A CHILD’S GUIDE TO
PICTURES

Copyright, 1906, by Detroit Publishing Company.

View on the Seine. Homer D. Martin.

(Also called “The Harp of the Winds.”)

A CHILD’S GUIDE TO
PICTURES

BY
CHARLES H. CAFFIN
AUTHOR OF “HOW TO STUDY PICTURES”
New York
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
1908

Copyright, 1908, by
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
——
Published, July, 1908
THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

A CHILD’S GUIDE
TO PICTURES

CHAPTER I
THE FEELING FOR BEAUTY

SOME of you, I expect, collect photographs of pictures in connection with your history studies. These portraits of the principal characters and pictures, illustrating great events, places, costumes, and modes of living of the period, add greatly to the interest of your reading. They bring the past time vividly before your eyes.

But it is not this view of pictures that we are going to talk about in the present book. I shall have very little to say about the subjects of pictures—partly because you can find out for yourselves what subjects interest you; but mostly, because the subject of a picture has so very little to do with its beauty as a work of art. For it is this view of a picture, as being a work of art, that I shall try to keep before you.

I remember seeing the photograph of a picture hanging in a place of honor on the wall of a girl’s room; and I asked her why she had chosen this particular one out of many that she had. You see that, in order to help anyone, you have to try to get into their minds, and find out how their minds are working; and as much of my work is with girls and boys, I try to get from them hints as to the best way of helping them. Well, this girl, let me tell you, bubbled over with life and fun, swam like a fish and climbed trees like a squirrel; but she had her thoughtful moods, when, as often as not, she would lay out her collection of photographs of pictures on the floor, and not only look at them, but think about them. And I have no doubt that she was in one of those moods, when she chose out this particular print and hung it on her wall, in order that she might see it often.

So I asked her why she had chosen it, and she said: “Because I liked it.” I asked her why? “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Now that is just the sort of girl or boy for whom I am writing this book. Not that I think that girl would have liked her picture any better for knowing why she liked it. Then, “What is the good,” you ask, “of writing a book to help her to know?” A very shrewd question and quite to the point. Let me try to answer it.

When the girl said she did not know why she liked the picture, I think she meant that she could not put into words what she felt. It was the feeling with which the picture filled her that made her like it. I could understand what she meant, because I remembered an experience of my own. The first time that I saw Raphael’s Disputá, which decorates a wall in one of the rooms of the Vatican in Rome, I had set out with my guidebook, intending to study all the paintings by Raphael that decorate these rooms. I entered the first room and, I suppose, looked round the walls and saw three other paintings; but all I recall during this visit was the Disputá. I sat down before it and remained seated! I do not know how long, but the morning slipped away. What I thought about as I looked at the picture I cannot tell you. My impression is that I did not think at all; I only felt. My spirit was lifted up and purified and strengthened with happiness. Returning to my hotel, I read about the picture in the guidebook. It appeared that one of the figures represented Dante. I had not noticed it, and as I read on I found out other things that I had missed; that, indeed, the whole subject, so far as it could be put into words, had escaped me. I had no knowledge of what the painting was about; only I had felt its beauty.

Since then I have studied the picture and discovered some of the means that Raphael employed to arouse this depth of feeling, and the knowledge has helped me to find beauty in other things.

So, to go back to my girl friend, I would not disturb the beauty of her feeling with teachy-teachy talk, any more than I would talk while beautiful music was being played. But, suppose in a simple way I could make her understand that I, too, felt the beauty of the picture; and, as I have learned a little how to express feeling in words, should try to tell her how I felt the beauty. Might it not add to her pleasure, if she discovered that I was putting into words some of the feeling that she herself had, and perhaps suggesting other beauties that she had not felt?

Well, that is what I hope to do for you in this book, to put some ideas into your head, that will lead you to look for and find more and more beauty in pictures and in nature and in life. Ideas, mark you, not words. We shall have to use words, but words are of no account, unless they make you feel the idea contained in them.

I say feel; and you will notice I have used these words, feel and feeling, several times already. I have done so because I want to impress upon you that the enjoyment of beauty, whether in pictures or any other form, comes to us through feeling. It may lead to thinking, and perhaps should, but it does not begin with thinking or reasoning, as does, for example, algebra or geometry. Nor can we, as we say, “get it down fine,” in the way we do with the Latin declensions. When you have learned them thoroughly, you know them once and for all, and you know about them just what every other girl and boy who has learned them knows. With feeling it is otherwise. What you feel is different to what I feel; we can never feel alike. No two people can. So I am not going to tell you what you ought to feel about pictures; nor am I going to try and persuade you to like one and not like another. Therefore, this book would not be much help to you in passing an examination about pictures, if anything so foolish could be supposed. But I hope it may start your imagination off in a great many new directions, and help you to discover more and more of beauty not only in pictures, but in life.

For we should study pictures not solely for their own sake, but also as a means of making our lives fuller and better. If you ask me what is the most beautiful thing in the world, I shall not say art, although I am writing about pictures—but life—its fullness of possibility and abundance of opportunity. Especially young life; the lives of you girls and boys, who, as yet, have so few mistakes to regret, so much to look forward to of promise and fulfillment. What you will make of those lives of yours may depend a little upon schools and teachers, parents and friends, money and health, and many other things, but most of all upon your own wills. I wonder if you have read the life of Robert Louis Stevenson?

He had only such education as many other boys of his time had, little or no money, and very poor health. But what a deal he made of his own life and how he helped the lives of others! What a fellow he was for fun, and how he loved wisdom; a great worker and a greatly conscientious one; not satisfied unless his work was the very best that he could make it. And the reason was that he loved beauty as well as wisdom; and in his life and writings, because in his own inward thoughts wisdom and beauty went hand in hand. I know of no better example of the full life; of a life made the most of, in the best and truest sense, with gladness and strength for itself and for the lives of others. While his body sleeps on an island mountain, overlooking the vast beauty of sky and ocean, his spirit stays with us.

The secret of the fullness of Stevenson’s life was that, so far as in him lay, he left no portion of the garden of his life uncultivated. There were no waste places, every part was fruitful. He did the best that he could for his poor, weak body; kept his intellect bright with learning, his fun alert with hope, his friendships warm with sympathy; and kept his life and work sweetened and purified and strengthened by the love of beauty. He was in a high sense in love with life—his own life, the lives of others, and life in art and nature, and the abundant harvest of his garden is the love that countless men and women and children bore him and still maintain.

Such fullness of life is rare. Boys and girls, and for that matter men and women, cultivate some part of themselves, and let the rest go to waste. And the part which is most apt to be overlooked is the sense of beauty. We train our bodies and our minds, but neglect those five senses, which are just as much a part of us. It is true that men train their senses for the practical purposes of business: the watchmaker, for instance, his delicacy of touch; the tea producer, his senses of taste and smell; the mariner, his senses of sight and sound. But business, though necessary, is not everything. We do not confine the exercise of our bodies and minds to work and business, but use them also for enjoyment, and train them for this purpose. Do we not learn to swim, play ball and tennis, and practice other bodily exercises for the pure enjoyment of them? Or in our leisure moments busy our brains with study of bees, machinery, history, all kinds of difficult subjects not as work, but as a relief from work? We call them our “hobbies,” and indulge them for pleasure, and find that the pleasure improves our health and spirits, and in the end even makes us do our necessary work better, and so find more pleasure in that also. For it is in what we know best and can do best that we really take most pleasure. And though life cannot be all pleasure, yet pleasure, rightly understood, should be one of the chief aims of life. And one of the chief sources of pleasure is to be found in the beauty that reaches our minds through the senses, especially through the senses of sight and sound.

Let me illustrate in a simple way how one child will gain pleasure from her senses while another doesn’t. Both have their five senses in working order—smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound—and have been in the woods gathering flowers. They reach home. One throws her handful down on a sofa, table, or chair, or the nearest bit of furniture, and goes off to do something, or it may be nothing, leaving the flowers to wither and become an untidiness. What made her gather them? Perhaps, because she is full of health and had to run about and do something; perhaps, because she has not quite gotten over the fondness that most of us had, as babies, for breaking and tearing things. It amused her to break the big stems and tear off the vines or pull up the little plants. Or possibly she was really attracted by the beauty of the flowers, but soon tired of them, and went off to other things.

Not so, however, with her companion. She spreads a paper on the table, lays out her flowers, brings one or two vases, and settles down to the pleasure of arranging them. She picks up a flower, and while she waits to decide in which vase it shall be put, see how delicately she handles it! You can tell in a moment she has a feeling of love and tenderness toward the flower. She puts it in a vase, and then her eye travels over the other flowers to decide which shall bear it company. What color, what form of flower will match best the first one? And while she is making the choice almost unconsciously she sniffs the fragrance of that spray of honeysuckle. Well, she lingers so long over the pleasure of arranging her flowers that we have not time to stay and watch the whole proceeding; but presently, when we come back, we find the vases filled and set about the room where they will look their best; this one in the dark corner with the wall behind it; another on the window sill, so that the light may shine through the petals of the flowers. And we think to ourselves what taste the girl has! For (have you ever thought of it?) we use the word taste, which originally described only the sense of tasting things with the tongue, in order to sum up a finer use of the senses of sight and sound.

And this finer use of the senses, such as Stevenson cultivated, so that his life and works are beautiful as well as wise and good, we too may cultivate, and it is the object of this book to help us do it. I call it a guide to pictures, but I want to make it much more than that—a guide for the wonderful organs, your senses, that they may grow more and more to feel the beauty that is all about us in nature and in life, as well as in pictures and other works of art. So beauty is really our subject, beauty in nature and in art. The two are separate, though united as twin sisters.

As I write, many of you are enjoying your summer vacations, face to face with nature. The health of the mountains or the sea is in your blood; your bodies know the joy of active movement; your minds are filled with the interest of new scenes and adventures, of sports and fun with friends. But every once in a while I think it likely that your happiness is increased by something beautiful you have seen in nature. Perhaps even now, as you read these words, there comes to you the memory of some sunset, or moonlight on the water, of early morning mist creeping among the tree tops, or I know not what of nature’s beauty, suddenly revealed to you because you were in the mood to receive it.

You were in the company of a friend, and you drew your arm closer through his or hers, and both were the happier for the beauty that was before you and had entered into your hearts. Or perhaps you were alone, and the eagerness came over you to make some record of your joy—in a letter to a friend or in some poem for no eyes but your own. You felt the need to give utterance to your joy in nature’s beauty. You had in you a little of the desire that stirs the artist.

And this brings us to the other kind of beauty, which is not of nature, though it is of nature’s prompting—the beauty created by the artist. We are going to study the work of artists who create beauty in pictures. But do not make the mistake some people do, of thinking that it is only painters who are artists. An artist is one who fits some beautiful conception with some beautiful form of expression. His form of expression, or as we say, his art, may be sculpture, painting, or architecture; or some handicraft, as of metal or porcelain or embroidery; or it may be music, the composing of music or the rendering of it by instrument or voice; it may be acting or some forms of dancing; it may be poetry or even prose. The artist, in a word, is one who not only takes beauty into his own soul, but has the gift of art that enables him to communicate the beauty to others by giving it a form or body. If he be a musician, he gives it a form of sound; if a painter, a form visible to the eye. It is his power of creating a form for the beauty which he feels that makes him an artist. And in its various forms—poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the rest—art is man’s highest expression of his reverence for and joy in beauty.

CHAPTER II
ART AND HER TWIN SISTER, NATURE
A Work of Art is Distinguished by Selection

IN the previous chapter we talked about beauty, and noted that there were two kinds—beauty in nature and beauty in art. Let us now look a little more closely into this distinction, so that we may grasp the idea of what a work of art is.

Since what the painter puts onto his canvas is visible to the eye, it will generally represent or suggest some form in nature. So the painter is a student of nature. But not in the same way as the botanist who studies the forms of trees and plants which grow above the ground, or the geologist who explores the secrets of the earth below the ground. These we call scientists or scientific students, because the object of their study is exact knowledge of nature. They address themselves directly to our intellects and teach us to know the facts of nature accurately; but the painter appeals first to our sense of sight and helps us to feel more deeply the beauty of the visible world.

Unless we thoroughly grasp this difference we shall never properly understand what painters try to do, nor be able properly to enjoy their pictures. So here, at the beginning of our talks together, let us look into this difference.

We have said that the painter represents or suggests some form in nature. Sometimes he represents the actual appearance of nature, as when he paints a portrait or a landscape. At other times he suggests the possible appearance of things, which he has never seen but only imagines, as the old Italian painters did when they made pictures of St. George, killing the dragon, or of Christ in the manger, with a choir of angels hovering above. They had never seen a dragon, but from their study of the lizard, which in hot countries like Italy may constantly be seen basking on the hot rocks or darting away at your approach, they imagined a form and painted it so that it suggests an actual creature. So, for their angels, they studied the forms and movement of children, as they ran and played, with hair and skirts streaming in the wind; also the wings and the flight of birds, and the appearance of the sky. Nature was, as it still remains, the artist’s teacher. Just in what way he learns of her and uses her lessons, I am going to try and show you. But first let me remind you that nature and art, though so close together that I have called them twin sisters, are quite separate. I do so because many people confuse them together. Frequently you will hear a person say of some view of nature that it is “beautiful as a picture.” Well, very likely it is, but as we shall see, not in the same way. Or some one will exclaim, as he stands in front of a picture, “It looks like nature.” So it does; and yet it is not really like nature. Why both these remarks are in a small way true, but in the big sense not true, we shall discover, I hope, presently. Meanwhile, suppose we lay the book aside and look out of the window.

Are you living in the country or city? In either case you are looking out at nature, as the painter understands the word. For, while we who are not painters, when we talk of nature, have in mind the earth and sky and water, and the living things that move therein, as beasts, birds, and fishes, and the forms that live but do not move, trees and flowers and seaweed, for example, and also the chief of living and moving creatures—man; the painter uses the word nature in a wider sense. With him it means everything outside himself, so that it includes things made by man: streets, buildings, chairs, and tables—the thousand and one objects that man’s brain and handiwork have fashioned out of the materials of nature.

But you are waiting at the window, looking out, perhaps, upon a street—a row of buildings, many people on the sidewalks, carriages and carts, passing before your eyes; or else into the garden of your country home, with its trees and shrubs and flowers, and possibly a view of fields and hills and woods. In each case the woodwork of the window frames in the view. Move slowly backward and you will notice that the view grows smaller and smaller; advance again and the view spreads out farther and farther; step to the left and some of the view on that side disappears, but you will see more toward the other side. Imagine for a moment that the woodwork of the window is a picture frame and you are deciding how much of the outside view you will include in the picture. If you own a kodak and are in the habit of taking pictures, you move the camera or your position until the image in the “finder” seems to be about what you wish to photograph. Whether you thus use the “finder” or the window frame, you are selecting a bit of nature for a picture.

This should make clear to you one of the differences between nature and art. Nature extends in every direction all round the artist, an unending panorama from which he selects some little portion to form the subject of his work of art. But he carries his selection still farther, for even in the part of nature that he has selected there is so much more than he could ever put into his picture. Take another look out of the window. What a mass of details the whole presents! And, if we fix our eye on any one of its parts, it also is made up of a number of details. It would be impossible for the artist to paint them all. And so, also, if your view from the window is a country scene and you look at one object, that elm, for example. Do you think it would be possible for an artist to paint all the scales of the bark, all the spreading limbs, much less all the little branches and twigs and the countless leaves?

As the artist cannot possibly paint everything, he must choose or select what he will leave out and what he will put in. Once more, the characteristic of art is selection, while that of nature is abundance. We talk of nature’s prodigality; we say that she is prodigal of her resources, flinging them around as a prodigal or wasteful man flings around his money. You know, for example, how the dandelion scatters its seeds broadcast over the lawn; how the daisies spread over the fields until the farmer calls them the “white weed”; how the woods become choked with undergrowth and the trees overhead crowd one another with their tangle of branches. The lawns and fields must be continually weeded; the woods cleared and thinned. Man, in fact, when he brings nature under the work of his hand, is continually selecting what he shall weed out and what he shall let remain. And so the artist with the work of his hand—his work of art.

Suppose we make believe that we are watching an artist as he begins his work of selection. The one over there, sitting under a big, white umbrella with his easel in front of him, will serve our turn. If he will let us look over his shoulder, we shall see that with a few strokes of charcoal upon his canvas he has already selected how much of the wide view in front of him he will include in his picture. It finishes, you see, on the right with a bit of that row of trees that stand against the sky, and on the left with that small bush, so that in between is a little bit of the winding road, with a meadow beyond dotted with cows. He has squeezed some of the paint from the tubes on to his palette, and takes up his brushes. Now watch him “lay in,” as he would say, “the local colors”; that is to say, the general color of each locality or part of the scene.

The general color of the sky is a faint blue; of the trees on the right, a grayish green; of the bush on the left, a deeper green; of the meadow, a yellowish green, while that of the road is a pinkish brown, for the soil of this part of the country, we will suppose, is red clay. All these local colors he lays in, covering each part with a flat layer of paint so that his canvas now presents a pattern of colored spaces. Yet already it begins to “look like something.” We can see, as it were, the ground plan, on which the artist is going to build up his picture. But now he must stop, for his paints are mixed with oils and take some time to dry, and he cannot work over the paint while it is sticky.

