Lectures on Landscape | Page 6

outlines so
complex that no pencil could follow them (as trees in middle distance),
or they have no actual outline at all, but a gradated and softened edge;
as, for the most part, clouds, foam, and the like. And even in things
which have determinate form, the outline of that form is usually quite
incapable of expressing their real character.
[Illustration]
19. Here is the most ordinary component of a foreground for instance, a
pleasantly colored stone. Any of its pure outlines are not only without
beauty, but absolutely powerless to give you any notion of its character,
although that character is in itself so interesting, that here Turner has
made a picture of little more than a heap of such stones, with blue water
to oppose their color. In consequence of these difficulties and
insufficiencies, most landscape-painters have been tempted to neglect
outline altogether, and think only of effects of light or color on masses
more or less obscurely defined. They have thus gradually lost their

sense of organic form, their precision of hand, and their respect for
limiting law; in a word, for all the safeguards and severe dignities of
their art. And landscape-painting has, therefore, more in consequence
of this one error than of any other, become weak, frivolous, and justly
despised.
20. Now, if any of you have chanced to notice at the end of my "Queen
of the Air," my saying that in landscape Turner must be your only
guide, you perhaps have thought I said so because of his great power in
melting colors or in massing light and shade. Not so. I have always said
he is the only great landscape-painter, and to be your only guide,
because he is the only landscape-painter who can draw an outline.
His finished works perhaps appear to you more vague than any other
master's: no man loses his outlines more constantly. You will be
surprised to know that his frankness in losing depends on his certainty
of finding if he chooses; and that, while all other landscape-painters
study from Nature in shade or in color, Turner always sketched with the
point.
"Always," of course, is a wide word. In your copying series I have put a
sketch by Turner in color from Nature; some few others of the kind
exist, in the National Gallery and elsewhere. But, as a rule, from his
boyhood to the last day of his life, he sketched only with the fine pencil
point, and always the outline, more if he had time, but at least the
outline, of every scene that interested him; and in general, outline so
subtle and elaborate as to be inexhaustible in examination and
uncopiable for delicacy.
Here is a sketch of an English park scene which represents the average
character of a study from Nature by Turner; and here the sketch from
Nature of Dumblane Abbey for the Liber Studiorum, which shows you
what he took from Nature, when he had time only to get what was most
precious to him.
21. The first thing, therefore, you have to learn in landscape, is to
outline; and therefore we must now know precisely what an outline is,
how it ought to be represented; and this it will be right to define in

quite general terms applicable to all subjects.
We saw in the fifth Lecture[5] that every visible thing consisted of
spaces of color, terminated either by sharp or gradated limits.
Whenever they are sharp, the line of separation, followed by the point
of your drawing instrument, is the proper outline of your subject,
whether it represents the limits of flat spaces or of solid forms.
[Footnote 5: "Lectures on Art, 1870," § 130.]
22. For instance, here is a drawing by Holbein of a lady in a dark dress,
with bars of black velvet round her arm. Her form is seen everywhere
defined against the light by a perfectly sharp linear limit which Holbein
can accurately draw with his pen; the patches of velvet are also
distinguished from the rest of her dress by a linear limit, which he
follows with his pen just as decisively. Here, therefore, is your first
great law. Wherever you see one space of color distinguished from
another by a sharp limit, you are to draw that limit firmly; and that is
your outline.
23. Also, observe that as your representing this limit by a dark line is a
conventionalism, and just as much a conventionalism when the line is
subtle as when it is thick, the great masters accept and declare that
conventionalism with perfect frankness, and use bold and decisive
outline, if any.
Also, observe, that though, when you are master of your art, you may
modify your outline by making it dark in some parts, light in others,
and even