The Crown of Wild Olive
delicate method of work, such as may ensure his seeing truly. For I am
nearly convinced, that when once we see keenly enough, there is very
little difficulty in drawing what we see; but, even supposing that this
difficulty be still great, I believe that the sight is a more important
thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils
may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may
learn to draw. It is surely also a more important thing for young people
and unprofessional students, to know how to appreciate the art of
others, than to gain much power in art themselves. Now the modes of
sketching ordinarily taught are inconsistent with this power of
judgment. No person trained to the superficial execution of modern
water-colour painting, can understand the work of Titian or Leonardo;
they must for ever remain blind to the refinement of such men's
pencilling, and the precision of their thinking. But, however slight a
degree of manipulative power the student may reach by pursuing the mode
recommended to him in these letters, I will answer for it that he cannot
go once through the advised exercises without beginning to understand
what masterly work means; and, by the time he has gained some
proficiency in them, he will have a pleasure in looking at the painting
of the great schools, and a new perception of the exquisiteness of
natural scenery, such as would repay him for much more labour than I
have asked him to undergo.
That labour is, nevertheless, sufficiently irksome, nor is it possible
that it should be otherwise, so long as the pupil works unassisted by a
master. For the smooth and straight road which admits unembarrassed
progress must, I fear, be dull as well as smooth; and the hedges need to
be close and trim when there is no guide to warn or bring back the
erring traveller. The system followed in this work will, therefore, at
first, surprise somewhat sorrowfully those who are familiar with the
practice of our class at the Working Men's College; for there, the
pupil, having the master at his side to extricate him from such
embarrassments as his first efforts may lead into, is _at once_ set to
draw from a solid object, and soon finds entertainment in his efforts
and interest in his difficulties. Of course the simplest object which it
is possible to set before the eye is a sphere; and practically, I find a
child's toy, a white leather ball, better than anything else; as the
gradations on balls of plaster of Paris, which I use sometimes to try
the strength of pupils who have had previous practice, are a little too
delicate for a beginner to perceive. It has been objected that a circle,
or the outline of a sphere, is one of the most difficult of all lines to
draw. It is so; but I do not want it to be drawn. All that his study of
the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the
appearance of projection. This he learns most satisfactorily from a
sphere; because any solid form, terminated by straight lines or flat
surfaces, owes some of its appearance of projection to its perspective;
but in the sphere, what, without shade, was a flat circle, becomes,
merely by the added shade, the image of a solid ball; and this fact is
just as striking to the learner, whether his circular outline be true or
false. He is, therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if
he makes the ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply
pointed out to him, and he does better next time, and better still the
next. But his mind is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the
outline left to take, in due time, care of itself. I call it outline,
for the sake of immediate intelligibility,--strictly speaking, it is
merely the edge of the shade; no pupil in my class being ever allowed to
draw an outline, in the ordinary sense. It is pointed out to him, from
the first, that Nature relieves one mass, or one tint, against another;
but outlines none. The outline exercise, the second suggested in this
letter, is recommended, not to enable the pupil to draw outlines, but as
the only means by which, unassisted, he can test his accuracy of eye,
and discipline his hand. When the master is by, errors in the form and
extent of shadows can be pointed out as easily as in outline, and the
handling can be gradually corrected in details of the work. But the
solitary student can only find out his own mistakes by help of the
traced limit, and can only test the firmness of his hand by an exercise
in which nothing but firmness is required; and during which all other
considerations (as of softness, complexity, &c.) are entirely excluded.
Both the system adopted at the Working Men's College, and that
recommended here, agree, however, in one principle, which I consider the
most important and special of all that are involved in my teaching:
namely, the attaching its full importance, from the first, to local
colour. I believe that the endeavour to separate, in the course of
instruction, the observation of light and shade from that of local
colour, has always been, and must always be, destructive of the
student's power of accurate sight, and that it corrupts his taste as
much as it retards his progress. I will not occupy the reader's time by
any discussion of the principle here, but I wish him to note it as the
only distinctive one in my system, so far as it is a system. For the
recommendation to the pupil to copy faithfully, and without alteration,
whatever natural object he chooses to study, is serviceable, among other
reasons, just because it gets rid of systematic rules altogether, and
teaches people to draw, as country lads learn to ride, without saddle or
stirrups; my main object being, at first, not to get my pupils to hold
their reins prettily, but to "sit like a jackanapes, never off."
