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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Elements of Drawing, by John Ruskin
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+
+
+
+Title: The Elements of Drawing
+       In Three Letters to Beginners
+
+
+Author: John Ruskin
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 24, 2009  [eBook #30325]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Marius Borror, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
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+Transcriber's note:
+
+      One typographical error has been corrected: it is listed
+      at the end of the text.
+
+      Illustrations occurring in the middle of a paragraph were
+      moved to the nearest paragraph's begining.
+
+
+
+
+
+Library Edition
+
+THE COMPLETE WORKS
+OF
+JOHN RUSKIN
+
+
+ELEMENTS OF DRAWING AND
+PERSPECTIVE
+THE TWO PATHS
+UNTO THIS LAST
+MUNERA PULVERIS
+SESAME AND LILIES
+ETHICS OF THE DUST
+
+
+National Library Association
+New York             Chicago
+
+
+THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING
+
+IN THREE LETTERS TO BEGINNERS.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                        PAGE
+
+  PREFACE                                                 ix
+
+    LETTER I.
+  ON FIRST PRACTICE                                        1
+
+    LETTER II.
+  SKETCHING FROM NATURE                                   65
+
+    LETTER III.
+  ON COLOR AND COMPOSITION                               106
+
+
+    APPENDIX I.
+  ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES                                     183
+
+    APPENDIX II.
+  THINGS TO BE STUDIED                                   188
+
+
+
+
+["The Elements of Drawing" was written during the winter of 1856. The
+First Edition was published in 1857; the Second followed in the same
+year, with some additions and slight alterations. The Third Edition
+consisted of sixth thousand, 1859; seventh thousand, 1860; and eighth
+thousand, 1861.
+
+The work was partly reproduced in "Our Sketching Club," by the Rev. R.
+St. John Tyrwhitt, M.A., 1874; with new editions in 1875, 1882, and
+1886.
+
+Mr. Ruskin meant, during his tenure of the Slade Professorship at
+Oxford, to recast his teaching, and to write a systematic manual for the
+use of his Drawing School, under the title of "The Laws of Fesole." Of
+this only vol. i. was completed, 1879; second edition, 1882.
+
+As, therefore, "The Elements of Drawing" has never been completely
+superseded, and as many readers of Mr. Ruskin's works have expressed a
+desire to possess the book in its old form, it is now reprinted as it
+stood in 1859.]
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENT
+
+TO
+
+THE SECOND EDITION.
+
+
+As one or two questions, asked of me since the publication of this work,
+have indicated points requiring elucidation, I have added a few short
+notes in the first Appendix. It is not, I think, desirable otherwise to
+modify the form or add to the matter of a book as it passes through
+successive editions; I have, therefore, only mended the wording of some
+obscure sentences; with which exception the text remains, and will
+remain, in its original form, which I had carefully considered. Should
+the public find the book useful, and call for further editions of it,
+such additional notes as may be necessary will be always placed in the
+first Appendix, where they can be at once referred to, in any library,
+by the possessors of the earlier editions; and I will take care they
+shall not be numerous.
+
+  _August 3, 1857._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+i. It may perhaps be thought, that in prefacing a manual of drawing, I
+ought to expatiate on the reasons why drawing should be learned; but
+those reasons appear to me so many and so weighty, that I cannot quickly
+state or enforce them. With the reader's permission, as this volume is
+too large already, I will waive all discussion respecting the importance
+of the subject, and touch only on those points which may appear
+questionable in the method of its treatment.
+
+ii. In the first place, the book is not calculated for the use of
+children under the age of twelve or fourteen. I do not think it
+advisable to engage a child in any but the most voluntary practice of
+art. If it has talent for drawing, it will be continually scrawling on
+what paper it can get; and should be allowed to scrawl at its own free
+will, due praise being given for every appearance of care, or truth, in
+its efforts. It should be allowed to amuse itself with cheap colors
+almost as soon as it has sense enough to wish for them. If it merely
+daubs the paper with shapeless stains, the color-box may be taken away
+till it knows better: but as soon as it begins painting red coats on
+soldiers, striped flags to ships, etc., it should have colors at
+command; and, without restraining its choice of subject in that
+imaginative and historical art, of a military tendency, which children
+delight in, (generally quite as valuable, by the way, as any historical
+art delighted in by their elders,) it should be gently led by the
+parents to try to draw, in such childish fashion as may be, the things
+it can see and likes,--birds, or butterflies, or flowers, or fruit.
+
+iii. In later years, the indulgence of using the color should only be
+granted as a reward, after it has shown care and progress in its
+drawings with pencil. A limited number of good and amusing prints should
+always be within a boy's reach: in these days of cheap illustration he
+can hardly possess a volume of nursery tales without good wood-cuts in
+it, and should be encouraged to copy what he likes best of this kind;
+but should be firmly restricted to a _few_ prints and to a few books. If
+a child has many toys, it will get tired of them and break them; if a
+boy has many prints he will merely dawdle and scrawl over them; it is by
+the limitation of the number of his possessions that his pleasure in
+them is perfected, and his attention concentrated. The parents need give
+themselves no trouble in instructing him, as far as drawing is
+concerned, beyond insisting upon economical and neat habits with his
+colors and paper, showing him the best way of holding pencil and rule,
+and, so far as they take notice of his work, pointing out where a line
+is too short or too long, or too crooked, when compared with the copy;
+_accuracy_ being the first and last thing they look for. If the child
+shows talent for inventing or grouping figures, the parents should
+neither check, nor praise it. They may laugh with it frankly, or show
+pleasure in what it has done, just as they show pleasure in seeing it
+well, or cheerful; but they must not praise it for being clever, any
+more than they would praise it for being stout. They should praise it
+only for what costs it self-denial, namely attention and hard work;
+otherwise they will make it work for vanity's sake, and always badly.
+The best books to put into its hands are those illustrated by George
+Cruikshank or by Richter. (See Appendix.) At about the age of twelve or
+fourteen, it is quite time enough to set youth or girl to serious work;
+and then this book will, I think, be useful to them; and I have good
+hope it may be so, likewise, to persons of more advanced age wishing to
+know something of the first principles of art.
+
+iv. Yet observe, that the method of study recommended is not brought
+forward as absolutely the best, but only as the best which I can at
+present devise for an isolated student. It is very likely that farther
+experience in teaching may enable me to modify it with advantage in
+several important respects; but I am sure the main principles of it are
+sound, and most of the exercises as useful as they can be rendered
+without a master's superintendence. The method differs, however, so
+materially from that generally adopted by drawing-masters, that a word
+or two of explanation may be needed to justify what might otherwise be
+thought willful eccentricity.
+
+v. The manuals at present published on the subject of drawing are all
+directed, as far as I know, to one or other of two objects. Either they
+propose to give the student a power of dexterous sketching with pencil
+or water-color, so as to emulate (at considerable distance) the slighter
+work of our second-rate artists; or they propose to give him such
+accurate command of mathematical forms as may afterwards enable him to
+design rapidly and cheaply for manufactures. When drawing is taught as
+an accomplishment, the first is the aim usually proposed; while the
+second is the object kept chiefly in view at Marlborough House, and in
+the branch Government Schools of Design.
+
+vi. Of the fitness of the modes of study adopted in those schools, to
+the end specially intended, judgment is hardly yet possible; only, it
+seems to me, that we are all too much in the habit of confusing art as
+_applied_ to manufacture, with manufacture itself. For instance, the
+skill by which an inventive workman designs and molds a beautiful cup,
+is skill of true art; but the skill by which that cup is copied and
+afterwards multiplied a thousandfold, is skill of manufacture: and the
+faculties which enable one workman to design and elaborate his original
+piece, are not to be developed by the same system of instruction as
+those which enable another to produce a maximum number of approximate
+copies of it in a given time. Farther: it is surely inexpedient that any
+reference to purposes of manufacture should interfere with the education
+of the artist himself. Try first to manufacture a Raphael; then let
+Raphael direct your manufacture. He will design you a plate, or cup, or
+a house, or a palace, whenever you want it, and design them in the most
+convenient and rational way; but do not let your anxiety to reach the
+platter and the cup interfere with your education of the Raphael. Obtain
+first the best work you can, and the ablest hands, irrespective of any
+consideration of economy or facility of production. Then leave your
+trained artist to determine how far art can be popularized, or
+manufacture ennobled.
+
+vii. Now, I believe that (irrespective of differences in individual
+temper and character) the excellence of an artist, as such, depends
+wholly on refinement of perception, and that it is this, mainly, which a
+master or a school can teach; so that while powers of invention
+distinguish man from man, powers of perception distinguish school from
+school. All great schools enforce delicacy of drawing and subtlety of
+sight: and the only rule which I have, as yet, found to be without
+exception respecting art, is that all great art is delicate.
+
+viii. Therefore, the chief aim and bent of the following system is to
+obtain, first, a perfectly patient, and, to the utmost of the pupil's
+power, a delicate method of work, such as may insure 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-color painting, can understand the work of Titian or Leonardo;
+they must forever remain blind to the refinement of such men's
+penciling, 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 labor than I have
+asked him to undergo.
+
+ix. That labor 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 traveler. 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;[A] 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, etc.) are entirely excluded.
+
+x. 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
+color. I believe that the endeavor to separate, in the course of
+instruction, the observation of light and shade from that of local
+color, 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."
+
+xi. 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.
+
+xii. 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 labor 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.
+
+xiii. 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-color 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 inclose
+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, etc.[B]
+
+xiv. 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.
+
+xv. 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 find himself in difficulties which I have not enough
+provided 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 answerer of questions is
+perseverance; and the best drawing-masters are the woods and hills.
+
+  [1857.]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [A] Or, more accurately, appears to be so, because any one can see
+    an error in a circle.
+
+  [B] If the student is fond of architecture, and wishes to know more
+    of perspective than he can learn in this rough way, Mr. Runciman (of
+    49 Acacia Road, St. John's Wood), who was my first drawing-master,
+    and to whom I owe many happy hours, can teach it him quickly,
+    easily, and rightly. [Mr. Runciman has died since this was written:
+    Mr. Ward's present address is Bedford Chambers, 28 Southampton
+    Street, Strand, London, W.C.]
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ELEMENTS OF DRAWING.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER I.
+
+ON FIRST PRACTICE.
+
+
+1. MY DEAR READER,--Whether this book is to be of use to you or not,
+depends wholly on your reason for wishing to learn to draw. If you
+desire only to possess a graceful accomplishment, to be able to converse
+in a fluent manner about drawing, or to amuse yourself listlessly in
+listless hours, I cannot help you: but if you wish to learn drawing that
+you may be able to set down clearly, and usefully, records of such
+things as cannot be described in words, either to assist your own memory
+of them, or to convey distinct ideas of them to other people; if you
+wish to obtain quicker perceptions of the beauty of the natural world,
+and to preserve something like a true image of beautiful things that
+pass away, or which you must yourself leave; if, also, you wish to
+understand the minds of great painters, and to be able to appreciate
+their work sincerely, seeing it for yourself, and loving it, not merely
+taking up the thoughts of other people about it; then I _can_ help you,
+or, which is better, show you how to help yourself.
+
+2. Only you must understand, first of all, that these powers, which
+indeed are noble and desirable, cannot be got without work. It is much
+easier to learn to draw well, than it is to learn to play well on any
+musical instrument; but you know that it takes three or four years of
+practice, giving three or four hours a day, to acquire even ordinary
+command over the keys of a piano; and you must not think that a masterly
+command of your pencil, and the knowledge of what may be done with it,
+can be acquired without painstaking, or in a _very_ short time. The kind
+of drawing which is taught, or supposed to be taught, in our schools, in
+a term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not
+drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not
+always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil;
+profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of
+vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person,
+after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will
+try to copy the commonest piece of real work--suppose a lithograph on
+the titlepage of a new opera air, or a wood-cut in the cheapest
+illustrated newspaper of the day,--they will find themselves entirely
+beaten. And yet that common lithograph was drawn with coarse chalk, much
+more difficult to manage than the pencil of which an accomplished young
+lady is supposed to have command; and that wood-cut was drawn in urgent
+haste, and half spoiled in the cutting afterwards; and both were done by
+people whom nobody thinks of as artists, or praises for their power;
+both were done for daily bread, with no more artist's pride than any
+simple handicraftsmen feel in the work they live by.
+
+3. Do not, therefore, think that you can learn drawing, any more than a
+new language, without some hard and disagreeable labor. But do not, on
+the other hand, if you are ready and willing to pay this price, fear
+that you may be unable to get on for want of special talent. It is
+indeed true that the persons who have peculiar talent for art, draw
+instinctively, and get on almost without teaching; though never without
+toil. It is true, also, that of inferior talent for drawing there are
+many degrees: it will take one person a much longer time than another to
+attain the same results, and the results thus painfully attained are
+never quite so satisfactory as those got with greater ease when the
+faculties are naturally adapted to the study. But I have never yet, in
+the experiments I have made, met with a person who could not learn to
+draw at all; and, in general, there is a satisfactory and available
+power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all
+persons have the power of learning French, Latin, or arithmetic, in a
+decent and useful degree, if their lot in life requires them to possess
+such knowledge.
+
+4. Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains,
+and to bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I
+can promise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an
+hour's practice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in
+whatever way you find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours'
+practice, will give you sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever
+you want to draw, and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other
+people's work: of which hours if you have one to spare at present, we
+may as well begin at once.
+
+
+EXERCISE I.
+
+5. Everything that you can see in the world around you, presents itself
+to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors
+variously shaded.[1] Some of these patches of color have an appearance
+of lines or texture within them, as a piece of cloth or silk has of
+threads, or an animal's skin shows texture of hairs: but whether this be
+the case or not, the first broad aspect of the thing is that of a patch
+of some definite color; and the first thing to be learned is, how to
+produce extents of smooth color, without texture.
+
+6. This can only be done properly with a brush; but a brush, being soft
+at the point, causes so much uncertainty in the touch of an unpracticed
+hand, that it is hardly possible to learn to draw first with it, and it
+is better to take, in early practice, some instrument with a hard and
+fine point, both that we may give some support to the hand, and that by
+working over the subject with so delicate a point, the attention may be
+properly directed to all the most minute parts of it. Even the best
+artists need occasionally to study subjects with a pointed instrument,
+in order thus to discipline their attention: and a beginner must be
+content to do so for a considerable period.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
+
+7. Also, observe that before we trouble ourselves about differences of
+color, we must be able to lay on _one_ color properly, in whatever
+gradations of depth and whatever shapes we want. We will try, therefore,
+first to lay on tints or patches of gray, of whatever depth we want,
+with a pointed instrument. Take any finely pointed steel pen (one of
+Gillott's lithographic crowquills is best), and a piece of quite smooth,
+but not shining, note-paper, cream laid, and get some ink that has stood
+already some time in the inkstand, so as to be quite black, and as thick
+as it can be without clogging the pen. Take a rule, and draw four
+straight lines, so as to inclose a square, or nearly a square, about as
+large as _a_, Fig. 1. I say nearly a square, because it does not in the
+least matter whether it is quite square or not, the object being merely
+to get a space inclosed by straight lines.
+
+8. Now, try to fill in that square space with crossed lines, so
+completely and evenly that it shall look like a square patch of gray
+silk or cloth, cut out and laid on the white paper, as at _b_. Cover it
+quickly, first with straightish lines, in any direction you like, not
+troubling yourself to draw them much closer or neater than those in the
+square _a_. Let them quite dry before retouching them. (If you draw
+three or four squares side by side, you may always be going on with one
+while the others are drying.) Then cover these lines with others in a
+different direction, and let those dry; then in another direction still,
+and let those dry. Always wait long enough to run no risk of blotting,
+and then draw the lines as quickly as you can. Each ought to be laid on
+as swiftly as the dash of the pen of a good writer; but if you try to
+reach this great speed at first, you will go over the edge of the
+square, which is a fault in this exercise. Yet it is better to do so now
+and then than to draw the lines very slowly; for if you do, the pen
+leaves a little dot of ink at the end of each line, and these dots spoil
+your work. So draw each line quickly, stopping always as nearly as you
+can at the edge of the square. The ends of lines which go over the edge
+are afterwards to be removed with the penknife, but not till you have
+done the whole work, otherwise you roughen the paper, and the next line
+that goes over the edge makes a blot.
+
+9. When you have gone over the whole three or four times, you will find
+some parts of the square look darker than other parts. Now try to make
+the lighter parts as dark as the rest, so that the whole may be of equal
+depth or darkness. You will find, on examining the work, that where it
+looks darkest the lines are closest, or there are some much darker lines
+than elsewhere; therefore you must put in other lines, or little
+scratches and dots, _between_ the lines in the paler parts; and where
+there are any very conspicuous dark lines, scratch them out lightly with
+the penknife, for the eye must not be attracted by any line in
+particular. The more carefully and delicately you fill in the little
+gaps and holes the better; you will get on faster by doing two or three
+squares perfectly than a great many badly. As the tint gets closer and
+begins to look even, work with very little ink in your pen, so as hardly
+to make any mark on the paper; and at last, where it is too dark, use
+the edge of your penknife very lightly, and for some time, to wear it
+softly into an even tone. You will find that the greatest difficulty
+consists in getting evenness: one bit will always look darker than
+another bit of your square; or there will be a granulated and sandy look
+over the whole. When you find your paper quite rough and in a mess,
+give it up and begin another square, but do not rest satisfied till you
+have done your best with every square. The tint at last ought at least
+to be as close and even as that in _b_, Fig. 1. You will find, however,
+that it is very difficult to get a pale tint; because, naturally, the
+ink lines necessary to produce a close tint at all, blacken the paper
+more than you want. You must get over this difficulty not so much by
+leaving the lines wide apart as by trying to draw them excessively fine,
+lightly and swiftly; being very cautious in filling in; and, at last,
+passing the penknife over the whole. By keeping several squares in
+progress at one time, and reserving your pen for the light one just when
+the ink is nearly exhausted, you may get on better. The paper ought, at
+last, to look lightly and evenly toned all over, with no lines
+distinctly visible.
+
+
+EXERCISE II.
+
+10. As this exercise in shading is very tiresome, it will be well to
+vary it by proceeding with another at the same time. The power of
+shading rightly depends mainly on lightness of hand and keenness of
+sight; but there are other qualities required in drawing, dependent not
+merely on lightness, but steadiness of hand; and the eye, to be perfect
+in its power, must be made accurate as well as keen, and not only see
+shrewdly, but measure justly.
+
+11. Possess yourself therefore of any cheap work on botany containing
+_outline_ plates of leaves and flowers, it does not matter whether bad
+or good: Baxter's British Flowering Plants is quite good enough. Copy
+any of the simplest outlines, first with a soft pencil, following it, by
+the eye, as nearly as you can; if it does not look right in proportions,
+rub out and correct it, always by the eye, till you think it is right:
+when you have got it to your mind, lay tracing-paper on the book; on
+this paper trace the outline you have been copying, and apply it to your
+own; and having thus ascertained the faults, correct them all
+patiently, till you have got it as nearly accurate as may be. Work with
+a very soft pencil, and do not rub out so hard[2] as to spoil the
+surface of your paper; never mind how dirty the paper gets, but do not
+roughen it; and let the false outlines alone where they do not really
+interfere with the true one. It is a good thing to accustom yourself to
+hew and shape your drawing out of a dirty piece of paper. When you have
+got it as right as you can, take a quill pen, not very fine at the
+point; rest your hand on a book about an inch and a half thick, so as to
+hold the pen long; and go over your pencil outline with ink, raising
+your pen point as seldom as possible, and never leaning more heavily on
+one part of the line than on another. In most outline drawings of the
+present day, parts of the curves are thickened to give an effect of
+shade; all such outlines are bad, but they will serve well enough for
+your exercises, provided you do not imitate this character: it is
+better, however, if you can, to choose a book of pure outlines. It does
+not in the least matter whether your pen outline be thin or thick; but
+it matters greatly that it should be _equal_, not heavier in one place
+than in another. The power to be obtained is that of drawing an even
+line slowly and in any direction; all dashing lines, or approximations
+to penmanship, are bad. The pen should, as it were, walk slowly over the
+ground, and you should be able at any moment to stop it, or to turn it
+in any other direction, like a well-managed horse.
+
+12. As soon as you can copy every curve _slowly_ and accurately, you
+have made satisfactory progress; but you will find the difficulty is in
+the slowness. It is easy to draw what appears to be a good line with a
+sweep of the hand, or with what is called freedom;[3] the real
+difficulty and masterliness is in never letting the hand _be_ free, but
+keeping it under entire control at every part of the line.
+
+
+EXERCISE III.
+
+13. Meantime, you are always to be going on with your shaded squares,
+and chiefly with these, the outline exercises being taken up only for
+rest.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
+
+As soon as you find you have some command of the pen as a shading
+instrument, and can lay a pale or dark tint as you choose, try to
+produce gradated spaces like Fig. 2, the dark tint passing gradually
+into the lighter ones. Nearly all expression of form, in drawing,
+depends on your power of gradating delicately; and the gradation is
+always most skillful which passes from one tint into another very little
+paler. Draw, therefore, two parallel lines for limits to your work, as
+in Fig. 2, and try to gradate the shade evenly from white to black,
+passing over the greatest possible distance, yet so that every part of
+the band may have visible change in it. The perception of gradation is
+very deficient in all beginners (not to say, in many artists), and you
+will probably, for some time, think your gradation skillful enough, when
+it is quite patchy and imperfect. By getting a piece of gray shaded
+ribbon, and comparing it with your drawing, you may arrive, in early
+stages of your work, at a wholesome dissatisfaction with it. Widen your
+band little by little as you get more skillful, so as to give the
+gradation more lateral space, and accustom yourself at the same time to
+look for gradated spaces in Nature. The sky is the largest and the most
+beautiful; watch it at twilight, after the sun is down, and try to
+consider each pane of glass in the window you look through as a piece of
+paper colored blue, or gray, or purple, as it happens to be, and observe
+how quietly and continuously the gradation extends over the space in the
+window, of one or two feet square. Observe the shades on the outside and
+inside of a common white cup or bowl, which make it look round and
+hollow;[4] and then on folds of white drapery; and thus gradually you
+will be led to observe the more subtle transitions of the light as it
+increases or declines on flat surfaces. At last, when your eye gets keen
+and true, you will see gradation on everything in Nature.
+
+14. But it will not be in your power yet awhile to draw from any objects
+in which the gradations are varied and complicated; nor will it be a bad
+omen for your future progress, and for the use that art is to be made of
+by you, if the first thing at which you aim should be a little bit of
+sky. So take any narrow space of evening sky, that you can usually see,
+between the boughs of a tree, or between two chimneys, or through the
+corner of a pane in the window you like best to sit at, and try to
+gradate a little space of white paper as evenly as that is gradated--as
+_tenderly_ you cannot gradate it without color, no, nor with color
+either; but you may do it as evenly; or, if you get impatient with your
+spots and lines of ink, when you look at the beauty of the sky, the
+sense you will have gained of that beauty is something to be thankful
+for. But you ought not to be impatient with your pen and ink; for all
+great painters, however delicate their perception of color, are fond of
+the peculiar effect of light which may be got in a pen-and-ink sketch,
+and in a wood-cut, by the gleaming of the white paper between the black
+lines; and if you cannot gradate well with pure black lines, you will
+never gradate well with pale ones. By looking at any common wood-cuts,
+in the cheap publications of the day, you may see how gradation is given
+to the sky by leaving the lines farther and farther apart; but you must
+make your lines as fine as you can, as well as far apart, towards the
+light; and do not try to make them long or straight, but let them cross
+irregularly in any directions easy to your hand, depending on nothing
+but their gradation for your effect. On this point of direction of
+lines, however, I shall have to tell you more, presently; in the
+meantime, do not trouble yourself about it.
+
+
+EXERCISE IV.
+
+15. As soon as you find you can gradate tolerably with the pen, take an
+H. or HH. pencil, using its point to produce shade, from the darkest
+possible to the palest, in exactly the same manner as the pen,
+lightening, however, now with india-rubber instead of the penknife. You
+will find that all _pale_ tints of shade are thus easily producible with
+great precision and tenderness, but that you cannot get the same dark
+power as with the pen and ink, and that the surface of the shade is apt
+to become glossy and metallic, or dirty-looking, or sandy. Persevere,
+however, in trying to bring it to evenness with the fine point, removing
+any single speck or line that may be too black, with the _point_ of the
+knife: you must not scratch the whole with the knife as you do the ink.
+If you find the texture very speckled-looking, lighten it all over with
+india-rubber, and recover it again with sharp, and excessively fine
+touches of the pencil point, bringing the parts that are too pale to
+perfect evenness with the darker spots.
+
+You cannot use the point too delicately or cunningly in doing this; work
+with it as if you were drawing the down on a butterfly's wing.
+
+16. At this stage of your progress, if not before, you may be assured
+that some clever friend will come in, and hold up his hands in mocking
+amazement, and ask you who could set you to that "niggling;" and if you
+persevere in it, you will have to sustain considerable persecution from
+your artistical acquaintances generally, who will tell you that all good
+drawing depends on "boldness." But never mind them. You do not hear them
+tell a child, beginning music, to lay its little hand with a crash among
+the keys, in imitation of the great masters: yet they might, as
+reasonably as they may tell you to be bold in the present state of your
+knowledge. Bold, in the sense of being undaunted, yes; but bold in the
+sense of being careless, confident, or exhibitory,--no,--no, and a
+thousand times no; for, even if you were not a beginner, it would be bad
+advice that made you bold. Mischief may easily be done quickly, but good
+and beautiful work is generally done slowly; you will find no boldness
+in the way a flower or a bird's wing is painted; and if Nature is not
+bold at her work, do you think you ought to be at yours? So never mind
+what people say, but work with your pencil point very patiently; and if
+you can trust me in anything, trust me when I tell you, that though
+there are all kinds and ways of art,--large work for large places, small
+work for narrow places, slow work for people who can wait, and quick
+work for people who cannot,--there is one quality, and, I think, only
+one, in which all great and good art agrees;--it is all delicate art.
+Coarse art is always bad art. You cannot understand this at present,
+because you do not know yet how much tender thought, and subtle care,
+the great painters put into touches that at first look coarse; but,
+believe me, it is true, and you will find it is so in due time.
+
+17. You will be perhaps also troubled, in these first essays at pencil
+drawing, by noticing that more delicate gradations are got in an instant
+by a chance touch of the india-rubber, than by an hour's labor with the
+point; and you may wonder why I tell you to produce tints so painfully,
+which might, it appears, be obtained with ease. But there are two
+reasons: the first, that when you come to draw forms, you must be able
+to gradate with absolute precision, in whatever place and direction you
+wish; not in any wise vaguely, as the india-rubber does it: and,
+secondly, that all natural shadows are more or less mingled with gleams
+of light. In the darkness of ground there is the light of the little
+pebbles or dust; in the darkness of foliage, the glitter of the leaves;
+in the darkness of flesh, transparency; in that of a stone, granulation:
+in every case there is some mingling of light, which cannot be
+represented by the leaden tone which you get by rubbing, or by an
+instrument known to artists as the "stump." When you can manage the
+point properly, you will indeed be able to do much also with this
+instrument, or with your fingers; but then you will have to retouch the
+flat tints afterwards, so as to put life and light into them, and that
+can only be done with the point. Labor on, therefore, courageously, with
+that only.
+
+
+EXERCISE V.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 3.]
+
+18. When you can manage to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil
+point, get a good large alphabet, and try to _tint_ the letters into
+shape with the pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure
+their height and extreme breadth with the compasses, as _a b_, _a c_,
+Fig. 3, and then scratch in their shapes gradually; the letter A,
+inclosed within the lines, being in what Turner would have called a
+"state of forwardness." Then, when you are satisfied with the shape of
+the letter, draw pen-and-ink lines firmly round the tint, as at _d_, and
+remove any touches outside the limit, first with the india-rubber, and
+then with the penknife, so that all may look clear and right. If you rub
+out any of the pencil inside the outline of the letter, retouch it,
+closing it up to the inked line. The straight lines of the outline are
+all to be ruled,[5] but the curved lines are to be drawn by the eye and
+hand; and you will soon find what good practice there is in getting the
+curved letters, such as Bs, Cs, etc., to stand quite straight, and come
+into accurate form.
+
+19. All these exercises are very irksome, and they are not to be
+persisted in alone; neither is it necessary to acquire perfect power in
+any of them. An entire master of the pencil or brush ought, indeed, to
+be able to draw any form at once, as Giotto his circle; but such skill
+as this is only to be expected of the consummate master, having pencil
+in hand all his life, and all day long,--hence the force of Giotto's
+proof of his skill; and it is quite possible to draw very beautifully,
+without attaining even an approximation to such a power; the main point
+being, not that every line should be precisely what we intend or wish,
+but that the line which we intended or wished to draw should be right.
+If we always see rightly and mean rightly, we shall get on, though the
+hand may stagger a little; but if we mean wrongly, or mean nothing, it
+does not matter how firm the hand is. Do not therefore torment yourself
+because you cannot do as well as you would like; but work patiently,
+sure that every square and letter will give you a certain increase of
+power; and as soon as you can draw your letters pretty well, here is a
+more amusing exercise for you.
+
+
+EXERCISE VI.
+
+20. Choose any tree that you think pretty, which is nearly bare of
+leaves, and which you can see against the sky, or against a pale wall,
+or other light ground: it must not be against strong light, or you will
+find the looking at it hurt your eyes; nor must it be in sunshine, or
+you will be puzzled by the lights on the boughs. But the tree must be in
+shade; and the sky blue, or gray, or dull white. A wholly gray or rainy
+day is the best for this practice.
+
+21. You will see that all the boughs of the tree are dark against the
+sky. Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map
+with absolute accuracy; and, without the least thought about the
+roundness of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them
+in with pencil, just as you did the limbs of your letters; then correct
+and alter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your
+paper is dirtied (only not destroying its surface), until every bough is
+exactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right in
+curvature and in thickness. Look at the white interstices between them
+with as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you had
+to survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavy
+penalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them, or gave
+the hedge anywhere too deep a curve; and try continually to fancy the
+whole tree nothing but a flat ramification on a white ground. Do not
+take any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confused
+network or mist; leave them all out,[6] drawing only the main branches
+as far as you can see them distinctly, your object at present being not
+to draw a tree, but to learn how to do so. When you have got the thing
+as nearly right as you can,--and it is better to make one good study,
+than twenty left unnecessarily inaccurate,--take your pen, and put a
+fine outline to all the boughs, as you did to your letter, taking care,
+as far as possible, to put the outline within the edge of the shade, so
+as not to make the boughs thicker: the main use of the outline is to
+affirm the whole more clearly; to do away with little accidental
+roughnesses and excrescences, and especially to mark where boughs cross,
+or come in front of each other, as at such points their arrangement in
+this kind of sketch is unintelligible without the outline. It may
+perfectly well happen that in Nature it should be less distinct than
+your outline will make it; but it is better in this kind of sketch to
+mark the facts clearly. The temptation is always to be slovenly and
+careless, and the outline is like a bridle, and forces our indolence
+into attention and precision. The outline should be about the thickness
+of that in Fig. 4, which represents the ramification of a small stone
+pine, only I have not endeavored to represent the pencil shading within
+the outline, as I could not easily express it in a wood-cut; and you
+have nothing to do at present with the indication of foliage above, of
+which in another place. You may also draw your trees as much larger than
+this figure as you like; only, however large they may be, keep the
+outline as delicate, and draw the branches far enough into their outer
+sprays to give quite as slender ramification as you have in this figure,
+otherwise you do not get good enough practice out of them.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
+
+22. You cannot do too many studies of this kind: every one will give you
+some new notion about trees. But when you are tired of tree boughs, take
+any forms whatever which are drawn in flat color, one upon another; as
+patterns on any kind of cloth, or flat china (tiles, for instance),
+executed in two colors only; and practice drawing them of the right
+shape and size by the eye, and filling them in with shade of the depth
+required.
+
+In doing this, you will first have to meet the difficulty of
+representing depth of color by depth of shade. Thus a pattern of
+ultramarine blue will have to be represented by a darker tint of gray
+than a pattern of yellow.
+
+23. And now it is both time for you to begin to learn the mechanical use
+of the brush; and necessary for you to do so in order to provide
+yourself with the gradated scale of color which you will want. If you
+can, by any means, get acquainted with any ordinary skillful water-color
+painter, and prevail on him to show you how to lay on tints with a
+brush, by all means do so; not that you are yet, nor for a long while
+yet, to begin to color, but because the brush is often more convenient
+than the pencil for laying on masses or tints of shade, and the sooner
+you know how to manage it as an instrument the better. If, however, you
+have no opportunity of seeing how water-color is laid on by a workman of
+any kind, the following directions will help you:--
+
+
+EXERCISE VII.
+
+24. Get a shilling cake of Prussian blue. Dip the end of it in water so
+as to take up a drop, and rub it in a white saucer till you cannot rub
+much more, and the color gets dark, thick, and oily-looking. Put two
+teaspoonfuls of water to the color you have rubbed down, and mix it well
+up with a camel's-hair brush about three quarters of an inch long.
+
+25. Then take a piece of smooth, but not glossy, Bristol board or
+pasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as large
+as those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfect
+squares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboard
+on something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping your
+brush into the color you have mixed, and taking up as much of the liquid
+as it will carry, begin at the top of one of the squares, and lay a pond
+or runlet of color along the top edge. Lead this pond of color
+gradually downwards, not faster at one place than another, but as if you
+were adding a row of bricks to a building, all along (only building down
+instead of up), dipping the brush frequently so as to keep the color as
+full in that, and in as great quantity on the paper, as you can, so only
+that it does not run down anywhere in a little stream. But if it should,
+never mind; go on quietly with your square till you have covered it all
+in. When you get to the bottom, the color will lodge there in a great
+wave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, and
+with the dry brush take up the superfluous color as you would with a
+sponge, till it all looks even.
+
+26. In leading the color down, you will find your brush continually go
+over the edge of the square, or leave little gaps within it. Do not
+endeavor to retouch these, nor take much care about them; the great
+thing is to get the color to lie smoothly where it reaches, not in
+alternate blots and pale patches; try, therefore, to lead it over the
+square as fast as possible, with such attention to your limit as you are
+able to give. The use of the exercise is, indeed, to enable you finally
+to strike the color up to the limit with perfect accuracy; but the first
+thing is to get it even,--the power of rightly striking the edge comes
+only by time and practice: even the greatest artists rarely can do this
+quite perfectly.
+
+27. When you have done one square, proceed to do another which does not
+communicate with it. When you have thus done all the alternate squares,
+as on a chess-board, turn the pasteboard upside down, begin again with
+the first, and put another coat over it, and so on over all the others.
+The use of turning the paper upside down is to neutralize the increase
+of darkness towards the bottom of the squares, which would otherwise
+take place from the ponding of the color.
+
+28. Be resolved to use blotting-paper, or a piece of rag, instead of
+your lips, to dry the brush. The habit of doing so, once acquired, will
+save you from much partial poisoning. Take care, however, always to draw
+the brush from root to point, otherwise you will spoil it. You may even
+wipe it as you would a pen when you want it very dry, without doing
+harm, provided you do not crush it upwards. Get a good brush at first,
+and cherish it; it will serve you longer and better than many bad ones.
+
+29. When you have done the squares all over again, do them a third time,
+always trying to keep your edges as neat as possible. When your color is
+exhausted, mix more in the same proportions, two teaspoonfuls to as much
+as you can grind with a drop; and when you have done the alternate
+squares three times over, as the paper will be getting very damp, and
+dry more slowly, begin on the white squares, and bring them up to the
+same tint in the same way. The amount of jagged dark line which then
+will mark the limits of the squares will be the exact measure of your
+unskillfulness.
+
+30. As soon as you tire of squares draw circles (with compasses); and
+then draw straight lines irregularly across circles, and fill up the
+spaces so produced between the straight line and the circumference; and
+then draw any simple shapes of leaves, according to the exercise No.
+II., and fill up those, until you can lay on color quite evenly in any
+shape you want.
+
+31. You will find in the course of this practice, as you cannot always
+put exactly the same quantity of water to the color, that the darker the
+color is, the more difficult it becomes to lay it on evenly. Therefore,
+when you have gained some definite degree of power, try to fill in the
+forms required with a full brush, and a dark tint, at once, instead of
+laying several coats one over another; always taking care that the tint,
+however dark, be quite liquid; and that, after being laid on, so much of
+it is absorbed as to prevent its forming a black line at the edge as it
+dries. A little experience will teach you how apt the color is to do
+this, and how to prevent it; not that it needs always to be prevented,
+for a great master in water-colors will sometimes draw a firm outline,
+when he _wants_ one, simply by letting the color dry in this way at the
+edge.
