Cupid’s Hunting Fieldsdetails

The excellent monochrome which, by permission of Mr Constantine Ionides, we have reproduced, in its original colour, as our frontispiece, is a characteristic example of the exquisite and peculiar art of the most imaginative and, in some ways, the most accomplished of modern painters. The draughtsmanship is so expressive and complete, so “entirely masterful,” that it recalls the very terms of Ruskin’s eulogy.

The colour, simple as it is, is eminently appropriate and attractive. The gestures are quick with passionate significance. The general effect is one that interests and that charms. The painter’s mannerisms are present, it is true—his indifference to perspective, his care for methods and ambitions long since abandoned, his preference for a unique type of face and a peculiar cast of expression. But to be mannered is not necessarily to be unbeautiful or imperfect.

Here there is too much beauty and too near an approach to certain kinds of perfectness to leave the matter in doubt for even a moment.

In invention and in aim the picture is in some sort representative. The love-god is blind and impassive as Fortune herself; at his approach the maidens who are his quarry are smitten, not with joy, but with amazement and dread; one is already stricken down, so that the archer holds her underfoot, and her hurt is manifestly desperate. From this imagining of love, and love’s works and ways, there is abstracted all that is gross, all that is unworthy, all that is trivial and mean. It is wholly noble and wholly spiritual; and the forms in which it is embodied are touched with the august and stainless chastity of great religious art. It is charged with the passionate melancholy which colours the poet-painter’s outlook upon life and time; it symbolises love as an influence which is the source, not only of the world’s happiness, but of the world’s misery as well. But it is the work of one who has “uttered nothing base;” and in the far-reaching significance of its conception, not less than in the matchless purity of the terms in which that conception is expressed, it is worthy [of] its author. (p. 511)