LECTURE V.

The object of my present lecture is to systematise and classify, as far as possible, the instruction which is, for various reasons, necessarily imparted in a somewhat desultory manner. (ftn. 2)

With this intention, I have thrown my remarks into the form of a short sketch of the course of study which I consider best for an art student, and shall describe as I go on the successive points or posts which he will have to occupy.

Now for the purpose of producing a work of art of the higher order, there are four subjects of which the painter must acquire knowledge — form, tone, colour, and finally, composition. The knowledge of the first three is gained through the study of nature; the last is rather an effort of the inventive or imaginative powers, and involves the harmonious combination or arrangement of form, tone, and colour, either separately or together. (ftn. 3) Thus we may have a composition of form only, as in an outline drawing of a group of figures; a composition of light and shade, which even in its simplest expression, as a mere study of effect, acquires of necessity some element of form, however vague or rudimentary; and a composition of colour, which must also in the same way be combined with form, either indefinitely as in a coloured sketch, or definitely as in a stained-glass window, or any subject coloured with flat-tints, like the early Etruscan wall-paintings. Lastly, we may have compositions of all three combined, which form what we consider the most complete kind of picture; for though it may occasionally be necessary that figure-pictures, where they are used for purely decorative purposes, should be compositions of form and colour only — that is, outlines with flat-tints or a minimum of light and shade — this cannot be considered the highest expression of the art of painting. It is clear then that to make a perfect composition, the student must first acquire a knowledge of form, of tone, and of colour; and to this end his studies must be directed; but it is also clear that though we may make a composition of form only, without light and shade or colour, an element of form must enter into any arrangement of masses of colour, or of chiaroscuro. It is then to the study of form that the attention of the student of painting must first be directed.

There is no doubt that the simplest way of beginning is to make copies of drawings in outline, beginning with easy forms, and progressing to the more difficult; and the School of Design drawing-books by Dyce are admirably adapted to this purpose. But this course may easily be carried too far, and in my opinion is useful only at the very earliest stage, as a means of acquiring steadiness of hand. The youth who comes to a school of art to study may be supposed to have displayed sufficient fondness for drawing to have practised it in some form or other from his earliest years, and therefore to have acquired some elementary knowledge. The surest and best method therefore for him on entering the school, is to begin to make outline drawings from the round, that is from solid objects, by which, under proper direction, he can attain as great steadiness of hand as he could from the flat. In pursuing this preliminary course his object will be to train both eye and hand in an equal degree, by endeavouring to draw with certainty as well as with accuracy; that is to say, he should, after first adjusting on his paper the proportions of the object he is copying, try to make his outline at once clear and correct, and draw it with as firm and steady a hand as a young student can command under the difficulties with regard to accuracy which must beset him at the outset.

The object, then, of the student is first to attain to a definite conception of the form before him, and in this he will fail unless he can express it on paper with a definite outline; next, to acquire the power of expressing the form with certainty and rapidity, which he will never do if he acquires a habit of drawing inaccurately to begin with, though he may have the full intention at the time of altering his lines to get them right in the end. In the third place, he must acquire steadiness of hand. This he must gain by the habit of drawing his lines continuous from one determined point to another, without retouching, or, as it is called, painting the line,— a point as important in figure as in ornamental drawing; the quick, and at the same time certain, apprehension of the form he is copying, and the correct rendering of it on a flat surface, being the end the artist aims at throughout his whole career.

Thus much conceded, the question arises as to the best models for a beginner to work from. My answer would be that he cannot do better than begin with what he intends ending with, that is, the study of the figure (ftn. 4). All else is usually but time lost; at whatever stage the drawing of the figure is taken up, the student will find it as difficult as if he started with it at first. At the same time I admit that what are called drawing-models, that is, solid geometrical figures in wood, may be of occasional use in the case of young or helpless students. If a student placed before a cast of a statue or head shows himself incapable of rendering it in any way intelligibly, he may well be set to do a few drawings in outline from geometrical models; when, if he does not soon show signs of progress, it is probable that he has mistaken his vocation; but this is of course a matter for the discretion of the instructor, some students being much slower than others. It would be dangerous, however, to devote too much time to this stage of study; especially when carried to the extent to be observed in the schools of the Science and Art Department (ftn. 5), it involves a mere waste of time; and the student should practise by preference from casts of heads, hands, feet, &c., proceeding by degrees to full-length antique figures.

