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PDFXVII. Battle of S. Egidio
XVIII. Showing how lines unrelated can be brought into harmony
XIX. Showing how lines unrelated can be brought into harmony
XX. The artist’s daughter
XXI. The influence on the face of different ways of doing the hair
XXII. The influence on the face of different ways of doing the hair
XXIII. Examples of early Italian treatment of trees
XXIV. The principle of mass or tone rhythm
XXV. Mass or tone rhythm in “Ulysses deriding Polyphemus”
XXVI. Example of Corot’s system of mass rhythm
XXVII. Illustrating how interest may balance mass
XXVIII. Proportion
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THE PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF DRAWING
I
INTRODUCTION
The best things in an artist’s work are so much a matter of intuition, that there is much to be said for the point of view that would altogether discourage intellectual inquiry into artistic phenomena on the part of the artist. Intuitions are shy things and apt to disappear if looked into too closely. And there is undoubtedly a danger that too much knowledge and training may supplant the natural intuitive feeling of a student, leaving only a cold knowledge of the means of expression in its place. For the artist, if he has the right stuff in him, has a consciousness, in doing his best work, of something, as Ruskin has said, “not in him but through him.” He has been, as it were, but the agent through which it has found expression.
Talent can be described as “that which we have,” and Genius as “that which has us.” Now, although we may have little control over this power that “has us,” and although it may be as well to abandon oneself unreservedly to its influence, there can be little doubt as to its being the business of the artist to see to it that his talent be so developed, that he may prove a fit instrument for the expression of whatever it may be given him to express; while it must be left to his individual temperament to decide how far it is advisable to pursue any intellectual analysis of the elusive things that are the true matter of art.
