recognizing the "natural facts" already explained to you, that is, the
skies and high lights being solidly opaque, the shadows being equally
transparent. This process requires certain modifications to be made in
the darks of the original drawing. The dense black shadow under the
eaves of a roof, for instance, are not in nature as black as the
charcoal, but perhaps a rich, warm brown. If the ground is in
sunlight, it is a dull, golden yellow and reflects the yellow glow of
the sand beneath. Or it may be a blue reflection, or even of a reddish
tone. These hard blacks then must be _glazed_ in such a way as to
preserve the power of the shadow obtained by means of the under
charcoal, and yet keep it _transparent_ (all shadows being
transparent) and at the same time preserve its true and proper tint.
This glaze is done by using the three semi-opaque primary
pigments--found in every color-box--namely:
Light red,
Cobalt-blue,
Yellow ochre.
These colors, of course, form the basis of all intermediate tones, and
from them all intermediate tones can be made.
These three colors are at the same time semi-opaque, their opacity
being just sufficient to tint the hard black of the coal, while never
clogging or muddying its transparency.
So it is with the millions of other tones in the whole composition,
when such perfectly transparent colors as brown madder, Indian yellow,
and indigo are used as a glaze, altering and modifying the undertone
of charcoal to any desired tint and at the same time preserving the
all-important thing--its transparency.
In conclusion, let me say that I fully recognize that I am addressing
students whose training enables them to understand perfectly this
explanation, and that further instructions are therefore unnecessary.
One thing, however, may be accentuated, and that is the use of plenty
of clean water. Another is that you should keep your palettes
separate. For myself, I make use of a common white metallic
dinner-plate, known as iron-stone china, costing another ten cents,
for my sky-palette, squeezing the color-tubes in a row around its edge
and my Chinese white below them on one side toward the bottom. For my
transparent palette, I use an ordinary moist sixteen-pan color-box,
being always careful never to blur it with even a brush stroke of body
color (Chinese white); and for my opaque work, an oval white metal
palette, with thumb-hole, and indentations around its edge into which
I squeeze the contents of my moist water-color tubes, my Chinese
white being heaped up in a little mound near my thumb.
The result may be seen in some of the illustrations accompanying this
text.
CHARCOAL
Before going into the value of charcoal as a medium in the recording
of the various aspects of nature in black-and-white, it will be wise
to review the several mediums in general use, namely, etching, pen and
ink, lithographic crayon, and charcoal gray in connection with Chinese
white; it will be well, also, to note the various mechanical processes
in use for the reproductions of these drawings on white paper.
Those of you who have seen the early illustration in _Harper's
Magazine_ of the late fifties will recall the work of "Porte Crayon"
(Colonel Strother), drawn on wood by the artist and engraved by such
men as A. V. S. Anthony and John Sartain. You will also recall how
some twenty-five years later an effective and marvellous change took
place in the quality of these reproductions, being by far the most
unique and rapid in the history of any art of the century. In less
than ten years, between 1876 and 1886, came this sudden awakening to
the necessity of better work from the burin, followed by an enormous
commercial demand for such results, until by common consent the
American engraver first rivalled and then surpassed the world. If we
search for the cause we find that, like many other inventions
developing others of still greater importance, as the telegraph
developed the telephone, electric light, and the phonograph, this
marvellous change is due entirely to the discovery and possibility of
photographing direct from the original upon the boxwood itself,
producing with an instant's exposure a complete reproduction of the
original drawing, with all its texture, gradation, and quality, not
only doing away entirely with the intermediate draftsman, as was the
case with "Porte Crayon's" work, but obtaining a result impossible to
the most skilful of the artists on wood of his day.
