Christa Giles

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wonderfully beautiful figures robed in white,
leaning over the water and dropping white
flowers from their fingers. Here is no
extensive intellectual scheme to trouble you,
and no metaphysics of which we have had
quite enough in art. But if the simple and
unaided colour strike the right keynote, the
whole conception is made clear. 468
Form, colour, structure – the painted surface – could
conjure up ideas and sensations so that, in Wilde’s words,
the outward is ˝rendered expressive of the inward.˝ 469
Whatever the artist chose to use as his material became his
idiom. The expressive qualities of the stylistic elements in
the hands of a great artist formed a new language:
This boils down to saying that the objects, i.e.,
abstractedly, the various combinations of
lines, planes, shadow, colours constitute the
vocabulary of a mysterious but wonderfully
expressive language, which one must know in
order to be an artist. This language, like every
language, has its own handwriting, its
orthography, grammar, syntax, even rhetoric,
which is the ˝style!˝ 470
The idea that a work was both surface and symbol became
widely accepted at the period. Baudelaire’s theory of
˝correspondences,˝ the evocation of one sense by another,