Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
Figure 4.1 Joseph Wright, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (© National Gallery,
London)
This gives truth an aesthetic character of its own: the scientific attitude involves
the unflinching contemplation of ugliness, while the voice of the artist faced with
a “misshapen” reality should wonder, according to Lessing, “Who will wish to
paint you, when no one wishes to see you?” Unfortunately, Lessing continues,
many modern artists do wish to paint the ugly, seeking to imitate all of Nature,
who “herself at all times sacrifices beauty to higher purposes.” 36
The modern artists with whom eighteenth-century writers associated such
themes were, as Lessing says, the Dutch, for whose genre scenes he finds a
classical predecessor in Pyreicus, the “rhyparograph, the dirt-painter,” whose
charmless subjects are elements of social nature—“barbers’ shops, filthy factories,
donkeys and cabbages.” 37 These are images of low class and labor: the peasant’s
with the inability of the one woman in the scene to face the truth before her: like the older girl
in the Experiment, she hides her face. Dr. Gross, like the scientist in Wright’s picture, is a hero of
modern times; successor to the warriors of old, he embodies what a hundred years before was
called the sublime. This is not to say that times do not change. Eakins’s Agnew Clinic, painted
fourteen years later, features a woman who has herself entered the territory of the sublime: the
assisting nurse, present not for aesthetic enjoyment but as a participant in men’s work.
36 Lessing, Laocoön, pp. 63, 66.
37 Ibid., p. 63.
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