Another important feature in the discovery was the possibility of
reducing a drawing to any size required, thus fitting it exactly to
the necessities of the printed page. Before these discoveries, as you
well know, from the time of Albert Duerer down to Linton and engravers
of his school, the original drawing of the painter was redrawn by the
use of lead-pencil, Chinese white, and India-ink washes upon the wood
itself, giving as close an imitation as possible of the original. Some
painters--illustrators, if you please, in those early days--in fact,
made their original designs direct upon the wood. The effects of light
and dark were then cut out in lines, curved or otherwise, with
suitable cross-hatchings, as the necessity of the drawing required, or
left comparatively untouched.
It is not my purpose to discuss here the different merits of the
different schools. There are varieties of opinion regarding the
excellence of the line compared with the technic in the modern school
of engravers. By the modern school I mean the work of such men as
Cole, Yuengling, Wolff, French, Smithwick, and others. I refer to them
that I may accent the stronger the medium which is the subject-matter
of this talk, namely, charcoal, in the hope that those of you who
propose to make reproductive illustrations your life-work may be
tempted to make use of charcoal as a medium through which to express
your ideas and ideals.
But before embarking on this phase of my subject it may be interesting
for a moment to go a little deeper into the earlier stages of this
marvellous change from boxwood to zinc. I remember distinctly the
beginnings of an organization well known in New York, and perhaps to
many of you, as the Tile Club, to which organization I can
conscientiously say as much credit is due for this revival in
wood-engraving as to any other. Not that good wood-engravers did not
exist before its time, and not because it contained wood-engravers,
for the club did not have the name of one among its membership, but as
containing a group of painters who for the first time in aid of the
art of wood-engraving in this country lent their names and brushes to
an illustrated magazine. Up to that time there had been a wide gulf
existing between the ordinary draftsman on wood and a painter. This
did not proceed from the prevalence of a certain disease among the
painters, known at the present time as an "enlarged head," but from
the fact that no artist accustomed to free-hand drawing and at liberty
to wander all over his canvas at will would bring himself down to
working through a magnifying-glass, a necessity, often, in
transferring a drawing to wood.
With this discovery, however, of making available even the roughest
drawing, the simplest blot in color or a scratch in charcoal, and
photographing its exact _textures_ upon a wooden block, the camera
reducing it in size and thus perfecting it, the artist immediately
took the place of the draftsman, and at the same time introduced into
the work an artistic quality, a dash, a vim and spirit entirely
unknown before.
Three things were needed to utilize this marvellously useful
discovery: first, a painter of rank; second, an engraver who could
express the textures and technics of the several artists--that is,
reproduce the exact values of an original in wash, an original in
charcoal, or an original in oil; and third, a magazine with sufficient
capital, taste, and intelligence to reproduce these results upon a
printed page. We had the painters, and the engravers developed
rapidly. The third requirement, of taste and intelligence, was found
in Mr. A. W. Drake, then art director of _Scribner's Monthly_, and,
after its merging into the _Century_, the distinguished art director
of the _Century Magazine_.
When the Tile Club was formed in New York it consisted of a group of
men (I was its scullion for seven years, its entire life, and, being
thus an honored servant, was familiar with its many affairs) who
represented at the time the leading spirits of the different schools:
William M. Chase, Arthur Quartley, Swain Gifford, A. B. Frost, George
Maynard, Frank D. Millet, Alden Weir, Edwin A. Abbey, Charles S.
Reinhart, Elihu Vedder, William Gedney Bunce, Stanford White, Augustus
Saint-Gaudens, and one or two others. The club was limited to eighteen
members, there being twelve painters and six musicians. If I am not
very much mistaken, not a single painter of this group had ever drawn
upon a wooden block, and yet each one of them, as the records of our
periodicals have shown, was admirably qualified for illustrative work.
At the time, the illustrations in _Harper's_ and _Scribner's_,
compared with the illustrations of to-day, reminded one of the early
primers of the New England schools, with their improbable trees and
impossible animals.
I remember distinctly the first meeting of the Tile Club, in which the
subject of drawing for _Scribner's Monthly_ was first mooted, and I do
not believe I overestimate the importance that the position of the
club, taken at that time, has had and still has--not as a club, for it
was dissolved some years back--in the influence its personal art has
wielded upon the printed pages of the day.