+
+32. When, however, you begin to cover complicated forms with the darker
+color, no rapidity will prevent the tint from drying irregularly as it
+is led on from part to part. You will then find the following method
+useful. Lay in the color very pale and liquid; so pale, indeed, that you
+can only just see where it is on the paper. Lead it up to all the
+outlines, and make it precise in form, keeping it thoroughly wet
+everywhere. Then, when it is all in shape, take the darker color, and
+lay some of it _into_ the middle of the liquid color. It will spread
+gradually in a branchy kind of way, and you may now lead it up to the
+outlines already determined, and play it with the brush till it fills
+its place well; then let it dry, and it will be as flat and pure as a
+single dash, yet defining all the complicated forms accurately.
+
+33. Having thus obtained the power of laying on a tolerably flat tint,
+you must try to lay on a gradated one. Prepare the color with three or
+four teaspoonfuls of water; then, when it is mixed, pour away about
+two-thirds of it, keeping a teaspoonful of pale color. Sloping your
+paper as before, draw two pencil lines all the way down, leaving a space
+between them of the width of a square on your chess-board. Begin at the
+top of your paper, between the lines; and having struck on the first
+brushful of color, and led it down a little, dip your brush deep in
+water, and mix up the color on the plate quickly with as much more water
+as the brush takes up at that one dip: then, with this paler color, lead
+the tint farther down. Dip in water again, mix the color again, and thus
+lead down the tint, always dipping in water once between each
+replenishing of the brush, and stirring the color on the plate well, but
+as quickly as you can. Go on until the color has become so pale that you
+cannot see it; then wash your brush thoroughly in water, and carry the
+wave down a little farther with that, and then absorb it with the dry
+brush, and leave it to dry.
+
+34. If you get to the bottom of your paper before your color gets pale,
+you may either take longer paper, or begin, with the tint as it was when
+you left off, on another sheet; but be sure to exhaust it to pure
+whiteness at last. When all is quite dry, recommence at the top with
+another similar mixture of color, and go down in the same way. Then
+again, and then again, and so continually until the color at the top of
+the paper is as dark as your cake of Prussian blue, and passes down into
+pure white paper at the end of your column, with a perfectly smooth
+gradation from one into the other.
+
+35. You will find at first that the paper gets mottled or wavy, instead
+of evenly gradated; this is because at some places you have taken up
+more water in your brush than at others, or not mixed it thoroughly on
+the plate, or led one tint too far before replenishing with the next.
+Practice only will enable you to do it well; the best artists cannot
+always get gradations of this kind quite to their minds; nor do they
+ever leave them on their pictures without after-touching.
+
+36. As you get more power, and can strike the color more quickly down,
+you will be able to gradate in less compass;[7] beginning with a small
+quantity of color, and adding a drop of water, instead of a brushful;
+with finer brushes, also, you may gradate to a less scale. But slight
+skill will enable you to test the relations of color to shade as far as
+is necessary for your immediate progress, which is to be done thus:--
+
+37. Take cakes of lake, of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt,
+and vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done
+with the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[8] Cut a narrow
+slip, all the way down, of each gradated color, and set the three slips
+side by side; fasten them down, and rule lines at equal distances across
+all the three, so as to divide them into fifty degrees, and number the
+degrees of each, from light to dark, 1, 2, 3, etc. If you have gradated
+them rightly, the darkest part either of the red or blue will be nearly
+equal in power to the darkest part of the blue-black, and any degree of
+the black slip will also, accurately enough for our purpose, balance in
+weight the degree similarly numbered in the red or the blue slip. Then,
+when you are drawing from objects of a crimson or blue color, if you
+can match their color by any compartment of the crimson or blue in your
+scales, the gray in the compartment of the gray scale marked with the
+same number is the gray which must represent that crimson or blue in
+your light and shade drawing.
+
+38. Next, prepare scales with gamboge, cobalt, and vermilion. You will
+find that you cannot darken these beyond a certain point;[9] for yellow
+and scarlet, so long as they remain yellow and scarlet, cannot approach
+to black; we cannot have, properly speaking, a dark yellow or dark
+scarlet. Make your scales of full yellow, blue, and scarlet, half-way
+down; passing _then_ gradually to white. Afterwards use lake to darken
+the upper half of the vermilion and gamboge; and Prussian blue to darken
+the cobalt. You will thus have three more scales, passing from white
+nearly to black, through yellow and orange, through sky-blue, and
+through scarlet. By mixing the gamboge and Prussian blue you may make
+another with green; mixing the cobalt and lake, another with violet; the
+sepia alone will make a forcible brown one; and so on, until you have as
+many scales as you like, passing from black to white through different
+colors. Then, supposing your scales properly gradated and equally
+divided, the compartment or degree No. 1 of the gray will represent in
+chiaroscuro the No. 1 of all the other colors; No. 2 of gray the No. 2
+of the other colors, and so on.
+
+39. It is only necessary, however, in this matter that you should
+understand the principle; for it would never be possible for you to
+gradate your scales so truly as to make them practically accurate and
+serviceable; and even if you could, unless you had about ten thousand
+scales, and were able to change them faster than ever juggler changed
+cards, you could not in a day measure the tints on so much as one side
+of a frost-bitten apple. But when once you fully understand the
+principle, and see how all colors contain as it were a certain quantity
+of darkness, or power of dark relief from white--some more, some less;
+and how this pitch or power of each may be represented by equivalent
+values of gray, you will soon be able to arrive shrewdly at an
+approximation by a glance of the eye, without any measuring scale at
+all.
+
+40. You must now go on, again with the pen, drawing patterns, and any
+shapes of shade that you think pretty, as veinings in marble or
+tortoiseshell, spots in surfaces of shells, etc., as tenderly as you
+can, in the darknesses that correspond to their colors; and when you
+find you can do this successfully, it is time to begin rounding.
+
+
+EXERCISE VIII.
+
+41. Go out into your garden, or into the road, and pick up the first
+round or oval stone you can find, not very white, nor very dark; and the
+smoother it is the better, only it must not _shine_. Draw your table
+near the window, and put the stone, which I will suppose is about the
+size of _a_ in Fig. 5 (it had better not be much larger), on a piece of
+not very white paper, on the table in front of you. Sit so that the
+light may come from your left, else the shadow of the pencil point
+interferes with your sight of your work. You must not let the _sun_ fall
+on the stone, but only ordinary light: therefore choose a window which
+the sun does not come in at. If you can shut the shutters of the other
+windows in the room it will be all the better; but this is not of much
+consequence.
+
+42. Now if you can draw that stone, you can draw anything; I mean,
+anything that is drawable. Many things (sea foam, for instance) cannot
+be drawn at all, only the idea of them more or less suggested; but if
+you can draw the stone _rightly_, everything within reach of art is also
+within yours.
+
+For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing
+_Roundness_. If you can once do that, all the rest is easy and
+straightforward; if you cannot do that, nothing else that you may be
+able to do will be of any use. For Nature is all made up of roundnesses;
+not the roundness of perfect globes, but of variously curved surfaces.
+Boughs are rounded, leaves are rounded, stones are rounded, clouds are
+rounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded: there is no more
+flatness in the natural world than there is vacancy. The world itself is
+round, and so is all that is in it, more or less, except human work,
+which is often very flat indeed.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
+
+Therefore, set yourself steadily to conquer that round stone, and you
+have won the battle.
+
+43. Look your stone antagonist boldly in the face. You will see that the
+side of it next the window is lighter than most of the paper; that the
+side of it farthest from the window is darker than the paper; and that
+the light passes into the dark gradually, while a shadow is thrown to
+the right on the paper itself by the stone: the general appearance of
+things being more or less as in _a_, Fig. 5, the spots on the stone
+excepted, of which more presently.
+
+44. Now, remember always what was stated in the outset, that everything
+you can see in Nature is seen only so far as it is lighter or darker
+than the things about it, or of a different color from them. It is
+either seen as a patch of one color on a ground of another; or as a pale
+thing relieved from a dark thing, or a dark thing from a pale thing. And
+if you can put on patches of color or shade of exactly the same size,
+shape, and gradations as those on the object and its ground, you will
+produce the appearance of the object and its ground. The best
+draughtsman--Titian and Paul Veronese themselves--could do no more than
+this; and you will soon be able to get some power of doing it in an
+inferior way, if you once understand the exceeding simplicity of what is
+to be done. Suppose you have a brown book on a white sheet of paper, on
+a red tablecloth. You have nothing to do but to put on spaces of red,
+white, and brown, in the same shape, and gradated from dark to light in
+the same degrees, and your drawing is done. If you will not look at what
+you see, if you try to put on brighter or duller colors than are there,
+if you try to put them on with a dash or a blot, or to cover your paper
+with "vigorous" lines, or to produce anything, in fact, but the plain,
+unaffected, and finished tranquillity of the thing before you, you need
+not hope to get on. Nature will show you nothing if you set yourself up
+for her master. But forget yourself, and try to obey her, and you will
+find obedience easier and happier than you think.
+
+45. The real difficulties are to get the refinement of the forms and the
+evenness of the gradations. You may depend upon it, when you are
+dissatisfied with your work, it is always too coarse or too uneven. It
+may not be wrong--in all probability is not wrong, in any (so-called)
+great point. But its edges are not true enough in outline; and its
+shades are in blotches, or scratches, or full of white holes. Get it
+more tender and more true, and you will find it is more powerful.
+
+46. Do not, therefore, think your drawing must be weak because you have
+a finely pointed pen in your hand. Till you can draw with that, you can
+draw with nothing; when you can draw with that, you can draw with a log
+of wood charred at the end. True boldness and power are only to be
+gained by care. Even in fencing and dancing, all ultimate ease depends
+on early precision in the commencement; much more in singing or drawing.
+
+47. Now I do not want you to copy my sketch in Fig. 5, but to copy the
+stone before you in the way that my sketch is done. To which end, first
+measure the extreme length of the stone with compasses, and mark that
+length on your paper; then, between the points marked, leave something
+like the form of the stone in light, scrawling the paper all over, round
+it; _b_, in Fig. 5, is a beginning of this kind. Rather leave too much
+room for the high light, than too little; and then more cautiously fill
+in the shade, shutting the light gradually up, and putting in the dark
+slowly on the dark side. You need not plague yourself about accuracy of
+shape, because, till you have practiced a great deal, it is impossible
+for you to draw the shape of the stone quite truly, and you must
+gradually gain correctness by means of these various exercises: what you
+have mainly to do at present is, to get the stone to look solid and
+round, not much minding what its exact contour is--only draw it as
+nearly right as you can without vexation; and you will get it more right
+by thus feeling your way to it in shade, than if you tried to draw the
+outline at first. For you can _see_ no outline; what you see is only a
+certain space of gradated shade, with other such spaces about it; and
+those pieces of shade you are to imitate as nearly as you can, by
+scrawling the paper over till you get them to the right shape, with the
+same gradations which they have in Nature. And this is really more
+likely to be done well, if you have to fight your way through a little
+confusion in the sketch, than if you have an accurately traced outline.
+For instance, having sketched the fossil sea-urchin at _a_, in Fig. 5,
+whose form, though irregular, required more care in following than that
+of a common stone, I was going to draw it also under another effect;
+reflected light bringing its dark side out from the background: but when
+I had laid on the first few touches I thought it would be better to
+stop, and let you see how I had begun it, at _b_. In which beginning it
+will be observed that nothing is so determined but that I can more or
+less modify, and add to or diminish the contour as I work on, the lines
+which suggest the outline being blended with the others if I do not want
+them; and the having to fill up the vacancies and conquer the
+irregularities of such a sketch will probably secure a higher completion
+at last, than if half an hour had been spent in getting a true outline
+before beginning.
+
+48. In doing this, however, take care not to get the drawing too dark.
+In order to ascertain what the shades of it really are, cut a round
+hole, about half the size of a pea, in a piece of white paper the color
+of that you use to draw on. Hold this bit of paper with the hole in it,
+between you and your stone; and pass the paper backwards and forwards,
+so as to see the different portions of the stone (or other subject)
+through the hole. You will find that, thus, the circular hole looks like
+one of the patches of color you have been accustomed to match, only
+changing in depth as it lets different pieces of the stone be seen
+through it. You will be able thus actually to _match_ the color of the
+stone at any part of it, by tinting the paper beside the circular
+opening. And you will find that this opening never looks quite _black_,
+but that all the roundings of the stone are given by subdued grays.[10]
+
+49. You will probably find, also, that some parts of the stone, or of
+the paper it lies on, look luminous through the opening; so that the
+little circle then tells as a light spot instead of a dark spot. When
+this is so, you cannot imitate it, for you have no means of getting
+light brighter than white paper: but by holding the paper more sloped
+towards the light, you will find that many parts of the stone, which
+before looked light through the hole, then look dark through it; and if
+you can place the paper in such a position that every part of the stone
+looks slightly dark, the little hole will tell always as a spot of
+shade, and if your drawing is put in the same light, you can imitate or
+match every gradation. You will be amazed to find, under these
+circumstances, how slight the differences of tint are, by which, through
+infinite delicacy of gradation, Nature can express form.
+
+If any part of your subject will obstinately show itself as a light
+through the hole, that part you need not hope to imitate. Leave it
+white; you can do no more.
+
+50. When you have done the best you can to get the general form, proceed
+to finish, by imitating the texture and all the cracks and stains of the
+stone as closely as you can; and note, in doing this, that cracks or
+fissures of any kind, whether between stones in walls, or in the grain
+of timber or rocks, or in any of the thousand other conditions they
+present, are never expressible by single black lines, or lines of simple
+shadow. A crack must always have its complete system of light and shade,
+however small its scale. It is in reality a little ravine, with a dark
+or shady side, and light or sunny side, and, usually, shadow in the
+bottom. This is one of the instances in which it may be as well to
+understand the reason of the appearance; it is not often so in drawing,
+for the aspects of things are so subtle and confused that they cannot in
+general be explained; and in the endeavor to explain some, we are sure
+to lose sight of others, while the natural overestimate of the
+importance of those on which the attention is fixed causes us to
+exaggerate them, so that merely scientific draughtsmen caricature a
+third part of Nature, and miss two-thirds. The best scholar is he whose
+eye is so keen as to see at once how the thing looks, and who need not
+therefore trouble himself with any reasons why it looks so: but few
+people have this acuteness of perception; and to those who are destitute
+of it, a little pointing out of rule and reason will be a help,
+especially when a master is not near them. I never allow my own pupils
+to ask the reason of anything, because, as I watch their work, I can
+always show them how the thing is, and what appearance they are missing
+in it; but when a master is not by to direct the sight, science may,
+here and there, be allowed to do so in his stead.
+
+51. Generally, then, every solid illumined object--for instance, the
+stone you are drawing--has a light side turned towards the light, a dark
+side turned away from the light, and a shadow, which is cast on
+something else (as by the stone on the paper it is set upon). You may
+sometimes be placed so as to see only the light side and shadow,
+sometimes only the dark side and shadow, and sometimes both or either
+without the shadow; but in most positions solid objects will show all
+the three, as the stone does here.
+
+52. Hold up your hand with the edge of it towards you, as you sit now
+with your side to the window, so that the flat of your hand is turned to
+the window. You will see one side of your hand distinctly lighted, the
+other distinctly in shade. Here are light side and dark side, with no
+seen shadow; the shadow being detached, perhaps on the table, perhaps on
+the other side of the room; you need not look for it at present.
+
+53. Take a sheet of note-paper, and holding it edgewise, as you hold
+your hand, wave it up and down past the side of your hand which is
+turned from the light, the paper being of course farther from the
+window. You will see, as it passes, a strong gleam of light strike on
+your hand, and light it considerably on its dark side. This light is
+_reflected_ light. It is thrown back from the paper (on which it strikes
+first in coming from the window) to the surface of your hand, just as a
+ball would be if somebody threw it through the window at the wall and
+you caught it at the rebound.
+
+Next, instead of the note-paper, take a red book, or a piece of scarlet
+cloth. You will see that the gleam of light falling on your hand, as
+you wave the book, is now reddened. Take a blue book, and you will find
+the gleam is blue. Thus every object will cast some of its own color
+back in the light that it reflects.
+
+54. Now it is not only these books or papers that reflect light to your
+hand: every object in the room on that side of it reflects some, but
+more feebly, and the colors mixing all together form a neutral[11]
+light, which lets the color of your hand itself be more distinctly seen
+than that of any object which reflects light to it; but if there were no
+reflected light, that side of your hand would look as black as a coal.
+
+55. Objects are seen therefore, in general, partly by direct light, and
+partly by light reflected from the objects around them, or from the
+atmosphere and clouds. The color of their light sides depends much on
+that of the direct light, and that of the dark sides on the colors of
+the objects near them. It is therefore impossible to say beforehand what
+color an object will have at any point of its surface, that color
+depending partly on its own tint, and partly on infinite combinations of
+rays reflected from other things. The only certain fact about dark sides
+is, that their color will be changeful, and that a picture which gives
+them merely darker shades of the color of the light sides must assuredly
+be bad.
+
+56. Now, lay your hand flat on the white paper you are drawing on. You
+will see one side of each finger lighted, one side dark, and the shadow
+of your hand on the paper. Here, therefore, are the three divisions of
+shade seen at once. And although the paper is white, and your hand of a
+rosy color somewhat darker than white, yet you will see that the shadow
+all along, just under the finger which casts it, is darker than the
+flesh, and is of a very deep gray. The reason of this is, that much
+light is reflected from the paper to the dark side of your finger, but
+very little is reflected from other things to the paper itself in that
+chink under your finger.
+
+57. In general, for this reason, a shadow, or, at any rate, the part of
+the shadow nearest the object, is darker than the dark side of the
+object. I say in general, because a thousand accidents may interfere to
+prevent its being so. Take a little bit of glass, as a wine-glass, or
+the ink-bottle, and play it about a little on the side of your hand
+farthest from the window; you will presently find you are throwing
+gleams of light all over the dark side of your hand, and in some
+positions of the glass the reflection from it will annihilate the shadow
+altogether, and you will see your hand dark on the white paper. Now a
+stupid painter would represent, for instance, a drinking-glass beside
+the hand of one of his figures, and because he had been taught by rule
+that "shadow was darker than the dark side," he would never think of the
+reflection from the glass, but paint a dark gray under the hand, just as
+if no glass were there. But a great painter would be sure to think of
+the true effect, and paint it; and then comes the stupid critic, and
+wonders why the hand is so light on its dark side.
+
+58. Thus it is always dangerous to assert anything as a _rule_ in
+matters of art; yet it is useful for you to remember that, in a general
+way, a shadow is darker than the dark side of the thing that casts it,
+supposing the colors otherwise the same; that is to say, when a white
+object casts a shadow on a white surface, or a dark object on a dark
+surface: the rule will not hold if the colors are different, the shadow
+of a black object on a white surface being, of course, not so dark,
+usually, as the black thing casting it. The only way to ascertain the
+ultimate truth in such matters is to _look_ for it; but, in the
+meantime, you will be helped by noticing that the cracks in the stone
+are little ravines, on one side of which the light strikes sharply,
+while the other is in shade. This dark side usually casts a little
+darker shadow at the bottom of the crack; and the general tone of the
+stone surface is not so bright as the light bank of the ravine. And,
+therefore, if you get the surface of the object of a uniform tint, more
+or less indicative of shade, and then scratch out a white spot or
+streak in it of any shape; by putting a dark touch beside this white
+one, you may turn it, as you choose, into either a ridge or an incision,
+into either a boss or a cavity. If you put the dark touch on the side of
+it nearest the sun, or rather, nearest the place that the light comes
+from, you will make it a cut or cavity; if you put it on the opposite
+side, you will make it a ridge or mound; and the complete success of the
+effect depends less on depth of shade than on the rightness of the
+drawing; that is to say, on the evident correspondence of the form of
+the shadow with the form that casts it. In drawing rocks, or wood, or
+anything irregularly shaped, you will gain far more by a little patience
+in following the forms carefully, though with slight touches, than by
+labored finishing of texture of surface and transparencies of shadow.
+
+59. When you have got the whole well into shape, proceed to lay on the
+stains and spots with great care, quite as much as you gave to the
+forms. Very often, spots or bars of local color do more to express form
+than even the light and shade, and they are always interesting as the
+means by which Nature carries light into her shadows, and shade into her
+lights; an art of which we shall have more to say hereafter, in speaking
+of composition. _a_, in Fig. 5, is a rough sketch of a fossil
+sea-urchin, in which the projections of the shell are of black flint,
+coming through a chalky surface. These projections form dark spots in
+the light; and their sides, rising out of the shadow, form smaller
+whiter spots in the dark. You may take such scattered lights as these
+out with the penknife, provided you are just as careful to place them
+rightly as if you got them by a more laborious process.
+
+60. When you have once got the feeling of the way in which gradation
+expresses roundness and projection, you may try your strength on
+anything natural or artificial that happens to take your fancy, provided
+it be not too complicated in form. I have asked you to draw a stone
+first, because any irregularities and failures in your shading will be
+less offensive to you, as being partly characteristic of the rough stone
+surface, than they would be in a more delicate subject; and you may as
+well go on drawing rounded stones of different shapes for a little
+while, till you find you can really shade delicately. You may then take
+up folds of thick white drapery, a napkin or towel thrown carelessly on
+the table is as good as anything, and try to express them in the same
+way; only now you will find that your shades must be wrought with
+perfect unity and tenderness, or you will lose the flow of the folds.
+Always remember that a little bit perfected is worth more than many
+scrawls; whenever you feel yourself inclined to scrawl, give up work
+resolutely, and do not go back to it till next day. Of course your towel
+or napkin must be put on something that may be locked up, so that its
+folds shall not be disturbed till you have finished. If you find that
+the folds will not look right, get a photograph of a piece of drapery
+(there are plenty now to be bought, taken from the sculpture of the
+cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres, which will at once educate
+your hand and your taste), and copy some piece of that; you will then
+ascertain what it is that is wanting in your studies from Nature,
+whether more gradation, or greater watchfulness of the disposition of
+the folds. Probably for some time you will find yourself failing
+painfully in both, for drapery is very difficult to follow in its
+sweeps; but do not lose courage, for the greater the difficulty, the
+greater the gain in the effort. If your eye is more just in measurement
+of form than delicate in perception of tint, a pattern on the folded
+surface will help you. Try whether it does or not: and if the patterned
+drapery confuses you, keep for a time to the simple white one; but if it
+helps you, continue to choose patterned stuffs (tartans and simple
+checkered designs are better at first than flowered ones), and even
+though it should confuse you, begin pretty soon to use a pattern
+occasionally, copying all the distortions and perspective modifications
+of it among the folds with scrupulous care.
+
+61. Neither must you suppose yourself condescending in doing this. The
+greatest masters are always fond of drawing patterns; and the greater
+they are, the more pains they take to do it truly.[12] Nor can there be
+better practice at any time, as introductory to the nobler complication
+of natural detail. For when you can draw the spots which follow the
+folds of a printed stuff, you will have some chance of following the
+spots which fall into the folds of the skin of a leopard as he leaps;
+but if you cannot draw the manufacture, assuredly you will never be able
+to draw the creature. So the cloudings on a piece of wood, carefully
+drawn, will be the best introduction to the drawing of the clouds of the
+sky, or the waves of the sea; and the dead leaf-patterns on a damask
+drapery, well rendered, will enable you to disentangle masterfully the
+living leaf-patterns of a thorn thicket or a violet bank.
+
+62. Observe, however, in drawing any stuffs, or bindings of books, or
+other finely textured substances, do not trouble yourself, as yet, much
+about the wooliness or gauziness of the thing; but get it right in shade
+and fold, and true in pattern. We shall see, in the course of
+after-practice, how the penned lines may be made indicative of texture;
+but at present attend only to the light and shade and pattern. You will
+be puzzled at first by _lustrous_ surfaces, but a little attention will
+show you that the expression of these depends merely on the right
+drawing of their light and shade, and reflections. Put a small black
+japanned tray on the table in front of some books; and you will see it
+reflects the objects beyond it as in a little black rippled pond; its
+own color mingling always with that of the reflected objects. Draw these
+reflections of the books properly, making them dark and distorted, as
+you will see that they are, and you will find that this gives the luster
+to your tray. It is not well, however, to draw polished objects in
+general practice; only you should do one or two in order to understand
+the aspect of any lustrous portion of other things, such as you cannot
+avoid; the gold, for instance, on the edges of books, or the shining of
+silk and damask, in which lies a great part of the expression of their
+folds. Observe also that there are very few things which are totally
+without luster; you will frequently find a light which puzzles you, on
+some apparently dull surface, to be the dim image of another object.
+
+63. And now, as soon as you can conscientiously assure me that with the
+point of the pen or pencil you can lay on any form and shade you like, I
+give you leave to use the brush with one color,--sepia, or blue black,
+or mixed cobalt and blue black, or neutral tint; and this will much
+facilitate your study, and refresh you. But, preliminary, you must do
+one or two more exercises in tinting.
+
+
+EXERCISE IX.
+
+64. Prepare your color as directed for Exercise VII. Take a brush full
+of it, and strike it on the paper in any irregular shape; as the brush
+gets dry, sweep the surface of the paper with it as if you were dusting
+the paper very lightly; every such sweep of the brush will leave a
+number of more or less minute interstices in the color. The lighter and
+faster every dash the better. Then leave the whole to dry; and, as soon
+as it is dry, with little color in your brush, so that you can bring it
+to a fine point, fill up all the little interstices one by one, so as to
+make the whole as even as you can, and fill in the larger gaps with more
+color, always trying to let the edges of the first and of the newly
+applied color exactly meet, and not lap over each other. When your new
+color dries, you will find it in places a little paler than the first.
+Retouch it therefore, trying to get the whole to look quite one piece. A
+very small bit of color thus filled up with your very best care, and
+brought to look as if it had been quite even from the first, will give
+you better practice and more skill than a great deal filled in
+carelessly; so do it with your best patience, not leaving the most
+minute spot of white; and do not fill in the large pieces first and then
+go to the small, but quietly and steadily cover in the whole up to a
+marked limit; then advance a little farther, and so on; thus always
+seeing distinctly what is done and what undone.
+
+
+EXERCISE X.
+
+65. Lay a coat of the blue, prepared as usual, over a whole square of
+paper. Let it dry. Then another coat over four fifths of the square, or
+thereabouts, leaving the edge rather irregular than straight, and let it
+dry. Then another coat over three fifths; another over two fifths; and
+the last over one fifth; so that the square may present the appearance
+of gradual increase in darkness in five bands, each darker than the one
+beyond it. Then, with the brush rather dry (as in the former exercise,
+when filling up the interstices), try, with small touches, like those
+used in the pen etching, only a little broader, to add shade delicately
+beyond each edge, so as to lead the darker tints into the paler ones
+imperceptibly. By touching the paper very lightly, and putting a
+multitude of little touches, crossing and recrossing in every direction,
+you will gradually be able to work up to the darker tints, outside of
+each, so as quite to efface their edges, and unite them tenderly with
+the next tint. The whole square, when done, should look evenly shaded
+from dark to pale, with no bars, only a crossing texture of touches,
+something like chopped straw, over the whole.[13]
+
+66. Next, take your rounded pebble; arrange it in any light and shade
+you like; outline it very loosely with the pencil. Put on a wash of
+color, prepared _very_ pale, quite flat over all of it, except the
+highest light, leaving the edge of your color quite sharp. Then another
+wash, extending only over the darker parts, leaving the edge of that
+sharp also, as in tinting the square. Then another wash over the still
+darker parts, and another over the darkest, leaving each edge to dry
+sharp. Then, with the small touches, efface the edges, reinforce the
+darks, and work the whole delicately together as you would with the pen,
+till you have got it to the likeness of the true light and shade. You
+will find that the tint underneath is a great help, and that you can now
+get effects much more subtle and complete than with the pen merely.
+
+67. The use of leaving the edges always sharp is that you may not
+trouble or vex the color, but let it lie as it falls suddenly on the
+paper: color looks much more lovely when it has been laid on with a dash
+of the brush, and left to dry in its own way, than when it has been
+dragged about and disturbed; so that it is always better to let the
+edges and forms be a little wrong, even if one cannot correct them
+afterwards, than to lose this fresh quality of the tint. Very great
+masters in water color can lay on the true forms at once with a dash,
+and bad masters in water color lay on grossly false forms with a dash,
+and leave them false; for people in general, not knowing false from
+true, are as much pleased with the appearance of power in the irregular
+blot as with the presence of power in the determined one; but _we_, in
+our beginnings, must do as much as we can with the broad dash, and then
+correct with the point, till we are quite right. We must take care to be
+right, at whatever cost of pains; and then gradually we shall find we
+can be right with freedom.
+
+68. I have hitherto limited you to color mixed with two or three
+teaspoonfuls of water; but, in finishing your light and shade from the
+stone, you may, as you efface the edge of the palest coat towards the
+light, use the color for the small touches with more and more water,
+till it is so pale as not to be perceptible. Thus you may obtain a
+perfect gradation to the light. And in reinforcing the darks, when they
+are very dark, you may use less and less water. If you take the color
+tolerably dark on your brush, only always liquid (not pasty), and dash
+away the superfluous color on blotting paper, you will find that,
+touching the paper very lightly with the dry brush, you can, by repeated
+touches, produce a dusty kind of bloom, very valuable in giving depth to
+shadow; but it requires great patience and delicacy of hand to do this
+properly. You will find much of this kind of work in the grounds and
+shadows of William Hunt's drawings.[14]
+
+69. As you get used to the brush and color, you will gradually find out
+their ways for yourself, and get the management of them. And you will
+often save yourself much discouragement by remembering what I have so
+often asserted,--that if anything goes wrong, it is nearly sure to be
+refinement that is wanting, not force; and connection, not alteration.
+If you dislike the state your drawing is in, do not lose patience with
+it, nor dash at it, nor alter its plan, nor rub it desperately out, at
+the place you think wrong; but look if there are no shadows you can
+gradate more perfectly; no little gaps and rents you can fill; no forms
+you can more delicately define: and do not _rush_ at any of the errors
+or incompletions thus discerned, but efface or supply slowly, and you
+will soon find your drawing take another look. A very useful expedient
+in producing some effects, is to wet the paper, and then lay the color
+on it, more or less wet, according to the effect you want. You will soon
+see how prettily it gradates itself as it dries; when dry, you can
+reinforce it with delicate stippling when you want it darker. Also,
+while the color is still damp on the paper, by drying your brush
+thoroughly, and touching the color with the brush so dried, you may take
+out soft lights with great tenderness and precision. Try all sorts of
+experiments of this kind, noticing how the color behaves; but
+remembering always that your final results must be obtained, and can
+only be obtained, by pure work with the point, as much as in the pen
+drawing.
+
+70. You will find also, as you deal with more and more complicated
+subjects, that Nature's resources in light and shade are so much richer
+than yours, that you cannot possibly get all, or anything like all, the
+gradations of shadow in any given group. When this is the case,
+determine first to keep the broad masses of things distinct: if, for
+instance, there is a green book, and a white piece of paper, and a black
+inkstand in the group, be sure to keep the white paper as a light mass,
+the green book as a middle tint mass, the black inkstand as a dark mass;
+and do not shade the folds in the paper, or corners of the book, so as
+to equal in depth the darkness of the inkstand. The great difference
+between the masters of light and shade, and imperfect artists, is the
+power of the former to draw so delicately as to express form in a
+dark-colored object with little light, and in a light-colored object
+with little darkness; and it is better even to leave the forms here and
+there unsatisfactorily rendered than to lose the general relations of
+the great masses. And this, observe, not because masses are grand or
+desirable things in your composition (for with composition at present
+you have nothing whatever to do), but because it is a fact that things
+do so present themselves to the eyes of men, and that we see paper,
+book, and inkstand as three separate things, before we see the wrinkles,
+or chinks, or corners of any of the three. Understand, therefore, at
+once, that no detail can be as strongly expressed in drawing as it is in
+reality; and strive to keep all your shadows and marks and minor
+markings on the masses, lighter than they appear to be in Nature; you
+are sure otherwise to get them too dark. You will in doing this find
+that you cannot get the projection of things sufficiently shown; but
+never mind that; there is no need that they should appear to project,
+but great need that their relations of shade to each other should be
+preserved. All deceptive projection is obtained by partial exaggeration
+of shadow; and whenever you see it, you may be sure the drawing is more
+or less bad: a thoroughly fine drawing or painting will always show a
+slight tendency towards flatness.
+
+71. Observe, on the other hand, that, however white an object may be,
+there is always some small point of it whiter than the rest. You must
+therefore have a slight tone of gray over everything in your picture
+except on the extreme high lights; even the piece of white paper, in
+your subject, must be toned slightly down, unless (and there are
+thousand chances against its being so) it should all be turned so as
+fully to front the light. By examining the treatment of the white
+objects in any pictures accessible to you by Paul Veronese or Titian,
+you will soon understand this.[15]
+
+72. As soon as you feel yourself capable of expressing with the brush
+the undulations of surfaces and the relations of masses, you may proceed
+to draw more complicated and beautiful things.[16] And first, the boughs
+of trees, now not in mere dark relief, but in full rounding. Take the
+first bit of branch or stump that comes to hand, with a fork in it; cut
+off the ends of the forking branches, so as to leave the whole only
+about a foot in length; get a piece of paper the same size, fix your bit
+of branch in some place where its position will not be altered, and draw
+it thoroughly, in all its light and shade, full size; striving, above
+all things, to get an accurate expression of its structure at the fork
+of the branch. When once you have mastered the tree at its _armpits_,
+you will have little more trouble with it.
+
+73. Always draw whatever the background happens to be, exactly as you
+see it. Wherever you have fastened the bough, you must draw whatever is
+behind it, ugly or not, else you will never know whether the light and
+shade are right; they may appear quite wrong to you, only for want of
+the background. And this general law is to be observed in all your
+studies: whatever you draw, draw completely and unalteringly, else you
+never know if what you have done is right, or whether you _could_ have
+done it rightly had you tried. There is nothing _visible_ out of which
+you may not get useful practice.
+
+74. Next, to put the leaves on your boughs. Gather a small twig with
+four or five leaves on it, put it into water, put a sheet of
+light-colored or white paper behind it, so that all the leaves may be
+relieved in dark from the white field; then sketch in their dark shape
+carefully with pencil as you did the complicated boughs, in order to be
+sure that all their masses and interstices are right in shape before you
+begin shading, and complete as far as you can with pen and ink, in the
+manner of Fig. 6, which is a young shoot of lilac.
+
+75. You will probably, in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at
+first puzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look of
+retirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of the
+leaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there are
+certain artifices by which good painters can partly conquer this
+difficulty; as slight exaggerations of force or color in the nearer
+parts, and of obscurity in the more distant ones; but you must not
+attempt anything of this kind. When you are first sketching the leaves,
+shut one of your eyes, fix a point in the background, to bring the point
+of one of the leaves against; and so sketch the whole bough as you see
+it in a fixed position, looking with one eye only. Your drawing never
+can be made to look like the object itself, as you see that object with
+_both_ eyes,[17] but it can be made perfectly like the object seen with
+one, and you must be content when you have got a resemblance on these
+terms.
+
+76. In order to get clearly at the notion of the thing to be done, take
+a single long leaf, hold it with its point towards you, and as flat as
+you can, so as to see nothing of it but its thinness, as if you wanted
+to know how thin it was; outline it so. Then slope it down gradually
+towards you, and watch it as it lengthens out to its full length, held
+perpendicularly down before you. Draw it in three or four different
+positions between these extremes, with its ribs as they appear in each
+position, and you will soon find out how it must be.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
+
+77. Draw first only two or three of the leaves; then larger clusters;
+and practice, in this way, more and more complicated pieces of bough and
+leafage, till you find you can master the most difficult arrangements,
+not consisting of more than ten or twelve leaves. You will find as you
+do this, if you have an opportunity of visiting any gallery of pictures,
+that you take a much more lively interest than before in the work of the
+great masters; you will see that very often their best backgrounds are
+composed of little more than a few sprays of leafage, carefully studied,
+brought against the distant sky; and that another wreath or two form the
+chief interest of their foregrounds. If you live in London you may test
+your progress _accurately_ by the degree of admiration you feel for the
+leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus, in Titian's Bacchus and
+Ariadne. All this, however, will not enable you to draw a mass of
+foliage. You will find, on looking at any rich piece of vegetation, that
+it is only one or two of the nearer clusters that you can by any
+possibility draw in this complete manner. The mass is too vast, and too
+intricate, to be thus dealt with.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
+
+78. You must now therefore have recourse to some confused mode of
+execution, capable of expressing the confusion of Nature. And, first,
+you must understand what the character of that confusion is. If you look
+carefully at the outer sprays of any tree at twenty or thirty yards'
+distance, you will see them defined against the sky in masses, which, at
+first, look quite definite; but if you examine them, you will see,
+mingled with the real shapes of leaves, many indistinct lines, which
+are, some of them, stalks of leaves, and some, leaves seen with the
+edge turned towards you, and coming into sight in a broken way; for,
+supposing the real leaf shape to be as at _a_, Fig. 7, this, when
+removed some yards from the eye, will appear dark against the sky, as at
+_b_; then, when removed some yards farther still, the stalk and point
+disappear altogether, the middle of the leaf becomes little more than a
+line; and the result is the condition at _c_, only with this farther
+subtlety in the look of it, inexpressible in the wood-cut, that the
+stalk and point of the leaf, though they have disappeared to the eye,
+have yet some influence in _checking the light_ at the places where they
+exist, and cause a slight dimness about the part of the leaf which
+remains visible, so that its perfect effect could only be rendered by
+two layers of color, one subduing the sky tone a little, the next
+drawing the broken portions of the leaf, as at _c_, and carefully
+indicating the greater darkness of the spot in the middle, where the
+under side of the leaf is.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
+
+This is the perfect theory of the matter. In practice we cannot reach
+such accuracy; but we shall be able to render the general look of the
+foliage satisfactorily by the following mode of practice.
