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OUTDOOR SKETCHING
Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago
The Scammon Lectures, 1914
by
F. HOPKINSON SMITH
With Illustrations by the Author
[Illustration: Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London]
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
Copyright, 1915, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
Contents
Page
I. Composition 3
II. Mass 39
III. Water-Colors 75
IV. Charcoal 119
Illustrations
Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames 84
The George and Vulture Inn, London 136
Diagram of Charcoal Technic 142
COMPOSITION
My chief reason for confining these four talks to the outdoor sketch
is because I have been an outdoor painter since I was sixteen years of
age; have never in my whole life painted what is known as a studio
picture evolved from memory or from my inner consciousness, or from
any one of my outdoor sketches. My pictures are begun and finished
often at one sitting, never more than three sittings; and a white
umbrella and a three-legged stool are the sum of my studio
appointments.
Another reason is that, outside of this ability to paint rapidly
out-of-doors, I know so little of the many processes attendant upon
the art of the painter that both my advice and my criticism would be
worthless to even the youngest of the painters to-day. Again, I work
only in two mediums, water-color and charcoal. Oil I have not touched
for many years, and then only for a short time when a student under
Swain Gifford (and this, of course, many, many years ago), who taught
me the use and value of the opaque pigment, which helped me greatly in
my own use of opaque water-color in connection with transparent color
and which was my sole reason for seeking the help of his master hand.
A further venture is to kindle in your hearts a greater love for and
appreciation of what a superbly felt and exactly rendered outdoor
sketch stands for--a greater respect for its vitality, its life-spark;
the way it breathes back at you, under a touch made unconsciously,
because you saw it, recorded it, and then forgot it--best of all
because you let it alone; my fervent wish being to transmit to you
some of the enthusiasm that has kept me young all these years of my
life; something of the joy of the close intimacy I have held with
nature--the intimacy of two old friends who talk their secrets over
each with the other; a joy unequalled by any other in my life's
experience.
There may be those who go a-fishing and enjoy it. The arranging and
selecting of flies, the jointing of rods, the prospective comfort in
high water-boots, the creel with the leather strap, every crease in it
a reminder of some day without care or fret--all this may bring the
flush to the cheek and the eager kindling of the eye, and a certain
sort of rest and happiness may come with it; but--they have never gone
a-sketching! Hauled up on the wet bank in the long grass is your boat,
with the frayed end of the painter tied around some willow that offers
a helping root. Within a stone's throw, under a great branching of
gnarled trees, is a nook where the curious sun, peeping at you
through the interlaced leaves, will stencil Japanese shadows on your
white umbrella. Then the trap is unstrapped, the stool opened, the
easel put up, and you set your palette. The critical eye with which
you look over your brush case and the care with which you try each
feather point upon your thumbnail are but an index of your enjoyment.
Now you are ready. You loosen your cravat, hang your coat to some
rustic peg in the creviced bark of the tree behind, seize a bit of
charcoal from your bag, sweep your eye around, and dash in a few
guiding strokes. Above is a changing sky filled with crisp white
clouds; behind you, the great trunks of the many branched willows; and
away off, under the hot sun, the yellow-green of the wasted pasture,
dotted with patches of rock and weeds, and hemmed in by the low hills
that slope to the curving stream.
It is high noon! There is a stillness in the air that impresses you,
broken only by the low murmur of the brook behind and the ceaseless
song of the grasshopper among the weeds in front. A tired bumblebee
hums past, rolls lazily over a clover blossom at your feet, and has
his midday lunch. Under the maples near the river's bend stand a group
of horses, their heads touching. In the brook below are the patient
cattle, with patches of sunlight gilding and bronzing their backs and
sides. Every now and then a breath of cool air starts out from some
shaded retreat, plays around your forehead, and passes on. All nature
rests. It is her noontime.
But you work on: an enthusiasm has taken possession of you; the paints
mix too slowly; you use your thumb, smearing and blending with a bit
of rag--anything for the effect. One moment you are glued to your
seat, your eyes riveted on your canvas; the next, you are up and
backing away, taking it in as a whole, then pouncing down upon it
quickly, belaboring it with your brush. Soon the trees take shape; the
sky forms become definite; the meadow lies flat and loses itself in
the fringe of willows.
When all of this begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some
lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf,
or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a
tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins
that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The
reaction comes the next day when, in the cold light of your studio,
you see how far short you have come and how crude and false is your
best touch compared with the glory of the landscape in your mind and
heart. But the thrill that it gave you will linger forever!