A few days later we pay him another visit. He has been busy in our absence; the picture looks to us to be finished, and we begin to compare it with the natural scene in front of us. In nature those trees on the right stand so sharply against the sky that we can count their branches. Evidently the artist hasn’t, for in his picture he has left out a great many of them; indeed, he has put in only a few of the more prominent ones. See, too, how he has painted the trees; he hasn’t put in a single leaf. Instead he has represented the foliage in masses, lighter in some parts where the sun strikes, darker in the shadows. When we compare his trees with the real ones, they are not a bit the same, and yet the painted ones look all right; we can see at once that they are maples and in a general way very like the real ones.

The artist hears us talking, and he says: “My business, you see, is not to make real trees; that’s nature’s business; I’m a maker of pictures, and in them I only suggest that the trees are real. I try to make you feel that these are maple trees”—and he points to that part of the picture with his brush—“and I hope also to make you feel their beauty. I don’t give you an imitation of nature, but a suggestion of nature’s truth.

“Now see,” he says, “how I have painted those cows: just a few dabs of brownish red and black and white, showing against the green of the grass. Do they suggest cows to you?” “Yes,” we say in chorus.

“Well, I hope they do,” he replies, “and that you don’t say ‘yes’ merely to please me. But if you had never seen a cow would you know from these dabs what a cow is really like?

“I am sure you wouldn’t,” he goes on without waiting for an answer; “and if the farmer gave me a commission to paint his favorite prize cow, I am sure he wouldn’t be satisfied with these dabs. And I should not blame him. No, in that case I should place the cow where I could study it closely: the long, straight line of the back, the big angle of the hips, the strong-ribbed carcass, and its covering of glossy hair, the mild liquid eyes, and damp nose. These and a great deal more I should paint, if I were near the cow. But look at those cows over yonder. They are a long way off, and consequently look very small. I can’t see in them the different points that I know a cow has; to my eyes from where I sit they look as I have painted them. For an artist does not paint what he knows to be there, but what he can see from here.

“Look,” he continues, picking up a tiny pointed brush. “See what happens, when I paint what I know to be there!” And with quick, deft strokes he proceeds to sharpen the lines of the back of one of his cows in the picture, and give her four very decided legs; to hang a tail; and give her horns; and titivate the head, put in an eye and make the tongue curl round the muzzle.

“Why, it looks like a toy cow!” we exclaim. And so it does.

And now, instead of intruding any longer on our artist friend’s time, let us see where our visit to him has brought us.

We have noted that one difference between nature and art is, that nature is inexhaustible in her effects, and that an artist selects from her only some little part to make his work of art. Secondly, that he does not paint the whole of what he has selected, but out of it again selects certain parts; sufficient not to imitate the original, but to suggest its appearance. Thirdly, that natural truth is not the same as artistic truth; that while the scientific man studies one thing at a time so that he may know what is there, the artist tries to obtain an impression of the whole scene, and paints each part of it, not as he knows it to be, but as he can see it from his fixed position.

By this time you can better understand that to say of nature “It is as beautiful as a picture,” is a loose way of talking. Nature is beautiful in the endless variety of its effects; a picture, for the one or two effects, choicely selected by the artist. And to say of a picture that it looks like nature is equally inaccurate, for the artist does not imitate nature but suggests it, which, as we have seen, is a very different thing.

However, I should tell you, that some painters do imitate nature. I have seen a picture in which the painter had represented a five-dollar bill, pinned on a board, and so accurately had he imitated the bill and the board that, until you were close to them and passed your hand over the flat canvas, you would not know it was a picture. And there is a story told of a Greek painter, Zeuxis, that he once imitated a bunch of grapes so exactly, that the birds flew down and pecked at it.

But, although it is a fact that a great many people think this exact imitation of nature a very fine thing, they do so because they have not seen many pictures or found out what a work of art really is. I am inclined to think that, by the time you have finished this book, if not sooner, you will look upon such examples of skill and patience as labor in vain, so far as art is concerned.

It is all very well for the conjurer to boast that the quickness of his hand deceives your eye. But the aim of the artist is not deception.

CHAPTER III
NATURE IS HAPHAZARD: ART IS ARRANGEMENT

WE have seen that the characteristic of nature is abundance, while that of art is selection. Now let us note another difference between the two—nature is haphazard, art is arrangement.

I do not forget that nature works by laws; that the workings of nature are not accidental, but the result of certain causes which produce certain effects; so that the operations of nature produce an endless chain of cause and effect. Thus in the fall, because the sap flows downward in the tree, the fiber of the leaf’s stalk is gradually weakened, until the leaf by degrees loses its hold on the branch, and, because everything obeys the law of gravitation, falls to the ground. But where will it fall? That may depend upon the force and direction of the wind. It may happen that the wind is from the north or from the west; that its breath is soft, or that it blows a gale. I say it “may happen” so or so; for this is our habit of speech. When we don’t understand the cause from which an effect springs, we use the word “happen,” as if the affair were an accident or chance.

But a scientific man would say that such words as “accident” and “chance” are inaccurate, and would tell us why the wind was blowing from a certain direction at a certain moment, and tell us why it was soft or fierce. And yet, why should the tiny leaf have been ready to let go just at the moment when the breeze came? Upon what particular spot will the dandelion seed, after floating far in the air, alight? We may believe that the moment and the place are controlled by one Great Mind to whom everything is plain. But to our finite minds, whose capacity to understand is limited, such things are not plain. They seem to us like chance, and their results appear to our eyes haphazard.

Compare, for example, the appearance of nature with that of a well-kept garden. The latter has straight paths, intersecting one another; trim borders with rows of lettuces and radishes; separate plots, reserved for peas, corn, spinach, potatoes, and other crops. Even the straggling vines of the cucumbers are kept within certain bounds. Everywhere is an appearance of order and arrangement, beside which the tangle of growth in the woods, or even the dotting of trees on the hillside, seems haphazard. Or look out into the street, which, as you remember, in the painter’s sense of the word is a part of nature. The city authorities have laid out the lines of the street, but the buildings vary in size and style; each one according to what happened to be the need and the taste of the man who built it. And the appearance of the sidewalk and roadway will vary from day to day and hour to hour, according to what may be the number and the character of the people and of the vehicles, as they happen to move or stand still. Compared with that garden, the appearance of the street is haphazard.

Compare two parlors. One is a medley of furniture and bric-a-brac, of all sorts of sizes and shapes and colors, picked up at auction sales, or in the shops, each because it happened to be a bargain or to strike a moment’s whim, and then set in the parlor where there happened to be room for it. The other parlor, on the contrary, shows signs of order and arrangement. There are fewer objects in it, and they have been carefully chosen and arranged for the double purpose of making the room comfortable and agreeable to the eye. It is an illustration of good taste in selection and arrangement.

The haphazard of nature we enjoy. But the confusion of the parlor distresses us, if we have any sense of selection and arrangement. This sense the artist possesses in a marked degree, and on it he bases the making of his picture.

We have already noticed how he selects, but may have to mention it again in describing how he arranges, since the two acts are mixed up together, as when you select some flowers and then arrange them in a vase.

When we first made the acquaintance of the artist in the previous chapter, he had already, you will remember, “roughed in” with his charcoal the objects he was going to paint. We were so interested in what he had selected, that we paid little attention to the arrangement of the objects. It is this that we are now going to study.

His canvas is on the easel, its bare white surface inclosed within the four sides. He is going to fill this space, not only for the purpose of suggesting to us the appearance of the scene he has selected, but in such a way that the actual arrangement of the objects—the pattern which they make upon the canvas—shall give us pleasure. This he calls his composition. The word, as you know, if you have studied Latin, means simply “putting”, or “placing together.” But, as the artist uses it, it always means that the placing together shall produce an effect that is pleasing to the eye. It is only when it does, that the result can properly be called a work of art. For you will recall what we said in the first chapter, that the artist is one who fits his conception with a beautiful form. And this form is his composition.

Now, before we go any farther with the artist’s method of composition, let me invite you to do a little composing on your own account. That wall in your special room or den where you hang your favorite photographs—how is it arranged? Are the photographs pinned up higgledy-piggledy, so as to crowd as many as possible on the wall? Is your only idea just to hang them up where you can see them? Or have you placed them together in such a way that their actual arrangement, as they spot the open space of your wall, is agreeable to your eye? For, in a way, your wall, before you hung the photographs, was like the bare canvas of the artist. The four edges inclosed it; the space is yours to do with it what you wish.

Suppose, now, that you are starting with the wall bare. Your family has moved into a new house, or the old one is being repaired. There is your plaster wall, as white as the artist’s canvas. You are allowed to decide what shall be done with it. What will you do with it?

Oh! you are going to choose a paper. Well, what shall it be? Yes, pretty, of course. But pretty by itself, or when your pictures are hung? For, if you choose a paper with a large pattern of many bright colors, it may interfere with the effect of the pictures. You don’t wish to do this? Then it will be well to choose a paper that is not too prominent; one that has a small pattern, or none at all, only a single tint. Some people prefer a neutral tint; one, that is to say, which is neither one thing nor the other; not very green, or blue, or red, or yellow, but rather so; some color that is difficult to define. For, because this paper does not attract particular attention, it allows the photographs, hung upon it, to show up more prominently.

However, the papering is your affair, and you have made your selection. At last the workmen, their ladders, their paste pots, and shavings are cleared out of the room and you can begin to arrange it. You have placed the furniture where it best fits in, looks best, and seems most comfortable, and now you turn your attention to each of the four walls. Once more, is the placing of the photographs to be higgledy-piggledy, “any-old-how,” just to show them, or are you going to arrange them carefully, so as to make each wall a pleasing composition?

We will suppose you decide upon the latter plan. How will you proceed? I can imagine you choosing one of two ways.

Either you will select your biggest picture, or the one you prize most, and place it in the middle of the wall, and then place the others on each side of it, so as to balance one another. Or, you will feel that such an arrangement would be too stiff and formal, too obviously balanced, and will sprinkle the pictures over the wall space, so that their arrangement is irregular and looks as if it were accidental, and yet seems balanced. For, if you are trying to arrange your pictures in the way in which they seem to you to look best, consciously or unconsciously you are working to secure a balance.

Yes, one of the principles of artistic composition is balance. Like all the principles, adapted by artists, it is founded on an instinct of human nature. Have you ever noticed that when a man carries a bucket of water, he holds the free arm away from his body? He does it by instinct, to offset the drag of the bucket on his other arm and to balance his body. Have you ever walked upon the steel rail of a railroad track? Most of us have, I imagine. We tread pretty firmly for a little while, and then we totter. Out go our arms immediately to restore our balance. We walk up and down the deck of an ocean liner, when the sea is rough, and slope our bodies to the movement of the vessel. Why? To keep our balance. If we lose it we are hurled across the deck in a very undignified fashion. On the contrary, what a beautiful spectacle is presented when a good skater balances backward and forward; perhaps an even more beautiful one, when a good dancer who feels the joy of movement sways to the rhythm of the music.

So, to maintain a balance is an instinct of human nature; to lose it produces ugly results; while beautiful ones may be secured from it, especially if the balance is rhythmic.

Another principle, then, of artistic composition is rhythm, and this, too, is founded on an instinct of human nature. Let us see what rhythm is. A small boy has found an old pot, catches up a stick, and begins to belabor the pot and make himself a nuisance. By and by he gets tired of his own noise, imagines his pot a drum, and hits it with rhythmic strokes, one following the other in measured beats. Watch how his legs begin to move to the time of the strokes, and how the other youngsters fall in behind him. Left, right, left, right, on they march; their legs and shoulders swinging to the rhythmic beat. I wonder if they know they are following an instinct, pretty nearly as old as humanity. Probably they don’t, and wouldn’t care if they did. All they know is that they are having a good time. That’s just it! And they are having the same sort of good time that the primitive man gave his friends, when he first hit on the idea of clapping his hands together in rhythm. Later on he found he could get more stirring effects and save his hands by rhythmic hammering of one piece of wood upon another. Then came along a primitive Edison who perfected the principle and put tom-toms on the market. And so, in time, music came to be invented. For the basis of music and of the pleasure that is received from it is its measured beat or rhythm.

It is, however, not only from the actual measured beat, appealing to our ear, that we gain pleasure, but also from the suggestion of rhythm to our sense of sight.

A man stone deaf can enjoy watching a dance. He has never heard a sound in his life, but his sense of sight is stirred to pleasure by the spectacle of measured repetition of the movements. Similarly, the measured repetitions of stationary objects gives us pleasure,—the measured repetition, for example, presented by the West Point cadets, as they suddenly halt, either in close formation or in open ranks. “How beautiful!” we exclaim. And it is because the Athenians realized the beauty of measured repetition and the pleasure that it gives to the sense of sight, that they surrounded their great temple, the Parthenon, with ranks of columns, arranged at equal distance from one another. For, though they may have learned the beauty of repetition from studying the tree stems in the woods, yet, when they built their work of art, they avoided the haphazard of nature, and introduced order and arrangement by making the repetitions measured.

Behind the columns, however, high up on the outside of the temple wall they set a frieze or band of figures. It extended clear around the temple, representing a procession of people on their way to the great festival of the goddess Athene. The remains are now in the British Museum; but, doubtless, you have seen casts of portions of it, and will recall some in which young men are riding, the head of each horse overlapping the body of the one in front of it. There is here no longer an actual measured repetition, as in the case of the columns. The bodies are not separated by exact intervals, nor do they repeat the same forms. The youths differ, so do the horses, and the actions of the forms are dissimilar. And yet the arching of the horses’ necks, the prancing of the forelegs, and the bodies of the youths swaying to the movement of the horses are so arranged, that there is no break or interruption or confusion, but the whole seems to flow up and down regularly. There are no actual, measured intervals or actual repetitions, yet the feeling of both is suggested. The arrangement of the forms is rhythmic, in that it suggests rhythm. And the principle of this also the Greeks found in nature, as you may, if you watch the waves rolling shoreward.

But all this while the artist’s canvas is standing white and bare upon the easel, and must continue to stand. For, when he gets to work, I want you, not only to see what he does, but feel the meaning of his intention. And we can best enter into another person’s feeling, if we have experienced something of his feeling in ourselves. So, I have rummaged among our own experiences, in order to make you feel how much we have in common with the artist. He and ourselves are creatures of like nature, with similar senses, similar sources of pleasure and pain, and similar instincts leading us to do and to like similar things. Only the artist has keener senses, and has cultivated his instincts and study of nature, and has drawn from them certain practical hints to help him create his work of art.

Among the instincts that we share with him are, as I have tried to show—first, an instinctive preference for order and arrangement; secondly, the need of balance and the pleasure we receive from it; thirdly, the increased pleasure we derive from balance, when it is accompanied with rhythmic repetitions. These are the principles on which he relies when he makes his composition. For let me repeat, and not for the last time, that the purpose of his composition is not only to suggest some scene of nature, but to make the composition itself a source of pleasure to our sense of sight.

CHAPTER IV
CONTRAST

IN the previous chapter we discussed balance and repetition as elements of composition. We have now to study another element—that of contrast. This also results from a natural love of change and variety. How sick we should get of candy, if we had nothing else to eat! how tired of sunshine, if there were never a cold or wet day to make the sun seem extra beautiful by contrast! “Jack,” as we know, “will become a dull boy,” if his studies are not enlivened by play; but how worse than dull—stupid and ill-tempered—if his play were not relieved by something serious. Yes, contrast is the salt of life, without which living would be tasteless and insipid. More than this, I can hardly believe that a boy or girl can grow up to be brave and true, a really fine specimen of manhood or womanhood, unless some shadow of hardship and pain has passed over the sunny period of youth. We have to learn to take the bitter with the sweet, and it is through meeting each, as it comes along, as a part of the day’s work, that we gradually build up character.

So contrast, it seems, serves two purposes in life—it adds to the pleasure of life, and it gives force and worth to character. Its effects in art are very similar. The artist employs it to give variety and at the same time character and distinction to the pattern of his compositions.

You can find out for yourselves how he does this, if you take a piece of paper, a pencil, a pair of compasses, and a straight-edge. First draw a rectangle. This is the space to be filled or developed into a composition. Now draw a vertical line up the center of it. You will admit that this is not interesting by itself; but cut it at right angles with a horizontal line, and immediately the figure begins to have some character. Immediately, also, if you have any eye for balance—and almost everybody has—you will begin to notice that it makes a great difference at just what point the horizontal line cuts the vertical. In the first place, whether the arms of the horizontal are or are not the same length—then, at how high or how low a point on the vertical line they branch out. You can experiment with these two lines until the cross seems to you to look its best.

