DRAWING, in art. Although the verb “to draw” has various meanings, the substantive drawing is confined by usage to its artistic sense, delineation or design. The word “draw,” from a root common to the Teutonic languages (Goth, dragan, O.H.G. drahan, Mod. Ger. tragen, which all have the sense of “carry,” O. Norse draga, A.S. drazan, drazen, “draw,” cf. Lat. trahere), means to pull or “drag” (a word of the same origin) as distinct from the action of pushing. It is thus used of traction generally, whether by men, animals or machines. The same idea is preserved in “drawing” as applied to the fine arts. We do not usually say, or think, that a sculptor is drawing when he is using his chisel, although he may be expressing or defining forms, nor that an engraver is drawing when he is pushing the burin with the palm of the hand, although the result may be the rendering of a design. But we do say that an artist is drawing when he uses the lead pencil, and here we have a motion bearing some resemblance to that of traction generally. The action of the artist in drawing the pencil point with his fingers along the paper is analogous, e.g., to that of a horse or man drawing a pole over soft ground and leaving a mark behind. The same analogy may be observed between two of the senses in which the French verb tirer is frequently employed. This word, the origin of which is quite uncertain, was formerly used by good writers in the two senses of the verb to draw. Thus Lafontaine says, “Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche”; and Caillières wrote, “Il n’y a pas longtemps que je me suis fait tirer par Rigaud,” meaning that Rigaud had drawn or painted his portrait. At the present day the verb tirer has fallen into disuse amongst cultivated Frenchmen with regard to drawing and painting, but it is still universally used for all kinds of design and even for photography by the common people. The cultivated use it still for printing, as for example “cette gravure sera tirée à cent exemplaires,” in the sense of pulling. A verb much more nearly related to the English verb to draw is the French traire (Lat. trahere), which has trait for its past participle. Traire is now used exclusively for milking cows and other animals, and though the analogy between this and artistic drawing is not obvious at first, nevertheless there is a certain analogy of motion, since the hand passing down the teat draws the milk downwards. The word trait is much more familiar in connexion with art as “les traits du visage,” the natural markings of the face, and it is very often used in a figurative sense, as we say “traits of character.” It is familiar in the English portrait, derived from protrahere. The ancient Romans used words which expressed more clearly the conception that drawing was done in line (delineare) or in shade (adumbrare), though there are reasons for believing that the words were often indiscriminately applied. Although the modern Italians have both traire and trarre, they use delineare still in the sense of artistic drawing, and also adombrare. The Greek verb γράφειν appears in English in “graphic” and in many compounds, such as photograph, &c. It is worth observing that the Greeks seem to have considered drawing and writing (q.v.) as essentially the same process, since they used the same word for both. This points to the early identity of the two arts when drawing was a kind of writing, and when such writing as men had learned to practise was essentially what we should call drawing, though of a rude and simple kind. Even in the present day picture writing is not unfrequently resorted to by travellers as a means of making themselves intelligible. There is also a kind of art which is writing in the modern sense and drawing at the same time, such as the work of the medieval illuminators in their manuscripts.
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The Art of Drawing.—Rather than attempt here a historical survey of the various so-called “styles” of drawing, or write a personal appreciation of them, it seems of greater use to give a logical account of drawing as an art, applicable to all times and countries. Reference to the teaching of drawing will be occasionally given rather to illustrate the argument than with a view to its being of practical use.
