Lectures on Landscape | Page 8

was twelve or thirteen
years old, of Dover Castle and the Dover Coach; in which the future
love of mystery is exhibited by his studiously showing the way in
which the dust rises about the wheels; and an interest in drunken sailors,
which materially affected his marine studies, shown not less in the

occupants of the hind seat. But what I want you to observe is that,
though the trees, coach, horses, and sailors are drawn as any schoolboy
would draw them, the sky is washed in so smoothly that few
water-color painters of our day would lightly accept a challenge to
match it.
And, therefore, it is, among many other reasons, that I put the brush
into your hands from the first, and try you with a wash in lampblack,
before you enter my working class. But, as regards the composition of
his picture, the drawing is always first with Turner, the color second.
30. Drawing: that is to say, the expression by gradation of light, either
of form or space. Again I thus give you a statement wholly adverse to
the vulgar opinion of him. You will find that statement early in the first
volume of "Modern Painters," and repeated now through all my works
these twenty-five years, in vain. Nobody will believe that the main
virtue of Turner is in his drawing. I say "the main virtue of Turner."
Splendid though he be as a colorist, he is not unrivaled in color; nay, in
some qualities of color he has been far surpassed by the Venetians. But
no one has ever touched him in exquisiteness of gradation; and no one
in landscape in perfect rendering of organic form.
31. I showed you in this drawing, at last Lecture, how truly he had
matched the color of the iron-stained rocks in the bed of the Ticino; and
any of you who care for color at all cannot but take more or less
pleasure in the black and greens and warm browns opposed throughout.
But the essential value of the work is not in these. It is, first, in the
expression of enormous scale of mountain and space of air, by
gradations of shade in these colors, whatever they may be; and,
secondly, in the perfect rounding and cleaving of the masses alike of
mountain and stone. I showed you one of the stones themselves, as an
example of uninteresting outline. If I were to ask you to paint it, though
its color is pleasant enough, you would still find it uninteresting and
coarse compared to that of a flower, or a bird. But if I can engage you
in an endeavor to draw its true forms in light and shade, you will most
assuredly find it not only interesting, but in some points quite beyond
the most subtle skill you can give to it.

32. You have heard me state to you, several times, that all the masters
who valued accurate form and modeling found the readiest way of
obtaining the facts they required to be firm pen outline, completed by a
wash of neutral tint. This method is indeed rarely used by Raphael or
Michael Angelo in the drawings they have left us, because their studies
are nearly all tentative--experiments in composition, in which the
imperfect or careless pen outline suggested all they required, and was
capable of easy change without confusing the eye. But the masters who
knew precisely before they laid touch on paper what they were going to
do--and this may be, observe, either because they are less or greater
than the men who change; less, in merely drawing some natural object
without attempt at composition, or greater in knowing absolutely
beforehand the composition they intend; it may be, even so, that what
they intend, though better known, is not so good:--but at all events, in
this anticipating power Tintoret, Holbein and Turner stand, I think,
alone as draughtsmen; Tintoret rarely sketching at all, but painting
straight at the first blow, while Holbein and Turner sketch indeed, but it
is as with a pen of iron and a point of diamond.
33. You will find in your educational series[6] many drawings
illustrative of the method; but I have enlarged here the part that is
executed with the pen, out of this smaller drawing, that you may see
with what fearless strength Holbein delineates even the most delicate
folds of the veil on the head, and of the light muslin on the shoulders,
giving them delicacy, not by the thinness of his line, but by its exquisite
veracity.
[Footnote 6: At the Ruskin Drawing School, Oxford.]
The eye will endure with patience, or even linger with pleasure, on any
line that is right, however coarse; while the faintest or finest that is
wrong will be forcibly destructive.