You could not draw anything much simpler than this figure; and yet it is sufficient to illustrate two principles of contrast in composition—first, that the contrast is interesting, and second, that it is made more interesting, when the contrasted parts are carefully balanced. Now take the compasses and, centering on the point of intersection of the two lines, describe a circle. The latter will introduce into the figure a still further contrast between curved and straight lines. And again your sense of balance will be brought into play. How far will you make your circle extend? It is for you to say, because you are trying to satisfy your own feeling for what will look best. Now, as a contrast to this circle, add four smaller ones at the extremities of the cross. Next, from the center of the big circle draw radiating lines. As a last touch of contrast, suppose you draw a segment of a circle in each of the four corners of the rectangle.

By this time we have built up a composition, the pattern of which consists of contrasts. But, as I dare say you have noticed, it also consists of repetitions. And once more I will remind you that both the repetitions and the contrasts are balanced. Contrast, repetition, and balance—these are the simple elements of composition.

Our pattern or composition is a very simple form of geometric figure. If you feel disposed, you can amuse yourself by devising other kinds of simple patterns; starting, for example, with a circle inside your rectangular space; or, selecting, to begin with, a circular frame and starting with a triangle or square inside of it, and in either case continuing to build up or embroider your design with additional features. In this way by varying the shape of your original frame and the character of the pattern that you put in it, you can go on indefinitely inventing designs. All these, I want you to observe, are geometric in character. They are based upon the figures which you find in geometry—the square, rectangle, triangle, and circle.

Now just as the acorn may in time become the great oak tree, so this simple basis of geometric design is at the root of the compositions of the great Italian pictures and of thousands of other pictures, even to our own day. Their compositions are based upon a geometric plan. The only difference is that your plan is clearly visible, while theirs is more or less disguised. The reason is that they do not fill their spaces, as you did, with simple lines, but with forms—figures, columns, buildings, draperies, trees, hills, and so on. Consequently, when we speak of the “lines” of their compositions, we often mean rather the direction which the figure, or the object whatever it may be, takes. Thus, a standing figure may take the place of your vertical line; the slightly undulating top of the hills behind it may correspond to your horizontal line; a curving group of angels, floating in the air, may suggest your circle; while your diagonal line may be replaced in the picture by the branches of a tree that spread in a diagonal direction. In other words, what you have done (shall I say?) stiffly with compasses and straight-edge, the artists do freely and loosely. Yet, I repeat it, underneath this seeming freedom, if you search for it, you will find the basis of a geometric design. This I hope to show you in the following chapter. Meanwhile, there is another use for contrast that you should know.

It is the contrast between the light and the dark parts of a picture. It is employed, in the first place, to make the objects in the picture look more real. If you fix your eyes on any object in the room or out of doors, you will observe that some parts of it are light and some dark, and that there are various degrees of lightness and darkness. It is the light on an object that enables us to see it. If there were no light on it—if it were in complete darkness, that is to say—nothing would be visible. And, while it is the light that enables us to see the object, it is the degree of light on some parts of it and the various degrees of darkness on others that enable us to realize the shape of it. In other words, the contrast of light and dark, received by the eyes, communicates to our brain the sense of form and bulk.

That it should do so seems to be the gradual result of a habit, unconsciously acquired. Those who study such things tell us that we began to perceive things, not through the sense of sight, but by the sense of touch. The baby reaches out its little hand to feel for the mother’s breast; it burrows its way to her warm body; is comforted by the feel of her arms around it. When the child is older and you present her with a doll, you may be disappointed that she does not at once show pleasure. Instead of her face lighting up with joy, as you hoped it would, she stares at the doll in rather a dull way. But presently she stretches out her hands, and takes the doll into them and begins to feel it all over, and at length clasps it in her arms against her body. It is by the sense of touch that she seems to have assured herself that the doll is “real.” When she is older, however, if you offer her a new doll, immediately her face lightens with gladness of welcome. For, in the meantime she has learned to know a doll by sight, and now when she gets it into her hands she turns it round and round that she may look at it, patting the face, however, and the dress, and lifting up the lace of the petticoats and handling the sash, because, although she has grown to recognize things by her sense of sight, she has not lost her delight in the sense of touch. Nor will she, I hope, as she grows older. Indeed, artists, knowing how much pleasure people derive from the feel of things, take great pains, as we shall see in another chapter, to paint the surfaces, or, as they suggest it, the texture of objects, in such a way as to make us feel how pleasant it would be to touch them. Besides, it makes the figure seem so much more real, if they suggest to us that, if we touched the face, it would feel like flesh; or, if we could pass our hand over the dress, it would seem soft and mossy like velvet, or smooth and polished like satin.

But, to return to the contrast of light and dark. Although it is by this contrast that we get an impression of the form or bulk of an object, most people are not aware of the fact. They have grown up in the habit of recognizing things by sight, without being conscious of how they do so. They just see things. Artists, however, have had to learn the reason and how to apply it to painting.

. . . . . .

The history of modern painting extends back about six hundred years. In the thirteenth century, the paintings which decorated some of the churches in Italy were painted in what is called a conventional way. That is to say, a certain custom was followed by all the painters. They represented the heads and hands of their figures, but the bodies were covered with draperies, under which there was little or no suggestion of any form or bulk. For the whole figure appeared flat. It was as if you should make a little figure of clay or paste, and then pass a roller over it, until its thickness is flattened down into nothing but length and breadth. The figures, in fact, gave no appearance of being real and lifelike because, as artists would say, there was no drawing in them. There was nothing to suggest that the figures had real bodies.

By degrees, however, people grew tired of these unlifelike figures, and a painter named Giotto (1266?-1337) became the leader of a new motive in painting. It was simply to try and make the figures look real and the scenes in which they appeared seem natural. Instead of following a convention, he used his eyes and studied nature. He was no longer satisfied to fill in the background of his picture with a flat gold tint as the conventional painters had done. He wished to increase the reality of his figures by representing them in real surroundings, sometimes in a room, sometimes out of doors. Instead of being content to make his pictures flat, representing only length and breadth, he set to work to create the suggestion of the third dimension—depth. He would try and make you feel that you could walk from the foreground of his picture, step by step, through to the background; and that, as you reached each figure or object in the scene, you could pass your hand round it and feel that it had real bulk. I said “step by step” and I lay stress on it. For what Giotto tried to represent was not merely some figures in front and then a big gap that you had to jump over before you reached the background, but what the artists call the “successive planes” of the scene—the step-by-step appearance of the scene.

Perhaps you will grasp better what this means if, when you next go to the theater, you carefully observe the scenery, representing some outdoor effect. On each side of the stage, very likely representing tree trunks, there is a series of “wings,” one behind another at a distance of say five feet, while across the stage, hanging down from the “flies,” is a series of cut cloths, representing foliage, that correspond with the wings and seem to be branches of the tree trunks. Well, these cloths and their wings correspond to the “successive planes” of a picture. They lead gradually back and you can actually walk in and out of them. But, when you reach the back cloth, you are stopped, so far as your legs are concerned. If you are sitting in the auditorium, however, your eye goes traveling on and on a long distance, for the back cloth is itself a picture, in which there is an illusion of successive planes.

The artist’s word for representing the successive planes is perspective. If you stand between the rails of a trolley line or railroad and look along it, the lines seem to draw together or converge. Yet in reality you know that they are equidistant from each other all the way along. But, since our power of seeing becomes less and less as objects are farther removed from us, so to our diminishing sight the size and distinctness of the space between the rails appears also to diminish. In the same way you will observe that the width of the street seems to diminish, and the people and wagons appear smaller and smaller, according as they are seen farther and farther back in the successive planes. The houses, too—you know that if you stood in front of any of the houses, exactly facing it, the upright sides would appear to be, as they are, of equal height, and that the windows and cornice would appear in parallel horizontal lines. Yet, as you stand in the street and look along the houses on either side, they present a different appearance. In the case of each house the upright side, nearer to you, seems higher than the one farther off, and the rows of windows and the line of the cornice appear to slope downward. For the houses as they take their places in the receding or successive planes seem to diminish in size.

This, you see, is another example of what we have already said, that the artist does not paint what he knows to be facts, but the appearances, as he sees them from the point where his eyes are—his “point of sight.” You remember how in an earlier chapter that artist represented, or rather suggested the cows in the distance by a few dabs. That was how he saw them from his point of sight. I could not tell you then, but you will understand now, that he was obeying the law of perspective, and was representing the cows as they appeared in their own proper plane of the scene. Do you remember that when he drew in their horns and tails and other details, they looked like toy cows? We can now see why. They contradicted their surroundings; they no longer were at home in their own plane; their plane was a good way off, but they were represented as if close to our eyes; and, as we saw how small they were, they seemed to us like toy cows.

You see, it is entirely a matter of how things look to the eyes. The painter, as I have said, does not represent the facts as he knows them to be, but the impressions which the facts make upon his eyesight; and these impressions, by the way in which he renders them, he hands on to us. His picture is not nature, but a suggestion or illusion of nature.

Now, although Giotto had discovered that, to make you feel that you could walk back through his pictures, he must represent the successive planes, he only partly found out how to do it. It was not until nearly a hundred years later that a painter named Masaccio learned how to fill the whole of his picture with a suggestion of atmosphere, so that the objects took their places properly in their proper planes, and it was still later before artists thoroughly worked out the methods of perspective.

The greatest difficulty that they had to surmount was how to “foreshorten” their figures, or represent them in “foreshortening.” A simple way of understanding what this means is to stand in front of a mirror and stretch out your arms to left and right, like the arms of a cross. Each extends a long way. But now bring them in front of you and stretch them toward the mirror. At once they look shorter, or at any rate you cannot see their length. They appear foreshortened. Or you may practice a still more “violent” example of foreshortening, if you are able to place the mirror where you can see your body, when lying down with the feet toward it, for now the whole length of the body appears foreshortened in the mirror. The surface of the latter, you observe, corresponds exactly with the surface of a picture. It is a flat plane upon which is produced the appearance of successive or receding planes, and though you cannot see the length of your body because it is foreshortened, you are made to feel its length.

It was a long time before artists overcame the difficulty of representing this effect; and the first pictures in which it was accomplished were naturally regarded as wonders. Since it is not the purpose of this book to teach you to draw I will mention only one of the principles involved. It is the one we have already been discussing—the contrast of light and dark, or, as it is called, “chiaroscuro.” Artists soon discovered that, if an object has bulk, that part of it which is nearest to the light will reflect most light; the parts less near, less light; while the parts that are exposed to no light will appear dark. As this was how the artists saw the objects, it was so they tried to represent them. They learned to “model” the object, that is to say, to represent it as having bulk, by reproducing in their pictures the contrasts of light and dark. At first the contrasts were crude, chiefly of the very light and very dark, but by degrees the artists became more skillful and learned to represent also all the varying gradations of less light and less dark. By this time they were better able to surmount the difficulty of foreshortening.

You will see how, if you will again stand in front of the mirror and stretch out one arm toward it. The simplest test is made, if you can arrange that the light shall be directly at your back, for then it is reflected by the mirror on to the front of you. In this case you will notice that your outstretched hand receives the most light, because it is nearest to the light. If it were represented in this way in a picture, our habit of seeing the highest or brightest light on the highest or most directly exposed surface of an object would make us feel that the hand projected in front of the body.

If, however, you stand before the mirror with light falling upon you from one side, the picture in the mirror will be quite different in appearance. The light and shadow will be more broken up and diversified. Some part of your hand, it may be simply the edges of the fingers, will catch a high light, even if it is not the highest; and light probably will fall on your forearm, between the wrist and elbow, and again upon the upper part of the arm. Broadly speaking, your arm presents three planes of form—the hand, the forearm, and the upper arm. And, though to your untrained eye the light on all of these planes may seem the same, to an artist’s eye it would vary according to the angle at which the light hits the plane, or, as the artist himself would say, according to the angle of the plane. These angles vary all over the figure, as you may be able to see if you examine your picture in the mirror. To mention a few, in a general way, there are several angles around each of the shoulders, about the breast, round the neck, while the face, with its projecting nose, its receding eye sockets, its rounded cheeks and so on, presents a regular patchwork of angles of plane. Or shall I say, the whole figure presents a whole multitude of facets like a cut diamond? Only, unlike the diamond, its facets are uneven in size and irregular in shape. And just as the light on the facets, here very light and elsewhere not so light, informs us of the shape of the diamond, so do these differently lighted angles of plane, when presented in a picture, give us the suggestion of the figure’s shape.

And now study the shadows in your mirror picture. They result from the opposite of what we have been talking about. In their case the angles of plane are turned away from instead of toward the light, and some parts, such as the hollows of the folds of your dress or coat, seem to catch no light at all and to be quite dark. I expect you find it much easier to detect the various gradations of dark or shadows than those of the light. And a great many artists, especially in olden times, seem to have seen the shadows more than the lights—for they represent the former with more subtlety, that is to say, with a keener eye for variations, than they do the latter. Indeed, the subtle rendering of light is particularly an accomplishment of modern artists.

Well, if you have carefully studied your portrait in the mirror, I think you must have discovered how large a part the contrast of light and shadow plays in the appearance of the figure, and therefore, what an equally important part it plays in producing an illusion of reality in the picture. I do not forget that an artist by simply drawing an outline with a pen or pencil can also suggest to us the appearance of an object. But, if he does so, it is by the help of ourselves, for he relies on our imagination to supply what he has omitted.

Finally, before we leave the mirror portrait, I should like to ask you in which of the following ways you see it: Do you see it as a bold, simple composition of light and dark? Or are you conscious of a hundred and one little details about the clothes and face and hair and so on? The former is what artists call the “broad” way of seeing nature. Many artists see nature in this way and represent in a bold, free, broad manner simply the big general facts. Others, on the other hand, as you may be, are conscious at once of the great variety of details of which the whole is composed, and represent the subject in a highly detailed manner. Neither is the right nor the wrong way. Thousands of fine pictures have been painted in both ways. On the other hand, if you find you grow to like one way more than another, it will be because you yourself, as well as the artist, have the habit of receiving impressions in that way. Do not on that account think other people wrong for receiving impressions differently and therefore preferring the other sort of picture. We cannot help having preferences, but they shouldn’t prejudice us against the preferences of others.

CHAPTER V
GEOMETRIC COMPOSITION

IN the previous chapters we talked about the elements of composition. We found that the composition or arrangement of figures and objects in the picture is designed by artists for two purposes: Firstly, to represent some subject; and, secondly, to represent it in such a way that the arrangement itself will be a source of pleasure. This second purpose is what makes the picture a work of art. And we found that the artist, in order to make his composition give pleasure to our sense of sight, relies upon the pleasure that we derive from repetition and contrast, and upon the instinct that we all have for keeping our balance. The elements of composition, in fact, are repetition and contrast in a state of balance, sometimes with the added charm of rhythm. We also found that one way in which artists contrive to make this balance of repetition and contrast is by playing, as we may say, upon the simple geometrical patterns of the rectangle, triangle, and circle.

Now let us study an actual example, and for the purpose I have chosen Raphael’s Disputá.[1] It is painted on a wall of one of the “Stanze” or suite of rooms in the Vatican, the home of the Pope, in Rome. Raphael painted many other decorations in these rooms, but this was his first one, executed when as a young man of twenty-five he had been summoned from Florence to work for the powerful pope, Julian II. Raphael had been a pupil of Perugino, and he took one of the geometrical designs that his master had already used. The pupil, however, improved upon it.

Observe, first, the shape of the space that Raphael was called upon to decorate. It is known as a lunette or moon-shape. Now it was this space and no other, that for the time being, he had to decorate. What he put into it, must be suggested by, one may almost say, must grow out of, the particular shape of this space. In fact, the outside lines of the lunette, and the lines inside, must together form the pattern of the composition. Now observe how he did it. Briefly, he put into it a number of curved lines, that would repeat the curve of the outside, and sometimes also be in contrast to it. Likewise he introduced horizontal lines, to repeat the bottom edge, and vertical ones in contrast. Let us examine it more closely.

Not quite in the center but nearly so, is a small circle, on which appears a dove. This circle arrests our eye, and its effect is to make us feel very certainly that part of the composition is above it and part below. It is repeated above by a much larger circle. This is not completed; for its regularity of

La Disputá del Sacramento. Raphael.

shape is interrupted by the two figures, seated one on each side. The circle seems to pass behind these till it merges with the clouds below. Both the small and the large circles repeat the outside curves of the lunette. On the other hand the curve of the clouds, and the figures seated upon them form a contrasting curve, and there is another one higher up, formed by the two groups of floating angels. In the center, above the larger circle, is a figure with a nimbus that points up, carrying our eye toward an imaginary center, somewhere outside the picture, from which start the radiating lines. So the impression of that part of the picture that we have been examining is of uplift. By successive steps the eye and, through it, the imagination, are invited to mount up.

And now for the part below the small circle, separated from what is above by an open space of clear blue sky. Do you notice that the band of figures stretching across this part takes the form of a curve, repeating the curves of the circles but contrasted with the two important curves of cloud? Its effect is to prevent one’s gaze from soaring altogether upward. This downward curve, as it were, tethers the composition to the ground firmly in the two corners. And now note that the central feature of this lower part is the altar, an equilateral, in strongest possible contrast to the curves and circles above it. That it may have still stronger emphasis, observe how its horizontal lines are repeated down to the bottom of the picture by the steps, so that the eye, as it were, mounts the steps to this central feature. Further the equilateral is again enforced and also balanced by the vertical and horizontal lines, forming a suggestion of equilateral figures in the corners. The one on the right is actually a doorway; the black part is the door. Some artists might have felt it was a drawback to have a bit thus cut out of the picture. Not so Raphael. There, as elsewhere in these rooms, he takes the doorway into his composition and makes it serve a very useful purpose of emphasising the corner, and then invents another structure to strengthen equally the corner opposite.

