The Mind of the Artist Part 10

CXIII

The great painters like Raphael and Michael Angelo insisted on the outline when finishing their work. They went over it with a fine brush, and thus gave new animation to the contours; they impressed on their design force and fire.

_Ingres._

CXIV

The first thing to seize in an object, in order to draw it, is the contrast of the princ.i.p.al lines. Before putting chalk to paper, get this well into the mind. In Girodet's work, for example, one sometimes sees this admirably shown, because through intense preoccupation with his model he has caught, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, something of its natural grace; but it has been done as if by accident. He applied the principle without recognising it as such. X---- seems to me the only man who has understood it and carried it out. That is the whole secret of his drawing. The most difficult thing is to apply it, like him, to the whole body. Ingres has done it in details like hands, &c. Without mechanical aids to help the eye, it would be impossible to arrive at the principle; aids such as prolonging a line, &c., drawing often on a pane of gla.s.s.

All the other painters, not excepting Michael Angelo and Raphael, draw by instinct, by inspiration, and found beauty by being struck with it in nature; but they did not know X----'s secret, accuracy of eye. It is not at the moment of carrying out a design that one ought to tie oneself down to working with measuring-rules, perpendiculars, &c.; this accuracy of eye must be an acquired habit, which in the presence of nature will spontaneously a.s.sist the imperious need of rendering her aspect. Wilkie, again, has the secret. In portraiture it is indispensable. When, for example, one has made out the _ensemble_ of a design, and when one knows the lines by heart, so to speak, one should be able to reproduce them geometrically, in a fashion, on the picture. Above all with women's portraits; the first thing to seize is to seize the grace of the _ensemble_. If you begin with the details, you will be always heavy. For instance: if you have to draw a thoroughbred horse, if you let yourself go into details, your outline will never be salient enough.

_Delacroix._

CXV

Drawing is the means employed by art to set down and imitate the light of nature. Everything in nature is manifested to us by means of light and its complementaries, reflection and shadow. This it is which drawing verifies. Drawing is the counterfeit light of art.

_Bracquemond._

CXVI

It won't do to begin painting heads or much detail in this picture till it's all settled. I do so believe in getting in the bones of a picture properly first, then putting on the flesh and afterwards the skin, and then another skin; last of all combing its hair and sending it forth to the world. If you begin with the flesh and the skin and trust to getting the bones right afterwards, it's such a slippery process.

_Burne-Jones._

CXVII

The creative spirit in descending into a pictorial conception must take upon itself organic structure. This great imaginative scheme forms the bony system of the work; lines take the place of nerves and arteries, and the whole is covered with the skin of colour.

_Hsieh Ho_ (Chinese, sixth century).

CXVIII

Simplicity in composition or distinctness of parts is ever to be attended to, as it is one part of beauty, as has been already said: but that what I mean by distinctness of parts in this place may be better understood it will be proper to explain it by an example.

When you would compose an object of a great variety of parts, let several of those parts be distinguished by themselves, by their remarkable difference from the next adjoining, so as to make each of them, as it were, one well-shaped quant.i.ty or part (these are like what they call pa.s.sages in music, and in writing paragraphs) by which means not only the whole, but even every part, will be better understood by the eye: for confusion will hereby be avoided when the object is seen near, and the shapes will seem well varied, though fewer in number, at a distance.

The parsley-leaf, in like manner, from whence a beautiful foliage in ornament was originally taken, is divided into three distinct pa.s.sages; which are again divided into other odd numbers; and this method is observed, for the generality, in the leaves of all plants and flowers, the most simple of which are the trefoil and cinquefoil.

Observe the well-composed nosegay, how it loses all distinctness when it dies; each leaf and flower then shrivels and loses its distinct shape, and the firm colours fade into a kind of sameness; so that the whole gradually becomes a confused heap.

If the general parts of objects are preserved large at first, they will always admit of further enrichments of a small kind, but then they must be so small as not to confound the general ma.s.ses or quant.i.ties; thus, you see, variety is a check upon itself when overdone, which of course begets what is called a _pet.i.t taste_ and a confusion to the eye.

_Hogarth._

CXIX

Drawing includes everything except the tinting of the picture.

_Ingres._

CXX

One must always be drawing, drawing with the eye when one cannot draw with the pencil. If observation does not keep step with practice you will do nothing really good.

_Ingres._

CXXI

As a means of practising this perspective of the variation and loss or diminution of the proper essence of colours, take at distances, a hundred braccia apart, objects standing in the landscape, such as trees, houses, men, and places, and in front of the first tree fix a piece of gla.s.s so that it is quite steady, and then let your eye rest upon it and trace out a tree upon the gla.s.s above the outline of the tree; and afterwards remove the gla.s.s so far to one side that the actual tree seems almost to touch the one that you have drawn. Then colour your drawing in such a way that the two are alike in colour and form, and that if you close one eye both seem painted on the gla.s.s and the same distance away. Then proceed in the same way with a second and a third tree, at distances of a hundred braccia from each other. And these will always serve as your standards and teachers when you are at work on pictures where they can be applied, and they will cause the work to be successful in its distance. But I find it is a rule that the second is reduced to four-fifths the size of the first when it is twenty braccia distant from it.

_Leonardo._

CXXII

The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art.... Great inventors in all ages knew this: Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by this line; Raphael and Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer, are known by this and this alone. The want of this determinate and bounding form evidences the idea of want in the artist's mind.

_Blake._

CXXIII

My opinion is that he who knows how to draw well and merely does a foot or a hand or a neck, can paint everything created in the world; and yet there are painters who paint everything there is in the world so impatiently and so much without worth that it would be better not to do it at all. One recognises the knowledge of a great man in the fear with which he does a thing the more he understands it; and, on the contrary, the ignorance of others in the foolhardy daring with which they fill pictures with what they know nothing about. There may be an excellent master who has never painted more than a single figure, and without painting anything more deserves more renown and honour than those who have painted a thousand pictures: he knows better how to do what he has not done than the others know what they do.

_Michael Angelo._

CXXIV

It is known that bodies in motion always describe some line or other in the air, as the whirling round of a firebrand apparently makes a circle, the waterfall part of a curve, the arrow and bullet, by the swiftness of their motions, nearly a straight line; waving lines are formed by the pleasing movement of a ship on the waves. Now, in order to obtain a just idea of action, at the same time to be judiciously satisfied of being in the right in what we do, let us begin with imagining a line formed in the air by any supposed point at the end of a limb or part that is moved, or made by the whole part or limb, or by the whole body together.

And that thus much of movements may be conceived at once is evident, on the least recollection; for whoever has seen a fine Arabian war-horse, unbacked and at liberty, and in a wanton trot, cannot but remember what a large waving line his rising, and at the same time pressing forward cuts through the air, the equal continuation of which is varied by his curveting from side to side; whilst his long mane and tail play about in serpentine movements.

_Hogarth._

CXXV

Distinguish the various planes of a picture by circ.u.mscribing them each in turn; cla.s.s them in the order in which they present themselves to the daylight; before beginning to paint, settle which have the same value.

Thus, for example, in a drawing on tinted paper make the parts that glitter gleam out with your white, then the lights, rendered also with white, but fainter; afterwards those of the half-tones that can be managed by means of the paper, then a first half-tone with the chalk, &c. When at the edge of a plane which you have accurately marked, you have a little more light than at the centre of it, you give so much more definition of its flatness or projection. This is the secret of modelling. It will be of no use to add black; that will not give the modelling. It follows that one can model with very slight materials.