CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE NC710 .H21^' """'«n"«y Library ^fiB-JHEWc arts o,i„ 3 1924 030 665 503 Overs The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030665503 THE GRAPHIC ARTS A TREATISE ON THE VARIETIES OF DRAWING, PAINTING, AND ENGRAVING. THE GRAPHIC ARTS A TREATISE ON THE VARIETIES OF DRAWING, PAINTING, AND ENGRAVING IN^ COMPARISON WITH EACH OTHER A AW WITH NATURE j» BY Philip Gilbert Hamerton Author of 'Etching and Etchers' ETC. etc. etc. ' There is a great advantage in thorough technical training which must not be over- looked. When a man learns anything thoroughly it teaches him to respect what he learns. It teaches him to delight in his task for its own sake, and not for the sake of pay or reward. The happiness of our lives depends less on the actual value of the work which we do than on the spirit in which we do it. If a man tries to do the simplest and humblest work as wfeU as he possibly can, he will be interested in it ; he will be proud of it. But if, on the other hand, he only thinks of what he can get by his work, then the highest work will soon become wearisome.' Prince LeopolcHs Sfeech at Nottingham, yune sath, 1881. LONDON SEELEY, JACKSON, AND HALLIDAY, FLEET STREET 1882 All Righis reserved TO ROBERT BROWNING. / wish to dedicate this book to you as the representative of a class that ought to be more numerous — the class of large-minded persons who can take a lively interest in arts which are not specially their own. No one who had not carefully observed the narrowing of tnen's minds by specialities could believe to what a degree it goes. Ifistead of being open, as yours has always been, to the influences of literature, in the largest sense, as well as to the influences of the graphic arts and music, the specialised mind shuts itself up itt its ozvn pursuit so exclusively that it does not even know what is nearest to its own closed doors. We meet with scholars who take no more account of the graphic arts than if they did Jtot exist, and with painters who never read ; but, what is still more surprising, is the complete indifference with which an art can be regarded by men who know and practise another not widely removed from it. One may be a painter, and yet know nothing whatever about any kind of engraving ; one may be a skilled engraver, and yet work in life-long mis- understanding of the rapid arts. If the specialists who devote themselves to a single study had more of your interest in the work of others, they might find, as you have done, that the quality which may be called open-mindedness is far from, being an impediment to success, even in the highest and most arduous of artistic and intel- lectual pursuits. . CONTENTS. PAGE I. — Importance of Material Conditions in the Graphic Arts ... i II. — ^The Distinction between Useful and Aesthetic Drawing ... 6 III. — Drawing for Aesthetic Pleasure 17 IV. — Educational Influences of the Graphic Arts 26 V. — Right and Wrong in Drawing 37 VI. — Of Outline 47 VII. — Of the Classic and the Picturesque Lines 53 VIII. — Of Drawing by Areas 56 IX. — Of Drawing BY Spots 59 X. — Pen and Ink 62 XL — Auxiliary Washes 83 XII. — ^The Silver Point 93 XIII. — The Lead-Pencil 99 XIV. — Sanguine, Chalk, and Black Stone 108 XV. — Charcoal 118 XVI. — Water Monochrome 133 XVII. — Oil Monochrome 144 XVIIL— Pastel 151 XIX.— Tempera 158 XX. — Fresco and its Substitutes 1 64 XXI. — Painting in Oil and Varnish 188 XXII. — Painting in Water-Colours 257 XXIII. — Painting on Tapestry 294 XXIV. — Wood-Engraving 302 XXV. — Etching and Dry Point 328 XXVI. — Line-Engraving 343 XXVII. — Aquatint and Mezzotint 3^7 XXVIII. — Lithography 373 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGB Virgin and Child .Pen and Ink Raphael . 0. Lacour . 66 The Widow's Acre ,. Pen and Ink G. H. Boughton, A.R.A. Autotype . 76 Standard Bearer .. Pen with Wash , Sir J. Gilbert, R.A. .. . GoupiL & Co. . 84 Study .. Silver-point , . Sir F. Leighton, P.R.A. Autotype . 96 Study OF a Head .. Silver-point and Chalk LioNARDo da Vinci .. . GoupiL & Co. . 98 Venice .. Lead-pencil . Turner . P. Dujardin . 100 Portrait of S. T. Coleridge. ..Lead-pencil . Maclise ,. A. & W.Dawson.. . 104 The Village of Plogoff ., Lead-pencil . Lalanne . P. Dujardin . 106 Study for a Figure of Plato Black Chalk . E. J. Poynter, R.A. .. . A. Durand . 108 Head of a Sleeping Woman . .. Brown Chalk . E. BuRNE Jones ,. GOUPIL & Co. no Study of Drapery .. Black and White Chalk E. J. Poynter, R.A. .. ,. A. Durand . 112 Study of a Head .. Black and Red Chalk .. . ZUCCHERO . GOUPIL & Co, .. . 114 Two Female Heads JBlack,White,andRed^^^^^^^ ( Chalk J ,. GoupiL & Co. .. . 116 A Forest Rivulet .. Charcoal . ALLONGi .. GoupiL & Co. .. . 118 A French Market .. Charcoal . L. Lhermitte ... .. GouPiL & Co. ,. 120 Psyche .. Indian Ink . E. J. Poynter, R.A. . .. P. Dujardin .. 136 Boat on a Sea Shore ... .. Sepia . J. D. Harding ... .. GoupiL & Co. .. 138 IsoTTA DA Rimini ..Line , P. DELLA FRANCESCA ., .. C.W. Sherborn., .. 160 f EMALE Head .. Tinted Drawing . Flemish School ,. GoupiL & Co. ,. 258 Portrait of Guicciardini .. Woodcut . Venetian work, 1567 . .. A. & W.Dawson., .. 302 Rebecca .. Woodcut . Landelle .. S. Pannemaker. .. 304 Owl and Female Kestrel . .. Woodcut . Bewick .. A. & W.Dawson. .. 310 Study of a Head .. Woodcut . Titian ..W.J.Linton .. 312 Design in Outline .. Woodcut . From Poliphilo .. A. & W.Dawson. ■• 315 A Penitent .. Woodcut . A. DiiRER .. A. & W.Dawson. .. 316 Design from 'Ars Moriendi' Woodcut i' .. A. & W.Dawson. .. 316 Death and the Knight ,.. Woodcut ,. Holbein .. A. & W.Dawson. .. 318 Death and the Waggoner . .. Woodcut . Holbein .. A. & W.Dawson. .. 318 Job .. Woodcut . Holbein... .. A. & W.Dawson. •• 319 Death and the Abbot ... ,., Woodcut .. Holbein .. A. & W.Dawson. .. 320 Portrait of M.d'Epinayin THE) t^„j>^/ Fashions of Goya's Time / ,. FORTUNY .."LtrEXLii. ... .. 320 The Brook's Side ... Woodcut ,. BiRKET Foster .. Edmund Evans , 3 .. 324 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Landscape Portrait OF John Price Lady ON Horseback The Pig Old Palace at Richmond Rouen Coat of Arms, with Cock A Combat The Temptation of Christ Dido Portrait of Gellius de Bouma ... Portrait of the Marquis of Castelnau Line. Lace from the Portrait of Arch, bishop de Vintimille Vision of St. Helena, First State Vision of St. Helena, Final State Portrait of A. Macmillan, Esq.... Waiting Barnard Castle Sainte Am]£lie, after Delaroche Shore AT St. Valery Chardin's Wife Rocks and River .. Woodcut ... Abbott H. Thayer. ..T. Cole 326 .. Etching ... Hollar .. P. Dujardin 328 .. Dry Point ... .. Heywood Hardy... 334 .. EUhing ,.. Rembrandt ... ..A.DURAND 336 . Etching .. Hollar .. P. Dujardin 338 . Soft-ground Etching .. Brunet-Debaines 340 .. Line... ... A. DtyRER ... .. A. DURAND 34* .. Line... ... Delaune ... .. p. Dujardin 348 .. Line... ... Lucas van Leyden A. DURAND 350 ,. Line... ... Marc Antonio ,. A. DURAND 352 .. Line... ... ViSSCHER ,. p. Dujardin 356 U Line... ... Nanteuil ,. GouPiL & Co. 356 \ Line... ... Drevet . P. Dujardin 358 . Line... .. Paul Veronese .. . L. Stocks, R.A. ... 360 . Line... .. Paul Veronese .. . L. Stocks, R.A. ... 360 ,. Stipule and Line ... . C. H. JF,F,NS 362 . Stipple .. F. HoLL, A.RA. . Francis Holl ... 362 . Line... .. Alfred Hunt . E. P. Brandard ... 364 , Line... .. Mercurj . GouPiL & Co. 366 . Aquatint . . Brunet-Debaines 368 . Mezzotint . .. Chardin . LURAT iio . Lithograph . .. W. J. MiJLLER . M. Hanhart 376 PREFACE ' I ^HE lesson brought home to me by the studies which have led to ■*- the production of this volume, is, that we ought not to despise any form of art which has been practised by great men. If it was good enough for them, it is probably good enough for us. Able artists have often accepted quite contentedly what may be truly called limited means of expression, but they have never tolerated a bad art. This reasonable degree of trust in the practical sense of great artists has not always been general, A well-known instance of the contrary is familiar to us in the history of etching. For a long time before the modern revival of that art it was treated with a degree of contempt which is hardly imaginable now. People could not be induced to look at etchings, no publisher would invest in them, no periodical would insert them, and the general belief of the time was that Rembrandt had practised an art which, at the best, was only a defective substitute for engraving. Surely a little reflection might have dissipated such a prejudice as that ! Rembrandt was an illustrious painter, a painter not only of great mental capacity, but of consummate technical skill, which he exhibited in remark- able variety. Besides this, he left behind him a great number of admir- able drawings in ink, in bistre, and other materials, quite sufficient to prove, if he had never produced such a thing as a picture at all, that he was a draughtsman of extraordinary powers, both mental and manual.^ Now, pray consider the extreme inherent improbability that such an artist as Rembrandt by these means had proved himself to be would have spent nearly half his time on a bad art ! He must have known, at least as well as we do, what are the qualities and powers which make an art available as a means of expression for such a genius as his, and, having made the necessary practical experiments, he must have come" to the conclusion that etching possessed them. xii PREFACE. If we, in the present day, are liable to any wrong judgments about other arts, like that of our immediate predecessors about etching, we have a ready means of correcting them. We have simply to inquire — the inquiry need not be long or difficult — if the art that we feel inclined to despise has been practised by great artists. If it has been practised by them, not as a -mere experiment, but as a pursuit, our contempt for it is either without grounds or on wrong grounds, we are probably blaming it for the absence of some quality -which is not necessary to the expression of artistic ideas. Let us take as an example the simple and primitive -looking art of drawing with common pen and ink upon common white paper. Most people do not think much of such an art, for tke materials are very cheap and to be met with everywhere, and the work does not flatter the eye when it is done. Still, it may deserve attention and consideration, tor it was practised by many of the greatest artists who ever lived, amongst whom may be specially mentioned these three — Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo. When we come to look into the matter, we find that the pen, though it does not offer any soft luxury to the sense of sight, is one of the best instruments for the ex- pression of firm, decided, substantial knowledge, and that is why those great men used it. The lead-pencil is sometimes despised because it is given to beginners, yet it was employed habitually by Turner in the full maturity of his talent ; and its predecessor, the silver-point, was constantly in the hands of the old masters. Some of us remember the time when water-colour was so despised in France that no critic would take it into consideration as a serious art. It was connected, in the popular conception, with the attempts of school-girls, and by an association of ideas in accordance with common mental habits, it was assumed that an art practised by young ladies could not possibly express the ideas of thoughtful and educated men. It would have been equally reasonable to infer that because young ladies used pens and paper for their school themes an experienced author could not employ them for his manuscripts ; but reason is p(^erless against the prejudices of association. The most practical argument in favour of water-colour is, that it actually has been employed by men of great learning (in artistic matters) and great genius. If it had been a feeble art, such men as Miiller and Cox would not have resorted to it. PREFACE. xiii Lithography is slightly esteemed because it has been vulgarised by feeble work, or by work that is manually skilful, but destitute of mental originality. It is also very unfortunate in being frequently represented by impressions from worn stones. It has become a business, and a business not always conducted with a due regard even to a commercial reputation. But surely this unlucky turn in the application of the art has nothing to* do with its higher capabilities ? It was heartily appreciated by great men in the last generation. If such men as Decamps, Gdricault, and Delacroix, practised it or approved of it, we may be quite sure that it is an artist's process, whether it may happen to be fashionable in the present day, or applied to unfashionable uses. I am told now that woodcut, though popular enough in a practical way as an adjunct to journalism, and a handmaid of scientific literature, is despised by the aesthetic taste of the day. Like lithography, it has become a trade ; careful drawings are often cut to pieces by apprentices, and badly printed afterwards. We may deplore these errors. It is always sad to see good materials turned to unworthy uses, but these misapplications ought not to make us unjust to the art which is pursued unworthily. Is literature always followed with a due sense of its noblest responsibilities and powers .'' Woodcut can be printed cheaply, so that it is used and abused in commerce, yet it has fine artistic capabilities. It is not a painter's process, because it is too laborious for an occupied painter to undertake it; but it is a thoroughly sound process, capable of the most various effects ; and it has been encouraged by great artists, especially by Holbein, too delicate a draughtsman to patronise a rude and imperfect art. The fundamental error in estimating the Graphic Arts is to rank them by comparison with the ineffable completeness of nature. They may be compared with nature; they shall be so compared in this volume? but only as a matter of scientific curiosity, not at all for the purpose of condemning some arts and exalting others. We who are constantly accustomed to the language — or rather, in the plural, the very different languages — of the graphic arts, lose by familiarity with their meaning the sense of their real remoteness from nature. We forget — we become incapable, of properly understanding — what a distance there is between the natural object and the artistic representation. For example, it was xiv PREFACE. the custom of the old masters in many of their drawings to shade m strong, open, diagonal lines. There is nothing in nature like that. It is simply a conventional language intended to convey the notion of shade without imitation, without even the beginning of an imitation, of its qualities. This is a single instance, but I could fill a hundred pages with such instances. If imitative truth were the test of excellence in the fine arts, the greater part of the drawings, etchings, and engravings in our museums, and many of the pictures in our gfalleries, would have to be condemned without remission. The real test of excellence in a process is this. Will it conveniently — that is, without too much troublesome technical embarrassment — express human knowledge and human feeling? Will it record in an intelligible manner the results of human observation? If it will do this for man, with reference to some limited department of nature only, such as form, or light and dark, or colour without full natural light, then it is a good art, however far it may fall short of nature in a vain struggle for complete imitation. This is the reason why we value so many drawings by great artists in which they voluntarily bridled the imitative instinct. They restrained that instinct; they pulled it up at some point fixed in each case by some special artistic purpose and by the nature of the materials that they employed. They did not share the scorn for limited means of expression, which is one of the signs of imperfect culture, but they looked upon each tool as a special instru- ment and employed it in accordance with its proper uses, content if it expressed their thought, often not less content if the thought were con- veyed by a hint or a suggestion to intelligences not very far inferior to their own. In our own time an entirely new set of processes have rendered service by reproducing drawings and engravings of various kinds, often with a remarkable degree of fidelity. Some of these processes have been employed in the illustration of the present volume, and great care has been taken, by the rejection of failures, to have the best results which the present condition of photographic engraving could afford. The reader may be glad to know how these reproductions have been made. Without entering into details which would require many pages for their explanation, I may say that the processes used for this volume are of very different natures. That employed by Messrs. Goupil. called PREFACE. XV photogravure, is a secret, and all I know about it is that the marvellously intelligent inventor discovered some means of making a photograph in which all the darks stood in proportionate relief, and from which a cast in electrotype could be taken which would afterwards serve as a plate to print from. All the Goupil photogravures in this volume are so produced, and very wonderful things they are, especially the Mercurj, which is the most difficult feat of reproduction I have hitherto seen attempted, on account of the extreme delicacy of many lines and the sharpness of others. We also give plates printed in two or more colours. They are printed in each case from one copper and with one turn of the press ; kow, we are unable to explain, but though the making of these illustrations is mysterious, the quality of them will be admitted by everyone who knows the originals in the Louvre. M. Dujardin's process of heliogravure is entirely different. He covers a plate made of a peculiar kind of bronze with a sensitive ground, and after photo- graphing the subject on that simply etches it and has it retouched with the burin if required.* M. Amand Durand employs ordinary copper plates, and uses bichromatised gelatine as an etching ground, which acquires various degrees of insolubility by exposure to light. He bites his plates like ordinary etchings ; and when they are intended to repre- sent etchings he rebites them in the usual way and works upon them with dry point, &c., just as an etcher does, but when they represent engravings he finishes them with the burin. In the reproductions from Mr. Poynter's drawings, in this volume, the dark lines are done by photographic etching, and the uniform ground, which imitates Mr. Poynter's paper, is in ordinary aquatint. The reader now perceives the essential difference between the Goupil process, in which there is no etching, and the processes employed by the hdliograveurs, which are entirely founded upon etching. The mechanical autotype process is founded upon the absorption of moisture by partially soluble gelatine, and its rejection by bichro- matised gelatine rendered insoluble by exposure to light. The printing is done in oil ink, which is rejected by the moist gelatine and caught ♦ He does not draw it, the drawing is done by photography ; he bites it in the lines cleared by the chemical process. M. Dujardin is not an artist like Amand Durand, but he is a remarkably skilful scientific operator. XVI PREFACE. by the insoluble. In the reproduction of a pen drawing the ink lines are printed from portions of gelatine which have been rendered insoluble by the action of light, and the blank spaces between the lines represent the moistened gelatine. This is an excellent process for many purposes, certainly the best of all for the imitation of pen drawings. The most defective of all photographic processes are generally those intended to print like woodcuts in the text. Such reproductions often abound in thickened or in broken lines, or in lines run together, and when this is the case they are worse than worthless from a critical point of view. The few reproductions printed with the text in the present volume have been very carefully executed by Messrs. A, and W. Dawson, and are as nearly as possible free from these defects. The process includes both photography and electrotype, but I am not able to give the reader very precise information as to the means by which the hollows are produced. The line, of course, is in relief, and always very nearly at the same level, as in woodcut.* The processes of photographic engraving have rendered very great services, especially to students of moderate means who live at a distance from great national collections, but the right use of reproductions must always be accompanied by a certain reserve. You can never trust them absolutely, for you can never be certain that a publisher will be a sufficiently severe critic to reject everything that is less than the best. They are most precious as memoranda of works that we have seen and know, and then the only limit to their usefulness is the danger that the reproduction which we possess may gradually take the place in our minds once occupied by the original which is absent. * Apropos of woodcut, I have just detected an erratum in the footnote to page 75. Writing from memory, I had the impression that the sitter for the first sketch mentioned there was a valet, on account of his costume, but he was really a gentleman who had put on an old-fashioned dress. The reader will find him at page 320. He is coixectly described in the List of Illustrations. THE GRAPHIC ARTS. CHAPTER I. Importance of Material Conditions in the Graphic Arts. TECHNICAL studies have been so generally undervalued that the purpose of a book like this may be readily misunderstood or misrepresented. It may be supposed to deal with matter only, and to neglect the mental element in art, because it is not disdainful of material things. This would be a wrong estimate of its purposes. In the Graphic Arts you cannot get rid of matter. Every drawing is in a substance and on a substance. Every substance used in drawing has its own special and pieculiar relations both to nature and to the human mind. The distinction in the importance of material things between the Graphic Arts and literature deserves consideration because our literary habits of thought lead us wrong so easily when we apply them to the arts of design. All of us who are supposed to be educated people have jDeen trained in the mental . habits which are derived from the study of books, and these habits, as all artists and men of science are well aware, lead students to value words and ideas more than things, and produce in their minds a sort of contempt for matter, or at least for the knowledge of matter, which indisposes them for material studies of all kinds, and often makes them blind to the close connexion which exists between matter and the artistic expression of thought. In literature, such a connexion can scarcely be said to exist. A writer of books may use pen or pencil, and whatever quality of paper he chooses. There is even no advantage in reading the original manuscript, for the mechanical work of the printer adds clearness to the text without injuring the most delicate shades of literary expression. The quality of paper used by Sir Walter Scptt did not affect one of his sentences; the quality of B 2 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. the different papers which were carefully selected by Turner, for studies of different classes, determined the kind of work he did upon them. Ink and pencil in the hands of a writer express exactly the same ideas ; in the hands of a draughtsman they express different ideas or different mental conditions. A draughtsman does not interpret the light and shade of Nature in the same manner with different instruments. He has to throw himself into a temper which may be in harmony with the instrument he uses, to be blind for the time to the qualities it cannot render, to be sensitive to those which it interprets readily. Even the roughness or smoothness of the substance he is working upon determines many a mental choice. Of these things a literary education gives us no perception. It even misleads our judgment by inducing us to suppose that substances are beneath the consideration of an artist, as they are outside the preoccu- pations of an author. Or it may falsify our opinions in another and more plausible way. It may, and it often does, induce people to think that technical matters may concern artists and still be below the region of the higher criticism which should interest itself in the things of the mind, and not bestow attention upon the products of the laboratory, or the processes of the painting-room. As a result of this way of thinking we sometimes hear critics praised for not being technical, and blunders in technical matters, which surprise those who understand the subject, do not appear to diminish the popularity of writers upon art, if only their style be elegant and their descriptions lively and amusing. Technical ignorance appears even to be an advantage to a critic, as it preserves him from one of the forms of tiresomeness, and leaves him to speak of sentiments which all can enter into rather than of substances which only workmen and students ever touch, and of processes which only the initiated can follow. It will be my purpose in the present volume to show how mental expression is affected by material conditions in the graphic arts. I shall point out, not in vague generalities, but in accurate detail, the temptations offered by each substance used and each process employed. I shall make it clear in what manner, and to what degree, the artist has to conform himself to material conditions in order that he may best express the thoughts and sentiments which are in him, and, above all, I shall make it my business to show how the choice amongst those thoughts and sentiments themselves, how the expression of some and the suppression of others, may in very many instances be accounted for by the nature of the materials employed. It is only by a thorough understanding of these conditions of things that criticism can lay its foundations in truth and MATERIAL CONDITIONS. 3 justice. You may write brilliantly about an artist without knowing any- thing of the inexorable material conditions under which his daily labour has to be done; you may captivate readers as disdainful of those con- ditions as yourself by the cleverness with which you can substitute rhetoric for information ; but if you have any real desire to understand the fine arts as they are^if you have any keen intellectual curiosity about them, if you wish to speak with fairness of those who have worked in them — you will be brought to the study of matter as well as to the comparison of ideals. The criticism which professes indifference to technical know- ledge is a criticism without foundations, however prettily it may be expressed. It is to the true criticism what a cloud is to a mountain — the one a changeful vapour sometimes gorgeous with transient colour and bearing a deceptive appearance of permanent form, the other massive and enduring, with a firm front to every wind and a base of granite deep- rooted in the very substance of the world. There is a prevalent idea that the study of material conditions is uninteresting — a dull study, not fit to occupy the attention of highly cultivated persons. This idea comes from our curiously unsubstantial education. The training of a gentleman has been so much confined to words and mathematical abstractions that he has seldom learned to know the intimate charm which dwells in substances perfectly adapted to - human purposes. There is a charm in things, in the mere varieties of matter, which affects our feelings with an exquisite sense of pleasurable satis- faction when we thoroughly- understand the relation of tliese substances to the conceptions and creations of the mind. This charm is entirely independent of their costliness, and one of the best results of knowledge is that it makes us appreciate things for themselves as no one can who is unfamiliar with their noblest uses. A painter takes some cheap earth which he finds in Italy, such as the ferruginous earth of Sienna ; and it is better than gold to him, for it will enter into a hundred lovely com- binations where gold would be of no use. Art does not reject what is costly, yet seeks nothing for its costliness. It accepts the blue of the lapis lazuli, and the colouring matter of the emerald,* but it also keenly appreciates a stick of well - burnt charcoal or a bit of common chalk. Many of the most delicate designs left to us by the old masters were done with the silver- point, one of the simplest instruments and one of the cheapest, as it did not wear perceptibly with use. Here we find artists taking advantage of that blackening of silver by the very tarnish, * In ultramarine and the emerald oxides of chromium, the first is lapis lazuli in powder, and the second contains the colouring matter of the emerald. ' 4 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. which gives so much labour to servants. The diamond point is used by engravers on metal, who appreciate its marvellous hardness. Ivory is used by miniature-painters on account of its exquisite surface. So influential are substances upon the fine arts that the modern development of wood-engraving has been dependent upon the use of a particular kind of wood, and even on a peculiar way of sawing it across the grain, whilst the existence of lithography is dependent upon the supply of a peculiar kind of stone. The metals used in engraving directly affect the style of the engraving itself The existence of such a metal as copper has had a direct influence upon art, for if there had been none of it in the world a great deal of the best work in etching and engraving would never have been executed. If an artist who had etched on copp>er took to etching on zinc, the change of metals would produce, after a few experiments, a marked alteration in his manner. Even the degree of fineness or coarseness, in paper or canvas, affects the style of an artist. No one paints in the same way on coarse cloth and smooth panel ; no one draws in the same way on rough paper and Bristol board. The materials employed affect not only the expression of the artist's thought and sentiment, but also the interpretation of nature. Every material used in the fine arts has its own subtle and profound affinities with certain orders of natural truth, and its own want of adaptability to others. One might think that the materials were sentient and alive, that they had tastes and passions, that they loved some things in nature as the horse loves a grassy plain, and hated others as a landlubber hates the sea. It will be a part of my business in this volume to show how these affinities and repugnances operate, and how they affect the inter- pretation of nature in art, by impelling artists to a selection of natural truth in accordance with their dictates. After this explanation of my project, I trust that its intellectual pur- poses are clear. The book will deal with matter, but with matter as an instrument of mind ; it will deal with the materials used by artists, but with reference to their various adaptabilities to the interpretation of nature. Seen with this double reference to human thought and nature, the substances we shall have to examine have a far higher significance than they could ever possess by themselves. What, by itself, is an inch of strong silver wire ? What is it but six -pennyworth of silver ? Set it in a holder, let Raphael take it up and draw with it— draw the Virgin modest and fair, the Child gleeful and strong— let Raphael trace the ideal forms in the dark grey silver lines, and then how noble the metal on the paper becomes ! MATERIAL CONDITIONS. 5 People reverence carbon in the form of the diamond because it is pro- digiously expensive, and they despise it in the form of charcoal because it is so cheap that it can be used for fuel ; but a piece of charcoal and a diamond point are both equally noble in the eyes of an artist, for with the first he can draw very delicate shades, with the second the finest of lines. Even the hair of the camel, the sable, and the badger, may become ennobled in the hands of painters as a goosequill is when a poet uses it, and that unclean animal the hog renders unceasing service to the fine arts by supplying the kind of brush which has done more than anything to encourage a manly style in oil. The importance of instru- ments in the interpretation of nature and the expression of mind may be realised by simply imagining what oil-painting would have been if the hog-tool, which gives mastery over thick pigments, had been replaced by the camel-hair pencil, which can only be used with thin ones. It may seem, to the ultra-refined, a degradation to great art to owe any- thing to pigs' bristles, but all debts ought to be acknowledged. The history of art can never be truly or completely written until the influences of such things (apparently humble, yet in reality most important) is fully recognised. The use of this or that kind of hair in brushes has more to do with executive style in art than the most ingenious reasonings about the beautiful. It may be thought that, as technical matters are very generally known, there is little need for a new book about them ; but to this it may be answered that the existing knowledge is scattered and frag- mentary, so that the mere bringing of it together may be a service not without utility. Besides, there is a morphology of processes which has never been traced, and which I desire to trace. I wish to show the close connexion which exists, in principle, between processes so different in apparent results that they are not called by the same names. It may be an advantage, again, to judge different methods fairly on their merits without reference to changeful tastes and fashions. There is an absolute value in each of the graphic arts quite independent of its relative value with regard to the temporary state of public opinion. The two questions about each of these arts are, 'Can it interpret nature?' and, *Can it express human thought and emotion ? ' The answer to these questions in every case is, ' Yes ; within certain limits fixed by the nature of the material and the process.' And then comes the farther question, 'What are those limits ?' to which this volume shall be as complete an answer as I can make it. THE GRAPHIC ARTS. CHAPTER II. The Distinction between Useful and Aesthetic Drawing. THE Graphic 'Arts are equally capable of expressing two opposite states of the human mind — the positive and the artistic. Work done in the positive state of mind has for its single purpose the recording of fact and truth. Work done in the artistic temper may record a great deal of truth incidentally, but that is not its main purpose. The real aim of all artistic drawing is to convey a peculiar kind of pleasure, which we call aesthetic pleasure. What this aesthetic pleasure is, and how it is excited, I shall have to explain later. For the present it is enough to note the separableness of it from simple truth, and the broad division of all work done in drawing into two great categories. These categories might be called the positive and the poetic; but the word 'poetic,' from its habitual association with the highest kind of imaginative creation, is too exalted for our present need. There is a great deal of clever, and by no means despicable artist-craft, which does not in the least deserve the name of poetry, and yet which is at the same time clearly not the outcome of the positive spirit, I therefore prefer the word ' artistic,' which will readily be understood to mean a kind of mental activity which plans and schemes for aesthetic pleasure. It is most important that the distinction between these two motives of draughtsmen, truth and delight, should be constantly remembered as a distinction which always exists ; but if we desire to think justly (which is the one purpose of all critical study and reflection) we must keep the distinction in our minds without hostility to either kind of drawing. Both are worth pursuing ; both have rendered welcome service to the world ; and it is only a proof of narrowness to think contemptuously of either. Unfortunately it often happens, since narrowness is the commonest of all the failings of men, that those who are strongly imbued with the love for measurable and ascertainable fact have a contempt for the purveyors of aesthetic pleasure ; whilst, on the other hand, those who are gifted with the genuine artistic temperament, — the temperament which flies to aesthetic pleasure as a bee to a bank of flowers, despise the slaves of truth for their deadness to exquisite sensations. USEFUL AND AESTHETIC DRAWING. 7 Ot the two kinds of drawing-, that of fact and truth has hitherto been the less appreciated. So keen is the general enjoyment of imaginative or fanciful art that the simple truth seems spiritless and unintelligent in com- parison. It is only since the great scientific development of the present century that severe, emotionless drawing has been produced in a regular and reliable manner by any class of draughtsmen. Even now, with the instructive examples of photography so readily accessible, the feelings and emotions of men are so strongly acted upon by imaginative drawing that it seems to them truer than truth itself; and they are not only in- capable of detecting its want of veracity, but they claim for it, in their enthusiasm, virtues precisely the opposite of those which it really possesses. The misfortune of this is that truthful work, the simple transcript of the facts of nature, does not receive the moderate degree of credit which it deserves. Being without charm it is also without friends. It warms no man's heart ; it awakens no man's enthusiasm ; and whereas the clever artist, who knows how to play upon our feelings by the well-known devices which appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities, gets credit for being truthful, which he is not, as well as accomplished, which he is ; the simple draughtsman, who draws what is before him, does not always win the trust which is due to his one virtue — ^veracity. This has been rather painfully impressed upon people who take an interest in these things by the failure of topographic landscape. In the decade between 1850 and i860 a distinct attempt was made, as an experiment, to draw the forms of landscape as they really are, and to colour them for truth rather than for beauty and charm. No intelligent artist or critic ever desired that the simple transcript of nature produced in this manner should supersede the cunningly arranged landscape which gave aesthetic pleasure ; but it was thought that plain truth might find utterance in painting as it did in literature. It turned out, however, that the most serious and con- scientious attempts in this direction were commonly misunderstood. The painters who set themselves to copy nature accurately were supposed to be ignorant of art. The absence of common artifices of arrangement made these men liable to the sort of criticism which blames one thing for not having the qualities of another, as if it were possible to reconcile composition with the truthful delineation of places. If topographic landscape- painting had little chance in England it had none whatever on the Continent. The one example of it in our National Gallery, Seddon's 'Jerusalem,' would not be tolerated in a Continental collection, it being always understood that the purpose of a picture is not to tell the truth but to gratify the aesthetic desires. The too clear atmosphere, 8 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. the importunate quantity of equally visible details, and the hopeless ugliness of very much of the material, are so strongly against that picture from the artistic point of view that its proper place is not amongst works of aesthetic art, where it shows to too great disadvantage ; yet paintings of that character, representing scenes of interest with the most strict veracity, would be valu- able in their own humble way as illustrations of remote realities. That such art should be denied the right of existence because it is not aesthetic is as unreasonable as it would be to refuse paper and print to plain narratives of travel because they are not novels and poems. It is well to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of Graphic Art when they are present; but, when they are not present, it is very desirable that we should be just to the humble merits which often take their place. Accuracy in matters of fact is one of those humble merits, and a very useful quality it is in all Graphic Art which illus- trates either contemporary events, or past history, or places which have an interest of their own. The woodcuts in our illustrated newspapers are often fairly accurate, but not always. When they are so the quality is far more valuable relatively to the special duty and function of such newspapers than any degree of cleverness in composition. For example, the Cape mail steamer, the American, foundered in mid-ocean in April 1880, from the rupture of the screw-shaft. The weather was calm; and the interesting point of the whole story is that the captain and. other people were as calm as the weather, and that there was no confusion in their proceedings. They first breakfasted quietly and then quitted the ship in the boats, which started in good order with a sufficient sailing breeze and all sails set. These inter- esting facts were illustrated in the Graphic, in plain, truthful woodcuts from sketches by the chief officer of the vessel. A French illustrated newspaper treated the wreck in the grand, imaginative style. In the French artist's vigorous sketch the American was tossed in such a terrific sea as only occurs in the most furious Atlantic gales. She was dismasted, and in such a con- dition of wild and hopeless disorder that it would have been impossible to launch even a life-boat. The artist had appealed powerfully to the feelings, and his sketch proved very considerable rough ability in its way; but observe how, by missing the facts of the real incident, he at the same time missed its peculiar and exceptional interest, and confounded a remarkable and unique occurrence with the crowd of ordinary shipwrecks resulting from mere bad weather. The example is a striking one, but it is not solitary. The clever artist, who is a very dangerous person indeed when a record of fact is wanted, comes with his love of effect and composition and is careless about truth of incident and form ; yet in all illustration what we need is a trust- worthy record. When the Tay Bridge broke down we wanted to know how USEFUL AND AESTHETIC DRAWING. 