65. Lay a coat of the blue, prepared as usual, over a whole square of
paper. Let it dry. Then another coat over four fifths of the square, or
thereabouts, leaving the edge rather irregular than straight, and let it
dry. Then another coat over three fifths; another over two fifths; and
the last over one fifth; so that the square may present the appearance
of gradual increase in darkness in five bands, each darker than the one
beyond it. Then, with the brush rather dry (as in the former exercise,
when filling up the interstices), try, with small touches, like those
used in the pen etching, only a little broader, to add shade delicately
beyond each edge, so as to lead the darker tints into the paler ones
imperceptibly. By touching the paper very lightly, and putting a
multitude of little touches, crossing and recrossing in every direction,
you will gradually be able to work up to the darker tints, outside of
each, so as quite to efface their edges, and unite them tenderly with
the next tint. The whole square, when done, should look evenly shaded
from dark to pale, with no bars, only a crossing texture of touches,
something like chopped straw, over the whole.[13]
66. Next, take your rounded pebble; arrange it in any light and shade
you like; outline it very loosely with the pencil. Put on a wash of
color, prepared _very_ pale, quite flat over all of it, except the
highest light, leaving the edge of your color quite sharp. Then another
wash, extending only over the darker parts, leaving the edge of that
sharp also, as in tinting the square. Then another wash over the still
darker parts, and another over the darkest, leaving each edge to dry
sharp. Then, with the small touches, efface the edges, reinforce the
darks, and work the whole delicately together as you would with the pen,
till you have got it to the likeness of the true light and shade. You
will find that the tint underneath is a great help, and that you can now
get effects much more subtle and complete than with the pen merely.
67. The use of leaving the edges always sharp is that you may not
trouble or vex the color, but let it lie as it falls suddenly on the
paper: color looks much more lovely when it has been laid on with a dash
of the brush, and left to dry in its own way, than when it has been
dragged about and disturbed; so that it is always better to let the
edges and forms be a little wrong, even if one cannot correct them
afterwards, than to lose this fresh quality of the tint. Very great
masters in water color can lay on the true forms at once with a dash,
and bad masters in water color lay on grossly false forms with a dash,
and leave them false; for people in general, not knowing false from
true, are as much pleased with the appearance of power in the irregular
blot as with the presence of power in the determined one; but _we_, in
our beginnings, must do as much as we can with the broad dash, and then
correct with the point, till we are quite right. We must take care to be
right, at whatever cost of pains; and then gradually we shall find we
can be right with freedom.
68. I have hitherto limited you to color mixed with two or three
teaspoonfuls of water; but, in finishing your light and shade from the
stone, you may, as you efface the edge of the palest coat towards the
light, use the color for the small touches with more and more water,
till it is so pale as not to be perceptible. Thus you may obtain a
perfect gradation to the light. And in reinforcing the darks, when they
are very dark, you may use less and less water. If you take the color
tolerably dark on your brush, only always liquid (not pasty), and dash
away the superfluous color on blotting paper, you will find that,
touching the paper very lightly with the dry brush, you can, by repeated
touches, produce a dusty kind of bloom, very valuable in giving depth to
shadow; but it requires great patience and delicacy of hand to do this
properly. You will find much of this kind of work in the grounds and
shadows of William Hunt's drawings.[14]
69. As you get used to the brush and color, you will gradually find out
their ways for yourself, and get the management of them. And you will
often save yourself much discouragement by remembering what I have so
often asserted,--that if anything goes wrong, it is nearly sure to be
refinement that is wanting, not force; and connection, not alteration.
