permission. My chief reason is, that I think it more necessary that the
pupil's eye should be trained to accurate perception of the relations of
curve and right lines, by having the latter absolutely true, than that
he should practice drawing straight lines. But also, I believe, though I
am not quite sure of this, that he never _ought_ to be able to draw a
straight line. I do not believe a perfectly trained hand ever can draw a
line without some curvature in it, or some variety of direction. Prout
could draw a straight line, but I do not believe Raphael could, nor
Tintoret. A great draughtsman can, as far as I have observed, draw every
line _but_ a straight one.
[204] Or, if you feel able to do so, scratch them in with confused quick
touches, indicating the general shape of the cloud or mist of twigs
round the main branches; but do not take much trouble about them.
[205] It is more difficult, at first, to get, in colour, a narrow
gradation than an extended one; but the ultimate difficulty is, as with
the pen, to make the gradation go _far_.
[206] Of course, all the columns of colour are to be of equal length.
[207] The degree of darkness you can reach with the given colour is
always indicated by the colour of the solid cake in the box.
[208] The figure _a_, Fig. 5., is very dark, but this is to give an
example of all kinds of depth of tint, without repeated figures.
[209] Nearly neutral in ordinary circumstances, but yet with quite
different tones in its neutrality, according to the colours of the
various reflected rays that compose it.
[210] If we had any business with the reasons of this, I might, perhaps,
be able to show you some metaphysical ones for the enjoyment, by truly
artistical minds, of the changes wrought by light, and shade, and
perspective in patterned surfaces; but this is at present not to the
point; and all that you need to know is that the drawing of such things
is good exercise, and moreover a kind of exercise which Titian,
Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, and Turner, all enjoyed, and strove to
excel in.
[211] The use of acquiring this habit of execution is that you may be
able, when you begin to colour, to let one hue be seen in minute
portions, gleaming between the touches of another.
[212] William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour Society.
[213] At Marlborough House, among the four principal examples of
Turner's later water-colour drawing, perhaps the most neglected is that
of fishing-boats and fish at sunset. It is one of his most wonderful
works, though unfinished. If you examine the larger white fishing-boat
sail, you will find it has a little spark of pure white in its
right-hand upper corner, about as large as a minute pin's head, and that
all the surface of the sail is gradated to that focus. Try to copy this
sail once or twice, and you will begin to understand Turner's work.
Similarly, the wing of the Cupid in Correggio's large picture in the
National Gallery is focussed to two little grains of white at the top of
it. The points of light on the white flower in the wreath round the head
of the dancing child-faun, in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, exemplify
the same thing.
[214] I shall not henceforward _number_ the exercises recommended; as
they are distinguished only by increasing difficulty of subject, not by
difference of method.
[215] If you understand the principle of the stereoscope you will know
why; if not, it does not matter; trust me for the truth of the
statement, as I cannot explain the principle without diagrams and much
loss of time.
[216] If you can, get first the plates marked with a star. The letters
mean as follows:--
_a_ stands for architecture, including distant grouping of towns,
cottages, &c.
_c_ clouds, including mist and aerial effects.
_f_ foliage.
_g_ ground, including low hills, when not rocky.
_l_ effects of light.
_m_ mountains, or bold rocky ground.
_p_ power of general arrangement and effect.
_q_ quiet water.
_r_ running or rough water; or rivers, even if calm, when their line of
flow is beautifully marked.
_From the England Series._
_a c f r._ Arundel.
_a f l._ Ashby de la Zouche.
_a l q r._ Barnard Castle.*
_f m r._ Bolton Abbey.
_f g r._ Buckfastleigh.*
_a l p._ Caernarvon.
_c l q._ Castle Upnor.
_a f l._ Colchester.
_l q._ Cowes.
_c f p._ Dartmouth Cove.
_c l q._ Flint Castle.*
_a f g l._ Knaresborough.*
_m r._ High Force of Tees.*
_a f q._ Trematon.
_a f p._ Lancaster.
_c l m r._ Lancaster Sands.*
_a g f._ Launceston.
_c f l r._ Leicester Abbey.
_f r._ Ludlow.
_a f l._ Margate.
_a l q._ Orford.
_c p._ Plymouth.
_f._ Powis Castle.
_l m q._ Prudhoe Castle.
_f l m r._ Chain Bridge over Tees.*
_m q._ Ulleswater.
_f m._ Valle Crucis.
_From the Keepsake._
_m p q._ Arona.
_m._ Drachenfells.
_f l._ Marley.*
_p._ St. Germain en Laye.
_l p q._ Florence.
_l m._ Ballyburgh Ness.*
_From the Bible Series._
_f m._ Mount Lebanon.
_m._ Rock of Moses at Sinai.
_a l m._ Jericho.
_a c g._ Joppa.
_c l p q._ Solomon's Pools.*
_a l._ Santa Saba.
_a l._ Pool of Bethesda.
_From Scott's Works._
_p r._ Melrose.
_f r._ Dryburgh.*
_c m._ Glencoe.
_c m._ Loch Coriskin.
_a l._ Caerlaverock.
_From the "Rivers of France."_
_a q._ Chateau of Amboise, with large bridge on right.
_l p r._ Rouen, looking down the river, poplars on right.*
_a l p._ Rouen, with cathedral and rainbow, avenue on the left.
_a p._ Rouen Cathedral.
_f p._ Pont de l'Arche.
_f l p._ View on the Seine, with avenue.
_a c p._ Bridge of Meulan.
_c g p r._ Caudebec.*
[217] As _well_;--not as minutely: the diamond cuts finer lines on the
steel than you can draw on paper with your pen; but you must be able to
get tones as even, and touches as firm.
[218] See, for account of these plates, the Appendix on "Works to be
studied."
[219] This sketch is not of a tree standing on its head, though it looks
like it. You will find it explained presently.
LETTER II.
SKETCHING FROM NATURE.
MY DEAR READER:--
The work we have already gone through together has, I hope, enabled you
to draw with fair success, either rounded and simple masses, like
stones, or complicated arrangements of form, like those of leaves;
provided only these masses or complexities will stay quiet for you to
copy, and do not extend into quantity so great as to baffle your
patience. But if we are now to go out to the fields, and to draw
anything like a complete landscape, neither of these conditions will any
more be observed for us. The clouds will not wait while we copy their
heaps or clefts; the shadows will escape from us as we try to shape
them, each, in its stealthy minute march, still leaving light where its
tremulous edge had rested the moment before, and involving in eclipse
objects that had seemed safe from its influence; and instead of the
small clusters of leaves which we could reckon point by point,
embarrassing enough even though numerable, we have now leaves as little
to be counted as the sands of the sea, and restless, perhaps, as its
foam.
In all that we have to do now, therefore, direct imitation becomes more
or less impossible. It is always to be aimed at so far as it _is_
possible; and when you have time and opportunity, some portions of a
landscape may, as you gain greater skill, be rendered with an
approximation almost to mirrored portraiture. Still, whatever skill you
may reach, there will always be need of judgment to choose, and of speed
to seize, certain things that are principal or fugitive; and you must
give more and more effort daily to the observance of characteristic
points, and the attainment of concise methods.
I have directed your attention early to foliage for two reasons. First,
that it is always accessible as a study; and secondly, that its modes of
growth present simple examples of the importance of leading or
governing lines. It is by seizing these leading lines, when we cannot
seize _all_, that likeness and expression are given to a portrait, and
grace and a kind of _vital_ truth to the rendering of every natural
form. I call it _vital_ truth, because these chief lines are always
expressive of the past history and present action of the thing. They
show in a mountain, first, how it was built or heaped up; and secondly,
how it is now being worn away, and from what quarter the wildest storms
strike it. In a tree, they show what kind of fortune it has had to
endure from its childhood; how troublesome trees have come in its way,
and pushed it aside, and tried to strangle or starve it; where and when
kind trees have sheltered it, and grown up lovingly together with it,
bending as it bent; what winds torment it most; what boughs of it behave
best, and bear most fruit; and so on. In a wave or cloud, these leading
lines show the run of the tide and of the wind, and the sort of change
which the water or vapour is at any moment enduring in its form, as it
meets shore, or counterwave, or melting sunshine. Now remember, nothing
distinguishes great men from inferior men more than their always,
whether in life or in art, _knowing the way things are going_. Your
dunce thinks they are standing still, and draws them all fixed; your
wise man sees the change or changing in them, and draws them so--the
animal in its motion, the tree in its growth, the cloud in its course,
the mountain in its wearing away. Try always, whenever you look at a
form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate,
and will have power over its futurity. Those are its _awful_ lines; see
that you seize on those, whatever else you miss. Thus, the leafage in
Fig. 16. (p. 291.) grew round the root of a stone pine, on the brow of a
crag at Sestri, near Genoa, and all the sprays of it are thrust away in
their first budding by the great rude root, and spring out in every
direction round it, as water splashes when a heavy stone is thrown into
it. Then, when they have got clear of the root, they begin to bend up
again; some of them, being little stone pines themselves, have a great
notion of growing upright, if they can; and this struggle of theirs to
recover their straight road towards the sky, after being obliged to
grow sideways in their early years, is the effort that will mainly
influence their future destiny, and determine if they are to be crabbed,
forky pines, striking from that rock of Sestri, whose clefts nourish
them, with bared red lightning of angry arms towards the sea; or if they
are to be goodly and solemn pines, with trunks like pillars of temples,
and the purple burning of their branches sheathed in deep globes of
cloudy green. Those, then, are their fateful lines; see that you give
that spring and resilience, whatever you leave ungiven: depend upon it,
their chief beauty is in these.
[Illustration: FIG. 17.]
[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
[Illustration: FIG. 19.]
So in trees in general and bushes, large or small, you will notice that,
though the boughs spring irregularly and at various angles, there is a
tendency in all to stoop less and less as they near the top of the tree.
This structure, typified in the simplest possible terms at _c_, Fig.
17., is common to all trees, that I know of, and it gives them a certain
plumy character, and aspect of unity in the hearts of their branches,
which are essential to their beauty. The stem does not merely send off a
wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all the branches
share in one great fountain-like impulse; each has a curve and a path to
take which fills a definite place, and each terminates all its minor
branches at its outer extremity, so as to form a great outer curve,
whose character and proportion are peculiar for each species; that is to
say, the general type or idea of a tree is not as _a_, Fig. 17., but as
_b_, in which, observe, the boughs all carry their minor divisions right
out to the bounding curve; not but that smaller branches, by thousands,
terminate in the heart of the tree, but the idea and main purpose in
every branch are to carry all its child branches well out to the air and
light, and let each of them, however small, take its part in filling the
united flow of the bounding curve, so that the type of each separate
bough is again not _a_ but _b_, Fig. 18.; approximating, that is to
say, so far to the structure of a plant of broccoli as to throw the
great mass of spray and leafage out to a rounded surface; therefore,
beware of getting into a careless habit of drawing boughs with
successive sweeps of the pen or brush, one hanging to the other, as in
Fig. 19. If you look at the tree-boughs in any painting of Wilson's, you
will see this structure, and nearly every other that is to be avoided,
in their intensest types. You will also notice that Wilson never
conceives a tree as a round mass, but flat, as if it had been pressed
and dried. Most people, in drawing pines, seem to fancy, in the same
way, that the boughs come out only on two sides of the trunk, instead of
all round it; always, therefore, take more pains in trying to draw the
boughs of trees that grow _towards_ you, than those that go off to the
sides; anybody can draw the latter, but the foreshortened ones are not
so easy. It will help you in drawing them to observe that in most trees
the ramification of each branch, though not of the tree itself, is more
or less flattened, and approximates, in its position, to the look of a
hand held out to receive something, or shelter something. If you take a
looking-glass, and hold your hand before it slightly hollowed, with the
palm upwards, and the fingers open, as if you were going to support the
base of some great bowl, larger than you could easily hold, and sketch
your hand as you see it in the glass, with the points of the fingers
towards you, it will materially help you in understanding the way trees
generally hold out their hands; and if then you will turn yours with its
palm downwards, as if you were going to try to hide something, but with
the fingers expanded, you will get a good type of the action of the
lower boughs in cedars and such other spreading trees.
[Illustration: FIG. 20.]