9 it had been constructed, and we did not care in the least what the skilful draughtsman on wood chose to imagine concerning the clouds about the moon. So in books of travel, the real interest of illustration lies in the faithful drawing of things that we should not clearly understand from a verbal description, and this can be given without any aesthetic artifice or charm. Drawing of that kind, though without pretension, is as valuable as any honest account of interesting facts in writing, and deserves the acknow- ledgment which is due to all works of simple utility. The plain drawing of facts has been undervalued not only in com- parison with artistic design, but also, in a different way, by comparison with photography. It is supposed by many that since photography gives very minute detail, and is, in some sort, the fixed reflexion of nature in a mirror, anyone who desires a true record can get it much better by making use of a photographic apparatus than by the most careful study with a pencil. This is one of those cases in which a really well-founded opinion cannot possibly be a simple opinion, easily transmitted to those who have not studied the subject. Photography does, in some respects, give more delicate truth than any draughtsman can, but from its incapacity for selection there are many truths which it cannot state so clearly as they can be stated in drawing, and it often happens that even if the photograph could give them separately, it cannot give them together. Again, not- withstanding all the really wonderful ingenuity which has been employed in making the photographic apparatus portable and convenient, it is still far from being so ready and handy as a pocket-book. But there is one fatal objection to photography in comparision with drawing, an objection which far outweighs all the others, and that is, the necessity for an actually existing model. You cannot photograph an intention, whilst you can draw an intention, even in the minutest detail, as we constantly see by the drawings made by architects of buildings not yet in existence. This settles the question in favour of drawing, because all constructors require to be able to represent ideas and conceptions which have not yet become realities. Even in the representation of realities, photography is less explicit than a good drawing by a person who thoroughly understands what he has to represent. I may mention, as a remarkably good example of explanatory clearness in drawing, the famous French architect Viollet- le-Duc. The purpose of his immense labours as a draughtsman was not to render the aspects of nature, but to give the clearest possible explanation of substance and structure. His work is, therefore, not to be compared with the work of painters, in which there is generally an attempt to render something of the mystery and effect of nature, and yet, although he did not lo THE GRAPHIC ARTS. attempt this, he employed an intelligence of extraordinary acuteness in drawings which every cultivated critic admires for the special merits which they possess. For people whose pursuits are not those of a painter, Viollet- le-Duc (though his work is ' hard as nails,' from the pictorial point of view) would be a much better model than Delacroix. It is much to be regretted that plain explanatory drawing should not be more generally practised and understood. I remember being told by a French artist, who lived in a provincial town of moderate importance, that there was not a single workman then living in the town who could under- stand a' design in perspective. Mechanical drawings of plans, sections, and elevations, are, perhaps, more clearly understood by workmen in the common trades ; but with reference to these I may express another regret, which is, that they are not better understood in the higher classes of society. It is so easy to explain ' structure by these three devices, and they place within our reach such admirably exact means of information with regard to very much human work, from the construction of a cathedral, or an armoured battle-ship, to that of a telephone, or a watch, that every educated person ought to be able to understand them without difficulty ; and yet at present you find ladies and gentlemen who can make something out of an elevation, but are puzzled by a plan, and almost irritated by the apparent insufficiency of a section. It is not intended to devote space to mechanical drawing in the present work, because the writer has not the special knowledge which would be required for any adequate treatment of the subject, and also because, since the purposes of mechanical and artistic drawing are so widely different, their presence in the same volume might appear in- congruous. One remark may, however, be made on the subject in passing. Enthusiastic writers upon the fine arts have sometimes brought themselves to believe, in the strength of their admiration for great artists, that their draughtsmanship was scientifically accurate, and could be compared with the perfection of the best mechanical work. This is one of the common errors which enthusiasts are so ready to commit. Perfect accuracy is never to be expected from any artist, though the degrees of deviation from it are infinite ; and we speak of ' accurate drawing ' as I have spoken of it in this very chapter, always with the well-understood reservation that the accuracy is relative and not absolute. Mechanical drawing, with rule and compass, is man's confession of the inaccuracy of his own faculties. If we could draw exacriy, what should hinder us from making elevations of steam-engines with a free hand, unembarrassed by these tiresome instruments ? USEFUL AND AESTHETIC DRAWING. ii There are degrees of perfection even in this, the most rigidly exact of all the graphic arts — degrees of perfection that no one can properly ap- preciate who has not been trained at the mechanical draughtsman's desk. When the thickness of a hair-line on one side or other of the all but invisible point is enough to lead to inconvenient constructive error, it is intelligible that intense care should be required. Let us respect these exact and patient labours with the bow-pen, for without them our modern industrial activity would not be possible. A locomotive could not be made from sketches, nor even from careful drawings done by the eye and the hand. A kind of drawing which completely realises the double sense of the Greek word ypd in G 452, THE GRAPHIC ARTS; ike seemingly slight work wlilch looks as if it; had not cost an effort; and, whIcK incurs strong moral condemnation from critics who have solittl^ understanding of art that they do riot Jcnpw how labour is applied in. it, ,.,. The virtues commdn to all drawings that iwe value are harmony and a fair, amount of knowledge, the knowledge required being only that of the time when the artist was alive. So with regard to artifices in the arrange- ment of materials, .a well-informed critic would be dissatisfied with an; artist, who appeared to be unaware of the artifices known and practised in his own .day. At the same timers admit into our collections many- drawings by great masters of past times in which these artifices were not resorted to, and we value these drawings in spite of their comparative, simplicity and iartlessness. i In Mr. Harding's Principles and Practice of AH, he severely criticised, several old, masters' for their ignorance of, modern rules of arrangement, and reproduced several of their drawings in evidence. He quite succeeded in proi^ing that they were not /up to the dodgeis,', if I may borrow a collo-j quialism of the studios, but the reader will probably agree with me that, wehave quite enough of these in modern art. For my part, I know these artifices so well, so much too well, that I am sick of them,- and get back to the simplicity of elder art with a delightful sense of refreshment. I know; air the modern rules of composition, which anybody with common abilities' can master in a week, but they have never inspired me with any profound faith or abiding enthusiasm.* It is pleasant to think that so many old masters worked in happy ignorance of this critical legislation of the future,, but a modern is expected to know about it,, and it is not safe for him to be ignorant of it. The right way is to know, the rules and pay them a, sort of limited and independent attention. Mr. Harding does not seem to have reflected that in drawing old works over again on modern principles to show the superiority of these * One of these rules is, that every long line should be interrupted, but there are many cases in which obedience to this rule would enfeeble the expression of sentiment. For example, on the first page of the Biography of Paul Chalmers, U.S. A., there is a drawing of 'Montrose,', by Mr. George Reid, R.SiA. In this drawing the town is seen beyond- the bay, and the water goes straight across the drawing without interruption, There is no foreground but some desolate land near the river, which flows towards the bay. Any ordinary artist, with a respect for established rules and little feelingi would have made the' desolate foreground picturesque by putting something there— a cottage, or a cart, or some, trees— to cut across the white line of. water ; but Mr. Reid,^ who has the higher artistic^ sense, knew very well that the whole, character of the scene would have been destroyed if' lie had done such a thing as that, and so he gave the dreary water without interruption,' by- which apparent absence of artifice he infinitely enhanced the interest of the distant' town, a low, line of buildings with one dominant tower. r RIGHT AND WRONG. .43 'prfncipfes, he' had'takett away everything that constituted', the^. special interest of the old works and reduced them all to the •level of modern cleverness, in Plate XII. of the Primiples and Practice 0/ Art} he gave topies of two drawings in the British Museum done in. pen and. wash ; one in the old Italian manner, by Bolognese ; the other in the old Dutch manner, by Rembrandt, and' under these copies Mr. Harding gave ithe same subjects with his own treatment and improvements, thus affordirrg us an excellent opportunity 'for comparing old and. modern work. Mn Harding's purpose was to show how hard the old, drawings were, and how defective the old system (if it was a system) of arrangement ; a!t the same time he felt himsdlf competent to demonstrate, by the work of his own hand, the superiority of modem praft. Certainly, if modern craft is superior, Mr. Harding was not guilty of any presumption in offering his own skill as an example of it, for he possessed it to perfection ; and I am not finding fault with him on that account, AH I desire to insist upon is, that if the old masters had followed modern rules we should have no old masters at all, as, in spite of dates, they would have been essentially modern. ' i The drawing- of Bolognese represents a large fortified country-house, built on the level. of a Small round lake, and reflected in the water. A Iroad goes half round the lake ind makes a sudden turn in the foreground. Just at this turn stand two figures, immediately, under the castle. .Just behind the castle rises a conical hill with a small fortification on the top of it,- and there is another conical hill, still higher, to the right,, which has also a little fort upon it's summit ;' beyond these are distant hills, and to the left a glimpse of sea. The whole is in clear sunshine,, probably: that of some bright Italian afternoon. The execution is of that simple kind which every student is familiar with in the drawings of the old masters : plain pen line, and a few flat washes one upon, another. It is 'not brilliant execution^ and it does not pretend to be, but it quite conveys the im- pression of clear light and serene peace. * 1 .-• ■ ■ , ■ - :. . . In Mr, Harding's improvement of. the same subject... everything is altered to suit the picturesque taste which prevailed in London about the year 1845. The Italian cakle was felt to be too square and simple in its masses, and too low down to be effective, so a tower was placed at each end, and an imposing structure, flanked by towers, was made to rise as a central mass behind the principal entrance, the whole building being set upon higher ground ;The little fOrt on the smaller conical hill was developed into a grand- feudal castle,, the buildingv on the second hill was removed, and the hill - itself lowered .and' altered in. shape, "so as to 44 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. make it duly subordinate to the central object. The sky, being to© monotonous, was variegated with a fine effect of cloud. , The circular lake was replaced by a sheet of water stretching across the picture, and communicating with the foreground by a stream. All lines were carefully interrupted by trees planted on purpose, and the treeless road by thg margin of the lake was replaced by a bit of the regular modern sketcher's rustic lane, with a cart on it and two figures, a dark one and a light one, for opposition. The space of distant sea was omitted because its flat line made a triangle with the hills. This is an account of the improvements in detail. The original drawing, in the modern artist's opinion, was wrong, and he was deterr mined to set it right ; but please observe how completely all these alterations have destroyed its character. The little circular lake, with the large formal castellated mansion rising directly from its level, the two curious conical hills with the little forts on their summits, the clear outlines of the distant mountains, and the expanse of level sea, all these things gave to the Italian -drawing a strong and peculiar character, which the improver dealt with quite ruthlessly. Such improvements as these ar§ effected at the cost of everything that gives any special interest to the older work. They are like those dreadful alterations by which old houses and gardens are arranged to suit modern requirements ; alterations for which there is generally not the slightest real necessity, and which are simply the laborious expression of a want of sympathy with the past, With the two drawings before me I can only say that the old one hag a local character of great originality and interest which quite disappears, in the modern one ; and that the very clearness and continuity of its lines are a part of that local character, and recall the bright southern atmosphere, which the modern improver seems to have exchanged for that of the Scotch highlands. As to its defects in composition they are fully counterbalanced in the improvement by defects of an opposite nature^ In the old drawing we see that the artist was simple-minded ; in the new one we meet at every step with obtrusive evidence of self-conscious intelligence. ; , : The changes in the new version of the Rembrandt landscape are not so revolutionary, but they are still a substitution of one character for another. In every group of trees, in every elevation or depression; of the ground, a modern grace and science are deliberately substituted for the old-fashioned simplicity of the great master. On glancing front one to the other we perceive clearly enough that art had made much progress in the direction of cleverness during the interval, but the progress RIGHT AND WRONG. 45 is not all gain. The old workman did not, like tlie modern, seize upon every available opportunity for forcing nature into the most convenient shapes, and for getting the most effective contrasts, but there is a dignity in the older work which is better than the prettiness of the modern. We feel that Rembrandt's landscape is serious, and that under certain effects it might be solemn, whilst Harding's is only brilliant. I have often wished that it were permitted to modern artists to •work in the quiet temper of the old masters. I do not say that the old masters produced more learned work than some of the moderns ; but there is clear evidence in their drawings that they were not con- stantly troubled by the anxiety to shine, or by the necessity to amuse. Some of the very best and greatest of them had in their drawings what we Englishrnen value so. much in manners — the straightforwardness which does without effort, and makes no personal display. When I compare modern art with modern literature I often see reason to regret that they should not be more upon an equality with reference to the requirement of cleverness. A man may write simply if he likes, and nobody finds fault with him ; but so soon as he draws or paints with the simplicity of a serious old master he is scornfully told that he does not understand his business ! Here we are nearly at the end of the space allotted to our chapter, and we have not yet arrived at any very satisfactory definition of right and wrong in drawing. If there were no right and wrong that would be very sad and discouraging, would it not .'' It would be a shock to our moral sense and a damper to our hopes of substantial and unquestionable excellence. Well, I have mentioned two virtues that may be considered certain, namely, harmony, and a certain amount of knowledge. Besides these there are many other virtues, but not one of them, that I can think of, is common to all good drawings whatever. I find after looking at great numbers of drawings that one will have conspicuously one virtue and another another: that one will be sincerely and humbly faithful, another boldly and grandly imaginative ; that one will have exquisite lines and be as flat as a Dutch field, whilst another will have no lines to speak of but be powerfully modelled. I find that serene, sweet-tempered patience constitutes the charm of one man's work, whilst the most fiery impatience arouses me, like the gallop of cavalry, in that of another. Learning commands my respect in some designs; and then perhaps in the same museum, in the same room, on the same wall, I come upon some bit of loving work done with little science that wins and moves me more than all the learning in the world. And the final conclusion to which all these works of art have 46 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. driven me is, that they are just like so many living humah beings whd have seldom more than one or two strong and vigorous virtues to redeehl their failings and their faults, and who are esteerried and respected even when they have these. And as the different professions aid the develop- ment of certain special virtues, often at the expense of others : as the soldier strengthens courage within himself, and the physician mercy, and the priest chastity, and the lawyer sagacity, and the merchant prudence, so the different divisions of the graphic arts give separate encouragement to the different virtues of drawing. The burin and the silver-point encourage purity of line, charcoal teaches vigour and truth of chiaroscuro, water- colour the refinements of delicate hues, and oil the force of strong ones; but as for uniting all these virtues together in one work it ought never to be expected. It is enough for a work of art to have the quality of its own order. .OUTLINE, : ; 47 CHAPTER VI. Of Otdline. < rHE earliest attempts in drawing were in outline, and outline is used still for various purposes in artistic and scientific work. Amongst artistic drawings those in complete outline are the simplpst. Their two merits, not always compatible, are beauty and truth of line. Truth of .line implies not only truth of modulation but a due observation of the angles at which the lines run relatively to the horizon and also of their proportionate length. When angles, length, and modula- tion are faithfully observed, the lines are said to be true, although the use of them is in itself a conventionalism. If the lines are right in length an4 direction the spaces enclosed are sure to have the right shape, so that true line - drawing becomes, by a consequence which need not be sought for consciously, true space -drawing at the same time. The truth of linear, drawing . has nothing whatever to do with the thicknes^s of the line, for an outline may be of any thickness provided only it be not variable. If it is variable in thickness then the eye is embarrassed in its choice of one side of the -line or the other as the real contour. Again, the shaded side of an object cannot be properly repre- sented by making the outline thicker on that side, though this has often been done, very irrationally. The unreasonableness of it is proved by the consideration that . the thick black line comes generally where the shaded side is lightened by reflection. The darkest place on a sphere or cylinder is not. at the contour but nearer to the middle. Outline drawing should, therefore, take no account whatever, of light and shade. Its function is simply to detach spaces without giving the time and trouble necessary to fill them up. This will be understood in a moment by a reference to geographical work. A simple line is enough to detach land from sea and one state from another. Nothing in all the range of the graphic arts does so much with so little labour as an outline. A line which any good draughtsman could put on paper in one minute will make the difference between nothing and a portrait in profile. The value of outline drawing has been very variously estimated by artists. It is not much cared for at the present day, for reasons which 48 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. will be given shortly. Two or three traditional anecdotes which have come down to us from classic times, and which are too well known to need repetition here, seem to indicate that the ancient Greeks thought more of the simple line than we do, and cared more for the manual skill which could produce it to perfection. , In our own time outline is chiefly used as a means of education in elementary drawing, and for architectural and ornamental purposes. Painters hardly ever use it in its purity ; they may occasionally have recourse to it as a convenience, but they do not keep to it, in which they are guided by a sure instinct, for outline belongs to an essentially early stage of art, and is not compatible with those habits of sight and thought which are, or ought to be, the habits of painters in an age like ours, when their art is technically compilete. All drawing began, in primitive times, with simple outline; and the next stage was to fill up the spaces so mapped out with flat colour, but the outline was still preserved for a long time in all its hardness of definition. The first notion of drawing which occurs to man is to mark out the shapes of things in profile with a hard line. He seems to con- ceive of objects as if they were cut out of some flat material, and he thinks that when he has mapped out the contour he has done enough. The notion of modelling in drawing seems to have developed itself very gradually, and even in an age so advanced as our own every inex- perienced student draws trees as if their branches went out to right and left, but never came to meet him. The first thing that strikes us in this choice of outline is that, the use of it involves a degree of defini- tion far exceeding anything usually found in nature, and that it is only after somewhat advanced study that we begin to perceive how rarely natural objects are vigorously and completely detached from each other. The power of seeing things as they actually appear to the eye, with all their confusion and mystery, all their intricacy, all their disguises of accidental light and shade, and colour, is a power which comes to us very late indeed, after a very slow and gradual education. All primitive drawing simplifies and detaches objects, and copies them in its own way, one by one, without any conception of their pictorial relations. So long as the mind of the draughtsman remains in this primitive condition out- line is his natural expression ; but when he begins to see more of nature, when he begins to perceive the confusion, mystery, intricacy, which we have just been talking about, outline ceases to be enough for him. He begins to feel that it is true only in a very narrow and conventional sense ; that it is often inevitably false, if drawn at all ; and that even its best beauty, the line of beauty which the skilled Greek artists drew, OUTLINE. 49 is still, however graceful, however pure, only a very limited and special kind of beauty, in a world which offers much else for our study and admiration. ^ The practice of drawing in outline involves a special danger to the student, which ought not to be passed in silence. It concentrates his attention so much on the contours of things that he ceases to perceive what is within them, and then he becomes the victim of a peculiar illusion. He fancies that because he knows the coast he knows the country. So much form can be explained by outline that it gets credit for still more ; and the draughtsman is innocently persuaded that the flat white spaces which his lines enclose actually contain the modelling which he vaguely imagines for them. To ascertain how little an outline really gives or encloses you have nothing to do. but paint a picture from a severe out- line drawing, you will then discover that the outline does little more than start you, and that the supplies of material for all your subsequent labour have to be drawn from your own stores of knowledge, or from the activity of your own imagination. There may, of course, be outline within outline, just as in a map of England we may have the coast-line first, which is the contour, and then the divisions of counties. In the Ordnance map we have even the fields, still in outUne, which answer to very minute details in artistic drawing. There is, therefore, such a thing as detailed outline drawing, which appears very full of matter at the cost of little labour, and it is quite true that such drawing conveys more facts than can be conveyed by any other kind of design, with equal clearness, in the same space. It is the right kind of work for topographic purposes ; but although Albert DUrer often made use of it for -distant landscape it is dangerous in fine art, except for memoranda, and dangerous even for these also unless the artist follows at the same time some other form of study which pre- sents things in their proper visual relations. The practice of Albert Diirer ought not to mislead the modern student. He was a skilful draughtsman in his own way, but not a good example for us to imitate. It is said sometimes that he knew nothing of aerial perspective, but that is only one of his deficiencips, or rather, to speak more accurately, it is only a part of his one great deficiency. He never drew things in their mutual relations, as we see them when we see several things at once ; he drew first one thing as if it had been an isolated object, and then another thing, till his paper or plate was covered. __ -^ Outline drawing may be practised with advantage as a part of an artist's education for two reasons- The first of these is that, unless we H 50 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. have drawn in outline we cannot know how many deHcate beauties are hidden in the subtle varieties of line ; the next is because outline, though hardly ever used by artists throughout an entire work, is often employed by them in portions of works where it is useful for some special reason. The principal convenience of it is that it will indicate the presence of objects, and give at least a good idea of their forms without involving the necessity for shading, a necessity from which, under certain circum- stances, the artist may be glad to escape, Rembrandt set the example, in etching, of using outline in what may seem a partial and capricious manner. It was partial, certainly, but not capricious, being dictated in every instance by the desire to avoid shading in some portion of the plate where shading would have produced some degree of dulness or heaviness. It was one of Rembrandt's artifices to keep large light spaces and large dark spaces in his plates, and it was a convenience to him to put very little shading in the light spaces. This he managed, as in the 'Hundred Guilder' print, the 'Beggars' at the Door of a House,' and other etchings, by using almost pure outline in the light parts, or outline in combination with a little shade, purposely kept much slighter and paler than in nature. If the reader examines the work of other original etchers he will find that they often have recourse to the same artifice. It is extremely convenient in etchings of landscape, because there is a great technical difficulty in observing accurately the distinctions between the palest tones in etching, and this is avoided by simply indi- cating certain objects in outline, a device which explains their presence, yet does not encumber the plate with too many lines. Before leaving the subject of outline we may take note of a curious fact about the use of the ruler. If you are drawing anything with a straight ■ line in it, such as a new building, you will always find a ruled line quite inadmissible in every kind of picturesque design, though it is the basis of architectural drawing. You may make bulges in your line, or you may tremble and make ripples in it, or you may make it lean to one side or the other, and any of these faults shall be readily forgiven you, but if you are so ill-advised as to rule your line, there is an end to the charm of your performance. What is curious in this is that the ruled line, in those cases where it is used at all, is generally much truer than anything which the unaided hand can draw. I remember- talking about this subject to a French critic, who maintained that the reason why the ruled line was disagreeable was because it was untrue, yet surely in many things, such as the corner of a new house, a ship's mast, or a tightly stretched cord, the ruled line comes nearest to the truth. My OUTLINE. SI conviction is that the question is not one of truth but of harmony. The ruled line is offensive in picturesque drawing because it is seen at a glance to be of a different origin from every other line about it, and so subordinate in fine art is truth itself to harmony, that we all positively prefer visible error to a glaring technical discrepancy. This is the main reason, but there is another, which is that, of all lines those produced with a ruler are the least interesting. The pleasantest of all architectural drawings are the first rude sketches of imagined edifices, in which the lines are never straight. I do not attach much importance to the often-repeated remark, that there are no lines in nature, by which it is intended to imply that linear art is of necessity inferior to that which is lineless. The rank of the fine arts is not determined so much by their imitative resemblance to nature as by their power of aesthetic and intellectual expression. We know, of course, that lines are not really imitative, as lineless colour may be, but they are most valuable and convenient as a means for expressing human knowledge and feeling, and are not likely ever to be entirely abandoned so long as art shall be an expression of the human spirit. Outline is used in the very earliest stage of an oil-picture for mapping out the first spaces of the dead colouring, but such outline is of a very rude and simple kind, I mean in modulation. In length and main direction it is carefully studied. All delicate modulations are given afterwards in the painting. Hard and decided outlines, delicately modulated, are often used as a basis for decorative painting, and left visible afterwards. They make the work much less costly in time, and as they are not disguised the conventionalism is readily admitted. Thick black outlines are used to a great extent in large modern wood-engravings for the purpose of detaching figures. In these the out- line is purposely overwhelmed by abundant shading, so that few people notice it, but it clears up the subject, of course at the cost of truth, as we shall see when we come to wood-engraving. These thick outlines in wood -engraving answer to the lines which some modern painters leave visible in their least laborious works. Such lines are a conventionalism by means of which the painter can get through his work more rapidly. There would be no objection to them if they stood alone, because then their conventionalism would be uncon- cealed, and they might even be filled up with flat tints without contra- diction ; but when they are combined with any attempt at complete modelling there is an artistic incongruity, because if the modelling were 52 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. really complete it ought to be able to detach objects without the help of lines. The truth is that when lines are used in oil-painting other than purely decorative, they are a cheap expedient by which the artist spares himself labour in tonic relations and in modelling. You may separate objects easily enough by an outline, but it requires careful labour to do as much by delicate light and shade. The qualities of line divide the graphic arts into two great schools, the classical and the picturesque, but these are of so much importance that the linear differences on which they are founded will require a chapter to themselves. CLASSIC AND PICTURESQUE LINES. 53 I CHAPTER VII. Of the Classic and the Picturesque Lines. T is the character of linear modulations which determines the difference between the classic and the picturesque line. All drawing comes under one of these two heads — it is either classic in style or picturesque, at least in its main principle, however remote its classicism may be from that of Phidias, or its picturesqueness from that of Rembrandt. The difference between the classic and the picturesque modifications of line has its origin in two states of the human spirit, by which its sympathies and interests are directed to different objects or to different qualities of the same object. The classic spirit is animated by the delight in organic perfection, the picturesque spirit by an interest in the peculiarities of character and in the effects of accident and time. In the two kinds of drawing it may happen that the modulations are equally minute. The essential difference is not in more or less of minute- ness, but in the relation to organic perfection. It does, however, happen, as a general rule, that the modulations of picturesque lines are more sudden and violent than those of classic design. They are at the same time more numerous and more distinctly countable. In picturesque design the changes of direction in line are often abrupt and unforeseen; in classic design the changes of direction may be frequent, but they are seldom abrupt, and are so little unforeseen that our knowledge of structure always leads us to expect them, whilst much of the pleasure derived from that kind of drawing is in the sufficient, yet delicate, satisfaction of that expectation. It is not desirable, in the interests of culture, that either the classic or the picturesque principle should become so dominant in the modern schools of art as to reign there unopposed. If the classic spirit reigned exclusively, nobody would draw anything that was not in perfect repair, and this would at once exclude from the materials of art all those things made by men of which the interest is chiefly romantic or pathetic. Besides this, the predominance of the classic spirit would extinguish our interest in humble and homely things. The classical draughtsman is not only indifferent to the world around him, but disposed to regard it with contempt. The most picturesque cities in Europe, and 54 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. all that charming rustic material which occupies such artists as Millet and Frere, would not afford him as much aesthetic pleasure as a bit of antique earthenware, if only the lines of the pot were delicately modulated and pure. If the picturesque spirit reigned exclusively, there would be an end to all severe study of beautiful form, as that would not be considered sufficiently lively and amusing. Sculpture would fall down to the level of those lifelike statuettes of the fishing population which are sold at BouIogne-sur-Mer, or of the Tarn o' Shanter and Souter Johnnie at Alloway. Architecture would be planned and schemed for the artificial picturesque in which all sorts of arrangements are considered permissible if they are quaint and unexpected, and in which artifice tries to gain the appearance of accident. Painting would flourish still, but would confine itself to such material as tumble-down buildings, rough soldiers and peasants, animals, and wild scenery. Nobody would paint the naked figure. Etching would flourish, on condition of avoiding what the painters avoided ; but line-engraving, already pursued by few, would be absolutely and finally abandoned. The liberty of individual taste, which has resulted for us from the experiments of the past, has this good consequence, that both the classic and the picturesque principles of drawing are alive and active together. Each is applied according to the taste of the artist and the subjects which he prefers. The love of ideal beauty and the desire for perfection lead us to the classic line ; a healthy interest in common things leads us to the picturesque line. Once adopted, each of the two principles gets possession of its man and pushes him forward in its own direction. The danger of studying line for its own beauty is that its tendency is against modelling and against effect. Pursued too ardently it leads back to flat Greek vase-painting, with its clear outlines and flat tints within them. I have even been told by a true believer that all art which goes beyond the firm line and flat wash is debased and degraded art ; that the firm line and flat wash are the high-water mark of painting, and that evanescent lines and modelled surfaces are its ebb and decadence. It is certain that firmness of out- line and flatness of spaces are highly favourable to the severe study of linear beauty, whilst the study of surfaces is against it. Severe students of the classic line have often been unfavourable to landscape, a disfavour which is perfectly natural, because, although beautiful lines are often to be met with in landscape, the interest of it is generally much more dependent upon light and shade, and especially upon colour, than on any degree of linear beauty. As, however, the linear beauty of natural CLASSIC AND PICTURESQUE LINES. 