If you dislike the state your drawing is in, do not lose patience with
it, nor dash at it, nor alter its plan, nor rub it desperately out, at
the place you think wrong; but look if there are no shadows you can
gradate more perfectly; no little gaps and rents you can fill; no forms
you can more delicately define: and do not _rush_ at any of the errors
or incompletions thus discerned, but efface or supply slowly, and you
will soon find your drawing take another look. A very useful expedient
in producing some effects, is to wet the paper, and then lay the color
on it, more or less wet, according to the effect you want. You will soon
see how prettily it gradates itself as it dries; when dry, you can
reinforce it with delicate stippling when you want it darker. Also,
while the color is still damp on the paper, by drying your brush
thoroughly, and touching the color with the brush so dried, you may take
out soft lights with great tenderness and precision. Try all sorts of
experiments of this kind, noticing how the color behaves; but
remembering always that your final results must be obtained, and can
only be obtained, by pure work with the point, as much as in the pen
drawing.
70. You will find also, as you deal with more and more complicated
subjects, that Nature's resources in light and shade are so much richer
than yours, that you cannot possibly get all, or anything like all, the
gradations of shadow in any given group. When this is the case,
determine first to keep the broad masses of things distinct: if, for
instance, there is a green book, and a white piece of paper, and a black
inkstand in the group, be sure to keep the white paper as a light mass,
the green book as a middle tint mass, the black inkstand as a dark mass;
and do not shade the folds in the paper, or corners of the book, so as
to equal in depth the darkness of the inkstand. The great difference
between the masters of light and shade, and imperfect artists, is the
power of the former to draw so delicately as to express form in a
dark-colored object with little light, and in a light-colored object
with little darkness; and it is better even to leave the forms here and
there unsatisfactorily rendered than to lose the general relations of
the great masses. And this, observe, not because masses are grand or
desirable things in your composition (for with composition at present
you have nothing whatever to do), but because it is a fact that things
do so present themselves to the eyes of men, and that we see paper,
book, and inkstand as three separate things, before we see the wrinkles,
or chinks, or corners of any of the three. Understand, therefore, at
once, that no detail can be as strongly expressed in drawing as it is in
reality; and strive to keep all your shadows and marks and minor
markings on the masses, lighter than they appear to be in Nature; you
are sure otherwise to get them too dark. You will in doing this find
that you cannot get the projection of things sufficiently shown; but
never mind that; there is no need that they should appear to project,
but great need that their relations of shade to each other should be
preserved. All deceptive projection is obtained by partial exaggeration
of shadow; and whenever you see it, you may be sure the drawing is more
or less bad: a thoroughly fine drawing or painting will always show a
slight tendency towards flatness.
71. Observe, on the other hand, that, however white an object may be,
there is always some small point of it whiter than the rest. You must
therefore have a slight tone of gray over everything in your picture
except on the extreme high lights; even the piece of white paper, in
your subject, must be toned slightly down, unless (and there are
thousand chances against its being so) it should all be turned so as
fully to front the light. By examining the treatment of the white
objects in any pictures accessible to you by Paul Veronese or Titian,
you will soon understand this.[15]
72. As soon as you feel yourself capable of expressing with the brush
the undulations of surfaces and the relations of masses, you may proceed
to draw more complicated and beautiful things.[16] And first, the boughs
of trees, now not in mere dark relief, but in full rounding. Take the
first bit of branch or stump that comes to hand, with a fork in it; cut
off the ends of the forking branches, so as to leave the whole only
about a foot in length; get a piece of paper the same size, fix your bit
of branch in some place where its position will not be altered, and draw
it thoroughly, in all its light and shade, full size; striving, above
all things, to get an accurate expression of its structure at the fork
of the branch. When once you have mastered the tree at its _armpits_,
you will have little more trouble with it.
73. Always draw whatever the background happens to be, exactly as you
see it. Wherever you have fastened the bough, you must draw whatever is
behind it, ugly or not, else you will never know whether the light and
shade are right; they may appear quite wrong to you, only for want of
the background. And this general law is to be observed in all your
studies: whatever you draw, draw completely and unalteringly, else you
never know if what you have done is right, or whether you _could_ have
done it rightly had you tried. There is nothing _visible_ out of which
you may not get useful practice.