At the outset a distinction must be made between drawing as a means of symbolic or literary expression and drawing as the direct and only means of expressing the beauty of form. If Pharaoh wants to have it known that a hundred ducks were consumed at one meal in his court, he employs a draughtsman to register the fact on a frieze by picturing a row of cooks occupied in preparing the hundred ducks. The artist in this case does not represent the scene as he must have known it in the kitchen, with all its variety of movement and composition (as an early Greek vase painter conceived the interior of a vase factory), but all he does and is required to do is to give the sufficient number of figures and ducks. The more uniform the figures the greater will be the effect of number. Drawing has been employed here to tell a story, and it succeeds in so far as it tells the spectator plainly what could be told, perhaps less conveniently, in words. It matters not whether the figures and objects be feelingly rendered and harmoniously composed. So, to-day, a child, or any one who has a simple trick of symbolizing figures and objects in nature, can describe any event or moral by this process, provided the plot be not too elaborate to be expressed by a scene, or series of scenes, enacted by dumb symbolic figures. It is plain that the amusing pictures in Punch or Fliegende Blätter would be none the more amusing if they were done by the hand of Michelangelo, nor would the mystic designs of Blake be more full of meaning if drawn by Rembrandt, for in neither case do these works depend upon any subtle rendering of the forms of nature for their success, but upon the dramatic or intellectual imagination of the man who conceived them. When the witty or ethical man is at the same time a master draughtsman his work has two values, the “literary” content and the beauty of his drawing of natural objects. But it must be borne in mind that these values are fundamentally distinct; so much so that the spectator who has no appreciation of the forms of nature enjoys the story told and remains blind to the qualities of draughtsmanship, whilst the lover of nature’s forms may or may not trouble to unravel the literary plot but finds perfect satisfaction in the drawing. By far the greater part of illustration, and of artistic production generally, must be classed as symbolic art. Magazine stories to-day are sometimes illustrated even by photography, for the hand of the artist is not required. Symbolic art describes indirectly and in a necessarily limited scope what literature can do directly and with unlimited powers. The only content of symbolic drawing is its literary meaning; as drawing it may be quite worthless.
Pure drawing, however, whether it represent a dramatic event or a knee-joint, has a content that cannot be expressed by words, and is not necessarily directed towards literary expression. Just as a fragment of good sculpture pleases the connoisseur without any reference either to the whole original or to its spiritual significance, fine drawing can appeal to the lover of nature independently of indirect considerations.
What is the content of pure drawing? It is held by some that drawing or monochrome can suggest colour, and many people, some consciously, others unconsciously, attempt to represent in drawings the colours of figures and landscape. It seems a strange aberration to argue that by different intensities of the one colour various other colours can be suggested: it would not be more unreasonable to maintain that E flat and F could be suggested by striking the note G with varying strength. Now the draughtsman employs various intensities of his monochrome as light and shade by which to give roundness to his forms. But if on the same drawing he uses the same means in his attempt to express colour, a conflict would be at once set up between that which makes for form and that which would make for colour, and the result would generally be a confusion. Again, let one attempt to give red hair to a monochrome drawing of a man, and if the red be plain and unmistakable to all who are not the artist’s accomplices, then the artist has succeeded; otherwise it is bootless to treat of colour and colour values (which of course must depend upon the existence of colour) in monochrome. Apart from theory, if we examine the drawings, etchings and monochromes of great artists, where do we find them attempting to give colour or colour values? The hundreds of costume studies by Rembrandt might have been done from white plaster models, and there are only a few exceptions where a man has, for instance, a black hat or cloak. But in these few instances the “colour” tone is applied with such discretion that the true representation of the form is scarcely, perhaps only theoretically, impaired: they certainly have gained nothing in colour value because no specific colour is manifest in them. In Rembrandt’s, Claude’s or Turner’s drawings of landscapes the formation of the country, the architecture, &c., is expressed by line, light and shade, and enhanced by shadows cast from clouds and trees. If, in the drawings of masters, we should find objects darker or lighter than their position in the light would warrant, they have value (perhaps not quite a legitimate one) for balancing the composition as a flat pattern. They were never intended to suggest colour, nor do they. Yet, in spite of the failure to succeed, and contrary to logical argument and the practice of great draughtsmen, the student of most of the schools of Europe and America still persists in doing the hair dark, and, by attempting to give colour values to the clothes, breaks up the consistency of the whole. For the same reason that the sculptor uses uniformly coloured material in order that the natural light and shade may have full opportunity of making his forms manifest to the spectator, the draughtsman confines himself to giving light and shade only. If a monochrome has “colour tones,” the effect is similar to that produced by a draped statue made out of variously coloured marbles—an inartistic jumble.
As the immediate purpose and content of drawing there remains the representation of form only. Drawing is, therefore, essentially the same activity as sculpture, and has no additional scope. “Pupils,” says Donatello, “I give you the whole art of sculpture when I tell you to draw” (cited by Holroyd, Michel Angelo, p. 2 95), and the only practical teaching of drawing might be summed up by the inversion of the above.