Or come with me to Constantinople and let us study its palaces and
mosques, its marvellous stuffs, its romantic history, its
religions--most profound and impressive--its commerce, industries, and
customs. Come to revel in color; to sit for hours, following with
reverent pencil the details of an architecture unrivalled on the
globe; to watch the sun scale the hills of Scutari and shatter its
lances against the fairy minarets of Stamboul; to catch the swing and
plash of the rowers rounding their _caiques_ by the bridge of Galata;
to wander through bazaar and market, dotting down splashes of robe,
turban, and sash; to rest for hours in cool tiled mosques, which in
their very decay are sublime; to study a people whose rags are
symphonies of color, and whose traditions and records breathe the
sweetest poems of modern times.
And then, when we have caught our breath, let us wander into any one
of the patios along the Golden Horn, and feast our eyes on columns of
verd-antique, supporting arches light as rainbows, framing the patio
of the Pigeon Mosque, the loveliest of all the patios I know, and let
us run our eyes around that Moorish square. The sun blazes down on
glistening marbles; gnarled old cedars twist themselves upward against
the sky; flocks of pigeons whirl and swoop and fall in showers on
cornice, roof, and dome; tall minarets like shafts of light shoot up
into the blue. Scattered over the uneven pavement, patched with strips
and squares of shadows, lounge groups of priests in bewildering robes
of mauve, corn-yellow, white, and sea-green; while back beneath the
cool arches bunches of natives listlessly pursue their several
avocations.
It is a sight that brings the blood with a rush to one's cheek. That
swarthy Mussulman at his little square table mending seals; that
fellow next him selling herbs, sprawled out on the marble floor, too
lazy to crawl away from the slant of sunshine slipping through the
ragged awning; that young Turk in frayed and soiled embroidered
jacket, holding up strings of beads to the priests passing in and
out--is not this the East, the land of our dreams? And the old public
scribe with the gray beard and white turban, writing letters, the
motionless veiled figures squatting around him--is he not Baba
Mustapha? and the soft-eyed girl whispering into his ear none other
than Morgiana, fair as the meridian sun?
So, too, in my beloved Venice, where many years ago I camped out by
the side of a canal--the Rio Giuseppe--all of it, from the red wall,
where the sailors land, to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is
ready to topple into the sea.
Not much of a canal--not much of a painting ground, really, to the
masters who have gone before and are still at work, but a truly
lovable, lovely, and most enchanting possession to me their humble
disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and once
out you are miserable until you get back again. On one bank stretches
a row of rookeries--a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies
hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and
patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the
whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long
brick wall of the garden--soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and
lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which mass and
sway the great sycamores that Ziem loved, their lower branches
interwoven with cinnobar cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun
drips gold.
Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pass--this canal of
mine; only deep enough to let a wine barge slip through; so narrow you
must go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola;
so short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch of its
water-surface part of everything about it, so clear are the
reflections; full of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave space--one
moment in a broad laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from
behind a cloud, its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next
swept by flurries of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a
mirror; then, when aroused by a passing boat, breaking out into
ribbons of color--swirls of twisted doorways, flags, awnings,
flower-laden balconies, black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside
down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters--a
bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in
detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole
scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any
painter living or dead.
These are some of the joys of the painter whose north light is the
sky, whose studio door is never shut, and who often works surrounded
by envious throngs, that treat him with such marked reverence that
they whisper one to another for fear of disturbing him.
* * * * *
And now for a few practical hints born of these experiences; and in
giving them to you, remember that no man is more keenly conscious of
his limitations than the speaker. My own system of work, all of which
will be explained to you in subsequent talks, one on water-color and
the other on charcoal, is, I am aware, peculiar, and has many
drawbacks and many shortcomings. I make bold to give these to you
because of my fifty years' experience in outdoor sketching, and
because in so doing I may encourage some one among you to begin where
I have left off and do better. The requirements are thoughtful and
well-studied selection before your brush touches your canvas; a
correct knowledge of composition; a definite grasp of the problem of
light and dark, or, in other words, _mass_; a free, sure, and
untrammelled rapidity of execution; and, last and by no means least, a
realization of what I shall express in one short compact sentence,
that _it takes two men to paint an outdoor picture: one to do the work
and the other to kill him when he has done enough_.
* * * * *
Before entering on the means and methods through which so early a
death becomes permissible I shall admit that the personal equation
will largely assert itself, and that because of it certain allowances
must be made, or rather certain variations in both grasp and treatment
will necessarily follow.
While, of course, nature is always the same, never changing and never
subservient to the whims or perceptive powers of the individual, there
are painters who will aver that they alone see her correctly and that
all the world that differs from them is wrong. One man from natural
defects may see all her greens or reds stronger or weaker than another
in proportion to the condition of his eye. Another may grasp only her
varying degrees of gray. One man unduly exaggerates the intensity of
the dark and the opposing brilliancy of the lights. Another eye--for
it is largely a question of optics, of optics and temperament--sees
only the more gentle and sometimes the more subtle gradations of light
and shade reducing even the blaze of the noonday sun to half-tones.
