God Send Us An Artist With A Heart To Reverence His Own Native
Mountains And Fields, And To Veil His Face In Awe When The Great
Master Walks Before His Cottage Door.
When shall arise the artist
whose inspiration shall be in prayer and in communion with God?
- Whose
eye, unsealed to behold his beauty in the natural world, shall offer
up, on canvas, landscapes which shall be hymns and ascriptions?
By a strange perversity, people seem to think that the Author of
nature cannot or will not inspire art; but "He that formed the eye,
shall he not see? he that planted the ear, shall he not hear?" Are not
God's works the great models, and is not sympathy of spirit with the
Master necessary to the understanding of the models?
But to continue our walk. We entered another Dutch apartment,
embellished with works by Dietrich, prettily colored, and laboriously
minute; then into a corridor devoted chiefly to the works of Rembrandt
and scholars. In this also were a number of those minute culinary
paintings, in which cabbages, brass kettles, onions, potatoes, &c.,
are reproduced with praiseworthy industry. Many people are enraptured
with these; but for my part I have but a very little more pleasure in
a turnip, onion, or potato in a picture than out, and always wish that
the industry and richness of color had been bestowed upon things in
themselves beautiful. The great Master, it is true, gives these
models, but he gives them not to be looked at, but eaten.
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