Thus far I have dealt only with the earliest and most rudimentary stage of instruction, and most people who have any knowledge, or hold any theories on the subject of art-teaching, will probably not be of a very different opinion on these points to myself. We come however now to a matter requiring more serious consideration. The aim of the student, after he can so draw an antique figure or head as to give correctly the general action and proportions, and to mark definitely the shape of the limbs and features, and the more important divisions of the body within the outline, is to acquire the power of presenting it to the eye as a rounded form. Now, outline drawing goes but a little way towards expressing form, — or rather, though it may express with perfect accuracy the outer or boundary lines of forms, it does very little towards expressing those inner markings which indicate the construction of the figure, and which are made apparent to us only through shades more or less defined and gradated. It would therefore be an error to carry too far the practice of drawing in mere outline, for it is after all a conventional method of representation, and to express correctly and intelligibly in this manner the inner markings of the body requires considerable knowledge of drawing.

There is a danger therefore of the student acquiring a mannered way of seeing and drawing the muscular and constructional indications, and it is much better that he should proceed, as soon as possible, to study them as they really present themselves to him — that is in light and shade — than that he should confine himself to a hard and unreal outline. I may, however, remark in passing that a student may derive much benefit in this early stage, if he looks at, and in leisure moments copies, good outline drawings of the figure, such as Flaxman's illustrations to Homer and Æschylus, so as to learn how far it is possible in pure outline to express the markings of the muscles and joints in the nude figure.

These illustrations have another advantage in being excellent studies of composition for beginners; and although Flaxman may sometimes be found to give to the faces of his heroes a somewhat exaggerated expression, through a mannerism, contracted apparently in the endeavour to impart to them something of the character of the ancient tragic mask, yet there is a knowledge of the human form, and a grace and purity of design displayed in the grouping of the figures and arrangement of the draperies, which is well worth the attention of the young student.

We suppose the student to have now arrived at the stage of what is commonly called "shading" his figures, and he enters upon the study of tone, which is probably, of all the departments of study to which he has to devote himself, the most subtle, the most complicated, and the most comprehensive. I might almost go on to call it the most important, for it is so intimately bound up with the study of form and colour, that it cannot be kept separate, and is, so to speak, continually interfering with the apprehension of them. It is, however, precisely the point of which our English students, teachers, and painters (always omitting from the latter category certain men of eminence, but including those who practise the more popular kind of work) appear to have the most imperfect appreciation. This I believe to be due entirely to the general system of education in our Art Schools. You will find that as a rule the pictures in our exhibitions are in their several degrees strong on every point but this one.

You will find pictures in which the story is well and pointedly told; pictures which are in a high degree poetical in conception and sentiment ; pictures harmonious in colour, thoughtful in arrangement of forms and lines, and effective in light and shade; but such as have any value or beauty as studies of tone, are only occasionally to be found, and those almost entirely among painters who have studied or worked abroad. Special stress should be laid on the words effective in light and shade used above, for it is the bane of English painters that they will seek for effect in their pictures by any kind of false trick of light and shade, rather than by a scientific combination of their true relations. This particularly is a fault that students are apt to run into under the influence of bad example. They cover a want of thought in the composition of their pictures, and are constantly advised by their friends to do so, by heightening a light here, or deepening a tint there, in defiance of all the laws of nature. There is no advice more commonly given to a young painter, if one of the inferior personages in his picture interferes with the relief of the principal figure, than that he should "scumble it over"; that is, place it in a sort of fog (dignified by the name of aerial perspective), to "give it air," as it is called; when the fault all the time is in the original composition, which was so ill-arranged in the grouping that some false device of this kind is necessary to bring out the intended effect. There are many pictures by artists of reputation among us where this stupid trick is resorted to, to say nothing of others of the same kind.

Now the perception of tone, in its extended sense, means the perception of that harmonious unity of effect, under every circumstance, which necessarily pervades all objects and scenes in nature; and the right application of those laws to compositions of form and colour; and it is impossible, unless a student is constantly directed to the acquisition of that perception, from the time when he begins by shading to give relief to his drawings, that he should ever afterwards be able to impart it to his pictures. The choice of effect depends indeed on the taste of the painter.