Now note the radiating lines of the pavement. In a general way they repeat the radiation of the lines at the top of the picture; but they are farther apart and bolder, as befits the bolder character of the lower part. Have you discovered the point from which these lines of the pavement radiate? By using a straight edge to each in turn, you will find that all the lines, if continued would meet within the little circle of ornament that stands upon the altar. To this point also the gaze of many of the figures is directed.

Some of the figures, however, are standing so that though they gaze towards this center, the lines of their bodies lead our gaze upward as well as towards the center. Then again, beside the altar is a figure with its arm pointing upward, so that our eye and imagination are not permitted to stop at the little circle. For Raphael had to bind the lower and upper parts together and make one united composition. Very easily the stretch of the sky might have divided the whole into two parts. Lest it should, he has softened the contrast of the lower and upper curves by introducing on the one side a building, on the other a low hill with delicate trees springing upward.

Now let us pause for a moment, and observe the general effect of the lines, which we can do by turning to the skeleton drawing on transparent paper. It lays bare the plan of the composition, and we can see that it is a geometric composition of repetition and contrasts, of horizontal, vertical, diagonal and curved lines, balanced so as to unite into one single impression. To myself the impression is of looking into the interior of a circular building, with a vaulted roof. I remember just such a building in Rome; the Pantheon, built in honor of all the gods, but now, as in Raphael’s time, a temple of the Church. As you enter it an altar faces you across the stretch of pavement, and the lines of the architecture, as it circles round you and above you, are very similar to these lines, while overhead the ribs or radiating lines of the vaulted ceiling suddenly stop, for there is a circular opening at the top, through which you can see the sky, and the light strikes down through it in diagonal shafts of light.

I wonder if Raphael had the Pantheon in mind when he composed this picture? Very likely, for he must have seen it; and he had a wonderful gift for receiving impressions and making use of them. And this building, both for its unusual shape and particularly from that wonderful opening, carrying one’s imagination upward from finite space to the infinite spaciousness of sky, is peculiarly impressive. It fits in also with the conception that Raphael seems to have formed of the subject which the picture commemorates.

For the name of the picture is misleading. It does not represent a dispute or argument, as the title Disputá would suggest. The real subject is an allegory of the Holy Catholic Church—the Church on Earth and the Church in Heaven, the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. And it is the idea of the Church on Earth as held by the Roman Catholic Church that is represented. You may not be a Roman Catholic yourself, any more than I am, but none the less let us try to enter reverently for a few minutes into the conception of the picture, since it will help us to see how wonderfully the composition grows out of the idea.

To the Roman Catholic the highest act of worship is the service of the Mass. Here, in consequence, the altar at which it is celebrated is made the most prominent feature of the lower part of the picture. It forms, as it were, a keystone of the arch of figures; the bishops, doctors, and faithful of the Church on Earth. Their worship is directed towards the altar on which rests the receptacle in which the Sacred Bread is reserved. On earth the Church reveres the Bread as the Body of Christ; a symbol of the Body of the risen Christ in Heaven. Above the altar hovers a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, through whom the Words of Holy Scripture make known the Glory of the Christ. The sacred books are borne by baby forms, “for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Above the symbol of the Holy Spirit, sits enthroned the Christ, with hands uplifted, showing the wounds that the nails made. On one side sits the Virgin Mother, on the other, John the Baptist, who prepared the way before Him; while to right and left is a row of Apostles, Saints, and Martyrs. Above the circle of glory appears the figure of God the Father, with hands upraised in blessing. On either side of Him float angels and the sky is thick with baby faces of Cherubs and Seraphs, singing “Hosanna.” Down through their midst descend shafts of golden light from the far off infinite Sun of Righteousness.

Whether or not Raphael had in mind the Pantheon, his rendering of the allegory far excels the grandeur even of the beautiful temple. For his own temple is composed of earth and sky. “The Earth is His Tabernacle,” and the ceiling thereof the vault of the Heavens themselves. Suspended in it is the vision of the Holy Trinity, and the throngs of the heavenly hosts, whose praise and adoration are the mighty echo of the prayers and praises down below on earth.

Thus, you see, with what simple clearness Raphael grasped the idea that Pope Julian II asked him to commemorate. It is as logical as a proposition in geometry, and on simple principles of geometric design he built up the idea into a picture. How the simplicity of the idea has been elaborated with a variety of beautiful thoughts, and how the simplicity of the design of the structure has been hung, as it were, with rich embroideries of detail, I must leave you to search out for yourselves. If you do, you will find that each figure represents some example of repetition or contrast, each a separate beauty and meaning.

In conclusion I will ask you one question. Do you perceive the rhythm that prevails in this balance of repetition and contrast: how from the bottom of the composition the successive waves of pattern flow upward, as the thoughts of the Faithful mount in successive waves of prayer and adoration?

CHAPTER VI
GEOMETRIC COMPOSITION (Continued)

HERE is another example of geometric composition. It is also by Raphael and is painted on one of the walls in the same room that the Disputá decorates. But, while the latter’s geometric plan was very noticeable, this one is more disguised and the whole design has a much greater appearance of freedom. It is recognised by artists as one of Raphael’s most beautiful compositions, and one of the finest examples of space decoration in existence.

But before we examine the plan on which the decoration of this space has been built up, let us study the subject. It is usually called Jurisprudence, that is to say the principle of Law—both the making and the administering of laws. In the Disputá the subject, as you remember, was Religion; in two of the other panels in this same room Raphael has represented Philosophy and Poetry. Here he set himself to represent the idea of Law. The idea, you observe. In all these four panels, it is an idea, not an event or incident, that is represented; but an idea—something that has existence only in the mind. For all the subjects represent abstract ideas; ideas, that is to say, abstracted or removed from the experience of the senses. We cannot, for example, see religion or Law; nor touch, taste, smell, nor hear them. We can see the policeman on his beat, or the judge in court, or the members of the legislature—the men who, respectively, maintain, administer, and make the laws; and we can see the record of the laws in books. But the idea or principle of Law which has caused men to construct all this machinery for the making and enforcing of the laws, exists only in the mind.

Therefore, when Raphael was asked to paint the subject of Jurisprudence or Law, something that no one has ever seen or will see, what did he do? He asked himself the question: When people have a respect for Law, how does it show itself in their acts? In the first place they are very careful in the making of the laws; they found them upon the experience of the past and shape them to fit the needs of the future; they exhibit PRUDENCE. Secondly, in the enforcing of the laws, they exhibit two qualities: FIRMNESS and MODERATION. Though they firmly uphold the law, they remember that

“earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.”

Raphael, then, determined to represent the idea of Law, by representing three of its qualities: Prudence, Firmness and Moderation. These three again are abstract ideas. No one has ever seen them or will see them; we can only see the results of them, the acts which they influence man to do. So if Prudence, Firmness and Moderation have no visible shape, how could he represent them to the eye? He probably took a hint from a form of a stage play that was popular in his day. At any rate he did what the authors of these “Moralities” or “Allegories” were in the habit of doing. For they introduced as characters in their plays the Vices and Virtues; making an actor, for example, personify Gluttony or embody in his own person the idea of Gluttony. Thus, a fat man would be chosen for the part, and he would pad himself so as to look still fatter; he would make his face shining and greasy, and perhaps cover the front of his coat with grease, to suggest what a greedy and dirty feeder he was. He would come on the stage eating, and anything he had to say or do would help the audience to realise that the only thing he lived for was to stuff himself with food. This was called an embodiment or personification of Gluttony; for the idea of Gluttony was suggested in the person of the actor by the peculiarities of his body and behaviour. While the personifications of the Vices were for the most part comic, those of the virtues were beautiful or heroic, so that these Moralities or Allegories were as popular with the crowd as with people of taste. Sometimes the allegory was represented, not with figures moving about the stage, speaking and acting, but as a stationary group, in which the figures were raised on steps, so that a very imposing composition or tableau was presented. And no doubt, when these were given on a grand scale artists often arranged the spectacle.

On the other hand, the artists were not slow to adopt the same idea in their pictures. The great altarpieces and large decorations, painted by the Italian artists of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries are to all intents and purposes allegories. Such certainly is this Jurisprudence of Raphael’s. He has personified the three virtues of Prudence, Firmness and Moderation. To Prudence he has given two faces. One is old, for it gazes back over the long past; the other has the freshness of youth, as it peers into the future. It is looking at itself in a mirror. Why? For everything in these allegories is intended to convey a meaning to the minds of the spectators. Perhaps there are two reasons. The face is gazing at the reflection of itself, as it now is; for Prudence, besides taking note of the past and looking toward the future, must know the present. Again, since a mirror reflects what is in front of it and shows us our face as others see it, it was used by the artists as an emblem of Truth. And to know the truth is wisdom, and to act according to truth and wisdom is prudence. So, when you see a figure holding the emblem of the mirror, you may be sure the artist is personifying the idea of Truth, or Wisdom, or Prudence, or all three combined.

On the bosom of Prudence is a winged head; perhaps intended for the head of Medusa, which turned to stone every one who looked at it. If so, it is an

Jurisprudence. Raphael.

emblem here of the terribleness of Prudence, when offended. She is gentle in herself, but a terror to evil doers. At her side a baby form holds a torch. This was used as the emblem of that which enlightens the world—Learning; and suggests here that Prudence is illuminated by learning, perhaps also, that truth and wisdom and prudence are themselves lights which lighten the darkness of the world.

The figure to the right of the Torch-bearer offers Prudence a bit and reins. It is with these that men control horses; so they were adopted by painters as an emblem of control; and, knowing this, we recognise that the woman who holds them is intended to personify Moderation. Her whole bearing suggests modesty, which is a form of moderation, for both words imply that a person has the sense to know how far it is right to go, and where it is fit to stop.

But note the figure of the woman on the right. She is of powerful build, seated in a positive sort of attitude that has nothing of the gentle retiring character of the other figures. She is a personification of Firmness, armed for defense, with helmet, cuirass, and greaves. But, though she carries no weapon of offense, she holds in leash one of those pumas with which the ancients used to hunt big game. She will, if necessary, pursue and pull down the law’s transgressors. Meanwhile she bears an oak branch, the emblem of strength and victory in civil life, as opposed to the laurel of war, for her victories are those of peace. The little Cupids, or Amorini, as the Italians call them, except the two who carry the mirror and torch, are put in simply to increase the beauty of the composition.

I have dwelt first upon the subject of this decoration, because it is a key to so many of the old paintings and to many modern ones as well. Their subjects represent abstract ideas personified, embodied in human form; the particular idea being shown by the emblems which accompany each figure. People had come to recognise that such and such an emblem indicated such and such an idea, and, whenever a painter wished to suggest that idea, he represented a figure with the familiar emblem.

Now, too, that we have grasped the meaning of this allegory of Raphael’s we can better enter into his manner of representing it. Since the idea is an abstract one, he has expressed it in an abstract way. That is to say, he has not attempted to represent real life, or the figures as doing any real thing. It is true they are life-like and their actions are quite natural; but the positions in which they have been placed were chosen in order that the arrangement of their limbs and bodies might produce an effect of beautiful rhythmic balance. Perhaps this was Raphael’s only thought, for he was above everything an artist, whose work in life it is to create forms of beauty. Yet he had a mind so ready to receive all kinds of impressions that, living as he did in a very lawless age, when men were guided more by self than justice, he may have realised how beautiful would be a reign of law and order.

Anyhow, this decoration in a wonderful way possesses just those characteristics that would belong to a state of society in which justice or justness were the natural habit and not merely a thing enforced by law. How simple life would be if every man did to others what he would have them do to him, and instead of rivalry and suspicion, what a harmony there would be! It is harmony and simplicity that are the chief characteristics of this decoration.

The simplicity is very marked. There are three principal figures. I believe, if there were nothing else but these, the balance of the composition would be complete, and certainly the allegory would be explained. But balance is not necessarily harmony. In a school debate, for instance, ten of you on the right of the room may say “aye,” and ten on the left may say “no,” to a subject which is being discussed between you. There is a balance—ten on one side, opposed to ten on the other.

But in this decoration there is harmony. You have only to look at the picture to be sure of it. You cannot detect any rivalry between the three figures, although one of them is so much more massive than either of the other two. All of them seem drawn together into one chord of feeling, the leading note of which is the head of Prudence, lifted above the heads of her companions and seen alone against the open space of the sky and in the place of chief importance—the center of the arc of space. Please remind me presently to say a word about the placing of this head, for just now I do not wish to interrupt the subject that we are considering—the harmony of the composition.

This is brought about particularly by the Amorini that, as it were, bind the three figures into a garland of festoons. Note, first, the two which are on the extreme right and left. The wing and arm of the former and the inclination of the latter’s whole body suggest diagonal lines. These cut across the angles of the space, or as they say in geometry, subtend the angles; tying their two arms together and also offering a strong contrast to their direction. The baby figures also keep the composition from running away to nothing at the corners, for they serve the purpose of making the pattern curl up at each end. Or suppose we think of the pattern of the composition, as if it were partly made up of a wreath, such as we use at Christmas time to festoon our houses. Imagine a nail driven into the wall where the head of the baby on the left hand is. Attach the wreath to it. Now drive another nail into the puma’s head and between this one and the first nail, let a loop of the wreath hang down so that it follows the direction of the baby’s body and a bit of the oak stem. This direction, if you look at the picture, suggests a festoon. Now continue to make festoons—first along the arm of Firmness up to the hand of the Cupid; now another from that point along the line on the Cupid’s wing and arm and up the arm of the next little figure; another from the top of the mirror, following the curve of the arm of Prudence up to her head. So far, on the left side of the painting we have four small festoons. But I wonder if you can make out another one a long one, the ends of which are fastened to the head of Prudence and that of the baby in the left corner. It follows the slope of the figure of Prudence until it reaches her foot, the direction of which starts it across the gap between her and Firmness, where the line reappears, following the folds of the latter’s drapery, at first along the floor and then above her greave up to the baby’s head.

And now for the right hand side of the painting. In the first place there is a repetition of the long festoon. This one is suspended from the head of Prudence to the top of the wing of the Cupid in the right hand corner. It dips down along the curve of the torch, down through the folds of Moderation’s drapery to her feet and then rises up and passes round the back of the child. But hanging above this main festoon are two rows of smaller ones. Firstly we find a very shallow festoon from the head of Prudence to the hand which holds the bit; another from this point to the top of the head of Moderation. Below this, however, is again a festoon from the bit, along the droop of the reins to the hand which holds them, from which point there is still another along the arm up to the head.

Now, I do not for a moment wish you to think that Raphael chose points in his composition and then arranged that the lines of the limbs and draperies should form festoons between them. In examining his work, I am trying not to tell you how he did it, but to explain what has been done. And here, clearly visible, are what I have called, festoons. We might describe them by some other name—as ripples of movement. For as the water in some shallow brook ripples over and between the stones dancing in the sunshine, so these curves of movement, now in light and now in shadow, flow between these figures and flow over them, until the whole composition is a woven mass of rhythmic undulations. Rhythmic? Yes, it is just because these ripples or festoons present such a beautiful example of rhythm, that I have dwelt upon them. In fact it is the rhythmic movement of the composition that gives to this painting its greatest charm.

In the following chapter I shall have more to say about the rhythmic movements of the figures. Let us conclude this one with a few words about the geometric plan on which the composition of the “Jurisprudence” is based. As I have said, it is not nearly so apparent as that of the Disputá. The latter’s plan looks as if it might have been laid out with straight edge and compasses. It was, as I have told you, adapted from a composition by Raphael’s master, Perugino, and he, very possibly, may have adapted it from some one else’s plan; for in those days, artists did not see any harm in starting with another man’s design, and altering it a little, or perhaps making it more elaborate to suit their own purpose for the moment. But in the short time that elapsed between the painting of the Disputá and the Jurisprudence the pupil had made great strides. He had found his own strength and was working in the glory of it. Therefore the Jurisprudence exhibits a freedom of design, which so disguises the ground plan, that it is difficult to be sure of what it is, although one still feels that it is geometrical.

The first thing we note is that the artist has strengthened the bottom line of the lunette by repetition. He has carried a stone bench along the entire width, which also serves as a seat for the figures. Do you see the advantage of making the figures seated? If Raphael had represented them in a standing position, he would have had to make them smaller in order to get them entirely into the space; and this would have lessened the feeling of bigness in the composition. So he invented a device by which he could represent them seated. Further, he has raised the bench in the center by the addition of another step, so as to lift the composition naturally in the part where the space to be decorated is highest.