74. Next, to put the leaves on your boughs. Gather a small twig with
four or five leaves on it, put it into water, put a sheet of
light-colored or white paper behind it, so that all the leaves may be
relieved in dark from the white field; then sketch in their dark shape
carefully with pencil as you did the complicated boughs, in order to be
sure that all their masses and interstices are right in shape before you
begin shading, and complete as far as you can with pen and ink, in the
manner of Fig. 6, which is a young shoot of lilac.
75. You will probably, in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at
first puzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look of
retirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of the
leaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there are
certain artifices by which good painters can partly conquer this
difficulty; as slight exaggerations of force or color in the nearer
parts, and of obscurity in the more distant ones; but you must not
attempt anything of this kind. When you are first sketching the leaves,
shut one of your eyes, fix a point in the background, to bring the point
of one of the leaves against; and so sketch the whole bough as you see
it in a fixed position, looking with one eye only. Your drawing never
can be made to look like the object itself, as you see that object with
_both_ eyes,[17] but it can be made perfectly like the object seen with
one, and you must be content when you have got a resemblance on these
terms.
76. In order to get clearly at the notion of the thing to be done, take
a single long leaf, hold it with its point towards you, and as flat as
you can, so as to see nothing of it but its thinness, as if you wanted
to know how thin it was; outline it so. Then slope it down gradually
towards you, and watch it as it lengthens out to its full length, held
perpendicularly down before you. Draw it in three or four different
positions between these extremes, with its ribs as they appear in each
position, and you will soon find out how it must be.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
77. Draw first only two or three of the leaves; then larger clusters;
and practice, in this way, more and more complicated pieces of bough and
leafage, till you find you can master the most difficult arrangements,
not consisting of more than ten or twelve leaves. You will find as you
do this, if you have an opportunity of visiting any gallery of pictures,
that you take a much more lively interest than before in the work of the
great masters; you will see that very often their best backgrounds are
composed of little more than a few sprays of leafage, carefully studied,
brought against the distant sky; and that another wreath or two form the
chief interest of their foregrounds. If you live in London you may test
your progress _accurately_ by the degree of admiration you feel for the
leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus, in Titian's Bacchus and
Ariadne. All this, however, will not enable you to draw a mass of
foliage. You will find, on looking at any rich piece of vegetation, that
it is only one or two of the nearer clusters that you can by any
possibility draw in this complete manner. The mass is too vast, and too
intricate, to be thus dealt with.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
78. You must now therefore have recourse to some confused mode of
execution, capable of expressing the confusion of Nature. And, first,
you must understand what the character of that confusion is. If you look
carefully at the outer sprays of any tree at twenty or thirty yards'
distance, you will see them defined against the sky in masses, which, at
first, look quite definite; but if you examine them, you will see,
mingled with the real shapes of leaves, many indistinct lines, which
are, some of them, stalks of leaves, and some, leaves seen with the
edge turned towards you, and coming into sight in a broken way; for,
supposing the real leaf shape to be as at _a_, Fig. 7, this, when
removed some yards from the eye, will appear dark against the sky, as at
_b_; then, when removed some yards farther still, the stalk and point
disappear altogether, the middle of the leaf becomes little more than a
line; and the result is the condition at _c_, only with this farther
subtlety in the look of it, inexpressible in the wood-cut, that the
stalk and point of the leaf, though they have disappeared to the eye,
have yet some influence in _checking the light_ at the places where they
exist, and cause a slight dimness about the part of the leaf which
remains visible, so that its perfect effect could only be rendered by
two layers of color, one subduing the sky tone a little, the next
drawing the broken portions of the leaf, as at _c_, and carefully
indicating the greater darkness of the spot in the middle, where the
under side of the leaf is.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
This is the perfect theory of the matter. In practice we cannot reach
such accuracy; but we shall be able to render the general look of the
foliage satisfactorily by the following mode of practice.