The first magazine article was the account of a trip that we made down
on Long Island, illustrated by the club, entitled "The Tile Club
Abroad," each man choosing his own medium--oil, charcoal, water-color,
etc.; the results of which were published in the then _Scribner's
Magazine_, and engraved by a group of men who afterward placed the
art of wood-engraving in America side by side with the best efforts
ever obtained by the English and German periodicals, and one of whom,
Yuengling, took the gold medal of excellence both in Paris and Munich.
With this difference in textures, the difference between a drawing in
charcoal and one made in oil, it became necessary to invent new modes
of expression with the burin. A simple line which might express the
round of the cheek or the fulness of the arm, and which would answer
for the uniform drapery of the old school, would not serve to explain
the subtle quality of one of Quartley's moonrises or the vigor and
dash of one of Chase's outdoor figures sketched in oil.
So it came about that in searching to express these new qualities,
never before seen upon a block, the technic of the new school was
developed.
The next important result was the creating not only of a new school of
wood-engraving, but of an entirely distinct department for art
workers, the school of the illustrator; and so we have Abbey,
Reinhart, Quartley, and, later, Church, Smedley, Dana Gibson, and
dozens of others whose names will readily come to your minds and of
whose careers I have already spoken.
But the burin was too slow, even in the hands of the skilful engraver,
for the necessities of the hour. It was also too expensive; a drawing
which a magazine would pay the artist $50 for would often cost $200 to
engrave in the hands of a master like Yuengling or Cole. Again
photography was called into use. The "straight process," so called, of
the phototype printer, reproducing a pen-and-ink line drawing on a
zinc plate which could be immediately run through a Hoe process, was
perfected. You all remember, doubtless, an illustrated daily
published in New York, called _The Daily Graphic_, illustrated by
this process. This process, however, was only possible where
pen-and-ink drawing or a very coarse lead-pencil drawing was used in
making the original, because it was necessary that spaces of white
should exist between each separate line or mass of black. This
process, however, utterly failed in all India-ink drawings. Where
these drawings covered the white of the paper, if ever so delicately,
the result was a dense black upon the plate.
Then came a race between all the inventors interested in such
discoveries, both here and abroad--a race to perfect a process which
would produce from such wash drawings an exact reproduction upon the
printed page, giving all the gradations of the original and doing away
not only with the draftsman but with the wood-engraver. To Professor
Vogel, of Berlin, I believe--although an American, Ives, claims it,
and some say justly--is due the credit of perfecting what is known as
the half-tone, or screen process: many others claim that Herr
Meisenbach first perfected this most important discovery.
As the wash drawing had no lines, and as it is absolutely necessary
that photo-printing should have lines--that is, clean spaces of black
between white--these lines were supplied by laying a sheet of plate
glass over the drawing upon which the lines were cut by a diamond and
through which the original could be clearly seen. Of course, the light
falling upon the edges of these several diamond cuttings made little
points of brilliant white between which the several blacks and whites
could be seen. This, without going very much further into the
mechanical details, is the basis of the half-tone process.
While this had its value, it had also its demerits, one of which was
the total extermination of the American wood-engraver, except for a
few men like Timothy Cole, whose genius and skill made it possible for
them, by the excellence of their work, to survive the great difference
between twenty cents a square inch for transferring on zinc and twenty
dollars a square inch for engraving on wood.
There are, however, results in the half-tone process which I hold are
infinitely superior to the work of any wood-engraver of the old
school. While it is true that there is no really positive rich dark
for any part of the composition--for, of course, the light specks are
everywhere, thus lightening and graying the dark--and while we lose by
such defects the richness of wood-engraving, we also get the exact
touch of the artist in no more and no less a degree, particularly no
less. How often have I seen an exquisite drawing of Abbey's or Du
Maurier's almost ruined by the slipping of the burin the
one-thousandth part of an inch! How infinitely superior are the
originals of John Leech's immortal caricatures in _Punch_ to the
reproductions, all because the shadow line under an eye, or that
little dot which denotes the difference between amusement and
curiosity in the expression of a face, has been cut away the
thousandth part of a hair-line! The processes of the half-tone,
however, are ever accurate and the reproduction given you is
exact--with the foregoing restrictions.