Fig. 20. will give you a good idea of the simplest way in which these
and other such facts can be rapidly expressed; if you copy it carefully,
you will be surprised to find how the touches all group together, in
expressing the plumy toss of the tree branches, and the springing of the
bushes out of the bank, and the undulation of the ground: note the
careful drawing of the footsteps made by the climbers of the little
mound on the left.[220] It is facsimiled from an etching of Turner's,
and is as good an example as you can have of the use of pure and firm
lines; it will also show you how the particular action in foliage, or
anything else to which you wish to direct attention, may be intensified
by the adjuncts. The tall and upright trees are made to look more tall
and upright still, because their line is continued below by the figure
of the farmer with his stick; and the rounded bushes on the bank are
made to look more rounded because their line is continued in one broad
sweep by the black dog and the boy climbing the wall. These figures are
placed entirely with this object, as we shall see more fully hereafter
when we come to talk about composition; but, if you please, we will not
talk about that yet awhile. What I have been telling you about the
beautiful lines and action of foliage has nothing to do with
composition, but only with fact, and the brief and expressive
representation of fact. But there will be no harm in your looking
forward, if you like to do so, to the account, in Letter III. of the
"Law of Radiation," and reading what it said there about tree growth:
indeed it would in some respects have been better to have said it here
than there, only it would have broken up the account of the principles
of composition somewhat awkwardly.
Now, although the lines indicative of action are not always quite so
manifest in other things as in trees, a little attention will soon
enable you to see that there _are_ such lines in everything. In an old
house roof, a bad observer and bad draughtsman will only see and draw
the spotty irregularity of tiles or slates all over; but a good
draughtsman will see all the bends of the under timbers, where they are
weakest and the weight is telling on them most, and the tracks of the
run of the water in time of rain, where it runs off fastest, and where
it lies long and feeds the moss; and he will be careful, however few
slates he draws, to mark the way they bend together towards those
hollows (which have the future fate of the roof in them), and crowd
gradually together at the top of the gable, partly diminishing in
perspective, partly, perhaps, diminished on purpose (they are so in most
English old houses) by the slate-layer. So in ground, there is always
the direction of the run of the water to be noticed, which rounds the
earth and cuts it into hollows; and, generally, in any bank, or height
worth drawing, a trace of bedded or other internal structure besides.
The figure 20. will give you some idea of the way in which such facts
may be expressed by a few lines. Do you not feel the depression in the
ground all down the hill where the footsteps are, and how the people
always turn to the left at the top, losing breath a little, and then how
the water runs down in that other hollow towards the valley, behind the
roots of the trees?
Now, I want you in your first sketches from nature to aim exclusively at
understanding and representing these vital facts of form; using the
pen--not now the steel, but the quill--firmly and steadily, never
scrawling with it, but saying to yourself before you lay on a single
touch,--"_That_ leaf is the main one, _that_ bough is the guiding one,
and this touch, _so_ long, _so_ broad, means that part of it,"--point or
side or knot, as the case may be. Resolve always, as you look at the
thing, what you will take, and what miss of it, and never let your hand
run away with you, or get into any habit or method of touch. If you want
a continuous line, your hand should pass calmly from one end of it to
the other, without a tremor; if you want a shaking and broken line, your
hand should shake, or break off, as easily as a musician's finger shakes
or stops on a note: only remember this, that there is no general way of
doing _any_ thing; no recipe can be given you for so much as the drawing
of a cluster of grass. The grass may be ragged and stiff, or tender and
flowing; sunburnt and sheep-bitten, or rank and languid; fresh or dry;
lustrous or dull: look at it, and try to draw it as it is, and don't
think how somebody "told you to _do_ grass." So a stone may be round and
angular, polished or rough, cracked all over like an ill-glazed teacup,
or as united and broad as the breast of Hercules. It may be as flaky as
a wafer, as powdery as a field puff-ball; it may be knotted like a
ship's hawser, or kneaded like hammered iron, or knit like a Damascus
sabre, or fused like a glass bottle, or crystallised like a hoar-frost,
or veined like a forest leaf: look at it, and don't try to remember how
anybody told you to "do a stone."
As soon as you find that your hand obeys you thoroughly and that you can
render any form with a firmness and truth approaching that of Turner's
and Durer's work,[221] you must add a simple but equally careful light
and shade to your pen drawing, so as to make each study as complete as
possible: for which you must prepare yourself thus. Get, if you have the
means, a good impression of one plate of Turner's Liber Studiorum; if
possible, one of the subjects named in the note below.[222]
If you cannot obtain, or even borrow for a little while, any of these
engravings, you must use a photograph instead (how, I will tell you
presently); but, if you can get the Turner, it will be best. You will
see that it is composed of a firm etching in line, with mezzotint shadow
laid over it. You must first copy the etched part of it accurately; to
which end put the print against the window, and trace slowly with the
_greatest_ care every black line; retrace this on smooth drawing-paper;
and, finally, go over the whole with your pen, looking at the original
plate always, so that if you err at all, it may be on the right side,
not making a line which is too curved or too straight already in the
tracing, _more_ curved or _more_ straight, as you go over it. And in
doing this, never work after you are tired, nor to "get the thing done,"
for if it is badly done, it will be of no use to you. The true zeal and
patience of a quarter of an hour are better than the sulky and
inattentive labour of a whole day. If you have not made the touches
right at the first going over with the pen, retouch them delicately,
with little ink in your pen, thickening or reinforcing them as they
need: you cannot give too much care to the facsimile. Then keep this
etched outline by you, in order to study at your ease the way in which
Turner uses his line as preparatory for the subsequent shadow;[223] it
is only in getting the two separate that you will be able to reason on
this. Next, copy once more, though for the fourth time, any part of this
etching which you like, and put on the light and shade with the brush,
and any brown colour that matches that of the plate;[224] working it
with the point of the brush as delicately as if you were drawing with
pencil, and dotting and cross-hatching as lightly as you can touch the
paper, till you get the gradations of Turner's engraving. In this
exercise, as in the former one, a quarter of an inch worked to close
resemblance of the copy is worth more than the whole subject carelessly
done. Not that in drawing afterwards from nature, you are to be obliged
to finish every gradation in this way, but that, once having fully
accomplished the drawing _something_ rightly, you will thenceforward
feel and aim at a higher perfection than you could otherwise have
conceived, and the brush will obey you, and bring out quickly and
clearly the loveliest results, with a submissiveness which it would have
wholly refused if you had not put it to severest work. Nothing is more
strange in art than the way that chance and materials seem to favour
you, when once you have thoroughly conquered them. Make yourself quite
independent of chance, get your result in spite of it, and from that day
forward all things will somehow fall as you would have them. Show the
camel's-hair, and the colour in it, that no bending nor blotting are of
any use to escape your will; that the touch and the shade _shall_
finally be right, if it cost you a year's toil; and from that hour of
corrective conviction, said camel's-hair will bend itself to all your
wishes, and no blot will dare to transgress its appointed border. If you
cannot obtain a print from the Liber Studiorum, get a photograph[225]
of some general landscape subject, with high hills and a village, or
picturesque town, in the middle distance, and some calm water of varied
character (a stream with stones in it, if possible), and copy any part
of it you like, in this same brown colour, working, as I have just
directed you to do from the Liber, a great deal with the point of the
brush. You are under a twofold disadvantage here, however; first, there
are portions in every photograph too delicately done for you at present
to be at all able to copy; and secondly, there are portions always more
obscure or dark than there would be in the real scene, and involved in a
mystery which you will not be able, as yet, to decipher. Both these
characters will be advantageous to you for future study, after you have
gained experience, but they are a little against you in early attempts
at tinting; still you must fight through the difficulty, and get the
power of producing delicate gradations with brown or grey, like those of
the photograph.
Now observe; the perfection of work would be tinted shadow, like
photography, _without_ any obscurity or exaggerated darkness; and as
long as your effect depends in anywise on visible _lines_, your art is
not perfect, though it may be first-rate of its kind. But to get
complete results in tints merely, requires both long time and consummate
skill; and you will find that a few well-put pen lines, with a tint
dashed over or under them, get more expression of facts than you could
reach in any other way, by the same expenditure of time. The use of the
Liber Studiorum print to you is chiefly as an example of the simplest
shorthand of this kind, a shorthand which is yet capable of dealing with
the most subtle natural effects; for the firm etching gets at the
expression of complicated details, as leaves, masonry, textures of
ground, &c., while the overlaid tint enables you to express the most
tender distances of sky, and forms of playing light, mist or cloud. Most
of the best drawings by the old masters are executed on this principle,
the touches of the pen being useful also to give a look of transparency
to shadows, which could not otherwise be attained but by great finish
of tinting; and if you have access to any ordinarily good public
gallery, or can make friends of any print-sellers who have folios of old
drawings, or facsimiles of them, you will not be at a loss to find some
example of this unity of pen with tinting. Multitudes of photographs
also are now taken from the best drawings by the old masters, and I hope
that our Mechanics' Institutes, and other societies organized with a
view to public instruction, will not fail to possess themselves of
examples of these, and to make them accessible to students of drawing in
the vicinity; a single print from Turner's Liber, to show the unison of
tint with pen etching, and the "St. Catherine," lately photographed by
Thurston Thompson, from Raphael's drawing in the Louvre, to show the
unity of the soft tinting of the stump with chalk, would be all that is
necessary, and would, I believe, be in many cases more serviceable than
a larger collection, and certainly than a whole gallery of second-rate
prints. Two such examples are peculiarly desirable, because all other
modes of drawing, with pen separately, or chalk separately, or colour
separately, may be seen by the poorest student in any cheap illustrated
book, or in shop windows. But this unity of tinting with line he cannot
generally see but by some especial enquiry, and in some out of the way
places he could not find a single example of it. Supposing that this
should be so in your own case, and that you cannot meet with any example
of this kind, try to make the matter out alone, thus:
Take a small and simple photograph; allow yourself half an hour to
express its subjects with the pen only, using some permanent liquid
colour instead of ink, outlining its buildings or trees firmly, and
laying in the deeper shadows, as you have been accustomed to do in your
bolder pen drawings; then, when this etching is dry, take your sepia or
grey, and tint it over, getting now the finer gradations of the
photograph; and finally, taking out the higher lights with penknife or
blotting-paper. You will soon find what can be done in this way; and by
a series of experiments you may ascertain for yourself how far the pen
may be made serviceable to reinforce shadows, mark characters of
texture, outline unintelligible masses, and so on. The more time you
have, the more delicate you may make the pen drawing, blending it with
the tint; the less you have, the more distinct you must keep the two.
Practice in this way from one photograph, allowing yourself sometimes
only a quarter of an hour for the whole thing, sometimes an hour,
sometimes two or three hours; in each case drawing the whole subject in
full depth of light and shade, but with such degree of finish in the
parts as is possible in the given time. And this exercise, observe, you
will do well to repeat frequently whether you can get prints and
drawings as well as photographs, or not.
And now at last, when you can copy a piece of Liber Studiorum, or its
photographic substitute, faithfully, you have the complete means in your
power of working from nature on all subjects that interest you, which
you should do in four different ways.
First. When you have full time, and your subject is one that will stay
quiet for you, make perfect light and shade studies, or as nearly
perfect as you can, with grey or brown colour of any kind, reinforced
and defined with the pen.
Secondly. When your time is short, or the subject is so rich in detail
that you feel you cannot complete it intelligibly in light and shade,
make a hasty study of the effect, and give the rest of the time to a
Dureresque expression of the details. If the subject seems to you
interesting, and there are points about it which you cannot understand,
try to get five spare minutes to go close up to it, and make a nearer
memorandum; not that you are ever to bring the details of this nearer
sketch into the farther one, but that you may thus perfect your
experience of the aspect of things, and know that such and such a look
of a tower or cottage at five hundred yards off means _that_ sort of
tower or cottage near; while, also, this nearer sketch will be useful to
prevent any future misinterpretation of your own work. If you have time,
however far your light and shade study in the distance may have been
carried, it is always well, for these reasons, to make also your
Dureresque and your near memoranda; for if your light and shade drawing
be good, much of the interesting detail must be lost in it, or
disguised.