Still another, whether by the fault of over-magnifying power or
long-sightedness, detects an infinity of detail in nature, and is not
satisfied until each particular blade of grass stands on end like the
quills of the traditional porcupine, while his brother brush
strenuously asserts that every detail is really only a question of
mass, and should be treated as such, and that for all practical
purposes it is quite immaterial whether a tree can be distinguished
from a farm-house so long as it is fluffy enough to be indistinct.
These defects, sympathies, tendencies, whatever one may call them,
only prove the more conclusively that there are many varying standards
set up by many minds. That which can easily be proved in addition is
that many a false standard owes its origin as often to a question of
bad digestion as of bad taste. They also show us that no one man or
set of men can rightfully lay claim to holding the one key which
unlocks the mysteries of nature, while insisting that the rules
governing their use of that key _must_ be adhered to by the rest of
the world.
There are, however, certain laws which control every pictured
expression of nature and to which every eye and hand must submit if
even a semblance of expression is to be sought for. One of them is
truth. In this all schools concur, each one demanding the truth, or at
least enough of it to placate their consciences when they add to it a
sufficient number of lies of their own manufacture to make the subject
interesting to their special line of constituents. Among these I do
not class the lunatics who are to-day wandering loose outside of
charitable asylums especially designed for disordered and impaired
intellects, and whose frothings I saw at the last Autumn Salon.
But to our text once more, taking up the first requirement; namely,
selection.
By selection I mean the "cutting out entire" from the great panorama
spread out before you just that portion which appeals to you and which
you want to have appeal to your fellow men.
Speaking for myself, I have always held that the most perfect
reproductions of nature are those which can be _selected_ any day,
under any condition of light, direct from the several objects
themselves, without arrangement and fore-shortenings or twistings to
the right and to the left. Nothing, in fact, seems to me so
astounding as that any human mind could for an instant suppose that it
can improve on the work of the Almighty.
If it is a street, and if you wish to express its perspective, and the
bit of blue sky beyond, with a burst of sunlight illumining the
corner, the figures crowded against the light, forming a mass in
themselves, and it interests you at a glance, sit down and study it
long enough to find out what feature of the landscape impressed you at
_first sight_. If, as you look, the first impression becomes weakened,
perhaps it is because the immediate foreground, which at the first
glance was clear, is now dotted with passers-by, thus obscuring your
point of interest, or a cloud has passed over the sky, lowering the
whole tone, or the group of figures across the light has dispersed,
exposing the ugly right-angled triangle of the flat wall and street
level instead of the same lines being broken picturesquely with the
black dots of heads of the crowd itself. In a moment it is no longer a
composition of the same power that struck you at first. Perhaps while
you sit and wait the scene again changes, and something infinitely
more interesting, or the reverse, is evolved from the perspective
before you. And so it goes on, until this constantly changing
kaleidoscope repeats itself in its first aspect, until you have fairly
grasped its meaning and analyzed its component parts. Or until either
the effect that first delighted you, or the subsequent effect that
charmed you still more, becomes a fixed fact in your mind. That, then,
is the picture that you want to paint and that you are to paint
_exactly as you saw it_. And if you can reproduce it exactly as you
did see it, ten chances to one it will impress your fellow men. The
trouble is that when you sit down to paint it you are so often lost in
its detail that you forget its salient features, and by the time you
have finished and blocked up the immediate foreground with figures
that did not exist when you were first thrilled by its beauty, you
have either painted its least interesting aspect, or you have filled
that street so full of lies of your own that the policeman on the beat
could not recognize it.
Of course, while all nature is interesting, there are parts of nature
more interesting than other parts, and since the skill of man is
inadequate to produce its more _humble_ effects, if I may so express
it, the painter should be on the lookout for her _dramatic_ air, in
order that when she is reproduced she may add that touch to her many
qualities, thus meeting the painter half-way. Even in the perspective
of a street, nature, in profound consideration of the devotee under
his umbrella, often gives him a deeper touch--one wall perhaps in
sudden brilliant light, while the vista of the street is in gloom made
by a passing cloud, she constantly calling out to the painter as he
works: "Watch me now and take me at my best."
Or change this picture for an instant and note, if you please, the
flight of cloud shadows over a mountain slope or the whirl of a wind
flurry across a still lake. There are moments in all phenomena like
these where a great man rising to the occasion can catch them exactly,
as did Rousseau in the golden glow of the fading light through the
forest, or Corot in the crisp light of the morning, or Daubigny in the
low twilight across the sunken marshes where one can almost hear the
frogs croak.
