Project Gutenberg's A Child's Guide to Pictures, by Charles H. Caffin This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license Title: A Child's Guide to Pictures Author: Charles H. Caffin Release Date: March 9, 2019 [EBook #59040] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CHILD'S GUIDE TO PICTURES *** Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) Contents. List of Illustrations (In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.) (etext transcriber's note) A CHILD’S GUIDE TO PICTURES [Image unavailable.] Copyright, 1906, by Detroit Publishing Company. View on the Seine. Homer D. Martin. (Also called “The Harp of the Winds.”) {1} {2} {3} A CHILD’S GUIDE TO PICTURES BY CHARLES H. CAFFIN AUTHOR OF “HOW TO STUDY PICTURES” New York THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 1908 Copyright, 1908, by THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY —— Published, July, 1908 THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. The Feeling for Beauty 11 II. Art and Her Twin Sister, Nature 21 III. Nature is Haphazard; Art is Arrangement 30 IV. Contrast 40 V. Geometric Composition 55 VI. Geometric Composition (Continued) 63 VII. The Action, Movement, and Composition of the Figure 75 VIII. The Classic Landscape 83 IX. Naturalistic Composition 95 X. Naturalistic Composition (Continued) 106 XI. The Naturalistic Landscape 117 XII. Form and Color 129 XIII. Color 144 XIV. Color—Values—Subtlety 160 XV. Color—Texture, Atmosphere, Tone 180 XVI. Color—Tone 204 XVII. Brush-work and Drawing 219 XVIII. Subject, Motive, and Point of View 230 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE View on the Seine Homer D. Martin Frontispiece La Disputá del Sacramento Raphael 56 Jurisprudence Raphael 66 The Manitou Lunette E. H. Blashfield 86 Dido Building Carthage J. M. W. Turner 92 {4} {5} {6} {7} S The Sower J. F. Millet 100 Young Woman Opening a Window J. Vermeer 108 Crossing the Brook J. M. W. Turner 118 Paysage J. B. C. Corot 128 Washington Crossing the Delaware E. Leutze 140 Prince Balthazar Carlos Velasquez 168 The Little White Girl J. M. Whistler 176 The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine Correggio 192 Light and Shade George Inness 202 Evening Anton Mauve 246 A CHILD’S GUIDE TO PICTURES CHAPTER I THE FEELING FOR BEAUTY OME of you, I expect, collect photographs of pictures in connection with your history studies. These portraits of the principal characters and pictures, illustrating great events, places, costumes, and modes of living of the period, add greatly to the interest of your reading. They bring the past time vividly before your eyes. But it is not this view of pictures that we are going to talk about in the present book. I shall have very little to say about the subjects of pictures—partly because you can find out for yourselves what subjects interest you; but mostly, because the subject of a picture has so very little to do with its beauty as a work of art. For it is this view of a picture, as being a work of art, that I shall try to keep before you. I remember seeing the photograph of a picture hanging in a place of honor on the wall of a girl’s room; and I asked her why she had chosen this particular one out of many that she had. You see that, in order to help anyone, you have to try to get into their minds, and find out how their minds are working; and as much of my work is with girls and boys, I try to get from them hints as to the best way of helping them. Well, this girl, let me tell you, bubbled over with life and fun, swam like a fish and climbed trees like a squirrel; but she had her thoughtful moods, when, as often as not, she would lay out her collection of photographs of pictures on the floor, and not only look at them, but think about them. And I have no doubt that she was in one of those moods, when she chose out this particular print and hung it on her wall, in order that she might see it often. So I asked her why she had chosen it, and she said: “Because I liked it.” I asked her why? “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Now that is just the sort of girl or boy for whom I am writing this book. Not that I think that girl would have liked her picture any better for knowing why she liked it. Then, “What is the good,” you ask, “of writing a book to help her to know?” A very shrewd question and quite to the point. Let me try to answer it. When the girl said she did not know why she liked the picture, I think she meant that she could not put into words what she felt. It was the feeling with which the picture filled her that made her like it. I could understand what she meant, because I remembered an experience of my own. The first time that I saw Raphael’s Disputá, which decorates a wall in one of the rooms of the Vatican in Rome, I had set out with my guidebook, intending to study all the paintings by Raphael that decorate these rooms. I entered the first room and, I suppose, looked round the walls and saw three other paintings; but all I recall during this visit was the Disputá. I sat down before it and remained seated! I do not know how long, but the morning slipped away. What I thought about as I looked at the picture I cannot tell you. My impression is that I did not think at all; I only felt. My spirit was lifted up and purified and strengthened with happiness. Returning to my hotel, I read about the picture in the guidebook. It appeared that one of the figures represented Dante. I had not noticed it, and as I read on I found out other things that I had missed; that, indeed, the whole subject, so far as it could be put into words, had escaped me. I had no knowledge of what the painting was about; only I had felt its beauty. Since then I have studied the picture and discovered some of the means that Raphael employed to arouse this depth of feeling, and the knowledge has helped me to find beauty in other things. So, to go back to my girl friend, I would not disturb the beauty of her feeling with teachy-teachy talk, any more than I would talk while beautiful music was being played. But, suppose in a simple way I could make her understand that I, too, felt the beauty of the