Frame

“ Now the question at once arises as to the best form for this protecting barrier, the best material to use in its construction, and the best and most harmonious surface for its finish. Artists are all aware of the vital importance of this matter. They know that a frame can either make or mar their picture, and they give the subject constant thought and attention. ”

“ The modern idea in framing pictures is to have the frame harmonize with the subject, rather than to employ a stock moulding with set pattern made by the mile, and cut up into frames of all sizes and for all sorts of pictures. All the frames shown in the illustrations accompanying this chapter were made at home, and from such simple materials as thin boards, burlap, tea-chest matting, denim, wire, sheet-lead, harness-rings, and brass-headed upholsterers’ tacks. ”

“ A scratch across the sky, a little indentation, and the illusion disappears; for the observer has become conscious of the surface of the canvas. The rough edge of the stretcher has the same disillusioning effect, and for this reason no picture is really complete until it is enclosed within the sheltering protection of a frame. It is necessary to separate the real from the unreal, the hard reality of the background of burlap or of wall-paper from the illusion of the picture. ”

“ To be effective in a frame, balance and unity are just as necessary. The eye finds repose and delight in the perfect equipoise of elements, brought into combination and bound together by the girdle of the frame.
A picture should be able to hang from its exact centre. Imperfect composition inflicts upon the beholder the duty of accommodating his head to the false angle of the picture. Pictures that stand the test of time do not demand astigmatic glasses. We view them balanced, and they repeat the countersign—“balanced.” ”

“ When you paint a picture with a brush and pigments, that is on a single plane, it can stop at your gilt frame; but when you paint one with a pen and words, that is in ALL the dimensions, how are you to stop? ”

“ The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ”

“ A collection of photographs in passe-partout bindings, especially if they deal with subjects in any way related, may form an attractive group. But pictures of any considerable size or those having decided individuality are generally not suited to any plan of grouping. They should appear by themselves, in frames and other surroundings which accentuate their peculiar merits.
The Kind of Frame.—The material of the frame, its colour, and the colour of the mat are determined by the tone of the picture. Oil paintings easily support gilt frames and should be hung in good light. ”

“ Frames many times control the use of a picture, and an old picture may be placed in a modern frame and used in a contemporary setting. Mats used on pictures may be varied according to the subject matter and the frame selected according to the manner in which the picture is used. Wood frames are popular and in good taste and are shown in natural wood color, mahogany, walnut, maple, or enameled. ”

“ It falls to the lot of an exceptional few to have frames made to fit them. Some of us make frames for ourselves, and as we always over-estimate our size such frames are never suitable. As we cannot expand or contract our frames to our liking, we must do the other thing, stretch and shape our pictures to them. I have seen coloured sketches on an elastic material capable of being extended indefinitely. Well for us if our life's picture be painted on such accommodating material. ”

“ Frames are not necessary for the simpler types of work, but for wide borders in needle-weaving, particularly for the novice, a frame will fix the warp threads by keeping them taut, and prevent puckering of the material—little tambour frames which consist of a couple of rings, the one fitting into the other, will serve the purpose. ”

“ Methinks I see your mirror frame,
Ornate with photographs of them.
Place mine therein, for, all the same,
I'll have my little laughs at them.
For girls may come, and girls may go,
I think I have the best of them ”

“ Gradually the frame is completely filled with figures; first, with very dissimilar figures, as, for example, a square, a very narrow rectangle, a triangle, a circle, an 48 ellipse and a hexagon, or with other figures in combination. ”

“ The impulses which made frames beautiful have long been extinct or dormant, but fine work was produced in such profusion that great numbers of examples are still extant. Frames for pictures or mirrors are usually square, oblong, round or oval, and, although they have usually been made of wood or composition overlaid upon wood, the richest and most costly materials have often been used. ”

“ What do you see? Every window, every cornice and roof, coming down to the level of your eye.
Now take the lift to the top story of your tall building. What do you then see? Everything is reversed. The eaves of each lower building, the roofs and cornices, rising to meet the level of your eye.
And the level of your eye is the height of your horizon.
"Is the thing below the level of my eye, or is it above the level of my eye?" is the inevitable question. You sit in a chair and look at the cornice, the beading, the top line of the picture frames, the mirror over the fireplace ”

“ Line Of first importance in composition is the notion of Light and Dark, to which Line is second. In the tone design line is but the edge of the masses. Line as the basis of the form of the design is reduced to a few forms which with modifications become the framework for all pictorial structure. (See Fundamental Forms.) Line as an element of beauty sufficient of itself to become subjective is rare, an exception in pictorial art. ”

“ Provide several frames of the same size as the aperture, covered with [176] the same kind of gauze, and delineate upon the gauze different figures, such as landscapes and buildings, analogous to the scenes which you intend to exhibit by means of small figures representing men and animals. These figures are formed of pasteboard, and their different parts are made movable, according to the effect intended to be produced by their shadows, when moved backward and forward behind the frames, at a small distance from them. ”

“ As was said above, their relation to the sides of the composition to which they are parallel in rectangular pictures is of great importance in uniting the subject to its bounding lines and giving it a well-knit look, conveying a feeling of great stability to a picture.
How impressive and suggestive of contemplation is the long line of the horizon on a calm day at sea, or the long, horizontal line of a desert plain! The lack of variety, with all the energy and vitality that accompany it, gives one a sense of peace and rest, a touch of infinity that no other lines can convey. ”