55 landscape is generally undervalued, I may beg the reader to bear with a few words in its defence. Linear beauty is found much more in some trees than others, and (as a general rule) more in leaves taken individually, or in small groups, than in masses of foliage. The trunks of some trees, such as the beech and the plane, are rich in linear beauty; whilst others, such as the oak, are more picturesque than beautiful. Noble mountain scenery, such as that of Switzerland and Savoy, abounds in loyely lines continually altered by perspective as we travel ; whilst minor hills, and amongst these some of the smallest and least imposing, like those in the south of England, are often exquisite in line. Some of the most beautiful lines ever to be seen in the earth-forms are found in the first gentle undulations between the broad continental plains and the great companies of mountains. Of all natural things, not organized, wind-sculptured snow is the most perfect in outline and in linear markings. It eifaces the picturesque irregularities of the earth, and substitutes for them a clean modelling like that of very delicately carved marble, which is sure to present refined outlines every- where. A great variety of beautiful lines may be found in agitated water, from the low smooth ground-swell, with its uninterrupted regularity of form, to the tossing and toppling breaker. After mentioning a few of those natural things, in which beautiful lines are commonly found, I may add that it is a mere superstition to suppose that Nature's drawing is always beautiful. It is sometimes ugly, and it happens more frequently still that natural lines seem as if some beautiful purpose had been intended and then very imperfectly carried out. It is probably this apparently im- perfect realisation of artistic intentions in landscape which makes classical figure-draughtsmen so indifferent to it, as the lines of the nude figure, which they are accustomed to study, more nearly fulfil the apparent intention. When artists have a taste for linear perfection they do well to devote themselves to the figure, and avoid landscape, not because they cannot find plenty of beautiful lines in landscape nature to please and occupy themselves, but because people are so little accustomed to look for beau- tiful line-drawing in landscape that when it is offered to them they do not perceive or value it. The popular qualities in landscape are colour first, then texture, composition, and chiaroscuro. The naked figure, or the figure simply draped, is the only subject in which classic line-drawing fully repays the student. Here the talent of a refined draughtsman is felt and acknowledged ; in the other forms of art it is generally thrown away. 56 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. CHAPTER VIII. Of Drawing by Areas. ^"^HIS kind of drawing is largely practised by painters who study from 1 nature with the brush. It differs widely from linear drawing both in principle and practice, and it both springs from and cultivates different habits of sight and thought. We have seen that if the linear draughtsman made his lines right in length and direction the areas enclosed by them must of necessity be the correct areas, although he may never have given them a thought If a land-surveyor gets the walls and angles of an enclosure right upon his plan the area will be right also. This is the linear process, by which the area comes right indirectly. It so happens that in oil-painting there is a great practical incon- venience in adhering faithfully to the linear process, for if the painter draws delicately modulated lines at the beginning of his task, he has to follow them out carefully in all subsequent colourings, which in- volves most tedious labour, and ties down the artist by so many petty manual restrictions that anything like energy of style becomes impossible for him. I have had occasion, at the beginning of this work, to remark how closely mental and manual qualities are woven together in the fine arts. Here is an excellent instance. Any high degree of mental energy in an oil-painter makes it unendurable for him to follow refinements of line during all the repaintings of his picture, so that if he has fire in his soul he will neglect the line during the earlier stages and reserve such attention as he may give to it for the finish. If, however, he neglects line he must still have something to go by, and he finds the necessary guidance in the proportions of areas. People of limited experience, who have some knowledge of drawing by line but none of the other method, are often surprised when they see an accomplished landscape-painter at work from nature. Let us suppose that he has to paint a cottage with a thatched roof and a whitewashed wall ; he will probably put it in with an initiatory patch of something like straw-colour for the roof, laid on with a large brush, and a similar patch DRAWING BY AREAS. 57 of white paint for the wall. The edges of both these patches will be left almost to chance, without any pretension whatever to linear drawing. In painting them the artist would not begin by the edges but by the middle, and when he had got them into the right state as a first painting, the probability is that any thoughtless person looking over his shoulder would not suppose that there was any drawing in them at all. There might, however, be good sound drawing of a certain kind, as the areas, though not enclosed by delicate lines, might be very nearly of the right proportion in the field of vision. On the other hand, a drawing of the same cottage in most delicate and observant line, might still be a bad drawing, if the artist's attention had been so much given to interesting details of line that he neglected their large proportions and so got his areas wrong. When drawing is delicate and bad at the same time, as it often is, the nature of the badness may be generally defined as a case of incorrectly proportioned areas. We may lay it down then as a general rule that drawing by areas is essentially the drawing of painters, and especially of oil-painters. It is still more necessary to a painter of landscape than to a figure painter that he should be able to draw correctly by areas, and to think in the language of areas rather than in the language of lines, because the intricacy and complexity of landscape subjects make it impossible to draw out all their parts delicately at first. The figure-painter might keep to a delicate figure outline; the landscape-painter could not follow minute out- lines of foliage or herbage. In the instance just given of a thatched cottage, a perfectly accurate outline would be full of minute details of straw and moss (perhaps also of grass and flowers) which could not be followed from the beginning with the brush without destroying the relations of tone and colour. As every kind of practice acts gradually upon the mind of the work- man, and slowly but surely produces an effect upon his thoughts and opinions, it is always interesting to inquire what the effect is, and how the workman's ideas are modified by the particular thing which he does. What is the effect of drawing by areas? Does it make painters in- different to any of the beauties of nature ? To know what the effect is we have only to refer to the school in which it is most practised — that of modern landscape. The effect here is certainly to make artists indifferent to elaborate delicacy of line, and this is a distinct loss ; but it is not without compensation, as this very indiffer- ence to line leaves the mind more free to attend to tone and colour, which the landscape-painter finds to be more important. For him, therefore, in S8 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. spite of a certain loss, drawing by areas is certainly the best method; and if he can see all areas in their proper shapes and proportionate sizes, his eye is cultivated as it ought to be so far as drawing only is concerned.* * One of the most unsuccessful landscape-painters, in the worldly sense, whom I ever knew, was greatly embarrassed to discover the reasons for his failure, as he rightly con- sidered himself to possess at least as deep a knowledge of nature as his successful rivals. Notwithstanding this, his failure was easily accounted for. Instead of drawing by areas, and with the brush, he went by very delicate lines, into which he put an amount of care and study for which nobody thanked him. He loved nature too much, so that it pained him to alter and compose ; and the consequence was that his works looked as if he were ignorant of composition. He knew too much of nature also, in a certain sense, which led him to paint rare effects which people could not understand; but of all his errors (errors, I mean, with reference to his worldly success) the greatest was drawing by line, There were beautiful lines in his pictures, but they gave them a look of hardness which made them less liked than far coarser and more ignorant work. DRAWING BY SPOTS. 59 CHAPTER IX. Of Drawing by Spots, THE title of this chapter would have greatly astonished a critic of the last generation, when spottiness was considered simply a vice in painting, and had not been developed into one of the forms of artistic expression. Methods of execution are good or vicious, according to the degree of intelligence with which they are done. Even spots have been developed, by the skill of clever and observant men, into an artistic language, which has been found of great use for the expression of certain qualities in nature and a peculiar condition of the human mind. We have just seen how painters may draw by areas. A spot is nothing but a small area distinguished from what surrounds it by some very visible difference of shade or colour. It may be of any shape, and need not be of one particular size, though when going beyond certain limited dimensions it becomes what we should call a patch in oil-painting, or a blot in water-colour. What I mean by the word ' spot ' in this chapter is an area of an eighth of an inch in breadth, or less in small works, and four or five times as much in large ones. It can be hardly necessary to observe that drawing by spots is directly opposed to that tranquillity which has generally been sought for by the greatest artists. Serene great art avoids them as much as it can, and always prefers broad spaces varied internally by well-studied modelling. Nevertheless, drawing by spots is certainly authorised by Nature in many of her aspects, so that artists who adopt the method may fairly appeal to her and say that they have authority for what they do. They are, indeed, quite independent of any necessity for self-justification, as their work, when good of its kind, has a striking resemblance to some appearances in nature. Spots of the most various shapes and colours are produced in the natural world by different causes. They may be actual things, such as the pebbles by a brook, the daisies in a pasture, the stars in the sky. They may be small reflections of light on polished surfaces, such as the 6o THE GRAPHIC ARTS. glitter on armour, or small spaces of darkness, such as the little hollows in rocks under sunshine. They may be mere changes of colour, like the spots on the hides of animals or the feathers of birds. Spots of all kinds are much more numerous in full sunshine than in quiet light, and this is a reason why full sunshine was carefully avoided by great old artists, and why it is often sought by clever modern ones. In sunshine there are innumerable small cast shadows, innumerable high lights. On dull days, or in twilight, all these disappear and give place to quiet breadth. Artists who like spots are often exceedingly ingenious in the choice of subjects which admit that kind of interpretation. In figure-painting they avoid those broad and simple draperies which the classic artists preferred, and give their attention to eighteenth-century costumes, which are cut up into little details by complex tailoring and embroidery. When they choose amongst the dresses of the present day it is always with the same purposes, and the still-life represented in their pictures is full of flicker and glitter. In landscape they like small-leaved trees with delicate stems and branches, and generally any small things that will catch the light and make spots and specks as little flowers do in a field. Whilst thinking about the subject of this chapter I happened to look out of a window which commands the edge of a wood. It was early in the morning, an April morning, and the wood was already covered with small green leaves, principally belonging to the birches. Bright early sunshine darted through everywhere, with level beams, and after getting through the entanglements of the trees, many of these beams hit some rising land opposite. The whole scene was nothing but specks and spots. All the leaves were dark or bright green spots, as they happened to be in shade or light. The stems of the birches were revealed by silvery spots, and even the branches of other trees were traceable only by a confused glitter in cool or warm grey. The field itself was pied with buttercups and daisies, and where the soil was not covered with vegetation, the bare earth showed itself in spots, and so did the small stones. In this instance Nature seemed fully to authorise the spot system, except in her sky, which was one vast space of serene pale azure. Some of the most important points in the human face, the pupils of the eyes, the orifices of the nostrils, and the corners of the mouth, may be represented by spots, and that so effectively, that a few dots on paper convey a likeness, as we often see in the slight sketches of caricaturists. The correct placing of spots requires a power of measurement by DRAWING BY SPOTS. 6i the eye, and consequently a power of drawing, not inferior to that re- quired for accurate work in line. To draw a space of starlight sky with any near approximation to fidelity, by the eye only, would require the same powers, and the same training, as linear work, so far as simple accuracy is concerned. The inferiority of the spot to the line is that it does not cultivate the sense of beauty to anything like the same degree, and consequently we find the spot resorted to rather by clever men than by great men. Skilful painters of costume and expression, including the whole school of Fortuny, use it extensively, but it is avoided by severe and serious students of form. In landscape it has been sometimes used by great artists. Many fine woodland pictures by the elder Linnell are founded more upon the spot than upon the line or the area. Constable's love of glitter on foliage led him to study the effect of spots more than it had ever been studied before his time, and the results he attained were nearer to those aspects of nature which he loved than more tranquil and sober painting ever could have been. Some artists who have not covered their pictures with spots have, nevertheless, made great use of them to give liveliness and sparkle to their work. The best known example of this is Landseer. He was excessively fond of sparkle, and loved above all things at the finish of a picture to put light dots on polished bits, stirrups, or armour, and especially on the bright eyes of his dogs and horses. An inferior draughtsman could not have put the dots as Landseer did, just in the right places for effect, and with the most unhesitating decision of touch. It should be observed, in conclusion, that drawing by spots has nothing to do with stipple, which is founded on principles of its own, to be explained later. 62 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. CHAPTER X. Pen and Ink. DRAWING in ink, either with the common pen that we write with, or with some other kind of pen used more particularly for artistic purposes, has sometimes been hastily classed amongst the * imper- fect arts.' What is meant by an ' imperfect art ? ' The expression is used to designate an art which does not render with equal facility all the aspects of nature. It is an expression which I have always strongly disliked, both for its want of precision, as it does not state in what the imperfec- tion lies, and for its implication that there exists some other art which may deserve to be called 'perfect.' The expression is objectionable, also, because it refers only to the imitation of nature, and takes no account of the human mind, which, nevertheless, is too important a factor in the fine arts to be entirely left out of consideration. Every art described in this volume is perfect within its own limits. When this is not understood there must be a fundamental misconception of the uses and possibilities of the fine arts. No one who understands them ever expects from them the complete representation of nature ; that is not their purpose, they are simply means of human expression — means by which men convey to others their delight in what they see, and in the exercise of their own inventive power. Consider, for a moment, how fundamentally imperfect, as imitations of nature, are the two arts which reign supreme in all the galleries of Europe, the arts of carving in marble and of painting in oil. Sculpture can only imitate massive form, painting can only imitate moderate light ; yet in spite of such imperfections, and many others, these arts are precious to us for their clear expression of the human spirit. If, then, it is said of pen-drawing that it is ' imperfect,' the answer is that pen-drawing is perfect within its own limits, and this is enough — enough for the long line of illustrious artists who have used the pen nobly, both in studies from nature and in sketching from imagination. Every one of the graphic arts has its limits in the imitation of nature. Those of pen-drawing lie chiefly in tone and gradation ; but here it is PEN AND INK. 63 necessary to establish a distinction between what is difficult and what is, in the absolute sense, impossible. The great artists who have drawn with the pen have always used it very much within its limits, they have not required from it as much tone and gradation as it can give ; and their reason for this reticence was because whenever tone and gradation happened to be their objects they had other and more rapid means at command. There is a wide distinction, in every art, between possibility and prudence. A delicate line-engraving may be so closely imitated with a fine pen that few people, at a little distance, would at the first glance detect the difference ; but no artist who knew the value of his time would waste it in such foolish toil. If he wanted delicate tones he would take sepia or bistre and a brush. Hence the pen-drawings of great artists, though really full of refinement, have often what to the uneducated seems a cdarse appearance. This apparent coarse- ness is always due to the omission of delicate tones ; yet the omission is wise and right, not because pen-drawing cannot render such tones, but be- cause it would be a misemployment of time and care to get them by its means. An author could, if he gave the necessary labour, learn to make his manuscript like print ; but no author who had anything to say would accept such a hindrance to mental expression. The (apparently) coarsest pen-drawings are usually the work of great artists ; the delicate and highly-finished pen-drawings are usually the work of amateurs, or else of workmen who are paid to imitate engravings for the purposes of photographic reproduction. Our first lesson in the criticism of pen-drawing must be on the dis- tinction between real and apparent coarseness. Real coarseness is deadness of perception, answering to vulgarity in manners ; but that which looks like coarseness to the uneducated is only directness and simplicity of expression, in which the artist purposely simplifies his statement of what he knows. Great artists, when they take up the pen, simplify by the omission of tones ; and the more they know of tone the more they simplify. Again, they very seldom appear to care about tenuity of line for its own sake ; a blunt pen which makes thick lines suits them, except in very small drawings, quite as well as a pen with a fine point. Neither do they care about making shade imitative of the delicate quality which it has in nature. In nature it is simply a degree of darkness without any texture whatever of its own, a veil beneath which all the qualities of objects — their roughness or smoothness, their chromatic brightness or intensity — are subdued in proportion to its thickness ; in pen-drawing the presence of shade is indicated by lines which, in the best woi-k, have the least of its natural softness. The best pen-drawing — ^that which has been practised by the greatest 64 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. masters— is rightly, and wisely, and resolutely conventional. It is only a partial expression of natural truth ; and it willingly accepts the falsity of linear shading without attempting to dissimulate it by making the lines so delicate that they may be unobtrusive. It expresses form by a decided line and a certain limited amount of modelling. It loses all delicate light shades in white paper, and it often represents all intense darks by black blots, without attempting minute distinctions between the degrees of their intensity. In many of the finest pen-drawings the extreme darks are omitted altogether, and the forms of nature are sufficiently suggested without them. A good example of the sort of work which looks very coarse, but is not, is a drawing by Donatello in the collection of the Due d'Aumale, a pen-sketch for some project of an Entombment.* All the lines are so thick and rude that if a poster were drawn on such principles the lines in it would be strong enough, but what does this rudeness matter ."* Donatello was not seeking for delicacy of shade ; he wanted to get the attitudes and ex- pressions of three or four important figures with the leading folds of their drapery, and here they are — one figure especially — clearly conceived and firmly set down whilst the idea was there in all its freshness. Modelling is rudely indicated with thick lines for shade and some cross-hatching running, in the darkest places, into black blots ; so that a Philistine, who knew nothing about summary expression in the fine arts and nothing about Donatello, might conclude that his notions of modelling were very elemen- tary. Such conclusions are perilous. Great artists do not always exhibit the whole of their knowledge ; they give what is sufficient for the occasion. Michael Angelo was another illustrious artist who used the pen with a great deal of rough vigour, and in his case there was sometimes a peculiarity which it is not desirable that anybody should imitate. So long as he kept within the limits of real drawing his work was full of grandeur; but he sometimes, in the exuberance of an overheated imagin- , ation, passed beyond drawing altogether and exercised himself in the flourishes of calligraphy. A bold and rapid pen -sketch of his.f repre- senting three reclining figures, is distinctly executed with the dashing curves and flourishes of the calligraphist. It looks as if it had been done by some clever writing-master, as a flourishing translation of a study by a learned artist. Michael Angelo, in this design, appears to have been intoxicated with his own facility and to have lost the self- control without which there can be no truthful modulation of line. The * Reproduced in L'Art, vol. xviii. \ L'Art, vol. iii. p. 117. PEN AND INK. 65 lines here are not studied, any of them, but dashed in like the curves of capital letters. A much finer and better example of Michael Angelo's work with the pen is the page of studies of hands, three of them, larger than life, with a man's back in the upper left-hand corner. The original is at Oxford ; but it has been autotyped by Braun, and is quite a first- rate example of bold but sober work. The hands are modelled with great power, showing both the bony and muscular structure and the ten- sion of skin between the fingers which are separated as they grasp some object, the wrist being high and bent. The well-known 'Satyr's Head,' in profile, in the Louvre, which was drawn by Michael Angelo in ink, upon a drawing of a female head in sanguine, and which is supposed to have been done when Michael Angelo was a young man, is a strong and careful piece of modelling in hatched pen -work after the manner of some powerful piece of engraving, plainly showing that the artist could do sober work when in the humour, and that the calligraphic flourishes in some of his rapid sketches were the result of a temporary excitement which carried him outside of, and beyond, the proper sphere of drawing. One of the finest of the very slight ink sketches is that of the reclining figure of Day, but it was done in such a hurry that the face is obliterated in scribble, and one foot is half as long again as the other.* The pen-drawings of Raphael are delightful for their easy grace, and for the sure judgment with which the artist stopped short at those limits that a wise painter seldom transgresses when he draws with pen and ink. He left many drawings with the pen, chiefly sketches of projects and intentions, so that the subjects are often fully composed and we get those improvements upon the natural lines which Raphael's exquisite taste suggested. Other drawings are more matter-of-fact studies in which, of course, there is much less grace of line than there is in his ideas for pictures. To my taste, the best of Raphael's pen-drawings are the most entirely satisfactory expressions of his genius. I like them better than his paintings, for reasons which shall be given when we come to the greater art, and they have a charm of freshness, of genius actually at work before us, thinking and realising its thoughts at the same time, which is not to be found in any of the elaborate engravings from his finished designs. Popular admiration often confounds one quality with another, and so because Raphael had such a gift of graceful drawing as had never been seen before in Europe, he has been called the Prince of Painters ; which is a great mistake— as great a mistake as if you were * A reproduction appeared in L'Art, vol. iii. p. 83. K 66 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. to credit a man with eminent Greek scholarship on the strength of his elegant Latin. Raphael, as a draughtsman with the pen, avoided (probably without ever thinking about it) the defects of Michael Angelo. There is great freedom in many of his designs, but you will never find in them a single instance of wild flourishes due to over-excitement. Always master of himself, he lived with his own ideas of grace and beauty, which may often have pressed upon him somewhat urgently for at least a partial realisation, but which never made him forget that he was drawing. No man ever sketched more slightly when in a hurry, but the haste is indicated by extreme economy of labour, and not by lines run wild. There is the lovely sketch for the Virgin with the bullfinch, at Oxford,* so rapid that there is no outline for the forehead of the infant Jesus, and we see the Virgin's right arm through the other child's head, as if it were glass ; yet the lines of the two principal figures are drawn with moderation, and although the .shading is very summary, consisting of strong diagonal strokes with wide spaces between them, it is carefully placed, so as to give the infant Jesus the calculated degree of relief, and the effect of it, taken together, is moderate. This moderation in shading is characteristic of Raphael. In certain places he would put a thick line, or a blot, to give strong accent or relief, but his shading is usually a middle-tint got with diagonal lines. All the elements of Raphael's pen-drawing will be found, on analysis, to reduce themselves to these four. 1. Pure line, indicating forms of persons, folds of drapery, &c. This line is not hard outline, but is often broken and picturesque, and deals with material within the outline ; it is often multiple, so that the eye has three or four lines to choose from, in consequence of experiments and alterations. It is not generally thick, though it seems so when near lines run into each other. 2. Shading over the line, mostly diagonal, but not invariably. This shading is generally open, the lines being sometimes an eighth of an inch apart, but it is used only as a middle tint, all lighter tints being left white. 3. Cross-hatching, seldom resorted to, and used only accidentally, as it were, in parts, never laboriously, as if to imitate an engraving. 4. Thickened lines in places. The use of these is to give vigorous accents of relief They have nothing to do with chiaroscuro, and are only used to detach features, members, or other objects. A nose, for instance, will sometimes be outlined with a very thick line, to make it very clearly * Reproduced as an illustration in the Life of Raphael, by Eugbne Muntz. PEN AND INK. 6^ visible, in which case the thick Hne becomes a dark background on which the nose relieves itself as a white object. In a study for the ' Entombment,' in M. Gay's collection, the shoulders of the kneeling female figure are out- lined with strokes as thick as a large capital letter of this type. This has nothing to do with nature, it is simply a device for detaching objects without full light-and-shade. It is extensively resorted to at the present day in wood -engraving. The greatest of the Venetian pen-draughtsmen was Titian, whose remarkable power with this instrument will be better appreciated if the reader will take the trouble to look at earlier work of the same school, such as that of Gentile Bellini, of which there are some examples in the British Museum. The advance from G. Bellini to Titian is even greater than that from Mantegna to Raphael, for Mantegna had great breadth and decision in a simple style, though his work was primitive in comparison with the mature work of Raphael, whereas G. Bellini was delicate and even timid in manner, working out his drawing in minute pen- touches, and giving details with extreme care.* The advance from work of that class to the masculine line of Titian is like the progress from hesitating infancy to the most robust maturity. The general characteristics of Titian's pen-drawing are these : — He seems to have considered the pen simply as an instrument for explaining the nature of tangible things, such as figures, trees, stones, ships, &c., and he did not use it even for the suggestion of colour, mystery, and effect. There is no local colour in his pen-drawings : an object dark in itself is of the same colour as a light object. I need hardly observe that this is not due either to ignorance or forgetfulness ; certainly it cannot have been due to ignorance, for hundreds of pictures give their testimony that Titian was even more alive than most artists are to the value of local colour in the lights and darks of a picture. Other artists very frequently seek for variety of light and dark in sunshine and shadow, but Titian contented himself with diffuse light from the sky, and got the necessary variety in depth almost exclusively by means of the weights or values of local colour. As to possible forgetfulness this might have occurred in a single drawing, but the pen-drawings of Titian are very numerous, and I believe they all ignore local colour equally, which proves a settled determination to avoid it in this kind of art. Again, his pen- drawings do not attempt to give either the mystery or the texture of * As, for example, in the drawing in the British Museum of a warrior in a high cap, seated, with a quiver on one side and a bow and sword on the other. Above him, in the same mount, is a study of a woman, executed on the same principles. 68 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. natural things, nor do they represent the contrasts of light and shade which come from illumination, consequently they miss several very valu- able elements of what may be called the poetical impressions that we receive from the external world. What they really do give, and that with extraordinary force and clearness, is the artist's knowledge of things in themselves, and his sense of their mutual relations as elements in composition. They are not so elegant and charming as the pen-drawings of Raphael ; but taking the whole of the material that Titian dealt with together, his drawings show by far the more comprehensive understanding of the visible world. Many readers will remember the noble pen-drawing of Peter Martyr, which has been autotyped,* and in which we see, at its best, the painter's firm and simple treatment both of figures and trees, but the drawings in the Ufifizj at Florence are less known, though some of them have been autotyped by Braun. Three landscapes, with moun- tainous distances and fine trees in the foregrounds, are especially grand examples of the bold and learned manner in which Titian dealt with natural material of a very high order. In one of these landscapes there is a crowded group of trees to the left on rocky ground, occupying half the picture, and the eye looks down from an eminence into a valley, out of which it ascends again over land diversified by minor hills and clumps of noble trees, until it comes to a distance of lofty crests, peak behind peak, ' far, far away.' This drawing is quite enough to prove that although Titian's system of pen-work did not admit delicate tones, which are very valuable and useful in landscape, he could give a great deal of landscape character without them. Properly speaking, there is no chiaroscuro in this drawing. There is some shading, but it is simply explanatory of form, of the roundness of tree-trunks, or the ruggedness of the mountain ground. Nothing can exceed the simplicity of the means used — a plain pen-line everywhere, never very delicate, even in the outlines of the distant mountains, and never thick or blotted as in Raphael and Michael Angelo, or in the modern work of which we shall have to speak pre- sently. If you do not enjoy the draiving, if you do not take delight in Titian's understanding of earth, and stones, and' trees, the work will seem grey and dull to you, for it has no glamour of sparkle and gloom ; but it is the kind of work in which landscape-painting of the most brilliant description may lay its firmest and most secure foundation. Here we have not the glory of landscape, not its splendours nor its mysteries, not Its soft seductive beauty that fills the heart of man with a sweet sadness It is included in a volume of autotypes from drawings in the British Museum, pub- lished by Messrs. Chatto and Windus, with text by Mr. Comyns Carr. PEN AND INK. 69 and inspires his imagination with dreams of a lost Paradise, but the positive tangible landscape of earth, and stone, and wood, drawn with the same grasp of matter that enables a figure -painter to deal with the bones and muscles of which our limbs are built. This realism, or, to use a still more accurate word, this materialism, of Titian's mind, made the pen an acceptable instrument for him. It is an excellent instrument for plain statements of material facts, the hard and clear ink line records them rigorously and preserves them permanently, but it is not the instru- ment wherewith to express the tender reveries of a weary heart or the vague longings of a wandering imagination. All hard and definite things, such as buildings and the trunks of trees, may be very well rendered with pen-lines. Titian often put buildings in the middle distances of his pen-drawings, and he had, notwithstanding the general largeness of his conceptions, rather a lively sense of the picturesque. His little mountain towns, with their variety of roofs and towers, and his villages with their homesteads, are delightful for the loving care with which he attended to interesting details of construction, such as the placing of windows and arches, but, unluckily, in consequence of some obliquity of vision, he never could draw vertical lines, always making them lean far to the right, sometimes even with a radiating sort of arrangement like the pieces on the right-hand side of a fan. In the Dresden Museum there is a noble drawing of a seaport on an island with rugged mountains beyond a strait, and a clifif crowned with a tower to the spectator's right, but, of course, all the walls are leaning in a way that threatens ruin. This drawing is specially interesting for its simple treatment of clouds and water, the movement of both being indicated with a few well -chosen lines, drawn just as firmly as those of the land or buildings. It not unfrequently happens that in the foregrounds of Titian's pen-drawings there is a good deal of what may be called unmeaning shading in long bold lines which efface the delicate beauty of natural vegetation, and are of use only as very broad indications of the modelling of the earth-masses ; but whatever faults may be pointed out in these works they are always noble in style and most happily combine great breadth and energy of treatment with a vigilant attention to characteristic facts of form.* Giorgione employed the pen in a manner which reminds us of Titian, but he used blacks more boldly, and he admitted a system of broken dotted lines as a suggestion of the texture of rocks which we do not find in Titian. * If the reader is seriously interested in studies of this kind he would do well to procure for himself Braun's Autotypes from the UiBzj, marked 813, 814, 815, and 816, in Braun's general catalogue, and also the drawing from the Dresden Museum marked 63. 