picture; and, as I have learned a little how to express feeling in words, should try to tell her how I felt the beauty. Might it not add to her pleasure, if she discovered that I was putting into words some of the feeling that she herself had, and perhaps suggesting other beauties that she had not felt? {8} {9} {10} {11} {12} {13} {14} Well, that is what I hope to do for you in this book, to put some ideas into your head, that will lead you to look for and find more and more beauty in pictures and in nature and in life. Ideas, mark you, not words. We shall have to use words, but words are of no account, unless they make you feel the idea contained in them. I say feel; and you will notice I have used these words, feel and feeling, several times already. I have done so because I want to impress upon you that the enjoyment of beauty, whether in pictures or any other form, comes to us through feeling. It may lead to thinking, and perhaps should, but it does not begin with thinking or reasoning, as does, for example, algebra or geometry. Nor can we, as we say, “get it down fine,” in the way we do with the Latin declensions. When you have learned them thoroughly, you know them once and for all, and you know about them just what every other girl and boy who has learned them knows. With feeling it is otherwise. What you feel is different to what I feel; we can never feel alike. No two people can. So I am not going to tell you what you ought to feel about pictures; nor am I going to try and persuade you to like one and not like another. Therefore, this book would not be much help to you in passing an examination about pictures, if anything so foolish could be supposed. But I hope it may start your imagination off in a great many new directions, and help you to discover more and more of beauty not only in pictures, but in life. For we should study pictures not solely for their own sake, but also as a means of making our lives fuller and better. If you ask me what is the most beautiful thing in the world, I shall not say art, although I am writing about pictures—but life—its fullness of possibility and abundance of opportunity. Especially young life; the lives of you girls and boys, who, as yet, have so few mistakes to regret, so much to look forward to of promise and fulfillment. What you will make of those lives of yours may depend a little upon schools and teachers, parents and friends, money and health, and many other things, but most of all upon your own wills. I wonder if you have read the life of Robert Louis Stevenson? He had only such education as many other boys of his time had, little or no money, and very poor health. But what a deal he made of his own life and how he helped the lives of others! What a fellow he was for fun, and how he loved wisdom; a great worker and a greatly conscientious one; not satisfied unless his work was the very best that he could make it. And the reason was that he loved beauty as well as wisdom; and in his life and writings, because in his own inward thoughts wisdom and beauty went hand in hand. I know of no better example of the full life; of a life made the most of, in the best and truest sense, with gladness and strength for itself and for the lives of others. While his body sleeps on an island mountain, overlooking the vast beauty of sky and ocean, his spirit stays with us. The secret of the fullness of Stevenson’s life was that, so far as in him lay, he left no portion of the garden of his life uncultivated. There were no waste places, every part was fruitful. He did the best that he could for his poor, weak body; kept his intellect bright with learning, his fun alert with hope, his friendships warm with sympathy; and kept his life and work sweetened and purified and strengthened by the love of beauty. He was in a high sense in love with life—his own life, the lives of others, and life in art and nature, and the abundant harvest of his garden is the love that countless men and women and children bore him and still maintain. Such fullness of life is rare. Boys and girls, and for that matter men and women, cultivate some part of themselves, and let the rest go to waste. And the part which is most apt to be overlooked is the sense of beauty. We train our bodies and our minds, but neglect those five senses, which are just as much a part of us. It is true that men train their senses for the practical purposes of business: the watchmaker, for instance, his delicacy of touch; the tea producer, his senses of taste and smell; the mariner, his senses of sight and sound. But business, though necessary, is not everything. We do not confine the exercise of our bodies and minds to work and business, but use them also for enjoyment, and train them for this purpose. Do we not learn to swim, play ball and tennis, and practice other bodily exercises for the pure enjoyment of them? Or in our leisure moments busy our brains with study of bees, machinery, history, all kinds of difficult subjects not as work, but as a relief from work? We call them our “hobbies,” and indulge them for pleasure, and find that the pleasure improves our health and spirits, and in the end even makes us do our necessary work better, and so find more pleasure in that also. For it is in what we know best and can do best that we really take most pleasure. And though life cannot be all pleasure, yet pleasure, rightly understood, should be one of the chief aims of life. And one of the chief sources of pleasure is to be found in the beauty that reaches our minds through the senses, especially through the senses of sight and sound. Let me illustrate in a simple way how one child will gain pleasure from her senses while another doesn’t. Both have their five senses in working order—smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound—and have been in the woods gathering flowers. They reach home. One throws her handful down on a sofa, table, or chair, or the nearest bit of furniture, and goes off to do something, or it may be nothing, leaving the flowers to wither and become an untidiness. What made her gather them? Perhaps, because she is full of health and had to run about and