Selection, then, preceded by the deepest and closest thought as to
whether the subject is worth painting at all, becomes necessary, the
student giving himself plenty of time to study it in all its phases;
time enough to "walk around it," reviewing it at different angles;
noting the hour at which it is at its best and happiest, seizing upon
its most telling presentment--and all this before he begins even
_mentally_ to compose its salient features on the square of his
canvas. You can turn, if you choose, your camera skyward and focus the
top of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it is uninteresting,
or rather unintelligible, until you focus also the church door, and
the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that winds through the
quiet graveyard. So a picture can be true and yet very much like a
slip cut from a newspaper. For some men cut thus into nature,
haphazard, without care or thought, and produce perhaps a square
containing an advertisement of a patent churn, a railroad timetable,
and a fragment of an essay on art. Cut carefully and with selection,
and you may get a poem which will soothe you like a melody.
* * * * *
As to the value of the laws which govern the perfect composition, it
is unquestionably true that a correct knowledge of these laws makes
or unmakes the picture and establishes or ruins the rank of the
painter. No matter how careful the drawing, how interesting the
subject, how true the mass, how subtle the gradations of light and
shade, how perfect the expression of the figures, or how transparent
the atmosphere of a landscape, a want of this knowledge will defeat
the result. On the other hand, a good composition--one that "carries,"
as the term is--one that can be seen across the room, if properly
composed will instantly excite your interest, even if upon near
inspection you are shocked by its crudities and faults. "I don't know
what it is," says a painter, "but it's good all the same."
After your selection has been made, the next thing is to search for
its centre of interest. When this is found it is equally important to
weigh carefully the _quality_ of this centre of interest in order to
determine whether, as has been said, the subject is worth painting at
all. My own rule is to spend half the time I am devoting to my sketch
in carefully weighing the subject in its every detail and expression.
* * * * *
Many men, I am aware, have endeavored to prove that there are eight or
ten different forms of composition. My own experience and
investigation are, of course, limited, but so far I have only been
able to discover one, namely, the larger mass and the smaller mass:
the larger mass dominating the centre of interest, which catches your
eye instantly at first sight of a picture, and the smaller or less
interesting object which next attracts your eye, and so relieves the
vision and spares you the monotony of looking at a single object long
and steadily, thus fatiguing the eye and dissipating the interest.
* * * * *
Having determined upon the _quality_ of the subject-matter and fixed
its centre interest in pleasing relation to the whole, the next step
is to confine yourself to all that _the eyes see at one glance_ and no
more, or, in other words, that portion of the landscape which you
could cut out with the scissors of your eye and paste upon your mind.
That which you can see when your head is kept perfectly still, your
eye looking straight before you, only seeing so high, so low, and so
far to the right and left, without a strain. The great sweep of
vision, a sweep covering a hundred subjects perhaps, is obtained by
turning the eyes up or down or sideways. But to be true--that is, to
see one picture at a time--the eye should be fixed like the lens of a
camera, the limit of the picture being the range of the eye and no
more. A departure from this rule not only confuses your perspective
but crowds a number of points of interest into the square of your
canvas, when there is really only _one_ centre point before you in
nature; and this one point you must treat as does the electrician in
a theatre who keeps the lime-light on the star of the play.
* * * * *
Another requirement is rapidity of execution. I am not speaking of
figure-drawing. I can well understand why the model grows tired,
although the crude lay figure may not, and why the constant workings
over and again upon the figure subject, the mosaicing (if I may coin a
word) of the different points of the figure during the different hours
of the day and the different days of the week deep into the canvas,
may be necessary.
I am speaking of outdoor, landscape work, for which only four hours,
at most, either in the morning or in the afternoon, can be utilized.
In this four hours nature keeps comparatively still long enough for
you to caress her with your brush, and if you would truly express what
you see, your work must be finished in that time. I can quite
understand that to the ordinary student this is a paralyzing
statement, but let us analyze it together for a moment and I think
that we shall all see that if it were possible for a human hand to
obey us as precisely as a human eye detects, the results on the canvas
would be infinitely more valuable, first, because the sun never stands
still and the shadows of one hour are not the shadows of the next; and
second, because this moving of the sun is affecting not only the mass
but the composition of the picture, one mass of buildings being in
light at ten o'clock and again in shadow at eleven. It is also
affecting its local color, the yellow of the afternoon sunlight
illumining and graying the silver-blue of the shadows, thus weakening
the force of positive shadows scattered through the composition. Of
course, to be really exact, there is only one moment in any one of the
hours of the day in which any one aspect of nature remains the same,
but since we are all finite we must do the best we can, and four
hours, in my experience, is all that a man can be sure of.