Your hasty study of effect may be made most easily and quickly with a
soft pencil, dashed over when done with one tolerably deep tone of grey,
which will fix the pencil. While this fixing colour is wet, take out the
higher lights with the dry brush; and, when it is quite dry, scratch out
the highest lights with the penknife. Five minutes, carefully applied,
will do much by these means. Of course the paper is to be white. I do
not like studies on grey paper so well; for you can get more gradation
by the taking off your wet tint, and laying it on cunningly a little
darker here and there, than you can with body-colour white, unless you
are consummately skilful. There is no objection to your making your
Dureresque memoranda on grey or yellow paper, and touching or relieving
them with white; only, do not depend much on your white touches, nor
make the sketch for their sake.
Thirdly. When you have neither time for careful study nor for Dureresque
detail, sketch the outline with pencil, then dash in the shadows with
the brush boldly, trying to do as much as you possibly can at once, and
to get a habit of expedition and decision; laying more colour again and
again into the tints as they dry, using every expedient which your
practice has suggested to you of carrying out your chiaroscuro in the
manageable and moist material, taking the colour off here with the dry
brush, scratching out lights in it there with the wooden handle of the
brush, rubbing it in with your fingers, drying it off with your sponge,
&c. Then, when the colour is in, take your pen and mark the outline
characters vigorously, in the manner of the Liber Studiorum. This kind
of study is very convenient for carrying away pieces of effect which
depend not so much on refinement as on complexity, strange shapes of
involved shadows, sudden effects of sky, &c.; and it is most useful as a
safeguard against any too servile or slow habits which the minute
copying may induce in you; for although the endeavour to obtain velocity
merely for velocity's sake, and dash for display's sake, is as baneful
as it is despicable; there _are_ a velocity and a dash which not only
are compatible with perfect drawing, but obtain certain results which
cannot be had otherwise. And it is perfectly safe for you to study
occasionally for speed and decision, while your continual course of
practice is such as to ensure your retaining an accurate judgment and a
tender touch. Speed, under such circumstances, is rather fatiguing than
tempting; and you will find yourself always beguiled rather into
elaboration than negligence.
[Illustration: FIG. 21.]
Fourthly. You will find it of great use, whatever kind of landscape
scenery you are passing through, to get into the habit of making
memoranda of the shapes of shadows. You will find that many objects of
no essential interest in themselves, and neither deserving a finished
study, nor a Dureresque one, may yet become of singular value in
consequence of the fantastic shapes of their shadows; for it happens
often, in distant effect, that the shadow is by much a more important
element than the substance. Thus, in the Alpine bridge, Fig. 21., seen
within a few yards of it, as in the figure, the arrangement of timbers
to which the shadows are owing is perceptible; but at half a mile's
distance, in bright sunlight, the timbers would not be seen; and a good
painter's expression of the bridge would be merely the large spot, and
the crossed bars, of pure grey; wholly without indication of their
cause, as in Fig. 22. _a_; and if we saw it at still greater distances,
it would appear, as in Fig. 22. _b_ and _c_, diminishing at last to a
strange, unintelligible, spider-like spot of grey on the light
hill-side. A perfectly great painter, throughout his distances,
continually reduces his objects to these shadow abstracts; and the
singular, and to many persons unaccountable, effect of the confused
touches in Turner's distances, is owing chiefly to this thorough
accuracy and intense meaning of the shadow abstracts.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.]
Studies of this kind are easily made when you are in haste, with an F.
or HB. pencil: it requires some hardness of the point to ensure your
drawing delicately enough when the forms of the shadows are very subtle;
they are sure to be so somewhere, and are generally so everywhere. The
pencil is indeed a very precious instrument after you are master of the
pen and brush, for the pencil, cunningly used, is both, and will draw a
line with the precision of the one and the gradation of the other;
nevertheless, it is so unsatisfactory to see the sharp touches, on which
the best of the detail depends, getting gradually deadened by time, or
to find the places where force was wanted look shiny, and like a
fire-grate, that I should recommend rather the steady use of the pen, or
brush, and colour, whenever time admits of it; keeping only a small
memorandum-book in the breast-pocket, with its well-cut, sheathed
pencil, ready for notes on passing opportunities: but never being
without this.
Thus much, then, respecting the _manner_ in which you are at first to
draw from nature. But it may perhaps be serviceable to you, if I also
note one or two points respecting your _choice_ of subjects for study,
and the best special methods of treating some of them; for one of by no
means the least difficulties which you have at first to encounter is a
peculiar instinct, common, as far as I have noticed, to all beginners,
to fix on exactly the most unmanageable feature in the given scene.
There are many things in every landscape which can be drawn, if at all,
only by the most accomplished artists; and I have noticed that it is
nearly always these which a beginner will dash at; or, if not these, it
will be something which, though pleasing to him in itself, is unfit for
a picture, and in which, when he has drawn it, he will have little
pleasure. As some slight protection against this evil genius of
beginners, the following general warnings may be useful:
1. Do not draw things that you love, on account of their associations;
or at least do not draw them because you love them; but merely when you
cannot get anything else to draw. If you try to draw places that you
love, you are sure to be always entangled amongst neat brick walls, iron
railings, gravel walks, greenhouses, and quickset hedges; besides that
you will be continually led into some endeavour to make your drawing
pretty, or complete, which will be fatal to your progress. You need
never hope to get on, if you are the least anxious that the drawing you
are actually at work upon should look nice when it is done. All you have
to care about is to make it _right_, and to learn as much in doing it as
possible. So then, though when you are sitting in your friend's parlour,
or in your own, and have nothing else to do, you may draw any thing that
is there, for practice; even the fire-irons or the pattern on the
carpet: be sure that it _is_ for practice, and not because it is a
beloved carpet, nor a friendly poker and tongs, nor because you wish to
please your friend by drawing her room.
Also, never make presents of your drawings. Of course I am addressing
you as a _beginner_--a time may come when your work will be precious to
everybody; but be resolute not to give it away till you know that it is
worth something (as soon as it is worth anything you will know that it
is so). If any one asks you for a present of a drawing, send them a
couple of cakes of colour and a piece of Bristol board: those materials
are, for the present, of more value in that form than if you had spread
the one over the other.
The main reason for this rule is, however, that its observance will
much protect you from the great danger of trying to make your drawings
pretty.
2. Never, by choice, draw anything polished; especially if complicated
in form. Avoid all brass rods and curtain ornaments, chandeliers, plate,
glass, and fine steel. A shining knob of a piece of furniture does not
matter if it comes in your way; but do not fret yourself if it will not
look right, and choose only things that do not shine.
3. Avoid all very neat things. They are exceedingly difficult to draw,
and very ugly when drawn. Choose rough, worn, and clumsy-looking things
as much as possible; for instance, you cannot have a more difficult or
profitless study than a newly-painted Thames wherry, nor a better study
than an old empty coal-barge, lying ashore at low-tide: in general,
everything that you think very ugly will be good for you to draw.
4. Avoid, as much as possible, studies in which one thing is seen
_through_ another. You will constantly find a thin tree standing before
your chosen cottage, or between you and the turn of the river; its near
branches all entangled with the distance. It is intensely difficult to
represent this; and though, when the tree _is_ there, you must not
imaginarily cut it down, but do it as well as you can, yet always look
for subjects that fall into definite masses, not into network; that is,
rather for a cottage with a dark tree _beside_ it, than for one with a
thin tree in front of it; rather for a mass of wood, soft, blue, and
rounded, than for a ragged copse, or confusion of intricate stems.
5. Avoid, as far as possible, country divided by hedges. Perhaps nothing
in the whole compass of landscape is so utterly unpicturesque and
unmanageable as the ordinary English patchwork of field and hedge, with
trees dotted over it in independent spots, gnawed straight at the cattle
line.
Still, do not be discouraged if you find you have chosen ill, and that
the subject overmasters you. It is much better that it should, than that
you should think you had entirely mastered _it_. But at first, and even
for some time, you must be prepared for very discomfortable failure;
which, nevertheless, will not be without some wholesome result.
As, however, I have told you what most definitely to avoid, I may,
perhaps, help you a little by saying what to seek. In general, all
_banks_ are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large
landscapes. If you live in a lowland country, you must look for places
where the ground is broken to the river's edges, with decayed posts, or
roots of trees; or, if by great good luck there should be such things
within your reach, for remnants of stone quays or steps, mossy
mill-dams, &c. Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will
present beautiful bits of broken bank at its sides; better in form and
colour than high chalk cliffs. In woods, one or two trunks, with the
flowery ground below, are at once the richest and easiest kind of study:
a not very thick trunk, say nine inches or a foot in diameter, with ivy
running up it sparingly, is an easy, and always a rewarding subject.
Large nests of buildings in the middle distance are always beautiful,
when drawn carefully, provided they are not modern rows of pattern
cottages; or villas with Ionic and Doric porticos. Any old English
village, or cluster of farm-houses, drawn with all its ins and outs, and
haystacks, and palings, is sure to be lovely; much more a French one.
French landscape is generally as much superior to English as Swiss
landscape is to French; in some respects, the French is incomparable.
Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have recommended you to
buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their expression of graceful
rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the beauty of component lines.
In drawing villages, take great pains with the gardens; a rustic garden
is in every way beautiful. If you have time, draw all the rows of
cabbages, and hollyhocks, and broken fences, and wandering eglantines,
and bossy roses: you cannot have better practice, nor be kept by
anything in purer thoughts.
Make intimate friends of all the brooks in your neighbourhood, and study
them ripple by ripple.
Village churches in England are not often good subjects; there is a
peculiar meanness about most of them, and awkwardness of line. Old
manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and
cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in
England from which it is possible to obtain _one_ subject for an
impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or jarring
vergerism about them.
If you live in a mountain or hill country, your only danger is
redundance of subject. Be resolved, in the first place, to draw a piece
of rounded rock, with its variegated lichens, quite rightly, getting its
complete roundings, and all the patterns of the lichen in true local
colour. Till you can do this, it is of no use your thinking of sketching
among hills; but when once you have done this, the forms of distant
hills will be comparatively easy.
When you have practised for a little time from such of these subjects as
may be accessible to you, you will certainly find difficulties arising
which will make you wish more than ever for a master's help: these
difficulties will vary according to the character of your own mind (one
question occurring to one person, and one to another), so that it is
impossible to anticipate them all; and it would make this too large a
book if I answered all that I _can_ anticipate; you must be content to
work on, in good hope that nature will, in her own time, interpret to
you much for herself; that farther experience on your own part will make
some difficulties disappear; and that others will be removed by the
occasional observation of such artists' work as may come in your way.
Nevertheless, I will not close this letter without a few general
remarks, such as may be useful to you after you are somewhat advanced in
power; and these remarks may, I think, be conveniently arranged under
three heads, having reference to the drawing of vegetation, water, and
skies.
And, first, of vegetation. You may think, perhaps, we have said enough
about trees already; yet if you have done as you were bid, and tried to
draw them frequently enough, and carefully enough, you will be ready by
this time to hear a little more of them. You will also recollect that we
left our question, respecting the mode of expressing intricacy of
leafage, partly unsettled in the first letter. I left it so because I
wanted you to learn the real structure of leaves, by drawing them for
yourself, before I troubled you with the most subtle considerations as
to _method_ in drawing them. And by this time, I imagine, you must have
found out two principal things, universal facts, about leaves; namely,
that they always, in the main tendencies of their lines, indicate a
beautiful divergence of growth, according to the law of radiation,
already referred to;[226] and the second, that this divergence is never
formal, but carried out with endless variety of individual line. I must
now press both these facts on your attention a little farther.
You may perhaps have been surprised that I have not yet spoken of the
works of J. D. Harding, especially if you happen to have met with the
passages referring to them in "Modern Painters," in which they are
highly praised. They are deservedly praised, for they are the only works
by a modern draughtsman which express in any wise the energy of trees,
and the laws of growth, of which we have been speaking. There are no
lithographic sketches which, for truth of general character, obtained
with little cost of time, at all rival Harding's. Calame, Robert, and
the other lithographic landscape sketchers are altogether inferior in
power, though sometimes a little deeper in meaning. But you must not
take even Harding for a model, though you may use his works for
occasional reference; and if you can afford to buy his "Lessons on
Trees,"[227] it will be serviceable to you in various ways, and will at
present help me to explain the point under consideration. And it is well
that I should illustrate this point by reference to Harding's works,
because their great influence on young students renders it desirable
that their real character should be thoroughly understood.