Michelangelo loved a bold relief of light and shade, his figures being generally half in light and half in shadow, with a view to developing to the utmost not only those beauties of form which are best displayed under those conditions, but those qualities of modelling with imperceptibly gradated half-tints and transparent shadows, to which this particular effect of light and shade lends itself. Rembrandt loved to relieve his principal figure or group, or, in a portrait, the most important portion of the subject, in a bright but softened sunlight, against a luminous gloom. Titian preferred the broad, open, and rather shadowless effect of the glowing light of the evening sky; but each in his kind was master of the effect he preferred; and their pictures never fail to convey the impress of absolute truth and unity of tone. Compare such works as these with our ordinary exhibition pictures, which are either forced up with a consciously false treatment to make effect in the exhibitions, or which lose all the broad truth of tone which is to be found in nature, in the desire to impress on the spectator's notice the infinite labour that has been bestowed on every trivial detail. Nor is it necessary to be consciously false on this point; ignorance of the importance of a true perception of tone will allow the painter to obtrude any or every other quality to the detriment of this.

It may be, as I have said, a point of sentiment, or of poetry, or of humour, or something inferior to these, which is put forward, while the other more important matter is forgotten. The perception of this quality of tone is indeed a matter of education, the importance of which is hardly felt among us; and this want is in great part due to the waste of the time spent, at an early stage of work, over laboriously- executed drawings from the antique and other models, in which the primary object of an intelligent understanding and reproduction of the model is subordinated to the acquisition of a laborious style of lithographic shading.

I have no hesitation in saying that I believe most of the want of perception of unity of tone among our artists to arise from the common habit of laborious work with the chalk-point. This use of the point, at all events in the way which is prevalent in our art-schools, not only involves loss of time, and the sinking of the study of form and tone in that of mere execution, but concentrates the attention of the student on minute details which blind him to the general effect. It is for this reason that I have always advised my students to make use of the stump, rather than of the point, in shading their drawings; for the former, while it allows of any amount of finish of modelling, lends itself particularly well to the production of broad effects of tone, and is moreover much easier for a beginner to manage than the complicated method of shading with the point. There is, it is true, an intelligent use of the point in drawing, which proceeds naturally from the study of the construction of the figure; but it should be contracted in actual drawing from the figure, and the lines made in shading with the point should always be indicative of the construction. Any student who shows a disposition to work in this way with the point should be encouraged in the use of it, but for the majority, the stump is by far the best means of learning to shade. As there is doubtless a certain amount of mechanical difficulty to be got over in its employment, it is here again that drawing-models may be made use of in teaching the beginner how to make flat and evenly-gradated shades; care being taken that he does not spend more time over this than is necessary to facilitate his work for the future.

This first mechanical difficulty got over, the one main point the student has to attend to is the general tone or effect of the object he is working from, whatever it may be. And this he will find his great difficulty, not only as a beginner, but all through his course of study, and indeed through his life; it is so easy to see detail, and it is so difficult to subordinate it to the general tone. The student must constantly keep in mind his subject as a whole, while at the same time he does not omit to give all details their proper value. A prevailing fault with our students, and indeed with experienced painters, is that of making the reflections too strong, and therefore throwing the whole work out of tone. This fault arises among students from the desire to express distinctly everything that is seen; and in the process of doing this they forget the general balance of light and shade. With painters the desire is rather to give a spurious brilliancy to their pictures at the expense of truth. It is useless, in making a study of a head, for instance, to have the proportions and features correct in outline, if in shading they are out of tone. A half-tint too dark, or a light too bright, will destroy the unity of the work, and will cause it to present an assemblage of features, each in itself possibly right, but bearing no reference to the general roundness of the head.