do something; perhaps, because she has not quite gotten over the fondness that most of us had, as babies, for breaking and tearing things. It amused her to break the big stems and tear off the vines or pull up the little plants. Or possibly she was really attracted by the beauty of the flowers, but soon tired of them, and went off to other things. Not so, however, with her companion. She spreads a paper on the table, lays out her flowers, brings one or two vases, and settles down to the pleasure of arranging them. She picks up a flower, and while she waits to decide in which vase it shall be put, see how delicately she handles it! You can tell in a moment she has a feeling of love and tenderness toward the flower. She puts it in a vase, and then her eye travels over the other flowers to decide which shall bear it company. What color, what form of flower will match best the first one? And while she is making the choice almost unconsciously she sniffs the fragrance of that spray of honeysuckle. Well, she lingers so long over the pleasure of arranging her flowers that we have not time to stay and watch the whole proceeding; but presently, when we come back, we find the vases filled and set about the room where they will look their best; this one in the dark corner with the wall behind it; another on the window sill, so that the light may shine through the petals of the flowers. And we think to ourselves what taste the girl has! For (have you ever thought of it?) we use the word taste, which originally described only the sense of tasting things with the tongue, in order to sum up a finer use of the senses of sight and sound. And this finer use of the senses, such as Stevenson cultivated, so that his life and works are beautiful as well as wise and good, we too may cultivate, and it is the object of this book to help us do it. I call it a guide to pictures, but I want to make it much more than that—a guide for the wonderful organs, your senses, that they may grow more and more to feel the beauty that is all about us in nature and in life, as well as in pictures and other works of art. So beauty is really our subject, beauty in nature and in art. The two are separate, though united as twin sisters. {15} {16} {17} {18} {19} I As I write, many of you are enjoying your summer vacations, face to face with nature. The health of the mountains or the sea is in your blood; your bodies know the joy of active movement; your minds are filled with the interest of new scenes and adventures, of sports and fun with friends. But every once in a while I think it likely that your happiness is increased by something beautiful you have seen in nature. Perhaps even now, as you read these words, there comes to you the memory of some sunset, or moonlight on the water, of early morning mist creeping among the tree tops, or I know not what of nature’s beauty, suddenly revealed to you because you were in the mood to receive it. You were in the company of a friend, and you drew your arm closer through his or hers, and both were the happier for the beauty that was before you and had entered into your hearts. Or perhaps you were alone, and the eagerness came over you to make some record of your joy—in a letter to a friend or in some poem for no eyes but your own. You felt the need to give utterance to your joy in nature’s beauty. You had in you a little of the desire that stirs the artist. And this brings us to the other kind of beauty, which is not of nature, though it is of nature’s prompting—the beauty created by the artist. We are going to study the work of artists who create beauty in pictures. But do not make the mistake some people do, of thinking that it is only painters who are artists. An artist is one who fits some beautiful conception with some beautiful form of expression. His form of expression, or as we say, his art, may be sculpture, painting, or architecture; or some handicraft, as of metal or porcelain or embroidery; or it may be music, the composing of music or the rendering of it by instrument or voice; it may be acting or some forms of dancing; it may be poetry or even prose. The artist, in a word, is one who not only takes beauty into his own soul, but has the gift of art that enables him to communicate the beauty to others by giving it a form or body. If he be a musician, he gives it a form of sound; if a painter, a form visible to the eye. It is his power of creating a form for the beauty which he feels that makes him an artist. And in its various forms—poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the rest—art is man’s highest expression of his reverence for and joy in beauty. CHAPTER II ART AND HER TWIN SISTER, NATURE A Work of Art is Distinguished by Selection N the previous chapter we talked about beauty, and noted that there were two kinds—beauty in nature and beauty in art. Let us now look a little more closely into this distinction, so that we may grasp the idea of what a work of art is. Since what the painter puts onto his canvas is visible to the eye, it will generally represent or suggest some form in nature. So the painter is a student of nature. But not in the same way as the botanist who studies the forms of trees and plants which grow above the ground, or the geologist who explores the secrets of the earth below the ground. These we call scientists or scientific students, because the object of their study is exact knowledge of nature. They address themselves directly to our intellects and teach us to know the facts of nature accurately; but the painter appeals first to our sense of sight and helps us to feel more deeply the beauty of the visible world. Unless we thoroughly grasp this difference we shall never properly understand what painters try to do, nor be able properly to enjoy their pictures. So here, at the beginning of our talks together, let us look into this difference. We have said that the painter represents or suggests some form in nature. Sometimes he represents the actual appearance of nature, as when he paints a portrait or a landscape. At other times he suggests the possible appearance of things, which he has never seen but only imagines, as