The Enjoyment of Art — Reading Companion

The Artist's Personal Vision

Noyes argues that realism is merely 'a label for one manner of handling' and that it 'comes no nearer the object as it really is.' He illustrates this with a newsboy seen by a fine lady, a philanthropist, a philosopher, and an artist—each perceives a different 'real' newsboy. The artist's representation involves selection and interpretation, suppressing some traits to emphasize others. Thus, realism, idealism, romanticism, and impressionism are all equally personal. The work of art is born from the artist's desire to express joy in a new aspect of universal harmony. Its mission is 'through interpretation to reveal.'

Teaching the Eye to See

Noyes describes how a visitor to an exhibition may be shocked by a picture that seems impossible, yet returns to study it. Soon the visitor notices that very effect in nature and exclaims, 'Why, that is like that picture!' The artist first saw it and taught the viewer to see it for themselves. Noyes cites Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi: 'We're made so that we love / First when we see them painted, things we have passed / Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.' This revealing power extends beyond individuals: Noyes claims that the French are an artistic people because their artists have for generations discovered beauty at their doorstep, and that Americans will become artistic when a truly native American art teaches them to appreciate.

Art as a Shared Discovery

Noyes likens the artist to 'a friend, more sensitive and more enthusiastic, with whom we are strolling,' who points out beauties by the wayside. The artist takes us by the hand and leads us into life, indicating a harmony we were blind to before. Burdened with daily affairs, we had not thought to look off to 'the spreading meadows tossing into hills which roll upward into the blue heaven beyond.' The beauty revealed is one the artist has apprehended in spirit and made actual. Noyes emphasizes that art is a revelation of a fuller beauty, a deeper harmony, than we have ever seen or felt. The purpose of the book is to help readers understand this process.

Noyes writes with a conversational, almost intimate voice, frequently addressing the reader as 'we' and drawing on everyday experiences—a newsboy, a stroll, a gallery visit—to ground his aesthetic theory. His prose is clear and unpretentious, avoiding the jargon he criticizes in others. Readers should note how Noyes builds his argument through concrete examples and personal narrative, and how his emphasis on the artist as a revealer of beauty anticipates later reader-response theories. The book is best approached as a reflective essay rather than a systematic treatise.

Reading Noyes, I recalled standing before a Sung landscape, feeling the artist's quiet gaze teaching me to see mist as intention, not accident. That same unhurried revelation returned years later within Chinese Painters: A Critical Study — Inside the Classic, where brushstroke becomes confession. Both books whisper that beauty isn't found—it's acknowledged, slowly, like recognizing an old friend's voice.