Lectures on Landscape
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John Ruskin >> Lectures on Landscape
LECTURES ON LANDSCAPE
DELIVERED AT OXFORD
IN LENT TERM, 1871.
Library Edition
THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN
CROWN OF WILD OLIVE
TIME AND TIDE
QUEEN OF THE AIR
LECTURES ON ART AND LANDSCAPE
ARATRA PENTELICI
NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
NEW YORK CHICAGO
[Illustration: BRANTWOOD
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH]
PREFATORY NOTE.
_These Lectures on Landscape were given at Oxford on January 20,
February 9, and February 23, 1871. They were not public Lectures, like
Professor Ruskin's other courses, but addressed only to undergraduates
who had joined his class. They were illustrated by pictures from his
collection, of which several are here reproduced, and by others which
may be seen in the Oxford University Galleries or in the Ruskin
Drawing School._
_W.G.C._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
LECTURE I.
OUTLINE 1
LECTURE II.
LIGHT AND SHADE 16
LECTURE III.
COLOR 32
LIST OF PLATES
Page
Vesuvius in Eruption, by J.M.W. Turner 2
Near Blair Athol, by J.M.W. Turner 19
Dumblane Abbey, by J.M.W. Turner 20
Madonna and Child, by Filippo Lippi 33
The Lady with the Brooch, by Sir Joshua Reynolds 35
AEsacus and Hesperie, by J.M.W. Turner 45
Mill near Grande Chartreuse, by J.M.W. Turner 47
L'Aiguillette; Valley of Cluses, by J.M.W. Turner 48
LECTURES ON LANDSCAPE.
I.
OUTLINE.
1. In my inaugural lecture,[1] I stated that while holding this
professorship I should direct you, in your practical exercises,
chiefly to natural history and landscape. And having in the course of
the past year laid the foundational elements of art sufficiently
before you, I will invite you, now, to enter on real work with me; and
accordingly I propose during this and the following term to give you
what practical leading I can in elementary study of landscape, and of
a branch of natural history which will form a kind of center for all
the rest--Ichthyology.
[Footnote 1: "Lectures on Art, 1870," Sec. 23.]
In the outset I must shortly state to you the position which landscape
painting and animal painting hold towards the higher branches of art.
2. Landscape painting is the thoughtful and passionate representation
of the physical conditions appointed for human existence. It imitates
the aspects, and records the phenomena, of the visible things which
are dangerous or beneficial to men; and displays the human methods of
dealing with these, and of enjoying them or suffering from them, which
are either exemplary or deserving of sympathetic contemplation. Animal
painting investigates the laws of greater and less nobility of
character in organic form, as comparative anatomy examines those of
greater and less development in organic structure; and the function
of animal painting is to bring into notice the minor and unthought of
conditions of power or beauty, as that of physiology is to ascertain
the minor conditions of adaptation.
3. Questions as to the purpose of arrangements or the use of the
organs of an animal are, however, no less within the province of the
painter than of the physiologist, and are indeed more likely to
commend themselves to you through drawing than dissection. For as you
dissect an animal you generally assume its form to be necessary and
only examine how it is constructed; but in drawing the outer form
itself attentively you are led necessarily to consider the mode of
life for which it is disposed, and therefore to be struck by any
awkwardness or apparent uselessness in its parts. After sketching one
day several heads of birds it became a vital matter of interest to me
to know the use of the bony process on the head of the hornbill; but
on asking a great physiologist, I found that it appeared to him an
absurd question, and was certainly an unanswerable one.
4. I have limited, you have just heard, landscape painting to the
representation of phenomena relating to human life. You will scarcely
be disposed to admit the propriety of such a limitation; and you will
still less be likely to conceive its necessary strictness and
severity, unless I convince you of it by somewhat detailed examples.
Here are two landscapes by Turner in his greatest time--Vesuvius in
repose, Vesuvius in eruption.
One is a beautiful harmony of cool color; and the other of hot, and
they are both exquisitely designed in ornamental lines. But they are
not painted for those qualities. They are painted because the state of
the scene in one case is full of delight to men; and in the other of
pain and danger. And it is not Turner's object at all to exhibit or
illustrate natural phenomena, however interesting in themselves.
