The Crown of Wild Olive
standard of precision in line. If you can get one with a _wing_ in it,
it will be best. The crest with the cock, that with the skull and satyr,
and the "Melancholy," are the best you could have, but any will do.
Perfection in chiaroscuro drawing lies between these two masters,
Rembrandt and Durer. Rembrandt is often too loose and vague; and Durer
has little or no effect of mist or uncertainty. If you can see anywhere
a drawing by Leonardo, you will find it balanced between the two
characters; but there are no engravings which present this perfection,
and your style will be best formed, therefore, by alternate study of
Rembrandt and Durer. Lean rather to Durer; it is better for amateurs to
err on the side of precision than on that of vagueness: and though, as I
have just said, you cannot copy a Durer, yet try every now and then a
quarter of an inch square or so, and see how much nearer you can come;
you cannot possibly try to draw the leafly crown of the "Melancholia"
too often.
If you cannot get either a Rembrandt or a Durer, you may still learn
much by carefully studying any of George Cruikshank's etchings, or
Leech's woodcuts in Punch, on the free side; with Alfred Rethel's and
Richter's[218] on the severe side. But in so doing you will need to
notice the following points:
When either the material (as the copper or wood) or the time of an
artist, does not permit him to make a perfect drawing,--that is to say,
one in which no lines shall be prominently visible,--and he is reduced
to show the black lines, either drawn by the pen, or on the wood, it is
better to make these lines help, as far as may be, the expression of
texture and form. You will thus find many textures, as of cloth or grass
or flesh, and many subtle effects of light, expressed by Leech with
zigzag or crossed or curiously broken lines; and you will see that
Alfred Rethel and Richter constantly express the direction and rounding
of surfaces by the direction of the lines which shade them. All these
various means of expression will be useful to you, as far as you can
learn them, provided you remember that they are merely a kind of
shorthand; telling certain facts, not in quite the _right_ way, but in
the only possible way under the conditions: and provided in any after
use of such means, you never try to show your own dexterity; but only to
get as much record of the object as you can in a given time; and that
you continually make efforts to go beyond shorthand, and draw portions
of the objects rightly.
And touching this question of _direction_ of lines as indicating that of
surface, observe these few points:
If lines are to be distinctly shown, it is better that, so far as they
_can_ indicate any thing by their direction, they should explain rather
than oppose the general character of the object. Thus, in the piece of
woodcut from Titian, Fig. 10., the lines are serviceable by expressing,
not only the shade of the trunk, but partly also its roundness, and the
flow of its grain. And Albert Durer, whose work was chiefly engraving,
sets himself always thus to make his lines as _valuable_ as possible;
telling much by them, both of shade and direction of surface: and if you
were always to be limited to engraving on copper (and did not want to
express effects of mist or darkness, as well as delicate forms), Albert
Durer's way of work would be the best example for you. But, inasmuch as
the perfect way of drawing is by shade without lines, and the great
painters always conceive their subject as complete, even when they are
sketching it most rapidly, you will find that, when they are not
limited in means, they do not much trust to direction of line, but will
often scratch in the shade of a rounded surface with nearly straight
lines, that is to say, with the easiest and quickest lines possible to
themselves. When the hand is free, the easiest line for it to draw is
one inclining from the left upward to the right, or _vice versa_, from
the right downwards to the left; and when done very quickly, the line is
hooked a little at the end by the effort at return to the next. Hence,
you will always find the pencil, chalk, or pen sketch of a _very_ great
master full of these kind of lines; and even if he draws carefully, you
will find him using simple straight lines from left to right, when an
inferior master will have used curved ones. Fig. 11. is a fair facsimile
of part of a sketch of Raphael's, which exhibits these characters very
distinctly. Even the careful drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are shaded
most commonly with straight lines; and you may always assume it as a
point increasing the probability of a drawing being by a great master if
you find rounded surfaces, such as those of cheeks or lips, shaded with
straight lines.
But you will also now understand how easy it must be for dishonest
dealers to forge or imitate scrawled sketches like Figure 11., and pass
them for the work of great masters; and how the power of determining the
genuineness of a drawing depends entirely on your knowing the _facts_ of
the object drawn, and perceiving whether the hasty handling is _all_
conducive to the expression of those truths. In a great man's work, at
its fastest, no line is thrown away, and it is not by the rapidity, but
the _economy_ of the execution that you know him to be great. Now to
judge of this economy, you must know exactly what he meant to do,
otherwise you cannot of course discern how far he has done it; that is,
you must know the beauty and nature of the thing he was drawing. All
judgment of art thus finally founds itself on knowledge of Nature.
