It is easier to jape at the light-bearing goddess than to imitate her works.
“In such an age as this, painting should be understood, not looked on with blind wonder, nor considered only as poetic inspiration, but as a pursuit, legitimate, scientific, and mechanical.”
John Constable.
L'ENVOI.
PHOTOGRAPHY—A PICTORIAL ART.
The aim.
We wish from the first to make it clearly understood as to what is our object in comparing photography with the other pictorial arts. It is not to condemn any of the other arts as inadequate for artistic expression, for we hold that good art, as expressed even by a lead pencil, is better than bad art expressed on the largest of canvases, but our object is to inquire what position the technique of photography takes when regarded side by side with the methods and limits of each of the pictorial arts. |Rock scratchings.| The earliest pictorial expressions of the human mind were, as we all know, rude rock-scratchings in the form of outline. |Outline drawing.| This outline drawing served the earliest nations, as it still serves children, to express in a conventional way certain limited truths, for the power of seeing and analyzing nature is of recent development, and is even now far from fully developed. Keeping this in mind, we must nevertheless not allow ourselves to despise these efforts of the undeveloped mind. Line drawing, it must be remembered, has nothing to do with tone. If you look at a line drawing of a figure by a great master, it suggests to you, in a certain limited way, the real thing, for the lines bound spaces, hence there is a suggestion of the solid figure. With almost any medium, even with pen, ink, and paper, an artist will often draw a subject in outline, to see “how it will come.” Sculptors nearly always do this, but these men do not consider these outlines as finished works, but simply as an aid to their work,—mere brief sketches suggestive of what shall be. Of course, such notes when done by a great artist become invaluable, as suggesting great truth of impression. Yet there are men who seem to stop at this stage, and revel in “beauty of line,” or else they elaborate these drawings until they pass beyond the legitimate limits of the art by which they are expressed.
We will now briefly enumerate these arts with their limitations.
Lead pencil.
Lead Pencil.—The scale between the white and black is very limited, for, as any one who has drawn with lead pencil will remember, the lowest tones are grey as compared with dead black. They are also shiny because light is reflected by the plumbago. An artist can, however, express a suggestion of tone within a limited scale, and, notwithstanding this limitation, a first-rate lead pencil drawing may give a far truer impression of nature than a bad painting, and will accordingly rank higher artistically.