August 20th, 1857 - Hawthorne's 8th and 9th visit

 

August 20th. 1857 — 

Murillo: Grape and Melon Eaters

I went to the Exhibition on Monday [17th August], and again yesterday [Wednesday 19th], and measurably enjoyed both visits. 

Murillo: The Holy Family in a Landscape

I continue to think, however, that a picture cannot be fully enjoyed except by long and intimate acquaintance with it, nor can I quite understand what the enjoyment of a connoisseur is. 

Murillo: Boy with Dog

He is not usually, I think, a man of deep, poetic feeling, and does not deal with the picture through his heart, nor set it in a poem, nor comprehend it morally. 

Murillo: Prodigal son feeding the swine

If it be a landscape, he is not entitled to judge of it by his intimacy with nature; if a picture of human action, he has no experience nor sympathy of life’s deeper passages. 

Murillo: Two women at a window

However, as my acquaintance with pictures increases, I find myself recognizing more and more the merit of the acknowledged masters of the art; but, possibly, it is only because I adopt the wrong principles which may have been laid down by the connoisseurs. 

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo: self portrait, c. 1730

But there can be no mistake about Murillo, — not that I am worthy to admire him yet, however. 

Murillo, The Immaculate Conception

Seeing the many pictures of Holy Families, and the Virgin and Child, which have been painted for churches and convents, the idea occurs, that it was in this way that the poor monks and nuns gratified, as far as they could, their natural longing for earthly happiness. 

Murillo: The Holy Family with a bird

(The bird is in the hand of the child)

It was not Mary and her heavenly Child that they really beheld, or wished for; but an earthly mother rejoicing over her baby, and displaying it probably to the world as an object worthy to be admired by kings, — as Mary does, in the Adoration of the Magi. 

Murillo: Le Christ Bon Pasteur

Every mother, I suppose, feels as if her first child deserved everybody’s worship.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Old Trafford