The Crown of Wild Olive
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.
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