 Lectures on Landscape, Lecture 1, Outline, by John Ruskin. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org 1. In my inaugural lecture, I stated that while holding this professorship I should direct you in your practical exercises, chiefly to natural history and landscape, and having in the course of the past year laid the foundational elements of art sufficiently before you, I will invite you now to enter on real work with me, and accordingly I propose during this in the following term to give you what practical leading I can in elementary study of landscape, and of a branch of natural history which will form a kind of center for all the rest, etiology. In the outset, I must shortly state to you the position which landscape painting and animal painting hold towards the higher branches of art. Landscape painting is the thoughtful and passionate representation of the physical conditions appointed for human existence. It imitates the aspects and records the phenomena of the visible things which are dangerous or beneficial to men, and displays the human methods of dealing with these, and of enjoying them or suffering from them, which are either exemplary or deserving of sympathetic contemplation. Animal painting investigates the laws of greater and less nobility of character in organic form as comparative anatomy examines those of greater and less development in organic structure. And the function of animal painting is to bring into notice the minor and unthought of conditions of power or beauty, as that of physiology is to ascertain the minor conditions of adaptation. Questions as to the purpose of arrangements, or the use of the organs of an animal are, however, no less within the province of the painter than of the physiologist, and are indeed more likely to commend themselves to you through drawing than dissection. For as you dissect an animal, you generally assume its form to be necessary, and only examine how it is constructed, but in drawing the outer form itself attentively, you are led necessarily to consider the mode of life for which it is disposed, and therefore to be struck by an awkwardness or apparent uselessness in its parts. After sketching one day several heads of birds, it becomes a vital matter of interest to me to know the use of the bony process on the head of the hornbill, but on asking a great physiologist I found that appeared to him an absurd question, and was certainly an unanswerable one. I have limited, you have just heard, landscape painting to the representation of phenomena relating to human life. You will scarcely be disposed to admit the propriety of such a limitation, and you will still less be likely to conceive its necessary strictness and severity unless I convince you of it by somewhat detailed examples. Here are two landscapes by Turner in his greatest time, Vesuvius in repose, Vesuvius in eruption. One is a beautiful harmony of cool color, the other of hot, and they are both exquisitely designed in ornamental lines, but they are not painted for those qualities, they are painted because the state of the scene in one case is full of delight to men, and in the other of pain and danger. And it is not Turner's object at all to exhibit or illustrate natural phenomena, however interesting in themselves. He does not want to paint blue mist in order to teach you the nature of evaporation, nor this lavastream to explain to you the operation of gravity on ponderous and viscous materials. He paints the blue mist because it brings life and joy to men, and the lavastream because it is death to them. Again here are two sea pieces by Turner of the same period, photographs from them at least. One is a calm on the shore at Scarborough, the other the wreck of an indian man. These also are each painted with exquisitely artistic purpose, the first in opposition of local black to diffuse sunshine, the second the decorative grouping of white spots on a dark ground. That decorative purpose of dappling is as studiously and deliciously carried out by Turner with the deadless side of him in the inlaying of these white spots on the indian man's deck, as if he were working a precious toy in ebony and ivory. But Turner did not paint either of the sea pieces for the sake of these decorous arrangements. Neither did he paint the Scarborough as a professor of physical science to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshire coast, nor the indian man to show you the force of impact in a liquid mass of sea water of given momentum. He painted this to show you the daily course of quiet human work and happiness, and that to enable you to conceive something of utter most human misery both ordered by the power of the great deep. You may easily, you must perhaps for a little time suspect me of exaggerating in this statement. It is so natural to suppose that the main interest of landscape is essentially in rocks and water and sky, and that figures are to be put. Let the salt and mustard to a dish only to give it a flavor. Put all that out of your heads at once. The interest of a landscape consists wholly in its relation either to figures present or to figures past or to human powers conceived. The most splendid drawing of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity, is no more a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For as natural philosophers there is no bigness or littleness to you. This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be, as if it was a million times as big. There is no more sublimity, per se, in ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, than in ground level, nor in a perpendicular fracture of a rock than in a horizontal one. The only thing that makes the one more interesting to you in a landscape than the other is that you could tumble over the perpendicular fracture, and couldn't tumble over the other. A cloud, looked at as a cloud only, is no more a subject for painting than so much feculence in dirty water. It is merely dirty air, or at best a chemical solution you'll made. That it is worthy of being painted all depends upon its being the means of nourishment and chastisement to men, or the dwelling place of imaginary gods. There's a bit of blue sky and cloud by Turner, one of the loveliest ever painted by human hand, but as a mere pattern of blue and white, he had better have painted a jay's wing. This was only painted by him, and is, in reality, only pleasant to you, because it signifies the coming of a gleam of sweet sunshine in windy weather. And the wind is worth thinking of only because it fills the sails of ships, and the sun because it warms the sailors. Now it is most important that you should convince yourself of, and fully enter into this truth, because all the difficulty in choosing subject arises from mistakes about it. I daresay some of you who are fond of sketching have gone out often in the most beautiful country, and yet with the feeling that there was no good subject to be found in it. That always arises from your not having sympathy enough with its vital character, and looking for physical picturesqueness instead. On the contrary, there are crude efforts at landscape painting made continually upon the most splendid physical phenomena in America and other countries without any history. It is not of the slightest use, Niagara, or the North Pole, and the Aurora Borealis won't make a landscape. Not a ditch at Ifley Will, if you have humanity in you, enough in you to interpret the feelings of hedgers and ditches and frogs. Next, here is one of the most beautiful landscapes ever painted, the best I have next to Greta and Tees. The subject physically is a mere bank of grass above a stream with some witch elms and willows, a level-topped bank. The water has cut its way down through the soft alubian of an elevated plain to the limestone rock at the bottom. Had this scene been in America, no mortal could have made a landscape of it. It is nothing but a grass bank with some not very pretty trees scattered over it, wholly without grouping. The stream at the bottom is rocky indeed, but its rocks are mean, flat, and of a dull yellow color. The sky is gray and shapeless. There is absolutely nothing to paint anywhere of a central landscape subject as commonly understood. Now see what the landscape consists in, which I have told you is one of the most beautiful ever painted by man. There's first a little bit of it left nearly wild, not quite wild. There's a cart and riders track through it among the copes. And then, standing simply on the wild moss, troopers ground. The scattered ruins of a great abbey, seen so dimly that they seem to be fading out of sight in color as in time. These two things together, the wild copes, wood, and the ruin, take you back into the life of the fourteenth century. The one is the border rider's kingdom, the other that of peace which has striven against border riding, how vainly. Both these are remains of the past, but the outhouses and refractory of the abbey have been turned into a farmhouse. And that is inhabited, and in front of it, the mistress is feeding her chickens. You see the country is perfectly quiet and innocent. For there is no trace of a fence anywhere. The cattle have strayed down to the riverside, it being hot day, and some rest in the shade and two in the water. They could not have done so at their ease had the river not been humanized, only a little bit of its stony bed is left. A mill weir thrown across stays the water in a perfectly clear and delicious pool. To show how clear it is, Turner has put the only piece of playing color in all the picture into the reflection in this. One cow is white, another white and red. Evidently as clean as morning dew can wash their sides. They could not have been so in a country where there was the least coal smoke. So Turner has put a wreath of perfectly white smoke through the trees, and lest that should not be enough to show you they burnt wood, he has made his foreground of a piece of copes just lopped, with the new faggots standing up against it. And this still not being enough to give you the idea of perfect cleanliness, he has covered the stones of the riverbed with white clothes laid out to dry. And that not being enough yet for the riverbed might be clean, though nothing else was, he has put a quantity more hanging over the abbey walls. Only natural phenomena in their direct relation to humanity. These are to be your subjects in landscape. Rocks and water and air may no more be painted for their own sakes than the armor carved without the warrior. But secondly, I said landscape is to be a passionate representation of these things. It must be done, that is to say, with strength and depth of soul. This is indeed, to some extent, merely the particular application of a principle that has no exception. If you are without strong passions, you cannot be a painter at all. The laying of paint by an insensitive person, whatever it endeavors to represent, is not painting, but dobbling or plastering, and that, observe, irrespective of the boldness or minuteness of the work. An insensitive person will dobb with a camel's hairbrush, an ultramarine, and a passionate one will paint with mortar and trowel. But far more than common passions necessary to paint landscape, the physical conditions there are so numerous, and the spiritual ones so occult, that you are sure to be overpowered by the materialism, unless your sentiment is strong. No man is naturally likely to think first of anatomy in painting a pretty woman, but he is very aptly to do so in painting a mountain. No man of ordinary sense will take pleasure in features that