70 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. His drawings of the figure are simple and lively, with light, easy shading, not too much insisted upon, and points of deep black which give accent and vivacity. Claude left many pen-drawings, of which by far the greater number are more or less sustained by washes of bistre, or some other watercolour monochrome. Some, however, are in pure pen-work, and these may be taken as the beginning of modern landscape sketching with the pen, which differs from the massive draughtsmanship of Titian in a greater lightness of style with less insistence upon facts of substance. Claude's drawing of material things was always comparatively slight, even when he was most energetic ; but this slightness was amply compensated for b)r^a new and exquisite sense of landscape effect and composition. We are not to look to his pure pen-drawings for effect, they are merely rough sketches of possible subjects, yet they show the landscape painter in the choice and arrangement of material. Some of them are apparently coarse in manner to a degree which may at first surprise students who are familiar with Claude's delicate skies and distances in oil-painting, but it very frequently happens that the most refined painters use the pen with the least seeking after delicacy of line. I do not, however, think that Claude generally drew powerfully enough to make his pen-drawings very valuable in themselves ; they require to be sustained by washes, when the chiar- oscuro so added makes them more interesting. ^ The northern schools used the pen quite as vigorously as the Italian. Albert Durer's wonderful manual skill with the burin, a much more diffi- cult instrument than the pen, made him quite at ease in his drawings, and there is a sense of freedom in them showing itself in a facility of manner which, though not comparable to the light grace of Raphael, is still an evidence that the artist felt himself at play. Durer's pen- drawings show the artist's mind in its hours, not of idleness, but of artistic relaxation, when he felt himself relieved for a while from the stress and strain of the mechanical perfection that engraving demanded, and could realise his ideas, to a certain extent at least, without any pain or effort. His system of shading was simple, and divided the subject into light and darker masses without reference to local colour, and with no intentional display of craft in cross-hatching or in varied thickness of line.* The pen is too valuable an instrument ever to have been completely abandoned by artists, but it has been employed by them more or less r..,/^.?^ ^^ ^''■'''^^ "^ 'A Holy Family,' by Albert Durer, in the collection of the Due dAumale, reproduced in Z'Ar^, vol. xix. p. 99. PEN AND INK. 71 according to those delicate elective affinities which exist between tools and workmen. Any one who knows Rembrandt's etchings would be aware beforehand that pen-drawing must have suited him. He left many sketches with the pen, remarkably free in manner, and answering rather to the croquis amongst his etchings than to his more elaborate perform- ances on copper. There is an essential difference between the massive drawing of Titian and Rembrandt's summary sketching. Rembrandt did not use the pen for the elaboration of forms, but simply to indicate them, just as in the most rapid writing it is enough if the words are recognisable provided they are in their right places. The omissions in such hasty sketching are often rather surprising. Rembrandt would omit important features when in a hurry. In a sketch for the 'Anatomical Lesson,' a student is seen full -face, but though the artist has provided him with a sort of nose and eyebrows, he has not thought it necessary to give him any mouth — an omission of no consequence in a sketch for composition. The real interest of these sketches is the artist's amazing strength of expression with the slightest means. In a sketch of the 'Entombment,' which belonged to the painter Diaz, the dead body looks more truly like death than it does in many an elaborate picture ; there is death in the open mouth, in the falling back of the head, in the un- restrained rising of the shoulder from the way the bearer carries it, and even in the very contraction of the toes. There is a sorrowful expression in the faces and attitudes of the living, though the whole composition does not contain ten minutes' work. Here is the virtue and excellence of such rapid sketching as this — of the true croquis — to give composition and expression. As to form, all that can be done in the time is to keep good proportions in length and thickness of Hmb and size of head, minute truth of form cannot be given, and is not to be expected. In the sketch just mentioned the back of the nearest figure is barred with thick diagonal lines, wide apart ; these are Rembrandt's rough note of an intended weight or value of shade. ' I mean this fellow to have a dark garment reaching below the knee.' It is an intention and not a representation. Only to mention the names of all the artists who have sketched or drawn with the pen would be to write a catalogue instead of a chapter, so we must restrict ourselves to a few characteristic examples of different varieties in method. A very systematic kind of pen-drawing was applied to landscape in the eariier part of the nineteenth century by two Frenchmen — Aligny and Edouard Bertin. Their drawings, especially those of Aligny, are still 72 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. valued, and may be found occasionally in French collections. I mention them here because, although Aligny was not a great master, it is evident that he had thought much about the proper way of interpreting nature with the pen, and that his reflections led him to a set method which combined a good deal of natural truth with tasteful choice and arrange- ment. He travelled much, and made pen -drawings of scenery and buildings full of very clear statements of fact, and often conveying very effectively the idea of sunlight, but prudently avoiding local colour and anything like full chiaroscuro. His drawings were hard and dry, yet they express a clear-cut artificial world, which bears a definite artistic relation to the half-seen, mysterious natural world, just as the sharp and brilliant writing of a clever French prosateur has some sort of relation to the unfathomable sea of universal truth.* So it is with the pen-drawings of Edouard Bertin. They are nature simplified and made clear. Moun- tains are cut into simple masses, and the branches of trees are laden with masses of a different character, sometimes light and sometimes dark, which have some of the qualities of foliage. The scheme of inter- pretation was successful as far as it went, but it had the defect of suggesting nothing that it could not positively explain. The pen- sketching of Rembrandt, on the other hand, is not very explanatory, but every scratch in it is interesting because it suggests far more than it communicates. There are, in fact, two distinct and opposite ways in which the draughtsman with the pen may deal with the truths that he cannot closely imitate, either from want of time, or from the narrow limits of his art. He may wholly and absolutely omit them, doing clearly without them as the writer of a book omits and does without a quotation which he can neither copy nor remember. This was Aligny's method — the method of abstraction ; but there is also another method, that of Rem- brandt, which gives hints and suggestions far beyond its power of realisation. There cannot be a doubt that the suggestive kinds of pen-" drawing are by far the more valuable of the two; for however careful and elaborate the clear kind of work may be, it is soon exhausted, and its very clearness is in itself a falsity, whereas suggestive work is always rewarding us by discoveries of partly expressed intentions, and the mystery of it, whether strictly true or not, is at least some sort of an equivalent for the endless mystery of nature. * There are some good examples of Aligny's work in the Museum at Autun; and one in the Luxembourg, 'A View of Corinth, with Ruins and Mountains,' was published in L'Art, vol. xii. p. 267. PEN AND INK. 73 It is time now, as we approach the modern schools, that we should examine one of the most important elements in modern pen-drawing, the black blot. Every reader who is at all familiar with the analysis of works of art must be aware already that in most drawings a great number of light shades are lost in pure white paper. I may call his attention to the fact, which he knows quite well already, that pure white paper is absolutely flat, that there is no gradation in it whatever. We see, then, that in tolerating flat white in a drawing, we tolerate the merging of many shades in one, which stands for them generally, as the word ' aristocracy ' stands for all the higher classes, and besides this we tolerate an untruth, the absence of gradation, which is contrary to the habit of nature. There can be no valid reason why exactly the same thing should not be done at the other end of the scale. We have flat whites in abundance ; why not admit flat blacks ? The artistic effect of flat blacks may be seen in many of the best wood - engravings, and also in immense numbers of Oriental drawings ; but the Chinese and Japanese draughtsmen, who use flat blacks in any large spaces, fill them up with the brush charged with Indian ink, and we are at present considering pure pen-work only. Now, as a matter of harmony in style, I think that all blacks introduced in a pen-drawing ought to have clearly the appearance of having been done easily with the pen itself, and that only. With this restriction, there can be no reasonable objection to their use. All that the artist means by them is that at those places the darks of nature went down below a certain level. The holes and corners of picturesque buildings are darker than Indian ink with the light upon it, and so are the shady sides of all dark draperies ; other darks come nearly up to Indian ink, others (greys and browns in nature) are just Equivalent to it. The flat black represents all these together quite as fairly and legitimately as the flat white represents luminous greys and greens. There may, however, be a vicious excess in the use of the black blot, and this is always reached when, for the mere sake of making the drawing look brilliant, the artist represents tones in absolute black which in nature are positively lighter. Daumier, the famous French caricaturist, was so fond of black that he freely used it to represent shadows which ought to have been translated by grey ; and although nobody expects a caricaturist to be very delicate in the choice of technical means, the manifest technical inferiority of Daumier to George Du Maurier is due in great measure to the fact that Daumier used flat blacks immoderately and out of their right 74 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. places, whilst Du Maurier puts them just where they ought to be with reference to local colour and light and shade. Charlet, a French draughts- man of military subjects, who won a great reputation between 1820 and 1845, and who used the pen with a full knowledge, of its value as an artistic instrument, employed the black blot very frequently indeed; I mean that you might count thirty or forty such blots in the same drawing, but none of them were very broad, and to prevent them from being too heavy, he would run a bit of pure white into them, such as a blade or two of grass, a few sprays and leaves in landscape, or in military accoutrements such little things as a button, a piece of braid, or the trigger- guard of a musket. Fortuny, the Spanish painter, introduced a new kind of pen-drawing, which has been followed by Casanova and others of the same school, and which has had some influence outside of it as well as upon the practice of etching. The line, in the pen-work of the old masters, had generally been rather long, and in some instances both long and strong at the same time. Fortuny tried the effect of short broken lines probably because he perceived that he seldom saw in nature anything that could be fairly interpreted by a long line. It is certain that the long, clear, sharp lines of Aligny are always false, from over- definition, along a great part of their course. In nature we see a contour clearly for a little way, then it becomes obscure or difficult to follow, and then we recover it again, changes in the degree of visibility which are better represented by a broken line than by one that is equally continuous. But, besides this, there is another element of falsity in what are con- sidered pure and classic lines. They may be beautiful in themselves, but to make them what is called ' pure,' they have to be simplified, that is to say, the small irregularities have to be cut away, and this is a sacrifice of many minute truths, and of the great truth that there are such irregu- larities. A reference to geography may illustrate my meaning clearly. A map of England with a purified and simplified outline might be beau- tiful, but it would be so at the cost of a multitude of omissions, since every league of coast has its own variety of projection and indentation. A map of England made by a carefully observant surveyor could never have a bold and simple outline. So it is with the drawings of artists; what is called chaste and classic simplicity, is an abstraction obtained at a great sacrifice. Fortuny sought the opposite quality *of variety. Again, it was a result of this taste that he used thin lines. His lines were black, but they were thin, because the pen that made a thick line could never have been nimble enough to follow the ins and outs of a varied natural PEN AND INK. 75 outline. He could bring his thin lines near together and get a dark shade, or he could bring them quite close and make an intentional blot, which he often did with very great judgment ; but as he found that, with his system of execution, the thin line could be made to express every degree of dark, he did not feel obliged to abandon it. Michael Angelo and Rembrandt both worked on a different system — with them the thick line was an important means of expression, whilst in Raphael it is an artifice for definition.* Pen-drawing of various kinds has been followed vigorously in France even in the past generation. Painters like Eugene Delacroix, Gdricault, Theodore Rousseau, and Paul Huet, drew very effectively with the pen. Huet was as systematic, as Aligny, but not so formal ; he used a strong picturesque line and a large black blot. Rousseau drew with an almost child-like absence of pretension, in fragmentary touches, which look very unlearned yet preserve the spirit of the scene. Gdricault drew with the fire and energy of a man of genius; he had, however, a mannerism some- times found amongst the draughtsmen of his time, which consisted in putting a dot at the end of a stroke when nothing in nature called for it. This vice did not infect his boldest work, which is almost equal to Rembrandt in strength of conception and simplicity of purpose. The 'Lion holding a Serpent,' a rude sketch by G^ricault in thick lines, bears a striking resemblance to Rembrandt's most energetic sketching, though, of course, Gericault thought only of his subject. Delacroix used the pen chiefly for experimental sketches, which are interesting and have a close affinity with his handwriting, in which he used large letters and thick strokes. Some pen-sketches by Delacroix remind one of Michael Angelo in their manner. Both artists employed the thickening line which begins with a point, like a blade of grass, and thickens towards the middle. It is one of the advantages of the pen over the etching-needle to be able to give lines of this description, which are a help at least so far as this, that they express elasticity and energy in the artist, f I have not had space in this chapter to mention a tithe of the famous artists who have employed pen and ink in drawing, but I invite the reader's attention to one point which is likely to be forgotten as time * The reader may find some pen-sketches by Fortuny in the artistic periodicals. There are in L'Art—\?X, A sketch of a valet, seated on a stool, with a stick in his hand (vol. i. p. 372) ; 2nd, A portrait of Jos^ Tapiro (vol. ii. p. 66) ; 3rd, A sketch of a warrior with his shield (vol. ii. p. 68). The first is an engraving on wood, but it preserves most of the qualities of Fortuny's work t A very good instance of this is the two arms sketched after the postscript in a letter from Delacroix to Alexander Dumas, given in the published correspondence of the painter. •je THE GRAPHIC ARTS. goes on. He must remember that no master who worked before the second half of the nineteenth century had any reason for choosing the pen except that he liked it, that he valued its artistic capabilities. If an old master, such as Titian, loved the pen, it was not for any external reason ; but the invention of photography and of the various kinds of photographic printing and engraving has in this second half of the nine- teenth century given a very powerful external reason for studying pen- drawing, and enormously enhanced the commercial importance of the art. It so happens that nothing we can draw reproduces quite so perfectly as a clear black -ink line on perfectly smooth white paper, and in conse- quence of this the art of drawing with the pen has suddenly become the principal means of disseminating artistic ideas when economy is an object. Pen-sketches by artists from their own pictures are reproduced and printed with catalogues, or in the pages of art -magazines, which by this means are able to give autographs more expressive of the artist's mind, however roughly executed, than a formal engraving by another hand. One very great educational advantage of the photographic processes is that the public, which formerly looked upon real sketches with indiffer- ence or contempt, as ill -drawn or unfinished things, unworthy of its attention, is now much better able to understand the short- hand of drawing, and consequently is better prepared to set a just value on the pen - sketches of the great masters. The immense quantities of pen-drawings which will be produced in the future with a view to some kind of photographic engraving (especially for printing with type) will form, as it were, an infinite ocean of produc- tion, in the midst of which the works of our contemporaries will be scarcely more distinguishable than the waves of the Atlantic. Their only chance of relative immortality is a reputation won in some other department of art. Sir John Gilbert will be remembered as a famous artist in many ways ; so, perhaps, posterity will not forget that his pen-work was strong and original. Such sketching as the lively croquis done by him in 1875, from his own picture of 'Don Quixote and Sancho before the Duchess,' is as perfect as anything can be in that manner. The elements of it are the thin line, the thick line, and the black blot, all used with the utmost lightness of hand and freedom, and conveying not only movement and expression, but something of local colour, in hair and dress, at the same time. White, black, and two greys, are the simple elements with which the local colour of the painting is suggested. Mr. Marks draws with intentional simplicity of line, and grey straight shading in the style of an old engraving. There is no play of hand in his manner, as in that of PEN AND INK. ^^ Sir John Gilbert, he draws soberly like the old draughtsmen on wood, with hardly any blotting, and as little cross-hatching as possible — a perfectly sound style, but not a very lively one. One of the best styles in pen-drawing practised by contemporary painters is that of Mr. G. H. Boughton. It is not hard, nor minute, and it does not appear laberious, and yet it takes account of lights and darks, and, to a sufficient degree, of the nature of materials. It entirely avoids the too great clearness and precision which we noticed in the systematic work of Aligny and Bertin. Mr. Boughton suggests much more than he fully expresses, and varies his means of interpretation as occasion requires, employing thin lines or thick ones, broken lines or continuous ones, dashes, dots, blots, just as it suits him. Such drawings as those from his pictures of 'The Rivals,' and 'A Ruffling Breeze,' show quite a strong and decided natural gift for pen-drawing in the modern spirit. Mr. Cecil Lawson's pen-drawings err in the opposite direction to those of Aligny. The French artist had no mystery, the Englishman has too much, so that his drawing passes into confusion. The French artist substituted for the infinite tones of nature a few distinct tones of his own, four or five of them, that you can count ; the English landscape-painter attempts the whole scale of natural tone with the pen, and the method betrays him. Aligny stuck to the line as a man overboard clings to a thrown rope ; in Mr. Lawson's work the line is so completely abolished that it seems as if the artist had never discovered anything like linear beauty in nature. In short, Mr. Lawson pens landscape as if he were painting, and the slightest deterioration in the reproduction of his drawings is fatal to them. They ought to be reproduced by the most perfect photographic intaglio engraving, and not by the typographic processes. Whenever there is strong individuality in a style, it is sure to deserve attention in spite of serious defects ; for individuality cannot exist without power, and there cannot be power without a combination of knowledge and passion. Ribot, the French painter, draws with the pen in a manner of his own, making great use of dots and spots wherever he can find a pretext for them, and broadly separating light spaces from dark spaces. He avoids straight parallel lines, in which his manner is directly opposed to early wood-engraving ; his lines are generally short, more or less curved, and very much varied in direction. The number of dots makes a pen- drawing by him look like a pitted etching, overbitten, except that all the dots help the drawing and expression of the figures. De Neuville, the famous military painter, is one of the most perfectly accomplished pen- draughtsmen who have ever practised the art. In his work 'A Coups de 78 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. Fusil,' a set of sketches of war subjects in 1870, he shows the qualities of the best and most natural modern manner, which looks as easy as handwriting, seems to go by no methodical rule of any kind, and yet cautiously avoids all the pitfalls which lie in wait for the unwary, whilst it is intensely observant in reality, though without any strain of attention. For example, in one of the sketches an old lady is burying her silver- plate on the approach of the enemy. It looks very slight, and the detail is quite unobtrusive, but when you come to look into it, you can quite easily make out the design of the coffee-pot and soup-tureen and cruet- stand down to the exact shape of the stoppers, with the lights and reflections on the silver and glass. So we know all about the poor old lady's dress, her black silk gown, and her white cap with the dark ribbons in it. In the sketches of cavalry there is not a strap or a buckle out of place, yet none of them are drawn more than they should be, and they never obtrude themselves on our notice. They are like words used correctly in easy speech, where there is not a trace of pedantry. The same knowledge, without insistence, may be observed in M. de Neuville's management of lights and darks. He recognises light and shade, and he recognises local colour also, but he never over-labours his work for the sake of either. You can see at once that the village mayor wears a dark coat and light trousers, that one side of a house is in light and the other in shadow, yet the drawing seems as little encum- bered by pen-shading, as if there were none of it. It would be hard to find a set of drawings which conveyed so much truth and made so little fuss about it. It sometimes happens that there are great virtues in the work of amateurs which are prevented from receiving due recognition because the amateur is not a master of form. The pen-sketches of Hood, the poet and humourist, were admirably sound in manner, far sounder and better than many laboured attempts by accomplished painters ; and yet, as it was evident that Hood's knowledge of form was quite unscientific, it was thought that his sketches had no higher quality than that of making people laugh. Not only was his line very expressive, but his manage- ment of the means at his command in lights and darks was always exceedingly judicious. For example, in the scene where four expectant negroes are roasting a white man,* he uses positive black on the negroes with the most artistic reserve, it is kept for the two nearest, and only used, even on them, for the deepest shades ; the receding distances of the others are expressed by three shades of grey; finally, the white man, who is suspended over the fire, is drawn in very thin outline without PEN AND INK. 79 any shading whatever, that we may clearly perceive his whiteness; Rembrandt himself could not have arranged the subject better. Another amateur, much more accomplished than Hood, M. Jules Buisson, who was a deputy at the National Assembly at Versailles, conceived the idea of making an historical portrait gallery of his colleagues under the happy title, ' Le Musde des Souverains.' It was a collection of pen -sketches, which are sure of immortality for their great political interest, and which richly deserve it for their artistic qualities quite independently of politics. M. Buisson's principle of caricature is the same as that of Lionardo da Vinci, the exaggeration of ugly or ridiculous features, but he is more moderate than Lionardo was, and therefore more to be dreaded by his victims, for he is crafty enough to leave us frequently in doubt as to the possible degree of natural ugliness in the living legislators. Had they really such features — those fathers of the constitution of 1875 ? We hardly know ; we think they may possibly have been like that. The caricatures are not obviously very wide deviations from nature, and the lolling, ungraceful attitudes seem to be truth itself. These are the notables of Philistia, in whom there is no sweetness, and for whom, if any light shineth, it is feeble and remote like the sunshine on Uranus. M. Buisson's collection of portraits exhibits pen-drawing in its most distinct varieties. We have the dashing sketch in few and strong lines, the quiet sketch in sober thin lines with just a suggestion of light and shade, and the carefully modelled drawing in innumerable lines. The more dreadful the caricature the more elaborate the artistic performance. Every abnormal bump on a cranium, every protuberant padding of fat on cheek or neck, is modelled as if it had been a beauty. It is easy to see that the artist had a grim enjoyment of his own skill, for in his finished drawings he carefully gives them the local colour of hair and complexion, of coat and velvet collar, or black neck-tie. Such work has technical as well as human interest, for it shows hpw much plain truth the pen may be made to tell. Before concluding this chapter I must clear away a possible cause of confusion. When people see the woodcuts in Punch, by such artists as Leech and George Du Maurier, they are apt to think of their technical merits, if ever they happen to think of them at all, as belonging to the art of engraving on wood. Now wood -engraving has its own merits, to which full justice shall be rendered in the right place, but we must say plainly here, that in the cuts from Leech and Du Maurier, wood- engraving is entirely a subordinate art, and that the whole artistic merit of those cuts (which the engraver is fortunate if he does not diminish) 8o THE GRAPHIC ARTS. is the merit of good, sound pen-drawing. Again, because the contributors to Punch are witty men who make us laugh, we are only too apt to overlook the artistic qualities of their drawings; so that it would seem strange to many if I compared John Leech to the great serious masters of the pen such as Raphael and Titian. Well, we know, of course, the mental distinction between a gentle satirist of modern life and an in- ventor of immortal beauty, but in such matters as the judicious use of the ink line in shading John Leech is comparable to Raphael, or to any artist who ever lived. If you study such admirable designs as the ' Hunting in the Holidays,' or the, ' "Oh, my goodness! It's beginning to rain!" a sketch on the Yorkshire coast,' with the attention which they deserve, you will find that the pen -line is made to convey a wonderful amount of truth, not only about the forms of organic and in- organic things, but about their local colour, texture, and substance. Leech's line was always wonderfully explanatory. Light and airy in one place, firm in another, sometimes clear and definite, sometimes intention- ally confused, it described everything that came in his way more accu- rately than the paragraphs of our most laborious novelists, and with all his respect for various kinds of truth vhis drawings were never encumbered. It is an endless pleasure to follow the strokes of his pen, to see how they express everything he chooses, and with what modestly consummate science, the possession of a gentleman, not the display of a performer. His well-dressed ladies, his fashionables, and middle-class people, his sleek horses, rough Shetland ponies, donkeys, and Skye- terriers — all have their precisely appropriate appearance, whilst even his landscape, subordinate though it be, is fully suggestive of English nature through all changes of season and weather. With all its excellence, the pen-drawing of Leech had one peculiarity, which made it pictorially less effective than it might have been ; it was rather grey. Now we sometimes find it assumed by critics that to be grey is a fault in a pen-drawing or a woodcut, whilst a strong opposition of white and black is a virtue. Such an assumption is quite untenable, and is founded on simple ignorance of what has been done by the great men ; for they made grey drawings, or black and white drawings, just as the subject required or as their own feeling suggested.* It was not in the slightest degree a fault in Leech to draw in rather a grey manner; but he might, if he had chosen, have made his drawings look more effective by insisting * Amongst modern artists who make grey pen-drawings with intelligence and skill I may mention Harpignies, the French landscape-painter whose work with the pen is always elegant and perfectly harmonious, yet conceived and executed from first to last in quiet greys. PEN AND INK. 8i more on blacks when he had an opportunity for doing so, and by artfully bringing clear and brilliant whites into opposition with them. Mr. George Du Maurier has availed himself of these resources with a degree of tact and skill which, in pen-drawing, is unprecedented. For example, in his ' Winter Walk' a number of school-girls are passing in procession along a wooded lane. In the middle distance their dresses tell in dark grey against the dark grey trees, but in the foreground they tell in most vigorous blacks against a large space of pure white snow. Small details of dress, such as the white fur round a muff, are used to prevent the black from being too heavy. So in the admirable scene on a staircase, where a procession of ladies and gentle- men is going down to dinner, the black costumes of the -men are used as foils to the bright dresses of the ladies ; and in the ladies' dresses them- selves, especially that in the most conspicuous position, white and black are opposed as vigorously as possible. Such a drawing is not in full tone, or anything like it ; there are many necessary and intentional omissions, very light tones are translated by white, very dark ones are merged in black; but the artist has so contrived his arrangements as to get the effective oppo- sitions which are an essential element of his art. Pray observe, too, that the effect of them is not merely technical ; they have an influence on our minds. The ideas of wealth, comfort, and civilisation, are certainly more fully expressed in this manner than they could be in the slighter manner of Doyle. A black coat or a velvet gown can never look warm in outline. I have not space to follow out the uses of the pen in architectural drawing, but the main distinctions may be marked in a few words. An architect may draw either to explain facts of construction, or to give truth of aspect. The two kinds of drawing are opposite and incom- patible. Facts of construction are most clearly explained by a conventional system, well understood by the best architectural draughtsmen, which entirely eliminates mystery ; whilst truth of aspect includes mere suggestion and intentionally doubtful and imperfe ' ■ g6 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. with decision, and the decision is chiefly given by the thin but firm and black pen Hne. The combination of silver-point with sanguine is not so dangerous as its use with the pen, because the value of sanguine as a dark is not so great as that of ink, and is consequently more on a level with the grey of silver. Many readers* will remember the exquisitely truthful studies of the hands of Erasmus, by Holbein, in the Louvre ; done, no doubt, when Erasmus sat for his painted portrait. Those studies are in a combination of silver-point with sanguine, — the clear precision of linear drawing being got in the silver line, and the suggestion of life given by the sanguine shade.* Although silver-point is generally used for sharp lines it may be used, like a lead-pencil, for broader lines by inclining it or by sharpening it so as to make a broader stroke. There is a study of two draped figures by Sandro Botticelli in the British Museum t on a pink ground. In this the silver-point is sometimes used like a line with a broad lead-penciL The most refined beauty of the silver-point is reached when the lines are thin and clear, and there is no necessity for them to be dark, or strengthened by any foreign help. There is no more lovely drawing in the world than that of some thoroughly accomplished master when he is confined to pale tones, because then he gets relief and projection by delicate skill and not by main force. It was one of the best results of Italian culture to produce and appreciate this refined kind of drawing, but even in the northern schools there are good examples of it, the main difference being that in the northern work the line itself is never so elegant as in Italy. For delicate drawing in its perfection, both as to line and shade, I know of nothing to beat two profiles of a child in the Louvre,:|: exquisitely drawn by Lionardo with the silver-point on blue- grey paper and relieved in white. The upper profile shows the upper lip, in the lower one this is hidden by the cheek; in both, whatever is seen of the features is modelled with more real success, though in very pale tones, than many a ' vigorous ' drawing in chalk, and than many a boldly -blackened etching. There is an extremely pale drawing in the same collection, by Vittore Pisano, of a man with a serious, almost ill- Marked 517 and 518 in the I.ouvre Catalogue. I observe that the Catalogue says the studies are in silver-point, sanguine, and pierre noire. Lest this should mislead, I ought to say that the studies of hands referred to in the text are in silver-point and sanguine only. Pierre noire was used exclusively for another and more rapid sketch of a hand on 517, and for the slight outline sketch of Erasmus on 518. t British Museum, D. Pp. i, 24. X These drawings do not as yet (1881) bear any number in the Louvre Collection. >. r v.^ •I i ,fi)'. i' •^ THE SILVER POINT. 97 humoured face looking to his right. It is most beautifully modelled, yet there is not a dark line in it, and the drawing is hardly visible at a little distance. Albert Diirer's pure silver-point drawing of Cardinal Albert of Mayence* is like a piece of delicate engraving, and quite strong enough, there is no need for more blackness. So in the British Museum there is a fine head, by Domenico Ghirlandajo,+ with long, wavy, flowing hair, and a skull-cap. It is delicately shaded in diagonal lines like an old Italian print, and the whole drawing is pale, on paper tinted with a very pale brown. Hundreds of other examples might be quoted to show how little the great masters felt the necessity for deep blacks in their drawings. The reader will understand, of course, that in denying the necessity for black, I am thinking of drawing only and not of chiaroscuro, though even under certain conditions of natural effect there may be very perfect chiaroscuro without black, or anything like it. Still, drawing and chiar- oscuro are two very different pursuits ; the object of drawing is form, the object of chiaroscuro is a sort of music in which lights are the treble notes, and darks the bass, just as colour is another sort of music with hot tints and cold ones. I find that when people who have not thought much about these matters hit upon a drawing which is done purely for form, they are likely to say that it is ' weak,' meaning that the shading of it is not dark enough. There is no discipline better calculated to correct this error than the study of silver-point, and of pure form through its means. A good silver-point drawing may include a moderate degree of shading, but only for the expression of form ; the study of chiaroscuro is better carried on with charcoal or sepia. Comparison of Silver-Point with Nature. — All linear drawing is an interpretation only, and when the line is hard and clear, as it is in silver- point, the interpretation is sure to be remote from the real aspect and texture of natural things. Silver-point, as practised by the best masters, can scarcely be said to come nearer to nature, in the sense of imitation, than primitive old line engraving, which (as we shall have occasion to show later) was very remote indeed from anything like imitative com- pleteness. The advantage of silver -point as a discipline is not that it makes us imitate the aspect of nature as it is, but on the contrary that it forces the artist to practise a high degree of abstraction. The instru- ment is admirably adapted for the rendering of pure form, and it is best adapted for the purest and best form. A very refined and sure draughts- • Numbered 500 in the Louvre Catalogue, t British Museum, D. Pp. i, 26. This drawing was attributed by Waagen to FiliRpino Lippi. O 98 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. man of the figure, with a well -shaped model before him, will find the silver-point delightful; it will be to him like a chisel, and his prepared paper like marble, on which he will delicately carve the lines or swellings of face or limb in a determined degree of relief. But, perfect as the silver stylus is in the hands of a form -draughtsman, it is of no use to the colourist or the chiaroscurist. I mean that if the colourist desires to interpret in black and white the full values of local colour he will find the range of the silver grey too limited for him, and if the chiaroscurist wants the gloomy and mysterious effects of nature, he will not only find the silver grey too pale, but the line too hard and definite for his purpose. So the conclusion is that the silver-point is a draughtsman's instrument, and that it only interprets a part of nature. It is favourable to classic form, which is harder, clearer, and more definite than nature, but it can- not deal with mystery and depth. Let us ever remember that limitation of means is not an evil in the fine arts ; the real evil is in their mis- application. A good silver-point drawing is sufficient in itself, and we no more desire to blacken its pale beauty than we desire, under pretext of more perfect truth, to strengthen some delicate sonnet with violent verses from a tragedy. THE LEAD-PENCIL. 