Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 November 1888 — MISSION OF PICTURES. [ARTICLE]

MISSION OF PICTURES.

THE INFLUENCE OF PICTURES GREATER THAN LANGUAGE. Oar Cou itrr Should Be 81-seed Wi h More of the Silent School*.., A Word in B<--j Halr of S t.r uggli- g Ari«t».— • Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at the Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday. Subject: “The Divine Mission of Pictures.” Text, Isaiah ii., 12-16. He said: It is not in a spirit of prudery, blit backed up by God’s eternal truth, when I say that you have no right to hang id your ait rooms or your dwelling-houses thafwhich would be offensive to good people if the figures pictured were alive n your parlor and the guests of your household. A picture that you have to hang in a somewhat secluded place, or thaim a public hall you cannot with a group of friends deliberately stand before and discuss, ought to have a knife stabbed into it at thy top and *cut clear through to the bottom and a stout finger thrust in on the right side ripping clear through to the left. Never till the books of the last day are opened shalhwe know what has been the dire harvest of

evil pictorals and unbecoming art galleries. Despoil a man’s imagination and he becomes a moral carcass. The show windows of English and American cities in which the low theaters have sometimes hung low lines of brazen actors and actresses, in style insulting to all propriety, have made a broad path teedeath for multitudes of. people. But so have all the other arts been at times suborned of evil. How has music been bedraggled! Is there any place so low down in dissoluteness that into it has not been carried David’s harp, and Handel’s organ, and Gottschalk’s piano and Ole Bull’s violin and the flute,which though named after so insignificant a thing as the Sicilian eel, which has seven spots on the side like flute holes, yet for thousands of years has had an exalted mission. Architecture, born in the heart of Him who made the worlds, under its arches and across its floors, what bacchanalian revelries have been enacted! It is not against any of these arts that they have been so led into captivity. What a pool world this would be if it were not for what my text calls “pleasant 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 wood-cuts 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. Painters were humiliated clear down below the majesty of their art. The oldest picture in England, a portrait of Chaucer, though now of great value, was picked out of a lumber garret. Great were the trials of Quentin Matsys who toiled on from blacksmith’s anvil till as a painter he won wide recognition. The first missionaries to Mexico made the fatal mistake of destroying pictures, for the loss of which art and religion must ever lament. But why go so far back when in this year of our Lord ope thousand eight hundred and eightyeight, and within twelve years of the twentieth century, to be a painter, except in rare exceptions, means poverty and neglect? Poorly fed, poorly clad, poorly housed, because poorly appreciated! When I hear a man is a painter, I have two feelings, one for the admiration for the greatness of his soul, and the other for the commiseration for the needs of his body.

But it hasbeen so in all departments of noble Work. Some of the mightiest have been hardly bestead. Oliver Goldsmith had such a big patch on the coat over his left breast that when he went any where he kept his hat in his hand closely pressed over the patch. Painters are not the only ones who have endured the lack of appreciation. Let men of wea th take under their patronage the suffering men of art. They lift no complaint; they make no strike for higher wages. But with a keenness of nervous organization which almost always charaeterizes genius these artists suffer more than any one but God can realize. There needs to be a concerted effort for Hie sentimental discourse what we owe to artists, but contracts that will give them a livelihood; for I am in full sympathy with the Christian farmer, who wks very busy gathering his fall apples, and some one asked him to pray for a poor family, the father of which had broken his leg, and the busy farmer said: “I can not stop now to pray, but you can go down into the cellar and get some corned beef, and butter, and eggs and potatoes; this is all I can do now.” A rtists may wish for our prayers, but they.also want practical help from men who can gi ve them work. You have heard scores of sermons for ad other kinds of suffering men and women, but I think this is the first sermon ever preached that made a plea for the suffering men and women of American art Their work is more true to nature and life than any of the masterpieces that have became immortal on the other side of the sea, but it is the fashion of Americans to mention foreign artists, and to know little or nothing about our own Gopley, and Allston, and Inman, and G reenough, and Kensett. Let the affluent fling out of their windows and into the back yard valueless daubs on canvas, and call in these splendid, but ■unrewarded, men, and tell them to adorn your walls, not only witlf* that yrhich shall please the taste, but enlarge the m nd and improve the morals and save the souls of those who gaze upon them. Brooklyn and all other American cities need great galleries of art, not only open annually for a few days on exhibition, but which shall stand open all tne year round, and from early morning until ten o’clock at night, and free to all who would come and go. Whit a preparation for the wear and tear of the day a five minutes’ look in the morning at some picture that will open a door into some larger realm than that in which onr population daily drudge! Or what a good thing the half hour of artistic opportunity on the way home in the evening from exhaustion that demands recuperation for mind and soul as well as body! "ho will do for Brooklyn or the citv where you live what W. W. Corcoran did for Washington, and what I am told John Wannamaker, by the donation of De Munkacsy’s greatpicture, “Christ before Pilate,” is going to do for Philadelphia? Men of wealth, if you ; are too modest to build and endow such a plaee during yejir lifetime, why not go to your iron safe and take out your Usi will and testament, and make a codicil that »-h>il' build for the city of your residence a thione for American art?