have no meaning, but he may easily take it in heath, woods, or waterfalls that have no expression, so that it needs much greater strength of heart and intellect to paint landscape than figure. Many commonplace persons, bred in good schools, have painted the figure pleasantly or even well. But none but the strongest, John Bellini, Titian Velasquez, Tintoret, Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Carpaccio, and Turner, have ever painted a fragment of good landscape. In missile painting, exquisite figure drawing is frequent in landscape backgrounds, in late works or elaborate, but I only know thoroughly good landscapes in one book, and I have examined, I speak deliberately, thousands. For one thing, the passion is necessary for the mere quantity of design. In good art, whether painting or sculpture, I have again and again told you every touch is necessary and beautifully intended. Now it falls within the compass of ordinary application to place, rightly, all the folds of drapery or gleams of light on a chain, or ornaments in a pattern, but when it comes to placing every leaf in a tree, the painter gets tired. Here, for instance, is a little bit of Sandro Botticelli background. I have purposely sketched it in the slightest way, that you might see how the entire value of it depends on thoughtful placing. There is no texture aimed at, no completion, scarcely any variety of light and shade, but by mere care in the placing, the thing is beautiful. Well, every leaf, every cloud, every touch is placed with the same care and great work, and when this is done, as by John Bellini, in the picture of Peter Martyr, or as it was by Titian in the great Peter Martyr, with every leaf in a wood he gets tired. I know no other such landscape in the world as that is, or as that was. Unless you think on such conditions, you never can paint a landscape at all. Well, great landscape certainly not, but pleasant and useful landscape, yes, provided only the passion you bring to it be true and pure, the degree of it you cannot command, the genuineness of it you can, yes, and the depth of source also, Tintoret's passion may be like the Reichenbach, and yours only like a little dripping hollywell, but both equally from deep springs. But though the virtue of all painting, and similarly of sculpture and every other art, is in passion, I must not have you begin by working passionately. The discipline of youth, in all its work, is in cooling and curbing itself, as the discipline of age is in warming and urging itself. You know the Bacchic chorus of Old Man and Plato's Laws. To the end of life, indeed, the strength of a man's finest nature is shown in due continence, but that is because the finest nature remains young to the death, and for you the first thing you have to do in art, as in life, is to be quiet and firm, quiet above everything, and modest, with this most essential modesty that you must like the landscape you are doing, and to draw better than you expect to like your drawing of it. However well it may succeed. If you would not rather have the real thing than your sketch of it, you are not in the right state of mind for sketching it all. If you only think of the scene, what a nice sketch this will make, be assured you will never make a nice sketch of it. You may think you have produced a beautiful work, nay perhaps the public and many fair judges will agree with you, but I tell you positively, there will be no enduring value in what you have thus done, whereas if you think of the scene, ah, if I could only get some shadow or scrawl of this to carry away with me how glad I should be, then whatever you do will be, according to your strength, good and progressive. It may be feeble or much faultful, but it will be vital and essentially precious. Now it is not possible for you to command this state of mind, nor anything like it, in yourselves at once. Nay in all probability your eyes are so satiated by the false popular art surrounding us, now on all sides that you cannot see the delicate reality though you try, but even though you may not care for the truth, you can act as if you did and tell it. Now therefore observe this following quite plain direction. Whenever you set yourself to draw anything, consider only how best you may give a person who has not seen the place a true idea of it. Use any means in your power to do that, and don't think of the person for whom you are drawing as a connoisseur, but as a person of ordinary sense and feeling. Don't get artist-like qualities for him, but first give him the pleasant sensation of being at the place, then show him how the land lies, how the water runs, how the wind blows, and so on. Always think of the public as mullier of his old woman. You have done nothing really great or good if you can't please her. Now beginning wisely so as to lose no time or labor, you will learn to paint all the conditions of quiet light and sky before you attempt those of variable light and cloud. Do not trouble yourselves with or allow yourselves to be tempted by any effects that are brilliant or tremendous, except only that from the beginning. I recommend you to watch always for sunrise, to keep a little diary of the manner of it, and to have beside your window a small sketchbook with pencil cut overnight, and colors moist. The one indulgence which I would have you allow yourself in fast coloring for some time is the endeavor to secure some record at the instant of the colors of morning clouds. While if they are merely white or gray or blue, you must get an outline of them with your pencil. You will soon feel by this means what are the real difficulties to be encountered in all landscape coloring, and your eyes will be educated to the quality and harmonious action of forms. But for the rest, learn to paint everything in the quietest and simplest light. First outline your whole subject completely with delicate sharp pencil line. If you don't get more than that, let your outline be a finished and lovely diagram of the whole. All the objects are then to be painted of their proper colors, matching them as nearly as you can in the manner that a missile is painted, filling the outline shapes neatly up to their junctions, reinforcing afterwards when necessary, but as little as possible, but above all, knowing precisely what the light is and where it is. I've brought two old fashioned colored engravings which are a precise type of the style I want you to begin with. Finished from corner to corner, as well as the painter easily could, everything done to good purpose, nothing for vein glory, nothing in haste or affectation, nothing in feverish or morbid excitement. The observation is accurate, the sentiment, though childish, deep and pure, and the effect of light for common work quite curiously harmonious and deceptive. They are, in spite of their weakness, absolutely the only landscapes I could show you which give you a real idea of the places or which put your minds into the tone which, if you were happy into these, they would take in the air and light of Italy. I dwell on the necessity of completion especially because I have lost much time myself for my sympathy with the feverish intensity of the minds of great engravers, and from always fastening on one or two points of my subject and neglecting the rest. We have seen then that every subject is to be taken up first in its terminal lines, then in its light and shade, then in its color, first of the terminal lines of landscape, or of drawing an outline. I think the examples of shell outline in your copying series must already have made you feel the exact nature of a pure outline, the difficulty of it, and the value, but we have now to deal with limits of a more subtle kind. The outline of any simple solid form, even though it may have complex parts, represents an actual limit accurately to be followed. The outline of a cup, of a shell, or an animal's limb has a determinable course which your pen or pencil line either coincides with or does not. You can say of that line either it is wrong or right. If right, it is in a measure suggestive and nobly suggestive of the character of the object. But the greater number of objects in a landscape either have outlines so complex that no pencil could follow them as trees in middle distance, or they have no actual outline at all, but a gradated and softened edge as for the most part clouds, foam, and the like. And even in things which have determinate form, the outline of that form is usually quite incapable of expressing its real character. Here is the most ordinary component of a foreground, for instance, a pleasantly colored stone. Any of its pure outlines are not only without beauty, but absolutely powerless to give you any notion of its character. Although that character is in itself so interesting that here Turner has made a picture of little more than a heap of such stones with blue water to oppose their color. In consequence of these difficulties and insufficiencies, most landscape painters have been tempted to neglect outline altogether and think only of effects of light or color on masses more or less obscurely defined. They have thus gradually lost their sense of organic form, their precision of hand, and their respect for limiting law. In a word, for all the safeguards and severe dignities of their art, and landscape painting has therefore more in consequence of this one error than of any other become weak, frivolous, and justly despised. Now, if any of you have chance to notice at the end of my Queen of the Air, my saying that in landscape Turner must be your only guide, you perhaps have thought I said so because of his great power and melting colors or in massing light and shade. Not so. I have always said he's the only great landscape painter and to be your only guide because he is the only landscape painter who can draw an outline. His finished works perhaps appear to you more vague than any other masters. No man loses his outlines more constantly. You will be surprised to know that his frankness and losing depends on his certainty of finding if he chooses, and that while all other landscape painters study from nature in shade or color, Turner always sketches with the point. Always, of course, is a wide word. In your copying series, I have put a sketch by Turner and color from nature. Some few others of the kind exist in the National Gallery and elsewhere, but as a rule from his boyhood to the last day of his life, he sketched only with the fine pencil point and always the outline. More if he had time, but at least the outline of every scene that interested him. And in general, outline so subtle and elaborate as to be inexhaustible, in examination and uncopiable for delicacy. Here is a sketch of an English Park scene which represents the average character of a study from nature by Turner. And here the sketch from nature of Dumblay Naby for the library, Studiorum, which shows you what he took from nature when he had time only to get what was most precious to him. The first thing, therefore, you have to learn in landscape is to outline. And therefore we must know precisely what an outline is, how it ought to be represented. And this it will be right to define in quite general terms applicable to all subjects. We saw in the fifth lecture that every visible thing consisted of spaces of color either by sharp or gradated limits. Whenever they are sharp, the line of separation followed by the point of your drawing instrument is the proper outline of your subject, whether it represents the limits of flat spaces or of solid forms. For instance, here is a drawing by Holbein of a lady in a