Again, it is obvious that the tendons on the back of a thin hand are long and clearly-defined strings: the first impulse of the careful student is to dwell on this, to the exclusion of the much more important place they hold as subordinate to the general distribution of light and shade. Consequently, he is certain to mark them too strongly; so that the back of the hand in his drawing becomes a disconnected map of veins and tendons. The difficulty arises from the fact that he has now two matters to deal with — form and tone; the forms he knows he must represent, or it will not be a hand; but he must also, while still remembering the forms with reference to the position of the lights, shadows, and half-tints, forget them while thinking of their relative values or strengths, and in this sense consider his model not as a hand but as a study of tone; otherwise the result will be, as I have said, the map of a hand, and not the representation of one. And so in making a drawing of a whole figure. According to its position with reference to the light, it may happen that a leading muscular division may be indicated by a half-tint so faint as to be hardly visible; observing its constructional importance, the beginner will be likely to mark it too strong, to the destruction of the unity of effect in the figure. Or again, on a plane receding from the light, the muscles may stand out in great relief of light and shade; the student will observe this strong contrast of lights and shadows in each separate muscular form, and forget that the whole plane on which they are relieved is in itself in half-tint; again to the destruction of the general roundness and unity of the figure.

There is also in connection with this subject another point to which attention must be directed. It is not only by dwelling on detail that a student may err in not giving the proper tone to his figure; the whole key of the drawing may be too dark or too light. The former is generally the fault of students who are in earnest about their work; this arises from their looking too much at the shades with reference to each other, without due reference to their surroundings; that is to say, from their paying attention only to their relative and not to what for convenience I may here call their absolute, strength in the scale of light and dark. It is very common, for instance, to see the darkest shadow in a drawing from a cast made absolutely, or very nearly, black. Now with reference to other shadows in the figure it may appear to be so, still more with reference to the lightest parts; but let the student look at anything really black (as for instance the shadow under the sleeve of a black coat), and he will then find the real value of the shade he is representing in the scale of tones in the room where he is working. This want of reference to the surroundings is the real cause of the blackness so frequently seen in drawings; by bringing the darkest shade to its proper value in the scale from black to white, you will then have to lighten by degrees the whole of the rest of the shading to bring it into proportion, and the drawing will gradually acquire its proper tone.

The importance of the correct perception of tone has given rise in France to a system of drawing by tone merely, to the ignoring of constructive drawing ; the result is that there is no school where tone (or as they call it "les valeurs") is better understood; the absurdities and crudities of modern English art in this respect being unknown there. At present the French devote themselves too exclusively to this side of art, and the result is that, in their seeking after its subtleties, they have almost arrived at the conclusion that one object is as good to paint as another; a female head or a piece of raw meat being looked upon as equally suitable for die exercise of their skill in painting. There is no necessity for carrying matters to this extreme; the great Italian painters were none the less masters of tone because they devoted themselves to the study of form, and to the higher points of construction and ideal beauty. But it must be kept in mind that no amount of anatomical or constructional knowledge of drawing is of value without a true perception of tone. A figure which, as we say, is "all to pieces" in this respect, however correct the outline, will never stand the light of intelligent criticism. It is our want of perception on this point that makes foreigners laugh when they see our pictures ; and with regard to most of our work of the more popular sort, the laugh is fully justified (ftn. 6).

I have thus far set forth the points a beginner has to attend to during his preliminary course of study in the antique, for there is no doubt that such a course is necessary up to a certain point, before proceeding to the study of the living model. So soon, however, as the student has acquired sufficient comprehension of the general proportions and character of the figure, he should be set to work from the life.

The great facility in drawing the human figure to be found among foreign artists, is no doubt mainly due to the fact of there being but a limited time allowed both for painting and drawing from the living model. In the six sittings of two hours each, which is the usual time allowed to French students in the Academy for their drawings from the life, drawings are done in which the utmost correctness is combined with the most exquisite finish; and what a French student can do, there is no doubt that an English student ought to do; it is a mere question of the habit of acquiring certainty and facility. If the student is allowed too much time for his work, he will easily fall into 'lazy and careless habits; so that this practice of early drawing from nature, and of being allowed a rigorously limited time for each study, I consider most important for the acquisition of a good style of work.

