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A CHILD’S GUIDE TO
PICTURES
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1906, by Detroit Publishing Company._
View on the Seine. _Homer D. Martin._
(_Also called “The Harp of the Winds.”_)
]
A CHILD’S GUIDE TO
PICTURES
BY
CHARLES H. CAFFIN
AUTHOR OF “HOW TO STUDY PICTURES”
NEW YORK
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
Published, July, 1908
THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE FEELING FOR BEAUTY 11
II. ART AND HER TWIN SISTER, NATURE 21
III. NATURE IS HAPHAZARD; ART IS ARRANGEMENT 30
IV. CONTRAST 40
V. GEOMETRIC COMPOSITION 55
VI. GEOMETRIC COMPOSITION (_Continued_) 63
VII. THE ACTION, MOVEMENT, AND COMPOSITION OF THE FIGURE 75
VIII. THE CLASSIC LANDSCAPE 83
IX. NATURALISTIC COMPOSITION 95
X. NATURALISTIC COMPOSITION (_Continued_) 106
XI. THE NATURALISTIC LANDSCAPE 117
XII. FORM AND COLOR 129
XIII. COLOR 144
XIV. COLOR--VALUES--SUBTLETY 160
XV. COLOR--TEXTURE, ATMOSPHERE, TONE 180
XVI. COLOR--TONE 204
XVII. BRUSH-WORK AND DRAWING 219
XVIII. SUBJECT, MOTIVE, AND POINT OF VIEW 230
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
View on the Seine _Homer D. Martin_ _Frontispiece_
La Disputá del Sacramento _Raphael_ 56
Jurisprudence _Raphael_ 66
The Manitou Lunette _E. H. Blashfield_ 86
Dido Building Carthage _J. M. W. Turner_ 92
The Sower _J. F. Millet_ 100
Young Woman Opening a Window _J. Vermeer_ 108
Crossing the Brook _J. M. W. Turner_ 118
Paysage _J. B. C. Corot_ 128
Washington Crossing the Delaware _E. Leutze_ 140
Prince Balthazar Carlos _Velasquez_ 168
The Little White Girl _J. M. Whistler_ 176
The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine _Correggio_ 192
Light and Shade _George Inness_ 202
Evening _Anton Mauve_ 246
A CHILD’S GUIDE TO PICTURES
CHAPTER I
THE FEELING FOR BEAUTY
Some of you, I expect, collect photographs of pictures in connection
with your history studies. These portraits of the principal characters
and pictures, illustrating great events, places, costumes, and modes of
living of the period, add greatly to the interest of your reading. They
bring the past time vividly before your eyes.
But it is not this view of pictures that we are going to talk about in
the present book. I shall have very little to say about the subjects of
pictures--partly because you can find out for yourselves what subjects
interest you; but mostly, because the subject of a picture has so very
little to do with its beauty as a work of art. For it is this view of a
picture, as being a work of art, that I shall try to keep before you.
I remember seeing the photograph of a picture hanging in a place of
honor on the wall of a girl’s room; and I asked her why she had chosen
this particular one out of many that she had. You see that, in order to
help anyone, you have to try to get into their minds, and find out how
their minds are working; and as much of my work is with girls and boys,
I try to get from them hints as to the best way of helping them. Well,
this girl, let me tell you, bubbled over with life and fun, swam like a
fish and climbed trees like a squirrel; but she had her thoughtful
moods, when, as often as not, she would lay out her collection of
photographs of pictures on the floor, and not only look at them, but
think about them. And I have no doubt that she was in one of those
moods, when she chose out this particular print and hung it on her wall,
in order that she might see it often.
So I asked her why she had chosen it, and she said: “Because I liked
it.” I asked her why? “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Now that is just the
sort of girl or boy for whom I am writing this book. Not that I think
that girl would have liked her picture any better for knowing why she
liked it. Then, “What is the good,” you ask, “of writing a book to help
her to know?” A very shrewd question and quite to the point. Let me try
to answer it.
When the girl said she did not know why she liked the picture, I think
she meant that she could not put into words what she felt. It was the
feeling with which the picture filled her that made her like it. I could
understand what she meant, because I remembered an experience of my own.
The first time that I saw Raphael’s _Disputá_, which decorates a wall in
one of the rooms of the Vatican in Rome, I had set out with my
guidebook, intending to study all the paintings by Raphael that
decorate these rooms. I entered the first room and, I suppose, looked
round the walls and saw three other paintings; but all I recall during
this visit was the _Disputá_. I sat down before it and remained seated!