79. Gather a spray of any tree, about a foot or eighteen inches long.
Fix it firmly by the stem in anything that will support it steadily; put
it about eight feet away from you, or ten if you are far-sighted. Put a
sheet of not very white paper behind it, as usual. Then draw very
carefully, first placing them with pencil, and then filling them up with
ink, every leaf-mass and stalk of it in simple black profile, as you see
them against the paper: Fig. 8 is a bough of Phillyrea so drawn. Do not
be afraid of running the leaves into a black mass when they come
together; this exercise is only to teach you what the actual shapes of
such masses are when seen against the sky.
80. Make two careful studies of this kind of one bough of every common
tree,--oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, etc.; in fact, if you are good, and
industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times
a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can
get branches of. You are to make two studies of each bough, for this
reason,--all masses of foliage have an upper and under surface, and the
side view of them, or profile, shows a wholly different organization of
branches from that seen in the view from above. They are generally seen
more or less in profile, as you look at the whole tree, and Nature puts
her best composition into the profile arrangement. But the view from
above or below occurs not unfrequently, also, and it is quite necessary
you should draw it if you wish to understand the anatomy of the tree.
The difference between the two views is often far greater than you could
easily conceive. For instance, in Fig. 9, _a_ is the upper view and _b_
the profile, of a single spray of Phillyrea. Fig. 8 is an intermediate
view of a larger bough; seen from beneath, but at some lateral distance
also.
81. When you have done a few branches in this manner, take one of the
drawings you have made, and put it first a yard away from you, then a
yard and a half, then two yards; observe how the thinner stalks and
leaves gradually disappear, leaving only a vague and slight darkness
where they were; and make another study of the effect at each distance,
taking care to draw nothing more than you really see, for in this
consists all the difference between what would be merely a miniature
drawing of the leaves seen near, and a full-size drawing of the same
leaves at a distance. By full size, I mean the size which they would
really appear of if their outline were traced through a pane of glass
held at the same distance from the eye at which you mean to hold your
drawing. You can always ascertain this full size of any object by
holding your paper upright before you, at the distance from your eye at
which you wish your drawing to be seen. Bring its edge across the object
you have to draw, and mark upon this edge the points where the outline
of the object crosses, or goes behind, the edge of the paper. You will
always find it, thus measured, smaller than you supposed.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
82. When you have made a few careful experiments of this kind on your
own drawings, (which are better for practice, at first, than the real
trees, because the black profile in the drawing is quite stable, and
does not shake, and is not confused by sparkles of luster on the
leaves,) you may try the extremities of the real trees, only not doing
much at a time, for the brightness of the sky will dazzle and perplex
your sight. And this brightness causes, I believe, some loss of the
outline itself; at least the chemical action of the light in a
photograph extends much within the edges of the leaves, and, as it
were, eats them away, so that no tree extremity, stand it ever so still,
nor any other form coming against bright sky, is truly drawn by a
photograph; and if you once succeed in drawing a few sprays rightly, you
will find the result much more lovely and interesting than any
photograph can be.
83. All this difficulty, however, attaches to the rendering merely the
dark form of the sprays as they come against the sky. Within those
sprays, and in the heart of the tree, there is a complexity of a much
more embarrassing kind; for nearly all leaves have some luster, and all
are more or less translucent (letting light through them); therefore, in
any given leaf, besides the intricacies of its own proper shadows and
foreshortenings, there are three series of circumstances which alter or
hide its forms. First, shadows cast on it by other leaves,--often very
forcibly. Secondly, light reflected from its lustrous surface, sometimes
the blue of the sky, sometimes the white of clouds, or the sun itself
flashing like a star. Thirdly, forms and shadows of other leaves, seen
as darknesses through the translucent parts of the leaf; a most
important element of foliage effect, but wholly neglected by landscape
artists in general.
