16th century

The sixteenth century is the historical reference point Blake McGrath uses to explain why the word “masterpiece” once carried a precise professional meaning. In his account, art was not merely the spontaneous production of images but the completed work of a trained master, and that older system becomes a measure against which modern artistic practice is judged.

The Sixteenth-Century Artistic Model

Blake explains that, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an artist was a qualified tradesman. Apprentices underwent several years of training and learned every practical aspect of the craft, including preparing canvas and mixing paint. Only after completing that apprenticeship did an artist become a master, making a painting by such an artist a “master piece” in the literal sense.

This historical definition separates mastery from popularity. A work was not called a masterpiece simply because collectors admired it or because a gallery could sell it for a high price; the term originally identified the product of a recognized craft tradition. The sixteenth century therefore functions in the novel as a standard of technical formation, professional discipline, and earned authority.

Blake McGrath’s Argument Against Modern Usage

Blake presents the sixteenth-century model while discussing the modern habit of calling paintings masterpieces. He dismisses the contemporary expression as a hackneyed term without relevant significance, arguing that the disappearance of formally trained masters also removed the right to apply the word confidently to modern paintings. In his view, anyone can now buy brushes and canvas, produce a painting, and sell it, whereas the older system required mastery to be demonstrated through years of apprenticeship.

The argument is deliberately paradoxical because Blake himself is celebrated as a major modern artist. His reputation as America’s Rembrandt and his international exhibitions at the Louvre and the National Gallery in London might appear to place him within the category he questions. Yet his distinction between public acclaim and the historical meaning of mastery reveals his suspicion of easy labels, even when those labels could be used to elevate his own status.

Technical Craft and the Novel’s Art World

The sixteenth-century reference also clarifies the novel’s broader concern with how paintings acquire authority. Contemporary works circulate through galleries, exhibitions, signatures, photographs, collectors, and prices, but Blake’s explanation directs attention back to the hidden labor beneath the finished image. His emphasis on canvas preparation and paint mixing makes the artwork a material process rather than an isolated visual effect.

That emphasis contrasts with the modern production methods Blake openly uses elsewhere. For a portrait, he photographs Connie Dixon, enlarges the selected image with a digital projector, and pencils the projected outline onto the canvas before painting. He regards the projector as practical rather than dishonest because buyers care about the finished realism, not the preliminary drawing. The contrast between this efficient modern method and the sixteenth-century apprenticeship ideal does not simply prove that one period is authentic and the other false; it exposes the tension between inherited definitions of mastery and the technologies through which contemporary art is actually made.

Historical Measure and Artistic Transformation

The sixteenth century ultimately supplies Blake with a language for resisting inflated judgments, while the later course of his life forces him to reconsider what mastery might mean. After blindness ends his ability to meet his former standards in dramatic seascapes and portraits, he decides to return to painting emotion: love, loss, hope, and sadness expressed through raw movement and color rather than visible scenes. His new project shifts artistic authority away from the old qualification of the sighted master toward an inward and transformed practice.

In that sense, the sixteenth century remains important not because the novel simply restores its standards, but because it provides the historical pressure against which Blake’s artistic reinvention takes shape. The old master was defined by apprenticeship and command of every craft procedure; Blake’s later ambition is to discover what artistic command can become after blindness has altered his relation to images, tools, and the visible world.