the old Italian painters did when they made pictures of St. George, killing the dragon, or of Christ in the manger, with a choir of angels hovering above. They had never seen a dragon, but from their study of the lizard, which in hot countries like Italy may constantly be seen basking on the hot rocks or darting away at your approach, they imagined a form and painted it so that it suggests an actual creature. So, for their angels, they studied the forms and movement of children, as they ran and played, with hair and skirts streaming in the wind; also the wings and the flight of birds, and the appearance of the sky. Nature was, as it still remains, the artist’s teacher. Just in what way he learns of her and uses her lessons, I am going to try and show you. But first let me remind you that nature and art, though so close together that I have called them twin sisters, are quite separate. I do so because many people confuse them together. Frequently you will hear a person say of some view of nature that it is “beautiful as a picture.” Well, very likely it is, but as we shall see, not in the same way. Or some one will exclaim, as he stands in front of a picture, “It looks like nature.” So it does; and yet it is not really like nature. Why both these remarks are in a small way true, but in the big sense not true, we shall discover, I hope, presently. Meanwhile, suppose we lay the book aside and look out of the window. Are you living in the country or city? In either case you are looking out at nature, as the painter understands the word. For, while we who are not painters, when we talk of nature, have in mind the earth and sky and water, and the living things that move therein, as beasts, birds, and fishes, and the forms that live but do not move, trees and flowers and seaweed, for example, and also the chief of living and moving creatures—man; the painter uses the word nature in a wider sense. With him it means everything outside himself, so that it includes things made by man: streets, buildings, chairs, and tables—the thousand and one objects that man’s brain and handiwork have fashioned out of the materials of nature. But you are waiting at the window, looking out, perhaps, upon a street—a row of buildings, many people on the sidewalks, carriages and carts, passing before your eyes; or else into the garden of your country home, with its trees and shrubs and flowers, and possibly a view of fields and hills and woods. In each case the woodwork of the window frames in the view. Move slowly backward and you will notice that the view grows smaller and smaller; advance again and the view spreads out farther and farther; step to the left and some of the view on that side disappears, but you will see more toward the other side. Imagine for a moment that the woodwork of the window is a picture frame and you are deciding how much of the outside view you will include in the picture. If you own a kodak and are in the habit of taking pictures, you move the camera or your position until the image in the “finder” seems to be about {20} {21} {22} {23} {24} what you wish to photograph. Whether you thus use the “finder” or the window frame, you are selecting a bit of nature for a picture. This should make clear to you one of the differences between nature and art. Nature extends in every direction all round the artist, an unending panorama from which he selects some little portion to form the subject of his work of art. But he carries his selection still farther, for even in the part of nature that he has selected there is so much more than he could ever put into his picture. Take another look out of the window. What a mass of details the whole presents! And, if we fix our eye on any one of its parts, it also is made up of a number of details. It would be impossible for the artist to paint them all. And so, also, if your view from the window is a country scene and you look at one object, that elm, for example. Do you think it would be possible for an artist to paint all the scales of the bark, all the spreading limbs, much less all the little branches and twigs and the countless leaves? As the artist cannot possibly paint everything, he must choose or select what he will leave out and what he will put in. Once more, the characteristic of art is selection, while that of nature is abundance. We talk of nature’s prodigality; we say that she is prodigal of her resources, flinging them around as a prodigal or wasteful man flings around his money. You know, for example, how the dandelion scatters its seeds broadcast over the lawn; how the daisies spread over the fields until the farmer calls them the “white weed”; how the woods become choked with undergrowth and the trees overhead crowd one another with their tangle of branches. The lawns and fields must be continually weeded; the woods cleared and thinned. Man, in fact, when he brings nature under the work of his hand, is continually selecting what he shall weed out and what he shall let remain. And so the artist with the work of his hand—his work of art. Suppose we make believe that we are watching an artist as he begins his work of selection. The one over there, sitting under a big, white umbrella with his easel in front of him, will serve our turn. If he will let us look over his shoulder, we shall see that with a few strokes of charcoal upon his canvas he has already selected how much of the wide view in front of him he will include in his picture. It finishes, you see, on the right with a bit of that row of trees that stand against the sky, and on the left with that small bush, so that in between is a little bit of the winding road, with a meadow beyond dotted with cows. He has squeezed some of the paint from the tubes on to his palette, and takes up his brushes. Now watch him “lay in,” as he would say, “the local colors”; that is to say, the general color of each locality or part of the scene. The general color of the sky is a faint blue; of the trees on the right, a grayish green; of the bush on the left, a deeper green; of the meadow, a yellowish green, while that of the road is a pinkish brown, for the soil of this part of the