dark dress with bars of black velvet around her arm. Her form is seen everywhere defined against the light by a perfectly sharp linear limit which Holbein can accurately draw with his pen. The patches of velvet are also distinguished from the rest of her dress by a linear limit which he follows with his pen just as decisively. Here, therefore, is your first great law. Whenever you see one space of color distinguished from another by a sharp limit, you are to draw that limit firmly and that is your outline. Also observe that as you're representing this limit by a dark line is a conventionalism and just as much a conventionalism when the line is subtle as when it is thick, the great masters accept and declare that conventionalism with perfect frankness and use bold and decisive outline, if any. Also observe that though when you are master of your art, you may modify your outline by making it dark in some parts, light in others and even sometimes thick and sometimes slender, a scientifically accurate outline is perfectly equal throughout. And in your first practice, I wish you to use always a pen with a blunt point which will make no hair stroke under any conditions so that using black ink and only one movement of the pen, not returning to thicken your line, you shall either have your line there or not there and that you may not be able to grade eight or change it in any way or degree whatsoever. Now the first question respecting it is what place is your thick line to have with respect to the limit which it represents outside of it or inside or over it. Theoretically it is to be over it, the true limit falling all the way along the center of your thick line. The contest of appellies with protogeness consisted in striking this true limit within each other's lines more and more finely and you may always consider your pen line as representing the first incision for sculpture, the true limit being the sharp center of the incision. But practically when you're outlining a light object defined against a dark one, the line must go outside of it and when a dark object against a light one, inside of it. In this drawing of Holbeins, the hand being seen against the light, the outline goes inside the contour of the fingers. Secondly, and this is of great importance, it will happen constantly that forms are entirely distinct from each other and separated by true limits which are yet invisible or nearly so to the eye. I place for instance one of these eggs in front of the other and probably to most of you the separation in the light is indisturnable. Is it then to be outlined? In practically combining outline with accomplished light and shade there are cases of this kind in which the outline may with advantage or even must for truth of effect be omitted. But the facts of the solid form are of so vital importance and the perfect command of them so necessary to the dignity and intelligibility of the work that the greatest artist, even for their finished drawings like to limit every solid form by a fine line whether its contour be visible to the eye or not. An outline thus perfectly made with absolute decision and with a wash of one color above it is the most masterly of all methods of light and shade study with limited time when the forms of the object to be drawn are clear and unaffected by mist. But without any wash of color such an outline is the most valuable of all means for obtaining such memoranda of any scene as may explain to another person or record for yourself what is most important in its features. Choose then a subject that interests you and so far as failure or time or materials compels you to finish one part or express one character rather than another of course dwell on the features that interest you most. But beyond this forget or even somewhat repress yourself and make it your first object to give a true idea of the place to other people. You are not to endeavor to express your own feelings about it if anything air on the side of concealing them. What is best is not to think of yourself at all but to state as plainly and simply as you can the whole truth of the thing. What you think unimportant in it may to another person be the most touching part of it. What you think beautiful may be in truth common place and of small value. Quietly complete each part to the best of your power endeavoring to maintain a steady and dutiful energy and the tranquil pleasure of a workman. End of lecture one. Lectures on landscape. Lecture two, light and shade by John Ruskin. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Kirsten Ferrari. Lecture two, light and shade. In my last lecture I laid before you evidence that the greatness of the master whom I wished you to follow as your only guide in landscape depended primarily on his studying from nature always with the point that is to say in pen or pencil outline. Today I wish to show you that his preeminence depends secondarily on his perfect rendering of form and distance by light and shade before he admits a thought of color. I say before, however, observe carefully only with reference to the construction of any given picture, not with reference to the order in which he learned his mechanical processes. From the beginning he worked out of doors with the point, but indoors with the brush and attains perfect skill in washing flat color long before he attains anything like skill in delineation of form. Here for instance is a drawing when he was 12 or 13 years old of Dover Castle and the Dover Coach in which the future love of mystery is exhibited by his studiously showing the way in which the dust rises about the wheels and an entrance in drunken sailors which materially affected his marine studies show not less in the occupants at the hind seat. But what I want you to observe is that though the trees, coach, horses and sailors are drawn as any schoolboy would draw them the sky is washed in so smoothly that few watercolor painters of our day would lightly accept a challenge to match it. And therefore it is among many other reasons that I put the brush into your hands from the first and try you with a wash in lamp black before you enter my working class. But as regards the composition of his picture the drawing is always first with Turner, the color second. Drawing that is to say the expression by gradation of light, either of form or space. Again I thus give you a statement wholly adverse to the vulgar opinion of him. You will find that statement early in the first volume of modern painters and repeated now through all my works these 25 years in vain. Nobody will believe that the main virtue of Turner is in his drawing. I say the main virtue of Turner splendid though he be as a colorist he is not unrivaled in color. Nay in some qualities of color he has been far surpassed by the Venetians but no one has ever touched him in the exquisiteness of gradation and no one in landscape in perfect rendering of organic form. I showed you in this drawing at last lecture how truly he had matched the color of the iron-stained rocks in the bed of the casino and any of you who care for color at all cannot but take more or less pleasure in the black and greens and warm browns opposed throughout. But the essential value of the work is not in these. It is first in the expression of enormous scale of mountain and space of air by gradations of shade in these colors whatever they may be. And secondly in the perfect rounding and cleaving of the masses alike of mountain and stone. I showed you one of the stones themselves as an example of uninteresting outline. If I were to ask you to paint it though its color is pleasant enough you would still find it uninteresting in course compared to that of a flower or a bird. But if I can engage you in an endeavor to draw its true forms in light and shade you'll most assuredly find it not only interesting but in some points quite beyond the most subtle skill you can give to it. You have heard me state to you several times that all the masters who valued accurate form and modeling found the readiest way of obtaining the facts they required to be firm pen outline completed by a wash of neutral tint. This method is indeed rarely used by Raphael or Michelangelo in the drawings they have left to us because their studies are nearly all tentative. Experiments and composition in which the imperfect or careless pen outline suggested all they required and was capable of easy change without confusing the eye. But the masters who knew precisely before they laid touch on paper what they were going to do and this may be observed either because they are less or greater than the men who change. Less in merely drawing some natural object without attempt at composition or greater in knowing absolutely beforehand the composition they intend. It may be even so that what they intend though better known is not so good. But at all events in this anticipating power Tintorette, Holbein and Turner stand I think alone as draftsmen. Tintorette rarely sketching at all but painting straight at the first blow while Holbein and Turner sketch indeed but it is as with pen of iron and a point of diamond. You will find in your educational series many drawings illustrative of the method but I have enlarged here the part that is executed with the pen out of this smaller drawing that you may see with what fearless strength Holbein delineates even the most delicate folds of the veil on the head and of the light muslin on the shoulders giving them delicacy not by the thinness of his line but by its exquisite veracity. The eye will endure with patience or even linger with pleasure on any line that is right, however coarse while the faintest or finest that is wrong will be forcibly destructive. And again and again I have to recommend you to draw always as if you were engraving and as if the line could not be changed. The method used by Turner in the Lieber's studio room is precisely analogous to that of Holbein. The lines of these etchings are to trees, rocks or buildings absolutely what these of Holbein are not suggestions of contingent grace but determinations of the limits of future form. You will see the explanatory office of such lines by placing this outline over my drawing of the stone until the lines coincide with the limits of the shadow. You will find that it intensifies and explains the forms which otherwise would have escaped notice and that a perfectly gradated wash of neutral tint with an outline of this kind is all that is necessary for grammatical statement of forms. It is all that the great colorists need for their studies. They would think it wasted time to go further but if you have no eye for color you may go further in another manner with enjoyment. Now to go back to Turner. The first great object of the Lieber's studio room for which I requested you in my sixth lecture to make constant use of it is the delineation of solid form by outline and shadow. But a yet more important purpose in each of the designs in that book is the expression of such landscape powers and character as have a special relation to the pleasures and pain of human life but especially the pain. And it is in this respect that I desired you to be assured not merely of their superiority but of their absolute difference in kind from photography as works of discipline design. I do not know whether any of you were interested enough in the little note in my catalog on this view near Blair Athol to look for the scene itself during your summer rambles. If any did and found it I am nearly certain their impression would be only that of an extreme wonder how Turner could have made so little of so beautiful