That the average architect should be incapable of artistically illustrating his own design, ought, I think, to be less an occasion for surprise than that few painters, whose point of view is essentially pictorial, can make even a tolerable interpretation in line of their own paintings.  Be it remembered that the pictures made by the architect are seldom the records of actualities.  The buildings themselves are merely contemplated, and the illustrations are worked up from geometrical elevations in the office, very, very far from Nature.  Moreover, the subjects are not infrequently such as lend themselves with an ill grace to picturesque illustration.  The structure to be depicted may, for instance, be a heavy cubical mass with a bald uninteresting sky-line; or it may be a tall office building, impossible to reconcile with natural accessories either in pictorial scale or in composition.  These natural accessories, too, the draughtsman must, with an occasional recourse to his photograph album, evolve out of his inner consciousness.  When it is further considered that such structures, even when actualities, are uncompromisingly stiff and immaculate in their newness, presenting absolutely none of those interesting accidents so dear to the artist, and perhaps with nothing whatever about them of picturesque suggestion, we have a problem presented which is somewhat analogous to that presented by the sculpturesque possibilities of “fashionable trousering.”  That, with such uninspiring conditions, architectural illustration does not develop so interesting a character nor attain to so high a standard as distinguishes general illustration is not to be wondered at.  It is rather an occasion for surprise that it exhibits so little of the artificiality of the fashion-plate after all, and that the better part of it, at least, is not more unworthy than figure illustration would be were it denied the invaluable aid of the living model.  So much by way of apology.

[Side note:  The Architects’ Point of View]

The architectural perspective, however, is not to be regarded purely from the pictorial point of view.  It is an illustration first, a picture afterwards, and almost invariably deals with an individual building, which is the essential subject.  This building cannot, therefore, be made a mere foil for interesting “picturesqueries,” nor subordinated to any scenic effect of landscape or chiaroscuro.  Natural accessories or interesting bits of street life may be added to give it an appropriate setting; but the result must clearly read “Building, with landscape,” not “Landscape, with building.”