A Child's Guide to Pictures

by Charles H. Caffin

The Mystic Marriage of St. Catharine. Correggio.

that among those who do some manufacture an atmosphere of their own, while others try to render nature’s atmosphere, let us study for ourselves the effect of atmosphere in nature. It will help us, if I begin by telling what we expect to find. First then, that the outlines of objects are softened; secondly, that the bulk of things seems flattened; and thirdly, that as objects recede or stand further off from our eyes, their forms becomes more and more indistinct and their colors change.

As to the first. Suppose you are standing on a street or country road, and a wagon passes you. While it is close in front of you, the body of the wagon and the wheels and the man driving, all are clearly outlined; you can distinguish distinctly the parts of the wagon and the character of the man’s figure, whether it is fat or thin, strong or weak-looking, and so on. But, as the wagon passes along the road, its appearance changes. At first, it is the smaller details that disappear; they have become merged in the general mass; then the outlines of this mass grow less and less distinct; you could not be sure now, unless you had seen the wagon close, exactly what its build is; nor does one part seem nearer to you than another, its bulk has become flattened, and gradually the whole affair looks to be only a patch of color against the color of the road.

Do you remember, it was as patches we saw the cows which we met early in our talk? The reason then given for their appearance was that our eyes were not strong enough to distinguish their details at such a distance. And this reason also holds good in the case of the wagon. But it is not only the distance that reduces our power of seeing, but also the layers, or veils of atmosphere that hang between us and the object. We are sure of this on a foggy day, when the mist lies low over the country or city, and trees and tall buildings loom up like blurs, and everything beyond the distance of a few hundred paces is blotted from sight. But the fog or mist is only the atmosphere more moist than usual and with its moisture condensed by cooling.

When you breathe on a mirror, the damp of your breath is condensed by the coolness of the glass. A film of mist forms over the mirror. Of an evening you may see the mist lying over the river or meadows; for the sun is gone down and the earth and air are cooling. But the upper air cools more quickly than the lower part, since the latter is still warmed by the heat stored in the earth. So, as the cooler air from above drops down, it acts like a mirror to the breath of the earth or the air that lies close over it; and this air is condensed into mist. All through the night both air and earth are cooling, but the earth more slowly, so that there is still a meeting of cooler and warmer air and consequent condensations, and the mist is hovering over the meadows when the next morning’s sun rises. As the sun mounts up, it begins to spread its warmth and the upper air is the first to feel it. Growing warm, it rises, drawing up after it the cooler air below. And as the cooler air is sucked up, the warmer air closes in behind it; until, as this circulation of cool and warm continues, the warmth at last reaches down to the mists above the earth. And then commences that beautiful sight that you may see on some summer mornings. The mists, that a while ago lay like a blanket over the sleeping earth, begin to stir, as if they themselves were awakening from sleep. They tremble a little, then slowly stretch themselves, and begin to rise to meet the warmth of day. And as they rise, little wisps of mist become detached from the main body and float up and disappear, until gradually the whole rising mass is rent asunder by the currents of warm air into shreds and wreaths, which curl and float and soar and at last lose themselves in the warmth that now wraps the earth.

Later in the day, if the weather is very hot the air, close above the ground, becomes so heated that it rises very quickly, and we see a shimmer of light upon its shifting patches. I mention this, because I wish you to think of atmosphere, not only as veils of gauze hung between us and objects we are looking at, but also as a moving, palpitating, vibrating fluid. We will talk a little more about this presently. Meanwhile, let us note some of the effects of atmosphere upon form and color.

We have mentioned that it softens the outlines of objects. This is only another way of saying that the objects appear less distinct; that even a chimney, though it cuts against the sky in strong contrast, has not really hard sharp outlines. At first sight you will think, perhaps, that it has; just as the cornices of the roofs may seem to you to have hard lines, and the windows and doorways to be sharply outlined. But they do not appear so to an artist’s eye, and will not to yours in time, if you are observant. Suppose an artist with pen and ink should draw one of these houses, using a straight edge to make the outline hard and sharp. This is how an architect draws the design of a house, because his object is to make an exact drawing for the builder to work by. But, if you have seen one of these architectural drawings, you will recognise, I think, that it does not look natural; that somehow or other it is too precise and tight and hard to suggest the appearance of an actual house. If this were his object, the architect himself would draw the house differently. He would make what is called a free-hand drawing. He would no longer represent the edges of cornices and chimneys and so on, with continuous lines; he would “break them up”; lifting his pen for a moment and leaving a tiny space of white before he continues the line; making the line thicker or thinner as he went along, and occasionally pressing on his pen to produce a dot. In these ways he will break up all the edges and outlines that they may not be too hard, but may have the less distinct appearance that the lines of the actual house present to his eye. For the same reason when he draws any bits of carving, such as the capitals of the columns of the front door, he will not represent every detail exactly, as if he were making a working drawing for the carver. He will leave out some and break up others, so that, although he plainly indicates the style and character of the ornament, it will not seem hard and sharp, but softened, and a trifle indistinct, as the capital appears to his eye. He will, in fact, make allowances for the softening effects of atmosphere.

Up to this point we have imagined the penmanship to be concerned only with the lines. Now let us see how a great pen-artist, like Joseph Pennell, or Edwin A. Abbey, would carry his drawing further. He would see the house, not as a skeleton of lines, but as a mass, part of which is silhouetted against the sky, while the rest is seen in relation to the other buildings or objects that stand near it. Each according to his own individual technique, that is to say, his own particular way of using the pen, will make his building a mass distinct from the masses of the other buildings, of the ground, and of the sky. And on the masses of buildings he will make the windows appear as they do in the actual building—namely, as patches, darker in color than the walls. All this he will do, because to his eye the different objects, under the influence of the atmosphere, appear as masses of various colors in relation to one another. More than this, when you have grown to appreciate fully the work of Pennell and Abbey, you will find that, though it is done in black and white, it seems to suggest color.

Elsewhere I have spoken of the fact that many artists, especially modern ones, see nature as an arrangement of colored spaces or masses in relation to one another. This implies that they are very little conscious of the edges or outlines of the masses. If they think of them at all, it is to try and prevent your noticing them in their pictures. They paint, for example, the head, and shoulders, and cheek of a man, a bust portrait—with a dark background. If you examine the picture closely, you will not find a sharp line, separating the head from the background. In fact the color of the hair and cheek seems to extend a little way into the dark of the background. The artist has dragged his brush round the head, so that it is impossible to say just where the background begins. The reason for this you understand, as soon as you step back and look at the picture from a short distance off. The head appears very solid; we can believe there is really a hard skull beneath the full flesh of the cheeks and the tight skin of the forehead. Yet the head does not seem to be stuck against the background, like a postage stamp on an envelope. Indeed, if the picture is well painted, the dark part is not really a background. That is to say, it is not merely something behind the head; it seems to have depth and to go back, but it also comes forward and surrounds the head. The latter does not stick out of the picture, it keeps its place back within the frame, enveloped in atmosphere that, though it is very dark, is penetrable. You feel, that is to say, that your hand could be pushed through it without coming up against some wall, as it were, that would stop it.