Studying from Nature
When is a man studying from nature, and when is he only flattering himself that he is doing so because he is painting with a model or lay-figure before him? A man may be working his eight or nine hours a day from the model and yet not be studying from nature. He is painting but not studying. He is like the man in the Bible who looks at himself in a glass and goeth away forgetting what manner of man he was. He will know no more about nature at the end of twenty years than a priest who has been reading his breviary day after day without committing it to memory will know of its contents. Unless he gets what he has seen well into his memory, so as to have it at his fingers’ ends as familiarly as the characters with which he writes a letter, he can be no more held to be familiar with, and to have command over, nature than a man who only copies his signature from a copy kept in his pocket, as I have known French Canadians do, can be said to be able to write. It is painting without nature that will give a man this, and not painting directly from her. He must do both the one and the other, and the one as much as the other.
The Model and the Lay-Figure
It may be doubted whether they have not done more harm than good. They are an attempt to get a bit of stuffed nature and to study from that instead of studying from the thing itself. Indeed, the man who never has a model but studies the faces of people as they sit opposite him in an omnibus, and goes straight home and puts down what little he can of what he has seen, dragging it out piecemeal from his memory, and going into another omnibus to look again for what he has forgotten as near as he can find it—that man is studying from nature as much as he who has a model four or five hours daily—and probably more. For you may be painting from nature as much without nature actually before you as with; and you may have nature before you all the while you are painting and yet not be painting from her.
Sketching from Nature
Is very like trying to put a pinch of salt on her tail. And yet many manage to do it very nicely.
Great Art and Sham Art
Art has no end in view save the emphasising and recording in the most effective way some strongly felt interest or affection. Where there is neither interest nor desire to record with good effect, there is but sham art, or none at all: where both these are fully present, no matter how rudely and inarticulately, there is great art. Art is at best a dress, important, yet still nothing in comparison with the wearer, and, as a general rule, the less it attracts attention the better.
Inarticulate Touches
An artist’s touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.