84. The consequence of all this is, that except now and then by chance,
the form of a complete leaf is never seen; but a marvelous and quaint
confusion, very definite, indeed, in its evidence of direction of
growth, and unity of action, but wholly indefinable and inextricable,
part by part, by any amount of patience. You cannot possibly work it out
in facsimile, though you took a twelvemonth's time to a tree; and you
must therefore try to discover some mode of execution which will more or
less imitate, by its own variety and mystery, the variety and mystery of
Nature, without absolute delineation of detail.
85. Now I have led you to this conclusion by observation of tree form
only, because in that the thing to be proved is clearest. But no natural
object exists which does not involve in some part or parts of it this
inimitableness, this mystery of quantity, which needs peculiarity of
handling and trick of touch to express it completely. If leaves are
intricate, so is moss, so is foam, so is rock cleavage, so are fur and
hair, and texture of drapery, and of clouds. And although methods and
dexterities of handling are wholly useless if you have not gained first
the thorough knowledge of the form of the thing; so that if you cannot
draw a branch perfectly, then much less a tree; and if not a wreath of
mist perfectly, much less a flock of clouds; and if not a single grass
blade perfectly, much less a grass bank; yet having once got this power
over decisive form, you may safely--and must, in order to perfection of
work--carry out your knowledge by every aid of method and dexterity of
hand.
86. But, in order to find out what method can do, you must now look at
Art as well as at Nature, and see what means painters and engravers have
actually employed for the expression of these subtleties. Whereupon
arises the question, what opportunity you have to obtain engravings? You
ought, if it is at all in your power, to possess yourself of a certain
number of good examples of Turner's engraved works: if this be not in
your power, you must just make the best use you can of the shop windows,
or of any plates of which you can obtain a loan. Very possibly, the
difficulty of getting sight of them may stimulate you to put them to
better use. But, supposing your means admit of your doing so, possess
yourself, first, of the illustrated edition either of Rogers's Italy or
Rogers's Poems, and then of about a dozen of the plates named in the
annexed lists. The prefixed letters indicate the particular points
deserving your study in each engraving.[18] Be sure, therefore, that
your selection includes, at all events, one plate marked with each
letter. Do not get more than twelve of these plates, nor even all the
twelve at first; for the more engravings you have, the less attention
you will pay to them. It is a general truth, that the enjoyment
derivable from art cannot be increased in quantity, beyond a certain
point, by quantity of possession; it is only spread, as it were, over a
larger surface, and very often dulled by finding ideas repeated in
different works. Now, for a beginner, it is always better that his
attention should be concentrated on one or two good things, and all his
enjoyment founded on them, than that he should look at many, with
divided thoughts. He has much to discover; and his best way of
discovering it is to think long over few things, and watch them
earnestly. It is one of the worst errors of this age to try to know and
to see too much: the men who seem to know everything, never in reality
know anything rightly. Beware of _handbook_ knowledge.
87. These engravings are, in general, more for you to look at than to
copy; and they will be of more use to you when we come to talk of
composition, than they are at present; still, it will do you a great
deal of good, sometimes to try how far you can get their delicate
texture, or gradations of tone: as your pen-and-ink drawing will be apt
to incline too much to a scratchy and broken kind of shade. For
instance, the texture of the white convent wall, and the drawing of its
tiled roof, in the vignette at p. 227 of Rogers's Poems, is as exquisite
as work can possibly be; and it will be a great and profitable
achievement if you can at all approach it. In like manner, if you can at
all imitate the dark distant country at p. 7, or the sky at p. 80, of
the same volume, or the foliage at pp. 12 and 144, it will be good gain;
and if you can once draw the rolling clouds and running river at p. 9 of
the Italy, or the city in the vignette of Aosta at p. 25, or the
moonlight at p. 223, you will find that even Nature herself cannot
afterwards very terribly puzzle you with her torrents, or towers, or
moonlight.