“ The attractive value of an object in the scale of balance may be weakened by moving it toward the centre or extending the picture on that side.
Motion toward, either in intention or by action, is equivalent to balancing weight in that space of the picture to which the action is directed.
Light is increased by deepening contiguous tones; dark, by heightening contiguous tones.
A still-life may be constructed on the same lines as any form on the vertical plane and many of the perspective plane of composition. ”

“ Stand before a mirror; hold your arms in precisely the same position at each side, your head upright your body straight; divide your hair exactly in the middle, and get it as nearly as you can into exactly the same shape over each ear, and you will see the effect of accurate symmetry; you will see, no less, how all grace and power in the human form result from the interference of motion and life with symmetry, and from the reconciliation of its balance with its changefulness. Your position, as seen in the mirror, is the highest type of symmetry as understood by modern architects. ”

“ But when the lines are below the eye, as the floor line and the bureau lines, then they seem to run up to the horizon and are drawn slanting upward; while if they are above the eye, as the top of the mirror, they tip down to the horizon and are drawn slanting downward—the end farther away from the artist lower in the picture than the end nearer him. ”

“ The character, direction and curve of all lines in a canvas change with every shifting of the point of visual contact. Since the unity of a picture is different from every focus, all the lines consequently assume a slightly different direction every time our eye shifts from one spot to another. ”

“ This fact of reflection and the fact that the so-called angle of reflection is the same as the angle of incidence, or, in other words, the angle at which the light falls upon the object, explains a familiar sight. Have you never seen, late in the afternoon, when the sun is above the horizon, a blaze upon a hill side, so bright that your first thought is it must be a house on fire? ”

“ Perhaps the most important of the images which come in to give depth, volume, solidity to the partly imagined and partly perceived ‘picture-space’ are those which are relicts of eye movements, kinæsthetic images of the convergence of the eyes and accommodation of the lenses according to the distance of the object contemplated. When, as it seems, we look past an object in a picture to some more distant object, seeming in so doing to change the focus of our eyes, we do not as a rule actually make any change. ”

“ Reflexion.—When rays of light fall upon a plane surface, as the flat surface of the mirror, a greater or less number of them are reflected, and this according to a definite law, by which the angle of incidence, or that formed by the incident ray with the perpendicular, is equal to the angle of reflexion, or that formed by the reflected ray with the same. ”

“ In the foreground are large strong masses of light and shade, broken up into details—clothes, hands, faces, and features; in the background are misty effects, either of trees or other details of a landscape; in the middle distance are groups of people, some sitting and some walking, their clothes of dark or uniform tint, their faces misty blurs, their features indistinguishable. ”

“ The feet would see from one angle, the hands from another, back and front would confuse us; so I cannot imagine the recording power in nature as reflecting like a mirror, and retaining and recording the impressions. ”

“ The figures cast on the screen in a theatre are on the flat, but have all the illusion of motion, distance, shadow, light and form. The figures of human memory I am content to accept as being in two dimensions. ”

“ In front, the space of a picture is limited by the plane of the surface on which it is painted; everything should appear to belong in the space back of this; nothing should seem to come forward out towards the spectator. But behind this, backwards, the space represented is unlimited, and its infinite depths may well be indicated by the convergence of perspective lines and the gradual fading of the outlines and colors of objects. ”

“ The devices which aid the figure painter in disposing of one or many verticals have been briefly viewed. A consideration of the horizontal will necessarily take us out of doors to earth and sky, where nature constructs on surfaces which follow the horizon.
The problem in composition which each of these lines presents is the same and the principle governing the solution of each identical; balance by equalization of forces. [pg 117] Given a line which coincides with but one side of the picture it becomes necessary for the poise of the quadrilateral to cross it with an opposing line. ”

“ Every group of two or more visible things, and nearly every visible thing in itself, must of necessity be looked upon as a pattern, either pleasing or displeasing to the eye. Therefore every motion picture that has been, or can be, thrown upon the screen describes a pattern, fixed, moving, or changing. ”

“ Simultaneity to these painters meant the combined presentation of a number of aspects of the same object from many different angles. In the visualisation of an object in nature during the absence of that object, we conceive it, not only as a silhouette or as a form with three dimensions, but as a congeries of silhouettes which, when imagined simultaneously, constitute the appearance of the object from every known angle. ”

“ That when the inclination of the mirror is an even aliquot part of a circle, the object seen by direct vision across the aperture, whether it is simple or compound, is so united with the images of it formed by repeated reflexions, as to form a symmetrical picture. ”

“ They paint, for example, the head, and shoulders, and cheek of a man, a bust portrait—with a dark background. If you examine the picture closely, you will not find a sharp line, separating the head from the background. In fact the color of the hair and cheek seems to extend a little way into the dark of the background. The artist has dragged his brush round the head, so that it is impossible to say just where the background begins. ”

“ The intermediate picture, as it may be called—the human artist's work—is itself seen perspectively. If the tower were so high that the sides, though parallel, appeared to meet in a point, the picture must also be so high that the picture-sides, though parallel, would appear to meet in a point. ”

“ At the back is the artist himself in a wig and other fashions of the time. A great column rises behind him, forming a part of the architecture or the landscape, one hardly knows which in so artificially constructed a picture. ”

“ For a clear understanding of perspective, it must be firmly fixed in mind, that for each prominent point of the object behind the picture plane, a corresponding point lies in the picture plane, in that position where a straight line or ray of sight that is going from the eye to the point of the object, cuts through the picture plane. ”

“ The eyes in a certain portrait seem to follow you, no matter where you may go in the room in which it is hung. This illusion persists, no matter how much you may tell yourself that the eyes do not actually move. When you are on a moving train it is only by the constant succession of passing trees, posts, and landscape that you realize you are going forward. ”