country, we will suppose, is red clay. All these local colors he lays in, covering each part with a flat layer of paint so that his canvas now presents a pattern of colored spaces. Yet already it begins to “look like something.” We can see, as it were, the ground plan, on which the artist is going to build up his picture. But now he must stop, for his paints are mixed with oils and take some time to dry, and he cannot work over the paint while it is sticky. A few days later we pay him another visit. He has been busy in our absence; the picture looks to us to be finished, and we begin to compare it with the natural scene in front of us. In nature those trees on the right stand so sharply against the sky that we can count their branches. Evidently the artist hasn’t, for in his picture he has left out a great many of them; indeed, he has put in only a few of the more prominent ones. See, too, how he has painted the trees; he hasn’t put in a single leaf. Instead he has represented the foliage in masses, lighter in some parts where the sun strikes, darker in the shadows. When we compare his trees with the real ones, they are not a bit the same, and yet the painted ones look all right; we can see at once that they are maples and in a general way very like the real ones. The artist hears us talking, and he says: “My business, you see, is not to make real trees; that’s nature’s business; I’m a maker of pictures, and in them I only suggest that the trees are real. I try to make you feel that these are maple trees”—and he points to that part of the picture with his brush—“and I hope also to make you feel their beauty. I don’t give you an imitation of nature, but a suggestion of nature’s truth. “Now see,” he says, “how I have painted those cows: just a few dabs of brownish red and black and white, showing against the green of the grass. Do they suggest cows to you?” “Yes,” we say in chorus. “Well, I hope they do,” he replies, “and that you don’t say ‘yes’ merely to please me. But if you had never seen a cow would you know from these dabs what a cow is really like? “I am sure you wouldn’t,” he goes on without waiting for an answer; “and if the farmer gave me a commission to paint his favorite prize cow, I am sure he wouldn’t be satisfied with these dabs. And I should not blame him. No, in that case I should place the cow where I could study it closely: the long, straight line of the back, the big angle of the hips, the strong-ribbed carcass, and its covering of glossy hair, the mild liquid eyes, and damp nose. These and a great deal more I should paint, if I were near the cow. But look at those cows over yonder. They are a long way off, and consequently look very small. I can’t see in them the different points that I know a cow has; to my eyes from where I sit they look as I have painted them. For an artist does not paint what he knows to be there, but what he can see from here. “Look,” he continues, picking up a tiny pointed brush. “See what happens, when I paint what I know to be there!” And with quick, deft strokes he proceeds to sharpen the lines of the back of one of his cows in the picture, and give her four very decided legs; to hang a tail; and give her horns; and titivate the head, put in an eye and make the tongue curl round the muzzle. “Why, it looks like a toy cow!” we exclaim. And so it does. And now, instead of intruding any longer on our artist friend’s time, let us see where our visit to him has brought us. We have noted that one difference between nature and art is, that nature is inexhaustible in her effects, and that an artist selects from her only some little part to make his work of art. Secondly, that he does not paint the whole of what he has selected, but out of it again selects certain parts; sufficient not to imitate the original, but to suggest its appearance. Thirdly, that natural truth is not the same as artistic truth; that while the scientific man studies one thing at a time so that he may know what is there, the artist tries to obtain an impression of the whole scene, and paints each part of it, not as he knows it to be, but as he can see it from his fixed position. By this time you can better understand that to say of nature “It is as beautiful as a picture,” is a loose way of talking. Nature is beautiful in the endless variety of its effects; a picture, for the one or two effects, choicely selected by the artist. And to say of a picture that it looks like nature is equally inaccurate, for the artist does not imitate nature but suggests it, which, as we have seen, is a very {25} {26} {27} {28} {29} W different thing. However, I should tell you, that some painters do imitate nature. I have seen a picture in which the painter had represented a five- dollar bill, pinned on a board, and so accurately had he imitated the bill and the board that, until you were close to them and passed your hand over the flat canvas, you would not know it was a picture. And there is a story told of a Greek painter, Zeuxis, that he once imitated a bunch of grapes so exactly, that the birds flew down and pecked at it. But, although it is a fact that a great many people think this exact imitation of nature a very fine thing, they do so because they have not seen many pictures or found out what a work of art really is. I am inclined to think that, by the time you have finished this book, if not sooner, you will look upon such examples of skill and patience as labor in vain, so far as art is concerned. It is all very well for the conjurer to boast that the quickness of his hand deceives your eye. But the aim of the artist is not deception. CHAPTER III NATURE IS HAPHAZARD: ART IS ARRANGEMENT E have seen that the characteristic of nature is abundance, while that of art is selection. Now let us note another difference between the two—nature is haphazard, art is arrangement. I do not forget that nature works by laws; that the workings of nature are not accidental, but the result of certain causes which produce certain effects; so that the operations of nature produce an endless chain of cause and effect. Thus in the fall, because the sap flows downward in the tree, the fiber of the