You will find, first, in the title-page of the "Lessons on Trees," a
pretty woodcut, in which the tree stems are drawn with great truth, and
in a very interesting arrangement of lines. Plate 1. is not quite worthy
of Mr. Harding, tending too much to make his pupil, at starting, think
everything depends on black dots; still the main lines are good, and
very characteristic of tree growth. Then, in Plate 2., we come to the
point at issue. The first examples in that plate are given to the pupil
that he may practise from them till his hand gets into the habit of
arranging lines freely in a similar manner; and they are stated by Mr.
Harding to be universal in application; "all outlines expressive of
foliage," he says, "are but modifications of them." They consist of
groups of lines, more or less resembling our Fig. 23.; and the
characters especially insisted upon are, that they "tend at their inner
ends to a common centre;" that "their ends terminate in [are enclosed
by] ovoid curves;" and that "the outer ends are most emphatic."
[Illustration: FIG. 23.]
Now, as thus expressive of the great laws of radiation and enclosure,
the main principle of this method of execution confirms, in a very
interesting way, our conclusions respecting foliage composition. The
reason of the last rule, that the outer end of the line is to be most
emphatic, does not indeed at first appear; for the line at one end of a
natural leaf is not more emphatic than the line at the other: but
ultimately, in Harding's method, this darker part of the touch stands
more or less for the shade at the outer extremity of the leaf mass; and,
as Harding uses these touches, they express as much of tree character as
any mere habit of touch _can_ express. But, unfortunately, there is
another law of tree growth, quite as fixed as the law of radiation,
which this and all other conventional modes of execution wholly lose
sight of. This second law is, that the radiating tendency shall be
carried out only as a ruling spirit in reconcilement with perpetual
individual caprice on the part of the separate leaves. So that the
moment a touch is monotonous, it must be also false, the liberty of the
leaf individually being just as essential a truth, as its unity of
growth with its companions in the radiating group.
[Illustration: FIG. 24.]
It does not matter how small or apparently symmetrical the cluster may
be, nor how large or vague. You can hardly have a more formal one than
_b_ in Fig. 9. p. 276., nor a less formal one than this shoot of Spanish
chestnut, shedding its leaves, Fig. 24.; but in either of them, even the
general reader, unpractised in any of the previously recommended
exercises, must see that there are wandering lines mixed with the
radiating ones, and radiating lines with the wild ones: and if he takes
the pen and tries to copy either of these examples, he will find that
neither play of hand to left nor to right, neither a free touch nor a
firm touch, nor any learnable or describable touch whatsoever, will
enable him to produce, currently, a resemblance of it; but that he must
either draw it slowly, or give it up. And (which makes the matter worse
still) though gathering the bough, and putting it close to you, or
seeing a piece of near foliage against the sky, you may draw the entire
outline of the leaves, yet if the spray has light upon it, and is ever
so little a way off, you will miss, as we have seen, a point of a leaf
here, and an edge there; some of the surfaces will be confused by
glitter, and some spotted with shade; and if you look carefully through
this confusion for the edges or dark stems which you really _can see_,
and put only those down, the result will be neither like Fig. 9. nor
Fig. 24., but such an interrupted and puzzling piece of work as Fig.
25.[228]
Now, it is in the perfect acknowledgment and expression of these _three_
laws that all good drawing of landscape consists. There is, first, the
organic unity; the law, whether of radiation, or parallelism, or
concurrent action, which rules the masses of herbs and trees, of rocks,
and clouds, and waves; secondly, the individual liberty of the members
subjected to these laws of unity; and, lastly, the mystery under which
the separate character of each is more or less concealed.
I say, first, there must be observance of the ruling organic law. This
is the first distinction between good artists and bad artists. Your
common sketcher or bad painter puts his leaves on the trees as if they
were moss tied to sticks; he cannot see the lines of action or growth;
he scatters the shapeless clouds over his sky, not perceiving the sweeps
of associated curves which the real clouds are following as they fly;
and he breaks his mountain side into rugged fragments, wholly
unconscious of the lines of force with which the real rocks have risen,
or of the lines of couch in which they repose. On the contrary, it is
the main delight of the great draughtsman to trace these laws of
government; and his tendency to error is always in the exaggeration of
their authority rather than in its denial.
[Illustration: FIG. 25.]
Secondly, I say, we have to show the individual character and liberty of
the separate leaves, clouds, or rocks. And herein the great masters
separate themselves finally from the inferior ones; for if the men of
inferior genius ever express law at all, it is by the sacrifice of
individuality. Thus, Salvator Rosa has great perception of the sweep of
foliage and rolling of clouds, but never draws a single leaflet or mist
wreath accurately. Similarly, Gainsborough, in his landscape, has great
feeling for masses of form and harmony of colour; but in the detail
gives nothing but meaningless touches; not even so much as the species
of tree, much less the variety of its leafage, being ever discernable.
Now, although both these expressions of government and individuality are
essential to masterly work, the individuality is the _more_ essential,
and the more difficult of attainment; and, therefore, that attainment
separates the great masters _finally_ from the inferior ones. It is the
more essential, because, in these matters of beautiful arrangement in
visible things, the same rules hold that hold in moral things. It is a
lamentable and unnatural thing to see a number of men subject to no
government, actuated by no ruling principle, and associated by no common
affection: but it would be a more lamentable thing still, were it
possible to see a number of men so oppressed into assimilation as to
have no more any individual hope or character, no differences in aim, no
dissimilarities of passion, no irregularities of judgment; a society in
which no man could help another, since none would be feebler than
himself; no man admire another, since none would be stronger than
himself; no man be grateful to another, since by none he could be
relieved; no man reverence another, since by none he could be
instructed; a society in which every soul would be as the syllable of a
stammerer instead of the word of a speaker, in which every man would
walk as in a frightful dream, seeing spectres of himself, in everlasting
multiplication, gliding helplessly around him in a speechless darkness.
Therefore it is that perpetual difference, play, and change in groups of
form are more essential to them even than their being subdued by some
great gathering law: the law is needful to them for their perfection and
their power, but the difference is needful to them for their _life_.
And here it may be noted in passing, that if you enjoy the pursuit of
analogies and types, and have any ingenuity of judgment in discerning
them, you may always accurately ascertain what are the noble characters
in a piece of painting, by merely considering what are the noble
characters of man in his association with his fellows. What grace of
manner and refinement of habit are in society, grace of line and
refinement of form are in the association of visible objects. What
advantage or harm there may be in sharpness, ruggedness, or quaintness
in the dealings or conversations of men; precisely that relative degree
of advantage or harm there is in them as elements of pictorial
composition. What power is in liberty or relaxation to strengthen or
relieve human souls; that power, precisely in the same relative degree,
play and laxity of line have to strengthen or refresh the expression of
a picture. And what goodness or greatness we can conceive to arise in
companies of men, from chastity of thought, regularity of life,
simplicity of custom, and balance of authority; precisely that kind of
goodness and greatness may be given to a picture by the purity of its
colour, the severity of its forms, and the symmetry of its masses.
You need not be in the least afraid of pushing these analogies too far.
They cannot be pushed too far; they are so precise and complete, that
the farther you pursue them, the clearer, the more certain, the more
useful you will find them. They will not fail you in one particular, or
in any direction of enquiry. There is no moral vice, no moral virtue,
which has not its _precise_ prototype in the art of painting; so that
you may at your will illustrate the moral habit by the art, or the art
by the moral habit. Affection and discord, fretfulness and quietness,
feebleness and firmness, luxury and purity, pride and modesty, and all
other such habits, and every conceivable modification and mingling of
them, may be illustrated, with mathematical exactness, by conditions of
line and colour; and not merely these definable vices and virtues, but
also every conceivable shade of human character and passion, from the
righteous or unrighteous majesty of the king, to the innocent or
faultful simplicity of the shepherd boy.
The pursuit of this subject belongs properly, however, to the
investigation of the higher branches of composition, matters which it
would be quite useless to treat of in this book; and I only allude to
them here, in order that you may understand how the utmost nobleness of
art are concerned in this minute work, to which I have set you in your
beginning of it. For it is only by the closest attention, and the most
noble execution, that it is possible to express these varieties of
individual character, on which all excellence of portraiture depends,
whether of masses of mankind, or of groups of leaves.
Now you will be able to understand, among other matters, wherein
consists the excellence, and wherein the shortcoming, of the
tree-drawing of Harding. It is excellent in so far as it fondly
observes, with more truth than any other work of the kind, the great
laws of growth and action in trees: it fails--and observe, not in a
minor, but in a principal point--because it cannot rightly render any
one individual detail or incident of foliage. And in this it fails, not
from mere carelessness or incompletion, but of necessity; the true
drawing of detail being for evermore _impossible_ to a hand which has
contracted a _habit_ of execution. The noble draughtsman draws a leaf,
and stops, and says calmly--That leaf is of such and such a character; I
will give him a friend who will entirely suit him: then he considers
what his friend ought to be, and having determined, he draws his friend.
This process may be as quick as lightning when the master is great--one
of the sons of the giants; or it may be slow and timid: but the process
is always gone through, no touch or form is ever added to another by a
good painter without a mental determination and affirmation. But when
the hand has got into a habit, leaf No. 1. necessitates leaf No. 2.; you
cannot stop, your hand is as a horse with the bit in its teeth; or
rather is, for the time, a machine, throwing out leaves to order and
pattern, all alike. You must stop that hand of yours, however painfully;
make it understand that it is not to have its own way any more, that it
shall never more slip from, one touch to another without orders;
otherwise it is not you who are the master, but your fingers. You may
therefore study Harding's drawing, and take pleasure in it;[229] and you
may properly admire the dexterity which applies the habit of the hand
so well, and produces results on the whole so satisfactory: but you
must never copy it, otherwise your progress will be at once arrested.
The utmost you can ever hope to do, would be a sketch in Harding's
manner, but of far inferior dexterity; for he has given his life's toil
to gain his dexterity, and you, I suppose, have other things to work at
besides drawing. You would also incapacitate yourself from ever
understanding what truly great work was, or what Nature was; but by the
earnest and complete study of facts, you will gradually come to
understand the one and love the other more and more, whether you can
draw well yourself or not.
I have yet to say a few words respecting the third law above stated,
that of mystery; the law, namely, that nothing is ever seen perfectly,
but only by fragments, and under various conditions of obscurity.[230]
This last fact renders the visible objects of Nature complete as a type
of the human nature. We have, observe, first, Subordination; secondly,
Individuality; lastly, and this not the least essential character,
Incomprehensibility; a perpetual lesson in every serrated point and
shining vein which escape or deceive our sight among the forest leaves,
how little we may hope to discern clearly, or judge justly, the rents
and veins of the human heart; how much of all that is round us, in men's
actions or spirits, which we at first think we understand, a closer and
more loving watchfulness would show to be full of mystery, never to be
either fathomed or withdrawn.
[Illustration: FIG. 26.]
[Illustration: FIG. 27.]
The expression of this final character in landscape has never been
completely reached by any except Turner; nor can you hope to reach it at
all until you have given much time to the practice of art. Only try
always when you are sketching any object with a view to completion in
light and shade, to draw only those parts of it which you really see
definitely; _preparing_ for the after development of the forms by
chiaroscuro. It is this preparation by isolated touches for a future
arrangement of superimposed light and shade which renders the etchings
of the Liber Studiorum so inestimable as examples and so peculiar. The
character exists more or less in them exactly in proportion to the pains
that Turner has taken. Thus the AEsacus and Hesperie was wrought out with
the greatest possible care; and the principal branch on the near tree is
etched as in Fig. 26. The work looks at first like a scholar's instead
of a master's; but when the light and shade are added, every touch falls
into its place, and a perfect expression of grace and complexity
results. Nay even before the light and shade are added, you ought to be
able to see that these irregular and broken lines, especially where the
expression is given of the way the stem loses itself in the leaves, are
more true than the monotonous though graceful leaf-drawing which, before
Turner's time, had been employed, even by the best masters, in their
distant masses. Fig. 27. is sufficiently characteristic of the manner of
the old woodcuts after Titian; in which, you see, the leaves are too
much of one shape, like bunches of fruit; and the boughs too completely
seen, besides being somewhat soft and leathery in aspect, owing to the
want of angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat
conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and
their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their
conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawing of the Caracci and
other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and
sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28., about the worst which
it is possible to get into the habit of using, though an ignorant person
might perhaps suppose it more "free," and therefore better than Fig. 26.
