A Child's Guide to Pictures

by Charles H. Caffin

Dido Building Carthage. J. M. W. Turner.

the picture the arrangement of dark and light is rhythmical. I have only touched upon the broad general plan of contrasted darks and lights, and must leave you to study for yourselves the intricate and subtle effects with which the picture abounds; for example, the fine threads and little dots of light and dark that form a tangle on the left bank; or, on the right, the mass of leafage in half shadow against which the trunk of the tree shows very dark. You know the old proverb about leading a horse to the water. I can draw your attention to these things, but I can not make you feel their beauty. I think, however, I can promise you, that, if you are sufficiently interested in what we are talking about to really study this picture, to explore carefully the lighter parts and peer into the shadows to see what lurks within them, its beauty will make itself known to you.

As I myself am examining a black and white reproduction of this picture, that lies before me while I write these lines, there is music coming from the next room. It has stopped, and I wish it would begin again; for music seems to fit in with the impressions that this picture stirs in my imagination. Nor is this merely a fanciful idea. Music is one art and painting is another. They are different, it is true, but yet are sisters with much in common. And why not? For they come from the same parents—the hand and the mind of man. And through the harmony of the light and dark of which this picture is composed there floats, it seems to me, the fancy of a melody. I think it comes from out the endless distance of that sky; gently floating toward us, and crooning over the objects in the foreground, as a mother murmurs a lullaby over her baby while it falls asleep. But it is not altogether crooning, for see that tree’s dark, round mass of tone! How it thumps itself into our notice, while its force spreads up the hill, and then leaps across the water, and stirs with a different kind of energy in the dark building on the left. There is nothing of the feebleness and the helplessness of a baby in this picture. It suggests rather, big and mighty effort, growing toward the time of rest. It is not the music of a lullaby I seem to hear, but the evening hymn of sturdy workers as they cease for a little from their toil.

CHAPTER IX
NATURALISTIC COMPOSITION

IN the preceding chapters we have been studying formal, or conventional, composition. We have seen how the artists arrange their groups of figures and the position and gestures of each figure according to a rule or formula or convention, the basis of which is a geometric plan, on which they build up a balance of repetitions and contrasts. And we have noted that these formal compositions are artificial arrangements; that the figures are not grouped as you might expect them to be in real life, nor in positions that men and women usually assume. And these formal compositions we have seen were also called, classic; the last example being the classic landscape in which nature has been made to look more grand by the addition of features of classic architecture.

We reach now another principle of composition. It is the arrangement adopted by the artist, whose motive is to make his picture represent nature naturally; so I call it naturalistic composition. But, as we have noted before, the artist is not satisfied merely to represent nature; he wishes in the first place to make his picture a thing of beauty. Nature is not always beautiful; so he selects from nature and arranges his subject in such a way, that we shall not only recognise how true the picture is to nature, but feel also how beautiful it is as a work of art. Its beauty, you see, is founded, not upon a formal plan, but on its truth to nature.

Here for example, is The Sower by the French artist, Jean François Millet. If we have ever seen a man scattering grain, we recognise at once the picture’s truth to life. But Millet’s intention was not only to make us know what the man is doing, but to create an impression on our minds that shall make us feel a sense of beauty, through the way in which the picture represents the incident. As a young man, Millet had studied the examples of Greek and Roman sculpture in the Museum of the Louvre in Paris, and learnt through them the classic principles of composition—the balance obtained by rhythmical repetition and contrast. And these principles, as we shall see presently, are applied to this figure of The Sower. I hope to show you that this is the secret of the picture’s beauty. Although the action of the figure inside the shabby clothes is quite natural, the movement is rhythmical. In fact it represents a mixture of the classical and the naturalistic motive.