Sir Joshua Reynolds wisely, stated the canon for artists when, referring to the choice of subjects, he said.
“No subject can be proper that is not generally interesting. It ought to be either some eminent instance of heroic action or heroic suffering. There must be something, either in the action or in the object, in which men are universally concerned, and which publicly strikes upon the public sympathy.” They who are not content to copy what is ignoble, or reproduce what is insignificant--who use art to expound and apply the teaching of God in nature and revelation--who design to address the heart, and so elevate the imaginations and judgments of men, are benefactors of their race--ministers at the altar of truth and righteousness. The work of such artists can be regarded as eminently sacred. (J. H. Hitchens, D. D.)
The far-reaching influence of art
The preacher’s voice must be occasionally silenced by weariness, and ultimately hushed by death; but the artist’s pictures continue to tell their own tale, and enforce their own lessons to all spectators, night and day, so long as they may be preserved. The author’s book, upon the loftiest possible theme, can be read only by those who are familiar with the language in which it is written, and among the would-be readers will be some who, being unaccustomed to the laws of thought, will lay the book aside as uninteresting; but pictures are biographies, histories, homilies, poems which, without words, can be studied at a glance. (J. H. Hitchens, D. D.)
Pictures
Pictures are by some relegated to the realm of the trivial, accidental, sentimental, or worldly, but the text shows that God scrutinises pictures, and whether they are good or bad, whether used for right or wrong purposes, is a matter of Divine observation and judgment. (T. DeWitt Talmage, D. D.)
The prostitution of art
That the artist’s pencil and the engraver’s knife have sometimes been made subservient to the kingdom of evil is frankly admitted. After the ashes and sconce were removed from Herculaneum and Pompeii the walls of those cities discovered to the explorers a degradation in art which cannot be exaggerated. Satan and all his imps have always wanted the fingering of the easel; they would rather have possession of that than the art of printing, for types are not so potent and quick for evil as pictures. (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.)
Bad pictures should be avoided
Pliny the elder lost his life by going near enough to see the eruption of Vesuvius, and the further you can stand off from the burning crater of sin, the better. Never till the books of the Last Day are opened shall we know what has been the dire harvest of evil pictorials and unbecoming art galleries. Despoil a man’s imagination and he becomes a moral carcase. The show windows of English and American cities in which have sometimes hung long lines of brazen actors and actresses in style insulting to all propriety, have made a broad path to death for multitudes of people. (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.)
The value of Bible pictures
I refer to your memory and mine when I ask if your knowledge of the Holy Scriptures has not been mightily augmented by the woodcuts or engravings in the old family Bible, which father and mother read out of, and laid on the table in the old homestead when you were boys and girls. The Bible scenes which we all carry in our minds were not gotten from the Bible typology, but from the Bible pictures. To prove the truth of it in my own case, the other day I took up the old family Bible which I inherited. Sure enough, what I have carried in my mind of Jacob’s ladder was exactly the Bible engraving of Jacob’s ladder; and so with Samson carrying off the gates of Gaza; Elisha restoring the Shunamite son; the massacre of the innocents; Christ blessing little children; the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgment. My idea of all these is that of the old Bible engravings which I scanned before I could read a word. (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.)
Gustave Dore’s pictures
In 1833 forth from Strasburg, Germany, there came a child that was to eclipse in speed and boldness and grandeur anything and everything that the world had seen since the first colour appeared on the sky at the creation, Paul Gustave Dore. At eleven years of age he published marvellous lithographs of his own. Saying nothing of what he did for Milton’s Paradise Lost, emblazoning it on the attention of the world, he takes up the Book of books, the monarch of literature, the Bible, and in his pictures “The Creation of Light,” “The Trial of Abraham’s Faith,” “The Burial of Sarah,” “Joseph Sold by his Brethren,” “The Brazen Serpent,” “Boaz and Ruth,” “David and Goliath,” “The Transfiguration,” “The Marriage in Cana,” “Babylon Fallen,”--two hundred and five Scriptural scenes in all,--and that with a boldness and grasp and almost supernatural afflatus that make the heart throb, and the brain reel, and the tears start, and the cheeks blanch, and the entire nature quake with the tremendous things of God and eternity and the dead. I actually staggered down the steps of the London Art Gallery under the power of Dore’s “Christ Leaving the Praetorium.” Profess you to be a Christian man or woman, and see no Divine mission in art, and acknowledge you no obligation either in thanks to God or man? (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.)