Note, also, that in noble outline drawing, it does not follow that a
bough is wrongly drawn, because it looks contracted unnaturally
somewhere, as in Fig. 26., just above the foliage. Very often the
muscular action which is to be expressed by the line, runs into the
_middle_ of the branch, and the actual outline of the branch at that
place may be dimly seen, or not at all; and it is then only by the
future shade that its actual shape, or the cause of its disappearance,
will be indicated.
[Illustration: FIG. 28.]
One point more remains to be noted about trees, and I have done. In the
minds of our ordinary water-colour artists, a distant tree seems only to
be conceived as a flat green blot, grouping pleasantly with other
masses, and giving cool colour to the landscape, but differing nowise,
in _texture_, from the blots of other shapes, which these painters use
to express stones, or water, or figures. But as soon as you have drawn
trees carefully a little while, you will be impressed, and impressed
more strongly the better you draw them, with the idea of their
_softness_ of surface. A distant tree is not a flat and even piece of
colour, but a more or less globular mass of a downy or bloomy texture,
partly passing into a misty vagueness. I find, practically, this lovely
softness of far-away trees the most difficult of all characters to
reach, because it cannot be got by mere scratching or roughening the
surface, but is always associated with such delicate expressions of form
and growth as are only imitable by very careful drawing. The penknife
passed lightly _over_ this careful drawing, will do a good deal; but you
must accustom yourself, from the beginning, to aim much at this softness
in the lines of the drawing itself, by crossing them delicately, and
more or less effacing and confusing the edges. You must invent,
according to the character of tree, various modes of execution adapted
to express its texture; but always keep this character of softness in
your mind and in your scope of aim; for in most landscapes it is the
intention of nature that the tenderness and transparent infinitude of
her foliage should be felt, even at the far distance, in the most
distinct opposition to the solid masses and flat surfaces of rocks or
buildings.
* * * * *
II. We were, in the second place, to consider a little the modes of
representing water, of which important feature of landscape I have
hardly said anything yet.
Water is expressed, in common drawings, by conventional lines, whose
horizontality is supposed to convey the idea of its surface. In
paintings, white dashes or bars of light are used for the same purpose.
But these and all other such expedients are vain and absurd. A piece of
calm water always contains a picture in itself, an exquisite reflection
of the objects above it. If you give the time necessary to draw these
reflections, disturbing them here and there as you see the breeze or
current disturb them, you will get the effect of the water; but if you
have not patience to draw the reflections, no expedient will give you a
true effect. The picture in the pool needs nearly as much delicate
drawing as the picture above the pool; except only that if there be the
least motion on the water, the horizontal lines of the images will be
diffused and broken, while the vertical ones will remain decisive, and
the oblique ones decisive in proportion to their steepness.
A few close studies will soon teach you this: the only thing you need to
be told is to watch carefully the lines of _disturbance_ on the surface,
as when a bird swims across it, or a fish rises, or the current plays
round a stone, reed, or other obstacle. Take the greatest pains to get
the _curves_ of these lines true; the whole value of your careful
drawing of the reflections may be lost by your admitting a single false
curve of ripple from a wild duck's breast. And (as in other subjects) if
you are dissatisfied with your result, always try for more unity and
delicacy: if your reflections are only soft and gradated enough, they
are nearly sure to give you a pleasant effect. When you are taking
pains, work the softer reflections, where they are drawn out by motion
in the water, with touches as nearly horizontal as may be; but when you
are in a hurry, indicate the place and play of the images with vertical
lines. The actual _construction_ of a calm elongated reflection is with
horizontal lines: but it is often impossible to draw the descending
shades delicately enough with a horizontal touch; and it is best always
when you are in a hurry, and sometimes when you are not, to use the
vertical touch. When the ripples are large, the reflections become
shaken, and must be drawn with bold undulatory descending lines.
I need not, I should think, tell you that it is of the greatest possible
importance to draw the curves of the shore rightly. Their perspective
is, if not more subtle, at least more stringent than that of any other
lines in Nature. It will not be detected by the general observer, if you
miss the curve of a branch, or the sweep of a cloud, or the perspective
of a building;[231] but every intelligent spectator will feel the
difference between a rightly drawn bend of shore or shingle, and a false
one. _Absolutely_ right, in difficult river perspectives seen from
heights, I believe no one but Turner ever has been yet; and observe,
there is NO rule for them. To develope the curve mathematically would
require a knowledge of the exact quantity of water in the river, the
shape of its bed, and the hardness of the rock or shore; and even with
these data, the problem would be one which no mathematician could solve
but approximatively. The instinct of the eye can do it; nothing else.
If, after a little study from Nature, you get puzzled by the great
differences between the aspect of the reflected image and that of the
object casting it; and if you wish to know the law of reflection, it is
simply this: Suppose all the objects above the water _actually_ reversed
(not in appearance, but in fact) beneath the water, and precisely the
same in form and in relative position, only all topsy-turvy. Then,
whatever you can see, from the place in which you stand, of the solid
objects so reversed under the water, you will see in the reflection,
always in the true perspective of the solid objects so reversed.
If you cannot quite understand this in looking at water, take a mirror,
lay it horizontally on the table, put some books and papers upon it, and
draw them and their reflections; moving them about, and watching how
their reflections alter, and chiefly how their reflected colours and
shades differ from their own colours and shades, by being brought into
other oppositions. This difference in chiaroscuro is a more important
character in water painting than mere difference in form.
When you are drawing shallow or muddy water, you will see shadows on the
bottom, or on the surface, continually modifying the reflections; and in
a clear mountain stream, the most wonderful complications of effect
resulting from the shadows and reflections of the stones in it, mingling
with the aspect of the stones themselves seen through the water. Do not
be frightened at the complexity; but, on the other hand, do not hope to
render it hastily. Look at it well, making out everything that you see,
and distinguishing each component part of the effect. There will be,
first, the stones seen through the water, distorted always by
refraction, so that if the general structure of the stone shows straight
parallel lines above the water, you may be sure they will be bent where
they enter it; then the reflection of the part of the stone above the
water crosses and interferes with the part that is seen through it, so
that you can hardly tell which is which; and wherever the reflection is
darkest, you will see through the water best, and _vice versa_. Then the
real shadow of the stone crosses both these images, and where that
shadow falls, it makes the water more reflective, and where the sunshine
falls, you will see more of the surface of the water, and of any dust
or motes that may be floating on it: but whether you are to see, at the
same spot, most of the bottom of the water, or of the reflection of the
objects above, depends on the position of the eye. The more you look
down into the water, the better you see objects through it; the more you
look along it, the eye being low, the more you see the reflection of
objects above it. Hence the colour of a given space of surface in a
stream will entirely change while you stand still in the same spot,
merely as you stoop or raise your head; and thus the colours with which
water is painted are an indication of the position of the spectator, and
connected inseparably with the perspective of the shores. The most
beautiful of all results that I know in mountain streams is when the
water is shallow, and the stones at the bottom are rich reddish-orange
and black, and the water is seen at an angle which exactly divides the
visible colours between those of the stones and that of the sky, and the
sky is of clear, full blue. The resulting purple obtained by the
blending of the blue and the orange-red, broken by the play of
innumerable gradations in the stones, is indescribably lovely.
All this seems complicated enough already; but if there be a strong
colour in the clear water itself, as of green or blue in the Swiss
lakes, all these phenomena are doubly involved; for the darker
reflections now become of the colour of the water. The reflection of a
black gondola, for instance, at Venice, is never black, but pure dark
green. And, farther, the colour of the water itself is of three kinds:
one, seen on the surface, is a kind of milky bloom; the next is seen
where the waves let light through them, at their edges; and the third,
shown as a change of colour on the objects seen through the water. Thus,
the same wave that makes a white object look of a clear blue, when seen
through it, will take a red or violet-coloured bloom on its surface, and
will be made pure emerald green by transmitted sunshine through its
edges. With all this, however, you are not much concerned at present,
but I tell it you partly as a preparation for what we have afterwards to
say about colour, and partly that you may approach lakes and streams
with reverence, and study them as carefully as other things, not hoping
to express them by a few horizontal dashes of white, or a few tremulous
blots.[232] Not but that much may be done by tremulous blots, when you
know precisely what you mean by them, as you will see by many of the
Turner sketches, which are now framed at the National Gallery; but you
must have painted water many and many a day--yes, and all day
long--before you can hope to do anything like those.
* * * * *
III. Lastly. You may perhaps wonder why, before passing to the clouds, I
say nothing special about _ground_.[233] But there is too much to be
said about that to admit of my saying it here. You will find the
principal laws of its structure examined at length in the fourth volume
of "Modern Painters;" and if you can get that volume, and copy carefully
Plate 21., which I have etched after Turner with great pains, it will
give you as much help as you need in the linear expression of
ground-surface. Strive to get the retirement and succession of masses in
irregular ground: much may be done in this way by careful watching of
the perspective diminutions of its herbage, as well as by contour; and
much also by shadows. If you draw the shadows of leaves and tree trunks
on any undulating ground with entire carefulness, you will be surprised
to find how much they explain of the form and distance of the earth on
which they fall.
Passing then to skies, note that there is this great peculiarity about
sky subject, as distinguished from earth subject;--that the clouds, not
being much liable to man's interference, are always beautifully
arranged. You cannot be sure of this in any other features of landscape.
The rock on which the effect of a mountain scene especially depends is
always precisely that which the roadmaker blasts or the landlord
quarries; and the spot of green which Nature left with a special purpose
by her dark forest sides, and finished with her most delicate grasses,
is always that which the farmer ploughs or builds upon. But the clouds,
though we can hide them with smoke, and mix them with poison, cannot be
quarried nor built over, and they are always therefore gloriously
arranged; so gloriously, that unless you have notable powers of memory
you need not hope to approach the effect of any sky that interests you.
For both its grace and its glow depend upon the united influence of
every cloud within its compass: they all move and burn together in a
marvellous harmony; not a cloud of them is out of its appointed place,
or fails of its part in the choir: and if you are not able to recollect
(which in the case of a complicated sky it is impossible you should)
precisely the form and position of all the clouds at a given moment, you
cannot draw the sky at all; for the clouds will not fit if you draw one
part of them three or four minutes before another. You must try
therefore to help what memory you have, by sketching at the utmost
possible speed the whole range of the clouds; marking, by any shorthand
or symbolic work you can hit upon, the peculiar character of each, as
transparent, or fleecy, or linear, or undulatory; giving afterwards such
completion to the parts as your recollection will enable you to do.
This, however, only when the sky is interesting from its general aspect;
at other times, do not try to draw all the sky, but a single cloud:
sometimes a round cumulus will stay five or six minutes quite steady
enough to let you mark out his principal masses: and one or two white or
crimson lines which cross the sunrise will often stay without serious
change for as long. And in order to be the readier in drawing them,
practise occasionally drawing lumps of cotton, which will teach you
better than any other stable thing the kind of softness there is in
clouds. For you will find when you have made a few genuine studies of
sky, and then look at any ancient or modern painting, that ordinary
artists have always fallen into one of two faults: either, in rounding
the clouds, they make them as solid and hard-edged as a heap of stones
tied up in a sack, or they represent them not as rounded at all, but as
vague wreaths of mist or flat lights in the sky; and think they have
done enough in leaving a little white paper between dashes of blue, or
in taking an irregular space out with the sponge. Now clouds are not as
solid as flour-sacks; but, on the other hand, they are neither spongy
nor flat. They are definite and very beautiful forms of sculptured mist;
sculptured is a perfectly accurate word; they are not more _drifted_
into form than they are _carved_ into form, the warm air around them
cutting them into shape by absorbing the visible vapour beyond certain
limits; hence their angular and fantastic outlines, as different from a
swollen, spherical, or globular formation, on the one hand, as from that
of flat films or shapeless mists on the other. And the worst of all is,
that while these forms are difficult enough to draw on any terms,
especially considering that they never stay quiet, they must be drawn
also at greater disadvantage of light and shade than any others, the
force of light in clouds being wholly unattainable by art; so that if we
put shade enough to express their form as positively as it is expressed
in reality, we must make them painfully too dark on the dark sides.