+
+79. Gather a spray of any tree, about a foot or eighteen inches long.
+Fix it firmly by the stem in anything that will support it steadily; put
+it about eight feet away from you, or ten if you are far-sighted. Put a
+sheet of not very white paper behind it, as usual. Then draw very
+carefully, first placing them with pencil, and then filling them up with
+ink, every leaf-mass and stalk of it in simple black profile, as you see
+them against the paper: Fig. 8 is a bough of Phillyrea so drawn. Do not
+be afraid of running the leaves into a black mass when they come
+together; this exercise is only to teach you what the actual shapes of
+such masses are when seen against the sky.
+
+80. Make two careful studies of this kind of one bough of every common
+tree,--oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, etc.; in fact, if you are good, and
+industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times
+a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can
+get branches of. You are to make two studies of each bough, for this
+reason,--all masses of foliage have an upper and under surface, and the
+side view of them, or profile, shows a wholly different organization of
+branches from that seen in the view from above. They are generally seen
+more or less in profile, as you look at the whole tree, and Nature puts
+her best composition into the profile arrangement. But the view from
+above or below occurs not unfrequently, also, and it is quite necessary
+you should draw it if you wish to understand the anatomy of the tree.
+The difference between the two views is often far greater than you could
+easily conceive. For instance, in Fig. 9, _a_ is the upper view and _b_
+the profile, of a single spray of Phillyrea. Fig. 8 is an intermediate
+view of a larger bough; seen from beneath, but at some lateral distance
+also.
+
+81. When you have done a few branches in this manner, take one of the
+drawings you have made, and put it first a yard away from you, then a
+yard and a half, then two yards; observe how the thinner stalks and
+leaves gradually disappear, leaving only a vague and slight darkness
+where they were; and make another study of the effect at each distance,
+taking care to draw nothing more than you really see, for in this
+consists all the difference between what would be merely a miniature
+drawing of the leaves seen near, and a full-size drawing of the same
+leaves at a distance. By full size, I mean the size which they would
+really appear of if their outline were traced through a pane of glass
+held at the same distance from the eye at which you mean to hold your
+drawing. You can always ascertain this full size of any object by
+holding your paper upright before you, at the distance from your eye at
+which you wish your drawing to be seen. Bring its edge across the object
+you have to draw, and mark upon this edge the points where the outline
+of the object crosses, or goes behind, the edge of the paper. You will
+always find it, thus measured, smaller than you supposed.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
+
+82. When you have made a few careful experiments of this kind on your
+own drawings, (which are better for practice, at first, than the real
+trees, because the black profile in the drawing is quite stable, and
+does not shake, and is not confused by sparkles of luster on the
+leaves,) you may try the extremities of the real trees, only not doing
+much at a time, for the brightness of the sky will dazzle and perplex
+your sight. And this brightness causes, I believe, some loss of the
+outline itself; at least the chemical action of the light in a
+photograph extends much within the edges of the leaves, and, as it
+were, eats them away, so that no tree extremity, stand it ever so still,
+nor any other form coming against bright sky, is truly drawn by a
+photograph; and if you once succeed in drawing a few sprays rightly, you
+will find the result much more lovely and interesting than any
+photograph can be.
+
+83. All this difficulty, however, attaches to the rendering merely the
+dark form of the sprays as they come against the sky. Within those
+sprays, and in the heart of the tree, there is a complexity of a much
+more embarrassing kind; for nearly all leaves have some luster, and all
+are more or less translucent (letting light through them); therefore, in
+any given leaf, besides the intricacies of its own proper shadows and
+foreshortenings, there are three series of circumstances which alter or
+hide its forms. First, shadows cast on it by other leaves,--often very
+forcibly. Secondly, light reflected from its lustrous surface, sometimes
+the blue of the sky, sometimes the white of clouds, or the sun itself
+flashing like a star. Thirdly, forms and shadows of other leaves, seen
+as darknesses through the translucent parts of the leaf; a most
+important element of foliage effect, but wholly neglected by landscape
+artists in general.
+
+84. The consequence of all this is, that except now and then by chance,
+the form of a complete leaf is never seen; but a marvelous and quaint
+confusion, very definite, indeed, in its evidence of direction of
+growth, and unity of action, but wholly indefinable and inextricable,
+part by part, by any amount of patience. You cannot possibly work it out
+in facsimile, though you took a twelvemonth's time to a tree; and you
+must therefore try to discover some mode of execution which will more or
+less imitate, by its own variety and mystery, the variety and mystery of
+Nature, without absolute delineation of detail.
+
+85. Now I have led you to this conclusion by observation of tree form
+only, because in that the thing to be proved is clearest. But no natural
+object exists which does not involve in some part or parts of it this
+inimitableness, this mystery of quantity, which needs peculiarity of
+handling and trick of touch to express it completely. If leaves are
+intricate, so is moss, so is foam, so is rock cleavage, so are fur and
+hair, and texture of drapery, and of clouds. And although methods and
+dexterities of handling are wholly useless if you have not gained first
+the thorough knowledge of the form of the thing; so that if you cannot
+draw a branch perfectly, then much less a tree; and if not a wreath of
+mist perfectly, much less a flock of clouds; and if not a single grass
+blade perfectly, much less a grass bank; yet having once got this power
+over decisive form, you may safely--and must, in order to perfection of
+work--carry out your knowledge by every aid of method and dexterity of
+hand.
+
+86. But, in order to find out what method can do, you must now look at
+Art as well as at Nature, and see what means painters and engravers have
+actually employed for the expression of these subtleties. Whereupon
+arises the question, what opportunity you have to obtain engravings? You
+ought, if it is at all in your power, to possess yourself of a certain
+number of good examples of Turner's engraved works: if this be not in
+your power, you must just make the best use you can of the shop windows,
+or of any plates of which you can obtain a loan. Very possibly, the
+difficulty of getting sight of them may stimulate you to put them to
+better use. But, supposing your means admit of your doing so, possess
+yourself, first, of the illustrated edition either of Rogers's Italy or
+Rogers's Poems, and then of about a dozen of the plates named in the
+annexed lists. The prefixed letters indicate the particular points
+deserving your study in each engraving.[18] Be sure, therefore, that
+your selection includes, at all events, one plate marked with each
+letter. Do not get more than twelve of these plates, nor even all the
+twelve at first; for the more engravings you have, the less attention
+you will pay to them. It is a general truth, that the enjoyment
+derivable from art cannot be increased in quantity, beyond a certain
+point, by quantity of possession; it is only spread, as it were, over a
+larger surface, and very often dulled by finding ideas repeated in
+different works. Now, for a beginner, it is always better that his
+attention should be concentrated on one or two good things, and all his
+enjoyment founded on them, than that he should look at many, with
+divided thoughts. He has much to discover; and his best way of
+discovering it is to think long over few things, and watch them
+earnestly. It is one of the worst errors of this age to try to know and
+to see too much: the men who seem to know everything, never in reality
+know anything rightly. Beware of _handbook_ knowledge.
+
+87. These engravings are, in general, more for you to look at than to
+copy; and they will be of more use to you when we come to talk of
+composition, than they are at present; still, it will do you a great
+deal of good, sometimes to try how far you can get their delicate
+texture, or gradations of tone: as your pen-and-ink drawing will be apt
+to incline too much to a scratchy and broken kind of shade. For
+instance, the texture of the white convent wall, and the drawing of its
+tiled roof, in the vignette at p. 227 of Rogers's Poems, is as exquisite
+as work can possibly be; and it will be a great and profitable
+achievement if you can at all approach it. In like manner, if you can at
+all imitate the dark distant country at p. 7, or the sky at p. 80, of
+the same volume, or the foliage at pp. 12 and 144, it will be good gain;
+and if you can once draw the rolling clouds and running river at p. 9 of
+the Italy, or the city in the vignette of Aosta at p. 25, or the
+moonlight at p. 223, you will find that even Nature herself cannot
+afterwards very terribly puzzle you with her torrents, or towers, or
+moonlight.
+
+88. You need not copy touch for touch, but try to get the same effect.
+And if you feel discouraged by the delicacy required, and begin to think
+that engraving is not drawing, and that copying it cannot help you to
+draw, remember that it differs from common drawing only by the
+difficulties it has to encounter. You perhaps have got into a careless
+habit of thinking that engraving is a mere business, easy enough when
+one has got into the knack of it. On the contrary, it is a form of
+drawing more difficult than common drawing, by exactly so much as it is
+more difficult to cut steel than to move the pencil over paper. It is
+true that there are certain mechanical aids and methods which reduce it
+at certain stages either to pure machine work, or to more or less a
+habit of hand and arm; but this is not so in the foliage you are trying
+to copy, of which the best and prettiest parts are always etched--that
+is, drawn with a fine steel point and free hand: only the line made is
+white instead of black, which renders it much more difficult to judge of
+what you are about. And the trying to copy these plates will be good for
+you, because it will awaken you to the real labor and skill of the
+engraver, and make you understand a little how people must work, in this
+world, who have really to _do_ anything in it.
+
+89. Do not, however, suppose that I give you the engraving as a
+model--far from it; but it is necessary you should be able to do as
+well[19] before you think of doing better, and you will find many little
+helps and hints in the various work of it. Only remember that _all_
+engravers' foregrounds are bad; whenever you see the peculiar wriggling
+parallel lines of modern engravings become distinct, you must not copy;
+nor admire: it is only the softer masses, and distances, and portions of
+the foliage in the plates marked _f_, which you may copy. The best for
+this purpose, if you can get it, is the "Chain bridge over the Tees,"
+of the England series; the thicket on the right is very beautiful and
+instructive, and very like Turner. The foliage in the "Ludlow" and
+"Powis" is also remarkably good.
+
+90. Besides these line engravings, and to protect you from what harm
+there is in their influence, you are to provide yourself, if possible,
+with a Rembrandt etching, or a photograph of one (of figures, not
+landscape). It does not matter of what subject, or whether a sketchy or
+finished one, but the sketchy ones are generally cheapest, and will
+teach you most. Copy it as well as you can, noticing especially that
+Rembrandt's most rapid lines have steady purpose; and that they are laid
+with almost inconceivable precision when the object becomes at all
+interesting. The "Prodigal Son," "Death of the Virgin," "Abraham and
+Isaac," and such others, containing incident and character rather than
+chiaroscuro, will be the most instructive. You can buy one; copy it
+well; then exchange it, at little loss, for another; and so, gradually,
+obtain a good knowledge of his system. Whenever you have an opportunity
+of examining his work at museums, etc., do so with the greatest care,
+not looking at _many_ things, but a long time at each. You must also
+provide yourself, if possible, with an engraving of Albert Duerer's. This
+you will not be able to copy; but you must keep it beside you, and refer
+to it as a 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 Duerer. Rembrandt is often too loose and vague;
+and Duerer 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 Duerer. Lean rather to Duerer; 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 Duerer, 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 leafy crown of the
+"Melancholia" too often.
+
+91. If you cannot get either a Rembrandt or a Duerer, you may still learn
+much by carefully studying any of George Cruikshank's etchings, or
+Leech's wood-cuts in Punch, on the free side; with Alfred Rethel's and
+Richter's[20] on the severe side. But in so doing you will need to
+notice the following points:
+
+92. 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 such shorthand, and draw portions
+of the objects rightly.
+
+93. And touching this question of direction of lines as indicating that
+of surface, observe these few points:
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 10.]
+
+If lines are to be distinctly shown, it is better that, so far as they
+_can_ indicate anything by their direction, they should explain rather
+than oppose the general character of the object. Thus, in the piece of
+wood-cut 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 Duerer, 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
+Duerer'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 upwards 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 would 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.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 11.]
+
+94. But you will also now understand how easy it must be for dishonest
+dealers to forge or imitate scrawled sketches like Fig. 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 objects 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.
+
+95. 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.
+
+96. 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 color, 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.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 12.]
+
+97. Hence, the published works of Retzsch, 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 inclose 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 installment of the future shadow, and the outline is
+really drawn with its inner edge.[21] 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 inclose 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.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 13.]
+
+98. 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 Duerer 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
+Duerer, 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 village. If you have not time to draw thus
+carefully, do not draw at all--you are merely wasting your work and
+spoiling your taste. When you have had four or five years' practice you
+may be able to make useful memoranda at a rapid rate, but not yet;
+except sometimes of light and shade, in a way of which I will tell you
+presently. And this use of outline, note farther, is wholly confined to
+objects which have edges or limits. You can outline a tree or a stone,
+when it rises against another tree or stone; but you cannot outline
+folds in drapery, or waves in water; if these are to be expressed at
+all, it must be by some sort of shade, and therefore the rule that no
+good drawing can consist throughout of pure outline remains absolute.
+You see, in that wood-cut of Duerer's, his reason for even limiting
+himself so much to outline as he has, in those distant woods and plains,
+is that he may leave them in bright light, to be thrown out still more
+by the dark sky and the dark village spire: and the scene becomes real
+and sunny only by the addition of these shades.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 14.]
+
+99. Understanding, then, thus much of the use of outline, we will go
+back to our question about tree-drawing left unanswered at page 48.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 15.]
+
+We were, you remember, in pursuit of mystery among the leaves. Now, it
+is quite easy to obtain mystery and disorder, to any extent; but the
+difficulty is to keep organization in the midst of mystery. And you will
+never succeed in doing this unless you lean always to the definite side,
+and allow yourself rarely to become quite vague, at least through all
+your early practice. So, after your single groups of leaves, your first
+step must be to conditions like Figs. 14 and 15, which are careful
+facsimiles of two portions of a beautiful wood-cut of Duerer's, the
+"Flight into Egypt." Copy these carefully,--never mind how little at a
+time, but thoroughly; then trace the Duerer, and apply it to your
+drawing, and do not be content till the one fits the other, else your
+eye is not true enough to carry you safely through meshes of real
+leaves. And in the course of doing this, you will find that not a line
+nor dot of Duerer's can be displaced without harm; that all add to the
+effect, and either express something, or illumine something, or relieve
+something. If, afterwards, you copy any of the pieces of modern tree
+drawing, of which so many rich examples are given constantly in our
+cheap illustrated periodicals (any of the Christmas numbers of last
+year's _Illustrated News_ or others are full of them), you will see
+that, though good and forcible general effect is produced, the lines are
+thrown in by thousands without special intention, and might just as well
+go one way as another, so only that there be enough of them to produce
+all together a well-shaped effect of intricacy: and you will find that a
+little careless scratching about with your pen will bring you very near
+the same result without an effort; but that no scratching of pen, nor
+any fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought, will
+imitate so much as one leaf of Duerer's. Yet there is considerable
+intricacy and glittering confusion in the interstices of those vine
+leaves of his, as well as of the grass.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 16.]
+
+100. When you have got familiarized to his firm manner, you may draw
+from Nature as much as you like in the same way; and when you are tired
+of the intense care required for this, you may fall into a little more
+easy massing of the leaves, as in Fig. 10 (p. 55). This is facsimiled
+from an engraving after Titian, but an engraving not quite first-rate in
+manner, the leaves being a little too formal; still, it is a good enough
+model for your times of rest; and when you cannot carry the thing even
+so far as this, you may sketch the forms of the masses, as in Fig.
+16,[22] taking care always to have thorough command over your hand;
+that is, not to let the mass take a free shape because your hand ran
+glibly over the paper, but because in Nature it has actually a free and
+noble shape, and you have faithfully followed the same.
+
+101. And now that we have come to questions of noble shape, as well as
+true shape, and that we are going to draw from Nature at our pleasure,
+other considerations enter into the business, which are by no means
+confined to first practice, but extend to all practice; these (as this
+letter is long enough, I should think, to satisfy even the most exacting
+of correspondents) I will arrange in a second letter; praying you only
+to excuse the tiresomeness of this first one--tiresomeness inseparable
+from directions touching the beginning of any art,--and to believe me,
+even though I am trying to set you to dull and hard work,
+
+                                      Very faithfully yours,
+
+                                                         J. RUSKIN.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] (_N.B._--This note is only for the satisfaction of incredulous
+    or curious readers. You may miss it if you are in a hurry, or are
+    willing to take the statement in the text on trust.)
+
+    The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We
+    see nothing but flat colors; and it is only by a series of
+    experiments that we find out that a stain of black or gray indicates
+    the dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates
+    that the object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical
+    power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the
+    _innocence of the eye_; that is to say, of a sort of childish
+    perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without
+    consciousness of what they signify,--as a blind man would see them
+    if suddenly gifted with sight.
+
+    For instance: when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain
+    directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat
+    dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenly
+    endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by
+    the sun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and
+    part a dusty yellow (very nearly of the color of primroses); and, if
+    there were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass
+    was another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow color. We
+    should try to gather some of them, and then find that the color went
+    away from the grass when we stood between it and the sun, but not
+    from the primroses; and by a series of experiments we should find
+    out that the sun was really the cause of the color in the one,--not
+    in the other. We go through such processes of experiment
+    unconsciously in childhood; and having once come to conclusions
+    touching the signification of certain colors, we always suppose that
+    we _see_ what we only know, and have hardly any consciousness of the
+    real aspect of the signs we have learned to interpret. Very few
+    people have any idea that sunlighted grass is yellow.
+
+    Now, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as
+    nearly as possible to this condition of infantine sight. He sees the
+    colors of nature exactly as they are, and therefore perceives at
+    once in the sunlighted grass the precise relation between the two
+    colors that form its shade and light. To him it does not seem shade
+    and light, but bluish green barred with gold.
+
+    Strive, therefore, first of all, to convince yourself of this great
+    fact about sight. This, in your hand, which you know by experience
+    and touch to be a book, is to your eye nothing but a patch of white,
+    variously gradated and spotted; this other thing near you, which by
+    experience you know to be a table, is to your eye only a patch of
+    brown, variously darkened and veined; and so on: and the whole art
+    of Painting consists merely in perceiving the shape and depth of
+    these patches of color, and putting patches of the same size, depth,
+    and shape on canvas. The only obstacle to the success of painting
+    is, that many of the real colors are brighter and paler than it is
+    possible to put on canvas: we must put darker ones to represent
+    them.
+
+  [2] Stale crumb of bread is better, if you are making a delicate
+    drawing, than india-rubber, for it disturbs the surface of the paper
+    less: but it crumbles about the room and makes a mess; and, besides,
+    you waste the good bread, which is wrong; and your drawing will not
+    for a long while be worth the crumbs. So use india-rubber very
+    lightly; or, if heavily, pressing it only, not passing it over the
+    paper, and leave what pencil marks will not come away so, without
+    minding them. In a finished drawing the uneffaced penciling is often
+    serviceable, helping the general tone, and enabling you to take out
+    little bright lights.
+
+  [3] What is usually so much sought after under the term "freedom" is
+    the character of the drawing of a great master in a hurry, whose
+    hand is so thoroughly disciplined, that when pressed for time he can
+    let it fly as it will, and it will not go far wrong. But the hand of
+    a great master at real _work_ is _never_ free: its swiftest dash is
+    under perfect government. Paul Veronese or Tintoret could pause
+    within a hair's breadth of any appointed mark, in their fastest
+    touches; and follow, within a hair's breadth, the previously
+    intended curve. You must never, therefore, aim at freedom. It is not
+    required of your drawing that it should be free, but that it should
+    be right; in time you will be able to do right easily, and then your
+    work will be free in the best sense; but there is no merit in doing
+    wrong easily.
+
+    These remarks, however, do not apply to the lines used in shading,
+    which, it will be remembered, are to be made as quickly as possible.
+    The reason of this is, that the quicker a line is drawn, the lighter
+    it is at the ends, and therefore the more easily joined with other
+    lines, and concealed by them; the object in perfect shading being to
+    conceal the lines as much as possible.
+
+    And observe, in this exercise, the object is more to get firmness of
+    hand than accuracy of eye for outline; for there are no outlines in
+    Nature, and the ordinary student is sure to draw them falsely if he
+    draws them at all. Do not, therefore, be discouraged if you find
+    mistakes continue to occur in your outlines; be content at present
+    if you find your hand gaining command over the curves.
+
+  [4] If you can get any pieces of dead white porcelain, not glazed,
+    they will be useful models.
+
+  [5] Artists who glance at this book may be surprised at this
+    permission. My chief reason is, that I think it more necessary that
+    the pupil's eye should be trained to accurate perception of the
+    relations of curve and right lines, by having the latter absolutely
+    true, than that he should practice drawing straight lines. But also,
+    I believe, though I am not quite sure of this, that he never _ought_
+    to be able to draw a straight line. I do not believe a perfectly
+    trained hand ever can draw a line without some curvature in it, or
+    some variety of direction. Prout could draw a straight line, but I
+    do not believe Raphael could, nor Tintoret. A great draughtsman can,
+    as far as I have observed, draw every line _but_ a straight one.
+
+  [6] Or, if you feel able to do so, scratch them in with confused
+    quick touches, indicating the general shape of the cloud or mist of
+    twigs round the main branches; but do not take much trouble about
+    them.
+
+  [7] It is more difficult, at first, to get, in color, a narrow
+    gradation than an extended one; but the ultimate difficulty is, as
+    with the pen, to make the gradation go _far_.
+
+  [8] Of course, all the columns of color are to be of equal length.
+
+  [9] The degree of darkness you can reach with the given color is
+    always indicated by the color of the solid cake in the box.
+
+  [10] The figure _a_, Fig. 5, is very dark, but this is to give an
+    example of all kinds of depths of tint, without repeated figures.
+
+  [11] Nearly neutral in ordinary circumstances, but yet with quite
+    different tones in its neutrality, according to the colors of the
+    various reflected rays that compose it.
+
+  [12] 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.
+
+  [13] The use of acquiring this habit of execution is that you may be
+    able, when you begin to color, to let one hue be seen in minute
+    portions, gleaming between the touches of another.
+
+  [14] William Hunt, of the Old Water-color Society.
+
+  [15] At Marlborough House, [in 1857] among the four principal
+    examples of Turner's later water-color drawing, perhaps the most
+    neglected was 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 focused 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.
+
+  [16] I shall not henceforward number the exercises recommended; as
+    they are distinguished only by increasing difficulty of subject, not
+    by difference of method.
+
+  [17] 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. See, however, Note 1, in Appendix I.
+
+  [18] The plates marked with a star are peculiarly desirable. See
+    note at the end of Appendix I. The letters mean as follows:--
+
+    _a_ stands for architecture, including distant grouping of towns,
+         cottages, etc.
+    _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 p._ Lancaster.
+      _a f l._ Ashby de la Zouche.      _c l m r._ Lancaster Sands.*
+    _a l q r._ Barnard Castle.*           _a g f._ Launceston.*
+      _f m r._ Bolton Abbey.            _c f l r._ Leicester Abbey.
+      _f g r._ Buckfastleigh.*              _f r._ Ludlow.
+      _a l p._ Caernarvon.                _a f l._ Margate.
+      _c l q._ Castle Upnor.              _a l q._ Orford.
+      _a f l._ Colchester.                  _c p._ Plymouth.
+        _l q._ Cowes.                         _f._ Powis Castle.
+      _c f p._ Dartmouth Cove.*           _l m q._ Prudhoe Castle.
+      _c l q._ Flint Castle.*           _f l m r._ Chain Bridge over
+    _a f g l._ Knaresborough.*                      Tees.*
+        _m r._ High Force of Tees.*         _m q._ Ulleswater.
+      _a f q._ Trematon.                    _f m._ Valle Crucis.
+
+    _From the Keepsake._
+
+      _m p q._ Arona.                         _p._ St. Germain en Laye.
+        _l m._ Drachenfels.*              _l p q._ Florence.
+        _f l._ Marly.*                      _l m._ Ballyburgh Ness.*
+
+    _From the Bible Series._
+
+        _f m._ Mount Lebanon.             _a c g._ Joppa.
+          _m._ Rock of Moses at         _c l p q._ Solomon's Pools.*
+                Sinai.                      _a l._ Santa Saba.
+      _a l m._ Jericho.                     _a l._ Pool of Bethesda.
+
+    _From Scott's Works._
+
+        _p r._ Melrose.*                    _c m._ Glencoe.
+        _f r._ Dryburgh.*                   _c m._ Loch Coriskin.*
+
+
+        _a l._ Caerlaverock.
+
+    _From the Rivers of France._
+
+        _a q._ Chateau of Amboise, with     _a p._ Rouen Cathedral.
+                large bridge on right.      _f p._ Pont de l'Arche.
+      _l p r._ Rouen, looking down the    _f l p._ View on the Seine,
+                river, poplars on right.*           with avenue.
+      _a l p._ Rouen, with cathedral      _a c p._ Bridge of Meulan.
+                and rainbow, avenue     _c g p r._ Caudebec.*
+                on left.
+
+  [19] 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.
+
+  [20] See, for account of these plates, the Appendix on "Works to be
+    studied."
+
+  [21] See Note 2 in Appendix I.
+
+  [22] 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.
+
+
+102. 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.
+
+103. 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.
+
+104. 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 vapor is at any moment enduring in its form, as it meets shore,
+or counter-wave, 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. 63) 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.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 17.]
+
+105. 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 greater 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 way, that the boughs come out only on two sides of the
+trunk, instead of all round it: always, therefore, take more pains in
+trying to draw the boughs of trees that grow _towards_ you than those
+that go off to the sides; anybody can draw the latter, but the
+foreshortened ones are not so easy. It will help you in drawing them to
+observe that in most trees the ramification of each branch, though not
+of the tree itself, is more or less flattened, and approximates, in its
+position, to the look of a hand held out to receive something, or
+shelter something. If you take a looking-glass, and hold your hand
+before it slightly hollowed, with the palm upwards, and the fingers
+open, as if you were going to support the base of some great bowl,
+larger than you could easily hold; and sketch your hand as you see it in
+the glass with the points of the fingers towards you; it will materially
+help you in understanding the way trees generally hold out their hands:
+and if then you will turn yours with its palm downwards, as if you were
+going to try to hide something, but with the fingers expanded, you will
+get a good type of the action of the lower boughs in cedars and such
+other spreading trees.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 19.]
+
+106. Fig. 20 will give you a good idea of the simplest way in which
+these and other such facts can be rapidly expressed; if you copy it
+carefully, you will be surprised to find how the touches all group
+together, in expressing the plumy toss of the tree branches, and the
+springing of the bushes out of the bank, and the undulation of the
+ground: note the careful drawing of the footsteps made by the climbers
+of the little mound on the left.[23] It is facsimiled from an etching of
+Turner's, and is as good an example as you can have of the use of pure
+and firm lines; it will also show you how the particular action in
+foliage, or anything else to which you wish to direct attention, may be
+intensified by the adjuncts. The tall and upright trees are made to look
+more tall and upright still, because their line is continued below by
+the figure of the farmer with his stick; and the rounded bushes on the
+bank are made to look more rounded because their line is continued in
+one broad sweep by the black dog and the boy climbing the wall. These
+figures are placed entirely with this object, as we shall see more fully
+hereafter when we come to talk about composition; but, if you please,
+we will not talk about that yet awhile. What I have been telling you
+about the beautiful lines and action of foliage has nothing to do with
+composition, but only with fact, and the brief and expressive
+representation of fact. But there will be no harm in your looking
+forward, if you like to do so, to the account, in Letter III. of the
+"Law of Radiation," and reading what is said there about tree growth:
+indeed it would in some respects have been better to have said it here
+than there, only it would have broken up the account of the principles
+of composition somewhat awkwardly.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 20.]
+
+107. Now, although the lines indicative of action are not always quite
+so manifest in other things as in trees, a little attention will soon
+enable you to see that there are such lines in everything. In an old
+house roof, a bad observer and bad draughtsman will only see and draw
+the spotty irregularity of tiles or slates all over; but a good
+draughtsman will see all the bends of the under timbers, where they are
+weakest and the weight is telling on them most, and the tracks of the
+run of the water in time of rain, where it runs off fastest, and where
+it lies long and feeds the moss; and he will be careful, however few
+slates he draws, to mark the way they bend together towards those
+hollows (which have the future fate of the roof in them), and crowd
+gradually together at the top of the gable, partly diminishing in
+perspective, partly, perhaps, diminished on purpose (they are so in most
+English old houses) by the slate-layer. So in ground, there is always
+the direction of the run of the water to be noticed, which rounds the
+earth and cuts it into hollows; and, generally, in any bank or height
+worth drawing, a trace of bedded or other internal structure besides.
+Figure 20 will give you some idea of the way in which such facts may be
+expressed by a few lines. Do you not feel the depression in the ground
+all down the hill where the footsteps are, and how the people always
+turn to the left at the top, losing breath a little, and then how the
+water runs down in that other hollow towards the valley, behind the
+roots of the trees?
+
+108. Now, I want you in your first sketches from Nature to aim
+exclusively at understanding and representing these vital facts of form;
+using the pen--not now the steel, but the quill--firmly and steadily,
+never scrawling with it, but saying to yourself before you lay on a
+single touch,--"_that_ leaf is the main one, _that_ bough is the guiding
+one, and this touch, _so_ long, _so_ broad, means that part of
+it,"--point or side or knot, as the case may be. Resolve always, as you
+look at the thing, what you will take, and what miss of it, and never
+let your hand run away with you, or get into any habit or method of
+touch. If you want a continuous line, your hand should pass calmly from
+one end of it to the other without a tremor; if you want a shaking and
+broken line, your hand should shake, or break off, as easily as a
+musician's finger shakes or stops on a note: only remember this, that
+there is no general way of doing _any_ thing; no recipe can be given you
+for so much as the drawing of a cluster of grass. The grass may be
+ragged and stiff, or tender and flowing; sunburnt and sheep-bitten, or
+rank and languid; fresh or dry; lustrous or dull: look at it, and try to
+draw it as it is, and don't think how somebody "told you to _do_ grass."
+So a stone may be round or angular, polished or rough, cracked all over
+like an ill-glazed teacup, or as united and broad as the breast of
+Hercules. It may be as flaky as a wafer, as powdery as a field
+puff-ball; it may be knotted like a ship's hawser, or kneaded like
+hammered iron, or knit like a Damascus saber, or fused like a glass
+bottle, or crystallized like hoar-frost, or veined like a forest leaf:
+look at it, and don't try to remember how anybody told you to "do a
+stone."
+
+109. As soon as you find that your hand obeys you thoroughly, and that
+you can render any form with a firmness and truth approaching that of
+Turner's or Duerer's work,[24] you must add a simple but equally careful
+light and shade to your pen drawing, so as to make each study as
+complete as possible; for which you must prepare yourself thus. Get, if
+you have the means, a good impression of one plate of Turner's Liber
+Studiorum; if possible, one of the subjects named in the note
+below.[25] If you cannot obtain, or even borrow for a little while, any
+of these engravings, you must use a photograph instead (how, I will tell
+you presently); but, if you can get the Turner, it will be best. You
+will see that it is composed of a firm etching in line, with mezzotint
+shadow laid over it. You must first copy the etched part of it
+accurately; to which end put the print against the window, and trace
+slowly with the greatest care every black line; retrace this on smooth
+drawing-paper; and, finally, go over the whole with your pen, looking at
+the original plate always, so that if you err at all, it may be on the
+right side, not making a line which is too curved or too straight
+already in the tracing, more curved or more straight, as you go over it.
+And in doing this, never work after you are tired, nor to "get the thing
+done," for if it is badly done, it will be of no use to you. The true
+zeal and patience of a quarter of an hour are better than the sulky and
+inattentive labor of a whole day. If you have not made the touches right
+at the first going over with the pen, retouch them delicately, with
+little ink in your pen, thickening or reinforcing them as they need: you
+cannot give too much care to the facsimile. Then keep this etched
+outline by you in order to study at your ease the way in which Turner
+uses his line as preparatory for the subsequent shadow;[26] it is only
+in getting the two separate that you will be able to reason on this.
+Next, copy once more, though for the fourth time, any part of this
+etching which you like, and put on the light and shade with the brush,
+and any brown color that matches that of the plate;[27] working it with
+the point of the brush as delicately as if you were drawing with pencil,
+and dotting and cross-hatching as lightly as you can touch the paper,
+till you get the gradations of Turner's engraving.
+
+110. In this exercise, as in the former one, a quarter of an inch worked
+to close resemblance of the copy is worth more than the whole subject
+carelessly done. Not that in drawing afterwards from Nature you are to
+be obliged to finish every gradation in this way, but that, once having
+fully accomplished the drawing _something_ rightly, you will
+thenceforward feel and aim at a higher perfection than you could
+otherwise have conceived, and the brush will obey you, and bring out
+quickly and clearly the loveliest results, with a submissiveness which
+it would have wholly refused if you had not put it to severest work.
+Nothing is more strange in art than the way that chance and materials
+seem to favor you, when once you have thoroughly conquered them. Make
+yourself quite independent of chance, get your result in spite of it,
+and from that day forward all things will somehow fall as you would have
+them. Show the camel's hair, and the color in it, that no bending nor
+blotting is of any use to escape your will; that the touch and the shade
+_shall_ finally be right, if it costs you a year's toil; and from that
+hour of corrective conviction, said camel's hair will bend itself to all
+your wishes, and no blot will dare to transgress its appointed border.
+If you cannot obtain a print from the Liber Studiorum, get a
+photograph[28] of some general landscape subject, with high hills and a
+village or picturesque town, in the middle distance, and some calm water
+of varied character (a stream with stones in it, if possible), and copy
+any part of it you like, in this same brown color, working, as I have
+just directed you to do from the Liber, a great deal with the point of
+the brush. You are under a twofold disadvantage here, however; first,
+there are portions in every photograph too delicately done for you at
+present to be at all able to copy; and, secondly, there are portions
+always more obscure or dark than there would be in the real scene, and
+involved in a mystery which you will not be able, as yet, to decipher.
+Both these characters will be advantageous to you for future study,
+after you have gained experience, but they are a little against you in
+early attempts at tinting; still you must fight through the difficulty,
+and get the power of producing delicate gradations with brown or gray,
+like those of the photograph.
+
+111. Now observe; the perfection of work would be tinted shadow, like
+photography, without any obscurity or exaggerated darkness; and as long
+as your effect depends in anywise on visible lines, your art is not
+perfect, though it may be first-rate of its kind. But to get complete
+results in tints merely, requires both long time and consummate skill;
+and you will find that a few well-put pen lines, with a tint dashed over
+or under them, get more expression of facts than you could reach in any
+other way, by the same expenditure of time. The use of the Liber
+Studiorum print to you is chiefly as an example of the simplest
+shorthand of this kind, a shorthand which is yet capable of dealing with
+the most subtle natural effects; for the firm etching gets at the
+expression of complicated details, as leaves, masonry, textures of
+ground, etc., while the overlaid tint enables you to express the most
+tender distances of sky, and forms of playing light, mist, or cloud.