But farther observe, that this scrawled, or economic, or impetuous
execution is never _affectedly_ impetuous. If a great man is not in a
hurry, he never pretends to be; if he has no eagerness in his heart, he
puts none into his hand; if he thinks his effect would be better got
with _two_ lines, he never, to show his dexterity, tries to do it with
one. Be assured, therefore (and this is a matter of great importance),
that you will never produce a great drawing by imitating the _execution_
of a great master. Acquire his knowledge and share his feelings, and the
easy execution will fall from your hand as it did from his; but if you
merely scrawl because he scrawled, or blot because he blotted, you will
not only never advance in power, but every able draughtsman, and every
judge whose opinion is worth having, will know you for a cheat, and
despise you accordingly.
Again, observe respecting the use of outline:
All merely outlined drawings are bad, for the simple reason, that an
artist of any power can always do more, and tell more, by quitting his
outlines occasionally, and scratching in a few lines for shade, than he
can by restricting himself to outline only. Hence the fact of his so
restricting himself, whatever may be the occasion, shows him to be a bad
draughtsman, and not to know how to apply his power economically. This
hard law, however, bears only on drawings meant to remain in the state
in which you see them; not on those which were meant to be proceeded
with, or for some mechanical use. It is sometimes necessary to draw pure
outlines, as an incipient arrangement of a composition, to be filled up
afterwards with colour, or to be pricked through and used as patterns or
tracings; but if, with no such ultimate object, making the drawing
wholly for its own sake, and meaning it to remain in the state he leaves
it, an artist restricts himself to outline, he is a bad draughtsman, and
his work is bad. There is no exception to this law. A good artist
habitually sees masses, not edges, and can in every case make his
drawing more expressive (with any given quantity of work) by rapid shade
than by contours; so that all good work whatever is more or less touched
with shade, and more or less interrupted as outline.
Hence, the published works of Retsch, and all the English imitations of
them, and all outline engravings from pictures, are bad work, and only
serve to corrupt the public taste, and of such outlines, the worst are
those which are darkened in some part of their course by way of
expressing the dark side, as Flaxman's from Dante, and such others;
because an outline can only be true so long as it accurately represents
the form of the given object with _one_ of its edges. Thus, the outline
_a_ and the outline _b_, Fig. 12., are both _true_ outlines of a ball;
because, however thick the line may be, whether we take the interior or
exterior edge of it, that edge of it always draws a true circle. But _c_
is a false outline of a ball, because either the inner or outer edge of
the black line must be an untrue circle, else the line could not be
thicker in one place than another. Hence all "force," as it is called,
is gained by falsification of the contours; so that no artist whose eye
is true and fine could endure to look at it. It does indeed often happen
that a painter, sketching rapidly, and trying again and again for some
line which he cannot quite strike, blackens or loads the first line by
setting others beside and across it; and then a careless observer
supposes it has been thickened on purpose; or, sometimes also, at a
place where shade is afterwards to enclose the form, the painter will
strike a broad dash of this shade beside his outline at once, looking as
if he meant to thicken the outline; whereas this broad line is only the
first instalment of the future shadow, and the outline is really drawn
with its inner edge. And thus, far from good draughtsmen darkening the
lines which turn away from the light, the _tendency_ with them is rather
to darken them towards the light, for it is there in general that shade
will ultimately enclose them. The best example of this treatment that I
know is Raphael's sketch, in the Louvre, of the head of the angel
pursuing Heliodorus, the one that shows part of the left eye; where the
dark strong lines which terminate the nose and forehead towards the
light are opposed to tender and light ones behind the ear, and in other
places towards the shade. You will see in Fig. 11. the same principle
variously exemplified; the principal dark lines, in the head and drapery
of the arms, being on the side turned to the light.
All these refinements and ultimate principles, however, do not affect
your drawing for the present. You must try to make your outlines as
_equal_ as possible; and employ pure outline only for the two following
purposes: either (1.) to steady your hand, as in Exercise II., for if
you cannot draw the line itself, you will never be able to terminate
your shadow in the precise shape required, when the line is absent; or
(2.) to give you shorthand memoranda of forms, when you are pressed for
time. Thus the forms of distant trees in groups are defined, for the
most part, by the light edge of the rounded mass of the nearer one being
shown against the darker part of the rounded mass of a more distant one;
and to draw this properly, nearly as much work is required to round each
tree as to round the stone in Fig. 5. Of course you cannot often get
time to do this; but if you mark the terminal line of each tree as is
done by Durer in Fig. 13., you will get a most useful memorandum of
their arrangement, and a very interesting drawing. Only observe in doing
this, you must not, because the procedure is a quick one, hurry that
procedure itself. You will find, on copying that bit of Durer, that
every one of his lines is firm, deliberate, and accurately descriptive
as far as it goes. It means a bush of such a size and such a shape,
definitely observed and set down; it contains a true "signalement" of
every nut-tree, and apple-tree, and higher bit of hedge, all round that