STUDY FOR THE PORTRAIT OF MME. R. By C. F. Gaillard.
{78} light to dark, you will soon realize that, while in your drawing for printing you may never in a hundred years’ practice draw anything so delicate as the Gaillard, yet in your simplest drawings you may put in practice the theory upon which it is made. For example, if you are drawing an old woman’s head, even if you only use four or five lines to represent her hair, you will not press upon your pen when you are doing her hair on the top, but you will press upon it when you come within the region of the ears; and that pressure, though it will not represent hairs, nor the actual value of the shadow, will yet give the difference between the light on the top of the head and the shadow behind the ears, and this will suggest to the educated eye the roundness of the cranium.
Now we reproduce also the rough Watts drawing. Let us contrast these two drawings. The one is almost as finished as it can be, the other slight; yet I want you to realize why I recommend this slight drawing to printers and tell you that it is artistic. It is so because in the very heavy lines that you see in the ear, beard and coat there is knowledge of modeling. The artist knew his business just as Gaillard did, and every time he put down a blotty line it was meant to represent the presence of a shadow. This face is from a photograph; hundreds of delicate tones have been left out; and the white hair of the beard is modeled with nothing but thin and heavy lines while the shadows of the photograph were delicate gray tints! A clever penman drawing from a photograph uses darks which the uneducated eye will take to be arbitrary blackening of the drawing, but which an artist knows are the result of intelligent observation.
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GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS, R. A. An English newspaper cut from Tid-Bits, artist unknown. An excellent example of newspaper work. Note that the skull-cap is not represented partly gray and partly black because the artist meant to indicate a cap that was one color in front and another in the back, but he meant to show the rounding of the cranium, just as Gaillard did in varying the tones in the hair of the old woman.
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Now, in the Gaillard drawing you see a very delicate line running diagonally from the wing of the nose almost to the corner of the lips. This is called the naso-labial line, and is found in every old face. I say again, that though you work for one hundred years as a printer you would probably never draw a delicate line like this. But if you should make studies in pencil and realize that this line is typical of old age, you would be able to put it in such a drawing as the Watts (the artist has used two lines to represent it), where, you will notice, it comes down about as far on the lower lip as in the Gaillard, and you would realize why it was left out in the Dagnan-Bouveret and Marchand younger subjects.
This chapter should be exceedingly interesting to you as indicating two things—one discouraging and the other encouraging. First, that when students of art have the opportunity to work so beautifully, as in the Bargue-Gérôme studies, and afterward from life, as in the Gaillard, they needs must see more than you do, and you must not expect to equal them if you, a busy printer, can only practice a few evenings a week. Therefore you should not attempt subtile renderings like the Gaillard, but should confine yourself to simple means. On the other hand, when I tell you that this is about all the study there is gone through with in an art school (I say about all, for besides blocking-in, students learn a good deal about values; this we shall treat of in a succeeding chapter), it should be interesting to you to realize that if you will simply train yourself to see light and shade like the plinth in the foot studies given in Chapter XII by drawing a pasteboard box, and then afterward draw from life, so as to see that hair is darker {81} in shaded portions than in light ones, and that in an old person the naso-labial line is marked and shows darker than the cheeks, you will, when copying a photograph for your paper, no matter how roughly you work, be able to indicate the shadows in the hair and the dark naso-labial line, as in the Watts portrait. This, I say, should encourage you, and it is the only way for you to learn to draw.