+Most of the best drawings by the old masters are executed on this
+principle, the touches of the pen being useful also to give a look of
+transparency to shadows, which could not otherwise be attained but by
+great finish of tinting; and if you have access to any ordinarily good
+public gallery, or can make friends of any printsellers who have folios
+either of old drawings, or facsimiles of them, you will not be at a loss
+to find some example of this unity of pen with tinting. Multitudes of
+photographs also are now taken from the best drawings by the old
+masters, and I hope that our Mechanics' Institutes and other societies
+organized with a view to public instruction, will not fail to possess
+themselves of examples of these, and to make them accessible to students
+of drawing in the vicinity; a single print from Turner's Liber, to show
+the unison of tint with pen etching, and the "St. Catherine,"
+photographed by Thurston Thompson from Raphael's drawing in the Louvre,
+to show the unity of the soft tinting of the stump with chalk, would be
+all that is necessary, and would, I believe, be in many cases more
+serviceable than a larger collection, and certainly than a whole gallery
+of second-rate prints. Two such examples are peculiarly desirable,
+because all other modes of drawing, with pen separately, or chalk
+separately, or color separately, may be seen by the poorest student in
+any cheap illustrated book, or in shop windows. But this unity of
+tinting with line he cannot generally see but by some special inquiry,
+and in some out of the way places he could not find a single example of
+it. Supposing that this should be so in your own case, and that you
+cannot meet with any example of this kind, try to make the matter out
+alone, thus:
+
+112. Take a small and simple photograph; allow yourself half an hour to
+express its subjects with the pen only, using some permanent liquid
+color instead of ink, outlining its buildings or trees firmly, and
+laying in the deeper shadows, as you have been accustomed to do in your
+bolder pen drawings; then, when this etching is dry, take your sepia or
+gray, and tint it over, getting now the finer gradations of the
+photograph; and, finally taking out the higher lights with penknife or
+blotting paper. You will soon find what can be done in this way; and by
+a series of experiments you may ascertain for yourself how far the pen
+may be made serviceable to reinforce shadows, mark characters of
+texture, outline unintelligible masses, and so on. The more time you
+have, the more delicate you may make the pen drawing, blending it with
+the tint; the less you have, the more distinct you must keep the two.
+Practice in this way from one photograph, allowing yourself sometimes
+only a quarter of an hour for the whole thing, sometimes an hour,
+sometimes two or three hours; in each case drawing the whole subject in
+full depth of light and shade, but with such degree of finish in the
+parts as is possible in the given time. And this exercise, observe, you
+will do well to repeat frequently, whether you can get prints and
+drawings as well as photographs, or not.
+
+113. And now at last, when you can copy a piece of Liber Studiorum, or
+its photographic substitute, faithfully, you have the complete means in
+your power of working from Nature on all subjects that interest you,
+which you should do in four different ways.
+
+First. When you have full time, and your subject is one that will stay
+quiet for you, make perfect light and shade studies, or as nearly
+perfect as you can, with gray or brown color of any kind, reinforced and
+defined with the pen.
+
+114. Secondly. When your time is short, or the subject is so rich in
+detail that you feel you cannot complete it intelligibly in light and
+shade, make a hasty study of the effect, and give the rest of the time
+to a Duereresque expression of the details. If the subject seems to you
+interesting, and there are points about it which you cannot understand,
+try to get five spare minutes to go close up to it, and make a nearer
+memorandum; not that you are ever to bring the details of this nearer
+sketch into the farther one, but that you may thus perfect your
+experience of the aspect of things, and know that such and such a look
+of a tower or cottage at five hundred yards off means _that_ sort of
+tower or cottage near; while, also, this nearer sketch will be useful to
+prevent any future misinterpretation of your own work. If you have time,
+however far your light and shade study in the distance may have been
+carried, it is always well, for these reasons, to make also your
+Duereresque and your near memoranda; for if your light and shade drawing
+be good, much of the interesting detail must be lost in it, or
+disguised.
+
+115. Your hasty study of effect may be made most easily and quickly with
+a soft pencil, dashed over when done with one tolerably deep tone of
+gray, which will fix the pencil. While this fixing color is wet, take
+out the higher lights with the dry brush; and, when it is quite dry,
+scratch out the highest lights with the penknife. Five minutes,
+carefully applied, will do much by these means. Of course the paper is
+to be white. I do not like studies on gray paper so well; for you can
+get more gradation by the taking off your wet tint, and laying it on
+cunningly a little darker here and there, than you can with body-color
+white, unless you are consummately skillful. There is no objection to
+your making your Duereresque memoranda on gray or yellow paper, and
+touching or relieving them with white; only, do not depend much on your
+white touches, nor make the sketch for their sake.
+
+116. Thirdly. When you have neither time for careful study nor for
+Duereresque detail, sketch the outline with pencil, then dash in the
+shadows with the brush boldly, trying to do as much as you possibly can
+at once, and to get a habit of expedition and decision; laying more
+color again and again into the tints as they dry, using every expedient
+which your practice has suggested to you of carrying out your
+chiaroscuro in the manageable and moist material, taking the color off
+here with the dry brush, scratching out lights in it there with the
+wooden handle of the brush, rubbing it in with your fingers, drying it
+off with your sponge, etc. Then, when the color is in, take your pen and
+mark the outline characters vigorously, in the manner of the Liber
+Studiorum. This kind of study is very convenient for carrying away
+pieces of effect which depend not so much on refinement as on
+complexity, strange shapes of involved shadows, sudden effects of sky,
+etc.; and it is most useful as a safeguard against any too servile or
+slow habits which the minute copying may induce in you; for although the
+endeavor to obtain velocity merely for velocity's sake, and dash for
+display's sake, is as baneful as it is despicable; there are a velocity
+and a dash which not only are compatible with perfect drawing, but
+obtain certain results which cannot be had otherwise. And it is
+perfectly safe for you to study occasionally for speed and decision,
+while your continual course of practice is such as to insure your
+retaining an accurate judgment and a tender touch. Speed, under such
+circumstances, is rather fatiguing than tempting; and you will find
+yourself always beguiled rather into elaboration than negligence.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 21.]
+
+117. Fourthly. You will find it of great use, whatever kind of landscape
+scenery you are passing through, to get into the habit of making
+memoranda of the shapes of shadows. You will find that many objects of
+no essential interest in themselves, and neither deserving a finished
+study, nor a Duereresque one, may yet become of singular value in
+consequence of the fantastic shapes of their shadows; for it happens
+often, in distant effect, that the shadow is by much a more important
+element than the substance. Thus, in the Alpine bridge, Fig. 21, seen
+within a few yards of it, as in the figure, the arrangement of timbers
+to which the shadows are owing is perceptible; but at half a mile's
+distance, in bright sunlight, the timbers would not be seen; and a good
+painter's expression of the bridge would be merely the large spot, and
+the crossed bars, of pure gray; wholly without indication of their
+cause, as in Fig. 22 _a_; and if we saw it at still greater distances,
+it would appear, as in Fig. 22 _b_ and _c_, diminishing at last to a
+strange, unintelligible, spider-like spot of gray on the light
+hill-side. A perfectly great painter, throughout his distances,
+continually reduces his objects to these shadow abstracts; and the
+singular, and to many persons unaccountable, effect of the confused
+touches in Turner's distances, is owing chiefly to this thorough
+accuracy and intense meaning of the shadow abstracts.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 22.]
+
+118. Studies of this kind are easily made, when you are in haste, with
+an F. or HB. pencil: it requires some hardness of the point to insure
+your drawing delicately enough when the forms of the shadows are very
+subtle; they are sure to be so somewhere, and are generally so
+everywhere. The pencil is indeed a very precious instrument after you
+are master of the pen and brush, for the pencil, cunningly used, is
+both, and will draw a line with the precision of the one and the
+gradation of the other; nevertheless, it is so unsatisfactory to see the
+sharp touches, on which the best of the detail depends, getting
+gradually deadened by time, or to find the places where force was wanted
+look shiny, and like a fire-grate, that I should recommend rather the
+steady use of the pen, or brush, and color, whenever time admits of it;
+keeping only a small memorandum-book in the breast-pocket, with its
+well-cut, sheathed pencil, ready for notes on passing opportunities: but
+never being without this.
+
+119. Thus much, then, respecting the manner in which you are at first to
+draw from Nature. But it may perhaps be serviceable to you, if I also
+note one or two points respecting your choice of subjects for study, and
+the best special methods of treating some of them; for one of by no
+means the least difficulties which you have at first to encounter is a
+peculiar instinct, common, as far as I have noticed, to all beginners,
+to fix on exactly the most unmanageable feature in the given scene.
+There are many things in every landscape which can be drawn, if at all,
+only by the most accomplished artists; and I have noticed that it is
+nearly always these which a beginner will dash at; or, if not these, it
+will be something which, though pleasing to him in itself, is unfit for
+a picture, and in which, when he has drawn it, he will have little
+pleasure. As some slight protection against this evil genius of
+beginners, the following general warnings may be useful:
+
+120. (1.) Do not draw things that you love, on account of their
+associations; or at least do not draw them because you love them; but
+merely when you cannot get anything else to draw. If you try to draw
+places that you love, you are sure to be always entangled amongst neat
+brick walls, iron railings, gravel walks, greenhouses, and quickset
+hedges; besides that you will be continually led into some endeavor to
+make your drawing pretty, or complete, which will be fatal to your
+progress. You need never hope to get on, if you are the least anxious
+that the drawing you are actually at work upon should look nice when it
+is done. All you have to care about is to make it _right_, and to learn
+as much in doing it as possible. So then, though when you are sitting in
+your friend's parlor, or in your own, and have nothing else to do, you
+may draw anything that is there, for practice; even the fire-irons or
+the pattern on the carpet: be sure that it _is_ for practice, and not
+because it is a beloved carpet, or a friendly poker and tongs, nor
+because you wish to please your friend by drawing her room.
+
+121. Also, never make presents of your drawings. Of course I am
+addressing you as a beginner--a time may come when your work will be
+precious to everybody; but be resolute not to give it away till you know
+that it is worth something (as soon as it is worth anything you will
+know that it is so). If any one asks you for a present of a drawing,
+send them a couple of cakes of color and a piece of Bristol board: those
+materials are, for the present, of more value in that form than if you
+had spread the one over the other.
+
+The main reason for this rule is, however, that its observance will much
+protect you from the great danger of trying to make your drawings
+pretty.
+
+122. (2.) Never, by choice, draw anything polished; especially if
+complicated in form. Avoid all brass rods and curtain ornaments,
+chandeliers, plate, glass, and fine steel. A shining knob of a piece of
+furniture does not matter if it comes in your way; but do not fret
+yourself if it will not look right, and choose only things that do not
+shine.
+
+(3.) Avoid all very neat things. They are exceedingly difficult to draw,
+and very ugly when drawn. Choose rough, worn, and clumsy-looking things
+as much as possible; for instance, you cannot have a more difficult or
+profitless study than a newly painted Thames wherry, nor a better study
+than an old empty coal-barge, lying ashore at low tide: in general,
+everything that you think very ugly will be good for you to draw.
+
+(4.) Avoid, as much as possible, studies in which one thing is seen
+through another. You will constantly find a thin tree standing before
+your chosen cottage, or between you and the turn of the river; its near
+branches all entangled with the distance. It is intensely difficult to
+represent this; and though, when the tree _is_ there, you must not
+imaginarily cut it down, but do it as well as you can, yet always look
+for subjects that fall into definite masses, not into network; that is,
+rather for a cottage with a dark tree beside it, than for one with a
+thin tree in front of it, rather for a mass of wood, soft, blue, and
+rounded, than for a ragged copse, or confusion of intricate stems.
+
+(5.) Avoid, as far as possible, country divided by hedges. Perhaps
+nothing in the whole compass of landscape is so utterly unpicturesque
+and unmanageable as the ordinary English patchwork of field and hedge,
+with trees dotted over it in independent spots, gnawed straight at the
+cattle line.
+
+Still, do not be discouraged if you find you have chosen ill, and that
+the subject overmasters you. It is much better that it should, than that
+you should think you had entirely mastered _it_. But at first, and even
+for some time, you must be prepared for very discomfortable failure;
+which, nevertheless, will not be without some wholesome result.
+
+123. As, however, I have told you what most definitely to avoid, I may,
+perhaps, help you a little by saying what to seek. In general, all banks
+are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large landscapes.
+If you live in a lowland country, you must look for places where the
+ground is broken to the river's edges, with decayed posts, or roots of
+trees; or, if by great good luck there should be such things within your
+reach, for remnants of stone quays or steps, mossy mill-dams, etc.
+Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will present beautiful
+bits of broken bank at its sides; better in form and color than high
+chalk cliffs. In woods, one or two trunks, with the flowery ground
+below, are at once the richest and easiest kind of study: a not very
+thick trunk, say nine inches or a foot in diameter, with ivy running up
+it sparingly, is an easy, and always a rewarding subject.
+
+124. Large nests of buildings in the middle distance are always
+beautiful, when drawn carefully, provided they are not modern rows of
+pattern cottages, or villas with Ionic and Doric porticoes. Any old
+English village, or cluster of farmhouses, drawn with all its ins and
+outs, and haystacks, and palings, is sure to be lovely; much more a
+French one. French landscape is generally as much superior to English as
+Swiss landscape is to French; in some respects, the French is
+incomparable. Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have
+recommended you to buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their
+expression of graceful rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the beauty
+of component lines.
+
+In drawing villages, take great pains with the gardens; a rustic garden
+is in every way beautiful. If you have time, draw all the rows of
+cabbages, and hollyhocks, and broken fences, and wandering eglantines,
+and bossy roses; you cannot have better practice, nor be kept by
+anything in purer thoughts.
+
+Make intimate friends with all the brooks in your neighborhood, and
+study them ripple by ripple.
+
+Village churches in England are not often good subjects; there is a
+peculiar meanness about most of them and awkwardness of line. Old
+manor-houses are often pretty. Ruins are usually, with us, too prim, and
+cathedrals too orderly. I do not think there is a single cathedral in
+England from which it is possible to obtain _one_ subject for an
+impressive drawing. There is always some discordant civility, or jarring
+vergerism about them.
+
+125. If you live in a mountain or hill country, your only danger is
+redundance of subject. Be resolved, in the first place, to draw a piece
+of rounded rock, with its variegated lichens, quite rightly, getting its
+complete roundings, and all the patterns of the lichen in true local
+color. Till you can do this, it is of no use your thinking of sketching
+among hills; but when once you have done this, the forms of distant
+hills will be comparatively easy.
+
+126. When you have practiced for a little time from such of these
+subjects as may be accessible to you, you will certainly find
+difficulties arising which will make you wish more than ever for a
+master's help: these difficulties will vary according to the character
+of your own mind (one question occurring to one person, and one to
+another), so that it is impossible to anticipate them all; and it would
+make this too large a book if I answered all that I _can_ anticipate;
+you must be content to work on, in good hope that Nature will, in her
+own time, interpret to you much for herself; that farther experience on
+your own part will make some difficulties disappear; and that others
+will be removed by the occasional observation of such artists' work as
+may come in your way. Nevertheless, I will not close this letter without
+a few general remarks, such as may be useful to you after you are
+somewhat advanced in power; and these remarks may, I think, be
+conveniently arranged under three heads, having reference to the drawing
+of vegetation, water, and skies.
+
+127. And, first, of vegetation. You may think, perhaps, we have said
+enough about trees already; yet if you have done as you were bid, and
+tried to draw them frequently enough, and carefully enough, you will be
+ready by this time to hear a little more of them. You will also
+recollect that we left our question, respecting the mode of expressing
+intricacy of leafage, partly unsettled in the first letter. I left it so
+because I wanted you to learn the real structure of leaves, by drawing
+them for yourself, before I troubled you with the most subtle
+considerations as to method in drawing them. And by this time, I
+imagine, you must have found out two principal things, universal facts,
+about leaves; namely, that they always, in the main tendencies of their
+lines, indicate a beautiful divergence of growth, according to the law
+of radiation, already referred to;[29] and the second, that this
+divergence is never formal, but carried out with endless variety of
+individual line. I must now press both these facts on your attention a
+little farther.
+
+128. You may, perhaps, have been surprised that I have not yet spoken of
+the works of J. D. Harding, especially if you happen to have met with
+the passages referring to them in Modern Painters, in which they are
+highly praised. They are deservedly praised, for they are the only
+works by a modern[30] draughtsman which express in any wise the energy
+of trees, and the laws of growth, of which we have been speaking. There
+are no lithographic sketches which, for truth of general character,
+obtained with little cost of time, at all rival Harding's. Calame,
+Robert, and the other lithographic landscape sketchers are altogether
+inferior in power, though sometimes a little deeper in meaning. But you
+must not take even Harding for a model, though you may use his works for
+occasional reference; and if you can afford to buy his Lessons on
+Trees,[31] it will be serviceable to you in various ways, and will at
+present help me to explain the point under consideration. And it is well
+that I should illustrate this point by reference to Harding's works,
+because their great influence on young students renders it desirable
+that their real character should be thoroughly understood.
+
+129. You will find, first, in the titlepage of the Lessons on Trees, a
+pretty wood-cut, in which the tree stems are drawn with great truth, and
+in a very interesting arrangement of lines. Plate 1 is not quite worthy
+of Mr. Harding, tending too much to make his pupil, at starting, think
+everything depends on black dots; still, the main lines are good, and
+very characteristic of tree growth. Then, in Plate 2, we come to the
+point at issue. The first examples in that plate are given to the pupil
+that he may practice from them till his hand gets into the habit of
+arranging lines freely in a similar manner; and they are stated by Mr.
+Harding to be universal in application; "all outlines expressive of
+foliage," he says, "are but modifications of them." They consist of
+groups of lines, more or less resembling our Fig. 23 below; and the
+characters especially insisted upon are, that they "tend at their inner
+ends to a common center;" that "their ends terminate in [are inclosed
+by] ovoid curves;" and that "the outer ends are most emphatic."
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 23.]
+
+130. Now, as thus expressive of the great laws of radiation and
+inclosure, the main principle of this method of execution confirms, in a
+very interesting way, our conclusions respecting foliage composition.
+The reason of the last rule, that the outer end of the line is to be
+most emphatic, does not indeed at first appear; for the line at one end
+of a natural leaf is not more emphatic than the line at the other: but
+ultimately, in Harding's method, this darker part of the touch stands
+more or less for the shade at the outer extremity of the leaf mass; and,
+as Harding uses these touches, they express as much of tree character as
+any mere habit of touch _can_ express. But, unfortunately, there is
+another law of tree growth, quite as fixed as the law of radiation,
+which this and all other conventional modes of execution wholly lose
+sight of. This second law is, that the radiating tendency shall be
+carried out only as a ruling spirit in reconcilement with perpetual
+individual caprice on the part of the separate leaves. So that the
+moment a touch is monotonous, it must be also false, the liberty of the
+leaf individually being just as essential a truth, as its unity of
+growth with its companions in the radiating group.
+
+131. It does not matter how small or apparently symmetrical the cluster
+may be, nor how large or vague. You can hardly have a more formal one
+than _b_ in Fig. 9, p. 47, nor a less formal one than this shoot of
+Spanish chestnut, shedding its leaves, Fig. 24; but in either of them,
+even the general reader, unpracticed in any of the previously
+recommended exercises, must see that there are wandering lines mixed
+with the radiating ones, and radiating lines with the wild ones: and if
+he takes the pen, and tries to copy either of these examples, he will
+find that neither play of hand to left nor to right, neither a free
+touch nor a firm touch, nor any learnable or describable touch
+whatsoever, will enable him to produce, currently, a resemblance of it;
+but that he must either draw it slowly or give it up. And (which makes
+the matter worse still) though gathering the bough, and putting it close
+to you, or seeing a piece of near foliage against the sky, you may draw
+the entire outline of the leaves, yet if the spray has light upon it,
+and is ever so little a way off, you will miss, as we have seen, a point
+of a leaf here, and an edge there; some of the surfaces will be confused
+by glitter, and some spotted with shade; and if you look carefully
+through this confusion for the edges or dark stems which you really
+_can_ see and put only those down, the result will be neither like Fig.
+9 nor Fig. 24, but such an interrupted and puzzling piece of work as
+Fig. 25.[32]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 25.]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 24.]
+
+132. Now, it is in the perfect acknowledgment and expression of these
+_three_ laws that all good drawing of landscape consists. There is,
+first, the organic unity; the law, whether of radiation, or parallelism,
+or concurrent action, which rules the masses of herbs and trees, of
+rocks, and clouds, and waves; secondly, the individual liberty of the
+members subjected to these laws of unity; and, lastly, the mystery under
+which the separate character of each is more or less concealed.
+
+I say, first, there must be observance of the ruling organic law. This
+is the first distinction between good artists and bad artists. Your
+common sketcher or bad painter puts his leaves on the trees as if they
+were moss tied to sticks; he cannot see the lines of action or growth;
+he scatters the shapeless clouds over his sky, not perceiving the sweeps
+of associated curves which the real clouds are following as they fly;
+and he breaks his mountain side into rugged fragments, wholly
+unconscious of the lines of force with which the real rocks have risen,
+or of the lines of couch in which they repose. On the contrary, it is
+the main delight of the great draughtsman to trace these laws of
+government; and his tendency to error is always in the exaggeration of
+their authority rather than in its denial.
+
+133. Secondly, I say, we have to show the individual character and
+liberty of the separate leaves, clouds, or rocks. And herein the great
+masters separate themselves finally from the inferior ones; for if the
+men of inferior genius ever express law at all, it is by the sacrifice
+of individuality. Thus, Salvator Rosa has great perception of the sweep
+of foliage and rolling of clouds, but never draws a single leaflet or
+mist wreath accurately. Similarly, Gainsborough, in his landscape, has
+great feeling for masses of form and harmony of color; but in the detail
+gives nothing but meaningless touches; not even so much as the species
+of tree, much less the variety of its leafage, being ever discernible.
+Now, although both these expressions of government and individuality are
+essential to masterly work, the individuality is the _more_ essential,
+and the more difficult of attainment; and, therefore, that attainment
+separates the great masters _finally_ from the inferior ones. It is the
+more essential, because, in these matters of beautiful arrangement in
+visible things, the same rules hold that hold in moral things. It is a
+lamentable and unnatural thing to see a number of men subject to no
+government, actuated by no ruling principle, and associated by no common
+affection: but it would be a more lamentable thing still, were it
+possible, to see a number of men so oppressed into assimilation as to
+have no more any individual hope or character, no differences in aim, no
+dissimilarities of passion, no irregularities of judgment; a society in
+which no man could help another, since none would be feebler than
+himself; no man admire another, since none would be stronger than
+himself; no man be grateful to another, since by none he could be
+relieved; no man reverence another, since by none he could be
+instructed; a society in which every soul would be as the syllable of a
+stammerer instead of the word of a speaker, in which every man would
+walk as in a frightful dream, seeing specters of himself, in everlasting
+multiplication, gliding helplessly around him in a speechless darkness.
+Therefore it is that perpetual difference, play, and change in groups of
+form are more essential to them even than their being subdued by some
+great gathering law: the law is needful to them for their perfection and
+their power, but the difference is needful to them for their life.
+
+134. And here it may be noted in passing, that, if you enjoy the pursuit
+of analogies and types, and have any ingenuity of judgment in discerning
+them, you may always accurately ascertain what are the noble characters
+in a piece of painting by merely considering what are the noble
+characters of man in his association with his fellows. What grace of
+manner and refinement of habit are in society, grace of line and
+refinement of form are in the association of visible objects. What
+advantage or harm there may be in sharpness, ruggedness, or quaintness
+in the dealings or conversations of men; precisely that relative degree
+of advantage or harm there is in them as elements of pictorial
+composition. What power is in liberty or relaxation to strengthen or
+relieve human souls; that power precisely in the same relative degree,
+play and laxity of line have to strengthen or refresh the expression of
+a picture. And what goodness or greatness we can conceive to arise in
+companies of men, from chastity of thought, regularity of life,
+simplicity of custom, and balance of authority; precisely that kind of
+goodness and greatness may be given to a picture by the purity of its
+color, the severity of its forms, and the symmetry of its masses.
+
+135. You need not be in the least afraid of pushing these analogies too
+far. They cannot be pushed too far; they are so precise and complete,
+that the farther you pursue them, the clearer, the more certain, the
+more useful you will find them. They will not fail you in one
+particular, or in any direction of inquiry. There is no moral vice, no
+moral virtue, which has not its _precise_ prototype in the art of
+painting; so that you may at your will illustrate the moral habit by the
+art, or the art by the moral habit. Affection and discord, fretfulness,
+and quietness, feebleness and firmness, luxury and purity, pride and
+modesty, and all other such habits, and every conceivable modification
+and mingling of them, may be illustrated, with mathematical exactness,
+by conditions of line and color; and not merely these definable vices
+and virtues, but also every conceivable shade of human character and
+passion, from the righteous or unrighteous majesty of the king to the
+innocent or faultful simplicity of the shepherd boy.
+
+136. The pursuit of this subject belongs properly, however, to the
+investigation of the higher branches of composition, matters which it
+would be quite useless to treat of in this book; and I only allude to
+them here, in order that you may understand how the utmost noblenesses
+of art are concerned in this minute work, to which I have set you in
+your beginning of it. For it is only by the closest attention, and the
+most noble execution, that it is possible to express these varieties of
+individual character, on which all excellence of portraiture depends,
+whether of masses of mankind, or of groups of leaves.
+
+137. Now you will be able to understand, among other matters, wherein
+consists the excellence, and wherein the shortcoming, of the
+tree-drawing of Harding. It is excellent in so far as it fondly
+observes, with more truth than any other work of the kind, the great
+laws of growth and action in trees: it fails,--and observe, not in a
+minor, but in the principal point,--because it cannot rightly render any
+one individual detail or incident of foliage. And in this it fails, not
+from mere carelessness or incompletion, but of necessity; the true
+drawing of detail being for evermore impossible to a hand which has
+contracted a _habit_ of execution. The noble draughtsman draws a leaf,
+and stops, and says calmly,--That leaf is of such and such a character;
+I will give him a friend who will entirely suit him: then he considers
+what his friend ought to be, and having determined, he draws his friend.
+This process may be as quick as lightning when the master is great--one
+of the sons of the giants; or it may be slow and timid: but the process
+is always gone through; no touch or form is ever added to another by a
+good painter without a mental determination and affirmation. But when
+the hand has got into a habit, leaf No. 1 necessitates leaf No. 2; you
+cannot stop, your hand is as a horse with the bit in its teeth; or
+rather is, for the time, a machine, throwing out leaves to order and
+pattern, all alike. You must stop that hand of yours, however painfully;
+make it understand that it is not to have its own way any more, that it
+shall never more slip from one touch to another without orders;
+otherwise it is not you who are the master, but your fingers. You may
+therefore study Harding's drawing, and take pleasure in it;[33] and you
+may properly admire the dexterity which applies the habit of the hand
+so well, and produces results on the whole so satisfactory: but you must
+never copy it; otherwise your progress will be at once arrested. The
+utmost you can ever hope to do would be a sketch in Harding's manner,
+but of far inferior dexterity; for he has given his life's toil to gain
+his dexterity, and you, I suppose, have other things to work at besides
+drawing. You would also incapacitate yourself from ever understanding
+what truly great work was, or what Nature was; but, by the earnest and
+complete study of facts, you will gradually come to understand the one
+and love the other more and more, whether you can draw well yourself or
+not.
+
+138. I have yet to say a few words respecting the third law above
+stated, that of mystery; the law, namely, that nothing is ever seen
+perfectly, but only by fragments, and under various conditions of
+obscurity.[34] This last fact renders the visible objects of Nature
+complete as a type of the human nature. We have, observe, first,
+Subordination; secondly, Individuality; lastly, and this not the least
+essential character, Incomprehensibility; a perpetual lesson, in every
+serrated point and shining vein which escapes or deceives our sight
+among the forest leaves, how little we may hope to discern clearly, or
+judge justly, the rents and veins of the human heart; how much of all
+that is round us, in men's actions or spirits, which we at first think
+we understand, a closer and more loving watchfulness would show to be
+full of mystery, never to be either fathomed or withdrawn.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 26.]
+
+139. The expression of this final character in landscape has never been
+completely reached by any except Turner; nor can you hope to reach it at
+all until you have given much time to the practice of art. Only try
+always when you are sketching any object with a view to completion in
+light and shade, to draw only those parts of it which you really see
+definitely; preparing for the after development of the forms by
+chiaroscuro. It is this preparation by isolated touches for a future
+arrangement of superimposed light and shade which renders the etchings
+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 wood-cuts 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 drawings of the Carracci 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.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 27.]
+
+140. One point more remains to be noted about trees, and I have done. In
+the minds of our ordinary water-color artists a distant tree seems only
+to be conceived as a flat green blot, grouping pleasantly with other
+masses, and giving cool color to the landscape, but differing no wise,
+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
+color, 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.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 28.]
+
+141. 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.
+
+142. 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.[35] 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.
+
+143. 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;[36] 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 develop 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.
+
+144. 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 could 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 colors and
+shades differ from their own colors 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.
+
+145. 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,[37] 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 color 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 colors
+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 colors 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.
+
+146. All this seems complicated enough already; but if there be a strong
+color 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 color of the water. The reflection of a black gondola, for
+instance, at Venice, is never black, but pure dark green. And, farther,
+the color 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
+color 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-colored bloom on its surface, and will be made pure
+emerald green by transmitted sunshine through its edges. With all this,
+however, you are not much concerned at present, but I tell it you partly
+as a preparation for what we have afterwards to say about color, and
+partly that you may approach lakes and streams with reverence,[38] and
+study them as carefully as other things, not hoping to express them by a
+few horizontal dashes of white, or a few tremulous blots.[39] Not but
+that much may be done by tremulous blots, when you know precisely what
+you mean by them, as you will see by many of the Turner sketches, which
+are now framed at the National Gallery; but you must have painted water
+many and many a day--yes, and all day long--before you can hope to do
+anything like those.
+
+147. III. Lastly. You may perhaps wonder why, before passing to the
+clouds, I say nothing special about _ground_.[40] But there is too much
+to be said about that to admit of my saying it here. You will find the
+principal laws of its structure examined at length in the fourth volume
+of Modern Painters; and if you can get that volume, and copy carefully
+Plate 21, which I have etched after Turner with great pains, it will
+give you as much help as you need in the linear expression of
+ground-surface. Strive to get the retirement and succession of masses in
+irregular ground: much may be done in this way by careful watching of
+the perspective diminutions of its herbage, as well as by contour; and
+much also by shadows. If you draw the shadows of leaves and tree trunks
+on any undulating ground with entire carefulness, you will be surprised
+to find how much they explain of the form and distance of the earth on
+which they fall.
+
+148. Passing then to skies, note that there is this great peculiarity
+about sky subject, as distinguished from earth subject;--that the
+clouds, not being much liable to man's interference, are always
+beautifully arranged. You cannot be sure of this in any other features
+of landscape. The rock on which the effect of a mountain scene
+especially depends is always precisely that which the roadmaker blasts
+or the landlord quarries; and the spot of green which Nature left with a
+special purpose by her dark forest sides, and finished with her most
+delicate grasses, is always that which the farmer plows or builds upon.
+But the clouds, though we can hide them with smoke, and mix them with
+poison, cannot be quarried nor built over, and they are always therefore
+gloriously arranged; so gloriously, that unless you have notable powers
+of memory you need not hope to approach the effect of any sky that
+interests you. For both its grace and its glow depend upon the united
+influence of every cloud within its compass: they all move and burn
+together in a marvelous harmony; not a cloud of them is out of its
+appointed place, or fails of its part in the choir: and if you are not
+able to recollect (which in the case of a complicated sky it is
+impossible you should) precisely the form and position of all the clouds
+at a given moment, you cannot draw the sky at all; for the clouds will
+not fit if you draw one part of them three or four minutes before
+another.
+
+149. You must try therefore to help what memory you have, by sketching
+at the utmost possible speed the whole range of the clouds; marking, by
+any shorthand or symbolic work you can hit upon, the peculiar character
+of each, as transparent, or fleecy, or linear, or undulatory; giving
+afterwards such completion to the parts as your recollection will enable
+you to do. This, however, only when the sky is interesting from its
+general aspect; at other times, do not try to draw all the sky, but a
+single cloud: sometimes a round cumulus will stay five or six minutes
+quite steady enough to let you mark out his principal masses; and one or
+two white or crimson lines which cross the sunrise will often stay
+without serious change for as long. And in order to be the readier in
+drawing them, practice occasionally drawing lumps of cotton, which will
+teach you better than any other stable thing the kind of softness there
+is in clouds. For you will find when you have made a few genuine studies
+of sky, and then look at any ancient or modern painting, that ordinary
+artists have always fallen into one of two faults: either, in rounding
+the clouds, they make them as solid and hard-edged as a heap of stones
+tied up in a sack, or they represent them not as rounded at all, but as
+vague wreaths of mist or flat lights in the sky; and think they have
+done enough in leaving a little white paper between dashes of blue, or
+in taking an irregular space out with the sponge. Now clouds are not as
+solid as flour-sacks; but, on the other hand, they are neither spongy
+nor flat. They are definite and very beautiful forms of sculptured mist;
+sculptured is a perfectly accurate word; they are not more _drifted_
+into form than they are _carved_ into form, the warm air around them
+cutting them into shape by absorbing the visible vapor beyond certain
+limits; hence their angular and fantastic outlines, as different from a
+swollen, spherical, or globular formation, on the one hand, as from that
+of flat films or shapeless mists on the other. And the worst of all is,
+that while these forms are difficult enough to draw on any terms,
+especially considering that they never stay quiet, they must be drawn
+also at greater disadvantage of light and shade than any others, the
+force of light in clouds being wholly unattainable by art; so that if we
+put shade enough to express their form as positively as it is expressed
+in reality, we must make them painfully too dark on the dark sides.
+Nevertheless, they are so beautiful, if you in the least succeed with
+them, that you will hardly, I think, lose courage.
+
+150. Outline them often with the pen, as you can catch them here and
+there; one of the chief uses of doing this will be, not so much the
+memorandum so obtained, as the lesson you will get respecting the
+softness of the cloud-outlines. You will always find yourself at a loss
+to see where the outline really is; and when drawn it will always look
+hard and false, and will assuredly be either too round or too square,
+however often you alter it, merely passing from the one fault to the
+other and back again, the real cloud striking an inexpressible mean
+between roundness and squareness in all its coils or battlements. I
+speak at present, of course, only of the cumulus cloud: the lighter
+wreaths and flakes of the upper sky cannot be outlined;--they can only
+be sketched, like locks of hair, by many lines of the pen. Firmly
+developed bars of cloud on the horizon are in general easy enough, and
+may be drawn with decision. When you have thus accustomed yourself a
+little to the placing and action of clouds, try to work out their light
+and shade, just as carefully as you do that of other things, looking
+exclusively for examples of treatment to the vignettes in Rogers's Italy
+and Poems, and to the Liber Studiorum, unless you have access to some
+examples of Turner's own work. No other artist ever yet drew the sky:
+even Titian's clouds, and Tintoret's, are conventional. The clouds in
+the "Ben Arthur," "Source of Arveron," and "Calais Pier," are among the
+best of Turner's storm studies; and of the upper clouds, the vignettes
+to Rogers's Poems furnish as many examples as you need.
+
+151. And now, as our first lesson was taken from the sky, so, for the
+present, let our last be. I do not advise you to be in any haste to
+master the contents of my next letter. If you have any real talent for
+drawing, you will take delight in the discoveries of natural loveliness,
+which the studies I have already proposed will lead you into, among the
+fields and hills; and be assured that the more quietly and
+single-heartedly you take each step in the art, the quicker, on the
+whole, will your progress be. I would rather, indeed, have discussed the
+subjects of the following letter at greater length, and in a separate
+work addressed to more advanced students; but as there are one or two
+things to be said on composition which may set the young artist's mind
+somewhat more at rest, or furnish him with defense from the urgency of
+ill-advisers, I will glance over the main heads of the matter here;
+trusting that my doing so may not beguile you, my dear reader, from your
+serious work, or lead you to think me, in occupying part of this book
+with talk not altogether relevant to it, less entirely or
+
+                                           Faithfully yours,
+
+                                                         J. RUSKIN.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [23] It is meant, I believe, for "Salt Hill."
+
+  [24] I do not mean that you can approach Turner or Duerer in their
+    strength, that is to say, in their imagination or power of design.
+    But you may approach them, by perseverance, in truth of manner.
+
+  [25] The following are the most desirable plates:--
+
+    Grande Chartreuse.               Little Devil's Bridge.
+    Aesacus and Hesperie.            River Wye (_not_ Wye and Severn).
+    Cephalus and Procris.            Holy Island.
+    Source of Arveron.               Clyde.
+    Ben Arthur.                      Lauffenburg.
+    Watermill.                       Blair Athol.
+    Hindhead Hill.                   Alps from Grenoble.
+    Hedging and Ditching.            Raglan. (Subject with quiet brook,
+    Dumblane Abbey.                   trees, and castle on the right.)
+    Morpeth.
+    Calais Pier.
+    Pembury Mill.
+
+    If you cannot get one of these, any of the others will be
+    serviceable, except only the twelve following, which are quite
+    useless:--
+
+      1. Scene in Italy, with goats on a walled road, and trees above.
+      2. Interior of church.
+      3. Scene with bridge, and trees above; figures on left, one playing
+          a pipe.
+      4. Scene with figure playing on tambourine.