We have, of course, the next day to continue in, but then the
landscape has changed. That delicate, transparent, gauzy cloud screen
that softened the sky light was, under the northwest wind of
yesterday, a clear, steely gray-blue, and the sun shining through it
made the sunlight almost white and the shadows a neutral blue; to-day
the wind is from the south and a great mass of soft summer clouds,
tea-rose color, drift over the clear azure, each one of which throws
its reflected light on every object over which they float. The half
you painted yesterday, therefore, will not match the half you must
paint to-day, and so if you will persist in working on your same
canvas you go on making an almanac of your picture, so apparent to an
expert that he can pick out the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as you
daily progressed. If you should be fortunate enough to work under
Italian skies, where sometimes for days together the light is the
same, the skies being one expanse of soft, opalescent blue, you might
think under such influence it would be possible for you to perform the
great almanac trick successfully in your sketch. But how about
yourself? Are you the same man to-day that you were yesterday? If so,
perhaps you might also find yourself in exactly the same frame of mind
that existed when your sketch was half finished. But would you
guarantee that you would be the same man for a week?
I believe we can maintain this position of the necessity of rapid work
in out-of-door sketches by looking for a moment at the product of the
best men of the last century, some of whom I have already mentioned.
Take Corot, for instance. Corot, as you know, spent almost his entire
life painting the early light of the morning. An analysis of his
life's work shows that he must have folded his umbrella and gone home
before eleven o'clock. My own idea is that many hundreds of his
canvases, which have since sold at many thousands of francs, were
perfectly finished in one sitting. This cannot be otherwise when you
remember that one dealer in Paris claims to have sold two thousand
Corots. These one-sitting pictures to me express his best work. In the
larger canvases in which figures are introduced--notably the one first
owned by the late Mr. Charles A. Dana, of New York, called "Apollo," I
believe--the treatment of the sky and foreground shows careful
repainting, and while the mechanical process of the brush, shown by
the over and under painting, the dragging of opaque color over
transparent, may produce certain translucencies which the more
forcible and direct stroke of the brush--one touch and no more--fails
to give, still the whole composition lacks that intimacy with nature
which one always feels in the smaller and more rapidly perfected
canvases.
Note, too, the sketches of Frans Hals and see what power comes from
the sure touch of a well-directed brush in the hand of a man who used
it to express his thoughts as other men use chords of music or
paragraphs in literature. A man who made no false moves, who knew that
every stroke of his brush must express a perfect sentence and that it
could never be recalled. Really the work of such a master is like the
gesture of an actor--if it is right a thrill goes through you, if it
is wrong it is like that player friend of Hamlet's who sawed the air.
This quality of "the stroke," by the by, if we stop to analyze for a
moment, is the stroke that comes straight from the heart, tingling up
the spinal column, down the arm, and straight to the finger-tips. Ole
Bull had it when his violin echoed a full orchestra; Paderewski has it
when he rings clearly and sharply some note that vibrates through you
for hours after; Booth had it when drawing himself up to his full
height as Cardinal Richelieu he began that famous speech, "Around her
form I draw the holy circle of our faith"--his upraised finger a
barrier that an army could not break down; Velasquez, in his
marvellous picture in the Museum of the Prado in Madrid of "The
Topers" ("Los Borrachos"); Frans Hals, in almost every canvas that his
brush touched; and in later years our own John Sargent, in many of his
portraits, but especially in his direct out-of-door studies, shows it;
as do scores of others whose sureness of touch and exact knowledge
have made their names household words where art is loved and genius
held sacred.
And with this ability to record swiftly and surely there will come a
certain enthusiasm, fanned to white heat when, some morning, trap in
hand, you are searching for something to paint, your mind entirely
filled with a certain object (you propose to paint boats if you
please, and you have walked around them for minutes trying to get the
best view and deciding upon the all-important best possible
composition)--when, turning suddenly, you face a mass of buildings and
a sweep of river that instantly put to flight every idea concerning
your first subject, and in a moment a new arrangement is evolved and
you are working like mad. It is only under this pressure of
_enthusiasm_ that the best work is produced.
* * * * *
The coming landscape-painter will be a _four-hour man_, of thorough
knowledge, one who has most intimate and close acquaintance with
nature, one who can select and then seize the salient features of the
landscape, at a glance arranging them upon the square of his canvas,
in other words, composing them, the basis being the most expansive and
most picturesque grouping of the several details of the subject,
extracting at the same moment, at the same instant, with one sweep of
his eye, the whole scheme of local color, and then surely, clearly,
lovingly, and reverently making it breathe upon his canvas for other
souls to live by.
* * * * *
And how noble the ambition!