99 CHAPTER XIII. The Lead-Pencil. THE fate of the different graphic arts is strangely and variously affected by changes of fashion and accidents of invention. The pen was always an artist's instrument, but the use of it never increased so much as between the years 1865 and 1880, and the increase was not due to any more general appreciation of its merits, but simply to the photographic processes of engraving which were brought to perfection between those dates, and which reproduced ink lines more certainly than any other. The lead-pencil, on the contrary, was less cared for, and less used, comparatively to other instruments in the eighth decade of the nineteenth century than in the sixth and fifth. Very few artists of the present day (1881) make a high degree of skill with the lead-pencil a special aim in itself as Harding and Ingres did, It is, of course, very difficult to know what may be done now in private studies which remain unseen in portfolios, but a French artist affirmed, probably in ignorance of certain works by Professor Legros, that the last French figure-painter who used the lead-pencil in its severe and serious perfection, was Gdr6me, and that his best work with that instrument was done before the fall of the Empire.* Very charming work has been done since then by Maxime Lalanne, both in France and Holland ; but that, of course, is less severe. The pencil is still very extensively used for sketching, as it is extremely convenient for taking memoranda from nature ; but pencil- drawing as a separate and independent art is not greatly valued, nor even appreciated at its proper worth. Photography Tias not encouraged it, for it is difficult to reproduce pleasantly in any but the most expensive kinds of photographic engraving, and although it is much employed in * Amongst living artists of serious purpose and high accomplishment who use the lead- pencil habitually I ought to mention Mr. Bume Jones. All his recent drawings are in very pale ' lead-pencil, answering exactly to the silver-point of the old masters. We were anxious to have one of them reproduced for this volume, but the delicacy of these drawmgs made the enterprise almost hopeless. Of all drawings those in pale lead-pencil present the greatest difficulties to the photographic operators. We tried a very beautiful one by Gdrome, one of the most perfect he ever made, but the delicacy of the drawmg was such that the defects of the paper overpowered it in the photograph, and the experiment had to be abandoned. I op THE GRAPHIC ARTS. drawing upon wood, the impressions from the engraved block do not preserve a trace of its peculiar quality. Drawings in lead-pencil may be divided into three distinct classes, which answer very closely to drawings in other materials. First you have the pure line with the point. A hard pencil is usually prepared for this, and the result is a very near approximation to the qualities of silver-point. The lead-pencil is, however, inferior in convenience, as the point is constandy becoming blunter, which the silver- point does not, perceptibly. The pencil, therefore, requires incessant sharpening for delicate drawing, which is a tiresome interruption. There is this compensation to be considered, that the work may be effaced, which silver-point cannot be. The hard point is most valuable for sketching details, and this for a simple reason of a material nature which will be easily understood. A soft pencil will not give a fine, sharp line, and when the line itself is broad, it occupies a great deal of space on its own account, and cannot turn round little things without either filling them up or making them bigger than they ought to be. For example, if you try to draw the letter e of this type with a thick line — say with a line a tenth of an inch broad — one of two things must happen, either you must fill up the little open space in the letter, or else, if you respect that, you must increase the size of the letter externally by a black border added to it. I may go even farther and say that nobody could draw the letter with a thick line on this scale, for the line would be sure to give false forms. So it is with the details of architecture, or anything else. All details in a drawing on a small scale must either be in fine, hard lines or not drawn at all. I do not call it drawing of detail when a piece of delicate sculpture on a cathedral is represented by a shapeless spot of black lead. In obedience to this necessity (it is a matter of J)ure necessity and not of choice) every artist who wishes to put many small details into a drawing must use a sharp thin line and a hard point. This is why we find so many point-drawings amongst the studies of Turner. The plain line on white paper, quite firm and clear, not obscured by any linear shading which would set up a contest with the organic lines, this is what records the greatest number of details in a given space. Such drawing has, of course, no pretension whatever to developed form, or local colour, or chiaroscuro. It has but one purpose, which is to state in clear language how things are made, and not how they appear. This is another of those numerous instances in which a partial ex- pression is most readily accepted by those whose knowledge is most °^iif3: 'yii ' ! - ^■^ '^' Ti' ■^''^>l^ '■■-■■' >ra; ^S' THE LEAD-PENCIL. loi complete. Few artists when using the brush have been less linear than Turner ; few artists have been better acquainted with the laws of effect and with the art of representing it,* and yet he was a steady practitioner of point-drawing which is an interpretation of nature, by abstraction, on principles directly opposed to the synthetic interpretation by painting. The pure hard line may be preserved in pencil drawing as entirely dominant and yet be sustained by a suggestion of shade lightly spread with a stump. Here we have, in another material, exactly the same thing as the flat wash with the pen line upon it. The wash is often preferred to stumped lead in combination with clear pencil lines. The great object is to have the shade flat and delicate in quality, with no lines in it to make a confusion with those of the pencil. Such auxiliary shades, whatever the material, ought always to be strictly subservient, and not to obscure the organic lines on which the constructional strength of the work depends. Pencil drawings are often composed of strong lines used in combi- nation with soft shading which is neither applied with a stump nor yet precisely linear. The greatest danger of this manner is that the shading may become too predominant and too black. Notwithstanding the success of the pencil manufacturers in producing very black lead pencils, it is still true that the blackest shades of lead are unpleasantly opaque, and that they have a shining surface which makes them inferior, for artistic purposes, to the fine dead surfaces of charcoal or black chalk. Again, however black a lead-pencil may be, it is never so perfectly black as some other materials, so that it is useless to set up a contest with other arts in that direction. The commonest use of the lead-pencil is neither in pure line nor in any intentional and settled combination of line with shade, but in a careless play from one to the other. The clever pencil sketchers of buildings and landscape who seek for what is picturesque, and who value animation of manner more than severity of study, draw form and effect together, or so much of both as they think necessary. Their work is not so much an abstraction, like the pure line, as a selection from the whole field of nature, and a synthesis of the qualities selected. There is nothing to be said against the system, but it can never develop that exquisite sense of form which the discipline of the hard point favours. Here we have the old antagonism between the beautiful and the picturesque. * I do not mean that he always observed the laws in his own practice, but he noticed them in nature. He observed them so far as they seemed to him compatible with the interests of his picture. 102 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. Synthetic sketching, with its love of broken line and its interest in effect* shows the picturesque aspect of the world, whilst careful drawing in sustained line gives us the beautiful, or rather, perhaps, expresses that intellectual beauty which is more in the mind of the artist than in the aspects of the things he sees. Harding said that the pencil did not imitate local colour well with- out much labour, and that 'such imitation, unless it could be done with judgment, should never be attempted.' The objection to local colour applies in an equal degree to light and shade. There is no reason in the nature of the material why an artist who uses lead -pencil should absolutely reject either local colour or light and shade, but there is a good reason why he should deal cautiously and reservedly with both. The reason is because form is easily overwhelmed in the darkening of paper by rubbing lead upon it, and because the material does not permit of any very pleasant or cleanly recovery of form when once it has been obscured. It can hardly be necessary to point out the clear distinction between the sort of shading which is enough for modelling, for the ex- pression of roundness, and the full, strong shades of nature. Plenty of modelling may be got in pale tones, as we have seen in several drawings with the silver-point, but that is not light and shade in any complete sense. It may simplify matters to reject local colour entirely and give rather strong light and shade in its place; but since full light and shade involves much blackening of the paper, which is what we desire to avoid, the rejection of local colour would be but a partial gain. Surely the most philosophical plan is to recognise local colour without insisting upon it: to explain that a black skull-cap is darker than the white hair of an old man without attempting to rival the real blackness of the velvet. In the portrait of Constable, drawn by Leslie and prefixed to the biography, the blackness of the cravat and coat is clearly indicated in comparison with the white of the collar, but it is not imitated. Again, the white of the collar is detached from the tone of the complexion by delicate shading ; and yet, when we come to examine the drawing closely, we see that the paper is left to do duty both for the collar, and the lighter parts of the face, though in nature they could not be of the same tone. This, then, is an instance of what I should call mitigated local colour and mitigated shading in the same work ; and this mitigation of the strong contrasts of nature is, I Jbelieve, the most judicious and learned manner of dealing with the difficulties of lead-pencil. In the portraits by Ingres, which are models of excellent drawing, it is quite true that the coats were left white, but this was simply because he did not choose to THE LEAD-PENCIL. 103 finish them. The proof that he did not systematically eliminate local colour is that he gave it in the hair and eyes. It is quite plain that he was glad of the spots of dark in the eyes and under cravats, and gene- rally in any little dark place such as a hollow under a chin. The flesh was delicately shaded so as to suggest flesh colour and not plaster of Paris. In the portrait of Ingres by himself* the black cravat has its local colour, and that of the velvet coat-collar is indicated. I do not see how portraits of that class could have gained in any way by the abolition of local colour ; which is certainly of use, with the discretion of the master, in suggesting some of the contrasts and oppositions of nature. On the other hand, complete local colour everywhere on the dress would have been heavy and tiresome. To relieve this heaviness of the pencil shade artists often have re- course to tinted papers which suggest a great deal of local colour when lights are detached in opaque white applied with the brush. The paper then serves as middle-tint all over, the pencil gives darks, at least to a certain extent; and Chinese white the lights ; a plan which both econo- mises labour and permits a nearer approach to the truth of nature. Every amateur has experienced the sudden sense of increased power which comes upon an artist when he passes from white to tinted paper, and detaches great masses, such as those of a mountain, by scumbling a light opaque wash on the sky behind them. We have seen that the old masters very frequently tinted their papers for silver-point and relieved the lights with white ; a plan which in our own day has been most ex- tensively followed in popular lithography. In the choice of papers for this purpose we have to be on our guard against our natural tendency to have them far too dark. The white lights look brilliant on dark paper, but they may look too brilliant, and the lines of the pencil may easily appear too pale. Notwithstanding the example of the old masters who prepared their papers with all sorts of unlikely tints, even with pink and green, it is evidently most reasonable to choose tints which serve simply as degrees of darkness, and attract little attention in themselves. Delicate greys, warm or cool, as the subject of the drawing may seem to require it, are always the least objectionable. We sometimes meet with studies in pencil on cold blue paper, which makes the whole drawing chilly, and gives it a particularly miserable appearance if there are nude figures in it. Of course I do not wish to imply that the tint of the paper is to take the place of colour, but it may suggest colour associa- * The admirable pencil drawing marked No. 1829 in the Catalogue of the Louvre. 104 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. tions remotely to the mind. There are tints of paper which slightly suggest flesh and which give warmth and life to a drawing of a face which would look ghastly on green or blue. Whatever be the tint selected, it is well to remember that it can never be anything more than a flat tint, and that the suggestion of modelling must be added by careful drawing. The paper does some thing, it saves some trouble, but the help it gives is slighter than it at first appears, on account of its inevitable flatness. To remedy this, some ingenious paper- makers have tempted amateurs with gradated papers, presenting a ready-made blue sky passing down in regularly diminishing blueness from the zenith to the horizon, where yellow land (easily turned green with a wash) went up to meet it, and white clouds might be obtained by scratching with a penknife. These devices are vain and futile. Nobody can put a gradation on a drawing, suitable for the subject, except the artist who knows exactly what his own intentions are. Besides tinted papers intended to suggest local colour by opposing it to high applied lights, papers with a moderate tone are often employed when there is no intention of putting any lights upon them at all. Ingres did not make his pencil portraits on crude white paper, but on a yellowish tone, just dark enough to bear up his work without taking the light out of it. Absolutely pure white makes a drawing look meagre and cold, a slight warm tint prevents this ; but if the tint is at all excessive, the lights in the drawing go out. Notwithstanding the frequent practice of very eminent men, it may, I think, be taken as a certainty that pencil drawings of a really high class are better without white lights added with the brush. There can never be any real harmony between brush touches and pencil lines, besides which the pencil is an instrument of quite sufficient delicacy and power to be enjoyed for itself alone. Nobody is ever so barbarous as to put white touches on a delicate engraving, which, though its lines may be finer, is certainly not more delicate as an artistic expression than the pencil-strokes of any artist who can truly see and feel. Common and cheap as the lead-pencil may appear, it is truly an artist's instrument, with powers of expression only limited by those of the man who holds it, and it deserves to be respected for itself If opaque white is used at all in combination with pencil, it must be on parts of the paper which are quite clear of black lead, for if it passes over lead, or gets mixed with it, very objectionable false tones are pro- duced. These are common enough in drawings upon wood, but there they are of no consequence, as the drawings are cut up by the engravers. .-inA- i •- -A fM': t/^"' THE LEAD-PENCIL. 105 Smooth papers are suitable for delicate line work with the hard point, even Bristol board is not too smooth for that, but as a general rule papers with a fine but perceptible grain are the most agreeable to work upon Some artists even use papier vergi, which has a strong wire-mark, but this is not of any advantage, except that it prevents shading from looking too opaque by leaving white lines in it, in the wire-marks. These lines, however, have a mechanical appearance, which is not desirable in a work of fine art, and in my opinion papier vergd ought to be rejected not only for pencil but for all kinds of drawing whatever. It may be used for printing etchings, but that is a different matter, as in plate -printing the pressure flattens the paper, and the roughest papers become smooth upon the copper. When soft pencil is used on rough paper the consequence is that the molecules of lead are caught upon the hillocks of the paper, and do not get down into the valleys between, so that the lines, instead of being really continuous, are a succession of small black spots. This broken effect is liked by some artists, because it avoids hardness. There is in the British Museum a grand pencil study^ by Bonnington, of the stem of a ship with a shield of arms and two anchor chains, the side of the vessel with her ports being seen in perspective ; this, like several other sketches in the same volume, is on rough paper and in black pencil, but there is also evidence that Bonnington knew the value of smoother paper when he wanted finer lines, as there are studies by him in hard pencil much more minute and definite, and the paper for these has a fine grain. Almost all styles of work in pencil resolve themselves, on analysis, into a very few elements. Bonnington, in his coarser work, used line, grey shade, and a certain black touch which gave accent. He sprinkled those black touches very freely over his drawings, wherever the subject gave an excuse for them. Prout used bold lines and dots, he was a very strong mannerist, and not a desirable model for everything, though he rendered good service in his time by awakening the sense of the pictu- resque. In the first half of the nineteenth century a very common mannerism amongst picturesque pencil-sketchers in England was to finish the line either with a dot or with a short sharp curve, which gave a sort of apparent decision and sprightliness to the work with little reference to nature. This mannerism may be found even in the elegant drawings of Henry Edridge. Except this fault, which is not very unpleasantly con- spicuous, a drawing of ' La Tour de la Grosse Horloge, Evreux,' by that master, is one of the best pencil drawings, with little shading, that I io6 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. know.* It would have been better still had it been a little quieter; and not so demonstrative of manual dexterity; but it perfectly expresses the character of the street picturesque in France by means of broken line and a very slight suggestion of shade. The tradition of this kind of drawing has survived to our own time, for Lalanne is at least equal to Edridge in grace and vivacity, and in the skill with which he interprets streets and towers. Another tradition, which is not a survival but a revival, is that of the severe figure-drawing in pencil which is now practised by M. Legros, and which is founded upon old silver-point drawing of the noblest kind. There are some admirable examples of his work in the Museum at Dijon, his native place. Those drawings are in thin line with sober shading, chiefly diagonal, and on slightly tinted paper of a warm tone. They might be hung in the Louvre, amongst the great Italian masters, without offending any one, for it would be difficult, even there, to find sounder examples of self- direction and self-restraint in drawing.f Comparison of Lead-pencil Drawing with Nature. — The lead-pencil may approach more nearly to the qualities of nature than the pen, because when cut broadly and a little aided by the stump it will produce a series of grey tones without lines resembling the textureless shades of nature. For all purposes of interpretation the pencil line is as good as that of the pen. The draughtsman with the pencil has the advantage that he can imitate tones truly within certain limits with the side of his pencil and, at once, without changing the instrument, interpret with the point on the principles common to all point drawing. The imitative inferiority of the pencil to some other means of repre- senting nature is that its range of tone is not so great. The very darkest black-lead, rubbed till every pore of the paper is choked up with it, is after all nothing but a grey between silver -point and black chalk. The paleness of black-lead is hardly credible until demonstrated by contrast, but a little crayon ContS, or a drop of ink by the side of it, soon gives the true measure of its depth. Besides this there is the additional inconvenience that the black-lead shines, and wherever it does so all the relations of tone go wrong together. The want of depth is only an obstacle to the imitation of nature, * In the British Museum. Reproduced by Mr. Dawson and published in the Portfolio for December, 1880. t The drawings alluded to are— i, A study of a head with a beard ; 2, A lady reading a book ; 3, A nude female, seated, holding up one arm and resting on one hand ; 4, A female figure, nude, seated, with the palms of the hands turned upwards. ■ '^^ f ' ■ ■ ■ • i / t ■ 1 V f i i 5 i r- \ ! THE LEAD-PENCIL. 107 as excellent interpretation is possible in pale lines. The true office of the lead-pencil is therefore to interpret by line with a moderate use of tone, and it ought never to attempt full tone. . It should be considered as a kind of silver - point, with the additional convenience of flat or gradated auxiliary shade. The finest and most valuable lead-pencil drawing is sparing of shade. It leaves all the higher lights in blank paper and avoids great spaces of strong dark, giving darks only in small spaces, thereby making them seem darker. It does not attempt much imitation of texture. Local colour it suggests, but does not try to follow out to its full consequences. In short, the office of the lead- pencil with regard to nature appears to be interpretation combined with strictly moderated and limited imitation. The taste and knowledge of artists is shown in the restrictions they place upon themselves in the presence of nature, when the instrument in their hands ' requires delicacy and discretion, so that its limited powers may not be overstrained and abused.' The reader may again be cautioned against the erroneous criticism which condemns limited means as ' imperfect.' A man's voice is not imperfect because he cannot sing all the notes on the piano. The lead- pencil is a perfect instrument of limited range. The wonderful improve- ment in its manufacture invented by Mr. Brockedon* gave us pencils without grit, which are as perfect as if they were darker and softer silver - points. The very cheapness of them, and their uniformity of sound quality, make them less appreciated than they deserve. * Mr. Brockedon's invention consisted in solidifying the powder of graphitie by hydraulic pressure, which allowed the graphite to be freed from the presence of grit, and cheapened pencils by using material that would have been otherwise unavailable. Another improve- ment has been introduced by Mr. Faber, who provides artists with long leads in holders, so as to avoid the troublesome necessity for cutting. These are most useful for hurried memoranda from nature, as they spare us an intolerable interruptioa io8 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. CHAPTER XIV. Sanguine^ Chalk, and Black Stone. BLACK chalk is natural or artificial. Like lead-pencils chalks have been improved by artificial processes of manufacture, as the natural product is not always free from grit, which the manufacturer carefully expels. Field tells us that natural black chalk is ' an indurated black clay.' The old masters used a black which they call«i black stone, or Italian stone. The black stones employed by them were native minerals, probably of different chemical compositions. The number of black minerals which might be used for drawing purposes is considerable. Black chalk has two advantages over the lead-pencil. It is very much darker, and shading produced with it does not shine. It is, however, greatly inferior to lead -pencil in precision and delicacy of line. A hard pencil could define quite clearly and precisely many minute delicacies of form which a chalk line could not possibly follow. Much of the incon- venience which might be occasioned by this inferiority is avoided by making chalk drawings on rather a large scale, whilst the lead - pencil is used for small works, such as drawings on wood, where delicacy of line is of more importance. The increase of scale permits the use of a clumsier instrument. Chalk may often be used for small sketches if minute details are not required. Artists who have not been accustomed to use chalk find it difficult to get over the clumsiness of its point, which remains tolerably sharp only for a very short time, and very easily breaks off, in which it is exactly the opposite of the silver-point : the lead - pencil occupying an intermediate position between the two. This defect in chalk would be very serious if point-drawing were its chief use, but it is not so. Chalk is understood to be rather a rude instrument for point-drawing, but to have other and compensating qualities. The line which can be made easily and naturally with chalk is not very thin and sharp, but of a charming quality. On paper perfecdy suitable to it the gradations from comparative clearness to a crumbling texture are not only agreeable in themselves but they recall one of the most charming qualities in nature — the passage from the definite to the SANGUINE, CHALK, AND BLACK STONE. 109 less definite — visible in all natural objects which are seen together, and not purposely and wilfully isolated. Skilful draughtsmen, accustomed to the peculiarities of chalk, obtain with it a sufficient degree of clearness for moderate definition, but do not care to have all lines thin and clear, because thicker and softer lines are often nearer to the morbidezza of nature. The chalk-line differs from the pen in this that, whereas in the pen-line two hard outlines enclose a black space, in the chalk-line the space is not enclosed by rigid limits, but dies away in a sort of crumble, thereby approaching much more nearly to the sought-for vagueness of the mature schools of painting. The darkness easily attainable in chalk permits its use on dark-tinted papers, which extinguish black lead completely. Pale lines, such as those of silver-point and hard pencil, may be used efficaciously on tinted papers, but they must be light in tone ; dark papers make the drawing look as if all its lights had gone out, because the lines are not dark enough to make them light by contrast. The darks of chalk being exceedingly deep, make the lights efficacious even when the paper is not light in itself. I do not, of course, speak of the highest lights, or of glitter, which are usually added in white chalk. It is a convenience, in working from nature, to be able to use rather dark tinted papers, as they spare the eyes in sunshine. It is even possible to work upon them comfortably without a parasol, when white paper would be blinding. This is a practical reason why landscape sketchers may prefer chalk to pencil. Another reason is that chalk gives a finer range of tones with the stump. The principle of line and shade which we have seen adopted In the pen-line and wash may be acted upon with great advantage by the draughtsman in chalk, without having recourse to any other material. He can get all his quiet lineless and textureless tones and shades with the stump, and then lay lines upon them where they are wanted to express character or define form. The technical harmony between the stump shade in chalk and the line, also in chalk, which is drawn upon it is complete, which cannot be said of all combinations. For example, chalk and wash will go together, but they are certainly less harmonious. The brush-line is what goes most harmoniously with a wash. Chalk has been used abundantly by artists until the last few years, when charcoal has in some measure superseded it. The difference between the two will be stated in the next chapter. Chalk has an important position as the parent of another art, which was of very great importance before the invention of photographic engraving. One great department no THE GRAPHIC ARTS. of lithography is an imitation, and often a marvellously close imitation, of chalk drawing. Not only full tone, but considerable vigour and truth of texture, may be got in chalk by a skilful artist. In this quality it is greatly superior to lead -pencil, silver-point, and pen-and-ink. Eminent painters, however, are rather apt to neglect texture in their drawings, even when their paintings show that they thoroughly understand it. Texture, as a subject of study, has been carried farther by lithographers. All the qualities of chalk are shown in perfection in good lithographs, which is a convenience for students who have not ready access to original drawings. Painters use chalk in a more secondary and subordinate way; they do not care to develop all its technical resources, but they accept readily enough those which present themselves without research. As an example of excellent rapid painter's work in black chalk, with nothing else to help it, I may mehtion a wonderful study of an elephant by Rembrandt,* remarkable for its economy of labour. The lines of shade follow the wrinkles of the animal's skin, and are at the same time shading and explanation. If you compare that study with any first-rate modern lithograph, in full tone and texture, you will at once see the difference between the easy, careless use of chalk, and the laborious following out of all its possible qualities. So in modern landscape work, if you com- pare the chalk drawings of Constable.f which he made for his own use, with the lithographs of Harding, which he made for publication, you will understand the difference between the simple, straightforward work of an artist who was only thinking about nature, and the showy performance of one who was thinking about his own clever methods of interpretation and his own almost unrivalled manual skill. Plain chalk drawing may be of the greatest use and convenience to painters, but it is quite un- necessary for them to bring it to any technical perfection. The best of them use it anyhow, and often with much simple force and originality- One of the best recommendations of Millet's numerous chalk drawings is their simplicity. He did not work for any elaborate texture or modelling, but got his forms well together by light, tentative strokes, and then, being sure of all his main proportions, put in the principal * British Museum, D. t A few of Constable's chalk drawings were reproduced in L'Art, voL xiii. p. 171, &c, to illustrate an article on Constable, by Mr. Frederick Wedmore. The reader may use such reproductions for reference, but he should remember that they are generally very much coarser than the originals. The study at p. 173, of a river flowing through a plain, which is separated by a wood from distant hills, is very simple, but it contains all the chief elements fif a fine and impressive landscape. -^^^^^. ■»x ,i#»«'»^ -*V1!X*Kh -"^^^ \ > •#i .' "%' ff ^. SANGUINE, CHALK, AND BLACK STONE. m darks boldly, without attention to minute detail. His style -of drawing conveys the impression that it was done from memory, so much is sacri- ficed, and so the chalk was a more suitable instrument for him than the pen or the etching needle, because it is richer in itself, and better prevents the appearance of vacancy. In the noble drawing of the ' Faggot-makers' (two men making a faggot in a wood, and a woman half carrying, half trailing two others) the paper is furnished by the mere thickness of the strokes, there being very little detail, whilst heaviness is prevented by the white depressions of the papier vergd showing through. There are numbers of slighter drawings by Millet in which the chalk is used more openly, and simply as a darker sort of pencil, leaving the white paper free in large spaces of sky or ground, and showing how little he thought it necessary to produce complete pictorial chiaroscuro. The ' Deux Faneuses ' was a good example of this class of drawings.* Two women are raking hay in a field, where the sky and the sun-lighted ground, as well as the lighted parts of the dresses, and of a large haystack in the background, are all left in pure white paper, as they might be in an etching, without any recognition whatever of local colour, or of pale shades, though both might be given very accurately in chalk if the artist chose to employ his time for that purpose, but the linear composition is just as good without them. In studies from nature black chalk is often used in pure line, as if it were a hard pencil. Some excellent studies of this class were made by Edmond H^douin for his picture of buckwheat -mowing, ' Faucheurs de Sainfoin.'f The men are represented in various attitudes with their scythes, and so linear is the drawing that there are always two lines for the woodwork of the scythes, except where a strong shadow is cast upon it. Why chalk should be preferred to pencil or pen for studies of this class I do not see, unless the artist thinks that its crumbling texture prevents hardness and makes the drawing more nearly related in quality to the painting which is to be produced from it. The preference for chalk is the more curious in M. Hedouin's case that he is perfectly accustomed to the clear and sharp line which he uses with very great skill in etching. I have said that chalk might be sustained with a wash. If any wash is used Indian ink is the best, as it is never desirable to set up a chromatic opposition between the lines and the flat shades which are * This drawing was in M. Alfred Sensier's sale, where it bore the number 236. It was reproduced in L'Art, vol xi. p. 190. t Reproduced in L'Art, vol xi. pp. 30, 31, 32, 33. 112 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. to sustain them. Millet often washed his chalk drawings partially, and sometimes rather extensively. The fine drawing of the Faggot-makers is washed on the left, flatly, the wash going over some tree-trunks and coming down upon the foreground, but it is resorted to sparingly. An- other fine drawing by him of a man on horseback struggling against a gale of wind on the sea-shore is washed much more extensively, and in three or four different tones, so that here the chalk lines may be, and are, more meagre. Washing of this kind answers precisely to ink left on the surface of a plate in printing etchings. It is positively the same thing, so far as artistic results are concerned.* Whenever the wash is resorted to it should be kept well subordinate. The best use of it is to extinguish a multiplicity of little lights, quietly and unobtrusively. When rough paper of a very light colour is used, such specks of light are extremely numerous, and must be put out in some parts where they are not wanted. In grey and other toned papers they are much less injurious, because the papers themselves lower them. Black chalk on grey paper has one immense advantage over lead- pencil. It can be accompanied by perfectly harmonious lights in white chalk, which has all its own characteristics except darkness. Lead- pencil has no such friendly opposite, for white chalk does not resemble it, and white applied with the brush is also technically discordant. The opposition of white and black chalk on grey paper has been resorted to by innumerable artists, amongst them by masters of the greatest emi- nence. There are only two rules of importance to be attended to in this combination ; one is to take care that the paper is not too dark, for if it is the lights will stare; and the other is to mind never to mix the two chalks together on the paper, as their grey is almost certain to set up a conflict of its own with the tint of the paper, and to appear louche, as the French say. The qualities of black and white chalk will be familiar to every reader, as their effect has been ably reproduced m thousands of lithographs. Original drawings are generally rougher and more straightforward, some of the finest being very rapid and energetic indeed. Turner used the two chalks very frequently in landscape sketching — even in drawing-books, where they easily got rubbed off, more or less, by the friction of the pages.f It is an inconvenience that * I do not know in whose possession are the two drawings by Millet mentioned above. I have not seen the originals, but Braun's autotypes are so good that one knows every- thing from them, even the nature of the wire -marked /a/zijr vergk on which Millet drew. t Sir Frederick Leighton's favourite materials for studies without colour are black and white chalk on tinted paper. SANGUINE, CHALK, AND BLACK STONE. 113 white chalk cannot be fixed without weakening it. I do not remember any studies in white and black chalk more recommendable (as technical examples) than those of Prud'hon. They are not dashing things— there is no bravura of style about them — but they are inspired by a genuine classic taste which is always elevating, and quite a different thing (both in its inspiration and in its effects) from the false pretension to classic taste which infects so much French work of the same epoch. The most delicately beautiful Prud'hon I ever saw, as an example of his lightest manner, is a head of the Virgin in the Museum at Dijon.* It is on grey paper which is first stumped with a darker grey, and on this he made a wonderfully free and light drawing in black and white lines, not one of which seems to have cost any labour or hesitation, or to have been disturbed when once laid. Such work as that is done in the temper of what Matthew Arnold calls 'sweetness and light' — I mean that the manner is charming and gracious, whilst it is illuminated by knowledge. Drawings have very frequently been made in red chalk, or in sanguine, a mineral of another variety of red. The old masters were fond of making red drawings, a practice which fell rather into disuse in the first half of the nineteenth century, but has since been revived, like most of the old varieties of art. A page on the general philosophy of drawing in red will not be out of place here. For convenience of illustration I will take an engraving that can be printed from in different colours, so that you can compare the proofs. Suppose, then, that you take an engraved copperplate to the printer^ and tell him to prepare, besides his ordinary black ink, some red ink which shall print like red chalk, or like sanguine. Suppose your copper to be engraved with some vigorous darks, then your proof in black ink will give these darks in all their depth, but the red proofs will not be able to get down to them. The black ink, like a diver with weights in his hands, goes down to the very bottom ; the red ink, like a diver without weights, manages only the transitions between the top and the half deeps. Now, as black may be presented in any degree of paleness (we call it grey when it is pale), it can always give with perfect precision every one of the tonic values of red (that is, the degrees of darkness there may be in red), whereas red cannot give the great weights, or dark shades of black at all, it is plain that in choosing red an artist is • No. 182 in the Catalogue. 