+      5. Scene on Thames with high trees, and a square tower of a church
+          seen through them.
+      6. Fifth Plague of Egypt.
+      7. Tenth Plague of Egypt.
+      8. Rivaulx Abbey.
+      9. Wye and Severn.
+     10. Scene with castle in center, cows under trees on the left.
+     11. Martello Towers.
+     12. Calm.
+
+    It is very unlikely that you should meet with one of the original
+    etchings; if you should, it will be a drawing-master in itself
+    alone, for it is not only equivalent to a pen-and-ink drawing by
+    Turner, but to a very careful one; only observe, the Source of
+    Arveron, Raglan, and Dumblane were not etched by Turner; and the
+    etchings of those three are not good for separate study, though it
+    is deeply interesting to see how Turner, apparently provoked at the
+    failure of the beginnings in the Arveron and Raglan, took the plates
+    up himself, and either conquered or brought into use the bad etching
+    by his marvelous engraving. The Dumblane was, however, well etched
+    by Mr. Lupton, and beautifully engraved by him. The finest Turner
+    etching is of an aqueduct with a stork standing in a mountain
+    stream, not in the published series; and next to it, are the
+    unpublished etchings of the Via Mala and Crowhurst. Turner seems to
+    have been so fond of these plates that he kept retouching and
+    finishing them, and never made up his mind to let them go. The Via
+    Mala is certainly, in the state in which Turner left it, the finest
+    of the whole series: its etching is, as I said, the best after that
+    of the aqueduct. Figure 20, above, is part of another fine
+    unpublished etching, "Windsor, from Salt Hill." Of the published
+    etchings, the finest are the Ben Arthur, Aesacus, Cephalus, and Stone
+    Pines, with the Girl washing at a Cistern; the three latter are the
+    more generally instructive. Hindhead Hill, Isis, Jason, and Morpeth,
+    are also very desirable.
+
+  [26] You will find more notice of this point in the account of
+    Harding's tree-drawing, a little farther on.
+
+  [27] The impressions vary so much in color that no brown can be
+    specified.
+
+  [28] You had better get such a photograph, even though you have a
+    Liber print as well.
+
+  [29] See the closing letter in this volume.
+
+  [30] [In 1857.]
+
+  [31] 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.
+
+  [32] 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 wood-cut.
+
+  [33] 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.
+
+  [34] On this law you do well, if you can get access to it, to look
+    at the fourth chapter of the fourth volume of Modern Painters.
+
+  [35] See Note 3 in Appendix I.
+
+  [36] 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.
+
+  [37] See Note 4 in Appendix I.
+
+  [38] See Note 5 in Appendix I.
+
+  [39] 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, etc.
+    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.
+
+  [40] Respecting Architectural Drawing, see the notice of the works
+    of Prout in the Appendix.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER III.
+
+ON COLOR AND COMPOSITION.
+
+
+152. 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 color, you had not longed to paint them, and felt
+considerable difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of
+black, or blue, or gray. You _ought_ to love color, 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 color because you think
+painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may color
+well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than
+pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in color,
+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 color 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 color to your work. For the chances are more than a
+thousand to one against your being right both in form and color 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, color 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 color in another place, and what was in harmony when you
+left it, becomes discordant as you set other colors 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 colorist.
+
+153. But though you cannot produce finished colored 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 color only; and
+preserving distinct statements of certain color 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 gray; 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
+color; but you may presume that you have this, if you enjoy color.
+
+154. And, though of course you should always give as much form to your
+subject as your attention to its color will admit of, remember that the
+whole value of what you are about depends, in a colored sketch, on the
+color merely. If the color 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 color
+at all, you must color rightly. Give up all the form, rather than the
+slightest part of the color: 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 colors. 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 colored memoranda. If you want the form of the
+subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its color, take its
+color, and be sure you _have_ it, and not a spurious, treacherous,
+half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colors all wrong, and
+the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit of
+considering the colored work merely as supplementary to your other
+studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a
+colored 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 color 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 color in each bit of moss pattern,
+and then none of the colors 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.
+
+155. Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting coloring,
+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.
+
+156. And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colors, not moist colors:
+grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning,
+keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colors 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 color when you need it; and force
+yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colors. The two best
+colorists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[41] 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 colors have
+altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the result
+of it with Rossetti is, that though his colors are safe, he has
+sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again.
+William Hunt, of the Old Water-color, 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 colors the more you will get into a
+deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true speed in
+coloring comes of this deliberation.
+
+157. Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colors 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 colors 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.
+
+158. This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them
+opaque, constitutes body-color drawing as opposed to transparent-color
+drawing, and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this
+body-color 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 labor. And if you hear it said that the
+body-color 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
+color, 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-color and transparent color in England, I am now
+entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art
+must be done in dead color. The habit of depending on varnish or on
+lucid tints for transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight
+of the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colors
+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,[42] and to enjoy, in
+general, quality of color 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 color, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and
+Veronese are those which are likest frescoes.
+
+159. Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little
+chalky and coarse-looking body-color is, in a sketch, infinitely liker
+Nature than transparent color: 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
+the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can
+ever be.
+
+160. Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds
+of color are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to
+alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is _no_ vehicle
+or method of color which admits of alteration or repentance; you must be
+right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle
+bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to
+recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good color in oil, water,
+or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by
+Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one,
+perhaps: you may have to ground with one color; to touch it with
+fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth
+into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and
+to re-enforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten,
+or twenty processes to go through, you must go _straight_ through them
+knowingly and foreseeingly all the way; and if you get the thing once
+wrong, there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping boldly down
+to the white ground, and beginning again.
+
+161. The drawing in body-color will tend to teach you all this, more
+than any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling
+into the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has
+nearly ruined our modern water-color school of art. There are sometimes
+places in which a skillful artist will roughen his paper a little to get
+certain conditions of dusty color with more ease than he could
+otherwise; and sometimes a skillfully rased piece of paper will, in the
+midst of transparent tints, answer nearly the purpose of chalky
+body-color in representing the surfaces of rocks or building. But
+artifices of this kind are always treacherous in a tyro's hands,
+tempting him to trust in them: and you had better always work on white
+or gray paper as smooth as silk;[43] and never disturb the surface of
+your color or paper, except finally to scratch out the very highest
+lights if you are using transparent colors.
+
+162. I have said above that body-color drawing will teach you the use of
+color better than working with merely transparent tints; but this is not
+because the process is an easier one, but because it is a more complete
+one, and also because it involves some working with transparent tints in
+the best way. You are not to think that because you use body-color you
+may make any kind of mess that you like, and yet get out of it. But you
+are to avail yourself of the characters of your material, which enable
+you most nearly to imitate the processes of Nature. Thus, suppose you
+have a red rocky cliff to sketch, with blue clouds floating over it. You
+paint your cliff first firmly, then take your blue, mixing it to such a
+tint (and here is a great part of the skill needed) that when it is laid
+over the red, in the thickness required for the effect of the mist, the
+warm rock-color showing through the blue cloud-color, may bring it to
+exactly the hue you want (your upper tint, therefore, must be mixed
+colder than you want it); then you lay it on, varying it as you strike
+it, getting the forms of the mist at once, and, if it be rightly done,
+with exquisite quality of color, from the warm tint's showing through
+and between the particles of the other. When it is dry, you may add a
+little color to retouch the edges where they want shape, or heighten the
+lights where they want roundness, or put another tone over the whole:
+but you can take none away. If you touch or disturb the surface, or by
+any untoward accident mix the under and upper colors together, all is
+lost irrecoverably. Begin your drawing from the ground again if you
+like, or throw it into the fire if you like. But do not waste time in
+trying to mend it.[44]
+
+163. This discussion of the relative merits of transparent and opaque
+color has, however, led us a little beyond the point where we should
+have begun; we must go back to our palette, if you please. Get a cake of
+each of the hard colors named in the note below[45] and try experiments
+on their simple combinations, by mixing each color with every other. If
+you like to do it in an orderly way, you may prepare a squared piece of
+pasteboard, and put the pure colors in columns at the top and side; the
+mixed tints being given at the intersections, thus (the letters standing
+for colors):
+
+      b       c      d      e      f     etc.
+    a a b    a c    a d    a e    a f
+    b --     b c    b d    b e    b f
+    c --     --     c d    c e    c f
+    d --     --     --     d e    d f
+    e --     --     --     --     e f
+    etc.
+
+This will give you some general notion of the characters of mixed tints
+of two colors only, and it is better in practice to confine yourself as
+much as possible to these, and to get more complicated colors, either by
+putting the third _over_ the first blended tint, or by putting the third
+into its interstices. Nothing but watchful practice will teach you the
+effects that colors have on each other when thus put over, or beside,
+each other.
+
+164. When you have got a little used to the principal combinations,
+place yourself at a window which the sun does not shine in at,
+commanding some simple piece of landscape: outline this landscape
+roughly; then take a piece of white cardboard, cut out a hole in it
+about the size of a large pea; and supposing R is the room, _a d_ the
+window, and you are sitting at _a_, Fig. 29, hold this cardboard a
+little outside of the window, upright, and in the direction _b d_,
+parallel to the side of the window, or a little turned, so as to catch
+more light, as at _a d_, never turned as at _c d_, or the paper will be
+dark. Then you will see the landscape, bit by bit, through the circular
+hole. Match the colors of each important bit as nearly as you can,
+mixing your tints with white, beside the aperture. When matched, put a
+touch of the same tint at the top of your paper, writing under it: "dark
+tree color," "hill color," "field color," as the case may be. Then wash
+the tint away from beside the opening, and the cardboard will be ready
+to match another piece of the landscape.[46] When you have got the
+colors of the principal masses thus indicated, lay on a piece of each in
+your sketch in its right place, and then proceed to complete the sketch
+in harmony with them, by your eye.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 29.]
+
+165. In the course of your early experiments, you will be much struck by
+two things: the first, the inimitable brilliancy of light in sky and in
+sunlighted things; and the second, that among the tints which you can
+imitate, those which you thought the darkest will continually turn out
+to be in reality the lightest. Darkness of objects is estimated by us,
+under ordinary circumstances, much more by knowledge than by sight;
+thus, a cedar or Scotch fir, at 200 yards off, will be thought of darker
+green than an elm or oak near us; because we know by experience that the
+peculiar color they exhibit, at that distance, is the _sign_ of darkness
+of foliage. But when we try them through the cardboard, the near oak
+will be found, indeed, rather dark green, and the distant cedar,
+perhaps, pale gray-purple. The quantity of purple and gray in Nature is,
+by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery.
+
+166. Well, having ascertained thus your principal tints, you may proceed
+to fill up your sketch; in doing which observe these following
+particulars:
+
+(1.) Many portions of your subject appeared through the aperture in the
+paper brighter than the paper, as sky, sunlighted grass, etc. Leave
+these portions, for the present, white; and proceed with the parts of
+which you can match the tints.
+
+(2.) As you tried your subject with the cardboard, you must have
+observed how many changes of hue took place over small spaces. In
+filling up your work, try to educate your eye to perceive these
+differences of hue without the help of the cardboard, and lay them
+deliberately, like a mosaic-worker, as separate colors, preparing each
+carefully on your palette, and laying it as if it were a patch of
+colored cloth, cut out, to be fitted neatly by its edge to the next
+patch; so that the _fault_ of your work may be, not a slurred or misty
+look, but a patched bed-cover look, as if it had all been cut out with
+scissors. For instance, in drawing the trunk of a birch tree, there will
+be probably white high lights, then a pale rosy gray round them on the
+light side, then a (probably greenish) deeper gray on the dark side,
+varied by reflected colors, and, over all, rich black strips of bark and
+brown spots of moss. Lay first the rosy gray, leaving white for the high
+lights _and for the spots of moss_, and not touching the dark side. Then
+lay the gray for the dark side, fitting it well up to the rosy gray of
+the light, leaving also in this darker gray the white paper in the
+places for the black and brown moss; then prepare the moss colors
+separately for each spot, and lay each in the white place left for it.
+Not one grain of white, except that purposely left for the high lights,
+must be visible when the work is done, even through a magnifying-glass,
+so cunningly must you fit the edges to each other. Finally, take your
+background colors, and put them on each side of the tree trunk, fitting
+them carefully to its edge.
+
+167. Fine work you would make of this, wouldn't you, if you had not
+learned to draw first, and could not now draw a good outline for the
+stem, much less terminate a color mass in the outline you wanted?
+
+Your work will look very odd for some time, when you first begin to
+paint in this way, and before you can modify it, as I shall tell you
+presently how; but never mind; it is of the greatest possible importance
+that you should practice this separate laying on of the hues, for all
+good coloring finally depends on it. It is, indeed, often necessary, and
+sometimes desirable, to lay one color and form boldly over another:
+thus, in laying leaves on blue sky, it is impossible always in large
+pictures, or when pressed for time, to fill in the blue through the
+interstices of the leaves; and the great Venetians constantly lay their
+blue ground first, and then, having let it dry, strike the golden brown
+over it in the form of the leaf, leaving the under blue to shine through
+the gold, and subdue it to the olive-green they want. But in the most
+precious and perfect work each leaf is inlaid, and the blue worked round
+it; and, whether you use one or other mode of getting your result, it is
+equally necessary to be absolute and decisive in your laying the color.
+Either your ground must be laid firmly first, and then your upper color
+struck upon it in perfect form, forever, thenceforward, unalterable; or
+else the two colors must be individually put in their places, and led up
+to each other till they meet at their appointed border, equally,
+thenceforward, unchangeable. Either process, you see, involves absolute
+decision. If you once begin to slur, or change, or sketch, or try this
+way and that with your color, it is all over with it and with you. You
+will continually see bad copyists trying to imitate the Venetians, by
+daubing their colors about, and retouching, and finishing, and
+softening: when every touch and every added hue only lead them farther
+into chaos. There is a dog between two children in a Veronese in the
+Louvre, which gives the copyists much employment. He has a dark ground
+behind him, which Veronese has painted first, and then when it was dry,
+or nearly so, struck the locks of the dog's white hair over it with some
+half-dozen curling sweeps of his brush, right at once, and forever. Had
+one line or hair of them gone wrong, it would have been wrong forever;
+no retouching could have mended it. The poor copyists daub in first some
+background, and then some dog's hair; then retouch the background, then
+the hair; work for hours at it, expecting it always to come right
+to-morrow--"when it is finished." They _may_ work for centuries at it,
+and they will never do it. If they can do it with Veronese's allowance
+of work, half a dozen sweeps of the hand over the dark background, well;
+if not, they may ask the dog himself whether it will ever come right,
+and get true answer from him--on Launce's conditions: "If he say 'ay,'
+it will; if he say 'no,' it will; if he shake his tail and say nothing,
+it will."
+
+168. (3.) Whenever you lay on a mass of color, be sure that however
+large it may be, or however small, it shall be gradated. No color exists
+in Nature under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If you do not
+see this, it is the fault of your inexperience: you will see it in due
+time, if you practice enough. But in general you may see it at once. In
+the birch trunk, for instance, the rosy gray _must_ be gradated by the
+roundness of the stem till it meets the shaded side; similarly the
+shaded side is gradated by reflected light. Accordingly, whether by
+adding water, or white paint, or by unequal force of touch (this you
+will do at pleasure, according to the texture you wish to produce), you
+must, in every tint you lay on, make it a little paler at one part than
+another, and get an even gradation between the two depths. This is very
+like laying down a formal law or recipe for you; but you will find it is
+merely the assertion of a natural fact. It is not indeed physically
+impossible to meet with an ungradated piece of color, but it is so
+supremely improbable, that you had better get into the habit of asking
+yourself invariably, when you are going to copy a tint--not "Is that
+gradated?" but "Which way is that gradated?" and at least in ninety-nine
+out of a hundred instances, you will be able to answer decisively after
+a careful glance, though the gradation may have been so subtle that you
+did not see it at first. And it does not matter how small the touch of
+color may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one
+part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not
+merely because the natural fact is so, that your color should be
+gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the color itself depends
+more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to
+colors just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful
+by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types,
+expressing the law of gradual change and progress in the human soul
+itself. What the difference is in mere beauty between a gradated and
+ungradated color, may be seen easily by laying an even tint of
+rose-color on paper, and putting a rose leaf beside it. The victorious
+beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers, depends wholly on the
+delicacy and quantity of its color gradations, all other flowers being
+either less rich in gradation, not having so many folds of leaf; or less
+tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed.
+
+169. (4.) But observe, it is not enough in general that color should be
+gradated by being made merely paler or darker at one place than another.
+Generally color changes as it diminishes, and is not merely darker at
+one spot, but also purer at one spot than anywhere else. It does not in
+the least follow that the darkest spots should be the purest; still less
+so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often the two gradations
+more or less cross each other, one passing in one direction from
+paleness to darkness, another in another direction from purity to
+dullness, but there will almost always be both of them, however
+reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of color until
+you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that you lay on
+must be _quite_ blue only at some given spot, nor that a large spot; and
+must be gradated from that into less pure blue,--grayish blue, or
+greenish blue, or purplish blue,--over all the rest of the space it
+occupies. And this you must do in one of three ways: either, while the
+color is wet, mix with it the color which is to subdue it, adding
+gradually a little more and a little more; or else, when the color is
+quite dry, strike a gradated touch of another color over it, leaving
+only a point of the first tint visible; or else, lay the subduing tints
+on in small touches, as in the exercise of tinting the chess-board. Of
+each of these methods I have something to tell you separately; but that
+is distinct from the subject of gradation, which I must not quit without
+once more pressing upon you the preeminent necessity of introducing it
+everywhere. I have profound dislike of anything like habit of hand, and
+yet, in this one instance, I feel almost tempted to encourage you to get
+into a habit of never touching paper with color, without securing a
+gradation. You will not, in Turner's largest oil pictures, perhaps six
+or seven feet long by four or five high, find one spot of color as large
+as a grain of wheat ungradated: and you will find in practice, that
+brilliancy of hue, and vigor of light, and even the aspect of
+transparency in shade, are essentially dependent on this character
+alone; hardness, coldness, and opacity resulting far more from
+_equality_ of color than from nature of color. Give me some mud off a
+city crossing, some ocher out of a gravel pit, a little whitening, and
+some coal-dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me
+time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust: but though you had the red
+of the ruby, the blue of the gentian, snow for the light, and amber for
+the gold, you cannot paint a luminous picture, if you keep the masses of
+those colors unbroken in purity, and unvarying in depth.
+
+170. (5.) Next, note the three processes by which gradation and other
+characters are to be obtained:
+
+A. Mixing while the color is wet.
+
+You may be confused by my first telling you to lay on the hues in
+separate patches, and then telling you to mix hues together as you lay
+them on: but the separate masses are to be laid, when colors distinctly
+oppose each other at a given limit; the hues to be mixed, when they
+palpitate one through the other, or fade one into the other. It is
+better to err a little on the distinct side. Thus I told you to paint
+the dark and light sides of the birch trunk separately, though, in
+reality, the two tints change, as the trunk turns away from the light,
+gradually one into the other; and, after being laid separately on, will
+need some farther touching to harmonize them: but they do so in a very
+narrow space, marked distinctly all the way up the trunk, and it is
+easier and safer, therefore, to keep them separate at first. Whereas it
+often happens that the whole beauty of two colors will depend on the one
+being continued well through the other, and playing in the midst of it:
+blue and green often do so in water; blue and gray, or purple and
+scarlet, in sky: in hundreds of such instances the most beautiful and
+truthful results may be obtained by laying one color into the other
+while wet; judging wisely how far it will spread, or blending it with
+the brush in somewhat thicker consistence of wet body-color; only
+observe, never mix in this way two _mixtures_; let the color you lay
+into the other be always a simple, not a compound tint.
+
+171. B. Laying one color over another.
+
+If you lay on a solid touch of vermilion, and after it is quite dry,
+strike a little very wet carmine quickly over it, you will obtain a much
+more brilliant red than by mixing the carmine and vermilion. Similarly,
+if you lay a dark color first, and strike a little blue or white
+body-color lightly over it, you will get a more beautiful gray than by
+mixing the color and the blue or white. In very perfect painting,
+artifices of this kind are continually used; but I would not have you
+trust much to them: they are apt to make you think too much of quality
+of color. I should like you to depend on little more than the dead
+colors, simply laid on, only observe always this, that the _less_ color
+you do the work with, the better it will always be:[47] so that if you
+had laid a red color, and you want a purple one above, do not mix the
+purple on your palette and lay it on so thick as to overpower the red,
+but take a little thin blue from your palette, and lay it lightly over
+the red, so as to let the red be seen through, and thus produce the
+required purple; and if you want a green hue over a blue one, do not lay
+a quantity of green on the blue, but a _little_ yellow, and so on,
+always bringing the under color into service as far as you possibly can.
+If, however, the color beneath is wholly opposed to the one you have to
+lay on, as, suppose, if green is to be laid over scarlet, you must
+either remove the required parts of the under color daintily first with
+your knife, or with water; or else, lay solid white over it massively,
+and leave that to dry, and then glaze the white with the upper color.
+This is better, in general, than laying the upper color itself so thick
+as to conquer the ground, which, in fact, if it be a transparent color,
+you cannot do. Thus, if you have to strike warm boughs and leaves of
+trees over blue sky, and they are too intricate to have their places
+left for them in laying the blue, it is better to lay them first in
+solid white, and then glaze with sienna and ocher, than to mix the
+sienna and white; though, of course, the process is longer and more
+troublesome. Nevertheless, if the forms of touches required are very
+delicate, the after glazing is impossible. You must then mix the warm
+color thick at once, and so use it: and this is often necessary for
+delicate grasses, and such other fine threads of light in foreground
+work.
+
+172. C. Breaking one color in small points through or over another.
+
+This is the most important of all processes in good modern[48] oil and
+water-color painting, but you need not hope to attain very great skill
+in it. To do it well is very laborious, and requires such skill and
+delicacy of hand as can only be acquired by unceasing practice. But you
+will find advantage in noting the following points:
+
+173. (_a._) In distant effects of rich subject, wood, or rippled water,
+or broken clouds, much may be done by touches or crumbling dashes of
+rather dry color, with other colors afterwards put cunningly into the
+interstices. The more you practice this, when the subject evidently
+calls for it, the more your eye will enjoy the higher qualities of
+color. The process is, in fact, the carrying out of the principle of
+separate colors to the utmost possible refinement; using atoms of color
+in juxtaposition, instead of large spaces. And note, in filling up
+minute interstices of this kind, that if you want the color you fill
+them with to show brightly, it is better to put a rather positive point
+of it, with a little white left beside or round it in the interstice,
+than to put a pale tint of the color over the whole interstice. Yellow
+or orange will hardly show, if pale, in small spaces; but they show
+brightly in firm touches, however small, with white beside them.
+
+174. (_b._) If a color is to be darkened by superimposed portions of
+another, it is, in many cases, better to lay the uppermost color in
+rather vigorous small touches, like finely chopped straw, over the under
+one, than to lay it on as a tint, for two reasons: the first, that the
+play of the two colors together is pleasant to the eye; the second, that
+much expression of form may be got by wise administration of the upper
+dark touches. In distant mountains they may be made pines of, or broken
+crags, or villages, or stones, or whatever you choose; in clouds they
+may indicate the direction of the rain, the roll and outline of the
+cloud masses; and in water, the minor waves. All noble effects of dark
+atmosphere are got in good water-color drawing by these two expedients,
+interlacing the colors, or retouching the lower one with fine darker
+drawing in an upper. Sponging and washing for dark atmospheric effect is
+barbarous, and mere tyro's work, though it is often useful for passages
+of delicate atmospheric light.
+
+175. (_c._) When you have time, practice the production of mixed tints
+by interlaced touches of the pure colors out of which they are formed,
+and use the process at the parts of your sketches where you wish to get
+rich and luscious effects. Study the works of William Hunt, of the Old
+Water-color Society, in this respect, continually, and make frequent
+memoranda of the variegations in flowers; not painting the flower
+completely, but laying the ground color of one petal, and painting the
+spots on it with studious precision: a series of single petals of
+lilies, geraniums, tulips, etc., numbered with proper reference to their
+position in the flower, will be interesting to you on many grounds
+besides those of art. Be careful to get the gradated distribution of the
+spots well followed in the calceolarias, foxgloves, and the like; and
+work out the odd, indefinite hues of the spots themselves with minute
+grains of pure interlaced color, otherwise you will never get their
+richness or bloom. You will be surprised to find as you do this, first,
+the universality of the law of gradation we have so much insisted upon;
+secondly, that Nature is just as economical of _her_ fine colors as I
+have told you to be of yours. You would think, by the way she paints,
+that her colors cost her something enormous; she will only give you a
+single pure touch, just where the petal turns into light; but down in
+the bell all is subdued, and under the petal all is subdued, even in the
+showiest flower. What you thought was bright blue is, when you look
+close, only dusty gray, or green, or purple, or every color in the world
+at once, only a single gleam or streak of pure blue in the center of it.
+And so with all her colors. Sometimes I have really thought her
+miserliness intolerable: in a gentian, for instance, the way she
+economizes her ultramarine down in the bell is a little too bad.[49]
+
+176. Next, respecting general tone. I said, just now, that, for the sake
+of students, my tax should not be laid on black or on white pigments;
+but if you mean to be a colorist, you must lay a tax on them yourself
+when you begin to use true color; that is to say, you must use them
+little, and make of them much. There is no better test of your color
+tones being good, than your having made the white in your picture
+precious, and the black conspicuous.
+
+177. I say, first, the white precious. I do not mean merely glittering
+or brilliant: it is easy to scratch white seagulls out of black clouds,
+and dot clumsy foliage with chalky dew; but when white is well managed,
+it ought to be strangely delicious,--tender as well as bright,--like
+inlaid mother of pearl, or white roses washed in milk. The eye ought to
+seek it for rest, brilliant though it may be; and to feel it as a space
+of strange, heavenly paleness in the midst of the flushing of the
+colors. This effect you can only reach by general depth of middle tint,
+by absolutely refusing to allow any white to exist except where you need
+it, and by keeping the white itself subdued by gray, except at a few
+points of chief luster.
+
+178. Secondly, you must make the black conspicuous. However small a
+point of black may be, it ought to catch the eye, otherwise your work is
+too heavy in the shadow. All the ordinary shadows should be of some
+_color_,--never black, nor approaching black, they should be evidently
+and always of a luminous nature, and the black should look strange among
+them; never occurring except in a black object, or in small points
+indicative of intense shade in the very center of masses of shadow.
+Shadows of absolutely negative gray, however, may be beautifully used
+with white, or with gold; but still though the black thus, in subdued
+strength, becomes spacious, it should always be conspicuous; the
+spectator should notice this gray neutrality with some wonder, and
+enjoy, all the more intensely on account of it, the gold color and the
+white which it relieves. Of all the great colorists Velasquez is the
+greatest master of the black chords. His black is more precious than
+most other people's crimson.
+
+179. It is not, however, only white and black which you must make
+valuable; you must give rare worth to every color you use; but the white
+and black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the
+other colors should be continually passing one into the other, being all
+evidently companions in the same gay world; while the white, black, and
+neutral gray should stand monkishly aloof in the midst of them. You may
+melt your crimson into purple, your purple into blue, and your blue into
+green, but you must not melt any of them into black. You should,
+however, try, as I said, to give preciousness to all your colors; and
+this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work,
+and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine coloring,
+like fine drawing, is delicate; and so delicate that if, at last, you
+_see_ the color you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You
+ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone, by touches of color
+which individually are too pale to be seen; and if there is one atom of
+any color in the whole picture which is unnecessary to it, that atom
+hurts it.
+
+180. Notice also that nearly all good compound colors are _odd_ colors.
+You shall look at a hue in a good painter's work ten minutes before you
+know what to call it. You thought it was brown, presently you feel that
+it is red; next that there is, somehow, yellow in it; presently
+afterwards that there is blue in it. If you try to copy it you will
+always find your color too warm or too cold--no color in the box will
+seem to have an affinity with it; and yet it will be as pure as if it
+were laid at a single touch with a single color.
+
+181. As to the choice and harmony of colors in general, if you cannot
+choose and harmonize them by instinct, you will never do it at all. If
+you need examples of utterly harsh and horrible color, you may find
+plenty given in treatises upon coloring, to illustrate the laws of
+harmony; and if you want to color beautifully, color as best pleases
+yourself at _quiet times_, not so as to catch the eye, nor look as if it
+were clever or difficult to color in that way, but so that the color may
+be pleasant to you when you are happy or thoughtful. Look much at the
+morning and evening sky, and much at simple flowers--dog-roses,
+wood-hyacinths, violets, poppies, thistles, heather, and such like,--as
+Nature arranges them in the woods and fields. If ever any scientific
+person tells you that two colors are "discordant," make a note of the
+two colors, and put them together whenever you can. I have actually
+heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the two colors
+which Nature seems to intend never to be separated, and never to be
+felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!--a peacock's
+neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with green
+lights through it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to clouds
+at sunrise, in this colored world of ours. If you have a good eye for
+colors, you will soon find out how constantly Nature puts purple and
+green together, purple and scarlet, green and blue, yellow and neutral
+gray, and the like; and how she strikes these color-concords for general
+tones, and then works into them with innumerable subordinate ones; and
+you will gradually come to like what she does, and find out new and
+beautiful chords of color in her work every day. If you enjoy them,
+depend upon it you will paint them to a certain point right: or, at
+least, if you do not enjoy them, you are certain to paint them wrong. If
+color does not give you intense pleasure, let it alone; depend upon it,
+you are only tormenting the eyes and senses of people who feel color,
+whenever you touch it; and that is unkind and improper.
+
+182. You will find, also, your power of coloring depend much on your
+state of health and right balance of mind; when you are fatigued or ill
+you will not see colors well, and when you are ill-tempered you will not
+choose them well: thus, though not infallibly a test of character in
+individuals, color power is a great sign of mental health in nations;
+when they are in a state of intellectual decline, their coloring always
+gets dull.[50] You must also take great care not to be misled by
+affected talk about colors from people who have not the gift of it:
+numbers are eager and voluble about it who probably never in all their
+lives received one genuine color-sensation. The modern religionists of
+the school of Overbeck are just like people who eat slate-pencil and
+chalk, and assure everybody that they are nicer and purer than
+strawberries and plums.
+
+183. Take care also never to be misled into any idea that color can help
+or display _form_; color[51] always disguises form, and is meant to do
+so.
+
+184. It is a favorite dogma among modern writers on color that "warm
+colors" (reds and yellows) "approach," or express nearness, and "cold
+colors" (blue and gray) "retire," or express distance. So far is this
+from being the case, that no expression of distance in the world is so
+great as that of the gold and orange in twilight sky. Colors, as such,
+are ABSOLUTELY inexpressive respecting distance. It is their quality (as
+depth, delicacy, etc.) which expresses distance, not their tint. A blue
+bandbox set on the same shelf with a yellow one will not look an inch
+farther off, but a red or orange cloud, in the upper sky, will always
+appear to be beyond a blue cloud close to us, as it is in reality. It is
+quite true that in certain objects, blue is a _sign_ of distance; but
+that is not because blue is a retiring color, but because the mist in
+the air is blue, and therefore any warm color which has not strength of
+light enough to pierce the mist is lost or subdued in its blue: but blue
+is no more, on this account, a "retiring color," than brown is a
+retiring color, because, when stones are seen through brown water, the
+deeper they lie the browner they look; or than yellow is a retiring
+color, because, when objects are seen through a London fog, the farther
+off they are the yellower they look. Neither blue, nor yellow, nor red,
+can have, as such, the smallest power of expressing either nearness or
+distance: they express them only under the peculiar circumstances which
+render them at the moment, or in that place, _signs_ of nearness or
+distance. Thus, vivid orange in an orange is a sign of nearness, for if
+you put the orange a great way off, its color will not look so bright;
+but vivid orange in sky is a sign of distance, because you cannot get
+the color of orange in a cloud near you. So purple in a violet or a
+hyacinth is a sign of nearness, because the closer you look at them the
+more purple you see. But purple in a mountain is a sign of distance,
+because a mountain close to you is not purple, but green or gray. It
+may, indeed, be generally assumed that a tender or pale color will more
+or less express distance, and a powerful or dark color nearness; but
+even this is not always so. Heathery hills will usually give a pale and
+tender purple near, and an intense and dark purple far away; the rose
+color of sunset on snow is pale on the snow at your feet, deep and full
+on the snow in the distance; and the green of a Swiss lake is pale in
+the clear waves on the beach, but intense as an emerald in the sunstreak
+six miles from shore. And in any case, when the foreground is in strong
+light, with much water about it, or white surface, casting intense
+reflections, all its colors may be perfectly delicate, pale, and faint;
+while the distance, when it is in shadow, may relieve the whole
+foreground with intense darks of purple, blue green, or ultramarine
+blue. So that, on the whole, it is quite hopeless and absurd to expect
+any help from laws of "aerial perspective." Look for the natural
+effects, and set them down as fully as you can, and as faithfully, and
+_never_ alter a color because it won't look in its right place. Put the
+color strong, if it be strong, though far off; faint, if it be faint,
+though close to you. Why should you suppose that Nature always means you
+to know exactly how far one thing is from another? She certainly intends
+you always to enjoy her coloring, but she does not wish you always to
+measure her space. You would be hard put to it, every time you painted
+the sun setting, if you had to express his 95,000,000 miles of distance
+in "aerial perspective."
+
+185. There is, however, I think, one law about distance, which has some
+claims to be considered a constant one: namely, that dullness and
+heaviness of color are more or less indicative of nearness. All distant
+color is _pure_ color: it may not be bright, but it is clear and lovely,
+not opaque nor soiled; for the air and light coming between us and any
+earthy or imperfect color, purify or harmonize it; hence a bad colorist
+is peculiarly incapable of expressing distance. I do not of course mean
+that you are to use bad colors in your foreground by way of making it
+come forward; but only that a failure in color, there, will not put it
+out of its place; while a failure in color in the distance will at once
+do away with its remoteness; your dull-colored foreground will still be
+a foreground, though ill-painted; but your ill-painted distance will not
+be merely a dull distance,--it will be no distance at all.
+
+186. I have only one thing more to advise you, namely, never to color
+petulantly or hurriedly. You will not, indeed, be able, if you attend
+properly to your coloring, to get anything like the quantity of form you
+could in a chiaroscuro sketch; nevertheless, if you do not dash or rush
+at your work, nor do it lazily, you may always get enough form to be
+satisfactory. An extra quarter of an hour, distributed in quietness
+over the course of the whole study, may just make the difference between
+a quite intelligible drawing, and a slovenly and obscure one. If you
+determine well beforehand what outline each piece of color is to have,
+and, when it is on the paper, guide it without nervousness, as far as
+you can, into the form required; and then, after it is dry, consider
+thoroughly what touches are needed to complete it, before laying one of
+them on; you will be surprised to find how masterly the work will soon
+look, as compared with a hurried or ill-considered sketch. In no process
+that I know of--least of all in sketching--can time be really gained by
+precipitation. It is gained only by caution; and gained in all sorts of
+ways; for not only truth of form, but force of light, is always added by
+an intelligent and shapely laying of the shadow colors. You may often
+make a simple flat tint, rightly gradated and edged, express a
+complicated piece of subject without a single retouch. The two Swiss
+cottages, for instance, with their balconies, and glittering windows,
+and general character of shingly eaves, are expressed in Fig. 30 with
+one tint of gray, and a few dispersed spots and lines of it; all of
+which you ought to be able to lay on without more than thrice dipping
+your brush, and without a single touch after the tint is dry.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 30.]
+
+187. Here, then, for I cannot without colored illustrations tell you
+more, I must leave you to follow out the subject for yourself, with
+such help as you may receive from the water-color drawings accessible to
+you; or from any of the little treatises on their art which have been
+published lately by our water-color painters.[52] But do not trust much
+to works of this kind. You may get valuable hints from them as to
+mixture of colors; and here and there you will find a useful artifice or
+process explained; but nearly all such books are written only to help
+idle amateurs to a meretricious skill, and they are full of precepts and
+principles which may, for the most part, be interpreted by their
+_precise_ negatives, and then acted upon with advantage. Most of them
+praise boldness, when the only safe attendant spirit of a beginner is
+caution;--advise velocity, when the first condition of success is
+deliberation;--and plead for generalization, when all the foundations of
+power must be laid in knowledge of speciality.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+188. And now, in the last place, I have a few things to tell you
+respecting that dangerous nobleness of consummate art,--COMPOSITION. For
+though it is quite unnecessary for you yet awhile to attempt it, and it
+_may_ be inexpedient for you to attempt it at all, you ought to know
+what it means, and to look for and enjoy it in the art of others.
