Lectures on Landscape
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John Ruskin >> Lectures on Landscape
21. The first thing, therefore, you have to learn in landscape, is to
outline; and therefore we must now know precisely what an outline is,
how it ought to be represented; and this it will be right to define
in quite general terms applicable to all subjects.
We saw in the fifth Lecture[5] that every visible thing consisted of
spaces of color, terminated either by sharp or gradated limits.
Whenever they are sharp, the line of separation, followed by the point
of your drawing instrument, is the proper outline of your subject,
whether it represents the limits of flat spaces or of solid forms.
[Footnote 5: "Lectures on Art, 1870," Sec. 130.]
22. For instance, here is a drawing by Holbein of a lady in a dark
dress, with bars of black velvet round her arm. Her form is seen
everywhere defined against the light by a perfectly sharp linear limit
which Holbein can accurately draw with his pen; the patches of velvet
are also distinguished from the rest of her dress by a linear limit,
which he follows with his pen just as decisively. Here, therefore, is
your first great law. Wherever you see one space of color
distinguished from another by a sharp limit, you are to draw that
limit firmly; and that is your outline.
23. Also, observe that as your representing this limit by a dark line
is a conventionalism, and just as much a conventionalism when the line
is subtle as when it is thick, the great masters accept and declare
that conventionalism with perfect frankness, and use bold and decisive
outline, if any.
Also, observe, that though, when you are master of your art, you may
modify your outline by making it dark in some parts, light in others,
and even sometimes thick and sometimes slender, a scientifically
accurate outline is perfectly equal throughout; and in your first
practice I wish you to use always a pen with a blunt point, which will
make no hair stroke under any conditions. So that using black ink and
only one movement of the pen, not returning to thicken your line, you
shall either have your line there, or not there; and that you may not
be able to gradate or change it, in any way or degree whatsoever.
24. Now the first question respecting it is: what place is your thick
line to have with respect to the limit which it represents--outside
of it, or inside, or over it? Theoretically, it is to be over it; the
true limit falling all the way along the center of your thick line.
The contest of Apelles with Protogenes consisted in striking this true
limit within each other's lines, more and more finely. And you may
always consider your pen line as representing the first incision for
sculpture, the true limit being the sharp center of the incision.
But, practically, when you are outlining a light object defined
against a dark one, the line must go outside of it; and when a dark
object against a light one, inside of it.
In this drawing of Holbein's, the hand being seen against the light,
the outline goes inside the contour of the fingers.
25. Secondly. And this is of great importance. It will happen
constantly that forms are entirely distinct from each other and
separated by true limits, which are yet invisible, or nearly so, to
the eye. I place, for instance, one of these eggs in front of the
other, and probably to most of you the separation in the light is
indiscernible. Is it then to be outlined? In practically combining
outline with accomplished light and shade there are cases of this kind
in which the outline may with advantage, or even must for truth of
effect, be omitted. But the facts of the solid form are of so vital
importance, and the perfect command of them so necessary to the
dignity and intelligibility of the work, that the greatest artists,
even for their finished drawings, like to limit every solid form by a
fine line, whether its contour be visible to the eye or not.
26. An outline thus perfectly made with absolute decision, and with a
wash of one color above it, is the most masterly of all methods of
light and shade study, with limited time, when the forms of the
objects to be drawn are clear and unaffected by mist. But without any
wash of color, such an outline is the most valuable of all means for
obtaining such memoranda of any scene as may explain to another
person, or record for yourself, what is most important in its
features.
27. Choose, then, a subject that interests you; and so far as failure
of time or materials compels you to finish one part, or express one
character, rather than another, of course dwell on the features that
interest you most. But beyond this, forget, or even somewhat repress
yourself, and make it your first object to give a true idea of the
place to other people. You are not to endeavor to express your own
feelings about it; if anything, err on the side of concealing them.
What is best is not to think of yourself at all, but to state as
plainly and simply as you can the whole truth of the thing. What you
think unimportant in it may to another person be the most touching
part of it: what you think beautiful may be in truth commonplace and
of small value. Quietly complete each part to the best of your power,
endeavoring to maintain a steady and dutiful energy, and the tranquil
pleasure of a workman.
II.
LIGHT AND SHADE.
