John Rowland Fothergill and Joseph Gregory Horner

“ If, to describe an incident in the street you had the entire affair re-enacted on the same spot, you would have but made a mechanical reproduction of it, leaving the spectator to simplify the affair, and construct his own conception of it. You have not given your ideas of the event, and so you have not made a work of art. So, if a man draws an object detail for detail by any mechanical process, or traces over its photograph, he has but reduplicated the real aspect of the object, and has failed to give the spectator a simple and intelligible idea of it. ”

“ Contour being in nature an ideal line between one form and another, it is illogical to treat it or criticize it in a drawing as an actual and specific thing, apart from the forms that make it and are made by it. If an artist drew a dragon with deliberate disregard for animal construction, his drawing would be silly, and only by a profound knowledge of the forms of nature could it be made to have beautiful lines. Truth to nature is always originality, and it is the only originality worth the name. ”

“ The great draughtsmen of every time and country are known by their own words, as well as their works, to have been infinitely respectful to the form of every detail in nature. Their drawings always recall to our minds reality as we ourselves have seen it (provided we have studied from nature and not from pictures) . The drawing of a hand, for instance, by Hokusai, Ingres or Dürer, revives in us our own impressions of the forms and aspects of real hands. ”

“ It is plain that the amusing pictures in Punch or Fliegende Blätter would be none the more amusing if they were done by the hand of Michelangelo, nor would the mystic designs of Blake be more full of meaning if drawn by Rembrandt, for in neither case do these works depend upon any subtle rendering of the forms of nature for their success, but upon the dramatic or intellectual imagination of the man who conceived them. When the witty or ethical man is at the same time a master draughtsman his work has two values, the “literary” content and the beauty of his drawing of natural objects. ”

“ It may be argued that each has a right to his own opinion about form and its representation, on the supposed ground that we all see form in different ways. But there is a fallacy in this argument. If we take the average man’s drawing of any form more complex than a loaf of bread as a fair and only testimony of his power of visualization of forms, we must conclude that most of us see not differently, but wrongly, or rather confusedly and disconnectedly, and that some can visualize form scarcely at all. ”

“ To regard a man’s works of art, or indeed any of his manifestations, from this point of view, is, after all, nothing but a kind of inquisitive cheiromancy. Those who pretend to like the drawings of Watteau or Michelangelo “because they show more individuality” than the incompetent work of a beginner or poor artist cannot be skilled in their own business, because the lady who tells your character by your handwriting finds as much individuality in bad writing as in good,—sometimes even more. ”

“ It may be entertaining to some to guess at the artist’s character from his works by this process of inference and comparison, but it is unreasonable to imagine that “individuality,” as such, can be made a serious criterion of aesthetic judgment. The only individuality a draughtsman can show directly by his drawing is his individual way of conceiving the forms of nature, and even this is immaterial provided the conception and drawing be good. ”

“ If then an artist of clean vision sees in an object of reality such clear characteristic lines, he draws them not for their abstract beauty, but merely because by them alone can he express his idea of the form before him. ”

“ We do not usually say, or think, that a sculptor is drawing when he is using his chisel, although he may be expressing or defining forms, nor that an engraver is drawing when he is pushing the burin with the palm of the hand, although the result may be the rendering of a design. But we do say that an artist is drawing when he uses the lead pencil, and here we have a motion bearing some resemblance to that of traction generally. ”

“ Art gives intelligible ideas of the forms of nature, mechanism attempts to reduplicate their aspects.
There are some who hold that drawing is not exclusively a matter of interpreting form, but that great artists have their own “personalities” which they infuse into their work. They will ask, How is it otherwise to be explained that two equally good draughtsmen will invariably make different drawings of the same figure? Is it not for the same reason that one man will divide up a row of eight marbles into groups of four, and another into five and three? ”

“ Consequently in art any face, figure or object that does not come into the category of what the average man cares for is condemned by him even as it would be in real life, since he is no lover of form for form’s sake, but provided the subject or moral be pleasing the quality of the draughtsmanship is of small account. The picture of a dwarf, or of an anatomy lesson, or of a group of ordinary bourgeois folk would not really please him, even though he were told that the work was by Velazquez, Rembrandt or Manet. ”

“ If we first examine the attitude of the average man, artist or layman, towards nature, we can better explain his attitude towards works of art. The average man or artist has not a highly developed appreciation of form per se, whether it be the form of natural or manufactured objects. And it would seem that he is still less a disinterested spectator of the forms and features of his fellow beings and animals, their movements, their colour, their value in a room or landscape. ”

“ At the outset a distinction must be made between drawing as a means of symbolic or literary expression and drawing as the direct and only means of expressing the beauty of form. If Pharaoh wants to have it known that a hundred ducks were consumed at one meal in his court, he employs a draughtsman to register the fact on a frieze by picturing a row of cooks occupied in preparing the hundred ducks. ”

“ This kind of preference, as remarked above, is superficial, for it overlooks the main issue and purpose of drawing, viz. the representation, by any means whatever, of the artist’s ideas of form. It is as though one should prefer a letter from Holbein to one from Rembrandt, though both were equally expressive, simply because Holbein’s handwriting was prettier than Rembrandt’s. Each draughtsman manifests a kind of handwriting peculiar to himself even in his most faithful rendering of form; and by this we can immediately recognize the artist ”

