DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18972#0105
LETTER I.]
ON FIEST PRACTICE.
77
slightly down, unless (and there are a thousand
chances to one against its being so) it should all be
turned so as fully to front the light. By examining
the treatment of the white objects in any pictures
accessible to you by Paul Veronese or Titian, you
will soon understand this.1
As soon as you feel yourself capable of expressing
with the brush the undulations of surfaces and the
relations of masses, you may proceed to draw more
complicated and beautiful things.2 And first, the
1 At Marlborough House, among the four principal examples
of Turner's later water-colour drawing, perhaps the most neg-
lected is that of fishing-boats and fish at sunset. It is one of
his most wonderful works, though unfinished. If you examine
the larger white fishing-boat sail, you will find it has a little
spark of pure white in its right-hand upper corner, about as
large as a minute pin's head, and that all the surface of the sail
is gradated to that focus. Try to copy this sail once or twice,
and you will begin to understand Turner's work. Similarly,
the wing of the Cupid in Correggio's large picture in the
National Gallery is focused to two little grains of white at the
top of it. The points of light on the white flower in the
wreath round the head of the dancing child-faun, in Titian's
Bacchus and Ariadne, exemplify the same thing.
2 I shall not henceforward number the exercises recom-
mended ; as they are distinguished only by increasing difficulty
of subject, not by difference of method.
ON FIEST PRACTICE.
77
slightly down, unless (and there are a thousand
chances to one against its being so) it should all be
turned so as fully to front the light. By examining
the treatment of the white objects in any pictures
accessible to you by Paul Veronese or Titian, you
will soon understand this.1
As soon as you feel yourself capable of expressing
with the brush the undulations of surfaces and the
relations of masses, you may proceed to draw more
complicated and beautiful things.2 And first, the
1 At Marlborough House, among the four principal examples
of Turner's later water-colour drawing, perhaps the most neg-
lected is that of fishing-boats and fish at sunset. It is one of
his most wonderful works, though unfinished. If you examine
the larger white fishing-boat sail, you will find it has a little
spark of pure white in its right-hand upper corner, about as
large as a minute pin's head, and that all the surface of the sail
is gradated to that focus. Try to copy this sail once or twice,
and you will begin to understand Turner's work. Similarly,
the wing of the Cupid in Correggio's large picture in the
National Gallery is focused to two little grains of white at the
top of it. The points of light on the white flower in the
wreath round the head of the dancing child-faun, in Titian's
Bacchus and Ariadne, exemplify the same thing.
2 I shall not henceforward number the exercises recom-
mended ; as they are distinguished only by increasing difficulty
of subject, not by difference of method.