The Press. — London, England, 1857-07-18 00:00:00

70L yittrature. The Elements of Drawing. In Three Letters to Beginners. By John Ruskin, M.A. Lon don : Smith and Elder. Tux advice which, in an appendix to the present volume, Mr. Ruskin offers his youth ful readers, to "avoid generally magazine and " review literature," need not prevent us from giving his treatise the hearty commendation we think it deserves, as the most useful and practical book on the subject which has ever come under our notice. There exist already several manuals of drawing, written by clever men and good artists; but Mr. Ruskin is a man of genius, and genius shows itself not less in its workmanlike attention to details than in its enunciation of great principles. In proportion to its high estimation of the end at which it aims will be its keen appreciation of the means to that end, and its dissatisfaction at anything like incompleteness or super. liciality of execution. No one who has examined the drawings which are produced by a course of study under any popular in structor, or by a diligent following out of the rules and examples in any popular handbook of the art, can have failed to perceive that the great danger to which they are liable is that of mannerism. Indeed, the case can hardly be otherwise, considering the nature and arrange ment of the precepts which such books usually contain. The directions they give for the composition of a particular sort of landscape do not enable their reader to compose land scapes in general; and the prescription for producing a particular " effect " of sunset or chiaroscuro carries him only as far as itself, and but very slightly increases his ability to cope with the infinite variety of nature. The consequence is that the sketcher becomes wedded to a favourite species of touch, or selects whenever it is possible the same kind of landscape, and shirks the difficulties which an impartial choice would necessarily entail upon him. Tho limited description of prac tice by which he has been prepared is as likely as not to break down with him when he applies it to the perpetuation of the view which has most vividly caught his fancy. Now these books differ from Mr. Ruskin's as a book of receipts for making fireworks would differ from a treatise on the chemistry of com bustible substances; or, to take a more lite rary illustration, as the method of teaching languages known as the " 011eudorff" system, and which was adopted by the late Mr. Kerchever Arnold, differs from that which has been from time immemorial in use at public schools. In the one case the pupil has just so much of the grammar given him as will enable him to put together the simplest logical sentence, and proceeds to more complex ones after the same fashion. In the other he commits to memory the whole accidence and syntax, and applies to that store for the particular form of speech or expression which may be suited to the matter before him. Which of these methods is preferable for tile acquisition of at language this is not the place to determine; we can but record our opinion that the latter is superior as far as drawing is concerned. Mr. Ruskin's book is, in fact, the grammar of drawing ; and any student who masters its exercises thoroughly will be seldom at a loss for some way of expressing the facts of nature which he may see before him, although he may not have the knack of pretty execution which practice under one of the popular teachers of the day would perhaps have enabled him to acquire. The only draw back, if it can be called one, to " The Elements of Drawing" is that its author so uncompro misingly sets before his pupil the difficulties which he has to surmount, and ties him down to so laborious a course of preparatory exer cises, that a great deal of moral determination will be requisite for those who intend CGII. s lientiously to follow out its precepts. For those, however, who seek to acquire the art merely as a medium of display, and not from any real love of the aspects of nature, Mr. Ruskin, as may be expected, does not write. 14e writes for the earnest and zealous student, who has looked on naturo with the THE PRESS, JULY 18, 1857. - eye of a lover, but who finds that without material aid he cannot paint to memory's eye The scene, the glance, he dearest loves, — Unchanged themselves, in him they die, Or faint and false their shadows prove ; and he would doubtless rejoice rather than lament if the irksome nature of his prelimi nary instructions should deter those who bring neither true feeling nor perseverance to the work they undertake. Of the three Letters, No. I. is devoted to " First Practice," No. 11. to " Sketching from Nature," and No. 111. to "Colour and Compo sition." In insisting upon tLe necessity of acquiring the power to produce a flat even tint, whether by pencil or brush, Mr. Ruskin takes occasion to enunciate a truth which will not be new to the philosophical student, but which we have never before seen so clearly and elegantly expressed. It is so important, that, instead of being banished to a note, it ought almost to have been printed in capital letters in the text (the italics are ours) : The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of ex• perience. We see nothing but flat colours ; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey 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 EVE ; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these fiat stains of colour, merely as such, without con• sciousness 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 colour of primroses) ; arid if there were primroses near, we should think that the sun• lighted grass was another mass of plants of the same sulphur•yellow colour. We should try to gather some of them, and then find that the colour went away from the grass when we stood before 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 colour in the one,—not in tha other. IVe go through such procer.ses of experiment unconsciously in childhood : and having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain colours, we always suppose that we see what we only know, and have hardly any consciousness of the rind 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 colours of nature