Original.
This is a mightily misused word. Only those artists can be called original who have something new to say, no matter by what methods they say it. A photograph may be far more original than a painting.
Photographic.
Some of the best writers and journalists of the day have adopted the use of the word “photographic,” as applying to written descriptions of scenes which are absolutely correct in detail and bald fact, though they are lacking in sentiment and poetry. What a trap these writers have fallen into will be seen in this work, for what they think so true is often utterly false. And, on the other hand, photography is capable of producing pictures full of sentiment and poetry. The word “photographic” should not be applied to anything except photography. No written descriptions can be “photographic.” The use of the word, when applied to writing, leads to a confusion of different phenomena, and therefore to deceptive inferences. This cannot be too strongly insisted upon, as some cultured writers have been guilty of the wrong use of the word “photographic,” and therefore of writing bad English.
Quality.
Quality is used when speaking of a picture or work which has in it artistic properties of a special character, in a word, artistic properties which are distinctive and characteristic of the fineness and subtlety of nature.
Realism.
By Naturalism it will be seen that we mean a very different thing from Realism. The realist makes no analysis, he is satisfied with the motes and leaves out the sunbeam. He will, in so far as he is able, paint all the veins of the leaves as they really are, and not as they look as a whole. For example, the realist, if painting a tree a hundred yards off, would not strive to render the tree as it appears to him from where he is sitting, but he would probably gather leaves of the tree and place them before him, and paint them as they looked within twelve inches of his eyes, and as the modern Pre-Raphaelites did, he might even imitate the local colour of things themselves. |Pre-Raphaelites.| Whereas the naturalistic painter would care for none of these things, he would endeavour to render the impression of the tree as it appeared to him when standing a hundred yards off, the tree taken as a whole, and as it looked, modified as it would be by various phenomena and accidental circumstances. The naturalist’s work we should call true to nature. The realist’s false to nature. The work of the realist would do well for a botany but not for a picture, there is no scope for fine art in realism, realism belongs to the province of science. This we shall still further illustrate in the following pages.
Relative tone and value.
Relative tone or value is the difference in the amount of light received on the different planes of objects when compared with one another.