Thus from the corners, or angles of the lunette there is on each side a gradual rise up to the head of Prudence, that suggests a pyramid or a triangle within the curved space. The same triangular effect is repeated in the pattern, made by the figures of Prudence and the Cupid who holds the torch. The curve of the torch is so arranged as to balance the slope of the woman’s legs. So the geometric plan may be the repetition of a smaller, inside a larger triangle, contrasted with the curve of the lunette. On the other hand, if you look at the painting again, you notice that the Cupid with the torch is balanced by the one who holds the mirror. Their bodies have a vertical or upright direction, and then the tops of the torch and the mirror supply points which the eye seems to join by a horizontal line, so that a rectangle occupies the center of the composition as it does in the Disputá. This strong contrast of a rectangular form to the curve of the lunette, and then again the contrast of the diagonal lines, formed by the Cupids’ figures across the angles of the space, may be the simple geometric elements out of which this composition grew.

CHAPTER VII
THE ACTION, MOVEMENT AND COMPOSITION OF THE FIGURE

WHEN a few pages back I spoke of the movement of the figures I was using the word as artists understand it. They do not mean by it that the figure is represented as moving its limbs or body. For this they use the word “action.” They speak of the action of the figure. But when they talk of “movement” they refer to the way in which the action is expressed. They mean that one, continuous stream of energy winds in and out through all the undulations of the action. Thus, in the figure of Moderation: the action consists in the fact that she is seated, with her legs extended to one side, while her body turns in the opposite direction, and while the hands are stretched out in the direction that the body faces, the head is turned away. If you compare the action of this figure with that of either of the others, you will see how much more complicated it is; how many more windings it makes. And an artist would say that this figure has a fine movement, because through all the windings or undulations of action one can feel a continuous stream of energy; so that every part of the figure contributes exactly its natural share to the action, and the lines of the figure, from the toe to the hand that holds the bit, flow continuously and harmoniously. The only way in which you can see for yourself how fine the movement is, is to study it very carefully, and by degrees you will begin to discover how wonderfully the flow of movement is expressed. It may help you, if you put yourself into the same position, that is to say, make your own body represent this action. At first it may seem a little awkward, but presently, as you adjust your body to the actions, you will find that it seems easy and natural, for you will have secured a perfect poise. And, after all, it is the perfect poise in the action of this figure of Moderation that helps to make the movements so fine.

Now turn to the figure of Prudence. Here the action is much simpler. The body faces in the same direction that the legs extend. But it leans back a little. If you try the action yourself, you will find it difficult, for the stretching out of the legs makes you wish to bring your body forward, so as to make the balance easy. But Raphael, knowing this, has made Prudence prop up her body, as it were, by leaning its weight on her left arm. Do you see how this forces up her left shoulder? The representation of this and the drawing of the arm make us feel what a pressure of weight downwards the hand has to support. Artists, you will find, usually make some one part of the figure carry the chief weight. Sometimes they may paint a standing figure in which the weight passes straight down through the figure and is supported evenly by the two feet, like a column bearing down on to its base. But, more often, they make one leg carry the chief weight, or, as in this figure, one arm. Then it becomes very interesting; first, to study the part of chief muscular strain, and secondly, to note how all the other parts of the action harmonise with it. For example, in this figure of Prudence, although the arm sustains the chief pressure, a considerable amount must bear down through her trunk[2] on to the seat. But, if we compare her trunk with that of Moderation, I think we shall feel at once that the latter is supporting the greater weight. In fact, the point of greatest muscular action in the figure of Moderation is at the base of the trunk.

But to return to Prudence. We have noted that the left shoulder is raised higher than the right. Now observe the inclination of the head as it leans gently forward on the neck to gaze into the mirror and the easy action of the arm that holds the light mirror. Equally easy and without effort is the action of the legs. In fact, except for the firm quiet pressure on the arm, the whole figure suggests a gracious repose. Not only is the expression of the face sweetly meditative, but the same feeling, as the artists would say, of exquisite repose pervades the entire figure. You should learn to look for this in pictures. Do not be satisfied only with a beautiful face; but expect to find the beauty and the same kind of beauty expressed in the action and movement of the figure. For it is in this expression of feeling that an artist shows his skill.

Compare the feeling in the figure of Moderation. It is no less marked, though the feeling expressed is a different one. It is also quiet and gracious, but it does not suggest repose. Corresponding with the flexible, winding movement, the feeling is rather one of reaching out, as if in pleading or tender invitation. However, it is often very difficult to explain in words just what the feeling of a figure expresses; and perhaps it is better not to try to do so. The main thing for you is to get the habit of feeling the feeling.

Now let us study the feeling of Firmness. Like that of the central figure, it suggests repose; but a repose not so much of gracious meditation, as of strength and force. In a moment, if need be, this figure would rise to its feet, thrill with alertness and put forth its strength. Meanwhile, as it sits, the line of pressure is straight down through the center of the trunk, and it is the lower muscles of the back that are supporting the chief weight. One shoulder is raised, not however, because it has to bear any pressure as in the case of the central figure, but simply because the trunk inclines a little toward the puma. Observe, though, that the head is held erect over the central line of the figure. If it were not, the feeling of firm strength in the figure would be lessened. On the other hand the face is turned to one side, in order that by its contrast of direction the movement of the whole figure may be more effective.

For, I wonder if you have noticed that the movement in every case presents a chain of contrasts and repetitions. Start, for example, with the left foot of Firmness, and move your finger over the direction of the figure; first up the calf of the leg to the knee; then off toward the right to the hip; then leftward up the body, then again to the right at the slope of the shoulders; then slightly to the left up the neck, and lastly note the face turned to the right. You will have found that your finger has described a series of zig-zags. If you start with the other foot, the figure will equally present a series of zig-zags, though some differ from the former ones.

Similarly, if you begin with the foot of Prudence, your eye travels up to the knee; then horizontally toward the lap; next up the slight backward slope of the body; then in the opposite direction, when you reach the neck and head. The contrasts in the figure of Moderation are so marked, that I am sure you can make the zig-zag for yourself.

I have used the word zig-zag because I want you to feel how marked the contrasts are, and to realise that it is by means of these contrasts that an artist composes his figures. The zig-zag, however, in the actual figure has rounded angles; it is indeed rather a series of alternate curves to right and left, somewhat like the curves described by a skilful and graceful skater, cutting figures on the ice. And it is this series of curves that give the effect of rhythm as well as harmony to the figures in this picture. For, as you may have seen for yourself, the principles on which an artist composes a single figure are the same as those he uses in the composition of several figures into one picture. He relies upon repetitions and contrasts to produce a balance, which because of its rhythm of parts shall ensure a harmonious whole.

The only difference in the case of the picture is that the composition is made up, not only of figures, but of the empty spaces of the background also. As artists would say, the composition is an arrangement of full and empty spaces; and its beauty depends upon the harmony and balance between them. In the Jurisprudence, for example, it is remarkable how the space filled by the figure of Prudence, corresponds in size and even in its wedge shape to the empty space formed by the upper and lower step of stonework. For the rest, the quantity of space occupied by the other two figures seems to be about equal to the empty spaces around them, though the latter, instead of being solid masses are broken up and distributed. But you will notice, how large a stretch of empty space is left at the top of the lunette, so that the eye is drawn upward and the dignity of the whole decoration thereby elevated. Note also, what a quiet impressive spot the head of Prudence makes against the background of the sky. There is, as it were, nothing to disturb its gracious repose. This device of setting a figure against the background of the sky, Raphael may have learned from one of his masters, Perugino. At any rate, both employed it, with beautiful effect.

You may often see in nature the beauty of this effect; when, for example, on the top of some rising ground a tree, or a figure, or a church spire, stands against the sky. If the object is motionless, it seems to become more impressive because of the vastness of the sky. Or, should the objects be children at play (I can remember a picture of this), then their sport seems to take on more joyousness, freedom, and buoyancy, from the vastness of the sky.

And now, a short description of the way in which this decoration was painted. It is what is called “fresco,” an Italian word that means “fresh.” The name is used because the painting is done while the plaster of the wall is still fresh, that is to say, not “set” or dry. The following is the process. The wall was first covered, as in our houses to-day, with a coat of rough-cast plaster, which was allowed to dry thoroughly. In the meanwhile the artist had prepared full-sized drawings of his figures. As soon as he was ready, a thin coating of smooth-finish plaster was spread over such portion of the lunette as he could paint in a day. Upon this the drawing was placed and an assistant would go over all the lines with a blunt-pointed tool, pressing hard enough on the paper to leave a mark in the plaster underneath. There, when the paper was removed, appeared the figure, enclosed in grooved lines. Then the artist set to work and laid in the color, using paint that was mixed, not with oil, but with water to which some gluey substance was added. The plaster, you remember, was still damp, but since it contained plenty of cement, dried or “set” quickly, and as it dried, the paint dried with it, and became a part of the plaster. When it was done, the artist, if he wished, could add a few decisive strokes. The following day another portion of the lunette would be treated in the same manner and so on until the whole was painted. It is a method, you see, that left the artist no chance of fumbling over his work. He had to make up his mind beforehand exactly what he meant to do, and to do it quickly. Hence, with an artist so skilled as Raphael, the work has the extra charm that belongs to what has been done easily and fluently. You know how much pleasanter it is to listen to an easy, fluent speaker than to one who hesitates and corrects himself continually. So, too, in a work of art, the feeling that it has grown easily under the artist’s hand adds to our enjoyment of it. It seems to be a spontaneous expression of himself.

CHAPTER VIII
THE CLASSIC LANDSCAPE

WE have seen in the previous chapters how Raphael built up composition from a simple geometric plan, on the principles of repetition and contrast, rhythmically balanced. Other Italian artists worked upon the same lines, and with such skill and grandeur of invention that the Italian pictures, especially of the Sixteenth Century, are still considered the finest examples of this sort of composition. It is distinguished by being what we may call “formal,” or “conventional.”

The figures are arranged, that is to say, not as you would be likely to see them in actual life, but according to a rule or formula or convention. The idea has been not to represent a real scene, but to display the figures and their surroundings in such a way as to produce an effect of beauty; sometimes a simple one, more often one of great impressiveness or magnificent splendor. The figures and other objects have been so arranged and so drawn as to furnish an orderly pattern of beauty and dignity. The subjects of the pictures might be taken from the Bible story or from the legends of ancient Greece, or be simply invented to set forth the pride that the people took in their cities—the pomp and glory of Venice, for example. But, no matter what the subject might be, the aim of the artist was first and foremost to paint a thing of beauty. And in this search for beauty he soon discovered how much depended upon the surroundings of his figures and the objects that he introduced.

When he desired the simpler kind of beauty he set his figures in lovely landscape scenery with hills and trees and winding streams; when he was bent on grander effects, he added architectural settings. For the architects of that day were erecting noble buildings with columns and arches, vaulted roofs and domes; partly in imitation of the remains of Roman architecture, but also designed in a fresh spirit of invention to fit the new purposes for which the buildings were required. Thus arose that vast temple of the Roman Church, St. Peter’s. It is what is called a classic building; because its style is in many respects like that of the old classic Roman temples, which in their turn had represented a new use of the still older classic style of Greek architecture.

The painters, then, inspired by the work of the architects, discovered how much dignity they could give to their own compositions by introducing architectural features. Sometimes they would introduce columns, or a flight of steps or a balustrade, sometimes a whole building; or represent the figures grouped in a street or square, surrounded by buildings, or often inside a building, standing under a vaulted ceiling. These are only a few of the architectural features, so freely used by the Italian painters. Let us study their value to the composition.

Some people who live in country homes are fond of flowers. They grow cluster-roses, honeysuckle, wistaria and other long-armed climbing plants over their verandahs. If they are fond of gardening and not satisfied merely with a lawn and a few shrubs, they will erect arches and trellis-work on which vines may cling and cluster. In the first place, they know that these slender, straggling plants will thrive better, if they have some support; they will not be so torn by the buffets of the wind, and their limbs and leaves and flowers will get more sunshine. Secondly, they will show to better advantage, because of the contrast of their winding, wreathing forms and irregular masses with the firm, strong, simple lines of the verandah or trellis-work. United they form a prettier composition, than would the vines and cluster-roses, if huddling in an unsupported tangle.

The principle is the same in the composition of a picture, where the vines are represented by the action of the figures. To their irregular masses of drapery and undulating lines of limbs the architecture presents at once the contrast and support of decided lines and clearly defined masses. And since the classic style of architecture, which was used, is so noble, it added nobility to the composition. Even the penny photographs of the Italian pictures will prove to you that this is so. Study them and find this out for yourselves.

Now, the example of the Italians, in this respect, was followed by other nations, especially the French. The latter continue to this day the painting of beautiful pictures in which the figures are combined with landscape and architecture. And our own American artists are doing the same thing, as you can see if you have a chance of visiting the Library of Congress, at Washington, or any other of the public buildings throughout this country, in which the walls have been decorated with mural paintings.[3]

So far we have been speaking of the use of architecture to support the figures. In time, however, artists found a new use for it. They employed it to support the landscape; which brings us to a talk about what is called the “Classic Landscape.”

Nowadays, when so many artists paint nothing else but landscape pictures, it may seem strange that the Italians of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries used landscape only as a support for the figures. It was not because they were blind to the beautiful scenery of their own country, for, when they did introduce it into their pictures, they represented it in a very lovely way. But always as a background to the figures, which you are made to feel are the principal features of the picture. The reason is that the public for whom they painted demanded figure subjects. The Church required pictures that would bring home to the hearts of the people who could not read the beauty of the Bible

The Manitou Lunette. E. H. Blashfield.

Story; rich men and women wished to decorate their palaces with scenes from the old Greek legends; while cities adorned their public buildings with allegorical subjects in which the pride they took in their own municipal life was set forth in figures, personifying the character of its greatness. Moreover, those were stirring times in which the rivalry between the cities and between the noble families led to constant wars and plottings. Men, beginning as nobodies, rose rapidly to power. Not, as they do to-day in our country, by using their brains and energy in the peaceful pursuits of industry and trade and learning; but through brute force, guided by brains that schemed to win by fraud and violence. So it was man that, as we say, cut the chief figure in these times; man’s power and woman’s beauty. Mankind was so interested in itself that it spared little thought for the beauty of nature. It is true that architects built noble houses on sites commanding beautiful views and laid out the gardens with fountains, trees and flowers. Even this however, was for the glorification of some man or woman. But the love of nature which leads artists to paint landscapes and the public to value such pictures is a different thing. In the love of nature man forgets himself; he is absorbed in the beauty of the natural world outside himself; he is fond of nature for its own sake.

It was not until the Seventeenth Century that artists began to study and paint the landscape in this spirit. When they did so, the landscape took the first place in their pictures, and the figures, if any were introduced, became the unimportant features, kept small and put in merely to enliven the scene. By this time landscape painting, as a subject distinct in itself, branched out into two directions—the naturalistic and the formal. The naturalistic was practised by the Dutch artists, who painted the out of door life and appearance of Holland so truthfully, that to-day when we look at their pictures we can see the meadows and streams, the mills and the farms, exactly as they were three hundred years ago. But the subject of natural landscape we will study later on.

The other kind of landscape I have called formal because, instead of being drawn directly from nature, it was made up, like the Italian figure pictures, according to a rule or formula or convention. Just as in those pictures the figures were represented as grander and more beautiful than people usually are in real life, and were arranged for the purpose of a handsome composition in attitudes that people do not usually assume, so with the formal landscapes. The artists tried to make them more grand and imposing than ordinary nature, and composed them according to an artificial plan. They did not in their picture represent any real scene in nature, but built up a number of natural details into a composition, constructed on a geometric plan. And especially they introduced details of classic architecture; so that these formal designs are often called classic landscapes.

If you turn to the illustration you will see at once that the artist has not represented the natural landscape. The very title, Dido Building Carthage, shows the classic influence. The subject is taken from Virgil’s Æneid, Book I, line 420. Turner, the great English artist, who in 1815 painted this picture, had never seen Carthage; nor had he ever seen any spot on earth like the one represented here. What he had seen was the work of Claude Lorrain, a French artist of the Seventeenth Century, who lived in Italy and invented this kind of landscape. Turner himself preferred to paint the natural landscape; but, since the people of his own day admired the classic landscape of Claude and his followers, he wished to prove that he also could paint like Claude, if he chose; and as well as the French artist. Therefore, when he died, he left this picture and another classic landscape, The Sun rising in a Mist to the National Gallery, on condition that they should be hung alongside of two by Claude Lorrain. So, while studying this picture we are really studying the principles on which Claude built up the classic landscape, and on which his followers worked for nearly two hundred years, until the love of nature won out and the naturalistic landscape took its place.

The geometric plan of this picture is very simple. You can discover it by joining the upper and lower opposite corners by two diagonal lines that cut each other in the center. This produces four triangles; of which the top is given to the sky, the bottom to the water, and the two sides to the land and buildings and trees. Sky and water occupy more space than the other two parts; but since the latter are filled with details of bold design, they attract extra attention, so that the balance between the full and empty spaces is kept true.

