Art and Artists: An Anthology of Diderot's Aesthetic Thought by Denis Diderot & John S. D. GlausJohn S. D. Glaus & Jean Seznec

Author:Denis Diderot & John S. D. GlausJohn S. D. Glaus & Jean Seznec
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

The State and Appearance

La Tour’s Ideas

I was leaving the Salon, I was tired. I went to see La Tour, this special individual who began to learn Latin at fifty-five, and who abandoned the art in which he excelled to plumb the depths of metaphysics which ended in disturbing his mind. I found him paying tribute to Restout’s memory; he was painting a portrait from one he had painted and which he was not satisfied. “Oh! What an interesting game I am playing! He told me. I can only be a winner. If I succeed, I will have the praise of a good artist; if I fail, there will remain that of a good friend”. He admitted to me that he owed a great deal to Restout’s advice, the only man with the same talent as himself who really appeared to communicate; that it was a painter who had taught him to turn a head and to circulate the air between the figure and the background by reflecting the lit side in the background and the side on the darkened side”; that either because it was Restout’s fault or either his own he had all the trouble in the world to understand how the principle worked, despite his uncomplicated ­character; for when the reflection is too strong or too weak you are not allowing nature, you are painting; that you are either weak or strong and that you are no longer truthful nor in harmony…

I wanted to know from him what he meant by embellish nature, and I had the satisfaction to see that a man who had overcome an ungrateful nature which opposed his progress and who had excelled by the sheer force of work and thought, had precisely the same ideas as my own.

The professors of our school, he told me, make two terrible mistakes: the first is to introduce this principal too early to the students; the second is to propose this without making any connection; from which it happens that amongst these students, some are subjected as slaves to the proportions of antiquity, to compass and ruler from which they never escape and are forever false and without feeling; the others abandon themselves to a freedom of imagination which delivers them to the false and mannered a place which leaves them no better.

“This is what I understand is meant, he continued, by embellishment of nature. In nature as consequentially in art, no lazy being. However, every being must have suffered more or less from the fatigue of being; it carries an imprint more or less defined. The first point to really be gained is an understanding of this impression, in such a way that if it depends on painting a king, an army general, a minister, a judge, a priest, a philosopher, a porter, that these people appear to be part of their state as much as possible; but as the change incurred in one has more or less influence on the others, the second point remains

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