leaf’s stalk is gradually weakened, until the leaf by degrees loses its hold on the branch, and, because everything obeys the law of gravitation, falls to the ground. But where will it fall? That may depend upon the force and direction of the wind. It may happen that the wind is from the north or from the west; that its breath is soft, or that it blows a gale. I say it “may happen” so or so; for this is our habit of speech. When we don’t understand the cause from which an effect springs, we use the word “happen,” as if the affair were an accident or chance. But a scientific man would say that such words as “accident” and “chance” are inaccurate, and would tell us why the wind was blowing from a certain direction at a certain moment, and tell us why it was soft or fierce. And yet, why should the tiny leaf have been ready to let go just at the moment when the breeze came? Upon what particular spot will the dandelion seed, after floating far in the air, alight? We may believe that the moment and the place are controlled by one Great Mind to whom everything is plain. But to our finite minds, whose capacity to understand is limited, such things are not plain. They seem to us like chance, and their results appear to our eyes haphazard. Compare, for example, the appearance of nature with that of a well-kept garden. The latter has straight paths, intersecting one another; trim borders with rows of lettuces and radishes; separate plots, reserved for peas, corn, spinach, potatoes, and other crops. Even the straggling vines of the cucumbers are kept within certain bounds. Everywhere is an appearance of order and arrangement, beside which the tangle of growth in the woods, or even the dotting of trees on the hillside, seems haphazard. Or look out into the street, which, as you remember, in the painter’s sense of the word is a part of nature. The city authorities have laid out the lines of the street, but the buildings vary in size and style; each one according to what happened to be the need and the taste of the man who built it. And the appearance of the sidewalk and roadway will vary from day to day and hour to hour, according to what may be the number and the character of the people and of the vehicles, as they happen to move or stand still. Compared with that garden, the appearance of the street is haphazard. Compare two parlors. One is a medley of furniture and bric-a-brac, of all sorts of sizes and shapes and colors, picked up at auction sales, or in the shops, each because it happened to be a bargain or to strike a moment’s whim, and then set in the parlor where there happened to be room for it. The other parlor, on the contrary, shows signs of order and arrangement. There are fewer objects in it, and they have been carefully chosen and arranged for the double purpose of making the room comfortable and agreeable to the eye. It is an illustration of good taste in selection and arrangement. The haphazard of nature we enjoy. But the confusion of the parlor distresses us, if we have any sense of selection and arrangement. This sense the artist possesses in a marked degree, and on it he bases the making of his picture. We have already noticed how he selects, but may have to mention it again in describing how he arranges, since the two acts are mixed up together, as when you select some flowers and then arrange them in a vase. When we first made the acquaintance of the artist in the previous chapter, he had already, you will remember, “roughed in” with his charcoal the objects he was going to paint. We were so interested in what he had selected, that we paid little attention to the arrangement of the objects. It is this that we are now going to study. His canvas is on the easel, its bare white surface inclosed within the four sides. He is going to fill this space, not only for the purpose of suggesting to us the appearance of the scene he has selected, but in such a way that the actual arrangement of the objects —the pattern which they make upon the canvas—shall give us pleasure. This he calls his composition. The word, as you know, if you have studied Latin, means simply “putting”, or “placing together.” But, as the artist uses it, it always means that the placing together shall produce an effect that is pleasing to the eye. It is only when it does, that the result can properly be called a work of art. For you will recall what we said in the first chapter, that the artist is one who fits his conception with a beautiful form. And this form is his composition. Now, before we go any farther with the artist’s method of composition, let me invite you to do a little composing on your own account. That wall in your special room or den where you hang your favorite photographs—how is it arranged? Are the photographs pinned up higgledy-piggledy, so as to crowd as many as possible on the wall? Is your only idea just to hang them up where you can see them? Or have you placed them together in such a way that their actual arrangement, as they spot the open space of your wall, is agreeable to your eye? For, in a way, your wall, before you hung the photographs, was like the bare canvas of the artist. The four {30} {31} {32} {33} {34} edges inclosed it; the space is yours to do with it what you wish. Suppose, now, that you are starting with the wall bare. Your family has moved into a new house, or the old one is being repaired. There is your plaster wall, as white as the artist’s canvas. You are allowed to decide what shall be done with it. What will you do with it? Oh! you are going to choose a paper. Well, what shall it be? Yes, pretty, of course. But pretty by itself, or when your pictures are hung? For, if you choose a paper with a large pattern of many bright colors, it may interfere with the effect of the pictures. You don’t wish to do this? Then it will be well to choose a paper that is not too prominent; one that has a small pattern, or none at all, only a single tint. Some people prefer a neutral tint; one, that is to say, which is neither one thing nor the other; not very green, or blue, or red, or yellow, but rather so; some color that is difficult to define. For, because this paper