The Crown of Wild Olive
[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