But at this point we enter on another branch of study. Hitherto the student has been able to draw his figures without more knowledge of construction or anatomy than is given for his help in the course of the teaching he receives. If he does not know as yet the position of the collar-bone in the skeleton, he can at all events see it for himself in an antique figure, forming a ridge from the pit of the neck to the point of the shoulder; and as it is always to be found in the same place on the figure, he will find no difficulty in drawing it more or less accurately. But the case is different when he is before the living model; a slight movement of the shoulder, or a pressure on the elbow, will in certain positions cause the collar-bone to start out in strong relief, or disappear into the shoulder. In order that he may draw it with any accuracy, therefore, it is necessary that he should know its form, the part it plays in the construction of the body, where it is attached at either end, and by what muscles it is surrounded. He must therefore carry on with his study of drawing the study of anatomy, which he will do by drawing from the skeleton and anatomical casts, and attending if possible a course of anatomical lectures. Such studies as appear among the prize-drawings at South Kensington in which the student has outlined an antique figure and drawn it out as an anatomical subject, are very good at a more advanced stage. Still better would be the same process applied to drawings from the life-model, the anatomical firms in the antique being generalised and difficult to discover except by a very advanced student. It will not, however, be of much use for him to study anatomy, until he has made some progress in drawing: unless he has some general knowledge of the aspect of the human figure which he can keep in mind while attending the lectures, he will only half take in, and probably soon forget all he hears, and the time spent in drawing anatomical studies would be better bestowed on his usual work. It is better therefore not to devote too much time to anatomy at first, as a competent instructor can give all the assistance in this respect that is needed in the earlier stages.

It must be remembered that anatomy will not teach drawing; it is only a help to the knowledge the student is seeking for, the knowledge of the human form in all its infinite varieties of action and position. I can even conceive the possibility of acquiring a knowledge of the figure, from continued practice in drawing it in all positions, without any acquaintance with anatomy. The Greek sculptors indeed are supposed by many to have worked from a knowledge of the external aspects of the figure only, the art of dissection being unknown to them. But such knowledge would seem to us to be impossible of attainment even in a life-time by the most gifted minds, while by the help of anatomy the ordinary student may gain by a short road the knowledge which would otherwise be but slowly and gradually acquired in the course of his studies. It may therefore be taken for granted that the more acquaintance with anatomy the artist possesses, the more intimate will be his knowledge of the external aspects of the figure, and the better will he be able to draw it. There is no doubt that Michelangelo, in his later years, was able, with a very small amount of assistance from nature in the shape of preliminary studies, frequently no more than slight sketches, to draw out his grand figures and paint them in fresco, with all their difficulties of foreshortening and relief, purely from his profound knowledge of anatomy. The advantage of tills of course was that the figure when painted was the complete expression of his first intention; and he could out of his supreme knowledge give to a figure whatever characteristics of beauty or sublimity he pleased, as freely as if he were its creator. If, therefore, I say that it is better not to take up this study too soon, it is only because I think the student's time may be better employed at first in acquiring knowledge of the more generally important properties of form and tone.

After the study of form and tone comes the study of colour; and the student having passed a certain time drawing in the life-school, will be anxious to proceed to the practice of this important part of his art. My experience indeed is that students are frequently too much in a hurry in this respect: they should remember that there is a certain amount of drudgery which is unavoidable in the earlier stages of all study, and that art makes no exception to this rule. If, as is unfortunately only too frequently the case, the study of art is taken up later in life than most others, the student must do his best to place himself in the position of a beginner, and to understand that nothing but a regular and methodical progress will be of any avail; that the ground must be gone over at whatever cost of patience; and that there is no such thing as jumping from one difficulty to another. When the student can accomplish a drawing from the life in black and white, which shall convey a just impression of the movement, proportions, and general characteristics of the model, and which at the same time shall show that he has mastered the more important points of anatomy and construction, and is able to express them in a workmanlike manner, with a due regard to those qualities of tone to which I have attached so much importance; — I think that then he may consider that he is entitled to add the difficulties of colour to those which he already has to deal with. I am aware that there is a school of artists who consider that painting cannot be taken up too soon, and that students should be taught form through the medium of colour; but these I think are of the same class as those who would teach drawing merely by the study of tone, and their system tends to lead to the same end, — the substitution of the lower arts of imitation, for that incomparably higher art which aims at ideal beauty, and which cannot be acquired without a thorou

gh training in sound constructional drawing. That painting should be carried on side by side with drawing from the beginning is far more intelligible, for the difficulties of oil-painting are extreme, so that one may almost say that it cannot be undertaken too young. I am to some extent of that opinion myself; only, if the student must begin to paint young, he must be still younger when he begins to draw, for he cannot carry on the two studies systematically at the same time; and, in brief, the simpler study must precede the more difficult, at the risk of neither being thoroughly learnt. Therefore until a student in the life can draw the figure well enough not to be hampered by difficulties of proportion and construction while he is painting, it will be of no advantage to him to involve himself in further difficulties: and it will be found that he will hardly have gained this necessary amount of proficiency, under two years of regular work from the time of his beginning his course as a student of art, though some may be more rapid in their progress than others. I admit, however, that whatever spare time a student has, and during the vacations, there can no harm, but rather good, result from his making studies in painting; it is only the interruption of the regular course of work that I consider objectionable.