does not attract particular attention, it allows the photographs, hung upon it, to show up more prominently. However, the papering is your affair, and you have made your selection. At last the workmen, their ladders, their paste pots, and shavings are cleared out of the room and you can begin to arrange it. You have placed the furniture where it best fits in, looks best, and seems most comfortable, and now you turn your attention to each of the four walls. Once more, is the placing of the photographs to be higgledy-piggledy, “any-old-how,” just to show them, or are you going to arrange them carefully, so as to make each wall a pleasing composition? We will suppose you decide upon the latter plan. How will you proceed? I can imagine you choosing one of two ways. Either you will select your biggest picture, or the one you prize most, and place it in the middle of the wall, and then place the others on each side of it, so as to balance one another. Or, you will feel that such an arrangement would be too stiff and formal, too obviously balanced, and will sprinkle the pictures over the wall space, so that their arrangement is irregular and looks as if it were accidental, and yet seems balanced. For, if you are trying to arrange your pictures in the way in which they seem to you to look best, consciously or unconsciously you are working to secure a balance. Yes, one of the principles of artistic composition is balance. Like all the principles, adapted by artists, it is founded on an instinct of human nature. Have you ever noticed that when a man carries a bucket of water, he holds the free arm away from his body? He does it by instinct, to offset the drag of the bucket on his other arm and to balance his body. Have you ever walked upon the steel rail of a railroad track? Most of us have, I imagine. We tread pretty firmly for a little while, and then we totter. Out go our arms immediately to restore our balance. We walk up and down the deck of an ocean liner, when the sea is rough, and slope our bodies to the movement of the vessel. Why? To keep our balance. If we lose it we are hurled across the deck in a very undignified fashion. On the contrary, what a beautiful spectacle is presented when a good skater balances backward and forward; perhaps an even more beautiful one, when a good dancer who feels the joy of movement sways to the rhythm of the music. So, to maintain a balance is an instinct of human nature; to lose it produces ugly results; while beautiful ones may be secured from it, especially if the balance is rhythmic. Another principle, then, of artistic composition is rhythm, and this, too, is founded on an instinct of human nature. Let us see what rhythm is. A small boy has found an old pot, catches up a stick, and begins to belabor the pot and make himself a nuisance. By and by he gets tired of his own noise, imagines his pot a drum, and hits it with rhythmic strokes, one following the other in measured beats. Watch how his legs begin to move to the time of the strokes, and how the other youngsters fall in behind him. Left, right, left, right, on they march; their legs and shoulders swinging to the rhythmic beat. I wonder if they know they are following an instinct, pretty nearly as old as humanity. Probably they don’t, and wouldn’t care if they did. All they know is that they are having a good time. That’s just it! And they are having the same sort of good time that the primitive man gave his friends, when he first hit on the idea of clapping his hands together in rhythm. Later on he found he could get more stirring effects and save his hands by rhythmic hammering of one piece of wood upon another. Then came along a primitive Edison who perfected the principle and put tom-toms on the market. And so, in time, music came to be invented. For the basis of music and of the pleasure that is received from it is its measured beat or rhythm. It is, however, not only from the actual measured beat, appealing to our ear, that we gain pleasure, but also from the suggestion of rhythm to our sense of sight. A man stone deaf can enjoy watching a dance. He has never heard a sound in his life, but his sense of sight is stirred to pleasure by the spectacle of measured repetition of the movements. Similarly, the measured repetitions of stationary objects gives us pleasure, —the measured repetition, for example, presented by the West Point cadets, as they suddenly halt, either in close formation or in open ranks. “How beautiful!” we exclaim. And it is because the Athenians realized the beauty of measured repetition and the pleasure that it gives to the sense of sight, that they surrounded their great temple, the Parthenon, with ranks of columns, arranged at equal distance from one another. For, though they may have learned the beauty of repetition from studying the tree stems in the woods, yet, when they built their work of art, they avoided the haphazard of nature, and introduced order and arrangement by making the repetitions measured. Behind the columns, however, high up on the outside of the temple wall they set a frieze or band of figures. It extended clear around the temple, representing a procession of people on their way to the great festival of the goddess Athene. The remains are now in the British Museum; but, doubtless, you have seen casts of portions of it, and will recall some in which young men are riding, the head of each horse overlapping the body of the one in front of it. There is here no longer an actual measured repetition, as in the case of the columns. The bodies are not separated by exact intervals, nor do they repeat the same forms. The youths differ, so do the horses, and the actions of the forms are dissimilar. And yet the arching of the horses’ necks, the prancing of the forelegs, and the bodies of the youths swaying to the movement of the horses are so arranged, that there is no break or interruption or confusion, but the whole seems to flow up and down regularly. There are no actual, measured intervals or actual repetitions, yet the feeling of both is suggested. The arrangement of the forms is rhythmic, in that it suggests rhythm. And the principle of this