Summary
Wilde opens with Reynolds seeing light and shade in ugly three-cornered hats and Baudelaire on colour in black coats, and quotes Whistler's praise of Rembrandt for finding grandeur in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam. The lesson is valuable to painters, who have to see life beautifully without waiting for it to be made so. But the painter's attitude is not a people's. Ugly things can become beautiful under certain light, yet no one can count on that light in Piccadilly at noon, and 'the arts are made for life, and not life for the arts.'
He doubts that Whistler keeps his own rule of painting only modern dress, recalling a picture of English girls in Japanese dress and Chelsea models posing in peplums. The professional model, he says, is ruining painting: the venerable Italian impostor from the Piazza di Spagna turns up in every exhibition as a patriarch or a brigand, 'the symbol of decay.' All costumes are caricatures, and art is not a fancy ball.
If national dress were simple, well coloured and hung from the shoulder, painting would stop reacting against the ugliness of life and express its beauty. Art is not taught in Academies: 'The real schools should be the streets', and Greek dress is echoed in Greek architecture. Wilde closes by praising Whistler's point that the painter's power lies in vision, not hand, and his gifts as an orator.