88. You need not copy touch for touch, but try to get the same effect.
And if you feel discouraged by the delicacy required, and begin to think
that engraving is not drawing, and that copying it cannot help you to
draw, remember that it differs from common drawing only by the
difficulties it has to encounter. You perhaps have got into a careless
habit of thinking that engraving is a mere business, easy enough when
one has got into the knack of it. On the contrary, it is a form of
drawing more difficult than common drawing, by exactly so much as it is
more difficult to cut steel than to move the pencil over paper. It is
true that there are certain mechanical aids and methods which reduce it
at certain stages either to pure machine work, or to more or less a
habit of hand and arm; but this is not so in the foliage you are trying
to copy, of which the best and prettiest parts are always etched--that
is, drawn with a fine steel point and free hand: only the line made is
white instead of black, which renders it much more difficult to judge of
what you are about. And the trying to copy these plates will be good for
you, because it will awaken you to the real labor and skill of the
engraver, and make you understand a little how people must work, in this
world, who have really to _do_ anything in it.
89. Do not, however, suppose that I give you the engraving as a
model--far from it; but it is necessary you should be able to do as
well[19] before you think of doing better, and you will find many little
helps and hints in the various work of it. Only remember that _all_
engravers' foregrounds are bad; whenever you see the peculiar wriggling
parallel lines of modern engravings become distinct, you must not copy;
nor admire: it is only the softer masses, and distances, and portions of
the foliage in the plates marked _f_, which you may copy. The best for
this purpose, if you can get it, is the "Chain bridge over the Tees,"
of the England series; the thicket on the right is very beautiful and
instructive, and very like Turner. The foliage in the "Ludlow" and
"Powis" is also remarkably good.
90. Besides these line engravings, and to protect you from what harm
there is in their influence, you are to provide yourself, if possible,
with a Rembrandt etching, or a photograph of one (of figures, not
landscape). It does not matter of what subject, or whether a sketchy or
finished one, but the sketchy ones are generally cheapest, and will
teach you most. Copy it as well as you can, noticing especially that
Rembrandt's most rapid lines have steady purpose; and that they are laid
with almost inconceivable precision when the object becomes at all
interesting. The "Prodigal Son," "Death of the Virgin," "Abraham and
Isaac," and such others, containing incident and character rather than
chiaroscuro, will be the most instructive. You can buy one; copy it
well; then exchange it, at little loss, for another; and so, gradually,
obtain a good knowledge of his system. Whenever you have an opportunity
of examining his work at museums, etc., do so with the greatest care,
not looking at _many_ things, but a long time at each. You must also
provide yourself, if possible, with an engraving of Albert Dürer's. This
you will not be able to copy; but you must keep it beside you, and refer
to it as a standard of precision in line. If you can get one with a
_wing_ in it, it will be best. The crest with the cock, that with the
skull and satyr, and the "Melancholy," are the best you could have, but
any will do. Perfection in chiaroscuro drawing lies between these two
masters, Rembrandt and Dürer. Rembrandt is often too loose and vague;
and Dürer has little or no effect of mist or uncertainty. If you can see
anywhere a drawing by Leonardo, you will find it balanced between the
two characters; but there are no engravings which present this
perfection, and your style will be best formed, therefore, by alternate
study of Rembrandt and Dürer. Lean rather to Dürer; it is better, for
amateurs, to err on the side of precision than on that of vagueness:
and though, as I have just said, you cannot copy a Dürer, yet try every
now and then a quarter of an inch square or so, and see how much nearer
you can come; you cannot possibly try to draw the leafy crown of the
"Melancholia" too often.