also the Greeks found in nature, as you may, if you watch the waves rolling shoreward. But all this while the artist’s canvas is standing white and bare upon the easel, and must continue to stand. For, when he gets to work, I want you, not only to see what he does, but feel the meaning of his intention. And we can best enter into another person’s {35} {36} {37} {38} {39} I feeling, if we have experienced something of his feeling in ourselves. So, I have rummaged among our own experiences, in order to make you feel how much we have in common with the artist. He and ourselves are creatures of like nature, with similar senses, similar sources of pleasure and pain, and similar instincts leading us to do and to like similar things. Only the artist has keener senses, and has cultivated his instincts and study of nature, and has drawn from them certain practical hints to help him create his work of art. Among the instincts that we share with him are, as I have tried to show—first, an instinctive preference for order and arrangement; secondly, the need of balance and the pleasure we receive from it; thirdly, the increased pleasure we derive from balance, when it is accompanied with rhythmic repetitions. These are the principles on which he relies when he makes his composition. For let me repeat, and not for the last time, that the purpose of his composition is not only to suggest some scene of nature, but to make the composition itself a source of pleasure to our sense of sight. CHAPTER IV CONTRAST N the previous chapter we discussed balance and repetition as elements of composition. We have now to study another element— that of contrast. This also results from a natural love of change and variety. How sick we should get of candy, if we had nothing else to eat! how tired of sunshine, if there were never a cold or wet day to make the sun seem extra beautiful by contrast! “Jack,” as we know, “will become a dull boy,” if his studies are not enlivened by play; but how worse than dull—stupid and ill-tempered—if his play were not relieved by something serious. Yes, contrast is the salt of life, without which living would be tasteless and insipid. More than this, I can hardly believe that a boy or girl can grow up to be brave and true, a really fine specimen of manhood or womanhood, unless some shadow of hardship and pain has passed over the sunny period of youth. We have to learn to take the bitter with the sweet, and it is through meeting each, as it comes along, as a part of the day’s work, that we gradually build up character. So contrast, it seems, serves two purposes in life—it adds to the pleasure of life, and it gives force and worth to character. Its effects in art are very similar. The artist employs it to give variety and at the same time character and distinction to the pattern of his compositions. You can find out for yourselves how he does this, if you take a piece of paper, a pencil, a pair of compasses, and a straight-edge. First draw a rectangle. This is the space to be filled or developed into a composition. Now draw a vertical line up the center of it. You will admit that this is not interesting by itself; but cut it at right angles with a horizontal line, and immediately the figure begins to have some character. Immediately, also, if you have any eye for balance—and almost everybody has—you will begin to notice that it makes a great difference at just what point the horizontal line cuts the vertical. In the first place, whether the arms of the horizontal are or are not the same length—then, at how high or how low a point on the vertical line they branch out. You can experiment with these two lines until the cross seems to you to look its best. You could not draw anything much simpler than this figure; and yet it is sufficient to illustrate two principles of contrast in composition—first, that the contrast is interesting, and second, that it is made more interesting, when the contrasted parts are carefully balanced. Now take the compasses and, centering on the point of intersection of the two lines, describe a circle. The latter will introduce into the figure a still further contrast between curved and straight lines. And again your sense of balance will be brought into play. How far will you make your circle extend? It is for you to say, because you are trying to satisfy your own feeling for what will look best. Now, as a contrast to this circle, add four smaller ones at the extremities of the cross. Next, from the center of the big circle draw radiating lines. As a last touch of contrast, suppose you draw a segment of a circle in each of the four corners of the rectangle. By this time we have built up a composition, the pattern of which consists of contrasts. But, as I dare say you have noticed, it also consists of repetitions. And once more I will remind you that both the repetitions and the contrasts are balanced. Contrast, repetition, and balance—these are the simple elements of composition. Our pattern or composition is a very simple form of geometric figure. If you feel disposed, you can amuse yourself by devising other kinds of simple patterns; starting, for example, with a circle inside your rectangular space; or, selecting, to begin with, a circular frame and starting with a triangle or square inside of it, and in either case continuing to build up or embroider your design with additional features. In this way by varying the shape of your original frame and the character of the pattern that you put in it, you can go on indefinitely inventing designs. All these, I want you to observe, are geometric in character. They are based upon the figures which you find in geometry—the square, rectangle, triangle, and circle. Now just as the acorn may in time become the great oak tree, so this simple basis of geometric design is at the root of the compositions of the great Italian pictures and of thousands of other pictures, even to our own day. Their compositions are based upon a geometric plan. The only difference is that your plan is clearly visible, while theirs is more or less disguised. The reason is that they do not fill their spaces, as you did, with simpl...