“ It is fair to suppose that all abstract principles of aesthetic judgment, such as beauty of line, personality, style, nobility of thought, romanticism, are merely pretexts set up by people who would still affect to admire the drawings of recognized masters when they have neither the knowledge of, nor the care for, the forms of nature by virtue of which alone these drawings are what they are, and by which alone they can be immediately appreciated. ”

“ The subjectivity of experience governs the different conceptions that good draughtsmen will form of the same object. Accordingly as a draughtsman feels form so will he draw it, and it is only because our sense apparatuses are more or less similarly constituted that we can understand and appreciate one another’s conceptions. ”

“ Now the draughtsman employs various intensities of his monochrome as light and shade by which to give roundness to his forms. But if on the same drawing he uses the same means in his attempt to express colour, a conflict would be at once set up between that which makes for form and that which would make for colour, and the result would generally be a confusion. Again, let one attempt to give red hair to a monochrome drawing of a man, and if the red be plain and unmistakable to all who are not the artist’s accomplices, then the artist has succeeded ”

“ A beautiful drawing, however slight, is but the precipitate of the whole in the artist’s mind. And a highly finished drawing by a master does not show even any apparent selection or elimination. The adoption of the principle of selection to differentiate art from mechanical reproduction is fundamentally vicious, and could be shown to be wholly inapplicable to the so-called formative arts. ”

“ We do not hear such personal criticism upon drawings of landscape, not because artists do them better, but because natural landscape has no interest for any one other than for its form, or, at least, people do not hold such definite personal likes or dislikes with regard to its various manifestations. But the artist, though his own personal predilections may, and generally do, lead him to work within that agreeable milieu, has, in the capacity of artist, no subjective prejudices ”

“ Symbolic art describes indirectly and in a necessarily limited scope what literature can do directly and with unlimited powers. The only content of symbolic drawing is its literary meaning; as drawing it may be quite worthless. ”

“ Emanuel Loewy, in his Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, demonstrates how the early Greek sculpture (and that of all primitive peoples, children and ungifted artists) shows an aversion from depth. Their reliefs are of the flattest description, almost raised contours, and their figures in the round have at first only one aspect, or flat façade, so to speak, then three and four aspects, and finally at the date of Lysippus the figures are fully rounded out, and the members project at liberty in all directions. ”

“ It is a fact that there are, and always have been, a certain number of people who agree perfectly in their appreciation of the works of certain draughtsmen of different times and countries, and who can state reasons for their appreciation in definite and almost identical terms, for it is based upon knowledge and experience. To such people all fine draughtsmanship owes its public fame, and its immortality lies in their safe keeping. ”

“ We have shown that the art of drawing is not an imitation, but an expression of the artist’s ideas of form; therefore all drawing of forms that merely reproduces the image on the retina, and leaves unconsulted the ideas of touch, is incomplete and primitive, because it does not express a conception of form which is the result of an association of the two senses ”

“ In those firms which manufacture a large range of machinery, the drawing-office staff is separated into departments, each under its own chief, and there is seldom any transference of men from one to another. ”

“ The artist in this case does not represent the scene as he must have known it in the kitchen, with all its variety of movement and composition (as an early Greek vase painter conceived the interior of a vase factory) , but all he does and is required to do is to give the sufficient number of figures and ducks. The more uniform the figures the greater will be the effect of number. Drawing has been employed here to tell a story, and it succeeds in so far as it tells the spectator plainly what could be told, perhaps less conveniently, in words. ”

“ The riding man’s admiration for the look of a particular horse is based upon the fact that it looks like “a horse to go,” and hence it is what he calls beautiful, while the artist, in the capacity of artist and not of sportsman, is not particular in his choice of horse-flesh, but finds each animal equally interesting for itself alone. ”

“ Let a good draughtsman make a successful likeness of the mother of some average man, and the latter will be delighted, but it by no means follows that he will delight in a drawing of the wife of the artist, though done by the same hand and with equal skill. ”

“ This points to the early identity of the two arts when drawing was a kind of writing, and when such writing as men had learned to practise was essentially what we should call drawing, though of a rude and simple kind. Even in the present day picture writing is not unfrequently resorted to by travellers as a means of making themselves intelligible. There is also a kind of art which is writing in the modern sense and drawing at the same time, such as the work of the medieval illuminators in their manuscripts. ”

“ In many establishments now the designing of shop tools and fixtures is done in a department of the office specially set apart for that kind of work.
The growing specialization of the engineer’s work is reflected in the drawing office. Specialists are sought after, and receive the highest rates of pay. A man is required to be an expert in some one branch, as electric cranes or hydraulic machines, steel works plant, lathes, or heavy or light machine tools. The days are past in which all-round men were in request. ”

“ However, if the competent characterization of form were admitted as at least the first condition of beautiful drawing, it would follow that any abstract value it might have must be wholly dependent upon the manner in which form is represented, and so it would be superfluous to judge it by any standard other than the direct, definite and concrete one of form. ”

“ An innovation in drawing-office equipment is that of vertical boards, displacing horizontal or sloping ones. They have the advantage that the draughtsman is able to avoid a bending posture at his work. ”