I do not know how long, but the morning slipped away. What I thought
about as I looked at the picture I cannot tell you. My impression is
that I did not think at all; I only felt. My spirit was lifted up and
purified and strengthened with happiness. Returning to my hotel, I read
about the picture in the guidebook. It appeared that one of the figures
represented Dante. I had not noticed it, and as I read on I found out
other things that I had missed; that, indeed, the whole subject, so far
as it could be put into words, had escaped me. I had no knowledge of
what the painting was about; only I had felt its beauty.
Since then I have studied the picture and discovered some of the means
that Raphael employed to arouse this depth of feeling, and the knowledge
has helped me to find beauty in other things.
So, to go back to my girl friend, I would not disturb the beauty of her
feeling with teachy-teachy talk, any more than I would talk while
beautiful music was being played. But, suppose in a simple way I could
make her understand that I, too, felt the beauty of the picture; and, as
I have learned a little how to express feeling in words, should try to
tell her how I felt the beauty. Might it not add to her pleasure, if she
discovered that I was putting into words some of the feeling that she
herself had, and perhaps suggesting other beauties that she had not
felt?
Well, that is what I hope to do for you in this book, to put some ideas
into your head, that will lead you to look for and find more and more
beauty in pictures and in nature and in life. Ideas, mark you, not
words. We shall have to use words, but words are of no account, unless
they make you feel the idea contained in them.
I say feel; and you will notice I have used these words, feel and
feeling, several times already. I have done so because I want to impress
upon you that the enjoyment of beauty, whether in pictures or any other
form, comes to us through feeling. It may lead to thinking, and perhaps
should, but it does not begin with thinking or reasoning, as does, for
example, algebra or geometry. Nor can we, as we say, “get it down fine,”
in the way we do with the Latin declensions. When you have learned them
thoroughly, you know them once and for all, and you know about them just
what every other girl and boy who has learned them knows. With feeling
it is otherwise. What _you_ feel is different to what _I_ feel; we can
never feel alike. No two people can. So I am not going to tell you what
you ought to feel about pictures; nor am I going to try and persuade you
to like one and not like another. Therefore, this book would not be much
help to you in passing an examination about pictures, if anything so
foolish could be supposed. But I hope it may start your imagination off
in a great many new directions, and help you to discover more and more
of beauty not only in pictures, but in life.
For we should study pictures not solely for their own sake, but also as
a means of making our lives fuller and better. If you ask me what is the
most beautiful thing in the world, I shall not say art, although I am
writing about pictures--but life--its fullness of possibility and
abundance of opportunity. Especially young life; the lives of you girls
and boys, who, as yet, have so few mistakes to regret, so much to look
forward to of promise and fulfillment. What you will make of those lives
of yours may depend a little upon schools and teachers, parents and
friends, money and health, and many other things, but most of all upon
your own wills. I wonder if you have read the life of Robert Louis
Stevenson?
He had only such education as many other boys of his time had, little or
no money, and very poor health. But what a deal he made of his own life
and how he helped the lives of others! What a fellow he was for fun, and
how he loved wisdom; a great worker and a greatly conscientious one; not
satisfied unless his work was the very best that he could make it. And
the reason was that he loved beauty as well as wisdom; and in his life
and writings, because in his own inward thoughts wisdom and beauty went
hand in hand. I know of no better example of the full life; of a life
made the most of, in the best and truest sense, with gladness and
strength for itself and for the lives of others. While his body sleeps
on an island mountain, overlooking the vast beauty of sky and ocean, his
spirit stays with us.
The secret of the fullness of Stevenson’s life was that, so far as in
him lay, he left no portion of the garden of his life uncultivated.
There were no waste places, every part was fruitful. He did the best
that he could for his poor, weak body; kept his intellect bright with
learning, his fun alert with hope, his friendships warm with sympathy;
and kept his life and work sweetened and purified and strengthened by
the love of beauty. He was in a high sense in love with life--his own
life, the lives of others, and life in art and nature, and the abundant
harvest of his garden is the love that countless men and women and
children bore him and still maintain.
Such fullness of life is rare. Boys and girls, and for that matter men
and women, cultivate some part of themselves, and let the rest go to
waste. And the part which is most apt to be overlooked is the sense of
beauty. We train our bodies and our minds, but neglect those five
senses, which are just as much a part of us. It is true that men train
their senses for the practical purposes of business: the watchmaker, for
instance, his delicacy of touch; the tea producer, his senses of taste
and smell; the mariner, his senses of sight and sound. But business,
though necessary, is not everything. We do not confine the exercise of
our bodies and minds to work and business, but use them also for
enjoyment, and train them for this purpose. Do we not learn to swim,
play ball and tennis, and practice other bodily exercises for the pure
enjoyment of them? Or in our leisure moments busy our brains with study
of bees, machinery, history, all kinds of difficult subjects not as
work, but as a relief from work? We call them our “hobbies,” and indulge
them for pleasure, and find that the pleasure improves our health and
spirits, and in the end even makes us do our necessary work better, and
so find more pleasure in that also. For it is in what we know best and
can do best that we really take most pleasure. And though life cannot be
all pleasure, yet pleasure, rightly understood, should be one of the
chief aims of life. And one of the chief sources of pleasure is to be
found in the beauty that reaches our minds through the senses,
especially through the senses of sight and sound.
