Lectures on Landscape | Page 4

man of ordinary sense will take pleasure in
features that have no meaning, but he may easily take it in heath,
woods or waterfalls, that have no expression. So that it needs much
greater strength of heart and intellect to paint landscape than figure:
many commonplace persons, bred in good schools, have painted the
figure pleasantly or even well; but none but the strongest--John Bellini,
Titian, Velasquez, Tintoret, Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Carpaccio
and Turner--have ever painted a fragment of good landscape. In missal
painting exquisite figure-drawing is frequent, and landscape
backgrounds in late works are elaborate; but I only know thoroughly
good landscape in one book; and I have examined--I speak
deliberately--thousands.
11. For one thing, the passion is necessary for the mere quantity of
design. In good art, whether painting or sculpture, I have again and
again told you every touch is necessary and beautifully intended. Now
it falls within the compass of ordinary application to place rightly all
the folds of drapery or gleams of light on a chain, or ornaments in a
pattern; but when it comes to placing every leaf in a tree, the painter
gets tired. Here, for instance, is a little bit of Sandro Botticelli
background; I have purposefully sketched it in the slightest way, that

you might see how the entire value of it depends on thoughtful placing.
There is no texture aimed at, no completion, scarcely any variety of
light and shade; but by mere care in the placing the thing is beautiful.
Well, every leaf, every cloud, every touch is placed with the same care
in great work; and when this is done as by John Bellini in the picture of
Peter Martyr,[2] or as it was by Titian in the great Peter Martyr, with
every leaf in a wood he gets tired. I know no other such landscape in
the world as that is, or as that was.
[Footnote 2: National Gallery, No. 812.]
12. Perhaps you think on such conditions you never can paint landscape
at all. Well, great landscape certainly not; but pleasant and useful
landscape, yes; provided only the passion you bring to it be true and
pure. The degree of it you cannot command; the genuineness of it you
can--yes, and the depth of source also. Tintoret's passion may be like
the Reichenbach, and yours only like a little dripping Holywell, but
both equally from deep springs.
13. But though the virtue of all painting (and similarly of sculpture and
every other art) is in passion, I must not have you begin by working
passionately. The discipline of youth, in all its work, is in cooling and
curbing itself, as the discipline of age is in warming and urging itself;
you know the Bacchic chorus of old men in Plato's Laws. To the end of
life, indeed, the strength of a man's finest nature is shown in due
continence; but that is because the finest natures remain young to the
death: and for you the first thing you have to do in art (as in life) is to
be quiet and firm--quiet, above everything; and modest, with this most
essential modesty, that you must like the landscape you are going to
draw better than you expect to like your drawing of it, however well it
may succeed. If you would not rather have the real thing than your
sketch of it, you are not in a right state of mind for sketching at all. If
you only think of the scene, "what a nice sketch this will make!" be
assured you will never make a nice sketch of it. You may think you
have produced a beautiful work; nay, perhaps the public and many fair
judges will agree with you; but I tell you positively, there will be no
enduring value in what you have thus done. Whereas if you think of the

scene, "Ah, if I could only get some shadow or scrawl of this to carry
away with me, how glad I should be!"--then whatever you do will be,
according to your strength, good and progressive: it may be feeble, or
much faultful, but it will be vital and essentially precious.
14. Now, it is not possible for you to command this state of mind, or
anything like it, in yourselves at once. Nay, in all probability your eyes
are so satiated by the false popular art surrounding us now on all sides,
that you cannot see the delicate reality though you try; but even though
you may not care for the truth, you can act as if you did, and tell it.
Now, therefore, observe this following quite plain direction. Whenever
you set yourself to draw anything, consider only how best you may
give a person who has not seen the place, a true idea