The balance is a harmonious one. You will perhaps realise better what this means if you think for a moment of a balance that is not harmonious; for instance of a pair of hanging scales, in one pan of which there is a flat round one pound weight, exactly balancing a pound of candy in the other pan. We should not call this a harmonious balance. If we examine why it is not, it will help us to understand the meaning of harmony in composition. The reason is that there is no relation between the box of candy and the one pound weight, except that each weighs the same. On the other hand, in the picture every detail has some relation to the other details, and all are related to the whole. The whole, in fact, is a woven mass of contrasts and repetitions, in exact relation; very much as a composition of music is made up of exactly related contrasts and repetitions of sound notes. Alter one of these and there will be a discord, unless some other notes are altered to restore the harmony. Similarly if the artist had altered the shape of one of the details in his picture, or its color, or its lightness or darkness, there would have been a discord in the effect of his picture; it would no longer present the appearance of perfect oneness. He would have to alter some other parts to restore the harmony.

In studying the picture to try and discover how the effect of harmony is produced we find ourselves studying the contrasts and repetitions of which it is composed. And, first the contrasts. One big one is the contrast of the architecture with everything else in the picture—the contrast of these quiet stately masses, which seem so firm and strong, compared with the shimmering surface of the water and the tremulous mistiness of the sky; the contrast also of their decided lines with the irregular spotting of the figures, and with the irregular masses of the trees and foliage. The big tree, although it is motionless in the quiet air, seems as if a breeze would stir it; the water has ripples of motion; some of the figures appear to be moving, while others are only still for the moment, and the sky—it is palpitating with the actual stir of the atmosphere, as the upper air gradually cools and draws up the warmer air from below, and this warmer air cools into mistiness. But the buildings stand immovable and solid. While all around them either moves or could move, they seem to suggest the force and permanence of what does not change. Or perhaps we may feel that grand as the buildings are, stately and magnificent, yet the sky is lovelier, for the buildings are limited to their one size and shape, while the sky seems a part of that which has no limits or boundaries. It draws off our imagination into the mystery of distance and of the unknown. So the impressions which the contrast of the architecture arouses are not only such as the eye can see, but such also as the imagination can feel. This, no doubt, is one of the secrets of the pleasure which so many people have found and still find in classic landscapes.

And now for another series of contrasts: those supplied by the lights and darks. In the original picture these contrasts would depend partly on the color of the various objects; but here, in the black and white reproduction, we may think of the pattern simply as one of very dark spots and very light ones, threaded together by others of varying depths of greyness. Again, what an important part the sky plays! It is a flood of light, against which everything forms a silhouette,[4] more or less dark, relieved by spots and streaks of light. The water, but for the pathway of reflection, is shrouded in shadow. Shadow, too, is wrapping itself round the tall building on the left, and slumbers drowsily among the trees on the opposite hill slopes. The artist, you will notice, has varied the distribution of shadows. On the left the gradation from very dark to very light is continuous. It is as if the first building struck a loud strong note, and the sound gradually diminished toward the distance. On the right, however, the foreground is lighter, and the dark gradually increases, swelling up, as they say in music, in a crescendo effect and then passing in a diminuendo far off into the distance. In fact, on both sides of

Dido Building Carthage. J. M. W. Turner.

the picture the arrangement of dark and light is rhythmical. I have only touched upon the broad general plan of contrasted darks and lights, and must leave you to study for yourselves the intricate and subtle effects with which the picture abounds; for example, the fine threads and little dots of light and dark that form a tangle on the left bank; or, on the right, the mass of leafage in half shadow against which the trunk of the tree shows very dark. You know the old proverb about leading a horse to the water. I can draw your attention to these things, but I can not make you feel their beauty. I think, however, I can promise you, that, if you are sufficiently interested in what we are talking about to really study this picture, to explore carefully the lighter parts and peer into the shadows to see what lurks within them, its beauty will make itself known to you.

As I myself am examining a black and white reproduction of this picture, that lies before me while I write these lines, there is music coming from the next room. It has stopped, and I wish it would begin again; for music seems to fit in with the impressions that this picture stirs in my imagination. Nor is this merely a fanciful idea. Music is one art and painting is another. They are different, it is true, but yet are sisters with much in common. And why not? For they come from the same parents—the hand and the mind of man. And through the harmony of the light and dark of which this picture is composed there floats, it seems to me, the fancy of a melody. I think it comes from out the endless distance of that sky; gently floating toward us, and crooning over the objects in the foreground, as a mother murmurs a lullaby over her baby while it falls asleep. But it is not altogether crooning, for see that tree’s dark, round mass of tone! How it thumps itself into our notice, while its force spreads up the hill, and then leaps across the water, and stirs with a different kind of energy in the dark building on the left. There is nothing of the feebleness and the helplessness of a baby in this picture. It suggests rather, big and mighty effort, growing toward the time of rest. It is not the music of a lullaby I seem to hear, but the evening hymn of sturdy workers as they cease for a little from their toil.

CHAPTER IX
NATURALISTIC COMPOSITION

IN the preceding chapters we have been studying formal, or conventional, composition. We have seen how the artists arrange their groups of figures and the position and gestures of each figure according to a rule or formula or convention, the basis of which is a geometric plan, on which they build up a balance of repetitions and contrasts. And we have noted that these formal compositions are artificial arrangements; that the figures are not grouped as you might expect them to be in real life, nor in positions that men and women usually assume. And these formal compositions we have seen were also called, classic; the last example being the classic landscape in which nature has been made to look more grand by the addition of features of classic architecture.

We reach now another principle of composition. It is the arrangement adopted by the artist, whose motive is to make his picture represent nature naturally; so I call it naturalistic composition. But, as we have noted before, the artist is not satisfied merely to represent nature; he wishes in the first place to make his picture a thing of beauty. Nature is not always beautiful; so he selects from nature and arranges his subject in such a way, that we shall not only recognise how true the picture is to nature, but feel also how beautiful it is as a work of art. Its beauty, you see, is founded, not upon a formal plan, but on its truth to nature.

Here for example, is The Sower by the French artist, Jean François Millet. If we have ever seen a man scattering grain, we recognise at once the picture’s truth to life. But Millet’s intention was not only to make us know what the man is doing, but to create an impression on our minds that shall make us feel a sense of beauty, through the way in which the picture represents the incident. As a young man, Millet had studied the examples of Greek and Roman sculpture in the Museum of the Louvre in Paris, and learnt through them the classic principles of composition—the balance obtained by rhythmical repetition and contrast. And these principles, as we shall see presently, are applied to this figure of The Sower. I hope to show you that this is the secret of the picture’s beauty. Although the action of the figure inside the shabby clothes is quite natural, the movement is rhythmical. In fact it represents a mixture of the classical and the naturalistic motive.

Firstly, the naturalistic. We know at a glance what the man is doing. The forms in the picture, the colors, the light and shade, make an impression on the eye which is immediately telegraphed to one of the centers of the brain. The result is that we know the picture represents a man in a field sowing grain, while from the color and light in the sky, and the shadows creeping over the field, we know that it is twilight.

This direct thought stirs us to further thinking; for we recall that laborers start for their work in early morning, so this one has probably been toiling all through the day. But we notice that his actions are still vigorous, he should be tired, yet he is working as sturdily as at any time during the day; perhaps with even more energy, in order that he may finish sowing the field before the darkness comes. In fact, the arrangement of forms, colors, and light and shade has made a strong impression on the thinking part of the brain, stirring us not only to observe, but to draw conclusions. And this, of course, is what Millet meant that it should do.

But this was not all that he intended. Most people of his day must have thought it was; for nearly all the critics, or persons who are supposed to be able to judge of the value of a picture, and nearly all the connoisseurs, who are supposed to be able to appreciate its beauty, turned up their noses and shrugged their shoulders. “This is horrible!” they exclaimed. “A common laborer in his dirty clothes, doing his miserable work. Ugh! how vulgar! This is not art; for art should be concerned with beauty. Why does not the fellow paint some beautiful girl in beautiful draperies? Phew! Take the picture away, it smells of the farm.”

You see they confined their criticisms and appreciation to what the picture was about—its subject; and because they did not like the subject, they condemned the picture. They got no further than knowing and thinking, they did not permit themselves to feel. But it was on their feelings also that Millet wished to make an impression. Through the arrangement of line, form, color, and light and shade he sought to stir that other part of the brain to which messages are telegraphed by the senses, with a result that we are made to feel. Let us analyse the composition; and see how it illustrates the principle that we have been discussing of balance, and rhythmic repetition, and contrast.

We will begin with the latter. Note, then, how the sloping line of the field cuts across the picture. This diagonal line is contrasted with the perpendicular sides of the picture, and with the upright direction of the figure of the man. It forms, however, another contrast; it divides the light from the dark. The sun has gone down behind the slope; so that, while the sky is still luminous with a lovely glow, the ground is in shadow, dreary and heavy looking. So, too, the figure of the man. The light is at his back, so that what we see of him is shrouded in gloom. Against the gloom of the ground his figure shows comparatively indistinctly, but the upper part stands very sharp against the light. There is a strong contrast between its heaviness and gloom and the lovely radiance of the waning light; while down below the figure looms out of the gloom and heaviness, as if it were a part of them that had gathered into definite shape. Yes, though his head may stand against the sky, the man is part of the earth.

Right away, is there nothing in this to make us feel? Millet, at any rate, had often felt the poignancy of contrast, in his own life and in the lives of others. He had known what it was to see his wife and children short of food, to have his own stomach empty, while his mind was full of beautiful ideas, and his cottage full of pictures, that some day men would buy, but not yet. He had seen little bright faced children standing at the open grave of the father or the mother; the happy young bride at the altar, and among the congregation the young widow; and evening after evening, as the darkness fell, the lonely figures in the field, toiling out their short lives, whilst behind them spread the everlasting beauty of the sunset, and a few miles off in Paris, where he came from, the lights were gleaming and people were making ready for pleasure, though there too, as he knew from his own experience, people starved. Yes, it is through experience that we learn to feel deeply, and it is to experience that the contrast of this picture appeals.

When we recognise that by this contrast of light and darkness, Millet sought to express the dreary routine, day in day out, early and late, of the peasant’s lot in a world where nature is so beautiful, and there can be so much beauty in life, we may imagine to ourselves what would be the effect of raising or lowering the diagonal line. To have given more lighted space, would have made the figure stand out too prominently so that it would have dominated the scene, and the scene itself would have seemed too spacious. Velasquez, in his equestrian portraits, kept the horizon line low, so that Philip IV, for example, or his minister, Olivarez, is made to appear a very important person in a very large world. But Millet wished us to feel the lowliness of the peasant, bound close to the earth in very narrow surroundings. Again, to have raised the horizon line, would have destroyed the balance between light and darkness, which now is absolutely true. This balance suggests a feeling of repose; shall I say of acquiescence in the necessity of the contrast? For Millet did not consider himself a reformer whose work is to set things right and to do away with contrasts; but an artist, whose aim was to harmonise the contrasts and to find some balance between the lights and darks of life; just as Stevenson out of his weakness and strength made his life a beautiful one.

And now let us study the lines of the figure. In the first place you will agree that they enclose a form which is unmistakably that of a man sowing grain. It was necessary for Millet to arrange the lines, in some way that should convey this impression. But there are many other ways in which they might have been arranged, so as to obtain this result. For in the act of sowing a man takes many positions and any one of these would have done, if all the artist had desired was to make us know that the man was sowing. But Millet wished to do more.

As a boy he toiled in his father’s fields, so he had

The Sower. J. F. Millet.

a fellow-feeling for the peasants; and as he watched them, day after day laboring so faithfully, he found a big idea in their work. It was something like this—work is necessary, and to do our own share of it as well as we can is the big thing for each of us. And the oldest work of all and the most necessary is the growing of the wheat. To-day the seed is laid in rows by machine-drills; but in Millet’s time it was scattered by hand, just as it had been since man began to sow. This sower, then, that he watched was a descendant of a long line of sowers, stretching back to the beginning of civilisation; and still in the fields of Barbizon he was doing his humble share of the world’s necessary work. Millet felt the bigness of this idea; and in his imagination the man was no longer Jacques or Jean—a sower; he became “The Sower,” a type—a big heroic type. Then, as Millet felt him to be, so he set to work to paint him, choosing such lines as would convey this big feeling to us. Observe, first, the balance of the figure: how the weight of the body is planted almost equally on both feet. If you try to put yourself in the position, you will find that you can raise neither foot without moving the body. If you wish to raise the back foot, you must move the body forward till the weight is on the right foot; or, if you would raise this latter, you must move the body back till the weight is over the left foot. The center of gravity or of mass runs down through the body and between the legs. Now sway your body backward and forward a few times, and then bring forward the left leg in front of the right, so that the position of the feet is reversed. Now sway again forward and backward. I ask you to do this that you may feel how freely the body moves in this position. And I ask you to stride, that you may feel that the position in the picture is only a momentary one, leading on to a natural advance. For this perfect poise of the body on the feet is not a stationary one, that in time will seem stiff, but part of a moving one, that has the freedom and the naturalness of life. And the movement is a swift one. We can feel it is so from the length of the stride; for it is only when you are moving quickly, that you can take long strides, and still preserve the balanced, rhythmic swing of the body.

We have spoken of the poise of the body on the legs; now let us note the action of the right arm. The action, I need hardly say, begins with taking a handful of grain from the bag; then the arm is swung back to the right to its full extent, and then again brought back to the bag. Between these two points—that of the bag and that of the full extent—the arm is poised in motion, just as the action of the body was poised between the backward and forward motion of the legs. We can feel that the arm is moving, and, at this instant it is moving backward, for our own experience when we walk and swing our arms naturally is that each arm goes back as the leg on that side goes forward. The man’s arm will reach its furthest point backward when he brings his full weight on the right foot. In a word, the poise of the arm and the poise of the leg correspond. They present an example of repetition of balance. It is enforced, you will observe, in the composition by the arm being made parallel to the direction of the backward leg. This is another instance of repetition; and there are still others: the repetitions of the waist line, the shoulders, and the hat brim; of the bandage on the left leg, the line from the shoulder through the thigh, the apron, hanging over the arm, and of the echo, as it were, of these, in the tail of the distant ox and the arm of the driver. These repetitions, and others that you may discover for yourself, help to bind the composition together and also to make it rhythmic.

And now for contrast, we have noted the big one made by the diagonal line, dividing the composition into light and dark. Let us note those appearing in the figure. First there is the big contrast of the figure’s own diagonal line from the shoulders down through the right leg. It is contrasted most forcibly with the sides of the picture, the horizon line, and the direction of the right arm and the left leg. The latter are practically at right angles to the figure—strongest of all contrasts of line. It is to all these vigorous contrasts that the energy and assertion of the figure are mainly due. But there are other contrasts in the figure. Do you notice that the swing of the arm brings the trunk of the body, or the torso, as it is called, along with it? Swing your own arm and you will find your torso following its direction. If the man’s arm were to reach its full extension, his left shoulder would appear and his torso would front us nearly full. If his hand should reach the bag, the right shoulder would come forward until the torso would be seen almost in profile. However, neither of these extremes is presented. The swing of the torso is poised between the two. But do you observe that the swing of the torso and arms is across the path of direction of the swing of the legs? While they swing forward and backward, the arms and torso swing alternately from right to left and left to right.

Imitate this action with your own body, step forward briskly with a swinging stride and at the same time swing your arms and torso. If you feel the exhilaration of the action as I think you will, you will realise that it is the wonderful way in which Millet has suggested this contrast of the swing, that makes the action of the figure so stirring. By the contrast of its lines, it expresses energy; by the contrast of swing, so free, so rhythmic, so vigorous, it lifts us to enthusiasm.

But finally observe the position of the head and the direction of its gaze. While below it the torso and arms swing from side to side, the head is fixed, leaning a little forward in the direction of the onward movement, its eyes firmly set on what is ahead. Within the head is the brain which directs all the action of the figure. But the face is shadowed over, and through the shadow the features appear coarse and heavy. We feel that the brain, though prompting the man to do his work to the utmost, is after all a dull brain, in pitiful contrast to the vigor of the body. Heroic though the figure is in the grandeur of its free, swift movement, as grand, if you will take my word for it, as a Greek statue, yet it is but that of a humble peasant, unconscious that he is doing aught but that which he has to do.

There you have the idea as it presented itself to the imagination of Millet!

“The Sower” is a striking illustration of the point with which I started this book; that the beauty of a picture does not depend upon the subject, but upon the way it is represented.

CHAPTER X
NATURALISTIC COMPOSITION (Continued)

IN The Sower, by Millet, we found that, though the composition was naturalistic, it was based upon the classic principle of rhythm of line. We shall not discover this principle in the present picture of a Young Woman Opening a Window. The arrangement of the figure and its surroundings is simply natural.