91. If you cannot get either a Rembrandt or a Dürer, you may still learn
much by carefully studying any of George Cruikshank's etchings, or
Leech's wood-cuts in Punch, on the free side; with Alfred Rethel's and
Richter's[20] on the severe side. But in so doing you will need to
notice the following points:
92. When either the material (as the copper or wood) or the time of an
artist does not permit him to make a perfect drawing,--that is to say,
one in which no lines shall be prominently visible,--and he is reduced
to show the black lines, either drawn by the pen, or on the wood, it is
better to make these lines help, as far as may be, the expression of
texture and form. You will thus find many textures, as of cloth or grass
or flesh, and many subtle effects of light, expressed by Leech with
zigzag or crossed or curiously broken lines; and you will see that
Alfred Rethel and Richter constantly express the direction and rounding
of surfaces by the direction of the lines which shade them. All these
various means of expression will be useful to you, as far as you can
learn them, provided you remember that they are merely a kind of
shorthand; telling certain facts not in quite the right way, but in the
only possible way under the conditions: and provided in any after use of
such means, you never try to show your own dexterity; but only to get as
much record of the object as you can in a given time; and that you
continually make efforts to go beyond such shorthand, and draw portions
of the objects rightly.
93. And touching this question of direction of lines as indicating that
of surface, observe these few points:
[Illustration: FIG. 10.]
If lines are to be distinctly shown, it is better that, so far as they
_can_ indicate anything by their direction, they should explain rather
than oppose the general character of the object. Thus, in the piece of
wood-cut from Titian, Fig. 10, the lines are serviceable by expressing,
not only the shade of the trunk, but partly also its roundness, and the
flow of its grain. And Albert Dürer, whose work was chiefly engraving,
sets himself always thus to make his lines as _valuable_ as possible;
telling much by them, both of shade and direction of surface: and if you
were always to be limited to engraving on copper (and did not want to
express effects of mist or darkness, as well as delicate forms), Albert
Dürer's way of work would be the best example for you. But, inasmuch as
the perfect way of drawing is by shade without lines, and the great
painters always conceive their subject as complete, even when they are
sketching it most rapidly, you will find that, when they are not limited
in means, they do not much trust to direction of line, but will often
scratch in the shade of a rounded surface with nearly straight lines,
that is to say, with the easiest and quickest lines possible to
themselves. When the hand is free, the easiest line for it to draw is
one inclining from the left upwards to the right, or vice versâ, from
the right downwards to the left; and when done very quickly, the line is
hooked a little at the end by the effort at return to the next. Hence,
you will always find the pencil, chalk, or pen sketch of a _very_ great
master full of these kind of lines; and even if he draws carefully, you
will find him using simple straight lines from left to right, when an
inferior master would have used curved ones. Fig. 11 is a fair facsimile
of part of a sketch of Raphael's, which exhibits these characters very
distinctly. Even the careful drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are shaded
most commonly with straight lines; and you may always assume it as a
point increasing the probability of a drawing being by a great master
if you find rounded surfaces, such as those of cheeks or lips, shaded
with straight lines.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.]
94. But you will also now understand how easy it must be for dishonest
dealers to forge or imitate scrawled sketches like Fig. 11, and pass
them for the work of great masters; and how the power of determining the
genuineness of a drawing depends entirely on your knowing the facts of
the objects drawn, and perceiving whether the hasty handling is _all_
conducive to the expression of those truths. In a great man's work, at
its fastest, no line is thrown away, and it is not by the rapidity, but
the _economy_ of the execution that you know him to be great. Now to
judge of this economy, you must know exactly what he meant to do,
otherwise you cannot of course discern how far he has done it; that is,
you must know the beauty and nature of the thing he was drawing. All
judgment of art thus finally founds itself on knowledge of Nature.
95. But farther observe, that this scrawled, or economic, or impetuous
execution is never affectedly impetuous. If a great man is not in a
hurry, he never pretends to be; if he has no eagerness in his heart, he
puts none into his hand; if he thinks his effect would be better got
with _two_ lines, he never, to show his dexterity, tries to do it with
one. Be assured, therefore (and this is a matter of great importance),
that you will never produce a great drawing by imitating the execution
of a great master. Acquire his knowledge and share his feelings, and the
easy execution will fall from your hand as it did from his: but if you
merely scrawl because he scrawled, or blot because he blotted, you will
not only never advance in power, but every able draughtsman, and every
judge whose opinion is worth having, will know you for a cheat, and
despise you accordingly.