a spot. The projecting rock when I last saw it in 1857 and I am certain when Turner saw it was covered with lichens having as many colors as a painted window. The stream or rather powerful and deep highland river the tilt foamed and eddied magnificently through the narrow channel and the wild vegetation in the rock crannies was a finished arabesque of living sculpture of which this study of mine made on another stream in Glenfinless only a few miles away will give you a fair idea. Turner has absolutely stripped the rock of its beautiful lichens to bare slate with one quartz vein running up through it. He has quieted the river into a commonplace stream. He has given of all the rich vegetation only one cluster of quite uninteresting leaves and a clump of birches with ragged trunks yet observe I have told you of it. He has put into one scene the spirit of Scotland. Similarly those of you who in your long vacations have ever stayed near Dumblin will I think be disappointed in no small degree by this study of the abbey for which I showed you the sketch at last lecture. You probably know that the oval window in its west end is one of the prettiest pieces of rough 13th century carving in the kingdom. I used it for a chief example in my lectures at Edinburgh and you know that the Lancet windows in their fine proportion and rugged masonry would alone form a study of ruined gothic masonry of exquisite interest. Yet you find Turner representing the Lancet window by a few bare oval lines like the hoop of a barrel and indicating the rest of the structure by a monotonous and thin piece of outline of which I was asked by one of yourselves last term and quite naturally and rightly how Turner came to draw it so slightly or we may even say so badly. Whenever you find Turner stopping short or apparently failing in this way especially when he does the contrary of what any of us would have been nearly sure to do then is the time to look for your main lesson from him. You recollect those quiet words of the strongest of all Shakespeare's heroes when anyone else would have had his sword out in an instant, quote, keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them where at my cue to fight I should have known it without a prompter end quote, Othello act one scene two. Now you must always watch keenly what Turner's cue is. You will see his hand go to his hilt fast enough when it comes. Dumb Lane Abbey is a pretty piece of building enough it is true but the virtue of the whole scene and meaning is not in the masonry of it. There is much better masonry and much more wonderful ruin of it elsewhere. Dumb Lane Abbey, Tower and Isles and all would go under one of the arches of buildings such as there are in the world. Look at what Turner will do when his cue is masonry in the Colosseum. What the execution of that drawing is you may judge by looking with a magnifying glass at the ivy and battlements in this when also his cue is masonry. What then can he mean by not so much as indicating one pebble or joint in the walls of Dumb Lane? I was sending out the other day to a friend in America a chosen group of the library studio room to form a nucleus for an art collection at Boston. And I warned my friend at once to guard his public against the sore disappointment their first sight of these much celebrated works would be to them. You will have to make them understand, I wrote to him, that their first lesson will be in observing not what Turner has done but what he has not done. These are not finished pictures but studies, endeavors, that is to say, to get the utmost result possible with the simplest means. They are essentially thoughtful and have each their fixed purpose to which everything else is sacrificed and that purpose is always imaginative to get at the heart of the thing, not at its outside. Now it is true there are beautiful lichens at Blair Athol and good building at Dumb Lane but there are lovely lichens all over the cold regions of the world and there is far more interesting architecture in other countries than in Scotland. The essential character of Scotland is that of a wild and thinly inhabited rocky country not sublimely mountainous but beautiful in low rock and light streamlit everywhere with sweet cobswood and rudely growing trees. This wild land possesses of subdued and imperfect school of architecture and has an infinitely tragic feudal, pastoral and civic history. And in the events of that history a deep tenderness of sentiment is mingled with a cruel and barren rigidity of habitual character accurately corresponding to the conditions of climate and earth. Now I want you especially to notice with respect to these things, Turner's introduction of the ugly square tower high upon the left. Your first instinct would be to exclaim how unlucky that that was there at all. Why at least could not Turner have kept it out of sight? He has quite gratuitously brought it into sight. Grituitously drawn firmly the three lines of stiff dripstone which markets squareness and blankness. It is precisely that blank vacancy of decoration and setting of the meager angles against wind and war which he wants to force on your notice that he may take you thoroughly out of Italy and Greece and put you wholly in a barbarous and frost-hardened land that once having its gloom defined he may show you all the more intensely what pastoral purity and innocence of life and loveliness of nature are underneath the banks and braves of down and by every brooklet that feeds the forth inclined. That is the main purpose of these two studies. How it is obtained by various incidents in the drawing of stones and trees and figures I will show you another time. The chief element in both is the sadness and depth of their effect of subdued though clear light in sky and stream. The sadness of their effect I repeat. If you remember anything of the lectures I gave you through last year you must be gradually getting accustomed to my definition of the Greek school in art as one essentially chiaroscurist as opposed to gothic color, realist as opposed to gothic imagination and despairing as opposed to gothic hope. And you are prepared to recognize it by any one of these three conditions. Only observe the chiaroscuro is simply the technical result of the two others. A Greek painter likes light and shade. First, because they enable him to realize form solidly while color is flat. And secondly, because light and shade are melancholy while color is gay. So that the defect of color and substitution of more or less gray or gloomy effects of rounded gradation constantly express the two characters. First, academic or Greek fleshliness and solidity as opposed to gothic imagination. And secondly, of Greek tragic horror and gloom as opposed to gothic gladness. In the great French room in the Louvre if you at all remember the general character of the historical pictures you will instantly recognize in thinking generally of them the rounded fleshly and solid character in the drawing. The gray or greenish and brownish color or defect of color, lurid and moonlight-like. And the gloomy choice of subjects as the deluge, the field of Eilau, the starvation on the raft and the death of Endymion. Always melancholy and usually horrible. The more recent pictures of the painter Jerome unite all these attributes in a singular degree. Above all, the fleshliness and materialism which make his studies of the nude in my judgment altogether inadmissible into the rank of the fine arts. Now you observe that I never speak of this Greek school but with a certain dread. And yet I have told you that Turner belongs to it. That all the strongest men in times have developed art belong to it. But then remember, so do all the basest. The learning of the academy is indeed a splendid accessory to the original power in Velazquez, in Titian or in Reynolds. But the whole world of art is full of a base learning of the academy which when fools possess they become a tenfold plague of fools. And again, a stern and more or less hopeless melancholy necessarily is undercurrent in the minds of the greatest men of all ages. Of Homer, Escalus, Pindar or Shakespeare. But an earthly sensual and weak despondency is the attribute of the lowest mental and bodily disease. And the imbecilities and lassitudes which follow crime both in nations and individuals can only find a last stimulus to their own dying sensation in the fascinated contemplation of complete her death. Between these, the highest, and these the basest, you have every variety and combination of strength and of mistake. The mass of foolish persons dividing themselves always between the two oppositely and equally erroneous faiths. That genius may dispense with law or that law can create genius. Of the two, there is more excuse for and less danger in the first than in the second mistake. Genius has sometimes done lovely things without knowledge and without discipline. But all the learning of the academies has never yet drawn so much as one fair face or even set two pleasant colors side by side. Now there is one great northern painter of whom I have not spoken till now, probably to your surprise, Rubens, whose power is composed of so many elements and whose character may be illustrated so completely and with it the various operation of the counterschools by one of his pictures now open to your study that I would press you to set aside one of your brightest Easter afternoons for the study of that one picture in the exhibition of the old masters, the so-called Juno and Argus, number 387. So-called, I say, for it is not a picture either of Argus or of Juno, but the portrait of a Flemish lady as Juno, just as Rubens painted his family picture with his wife as the virgin and himself as St. George, and a good anatomical study of a human body as Argus. In the days of Rubens, you must remember, mythology was thought of as a mere empty form of compliment or fable and the original meaning of it wholly forgotten. Rubens never dreamed that Argus is the knight or that his eyes are stars, but with the absolutely literal and brutal part of his Dutch nature supposes the head of Argus full of real eyes all over and represents he be cutting them out with a bloody knife and putting one into the hand of the goddess like an unseemly oyster. That conception of the action and the loathsome sprawling of the trunk of Argus under the chariot are the essential contributions of Rubens' own Netherland personality. Then with the rest of the treatment he learned from other schools, but adopted with splendid power. First I think you ought to be struck by having two large peacocks painted with scarcely any color in them. They are nearly black or black green peacocks. Now you know that Rubens is always spoken of as a great colorist, par excellence a colorist. And would you not have expected that before all things the first thing you would have seen in a peacock would have been golden blue? He sees nothing of the kind. A peacock to him is essentially a dark bird, serpent-like in the writhing of the neck, cloud-like in the toss and wave of its plumes. He has dashed out the filaments of every feather with magnificent drawing. He has not given you one bright gleam of green or purple in all the two birds. Well, the reason of that is that Rubens is not par excellence a colorist. Nay, not even a good colorist. He is a very second-rate and coarse colorist, and therefore his color catches the lower public and gets talked about. But he is par excellence a splendid draftsman of the Greek school, and no one else except Tintorette could have drawn with the same ease either the muscles of the