114 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. depriving himself of resources in chiaroscuro and gaining none in return. The same is true, but to a much smaller degree, if he chooses brown instead of black. Then why do artists ever choose red at all for drawings — why not work persistently in black .■* The original reason I take to be that red, especially when used on paper of a slightly yellow tone, and wheJi the subject is a naked figure, suggests the warmth and glow of carnation. Of course the old masters who drew in red never supposed that they were using colour, since they made the eyes and noses of their figures as red as the cheeks; but, though not using colour in the true sense, they were suggesting warmth and life. The degree to which the choice of drawing materials may suggest life or the contrary when there is no colour whatever in the sense of making and copying tints, may be fully understood by an experiment : Let the reader draw a living figure in red chalk on cream- tinted paper, and a corpse in black chalk with white lights on a very cold grey paper, he will soon see how the materials help the expression of life and death. The old masters, as we have seen, were in the habit of tinting the grounds on which they drew in silver point. There is a head in the Louvre* attributed to Albert Diirer on a circular piece of green-tinted paper — a fat, healthy, good tempered looking face enough, but the green paper makes it ghastly, like children's faces round a snap-dragon. There is also a highly-finished study of a torso of a young man with a cloth round his loins, a drawing of the Florentine school,f but this is on pink paper, and not death-like at all, though the figure is decapitated.f These elementary ideas of the suggestion of life and death in- fluenced the figure-painters. Red chalk and sanguine have been used in landscape, but not often, and there are even engraved landscapes printed in red, but these are rare. Brown has been the favourite colour for landscape monochromes when black has been departed from, and in this choice of brown we have another instance, not of colour, but of * Catalogue of Drawings exhibited, 504. t Catalogue of Drawings, 419. X The wonderful suggestive power of the tint of paper is shown in the following instance : Theodore Rousseau began a picture of a sunset on the sands of a region in the Fontainebleau Forest, called the Jean de Paris. Intending to paint a red sunset, he pre- pared his canvas with vermilion, and on that he drew his subject, I think in black. He worked a little upon the drawing, but very little, and his friends liked the unfinished picture so much that he left it in that state. After his death a heliogravure was made from it by M. Amand Durand, which was printed on reddish paper in imitation of the vermilion ground of the canvas. It so completely suggests the idea of a glowing sunset that so far as the mental impression is concerned it is equivalent to a work in colour. »,<*^v.i SANGUINE, CHALK, AND BLACK STONE. 115 chromatic suggestion and analogy. Brown is not the most prevalent colour of landscape, but it is the colour which can be most easily turned into the landscape colours, as the old artists found by experience when they painted on monochromes. It may, however, always be concluded that when an artist uses red chalk or sanguine he does not intend to produce a very powerful effect. It is as if he took silver- point or pale pencil instead of black chalk. He may get beautiful modelling and good effect within a limited range, but it is simply not possible that he should ever get th6 strong effects of black chalk or printing ink. Examples of fine sanguines are so extremely frequent in every large collection of drawings by the old masters that it is unnecessary to particularise them. One of the loveliest in the British Museum is the charming study of a female face and bust by Andrea del Sarto, which was autotyped and published in Mr. Comyns Carr's selections, I do not know a more beautiful drawing ; so learned it is, and yet so perfectly unpretending in style, every line tenderly touched, every shade followed to the full expression of rounded form.* As a good example of a rougher and readier kind of work, I may mention the straightfor- ward study by Titian of a man holding a halbertf If the reader notices that study he will observe that the lines of shading are rounded across the muscles and varied in direction, which is a technical advance on the old diagonal line, here relegated to the background. Although considerable strength of effect may. be got in red, still an artist accustomed to the full scale of black may often feel, when working in red only, like a man confined to an upper storey. On the other hand, he may like to preserve the warmth of the red lines. These conflicting desires were reconciled by. the union of red and black chalk in the same drawing, or sanguine and black stone, which amount to the same thing. The use of the three chalks, white, black, and red, for the suggestion of colour, has never been carried farther than by Rubens. There are two very fine studies of his in the Louvre,;]: about twenty inches high, which were made use of in a picture called the ' Jardin d' Amour.' One of them represents a lady with a fan, and so dexterously are the chalks used that it * The reproduction in Mr. Comyns Carr's publication is a good autotype, and may be relied upon within the usual limits of autotype, which the reader will find explained later on in this volume : but he ought not even to look at the dreadfully unfortunate reproduc- tion of the same drawing by Yves and Barret, which appeared in L'Art June loth, 1877. t Louvre. Catalogue of Drawings, 376. X Nos. 556 and 557 in the Catalogue. 1 16 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. requires only a little imagination to see a picture in the place of the drawing. The flesh is in red and white chalk almost exclusively, but the eye is touched in black. In the dress this is ingeniously counterchanged ; here black is used everywhere in very broad touches, with white high lights, but the ribbons are picked out in red. It is quite plain that this is not done for light and shade, as the value of the red could have been perfectly well rendered in grey ; it is done with the deliberate intention of suggesting colour to the mind, though of course it is not real colour, nor even, without the help of imagination, anything approaching to it. Many readers will remember the Academy studies in three crayons by Mulready, some of which were lithographed and published by the Government for the Schools of Art. These were very highly finished, being carried as far in delicacy of drawing and fulness of modelling as Mulready's learning and skill could go. If the reader remembers them he is sure to have noticed how wonderfully they suggest flesh, considering the simple means employed.* Mulready's paper had much to do with his success, as it supplied an element of flesh colour. He would never have been able to give his models anything like English skins on such paper as that used by Paul Veronese for the negro's head in the Louvre.t a coarse brown paper, quite as good for that purpose as any other. The drawing upon it is in black stone, with touches of sanguine, and it is a model of fine, broad, comprehensive sketching, soft on the face, ruder upon the hair. Comparison of Chalk, Sanguine, and Black Stone with Nature. — The dark greys and the blacks of chalk and black stone are much nearer nature than those of the lead-pencil. The essential characteristic of deep natural shade is that it reflects little or no light, and this is the quality of chalk, Chalk lines, on slightly rough paper, resemble in quality the edges of oil-paint on rough canvas, and have altogether much more of the painter- like quality than lines with the silver-point or hard pencil, which are more like engraving. This resemblance to painting is also a resemblance to nature, for in nature the boundaries of things rarely present a hard and sharp outline. They do so occasionally, and then they can be imitated, even in chalk, with special care ; though when chalk is used easily and carelessly, its line is soft, being bounded by a series of irregularities. Red chalk and sanguine, when used on judiciously selected papers, call to mind the flesh tones of nature by suggesting their warmth, * I am thinking particularly of three, dated 1848, 1852, and 1853, the last a female, the others male. The large one dated 1852, of a man seated and resting on his hand, comes nearest m its treatment to the expression of flesh, t Catalogue, 141. SANGUINE, CHALK, AND BLACK STONE. 117 Red chalk and sanguine, in combination with black chalk or black stone, and with white chalk, on tinted paper, may be made to play together in such a manner as to suggest full colour to the imagination when the subject is judiciously chosen. They would never suggest the colour of a blue sky or a green field, but they can convey to us that of a gravely-dressed figure. On the whole the three chalks present one of the most powerful means known to us for obtaining a record or a suggestion of many truths of nature with gjreat economy of labour, especially if the drawings are on rather a large scale, but they are not favourable to minute detail. ii8 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. CHAPTER XV. Charcoal. THIS art of charcoal - drawing, which now occupies a very high position in the opinion of artists as an independent means of expression, is a most curious example of what may be called promotion amongst the graphic arts. It is not quite an isolated example, for there have already been one or two instances in which arts have been strangely neglected for a long time (even when they already perfectly existed), and afterwards been suddenly taken into favour and developed by the practice of very able men. Still, I do not call to mind a single instance quite so remarkable and surprising as the history of charcoal. The means of working in other neglected arts were in the hands of a few — only a few men had the necessary materials and were likely to be led to their employment, so that it was not very surprising if, with the narrowness which the handicrafts encourage in the human mind, these men should have gone on working in their old ways and not have developed the new possibilities of the things that lay about in their work-rooms. It is not surprising, to mention the most conspicuous instance, that silversmiths who made niellos should not have become copper -plate engravers and printers, though they were divided from such work by the thinnest of all imaginable partitions ; but it really is rather surprising that hundreds and thousands of painters should have had pieces of charcoal in their colour- boxes and never been tempted to make any other use of them than the first slight sketch on each of their canvases — a sketch not valued for its technical qualities at all, but only because it could be so very easily effaced and annihilated as a thing worthless in itself but a convenient step to something better. The universal custom was to play with charcoal on the canvas till the forms were roughly in their places, and then to define the forms with pencil or ink through the charcoal, after which a whiff with a rag or a bundle of feathers removed the slightly adherent black dust, and the charcoal lay quietly in the box till the beginning of another picture. If a drawing on paper was required, the artist employed chalk X)r pencil, but never thought of charcoal. Perhaps its qualities were entirely unsuspected ; perhaps, also, it may have been thought useless to CHARCOAL. 119 devote labour to mere dust that a touch could wipe away. It had been used in a few drawings by old masters, but in combination with chalk, and the rare instances of its employment easily escaped attention. It is believed that the real origin of the modern charcoal-drawing has no refer- ence whatever to old work of any kind, but is simply a development of the sketch on canvas with which painters began their pictures. There was a change of material — instead of canvas they took paper, and finding that the paper was favourable to the work they carried it further, until finally they reached the full development of charcoal as an inde- pendent art. It appears that the designers of church windows had used charcoal for some time to indicate the intended degrees of light and dark in the spaces between their ink lines, but nothing could be more remote than this kind of drawing (dependent as it was on the rigid line in another medium) from the true spirit of modern work in charcoal. The "modern art is really a painter's art, and the daughter of painting. It was first practised by some French painters, of whom Decamps and Troyon are the best known beyond the limits of their own country. Since their time the number of fusinistes has immensely increased in France. Almost every painter has used charcoal more or less : it is constantly employed for studies in the schools of art, and landscape-painters use it in their work from nature. At the present date (1881), the best known masters of charcoal in landscape are AUongd and Appian, who are painters ; and Lalanne, the celebrated etcher. Amongst painters of the figure who have made a separate reputation by their drawings in charcoal, I do not know of one who excels Ldon Lhermitte in every important quality of the art. Charcoal-drawings may be executed on paper or canvas, or even on the clean plaster of walls, and fixed there ; but of all materials paper is the most used. The quality of its grain is of great importance, as it is sure to affect very strongly the quality of the manual work, and also the particular kind of natural truth which the artist will be able to interpret. If it is too rough it catches the charcoal too strongly on its little eminences, so that the artist finds it difficult, if not impossible, to get any delicate textures, and has to shade sky and water as if they were rock. If, on the other hand, the paper is too smooth (as Bristol board, for example), the charcoal does not bite upon it properly— it seems to have no hold,— and good shading is not easy. The best papers have a grain, but rather a fine grain, and very even in its particular kind of roughness, like some fine-grained stone. Some draughtsmen in charcoal, headed by 120 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. Lalanne and Lhermitte, have a liking for papier vergi — paper with a strongly visible wiremark. In the process of manufacture the paper- pulp dries thinner where it meets the wire, which consequently leaves a small hollow like a furrow in earth. The charcoal passes over this furrow without getting into it, so that the furrow remains white, unless the charcoal is rubbed into it purposely. The consequence is that you have many straight white lines going across your drawing, and others going at right angles to them at measured intervals. Can this be any advantage? Allong^ says no ; he thinks that there is nothing in nature answering to these straight lines, which he looks upon as an intrusion and an inter- ference, and he will not use paper in which they occur. On the other hand, Lalanne has a strong preference for this papier vergi. For a long time I could not discover the reason for this preference, but was fully persuaded that there must be a reason, as there always is for technical preferences in the fine arts. At last \ found it out. All artists know that one of the worst faults in shading is opacity, they know that shade ought not to be like black marble which the eye cannot penetrate, but rather like dark waters in which the eye seems to dive, as it were, to some indeterminate depth, and in which it discovers mysterious gleams of confused light, whereby the darkness is tempered and modified. Well, the wire-mark interrupts the shade — it does so no doubt in a mechanical manner, and that is the fault of it, a fault that I cannot help considering serious, notwithstanding the practice of very eminent men — still the interruption is there, and the eye is not ungrateful for it.* Again, as the charcoal catches the ridges of the paper it seems as if the artist had drawn his subject in a great number of horizontal lines which seem less heavy than continuous shade. The reader may see the effect of this in Lhermitte's drawing of a market-place which accompanies this chapter. The charcoal was applied to the surface, simply, and wherever the pressure was not great these horizontal lines or markings are produced, the furrows being left white, but where the pressure is increased there is a tendency to fill up the furrows, as the black gets down into them ; and wherever the pressure is extreme, as in the bits of deepest black, the furrows are quite filled up, which by contrast is very effective. If the reader will take the trouble to examine the penumbra in the shop he will perceive that the nature of the paper gives it a variety and transparence which would not have been attained so easily by any other means. The paper is very dexterously made use of, * The lines of the wire-marfc, though mechanical, are seldom hard, but have a sort of indeterminate natural edge which is not disagreeable to the eye. CHARCOAL. 12 r also, to suggest the texture of the stone, but the wire-marks are not allowed to interfere with the faces. See how entirely they are absent from the face of the young woman who is offering the apple. If the reader will now turn to the drawing of the ' Rivulet,' by Allonge,, he will at once see the immense difference which may be produced by so simple a matter as the choice of paper. Allonge's drawing was done upon papier Vdlin, that is, paper with an even grain and no wire-mark. After consulting Lhermitte's drawing, where the wire-marks are so con- spicuous, the reader may very easily imagine for himself what would have been the effect of them on the trees, herbage, and water in the ' Rivulet.' They would have come across all those tree-trunks, except in the darkest parts, like horizontal stripes or bands, they would have shown through the herbage and in the water. The lines of the slighter trunks would have been broken by them into a series of dots. I quite think that for the class of subjects which M. Allongd deals with his prejudice against wire-marks is a great safeguard. An artist may do as he likes with charcoal or with anything else. He may, of course, take a piece of hard charcoal and draw in pure line with it, if he prefers line, or he may draw in line first, then fix it, and add auxiliary shade with a stump, answering the same purpose as a sepia wash on a line in indelible ink ; or, again, he may begin by shading his subject and then mark organic lines upon it wherever he feels them to be necessary or useful to clear up his drawing and give it a decision and accent. All these methods are legitimate enough, but the true spirit or genius of charcoal-drawing is in the interpretation of nature by pure shade with no assistance from line, and the use of charcoal in this sense is the best discipline that it affords to painters of all kinds as well as to etchers and engravers. The Graphic Arts contain three distinct languages. There is the language of the line, represented by various kinds of linear drawing, and by none better than silver-point or very hard lead-pencil; there is the language of relative lightness and darkness in spaces represented by all the means which are capable of shading spaces with a delicately right degree of darkness; lastly, there is the language of colour represented by all the means which can be relied upon for colouring spaces with precisely the right tints. It has been found by experience that charcoal is one of the surest and most convenient means for shading spaces correctly. I do not intend to imply that the shades it gives will be more accurate than those in a water-colour or oil monochrome, but they may be equally truthful, equally R 122 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. delicate, and they are superior in convenience and facility of application, and also of alteration. I have said that the shades of charcoal may be as delicate and as truthful as those of water-colour or oil monochromes. This requires just one little restriction or reserve. They are quite as delicate, and they are not less truthful in all parts of the scale except the very lowest, but charcoal cannot get quite so low down in the bass notes as some other kinds of drawing. Its most intense blacks are not so dark as those which may be easily obtained in black chalk, or in sepia. In my opinion some restriction in the scale of light and dark is not in itself an evil. I have already argued in this sense with reference to silver- point, which gives darks very much paler than the darks of charcoal. Men sometimes talk as if some kinds of drawing had the whole scale of natural light and dark, and were perfect, whilst other kinds of drawing had less than that scale, and were imperfect. This would be a very inaccurate way of stating the case. The true statement is that we have no means at command, in any graphic art, which can be considered in any way equivalent to the prodigious scale of natural light and dark ; and it can be positively, scientifi- cally proved that even oil painting has a scale very far inferior to the natural one, so that the difference between one graphic art and another is not that one is adequate and the other inadequate, but that all are inadequate, and there are only different degrees of imperfection and insufficiency. This quite takes away the sting of the reproach against the paler arts. It is one thing to fail where another succeeds, and a very different thing to fall short a little more in a contest against superhuman powers where all results attained are nothing but degrees of failure. You might as well attempt to outrun the planetary velocities by artificial means as to contend with the dazzling splendour of nature or to rival in any visible work of art the darkness of her deepest gloom. Charcoal, by its want of intense blackness, does not go to the lowest notes of chalk, and, therefore, to give it as large a scale as possible, it is desirable that it should be on paper either perfectly white or very nearly so. Pure white papers are cold, but this is remedied to some extent by the fixer, which stains the paper slightly with a warmer tone. Pulverisers have been invented which throw the fixer at the drawing in a jet of very fine spray, as perfumes are diffused in the air ; but fixing in this way is seldom satisfactory until the operation has been performed repeatedly on the same drawing, and the pulveriser itself is a very delicate instrument, which requires to be kept in a state of perfect cleanliness, so that its little tubes and orifices may not be clogged with dissolved gum-lac. It is much CHARCOAL. 123 pleasanter to be entirely independent of these inventions, and to fix the drawing in the old-fashioned way from behind, but when this is done the paper must be stretched on a frame in such a manner as to leave the back of the whole drawing perfectly accessible to the brush. As to the composition of the fixer, it is simply a very weak solution of gum-lac in spirits of wine, the colour of pale sherry, and perfectly fluid, so as to enter the pores of the paper very easily. The artists' colourmen supply charcoal of very various qualities, some kinds grey and soft, others darker and harder. It would not be of much use to describe these in detail here, for the qualities may vary at different times, so that the same name may not always indicate the same thing. A few experiments with the prepared charcoals which are to be procured in the colour-shops will settle their respective merits, I have little faith in a specially prepared charcoal which does not require fixing. It is quite true that this charcoal may be used for drawing, but it has not the qualities of the natural material. I believe it is steeped in oil, but, whatever may be the preparation, it is simply a black drawing material, whereas charcoal which has not been treated so as to change its nature has most valuable qualities of its own which no artist who understands and loves it could endure to see diminished. One of the greatest merits of charcoal is that it is so easily removed that it can be played with as the artist composes. He can introduce new forms, alter all his arrangements of light and shade, make experiments with his masses, and, in short, deal with his materials as freely as an author deals with his manuscript before it is printed. So long as the fatal operation of fixing has not been performed the drawing is in a delightfully unsettled state ; it is mere powder, scarcely adherent, and ready to take its departure at the slightest notice. It seems scarcely credible that a work of art that has the appearance of a figure or a landscape should really consist of nothing but a number of loose molecules which taken altogether are only a pinch of black dust. The truth of this was borne in upon me rather painfully upon one occasion. I had finished a large charcoal drawing on paper well stretched upon a frame, and It stood on my easel, where it gave me perhaps a little more satisfaction, or at any rate rather less torment and vexation, than works of art usually inflict upon the authors of their existence, when the catch of the easel came down rather sharply and suddenly upon the stretching frame, giving a peculiar shock to the whole drawing, and most of the charcoal fell down in a rain of dust, leaving only the pale grey ghost of a landscape behind. Every draughtsman in charcoal has a peculiar dread and horror of the 124 THE. GRAPHIC ARTS. zeal and activity of servants with that fearful instrument which they possess, a bundle of feathers tied to the end of a stick. One minute of light and elegant 'dusting,' supposed to be a respectful attention to your work of art, will remove it into that limbo of things unfindable where are ' the snows of yester-year.' This facility of effacement has of itself a peculiar intellectual in- fluence. The draughtsman in silver- point learns habits of decision, but the draughtsman in charcoal is led into what may be called tentative habits. He works out his ideas gradually, plays with them, alters them, feels his way towards a more perfect work than that which first pre- sented itself to his imagination. It is maintained by some able artists that there is a great mental advantage in this mode of procedure. They say that the first idea of the work is never so beautiful as that which may be reached afterwards by a process of correction and de- velopment, that improvements frequently suggest themselves whilst the work is in progress, and that when its material conditions offer no obstacle to the immediate carrying-out of these suggestions the ad- vantage is indisputable. I need hardly say that there are divided opinions upon this subject. Some artists maintain that it is a severe and salutary mental discipline to draw at once without facilities for alteration, and that arts which offer such facilities are so far contrary to the best discipline of the mind. I should say that the advantage, or the disadvantage depends very much upon the nature of the individual mind itself, that an energetic and decided character would find such an art as pen and ink a stimulus to its own decision, whilst a dreamy and poetic nature might find in charcoal the most favourable conditions for those imaginative seekings and findings which are the favourite occu- pation of such natures, and their noblest distinction. Every graphic art has its own peculiar quality, sometimes brought out with difficulty by the performer, but very visible when he has brought it out — I mean that when the performer is a master the very dullest of us can see what the qualities of his art really are, and that they belong to the art in itself, his skill being merely the means of educing them. There are, no doubt, many mental gifts, of which imagi- nation is the brightest, which belong in a special sense to the man himself and not to the art, for if a critic says that a charcoal drawing is imaginative he is not thinking of the particles of carbon dust on the paper but of the artist's brain with its inward eye, its mysterious image- making faculty, which expressed itself in the drawing. But, on the other hand, when the critic speaks of the purely technical qualities of shade CHARCOAL/ 125 and touch he speaks of that which is dependent on material things, on charcoal and paper, or whatever other materials may be used; and here I say that the qualities, or the potentialities if you prefer it, are inherent in the materials and are only brought out by the artist as a violinist brings out the tones of a violin. A bad performer with a good in- strument is blamed for not having done justice to the instrument. We know that there was more in it than he brought out. The qualities of charcoal are exquisite. Its pale tones may be of the most extreme refinement, delicate pure grays, half transparent, showing the light of the paper through and closely approaching the quality of natural cloud, as may be proved by the ease with which clouds are imitated, or at least suggested, in charcoal drawings. The tones become more opaque as they darken, but they have a velvety richness extremely valuable in many textures, such as dark mosses in landscape, and dark dresses in genre. The line of charcoal, when wisely, used, is a luxury to the eye ; it crumbles away from its stronger accents with so becoming a transience, as if it did not desire to insist rudely, but soon became less positive after every effort of assertion. Any artist who can model well in drawing can delicately and fully express every variety of roundness and projection in charcoal, on which account it is much used for studies from the naked figure, and the same reason makes it very favourable to solid, well-developed forms in landscape drawing. A great variety of textures may be got in charcoal which offers tech- nical resources of various kinds according to the method of its appli- cation. On the same paper it may be made to adhere in such different ways that the paper itself seems roughly grained in one place and smooth in another, though nothing be done to alter its own surface. Charcoal, in fine powder, may be applied with brushes like paint; it can be played with and altered in its character by means of different stumps made of elder pith, of paper, leather, &c. The bare fingers are ex- cellent instruments for certain purposes, as they give the charcoal a peculiar texture of their own. Sometimes it is left just as it was rubbed upon the paper without any stumping or blending whatever, and in this state it gives a crispness, freshness, liveliness to the drawing which no stumped work can rival in those qualities. Lights are easily taken out with the crumb of new bread pinched and kneaded between the fingers into the form of a small pointed stump ; but it is worth noting that where the bread has passed the paper does not take charcoal afterwards so well as it did before. Bread crumb in its natural state may be used for broader spaces. 126 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. The great merit of charcoal for sketching from nature is its wonderful rapidity. It has the advantage over oil and water-colour of being a dry process, not necessitating delays for drying, which, even in the case of water-colour, are a great hindrance in the presence of nature. Besides this, charcoal has the advantage over all linear processes, such as pen- and-ink for example, of getting a shade at once, even on a broad space. In the hands of an artist who has its resources perfectly at command, the rapidity of charcoal is amazing. Many drawings by Lalanne, executed in a single sitting of two or three hours, seem to contain as much truth, and as sufficient a degree of finish, as if he had laboured upon them for days. The truth is that charcoal is perfectly accommodating as to time. There is nothing in the process to hurry you, as you are hurried with a water-colour wash that is likely to begin drying before you can get it right, and there is nothing to delay you as you may be delayed by the slow drying of oil. You are not compelled, as in fresco, to work on some particular portion of your design ; you can take it up anywhere and make any part of it ready for going on with in a few minutes. You can efface anything that is unsatisfactory with a facility unknown in any other kind of drawing that is usually practised.* Your work may be a succession of alterations and experiments which will be known only to yourself. It may be the expression of a sudden inspiration, or the slowly-developed, thoughtful labour of many days. You may give it the most truthful textures if you choose, or you may express form without texture, if that severe kind of art pleases you better. Certainly not one of the graphic arts mentioned in this volume is more convenient or accommodating than this. There is one condition, however, attached to this convenience, which is, that the drawing should never be of very small dimensions. The illustrations in this chapter, restricted as they are by the size of the page, are too small to be convenient for a draughtsman in charcoal ; and we have been obliged to allow some reduction on this account, though we have serious objections to reduction in a book on the technical qualities of drawing. The smallest size in which a charcoal draughtsman finds comfortable elbow-room will measure about a foot in one of its dimensions ; but as there are many other kinds of drawing which are perfectly adapted to small works, it is quite as well that this should be suited for large ones. For painters, in particular, it is better practice to draw on a large scale than on a small one, as what is usually considered a large drawing is but * Pencil sketches on white opaque ground-glass are convenient for determining compo- sitioiis, as the lines can be completely removed anywhere with a wet rag, but this kind of drawing is not so much resorted to as it might be. CHARCOAL. 127 of moderate dimensions for a picture ; and It is a technical advantage to be accustomed, in studies, to the dimensions of the work on which repu- tation depends. This is only one reason the more why charcoal is essentially a painter's kind of drawing. Of all dry processes it is the one which approaches most nearly to the style and spirit of painting, especially of painting in full chiaroscuro. Though used extensively by figure-painters, and, as we have* seen, admirably adapted to the modelling of flesh, and the texture of hair and costume, charcoal is still more closely allied to the technical qualities of good modern landscape-painting, in which chiaroscuro is an important element of expression and emotion. The landscape-painter should make his charcoal drawings as nearly as possible on the scale of his intended pictures, for which, at a very moderate expenditure of time and labour, they may be made most useful chiaroscuro cartoons. I can hardly imagine anything more valuable to a landscape-painter than a rich collection of compositions and impressions from nature done in charcoal on a fine scale, with all the light-and-shade arrangements of complete pictures, and yet produced so rapidly that the first intention is expressed, in every case, with all the energy and fresh- ness that our thoughts have when they first spring from the brain. Charcoal drawing is so recent an art that there are not many examples to refer to in public collections. The best examples are to be found in the various current Black and White exhibitions, and in the reproduced works of several well-known modern artists. Charcoal draw- ings are reproduced by several different photographic processes, of which I shall have more to say in a special chapter on photographic reproduc- tion. Berville, of Paris, has published a set of seventy-five plates from charcoal drawings by Lalanne, divided into three different sizes, many of which are most artistic in feeling, whilst all are good examples of the artist's great manual skill. An eminent artist, speaking of these things, said : ' I might say I liked Lalanne's charcoals, but that would not be enough; I do more than like them, I love -them.' Four of the finest are 'La Naumachie (pare de Monceau)', 'Clair de Lune dans les Pyr6n6es,' ' Ruines et Ch^ne,' and ' Le Pont' M. Allongd, Lalanne's distinguished rival, who is more of a pure landscape-painter and less a frequenter of the haunts of men, has found his material amongst the streams and hills of the Morvan and other picturesque districts. Many of his drawings have been reproduced by Goupil, and the collection is still increasing. Both the quality of the work, and the class of subject which Allonge generally likes best, may be understood from the example in this volume, except that his separate studies and reproductions are 138 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. on a very much larger scale. The only serious reproach which has ever been directed against him is that his manner is too methodically perfect, and reduces nature to a set system of interpretation, excluding the unforeseen ; but this reproach is equally deserved by almost all artists who have spent much of their time in teaching. Mr. J. F. Hardy has published a considerable number of charcoals through the autotype process, of which I may mention three views of Arundel Castle as being particularly characteristic of his style, — a style quite opposed to the tran- quillity of Allonge's manner, and seeking rather to interpret the flickering lights and scattered darks of nature than its quiet spaces. Mr. Hardy's manner is intended especially to express or suggest the multitude and infinity of the elements which compose extensive landscapes. He defines nothing, and can hardly be said to draw anything ; yet, on the other hand, you feel that he never omits to notice anything, and though the touches are not imitative they remind you that the things are there, in the natural scene, and the drawing is not easily exhausted. The style of Decamps, on the contrary, was one of simplification ; he did not give the mystery of nature, but relieved himself of the encumbrance of details by omitting them, which figure-painters are generally tempted to do for reasons which I shall explain elsewhere. I notice the presence of pen lines in some of Mr. Hardy's charcoals, and this leads me to another part of my subject — the possibility of com- bining charcoal with other materials. It has been already mentioned that the designers of stained-glass have used charcoal to fill up the spaces between the lines of their draw- ings, which were done in ink. It occurred to me, independently of this, that if an ink drawing were made so as to represent the lines, and the lines only, in one of Turner's etchings, charcoal would then very efficiently do duty for the mezzotint. I tried this in practice, and found it both a rapid and convenient way of sketching from nature ; there was no loss of time in shading with the pen, and when the charcoal was taken up it was a convenience to find all the forms ready and have nothing to do but give them their due degrees of light and dark. The only objection was that the ink line looked very hard to be associated with such a lovely texture as that of charcoal ; a brush line in thick Indian ink, often dragged along the asperities of -the paper, was more in harmony with the quality of the shade. The harmony is still more perfect when the lines are all drawn in black chalk, but then you have to make the drawing on a larger scale if you require very minute detail, because the chalk is necessarily rather a blunt instrument. CHARCOAL. 129 The comparative paleness of charcoal shades has often tempted artists to use Indian ink in combination with them. This is best done by finishing the charcoal drawing, and fixing it, after which Indian ink may be used upon it with perfect freedom. If the object is merely to reinforce the charcoal without betraying the presence oi the auxiliary, the wash must be used only in well-shaded parts, and the edges of it prevented from drying sharp and hard. If these conditions are observed, the wash may be used liberally enough and quite escape detection except by an experienced eye. The only effect of it is to tint the paper with a more or less deep shade of carbon grey between the molecules of charcoal dust. It equalises the tone, which in some parts may pro- duce a favourable result by removing crudity, whilst in others the result may be the unfavourable one of extinguishing a desirable bright- ness. This depends entirely upon the circumstances of the case, and it is for the artist's own judgment to decide whether it will be an advantage to extinguish the microscopic spaces of white paper or not Charcoal and Indian ink may be used in . combination, on equal terms, without any attempt to conceal the ink, which is now no longer an auxiliary but an ally. In drawings of this class the general relations of tone and the more important details are got first in charcoal, which is fixed, and then the work is taken up with the brush and carried out in full detail, quite frankly, without hiding the sharp edges of the ink. A composite drawing of this kind is perfectly legitimate. The charcoal foundation saves much labour, because it enables the artist to get a great deal of modelling and texture into his work, much more easily and quickly than he could do if he depended for if en- tirely on the brush. On the other hand, the brush permits a degree of finish in small matters which is not so easy with the broader method of charcoal. Chinese white is extremely convenient for high lights and bright touches of all kinds, when the work is only intended for reproduction and not valued in itself. In all reproductions opaque white lights are rendered harmoniously and pleasantly enough, and they are most con- venient to the draughtsman. In works intended to be preserved for themselves, the use of opaque white is quite another matter ; here it is extremely dangerous, from the unpleasant greys which it so easily calls into existence. Suppose you have a charcoal drawing, well fixed, and slightly yellowed by the fixing. On this your charcoal gives rather warm grey shades. If upon any of these you have the bad luck to 130 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. wash a little semi-transparent white, you will have a cold, discordant grey, very offensive in the drawing itself, though the offence (which is entirely one of tint) would be removed in a reproduction. The very utmost care should be taken in monochrome drawings of all kinds to see that they are really monochromes, and that no false note gets in. The false note may sometimes be avoided by delicately tinting the white till it exactly matches the paper, but even then it should never be allowed to go upon black or grey shades, which would lose their quality if clouded by a scumble. Charcoal drawings are sometimes executed upon paper prepared much in the same manner as the papers prepared by the old masters for silver-point, and then the high lights can be scraped ; but a scraped light is apt to look as if it were not related to. the charcoal greys, which have such a different quality. After all, by far the most harmonious high lights in a charcoal drawing are those which are taken out with bread. They are not so minute and brilliant as opaque white lights, nor are they so sharp, but they are quite brilliant enough for a sober and sound judgment, and the very absence of extreme sharpness makes them harmonise with the morbidezza of charcoal. A charcoal drawing may be treated as if it were done on a most harmoniously tinted paper, in the following manner. A sheet of white paper may be covered with one even flat tint of charcoal dust, and the drawing may be executed upon this, before it is fixed, as if it were a drawing on grey paper, and then all the lights can be taken out with bread. The method is expeditious ; but it is not really so good as a drawing on white paper, because it leaves many flat spaces, unless the grey is entirely worked over. Crayon Contd, and also lithographic chalk, are often used for the extreme darks in charcoal, because their blacks are more intense. I do not see any real necessity for these auxiliaries, except when the work is dofte for photographic reproduction. Charcoal may be used as a basis for" water-colour. A drawing may be carried rather far in charcoal and then fixed, after which the artist may work upon it freely in water-colour, for which it is a safe mono- chrome foundation. David Cox liked to work upon charcoal. ' Try by lamplight,' he says to his son, in a letter written in 1842, 'try by lamp- light a subject in charcoal, and don't be afraid of darks, and work the subject throughout with charcoal in the darks, middle tint and half, and with some very spirited touches in parts to give a marking. When you have done all this, have your colours quite soft, and colour upon CHARCOAL. 131 the charcoal. Get all the depth of the charcoal, and be not afraid of the colour.'* As. charcoal can now be fixed with a jet of lac solution in spray, it can be used on canvas and afterwards tinted in oil colour. Such tinted drawings may either be left with a mere suggestion of colour or carried farther towards the full colour of oil pictures. An experiment in mural decoration by charcoal drawing on plaster, made roughly but on rather a large scale, convinced me that valuable results might be attained in that direction without any great cost of labour ; but as charcoal by itself is cold, a large mural drawing in this material might be first fixed with spray and then tinted in spirit fresco, a process explained further in this volume. For picturesque landscape subjects such tinted drawings would be safer than frescoes in full colour; I mean that the artist would be less likely to fall into crudity, the great danger of mural painting in colour. Comparison of Charcoal Drawing with Nature. — In this comparison it must be understood that pure charcoal done for tone and not for line is referred to, that being the most genuine form of the art. Charcoal approaches very closely to the qualities of many natural objects and effects which are of great importance in the fine arts. It imitates with great- success the textures and modelling of the human body, and also of the materials used in costume. In landscape it is excellent for cloudy skies, so that by skilful hands their quality of soft- ness in contour and their delicacy in light and shade can be imitated with wonderful truth. In a good charcoal sky the lights are never hard nor the shades heavy ; we see in and about the clouds which melt into each other or stand in bolder relief, exactly as they do in nature. There is a lightness, an immateriality, in the paler shades of charcoal which may be imitated, no doubt, in some other materials, but at a far greater cost of labour, and it is this lightness which makes charcoal so useful for cloyd studies. In its iftiitation of clear sky charcoal easily gives the feeling of permeability and remoteness. A man must be very unskilful with it who made the sky like an opaque dome against which * It does not, however, seem to be clear that Cox fixed his charcoal before he painted upon it, for if he had done so he would scarcely have needed to clean the drawing after- wards with bread J and he talks of the colour not adhering, likely enough to happen if the charcoal were still in powder. 'When you look at it by daylight,' he says, 'and clean it with bread, you will find a number of light parts, which have been left when the colour would not exactly adhere over the charcoal.' On the other hand, unfixed charcoal must surely have dirtied the colour, except when overpowered in the darks. 132 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. a bird might knock its head and kill itself; but, on the other hand, it may be objected that charcoal does not so readily as water-colour give the notion of clear atmosphere — it is always somewhat smoky at the best. Yes, we have to admit this, the one technical defect of the art A cloudy or smoky sky is better within the means of charcoal than a clear one. All textures of earth and vegetation can be imitated with striking truth in charcoal. Rocks, earth, grass, the foliage and the trunks of trees, all these things are well within its means. It imitates the qualities of water surfaces admirably, blending so easily the reflections in calm water, and affording so many facilities for rendering the changing forms of waves, not in mere flat silhouettes, but in full mass and volume. But the grand quality of charcoal with reference to nature is the extreme ease with which it renders effects of light and dark. Simply to hold a piece of charcoal in the hand and to be in the presence of nature is in itself almost an education in chiaroscuro, so strongly is the artist tempted to the study of shade. Nature is generally somewhat hard upon her votaries, and exacts from them much labour and long patience before she gives them any substantial satisfaction, but she is very unequal in the bestowal of that reward, and is certainly kinder to the workers in charcoal than to many others. Their art is, of all the graphic arts, the one that soonest repays labour ; of all the graphic arts it is the one which soonest permits the aspirant to express his knowledge of natural truth without offending a fastidious taste by technical shortcomings or inconsistencies. WATER MONOCHROME. 133 CHAPTER XVI. Water Monochrome. INSTEAD of treating Indian ink, sepia, &c., in separate chapters, I class them together in one, as water monochromes. They are, in fact, exactly the same art, the mere difference of tint in the monochrome being of no consequence whatever when both the manipulation and the mental labour are the same. Indian ink and charcoal are of the same colour, and are chemically identical, since the black in each is carbon* (the difference being in the manner of its application) ; but the use of them requires two entirely different states of mind, for the mind cannot be in the same state when it plays deliberately with a dry material and works hurriedly with a wet one. But Indian ink and sepia are used by a mind in the same state for both, and therefore the practice of them is the same art. So with all other water monochromes, except that if a colour were used which could not get down to low degrees of dark the chiaroscuro of the drawing would of necessity be limited. A drawing in yellow ochre could never realise anything approaching to full chiaroscuro, and consequently, if the mind of the artist were by nature disposed to express itself in full chiar- oscuro, he would have to work in a state of self-denial with yellow ochre, in unpleasant contrast with the ample satisfaction he would have with sepia. This would be all the difference ; in other respects the mental state would be the same in both cases, and, as a matter of fact, it seldom happens that artists use pale colours for monochromes, because they can make the dark ones themselves pale by the addition of water. When a dark pigment is used for water monochrome the resources of the art are exactly the same as those of full water-colour painting, except that there is no colour in the sense of tint and hue. The relative darks of colours may be rendered quite as well as in water-colour itself. You may show the difference in weight of colour between a white horse and a black one as well as a painter could, but you would find it impossible; * With charcoal the molecules of carbon are put upon the paper in a dry state, and are al; first very slightly adherent, but they are bound together afterwards with gum-lac applied va, solution as a fixer. With Indian ink the molecules of carbon are joined from the first with their fixer, which is a solution of glue or size. The difference seems a small one, but in the fine arts very small differences in the employment of materials lead to very great mtellectual divergencies. 134 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. in monochrome to make people understand that one horse in a pair was a bay and the other a chestnut. As water monochrome and full water-colour are the same arts, except that one is chromatic and the other not — as the same paper, brushes, medium, and handling are used for both, it is the common practice to begin to learn water-colour by passing through a preliminary stage of water monochrome. There is a difference here between water-colour and oil. It is not at all a common practice to approach oil colour through oil monochrome, and the reason probably is that, unless great precautions are taken, oil monochrome is very offensive to the eye, whereas monochrome is perfectly agreeable when it has water for a medium. I will explain the reasons for this in another chapter. For the present it is enough to say that any colour which is used transparently with water (opaque white being excluded) will run up the scale from bass to treble without any loss of its own natufe. However pale, however dark, sepia is sepia still ; from its strongest black to its lightest grey Indian ink is still itself; so that monochromes done with these pigments are sure to be chromatically harmonious, as every monochrome ought to be. Although sepia is brown and Indian ink is black, the brown pigment is the deeper of the two, for Indian ink does not dry really black, but only a deep shade of grey which looks black until something darker is put by the side of it. Indian ink is, however, quite dark enough for all practical purposes of chiaroscuro. It is much darker than the blacks of charcoal,' and charcoal offers ample resources, if only a little care is taken to make its darks look darker by opposition. The qualities of Indian ink* have never been described with so much affection and so much talent as by Topffer, the admirable Swiss humourist. Topffer began life with the intention of being a , painter ; he was the son of a painter, loved nature with all his heart, and had the feeling and insight which belong to the artistic temperament. Unhappily, just as he was beginning to work, an unfortunate infirmity of sight compelled him to renounce art as a profession. He had to earn his bread as a schoolmaster, but, like all artists who have been thrown by necessity into other callings, he still clung to Art, if only by the hem of her garment. Of all material objects, the thing that he loved best in the world was a stick of Indian ink. Though a man of the simplest tastes, he envied the, Emperor of Russia, not for his pomp or his power, not for his rank and position * Why this substance should be called Indian I do not know, as the best of it comes from China. We also call Chinese paper India paper. In French, more correctly, they are called encre de Chine and papier de Chine. WATER MONOCHROME. 135 amongst men, but because from time to time the Czar receives from his brother on the throne of China the most perfect ink that is made in the whole world, — 'I'encre de Chine la plus pure, la plus belle, enveloppde dans des 6tuis de laque, doubles de satin,' ....jTopffer kindly cautions us, if we do not happen to be intimate with the Emperor of Russia, so as to beg a cake of Indian ink from him, at least to take care that we follow good advice in purchasing one, lest we discover, later, that we have set our affections on an unworthy object. If the reader expects good advice from me he will be disappointed. The quality of Indian ink may be guessed at by "breaking it, but dealers object to this test. If the fracture is bright there is a probability that the ink is good ; if the fracture is dull the ink is probably bad. A great deal of the Indian ink sold in Europe, without being very bad, is mediocre, and as different from the best as tolerable poetry is from the true inspir- ation of the Muse. The only real test of Indian ink is actual use, and it is by mere chance that one hits upon that which is truly and unquestionably excellent. I have possessed two good sticks. One of them was discovered in its hiding-place by a too appreciative friend, who borrowed it, used it for some time, neglected to put it by, and lost it ; the other was probably stolen from my bag when travelling, or unfortunately mislaid. I mourn for both of them to this day, and have never been able to replace them. I have several more recent purchases, very pretty to look at, but inferior in quality. The good ink did not clog the pen, was not overcharged With glue, and gave a black line, with washes of various pure greys ; the inferior ink rubs more softly and thickly, it does not give a pure black, and its greys are brownish.* Still, I have no reason to believe that this inferior ink would be condemned as bad in China, it is only mediocre; neither am I quite certain that the ideally perfect ink sent to the Czar has exactly the qualities of that which I regret. ; It is easy to make a poor imitation of Indian ink in Europe ; and it is probable that many such imitations are passed off in trade with imitations of Chinese moulds and cases, but that which comes from China itself is of different qualities. Those by which good ink may be known are defined as follows by M^rimde : — 'When broken its fracture is black and shiny.' 'The substance is fine in texture, and perfectly homogeneous.' *• Field believes, or says it is believed, that sepia is mixed with Indian ink. If this is so the brown tint is accounted for, and it may possibly be considered a beauty by some makers, and purposely sought by them. This is a matter of taste, but I prefer the cool pure gi-eys of what seems to me the best Indian ink, to the muddy tones of that which lies between black and brown. 136 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. 'When you rub it with water you do not feel the slightest grit, and if you mix it with a great deal of water there will be no sediment' ' In drying, its surface takes upon itself a skin which has a metallic appearance.' ' It flows easily from the pen, even at a low temperature, and when it has dried on the paper a brush charged with water passes over it without disturbing it. This property is very remarkable, for the same ink, dried upon marble or ivory, gives way as soon as it is wetted, which proves that an indelible combination is formed by the ink and the paper impregnated with alum.' M6rim^e tells us that if lampblack of fine quality is mixed with the purest gelatine the result will be ink of a good tint, but it will not shine in the fracture, nor will it be indelible on paper like good Chinese ink; yet this property may be given to it by mixing astringent vegetable juices with the gelatine.* Some importance is attached to the sharpness of the impression which the cake of ink receives from the mould. A sharp and clear impression is the result of fineness of material as well as a clearly cut mould ; but Mdrimde says that the presence of camphor, in the proportion of two per cent, has been detected in the best Chinese ink, so he mixed some camphor in that which he prepared himself, and attributed the perfection of the moulding to the presence of camphor. The best ink I ever used had extremely sharp and delicate mouldings, but I have observed them also on second-rate ink, so that they do not afford a sure criterion. On the other hand, some Indian ink of third-rate quality in my possession has dull markings. Gilding on the cake, and the luxury of ornamental cases to keep it in, as if it were very precious, please children, and awaken distrust in mature Europeans, but they signify nothing either way. Good ink may be gilded, as Topffer's was, and nothing is easier than to gild bad ink also. Again, I am not sure that the marks on the cakes, such as the dragon on the side, or the litde lion on the top, are at all to be relied upon as the marks of trustworthy makers. Topffer says that good Chinese ink gives forth when rubbed a delicate odour of musk, but that the bad imitation inks are much more strongly scented. It would hardly be safe to go by this, as an imitator might scent his ink delicately, just as he might gild it in moderation. If the reader concludes from all this that we know very little about the subject he will be right. We hit upon ink of excellent quality by chance, and then we ought to keep it with a due sense of its preciousness. Fortunately it lasts a very long time. A wonderful number of drawings might be made with one piece. Topffer says that his cake, which had • But so as not to form a precipitate. M&im€e explains how this may be done, but 1 have not space for chemical details in this volume, where so many things have to be treated. WATER MONOCHROME. 137 belonged to his father, had served him also, in regular use, for twenty years, and was only shortened by a quarter of an inch. In comparing the qualities of Indian ink and sepia, TopfiFer's strong affection for his twenty years' friend and companion led him to say rather harsh things of the product of the cuttle-fish. He says that it is of a comparatively coarse grain, that it sustains a shade badly, and that its shades are not so minutely divisible as those of Indian ink. This depends on the preparation of sepia, and is not applicable to the best recent preparations, especially the best liquid sepia. The qualities of Indian ink are, however, so good in themselves as to need no heighten- ing by comparison. The molecules of carbon which it contains are so divisible in water that they tint a large quantity of water equally. The most delicate distinctions of shade may be given with Indian ink, and, what is more, a delicate or a deep shade may be maintained with the most perfect purity and equality over a large surface of paper. The quality of becoming indelible in combination with paper is a very great convenience to the workman, as his first lines, or washes, need not be disturbed afterwards. Notwithstanding these merits Indian ink is less used by artists than sepia, probably because the greys of ink are felt to be rather cold, and also because its blacks are not the most intense. Another reason of a practical nature, trifling in appearance yet not without its weight, is that sepia is to be had in tubes, and in a convenient liquid form, which avoids a considerable loss of time in rubbing. Lamp-black or ivory- black, in tube, may be preferred to Indian ink for the same reason. But whatever may be the changes of habit amongst artists, Indian ink, of good quality, must always be esteemed as one of the most successful inventions amongst the materials of art. Human ingenuity has seldom attained its object so completely as the Chinese inventors attained theirs when they tried to present the black smoke of lamps in such a form that it might be cleanly and portable, and convenient both for writing, for linear drawing, and for the most delicate shading. It is one of the very few things in which absolute perfection has been attained. It lasts for ever. Many feeble drawings have been executed in Indian ink which may have created some degree of prejudice against it, just as some people have a contempt for lead-pencil because it is the instrument of beginners. We ought to keep well on our guard against prejudices of this kind and judge things strictly on their own merits. Feeble persons often write verse, but a powerful mind may also express itself in verse; feeble people 138 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. often speak English, yet it is the language of great orators. There is no reason why artists of the most consummate science should not use Indian ink. Bistre was much employed by the old masters. Field tells us that 'it is a brown pigment extracted by watery solution from the soot of wood-fires, whence it retains a strong pyroligneous scent.' Scotch bistre is got by collecting the deposits of the peat-smoke behind the fires in cottages, which is afterwards purified by solution and evaporation. I, myself, have prepared a fine bistre by boiling the shavings of bog oak. The peat bogs of Scotland are, I suppose, coloured with bistre, and the brown rivers and lakes hold bistre in solution, so that nature tints with it on an extensive scale. In art it is pleasant to use, and quite per- manent, but not so powerful as sepia. It gives a cool brown, passing almost exactly through the tints that oak assumes with age.* There can be no possible objection to its use in water colour monochrome, but it has been much disused in modern times on account of the modern pre- ference for sepia. Sepia, as the reader probably knows already — for this is one of the curiosities of artistic materials,— is produced by the cuttle-fish, which has an ink-bag. The ink dries and solidifies. In commerce the raw material is in the solid state, and afterwards prepared for use in various ways. There are different qualities and tints of sepia, especially two, of which one is rather cool in hue and the other warmer and more golden. I have found it an agreeable practice to do all the substantial work of the monochrome in cake sepia, and afterwards glaze with liquid sepia of a more golden colour.t Although sepia is a brown and not a black it is remarkable for the intense depth of its darks, which get down to a note lower than many shades of colourless grey which are commonly called black. This, of course, is a great convenience as it gives the artist a fine range or gamut. By using tube sepia he can put very intense darks in their full strength wherever he requires them. I have not found, in practice, that Topffer's objection to sepia as being irregular in tint and not easily divisible into * In staining new oak to imitate old, the cool brown of bistre comes very much nearer the truth than the hot brown of burnt umber, besides which bistre is a real stain, and umber an earth. Some workmen go so far as to put red in their stains for oak, which should be carefully avoided. t The unlearned reader may need to be told that in the technical language of painting, the word 'glaze' has nothing whatever to do with lustre of surface; it merely means the addition of transparent colour to a picture or drawing which alters the hue of the more opaque pigment under it. The allusion in the word is to the transparence of glass and not to its lustre. WATER MONOCHROME. 139 a minute scale of shades, was tenable. With sepia, as it is prepared in the present day, I do not perceive that there is any greater technical difficulty in washes and shades than there is with Indian ink. The list of pigments available for water-monochromes is not confined to Indian ink, bistre, and sepia, but these are the best. Other blacks may be used, such as ivory black, blue black, &c., and other browns, such as the umbers; but the custom of artists has preferred the three materials we have described, and from the agreeable quality of their tints and the perfection of their working they are likely to keep their place, so that it does not seem necessary to speak in detail about any others. A water monochrome presents all the technical difficulties of a full water-colour, except the purely chromatic difficulties and a certain im- pediment arising from the difference of fineness in the substance of the pigments. As for the use of the brush it , is exactly the same in both cases, and so are the scientific matters relating to light and shade and texture. He who can make thoroughly good water monochromes is, therefore, very far on his way to being a good painter in water-colours ; he has nothing left to learn but colour, the rest of his knowledge, and his manual skill also, being continually of use in the complete art. It is admitted, as a rule, amongst ^tists that the first processes a student works in should be dry processes, such as pencil, chalk, or charcoal, and that only after knowledge has been gained in these ought he to attempt any wet process, the reason being because wet processes have their own difficulties, which may. well be spared to a beginner. But, on the other hand, when sound knowledge has once been acquired in a dry process the experience of many artists .seems to prove that this same fcaowledge can very soon be expressed in any monochrome wet process. Harding says, ' The mechanical difficulties of the brush are speedily overcome — so very speedily, that I have invariably found persons who were capable of using the chalk or pencil well, use the brush with equal facility and power after a very, few trials.' The first difficulty in water monochrome is the necessity for speed. It is not always necessary to work rapidly, but it is so under certain circumstances, in certain parts of the work. Small details may be painted slowly if you like, broad washes, over considerable spaces must be applied with rapidity and decision, .because if they were done slowly they would dry at the limits of the work done, of the band of pigment applied, and the artist could not extend it without leaving a watermark showing where he had first paused. A large gradated J40 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. space of sky must always be done quickly; any hesitation would throw its gradations wrong. This necessity for speed in water-colour is often considered to be a fatal objection by oil-painters, who, being accustomed to a delightful liberty of deliberation in their own art, think that compulsory rapidity is not only a hardship to the executant, but contrary to the very nature of art itself. A little reflection, however, will soon convince us that com- pulsory speed is perfectly compatible with artistic sentiment. Oratory and music are both arts of sentiment, and yet speed is a necessity in them. An orator is never allowed to compose his sentences with the deliberation which is possible to a writer, and if he wants to produce certain effects of vehemence and energy his words must follow fast, like balls from a Gatling gun. In music, sentiment itself depends upon the exact observation of rapidity — every passage must be played with the rapidity fixed for it by the composer, the very meaning of a presto would be missed if you played it as an andante. I am, therefore, far from believing that the compulsory speed of water-colour is an artistic disadvantage ; I even believe that the power of working rapidly, which every water-colour painter must acquire for technical reasons, is of the greatest value to him for artistic reasons also, and that a certain dash and vehemence of utterance may often do more to express the power of natural forces and the passion of the human mind than all the patience ever lavished on canvas by the laborious artists of Holland. In passing from line to brush work the student has to abandon the mental habits which are connected with the line and to acquire the habit of seeing nature in spaces. If water monochrome is intended as a means of transition to water-colour the mental revolution cannot be too complete. The artist ought to see nature simply as a large space divided into many smaller spaces of different degrees of darkness, and if he gives to these smaller spaces their due proportionate size, and their proper relative tone and texture, his work will be fully accomplished, even though he may never have thought about linear beauty from the first touch to the last. In short, a water monochrome should have the qualities of a good charcoal drawing in full tone, except, of course, that the peculiar nature of bistre or sepia is substituted for the powdery and crumbling nature of charcoal. The old masters used water monochrome most frequently in the shape of auxiliary washes in combination with pen or pencil lines, but there do exist complete brush drawings by the old masters in brown or black, which, though not equal to good modern work in manipulation,. WATER MONOCHROME. 141 are interesting in the history of art. There is a fine sketch in the Liber Veritatis of Claude * which represents a river winding through a picturesque country, with hills in the distance, and one or two towns or villages at the foot of the hills. The country through which the river flows is dark, and richly, though not densely, wooded; the river is bright with the reflection of the sky, but the general character of the scene is solemn rather than brilliant. What I mention it specially here for is that Claude, who was so much accustomed to use pen and wash together, has in this instance relied exclusively on the brush, which he uses boldly, blotting his sylvan masses, his dark fields, and his distant hills, just as broadly as would a modern water-colour painter. The reader may find occasionally some drawing by an old master in which the brush only has been used, without any dependence upon line. Such drawings are boldly and broadly begun, but seldom carried far, and may have been intended for subsequent finish with the pen, in clear and decided line. The true water monochrome, in full tone without line, is found in its perfection in modern work, and is really the daughter of modern water-colour, though by a sort of atavism in art genealogy it seems more like its grandmother, the old monochrome, from which modern water-colour sprang. The difference is that the eighteenth- century monochrome, sustained by lines, was tinted in the wash and had little texture, whilst the true modern monochrome has a richness and boldness which it derives from the example of contemporary painting in full colour. The example given in this volume, a sepia drawing by Harding, shows the influence of modern colour-art in the relief given to objects, in the texture and' in the local colour. A little line is admitted, more than in the Claude just mentioned, and certainly more than is quite compatible with the strict principle of pure mass, but the line is not obtrusively dark, and is . entirely done with the brush, so that it does not show very much. I need hardly comment upon the visible skill' with which the artist, at a minimum cost of labour, has given to his objects a vivid appearance of truth. The boat is detached by light along the gunwale from the shaded part of the hill, and by dark against the sky, the boy's dark trousers are made use of as a contrast to the light stone, and the dark stone as a repoussoir to the distant castle.' I have seldom met with more completely successful ejiampliss of modern water monochrome, than two drawings in Indian ink by Mr.' T. L. Rowbotham, reproduced in autotype. One entitled ' At Rochester,' and dated 1874, represents a picturesque rustic scene with ruinous * In the British Museum; No. 217 in Braun's autotypes. 142 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. cottages .and a boat at the water's edge, all the picturesque material most skilfully treated in pure brush-work with lights reserved, the quiet broad grey tones of water, sky, and distance being in contrast with the brilliant broken lights and darks of the foreground detail. When a certain advanced degree of manual skill is attained, artists amuse them- selves, and please us, by expressing much with little labour. I have seldom seen a better instance of this than a jar near the fishing-basket in this drawing. The whole jar with its neck and body, its points of high light and its shade, is expressed with a brush twice charged, and probably in one minute. The other drawing, ' Near Guildford, Surrey,' also dated 1874, is a winter scene with a cottage and a windmill and snow on the ground. The beauty of this is not in brilliant sharp con- trasts of black and white detail, but in the truth of unpretending greys only relieved Jsy a little vigour of black on foreground trees. It is the kind of subject which exactly suits the delicacy of Indian ink. It is unnecessary to go farther into the technical examination of water monochrome, because the qualities of it in wash and texture are the same as those of full water-colour, and will be treated in the chapter on that process. Comparison of Water Monochrome with Nature. — Truth of tone may be got in water monochrome as nearly as the difference in the scale of light and dark between nature and artistic materials will permit. The transparence of sepia, bistre, and Indian ink, is a most valuable quality for the interpretation of many things in nature, and gives thein a decided superiority (so far) over charcoal; but transparence is not always desirable, and a painter in oil, when reduced to water mono- chrome, may often desire a little body and opacity. This is given to some extent by the white paper in the lights, and the monochrome becomes itself quite sufficiently opaque in the extreme darks ; it is the middle tints, and especially the paler middle tints, that are sometimes more transparent than they are in nature, from which a certain flimsiness of appearance may result. There is a tendency in all water-painting, whether in monochrome or full colour, to a certain hardness, meagreness, and sharpness, which we do not commonly find in nature, and which is very happily avoided by charcoal. Good painters in water-colour, being aware of this, take measures to prevent it. There is also a natural tendency to flatness in water-painting (a flat wash being more easily managed than a piece oi modelling) which has to be overcome. WATER MONOCHROME. 14J On the whole a good water monochrome may be truly said to come very near to nature within certain limits. It avoids the falsity of lines, it can translate local colour into light and dark with almost perfect accuracy, and it can imitate texture very well, though not so well as oil painting. It is not so good as chalk or charcoal for the study of the naked figure, because deliberate modelling is not so easy by its means ; but it is good for landscape sketching in which a number of distinct and delicate shades are of more importance than laboured modelling. 144 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. CHAPTER XVII. Oil Monochrome. A CERTAIN number of oil monochromes have come down to us from the old masters, but the greater part of them were probably preparations for colour. Many artists have painted in colour upon mono- chromes : a kind of oil painting which we shall have to examine more fully when we arrive at colour work in oil. Oil monochromes may be divided into two distinct classes, the trans- parent and the opaque. The greater number of existing monochromes are transparent, and generally in brown. The admirable browns which we have just spoken of as valuable for water monochrome can be mixed with oil, but they are, unluckily, bad driers, and so have to be rejected. It is a pity we cannot use bistre and sepia in oil, but so it is, and on leaving water-colour we bid adieu to them. It is a pity, too, that asphaltum is not fit for use in transparent oil monochromes, for it is a delightful golden brown, and very pleasant, to work in. Many artists have been unable to resist the temptation which it offers, but it allures them to destruction — not precisely to their own death, but to the ruin of their work.* Vandyke brown is better avoided, because it dries very slowly, and has a dull chilled surface when dry. Cappagh brown is fine in hue and dries well, but if used thickly anywhere it shrivels. The best browns for practical use in oil monochrome are the two umbers. Raw umber is a delicate citrine-brown earth of the most agreeable tone but of moderate power, and it may be used alone where great force is not particularly required. Burnt umber is very powerful, but hot, and it has entirely lost the delicate beauty of the natural earth. It may be used with great advantage in monochromes which are intended to be vigorous rather than pleasing. * By cracking and running. Asphaltum cracks in wide fissures when it is used beneath other pigments and tears them asunder. When it is employed as a surface glaze only it never really dnes, but for years afterwards slowly runs down the picture, forming drops, like the condensation of damp in the air on a cold wall. OIL MONOCHROME. 