In these written instructions, therefore, it has always been with regret
that I have seen myself forced to advise anything like monotonous or
formal discipline. But, to the unassisted student, such formalities are
indispensable, and I am not without hope that the sense of secure
advancement, and the pleasure of independent effort, may render the
following out of even the more tedious exercises here proposed, possible
to the solitary learner, without weariness. But if it should be
otherwise, and he finds the first steps painfully irksome, I can only
desire him to consider whether the acquirement of so great a power as
that of pictorial expression of thought be not worth some toil; or
whether it is likely, in the natural order of matters in this working
world, that so great a gift should be attainable by those who will give
no price for it.
One task, however, of some difficulty, the student will find I have not
imposed upon him: namely, learning the laws of perspective. It would be
worth while to learn them, if he could do so easily; but without a
master's help, and in the way perspective is at present explained in
treatises, the difficulty is greater than the gain. For perspective is
not of the slightest use, except in rudimentary work. You can draw the
rounding line of a table in perspective, but you cannot draw the sweep
of a sea bay; you can foreshorten a log of wood by it, but you cannot
foreshorten an arm. Its laws are too gross and few to be applied to any
subtle form; therefore, as you must learn to draw the subtle forms by
the eye, certainly you may draw the simple ones. No great painters ever
trouble themselves about perspective, and very few of them know its
laws; they draw everything by the eye, and, naturally enough, disdain in
the easy parts of their work rules which cannot help them in difficult
ones. It would take about a month's labour to draw imperfectly, by laws
of perspective, what any great Venetian will draw perfectly in five
minutes, when he is throwing a wreath of leaves round a head, or bending
the curves of a pattern in and out among the folds of drapery. It is
true that when perspective was first discovered, everybody amused
themselves with it; and all the great painters put fine saloons and
arcades behind their madonnas, merely to show that they could draw in
perspective: but even this was generally done by them only to catch the
public eye, and they disdained the perspective so much, that though they
took the greatest pains with the circlet of a crown, or the rim of a
crystal cup, in the heart of their picture, they would twist their
capitals of columns and towers of churches about in the background in
the most wanton way, wherever they liked the lines to go, provided only
they left just perspective enough to please the public. In modern days,
I doubt if any artist among us, except David Roberts, knows so much
perspective as would enable him to draw a Gothic arch to scale, at a
given angle and distance. Turner, though he was professor of perspective
to the Royal Academy, did not know what he professed, and never, as far
as I remember, drew a single building in true perspective in his life;
he drew them only with as much perspective as suited him. Prout also
knew nothing of perspective, and twisted his buildings, as Turner did,
into whatever shapes he liked. I do not justify this; and would
recommend the student at least to treat perspective with common
civility, but to pay no court to it. The best way he can learn it, by
himself, is by taking a pane of glass, fixed in a frame, so that it can
be set upright before the eye, at the distance at which the proposed
sketch is intended to be seen. Let the eye be placed at some fixed
point, opposite the middle of the pane of glass, but as high or as low
as the student likes; then with a brush at the end of a stick, and a
little body-colour that will adhere to the glass, the lines of the
landscape may be traced on the glass, as you see them through it. When
so traced they are all in true perspective. If the glass be sloped in
any direction, the lines are still in true perspective, only it is
perspective calculated for a sloping plane, while common perspective
always supposes the plane of the picture to be vertical. It is good, in
early practice, to accustom yourself to enclose your subject, before
sketching it, with a light frame of wood held upright before you; it
will show you what you may legitimately take into your picture, and
what choice there is between a narrow foreground near you, and a wide
one farther off; also, what height of tree or building you can properly
take in, &c.[198]
Of figure drawing, nothing is said in the following pages, because I do
not think figures, as chief subjects, can be drawn to any good purpose
by an amateur. As accessaries in landscape, they are just to be drawn on
the same principles as anything else.
Lastly: If any of the directions given subsequently to the student
should be found obscure by him, or if at any stage of the recommended
practice he finds himself in difficulties which I have not provided
enough against, he may apply by letter to Mr. Ward, who is my under
drawing-master at the Working Men's College (45 Great Ormond Street),
and who will give any required assistance, on the lowest terms that can
remunerate him for the occupation of his time. I have not leisure myself
in general to answer letters of inquiry, however much I may desire to do
so; but Mr. Ward has always the power of referring any question to me
when he thinks it necessary. I have good hope, however, that enough
guidance is given in this work to prevent the occurrence of any serious
embarrassment; and I believe that the student who obeys its directions
will find, on the whole, that the best answer of questions is
perseverance; and the best drawing-masters are the woods and hills.
FOOTNOTES:
[198] If the student is fond of architecture, and wishes to know more of