Six lectures on painting: delivered to the students of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, January, 1904

About this book

"Six lectures on painting" by George Clausen is a collection of art lectures written in the early 20th century. The work offers practical guidance and clear aesthetic principles for students, blending historical overview with hands-on advice about seeing, composing, lighting, and colouring, and uses exemplary masters to show how painters think and decide.

The opening of the lectures sets out to supplement studio training with mental direction, noting how modern freedom, photography, and Japanese art have unsettled tradition while widening choice. Clausen urges students to study old masters by sympathy and beginnings, then contrasts Fra Angelico’s visionary simplicity with Masaccio’s truthful realism to show how sentiment and structure can coexist. He rejects a strict divide between decorative and pictorial art, arguing for pictures that please the eye yet control attention through lighting, arrangement, and deliberate conventions, drawing on Leonardo’s precepts and examples such as Velázquez’s room-lit scenes and Titian’s outdoor groupings. He explains two ways of “seeing” light (Rembrandt’s concentrated glare versus Claude’s open gradation), warns against photographic neutrality, and makes colour—its warm/cool balance, keying, and quality—the painter’s chief means of expression, whether by direct paint or glazing. He illustrates modern truthfulness in colour and tone with Velázquez, Chardin, Manet, Millais, and Whistler. A comparative survey follows: Titian’s unifying, radiant harmonies; Velázquez’s detached, exact vision; and Rembrandt’s imaginative light and human sympathy. The section closes by turning to landscape and open-air painting—from early Italian skies through Patinir, Titian, the Dutch line to Claude, Turner, and Constable—arguing that compelling landscape translates the mood of nature rather than inventorying its parts.