Beauty in woman: analysed and classified : with a critical view of the hypotheses of the most eminent writers, painters, and sculptors / by Alexander Walker.

  • Alexander Walker
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Beauty in woman: analysed and classified : with a critical view of the hypotheses of the most eminent writers, painters, and sculptors / by Alexander Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    94/396 (page 88)
    the imitative representation of such objects in paint- ing is far less harsh and dazzling than the effects of them in reality: for there are no materials, that a painter can employ, capable of expressing the sharp- ness and brilliancy of those angular reflections of the collected and condensed rays, which are emitted from the surfaces of polished metals.” It seems, to me, scarcely possible to find sophistry more worthless than this, or rather a more con- temptible quibble ; for that which, availing himself of our technicalities about light, he calls angularity, sharpness, etc., has no analogy with disagreeable angularity of form. To produce the brilliance and splendour which he calls angular, and describes as so offensive^ we polish crystalline and metallic bodies in the highest degree!—we value precisely those which thus admit of greatest splendour !—and, on that very account, the diamond (rightly or wrongly, is not the question) is deemed the most valuable object on earth ! So much for those elements of beauty, in inanimate things, which fall under the cognizance of our fundamental sense, or that of touch. As to sight and its objects, it is true that, as this organ varies in different persons, their taste is modi- fied with regard to colours. But the preference of light and delicate colours to dark and glaring ones, is almost universal among persons of sensibility. Alison, indeed, ascribes the effects of all colours to association. “ White,” he says, “as it is the colour of day, is expressive to us of the cheerfulness or gaiety which the return of day brings: black, as the colour of darkness [night], is expressive of gloom and melancholy.” And he adds, “Whether