The Crown of Wild Olive
[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.
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