exactly as they are, and therefore perceis es at once in the sunlighted grass the precise relation between the two colours that form its shade and light. To him it does not seem shade and light, but bluish green barred with gold. &rive, 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 spltted ; 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 colour, 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 colours are brighter and paler than it is possible to put on canvas : we must put darker ones to represent them. Thus, a very young artist will sometimes try to draw two eyes in the profile of a face ; and a Chinese artist is said to attempt to represent all the sides of an interior at once. In the remainder of the first letter, Mr. Ruskin en forces the value of skill in rendering the appearance of convexity, and the accuracy and power which are gained by a faithful and minute study of the intricacy of foliage ; in the latter case recommending wood-engravings of Rembrandt and Albert Durer as useful media of transition to the excessive complexity of nature. In the second letter he insists on a point which is hardly ever attended to—the carelul study of the governing lines of objects, whether of clouds according to the direction of the wind, of tiles on a roof in consequence of the bending of the timbers, of trees according to the law of their growth, or Of hills according to the lie of their geologi‘ml strata:— Now remember, nothing distinguishes great men from inferior men more than their always, whether in life or in nrt, knowing the way !hinge are going. Your dunce thinks they are standing still, and draws them all fixed ; your wise man sees the chinge or changing in them, an 1 draws ti n I.i—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. We recollect once suggesting the latter point (that of geology), as an important one in giving the expression of a country, to a London drawing-master of great ex perience and reputation. He acknowledged the importance of the idea, but confessed that it had never struck him before, and that he had of course never embodied it in his teaching. Yet it would seem as absurd to delineate a country without some idea of its geology, as to attempt drawing from the life without some idea of anatomy. No one, however, who has studied " Modern Painters" could possibly fall into the error against which these sentences warn us. After giving directions for close shyly of a photograph, or of one of Turner's drawings in the Liber Studiorum, as a step towards actual study of nature, Mr. Ruskin furnishes some useful cautions as to what the sketcher should avoid :—l. Scenes only valuable from asso ciation, especially with a view to making pre sents of them. 2. Polished things. 3. Neat things. 4. Subjects where ono thing is seen through another. 5. Countries divided by hedges. On the representation of water the following observations are valuable, and not often attended to:— Whether you are to see, at the same spot, most of the bottom of the water, or of the reflection of the objects above, depends on the position of the eye. The more you look down into the water, the better you see objects through it ; the more you look along it, the eye being low, the more you see the reflection of objects above it. Hence the colour of a given space of surfece in a stream will entirely change while you stand still in the same spot, merely u you stoop or raise your head ; and thus the colours with which water is painted are an indication of the position of the spectator, and connected inseparably with the perspective of the shores. In his third letter, on " Colour and Compo sition," Mr. Ruskin recommends the use of " hard cake colours, not moist colours." This is all very well if you are working in-doors. Ceke colours, properly ground down, are un doubtedly the purest. But how, if you are sketching out of doors ? While you are grind ing a cake of colour, the effect of colour is passing away; indeed, it is often so fleeting that even moist colours are too slow, and re course must be had to chalk. We arc glad to see that Mr. Ruskin does not give any catalogue of mixtures of colour for depicting the various hues of natural objects. This is as pernicious a practice as cramming the student of Greek or Latin composition with phrases, or teaching him to make his verses out of scraps in a grades. The much more sensible method prescribed in the pre sent volume is to take twenty-four colours, and expel imentalise on all their combinations till you are completely master of them. Then, when you see a cloud, or a distant hill of a pecu liar tint, you know from your previous trials what arc its factors, instead of heing limited by the necessarily inadequate list which your manual or your teacher has given you. Students are often taught to make a liberal use of the sponge in order to obtain that aerial granulation which is so attractive in water colour drawings, and to avoid the use of body colour as " M r Ruskin's opinion is exactly the reverse of this ; but it does not seem to have occurred to him that when a colour has been well sponged, that part of it which is tenacious enough to remain in the interstices of the paper may be reasonably ex pected to show some durability, and, so to speak, to have got all its fading over at once ; whereas, body-colour may be hopelessly ruined by the least amount of damp or friction. On the question of illegitimacy, the following remarks are profoundly true, and apply to other subjects than those of art : All kinds of colour are equally illegitimate, if yon think they will allow yon to alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is no vehicle or method of colour which admits of alteration or repentance ; you must be right at once, or never ; and yon 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 colour in oil, water, or !Hirano: , else, lies pi imarily in that sentence spoken to me by Alulready, " Know what you have to do." The prccess may be a long one, per. haps : y3ll may have to ground with one colour ; 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 reinforce in points with a sixth ; but whether you have one, or ten, or twenty processes to go through, you must go straight through _ .