28. In my last Lecture I laid before you evidence that the greatness
of the master whom I wished you to follow as your only guide in
landscape depended primarily on his studying from Nature always with
the point; that is to say, in pencil or pen outline. To-day I wish to
show you that his preeminence depends secondarily on his perfect
rendering of form and distance by light and shade, before he admits a
thought of color.
I say "before" however--observe carefully--only with reference to the
construction of any given picture, not with reference to the order in
which he learnt his mechanical processes. From the beginning, he
worked out of doors with the point, but indoors with the brush; and
attains perfect skill in washing flat color long before he attains
anything like skill in delineation of form.
29. Here, for instance, is a drawing, when he was twelve or thirteen
years old, of Dover Castle and the Dover Coach; in which the future
love of mystery is exhibited by his studiously showing the way in
which the dust rises about the wheels; and an interest in drunken
sailors, which materially affected his marine studies, shown not less
in the occupants of the hind seat. But what I want you to observe is
that, though the trees, coach, horses, and sailors are drawn as any
schoolboy would draw them, the sky is washed in so smoothly that few
water-color painters of our day would lightly accept a challenge to
match it.
And, therefore, it is, among many other reasons, that I put the brush
into your hands from the first, and try you with a wash in lampblack,
before you enter my working class. But, as regards the composition of
his picture, the drawing is always first with Turner, the color
second.
30. Drawing: that is to say, the expression by gradation of light,
either of form or space. Again I thus give you a statement wholly
adverse to the vulgar opinion of him. You will find that statement
early in the first volume of "Modern Painters," and repeated now
through all my works these twenty-five years, in vain. Nobody will
believe that the main virtue of Turner is in his drawing. I say "the
main virtue of Turner." Splendid though he be as a colorist, he is not
unrivaled in color; nay, in some qualities of color he has been far
surpassed by the Venetians. But no one has ever touched him in
exquisiteness of gradation; and no one in landscape in perfect
rendering of organic form.
31. I showed you in this drawing, at last Lecture, how truly he had
matched the color of the iron-stained rocks in the bed of the Ticino;
and any of you who care for color at all cannot but take more or less
pleasure in the black and greens and warm browns opposed throughout.
But the essential value of the work is not in these. It is, first, in
the expression of enormous scale of mountain and space of air, by
gradations of shade in these colors, whatever they may be; and,
secondly, in the perfect rounding and cleaving of the masses alike of
mountain and stone. I showed you one of the stones themselves, as an
example of uninteresting outline. If I were to ask you to paint it,
though its color is pleasant enough, you would still find it
uninteresting and coarse compared to that of a flower, or a bird. But
if I can engage you in an endeavor to draw its true forms in light and
shade, you will most assuredly find it not only interesting, but in
some points quite beyond the most subtle skill you can give to it.
32. You have heard me state to you, several times, that all the
masters who valued accurate form and modeling found the readiest way
of obtaining the facts they required to be firm pen outline, completed
by a wash of neutral tint. This method is indeed rarely used by
Raphael or Michael Angelo in the drawings they have left us, because
their studies are nearly all tentative--experiments in composition, in
which the imperfect or careless pen outline suggested all they
required, and was capable of easy change without confusing the eye.
But the masters who knew precisely before they laid touch on paper
what they were going to do--and this may be, observe, either because
they are less or greater than the men who change; less, in merely
drawing some natural object without attempt at composition, or greater
in knowing absolutely beforehand the composition they intend; it may
be, even so, that what they intend, though better known, is not so
good:--but at all events, in this anticipating power Tintoret, Holbein
and Turner stand, I think, alone as draughtsmen; Tintoret rarely
sketching at all, but painting straight at the first blow, while
Holbein and Turner sketch indeed, but it is as with a pen of iron and
a point of diamond.
33. You will find in your educational series[6] many drawings
illustrative of the method; but I have enlarged here the part that is
executed with the pen, out of this smaller drawing, that you may see
with what fearless strength Holbein delineates even the most delicate
folds of the veil on the head, and of the light muslin on the
shoulders, giving them delicacy, not by the thinness of his line, but
by its exquisite veracity.
[Footnote 6: At the Ruskin Drawing School, Oxford.]