The picture is by Johannes Vermeer[5] of Delft, so called because this town in Holland was his birthplace and the scene of his life’s work. Born in 1632, he is one of those famous Dutch artists of the Seventeenth Century, of whom I have already spoken. We were talking of landscape painting and mentioned that in this century the art branched out in two directions. Landscape up to that time having been used as a background for figures, became then an independent art, cultivated for its own sake; and the artists treated it in two ways. On the one hand, some applied the principles of geometric composition to an artificial building up of bits of nature into what is called the formal, or classic landscape; while other painters represented the natural landscape naturally. These latter were the Dutchmen, who treated figures also in the same realistic spirit. That is to say, whether they painted portraits or figure pictures or landscapes, their aim was to represent the actual subject as they really saw it. They did not substitute an artificial arrangement for the natural appearance of people and things; nor did they try to obtain beauty by altering and improving upon nature. Their motive or purpose was to render the beauty that is actually in nature. So, for the most part, they chose subjects of familiar every day life.

This picture, for example, represents simply a glimpse of home life, of a Dutch girl in well-to-do circumstances. Perhaps the artist intended to make a portrait of her; probably his intention was only to paint a genre picture, that is to say, an incident of every day life. Not so much, however, for the sake of representing the incident, as of making it contribute to a subject of abstract beauty. How he has done this I hope we shall see presently. Meanwhile, I want you to grasp the distinction between simply representing an incident, as you or I might have seen it, if we had been present, and Vermeer’s motive of using the incident as a peg on which to hang some beauty of light and color and texture. I mean, it was the beauty of light and color and texture that made him pleased to paint this picture; and probably he would have been just as pleased if some other girl had been standing there, or some other objects had been spread upon the table.

Perhaps a familiar example will illustrate this distinction. Two people start off for an afternoon’s walk. One sets out because he wishes to call upon a friend who lives on the other side of the wood. To pay this call is the object of his walk; for the friend is building a new house. As he walks along he is busy wondering how far it is advanced, whether the plasterers have finished their work; and as he returns home he is thinking about the house he has seen and how he himself, when he builds a house of his own, will plan it differently. In fact, the incident of his friend’s being engaged in building is what interests him, and has been throughout the afternoon the motive of his walk. His companion, on the other hand, agrees to go along with him, not so much because he is interested in the house, although he is to some extent, but mostly because he loves a walk. He enjoys the exhilaration of the exercise; he is fond of the wood through which they have to pass. He will have a chance to hunt for the first signs of spring—the early skunk-cabbage, the shy peep of the violet through the dead leaves underfoot, the rose blush of the maples overhead, the piping and flicker of the first bird-arrivals and so on. The real motive of his walk is the joy of exercise and of the beauties met with on the way. Visiting the house was but an excuse.

There is the same distinction among painters. To some the representation of the incident is the main thing; to others, the rendering of the beauties which it involves. Vermeer, like the other Dutch artists, of the Seventeenth Century, belonged to the latter

Young Woman Opening a Window. Johannes Vermeer.

(Property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

class. Since, however, his subject is the peg on which he hangs his arrangement of light and color, let us begin by examining it.

A young woman is standing between a table and a window. With one hand she opens the casement while the other grasps the handle of a brass pitcher that stands in an ewer of the same material. Perhaps she is going to water some flowers that are outside on the window sill. Her costume consists of a dark blue skirt, buff-colored bodice, and a broad collar and hood-like cap of thin white linen. The table is covered with an oriental cloth, on which is a yellow jewel case, while over the blue chair lies a cloak of lighter blue. On the gray wall hangs a map. This and the table cloth may remind us, that the Dutch of that period, although they were fighting for their political liberty against Spain, found means to build ships and carry on trade across the sea with far distant countries. Possibly the girl was the daughter of some sea-captain or prosperous merchant.

Anyhow the picture, beside being a beautiful painting, is very interesting to us to-day as an illustration of the domestic life of a Dutch girl of some two hundred and fifty years ago. And the same interest belongs to all the old genre pictures. They make the past still alive to our eyes; just as the genre pictures painted to-day will show some future generation how we lived. But this, I repeat, was not Vermeer’s first thought. On the other hand, I do not wish you to think that he was not himself interested in the subject of his picture. He was, I am sure; but in another way. He, no doubt, arranged the figure with great care and carefully selected and grouped the surrounding objects. But, in placing the girl, he did not try to get the graceful lines that Raphael, for example, would have imagined. Vermeer’s desire was to keep the pose and gesture natural. In this he was simply following the general motive of the artists of his country and of that time. But his own particular motive in representing the girl in the act of opening the window was that the clear outside light might stream in at the back of her figure and blend with the dimmer light of the interior.

I said that we would study the kind of beauty that this picture possesses; and it is to be found in the rendering of the light. The Italians, busy with their grand classic compositions, would not have thought of this. Their motive was the beauty of form, arrayed in beautiful draperies, and so arranged that the figures should produce beautiful patterns of line and form. To make a motive of the beauty of natural light was a discovery of the Dutch.

They were artists, you see, and therefore in love with beauty. But they confined themselves, almost entirely, to real subjects of every day life, and accordingly had to find out the beauty that may be in these familiar things. And it was not long before they learned how much the beauty of things depends upon the light in which they are seen.

Before we go any further in our study of the picture, let us see if we cannot be sure of this from our own experience. Whether you live in a city or in the country, how differently you feel when you start out in the morning, according as the day is fine or not. Under a bright sky everything takes on a cheerfulness that is communicated to our own spirit. Let the sky become downcast and the appearance of objects becomes dulled. Often too, some familiar object that we have passed time and time again without particular notice, suddenly attracts us. How beautiful! we exclaim. If we try to discover the reason of the beauty, we shall find very likely, that it is due to some effect of light. It need not be a bright light, on the contrary, it may be a soft light, such as wraps itself around objects like a gauzy veil, when the sky is thick with vapor. Do you remember that line of Tennyson’s—“Waves of light went over the wheat”? He had been watching a field of wheat, spread out smoothly like a pale golden carpet in the yellow sunshine. Suddenly, a soft breeze passes over it, and as the stems bend their heavy heads of grain, and recover themselves, ripples of light travel across the field. The poet notes it in his memory, for a future poem. So, if we use our eyes, we may note countless examples of the beauty which is added to the simplest things by light. In fact, the changing effect of light will correspond to the changing expressions that pass over the human face.

The Dutch artists, as soon as they became really interested in the nature and life around them, quickly recognised this fact, and made it the chief motive of their pictures. They were no longer satisfied with mere realism; that is to say, to make the figure and the objects around it look as real in the pictures as they did in actual reality. They sought to render the expression of which these objects were capable, under the influence of light. If you do not understand this I think you will, if you place a bunch of flowers in some dark corner of the room, look at it a little while, and then move it to the window. Now, as the light falls upon the flowers and shines through the petals, the whole bunch is transfigured. It has taken on a new appearance of beauty. Like a face that has suddenly lighted up with an expression of happiness, the flowers seem alive with radiance. They too, have their expression and it will change with the changing of light. For look at them again toward evening, when the light is low, and their faces, not less beautiful, will show a quite different expression.

Now the light which streamed in at that window in Delft, when Vermeer painted this picture, was a very cool, pure light; one would say, from seeing the original picture, a morning light in Spring, it is so pure and fresh and fragrant. Yes, one can even feel the fragrance of its freshness, so exquisitely has the artist suggested to us the impression of the lighted air that steals into the room, filling it with purity. See, how it bathes the wall; even the bare gray becomes radiant; how it gleams on the girl’s shoulder, and filters through her cap, making it in parts transparent, so that one sees the background color through it. Note also, how it roams among the objects in the room, caressing the under part of the girl’s right arm, bringing out the softness and plumpness of her left wrist; splashing the ewer and touching the pitcher, the table cloth, and other details with glints of sparkle, like notes of gladness in a melody of tender freshness.

Even in the reproduction one can feel the freshness that pervades the room, and the delicate quality of the lighted atmosphere that envelopes the figures and fills every part of the scene. I mean, that not only is this effect of light visible to our eyes, but it also stirs in us a sentiment or feeling of gladness and refreshment. Still more will the original, if you have a chance of seeing it in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, where, though a very small picture, it is one of the gems of the collection. For there you will feel also the effect of the color, yellow, gray, and various hues of blue. They are all cool colors, the blues especially, and very pure in hue, which increases the sensation of freshness.

A moment ago I spoke of the picture as being like a melody. It will suggest to some imaginations the blitheness of a spring-song. The fact that a painting may sometimes seem to have the tunefulness or harmony of music I have already mentioned in a previous chapter. The reason is that painting and music, although different arts, have certain elements in common. Later on, when we shall speak of color, I shall try to suggest to you the correspondence between sound notes in music and color notes in painting. But for the present I will remind you of an element, common to both arts, of which we have already spoken—rhythm. In Raphael’s Jurisprudence, I pointed out to you the rhythm of movement in the figures. It flows through the forms of the figures in rippling, wave-like lines of direction. But nothing of that sort is apparent in Vermeer’s picture. There are repetitions and contrasts in the arrangement of the full and empty spaces; but they represent rather a pattern of spots; we are not conscious of any rhythm of line. Then, in what does the rhythm consist?

If you think of that line of Tennyson’s—“Waves of light went over the wheat,” you may perhaps discover for yourselves the kind of rhythm in this picture. To give you time to think it out, before I tell you, let me ask you, if you have noticed that in a flower-bed in the garden a number of blossoms of different colors will “dwell together in unity,” but if you pick some of these and bring them indoors and begin to arrange them in a vase, the colors will seem to clash. That they do not appear to clash in the flower bed is because the out-of-door light envelopes everything, soothes the violence of the colors and brings them all into an appearance of harmony. Similarly in this picture, the light streaming through the window brings all the different spots of color into a single harmony of effect. They are no longer separate and independent, but drawn together and united by the veil of lighted atmosphere. Of this again, we will speak when we reach the subject of color.

But the rhythm of this picture, in what does it consist? Yes, in the movement, not of form, but of light. Uniting all the colors into a single harmony, it flows in and out through the lighter and darker parts of the composition; sometimes in a broad sweeping flood, as on the wall; sometimes in little pulses of movement, as it leaps from point to point; now losing itself in the hollow of a shadow, then reappearing in the gleam of a fold; all the while streaming through the picture in a continuous ebb and flow. In fact, as we study it, we gradually find that the light does for the parts of this composition what the lines of direction did in Raphael’s—it unites them in a rhythmic movement.

Do not be disturbed, if at first reading these words convey little meaning to you; or if at first sight you do not feel the rhythm of the composition. It is there, however, and some day, if you are really going to be a student of pictures, you will feel it yourself.

For the present, if you will accept my word for it, I wish you to understand that this rhythmic effect of out-of-door light represented a new motive in painting. The Italians of the great period did not see it. It was the discovery of the Dutch realists, those artists of Holland in the Seventeenth Century, whose study was the real appearances of nature and life.[6] Their pictures were not as grand as the Italians’; for they were small in size, and were not built up on the magnificently formal plan that gives such a dignity and distinction to the Italian pictures. Nor are their subjects so heroic and impressive. They represent only the facts of every day life. Yet they have a great beauty of their own, because they rely on the inexhaustible beauty of light.

It is on this same beauty that after two hundred years artists of our own day are relying. They have gone back to the example of Vermeer and the other Dutch artists, and are applying it to the study of similar subjects. They are painting nature as it shows itself to them in its envelope of lighted atmosphere.

CHAPTER XI
THE NATURALISTIC LANDSCAPE

WE come now to the other arm of the Y, about which we spoke in a previous chapter. Landscape had been used as a background to the figures, until in the Seventeenth Century some artists began to make it the chief subject of their pictures. But no sooner was landscape painting practised as a separate art than it branched into two directions. We followed one of these and saw how Claude Lorrain invented the formal, or classic landscape; taking bits of nature, some from one place, some from another, and building them up into an artificial composition, which he made more grand by the addition of classic architecture. It was not unlike the way in which a handsome house is built; the materials,—stone, wood, marble, and so on—are brought together from various places, hewed to certain shapes designed by the architect, and then put together according to the rule or formula of building. The main difference is that, though the classic landscape does not represent any actual spot in nature, it still bears a resemblance to nature. But it is nature worked over by the fancy of man, and improved according to his own idea of what is beautiful. The artist did not paint nature because he loved it as it is but because it furnished him with material for making a handsome picture. And this picture-making use of landscape continued to be popular with artists and the public well on into the Nineteenth Century.

Meanwhile the other branch of landscape painting had been started in the Seventeenth Century by the Dutchmen. They, as we have seen, were interested above everything in themselves, their own lives and surroundings. This was the state of mind of the whole people, and the artists gave expression to it in their pictures. They too, were picture-makers, who by their skill of painting and their love of beauty made their pictures beautiful works of art. But the subjects that they represented were seldom imaginary ones. They painted what they actually saw; and with so much truth that their art has been called an art of portraiture. They made portraits of people, portraits of the outdoor and indoor life, and portraits of their towns and harbors, and of the country that surrounded them. So, by comparison with the formal or classic landscape, we may call their landscapes naturalistic, for they represented nature as it actually appeared to their eyes.

But their art died with them. As soon as Holland had secured her independence, her artists began to travel to foreign countries, especially to Italy. There they set themselves to imitate the great Italians, and so far as landscape was concerned, joined in the popular taste for the classic kind. It was not

Crossing the Brook. J. M. W. Turner.

until a hundred years later, namely at the end of the Eighteenth Century, that an English artist, Constable, revived the naturalistic style of landscape. He was a miller’s son, whose boyhood had been spent amid the simple loveliness of nature. Later he went to London and studied painting; but while he worked in the big city, his heart was in the country, and he suddenly made up his mind to go back to the old scenes, and paint what he knew and loved. He had seen some of the landscapes of the old Dutchmen, and resolved that he would do what they had done. In his own words, he would be a “natural painter.”

It was not long before the example of Constable led some of the younger French artists to study the old Dutch pictures in the Louvre. They were dissatisfied with the methods of painting upheld by the older artists. It seemed to them a waste of time to set up a model in a studio, and then, instead of drawing it as they saw it, to correct it according to some standard of perfection. Nor did they find any interest in putting a number of such figures into artificial groups, in order to build up some grand composition, supposed to represent some classical subject or story of the old time. They were full of interest in the life of their own time, which was the period following the Revolution, when France felt young again and vigorous, and the young artists and poets and fiction-writers were eager to express in their work their joy in the reality of life. When life was so real and so full of promise, why should they look back to the times of the great Italians and occupy themselves with the artificial and make-believe?

Among these younger men was one, Theodore Rousseau. He was not only independent in character and determined to see things with his own eyes and to represent them as he saw them and felt them, but he had a great love of nature. This led him away from the city into the country; where he studied the skies and the trees, and all the objects of the landscape with an ever increasing love and knowledge, until he came to know nature, as few have done, and to feel toward it, as a man feels toward that which he loves best in all the world. His favorite spot in nature was that which surrounds the Palace of Fontainebleau, an ancient residence some thirty miles from Paris, of the kings of France. It is a rolling tract of ground, broken up with rocky glens and thick with forest trees, especially the oak. On the outskirts of this enchanting garden of wildness, in the little village of Barbizon, Rousseau made his home, and around him gathered other artists, fascinated by the beauty of nature. Among them was the Jean François Millet whose picture, The Sower, we have already studied. He for the most part painted the peasants, working in the fields or tending their flocks; but the others, among them Dupré, Corot, and Diaz, painted the landscape, while Troyon introduced cows into his pictures and Jacque, sheep. With all of them the motive was to represent nature as they saw and felt it. They are known as the Fontainebleau-Barbizon group of artists, and their example has had very great influence on modern art. I shall speak of it presently; meanwhile will continue the story of naturalistic landscape.

It is a very interesting fact that while these French artists were going straight to nature for their subjects and inspiration, some American artists, knowing nothing of the Frenchmen, were doing the same thing. A similar love of nature and longing to paint it as they saw and felt it drew them from the city to the beautiful spots that border on the Hudson River. Their leader was Thomas Cole, who made his headquarters among the hills and valleys, the waterfalls and luxuriant vegetation of the romantic Catskills. Other names are those of Thomas Doughty, Asher B. Durand, John F. Kensett. Sometimes they painted the grander aspects of the scenery; the broad Hudson sweeping past its headlands, or the lakes with their girdle of mountains; but quite as often the simpler loveliness of smiling meadows and cosy farms. But always with the sincere wish to represent, as faithfully as they could, the natural beauty that they loved.

Gradually, however, as the country expanded Westward and the pioneer spirit of the nation was aroused, American artists began to attempt bigger subjects. Church, Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran attacked the colossal wonders of the Yellowstone and the Rockies. It was no longer the beauty of nature that inspired them, so much as its marvelousness and immensity. As many people believe, they tried to do something that is beyond the power of painting to express. For on the comparatively tiny space of their canvasses they did succeed in expressing some of the appearances of nature’s grandeur, but they hardly made you feel it. I believe myself it is impossible that they should; for an artist can only make you feel in his picture something of what he himself has felt; and he must have thoroughly mastered his own feeling before he can express it. But in the presence of the stupendous works of nature, as far as my experience goes, the feeling masters ourselves. Amid the vastness of the height and depth and breadth and the grandeur and glory and marvel of it all, our spirit is swept out of us. We see the mighty volume of water coming over Niagara and hear the roar of its might; but not as we gaze into the face of a friend and listen to the voice that we have learned to know and love so well. In the one case our feeling is all brought to a center of attraction, in the other it is caught away and carried beyond our comprehension. We can only lose ourselves in wonder.