145 The difficulty in painting transparent oil monochromes is that if oil is really used the work does not hold well in pale tones, hut runs or flows upon the canvas, so that it is impossible to preserve that appearance of a decided and firm touch which is one of the best qualities of water monor chrome ; indeed, it is not too much to say that any skilled master of water monochrome would consider oil a very inferior medium, and with good reason ; I mean if it were really oil, and if the monochrome were transparent. The word 'oil' has, however, in the technical language of painting; a very comprehensive signification. It is supposed to include all varnishes and mediums with which colours ground in oil can be easily mixed. The umbers, ground in oil, may be used in monochrome with varnish, and this is the right way to employ them when transparent work is intended. Even with varnish, or with the thickest jellies known as ' megilps,' oil monochromes are still inferior to water drawings in freshness and decision. They are also inferior in speed, for if you wait until a coat of transparent painting is dry enough to work upon again there is some delay, and if you do not wait the second painting cannot retain sharp edges, but will melt into the first. The only compensation for these inferiorities is the superior strength of oil, such a colour as burnt umber, in varnish, being powerful to a degree which cannot be rivalled by sepia or Indian ink. I have had occasion several times already to warn the reader against attaching too much importance to mere strength of dark material in art, since so much beauty and truth can be got out of weaker materials. The comparative weakness of charcoal and Indian ink is not, let me repeat, a serious defect from the artistic point of view, neither is the strength of burnt umber in varnish a force to be too ardently desired, or purchased at a very high price. Although there are examples of transparent oil or varnish monochrome which show great delicacy, and convey a great deal of truth, this kind of monochrome, at the best, is inferior to sepia skilfully used with water. The dead surface of water painting on paper is in itself a substantial advantage, and besides this the surface of the paper itself, in its com- bination with the pigment, may be made an important aid to texture. I once painted a series of transparent oil monochromes on paper not other- wise prepared than by a good sizing, the first sketch being made with pen and ink. The result was not unsatisfactory, except that the sketch, which was in lines, would have better harmonised with the shading if it had been done with the brush, and with water-colour burnt umber from a tube, rather heavily loaded in some parts and dragged so as to give a u 1^6 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. broken line in others. The pen line is too hard and mechanical to be painted upon unless it is wholly concealed. In some slight and light transparent monochromes a careful pencil line may be seen beneath the raw umber glaze ; there is much less harm in this than in hard pen-work. Many transparent oil monochromes are touched upon more or less extensively with opaque colour in the lights, the shades being left trans- parent. There is nothing to be said against this, provided that the tone of the opaque colour is made to harmonise well with the transparent pigment, so that the work may still be truly a monochrome. Much caution is required for this, and care must be taken not to mix white with the raw umber or whatever else is used for the transparent mono- chrome, for so soon as this is done there is a certainty of producing a new set of tones, which are sure to look discordant. We cannot insist too strongly on the doctrine that a monochrome, though it professes to have nothing to do with colour, is in fact just as much subject to the laws of chromatic harmony as a coloured picture ; that there are solecisms in tints as there are in words ; and that offences of this kind in mono- chromes are sure to be felt by persons of naturally refined taste, even though they may not be able to explain exactly in what the offence consists. I have no doubt that it is a reason of this kind which has made oil monochromes so much less popular than water drawings in sepia, and so much less frequently produced. If the reader reflects a little he can hardly fail to be struck with the curious fact that, although painters in oil are very numerous, oil monochromes (or what are called grisailles) are not by any means largely produced ; whilst in the past, when artists made drawings washed in water-brown by thousands, they seldom painted monochromes, except with the intention of hiding them beneath scum- blings and glazings of full and various colour. This is the more curious and remarkable that we so frequently hear people complaining, and so often complain ourselves, with perfect justice, of the offensive crudity of much that is called ' colour,' and which is no more colour, in any true sense, than the noise of the streets is music. It would seem, then, that as our oil-painters seldom colour well enough to satisfy either their critics or themselves, those amongst them who have no natural gift for colour would do well to abandon the pursuit of it, and paint courageously in grisaille, just as writers who find they are not poets take contentedly to plain prose. Unfortunately for this proposal, the painters know that even bad colour is more saleable than oil monochrome. Why is this ? The public does not object to black and white in other arts, such as OIL MONOCHROME. 147 engraving, etching, charcoal, and sepia drawing. Why does it object to oil monochromes ? Transparent monochromes are not objectionable for their tint, but they are thin, they have not the solidity of oil-painting; the lights and half-lights, instead of being substantial, are thinner than the shades, and the darkest shades are the thickest in pigment. This kind of painting can never be quite satisfactory for these reasons, but it has the addi- tional defect of poor texture. No painter can ever get great variety of texture in transparent colour alone. Opaque monochromes, glazed with transparent brown, and scumbled with semi-transparent brown just as if they were complete pictures, have not these deficiencies. They have all the technical merits of oil-painting except colour. Strong, substantial relief, vigorous and truthful texture, effective manual expression with the brush, belong to opaque mono- chrome, as they do to complete oil-painting ; whilst in range of light and dark, and in all technical facilities of alteration and correction, the two arts are precisely alike. The one objection — there is but one — to opaque oil monochrome is that its scale of colour, for it has colour, is not a true chromatic sequence. To understand this thoroughly, the reader should make experiments with some colour and white, both ground in oil. I will take vermilion, as an extreme instance. Let us try to make a scale, of which vermilion shall be the lowest bass and white the highest treble. To get the inter- mediate notes you mix white with your vermilion, but pray observe the disastrous consequences! The mixture does not give you lighter ver- milion, as it ought to do for a true chromatic scale ; it gives you something lighter, but the thing is no longer vermilion — the note may be true in light and shade, but it is false in colour. And now observe that the fcdsity, once admitted, does not even remain in the same proportion, but constantly alters its proportions. Vermilion with a little white and ver- milion with much white are not merely different in light and dark, they are different chromatically — they seem as if they belonged to different scales of colour. Every landscape-painter knows that in painting fiery sunsets the great difficulty is to avoid falsifying the colour of the flame, whilst trying to imitate its light. I know that vermilion is an extreme instance, because it is a colour which alters remarkably in chromatic quality when it is mixed with white. Yellows do not alter so much. A bright yellow is still a bright yellow, only paler, when white is added to it, but the danger is in the transform- ations of those colours which might possibly be used for monochrome. 1^8 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. Vandyke brown and burnt umber produce a series of false and unpleasant notes with white. The white seems to reveal in them, as marriage does in bad-tempered persons, possibilities of disagreeableness which were unsuspected when they were alone. Vandyke brown and white look like a mixture of chalk, mud, and the lees of wine ; they have no apparent relation to the 'fine, deep, semi-transparent brown colour,' which bears the name of the illustrious artist who loved it. Burnt umber, so rich in its pure state, is so dirty with white that the mixture spoils the colour of every picture where it is admitted. The greys produced by ivory black and white are less disagreeable, but they are not neutral, nor are they a consistent continuation of the pigment itself in lighter shades. They are not lighter black, but something else. The greys of black lead, ground in oil, and mixed with white, are much nearer in quality to the black lead itself, and much pleasanter, being less ghastly, but plumbago is not dark enough for the lowest notes. The most available pigment for opaque oil monochromes is raw umber. It is not very disagreeable in mixture with white, and the discordance between the tints in mixture is not very striking. Nevertheless an opaque monochrome, painted simply in raw umber and white, can never charm the eye, however good in drawing, and light and shade. At the best it looks crude and cold. To remedy this it may be treated by glazing and scumbling like a picture in complete colour, but with a very limited palette composed of raw umber, raw sienna, burnt umber, and white. I have found in practice (having painted a good many oil monochromes) that a treatment of this kind, when the painting approached its finish, was an effectual remedy against the rawness and opacity of the simple umber and white. Raw sienna was necessary chiefly in scumbles in the lights where it corrected the coldness of raw umber, and burnt umber was used transparently in the darks. Notwithstanding the chromatic differences between these pigments they harmonised fairly well, so' as to be apparently a true monochrome. I am convinced that if opaque oil mono- chrome is to be produced in a satisfactory manner at all it must be by some compromise of this kind. It is to be regretted that complete oil monochrome, like that just described, with solid under-colour and rich glazing, scumbling, and re- touching, should not be more practised by young oil-painters, as it would afford for them the same convenient technical introduction to the difficulties of painting that sepia does for painters in water-colour. Complete oil monochrome would be easier for amateurs than sepia and Indian ink, as it affords plenty of time for deliberation. It has also OIL MONOCHROME. 149 the advantage that it can be practised on any scale ; whereas charcoal is Dot convenient on a very small scale, nor water-colour on a very large one. For reasons which will be given at length elsewhere, oil monochrome is not so good as sepia with water for purposes of photographic repro- duction. This is to be regretted ; but I have no doubt of the fact, having ascertained it by many very careful experiments on rather a large scale. All that can be said in favour of oil monochrome is that it is much better for photographic purposes than coloured painting in the same medium, and that a copy in oil monochrome from an oil picture may come nearer to its texture than a copy in any other material. There is a kind of oil monochrome quite distinct from picture- painting, and that is decorative camaieu.* In this, the colours employed are generally brighter and prettier in themselves than the dull earths of picturesque monochrome. They may also be selected with an eye to successful mixture with white. In a decorative panel, a figure with the landscape behind it may be painted all in rose colour or all in blue, like painting on a porcelain vase or a tile. In these camaieus the choice of hue is perfectly free^ except that it must bear reference to the decorative surroundings, so that you may paint a blue lady or a pink tree if you like, provided that the blue lady has a blue background and the pink tree a pink figure in its own panel. Notwithstanding this liberty, however, there are certain considerations which make it wiser to choose one colour than another. Camaieus seem to be an ingenious means for getting over a certain difficulty. A definite colour may be wanted for decorative reasons, and yet at the same time you may wish for a form of some interest and significance. The difficulty of reconciling the two is got over by a simple postulate : ' Let it be granted that I may paint a world all in rose colour;' to which our readily accommodating imagination at once replies, ' By all means, paint away ; let it be rose colour, or mauve, or magenta, or whatever you please.' So the artist sets to work with liberty to draw as delicately and beautifully as he can, but he is to use only one colour, which may be as unnatural as he likes. It is generally understood that the drawing in camaieus should be very careful and elegant, and idealised so as to be in harmony with the conventional colour. ♦According to Littrd, camaieu is derived from the base-Latin word camahotus ; cama- hutus, from the base-Latin camaeus, onyx 150 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. Comparison of Oil Monochrome with Nature. — Transparent oil mono- chrome is not strong in the representation of direct light on objects, nor does it .often give their modelling powerfully, nor their texture. It gives delicate shadows truly. Opaque oil monochrome, in combination with glazing and scumbling, like complete oil-painting in everything but colour, is capable of the closest imitation of nature except in hue. It permits the most complete model- ling, the most perfect rendering of light and shade, the most accurate translation of local colour into light and dark, that are possible in the graphic arts. It allows also the most powerful imitation, or suggestion, of natural textures, and every variety of surface, whilst it gives the full scale of transition by every intermediate degree from the densest opacity to the most lucid transparence. With these powers, the whole of nature, whether picturesque or severe, is open to the workman in this art, if only he can renounce colour, and yet it is less practised in working from nature than most of the arts which are mentioned in this volume. The reason for this has already been stated. It is the chromatic solecisms which occur in opaque oil monochrome from the mixture of the dark pigments with white, and which can only be overcome by carefully avoiding the pig- ments that ally themselves badly with white, and by having recourse to certain artifices by which crudity and discrepancy may be avoided or concealed. PASTEL. 151 CHAPTER XVIII. Pastel. SOME qualities in the Graphic Arts are pleasing or displeasing in themselves, independently of their fidelity to nature. Hardness is unpopular in itself, softness is popular ; the first answers to dogmatism and decision in conversation, which nobody quite likes, though it may be the affirmation of pure truth ; the second answers to flattering acquiescence, or to affirmation of the very gentlest and mildest kind, which is incom- parably more pleasing to all of us. On this principle pastel ought to be the most popular of all the forms of drawing, for it is like velvet to the eye. It is, indeed, always sure to please when executed with ability, but it is not very much followed, in cbmparison with water-colour, because it cannot be preserved without great care, and has a reputation for being more fugitive than it really is. Safe only under glass, and at some distance from the glass, safe even there only on condition that the room is free from damp, a pastel drawing is not a very convenient thing to keep. It is nothing but dry, coloured powder on paper with a soft surface. Of all the graphic arts it has the most delicate constitution — 'Ainsi de la beauts Le pastel a I'^clat et la fragility.' The charm and effeminate softness which distinguish so many pastels have also produced an impression, a very erroneous yet a very natural impression, that the art is incapable of manly and vigorous delineation. Pastel is more durable than people think, and it is, or may be, a more firm and masculine art than a careless world imagines. There is no reason why a pastel, preserved under glass in a rich man's warmed and ventilated room, should not last for many generations. The poet just quoted has said prettily that pastel has the Scht and the fragility of beauty; he was thinking, no doubt,, that as beauty may be at any time disfigured by accident or disease, so the pastel powder may be displaced by the touch of a feather, and the graceful form, the brilliant colour, effaced and obliterated for ever. Still it is true, however sad, that this delicate 152 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. powder will far outlast the bloom of that natural beauty which it represents. Where are the pretty marchionesses who sat to Latour ? Oii sont les neiges d'antan f The principle of pastel is that the colours, when on the paper, are in a state of dry powder, most of which is slightly adherent. In painting of different kinds the powder is held together by some medium. Pastel is therefore exactly the same thing as painting, minus the medium. In all kinds of painting, even in water-colour, the necessity for waiting until the paint has dried is a cause of delay. The dry processes of charGoal and pastel economise the time lost in these delays ; they are consequently more rapid than any of the wet processes. My attention was first drawi> to pastel in a practical way, when, on looking through the portfolio of ,a well-known landscape-painter, I found a collection of landscape effects, of the kind which in nature last five minutes, or less; and he told me that he had been able to get the relations of colour either directly from nature itself or from the most fresh and immediate recollection. Unimpeded, by the necessity for waiting till pigments dried, he could, by the help of pastel, finish a work in colour in one short sitting, Eugene Delacrojx used pastel frequently for rapid notes of colour, and he had a peculiar gift for setting down chromatic relations rapidly. It can hardly -be necessary to observe that no amount of facility offered by the materials will enable anybody but a colourist to get these relations even in phe slightest sketch. Still, when the colour faculty is there, it is an immense convenience to have a process which goes on without interruption. Pastel answers in colour to soft chalk or charcoal in monochrome, just as water-colour answers to sepia, and oil-colour to grisaille. The proper technical preparation for pastel is, consequently, a training in chalk or charcoal. The transition from that to colour involves only the chro- matic difficulty, there is no new manual difficulty to be overcome. The colours used are in the form of cylinders, about two inches long and three-eighths of an inch in diameter. They are divided into two classes— -soft and hard; and sometimes into three — soft, hard, and intermediary — kept in separate boxes. The preparation of pastels is extremely artificial, and differs with the colours employed. Pipeclay and chalk are mixed with the colouring substances, and the molecules are held together by a little mucilage, which is varied according to circumstances. In soft pastels they cohere just sufficiently to be laid on the paper as broad shades, in hard pastels they cohere so as to be applicable in lines. Many of the colours used PASTEL. 153 in water and oil have to be rejected from the list of pastels, but this is not of the slightest consequence practically, as complete colour can be got without them. Pastels are not usually prepared, like oil and water colour, in pure pigments, but in tints — so that a box is like a palette set carefully and elaborately with fifty or sixty hues ready to hand. The object of this is to save the artist a good deal of mixing, which is not so convenient in pastel as in painting. I may, however, be permitted to observe that ready-made tints, however numerous, scarcely ever supply the exact one that the artist happens to require; so that mixing is to some extent inevitable, and in pastel it seems awkward to manage, when one has been accustomed to the practical readiness of oil. The papers used are various, but it appears to be understood by artists that their surface should never be too hard and smooth, but should have a sufficiently free fibre to catch and hold the powder. When the paper does not supply this of itself, care is taken to prepare it by wetting and brushing, which in some degree detaches the fibre. The same thing is done to hard papers for plate-printing. Pastels may be done on paper of any tint that the artist prefers, but cool greys seem to be the most satisfactory. White papers are bright, but they do not sustain the tones, which are apt to look thin and un- sound unless very carefully laid. It must be remembered that pastel does not answer to transparent painting, like washed water-colour, but to opaque painting, like body-colour, so that there is no real necessity for brightness in the paper, as it can be given by the pastels themselves. To make the paper catch and retain pastel more easily, to give it more of what is called 'tooth,' it is often prepared with a surface of adherent pumice-powder, or fine sand, or sawdust, to which the pastel clings. Canvas is used sometimes, and upon this the artist first lays a coat of parchment-size, on which he blows fine marble and pumice-powder, which remains fixed after the size is dry, and is then rubbed over with pumice-stone to make it even. A certain roughness still remains to catch the pastel. When a variety of texture is not required, the pastel tints may be rubbed into the paper either with a stump or with the finger,* and if the paper has been well selected it will retain the pastel so well that the drawings may be kept in a portfolio without being fixed, and without * The palm of the hand is used for large spaces, when the drawing is on a con- siderable scale. X 154 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. any special protection.* It is easy, however, to give them some pro- tection by sunk mounts. Rubbed tints of this kind are often used as the general beginning or ground-work of a pastel, and on these the work is continued and finished in decided touches for accent and texture, which of course are left quite undisturbed, as they are the life and soul of the performance. When pastel has been first applied to the paper, and is not yet rubbed in, it may be removed with a badger-hair brush, used lightly as a duster, the drawing being inclined forward, so that the dust may not fall on the parts of the work which are to be preserved. Rules for order in working are not of much use in any art, as no artist ever pays attention to them for any length of time together, but it may often be a convenience to begin by rubbing in the middle tint, then add the darks, and finally put on the lights. If any student wishes to be methodical he can scarcely choose a more rational method than this, for it is founded upon the simplest and most orderly analysis, and is applicable to everything. In by far the greater number of subjects which are interpreted in full colour, middle tint largely predominates — high lights and low darks being as exceptional as bright intelligence and extreme dulness in mankind. Pastel is often used with something else for a basis. Latour and his contemporaries are said to have prepared their pastels with san- guine and black chalk, t — the sanguine for the warm shadows, and the chalk for those parts of the flesh in which a bluish tint is perceptible. 1 need hardly observe that both were used with much lightness and delicacy. My authority says that no blue will replace the cool tone given by a ground-work of black. When we come to painting we shall see that many artists of eminence have painted upon monochromes for the convenience of finding drawing and light and shade ready to hand. Precisely the same thing has been done in pastel. We shall find, as we proceed further in our comparison of the graphic arts, that the same principles and methods are constantly recurring in new applications. Colour upon monochrome is managed in pastel by first making a charcoal drawing and fixing it, the pastel being then worked upon that. The general temper of charcoal * I have pastel studies of skies which have been kept quite carelessly for twenty years, and do not seem the worse for friction ; at any rate they still answer their purpose, but they are mere frotUs for broad relations of tint. If done by a good colourist, such things would be very valuable to a landscape-painter. t In Goupil's treatise on Pastel, page 42. I owe some other bits of information to this little work. PASTEL. 15s and pastel is so very nearly the same that the union of them in one work is not unnatural. The greys of charcoal are of a quality so nearly neutral that they need not harm the colour by showing through. The charcoal should be done on white paper, as its own greys darken the paper sufficiently to sustain the pastel. It is rather to be regretted that there is not yet in our National Gallery a room given entirely to pastel. In a perfect gallery all the graphic arts which have been practised by eminent men ought to be represented, but oil-painting has overpowered the other arts, which do not receive a fair share of consideration. Pastel is quite an artist's art — I mean that it is an art which offers perfect facility for artistic expression — ^for the expression of an artist's knowledge and sentiment. The plain truth is that it is simply dry painting. We may be asked why such an art should be encouraged at all when oil-painting can express everything in a safer form. The answer is, that some artists may find pastel more suitable to their genius, and that all sound varieties of art ought to be encouraged, because variety is a refreshment to all of us. There is a small but admirable collection of pastels in the Louvre, enough to serve as examples. Two of the best are the portraits of Chardin and his wife, done by him at the age of seventy-six, and full of vivacity. One of them has been engraved in mezzotint for this book,* and as mezzotint may be made to imitate a good deal of the quality of pastel, the engraving is very like the original, but it lacks, of course, the life-giving carnations and the advantage of the natural scale. Poor Chardin, who had lived to be eighty, and laboured to the last,+ was so completely forgotten twenty years after his death that this pastel was sold in 18 10 for less than one pound sterling. In 1839 he had risen in the market, as this portrait and another of himself nearly reached six pounds, taken together.^ Chardin had startling vigour, even in pastel, which he took up late in life, but he had not the charm and finish of Latour, nor his marvellous technical accomplish- ment. In Latour you have the master of the special pastel craft, and a wonderful craft it was, in his hands, admirably adapted to his subjects, to whom it lent a lightness and elegance which were the idea- lisation of their -own. The courtly graces of the eighteenth century— so remote from us now that they seem thirty generations back instead of three — the splendours of an aristocracy nearly at the end of its power, * See the chapter on Mezzotint Engraving. t He died in December 1779, having exhibited in the Salon of the same year. % The exact prices were 2i,ix. and 1426:. 156 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. but still retaining a style quite pure from democratic manners, found in this art of Latour a record of itself so delicate that it seems as if the very air of the court were preserved in the tinted dust of his pastels. All things considered, I suppose that the portrait of Madame de Pompadour, by Latour, now in the Louvre, is the most complete manifestation of the art of pastel which exists ; but I am inclined to think that the best use of pastel is not in wonderful, highly- finished performances, but in excellent sketches and studies. Several other arts are in this position. The pen -drawings, and even the etchings, which seem to express best the genius of their arts, are not laborious, highly- finished performances, but the animated and often rapid records of in- telligent observation. There is a sketch in the Louvre by Prud'hon, a portrait of ' Mademoiselle Mayer,' on coarse paper, which shows plainly what great sketching power may work through pastel. The power of colouring rapidly like that, in a dry process, would certainly be of the greatest use to painters, and when the sketches had served the purpose of the artists they would be greatly valued by intelligent collectors. The speed of the process might place good work in colour within easy reach of collectors of moderate fortune.* Of all processes in colour, pastel seems to be the most accessible to amateurs. It allows of endless correction, it does not hurry the artist like water-colour, and it may be continued or interrupted at any time, which cannot be said of oil. Besides this, the colours of pastel are pleasanter in themselves than oil and water-colour, and do not require so much mastery to make them agreeable. When full colour is not attempted, a drawing may be pleasantly tinted in pastel or the colour of an intended painting may be indicated by touches of pastel on a car- toon. There is an instance of this in the Louvre— a cartoon portrait by Lionardo in black stone and sanguine with indications of colour in pastel, not powerful, but enough to go by. Comparison of Pastel with Nature. — The strongest advocates of pastel lay stress on the dulness of its surface, which is a great advan- tage in the representation of nature, as a pastel can be seen like a fresco from any point, and your mind is not called back to the material by a glistening of paint or varnish. This is quite true, but it is only true of pastels unprotected by glass, for glass is far worse than any varnish, as it reflects objects far better. The pictures behind plate-glass *The portrait of 'Mademoiselle Mayer' was bought by the Louvre for less than 6/., and another fine pastel study by Prud'hon for 2/. PASTEL. 157 in the National Gallery cannot be completely seen from any point of view whatever; what we see is a confusion between the painting and the reflected costumes of the visitors. A surprising degree of vivid imitation can be attained in pastel, which in skilful hands rivals painting in this power, but its best employ- ment is in securing accurate notes of colour relations in spaces. The natural morbidezza of pastel, and its fine aerial quality, make it admirably adapted for studies of skies. The ease with which its tints are melted into each other makes it extremely available for studies of water. Flesh may be rendered in pastel with the most life-like truth of colour, but there is a risk of chalkiness which can only be avoided by intentional vigour of tone. On the whole it may be truly said that pastel is better and safer for rather large spaces of colour than for minute detail, which is not in the natural genius of the art, though it may be attainable with labour. Pastel is a colourist's art, and its most precious work is the recording of lovely colour-combinations in a sort of vague visible music without too much insistence on what is positive, material, and tangible. 158 THE GRAPHIC ARTS. CHAPTER XIX. Tempera. A GREAT practical hindrance to the general knowledge of tempera is, that paintings so executed are often varnished, and then they look like paintings in oil, and commonly pass for such. They are recog- nised by experts on account of a certain sharpness, which an oil-painter might attain if he tried for it, but which, as a matter of fact, is rare in oil and invariably found in tempera. Instead of saying over again in other words what Sir Charles Eastlake said in explanation of the word ' tempera,' I prefer to make a quotation from his Materials for a History of Oil Painting. ' Before entering on this subject,* it may be necessary to explain the different meanings of the word tempera, applied to more or less liquid compositions. First, it is used in the general sense of mixture, in accord- ance with the import of the classic expression "temperare" (thus Pliny, "temperare unguentum"). In this widest application the Italian substan- tive " tempera" means any more or less fluid medium with which pigments may be mixed, including even oil.f Hence Vasari says, "1 'olio che e la tempera loro." Secondly, in a less general sense, the term represents a glutinous, as distinguished from an unctuous or oily, medium ; and thus comprehends ^g^, size, and gums ; or, in a more general expression, binding substances originally soluble in water. Lastly, in its most restricted and proper acceptation, it means a vehicle in which yolk of &^g is a chief ingredient : the varieties being, yolk of ^^g mixed in equal quantities with the colour ; yolk and white of &gg beaten together, and diluted with the milky juice expressed from the shoots of the fig-tree ; and the yolk alone so diluted. These last-named vehicles were the most commonly used by the painters of the South of Europe, before the invention and improvement of oil-painting. They are described by the chief Italian * English and German tempera. t Buttura, in his Italian dictionary, defines tempera as ogni liquore, o sia colla, o chiara d'uovo, con che i piitori liquefanno i colori ; he only mentions the white of egg, but tells us that any diluent comes within the meaning of the word. It is, however, restricted by usage to egg or size painting; and especially, as Sir Charles Eastlake says above, to painting in which the yolk of egg is employed. TEMPERA. 1 59 writers on art, and by those who have followed them. Sandrart intimates that tempera was still employed in his time, but observes that it was only fit for dry situations.' The word tempera is also sometimes used for size-painting, in which there is no egg, but simply some kind of thin glue. Coarse work of this kind is done in large quantities for theatrical purposes, and for the cheap decoration of houses and churches ; but it is not worth our while to go 1 into the examination of size-painting minutely here as the principles of it are exactly the same as those of egg tempera applied to common purposes. Northern artists had to do without the fig-tree juice, which they might replace with vinegar. Eastlake believed that the German and English artists added honey to their tempera vehicle to retard its drying, just as honey is mixed with our modern moist water-colours by the colourmakers. A manuscript of the fifteenth century in the library at Strasbourg, quoted by Eastlake, contains a clear description of the preparation of parchment size, mixed with vinegar, for size-painting ; and the writer adds, that when it is used it should be mixed with water, ' and likewise much honey with them. Warm the composition a little, and immix the honey thoroughly with the size.' The MS. then goes on to explain how paintings so executed may afterwards be varnished for their preservation. Water is not, strictly speaking, the medium of tempera painting, but it is the diluent of the medium, and consequently tempera may be not unfairly regarded as a sort of water-colour painting, for even in ordinary water-colour it often happens that water is not employed alone. In the first place, the powder colours are not formed into cakes or pigments with water only, for gums are added ; and, in the case of moist water-colours, honey is also added, as we have just seen. Besides this, some water-colour painters use a wax medium, made so as to be soluble in water. Tempera is, in fact, body-colour with an egg medium and a watery diluent. It is not necessary, with regard to the purpose of this volume, to enter into any minute inquiries into the nature of the colours employed by the old tempera painters, as this book does not profess to be a history of art, but only offers such details as may be of practical use now and in the future. We may take it for granted, on account of the affinity of the processes, that all pigments which are good for use in water must be available for tempera, if only we bear in mind that tempera is an opaque process. The colours should be procured in powder and mixed with egg by the artist himself on a slab of ground glass with a muller. i6o THE GRAPHIC ARTS. Notwithstanding this general availableness of pigments, it must be remembered that there is colouring matter in yolk of egg which affects all colours as a yellow varnish in oil-painting affects them, consequently yellows will -be deepened, reds turned a little in the direction of orange, and blues greened. The influence of yolk of egg on warm colours is not very injurious, but it is serious on cold ones. Borghini, as quoted by Mrs. Merrifield, recommends the mixture of blue with a medium of gum or parchment size to avoid greening. Tempera is durable when it has been managed prudently and kept in favourable situations, but it is very much exposed to cracking and peeling when too much egg or size has been employed. William Dyce; in his evidence before the Select Committee of the Fine Arts ( 1 84.1), expressed the belief that the cause of peeling was some action of heat and moisture, or that the size might have been too strong. Since the general use of oil-painting, tempera has ceased to be used for pictures, but it may still be of occasional use for decorative purposes, though even for these it is generally superseded by other processes. It has therefore very little importance as a living art, and would scarcely deserve notice now if it were not for its historical rank. The reader may find many excellent examples of early tempera painting, varnished, in our own National Gallery. They are generally brilliant in colour and very clear and precise in form ; indeed, the quaint charm of these works is due in a great measure to ignorance of visual effect which led the artists to combine bright colouring with hard, though delicate, linear drawing in the same works, consequently they have a union of attractions which, if optical effect were studied, would be incompatible. Those artists gave, in fact, more delineation and purer colours together than could be combined in an advanced state of art. The absence of aerial perspective, which we excuse in i^m, but which we do not excuse in our own con- temporaries, enabled them to make their work more decorative, and so all the more in accordance with the natural sharpness of the process. There are two admirable portraits by Piero della Francesca in the National Gallery — one of Isotta da Rimini, the other of some unknown lady — in which the artist reached the perfection of the primitive method. They have a clearness of definition like that of severe old engraving, and we have had that of Isotta engraved for this volume in the old manner. The painter had attained the utmost manual skill in the use of the brush ; he evidently delighted, as Giotto did, in the deftness with which he used its point in drawing hair, for example, in its curves and thin individual hairs ; not a learned nor an artisti