The eye will endure with patience, or even linger with pleasure, on
any line that is right, however coarse; while the faintest or finest
that is wrong will be forcibly destructive. And again and again I have
to recommend you to draw always as if you were engraving, and as if
the line could not be changed.
34. The method used by Turner in the _Liber Studiorum_ is precisely
analogous to that of Holbein. The lines of these etchings are to
trees, rocks, or buildings, absolutely what these of Holbein are; not
suggestions of contingent grace, but determinations of the limits of
future form. You will see the explanatory office of such lines by
placing this outline over my drawing of the stone, until the lines
coincide with the limits of the shadow. You will find that it
intensifies and explains the forms which otherwise would have escaped
notice, and that a perfectly gradated wash of neutral tint with an
outline of this kind is all that is necessary for grammatical
statement of forms. It is all that the great colorists need for their
studies; they would think it wasted time to go farther; but, if you
have no eye for color, you may go farther in another manner, with
enjoyment.
35. Now to go back to Turner.
The _first_ great object of the _Liber Studiorum_, for which I
requested you in my sixth Lecture[7] to make constant use of it, is
the delineation of solid form by outline and shadow. But a yet more
important purpose in each of the designs in that book is the
expression of such landscape powers and character as have especial
relation to the pleasures and pain of human life--but especially the
pain. And it is in this respect that I desired you (Sect. 172) to be
assured, not merely of their superiority, but of their absolute
difference in kind from photography, as works of disciplined design.
[Footnote 7: "Lectures on Art, 1870," Sec. 170.]
[Illustration: NEAR BLAIR ATHOL.
From the painting by Turner.]
36. I do not know whether any of you were interested enough in the
little note in my catalogue on this view near Blair Athol, to look for
the scene itself during your summer rambles. If any did, and found it,
I am nearly certain their impression would be only that of an extreme
wonder how Turner could have made so little of so beautiful a spot.
The projecting rock, when I saw it last in 1857, and I am certain,
when Turner saw it, was covered with lichens having as many colors as
a painted window. The stream--or rather powerful and deep Highland
river, the Tilt--foamed and eddied magnificently through the narrowed
channel; and the wild vegetation in the rock crannies was a finished
arabesque of living sculpture, of which this study of mine, made on
another stream, in Glenfinlas, only a few miles away, will give you a
fair idea. Turner has absolutely stripped the rock of its beautiful
lichens to bare slate, with one quartz vein running up through it; he
has quieted the river into a commonplace stream; he has given, of all
the rich vegetation, only one cluster of quite uninteresting leaves
and a clump of birches with ragged trunks. Yet, observe, I have told
you of it, he has put into one scene the spirit of Scotland.
[Illustration: DUMBLANE ABBEY.
From the painting by Turner.]
37. Similarly, those of you who in your long vacations have ever
stayed near Dumblane will be, I think, disappointed in no small degree
by this study of the abbey, for which I showed you the sketch at last
Lecture. You probably know that the oval window in its west end is one
of the prettiest pieces of rough thirteenth-century carving in the
kingdom; I used it for a chief example in my lectures at Edinburgh;
and you know that the lancet windows, in their fine proportion and
rugged masonry, would alone form a study of ruined Gothic masonry of
exquisite interest.
Yet you find Turner representing the lancet window by a few bare oval
lines like the hoop of a barrel; and indicating the rest of the
structure by a monotonous and thin piece of outline, of which I was
asked by one of yourselves last term, and quite naturally and rightly,
how Turner came to draw it so slightly--or, we may even say, so badly.
38. Whenever you find Turner stopping short, or apparently failing in
this way, especially when he does the contrary of what any of us would
have been nearly sure to do, then is the time to look for your main
lesson from him. You recollect those quiet words of the strongest of
all Shakespeare's heroes, when any one else would have had his sword
out in an instant:
"Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them ...
Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
Without a prompter."[8]
[Footnote 8: "Othello," I. 2.]
Now you must always watch keenly what Turner's _cue_ is. You will see
his hand go to his hilt fast enough, when it comes. Dumblane Abbey is
a pretty piece of building enough, it is true; but the virtue of the
whole scene, and meaning, is not in the masonry of it. There is
much better masonry and much more wonderful ruin of it elsewhere;
Dumblane Abbey--tower and aisles and all--would go under one of the
arches of buildings such as there are in the world. Look at what
Turner will do when his cue is masonry,--in the Coliseum. What the
execution of that drawing is you may judge by looking with a
magnifying glass at the ivy and battlements in this, when, also, his
cue is masonry. What then can he mean by not so much as indicating one
pebble or joint in the walls of Dumblane?