Nevertheless, they are so beautiful, if you in the least succeed with
them, that you will hardly, I think, lose courage. Outline them often
with the pen, as you can catch them here and there; one of the chief
uses of doing this will be, not so much the memorandum so obtained as
the lesson you will get respecting the softness of the cloud-outlines.
You will always find yourself at a loss to see where the outline really
is; and when drawn it will always look hard and false, and will
assuredly be either too round or too square, however often you alter it,
merely passing from the one fault to the other and back again, the real
cloud striking an inexpressible mean between roundness and squareness in
all its coils or battlements. I speak at present, of course, only of the
cumulus cloud: the lighter wreaths and flakes of the upper sky cannot
be outlined--they can only be sketched, like locks of hair, by many
lines of the pen. Firmly developed bars of cloud on the horizon are in
general easy enough, and may be drawn with decision. When you have thus
accustomed yourself a little to the placing and action of clouds, try to
work out their light and shade, just as carefully as you do that of
other things, looking _exclusively_ for examples of treatment to the
vignettes in Rogers's Italy and Poems, and to the Liber Studiorum,
unless you have access to some examples of Turner's own work. No other
artist ever yet drew the sky: even Titian's clouds, and Tintoret's, are
conventional. The clouds in the "Ben Arthur," "Source of Arveron," and
"Calais Pier," are among the best of Turner's storm studies; and of the
upper clouds, the vignettes to Rogers's Poems furnish as many examples
as you need.
And now, as our first lesson was taken from the sky, so, for the
present, let our last be. I do not advise you to be in any haste to
master the contents of my next letter. If you have any real talent for
drawing, you will take delight in the discoveries of natural loveliness,
which the studies I have already proposed will lead you into, among the
fields and hills; and be assured that the more quietly and
single-heartedly you take each step in the art, the quicker, on the
whole, will your progress be. I would rather, indeed, have discussed the
subjects of the following letter at greater length, and in a separate
work addressed to more advanced students; but as there are one or two
things to be said on composition which may set the young artist's mind
somewhat more at rest, or furnish him with defence from the urgency of
ill-advisers, I will glance over the main heads of the matter here;
trusting that my doing so may not beguile you, my dear reader, from your
serious work, or lead you to think me, in occupying part of this book
with talk not altogether relevant to it, less entirely or
Faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[220] It is meant, I believe, for "Salt Hill."
[221] I do not mean that you can approach Turner or Durer in their
strength, that is to say, in their imagination or power of design. But
you may approach them, by perseverance, in truth of manner.
[222] The following are the most desirable plates:
Grande Chartreuse.
AEsacus and Hesperie.
Cephalus and Procris.
Source of Arveron.
Ben Arthur.
Watermill.
Hindhead Hill.
Hedging and Ditching.
Dumblane Abbey.
Morpeth.
Calais Pier.
Pembury Mill.
Little Devil's Bridge.
River Wye (_not_ Wye and Severn).
Holy Island.
Clyde.
Lauffenbourg.
Blair Athol.
Alps from Grenoble.
Raglan. (Subject with quiet brook, trees, and castle on the right.)
If you cannot get one of these, any of the others will be serviceable,
except only the twelve following, which are quite useless:--
1. Scene in Italy, with goats on a walled road, and trees above.
2. Interior of church.
3. Scene with bridge, and trees above; figures on left, one playing a
pipe.
4. Scene with figure playing on tambourine.
5. Scene on Thames with high trees, and a square tower of a church seen
through them.
6. Fifth Plague of Egypt.
7. Tenth Plague of Egypt.
8. Rivaulx Abbey.
9. Wye and Severn.
10. Scene with castle in centre, cows under trees on the left.
11. Martello Towers.
12. Calm.
It is very unlikely that you should meet with one of the original
etchings; if you should, it will be a drawing-master in itself alone,
for it is not only equivalent to a pen-and-ink drawing by Turner, but to
a very careful one: only observe, the Source of Arveron, Raglan, and
Dumblane were not etched by Turner; and the etchings of those three are
not good for separate study, though it is deeply interesting to see how
Turner, apparently provoked at the failure of the beginnings in the
Arveron and Raglan, took the plates up himself, and either conquered or
brought into use the bad etching by his marvellous engraving. The
Dumblane was, however, well etched by Mr. Lupton, and beautifully
engraved by him. The finest Turner etching is of an aqueduct with a
stork standing in a mountain stream, not in the published series; and
next to it, are the unpublished etchings of the Via Mala and Crowhurst.
Turner seems to have been so fond of these plates that he kept
retouching and finishing them, and never made up his mind to let them
go. The Via Mala is certainly, in the state in which Turner left it, the
finest of the whole series: its etching is, as I said, the best after
that of the aqueduct. Figure 20., above, is part of another fine
unpublished etching, "Windsor, from Salt Hill." Of the published
etchings, the finest are the Ben Arthur, AEsacus, Cephalus, and Stone
Pines, with the Girl washing at a Cistern; the three latter are the more
generally instructive. Hindhead Hill, Isis, Jason, and Morpeth, are also
very desirable.
[223] You will find more notice of this point in the account of
Harding's tree-drawing, a little farther on.
[224] The impressions vary so much in colour that no brown can be
specified.
[225] You had better get such a photograph, even if you have a Liber
print as well.
[226] See the closing letter in this volume.
[227] Bogue, Fleet Street. If you are not acquainted with Harding's
works (an unlikely supposition, considering their popularity), and
cannot meet with the one in question, the diagrams given here will
enable you to understand all that is needful for our purposes.
[228] I draw this figure (a young shoot of oak) in outline only, it
being impossible to express the refinements of shade in distant foliage
in a woodcut.
[229] His lithographic sketches, those, for instance, in the Park and
the Forest, and his various lessons on foliage, possess greater merit
than the more ambitious engravings in his "Principles and Practice of
Art." There are many useful remarks, however, dispersed through this
latter work.
[230] On this law you will do well, if you can get access to it, to look
at the fourth chapter of the fourth volume of "Modern Painters."
[231] The student may hardly at first believe that the perspective of
buildings is of little consequence: but he will find it so ultimately.
See the remarks on this point in the Preface.
[232] It is a useful piece of study to dissolve some Prussian blue in
water, so as to make the liquid definitely blue: fill a large white
basin with the solution, and put anything you like to float on it, or
lie in it; walnut shells, bits of wood, leaves of flowers, &c. Then
study the effects of the reflections, and of the stems of the flowers or
submerged portions of the floating objects, as they appear through the
blue liquid; noting especially how, as you lower your head and look
along the surface, you see the reflections clearly; and how, as you
raise your head, you lose the reflections, and see the submerged stems
clearly.
[233] Respecting Architectural Drawing, see the notice of the works of
Prout in the Appendix.
LETTER III.
ON COLOUR AND COMPOSITION.
MY DEAR READER:--
If you have been obedient, and have hitherto done all that I have told
you, I trust it has not been without much subdued remonstrance, and some
serious vexation. For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the
course of your study to observe closely such things as are beautiful in
colour, you had not longed to paint them, and felt considerable
difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of black, or
blue, or grey. You _ought_ to love colour, and to think nothing quite
beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its
own sake, and are not merely desirous to colour because you think
painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may colour
well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than
pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in colour,
unless you mean to be wholly an artist. You may, in the time which other
vocations leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, and
masterly drawings in light and shade. But to colour well, requires your
life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is
increased--not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, and more--by
the addition of colour to your work. For the chances are more than a
thousand to one against your being right both in form and colour with a
given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend
to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much
more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely
increased--and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that,
while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any
line that it is either right or wrong, colour is wholly _relative_.
Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in
other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you
have put a hotter colour in another place, and what was in harmony when
you left it, becomes discordant as you set other colours beside it; so
that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the
time, but with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of
all that is afterwards to be done being previously considered. You may
easily understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life,
and great genius besides, can make a colourist.
But though you cannot produce finished coloured drawings of any value,
you may give yourself much pleasure, and be of great use to other
people, by occasionally sketching with a view to colour only; and
preserving distinct statements of certain colour facts--as that the
harvest-moon at rising was of such and such a red, and surrounded by
clouds of such and such a rosy grey; that the mountains at evening were
in truth so deep in purple; and the waves by the boat's side were indeed
of that incredible green. This only, observe, if you have an eye for
colour; but you may presume that you have this, if you enjoy colour.
And, though of course you should always give as much form to your
subject as your attention to its colour will admit of, remember that the
whole value of what you are about depends, in a coloured sketch, on the
colour _merely_. If the colour is wrong, everything is wrong: just as,
if you are singing, and sing false notes, it does not matter how true
the words are. If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if you
colour at all, you must colour rightly. Give up _all_ the form, rather
than the slightest part of the colour: just as, if you felt yourself in
danger of a false note, you would give up the word, and sing a
meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could save the note. Never
mind though your houses are all tumbling down--though your clouds are
mere blots, and your trees mere knobs, and your sun and moon like
crooked sixpences--so only that trees, clouds, houses, and sun or moon,
are of the right colours. Of course, the discipline you have gone
through will enable you to hint something of form, even in the fastest
sweep of the brush; but do not let the thought of form hamper you in the
least, when you begin to make coloured memoranda. If you want the form
of the subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its colour, take
its colour, and be sure you _have_ it, and not a spurious, treacherous,
half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colours all wrong,
and the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit
of considering the coloured work merely as supplementary to your other
studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a
coloured memorandum separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful
in hue, and entirely minding its own business. This principle, however,
bears chiefly on large and distant subjects; in foregrounds and near
studies, the colour cannot be had without a good deal of definition of
form. For if you do not map the mosses on the stones accurately, you
will not have the right quantity of colour in each bit of moss pattern,
and then none of the colours will look right; but it always simplifies
the work much if you are clear as to your point of aim, and satisfied,
when necessary, to fail of all but that.
Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting colouring,
which is the beginning and end of a painter's craft, I should need to
make this a work in three volumes instead of three letters, and to
illustrate it in the costliest way. I only hope at present to set you
pleasantly and profitably to work, leaving you, within the tethering of
certain leading-strings, to gather what advantages you can from the
works of art of which every year brings a greater number within your
reach;--and from the instruction which, every year, our rising artists
will be more ready to give kindly, and better able to give wisely.
And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colours, not moist colours:
grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning,
keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colours to be used in
broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be
able always to get good and pure colour when you need it; and force
yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colours. The two
best colourists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[234] afford us, I
am sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their practice.
Turner was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men
can well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colours
have altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the
result of it with Rossetti is, that, though his colours are safe, he has
sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again.
William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour, is very neat in his practice; so,
I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading
Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about
the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the
more particular you are about your colours the more you will get into a
deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true _speed_ in
colouring comes of this deliberation.
Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colours in order to
pale them, instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to
shape your masses more quietly, and play the colours about with more
ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go
on continually, and lay forms of passing cloud and other fugitive or
delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time.
This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque,
constitutes _body_-colour drawing as opposed to _transparent_-colour
drawing and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this
body-colour is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting,
being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without
its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil
will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of
atmosphere without tenfold labour. And if you hear it said that the
body-colour looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so
yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow
and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent
colour, those glows and glooms are _not_ the noblest aim of art. After
many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in
Italy, and of body-colour and transparent colour in England, I am now
entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art
must be done in dead colour. The habit of depending on varnish or on
lucid tints transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight of
the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colours
amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue
is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost
always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him
to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,[235] and to enjoy, in
general, quality of colour more than grandeur of composition, and
confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest
thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been
reached in dead colour, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and
Veronese are those which are likest frescos.
Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little chalky and
coarse-looking, body-colour is, in a sketch, infinitely liker nature
than transparent colour: the bloom and mist of distance are accurately
and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (_quite_
accurately, I think, by _nothing_ else); and for ground, rocks, and
buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than
the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can
ever be.
Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds of
colour are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to
alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is _no_ vehicle
or method of colour which admits of alteration or repentance; you must
be right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle
bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to
recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good colour in oil,
water, or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by
Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one,
perhaps: you may have to ground with one colour; to touch it with
fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth
into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and
to reinforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten,
or twenty processes to go through, you must go _straight_ through them,
knowingly and foreseeingly all the way; and if you get the thing once
wrong, there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping boldly down
to the white ground, and beginning again.
The drawing in body-colour will tend to teach you all this, more than
any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling into
the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has nearly
ruined our modern water-colour school of art. There are sometimes places
in which a skilful artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain
conditions of dusty colour with more ease than he could otherwise; and
sometimes a skilfully rased piece of paper will, in the midst of
transparent tints, answer nearly the purpose of chalky body-colour in
representing the surfaces of rocks or buildings. But artifices of this
kind are always treacherous in a tyro's hands, tempting him to trust in
them; and you had better always work on white or grey paper as smooth as
silk;[236] and never disturb the surface of your colour or paper, except
finally to scratch out the very highest lights if you are using
transparent colours.
I have said above that body-colour drawing will teach you the use of
colour better than working with merely transparent tints; but this is
not because the process is an easier one, but because it is a more
_complete_ one, and also because it involves _some_ working with
transparent tints in the best way. You are not to think that because you
use body-colour you may make any kind of mess that you like, and yet get
out of it. But you are to avail yourself of the characters of your
material, which enable you most nearly to imitate the processes of
Nature. Thus, suppose you have a red rocky cliff to sketch, with blue
clouds floating over it. You paint your cliff first firmly, then take
your blue, mixing it to such a tint (and here is a great part of the
skill needed), that when it is laid over the red, in the thickness
required for the effect of the mist, the warm rock-colour showing
through the blue cloud-colour, may bring it to exactly the hue you want;
(your upper tint, therefore, must be mixed colder than you want it;)
then you lay it on, varying it as you strike it, getting the forms of
the mist at once, and, if it be rightly done, with exquisite quality of
colour, from the warm tint's showing through and between the particles
of the other. When it is dry, you may add a little colour to retouch the
edges where they want shape, or heighten the lights where they want
roundness, or put another tone over the whole; but you can take none
away. If you touch or disturb the surface, or by any untoward accident
mix the under and upper colours together, all is lost irrecoverably.
Begin your drawing from the ground again if you like, or throw it into
the fire if you like. But do not waste time in trying to mend it.[237]
This discussion of the relative merits of transparent and opaque colour
has, however, led us a little beyond the point where we should have
begun; we must go back to our palette, if you please. Get a cake of each
of the hard colours named in the note below[238] and try experiments on
their simple combinations, by mixing each colour with every other. If
you like to do it in an orderly way, you may prepare a squared piece of
pasteboard, and put the pure colours in columns at the top and side;
the mixed tints being given at the intersections, thus (the letters
standing for colours):
b c d e f &c.
a ab ac ad ae af
b -- bc bd be bf
c -- -- cd ce cf
d -- -- -- de df
e -- -- -- -- ef
&c.
This will give you some general notion of the characters of mixed tints
of two colours only, and it is better in practice to confine yourself as
much as possible to these, and to get more complicated colours, either
by putting a third _over_ the first blended tint, or by putting the
third into its interstices. Nothing but watchful practice will teach you
the effects that colours have on each other when thus put over, or
beside, each other.
[Illustration: FIG. 29.]
When you have got a little used to the principal combinations, place
yourself at a window which the sun does not shine in at, commanding some
simple piece of landscape; outline this landscape roughly; then take a
piece of white cardboard, cut out a hole in it about the size of a large
pea; and supposing _R_ is the room, _a d_ the window, and you are
sitting at _a_, Fig. 29., hold this cardboard a little outside of the
window, upright, and in the direction _b d_, parallel a little turned to
the side of the window, or so as to catch more light, as at _a d_, never
turned as at _c d_, or the paper will be dark. Then you will see the
landscape, bit by bit, through the circular hole. Match the colours of
each important bit as nearly as you can, mixing your tints with white,
beside the aperture. When matched, put a touch of the same tint at the
top of your paper, writing under it: "dark tree colour," "hill colour,"
"field colour," as the case may be. Then wash the tint away from beside
the opening, and the cardboard will be ready to match another piece of
the landscape.[239] When you have got the colours of the principal
masses thus indicated, lay on a piece of each in your sketch in its
right place, and then proceed to complete the sketch in harmony with
them, by your eye.
In the course of your early experiments, you will be much struck by two
things: the first, the inimitable brilliancy of light in sky and in
sunlighted things: and the second, that among the tints which you can
imitate, those which you thought the darkest will continually turn out
to be in reality the lightest. Darkness of objects is estimated by us,
under ordinary circumstances, much more by _knowledge_ than by sight;
thus, a cedar or Scotch fir, at 200 yards off, will be thought of darker
green than an elm or oak near us; because we know by experience that the
peculiar colour they exhibit, at that distance, is the _sign_ of
darkness of foliage. But when we try them through the cardboard, the
near oak will be found, indeed, rather dark green, and the distant
cedar, perhaps, pale gray-purple. The quantity of purple and grey in
Nature is, by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery.
Well, having ascertained thus your principal tints, you may proceed to
fill up your sketch; in doing which observe these following particulars:
1. Many portions of your subject appeared through the aperture in the
paper brighter than the paper, as sky, sunlighted grass, &c. Leave these
portions, for the present, white; and proceed with the parts of which
you can match the tints.
2. As you tried your subject with the cardboard, you must have observed
how many changes of hue took place over small spaces. In filling up your
work, try to educate your eye to perceive these differences of hue
without the help of the cardboard, and lay them deliberately, like a
mosaic-worker, as separate colours, preparing each carefully on your
palatte, and laying it as if it were a patch of coloured cloth, cut out,
to be fitted neatly by its edge to the next patch; so that the _fault_
of your work may be, not a slurred or misty look, but a patched
bed-cover look, as if it had all been cut out with scissors. For
instance, in drawing the trunk of a birch tree, there will be probably
white high lights, then a pale rosy grey round them on the light side,
then a (probably greenish) deeper grey on the dark side, varied by
reflected colours, and over all, rich black strips of bark and brown
spots of moss. Lay first the rosy grey, leaving white for the high
lights _and for the spots of moss_, and not touching the dark side. Then
lay the grey for the dark side, fitting it well up to the rosy grey of
the light, leaving also in this darker grey the white paper in the
places for the black and brown moss; then prepare the moss colours
separately for each spot, and lay each in the white place left for it.
Not one grain of white, except that purposely left for the high lights,
must be visible when the work is done, even through a magnifying-glass,
so cunningly must you fit the edges to each other. Finally, take your
background colours, and put them on each side of the tree-trunk, fitting
them carefully to its edge.
Fine work you would make of this, wouldn't you, if you had not learned
to draw first, and could not now draw a good outline for the stem, much
less terminate a colour mass in the outline you wanted?
Your work will look very odd for some time, when you first begin to
paint in this way, and before you can modify it, as I shall tell you
presently how; but never mind; it is of the greatest possible importance
that you should practice this separate laying on of the hues, for all
good colouring finally depends on it. It is, indeed, often necessary,
and sometimes desirable, to lay one colour and form boldly over another:
thus, in laying leaves on blue sky, it is impossible always in large
pictures, or when pressed for time, to fill in the blue through the
interstices of the leaves; and the great Venetians constantly lay their
blue ground first, and then, having let it dry, strike the golden brown
over it in the form of the leaf, leaving the under blue to shine through
the gold, and subdue it to the olive green they want. But in the most
precious and perfect work each leaf is inlaid, and the blue worked round
it: and, whether you use one or other mode of getting your result, it is
equally necessary to be absolute and decisive in your laying the colour.
Either your ground must be laid firmly first, and then your upper colour
struck upon it in perfect form, for ever, thenceforward, unalterable; or
else the two colours must be individually put in their places, and led
up to each other till they meet at their appointed border, equally,
thenceforward, unchangeable. Either process, you see, involves
_absolute_ decision. If you once begin to slur, or change, or sketch, or
try this way and that with your colour, it is all over with it and with
you. You will continually see bad copyists trying to imitate the
Venetians, by daubing their colours about, and retouching, and
finishing, and softening: when every touch and every added hue only lead
them farther into chaos. There is a dog between two children in a
Veronese in the Louvre, which gives the copyist much employment. He has
a dark ground behind him, which Veronese has painted first, and then
when it was dry, or nearly so, struck the locks of the dog's white hair
over it with some half-dozen curling sweeps of his brush, right at once,
and forever. Had one line or hair of them gone wrong, it would have been
wrong forever; no retouching could have mended it. The poor copyists
daub in first some background, and then some dog's hair; then retouch
the background, then the hair, work for hours at it, expecting it always
to come right to-morrow--"when it is finished." They _may_ work for
centuries at it, and they will never do it. If they can do it with
Veronese's allowance of work, half a dozen sweeps of the hand over the
dark background, well; if not, they may ask the dog himself whether it
will ever come right, and get true answer from him--on Launce's
conditions: "If he say 'ay,' it will; if he say 'no,' it will; if he
shake his tail and say nothing, it will."
Whenever you lay on a mass of colour, be sure that however large it may
be, or however small, it shall be gradated. No colour exists in Nature
under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If you do not see this,
it is the fault of your inexperience; you _will_ see it in due time, if
you practise enough. But in general you may see it at once. In the birch
trunk, for instance, the rosy grey _must_ be gradated by the roundness
of the stem till it meets the shaded side; similarly the shaded side is
gradated by reflected, light. Accordingly, whether by adding water, or
white paint, or by unequal force of touch (this you will do at pleasure,
according to the texture you wish to produce), you must, in every tint
you lay on, make it a little paler at one part than another, and get an
even gradation between the two depths. This is very like laying down a
formal law or recipe for you; but you will find it is merely the
assertion of a natural fact. It is not indeed physically impossible to
meet with an ungradated piece of colour, but it is so supremely
improbable, that you had better get into the habit of asking yourself
invariably, when you are going to copy a tint,--not "_Is_ that
gradated?" but "_Which way_ is it gradated?" and at least in ninety-nine
out of a hundred instances, you will be able to answer decisively after
a careful glance, though the gradation may have been so subtle that you
did not see it at first. And it does not matter how small the touch of
colour may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one
part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not
merely because the natural fact is so, that your colour should be
gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the colour itself depends
more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to
colours just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful
by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types,
expressing the law of gradual change and progress in the human soul
itself. What the difference is in mere beauty between a gradated and
ungradated colour, may be seen easily by laying an even tint of
rose-colour on paper, and putting a rose leaf beside it. The victorious
beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers, depends wholly on the
delicacy and quantity of its colour gradations, all other flowers being
either less rich in gradation, not having so many folds of leaf; or less
tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed.
4. But observe, it is not enough in general that colour should be
gradated by being made merely paler or darker at one place than another.
Generally colour _changes_ as it _diminishes_, and is not merely
_darker_ at one spot, but also _purer_ at one spot than anywhere else.
It does not in the least follow that the darkest spot should be the
purest; still less so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often
the two gradations more or less cross each other, one passing in one
direction from paleness to darkness, another in another direction from
purity to dullness, but there will almost always be both of them,
however reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of
colour until you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that
you lay on must be _quite_ blue only at some given spot, nor that a
large spot; and must be gradated from that into less pure blue--greyish
blue, or greenish blue, or purplish blue, over all the rest of the space
it occupies. And this you must do in one of three ways: either, while
the colour is wet, mix it with the colour which is to subdue it, adding
gradually a little more and a little more; or else, when the colour is
quite dry, strike a gradated touch of another colour over it, leaving
only a point of the first tint visible: or else, lay the subduing tints
on in small touches, as in the exercise of tinting the chess-board. Of
each of these methods I have something to tell you separately: but that
is distinct from the subject of gradation, which I must not quit without
once more pressing upon you the preeminent necessity of introducing it
everywhere. I have profound dislike of anything like _habit_ of hand,
and yet, in this one instance, I feel almost tempted to encourage you to
get into a habit of never touching paper with colour, without securing a
gradation. You will not in Turner's largest oil pictures, perhaps six or
seven feet long by four or five high, find one spot of colour as large
as a grain of wheat ungradated: and you will find in practice, that
brilliancy of hue, and vigour of light, and even the aspect of
transparency in shade, are essentially dependent on this character
alone; hardness, coldness, and opacity resulting far more from
_equality_ of colour than from nature of colour. Give me some mud off a
city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit, a little whitening, and
some coal-dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me
time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust: but though you had the red
of the ruby, the blue of the gentian, snow for the light, and amber for
the gold, you cannot paint a luminous picture, if you keep the masses of
those colours unbroken in purity, and unvarying in depth.