Now in painting, as in drawing, the just perception of tone is of the highest possible importance. The absolute colour of an object (supposing for convenience' sake that there be such a thing) is hardly ever seen in nature; it is always more or less modified by the circumstances under which it is seen. A simple example is sufficient to explain my meaning. A blue drapery, in shade, without reflection of any kind falling upon it, or light transmitted through it, will be black (which is equally true of course of any other colour). With a reflection upon it from a yellow wall it will appear green; with a reflection from a red wall it would appear purple, and so on; now all this time the drapery will be inherently blue, but to the spectator it will appear of different colours according to circumstances. The various tints that colours take under various circumstances are no! by any means always so obvious as in this example ; indeed they may be said to be practically infinite; but in every case it is the precise tone of these apparent colours that the painter has to discover and fix on his canvas in absolute colours, that is to say in the various tints which he has mixed together on his palette.

Now almost every painter has his pet system of painting. There are all sorts of schemes for underpainting, glazing, scumbling, and a hundred other processes, which are calculated to give transparency to the shadows, brightness to the lights, solidity to the masses, and I know not what; — the impression apparently being that solidity and transparency are to be obtained by some trick of painting rather than by imitating the aspects of nature. But with all this the student has nothing to do. It appears to me obvious, that, if in making his study, he can so match on his canvas the colours and tone of the object he is painting, that an exact resemblance shall result, nothing further can be wished for; if this is achieved the object will appear solid and the shadows will appear transparent as a matter of course. The intention is so to train the student's eye that he shall be able to see, and see at once, the tones and colours of his model; and if he is always painting colours which he does not see, with a view of correcting them afterwards by glazes and other methods, what probability is there that he will ever see colour truly? His only chance is by matching each tint and each gradation of tint to gain the necessary practice in seeing which is the all-important matter; it is his eye which he must educate to learn the art of painting. The right tones placed in the right places, and the work is done. That is the whole mystery of painting for a student; aided by his previous practice in drawing, the hand will certainly educate itself with the eye.

For a student, I said; for when he has once mastered this difficulty of seeing, and knows what nature is like, he may take what liberties with his palette he pleases; he need never go wrong: and if he thinks he can gain by processes of painting qualities of workmanship which cannot be produced by this simple means of tone-matching (as he no doubt can) he will not only have the liberty to use them, but what is more important, the power of doing so. To a student, however, processes are delusive; and only lead him to endeavour, as Reynolds I think has said, to begin where the great men have left off. The method I prescribe, therefore, is no method of painting at all, but a method of study or education; it teaches no process; and I hope no one will imagine for a moment that there is any short road to painting by means of a process.

To the beginnings of painting the same rule will apply as to the beginnings of drawing; the simplest proceeding must come first. A student having obtained admission to the painting class in his school, will begin best by painting from the cast, not doing what are called at South Kensington monochromes, which are not paintings but mere light and shade studies in oil-colours, the imitation of tone not being included ; but by really endeavouring to imitate at once the exact tones of the cast. The method indeed, universal in the Government schools, of making monochrome paintings, on a system of not imitating the tone of the casts, is about the most dangerous part of all their system. The practice of merely making a drawing in oil-colours, simply shuts out the one great difficulty in painting; that of keeping in mind the three great qualities of form, tone, and colour. The only method of educating the eye for colour is by teaching the student from the very first to match his tones to those of the model. The painting when placed at the side of the model should be so like it as to be startling in its truth. When the student can do this he may allow full scope to his imagination; he will be able to paint what presents itself to his mind's eye as easily as that which he sees with his bodily vision; but unless he can truly paint what he has before him he can do nothing else.