+
+Composition means, literally and simply, putting several things
+together, so as to make _one_ thing out of them; the nature and goodness
+of which they all have a share in producing. Thus a musician composes an
+air, by putting notes together in certain relations; a poet composes a
+poem, by putting thoughts and words in pleasant order; and a painter a
+picture, by putting thoughts, forms, and colors in pleasant order.
+
+In all these cases, observe, an intended unity must be the result of
+composition. A pavior cannot be said to compose the heap of stones which
+he empties from his cart, nor the sower the handful of seed which he
+scatters from his hand. It is the essence of composition that
+everything should be in a determined place, perform an intended part,
+and act, in that part, advantageously for everything that is connected
+with it.
+
+189. Composition, understood in this pure sense, is the type, in the
+arts of mankind, of the Providential government of the world.[53] It is
+an exhibition, in the order given to notes, or colors, or forms, of the
+advantage of perfect fellowship, discipline, and contentment. In a
+well-composed air, no note, however short or low, can be spared, but the
+least is as necessary as the greatest: no note, however prolonged, is
+tedious; but the others prepare for, and are benefited by, its duration:
+no note, however high, is tyrannous; the others prepare for, and are
+benefited by, its exaltation: no note, however low, is overpowered; the
+others prepare for, and sympathize with, its humility: and the result
+is, that each and every note has a value in the position assigned to it,
+which, by itself, it never possessed, and of which, by separation from
+the others, it would instantly be deprived.
+
+190. Similarly, in a good poem, each word and thought enhances the value
+of those which precede and follow it; and every syllable has a
+loveliness which depends not so much on its abstract sound as on its
+position. Look at the same word in a dictionary, and you will hardly
+recognize it.
+
+Much more in a great picture; every line and color is so arranged as to
+advantage the rest. None are inessential, however slight; and none are
+independent, however forcible. It is not enough that they truly
+represent natural objects; but they must fit into certain places, and
+gather into certain harmonious groups: so that, for instance, the red
+chimney of a cottage is not merely set in its place as a chimney, but
+that it may affect, in a certain way pleasurable to the eye, the pieces
+of green or blue in other parts of the picture; and we ought to see that
+the work is masterly, merely by the positions and quantities of these
+patches of green, red, and blue, even at a distance which renders it
+perfectly impossible to determine what the colors represent: or to see
+whether the red is a chimney, or an old woman's cloak; and whether the
+blue is smoke, sky, or water.
+
+191. It seems to be appointed, in order to remind us, in all we do, of
+the great laws of Divine government and human polity, that composition
+in the arts should strongly affect every order of mind, however
+unlearned or thoughtless. Hence the popular delight in rhythm and meter,
+and in simple musical melodies. But it is also appointed that _power_ of
+composition in the fine arts should be an exclusive attribute of great
+intellect. All men can more or less copy what they see, and, more or
+less, remember it: powers of reflection and investigation are also
+common to us all, so that the decision of inferiority in these rests
+only on questions of _degree_. A. has a better memory than B., and C.
+reflects more profoundly than D. But the gift of composition is not
+given _at all_ to more than one man in a thousand; in its highest range,
+it does not occur above three or four times in a century.
+
+192. It follows, from these general truths, that it is impossible to
+give rules which will enable you to compose. You might much more easily
+receive rules to enable you to be witty. If it were possible to be witty
+by rule, wit would cease to be either admirable or amusing: if it were
+possible to compose melody by rule, Mozart and Cimarosa need not have
+been born: if it were possible to compose pictures by rule, Titian and
+Veronese would be ordinary men. The essence of composition lies
+precisely in the fact of its being unteachable, in its being the
+operation of an individual mind of range and power exalted above others.
+
+But though no one can _invent_ by rule, there are some simple laws of
+arrangement which it is well for you to know, because, though they will
+not enable you to produce a good picture, they will often assist you to
+set forth what goodness may be in your work in a more telling way than
+you could have done otherwise; and by tracing them in the work of good
+composers, you may better understand the grasp of their imagination,
+and the power it possesses over their materials. I shall briefly state
+the chief of these laws.
+
+
+1. THE LAW OF PRINCIPALITY.
+
+193. The great object of composition being always to secure unity; that
+is, to make out of many things one whole; the first mode in which this
+can be effected is, by determining that _one_ feature shall be more
+important than all the rest, and that the others shall group with it in
+subordinate positions.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 31.]
+
+This is the simplest law of ordinary ornamentation. Thus the group of
+two leaves, _a_, Fig. 31, is unsatisfactory, because it has no leading
+leaf; but that at _b_ _is_ prettier, because it has a head or master
+leaf; and _c_ more satisfactory still, because the subordination of the
+other members to this head leaf is made more manifest by their gradual
+loss of size as they fall back from it. Hence part of the pleasure we
+have in the Greek honeysuckle ornament, and such others.
+
+194. Thus, also, good pictures have always one light larger and brighter
+than the other lights, or one figure more prominent than the other
+figures, or one mass of color dominant over all the other masses; and in
+general you will find it much benefit your sketch if you manage that
+there shall be one light on the cottage wall, or one blue cloud in the
+sky, which may attract the eye as leading light, or leading gloom, above
+all others. But the observance of the rule is often so cunningly
+concealed by the great composers, that its force is hardly at first
+traceable; and you will generally find they are vulgar pictures in which
+the law is strikingly manifest.
+
+195. This may be simply illustrated by musical melody: for instance, in
+such phrases as this--
+
+[Illustration]
+
+one note (here the upper G) rules the whole passage, and has the full
+energy of it concentrated in itself. Such passages, corresponding to
+completely subordinated compositions in painting, are apt to be
+wearisome if often repeated. But, in such a phrase as this--
+
+[Illustration]
+
+it is very difficult to say which is the principal note. The A in the
+last bar is slightly dominant, but there is a very equal current of
+power running through the whole; and such passages rarely weary. And
+this principle holds through vast scales of arrangement; so that in the
+grandest compositions, such as Paul Veronese's Marriage in Cana, or
+Raphaels Disputa, it is not easy to fix at once on the principal figure;
+and very commonly the figure which is really chief does not catch the
+eye at first, but is gradually felt to be more and more conspicuous as
+we gaze. Thus in Titian's grand composition of the Cornaro Family, the
+figure meant to be principal is a youth of fifteen or sixteen, whose
+portrait it was evidently the painter's object to make as interesting as
+possible. But a grand Madonna, and a St. George with a drifting banner,
+and many figures more, occupy the center of the picture, and first
+catch the eye; little by little we are led away from them to a gleam of
+pearly light in the lower corner, and find that, from the head which it
+shines upon, we can turn our eyes no more.
+
+196. As, in every good picture, nearly all laws of design are more or
+less exemplified, it will, on the whole, be an easier way of explaining
+them to analyze one composition thoroughly, than to give instances from
+various works. I shall therefore take one of Turner's simplest; which
+will allow us, so to speak, easily to decompose it, and illustrate each
+law by it as we proceed.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 32.]
+
+Fig. 32 is a rude sketch of the arrangement of the whole subject; the
+old bridge over the Moselle at Coblentz, the town of Coblentz on the
+right, Ehrenbreitstein on the left. The leading or master feature is, of
+course, the tower on the bridge. It is kept from being _too_ principal
+by an important group on each side of it; the boats, on the right, and
+Ehrenbreitstein beyond. The boats are large in mass, and more forcible
+in color, but they are broken into small divisions, while the tower is
+simple, and therefore it still leads. Ehrenbreitstein is noble in its
+mass, but so reduced by aerial perspective of color that it cannot
+contend with the tower, which therefore holds the eye, and becomes the
+key of the picture. We shall see presently how the very objects which
+seem at first to contend with it for the mastery are made, occultly, to
+increase its preeminence.
+
+
+2. THE LAW OF REPETITION.
+
+197. Another important means of expressing unity is to mark some kind of
+sympathy among the different objects, and perhaps the pleasantest,
+because most surprising, kind of sympathy, is when one group imitates or
+repeats another; not in the way of balance or symmetry, but
+subordinately, like a far-away and broken echo of it. Prout has insisted
+much on this law in all his writings on composition; and I think it is
+even more authoritatively present in the minds of most great composers
+than the law of principality.[54] It is quite curious to see the pains
+that Turner sometimes takes to echo an important passage of color; in
+the Pembroke Castle for instance, there are two fishing-boats, one with
+a red, and another with a white sail. In a line with them, on the beach,
+are two fish in precisely the same relative positions; one red and one
+white. It is observable that he uses the artifice chiefly in pictures
+where he wishes to obtain an expression of repose: in my notice of the
+plate of Scarborough, in the series of the Harbors of England, I have
+already had occasion to dwell on this point; and I extract in the
+note[55] one or two sentences which explain the principle. In the
+composition I have chosen for our illustration, this reduplication is
+employed to a singular extent. The tower, or leading feature, is first
+repeated by the low echo of it to the left; put your finger over this
+lower tower, and see how the picture is spoiled. Then the spires of
+Coblentz are all arranged in couples (how they are arranged in reality
+does not matter; when we are composing a great picture, we must play the
+towers about till they come right, as fearlessly as if they were
+chessmen instead of cathedrals). The dual arrangement of these towers
+would have been too easily seen, were it not for the little one which
+pretends to make a triad of the last group on the right, but is so faint
+as hardly to be discernible: it just takes off the attention from the
+artifice, helped in doing so by the mast at the head of the boat, which,
+however, has instantly its own duplicate put at the stern.[56] Then
+there is the large boat near, and its echo beyond it. That echo is
+divided into two again, and each of those two smaller boats has two
+figures in it; while two figures are also sitting together on the great
+rudder that lies half in the water, and half aground. Then, finally, the
+great mass of Ehrenbreitstein, which appears at first to have no
+answering form, has almost its _facsimile_ in the bank on which the girl
+is sitting; this bank is as absolutely essential to the completion of
+the picture as any object in the whole series. All this is done to
+deepen the effect of repose.
+
+198. Symmetry, or the balance of parts or masses in nearly equal
+opposition, is one of the conditions of treatment under the law of
+Repetition. For the opposition, in a symmetrical object, is of like
+things reflecting each other: it is not the balance of contrary natures
+(like that of day and night), but of like natures or like forms; one
+side of a leaf being set like the reflection of the other in water.
+
+Symmetry in Nature is, however, never formal nor accurate. She takes the
+greatest care to secure some difference between the corresponding things
+or parts of things; and an approximation to accurate symmetry is only
+permitted in animals, because their motions secure perpetual difference
+between the balancing parts. Stand before a mirror; hold your arms in
+precisely the same position at each side, your head upright, your body
+straight; divide your hair exactly in the middle and get it as nearly as
+you can into exactly the same shape over each ear; and you will see the
+effect of accurate symmetry: you will see, no less, how all grace and
+power in the human form result from the interference of motion and life
+with symmetry, and from the reconciliation of its balance with its
+changefulness. Your position, as seen in the mirror, is the highest type
+of symmetry as understood by modern architects.
+
+199. In many sacred compositions, living symmetry, the balance of
+harmonious opposites, is one of the profoundest sources of their power:
+almost any works of the early painters, Angelico, Perugino, Giotto,
+etc., will furnish you with notable instances of it. The Madonna of
+Perugino in the National Gallery, with the angel Michael on one side and
+Raphael on the other, is as beautiful an example as you can have.
+
+In landscape, the principle of balance is more or less carried out, in
+proportion to the wish of the painter to express disciplined calmness.
+In bad compositions, as in bad architecture, it is formal, a tree on one
+side answering a tree on the other; but in good compositions, as in
+graceful statues, it is always easy and sometimes hardly traceable. In
+the Coblentz, however, you cannot have much difficulty in seeing how the
+boats on one side of the tower and the figures on the other are set in
+nearly equal balance; the tower, as a central mass, uniting both.
+
+
+3. THE LAW OF CONTINUITY.
+
+200. Another important and pleasurable way of expressing unity, is by
+giving some orderly succession to a number of objects more or less
+similar. And this succession is most interesting when it is connected
+with some gradual change in the aspect or character of the objects. Thus
+the succession of the pillars of a cathedral aisle is most interesting
+when they retire in perspective, becoming more and more obscure in
+distance: so the succession of mountain promontories one behind another,
+on the flanks of a valley; so the succession of clouds, fading farther
+and farther towards the horizon; each promontory and each cloud being of
+different shape, yet all evidently following in a calm and appointed
+order. If there be no change at all in the shape or size of the objects,
+there is no continuity; there is only repetition--monotony. It is the
+change in shape which suggests the idea of their being individually free,
+and able to escape, if they like, from the law that rules them, and yet
+submitting to it.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 33.]
+
+201. I will leave our chosen illustrative composition for a moment to
+take up another, still more expressive of this law. It is one of
+Turner's most tender studies, a sketch on Calais Sands at sunset; so
+delicate in the expression of wave and cloud, that it is of no use for
+me to try to reach it with any kind of outline in a wood-cut; but the
+rough sketch, Fig. 33, is enough to give an idea of its arrangement.
+The aim of the painter has been to give the intensest expression of
+repose, together with the enchanted, lulling, monotonous motion of cloud
+and wave. All the clouds are moving in innumerable ranks after the sun,
+meeting towards that point in the horizon where he has set; and the
+tidal waves gain in winding currents upon the sand, with that stealthy
+haste in which they cross each other so quietly, at their edges; just
+folding one over another as they meet, like a little piece of ruffled
+silk, and leaping up a little as two children kiss and clap their hands,
+and then going on again, each in its silent hurry, drawing pointed
+arches on the sand as their thin edges intersect in parting. But all
+this would not have been enough expressed without the line of the old
+pier-timbers, black with weeds, strained and bent by the storm waves,
+and now seeming to stoop in following one another, like dark ghosts
+escaping slowly from the cruelty of the pursuing sea.
+
+202. I need not, I hope, point out to the reader the illustration of
+this law of continuance in the subject chosen for our general
+illustration. It was simply that gradual succession of the retiring
+arches of the bridge which induced Turner to paint the subject at all;
+and it was this same principle which led him always to seize on subjects
+including long bridges wherever he could find them; but especially,
+observe, unequal bridges, having the highest arch at one side rather
+than at the center. There is a reason for this, irrespective of general
+laws of composition, and connected with the nature of rivers, which I
+may as well stop a minute to tell you about, and let you rest from the
+study of composition.
+
+203. All rivers, small or large, agree in one character, they like to
+lean a little on one side: they cannot bear to have their channels
+deepest in the middle, but will always, if they can, have one bank to
+sun themselves upon, and another to get cool under; one shingly shore to
+play over, where they may be shallow, and foolish, and childlike, and
+another steep shore, under which they can pause, and purify themselves,
+and get their strength of waves fully together for due occasion. Rivers
+in this way are just like wise men, who keep one side of their life for
+play, and another for work; and can be brilliant, and chattering, and
+transparent, when they are at ease, and yet take deep counsel on the
+other side when they set themselves to their main purpose. And rivers
+are just in this divided, also, like wicked and good men: the good
+rivers have serviceable deep places all along their banks, that ships
+can sail in; but the wicked rivers go scooping irregularly under their
+banks until they get full of strangling eddies, which no boat can row
+over without being twisted against the rocks; and pools like wells,
+which no one can get out of but the water-kelpie that lives at the
+bottom; but, wicked or good, the rivers all agree in having two kinds of
+sides. Now the natural way in which a village stone-mason therefore
+throws a bridge over a strong stream is, of course, to build a great
+door to let the cat through, and little doors to let the kittens
+through; a great arch for the great current, to give it room in flood
+time, and little arches for the little currents along the shallow shore.
+This, even without any prudential respect for the floods of the great
+current, he would do in simple economy of work and stone; for the
+smaller your arches are, the less material you want on their flanks. Two
+arches over the same span of river, supposing the butments are at the
+same depth, are cheaper than one, and that by a great deal; so that,
+where the current is shallow, the village mason makes his arches many
+and low: as the water gets deeper, and it becomes troublesome to build
+his piers up from the bottom, he throws his arches wider; at last he
+comes to the deep stream, and, as he cannot build at the bottom of that,
+he throws his largest arch over it with a leap, and with another little
+one or so gains the opposite shore. Of course as arches are wider they
+must be higher, or they will not stand; so the roadway must rise as the
+arches widen. And thus we have the general type of bridge, with its
+highest and widest arch towards one side, and a train of minor arches
+running over the flat shore on the other: usually a steep bank at the
+river-side next the large arch; always, of course, a flat shore on the
+side of the small ones: and the bend of the river assuredly concave
+towards this flat, cutting round, with a sweep into the steep bank; or,
+if there is no steep bank, still assuredly cutting into the shore at the
+steep end of the bridge.
+
+Now this kind of bridge, sympathizing, as it does, with the spirit of
+the river, and marking the nature of the thing it has to deal with and
+conquer, is the ideal of a bridge; and all endeavors to do the thing in
+a grand engineer's manner, with a level roadway and equal arches, are
+barbarous; not only because all monotonous forms are ugly in themselves,
+but because the mind perceives at once that there has been cost
+uselessly thrown away for the sake of formality.[57]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 34.]
+
+204. Well, to return to our continuity. We see that the Turnerian bridge
+in Fig. 32 is of the absolutely perfect type, and is still farther
+interesting by having its main arch crowned by a watch-tower. But as I
+want you to note especially what perhaps was not the case in the real
+bridge, but is entirely Turner's doing, you will find that though the
+arches diminish gradually, not one is _regularly_ diminished--they are
+all of different shapes and sizes: you cannot see this clearly in Fig.
+32, but in the larger diagram, Fig. 34, over leaf, you will with ease.
+This is indeed also part of the ideal of a bridge, because the lateral
+currents near the shore are of course irregular in size, and a simple
+builder would naturally vary his arches accordingly; and also, if the
+bottom was rocky, build his piers where the rocks came. But it is not as
+a part of bridge ideal, but as a necessity of all noble composition,
+that this irregularity is introduced by Turner. It at once raises the
+object thus treated from the lower or vulgar unity of rigid law to the
+greater unity of clouds, and waves, and trees, and human souls, each
+different, each obedient, and each in harmonious service.
+
+
+4. THE LAW OF CURVATURE.
+
+205. There is, however, another point to be noticed in this bridge of
+Turner's. Not only does it slope away unequally at its sides, but it
+slopes in a gradual though very subtle curve. And if you substitute a
+straight line for this curve (drawing one with a rule from the base of
+the tower on each side to the ends of the bridge, in Fig. 34, and
+effacing the curve), you will instantly see that the design has suffered
+grievously. You may ascertain, by experiment, that all beautiful objects
+whatsoever are thus terminated by delicately curved lines, except where
+the straight line is indispensable to their use or stability; and that
+when a complete system of straight lines, throughout the form, is
+necessary to that stability, as in crystals, the beauty, if any exists,
+is in color and transparency, not in form. Cut out the shape of any
+crystal you like, in white wax or wood, and put it beside a white lily,
+and you will feel the force of the curvature in its purity, irrespective
+of added color, or other interfering elements of beauty.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 35.]
+
+206. Well, as curves are more beautiful than straight lines, it is
+necessary to a good composition that its continuities of object, mass,
+or color should be, if possible, in curves, rather than straight lines
+or angular ones. Perhaps one of the simplest and prettiest examples of a
+graceful continuity of this kind is in the line traced at any moment by
+the corks of a net as it is being drawn: nearly every person is more or
+less attracted by the beauty of the dotted line. Now, it is almost
+always possible, not only to secure such a continuity in the arrangement
+or boundaries of objects which, like these bridge arches or the corks of
+the net, are actually connected with each other, but--and this is a
+still more noble and interesting kind of continuity--among features
+which appear at first entirely separate. Thus the towers of
+Ehrenbreitstein, on the left, in Fig. 32, appear at first independent of
+each other; but when I give their profile, on a larger scale, Fig. 35,
+the reader may easily perceive that there is a subtle cadence and
+harmony among them. The reason of this is, that they are all bounded by
+one grand curve, traced by the dotted line; out of the seven towers,
+four precisely touch this curve, the others only falling hack from it
+here and there to keep the eye from discovering it too easily.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 36.]
+
+207. And it is not only always possible to obtain continuities of this
+kind: it is, in drawing large forests or mountain forms, essential to
+truth. The towers of Ehrenbreitstein might or might not in reality fall
+into such a curve, but assuredly the basalt rock on which they stand
+did; for all mountain forms not cloven into absolute precipice, nor
+covered by straight slopes of shales, are more or less governed by these
+great curves, it being one of the aims of Nature in all her work to
+produce them. The reader must already know this, if he has been able to
+sketch at all among mountains; if not, let him merely draw for himself,
+carefully, the outlines of any low hills accessible to him, where they
+are tolerably steep, or of the woods which grow on them. The steeper
+shore of the Thames at Maidenhead, or any of the downs at Brighton or
+Dover, or, even nearer, about Croydon (as Addington Hills), is easily
+accessible to a Londoner; and he will soon find not only how constant,
+but how graceful the curvature is. Graceful curvature is distinguished
+from ungraceful by two characters; first in its moderation, that is to
+say, its close approach to straightness in some part of its course;[58]
+and, secondly, by its variation, that is to say, its never remaining
+equal in degree at different parts of its course.
+
+208. This variation is itself twofold in all good curves.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 37.]
+
+A. There is, first, a steady change through the whole line, from less to
+more curvature, or more to less, so that _no_ part of the line is a
+segment of a circle, or can be drawn by compasses in any way whatever.
+Thus, in Fig. 36, _a_ is a bad curve because it is part of a circle, and
+is therefore monotonous throughout; but _b_ is a good curve, because it
+continually changes its direction as it proceeds.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 38.]
+
+The _first_ difference between good and bad drawing of tree boughs
+consists in observance of this fact. Thus, when I put leaves on the line
+_b_, as in Fig. 37, you can immediately feel the springiness of
+character dependent on the changefulness of the curve. You may put
+leaves on the other line for yourself, but you will find you cannot make
+a right tree spray of it. For _all_ tree boughs, large or small, as well
+as all noble natural lines whatsoever, agree in this character; and it
+is a point of primal necessity that your eye should always seize and
+your hand trace it. Here are two more portions of good curves, with
+leaves put on them at the extremities instead of the flanks, Fig. 38;
+and two showing the arrangement of masses of foliage seen a little
+farther off, Fig. 39, which you may in like manner amuse yourself by
+turning into segments of circles--you will see with what result. I hope
+however you have beside you, by this time, many good studies of tree
+boughs carefully made, in which you may study variations of curvature in
+their most complicated and lovely forms.[59]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 39.]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 40.]
+
+209. B. Not only does every good curve vary in general tendency, but it
+is modulated, as it proceeds, by myriads of subordinate curves. Thus the
+outlines of a tree trunk are never as at _a_, Fig. 40, but as at _b_. So
+also in waves, clouds, and all other nobly formed masses. Thus another
+essential difference between good and bad drawing, or good and bad
+sculpture, depends on the quantity and refinement of minor curvatures
+carried, by good work, into the great lines. Strictly speaking, however,
+this is not variation in large curves, but composition of large curves
+out of small ones; it is an increase in the quantity of the beautiful
+element, but not a change in its nature.
+
+
+5. THE LAW OF RADIATION.
+
+210. We have hitherto been concerned only with the binding of our
+various objects into beautiful lines or processions. The next point we
+have to consider is, how we may unite these lines or processions
+themselves, so as to make groups of _them_.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 41.]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 42.]
+
+Now, there are two kinds of harmonies of lines. One in which, moving
+more or less side by side, they variously, but evidently with consent,
+retire from or approach each other, intersect or oppose each other;
+currents of melody in music, for different voices, thus approach and
+cross, fall and rise, in harmony; so the waves of the sea, as they
+approach the shore, flow into one another or cross, but with a great
+unity through all; and so various lines of composition often flow
+harmoniously through and across each other in a picture. But the most
+simple and perfect connection of lines is by radiation; that is, by
+their all springing from one point, or closing towards it; and this
+harmony is often, in Nature almost always, united with the other; as the
+boughs of trees, though they intersect and play amongst each other
+irregularly, indicate by their general tendency their origin from one
+root. An essential part of the beauty of all vegetable form is in this
+radiation; it is seen most simply in a single flower or leaf, as in a
+convolvulus bell, or chestnut leaf; but more beautifully in the
+complicated arrangements of the large boughs and sprays. For a leaf is
+only a flat piece of radiation; but the tree throws its branches on all
+sides, and even in every profile view of it, which presents a radiation
+more or less correspondent to that of its leaves, it is more beautiful,
+because varied by the freedom of the separate branches. I believe it has
+been ascertained that, in all trees, the angle at which, in their
+leaves, the lateral ribs are set on their central rib is approximately
+the same at which the branches leave the great stem; and thus each
+section of the tree would present a kind of magnified view of its own
+leaf, were it not for the interfering force of gravity on the masses of
+foliage. This force in proportion to their age, and the lateral
+leverage upon them, bears them downwards at the extremities, so that, as
+before noticed, the lower the bough grows on the stem, the more it
+droops (Fig. 17, p. 67); besides this, nearly all beautiful trees have a
+tendency to divide into two or more principal masses, which give a
+prettier and more complicated symmetry than if one stem ran all the way
+up the center. Fig. 41 may thus be considered the simplest type of tree
+radiation, as opposed to leaf radiation. In this figure, however, all
+secondary ramification is unrepresented, for the sake of simplicity; but
+if we take one half of such a tree, and merely give two secondary
+branches to each main branch (as represented in the general branch
+structure shown at _b_, Fig. 18, p. 68), we shall have the form Fig. 42.
+This I consider the perfect general type of tree structure; and it is
+curiously connected with certain forms of Greek, Byzantine, and Gothic
+ornamentation, into the discussion of which, however, we must not enter
+here. It will be observed, that both in Figs. 41 and 42 all the branches
+so spring from the main stem as very nearly to suggest their united
+radiation from the root R. This is by no means universally the case; but
+if the branches do not bend towards a point in the root, they at least
+converge to some point or other. In the examples in Fig. 43, the
+mathematical center of curvature, _a_, is thus, in one case, on the
+ground, at some distance from the root, and in the other, near the top
+of the tree. Half, only, of each tree is given, for the sake of
+clearness: Fig. 44 gives both sides of another example, in which the
+origins of curvature are below the root. As the positions of such points
+may be varied without end, and as the arrangement of the lines is also
+farther complicated by the fact of the boughs springing for the most
+part in a spiral order round the tree, and at proportionate distances,
+the systems of curvature which regulate the form of vegetation are quite
+infinite. Infinite is a word easily said, and easily written, and people
+do not always mean it when they say it; in this case I _do_ mean it: the
+number of systems is incalculable, and even to furnish anything like a
+representative number of types, I should have to give several hundreds
+of figures such as Fig. 44.[60]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 43.]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 44.]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 45.]
+
+211. Thus far, however, we have only been speaking of the great
+relations of stem and branches. The forms of the branches themselves are
+regulated by still more subtle laws, for they occupy an intermediate
+position between the form of the tree and of the leaf. The leaf has a
+flat ramification; the tree a completely rounded one; the bough is
+neither rounded nor flat, but has a structure exactly balanced between
+the two, in a half-flattened, half-rounded flake, closely resembling in
+shape one of the thick leaves of an artichoke or the flake of a fir
+cone; by combination forming the solid mass of the tree, as the leaves
+compose the artichoke head. I have before pointed out to you the general
+resemblance of these branch flakes to an extended hand; but they may be
+more accurately represented by the ribs of a boat. If you can imagine a
+very broad-headed and flattened boat applied by its keel to the end of a
+main branch,[61] as in Fig. 45, the lines which its ribs will take,
+supposing them outside of its timbers instead of inside, and the general
+contour of it, as seen in different directions, from above and below,
+will give you the closest approximation to the perspectives and
+foreshortenings of a well-grown branch-flake. Fig. 25 above, p. 89, is
+an unharmed and unrestrained shoot of healthy young oak; and, if you
+compare it with Fig. 45, you will understand at once the action of the
+lines of leafage; the boat only failing as a type in that its ribs are
+too nearly parallel to each other at the sides, while the bough sends
+all its ramification well forwards, rounding to the head, that it may
+accomplish its part in the outer form of the whole tree, yet always
+securing the compliance with the great universal law that the branches
+nearest the root bend most back; and, of course, throwing _some_ always
+back as well as forwards; the appearance of reversed action being much
+increased, and rendered more striking and beautiful, by perspective.
+Fig. 25 shows the perspective of such a bough as it is seen from below;
+Fig. 46 gives rudely the look it would have from above.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 46.]
+
+212. You may suppose, if you have not already discovered, what
+subtleties of perspective and light and shade are involved in the
+drawing of these branch-flakes, as you see them in different directions
+and actions; now raised, now depressed: touched on the edges by the
+wind, or lifted up and bent back so as to show all the white under
+surfaces of the leaves shivering in light, as the bottom of a boat rises
+white with spray at the surge-crest; or drooping in quietness towards
+the dew of the grass beneath them in windless mornings, or bowed down
+under oppressive grace of deep-charged snow. Snow time, by the way, is
+one of the best for practice in the placing of tree masses; but you will
+only be able to understand them thoroughly by beginning with a single
+bough and a few leaves placed tolerably even, as in Fig. 38, p. 149.
+First one with three leaves, a central and two lateral ones, as at _a_;
+then with five, as at _b_, and so on; directing your whole attention to
+the expression, both by contour and light and shade, of the boat-like
+arrangements, which, in your earlier studies, will have been a good deal
+confused, partly owing to your inexperience, and partly to the depth of
+shade, or absolute blackness of mass required in those studies.
+
+213. One thing more remains to be noted, and I will let you out of the
+wood. You see that in every generally representative figure I have
+surrounded the radiating branches with a dotted line: such lines do
+indeed terminate every vegetable form; and you see that they are
+themselves beautiful curves, which, according to their flow, and the
+width or narrowness of the spaces they inclose, characterize the species
+of tree or leaf, and express its free or formal action, its grace of
+youth or weight of age. So that, throughout all the freedom of her
+wildest foliage, Nature is resolved on expressing an encompassing limit;
+and marking a unity in the whole tree, caused not only by the rising of
+its branches from a common root, but by their joining in one work, and
+being bound by a common law. And having ascertained this, let us turn
+back for a moment to a point in leaf structure which, I doubt not, you
+must already have observed in your earlier studies, but which it is well
+to state here, as connected with the unity of the branches in the great
+trees. You must have noticed, I should think, that whenever a leaf is
+compound,--that is to say, divided into other leaflets which in any way
+repeat or imitate the form of the whole leaf,--those leaflets are not
+symmetrical, as the whole leaf is, but always smaller on the side
+towards the point of the great leaf, so as to express their
+subordination to it, and show, even when they are pulled off, that they
+are not small independent leaves, but members of one large leaf.
+
+214. Fig. 47, which is a block-plan of a leaf of columbine, without its
+minor divisions on the edges, will illustrate the principle clearly. It
+is composed of a central large mass, A, and two lateral ones, of which
+the one on the right only is lettered, B. Each of these masses is again
+composed of three others, a central and two lateral ones; but observe,
+the minor one, _a_ of A, is balanced equally by its opposite; but the
+minor _b_ 1 of B is larger than its opposite _b_ 2. Again, each of these
+minor masses is divided into three; but while the central mass, A of A,
+is symmetrically divided, the B of B is unsymmetrical, its largest
+side-lobe being lowest. Again, in _b_ 2, the lobe _c_ 1 (its lowest lobe
+in relation to B) is larger than _c_ 2; and so also in _b_ 1. So that
+universally one lobe of a lateral leaf is always larger than the other,
+and the smaller lobe is that which is nearer the central mass; the lower
+leaf, as it were by courtesy, subduing some of its own dignity or power,
+in the immediate presence of the greater or captain leaf, and always
+expressing, therefore, its own subordination and secondary character.
+This law is carried out even in single leaves. As far as I know, the
+upper half, towards the point of the spray, is always the smaller; and a
+slightly different curve, more convex at the springing, is used for the
+lower side, giving an exquisite variety to the form of the whole leaf;
+so that one of the chief elements in the beauty of every subordinate
+leaf throughout the tree is made to depend on its confession of its own
+lowliness and subjection.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 47.]
+
+215. And now, if we bring together in one view the principles we have
+ascertained in trees, we shall find they may be summed under four great
+laws; and that all perfect[62] vegetable form is appointed to express
+these four laws in noble balance of authority.
+
+1. Support from one living root.
+
+2. Radiation, or tendency of force from some one given point, either in
+the root or in some stated connection with it.
+
+3. Liberty of each bough to seek its own livelihood and happiness
+according to its needs, by irregularities of action both in its play and
+its work, either stretching out to get its required nourishment from
+light and rain, by finding some sufficient breathing-place among the
+other branches, or knotting and gathering itself up to get strength for
+any load which its fruitful blossoms may lay upon it, and for any stress
+of its storm-tossed luxuriance of leaves; or playing hither and thither
+as the fitful sunshine may tempt its young shoots, in their undecided
+states of mind about their future life.
+
+4. Imperative requirement of each bough to stop within certain limits,
+expressive of its kindly fellowship and fraternity with the boughs in
+its neighborhood; and to work with them according to its power,
+magnitude, and state of health, to bring out the general perfectness of
+the great curve, and circumferent stateliness of the whole tree.
+
+216. I think I may leave you, unhelped, to work out the moral analogies
+of these laws; you may, perhaps, however, be a little puzzled to see the
+meaning of the second one. It typically expresses that healthy human
+actions should spring radiantly (like rays) from some single heart
+motive; the most beautiful systems of action taking place when this
+motive lies at the root of the whole life, and the action is clearly
+seen to proceed from it; while also many beautiful secondary systems of
+action taking place from motives not so deep or central, but in some
+beautiful subordinate connection with the central or life motive.
+
+The other laws, if you think over them, you will find equally
+significative; and as you draw trees more and more in their various
+states of health and hardship, you will be every day more struck by the
+beauty of the types they present of the truths most essential for
+mankind to know;[63] and you will see what this vegetation of the earth,
+which is necessary to our life, first, as purifying the air for us and
+then as food, and just as necessary to our joy in all places of the
+earth,--what these trees and leaves, I say, are meant to teach us as we
+contemplate them, and read or hear their lovely language, written or
+spoken for us, not in frightful black letters nor in dull sentences, but
+in fair green and shadowy shapes of waving words, and blossomed
+brightness of odoriferous wit, and sweet whispers of unintrusive wisdom,
+and playful morality.
+
+217. Well, I am sorry myself to leave the wood, whatever my reader may
+be; but leave it we must, or we shall compose no more pictures to-day.
+
+This law of radiation, then, enforcing unison of action in arising from,
+or proceeding to, some given point, is perhaps, of all principles of
+composition, the most influential in producing the beauty of groups of
+form. Other laws make them forcible or interesting, but this generally
+is chief in rendering them beautiful. In the arrangement of masses in
+pictures, it is constantly obeyed by the great composers; but, like the
+law of principality, with careful concealment of its imperativeness, the
+point to which the lines of main curvature are directed being very
+often far away out of the picture. Sometimes, however, a system of
+curves will be employed definitely to exalt, by their concurrence, the
+value of some leading object, and then the law becomes traceable enough.
+
+218. In the instance before us, the principal object being, as we have
+seen, the tower on the bridge, Turner has determined that his system of
+curvature should have its origin in the top of this tower. The diagram
+Fig. 34, p. 145, compared with Fig. 32, p. 137, will show how this is
+done. One curve joins the two towers, and is continued by the back of
+the figure sitting on the bank into the piece of bent timber. This is a
+limiting curve of great importance, and Turner has drawn a considerable
+part of it with the edge of the timber very carefully, and then led the
+eye up to the sitting girl by some white spots and indications of a
+ledge in the bank; then the passage to the tops of the towers cannot be
+missed.
+
+219. The next curve is begun and drawn carefully for half an inch of its
+course by the rudder; it is then taken up by the basket and the heads of
+the figures, and leads accurately to the tower angle. The gunwales of
+both the boats begin the next two curves, which meet in the same point;
+and all are centralized by the long reflection which continues the
+vertical lines.