Let me illustrate in a simple way how one child will gain pleasure from
her senses while another doesn’t. Both have their five senses in working
order--smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound--and have been in the woods
gathering flowers. They reach home. One throws her handful down on a
sofa, table, or chair, or the nearest bit of furniture, and goes off to
do something, or it may be nothing, leaving the flowers to wither and
become an untidiness. What made her gather them? Perhaps, because she is
full of health and had to run about and do something; perhaps, because
she has not quite gotten over the fondness that most of us had, as
babies, for breaking and tearing things. It amused her to break the big
stems and tear off the vines or pull up the little plants. Or possibly
she was really attracted by the beauty of the flowers, but soon tired of
them, and went off to other things.
Not so, however, with her companion. She spreads a paper on the table,
lays out her flowers, brings one or two vases, and settles down to the
pleasure of arranging them. She picks up a flower, and while she waits
to decide in which vase it shall be put, see how delicately she handles
it! You can tell in a moment she has a feeling of love and tenderness
toward the flower. She puts it in a vase, and then her eye travels over
the other flowers to decide which shall bear it company. What color,
what form of flower will match best the first one? And while she is
making the choice almost unconsciously she sniffs the fragrance of that
spray of honeysuckle. Well, she lingers so long over the pleasure of
arranging her flowers that we have not time to stay and watch the whole
proceeding; but presently, when we come back, we find the vases filled
and set about the room where they will look their best; this one in the
dark corner with the wall behind it; another on the window sill, so that
the light may shine through the petals of the flowers. And we think to
ourselves what taste the girl has! For (have you ever thought of it?) we
use the word taste, which originally described only the sense of tasting
things with the tongue, in order to sum up a finer use of the senses of
sight and sound.
And this finer use of the senses, such as Stevenson cultivated, so that
his life and works are beautiful as well as wise and good, we too may
cultivate, and it is the object of this book to help us do it. I call it
a guide to pictures, but I want to make it much more than that--a guide
for the wonderful organs, your senses, that they may grow more and more
to feel the beauty that is all about us in nature and in life, as well
as in pictures and other works of art. So beauty is really our subject,
beauty in nature and in art. The two are separate, though united as twin
sisters.
As I write, many of you are enjoying your summer vacations, face to face
with nature. The health of the mountains or the sea is in your blood;
your bodies know the joy of active movement; your minds are filled with
the interest of new scenes and adventures, of sports and fun with
friends. But every once in a while I think it likely that your happiness
is increased by something beautiful you have seen in nature. Perhaps
even now, as you read these words, there comes to you the memory of some
sunset, or moonlight on the water, of early morning mist creeping among
the tree tops, or I know not what of nature’s beauty, suddenly revealed
to you because you were in the mood to receive it.
You were in the company of a friend, and you drew your arm closer
through his or hers, and both were the happier for the beauty that was
before you and had entered into your hearts. Or perhaps you were alone,
and the eagerness came over you to make some record of your joy--in a
letter to a friend or in some poem for no eyes but your own. You felt
the need to give utterance to your joy in nature’s beauty. You had in
you a little of the desire that stirs the artist.
And this brings us to the other kind of beauty, which is not of nature,
though it is of nature’s prompting--the beauty created by the artist. We
are going to study the work of artists who create beauty in pictures.
But do not make the mistake some people do, of thinking that it is only
painters who are artists. An artist is one who fits some beautiful
conception with some beautiful form of expression. His form of
expression, or as we say, his art, may be sculpture, painting, or
architecture; or some handicraft, as of metal or porcelain or
embroidery; or it may be music, the composing of music or the rendering
of it by instrument or voice; it may be acting or some forms of dancing;
it may be poetry or even prose. The artist, in a word, is one who not
only takes beauty into his own soul, but has the gift of art that
enables him to communicate the beauty to others by giving it a form or
body. If he be a musician, he gives it a form of sound; if a painter, a
form visible to the eye. It is his power of creating a form for the
beauty which he feels that makes him an artist. And in its various
forms--poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the
rest--art is man’s highest expression of his reverence for and joy in
beauty.