[Illustration: VESUVIUS IN ERUPTION.
From the painting by Turner.]
He does not want to paint blue mist in order to teach you the nature
of evaporation; nor this lava stream, to explain to you the operation
of gravity on ponderous and viscous materials. He paints the blue
mist, because it brings life and joy to men, and the lava stream
because it is death to them.
5. Again here are two sea-pieces by Turner of the same
period--photographs from them at least. One is a calm on the shore at
Scarborough; the other the wreck of an Indiaman.
These also are each painted with exquisitely artistic purpose: the
first in opposition of local black to diffused sunshine; the second in
the decorative grouping of white spots on a dark ground. That
decorative purpose of dappling, or [Greek: poikilia], is as studiously
and deliciously carried out by Turner with the Daedalus side of him, in
the inlaying of these white spots on the Indiaman's deck, as if he
were working a precious toy in ebony and ivory. But Turner did not
paint either of the sea-pieces for the sake of these decorous
arrangements; neither did he paint the Scarborough as a professor of
physical science, to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshire
coast; nor the Indiaman to show you the force of impact in a liquid
mass of sea-water of given momentum. He painted this to show you the
daily course of quiet human work and happiness, and that, to enable
you to conceive something of uttermost human misery--both ordered by
the power of the great deep.
6. You may easily--you must, perhaps, for a little time--suspect me of
exaggeration in this statement. It is so natural to suppose that the
main interest of landscape is essentially in rocks and water and sky;
and that figures are to be put, like the salt and mustard to a dish,
only to give it a flavor.
Put all that out of your heads at once. The interest of a landscape
consists wholly in its relation either to figures present--or to
figures past--or to human powers conceived. The most splendid drawing
of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity,
is no more a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For,
as natural philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you.
This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be--as if it was
a million times as big. There is no more sublimity--_per se_--in
ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, than in ground level; nor in
a perpendicular fracture of a rock, than in a horizontal one. The only
thing that makes the one more interesting to you in a landscape than
the other, is that you could tumble over the perpendicular
fracture--and couldn't tumble over the other. A cloud, looked at as a
cloud only, is no more a subject for painting than so much feculence
in dirty water. It is merely dirty air, or at best a chemical solution
ill made. That it is worthy of being painted at all depends upon its
being the means of nourishment and chastisement to men, or the
dwelling place of imaginary gods. There's a bit of blue sky and cloud
by Turner--one of the loveliest ever painted by human hand. But, as a
mere pattern of blue and white, he had better have painted a jay's
wing: this was only painted by him--and is, in reality, only pleasant
to you--because it signifies the coming of a gleam of sweet sunshine
in windy weather; and the wind is worth thinking of only because it
fills the sails of ships, and the sun because it warms the sailors.
7. Now, it is most important that you should convince yourselves of
and fully enter into this truth, because all the difficulty in
choosing subject arises from mistakes about it. I daresay some of you
who are fond of sketching have gone out often in the most beautiful
country, and yet with the feeling that there was no good subject to be
found in it. That always arises from your not having sympathy enough
with its vital character, and looking for physical picturesqueness
instead. On the contrary, there are crude efforts at landscape-painting,
made continually upon the most splendid physical phenomena, in
America, and other countries without any history. It is not of the
slightest use. Niagara, or the North Pole and the Aurora Borealis,
won't make a landscape; but a ditch at Iffley will, if you have
humanity in you--enough in you to interpret the feelings of hedgers
and ditchers, and frogs.
8. Next, here is one of the most beautiful landscapes ever painted,
the best I have next to the Greta and Tees.
The subject physically is a mere bank of grass above a stream with
some wych-elms and willows. A level-topped bank; the water has cut its
way down through the soft alluvion of an elevated plain to the
limestone rock at the bottom.
Had this scene been in America, no mortal could have made a landscape
of it. It is nothing but a grass bank with some not very pretty trees
scattered over it, wholly without grouping. The stream at the bottom
is rocky indeed, but its rocks are mean, flat, and of a dull yellow
color. The sky is gray and shapeless. There's absolutely nothing to
paint anywhere of essential landscape subject, as commonly understood.