+
+220. Subordinated to this first system of curves there is another, begun
+by the small crossing bar of wood inserted in the angle behind the
+rudder; continued by the bottom of the bank on which the figure sits,
+interrupted forcibly beyond it,[64] but taken up again by the water-line
+leading to the bridge foot, and passing on in delicate shadows under the
+arches, not easily shown in so rude a diagram, towards the other
+extremity of the bridge. This is a most important curve, indicating
+that the force and sweep of the river have indeed been in old times
+under the large arches; while the antiquity of the bridge is told us by
+a long tongue of land, either of carted rubbish, or washed down by some
+minor stream, which has interrupted this curve, and is now used as a
+landing-place for the boats, and for embarkation of merchandise, of
+which some bales and bundles are laid in a heap, immediately beneath the
+great tower. A common composer would have put these bales to one side or
+the other, but Turner knows better; he uses them as a foundation for his
+tower, adding to its importance precisely as the sculptured base adorns
+a pillar; and he farther increases the aspect of its height by throwing
+the reflection of it far down in the nearer water. All the great
+composers have this same feeling about sustaining their vertical masses:
+you will constantly find Prout using the artifice most dexterously (see,
+for instance, the figure with the wheelbarrow under the great tower, in
+the sketch of St. Nicholas, at Prague, and the white group of figures
+under the tower in the sketch of Augsburg[65]); and Veronese, Titian,
+and Tintoret continually put their principal figures at bases of
+pillars. Turner found out their secret very early, the most prominent
+instance of his composition on this principle being the drawing of Turin
+from the Superga, in Hakewell's Italy. I chose Fig. 20, already given to
+illustrate foliage drawing, chiefly because, being another instance of
+precisely the same arrangement, it will serve to convince you of its
+being intentional. There, the vertical, formed by the larger tree, is
+continued by the figure of the farmer, and that of one of the smaller
+trees by his stick. The lines of the interior mass of the bushes
+radiate, under the law of radiation, from a point behind the farmer's
+head; but their outline curves are carried on and repeated, under the
+law of continuity, by the curves of the dog and boy--by the way, note
+the remarkable instance in these of the use of darkest lines towards the
+light--all more or less guiding the eye up to the right, in order to
+bring it finally to the Keep of Windsor, which is the central object of
+the picture, as the bridge tower is in the Coblentz. The wall on which
+the boy climbs answers the purpose of contrasting, both in direction and
+character, with these greater curves; thus corresponding as nearly as
+possible to the minor tongue of land in the Coblentz. This, however,
+introduces us to another law, which we must consider separately.
+
+
+6. THE LAW OF CONTRAST.
+
+221. Of course the character of everything is best manifested by
+Contrast. Rest can only be enjoyed after labor; sound to be heard
+clearly, must rise out of silence; light is exhibited by darkness,
+darkness by light; and so on in all things. Now in art every color has
+an opponent color, which, if brought near it, will relieve it more
+completely than any other; so, also, every form and line may be made
+more striking to the eye by an opponent form or line near them; a curved
+line is set off by a straight one, a massy form by a slight one, and so
+on; and in all good work nearly double the value, which any given color
+or form would have uncombined, is given to each by contrast.[66]
+
+In this case again, however, a too manifest use of the artifice
+vulgarizes a picture. Great painters do not commonly, or very visibly,
+admit violent contrast. They introduce it by stealth, and with
+intermediate links of tender change; allowing, indeed, the opposition to
+tell upon the mind as a surprise, but not as a shock.[67]
+
+222. Thus in the rock of Ehrenbreitstein, Fig. 35, the main current of
+the lines being downwards, in a convex swell, they are suddenly stopped
+at the lowest tower by a counter series of beds, directed nearly
+straight across them. This adverse force sets off and relieves the great
+curvature, but it is reconciled to it by a series of radiating lines
+below, which at first sympathize with the oblique bar, then gradually
+get steeper, till they meet and join in the fall of the great curve. No
+passage, however intentionally monotonous, is ever introduced by a good
+artist without _some_ slight counter current of this kind; so much,
+indeed, do the great composers feel the necessity of it, that they will
+even do things purposely ill or unsatisfactorily, in order to give
+greater value to their well-doing in other places. In a skillful poet's
+versification the so-called bad or inferior lines are not inferior
+because he could not do them better, but because he feels that if all
+were equally weighty, there would be no real sense of weight anywhere;
+if all were equally melodious, the melody itself would be fatiguing; and
+he purposely introduces the laboring or discordant verse, that the full
+ring may be felt in his main sentence, and the finished sweetness in his
+chosen rhythm.[68] And continually in painting, inferior artists destroy
+their work by giving too much of all that they think is good, while the
+great painter gives just enough to be enjoyed, and passes to an opposite
+kind of enjoyment, or to an inferior state of enjoyment: he gives a
+passage of rich, involved, exquisitely wrought color, then passes away
+into slight, and pale, and simple color; he paints for a minute or two
+with intense decision, then suddenly becomes, as the spectator thinks,
+slovenly; but he is not slovenly: you could not have _taken_ any more
+decision from him just then; you have had as much as is good for you:
+he paints over a great space of his picture forms of the most rounded
+and melting tenderness, and suddenly, as you think by a freak, gives you
+a bit as jagged and sharp as a leafless blackthorn. Perhaps the most
+exquisite piece of subtle contrast in the world of painting is the arrow
+point, laid sharp against the white side and among the flowing hair of
+Correggio's Antiope. It is quite singular how very little contrast will
+sometimes serve to make an entire group of forms interesting which would
+otherwise have been valueless. There is a good deal of picturesque
+material, for instance, in this top of an old tower, Fig. 48, tiles and
+stones and sloping roof not disagreeably mingled; but all would have
+been unsatisfactory if there had not happened to be that iron ring on
+the inner wall, which by its vigorous black _circular_ line precisely
+opposes all the square and angular characters of the battlements and
+roof. Draw the tower without the ring, and see what a difference it will
+make.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 48.]
+
+223. One of the most important applications of the law of contrast is in
+association with the law of continuity, causing an unexpected but gentle
+break in a continuous series. This artifice is perpetual in music, and
+perpetual also in good illumination; the way in which little surprises
+of change are prepared in any current borders, or chains of ornamental
+design, being one of the most subtle characteristics of the work of the
+good periods. We take, for instance, a bar of ornament between two
+written columns of an early fourteenth century MS., and at the first
+glance we suppose it to be quite monotonous all the way up, composed of
+a winding tendril, with alternately a blue leaf and a scarlet bud.
+Presently, however, we see that, in order to observe the law of
+principality, there is one large scarlet leaf instead of a bud, nearly
+half-way up, which forms a center to the whole rod; and when we begin to
+examine the order of the leaves, we find it varied carefully. Let A
+stand for scarlet bud, _b_ for blue leaf, _c_ for two blue leaves on one
+stalk, _s_ for a stalk without a leaf, and R, for the large red leaf.
+Then, counting from the ground, the order begins as follows:
+
+_b_, _b_, A; _b_, _s_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, A; and we think we
+shall have two _b_'s and an A all the way, when suddenly it becomes _b_,
+A; _b_, R; _b_, A; _b_, A; _b_, A; and we think we are going to have
+_b_, A continued; but no: here it becomes _b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _b_, A;
+_b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _c_, _s_; _b_, _s_; _b_, _s_; and we think we are
+surely going to have _b_, _s_ continued, but behold it runs away to the
+end with a quick _b_, _b_, A; _b_, _b_, _b_, _b_![69] Very often,
+however, the designer is satisfied with _one_ surprise, but I never saw
+a good illuminated border without one at least; and no series of any
+kind was ever introduced by a great composer in a painting without a
+snap somewhere. There is a pretty one in Turner's drawing of Rome with
+the large balustrade for a foreground in the Hakewell's Italy series:
+the single baluster struck out of the line, and showing the street below
+through the gap, simply makes the whole composition right, when
+otherwise it would have been stiff and absurd.
+
+224. If you look back to Fig. 48 you will see, in the arrangement of the
+battlements, a simple instance of the use of such variation. The whole
+top of the tower, though actually three sides of a square, strikes the
+eye as a continuous series of five masses. The first two, on the left,
+somewhat square and blank, then the next two higher and richer, the
+tiles being seen on their slopes. Both these groups being couples, there
+is enough monotony in the series to make a change pleasant; and the last
+battlement, therefore, is a little higher than the first two,--a little
+lower than the second two,--and different in shape from either. Hide it
+with your finger, and see how ugly and formal the other four battlements
+look.
+
+225. There are in this figure several other simple illustrations of the
+laws we have been tracing. Thus the whole shape of the walls' mass being
+square, it is well, still for the sake of contrast, to oppose it not
+only by the element of curvature, in the ring, and lines of the roof
+below, but by that of sharpness; hence the pleasure which the eye takes
+in the projecting point of the roof. Also, because the walls are thick
+and sturdy, it is well to contrast their strength with weakness;
+therefore we enjoy the evident decrepitude of this roof as it sinks
+between them. The whole mass being nearly white, we want a contrasting
+shadow somewhere; and get it, under our piece of decrepitude. This
+shade, with the tiles of the wall below, forms another pointed mass,
+necessary to the first by the law of repetition. Hide this inferior
+angle with your finger, and see how ugly the other looks. A sense of the
+law of symmetry, though you might hardly suppose it, has some share in
+the feeling with which you look at the battlements; there is a certain
+pleasure in the opposed slopes of their top, on one side down to the
+left, on the other to the right. Still less would you think the law of
+radiation had anything to do with the matter: but if you take the
+extreme point of the black shadow on the left for a center, and follow
+first the low curve of the eaves of the wall, it will lead you, if you
+continue it, to the point of the tower cornice; follow the second curve,
+the top of the tiles of the wall, and it will strike the top of the
+right-hand battlement; then draw a curve from the highest point of the
+angled battlement on the left, through the points of the roof and its
+dark echo; and you will see how the whole top of the tower radiates from
+this lowest dark point. There are other curvatures crossing these main
+ones, to keep them from being too conspicuous. Follow the curve of the
+upper roof, it will take you to the top of the highest battlement; and
+the stones indicated at the right-hand side of the tower are more
+extended at the bottom, in order to get some less direct expression of
+sympathy, such as irregular stones may be capable of, with the general
+flow of the curves from left to right.
+
+226. You may not readily believe, at first, that all these laws are
+indeed involved in so trifling a piece of composition. But, as you study
+longer, you will discover that these laws, and many more, are obeyed by
+the powerful composers in every _touch_: that literally, there is never
+a dash of their pencil which is not carrying out appointed purposes of
+this kind in twenty various ways at once; and that there is as much
+difference, in way of intention and authority, between one of the great
+composers ruling his colors, and a common painter confused by them, as
+there is between a general directing the march of an army, and an old
+lady carried off her feet by a mob.
+
+
+7. THE LAW OF INTERCHANGE.
+
+227. Closely connected with the law of contrast is a law which enforces
+the unity of opposite things, by giving to each a portion of the
+character of the other. If, for instance, you divide a shield into two
+masses of color, all the way down--suppose blue and white, and put a
+bar, or figure of an animal, partly on one division, partly on the
+other, you will find it pleasant to the eye if you make the part of the
+animal blue which comes upon the white half, and white which comes upon
+the blue half. This is done in heraldry, partly for the sake of perfect
+intelligibility, but yet more for the sake of delight in interchange of
+color, since, in all ornamentation whatever, the practice is continual,
+in the ages of good design.
+
+228. Sometimes this alternation is merely a reversal of contrasts; as
+that, after red has been for some time on one side, and blue on the
+other, red shall pass to blue's side and blue to red's. This kind of
+alternation takes place simply in four-quartered shields; in more subtle
+pieces of treatment, a little bit only of each color is carried into the
+other, and they are as it were dovetailed together. One of the most
+curious facts which will impress itself upon you, when you have drawn
+some time carefully from Nature in light and shade, is the appearance of
+intentional artifice with which contrasts of this alternate kind are
+produced by her; the artistry with which she will darken a tree trunk as
+long as it comes against light sky, and throw sunlight on it precisely
+at the spot where it comes against a dark hill, and similarly treat all
+her masses of shade and color, is so great, that if you only follow her
+closely, every one who looks at your drawing with attention will think
+that you have been inventing the most artificially and unnaturally
+delightful interchanges of shadow that could possibly be devised by
+human wit.
+
+229. You will find this law of interchange insisted upon at length by
+Prout in his Lessons on Light and Shade: it seems of all his principles
+of composition to be the one he is most conscious of; many others he
+obeys by instinct, but this he formally accepts and forcibly declares.
+
+The typical purpose of the law of interchange is, of course, to teach us
+how opposite natures may be helped and strengthened by receiving each,
+as far as they can, some impress or reflection, or imparted power, from
+the other.
+
+
+8. THE LAW OF CONSISTENCY.
+
+230. It is to be remembered, in the next place, that while contrast
+exhibits the _characters_ of things, it very often neutralizes or
+paralyzes their _power_. A number of white things may be shown to be
+clearly white by opposition of a black thing, but if we want the full
+power of their gathered light, the black thing may be seriously in our
+way. Thus, while contrast displays things, it is unity and sympathy
+which employ them, concentrating the power of several into a mass. And,
+not in art merely, but in all the affairs of life, the wisdom of man is
+continually called upon to reconcile these opposite methods of
+exhibiting, or using, the materials in his power. By change he gives
+them pleasantness, and by consistency value; by change he is refreshed,
+and by perseverance strengthened.
+
+231. Hence many compositions address themselves to the spectator by
+aggregate force of color or line, more than by contrasts of either; many
+noble pictures are painted almost exclusively in various tones of red,
+or gray, or gold, so as to be instantly striking by their breadth of
+flush, or glow, or tender coldness, these qualities being exhibited only
+by slight and subtle use of contrast. Similarly as to form; some
+compositions associate massive and rugged forms, others slight and
+graceful ones, each with few interruptions by lines of contrary
+character. And, in general, such compositions possess higher sublimity
+than those which are more mingled in their elements. They tell a special
+tale, and summon a definite state of feeling, while the grand
+compositions merely please the eye.
+
+232. This unity or breadth of character generally attaches most to the
+works of the greatest men; their separate pictures have all separate
+aims. We have not, in each, gray color set against somber, and sharp
+forms against soft, and loud passages against low: but we have the
+bright picture, with its delicate sadness; the somber picture, with its
+single ray of relief; the stern picture, with only one tender group of
+lines; the soft and calm picture, with only one rock angle at its flank;
+and so on. Hence the variety of their work, as well as its
+impressiveness. The principal bearing of this law, however, is on the
+separate masses or divisions of a picture: the character of the whole
+composition may be broken or various, if we please, but there must
+certainly be a tendency to consistent assemblage in its divisions. As an
+army may act on several points at once, but can only act effectually by
+having somewhere formed and regular masses, and not wholly by
+skirmishers; so a picture may be various in its tendencies, but must be
+somewhere united and coherent in its masses. Good composers are always
+associating their colors in great groups; binding their forms together
+by encompassing lines, and securing, by various dexterities of
+expedient, what they themselves call "breadth:" that is to say, a large
+gathering of each kind of thing into one place; light being gathered to
+light, darkness to darkness, and color to color. If, however, this be
+done by introducing false lights or false colors, it is absurd and
+monstrous; the skill of a painter consists in obtaining breadth by
+rational arrangement of his objects, not by forced or wanton treatment
+of them. It is an easy matter to paint one thing all white, and another
+all black or brown; but not an easy matter to assemble all the
+circumstances which will naturally produce white in one place, and brown
+in another. Generally speaking, however, breadth will result in
+sufficient degree from fidelity of study: Nature is always broad; and if
+you paint her colors in true relations, you will paint them in majestic
+masses. If you find your work look broken and scattered, it is, in all
+probability, not only ill composed, but untrue.
+
+233. The opposite quality to breadth, that of division or scattering of
+light and color, has a certain contrasting charm, and is occasionally
+introduced with exquisite effect by good composers.[70] Still it is
+never the mere scattering, but the order discernible through this
+scattering, which is the real source of pleasure; not the mere
+multitude, but the constellation of multitude. The broken lights in the
+work of a good painter wander like flocks upon the hills, not
+unshepherded, speaking of life and peace: the broken lights of a bad
+painter fall like hailstones, and are capable only of mischief, leaving
+it to be wished they were also of dissolution.
+
+
+9. THE LAW OF HARMONY.
+
+234. This last law is not, strictly speaking, so much one of composition
+as of truth, but it must guide composition, and is properly, therefore,
+to be stated in this place.
+
+Good drawing is, as we have seen, an _abstract_ of natural facts; you
+cannot represent all that you would, but must continually be falling
+short, whether you will or no, of the force, or quantity, of Nature.
+Now, suppose that your means and time do not admit of your giving the
+depth of color in the scene, and that you are obliged to paint it paler.
+If you paint all the colors proportionately paler, as if an equal
+quantity of tint had been washed away from each of them, you still
+obtain a harmonious, though not an equally forcible, statement of
+natural fact. But if you take away the colors unequally, and leave some
+tints nearly as deep as they are in Nature, while others are much
+subdued, you have no longer a true statement. You cannot say to the
+observer, "Fancy all those colors a little deeper, and you will have the
+actual fact." However he adds in imagination, or takes away, something
+is sure to be still wrong. The picture is out of harmony.
+
+235. It will happen, however, much more frequently, that you have to
+darken the whole system of colors, than to make them paler. You
+remember, in your first studies of color from Nature, you were to leave
+the passages of light which were too bright to be imitated, as white
+paper. But, in completing the picture, it becomes necessary to put color
+into them; and then the other colors must be made darker, in some fixed
+relation to them. If you deepen all proportionately, though the whole
+scene is darker than reality, it is only as if you were looking at the
+reality in a lower light: but if, while you darken some of the tints,
+you leave others undarkened, the picture is out of harmony, and will not
+give the impression of truth.
+
+236. It is not, indeed, possible to deepen _all_ the colors so much as
+to relieve the lights in their natural degree, you would merely sink
+most of your colors, if you tried to do so, into a broad mass of
+blackness: but it is quite possible to lower them harmoniously, and yet
+more in some parts of the picture than in others, so as to allow you to
+show the light you want in a visible relief. In well-harmonized pictures
+this is done by gradually deepening the tone of the picture towards the
+lighter parts of it, without materially lowering it in the very dark
+parts; the tendency in such pictures being, of course, to include large
+masses of middle tints. But the principal point to be observed in doing
+this, is to deepen the individual tints without dirtying or obscuring
+them. It is easy to lower the tone of the picture by washing it over
+with gray or brown; and easy to see the effect of the landscape, when
+its colors are thus universally polluted with black, by using the black
+convex mirror, one of the most pestilent inventions for falsifying
+Nature and degrading art which ever was put into an artist's hand.[71]
+For the thing required is not to darken pale yellow by mixing gray with
+it, but to deepen the pure yellow; not to darken crimson by mixing black
+with it, but by making it deeper and richer crimson: and thus the
+required effect could only be seen in Nature, if you had pieces of glass
+of the color of every object in your landscape, and of every minor hue
+that made up those colors, and then could see the real landscape through
+this deep gorgeousness of the varied glass. You cannot do this with
+glass, but you can do it for yourself as you work; that is to say, you
+can put deep blue for pale blue, deep gold for pale gold, and so on, in
+the proportion you need; and then you may paint as forcibly as you
+choose, but your work will still be in the manner of Titian, not of
+Caravaggio or Spagnoletto, or any other of the black slaves of
+painting.[72]
+
+237. Supposing those scales of color, which I told you to prepare in
+order to show you the relations of color to gray, were quite accurately
+made, and numerous enough, you would have nothing more to do, in order
+to obtain a deeper tone in any given mass of color, than to substitute
+for each of its hues the hue as many degrees deeper in the scale as you
+wanted, that is to say, if you wanted to deepen the whole two degrees,
+substituting for the yellow No. 5 the yellow No. 7, and for the red No.
+9 the red No. 11, and so on: but the hues of any object in Nature are
+far too numerous, and their degrees too subtle, to admit of so
+mechanical a process. Still, you may see the principle of the whole
+matter clearly by taking a group of colors out of your scale, arranging
+them prettily, and then washing them all over with gray: that represents
+the treatment of Nature by the black mirror. Then arrange the same group
+of colors, with the tints five or six degrees deeper in the scale; and
+that will represent the treatment of Nature by Titian.
+
+238. You can only, however, feel your way fully to the right of the
+thing by working from Nature.
+
+The best subject on which to begin a piece of study of this kind is a
+good thick tree trunk, seen against blue sky with some white clouds in
+it. Paint the clouds in true and tenderly gradated white; then give the
+sky a bold full blue, bringing them well out; then paint the trunk and
+leaves grandly dark against all, but in such glowing dark green and
+brown as you see they will bear. Afterwards proceed to more complicated
+studies, matching the colors carefully first by your old method; then
+deepening each color with its own tint, and being careful, above all
+things, to keep truth of equal change when the colors are connected with
+each other, as in dark and light sides of the same object. Much more
+aspect and sense of harmony are gained by the precision with which you
+observe the relation of colors in dark sides and light sides, and the
+influence of modifying reflections, than by mere accuracy of added depth
+in independent colors.
+
+239. This harmony of tone, as it is generally called, is the most
+important of those which the artist has to regard. But there are all
+kinds of harmonies in a picture, according to its mode of production.
+There is even a harmony of touch. If you paint one part of it very
+rapidly and forcibly, and another part slowly and delicately, each
+division of the picture may be right separately, but they will not agree
+together: the whole will be effectless and valueless, out of harmony.
+Similarly, if you paint one part of it by a yellow light in a warm day,
+and another by a gray light in a cold day, though both may have been
+sunlight, and both may be well toned, and have their relative shadows
+truly cast, neither will look like light; they will destroy each other's
+power, by being out of harmony. These are only broad and definable
+instances of discordance; but there is an extent of harmony in all good
+work much too subtle for definition; depending on the draughtsman's
+carrying everything he draws up to just the balancing and harmonious
+point, in finish, and color, and depth of tone, and intensity of moral
+feeling, and style of touch, all considered at once; and never allowing
+himself to lean too emphatically on detached parts, or exalt one thing
+at the expense of another, or feel acutely in one place and coldly in
+another. If you have got some of Cruikshank's etchings, you will be
+able, I think, to feel the nature of harmonious treatment in a simple
+kind, by comparing them with any of Richter's illustrations to the
+numerous German story-books lately published at Christmas, with all the
+German stories spoiled. Cruikshank's work is often incomplete in
+character and poor in incident, but, as drawing, it is _perfect_ in
+harmony. The pure and simple effects of daylight which he gets by his
+thorough mastery of treatment in this respect, are quite unrivaled, as
+far as I know, by any other work executed with so few touches. His
+vignettes to Grimm's German stories, already recommended, are the most
+remarkable in this quality. Richter's illustrations, on the contrary,
+are of a very high stamp as respects understanding of human character,
+with infinite playfulness and tenderness of fancy; but, as drawings,
+they are almost unendurably out of harmony, violent blacks in one place
+being continually opposed to trenchant white in another; and, as is
+almost sure to be the case with bad harmonists, the local color hardly
+felt anywhere. All German work is apt to be out of harmony, in
+consequence of its too frequent conditions of affectation, and its
+willful refusals of fact; as well as by reason of a feverish kind of
+excitement, which dwells violently on particular points, and makes all
+the lines of thought in the picture to stand on end, as it were, like a
+cat's fur electrified; while good work is always as quiet as a couchant
+leopard, and as strong.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+240. I have now stated to you all the laws of composition which occur to
+me as capable of being illustrated or defined; but there are multitudes
+of others which, in the present state of my knowledge, I cannot define,
+and others which I never hope to define; and these the most important,
+and connected with the deepest powers of the art. I hope, when I have
+thought of them more, to be able to explain some of the laws which
+relate to nobleness and ignobleness; that ignobleness especially which
+we commonly call "vulgarity" and which, in its essence, is one of the
+most curious subjects of inquiry connected with human feeling. Others I
+never hope to explain, laws of expression, bearing simply on simple
+matters; but, for that very reason, more influential than any others.
+These are, from the first, as inexplicable as our bodily sensations are;
+it being just as impossible, I think, to show, finally, why one
+succession of musical notes[73] shall be lofty and pathetic, and such as
+might have been sung by Casella to Dante, and why another succession is
+base and ridiculous, and would be fit only for the reasonably good ear
+of Bottom, as to explain why we like sweetness, and dislike bitterness.
+The best part of every great work is always inexplicable: it is good
+because it is good; and innocently gracious, opening as the green of the
+earth, or falling as the dew of heaven.
+
+241. But though you cannot explain them, you may always render yourself
+more and more sensitive to these higher qualities by the discipline
+which you generally give to your character, and this especially with
+regard to the choice of incidents; a kind of composition in some sort
+easier than the artistical arrangements of lines and colors, but in
+every sort nobler, because addressed to deeper feelings.
+
+242. For instance, in the "Datur Hora Quieti," the last vignette to
+Rogers's Poems, the plow in the foreground has three purposes. The first
+purpose is to meet the stream of sunlight on the river, and make it
+brighter by opposition; but any dark object whatever would have done
+this. Its second purpose is, by its two arms, to repeat the cadence of
+the group of the two ships, and thus give a greater expression of
+repose; but two sitting figures would have done this. Its third and
+chief, or pathetic, purpose is, as it lies abandoned in the furrow (the
+vessels also being moored, and having their sails down), to be a type of
+human labor closed with the close of day. The parts of it on which the
+hand leans are brought most clearly into sight; and they are the chief
+dark of the picture, because the tillage of the ground is required of
+man as a punishment: but they make the soft light of the setting sun
+brighter, because rest is sweetest after toil. These thoughts may never
+occur to us as we glance carelessly at the design; and yet their under
+current assuredly affects the feelings, and increases, as the painter
+meant it should, the impression of melancholy, and of peace.
+
+243. Again, in the "Lancaster Sands," which is one of the plates I have
+marked as most desirable for your possession: the stream of light which
+falls from the setting sun on the advancing tide stands similarly in
+need of some force of near object to relieve its brightness. But the
+incident which Turner has here adopted is the swoop of an angry sea-gull
+at a dog, who yelps at it, drawing back as the wave rises over his
+feet, and the bird shrieks within a foot of his face. Its unexpected
+boldness is a type of the anger of its ocean element, and warns us of
+the sea's advance just as surely as the abandoned plow told us of the
+ceased labor of the day.
+
+244. It is not, however, so much in the selection of single incidents of
+this kind, as in the feeling which regulates the arrangement of the
+whole subject, that the mind of a great composer is known. A single
+incident may be suggested by a felicitous chance, as a pretty motto
+might be for the heading of a chapter. But the great composers so
+arrange _all_ their designs that one incident illustrates another, just
+as one color relieves another. Perhaps the "Heysham," of the Yorkshire
+series, which, as to its locality, may be considered a companion to the
+last drawing we have spoken of, the "Lancaster Sands," presents as
+interesting an example as we could find of Turner's feeling in this
+respect. The subject is a simple north-country village, on the shore of
+Morecambe Bay; not in the common sense a picturesque village; there are
+no pretty bow-windows, or red roofs, or rocky steps of entrance to the
+rustic doors, or quaint gables; nothing but a single street of thatched
+and chiefly clay-built cottages, ranged in a somewhat monotonous line,
+the roofs so green with moss that at first we hardly discern the houses
+from the fields and trees. The village street is closed at the end by a
+wooden gate, indicating the little traffic there is on the road through
+it, and giving it something the look of a large farmstead, in which a
+right of way lies through the yard. The road which leads to this gate is
+full of ruts, and winds down a bad bit of hill between two broken banks
+of moor ground, succeeding immediately to the few inclosures which
+surround the village; they can hardly be called gardens: but a decayed
+fragment or two of fencing fill the gaps in the bank; a clothes-line,
+with some clothes on it, striped blue and red, and a smock-frock, is
+stretched between the trunks of some stunted willows; a _very_ small
+haystack and pig-sty being seen at the back of the cottage beyond. An
+empty, two-wheeled, lumbering cart, drawn by a pair of horses with huge
+wooden collars, the driver sitting lazily in the sun, sideways on the
+leader, is going slowly home along the rough road, it being about
+country dinner-time. At the end of the village there is a better house,
+with three chimneys and a dormer window in its roof, and the roof is of
+stone shingle instead of thatch, but very rough. This house is no doubt
+the clergyman's: there is some smoke from one of its chimneys, none from
+any other in the village; this smoke is from the lowest chimney at the
+back, evidently that of the kitchen, and it is rather thick, the fire
+not having been long lighted. A few hundred yards from the clergyman's
+house, nearer the shore, is the church, discernible from the cottages
+only by its low two-arched belfry, a little neater than one would expect
+in such a village; perhaps lately built by the Puseyite incumbent:[74]
+and beyond the church, close to the sea, are two fragments of a border
+war-tower, standing on their circular mound, worn on its brow deep into
+edges and furrows by the feet of the village children. On the bank of
+moor, which forms the foreground, are a few cows, the carter's dog
+barking at a vixenish one: the milkmaid is feeding another, a gentle
+white one, which turns its head to her, expectant of a handful of fresh
+hay, which she has brought for it in her blue apron, fastened up round
+her waist; she stands with her pail on her head, evidently the village
+coquette, for she has a neat bodice, and pretty striped petticoat under
+the blue apron, and red stockings. Nearer us, the cowherd, bare-footed,
+stands on a piece of the limestone rock (for the ground is thistly and
+not pleasurable to bare feet);--whether boy or girl we are not sure: it
+may be a boy, with a girl's worn-out bonnet on, or a girl with a pair of
+ragged trousers on; probably the first, as the old bonnet is evidently
+useful to keep the sun out of our eyes when we are looking for strayed
+cows among the moorland hollows, and helps us at present to watch
+(holding the bonnet's edge down) the quarrel of the vixenish cow with
+the dog, which, leaning on our long stick, we allow to proceed without
+any interference. A little to the right the hay is being got in, of
+which the milkmaid has just taken her apronful to the white cow; but the
+hay is very thin, and cannot well be raked up because of the rocks; we
+must glean it like corn, hence the smallness of our stack behind the
+willows; and a woman is pressing a bundle of it hard together, kneeling
+against the rock's edge, to carry it safely to the hay-cart without
+dropping any. Beyond the village is a rocky hill, deep set with
+brushwood, a square crag or two of limestone emerging here and there,
+with pleasant turf on their brows, heaved in russet and mossy mounds
+against the sky, which, clear and calm, and as golden as the moss,
+stretches down behind it towards the sea. A single cottage just shows
+its roof over the edge of the hill, looking seawards: perhaps one of the
+village shepherds is a sea captain now, and may have built it there,
+that his mother may first see the sails of his ship whenever it runs
+into the bay. Then under the hill, and beyond the border tower, is the
+blue sea itself, the waves flowing in over the sand in long curved lines
+slowly; shadows of cloud, and gleams of shallow water on white sand
+alternating--miles away; but no sail is visible, not one fisher-boat on
+the beach, not one dark speck on the quiet horizon. Beyond all are the
+Cumberland mountains, clear in the sun, with rosy light on all their
+crags.
+
+245. I should think the reader cannot but feel the kind of harmony there
+is in this composition; the entire purpose of the painter to give us the
+impression of wild, yet gentle, country life, monotonous as the
+succession of the noiseless waves, patient and enduring as the rocks;
+but peaceful, and full of health and quiet hope, and sanctified by the
+pure mountain air and baptismal dew of heaven, falling softly between
+days of toil and nights of innocence.
+
+246. All noble composition of this kind can be reached only by
+instinct; you cannot set yourself to arrange such a subject; you may see
+it, and seize it, at all times, but never laboriously invent it. And
+your power of discerning what is best in expression, among natural
+subjects, depends wholly on the temper in which you keep your own mind;
+above all, on your living so much alone as to allow it to become acutely
+sensitive in its own stillness. The noisy life of modern days is wholly
+incompatible with any true perception of natural beauty. If you go down
+into Cumberland by the railroad, live in some frequented hotel, and
+explore the hills with merry companions, however much you may enjoy your
+tour or their conversation, depend upon it you will never choose so much
+as one pictorial subject rightly; you will not see into the depth of
+any. But take knapsack and stick, walk towards the hills by short day's
+journeys,--ten or twelve miles a day--taking a week from some
+starting-place sixty or seventy miles away: sleep at the pretty little
+wayside inns, or the rough village ones; then take the hills as they
+tempt you, following glen or shore as your eye glances or your heart
+guides, wholly scornful of local fame or fashion, and of everything
+which it is the ordinary traveler's duty to see, or pride to do. Never
+force yourself to admire anything when you are not in the humor; but
+never force yourself away from what you feel to be lovely, in search of
+anything better; and gradually the deeper scenes of the natural world
+will unfold themselves to you in still increasing fullness of passionate
+power; and your difficulty will be no more to seek or to compose
+subjects, but only to choose one from among the multitude of melodious
+thoughts with which you will be haunted, thoughts which will of course
+be noble or original in proportion to your own depth of character and
+general power of mind; for it is not so much by the consideration you
+give to any single drawing, as by the previous discipline of your powers
+of thought, that the character of your composition will be determined.
+Simplicity of life will make you sensitive to the refinement and modesty
+of scenery, just as inordinate excitement and pomp of daily life will
+make you enjoy coarse colors and affected forms. Habits of patient
+comparison and accurate judgment will make your art precious, as they
+will make your actions wise; and every increase of noble enthusiasm in
+your living spirit will be measured by the reflection of its light upon
+the works of your hands.--Faithfully yours,
+
+                                                          J. RUSKIN.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [41] I give Rossetti this pre-eminence, because, though the leading
+    Pre-Raphaelites have all about equal power over color in the
+    abstract, Rossetti and Holman Hunt are distinguished above the rest
+    for rendering color under effects of light; and of these two,
+    Rossetti composes with richer fancy, and with a deeper sense of
+    beauty, Hunt's stern realism leading him continually into harshness.
+    Rossetti's carelessness, to do him justice, is only in water-color,
+    never in oil.
+
+  [42] All the degradation of art which was brought about, after the
+    rise of the Dutch school, by asphaltum, yellow varnish, and brown
+    trees would have been prevented, if only painters had been forced to
+    work in dead color. Any color will do for some people, if it is
+    browned and shining; but fallacy in dead color is detected on the
+    instant. I even believe that whenever a painter begins to _wish_
+    that he could touch any portion of his work with gum, he is going
+    wrong.
+
+    It is necessary, however, in this matter, carefully to distinguish
+    between translucency and luster. Translucency, though, as I have
+    said above, a dangerous temptation, is, in its place, beautiful; but
+    luster or _shininess_ is always, in painting, a defect. Nay, one of
+    my best painter-friends (the "best" being understood to attach to
+    both divisions of that awkward compound word,) tried the other day
+    to persuade me that luster was an ignobleness in anything; and it
+    was only the fear of treason to ladies' eyes, and to mountain
+    streams, and to morning dew, which kept me from yielding the point
+    to him. One is apt always to generalize too quickly in such matters;
+    but there can be no question that luster is destructive of
+    loveliness in color, as it is of intelligibility in form. Whatever
+    may be the pride of a young beauty in the knowledge that her eyes
+    shine (though perhaps even eyes are most beautiful in dimness), she
+    would be sorry if her cheeks did; and which of us would wish to
+    polish a rose?
+
+  [43] But not shiny or greasy. Bristol board, or hot-pressed
+    imperial, or gray paper that feels slightly adhesive to the hand, is
+    best. Coarse, gritty, and sandy papers are fit only for blotters and
+    blunderers; no good draughtsman would lay a line on them. Turner
+    worked much on a thin tough paper, dead in surface; rolling up his
+    sketches in tight bundles that would go deep into his pockets.
+
+  [44] I insist upon this unalterability of color the more because I
+    address you as a beginner, or an amateur: a great artist can
+    sometimes get out of a difficulty with credit, or repent without
+    confession. Yet even Titian's alterations usually show as stains on
+    his work.
+
+  [45] It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few
+    colors: it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing,
+    and you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange
+    them in your color-box in the order I have set them down, you will
+    always easily put your finger on the one you want.
+
+    Cobalt         Smalt                  Antwerb blue     Prussian blue
+    Black          Gamboge                Emerald green    Hooker's green
+    Lemon yellow   Cadmium yellow         Yellow ocher     Roman ocher
+    Raw sienna     Burnt sienna           Light red        Indian red
+    Mars orange    Extract of vermilion   Carmine          Violet carmine
+    Brown madder   Burnt umber            Vandyke brown    Sepia
+
+    Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colors, but
+    you need not care much about permanence in your work as yet, and
+    they are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more
+    fugitive still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed color,
+    put in the box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and
+    Prussian blue. No. 1 is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a
+    noble color for laying broken shadows with, to be worked into
+    afterwards with other colors.
+
+    If you wish to take up coloring seriously you had better get Field's
+    "Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says
+    about principles or harmonies of color; but only to its statements
+    of practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on
+    each other when mixed, etc.
+
+  [46] A more methodical, though under general circumstances uselessly
+    prolix way, is to cut a square hole, some half an inch wide, in the
+    sheet of cardboard, and a series of small circular holes in a slip
+    of cardboard an inch wide. Pass the slip over the square opening,
+    and match each color beside one of the circular openings. You will
+    thus have no occasion to wash any of the colors away. But the first
+    rough method is generally all you want, as, after a little practice,
+    you only need to _look_ at the hue through the opening in order to
+    be able to transfer it to your drawing at once.