dead body or the plumes of the birds. Further, that he never became a great colorist does not mean that he could not had he chosen. He was warped from color by his lower Greek instincts, by his animal delight in coarse and violent forms and scenes, in fighting, in hunting, and in torments of martyrdom and hell. But he had the higher gift in him if the flesh had not subdued it. There is one part of this picture which he learned how to do at Venice, the iris with the golden hair in the chariot behind Juno. In her he has put out his full power under the teaching of Veronese and Titian, and he has all the splendid Northern Gothic, Reynolds, or Gainsborough play of feature with Venetian color. Scarcely anything more beautiful than that head or more masterly than the composition of it with the inlaid pattern of Juno's robe beneath exists in the art of any country. Si sicomnia, but I know nothing else equal to it throughout the entire works of Rubens. See then how the picture divides itself. In the fleshly baseness, brutality, and stupidity of its main conception is the Dutch part of it. That is Rubens' own. In the noble drawing of the dead body and of the birds you had the Phidias Greek part of it, brought down to Rubens through Michelangelo. In the embroidery of Juno's robe you had the Daedalus Greek part of it, brought down to Rubens through Veronese. In the head of iris you had the pure Northern Gothic part of it, brought down to Rubens through Giorgiani and Titian. Now though, even if we had given ten minutes of digression, the lessons in this picture would have been well worth it. I have not in taking you to it gone out of my own way. There is a special point for us to observe in those dark peacocks. If you look at the notes on the Venetian pictures in the end of My Stones of Venice, you will find it especially dwelt upon a singular that Tintoret in his picture of the Nativity has a peacock without any color in it. And the reason of it also that Tintoret belongs with the full half of his mind as Rubens does to the Greek school. But the two men reach the same point by opposite paths. Tintoret begins with what Venice taught him and adopted from what Athens could teach. But Rubens begins with Athens and adopts from Venice. Now if you will look back to my fifth lecture, you will find it said that the colorists can always adopt as much chiaroscuro suits them and so become perfect. But the chiaroscurists cannot on their part adopt color except partially. And accordingly whenever Tintoret chooses, he can laugh Rubens to scorn in management of light and shade. But Rubens only here and there, as far as I know myself only this once, touches Tintoret or Georgianian color. But now observe further. The Greek chiaroscuro I have just told you is by one body of men pursued academically as a means of expressing form by another tragically as a mystery of light and shade corresponding to and forming part of the joy and sorrow of life. You may of course find the two purposes mingled. But pure formal chiaroscuro, Marcantonios and Leonardo's is inconsistent with color. And though it is thoroughly necessary as an exercise, it is only as a correcting and guarding one, never as a basis of art. Let me be sure now that you thoroughly understand the relation of formal shade to color. Here is an egg, here a green cluster of leaves, here a bunch of black grapes. In formal chiaroscuro all these are to be considered as white and drawn as if they were carved in marble. In the engraving of melancholy, what I meant by telling you it was informal chiaroscuro was that the ball is white, the leaves are white, the dress is white. You can't tell what color any of these stand for. On the contrary, to a colorist, the first question about everything is its color. Is this a white thing, a green thing or a blue thing? Down must go my touch of white, green or dark blue, first of all. If afterwards I can make them look round or like fruit and leaves, it is all very well. But if I can't, blue or green, they at least shall be. Now, here you have exactly the thing done by the two masters we are speaking of. Here is a copy of Turner's vignette of Martigny. This is wholly a design of the colored skull. Here is a bit of the vine in the foreground with purple grapes. The grapes, so far from being drawn as round, are stuck in with angular flat spots. But they are vividly purple spots. Their whole vitality and use in the design is in their Tyrian nature. Here, on the contrary, is jurors flight into Egypt with grapes and palm fruit above. Both are white, but both engraved so as to look thoroughly round. All the other great chiaroscurists who my name to you, Reynolds, Velasquez, and Titian, approached their color also on the safe side, from Venice. They always think of color first. But Turner had to work his way out of the dark Greek school up to Venice. He always thinks of his shadow first and it held him in some degree fatally to the end. These pictures, which you all laughed at, were not what you fancied, mad endeavors for color. They were agonizing Greek efforts to get light. He could have got color easily enough if he had rested in that, which I will show you in next lecture. Still, he so nearly made himself a Venetian that as opposed to the Dutch academic chiaroscurists, he is to be considered a Venetian altogether. And now I will show you, in a very simple subject, the exact opposition of the two schools. Here is a study of swans from a Dutch book of academic instruction in Rubens's time. It is a good and valuable book in many ways and you are going to have some copies set you from it. But as a type of academic chiaroscuro, it will give you most valuable lessons on the other side, a warning. Here, then, is the academic Dutchman's notion of a swan. He has laboriously engraved every feather and has rounded the bird into a ball and has thought to himself that never swan has been so engraved before. But he has never with his Dutch eyes perceived two points in the swan, which are vital to it. First, that it is white. And secondly, that it is graceful. He has above all things missed the proportion and necessarily, therefore, the bend of its neck. Now, take the colorist's view of the matter. To him, the first main facts about the swan are that it is a white thing with black spots. Turner takes his brush in his right hand with a little white in it, another in his left hand with a little lamp black. He takes a piece of brown paper, works for about two minutes with his white brush, passes the black to his right hand and works half a minute with that and there you are. You would like to be able to draw two swans in two minutes and a half yourselves. Perhaps so and I can show you how, but it will need 20 years work all day long. First, in the meantime, you must draw them rightly. If it takes two hours instead of two minutes and above all, remember that they are black and white. But further, you see how intensely Turner felt precisely what the Fleming did not feel, the bend of the neck. Now, this is not because Turner is a colorist as opposed to the Fleming, but because he is a pure and highly trained Greek as opposed to the Fleming's low Greek. Both, so far as they are aiming at form, are now working in the Greek school of Phidias. But Turner is true Greek, for he is thinking only of the truth about the swan. And Duwit is pseudo-Greek, for he is thinking not of the swan at all, but of his own Dutch self. And so he has ended in making, with all his essentially pigish nature, this sleeping swan's neck as nearly possible like a leg of a pork. That is the result of academical work in the hands of a vulgar person. And now I will ask you to look carefully at three more pictures in the London exhibition. The first, The Nativity, by Sandra Botticelli. It is an early work by him, but a quite perfect example of what the masters of the pure Greek school did in Florence. One of the Greek main characters, you know, is to be Greek, apresopos, faceless. If you look first at the faces in this picture, you will find them ugly, often without expression, always ill or carelessly drawn. The entire purpose of the picture is a mystic symbolism by motion and chiaroscuro. By motion first, there is a dome of burning clouds in the upper heaven. 12 angels half float, half dance in a circle round the lower vault of it. All their drapery is drifted so as to make you feel the whirlwind of their motion. They are seen by gleams of silvery or fiery light, relieved against an equally lighted blue of inimitable depth and loveliness. It is impossible for you ever to see a more noble work of passionate Greek chiaroscuro, rejoicing in light. From this I should like you to go instantly to Rembrandt's portrait of a burgamaster, number 77 in the exhibition of Old Masters. That is a nobly passionate chiaroscuro, rejoicing in darkness rather than light. You cannot see a finer work by Rembrandt. It has all his power of rendering character and the portrait is celebrated through the world, but it is entirely second-rate work. The character in the face is only striking to persons who like candlelight effects better than sunshine. Any head by Tishon has twice the character and seen by daylight instead of glass. The rest of the picture is as false in light and shade as it is pretentious, made up chiefly of gleaming buttons in places where no light could possibly reach them and of an embossed belt on the shoulder which people think finely painted because it is all over lumps of color, not one of which was necessary. That embossed execution of Rembrandt's is just as much ignorant work as the embossed projecting jewels of Carlo Crivelli, a real painter never loads. See the Velazquez, number 415 in the same exhibition. Finally, from the Rembrandt go to the little SEMA, number 93, St. Mark. There you have the Sandra Botticelli of the Noble Greek School in Florence, the Rembrandt of the Debased Greek School in Holland and the SEMA of the Pure Color School of Venice. The SEMA differs from the Rembrandt by being lovely, from the Botticelli by being simple and calm. The painter does not desire the excitement of rapid movement nor even the passion of beautiful light, but he hates darkness as he does death and falsehood more than either. He has painted a noble human creature simply in clear daylight, not in rapture nor yet in agony. He is dressed neither in a rainbow nor bedraggled with blood. You are neither to be alarmed nor entertained by anything that is likely to happen to him. You are not to be improved by the piety of his expression nor disgusted by its truculence, but there is more true mastery of light and shade if your eye is subtle enough to see it in the hollows and angles of the architecture and folds of the dress than in all the etchings of Rembrandt put together. The unexciting color will not at first delight you, but its charm will never fail, and from all the works of variously strained and obtrusive power with which it is surrounded, you will find that you never return to it but with a sense of relief and of peace, which can only be given you by the tender skill which is wholly without pretense, without pride and without error. End of lecture two, light and shade. Lectures on Landscape, lecture three. Color by John Ruskin. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Duncan Merle. Lecture three, color. The distinctions between schools of art which I have so often asked you to observe are, you must be aware, founded only on the excess of certain qualities in one group of painters over another, or the difference in their tendencies and not in the absolute possession by one group and absence in the rest of any given skill. But this impossibility of drawing trenchant lines of parting need never interfere with the distinctness of our conception of the opponent principles which balance each other in great minds or paralyze each other in weak ones. And I cannot too often urge you to keep clearly separate in your thoughts the school which I have called of crystal because its distinctive virtue is seen unaided in the sharp separations and prismatic harmonies of painted glass and the other the school of clay because its distinctive virtue is seen in the qualities of any fine work and uncolored terracotta and in every drawing which represents them. You know I sometimes speak of these generally as the gothic and Greek schools, sometimes as the colorist and chiaroscurist. All these oppositions are liable to infinite qualification and gradation as between species of animals and you must not be troubled therefore if sometimes momentary contradictions seem to arise in examining special points. Nay, the modes of opposition and the greatest men are inlaid and complex, difficult to explain, though in themselves clear. Thus you know in your study of sculpture we saw that the essential aim of the Greek art was tranquil action. The chief aim of gothic art was passionate rest, a peace and eternity of intense sentiment. As I go into detail I shall continually therefore have to oppose gothic passion to Greek temperance. Yet gothic rigidity, stasis of ecstasis, to Greek action and Eleotheria. You see how doubly, how intimately opposed the ideas are yet how difficult to explain without apparent contradiction. Now today I must guard you carefully against a misapprehension of this kind. I have told you that the Greeks as Greeks made real and material what was before indefinite. They turned the clouds and the lightning of Mount Ithume into the human flesh and eagle upon the extended arm of the Messinian Zeus. And yet being in all things set upon absolute veracity and realization they perceive as they work and think forward that to see in all things truly is to see in all things dimly and through hiding of cloud and fire. So that the schools of crystal, visionary, passionate and fantastic in purpose are in method trenchantly formal and clear and the schools of clay absolutely realistic, temperate and simple in purpose are in method mysterious and soft. Sometimes licentious, sometimes terrific and always obscure. Look once more at this Greek dancing girl which is from a terracotta and therefore intensely of the school of clay. Look at her beside this Madonna of Philippo Lippies. Greek motion against Gothic absolute quietness. Greek indifference, dancing careless against Gothic passion, the mothers. What word can I use except frenzy of love? Greek fleshliness against hungry wasting of the self-forgetful body. Greek softness of diffused shadow and ductile curve against Gothic lucidity of color and acuteness of angle and Greek simplicity and cold veracity against Gothic rapture of trusted vision. And now I may safely, I think go into our work of today without confusing you except only in this. You will find me continually speaking of four men, Titian, Holbein, Turner and Tintoret in almost the same terms. They unite every quality and sometimes you will find me referring to them as colorists, sometimes as chiaroscurists. Only remember this, that Holbein and Turner are Greek chiaroscurists, nearly perfect by adopted color. Titian and Tintoret are essentially Gothic colorists quite perfect by adopted chiaroscuro. I used the word prismatic just now of the schools of crystal as being iridescent. By being studious of color, they are studious of division and while the chiaroscurist devotes himself to the representation of degrees of force in one thing, unseparated light, the colorists have for their function the attainment of beauty by arrangement of the divisions of light. And therefore primarily they must be able to divide so that elementary exercises in color must be directed like first exercises in music to the clear separation of notes and the final perfections of color are those in which of innumerable notes or hues everyone has a distinct office and can be fastened on by the eye and approved as fulfilling it. I do not doubt that it has often been a matter of wonder among any of you who had faith in my judgment why I gave to the university as characteristic of Turner's work the simple and first unattractive drawings of the Lois series. My first and principal reason was that they enforced beyond all resistance on any student who might attempt to copy them this method of laying portions of distinct hues side by side. Some of the touches indeed when the tint has been mixed with much water have been laid in little drops or ponds so that the pigment might crystallize hard at the edge. And one of the chief delights which anyone who really enjoys painting finds in that art is distinct from sculpture is in this exquisite inlaying or joiner's work of it the fitting of edge to edge with a manual skill precisely correspondent to the close application of crowded notes without the least slur in fine harp or piano playing. In many of the finest works of color on a large scale there is even some admission of the quality given to a painted window by the dark lead bars between the pieces of glass both tintorette and veronese when they paint on dark grounds continually stop short with their tints just before they touch others leaving the dark ground showing between in a narrow bar. In the paul veronese and the national gallery you will everywhere and there find pieces of outline like this of holbines which you would suppose were drawn as that is with a brown pencil but no, look close and you will find they are the dark ground left between two tints brought close to each other without touching. It follows also from this law of construction that any master who can color can also do any pain of his window that he likes separately from the rest. Thus you see here is one of Sir Josh's first sittings. The head is very nearly done with the first color. A piece of background is put in and rounded. His sitter has had a pretty silver brooch on which Reynolds having done as much as he chose to the face for that time paints quietly in its place below leaving the dress between to be fitted in afterwards and he puts a little patch of the yellow gown that is to be at the side and it follows also from this law of construction that there must never be any hesitation or repentance in the direction of your lines of limit. So that not only in the beautiful dexterity of the joiner's work but in the necessity of cutting out each piece of color at once and forever for though you can correct an erroneous junction of black and white because the gray between has the nature of either you cannot correct an erroneous junction of red and green which make a neutral between them. If they overlap that is neither red nor green. Thus the practice of color educates at once in neatness of hand and distinctness of will so that as I wrote long ago in the third volume of modern painters you are always safe if you hold the hand of a colorist. I have brought you a little sketch today from the foreground of a Venetian picture in which there is a bit that will show you in this precision of method. It is the head of a parrot with a little flower in his beak from a picture of Carpathios. One of his series of the life of St. George. I could not get the curves of the leaves and they are patched and spoiled. But the parrot's head, however badly done is put down with no more touches than the Venetian gave it and it will show you exactly his method. First a thin warm ground has been laid over the whole canvas which Carpathio wanted as an undercurrent through all the color just as there is an undercurrent of gray in the Lois drawings. Then on this he strikes his parrot in vermilion almost flat color rounding a little only with a glaze of lake but attending mainly to get the character of the bird by the pure outline of its form as if it were cut out of a piece of ruby glass. Then he comes to the beak of it. The brown ground beneath is left for the most part. One touch of black is put for the hollow two delicate lines of dark gray to find the outer curve and one little quivering touch of white draws the inner edge of the mandible. There are just four touches fine as the finest penmanship to do that beak and yet you will find that in the peculiar parochetish mumbling and nibbling action of it and all the character in which this nibbling beak differs from the tearing beak of the eagle it is impossible to go farther or be more precise and this is only an incident remember in a large picture. Let me notice in passing the infinite absurdity of ever hanging Venetian pictures above the line of sight. There are very few persons in the room who will be able to see the drawing of the bird's beak without a magnifying glass. Yet it is 10 to one that in any modern gallery such a picture would be hung 30 feet from the ground. Here again it's a little bit to show Carpaccio's execution. It is his signature only a little wall lizard holding the paper in its mouth. Perfect. Yet so small that you can scarcely see its feet and that I could not with my finest pointed brush copy their stealthy action. And now I think the members of my class will more readily pardon the intensely irksome work I put them to with the compasses and the ruler. Measurement and precision are with me before all things. Just because though myself trained wholly in the chiaroscuro schools I know the value of color and I want you to begin with color in the very outset and to see everything as children would see it. For believe me the final philosophy of art can only ratify their opinion that the beauty of a cock robin is to be red and of a grass plot to be green. And the best skill of art is an instantly seizing on the manifold deliciousness of light which you can only seize by precision of instantaneous touch. Of course I cannot do so myself yet in these sketches of mine made for the sake of color there is enough to show you the nature and the value of the method. They are two pieces of study of the color of marble architecture. The tints literally edified and laid edge to edge is simply on the paper as the stones are on the walls. But please note in them one thing especially the testing rule I gave for good color in the elements of drawing is that you make the white precious and the black conspicuous. Now you will see in these studies that the moment the white is enclosed properly and harmonized with the other hues it becomes somehow more precious and pearly than the white paper. And that I am not afraid to leave a whole field of untreated white paper all around it being sure that even the little diamonds in the round window will tell as jewels if they are gradated justly. Again there is not a touch of black in any shadow however deep of these two studies so that if I chose to put a piece of black near them it would be conspicuous with a vengeance. But in this vignette copied from Turner you have the two principles brought out perfectly. You have the white of foaming water of buildings and clouds brought out brilliantly from a white ground and though part of the subject is in deep shadow the eye at once catches the one black point admitted in front. Well, the first reason that I gave you these luau drawings was this of their infallible decision. The second was their extreme modesty and color. They are beyond all other works than I know existing dependent for their effect on low subdued tones. Their favorite choice