In our present civilization some men are moved to philanthropy, some
to science, some to be rulers of men. Some men are brimful and running
over with harmonies that will live forever. Other men's hearts beat in
unison with the symphonies of the spheres, and Homer and Milton and
Dante become household words. You seek another expression of the good
that is in you. You will be painters and sculptors. Color, form, and
mass are to you what the pen, the sword, and the lute are to those
others who have gone before, or are now around you. Your mission is as
distinct as theirs, and it is as imperative that you should fulfil
it. Paint what you see and as you see it. Nothing more nor less. See
only the beautiful, and if you cannot reach that content yourself with
the picturesque. It is a first cousin but once removed.
MASS
The difference between composition and mass is that a composition is a
mere outline of pen or pencil, each object taking its proper place in
the square of a canvas, while mass is the filling in between these
outlines either of varied color or in lights or darks, their
gradations but so many guides to the spectator's eye marking not only
its perspective, form and atmosphere, but, if skilfully done, telling
the story of your subject at a glance.
To do this the student must find the lightest light and darkest dark
in the subject before him and, having found it, adhere to it to the
end of his work. For as the sun dominates the sky and earth so do its
rays dominate parts of the whole, making more luminous than the rest
only one object upon which its light falls. To make this more
explicit it is only necessary to look at an egg upon a white
table-cloth. Here is a natural object devoid of local color except in
reflected lights, and yet you will find that where the round of the
egg reflects the light the highest light is found, while in the edge
of the shadow, where the egg turns into the round--between that high
light and the reflected light from the table-cloth, I mean--is found
its darkest dark. But only one portion of that shadow, a point as
large as the point of a pin, is the darkest dark. Everything else is
gradation, from the highest light to the lowest light, the lowest
light being almost a shadow; and from its darkest dark to its lightest
dark the lightest dark again being almost a light.
In landscape art these problems are greatly simplified. The sun is
always the strongest light, and whatever comes against it, church
tower, rock, palace, or ship under full sail, is the darkest object.
In addition to this there is always some one point where the outdoor
painter can find a lesser supplementary light and near it a lesser
supplementary dark. Moreover, throughout the rest of the composition
these same lights and darks are echoed and re-echoed in constantly
decreasing gradations.
You may apply these same tests everywhere in nature. Even in a gray
day, when the sun is not so positive a factor in distributing light,
and the shadows are so subtle that it is difficult to discover them,
there is always some mass of foliage, the silver sheen from an old
shingled roof, the glare of a white wall, which marks for the
composition its lightest light, while a corresponding dark can always
be found somewhere in the tree-trunks, under the overhanging eaves, or
in the broken crevices of the masonry.
So it is with every other expression of nature. Even on a Venetian
lagoon, where the sky and water are apparently one (not really one to
the quick eye of an expert, the water always being one tone lower than
the sky--that is, more gray than the overbending sky)--even in this
lagoon you will find some one portion of the surface lighter than any
other portion; and in expressing it your eye first and your brush next
must catch in the opalescent sweep of delicious color under your eye
its exact quantity of black and white. By black and white I mean, of
course, that excess or absence of pure color which when translated
into pure black and white would express the meaning of the
subject-matter, as one of Raphael Morghen's engravings on steel gives
you the feeling and color in his masterly rendering of Da Vinci's
"Last Supper."
In my judgment one of the great landscapes of modern times is the
picture by the distinguished Dutch painter, Mauve, known as "Changing
Pasture," which is now owned by Mr. Charles P. Taft, of Cincinnati.
Here the factor of mass is carried to its utmost limit. Sky one mass;
flock of sheep another mass; and the foreground, sweeping under the
sheep and beyond until it is lost in the haze of the distance, another
mass, or, if one chooses to put it that way, another broad gradation
of a section of the picture: the highest light being some
infinitesimal speck in the diaphanous silver sky, the strongest dark
being found somewhere in the foreground or in the flock of sheep.
By a strict adherence to this law of one supreme light and one supreme
dark does Mauve's work, as it were, get back from and out of his
canvas, as from the record of a phonograph into which some soul has
breathed its own precise purpose and intent.
So, too, does nature often call out to you fixing your attention,
often shrouding in shadow the unimportant in the landscape, while high
up above the gloom it holds up to your gaze a white candle of a
minaret or the bared breast of an Alpine peak reflecting the loving
look of a tired sunbeam bidding it good-night.
* * * * *
To accent the more strongly the value of this dominant light even
though it be treated in very low gradation, I recall that a year ago
the art world was startled by the sum received for a medium sized
picture of some coryphees painted by Degas, now an old man over eighty
years old--a subject which he always loved and, indeed, which he has
painted many times. Some thirty years ago, when he was comparatively a
young man, I saw, at the Bartholdi exhibition in New York, a picture
by this master of these same coryphees, two figures standing together
in the flies resting their weary, pink, fishworm legs as they balanced
themselves with their hands against the wabbling scenery. It was a
wholly gray picture, and almost in a monotone, and yet the flashes of
their diamond earrings, no larger than the point of a pin, were
distinctly visible, holding their place in, if not dominating, the
whole color scheme.