Now see what the landscape consists in, which I have told you is one
of the most beautiful ever painted by man. There's first a little bit
of it left nearly wild, not quite wild; there's a cart and rider's
track through it among the copse; and then, standing simply on the
wild moss-troopers' ground, the scattered ruins of a great abbey, seen
so dimly, that they seem to be fading out of sight, in color as in
time.
These two things together, the wild copse wood and the ruin, take you
back into the life of the fourteenth century. The one is the
border-riders' kingdom; the other that of peace which has striven
against border-riding--how vainly! Both these are remains of the past.
But the outhouses and refectory of the abbey have been turned into a
farmhouse, and that is inhabited, and in front of it the Mistress is
feeding her chickens. You see the country is perfectly quiet and
innocent, for there is no trace of a fence anywhere; the cattle have
strayed down to the riverside, it being a hot day; and some rest in
the shade and two in the water.
They could not have done so at their ease had the river not been
humanized. Only a little bit of its stony bed is left; a mill weir,
thrown across, stays the water in a perfectly clear and delicious
pool; to show how clear it is, Turner has put the only piece of
playing color in all the picture into the reflections in this. One cow
is white, another white and red, evidently as clean as morning dew
can wash their sides. They could not have been so in a country where
there was the least coal smoke; so Turner has put a wreath of
perfectly white smoke through the trees; and lest that should not be
enough to show you they burnt wood, he has made his foreground of a
piece of copse just lopped, with the new fagots standing up against
it; and this still not being enough to give you the idea of perfect
cleanliness, he has covered the stones of the river-bed with white
clothes laid out to dry; and that not being enough yet, for the
river-bed might be clean though nothing else was, he has put a
quantity more hanging over the abbey walls.
9. _Only natural phenomena in their direct relation to
humanity_--these are to be your subjects in landscape. Rocks and water
and air may no more be painted for their own sakes, than the armor
carved without the warrior.
But, secondly. I said landscape is to be a _passionate representation_
of these things. It must be done, that is to say, with strength and
depth of soul. This is indeed to some extent merely the particular
application of a principle that has no exception. If you are without
strong passions, you cannot be a painter at all. The laying of paint
by an insensitive person, whatever it endeavors to represent, is not
painting, but daubing or plastering; and that, observe, irrespective
of the boldness or minuteness of the work. An insensitive person will
daub with a camel's hair-brush and ultramarine; and a passionate one
will paint with mortar and a trowel.
10. But far more than common passion is necessary to paint landscape.
The physical conditions there are so numerous, and the spiritual ones
so occult, that you are sure to be overpowered by the materialism,
unless your sentiment is strong. No man is naturally likely to think
first of anatomy in painting a pretty woman; but he is very apt to do
so in painting a mountain. No man of ordinary sense will take pleasure
in features that have no meaning, but he may easily take it in heath,
woods or waterfalls, that have no expression. So that it needs much
greater strength of heart and intellect to paint landscape than
figure: many commonplace persons, bred in good schools, have painted
the figure pleasantly or even well; but none but the strongest--John
Bellini, Titian, Velasquez, Tintoret, Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli,
Carpaccio and Turner--have ever painted a fragment of good landscape.
In missal painting exquisite figure-drawing is frequent, and landscape
backgrounds in late works are elaborate; but I only know thoroughly
good landscape in one book; and I have examined--I speak
deliberately--thousands.
11. For one thing, the passion is necessary for the mere quantity of
design. In good art, whether painting or sculpture, I have again and
again told you every touch is necessary and beautifully intended. Now
it falls within the compass of ordinary application to place rightly
all the folds of drapery or gleams of light on a chain, or ornaments
in a pattern; but when it comes to placing every leaf in a tree, the
painter gets tired. Here, for instance, is a little bit of Sandro
Botticelli background; I have purposefully sketched it in the
slightest way, that you might see how the entire value of it depends
on thoughtful placing. There is no texture aimed at, no completion,
scarcely any variety of light and shade; but by mere care in the
placing the thing is beautiful. Well, every leaf, every cloud, every
touch is placed with the same care in great work; and when this is
done as by John Bellini in the picture of Peter Martyr,[2] or as it
was by Titian in the great Peter Martyr, with every leaf in a wood he
gets tired. I know no other such landscape in the world as that is, or
as that was.
