Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

has tended to obscure tlic similarity between his statements
and those of less creative and radical men. Although few went
so far as to proclaim in the journals the sublime moral
independence of the artist, many critics were advising their
readers that it was not only literary and dramatic subjects
in painting that influenced minds and morals.
There was little consistent distinction between the terms
"literary", dramatic" and "pictorial" in discussions of new
paintings. In October 1603 a note accompanying Albert Moore's
Midsummer suggested how the artist had freed himself from the
"literary" tradition;
the dramatic movement of human life is not
necessarily literary. It makes appeal to the
eyes with a pictorial simplicity, and with all
the more simplicity as the people among whom
it passes are nationally too young to be
literary.
The Art-Journal's anonymous contributor claims Moore's paintings
had been for some time "the medicine of a distinct ill" -
the confusion of the arts that existed so long in England and
the general neglect of their boundaries" (n.s.VIII (IPP.fi) 317)
No attempt is made to define the terms, and the writer's
distaste for the confusion of the arts does not squr.re with
that important tenet of the Aesthetes, that musical terminolo j
can be used in talking of graphic art and literature. The
claim that some freedom has been newly granted to the painter
is, however, significant. Similarly, an unattributed reviev;
of Watt's work claimed in 1882 that his effectiveness was
independent of literary criteria and inspiration:
He is absolutely and remarkably consistent,
insomuch as his choice, however wiOe, is strictly
confined within the limits of pictorial art; he
does not wander into literary interests, shoi/iir:
in this reserve that judgement as to the
distinctions of the arts v/hich marks the artist
of thought and culture.
This does not c^mit of the possibility that a painter oi.;ht
depict some vis--ionary narrative, and the ten:, pictorial"
is used vaguely. The new tendency is seen as an abstention
frora literary traditions, rather tlian a novel freedom. The
writer concludes by suggesting tlr^t Watt's other principal
activity, portraiture,