Again, in that marvellous portrait of Wertheimer, the bric-a-brac
dealer, if you remember, the eye first catches the strong vermilion
touch on the lower lip, and then, knowing that a master like Sargent
would not leave it isolated, one finds, to one's delight and joy, a
little swipe of red on the tongue of the barely discernible black
poodle squatting at his feet. Had the red of the dog's tongue
predominated, we should never have been thrilled and fascinated by one
of the great portraits of this or any other time.
This is also true in other great portraits--in, for instance, the
pictures of Rembrandt, Vandyck, and Frans Hals, especially where a
face is relieved by the addition of a hand and the white of a ruff.
Somewhere in that warm expanse of the face there can be found a
pinhead of color, brighter and more dominating than any other brush
touch on the canvas. It may be the high egg-light in the forehead, or
the click on the tip of the nose, or a fold of the white ruff; but
slight as it is and unnoticeable at first, because of it not only does
the head look round as the egg looks round when relieved by the same
treatment, but the attention is fixed. Unless this had been preserved,
the eye would have, perhaps, rested first on the hand, something
foreign to the painter's intention.
Recalling again the law of the high light and strong dark, and
referring again to the value of the skilful manipulation of light and
shade forming the mass thereby expressing the more clearly the meaning
of a picture, I repeat that, while the eye is always caught by the
strongest dark against the strongest light, it is next caught by the
lesser supplementary light and lesser supplementary dark; and then,
if the painter is skilful enough in the management of the remaining
lesser lights and darks, the eye will run through the gradations to
the end, rebounding once more to the greater light and dark, exactly
in the order intended by the painter; thus unfolding to the spectator
little by little, quite as a plot of a novel is made clear, the story
which the painter had in his own mind to tell. This is effected purely
and entirely by the correct accentuations of the explanatory lights
and darks. One mistake in the management--that is, the accentuating of
the third light, if you please, instead of the second--will not only
confuse the eye of the spectator, but may perhaps give him an entirely
different impression from what was intended by the painter, just as
the shifting of a chapter in a novel would confuse a reader; and this,
if you please, without depending in any way upon either the drawing or
the color of the accessories.
I can best illustrate this by recalling to your mind that marvellous
picture of the so-called literary school of England, a picture by Luke
Fildes known as "The Doctor" and now hanging in the Tate Gallery in
London, in which the whole sad story is told in logical sequence by
the artist's consummate handling of the darks and lights in regular
progression.
* * * * *
You will pardon me, I hope, if I leave the more technical details of
my subject for a moment that I may discuss with you one of the
peculiarities of the so-called art-loving public of to-day, notably
that section which insists that no picture should tell a story of any
kind.
To my own mind this picture of Luke Fildes reaches high-water mark in
the school of his time, and yet in watching as I have done the crowds
who surge through the Tate Galleries and the National Gallery, it is
an almost every-day occurrence to overhear such contemptuous remarks
as "Oh, yes, one of those literary fellows," drop from the lips of
some highbrow who only tolerates Constable because of the influence
his example and work had on Corot and other men of the Barbizon
school.
Another section lose their senses over pure brush work.
A story of Whistler--one he told me himself--will illustrate what I
mean. Jules Stewart's father, a great lover of good pictures and one
of Fortuny's earliest patrons, had invited Whistler to his house in
Paris to see his collection, and in the course of the visit drew from
a hiding-place a small panel of Meissonier's, of a quality so high
that any dealer in Paris would have given him $30,000 for it.
Whistler would not even glance at it.
Upon Stewart insisting, he adjusted his monocle and said: "Oh, yes,
very good--_snuff-box style_."
This affectation was to have been expected of Whistler because of his
aggressive mental attitude toward the work of any man who handled his
brush differently from his own personal methods, but saner minds may
think along broader lines.
If they do not, they have short memories. Even in my own experience I
have watched the rise and fall of men whose technic called from the
housetops--a call which was heard by the passing throng below, many of
whom stopped to listen and applaud; for in pictures as in bonnets the
taste of the public changes almost daily. One has only to review
several of the schools, both in English and in Continental art, noting
their dawn of novelty, their sunrise of appreciation, their high noon
of triumph, their afternoon of neglect, and their night of oblivion,
to be convinced that the wheel of artistic appreciation is round like
other wheels--the world, for one--and that its revolutions bring the
night as surely as they bring the dawn.
Not a hundred years have passed since the broad, sensuous work of
Turner, big in conception and big in treatment, was followed by the
more exact painters of the English school, many of whom are still at
work, notably Leader and Alfred Parsons, both Royal Academicians, and
of whom some contemporaneous critic insisted that they had counted the
leaves on their elm-trees fringing the polished water of the Thames.