[Footnote 2: National Gallery, No. 812.]
12. Perhaps you think on such conditions you never can paint landscape
at all. Well, great landscape certainly not; but pleasant and useful
landscape, yes; provided only the passion you bring to it be true and
pure. The degree of it you cannot command; the genuineness of it you
can--yes, and the depth of source also. Tintoret's passion may be like
the Reichenbach, and yours only like a little dripping Holywell, but
both equally from deep springs.
13. But though the virtue of all painting (and similarly of sculpture
and every other art) is in passion, I must not have you begin by
working passionately. The discipline of youth, in all its work, is in
cooling and curbing itself, as the discipline of age is in warming and
urging itself; you know the Bacchic chorus of old men in Plato's
_Laws_. To the end of life, indeed, the strength of a man's finest
nature is shown in due continence; but that is because the finest
natures remain young to the death: and for you the first thing you
have to do in art (as in life) is to be quiet and firm--quiet, above
everything; and modest, with this most essential modesty, that you
must like the landscape you are going to draw better than you expect
to like your drawing of it, however well it may succeed. If you would
not rather have the real thing than your sketch of it, you are not in
a right state of mind for sketching at all. If you only think of the
scene, "what a nice sketch this will make!" be assured you will never
make a nice sketch of it. You may think you have produced a beautiful
work; nay, perhaps the public and many fair judges will agree with
you; but I tell you positively, there will be no enduring value in
what you have thus done. Whereas if you think of the scene, "Ah, if I
could only get some shadow or scrawl of this to carry away with me,
how glad I should be!"--then whatever you do will be, according to
your strength, good and progressive: it may be feeble, or much
faultful, but it will be vital and essentially precious.
14. Now, it is not possible for you to command this state of mind, or
anything like it, in yourselves at once. Nay, in all probability your
eyes are so satiated by the false popular art surrounding us now on
all sides, that you cannot see the delicate reality though you try;
but even though you may not care for the truth, you can act as if you
did, and tell it.
Now, therefore, observe this following quite plain direction. Whenever
you set yourself to draw anything, consider only how best you may give
a person who has not seen the place, a true idea of it. Use any means
in your power to do that, and don't think of the person for whom you
are drawing as a connoisseur, but as a person of ordinary sense and
feeling. Don't get artist-like qualities for him: but first give him
the pleasant sensation of being at the place, then show him how the
land lies, how the water runs, how the wind blows, and so on. Always
think of the public as Moliere of his old woman; you have done nothing
really great or good if you can't please her.
15. Now beginning wisely, so as to lose no time or labor, you will
learn to paint all the conditions of quiet light and sky, before you
attempt those of variable light and cloud. Do not trouble yourselves
with or allow yourselves to be tempted by any effects that are
brilliant or tremendous; except only that from the beginning I
recommend you to watch always for sunrise; to keep a little diary of
the manner of it, and to have beside your window a small sketch-book,
with pencil cut over night, and colors moist. The one indulgence which
I would have you allow yourselves in fast coloring, for some time, is
the endeavor to secure some record at the instant of the colors of
morning clouds; while, if they are merely white or gray or blue, you
must get an outline of them with pencil. You will soon feel by this
means what are the real difficulties to be encountered in all
landscape coloring, and your eyes will be educated to quantity and
harmonious action of forms.
But for the rest--learn to paint everything in the quietest and
simplest light. First outline your whole subject completely, with
delicate sharp pencil line. If you don't get more than that, let your
outline be a finished and lovely diagram of the whole.
16. All the objects are then to be painted of their proper colors,
matching them as nearly as you can, in the manner that a missal is
painted, filling the outlined shapes neatly up to their junctions;
reenforcing afterwards when necessary, but as little as possible; but,
above all, knowing precisely what the light is, and where it is.[3]
[Footnote 3: Make a note of these points:
1. Date, time of day, temperature, direction and force of wind.
2. Roughly, by compass, the direction in which you are looking; and
angle of the light with respect to it.