+
+  [47] If colors were twenty times as costly as they are, we should
+    have many more good painters. If I were Chancellor of the Exchequer
+    I would lay a tax of twenty shillings a cake on all colors except
+    black, Prussian blue, Vandyke brown, and Chinese white, which I
+    would leave for students. I don't say this jestingly; I believe such
+    a tax would do more to advance real art than a great many schools of
+    design.
+
+  [48] I say _modern_, because Titian's quiet way of blending colors,
+    which is the perfectly right one, is not understood now by any
+    artist. The best color we reach is got by stippling; but this is not
+    quite right.
+
+  [49] See Note 6 in Appendix I.
+
+  [50] The worst general character that color can possibly have is a
+    prevalent tendency to a dirty yellowish green, like that of a
+    decaying heap of vegetables; this color is _accurately_ indicative
+    of decline or paralysis in missal-painting.
+
+  [51] That is to say, local color inherent in the object. The
+    gradations of color in the various shadows belonging to various
+    lights exhibit form, and therefore no one but a colorist can ever
+    draw _forms_ perfectly (see Modern Painters, vol. iv. chap. iii. at
+    the end); but all notions of explaining form by superimposed color,
+    as in architectural moldings, are absurd. Color adorns form, but
+    does not interpret it. An apple is prettier because it is striped,
+    but it does not look a bit rounder; and a cheek is prettier because
+    it is flushed, but you would see the form of the cheek bone better
+    if it were not. Color may, indeed, detach one shape from another, as
+    in grounding a bas-relief, but it always diminishes the appearance
+    of projection, and whether you put blue, purple, red, yellow, or
+    green, for your ground, the bas-relief will be just as clearly or
+    just as imperfectly relieved, as long as the colors are of equal
+    depth. The blue ground will not retire the hundredth part of an inch
+    more than the red one.
+
+  [52] See, however, at the close of this letter, the notice of one
+    more point connected with the management of color, under the head
+    "Law of Harmony."
+
+  [53] See farther, on this subject, Modern Painters, vol. iv. chap.
+    viii. Sec. 6.
+
+  [54] See Note 7 in Appendix I.
+
+  [55] "In general, throughout Nature, reflection and repetition are
+    peaceful things, associated with the idea of quiet succession in
+    events; that one day should be like another day, or one history the
+    repetition of another history, being more or less results of
+    quietness, while dissimilarity and non-succession are results of
+    interference and disquietude. Thus, though an echo actually
+    increases the quantity of sound heard, its repetition of the note or
+    syllable gives an idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence
+    also the feeling of calm given to a landscape by the voice of a
+    cuckoo."
+
+  [56] This is obscure in the rude wood-cut, the masts being so
+    delicate that they are confused among the lines of reflection. In
+    the original they have orange light upon them, relieved against
+    purple behind.
+
+  [57] The cost of art in getting a bridge level is _always_ lost, for
+    you must get up to the height of the central arch at any rate, and
+    you only can make the whole bridge level by putting the hill farther
+    back, and pretending to have got rid of it when you have not, but
+    have only wasted money in building an unnecessary embankment. Of
+    course, the bridge should not be difficultly or dangerously steep,
+    but the necessary slope, whatever it may be, should be in the bridge
+    itself, as far as the bridge can take it, and not pushed aside into
+    the approach, as in our Waterloo road; the only rational excuse for
+    doing which is that when the slope must be long it is inconvenient
+    to put on a drag at the top of the bridge, and that any restiveness
+    of the horse is more dangerous on the bridge than on the embankment.
+    To this I answer: first, it is not more dangerous in reality, though
+    it looks so, for the bridge is always guarded by an effective
+    parapet, but the embankment is sure to have no parapet, or only a
+    useless rail; and secondly, that it is better to have the slope on
+    the bridge and make the roadway wide in proportion, so as to be
+    quite safe, because a little waste of space on the river is no loss,
+    but your wide embankment at the side loses good ground; and so my
+    picturesque bridges are right as well as beautiful, and I hope to
+    see them built again some day instead of the frightful
+    straight-backed things which we fancy are fine, and accept from the
+    pontifical rigidities of the engineering mind.
+
+  [58] I cannot waste space here by reprinting what I have said in
+    other books; but the reader ought, if possible, to refer to the
+    notices of this part of our subject in Modern Painters, vol. iv.
+    chap xvii.; and Stones of Venice, vol. iii. chap. i. Sec. 8.
+
+  [59] If you happen to be reading at this part of the book, without
+    having gone through any previous practice, turn back to the sketch
+    of the ramification of stone pine, Fig. 4, p. 17, and examine the
+    curves of its boughs one by one, trying them by the conditions here
+    stated under the heads A and B.
+
+  [60] The reader, I hope, observes always that every line in these
+    figures is itself one of varying curvature, and cannot be drawn by
+    compasses.
+
+  [61] I hope the reader understands that these wood-cuts are merely
+    facsimiles of the sketches I make at the side of my paper to
+    illustrate my meaning as I write--often sadly scrawled if I want to
+    get on to something else. This one is really a little too careless;
+    but it would take more time and trouble to make a proper drawing of
+    so odd a boat than the matter is worth. It will answer the purpose
+    well enough as it is.
+
+  [62] Imperfect vegetable form I consider that which is in its nature
+    dependent, as in runners and climbers; or which is susceptible of
+    continual injury without materially losing the power of giving
+    pleasure by its aspect, as in the case of the smaller grasses. I
+    have not, of course, space here to explain these minor distinctions,
+    but the laws above stated apply to all the more important trees and
+    shrubs likely to be familiar to the student.
+
+  [63] There is a very tender lesson of this kind in the shadows of
+    leaves upon the ground; shadows which are the most likely of all to
+    attract attention, by their pretty play and change. If you examine
+    them, you will find that the shadows do not take the forms of the
+    leaves, but that, through each interstice, the light falls, at a
+    little distance, in the form of a round or oval spot; that is to
+    say, it produces the image of the sun itself, cast either vertically
+    or obliquely, in circle or ellipse according to the slope of the
+    ground. Of course the sun's rays produce the same effect, when they
+    fall through any small aperture: but the openings between leaves are
+    the only ones likely to show it to an ordinary observer, or to
+    attract his attention to it by its frequency, and lead him to think
+    what this type may signify respecting the greater Sun; and how it
+    may show us that, even when the opening through which the earth
+    receives light is too small to let us see the Sun Himself, the ray
+    of light that enters, if it comes straight from Him, will still bear
+    with it His image.
+
+  [64] In the smaller figure (32), it will be seen that this
+    interruption is caused by a cart coming down to the water's edge;
+    and this object is serviceable as beginning another system of curves
+    leading out of the picture on the right, but so obscurely drawn as
+    not to be easily represented in outline. As it is unnecessary to the
+    explanation of our point here, it has been omitted in the larger
+    diagram, the direction of the curve it begins being indicated by the
+    dashes only.
+
+  [65] Both in the Sketches in Flanders and Germany.
+
+  [66] If you happen to meet with the plate of Duerer's representing a
+    coat-of-arms with a skull in the shield, note the value given to the
+    concave curves and sharp point of the helmet by the convex leafage
+    carried round it in front; and the use of the blank white part of
+    the shield in opposing the rich folds of the dress.
+
+  [67] Turner hardly ever, as far as I remember, allows a strong light
+    to oppose a full dark, without some intervening tint. His suns never
+    set behind dark mountains without a film of cloud above the
+    mountain's edge.
+
+  [68]       "A prudent chief not always must display
+              His powers in equal ranks and fair array,
+              But with the occasion and the place comply,
+              Conceal his force; nay, seem sometimes to fly.
+              Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
+              Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream."
+
+                                                  _Essay on Criticism._
+
+  [69] I am describing from an MS., _circa_ 1300, of Gregory's
+    Decretalia, in my own possession.
+
+  [70] One of the most wonderful compositions of Tintoret in Venice,
+    is little more than a field of subdued crimson, spotted with flakes
+    of scattered gold. The upper clouds in the most beautiful skies owe
+    great part of their power to infinitude of divisions; order being
+    marked through this division.
+
+  [71] I fully believe that the strange gray gloom, accompanied by
+    considerable power of effect, which prevails in modern French art,
+    must be owing to the use of this mischievous instrument; the French
+    landscape always gives me the idea of Nature seen carelessly in the
+    dark mirror, and painted coarsely, but scientifically, through the
+    veil of its perversion.
+
+  [72] Various other parts of this subject are entered into,
+    especially in their bearing on the ideal of painting, in Modern
+    Painters, vol. iv. chap. iii.
+
+  [73] In all the best arrangements of color, the delight occasioned
+    by their mode of succession is entirely inexplicable, nor can it be
+    reasoned about; we like it just as we like an air in music, but
+    cannot reason any refractory person into liking it, if they do not:
+    and yet there is distinctly a right and a wrong in it, and a good
+    taste and bad taste respecting it, as also in music.
+
+  [74] "Puseyism" was unknown in the days when this drawing was made;
+    but the kindly and helpful influences of what may be called
+    ecclesiastical sentiment, which, in a morbidly exaggerated
+    condition, forms one of the principal elements of "Puseyism,"--I use
+    this word regretfully, no other existing which will serve for
+    it,--had been known and felt in our wild northern districts long
+    before.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+
+I.
+
+ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.
+
+  NOTE 1, p. 42.--"_Principle of the stereoscope._"
+
+247. I am sorry to find a notion current among artists, that they can,
+in some degree, imitate in a picture the effect of the stereoscope, by
+confusion of lines. There are indeed one or two artifices by which, as
+stated in the text, an appearance of retirement or projection may be
+obtained, so that they partly supply the place of the stereoscopic
+effect, but they do not imitate that effect. The principle of the human
+sight is simply this:--by means of our two eyes we literally see
+everything from two places at once; and, by calculated combination, in
+the brain, of the facts of form so seen, we arrive at conclusions
+respecting the distance and shape of the object, which we could not
+otherwise have reached. But it is just as vain to hope to paint at once
+the two views of the object as seen from these two places, though only
+an inch and a half distant from each other, as it would be if they were
+a mile and a half distant from each other. With the right eye you see
+one view of a given object, relieved against one part of the distance;
+with the left eye you see another view of it, relieved against another
+part of the distance. You may paint whichever of those views you please;
+you cannot paint both. Hold your finger upright, between you and this
+page of the book, about six inches from your eyes, and three from the
+book; shut the right eye, and hide the words "inches from," in the
+second line above this, with your finger; you will then see "six" on one
+side of it, and "your," on the other. Now shut the left eye and open the
+right without moving your finger, and you will see "inches," but not
+"six." You may paint the finger with "inches" beyond it, or with "six"
+beyond it, but not with both. And this principle holds for any object
+and any distance. You might just as well try to paint St. Paul's at once
+from both ends of London Bridge as to realize any stereoscopic effect in
+a picture.
+
+
+  NOTE 2, p. 59.--"_Dark lines turned to the light._"
+
+248. It ought to have been farther observed, that the inclosure of the
+light by future shadow is by no means the only reason for the dark lines
+which great masters often thus introduce. It constantly happens that a
+local color will show its own darkness most on the light side, by
+projecting into and against masses of light in that direction; and then
+the painter will indicate this future force of the mass by his dark
+touch. Both the monk's head in Fig. 11 and dog in Fig. 20 are dark
+towards the light for this reason.
+
+
+  NOTE 3, p. 98.--"_Softness of reflections._"
+
+249. I have not quite insisted enough on the extreme care which is
+necessary in giving the tender evanescence of the edges of the
+reflections, when the water is in the least agitated; nor on the
+decision with which you may reverse the object, when the water is quite
+calm. Most drawing of reflections is at once confused and hard; but
+Nature's is at once intelligible and tender. Generally, at the edge of
+the water, you ought not to see where reality ceases and reflection
+begins; as the image loses itself you ought to keep all its subtle and
+varied veracities, with the most exquisite softening of its edge.
+Practice as much as you can from the reflections of ships in calm
+water, following out all the reversed rigging, and taking, if anything,
+more pains with the reflection than with the ship.
+
+
+  NOTE 4, p. 100.--"_Where the reflection is darkest, you will see
+     through the water best._"
+
+250. For this reason it often happens that if the water be shallow, and
+you are looking steeply down into it, the reflection of objects on the
+bank will consist simply of pieces of the bottom seen clearly through
+the water, and relieved by flashes of light, which are the reflection of
+the sky. Thus you may have to draw the reflected dark shape of a bush:
+but, inside of that shape, you must not draw the leaves of the bush, but
+the stones under the water; and, outside of this dark reflection, the
+blue or white of the sky, with no stones visible.
+
+
+  NOTE 5, p. 101.--"_Approach streams with reverence._"
+
+251. I have hardly said anything about waves of torrents or waterfalls,
+as I do not consider them subjects for beginners to practice upon; but,
+as many of our younger artists are almost breaking their hearts over
+them, it may be well to state at once that it is physically impossible
+to draw a running torrent quite rightly, the luster of its currents and
+whiteness of its foam being dependent on intensities of light which art
+has not at its command. This also is to be observed, that most young
+painters make their defeat certain by attempting to draw running water,
+which is a lustrous object in rapid motion, without ever trying their
+strength on a lustrous object standing still. Let them break a coarse
+green-glass bottle into a great many bits, and try to paint those, with
+all their undulations and edges of fracture, as they lie still on the
+table; if they cannot, of course they need not try the rushing crystal
+and foaming fracture of the stream. If they can manage the glass bottle,
+let them next buy a fragment or two of yellow fire-opal; it is quite a
+common and cheap mineral, and presents, as closely as anything can, the
+milky bloom and color of a torrent wave: and if they can conquer the
+opal, they may at last have some chance with the stream, as far as the
+stream is in any wise possible. But, as I have just said, the bright
+parts of it are _not_ possible, and ought, as much as may be, to be
+avoided in choosing subjects. A great deal more may, however, be done
+than any artist has done yet, in painting the gradual disappearance and
+lovely coloring of stones seen through clear and calm water.
+
+Students living in towns may make great progress in rock-drawing by
+frequently and faithfully drawing broken edges of common roofing slates,
+of their real size.
+
+
+  NOTE 6, p. 125.--"_Nature's economy of color._"
+
+252. I heard it wisely objected to this statement, the other day, by a
+young lady, that it was not through economy that Nature did not color
+deep down in the flower bells, but because "she had not light enough
+there to see to paint with." This may be true; but it is certainly not
+for want of light that, when she is laying the dark spots on a foxglove,
+she will not use any more purple than she has got already on the bell,
+but takes out the color all round the spot, and concentrates it in the
+middle.
+
+
+  NOTE 7, p. 138.--"_The law of repetition._"
+
+253. The reader may perhaps recollect a very beautiful picture of
+Vandyck's in the Manchester Exhibition, representing three children in
+court dresses of rich black and red. The law in question was amusingly
+illustrated, in the lower corner of that picture, by the introduction of
+two crows, in a similar color of court dress, having jet black feathers
+and bright red beaks.
+
+254. Since the first edition of this work was published, I have
+ascertained that there are two series of engravings from the Bible
+drawings mentioned in the list at p. 50. One of these is inferior to the
+other, and in many respects false to the drawing; the "Jericho," for
+instance, in the false series, has common bushes instead of palm trees
+in the middle distance. The original plates may be had at almost any
+respectable printseller's; and ordinary impressions, whether of these or
+any other plates mentioned in the list at p. 50, will be quite as useful
+as proofs: but, in buying Liber Studiorum, it is always well to get the
+best impressions that can be had, and if possible impressions of the
+original plates, published by Turner. In case these are not to be had,
+the copies which are in course of publication by Mr. Lupton (4 Keppel
+Street, Russell Square) are good and serviceable; but no others are of
+any use.--[Note of 1857.]
+
+I have placed in the hands of Mr. Ward (Working Men's College) some
+photographs from the etchings made by Turner for the Liber; the original
+etchings being now unobtainable, except by fortunate accident. I have
+selected the subjects carefully from my own collection of the etchings;
+and though some of the more subtle qualities of line are lost in the
+photographs, the student will find these proofs the best lessons in
+pen-drawing accessible to him.--[Note of 1859]
+
+
+II.
+
+THINGS TO BE STUDIED.
+
+255. The worst danger by far, to which a solitary student is exposed, is
+that of liking things that he should not. It is not so much his
+difficulties, as his tastes, which he must set himself to conquer: and
+although, under the guidance of a master, many works of art may be made
+instructive, which are only of partial excellence (the good and bad of
+them being duly distinguished), his safeguard, as long as he studies
+alone, will be in allowing himself to possess only things, in their way,
+so free from faults, that nothing he copies in them can seriously
+mislead him, and to contemplate only those works of art which he knows
+to be either perfect or noble in their errors. I will therefore set
+down, in clear order, the names of the masters whom you may safely
+admire, and a few of the books which you may safely possess. In these
+days of cheap illustration, the danger is always rather of your
+possessing too much than too little. It may admit of some question, how
+far the looking at bad art may set off and illustrate the characters of
+the good; but, on the whole, I believe it is best to live always on
+quite wholesome food, and that our enjoyment of it will never be made
+more acute by feeding on ashes; though it may be well sometimes to taste
+the ashes, in order to know the bitterness of them. Of course the works
+of the great masters can only be serviceable to the student after he has
+made considerable progress himself. It only wastes the time and dulls
+the feelings of young persons, to drag them through picture galleries;
+at least, unless they themselves wish to look at particular pictures.
+Generally, young people only care to enter a picture gallery when there
+is a chance of getting leave to run a race to the other end of it; and
+they had better do that in the garden below. If, however, they have any
+real enjoyment of pictures, and want to look at this one or that, the
+principal point is never to disturb them in looking at what interests
+them, and never to make them look at what does not. Nothing is of the
+least use to young people (nor, by the way, of much use to old ones),
+but what interests them; and therefore, though it is of great importance
+to put nothing but good art into their possession, yet, when they are
+passing through great houses or galleries, they should be allowed to
+look precisely at what pleases them: if it is not useful to them as art,
+it will be in some other way; and the healthiest way in which art can
+interest them is when they look at it, not as art, but because it
+represents something they like in Nature. If a boy has had his heart
+filled by the life of some great man, and goes up thirstily to a Vandyck
+portrait of him, to see what he was like, that is the wholesomest way in
+which he can begin the study of portraiture; if he loves mountains, and
+dwells on a Turner drawing because he sees in it a likeness to a
+Yorkshire scar or an Alpine pass, that is the wholesomest way in which
+he can begin the study of landscape; and if a girl's mind is filled with
+dreams of angels and saints, and she pauses before an Angelico because
+she thinks it must surely be like heaven, that is the right way for her
+to begin the study of religious art.
+
+256. When, however, the student has made some definite progress, and
+every picture becomes really a guide to him, false or true, in his own
+work, it is of great importance that he should never look, with even
+partial admiration, at bad art; and then, if the reader is willing to
+trust me in the matter, the following advice will be useful to him. In
+which, with his permission, I will quit the indirect and return to the
+epistolary address, as being the more convenient.
+
+
+  First, in Galleries of Pictures:
+
+1. You may look, with trust in their being always right, at Titian,
+Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, John Bellini, and Velasquez; the
+authenticity of the picture being of course established for you by
+proper authority.
+
+2. You may look with admiration, admitting, however, question of right
+and wrong,[75] at Van Eyck, Holbein, Perugino, Francia, Angelico,
+Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt, Reynolds,
+Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern Pre-Raphaelites.[76] You had better
+look at no other painters than these, for you run a chance, otherwise,
+of being led far off the road, or into grievous faults, by some of the
+other great ones, as Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Rubens; and of being,
+besides, corrupted in taste by the base ones, as Murillo, Salvator,
+Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Teniers, and such others. You may look, however,
+for examples of evil, with safe universality of reprobation, being sure
+that everything you see is bad, at Domenichino, the Carracci, Bronzino,
+and the figure pieces of Salvator.
+
+Among those named for study under question, you cannot look too much at,
+nor grow too enthusiastically fond of, Angelico, Correggio, Reynolds,
+Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites; but, if you find yourself getting
+especially fond of any of the others, leave off looking at them, for you
+must be going wrong some way or other. If, for instance, you begin to
+like Rembrandt or Leonardo especially, you are losing your feeling for
+color; if you like Van Eyck or Perugino especially, you must be getting
+too fond of rigid detail; and if you like Vandyck or Gainsborough
+especially, you must be too much attracted by gentlemanly flimsiness.
+
+257. Secondly, of published, or otherwise multiplied, art, such as you
+may be able to get yourself, or to see at private houses or in shops,
+the works of the following masters are the most desirable, after the
+Turners, Rembrandts, and Duerers, which I have asked you to get first:
+
+
+  1. Samuel Prout.[77]
+
+All his published lithographic sketches are of the greatest value,
+wholly unrivaled in power of composition, and in love and feeling of
+architectural subject. His somewhat mannered linear execution, though
+not to be imitated in your own sketches from Nature, may be occasionally
+copied, for discipline's sake, with great advantage: it will give you a
+peculiar steadiness of hand, not quickly attainable in any other way;
+and there is no fear of your getting into any faultful mannerism as long
+as you carry out the different modes of more delicate study above
+recommended.
+
+If you are interested in architecture, and wish to make it your chief
+study, you should draw much from photographs of it; and then from the
+architecture itself, with the same completion of detail and gradation,
+only keeping the shadows of due paleness,--in photographs they are
+always about four times as dark as they ought to be,--and treat
+buildings with as much care and love as artists do their rock
+foregrounds, drawing all the moss, and weeds, and stains upon them. But
+if, without caring to understand architecture, you merely want the
+picturesque character of it, and to be able to sketch it fast, you
+cannot do better than take Prout for your exclusive master; only do not
+think that you are copying Prout by drawing straight lines with dots at
+the end of them. Get first his "Rhine," and draw the subjects that have
+most hills, and least architecture in them, with chalk on smooth paper,
+till you can lay on his broad flat tints, and get his gradations of
+light, which are very wonderful; then take up the architectural subjects
+in the "Rhine," and draw again and again the groups of figures, etc., in
+his "Microcosm," and "Lessons on Light and Shadow." After that, proceed
+to copy the grand subjects in the "Sketches in Flanders and Germany;" or
+"in Switzerland and Italy," if you cannot get the Flanders; but the
+Switzerland is very far inferior. Then work from Nature, not trying to
+Proutize Nature, by breaking smooth buildings into rough ones, but only
+drawing _what you see_, with Prout's simple method and firm lines. Don't
+copy his colored works. They are good, but not at all equal to his chalk
+and pencil drawings; and you will become a mere imitator, and a very
+feeble imitator, if you use color at all in Prout's method. I have not
+space to explain why this is so, it would take a long piece of
+reasoning; trust me for the statement.
+
+
+  2. John Lewis.
+
+His sketches in Spain, lithographed by himself, are very valuable. Get
+them, if you can, and also some engravings (about eight or ten, I think,
+altogether) of wild beasts, executed by his own hand a long time ago;
+they are very precious in every way. The series of the "Alhambra" is
+rather slight, and few of the subjects are lithographed by himself;
+still it is well worth having.
+
+But let _no_ lithographic work come into the house, if you can help it,
+nor even look at any, except Prout's, and those sketches of Lewis's.
+
+
+  3. George Cruikshank.
+
+If you ever happen to meet with the two volumes of "Grimm's German
+Stories," which were illustrated by him long ago, pounce upon them
+instantly; the etchings in them are the finest things, next to
+Rembrandt's, that, as far as I know, have been done since etching was
+invented. You cannot look at them too much, nor copy them too often.
+
+All his works are very valuable, though disagreeable when they touch on
+the worst vulgarities of modern life; and often much spoiled by a
+curiously mistaken type of face, divided so as to give too much to the
+mouth and eyes and leave too little for forehead, the eyes being set
+about two thirds up, instead of at half the height of the head. But his
+manner of work is always right; and his tragic power, though rarely
+developed, and warped by habits of caricature, is, in reality, as great
+as his grotesque power.
+
+There is no fear of his hurting your taste, as long as your principal
+work lies among art of so totally different a character as most of that
+which I Have recommended to you; and you may, therefore, get great good
+by copying almost anything of his that may come in your way; except only
+his illustrations, lately published, to "Cinderella," and "Jack and the
+Bean-stalk," and "Tom Thumb," which are much overlabored, and confused
+in line. You should get them, but do not copy them.
+
+
+  4. Alfred Rethel.
+
+I only know two publications by him; one, the "Dance of Death," with
+text by Reinick, published in Leipsic, but to be had now of any London
+bookseller for the sum, I believe, of eighteen pence, and containing six
+plates full of instructive character; the other, of two plates only,
+"Death the Avenger," and "Death the Friend." These two are far superior
+to the "Todtentanz," and, if you can get them, will be enough in
+themselves to show all that Rethel can teach you. If you dislike ghastly
+subjects, get "Death the Friend" only.
+
+
+  5. Bewick.
+
+The execution of the plumage in Bewick's birds is the most masterly
+thing ever yet done in wood-cutting; it is worked just as Paul Veronese
+would have worked in wood, had he taken to it. His vignettes, though too
+coarse in execution, and vulgar in types of form, to be good copies,
+show, nevertheless, intellectual power of the highest order; and there
+are pieces of sentiment in them, either pathetic or satirical, which
+have never since been equaled in illustrations of this simple kind; the
+bitter intensity of the feeling being just like that which characterizes
+some of the leading Pre-Raphaelites. Bewick is the Burns of painting.
+
+
+  6. Blake.
+
+The "Book of Job," engraved by himself, is of the highest rank in
+certain characters of imagination and expression; in the mode of
+obtaining certain effects of light it will also be a very useful example
+to you. In expressing conditions of glaring and flickering light, Blake
+is greater than Rembrandt.
+
+
+  7. Richter.
+
+I have already told you what to guard against in looking at his works. I
+am a little doubtful whether I have done well in including them in this
+catalogue at all; but the imaginations in them are so lovely and
+numberless, that I must risk, for their sake, the chance of hurting you
+a little in judgment of style. If you want to make presents of
+story-books to children, his are the best you can now get; but his most
+beautiful work, as far as I know, is his series of Illustrations to the
+Lord's Prayer.
+
+
+  8. Rossetti.
+
+An edition of Tennyson, lately published, contains wood-cuts from
+drawings by Rossetti and other chief Pre-Raphaelite masters. They are
+terribly spoiled in the cutting, and generally the best part, the
+expression of feature, _entirely_ lost;[78] still they are full of
+instruction, and cannot be studied too closely. But observe, respecting
+these wood-cuts, that if you have been in the habit of looking at much
+spurious work, in which sentiment, action, and style are borrowed or
+artificial, you will assuredly be offended at first by all genuine work,
+which is intense in feeling. Genuine art, which is merely art, such as
+Veronese's or Titian's, may not offend you, though the chances are that
+you will not care about it; but genuine works of feeling, such as "Maud"
+or "Aurora Leigh" in poetry, or the grand Pre-Raphaelite designs in
+painting, are sure to offend you: and if you cease to work hard, and
+persist in looking at vicious and false art, they will continue to
+offend you. It will be well, therefore, to have one type of entirely
+false art, in order to know what to guard against. Flaxman's outlines to
+Dante contain, I think, examples of almost every kind of falsehood and
+feebleness which it is possible for a trained artist, not base in
+thought, to commit or admit, both in design and execution. Base or
+degraded choice of subject, such as you will constantly find in Teniers
+and others of the Dutch painters, I need not, I hope, warn you against;
+you will simply turn away from it in disgust; while mere bad or feeble
+drawing, which makes mistakes in every direction at once, cannot teach
+you the particular sort of educated fallacy in question. But, in these
+designs of Flaxman's, you have gentlemanly feeling, and fair knowledge
+of anatomy, and firm setting down of lines, all applied in the
+foolishest and worst possible way; you cannot have a more finished
+example of learned error, amiable want of meaning, and bad drawing with
+a steady hand.[79] Retzsch's outlines have more real material in them
+than Flaxman's, occasionally showing true fancy and power; in artistic
+principle they are nearly as bad, and in taste, worse. All outlines from
+statuary, as given in works on classical art, will be very hurtful to
+you if you in the least like them; and _nearly_ all finished line
+engravings. Some particular prints I could name which possess
+instructive qualities, but it would take too long to distinguish them,
+and the best way is to avoid line engravings of figures altogether.[80]
+If you happen to be a rich person, possessing quantities of them, and if
+you are fond of the large finished prints from Raphael, Correggio, etc.,
+it is wholly impossible that you can make any progress in knowledge of
+real art till you have sold them all,--or burnt them, which would be a
+greater benefit to the world. I hope that, some day, true and noble
+engravings will be made from the few pictures of the great schools,
+which the restorations undertaken by the modern managers of foreign
+galleries may leave us; but the existing engravings have nothing
+whatever in common with the good in the works they profess to represent,
+and, if you like them, you like in the originals of them hardly anything
+but their errors.
+
+258. Finally, your judgment will be, of course, much affected by your
+taste in literature. Indeed, I know many persons who have the purest
+taste in literature, and yet false taste in art, and it is a phenomenon
+which puzzles me not a little; but I have never known any one with false
+taste in books, and true taste in pictures. It is also of the greatest
+importance to you, not only for art's sake, but for all kinds of sake,
+in these days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps of
+literature, and live on a little rocky island of your own, with a spring
+and a lake in it, pure and good. I cannot, of course, suggest the choice
+of your library to you: every several mind needs different books; but
+there are some books which we all need, and assuredly, if you read
+Homer,[81] Plato, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Dante,[82] Shakspeare, and
+Spenser, as much as you ought, you will not require wide enlargement of
+shelves to right and left of them for purposes of perpetual study. Among
+modern books avoid generally magazine and review literature. Sometimes
+it may contain a useful abridgment or a wholesome piece of criticism;
+but the chances are ten to one it will either waste your time or mislead
+you. If you want to understand any subject whatever, read the best book
+upon it you can hear of: not a review of the book. If you don't like the
+first book you try, seek for another; but do not hope ever to understand
+the subject without pains, by a reviewer's help. Avoid especially that
+class of literature which has a knowing tone; it is the most poisonous
+of all. Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration and
+awe; it may contain firm assertion or stern satire, but it never sneers
+coldly, nor asserts haughtily, and it always leads you to reverence or
+love something with your whole heart. It is not always easy to
+distinguish the satire of the venomous race of books from the satire of
+the noble and pure ones; but in general you may notice that the
+cold-blooded, Crustacean and Batrachian books will sneer at sentiment;
+and the warm-blooded, human books, at sin. Then, in general, the more
+you can restrain your serious reading to reflective or lyric poetry,
+history, and natural history, avoiding fiction and the drama, the
+healthier your mind will become. Of modern poetry, keep to Scott,
+Wordsworth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Thomas Hood,
+Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Patmore, whose "Angel in the House" is
+a most finished piece of writing, and the sweetest analysis we possess
+of quiet modern domestic feeling; while Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh"
+is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced
+in any language. Cast Coleridge at once aside, as sickly and useless;
+and Shelley, as shallow and verbose; Byron, until your taste is fully
+formed, and you are able to discern the magnificence in him from the
+wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor write any poetry yourself;
+there is, perhaps, rather too much than too little in the world already.
+
+259. Of reflective prose, read chiefly Bacon, Johnson, and Helps.
+Carlyle is hardly to be named as a writer for "beginners," because his
+teaching, though to some of us vitally necessary, may to others be
+hurtful. If you understand and like him, read him; if he offends you,
+you are not yet ready for him, and perhaps may never be so; at all
+events, give him up, as you would sea-bathing if you found it hurt you,
+till you are stronger. Of fiction, read "Sir Charles Grandison," Scott's
+novels, Miss Edgeworth's, and, if you are a young lady, Madame de
+Genlis', the French Miss Edgeworth; making these, I mean, your constant
+companions. Of course you must, or will, read other books for amusement
+once or twice; but you will find that these have an element of
+perpetuity in them, existing in nothing else of their kind; while their
+peculiar quietness and repose of manner will also be of the greatest
+value in teaching you to feel the same characters in art. Read little at
+a time, trying to feel interest in little things, and reading not so
+much for the sake of the story as to get acquainted with the pleasant
+people into whose company these writers bring you. A common book will
+often give you much amusement, but it is only a noble book which will
+give you dear friends. Remember, also, that it is of less importance to
+you in your earlier years, that the books you read should be clever than
+that they should be right. I do not mean oppressively or repulsively
+instructive; but that the thoughts they express should be just, and the
+feelings they excite generous. It is not necessary for you to read the
+wittiest or the most suggestive books: it is better, in general, to hear
+what is already known, and may be simply said. Much of the literature of
+the present day, though good to be read by persons of ripe age, has a
+tendency to agitate rather than confirm, and leaves its readers too
+frequently in a helpless or hopeless indignation, the worst possible
+state into which the mind of youth can be thrown. It may, indeed, become
+necessary for you, as you advance in life, to set your hand to things
+that need to be altered in the world, or apply your heart chiefly to
+what must be pitied in it, or condemned; but, for a young person, the
+safest temper is one of reverence, and the safest place one of
+obscurity. Certainly at present, and perhaps through all your life, your
+teachers are wisest when they make you content in quiet virtue, and that
+literature and art are best for you which point out, in common life, and
+in familiar things, the objects for hopeful labor, and for humble love.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [75] I do not mean necessarily to imply inferiority of rank in
+    saying that this second class of painters have questionable
+    qualities. The greatest men have often many faults, and sometimes
+    their faults are a part of their greatness; but such men are not, of
+    course, to be looked upon by the student with absolute implicitness
+    of faith.
+
+  [76] Including, under this term, John Lewis, and William Hunt of the
+    Old Water-color, who, take him all in all, is the best painter of
+    still life, I believe, that ever existed.
+
+  [77] The order in which I place these masters does not in the least
+    imply superiority or inferiority. I wrote their names down as they
+    occurred to me; putting Rossetti's last because what I had to say of
+    him was connected with other subjects; and one or another will
+    appear to you great, or be found by you useful, according to the
+    kind of subjects you are studying.
+
+  [78] This is especially the case in the St. Cecily, Rossetti's first
+    illustration to the "Palace of Art," which would have been the best
+    in the book had it been well engraved. The whole work should be
+    taken up again, and done by line engraving, perfectly; and wholly
+    from Pre-Raphaelite designs, with which no other modern work can
+    bear the least comparison.
+
+  [79] The praise I have given incidentally to Flaxman's sculpture in
+    the "Seven Lamps," and elsewhere, refers wholly to his studies from
+    Nature, and simple groups in marble, which were always good and
+    interesting. Still, I have overrated him, even in this respect; and
+    it is generally to be remembered that, in speaking of artists whose
+    works I cannot be supposed to have specially studied, the errors I
+    fall into will always be on the side of praise. For, of course,
+    praise is most likely to be given when the thing praised is above
+    one's knowledge; and, therefore, as our knowledge increases, such
+    things may be found less praiseworthy than we thought. But blame can
+    only be justly given when the thing blamed is below one's level of
+    sight; and, practically, I never do blame anything until I have got
+    well past it, and am certain that there is demonstrable falsehood in
+    it. I believe, therefore, all my blame to be wholly trust-worthy,
+    having never yet had occasion to repent of one depreciatory word
+    that I have ever written, while I have often found that, with
+    respect to things I had not time to study closely, I was led too far
+    by sudden admiration, helped, perhaps, by peculiar associations, or
+    other deceptive accidents; and this the more, because I never care
+    to check an expression of delight, thinking the chances are, that,
+    even if mistaken, it will do more good than harm; but I weigh every
+    word of blame with scrupulous caution. I have sometimes erased a
+    strong passage of blame from second editions of my books; but this
+    was only when I found it offended the reader without convincing him,
+    never because I repented of it myself.
+
+  [80] Large line engravings, I mean, in which the lines, as such, are
+    conspicuous. Small vignettes in line are often beautiful in figures
+    no less than landscape; as, for instance, those from Stothard's
+    drawings in Rogers's Italy; and, therefore, I have just recommended
+    the vignettes to Tennyson to be done by line engraving.
+
+  [81] Chapman's, if not the original.
+
+  [82] Gary's or Cayley's, if not the original. I do not know which
+    are the best translations of Plato. Herodotus and Aeschylus can only
+    be read in the original. It may seem strange that I name books like
+    these for "beginners:" but all the greatest books contain food for
+    all ages; and an intelligent and rightly bred youth or girl ought to
+    enjoy much, even in Plato, by the time they are fifteen or sixteen.
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CORRECTION MADE TO THE ORIGINAL TEXT.
+
+Page 58: 'Thus, the outline a and the outline d.' 'd' replaced by 'b.'
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING***
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