They, of course, had only been eclipsed by the broader brushes of more
recent time, men like Frank Brangwyn and Colin Hunter, who have
yielded to the pressure of the change in taste, or of whom it would be
more just to say, have _set_ present taste, so that to-day not only
the afternoon of night, but the twilight of forgetfulness, is slowly
and surely casting long shadows over the more realistic men of the
eighties and nineties.
What will follow this evolution of technic no man can predict. The
lessons of the past, however, are valuable, and to-day one touch of
Turner's brush is more sought for than acres of canvases so greatly
prized twenty years after his death.
And this is not alone confined to the old realistic English school. In
my own time I have seen Verbeckoeven eclipsed by Van Marcke,
Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gerome by Manet, and Sir Frederick Leighton
by John Sargent--a young David slaying the Goliath of English technic
with but a wave of his magic brush--and, last and by no means least,
the great French painter Meissonier by the equally great Spanish
master Sorolla.
I am tempted to continue, for the success of these men in the fulness
of the sunlight of their triumph, realists as well as impressionists,
was wholly due to their understanding of and adherence to the rules of
selection, composition, and mass which form the basis of these papers,
and which despite their differences in brush work they all adhered
to.
In the late half of the preceding century Meissonier received $66,000
for his "Friedland," a picture which cost him the best part of two
years to paint, and the expenditure of many thousands of francs,
notably the expense attendant upon the trampling down of a field of
growing wheat by a drove of horses that he might study the action and
the effect the better. Forty years later Sorolla received $20,000 for
two figures in blazing sunlight which took him but two days to paint,
the rest of his collection bringing $250,000, the whole exhibit of one
hundred and odd pictures having been visited by 150,000 persons in
thirty-two days. And he is still in the full tide of success,
pre-eminently the greatest master of the out-of-doors of modern times,
while to-day the work of Meissonier has fallen into such disrepute
that no owner dares offer one of his canvases at public auction except
under the keenest necessity. The first master expresses the refinement
of extreme realism, or rather detailism; the other is a pronounced
impressionist of the sanest of the open-air school of to-day. How long
this pendulum will continue to swing no one can tell. Both men are
great painters in the widest, deepest, and most pronounced sense; both
men have glorified, ennobled, and enriched their time; and both men
have reflected credit and honor upon their nation and their school.
Meissonier could not only draw the figure, give it life and action,
keep it harmonious in color, perfect in its gradations of black and
white, but he had that marvellous gift of color analysis which
reproduces for you in a picture the size of the top of a cigar-box
every tone in the local and reflected light to be found, say, in the
folds of a cavalier's cloak, the pleats no wider than the point of a
stub pen.
All this, of course, Sorolla ignores and, I am afraid, knowing the man
personally as I do, despises. What concerns the great Spaniard is the
whole composition alive in the blaze of the sunlight, the glare of the
hot sand and the shimmer of the blue, overarching sky, beating up and
down and over the figures, and all depicted with a slash of a brush
almost as wide as your hand. The first picture, the size of a
tobacco-box, you can hold between thumb and finger and enjoy, amazed
at the master's knowledge and skill. The other grips you from afar off
as you enter the gallery and stand startled and astounded before its
truth and dignity. In the first Meissonier tells you the whole story
to the very end. In the second Sorolla presents but a series of
shorthand notes which you yourself can fill in to suit your taste and
experience both of life and nature.
Whether you prefer one or the other, or neither, is a matter for you
to decide. You pay your money or you don't, and you can take your
choice. The future only can tell the story of the revolution of the
wheel. In the next decade a single Meissonier may be worth its weight
in sheet gold and layers of Sorollas may be stored in attics awaiting
some fortunate auction.
What will ensue, the art world over, before the wheel travels its full
periphery, no man knows. It will not be the hysteria of paint, I feel
assured, with its dabbers, spotters, and smearers; nor will it be the
litters of the cub-ists, that new breed of artistic pups, sponsors for
"The girl coming down-stairs," or "The stairs coming down the girl,"
or "The coming girl and the down-stairs," it makes no difference
which, all are equally incoherent and unintelligible; but it will be
something which, at least, will boast the element of beauty which is
the one and only excuse for art's existence. I may not live to see
Meissonier's second dawn and I never want to see Sorolla's eclipse,
but you may. You have only to remember Turner's second high noon to be
assured of it.
* * * * *
And just here it might be well to consider this question of technic,
especially its value in obtaining the results desired. While it has
nothing to do with either selection, composition, or mass, it has, I
claim, much to do with the way a painter expresses himself--his tone
of voice, his handwriting, his gestures in talking, so to speak--and
therefore becomes an integral part of my discourse. It may also be of
service in the striking of a note of compromise, some middle ground
upon which the extremes may one day meet.