The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners

29

The impressions vary so much in color that no brown can be specified.

30

You had better get such a photograph, even though you have a Liber print as well.

31

See the closing letter in this volume.

32

[In 1857.]

33

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.

34

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.

35

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.

36

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.

37

See Note 3 (#x6_x_6_i119) in Appendix I.

38

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.

39

See Note 4 (#x6_x_6_i121) in Appendix I.

40

See Note 5 (#x6_x_6_i124) in Appendix I.

41

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.

42

Respecting Architectural Drawing, see the notice of the works of Prout in the Appendix.

43

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.

44

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?

45

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.

46

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.

47

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.

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.

48

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.

49

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.

50

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.

51

See Note 6 (#x6_x_6_i127) in Appendix I.

52