Then again, in landscape effects and in some portraits, the uniformity
of tone, the certainty of every touch being reproduced, the exact
balancing from dark to light, all result in better work than can be
done by the ordinary engraver.
And yet, with all the half-tone's advantages, I must admit that
Yuengling's head of the "Professor" and many of his wood-cuts in an
illustrated edition of "Sir Launfal," published some years ago, and
much of the work of such masters as Cole, Wolff, Yuengling, and
others, stand as monuments for all time to the skill of hands that no
process will ever excel, for they put into it that something which the
bath of vitriol will never furnish, a bite of the acid of their own
genius.
Since these earlier days a new departure has been made, until now
reproductive processes have been brought to such perfection that there
is hardly any texture or color scheme that can not be matched. Note,
if you will, Howard Pyle in color--rich in yellows and reds, with
black and white spaces as an enrichment. Note also A. I. Keller's
transparent work in charcoal gray. Note particularly the reproductions
in the magazines of F. Walter Taylor's drawings in charcoal, in which
the very texture of the coal is preserved. And, if you will permit me,
note the half tones of my own charcoal drawings now on exhibition in
the adjoining gallery. So perfect is the reproduction that one is
careful not to smudge his fingers in turning the leaves of the
publication in which they are printed.
This being the case (and the printers must be thanked as well for
their share in the results), I earnestly hope that some of my brother
illustrators--the more the merrier--will seriously consider the value
of charcoal as a medium for illustrative work. There is no subject, I
assure you, that the sun shines on or its light filters into, or any
phase of nature, be it rain or storm, fog, snow, or mist, including
marines, figures, sunrises and sunsets, blazing heat and cool,
transparent shadows, that cannot be visualized by it.
I hold, too, that by its use qualities can be obtained impossible to
be found in either etchings, lithographic crayon, wash, or pen and
ink--especially the velvet of its black.
Charcoal is the unhampered, the free, the personal individual medium.
No water, no oil, no palette, no squeezing of tubes or wiping of
tints; no scraping, scumbling, or other dilatory and exasperating
necessities. Just a piece of coal, the size of a cigarette, held flat
between the thumb and the forefinger, a sheet of paper, and then "let
go." Yes, one thing more--care must be taken to have this forefinger
fastened to a sure, knowing, and fearless hand, worked by an arm which
plays easily and loosely in a ball-socket set firmly near your
backbone. To carry out the metaphor, the steam of your enthusiasm,
kept in working order by the safety-valve of your experience, and
regulated by the ball-governor of your art knowledge--such as
composition, drawing, mass, light and dark--is then turned on.
Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never
arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal
sketch, covering and containing all a man can see--and he should
neither record nor explain anything more--is not completely finished
in two hours it cannot be finished by the same man in two days or two
years.
For a drawing in charcoal is really a record of a man's temperament.
It represents pre-eminently the personality of the individual--his
buoyancy, his perfect health, the quickness of his gestures. All these
are shown in the way he strikes his canvas--compelling it to talk back
to him. So also does it record the man's timidity, his want of
confidence in himself, his fear of spoiling what he has already done,
forgetting that a nickel will buy him another sheet of paper.
Courage, too, is a component part--not to be afraid to strike hard and
fast, belaboring the canvas as a pugilist belabors an opponent,
beating nature into shape.
[Illustration: The George and Vulture Inn, London]
As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke
goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that
charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge blow going from the
spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the
repousse around a goblet.
Remember, too, that the fight is all over in two hours--three at the
outside--the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if
you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining
your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark.
It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and
darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next
supplementary light and dark.
