It will readily be seen that large copies of small sketches can be made in exact proportions by a further application of the diagonal, but care should be taken to have all these lines drawn scrupulously accurate, because the slightest deviation throws the proportions all out.
STYLES AND MANNER.
Pen-drawing is ruled by expediency more, perhaps, than any art. I shall not say that one method is more right than another in the management of textures, or in the elaboration or mere suggestion of detail, for line work is, to begin with, a purely arbitrary rendering of tones. There is nothing like line in nature. Take up an isolated brick; it does not suggest line in any way. Build it up with others into a wall, and you can in pen and ink render that wall in many ways that will be equally convincing and right. It may be expressed in terms of splatter-work, which can be made to represent admirably a wall where the bricks have become welded into an homogeneous mass, individually indistinguishable by age, or of vertical or horizontal lines that may or may not take account of each individual brick and the joints of the mortar that binds the courses together. Crosshatching, though a cheap expedient and a decaying convention, may be used. But to lose sight of ordinary atmospheric conditions is no more privileged in pen-work than in paint. This is not by any means unnecessary or untimely advice, though it should be. The fact of using a pen instead of a brush does not empower anybody to play tricks with the solar system, though one sees it constantly done. One continually sees in pen-drawing the laws of light and shade set at naught, and nobody says anything against it—perhaps it looks smart. Certainly the effect is novel, and novelty is a powerful factor in anything. But to draw a wall shining with a strong diffused light which throws a great black shadow, is contrary to art and nature both. “Nature,” according to Mr. Whistler, “may be ‘creeping up,’ but she has not reached that point yet. When one sees suns setting behind the east ends of cathedrals, with other vagaries of that sort, one simply classes such things with that amusing erratum of Mr. Rider Haggard’s, in which he describes a ship ‘steaming out of the mouth of the Thames, shaping her course toward the red ball of the setting sun.’” But though the instance is amusing, the custom is apt to pall.
Some of the American pen-draughtsmen who contribute to the Century are exceedingly clever, and their handling extremely personal; but after a time this excessive personality ceases to charm, and, for one thing, these young bloods are curiously narrow in their choice of the masters from whom they are only too pleased to derive. Mr. Brennan is, perhaps, the most curiously original of these men. He is the man who has shown most convincingly that the inked thumb is the most instant and effective instrument wherewith to render velvet in a pen-drawing. You cannot fail to be struck with his method; his manner is entirely personal, and yet, after a time, it worries one into intolerance.
It is the same with that convention, founded, apparently, by Mr. Herbert Railton, which has had a long run of some nine or ten years. It was a convention in pictorial architecture that had nothing except a remarkably novel technique to recommend it. The illustrator invited us rather to see how “pretty” he could render an old building, than how nearly he could show it us as it stood. He could draw an elevation in a manner curiously feminine, but he could only repeat himself and his trees; his landscapes were insults to the imagination. Nothing inspired him to achievements beyond pictorial confectionery.
This convention has had its day, although in the mean while so strikingly mannered was it that it appealed to almost all the young and undiscriminating men whose work lay in the rendering of pictorial architecture. “Go to,” said the Average Artist in “the picturesque,” “I will sit down and make a drawing in the manner of Mr. Railton.” And he did, generally, it may be observed, from a photograph, and in the undistracting seclusion of his own room. This sort of artistic influenza, which nearly all the younger men caught at one time or another, was very dangerous to true art. But it could not possibly last; it was so resourceless. Always we were invited to glance at the same sky and an unchanging rendering of buildings, whether old or new, in the same condition of supposedly picturesque decrepitude. Everything in this mannerism wore the romantic air of the Moated Grange and radiated Mrs. Radcliffe, dungeons, spectres, and death, whether the subject was a ruinated castle or a new warehouse. All this has grown offensive: we want more sobriety. This apotheosis of raging skies and falling smuts, of impending chimneys, crumbling stones, and tottering walls was only a personal manner. Its imitators have rendered it ridiculous.
The chief merits of such topographical and archæological drawings are that they be truthful and reverent. If art is ever to approach the documentary stage, to be used as the record of facts, it is in this matter. To flood the country with representations of old buildings that are not so much pictures of them as exercises in an exaggerated personal manner, is to deserve ill at the hands of all who would have preserved to them the appearance of places that are passing away. The illustrations to such books, say, as Mr. Loftie’s Inns of Court or his Westminster Abbey are of no historic or artistic value whatever; they are merely essays in a wild and weird manner of which we are tired in the originator of it; which we loathe in those who imitate its worst faults. We require a sober style in this work, after being drunken so long with its so-called picturesqueness, which, rightly considered, is but impressionism, ill seen and uninstructed.
No one has exercised so admirable a method, whether in landscape, in portraiture, or in architecture, as Sir George Reid, but his work is not readily accessible for the study it invites. It is scholarly and expressive, eloquent of the character of his subject, free from redundancies. It is elaborate or suggestive on due occasion, and, although the style is so distinguished, you always feel that every drawing by this stylist is really and truly a representation of the person, place, or thing he has drawn, and not a mere pretext for an individual handling; no braggart assumption of “side.”