3. Angle subtended by picture, and distance of nearest object in it.]
17. I have brought two old-fashioned colored engravings,[4] which are
a precise type of the style I want you to begin with. Finished from
corner to corner, as well as the painter easily could; everything done
to good purpose, nothing for vain glory; nothing in haste or
affectation, nothing in feverish or morbid excitement. The observation
is accurate; the sentiment, though childish, deep and pure; and the
effect of light, for common work, quite curiously harmonious and
deceptive.
[Footnote 4: From a "Picturesque Tour from Geneva to Milan" ...
engraved from designs by J. Lory of Neufchatel. London: Published by
R. Ackermann, at his Repository of Arts, 1820.]
They are, in spite of their weaknesses, absolutely the only landscapes
I could show you which give you a real idea of the places, or which
put your minds into the tone which, if you were happy and at ease,
they would take in the air and light of Italy.
I dwell on the necessity of completion especially, because I have lost
much time myself from my sympathy with the feverish intensity of the
minds of the great engravers; and from always fastening on one or two
points of my subject and neglecting the rest.
18. We have seen, then, that every subject is to be taken up first in
its terminal lines, then in its light and shade, then in its color.
First of the terminal lines of landscape, or of drawing in outline.
I think the examples of shell outline in your copying series must
already have made you feel the exact nature of a pure outline, the
difficulty of it, and the value.
But we have now to deal with limits of a more subtle kind.
The outline of any simple solid form, even though it may have complex
parts, represents an actual limit, accurately to be followed. The
outline of a cup, of a shell, or of an animal's limb, has a
determinable course, which your pen or pencil line either coincides
with or does not. You can say of that line, either it is wrong or
right; if right, it is in a measure suggestive, and nobly suggestive
of the character of the object. But the greater number of objects in a
landscape either have outlines so complex that no pencil could follow
them (as trees in middle distance), or they have no actual outline at
all, but a gradated and softened edge; as, for the most part, clouds,
foam, and the like. And even in things which have determinate form,
the outline of that form is usually quite incapable of expressing
their real character.
[Illustration]
19. Here is the most ordinary component of a foreground for instance,
a pleasantly colored stone. Any of its pure outlines are not only
without beauty, but absolutely powerless to give you any notion of its
character, although that character is in itself so interesting, that
here Turner has made a picture of little more than a heap of such
stones, with blue water to oppose their color. In consequence of these
difficulties and insufficiencies, most landscape-painters have been
tempted to neglect outline altogether, and think only of effects of
light or color on masses more or less obscurely defined. They have
thus gradually lost their sense of organic form, their precision of
hand, and their respect for limiting law; in a word, for all the
safeguards and severe dignities of their art. And landscape-painting
has, therefore, more in consequence of this one error than of any
other, become weak, frivolous, and justly despised.
20. Now, if any of you have chanced to notice at the end of my "Queen
of the Air," my saying that in landscape Turner must be your only
guide, you perhaps have thought I said so because of his great power
in melting colors or in massing light and shade. Not so. I have always
said he is the only great landscape-painter, and to be your only
guide, because he is the only landscape-painter who can draw an
outline.
His finished works perhaps appear to you more vague than any other
master's: no man loses his outlines more constantly. You will be
surprised to know that his frankness in losing depends on his
certainty of finding if he chooses; and that, while all other
landscape-painters study from Nature in shade or in color, Turner
always sketched with the point.
"Always," of course, is a wide word. In your copying series I have put
a sketch by Turner in color from Nature; some few others of the kind
exist, in the National Gallery and elsewhere. But, as a rule, from his
boyhood to the last day of his life, he sketched only with the fine
pencil point, and always the outline, more if he had time, but at
least the outline, of every scene that interested him; and in general,
outline so subtle and elaborate as to be inexhaustible in examination
and uncopiable for delicacy.
Here is a sketch of an English park scene which represents the average
character of a study from Nature by Turner; and here the sketch from
Nature of Dumblane Abbey for the _Liber Studiorum_, which shows you
what he took from Nature, when he had time only to get what was most
precious to him.