5. Next note the three processes by which gradation and other characters
are to be obtained:
A. Mixing while the colour is wet.
You may be confused by my first telling you to lay on the hues in
separate patches, and then telling you to mix hues together as you lay
them on: but the separate masses are to be laid, when colours distinctly
oppose each other at a given limit; the hues to be mixed, when they
palpitate one through the other, or fade one into the other. It is
better to err a little on the distinct side. Thus I told you to paint
the dark and light sides of the birch trunk separately, though in
reality, the two tints change, as the trunk turns away from the light,
gradually one into the other: and, after being laid separately on, will
need some farther touching to harmonize them: but they do so in a very
narrow space, marked distinctly all the way up the trunk; and it is
easier and safer, therefore, to keep them separate at first. Whereas it
often happens that the whole beauty of two colours will depend on the
one being continued well through the other, and playing in the midst of
it: blue and green often do so in water: blue and grey, or purple and
scarlet, in sky; in hundreds of such instances the most beautiful and
truthful results may be obtained by laying one colour into the other
while wet; judging wisely how far it will spread, or blending it with
the brush in somewhat thicker consistence of wet body-colour; only
observe, never mix in this way two _mixtures_; let the colour you lay
into the other be always a simple, not a compound tint.
B. Laying one colour over another.
If you lay on a solid touch of vermilion, and, after it is quite dry,
strike a little very wet carmine quickly over it, you will obtain a much
more brilliant red than by mixing the carmine and vermilion. Similarly,
if you lay a dark colour first, and strike a little blue or white
body-colour lightly over it, you will get a more beautiful grey than by
mixing the colour and the blue or white. In very perfect painting,
artifices of this kind are continually used; but I would not have you
trust much to them; they are apt to make you think too much of quality
of colour. I should like you to depend on little more than the dead
colours, simply laid on, only observe always this, that the _less_
colour you do the work with, the better it will always be:[240] so that
if you have laid a red colour, and you want a purple one above, do not
mix the purple on your palette and lay it on so thick as to overpower
the red, but take a little thin blue from your palette, and lay it
lightly over the red, so as to let the red be seen through, and thus
produce the required purple; and if you want a green hue over a blue
one, do not lay a quantity of green on the blue, but a _little_ yellow,
and so on, always bringing the under colour into service as far as you
possibly can. If, however, the colour beneath is wholly opposed to the
one you have to lay on, as, suppose, if green is to be laid over
scarlet, you must either remove the required parts of the under colour
daintily first with your knife, or with water; or else, lay solid white
over it massively, and leave that to dry, and then glaze the white with
the upper colour. This is better, in general, than laying the upper
colour itself so thick as to conquer the ground, which, in fact, if it
be a transparent colour, you cannot do. Thus, if you have to strike
warm boughs and leaves of trees over blue sky, and they are too
intricate to have their places left for them in laying the blue, it is
better to lay them first in solid white, and then glaze with sienna and
ochre, than to mix the sienna and white; though, of course, the process
is longer and more troublesome. Nevertheless, if the forms of touches
required are very delicate, the after glazing is impossible. You must
then mix the warm colour thick at once, and so use it: and this is often
necessary for delicate grasses, and such other fine threads of light in
foreground work.
C. Breaking one colour in small points through or over another.
This is the most important of all processes in good modern[241] oil and
water-colour painting, but you need not hope to attain very great skill
in it. To do it well is very laborious, and requires such skill and
delicacy of hand as can only be acquired by unceasing practice. But you
will find advantage in noting the following points:
(_a._) In distant effects of rich subjects, wood, or rippled water, or
broken clouds, much may be done by touches or crumbling dashes of rather
dry colour, with other colours afterwards put cunningly into the
interstices. The more you practise this, when the subject evidently
calls for it, the more your eye will enjoy the higher qualities of
colour. The process is, in fact, the carrying out of the principle of
separate colours to the utmost possible refinement; using atoms of
colour in juxtaposition, instead of large spaces. And note, in filling
up minute interstices of this kind, that if you want the colour you fill
them with to show brightly, it is better to put a rather positive point
of it, with a little white left beside or round it in the interstice,
than to put a pale tint of the colour over the whole interstice. Yellow
or orange will hardly show, if pale, in small spaces; but they show
brightly in firm touches, however small, with white beside them.
(_b._) If a colour is to be darkened by superimposed portions of
another, it is, in many cases, better to lay the uppermost colour in
rather vigorous small touches, like finely chopped straw, over the under
one, than to lay it on as a tint, for two reasons: the first, that the
play of the two colours together is pleasant to the eye; the second,
that much expression of form may be got by wise administration of the
upper dark touches. In distant mountains they may be made pines of, or
broken crags, or villages, or stones, or whatever you choose; in clouds
they may indicate the direction of the rain, the roll and outline of the
cloud masses; and in water, the minor waves. All noble effects of dark
atmosphere are got in good water-colour drawing by these two expedients,
interlacing the colours, or retouching the lower one with fine darker
drawing in an upper. Sponging and washing for dark atmospheric effect is
barbarous, and mere tyro's work, though it is often useful for passages
of delicate atmospheric light.
(_c._) When you have time, practice the production of mixed tints by
interlaced touches of the pure colours out of which they are formed, and
use the process at the parts of your sketches where you wish to get rich
and luscious effects. Study the works of William Hunt, of the Old
Water-colour Society, in this respect, continually, and make frequent
memoranda of the variegations in flowers; not painting the flower
completely, but laying the ground colour of one petal, and painting the
spots on it with studious precision: a series of single petals of
lilies, geraniums, tulips, &c., numbered with proper reference to their
position in the flower, will be interesting to you on many grounds
besides those of art. Be careful to get the _gradated_ distribution of
the spots well followed in the calceolarias, foxgloves, and the like;
and work out the odd, indefinite hues of the spots themselves with
minute grains of pure interlaced colour, otherwise you will never get
their richness of bloom. You will be surprised to find, as you do this,
first the universality of the law of gradation we have so much insisted
upon; secondly, that Nature is just as economical of _her_ fine colours
as I have told you to be of yours. You would think, by the way she
paints, that her colours cost her something enormous: she will only give
you a single pure touch just where the petal turns into light; but down
in the bell all is subdued, and under the petal all is subdued, even in
the showiest flower. What you thought was bright blue is, when you look
close, only dusty grey, or green, or purple, or every colour in the
world at once, only a single gleam or streak of pure blue in the centre
of it. And so with all her colours. Sometimes I have really thought her
miserliness intolerable: in a gentian, for instance, the way she
economises her ultramarine down in the bell is a little too bad.
Next, respecting general tone. I said, just now, that, for the sake of
students, my tax should not be laid on black or on white pigments; but
if you mean to be a colourist, you must lay a tax on them yourselves
when you begin to use true colour; that is to say, you must use them
little and make of them much. There is no better test of your colour
tones being good, than your having made the white in your picture
precious, and the black conspicuous.
I say, first, the white precious. I do not mean merely glittering or
brilliant; it is easy to scratch white seagulls out of black clouds and
dot clumsy foliage with chalky dew; but, when white is well managed, it
ought to be strangely delicious--tender as well as bright--like inlaid
mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to seek it
for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space of
strange, heavenly paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colours.
This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint, by
absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need
it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by grey, except at a few
points of chief lustre.
Secondly, you must make the black conspicuous. However small a point of
black may be, it ought to catch the eye, otherwise your work is too
heavy in the shadow. All the ordinary shadows should be of some
_colour_--never black, nor approaching black, they should be evidently
and always of a luminous nature, and the black should look strange among
them; never occurring except in a black object, or in small points
indicative of intense shade in the very centre of masses of shadow.
Shadows of absolutely negative grey, however, may be beautifully used
with white, or with gold; but still though the black thus, in subdued
strength, becomes _spacious_, it should always be _conspicuous_; the
spectator should notice this grey neutrality with some wonder, and
enjoy, all the more intensely on account of it, the gold colour and the
white which it relieves. Of all the great colourists Velasquez is the
greatest master of the black chords. His black is more precious than
most other people's crimson.
It is not, however, only white and black which you must make valuable;
you must give rare worth to every colour you use; but the white and
black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the
other colours should be continually passing one into the other, being
all evidently companions in the same gay world; while the white, black,
and neutral grey should stand monkishly aloof in the midst of them. You
may melt your crimson into purple, your purple into blue and your blue
into green, but you must not melt any of them into black. You should,
however, try, as I said, to give _preciousness_ to all your colours; and
this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work,
and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine colouring,
like fine drawing, is _delicate_; and so delicate that if, at last, you
_see_ the colour you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You
ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone, by touches of colour
which individually are too pale to be seen; and if there is one atom of
any colour in the whole picture which is unnecessary to it, that atom
hurts it.
Notice also, that nearly all good compound colours are _odd_ colours.
You shall look at a hue in a good painter's work ten minutes before you
know what to call it. You thought it was brown, presently, you feel that
it is red; next that there is, somehow, yellow in it; presently
afterwards that there is blue in it. If you try to copy it you will
always find your colour too warm or too cold--no colour in the box will
seem to have any affinity with it; and yet it will be as pure as if it
were laid at a single touch with a single colour.
As to the choice and harmony of colours in general, if you cannot
choose and harmonize them by instinct, you will never do it at all. If
you need examples of utterly harsh and horrible colour, you may find
plenty given in treatises upon colouring, to illustrate the laws of
harmony; and if you want to colour beautifully, colour as best pleases
yourself at _quiet times_, not so as to catch the eye, nor to look as if
it were clever or difficult to colour in that way, but so that the
colour may be pleasant to you when you are happy, or thoughtful. Look
much at the morning and evening sky, and much at simple
flowers--dog-roses, wood hyacinths, violets, poppies, thistles, heather,
and such like--as Nature arranges them in the woods and fields. If ever
any scientific person tells you that two colours are "discordant," make
a note of the two colours, and put them together whenever you can. I
have actually heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the
two colours which Nature seems to intend never to be separated and never
to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!--a
peacock's neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with
green lights though it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to
clouds at sunrise, in this coloured world of ours. If you have a good
eye for colours, you will soon find out how constantly Nature puts
purple and green together, purple and scarlet, green and blue, yellow
and neutral grey, and the like; and how she strikes these
colour-concords for general tones, and then works into them with
innumerable subordinate ones; and you will gradually come to like what
she does, and find out new and beautiful chords of colour in her work
every day. If you _enjoy_ them, depend upon it you will paint them to a
certain point right: or, at least, if you do not enjoy them, you are
certain to paint them wrong. If colour does not give you _intense_
pleasure, let it alone; depend upon it, you are only tormenting the eyes
and senses of people who feel colour, whenever you touch it; and that is
unkind and improper. You will find, also, your power of colouring depend
much on your state of health and right balance of mind; when you are
fatigued or ill you will not see colours well, and when you are
ill-tempered you will not choose them well: thus, though not infallibly
a test of character in individuals, colour power is a great sign of
mental health in nations; when they are in a state of intellectual
decline, their colouring always gets dull.[242] You must also take great
care not to be misled by affected talk about colour from people who have
not the gift of it: numbers are eager and voluble about it who probably
never in all their lives received one genuine colour-sensation. The
modern religionists of the school of Overbeck are just like people who
eat slate-pencil and chalk, and assure everybody that they are nicer and
purer than strawberries and plums.
Take care also never to be misled into any idea that colour can help or
display _form_; colour[243] always disguises form, and is meant to do
so.