[Illustration]
39. I was sending out the other day, to a friend in America, a chosen
group of the _Liber Studiorum_ to form a nucleus for an art
collection at Boston. And I warned my friend at once to guard his
public against the sore disappointment their first sight of these so
much celebrated works would be to them. "You will have to make them
understand," I wrote to him, "that their first lesson will be in
observing not what Turner has done, but what he has not done. These
are not finished pictures, but studies; endeavors, that is to say, to
get the utmost result possible with the simplest means; they are
essentially thoughtful, and have each their fixed purpose, to which
everything else is sacrificed; and that purpose is always
imaginative--to get at the heart of the thing, not at its outside."
40. Now, it is true, there are beautiful lichens at Blair Athol, and
good building at Dumblane; but there are lovely lichens all over the
cold regions of the world, and there is far more interesting
architecture in other countries than in Scotland. The essential
character of Scotland is that of a wild and thinly inhabited rocky
country, not sublimely mountainous, but beautiful in low rock and
light streamlet everywhere; with sweet copsewood and rudely growing
trees. This wild land possesses a subdued and imperfect school of
architecture, and has an infinitely tragic feudal, pastoral, and civic
history. And in the events of that history a deep tenderness of
sentiment is mingled with a cruel and barren rigidity of habitual
character, accurately corresponding to the conditions of climate and
earth.
41. Now I want you especially to notice, with respect to these things,
Turner's introduction of the ugly square tower high up on the left.
Your first instinct would be to exclaim, "How unlucky that was there
at all! Why, at least, could not Turner have kept it out of sight?" He
has quite gratuitously brought it into sight; gratuitously drawn
firmly the three lines of stiff drip-stone which mark its squareness
and blankness. It is precisely that blank vacancy of decoration, and
setting of the meager angles against wind and war, which he wants to
force on your notice, that he may take you thoroughly out of Italy and
Greece, and put you wholly into a barbarous and frost-hardened land;
that once having its gloom defined he may show you all the more
intensely what pastoral purity and innocence of life, and loveliness
of nature, are underneath the banks and braes of Doune, and by every
brooklet that feeds the Forth and Clyde.
That is the main purpose of these two studies. How it is obtained by
various incidents in the drawing of stones, and trees, and figures, I
will show you another time. The chief element in both is the sadness
and depth of their effect of subdued though clear light in sky and
stream.
42. The sadness of their effect, I repeat. If you remember anything of
the Lectures I gave you through last year, you must be gradually
getting accustomed to my definition of the Greek school in art, as one
essentially Chiaroscurist, as opposed to Gothic color; Realist, as
opposed to Gothic imagination; and Despairing, as opposed to Gothic
hope. And you are prepared to recognize it by any one of these three
conditions. Only, observe, the chiaroscuro is simply the technical
result of the two others: a Greek painter likes light and shade,
first, because they enable him to realize form solidly, while color is
flat; and secondly, because light and shade are melancholy, while
color is gay.
So that the defect of color, and substitution of more or less gray or
gloomy effects of rounded gradation, constantly express the two
characters: first, Academic or Greek fleshliness and solidity as
opposed to Gothic imagination; and secondly, of Greek tragic horror
and gloom as opposed to Gothic gladness.
43. In the great French room in the Louvre, if you at all remember the
general character of the historical pictures, you will instantly
recognize, in thinking generally of them, the rounded fleshly and
solid character in the drawing, the gray or greenish and brownish
color, or defect of color, lurid and moonlight-like, and the gloomy
choice of subjects, as the Deluge, the Field of Eylau, the Starvation
on the Raft, and the Death of Endymion; always melancholy, and usually
horrible.
The more recent pictures of the painter Gerome unite all these
attributes in a singular degree; above all, the fleshliness and
materialism which make his studies of the nude, in my judgment,
altogether inadmissible into the rank of the fine arts.
