Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, on the Distribution of the Prizes, December 11, I769, by the President.
Gentlemen,--I congratulate you on the honour which you have just received.I have the highest opinion of your merits, and could wish to show my sense of them in something which possibly may be more useful to you than barren praise.I could wish to lead you into such a course of study as may render your future progress answerable to your past improvement; and, whilst I applaud you for what has been done, remind you of how much yet remains to attain perfection.
I flatter myself, that from the long experience I have had, and the unceasing assiduity with which I have pursued those studies, in which, like you, I have been engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in offering some hints to your consideration.They are indeed in a great degree founded upon my own mistakes in the same pursuit.But the history of errors properly managed often shortens the road to truth.And although no method of study that I can offer will of itself conduct to excellence, yet it may preserve industry from being misapplied.
In speaking to you of the theory of the art, I shall only consider it as it has a relation to the method of your studies.
Dividing the study of painting into three distinct periods, I shall address you as having passed through the first of them, which is confined to the rudiments, including a facility of drawing any object that presents itself, a tolerable readiness in the management of colours, and an acquaintance with the most simple and obvious rules of composition.
This first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, a general preparation to whatever species of the art the student may afterwards choose for his more particular application.The power of drawing, modelling, and using colours is very properly called the language of the art; and in this language, the honours you have just received prove you to have made no inconsiderable progress.
When the artist is once enabled to express himself with some degree ofcorrectness, he must then endeavour to collect subjects for expression; to amass a stock of ideas, to be combined and varied as occasion may require.He is now in the second period of study, in which his business is to learn all that has hitherto been known and done.Having hitherto received instructions from a particular master, he is now to consider the art itself as his master.He must extend his capacity to more sublime and general instructions.Those perfections which lie scattered among various masters are now united in one general idea, which is henceforth to regulate his taste and enlarge his imagination.With a variety of models thus before him, he will avoid that narrowness and poverty of conception which attends a bigoted admiration of a single master, and will cease to follow any favourite where he ceases to excel.This period is, however, still a time of subjection and discipline.Though the student will not resign himself blindly to any single authority when he may have the advantage of consulting many, he must still be afraid of trusting his own judgment, and of deviating into any track where he cannot find the footsteps of some former master.
The third and last period emancipates the student from subjection to any authority but what he shall himself judge to be supported by reason.Confiding now in his own judgment, he will consider and separate those different principles to which different modes of beauty owe their original.In the former period he sought only to know and combine excellence, wherever it was to be found, into one idea of perfection; in this he learns, what requires the most attentive survey and the subtle disquisition, to discriminate perfections that are incompatible with each other.
He is from this time to regard himself as holding the same rank with those masters whom he before obeyed as teachers, and as exercising a sort of sovereignty over those rules which have hitherto restrained him.Comparing now no longer the performances of art with each other, but examining the art itself by the standard of nature, he corrects what is erroneous, supplies what is scanty, and adds by his own observation what the industry of his predecessors may have yet left wanting to perfection.Having well established his judgment, and stored his memory, he may now without fear try the power of his imagination.The mind that hasbeen thus disciplined may be indulged in the warmest enthusiasm, and venture to play on the borders of the wildest extravagance.The habitual dignity, which long converse with the greatest minds has imparted to him, will display itself in all his attempts, and he will stand among his instructors, not as an imitator, but a rival.
These are the different stages of the art.But as I now address myself particularly to those students who have been this day rewarded for their happy passage through the first period, I can with no propriety suppose they want any help in the initiatory studies.My present design is to direct your view to distant excellence, and to show you the readiest path that leads to it.Of this I shall speak with such latitude as may leave the province of the professor uninvaded, and shall not anticipate those precepts which it is his business to give and your duty to understand.
It is indisputably evident that a great part of every man's life must be employed in collecting materials for the exercise of genius.Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory.Nothing can come of nothing.He who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.