Now if everything in nature—men, mountains or clouds—were as flat targets, i.e. two-dimensional, drawing could be legitimately reduced to a mechanical process,—to trace their contours upon a glass screen or even photograph them would be all that would be required. Indeed, provided the size of the drawing, the local colour and the texture be the same as those of the original, a complete illusion would be the result, in fact the proper end of one’s labours. But the presence of the third dimension in all objects causes light and shade, which in their turn bring about radical changes of the local colour, even in uniformly coloured objects. Now since drawing cannot suggest colour, local or atmospherical, any attempt to effect an illusion by a monochrome is at once defeated. If the end of drawing were to approach imitation or illusion as nearly as possible, how is it that a mere “sketch” by a master draughtsman can be for itself as valuable as his highly finished drawing? And surely a masterly outline drawing of a figure or landscape does not pretend to be an illusion. If then the draughtsman does not, and cannot hope to imitate nature, he is compelled to state only his ideas of it, ideas of three-dimensional form. For this reason only drawing must be treated as an art, and not as a mechanical act of getting an illusion.
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| (From a Greek vase in the BritishMuseum (E. 46). Fig. 1. | (From Bulletino arch. Napol. (1843, tom. 1, tav. 7). Fig. 2. | (From a drawing by Michelangelo (1854, 5, 13, i.), Print Room, British Museum). Fig. 3. |
It is interesting to trace in the history of an indigenous art the development of drawing that shall ultimately express ideas of three-dimensional form. Prof. Emanuel Loewy, in his Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, demonstrates how the early Greek sculpture (and that of all primitive peoples, children and ungifted artists) shows an aversion from depth. Their reliefs are of the flattest description, almost raised contours, and their figures in the round have at first only one aspect, or flat façade, so to speak, then three and four aspects, and finally at the date of Lysippus the figures are fully rounded out, and the members project at liberty in all directions. Then for the first time Greek sculpture showed a complete conception of the body’s corporeity (Körperlichkeit). The primitive artist, however well he may be intellectually aware of the three dimensions of an object, does not fully apprehend its true aspect as offered to the eye from one point of view. Following this conclusion, it is easy to see also in the drawing of the early Greeks, children and so on, the same lack of idea of the third dimension. The figures on the vases of the “finest period” (about 475 b.c.), despite occasional foreshortenings, have, when considered as representations of solid forms, a papery appearance. They have not half the draughtsmanship shown by the latter period of the vase industry, where the figures, though careless, stereotyped and ill-composed, come forwards (to use Prof. Loewy’s description of later sculpture), go backwards, twist and turn in space in a manner which cannot be excelled. The reproductions in figs. 1, 2, 3 will illustrate the development. The primitive draughtsman is at first bound by the silhouette. Later, he desires to fill out the interior, but this cannot be done without in great part modifying his contour lines, because they are generally merely indications of the disappearing and reappearing inner modelling, i.e. of the figure’s third dimension. Finally, the draughtsman in full possession of a feeling for the corporeity of the object will determine his contour entirely from within, a procedure which is the exact opposite to that of his first beginnings. He conceives the length, breadth and depth of an object and all its parts as solid wholes. To him a body in violent foreshortening is as easy as a simple profile, and, though it may not be as attractive, it is perhaps more interesting because its contours are more bound up with, and dependent upon, the inner modelling; in other words, it has more depth. The draughtsman’s idea of a form in nature is not a “flat idea,” but one containing three dimensions. This idea he seeks to express either by line alone or by light and shade. If an artist has not a three-dimensional “grasp” of forms, and, like a child, confines himself to the primitive tracing of the silhouette, his compositions may be of excellent flat pattern, and equal to any of the designs of ancient carpets or early Greek vases; but in the light of the above argument, and when compared with the productions of mature draughtsmen of all ages and countries, they cannot be said to be complete drawings, any more than the early unifacial statues of the Greeks can be called true plastic, simply because in neither case has the artist yet reached the highest possible development of corporeous conception, by which truly to interpret the solid objects of nature as we know them, and as master draughtsmen see them.