in time of day being either dawn or twilight and even their brightest sunsets produced chiefly out of gray paper. This last, the loveliest of all gives the warmth of a summer twilight with a tinge of color on the gray paper. So slight that it may be a question with some of you whether any is there. And I must beg you to observe and receive as a rule without any exception that whether color be gay or sad the value of it depends never on violence but always on solitude. It may be that a great colorless will use his utmost force of color as a singer his full power of voice. But loud or low the virtue is in both cases always in refinement, never in loudness. The west window of Sharth is bedropped with crimson deeper than blood but it is as soft as it is deep and as quiet as the light of dawn. I say whether color be gay or sad it must remember be one or the other. You know I told you that the pure gothic school color was entirely cheerful. That is applied to landscape. It assumes that all nature is lovely and maybe clearly seen that destruction and decay or accidents of our present state never to be thought of seriously and above all things never to be painted. But that whatever is orderly, healthy, radiant, fruitful and beautiful is to be loved with all our hearts and painted with all our skill. I told you also that no complete system of art for either natural history or landscape could be formed on this system. That the wrath of a wild beast and the tossing of a mountain torrent are equally impossible to a painter of the purest school. That in higher fields of thought increasing knowledge means increasing sorrow. And every art which has complete sympathy with humanity must be chastened by the sight and oppressed by the memory of pain. But there is no reason why your system of study should be a complete one if it be right and profitable though incomplete. If you can find it in your hearts to follow out only the gothic thoughts of landscape, I deeply wish you would and for many reasons. First, it has never yet received due development for at the moment when artistic skill and knowledge of effect became sufficient to complete its purposes, the reformation destroyed the faith in which they might have been accomplished. For to the whole body of powerful draftsmen, the reformation meant the Greek school and the shadow of death. So that of exquisitely developed gothic landscape, you may count the examples on the fingers of your hand. Van Eyck's adoration of the lamb at Bruges. Another little Van Eyck in the Louvre. The John Bellini lately presented to the National Gallery. Another John Bellini in Rome and the St. George of Carpaccio at Venice are all that I can name myself of great works, but there exists some exquisite though feebler designs in missile painting of which in England, the landscape in flowers in the Salter of Henry VI will serve you for a sufficient type. The landscape in the Grimani missile at Venice being monumentally typical and perfect. Now for your own practice in this, having first acquired the skill of exquisite delineation and laying a pure color day by day, you must draw some lovely natural form or flower or animal without obscurity as in missile painting. Choosing for study in natural scenes only what is beautiful and strong in life. I fully anticipated at the beginning of the pre-Raphaelite movement that they would have carried forward this method of work but they broke themselves to pieces by pursuing dramatic sensation instead of beauty so that to this day all the loveliest things in the world remain unpainted and although we have occasionally spasmodic efforts and fits of enthusiasm and green meadows and apple blossom to spare, it yet remains a fact that not in all this England and still less in France have you a painter who has been able to nobly to paint so much as a hedge of wild roses or a forest glade full of anemones or wood sorrel. One reason of this has been the idea that such work was easy on the part of the young men who attempted it and the total vulgarity and want of education in the greater body of abler artists rendering them insensitive to qualities of fine delineation, the universal law for them being that they can draw a pig but not a Venus. For instance, two landscape painters of much reputation in England and one of them in France also, David Cox and John Constable, represent a form of blunt and untrained faculty which in being very frank and simple apparently powerful and needing no thought, intelligence or trouble whatever to observe and being wholly disorderly, slovenly and licentious and therein meeting with instant sympathy from the disorderly public mind now resentful of every trammel and ignorant of every law. These two men I say, represent in their intensity the qualities adverse to all accurate science or skill in landscape art. Their work being the mere blundering of clever peasants and deserving no name whatever in any school of true practice but consummately mischievous. First, in its easy satisfaction the painters own self complacencies and then in the pretense of ability which blinds the public to all the virtue of patience and to all the difficulty of precision. There is more relation to the great schools of art more fellowship with Balini and Titian in the humblest painter of letters on village signboards than in men like these. Do not therefore think that the gothic school is an easy one. You might more easily fill a house with pictures like constables from Garrett to Seller than imitate one cluster of leaves by Van Eyck or Giotto. And among all the efforts that have been made to paint our common wildflowers, I've only once and that in this very year just in time to show it to you seen the thing done rightly. But now observe, these flowers, beautiful as they are, are not of the gothic school. The law of that school is that everything shall be seen clearly or at least only in such mist or faintness as shall be delightful. And I have no doubt that the best introduction to it would be the elementary practice of painting every study on a golden ground. This at once compels you to understand that the work is to be imaginative and decorative, that it represents beautiful things in the clearest way but not under existing conditions and that, in fact, you are producing jeweler's work rather than pictures. Then the qualities of grace and design become paramount to every other and you may afterwards substitute clear sky for the golden background without danger of loss or sacrifice of system. Clear sky of golden light or deep in full blue for the full blue of Titian is just as much a piece of conventional enamel background as if it were a plate of gold. That depth of blue in relation to foreground objects being wholly impossible. There is another immense advantage in this Byzantine and gothic abstraction of decisive form when it is joined with a faithful desire of whatever truth can be expressed on narrow conditions. It makes us observe the vital points in which character consists and educates the eye and mind in the habit of fastening and limiting themselves to essentials. In complete drawing, one is continually liable to be led aside from the main points by picturesque additions of light and shade. In gothic drawing, you must get the character, if at all, by a keenness of analysis which must be in constant exercise. And here I must beg of you very earnestly, once for all, to clear your minds of any misapprehension of the nature of gothic art as if it implied error and weakness instead of severity. That a style is restrained or severe does not mean that it is also erroneous. Much mischief has been done. Endless misapprehension induced in this matter by the blundering religious painters of Germany who have become examples of the opposite error from our English painters of the Constable group. Our uneducated men work too bluntly to be ever in the right but the Germans draw finely and resolutely wrong. Here is a reposso of Overbecks, for instance, which the painter imagined to be elevated in style because he had drawn it without light and shade and with absolute decision. And so far indeed it is gothic enough but it is separated everlastingly from gothic and from all other living work because the painter was too vain to look at anything he had to paint and drew every mass of his drapery in lines that were as impossible as they were stiff and stretched out the limbs of his Madonna in actions as unlikely as they are uncomfortable. In all early gothic art, indeed, you will find failure of this kind, especially distortion and rigidity which are in many respects painfully to be compared with the splendid repose of classic art. But the distortion is not gothic. The intensity, the abstraction, the force of character are and the beauty of color. Here is a very imperfect but illustrative border of flowers and animals on a golden ground. The large letter contains, indeed, entirely feeble and ill-drawn figures. That is merely childish and failing work of an inferior hand. It is not characteristic of gothic or any other school but this peacock being drawn with intense delight and blue on gold and getting character of peacock in the general sharp outline. Instead of, as Ruben's peacocks in black shadow is distinctively gothic of fine style. I wish you therefore to begin your study of natural history and landscape by discerning the simple outlines and the pleasant colors of things and to rest in them as long as you can. But observe, you can only do this on one condition that of striving also to create in reality the beauty which you seek in imagination. It will be wholly impossible for you to retain the tranquility of temper and felicity of faith necessary for noble, purest painting unless you are actively engaged in promoting the felicity and peace of practical life. None of this bright gothic art was ever done but either by faith in the attainableness of felicity in heaven or under conditions of real order and delicate loveliness on the earth. As long as I can possibly keep you among them, there you shall stay, among the almond and apple blossom. But if you go on into the veracities of the school of clay, you will find there is something at the roots of almond and apple trees, which is this. You must look at him in the face, fight him, conquer him with what scathe you may. You need not think to keep out of the way of him. There is Turner's dragon and there is Michelangelo's. There, a very little one of Carpaccio's. Every soul of them had to understand the creature and very earnestly. Not that Michelangelo understands his dragon as the others do. He was not enough of a colorist either to catch the points of the creature's aspect or to feel the same hatred of them. But I confess myself always amazed in looking at Michelangelo's work here or elsewhere at his total carelessness of anatomical character except only in the human body. It is very easy to round a dragon's neck if the only idea you have of it is that it is virtually no more than a coiled sausage. And besides, anybody can round anything if you have full scale from white highlight to black shadow. But look here at Carpaccio, even in my copy. The colorist says, first of all, as my delicious parakea was ruby, so this nasty viper shall be black. And then is the question, can I round him off even though he is black and make him slimy and yet springy and close down, clotted like a pool of black blood on the earth, all the same? Look at him besides Michelangelo's and then tell me the Venetians can't draw. And also, Carpaccio does it with a touch with one sweep of his brush. Three minutes at the most allowed