Summary
Image opens by answering a friendly critic: a mere book illustration translates literature and 'misses the music', while works such as Michelangelo's Expulsion from Eden and Rossetti's Beata Beatrix treat literature as if it were life itself. Subject, he says, is the thought or feeling an artist wants to embody, so Whistler's fireworks count as much as Giotto's angels. Style is 'masterful but restrained individuality of manner', marked by restraint, simplicity and severity. The true artist is both realist and idealist, and a picture is finished when its means convey the artist's intention.
Wilde wishes Image had separated the purely pictorial subject from one carrying historical or poetic memories. Over the refreshments, one young man warns that the lecturer's modesty may become a mannerism, and the few Philistines who defend the mirror are met with the contempt of the highly cultured.