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قراءة كتاب Outdoor Sketching Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914

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Outdoor Sketching
Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914

Outdoor Sketching Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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a newspaper. For some men cut thus into nature, haphazard, without care or thought, and produce perhaps a square containing an advertisement of a patent churn, a railroad timetable, and a fragment of an essay on art. Cut carefully and with selection, and you may get a poem which will soothe you like a melody.


As to the value of the laws which govern the perfect composition, it is unquestionably true that a correct knowledge of these laws makes or unmakes the picture and establishes or ruins the rank of the painter. No matter how careful the drawing, how interesting the subject, how true the mass, how subtle the gradations of light and shade, how perfect the expression of the figures, or how transparent the atmosphere of a landscape, a want of this knowledge will defeat the result. On the other hand, a good composition—one that "carries," as the term is—one that can be seen across the room, if properly composed will instantly excite your interest, even if upon near inspection you are shocked by its crudities and faults. "I don't know what it is," says a painter, "but it's good all the same."

After your selection has been made, the next thing is to search for its centre of interest. When this is found it is equally important to weigh carefully the quality of this centre of interest in order to determine whether, as has been said, the subject is worth painting at all. My own rule is to spend half the time I am devoting to my sketch in carefully weighing the subject in its every detail and expression.


Many men, I am aware, have endeavored to prove that there are eight or ten different forms of composition. My own experience and investigation are, of course, limited, but so far I have only been able to discover one, namely, the larger mass and the smaller mass: the larger mass dominating the centre of interest, which catches your eye instantly at first sight of a picture, and the smaller or less interesting object which next attracts your eye, and so relieves the vision and spares you the monotony of looking at a single object long and steadily, thus fatiguing the eye and dissipating the interest.


Having determined upon the quality of the subject-matter and fixed its centre interest in pleasing relation to the whole, the next step is to confine yourself to all that the eyes see at one glance and no more, or, in other words, that portion of the landscape which you could cut out with the scissors of your eye and paste upon your mind. That which you can see when your head is kept perfectly still, your eye looking straight before you, only seeing so high, so low, and so far to the right and left, without a strain. The great sweep of vision, a sweep covering a hundred subjects perhaps, is obtained by turning the eyes up or down or sideways. But to be true—that is, to see one picture at a time—the eye should be fixed like the lens of a camera, the limit of the picture being the range of the eye and no more. A departure from this rule not only confuses your perspective but crowds a number of points of interest into the square of your canvas, when there is really only one centre point before you in nature; and this one point you must treat as does the electrician in a theatre who keeps the lime-light on the star of the play.


Another requirement is rapidity of execution. I am not speaking of figure-drawing. I can well understand why the model grows tired, although the crude lay figure may not, and why the constant workings over and again upon the figure subject, the mosaicing (if I may coin a word) of the different points of the figure during the different hours of the day and the different days of the week deep into the canvas, may be necessary.

I am speaking of outdoor, landscape work, for which only four hours, at most, either in the morning or in the afternoon, can be utilized. In this four hours nature keeps comparatively still long enough for you to caress her with your brush, and if you would truly express what you see, your work must be finished in that time. I can quite understand that to the ordinary student this is a paralyzing statement, but let us analyze it together for a moment and I think that we shall all see that if it were possible for a human hand to obey us as precisely as a human eye detects, the results on the canvas would be infinitely more valuable, first, because the sun never stands still and the shadows of one hour are not the shadows of the next; and second, because this moving of the sun is affecting not only the mass but the composition of the picture, one mass of buildings being in light at ten o'clock and again in shadow at eleven. It is also affecting its local color, the yellow of the afternoon sunlight illumining and graying the silver-blue of the shadows, thus weakening the force of positive shadows scattered through the composition. Of course, to be really exact, there is only one moment in any one of the hours of the day in which any one aspect of nature remains the same, but since we are all finite we must do the best we can, and four hours, in my experience, is all that a man can be sure of.

We have, of course, the next day to continue in, but then the landscape has changed. That delicate, transparent, gauzy cloud screen that softened the sky light was, under the northwest wind of yesterday, a clear, steely gray-blue, and the sun shining through it made the sunlight almost white and the shadows a neutral blue; to-day the wind is from the south and a great mass of soft summer clouds, tea-rose color, drift over the clear azure, each one of which throws its reflected light on every object over which they float. The half you painted yesterday, therefore, will not match the half you must paint to-day, and so if you will persist in working on your same canvas you go on making an almanac of your picture, so apparent to an expert that he can pick out the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as you daily progressed. If you should be fortunate enough to work under Italian skies, where sometimes for days together the light is the same, the skies being one expanse of soft, opalescent blue, you might think under such influence it would be possible for you to perform the great almanac trick successfully in your sketch. But how about yourself? Are you the same man to-day that you were yesterday? If so, perhaps you might also find yourself in exactly the same frame of mind that existed when your sketch was half finished. But would you guarantee that you would be the same man for a week?

I believe we can maintain this position of the necessity of rapid work in out-of-door sketches by looking for a moment at the product of the best men of the last century, some of whom I have already mentioned. Take Corot, for instance. Corot, as you know, spent almost his entire life painting the early light of the morning. An analysis of his life's work shows that he must have folded his umbrella and gone home before eleven o'clock. My own idea is that many hundreds of his canvases, which have since sold at many thousands of francs, were perfectly finished in one sitting. This cannot be otherwise when you remember that one dealer in Paris claims to have sold two thousand Corots. These one-sitting pictures to me express his best work. In the larger canvases in which figures are introduced—notably the one first owned by the late Mr. Charles A. Dana, of New York, called "Apollo," I believe—the treatment of the sky and foreground shows careful repainting, and while the mechanical process of the brush, shown by the over and under

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