Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art.

by P. H. Emerson

When the vulgar herd jape at photography, stand firm and ask them if their long-eared ancestors did not jape at water-colour painting and at etching.

Criticism.

Ask of critics only “fair play.” Much of the criticism of to-day consists in the suppression of the truth of the author and the advocacy of the falsity of the critic. Criticism is as yet in the metaphysical stage, but it will one day become rational and of some worth. Then, critics will not attempt the huge joke of “placing” people in order like a pedagogue, e.g. Matthew Arnold between Gray and Wordsworth, as some wonderful person did not long ago in one of the reviews; but criticism will show us how works of art may serve to illustrate the life-history of different epochs. The huge farce of “placing” criticism will be one of the stock jokes of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER V.
DECORATIVE ART.

Decorative art.

By the term “decorative,” we mean the ornamentation of anything constructed for some useful or special purpose as opposed to the ornamentation whose object is to please per se. Thus, though both sculpture and easel pictures are decorative in one sense, they are executed with no consideration or regard for other purposes than to please. As we have before shown, the humblest of the decorative arts may be raised to the dignity of a fine art if an artist takes the work in hand and succeeds, or the work may degenerate into mere craftsman’s work. For decorative purposes, the various methods are modified and adapted to the important considerations of the use and fitness of the object or place decorated. Thus no good artist would paint a finished and studied landscape on a dado, he would paint the scene flat, and colour it in appropriate harmony with surrounding objects, for that is the aim; and a workman not an artist would, of course, painfully elaborate and finish it so that it was neither a decorative work nor a painting in the ordinary sense. |Naturalism in decorative art.| In all good decorative work the same old story of naturalism holds good; all the best decorative work we have seen was suggested by nature, and though, of course, it is beyond the scope of decorative art to “copy nature,” as superficial folk say, yet all patterns and forms and harmonies should be suggested by nature. We have seen harmonies of sea-weed and sand which would have made a beautiful colour scheme for decorative work. The best decorative work has always been suggested by nature; geometrical patterns being taken from crystals, microscopic drawings of vegetable cells, &c.

Photography as applied to decorative art.

However, we must omit a general discussion of this interesting subject, for we are here only concerned with its photographic side. We are not aware that this application of decorative art has ever received much attention; and when we mention transparencies and enamels, we have said all that has been done towards employing photography decoratively. By enamels, of course, is not understood those glossed and raised productions on paper, which by some extraordinary blunder have been erroneously called enamels.

Principles.

Now the photographer, who studies and hopes to excel at decorative photography, must remember that he must work on the same general principles as he does in producing pictures, that is, he must pay attention, in a broad way, to the tone of the room, to effects of contrast, to harmonies, to the effect of artificial lights and of complementary colours, and above all to naturalism. Thus a delicate landscape must not be enamelled on a tea-cup, for it is obviously false in principle to place a picture on a curved surface. Again, a palmetto leaf must not be burned into the tiles of a fireplace, the two are incongruous and incompatible. Taste and a regard for truth should govern all such work.