Lectures on Landscape: Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871Ruskin, John
Philosophy
Lectures on Landscape: Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871
Ruskin, John
Landscape painting
53. 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 school. Here is a bit of vine in the
foreground with purple grapes; the grapes, so far from being drawn as
round, are struck 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 Duerer's "Flight into Egypt,"
with grapes and palm fruit above. Both are white; but both engraved so
as to look thoroughly round.
54. All the other great chiaroscurists whom I named to you--Reynolds,
Velasquez, and Titian--approached their shadow 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. Those 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 academical
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.
55. Here is a study of swans, from a Dutch book of academical
instruction in Rubens' 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 academical chiaroscuro it will give you most valuable lessons
on the other side--of warning.
Here, then, is the academical 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 a
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.
56. 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 one brush in his right hand, with a little white in it;
another in his left hand, with a little lampblack. 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
twenty 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.
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