Inadequate as this imperfect treatment of a profoundly interesting subject is, it may serve to give some idea of the point of view from which the following pages are written, and if it also serves to disturb the “copying theory” in the minds of any students and encourages them to make further inquiry, it will have served a useful purpose.

II

DRAWING

By drawing is here meant #the expression of form upon a plane surface#.

Art probably owes more to form for its range of expression than to colour.  Many of the noblest things it is capable of conveying are expressed by form more directly than by anything else.  And it is interesting to notice how some of the world’s greatest artists have been very restricted in their use of colour, preferring to depend on form for their chief appeal.  It is reported that Apelles only used three colours, black, red, and yellow, and Rembrandt used little else.  Drawing, although the first, is also the last, thing the painter usually studies.  There is more in it that can be taught and that repays constant application and effort.  Colour would seem to depend much more on a natural sense and to be less amenable to teaching.  A well-trained eye for the appreciation of form is what every student should set himself to acquire with all the might of which he is capable.

It is not enough in artistic drawing to portray accurately and in cold blood the appearance of objects.  To express form one must first be moved by it.  There is in the appearance of all objects, animate and inanimate, what has been called an #emotional significance#, a hidden rhythm that is not caught by the accurate, painstaking, but cold artist.  The form significance of which we speak is never found in a mechanical reproduction like a photograph.  You are never moved to say when looking at one, “What fine form.”

It is difficult to say in what this quality consists.  The emphasis and selection that is unconsciously given in a drawing done directly under the guidance of strong feeling, are too subtle to be tabulated; they escape analysis.  But it is this selection of the significant and suppression of the non-essential that often gives to a few lines drawn quickly, and having a somewhat remote relation to the complex appearance of the real object, more vitality and truth than are to be found in a highly-wrought and painstaking drawing, during the process of which the essential and vital things have been lost sight of in the labour of the work; and the non-essential, which is usually more obvious, is allowed to creep in and obscure the original impression.  Of course, had the finished drawing been done with the mind centred upon the particular form significance aimed at, and every touch and detail added in tune to this idea, the comparison might have been different.  But it is rarely that good drawings are done this way.  Fine things seem only to be seen in flashes, and the nature that can carry over the impression of one of these moments during the labour of a highly-wrought drawing is very rare, and belongs to the few great ones of the craft alone.