44. Now you observe that I never speak of this Greek school but with a
certain dread. And yet I have told you that Turner belongs to it, that
all the strongest men in times of developed art belong to it; but
then, remember, so do all the basest. The learning of the Academy is
indeed a splendid accessory to original power, in Velasquez, in
Titian, or in Reynolds; but the whole world of art is full of a base
learning of the Academy, which, when fools possess, they become a
tenfold plague of fools.
And again, a stern and more or less hopeless melancholy necessarily is
under-current in the minds of the greatest men of all ages,--of Homer,
Aeschylus, Pindar, or Shakespeare. But an earthy, sensual, and weak
despondency is the attribute of the lowest mental and bodily disease;
and the imbecilities and lassitudes which follow crime, both in
nations and individuals, can only find a last stimulus to their own
dying sensation in the fascinated contemplation of completer death.
45. Between these--the highest, and these--the basest, you have every
variety and combination of strength and of mistake: the mass of
foolish persons dividing themselves always between the two oppositely
and equally erroneous faiths, that genius may dispense with law, or
that law can create genius. Of the two, there is more excuse for, and
less danger in the first than in the second mistake. Genius has
sometimes done lovely things without knowledge and without discipline.
But all the learning of the Academies has never yet drawn so much as
one fair face, or ever set two pleasant colors side by side.
46. Now there is one great Northern painter, of whom I have not spoken
till now, probably to your surprise, Rubens; whose power is composed
of so many elements, and whose character may be illustrated so
completely, and with it the various operation of the counter schools,
by one of his pictures now open to your study, that I would press you
to set aside one of your brightest Easter afternoons for the study of
that one picture in the Exhibition of Old Masters, the so-called "Juno
and Argus," No. 387.
So-called, I say; for it is not a picture either of Argus or of Juno,
but the portrait of a Flemish lady "as Juno" (just as Rubens painted
his family picture with his wife "as the Virgin" and himself "as St.
George"): and a good anatomical study of a human body as Argus. In the
days of Rubens, you must remember, mythology was thought of as a mere
empty form of compliment or fable, and the original meaning of it
wholly forgotten. Rubens never dreamed that Argus is the night, or
that his eyes are stars; but with the absolutely literal and brutal
part of his Dutch nature supposes the head of Argus full of real eyes
all over, and represents Hebe cutting them out with a bloody knife and
putting one into the hand of the goddess, like an unseemly oyster.
That conception of the action, and the loathsome sprawling of the
trunk of Argus under the chariot, are the essential contributions of
Rubens' own Netherland personality. Then the rest of the treatment he
learned from other schools, but adopted with splendid power.
47. First, I think, you ought to be struck by having two large
peacocks painted with scarcely any color in them! They are nearly
black, or black-green, peacocks. Now you know that Rubens is always
spoken of as a great colorist, _par excellence_ a colorist; and would
you not have expected that--before all things--the first thing he
would have seen in a peacock would have been gold and blue? He sees
nothing of the kind. A peacock, to him, is essentially a dark bird;
serpent-like in the writhing of the neck, cloud-like in the toss and
wave of its plumes. He has dashed out the filaments of every feather
with magnificent drawing; he has not given you one bright gleam of
green or purple in all the two birds.
Well, the reason of that is that Rubens is not _par excellence_ a
colorist; nay, is not even a good colorist. He is a very second-rate
and coarse colorist; and therefore his color catches the lower public,
and gets talked about. But he is _par excellence_ a splendid
draughtsman of the Greek school; and no one else, except Tintoret,
could have drawn with the same ease either the muscles of the dead
body or the plumes of the birds.
48. Farther, that he never became a great colorist does not mean that
he could not, had he chosen. He was warped from color by his lower
Greek instincts, by his animal delight in coarse and violent forms and
scenes--in fighting, in hunting, and in torments of martyrdom and of
hell: but he had the higher gift in him, if the flesh had not subdued
it. There is one part of this picture which he learned how to do at
Venice, the Iris, with the golden hair, in the chariot behind Juno. In
her he has put out his full power, under the teaching of Veronese and
Titian; and he has all the splendid Northern-Gothic, Reynolds or
Gainsborough play of feature with Venetian color. Scarcely anything
more beautiful than that head, or more masterly than the composition
of it, with the inlaid pattern of Juno's robe below, exists in the art
of any country. _Si sic omnia!_--but I know nothing else equal to it
throughout the entire works of Rubens.