Lectures on Landscape | Page 9

And again and again I have to
recommend you to draw always as if you were engraving, and as if the
line could not be changed.
34. The method used by Turner in the Liber Studiorum is precisely
analogous to that of Holbein. The lines of these etchings are to trees,
rocks, or buildings, absolutely what these of Holbein are; not

suggestions of contingent grace, but determinations of the limits of
future form. You will see the explanatory office of such lines by
placing this outline over my drawing of the stone, until the lines
coincide with the limits of the shadow. You will find that it intensifies
and explains the forms which otherwise would have escaped notice,
and that a perfectly gradated wash of neutral tint with an outline of this
kind is all that is necessary for grammatical statement of forms. It is all
that the great colorists need for their studies; they would think it wasted
time to go farther; but, if you have no eye for color, you may go farther
in another manner, with enjoyment.
35. Now to go back to Turner.
The first great object of the Liber Studiorum, for which I requested you
in my sixth Lecture[7] to make constant use of it, is the delineation of
solid form by outline and shadow. But a yet more important purpose in
each of the designs in that book is the expression of such landscape
powers and character as have especial relation to the pleasures and pain
of human life--but especially the pain. And it is in this respect that I
desired you (Sect. 172) to be assured, not merely of their superiority,
but of their absolute difference in kind from photography, as works of
disciplined design.
[Footnote 7: "Lectures on Art, 1870," § 170.]
[Illustration: NEAR BLAIR ATHOL.
From the painting by Turner.]
36. I do not know whether any of you were interested enough in the
little note in my catalogue on this view near Blair Athol, to look for the
scene itself during your summer rambles. If any did, and found it, I am
nearly certain their impression would be only that of an extreme
wonder how Turner could have made so little of so beautiful a spot.
The projecting rock, when I saw it last in 1857, and I am certain, when
Turner saw it, was covered with lichens having as many colors as a
painted window. The stream--or rather powerful and deep Highland
river, the Tilt--foamed and eddied magnificently through the narrowed

channel; and the wild vegetation in the rock crannies was a finished
arabesque of living sculpture, of which this study of mine, made on
another stream, in Glenfinlas, only a few miles away, will give you a
fair idea. Turner has absolutely stripped the rock of its beautiful lichens
to bare slate, with one quartz vein running up through it; he has quieted
the river into a commonplace stream; he has given, of all the rich
vegetation, only one cluster of quite uninteresting leaves and a clump
of birches with ragged trunks. Yet, observe, I have told you of it, he has
put into one scene the spirit of Scotland.
[Illustration: DUMBLANE ABBEY.
From the painting by Turner.]
37. Similarly, those of you who in your long vacations have ever stayed
near Dumblane will be, I think, disappointed in no small degree by this
study of the abbey, for which I showed you the sketch at last Lecture.
You probably know that the oval window in its west end is one of the
prettiest pieces of rough thirteenth-century carving in the kingdom; I
used it for a chief example in my lectures at Edinburgh; and you know
that the lancet windows, in their fine proportion and rugged masonry,
would alone form a study of ruined Gothic masonry of exquisite
interest.
Yet you find Turner representing the lancet window by a few bare oval
lines like the hoop of a barrel; and indicating the rest of the structure by
a monotonous and thin piece of outline, of which I was asked by one of
yourselves last term, and quite naturally and rightly, how Turner came
to draw it so slightly--or, we may even say, so badly.
38. Whenever you find Turner stopping short, or apparently failing in
this way, especially when he does the contrary of what any of us would
have been nearly sure to do, then is the time to look for your main
lesson from him. You recollect those quiet words of the strongest of all
Shakespeare's heroes, when any one else would have had his sword out
in an instant:
"Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them ... Were it my

cue to fight, I should have known it Without a prompter."[8]
[Footnote 8: