R.A.M. Stevenson (1847-1900)

“When he leaves nature for art, a man leaves bright boundless space where he has no dominion for a dark cloistered place where he is master of a medium susceptible of arrangement by harmony, contrast, and gradation; master to make his material speak in character, follow a vein of sentiment, express a mood of seeing.”

** Full page content coming soon… in the meantime, a selection of notable Stevenson quotes, and some photographs from the archives.

“Everybody knows the condition under which a man receives an effective visual impression, one that goes to mould his view of the world. Whether he is looking at a piece of still life, or is standing in a vast landscape, he looks in a half dream; he ceases to think, to feel his own identity, for his whole consciousness is absorbed in the eye.”

“…detail should be what the impression will stand, and it must be put on that its very manner of putting on sings the same song as the impression does.”

“In Art it is not being but seeming which contents.”

“Breadth of view was Velasquez’s most admirable possession; by it he made composition, modelling, and style the slaves of his impressions. This breadth of view led him in his later pictures to vary his manner of painting according to the sentiment of his impressions, so that you will find in his work no pattern of brushwork, no settled degree of intimacy in the modelling, no constantly equal force of realisation in edges and, in short, no fixed habits or methods of expression.”

“Now the ensemble of "Las Meninas" has been perceived in some high mood of impressionability, and has been imaginatively kept in view during the course of after-study. The realism of this picture is a revelation of the way the race has felt a scene of the kind during thousands of years. The unconscious habit of the eye, in estimating the relative importance of colours, forms, definitions, masses, sparkles, is revealed to us by the unequalled sensitiveness of this man's eyesight.”