for all the beast while Michelangelo has been haggling at this dragon's neck for an hour. Then node also in turners that clinging to the earth, the specialty of him, Il Gran Namintio, the great enemy, Plutus. His claws are like the clefts of the rock. His shoulders like its pinnacles, his belly deep into every fissure, glued down, loaded down. His bat's wings cannot lift him. They are rudimentary wings only. Before I tell you what he means himself, you must know what all this smoke about him means. Nothing will be more precious to you, I think, in the practical study of art than the conviction, which will force itself on you more and more every hour, of the way all things are bound together, little and great in spirit and in matter, so that if you get once the right clue to any group of them, it will grasp the simplest, yet reach to the highest truths. You know I've just been telling you how this school of materialism and clay involved itself at last in cloud and fire. Now, down to the least detailed method and subject that will hold. Here is the perfect type, though not a complex one, of gothic landscape. The background gold, the trees drawn leaf by leaf, and full green in color. No effect of light. Here is an equally typical Greek school landscape by Wilson. Lost holy and golden mist, the trees so slightly drawn that you don't know if they are trees or towers, and no care for color whatsoever. Perfectly deceptive and marvelous effect of sunshine through the mist, Apollo and the Python. Now here is Raphael. Exactly between the two. Trees still drawn leaf by leaf, wholly formal, but beautiful mist coming gradually into the distance. Well then, last, here is Turner's. Greek school of the highest class, and you define his art absolutely as first the displaying intensely and with the sternest intellect of natural form as it is. And then the envelopment of it with cloud and fire. Only there are two sorts of cloud and fire. He knows them both. There's one and there's another, the Dudley and the Flint. That's what the cloud and flame of the dragon mean. Now, let me show you what the dragon means himself. I go back to another perfect landscape of the living gothic school. It is only a pencil outline by Edward Byrne Jones in illustration of the story of Psyche. It is the introduction of Psyche after all her troubles into heaven. Now, in this of Byrne Jones, the landscape is clearly full of light everywhere, color or glass light. That is, the outline is prepared for modification of color only. Every plant in the grass is set formally, grows perfectly, and may be realized completely. Exquisite order and universal with eternal life and light. This is the faith and effort of the schools of crystal. And you may describe and complete their work quite literally by taking any verses of Chaucer in his tender mood and observing how he insists on the clearness and brightness first and then on the order. Thus, in Chaucer's dream, when if an aisle, me thought I was, where wall and yate was all of glass and so was closed round about, that leaveless nun come in the out, uncouth and strange to behold. For every yate of fine gold, a thousand fans eye-turning, entuned had and bride singing, diverse and on each fan a pair with open mouth again here. And of a suit were all the towers, subtly coven after flowers, of uncouth colors during I, that never been none seen in may. Next to this drawing of Psyche, I placed two of Turner's most beautiful classical landscapes. At once you are out of the open daylight, either in sunshine, admitted partially through trembling leaves, or in the last rays of its setting, scarcely any more warm on the darkness of the islex wood. In both the vegetation, though beautiful, is absolutely wild and uncared for, as it seems either by human or by higher powers, which having appointed for it the laws of its being, leave it to spring into such beauty as is consistent with disease and alternate with decay. In the purest landscape, the human subject is the immortality of the soul by the faithfulness of love. In both the Turner landscapes, it is the death of the body by the impatience and error of love. The one is the first glimpse of Asperia by Esechus. Aspecite Asperian patria sebranida rippa. Injectos omeres secantem sole capilos. In a few moments to lose her forever. The other is a mythological subject of deeper meaning, the death of Procris. I just now referred to the landscape by John Bellini in the National Gallery as one of the six best existing of the purest school, being holy, felicitous, and enjoyable. In the foreground of it indeed is the martyrdom of Peter Martyr. But John Bellini looks upon that as an entirely cheerful and pleasing incident. It does not disturb or even surprise him, much less displease in the slightest degree. Now the best landscape to this in the National Gallery is a Florentine one on the edge of transition to the Greek feeling. And in that distance is still beautiful but misty, not clear. The flowers are still beautiful, but intentionally of the color of blood. And in the foreground lies the dead body of Procris, which disturbs the poor painter greatly, and he has expressed his disturbed mind about it in the figure of a poor little brown, newly black fawn, or perhaps the god Faunus himself, who is much puzzled by the death of Procris and stoopes over her, thinking it a woeful thing to find her pretty body lying there breathless and all spotted with blood on the breast. You remember I told you how the earthly power that is necessary in art was shown by the flight of deadless to the herpeton Minos. Look for yourselves at the story of Procris as related to Minos in the 15th chapter of the third book of Apollodorus, and you will see why it is a fawn who's put to wonder at her. She having escaped by artifice from the bestial power of Minos, yet she is wholly an earth nymph and the son of Aurora must not only leave her, but himself slay her. The myth of Simeon, desiring to Cesus and of Apollod and Coronis, and this having all the same main interest. Once understand that, and you will see why Turner has put her death under this deep shade of trees, the son withdrawing his last ray, and why he has put beside her the low type of an animal's pain, a dog licking its wounded paw. But now I want you to understand Turner's depth of sympathy farther still in both these high, mythical subjects, the surrounding nature, though suffering, is still dignified and beautiful. Every line in which the master traces it, even where seemingly negligent is lovely and set down with a meditative calmness which makes these two etchings capable of being placed beside the most tranquil work of Holbein or Durer. In this Cephalus especially, note the extreme equality and serenity of every outline. But now here's the subject of which you will wonder at first why Turner drew it at all. It has no beauty whatsoever, no specialty of picturesqueness and all its lines are cramped and poor. The crampness and the poverty are all intended. This is no longer to make us think the death of happy souls, but of the labor of unhappy ones, at least of the more or less limited dullest and, I must not say, homely, but unhomely life of the neglected agricultural poor. It is a gleener bringing down her one sheaf of corn to an old water mill, itself mossy and rent, scarcely able to get its stones to turn. An ill-bred dog stands joyless by the unfenced stream. Two country boys lean, joyless against a wall that is half broken down, and all about the steps down which the girl is bringing her sheaf, the bank of earth, flowerless and rugged, testifies only of its malignity. And in the black and sternly rugged etching, no longer graceful but hard and broken in every touch, the master insists upon the ancient curse of the earth. The corn's also, and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. And now you will see at once with what feeling Turner completes in a more tender mood, this lovely subject of his Yorkshire stream, by giving it the conditions of pastoral and agricultural life, the cattle by the pool, the milkmaid crossing the bridge with her pale on her head, the mill with the old millstones, and its gleaming wear as his chief light led across the behind the wild trees. And not among our soft-flowing rivers only, but here among the torrents of the great Chartreuse, where another man would assuredly have drawn the monastery, Turner only draws their working mill. And here I am able to show you, fortunately, one of his works painted at this time of his most earnest thought, when his imagination was still freshly filled with the Greek mythology, and he saw for the first time with his own eyes, the clouds come down upon the actual earth. The scene is one which, in old times of Swiss traveling, you would all have known well. A little cascade, which descends to the road from Geneva to Chamonix, near the village of Laguerre, from under a subordinate ridge of the Aiguille de Vara, known as the Aiguillette. You, none of you probably know the scene now, for your only subject is to get to Chamonix and up Mont Blanc, and down again. But the valley of Cluce, if you knew it, is worth many Chamonix. And an impressed Turner profoundly. The facts of the spot are here given in Mirren's purest simplicity, a quite unpicturesque bridge, a few trees partly stunted and blasted by the violence of the torrent and storms at their roots, a cottage with its mill-wheel. This has lately been pulled down to widen the road. And the brook shed from the rocks, and finding its way to join the arve. The scene is absolutely Arcadian. All the traditions of the Greek hills, in their purity, were found on such rocks and shadows as these, and Turner has given you the birth of the shepherd Hermes on Selene, in its visible and solemn presence, the white cloud, Hermes aereoforos, forming out of heaven upon the hills, the brook distilled from it as the type of human life, born of the cloud and vanishing into the cloud, led down by the haunting Hermes among the ravines, and then, like the reflection of the cloud itself, the white sheep with the dog of Argus, guarding them, drinking from the stream. And now, do you see why I gave you for the beginning of your types of landscape thought, that junction of teas and gretta in their misty ravines? And this glen of the gretta above, in which Turner has indeed done his best to paint the trees that live again after their autumn, the twilight that will rise again with twilight of dawn, the stream that flows always, and the resting on the cliffs of the clouds that return if they vanish. But of human life, he says, a boy climbing among the trees for his entangled kite, and these white stones in the mountain churchyard, show forth all the strength, and all the end. You think that saying of the Greek school, pinder's summary of it, te detis, te deotis, a sorrowful and degrading lesson. See at least then, that you reach the level of such degradation. See that your lives be in nothing worse than a boy's climbing for his entangled kite. It will be well for you if you join not with those who instead of kites fly falcons, who instead of obeying the last words of the great cloud shepherd, to feed his sheep, live the lives. How much less than vanity of the war wolf and the gear eagle? Or do you think it a dishonor to man to say to him that death is but only rest? See that when it draws near to you, you may look to it, at least for sweetness of rest, and that you recognize the Lord of death coming to you as a shepherd, gathering you into his fold for the night. End of lecture three, Lectures on Landscape by John Ruskin.