Portrait painters have always been fond of a top light, which gives a direct concentrated light descending on the sitter, very similar in character to the side-light, but more favorable to the expression and drawing of the face.
Cross Lights.—The most confusing and difficult of study and representation are the "cross lights." If there are several windows or other points for the admission of light, and the sitter or object painted is between them, the light comes from all sides, so that the rays cross each other and there is no single scheme of light and shade. The rays from one side modify the shadows cast from the other side, and a perplexing and involved arrangement of values is the result. This is a favorite technical problem with painters, and its solution is splendid training; but the student who can successfully solve it is not far from the end of his "student days."
CHAPTER XX
COMPOSITION
Importance.—Composition is of the utmost importance. It is impossible that a picture should be good without it. You may define it as that study by means of which the balance of the picture comes about. But you must understand the word balance in its broadest sense. There is nothing in the planning of the picture which has not to be considered in making the picture balance.
The arrangement of the lines, of the forms, of the masses, and of the colors must all be right if the composition be right. Composition is the planning of the picture; and it is more or less complicated, more or less to be carefully studied beforehand in exact accordance with the simplicity or complication of the scheme of the picture. You may not need more than the consideration of a few main facts. It may almost be done by a few moments' deliberation in some simple studies or even pictures. But even then there is possible the most subtle discrimination of selection, and a perfect gem of composition may be found in the arrangement of a picture having the simplest and fewest elements. The more complicated the materials which are to be worked into a picture, the more careful must be the previous planning; but, for all that, the genius will find scope for his utmost powers in a simple figure, just because the fewer the means, the more each single thing can interfere with the balance of the whole, and the more a fine choice will tell.
The Æsthetic.—I have already mentioned briefly the æsthetic elements of a picture. I have called to your attention that back of the obvious facts of a subject and the objects in the picture, and the theme which the painter makes his picture represent; back of the technical processes and management of concrete material which make painting possible, is the æsthetic purpose of the work of art; without this it could not be a work of art at all: it would be merely a more or less exact representation of something, a mere prosaic description, the interest in which would lie wholly in the fact, and would perish whenever interest in the fact should cease. It is not the fact, nor even the able expression of the fact, which makes a work of art a thing of interest and delight centuries after the bearing of the fact has been forgotten. The perennial interest of a work of art lies in the way in which the artist has used his ostensible theme, and all the facts and objects appertaining to it, as a part of the material with which he expresses those ideas which are purely æsthetic; which do not rest on material things. These have to do with material things only by rendering them beautiful, giving to them an interest which they themselves could not otherwise have.