The following letters,[185] one from Forbes to myself, written ten years ago, and the other from one of his pupils, received by me a few weeks since, must, however, take their due place among the other evidence on which such judgment is to be given.
J. R.
II.
MISCELLANEOUS.
[From “The Artist and Amateur’s Magazine” (edited by E. V. Rippingille), February
1844, pp. 314-319.]
REFLECTIONS IN WATER.[186]
To the Editor of “The Artist and Amateur’s Magazine.”
Sir: The phenomena of light and shade, rendered to the eye by the surface or substance of water, are so intricate and so multitudinous, that had I wished fully to investigate, or even fully to state them, a volume instead of a page would have been required for the task. In the paragraphs[187] which I devoted to the subject I expressed, as briefly as possible, the laws which are of most general application—with which artists are indeed so universally familiar, that I conceived it altogether unnecessary to prove or support them: but since I have expressed them in as few words as possible, I cannot afford to have any of those words missed or disregarded; and therefore when I say that on clear water, near the eye, there is no shadow, I must not be understood to mean that on muddy water, far from the eye, there is no shadow. As, however, your correspondent appears to deny my position in toto, and as many persons, on their first glance at the subject, might be inclined to do the same, you will perhaps excuse me for occupying a page or two with a more explicit statement, both of facts and principles, than my limits admitted in the “Modern Painters.”
First, for the experimental proof of my assertion that “on clear water, near the eye, there is no shadow.” Your correspondent’s trial with the tub is somewhat cumbrous and inconvenient;[188] a far more simple experiment will settle the matter. Fill a tumbler with water; throw into it a narrow strip of white paper; put the tumbler into sunshine; dip your finger into the water between the paper and the sun, so as to throw a shadow across the paper and on the water. The shadow will of course be distinct on the paper, but on the water absolutely and totally invisible.
This simple trial of the fact, and your explanation of the principle given in your ninth number,[189] are sufficient proof and explanation of my assertion; and if your correspondent requires authority as well as ocular demonstration, he has only to ask Stanfield or Copley Fielding, or any other good painter of sea; the latter, indeed, was the person who first pointed out the fact to me when a boy. What then, it remains to be determined, are those lights and shades on the sea, which, for the sake of clearness, and because they appear such to the ordinary observer, I have spoken of as “horizontal lines,” and which have every appearance of being cast by the clouds like real shadows? I imagined that I had been sufficiently explicit on this subject both at pages 330 and 363:[190] but your correspondent appears to have confused himself by inaccurately receiving the term shadow as if it meant darkness of any kind; whereas my second sentence—“every darkness on water is reflection, not shadow”—might have shown him that I used it in its particular sense, as meaning the absence of positive light on a visible surface. Thus, in endeavoring to support his assertion that the shadows on the sea are as distinct as on a grass field, he says that they are so by contrast with the “light reflected from its polished surface;” thus showing at once that he has been speaking and thinking all along, not of shadow, but of the absence of reflected light—an absence which is no more shadow than the absence of the image of a piece of white paper in a mirror is shadow on the mirror.
The question, therefore, is one of terms rather than of things; and before proceeding it will be necessary for me to make your correspondent understand thoroughly what is meant by the term shadow as opposed to that of reflection.