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Painters of Boecklin's type, on the other hand, wish to produce in the observer a strong emotion, but they become slaves to their medium because their own emotion is not sufficiently powerful to conquer their minds, which become diverted by the colors and forms they produce.
Roman fountain, "Dome of Philosophy," by Faville; simplest and one of the most beautiful of the fountains on grounds. Suggested by fountains in Sienna and Ravenna. Palace of Fine Arts Palace of Fine Arts, Bernard R. Maybeck, of San Francisco. Conception inspired by Boecklin's painting, "The Island of the Dead." Rotunda like Pantheon in Rome. Colonnade suggested by Gerome's "Chariot Race."
No doubt you may detect a difference between Boecklin's creations and those of classic days; it is as if the light of his dreamings had filtered through some medium, some stained-glass window in a Gothic church which distorted their outlines and rendered them somewhat more grotesque. It is the hand of time. The world has aged.
One of Blake's swift upward soaring lines has more power to carry the imagination heavenward than all the versions of Boecklin's "Island of Death."
But his appreciation of the effect upon the mind of noble arrangements of space and mass raises him to a much higher place as an artist than he can be said to occupy as a painter. Franz von Stuck is Boecklin's most distinguished follower.
The translucence of this sea in which the boys plash and plunge is another witness to the verisimilitude of Sorolla's vision. Boecklin's large canvas at the new Pinakothek, Munich, is often cited as a tour de force of water painting. We allude to the mermaids and mermen playing in the trough of a greenish sea.
He found them in the garden, dozing under the round canopy of an ash, on a warm summer afternoon. They were like Boecklin's old couple, sleeping hand in hand, in an arbor. Sun, sleep, old age overwhelm them: they are falling, they are already half-buried in the eternal dream. And, as the last gleam of their life, their tenderness persists to the end.
There is Boecklin's insistence upon the symbol, and upon the bodying forth of things unseen, there is the solid violence of color, there is the pompous statement of the half-discerned truths which more sensitive artists are content to whisper. But there is also a splendid arabesque of line and a deeper reading of the spiritual content of the subject.
With both Boecklin and Stuck we feel that the manner of rendering the conception becomes more important than the initial conception, and this seldom, if ever, is true of Blake. In spite of Boecklin's superb restraint in the disposition of his masses, when it comes to color he is at the mercy of the material pigment and permits it to obliterate where it should enhance and reveal.
Against Boecklin's followers, whose minds are more or less befogged by their lack of appreciation of paint as a means to an end, we must place Wilhelm Truebner who is a clear thinker and a great painter, with more warmth than Liebermann and with a reticent color sense, a feeling for expressive form, a love of reality, and no apparent desire to re-invent the grotesque.
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