Lectures on Landscape | Page 6

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 sometimes thick and sometimes slender, a scientifically accurate outline is perfectly equal throughout; and in your first practice I wish you to use always a pen with a blunt point, which will make no hair stroke under any conditions. So that using black ink and only one movement of the pen, not returning to thicken your line, you shall either have your line there, or not there; and that you may not be able to gradate or change it, in any way or degree whatsoever.
24. Now the first question respecting it is: what place is your