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

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
_ .

them, knowingly and foreseeingly all the way ; and if you
get the thing once wrong, there is no hope fcr you but in
washing or scraping boldly down to the white ground, and
beginning again.
Mr. Buskin concludes his letters by an ex-
position of the various points which are to be
attended to in composition. As he truly says,
composition, in its highest sense, is a gift, and
it is as impossible to teach it in drawing, as in
music to teach a man how to compose an
opera like Mozart or an oratorio like Handel.
But there are certain laws which should not
be violated ; and these are—the laws of princi-
pality, of repetition, of continuity, of curva-
ture, of radiation, of contrast, of interchange,
of consistency. and of harmony. For the full
exposition of these the reader must be referred
to the book itself ; and it would be equally
impossible within our present limits to inquire
whether they are capable of being reduced to
a smeller number, or, if not, whether they all
stand on the same level of importance. We
have but one remark to make in conclusion—
viz., that it is impossible unreservedly to
recommend any course of instruction till you
hare seen what it produces. We have carefully
studied Mr. Ruskin's drawings in the third
and fourth volumes of " Modern Painters,"
but we have never been so fortunate as to see
any of his coloured sketches, and before doing
so we could hardly presume to recommend his
present volume without entering a caveat
against the possible result of what seems to tie
a most excellent system. We have little
doubt, ho,vever, that his practice is of com•
mensurate merit with the precepts we have
just discussed. And, at any rate, the nook is
pleasant reading, oven for those who may not
wish to use it as an artistic manual.

Thet Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis, a
Beaklava Nurse. Edited by Jane Williams.
Two Vols. London: Hurst and Blackett.
WE are informed by the editress of this narra-
tive that the heroine of it, "in the decline
" of life, and with broken health, is left unpro-
" vided for." We know of nothing more likely
to check the flow of public benevolence towards
her than the publication of these volumes. A
more injudicious proceeding, or ono charac-
terised by worse taste, it is difficult to con-
ceive and we are strongly inclined to suspect
that the poor woman herself has been made a
tool of by interested persons, who have led
her on to talk thoughtlessly and carelessly of
her own experience, and, under cover of an
appeal to the public in her behalf, have dis-
suminated the promptings of private malice
and jealousy.
We should observe, too, that the work in its
present form is as great an imposture on the
public as its contents are slanderous and spite-
ful Of two good-sized octavo volumes, con-
taining together 606 pages, only 110 (!) are
the autobiography of a Crimean nurse. The
first volume and a half is occupied with Mrs.
Elizabeth Davis's early life, which is of no
earthly interest whatever, and would have
been equally useless but for ithe evidence it
affords of her total unfitness to form a trust-
worthy judgment upon persons placed in
authority over her.
Mrs. Davis seems to have been "spoiled"
from the first moment of her going out to
service. She happened to meet with masters
and mistresses who smiled at her eccentrici-
ties, and encouraged her in an insubordinate
and flighty disposition which it would have
been kinder and wiser to correct. She was at
Paris with a baronet's family in 1814, and she
and a lady's maid disported themselves as
follows :
Flyn Madrid, Sir George - took us back to Paris.
The dal/ afterwards, May :I, 1814, I was on the bridge of
St. Denis anti saw Louis XVI 11. come into the city.
One night the king gave a grand entertainment at St. Cloud,
to celebrute his restoration. Six George and Lady
were invited and went to it.
After their carriage was gone, the lady's maid expressed
to me her eager desire to go too, adding that nothing should
prevent it, if she had but a proper man to accompany her.
"If that is all," said I, " you shall soon have oue, fur I
will myself be your beau, and we will both go."
We held ourselves much too high on all occasions to
associate with the men-servants. The valet had gone out
I knew where our master's things were kept, went to his
dressing.room, took out his Spanish uniform, put it on,
and also his moustache and whiskers, took his hat, and
sword, and cane, and set off with Owen to St. Cloud. We
gained admission withogt difficulty, and I made my way