It is useless to pursue any further the career of the art-student. When he can paint reasonably well from the cast, he will proceed to work from the living-model, which will be the last stage in his course of instruction ; but he must never give up continuing to draw, carrying on this study along with that of painting. The various other studies he will pursue do not come within the limits of this paper, which touches only on the points immediately connected with the study of the figure, but he will do well, indeed he will find it necessary if he aims at any high form of art, to pursue courses of Perspective, and of Architecture ; of the latter especially, as opening out fields for the imagination in the treatment of the higher classes of subject, which are closed to any one ignorant of that art. He will also carry on the study of water-colour greatly to his advantage ; if he ever has the good fortune to have a painting in fresco to do, he will hardly be able to manage the material' without previous practice in watercolour; unless of course he has made fresco his special study. As for the great masters of painting and sculpture, if he has any love for his art he will take a natural pleasure in constantly contemplating their works.

If I have expressed myself clearly, I shall have been understood to speak in this paper only of matters which are necessary in the education of all artists, to whatever style of figure-painting they may devote themselves. A true and correct perception of the three points of Form, Tone, and Colour will have been seen to be as necessary to the treatment of subjects of a lower as well as of a higher order. They do not any of them come under the category of things which may be neglected or not, as the artist pleases. They are the essentials, without which an artist cannot put his ideas into proper form. It is useless for an artist to put forward his poetical feeling, depth of religious sentiment, attention to beauty of detail, earnestness of intention, or any other quality, in the place of the workmanlike power which shall enable him to place his intentions before us in an artistic form. And if it were allowable to make a choice amongst these scholastic qualities, I, for my part, should rather tolerate a fault of drawing or of perspective, or an inharmonious arrangement of colour, than a false rendering of tone. The true perception of this is, so to speak, a constant in the works of all the great painters: for its sake one forgives the absurdities of Correggio's drawing, and the vulgarity of Rembrandt's heads; its treatment is developed in the works of Michelangelo to an equal grandeur with that of form; while it is the whole secret of the position which Velasquez holds as the chief among realistic painters. When Turner begins to lose his perception of it, all the poetical and imaginative power, so copiously displayed in the conceptions of his subjects, does not save his pictures from being repulsive; while we have one living painter who, though he may not owe his popularity to this quality, has earned his success among artists and intelligent critics to his wonderful power, when he chooses to exert it, of seizing on its higher and more subtle truths. A true appreciation of the important part it plays in those external aspects of nature, which it is the business of the artist to interpret, is never absent from the work of any great master; and conversely it may be said that no painter, of any time or country, can come into the list of even second-rate artists, whose pictures are deficient in this all-important quality.

Footnotes:

1. This lecture was first delivered at the opening of the third session of the Slade Schools, and afterwards in a modified form at Leeds, and again, with alterations, at the distribution of prizes at the Middlesborough School of Art. I give it here in the form in which it might have been given at University College, with the subsequent alterations.

2. Through the pergonal nature of the teaching, the school being new, and the scholars few, and not sufficiently advanced to divide into classes.

3. It would of course be a mistake to talk of a composition of tone. ' Tone" does not mean exactly "light and shade," but the knowledge of tone means the knowledge of the correct relations of light and shade, and is necessary in order to make what Lionardo calls "That just and natural dispensation of lights and shadows, usually expressed by the word Chiaroscuro." The study of tone must be made from nature, and the knowledge applied to compositions of light and shade.

4. It must be understood that these remarks are throughout addressed to students of figure-painting for pictures. For ornamental design a more extended Course of outline drawing from the first is necessary.

5. As much time used to be wasted over highly-stippled drawings of cubes and cones in Schools of Art, as over the antique figures referred to in Lecture III. p. 106.

6. That there has been great improvement in English art in this respect within the last decade there can be no doubt. The particular garish look that was common to English exhibition-rooms is much modified of late; and French artists remarked on the great general improvement in English art in the Paris Exhibition of last year (1878) compared to what they saw of it in 1867. I was gratified to hear from a French artist of distinction an opinion which is a confirmation of my own, that our art has improved and will continue to improve, because the English take what is good from other schools without sacrificing their originality. He compared it with the art of the Belgian, Italian, and other schools, which can only imitate.