Take some of that money that would otherwise spoil your children, and build an art gallery that shall associate your name forever, not only with the great masters of painting, who are gone, but with the great masters who are trying to live and also win the admiration and love of tens of thousands of people, who, unable to "have fine pictures of their own, would be advantaged by your-ben-efaction. Build your own monuments, and not leave it to the whim of others. Some of the best people sleeping in .. Greenwood have no monuments at all, or some crumbling stones that in a few years will let the rain wash out name and epitaph; while some men, death wks the abatement of a nuisance, have a pile of polished Aberdeen high enough for a king, andeulogism enough to embarntss a seraph. Oh* man of large wealth, instead of leaving to the whim of others vour monumental commemoration and epitaphiology to be looked at when people are going to and fro at the burial of others, build right down in the heart of your great city, or the ci tv where you live, an impaense free reading room, or a free musical conservatory, or a free art gallery, the nitches for sculpture, and the walls abloom with the rise arid fall of nations, and lessons of courage for the disheartened, .. and rest for the weary, and life for the dead, and one hundred and fifty years from now you will be wielding influences to this world for good among those w hose great-grandfather was your great-grand-child. How much better than white marble that chills you if you put your hand on it when you touch it in the cemetery would be a monument in colors, in beaming eyes, in living possession, in splendors which under the chandelier would be glowing and warm, and looked at by strolling groups with catalogue in hand, on the January night when the necropolis where the body sleeps, is all snowed under?; The tower of David was hung with one thousand dented shields of battle, but you oh! man of wealth, may have a grander tower named after you,- one that shall be hung not with the symbols of carnage, but with the victories of that art which was so long ago recognized in my text as “pleasant pictures.” Oh, the power of pictures! I can not deride, as some have done, Cardinal Mazarin, who, when told he must die, took his last walk through the art gallery of palace saying: “Must I quit all this? Lo >k at that Titian! Look at that Corregio! Look at that deluge of Caracci! Farewell dear pictures!” As the day of the Lord of Hosts, according to this text, will scrutinize the pictures. I emplore all parentSto see that in their households they have neither in book or newspaper? or on canvas anything that will deprave. Pictures are no longer the exclusive possession of the affluent. There is not a respectable home in these cities that has not specimens of woodcut or steel engraving, if not of the painting, and your whole family will feel the moral uplifting or depression. And here I am going to say a word of cheer to people who have never had a word of consolation on that subject. There are men and women in this world by hundi eds of thousands, and sonie of them are here to-day, who have a fine natural taste, and yet all their lives that taste has been suppressed, and although they could appreciate the galleries of Dresden and Vienna and Naples far more than nine hundred and ninetynine out of one thousand who visit them, they never may go, for they must support their households, and bread and schooling for their children are of more . Importance than . pictures. Though fond of music, they are compelled to live amid discord’, and though fond of architecture, the dwell in clumsy abodes, and though appreciative of all that engravings and paintings can do, they are in perpetual deprivation; You’are going, after you get on the sixth step of that stairs just spoken of, tq find yourselves in the royal gallery of the universe, the concentered splendors of all worlds before your transported vision. In some way all the thrilling scenes through which we and the Church of God have passed in our earthly state will be pictured or brought to mind. At the cyclorama of Gettysburg, which we had in Brooklyn, one day a blind man, ..whojost his sight in that battle, was with-nis child heard talking while standing before that picture. The blind man said to the daughter: “Are there at the right of the picture some regiments marching up a hill?” “Yes,” she said, “Well, is there rushing down on these men a cavalnry charge?” “Yes,” was the reply. “And do there seem to be many dying and dead?” “Yes,” was the answer. “Well, now do you see a shell from the woods bursting near the wheel of a cannon?” “Yqs,” she said. Stop right there!” said the blind man. “That is the last thing I ever saw on earth! What a time it was, Jenny,when I lost my eye-sight!” But when you. who have found life a hard battle, a very Gettysburg, shall stand in the Royal Gallery of Heaven, and with your new vision begin to see and understand that which in your earthly 'blindness you could not see at all,‘you will point but to ycur celestial comrades, perhaps to your own dear children wbo have gone before, the scenes of the earthly conflicts in which you participated, saying: “There from that hill of prosperity I was driven back; from that valley of humiliation I was wounded; there I lost my eyesight. That was the way the world looked when I last saw it.” < But what a grand thing to get celestial vision and stand b ere before the ‘ cyclorama of all worlds’whi e the Rider on the white horse goe&ion conquering and to conquer,” the moon under His feet and the stars of Heaven for Ilia tiara! t