Well, artists discovered the truth of this. Constable and Rousseau lead the way, and now it is the usual habit of the landscape artists to study nature as one studies the face and form, the expression and action of a friend. One cannot know a number of friends as intimately as one or two. So they have confined their pictures to the few and simple aspects of nature; one little fragment at a time, studied with loving intimacy and represented with the faithfulness of sincere and thorough knowledge. In doing so, they have learned like Johannes Vermeer and other Dutch artists of the Seventeenth Century, that much of the beauty and almost all the expression on the face of nature are due to the effects of natural light. Light has become the special study of the modern painters of the naturalistic landscape. And they have carried it further than the other artists did. Helped by the scientific men, who have examined into the color of light, the modern artist has found out how to represent a great variety of the effects of light: cool or warm light, the light at a particular hour of the day, at a particular season of the year, and in a particular kind of weather. In fact, the light that he represents in his pictures is a faithful rendering of some one of the countless conditions of natural light.

You remember how the light in Vermeer’s picture drew all the parts of the composition into a harmonious whole and gave it rhythm. So too, in these modern naturalistic landscapes the artist has ceased to depend upon line and form in making the composition. The latter is now rather an arrangement of masses of lighted color. We will talk more about this when we come to color; for the present, it is enough to remember that we must not expect to find in modern naturalistic landscapes the same handsome patterns of composition that we find in the classical. The modern have less dignity, but a more intimate charm. We do not stand apart from the scene and admire it; we rather enter in to it and enjoy it. It is something with which we are familiar in nature, but we are made to feel a greater beauty in it through the personal feeling that the artist has put into his work. The French have a term for this kind of landscape, which well expresses the artist’s motive and the feelings which his picture inspires in us. They call it the “paysage intime.”[7] Literally translated this means “intimate landscape”; but it may be rendered more freely a landscape in which we recognise how intimately the artist has studied his subject.

. . . . . .

I have given you a sketch of the growth of naturalistic landscape in the Seventeenth Century up to our own day, when this branch of painting has become fully as important as that of figure subjects. Now let me briefly describe the change that has taken place in the motive of the landscape painter.

The motive, or aim of the early Dutchmen was to make their pictures resemble as much as possible the actual landscape. They were, as I have said, “portraits” of the natural surroundings. In their desire that the portraits should be lifelike these artists painted in as many of the details as they could. Moreover their point of view was objective. By “point of view” I mean the way in which they looked at the landscape; and I call it “objective,” because they looked at it simply as an object in front of them to be painted as nearly as possible lifelike. This is the usual point of view of the modern photographer. You go to him to have your portrait taken. He poses you as an object in front of his camera. His aim is to make a portrait that will be like you, and will also please you because it is a good-looking picture. He will do the same for the next person that comes to him, and for the next, and so on. All of them are simply objects to be photographed. He has no personal feeling toward any of them; his point of view is objective. But, suppose he makes a portrait of his own child. He will wish it to be more than a likeness that any one would recognise. He wants it to be a reminder in after years, when she is grown up and changed, of how she used to look as a little one, in moments when to her mother and himself she seemed more than ever a darling. To him, you see, she is not merely an object to be photographed; his point of view towards his own child is not objective; on the contrary it is influenced by his personal love for her; the picture is to be a likeness plus something more—a reflection of his own feeling. This personal kind of point of view is called “subjective,” the opposite to objective. Perhaps you will understand the difference between the two more clearly by the following sentence: “The photographer photographs Mrs. X.” The photographer is the subject of the verb, photographs, “Mrs. X.” is the object. In this case the object is of more importance than the subject because it is Mrs. X. who pays the money and has to be considered. But change the words in this way—“The father photographs his little one.” Now, so far as the taking of the photograph is concerned, the father is the more important. He is the subject of the verb, the one who is going to do something and do it his own way, so as to represent something which he, the subject, has in his mind. His point of view is entirely his own—the subjective. Observe how this will affect the way in which he takes the photograph.

The little one has just come in, we will say, from a romp in the meadow. Her hair is tumbled and the light plays through the silky strands; there is a sparkle of sunshine in her eyes; her lips are parted in a sunny smile as she stretches out to her father a podgy hand, tightly clasping a bunch of daisies. “Little love” he thinks to himself, “what a picture!” He seizes his camera, and tells her to stand still a minute. What is it, do you think that he is going to try and catch? I need hardly say it is the radiance in her face. Perhaps her podgy hand too; but first and chiefly that expression of happiness and love; for it is an echo, as it were, of the happiness and love that he feels in his own heart toward her. If he succeed, the picture will be as much an expression of his own subjective feeling toward the child, as of the child herself.

If you see what I mean you can now begin to understand how Constable, and, even more, Rousseau and the other Fontainebleau-Barbizon artists looked at nature. No longer an objective point of view, like the old Dutchmen’s, it was a subjective one. To them nature was not merely an object of which to make a portrait. It was something they loved, and, because they loved it, they painted it, and in such a way that their pictures embodied the feeling which they had for nature. They are full of the artist’s personal feeling, or as it is sometimes called, sentiment. A landscape of Rousseau’s sets our imagination working. It may represent an oak tree and a rocky boulder, half hidden in ferns and vines, some little spot in the forest of Fontainebleau. As we look at it we become more and more conscious of the strength and vigor of the tree; the firmness of its huge trunk, the mighty muscles of its brawny arms, the grip which it has upon the ground, and our imagination may begin thinking of the roots hidden below the ground. While the branches spread out to the sunshine and the air, the unseen roots reach out and grip the soil and grapple with the rocks, anchoring firmly the tree against the storms of weather and time. And perhaps we begin to feel, as Rousseau himself did, that the oak is a symbol of the might of nature; and how she silently works on regardless of the changes that happen in the lot of comparatively short-lived men. Or we look at one of Corot’s pictures of the twilight, in which the trees seem to have sunk asleep in blurs of shade against the pale, faint light that is fading from the sky; and the hush and tenderness of the daily miracle of nature’s rest steals over our spirits. It is as if we were listening to the pensive melody of some sweet lyrical poem, very gently and reverently read; such a one, perhaps, as Longfellow’s “Hymn to the Night.” On the other hand, to receive an impression like that of Rousseau’s picture, we must choose a poem that tells, not of rest, but of the grandeur of human effort, and must read it in a strong voice and confidently, as if we were sure that to be strong and faithful to the end was a grand thing.

Indeed, so many landscapes, not only by the Fontainebleau-Barbizon artists, but also by modern men who are following in their footsteps, are full of the suggestion of poetry, and we speak of them as poetic landscapes. This does not mean that they illustrate any particular poem, but that they affect one’s imagination in somewhat the same way as poetry does. The reason is that such artists have the spirit of poets. For nature arouses in them deep emotions, and their pictures, like the poet’s verses, not only describe the beauty of nature, but express the sentiment, or feeling, of their own souls.

On the other hand you must not expect to find this suggestion of poetry in all modern naturalistic landscape. There are still artists whose point of view, like that of the old Dutchmen, is objective. They are content to paint the beauty of nature simply as it shows itself to their eyes. Nor need we argue as to which is the better way, this, or the subjective point of view. We may prefer the one or the other; though, perhaps, it is better for us to keep our minds open to the beauties of both.

Paysage. J. B. C. Corot.

CHAPTER XII
FORM AND COLOR

WHEN we began to speak about composition we continually used the words “line and form.” Gradually, however, as we left the subject of formal composition and talked of naturalistic composition, we found ourselves substituting the words “colored masses.”

It would seem then as if there were a distinction between these two things; that form was on one side of the fence and color on the other. Yet that would contradict our experience; for we know that everything which has a form or shape, visible to the eye, has also color that we can see. And most things that have color are seen to have a shape or form. Not all; for example, when the sky is a cloudless blue, or when we gaze over a distant expanse of sea. Still, as a general experience, color and form are identical. The face of a friend—you recognise it by its color as well as by the form of the features; and, should you have the sorrow of looking upon that face when it is dead, the change in the color would make you recognise the once familiar features as strangely different.

Yet, notwithstanding the identity of form and color, we find a certain separation between the two, when we come to study pictures. The reason is that some artists are more sensitive to form, others to color. As I have already said, an artist paints only the particular impression of an object which his eye receives. Every eye has its own particular way of seeing. Even the eye, most sensitive to form, will not see it as other eyes will; nor will any one color seem the same to every eye that is chiefly interested in color. This is only another way of saying that the varieties in nature are inexhaustible. Nevertheless, although no two elm trees are exactly alike, all elm trees are sufficiently similar to be recognised at once as elm trees. So with artists, some group themselves as painters of form; others, of color. In the old Italian days this distinction separated the artists of Florence from those of Venice. The Florentines—Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, among the greatest—were masters of form; the Venetians, especially in the persons of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese, were masters of color. The one group saw especially the shapes of things, the other saw the world as an arrangement of spots or masses of color.

The Florentines, in consequence of their interest in form, took great pains with the outlines of their figures. The outlines were clearly defined; in the mural paintings the figures were enclosed by an actual line; and always the figure shows distinctly against the background. For, having drawn the figure very carefully, the artist did not let the color, that was afterwards laid on, lap over the line or interfere with the subtle undulations of the outline. They were in fact, a school of great draughtsmen, who relied principally on the beauty and vigor of the drawing. The Venetians, however, were great colorists, relying on color; and may be spoken of as painters rather than draughtsmen. Yet they too, of course, were masters of drawing. They could represent the action of the figure as well as the Florentines, but unlike the latter, did not care for the clear outline. On the contrary, they softened or blurred the outline slightly, in closer imitation of nature.

If, for example, you look carefully at a tree, you will not find that its shape is enclosed by a hard line. The light creeps round the edges of the trunk and of the masses of foliage in such a way that the outlines are softened or slightly blurred. It is the same with a figure seated in a room; here and there its edges may seem sharply cut out against the background, but in other parts the edges will seem to melt into the background. In other words, as we look at the figure, what we are most conscious of is not its outline, but its mass of color in relation to the other masses of color that surround it.

Now, this distinction, between the way in which the Florentines and the Venetians saw and represented objects, still appears in modern art. In fact, ever since the days of the great Italians there have been artists who relied on drawing and artists who relied on color. For over a hundred years the importance of drawing has been upheld by the great school of art in Paris maintained by the French government. One of its famous teachers, Ingres, used to tell his pupils “form is everything, color is nothing.” Perhaps he only meant by this that, as long as they were pupils, the only necessary thing for them to think about and learn to represent was form. Because to draw well is so important for any artist, and it is a thing that can be thoroughly taught and learned. The French school takes as its standard of excellence the perfect forms of classic sculpture and the great works of the Florentine artists. Although the student may be drawing from a living model whose form is not perfect, he is taught to correct the imperfections of this or that part, in order that the figure, as it appears in his drawing, may be as near as he can get it to classic perfection. But color, as we shall see presently, is so much a matter of each person’s feeling, that it is impossible to reduce the teaching of it to any method or standard. So perhaps that is what Ingres had in mind. He meant that, for the time being, his students should consider form to be everything, color nothing.

On the other hand it is generally understood that he meant much more than this, that he was telling his pupils what he himself considered to be the whole duty of an artist. Let us try and enter into his point of view.

I can imagine some of my readers saying that the phrase, “form is everything; color, nothing,” is nonsense; because color plays so important a part in our enjoyment of sight. Just think what a dreary world it would be, if everything, for instance, were a uniform gray! Quite true, and Ingres probably would have agreed. As a man, he no doubt enjoyed the pleasures of color. But it was as an artist that he was speaking. He was stating what he believed to be the proper subject of his own art.

In the first place he was evidently one of those artists who see the shape rather than the color of things; to whom form makes an irresistible appeal. In the second place—and mark, for this is very important—he was not thinking of how things appear in the actual world, but how they should be represented in art. He was one of those artists who are not interested in naturalistic painting; who do not profess to paint nature. On the contrary, like the great Italians, he only borrowed from nature certain materials in order to build them up into a formal composition of his own creation. He would have told you that he was not representing the works of nature but creating for himself a totally different thing—a work of art.

On the other hand, many artists will reply, that the work of art need not be a totally different thing. That they themselves, like the Dutch of the Seventeenth Century and all the modern painters of the naturalistic composition, combine the two. It is by representing nature, that they create a work of art.

Here, you see, is a sharp conflict of points of view. One group of artists, loving nature, desires to represent it; the other, perhaps not loving nature less, certainly loves art more. This latter group, therefore, tries to improve on nature, and to use it only for the creation of something that it feels to be different and superior to nature. While the one set of men wed nature to art, the other divorce art from nature. Between the two there is a Great Divide, which no amount of talking can bridge over. The only conclusion to be reached is that there is right on both sides. For the one group, because of the kind of men composing it, its own way is the right way; and for the other, for the same reason, its way. We, as lookers on at the dispute, will do well to learn to see the beauty in both kinds of picture.

You may as well know the names by which the two points of view are known. With one, the naturalistic, we have already become acquainted. The other is called by the artists who practise it the “idealistic.” They will tell you that they paint “ideal” subjects. By those, however, who disagree with them, their point of view and method are apt to be called Academic.

The word ideal, used in this sense, has the meaning “more perfect than in real life.” When a person says: “The ideal way to spend a summer holiday”—we know even before he utters the next words, “would be,” that he is going to tell us something that he does not expect to enjoy. It is how he would have things, if he could arrange them according to his own idea of perfection. Now this is what the artist means when he calls his picture an ideal one.

Personally, I do not like this use of the word, because it seems to imply that this kind of picture is superior to the other. And the artists who paint this kind of picture believe that it is; we, however, who are simply students of pictures, longing to enjoy the beauty of all kinds of motive and ways of painting, will not admit this. We go back to the fact with which I started this book: that the value of a picture does not depend upon the subject but the way in which the artist has rendered it. Because a man portrays some noble incident from poetry or the Bible, or invents some scene out of his brain, it does not follow that his picture will represent a higher degree of beauty or a finer imagination than one which only represents some simple scene in nature. I will go further and say that some of the pictures of “still life”[8] by the Frenchman, Antoine Vollon, or our own American artist, Emil Carlsen, exhibit more beauty, yes, and even more imagination than many ambitious figure subjects. Why is this? How can a picture of a pumpkin and vegetables by Vollon, or one of Carlsen’s subjects, such as a creamy porcelain vase, and a lemon, and one or two other delicately colored objects on a white tablecloth, show more beauty and imagination than, for instance, an imposing picture like Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware?

The answer is that Vollon and Carlsen exhibit more feeling for beauty and more imagination in matters that especially belong to painting, while Leutze went outside of painting. Let me explain myself. Leutze saw beauty in the heroism of Washington and his soldiers, fighting against tremendous odds for a great cause in the terrible cold of winter. His imagination was kindled by the importance of the cause and the devotion of those who fought for it. It was the facts, as they appealed to his mind, and the ideas that his mind formed about them which he tried to represent. But the special field for the artist, as I have already said, is not covered by his mind but by his eyes. It is with what he can see that he should be first and chiefly concerned—the beauty of the visible world. And his imagination as an artist is chiefly shown in the capacity that his mind has for discovering unexpected beauties and rendering them. Thus to ourselves, and even to some artists, a pumpkin may seem but a bright orange mass, with a rough or shiny rind as the case may be; an attractive spot of color and shape, a thing to be admired for a moment and then forgotten. Another artist, on the contrary, sees a great deal more in it. He sees subtle differences of color, according to the way the light falls on it, various delicate differences in the roughness or smoothness of the rind; curiously beautiful accidents of color, as it reflects the colors of other objects near it; mysteries of shadow, some deep and strong, others so faint that an ordinary eye might not detect them. These and other qualities, that his sensitive eyes perceive, create impressions in his brain that fill his imagination with a sense of beauty somewhat as music does. He cannot tell you why he enjoys it so much, or explain in words the effect it has on his imagination. The whole impression is a vision of his imagination, excited by the sense of sight, and this vision he sets to work to interpret on his canvas, in order that it may be communicated to our eyesight, and, in turn, excite our imagination. We receive from form and color feelings of pleasure that we cannot describe in words but which are not less real on that account. It is an abstract enjoyment, free from any distinct connection with words or facts. On the other hand, in Washington Crossing the Delaware it is the record of facts, presented in the picture, that chiefly interests us. Neither the forms nor the arrangement of color have in themselves any separate abstract quality of beauty.

So, it is not upon the beauty of the things seen by the eyes, but upon the interest of things understood by the mind that Leutze depended. He really neglected his own proper field of painting, for that of the writer or orator. Therefore, he put himself at a disadvantage; for I think you will admit, that a good speaker or writer could describe the incident in a much more thrilling way than the picture does.

But we have strayed somewhat from our point. We were speaking of idealistic pictures, and noted that they are so called because the artist instead of representing nature as it is, corrects it and improves upon it in order to bring it up to what he considers an “ideal” standard of perfection. I mentioned that these pictures and the motive which prompts them are also called “Academic.”