Remember, too, that when the fight is over you must not spoil what you
have done by repetition or finish. _Let it alone._ You may not have
covered everything you wanted to express, but if you have smashed in
the salient features, the details will look out at you when you least
expect it. There are a thousand cross lights and untold mysteries in
Rembrandt's shadows which his friends failed to see when his canvas
left his studio. It is the unexpressed which is often most
interesting. Meissonier tells his story to the end. So do Vibert,
Rico, and the whole realistic school. Corot gives you a mass of
foliage, no single leaf expressed, but beneath it lurk great,
cavernous shadows in which nymphs and satyrs play hide-and-seek.
Remember, also, that just as the blunt end of a bit of charcoal is
many, many times larger than the point of an etching-needle, so are
its resources for fine lines and minute dots and scratches just that
much reduced. It is the flat of the piece of coal that is valuable,
not its point.
As to what can be done with this piece of coal, I can but repeat,
_everything_. That there are some subjects better than others, I will
admit. For me, London, its streets and buildings, come first,
especially if it be raining; and there is no question that it does
rain once in a while in London, making the wet streets and sidewalks
glisten under its silver-gray sky, little rivulets of molten silver
escaping everywhere. When with these you get a background--and I
always do--of flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the
haze and mist of smoke, your delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else
in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start
your foreground with, say, a figure, or an umbrella, or a cab,
expressed in a stroke of jet-black, and the perspective instantly
fades into grays of steeple, dome, or roof, so delicate and vapory
that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky. Or
you stroll into some old church or cathedral, as I did last summer
when I found myself in that most wonderful of all English
churches--and I say it deliberately--St. Bartholomew's the Great, over
in Smithfield.
Other churches have I studied in my wanderings; many and various
cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques have delighted me. I know the color
and the value of tapestry and rich hangings; of mosaics, porphyry, and
verd-antiques; of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of the
arabesque; but the velvety quality of London soot when applied to the
rough surfaces of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveliness
gained by grime and smoke, came to me as a revelation.
This rich black which, like a tropical fungus, grows and spreads
through St. Bartholomew's interior, hiding under its soft, caressing
touch the rough angles and insistent edges of the Norman, is what the
bloom is to the grape, what the dark purpling is to the plum,
mellowing from sight the brilliancy of the under skin. And there are
wide coverings of it, too, in this wonderful church, as if some master
decorator had wielded a great coal and at one sweep of his hand had
rubbed its glorious black into every crevice, crack, and cranny of
wall, column, and arch.
Certain it is that no other medium than the one used could give any
idea of its charm. Neither oil, water-color, nor pastel will transmit
it--no, nor the dry-point or bitten plate. The soot of centuries, the
fogs of countless Novembers, the smoke of a thousand firesides were
the pigments which the Master Painter set upon his palette in the task
of giving us one exquisitely beautiful interior wholly in
black-and-white.
So it was in the Temple when I was searching for Mr. Thackeray's
haunts.
What of alterations, scrapings, patchings up, and fillings in have
taken place in these various courts and their surroundings, I did not
trouble myself to find out. Nothing looks new in London after the fogs
and soot of one winter have wreaked their vengeance upon it. Whether
the facade is of brick, stone, or stucco depends entirely on the
thickness of the soot, packed in or scoured clean by winds and rains,
or whether the surface is ebony or marble, as may be seen in many of
the statues on Burlington House, where a head, arm, or part of a
pedestal chair has been kept white by constant douches.
As for me, I was glad that these old haunts of Mr. Thackeray and his
characters are even blacker to-day than they might have been in his
time. For the soot and grime become them, and London as well, for that
matter. A great impressionist, this smoke-smudger and wiper-out of
detail, this believer in masses and simple surfaces, this destroyer of
gingerbread ornaments, petty mouldings, and cheap flutings!
* * * * *
And now for a few practical data as to my own way of handling the
coal, which may be of value as coming from one who has profited these
many years by its infinite possibilities.
[Illustration: Diagram of Charcoal Technic]