Artistic Landscape Photography by Wall, 1896

r
I
'
ARTISTIC
LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
ARTISTIC
LANDSCAPE
PHOTOGRAPHY
A SERIES OF CHAPTERS ON THE
PRACTICAL AND THEORETICAL PRINCIPLES OF
PICTORIAL COMPOSITION.
A. H. WALL.
Author of
"Stray Chapters on Art," "The Technology of Art,"
" Harmonious Colouring," etc.
Formerly Editor of
The Art Student," and "The Illustrated Photographer.'
'ERCY LUND & CO., LTD., THE COUNTRY PRESS, BRADFORD
AND MEMORIAL HALL, LONTON, EC.

PERCY LUND AND CO., LTD
PR1NTFRS AND PUBLISHERS
COUNTRY I'RKSS, BRADFORD

AND LONDON
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY .. .. .. .. .
CHAPTER II.
ON THOUGHT AND OBSERVATION AS THE FOUNDATIONS OF

SUCCESS IN ART .. .. .. .. .. ..21
CHAPTER III.
ON THE IMAGINATION AND ITS CULTIVATION ...... 29
CHAPTER IV.
ABOUT TRUTHFULNESS IN ART .. .. .. .. ..39
CHAPTER V.
ON THE EXPRESSION OF SPACE .. .. .. .. -.51
CHAPTER VI.
ON SKIES, CLOUDS, AERIAL PERSPECTIVE AND ATMOSPHERIC
EFFECTS .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 61
CHAPTER VII.
ON WATER AS AN ELEMENT OF PICTORIAL EFFECT .. .-93
CHAPTER VIII.
OF SENTIMENT AND FEELING, CONTRASTS AND VARIETY,
SUBORDINATION, DOMINATION AND HARMONY . .
105
CHAPTER IX.
PICTORIAL COMPOSITION ............ 115
6 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
CHAPTER X.
THE COMPOSITION OF OUTLINES, AND THE POINTS OF VIEW 127
CHAPTER XI.
PERSPECTIVE, PHOTOGRAPHICAL AND PICTORIAL .. ..137
CHAPTER XII.
BREADTH OF EFFECT .. .. .. .. .. .. 151
CHAPTER XIII.
FIGURES AND FOREGROUNDS .. .. .. .. .. 163
CHAPTER XIV.
GOOD HINTS FROM GOOD AUTHORITIES OLD AND NEW .. 169
PREFACE.
E art possibilities of photography, although fairly

demonstrated, are not yet fairly recognised, or
sought after. How to use the camera and chemicals is
not all the knowledge required by a photographer to
make him an artist, any more than knowing how to use
pigments and brushes is all a painter requires to produce

pictures. To "take" a mere ordinary photograph is a
simple easy task, to produce by photography a genuine
pictureis quite another thing.
In the following chapters I address beginners in art,
who, although they may be accomplished photographers,

are not artistic, and if to certain sections of my readers
I appear too didacticI trust they will remember that I
am addressing not only advanced students but also the

young in art, including the veriest tyros.
Some of the chapters included in this volume have
already appeared in The Practical Photographer
and The
Amateur Photographer, but each has been carefully re-
vised, added to, and for the most part re-written.
A. H. W.
Stratford-on-Avon, 1896.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
"
He who does not ascertain what a pidure is
before he attempts to produce it is like one who
runs a race without knowing either the course or
the goal." The Art Student.
is a steadily widening field for photographic

work of the better kind, and a very promising
field of study for those who desire to elevate its artistic
pretensions. But, unfortunately, it is so easy for anyone

to carry a camera, expose a plate and either develop or
get it developed, that a vast quantity of the poorest

productions at once lowers the dignity and importance
of it as art-work, and makes the pretensions of most
photographers to take rank with artists, simply ludicrous.

But photography is not the only calling that exhibits
high and low class work, that has in its ranks
practitioners of talent and intellect, and others who lack
both plentifully.
Artists of eminence have frankly admitted the
possibility of producing photographic pictures (but only

when the photographer is also the artist) because they
have taken trouble to understand the possibilities of the
camera and seen them illustrated. Other artists, as
eminent but less reasonable, still continue to deny
all photographers the power of producing pictures,
refusing to listen to argument or

see what they don't
want to see.
Then there are photographers of the old school in
"
whose eyes any photograph that is sharp," full of
microscopically minute detail and from distortion, free
however uninteresting and commonplace its subject and

inartistic its treatment, is superior to all other pictures.
And so itwith press critics who do not understand
is
either the principles of art or the power and capabilities

of photography.
Again there are those who understand art but not
photography. An amusing illustration will be found in
that exceedingly valuable and interesting work, the late

Mr. Hammerton's Painter's Tour in the Highlands, in
which faults due to common blunders of manipulation

and judgment are seriously advanced as arguments
conclusively demonstrating the necessarily inartistic
character of all photographs. It would have been as just

to deny the ability of SirJoshua Reynolds to produce a
picture because such miserable daubs were painted by
cheap portraitists, using the brushes and the oil colours
with which he produced his pictures.
Another way of regarding our subject is seen in the
rapidly increasing number of professional photographers

who can only support themselves by lowering prices.
Art culture and practice are of course out of the question
in their case. These mechanical, cheap operators, with
their ignoble self-content, neither read nor think, they
stagnate. But worst of all they drive out of the calling
men who would love, honour and ennoble it, students of
refined and elevated taste, acquainted with both science
and art.
The fact that a large number of the best pictorial
" taken " who have
photographs are by amateurs,
ambition, learning and leisure, is a very hopeful sign.
Where they lead others will follow and where they ;
enter into competition with professional operators on the

walls of our exhibitions, the standard is sure to rise
year
PRELIMINARY. :I
by year, and photography to rise with it in public

estimation.
Hopeful signs for the future of pictorial photo-
graphy exist in new fields of activity.

Nearly all the
illustrated papersand magazines now use photographs
for automatic engraving processes. We have a new Art
Society's Exhibition of works judged only as pictures,
separating purely photographic art study from its
apparatus and materials and its more purely scientific
and mechanical applications, just as the study of
painting, sculpture, architecture and music are separated
from the chemistry and manufacture of pigments and
pencils, the making of brushes and easels, and the
manufacturing of fiddles, etc.
And, side by side with these wholesome changes,

we have that growing demand for more thoroughly
systematic art instruction to which the following chapters
owe their existence. In what form this can be best and
most usefully 'given is now the question, a reply to which
is suggested by the success which has attended the
delivery and publication of lectures at the Royal Academy
of Fine Arts ever since it was founded in the reading
;
of papers written by artists for artists at the meetings

of photographic societies and the fact that these
;
lectures and papers have always been most permanently

useful when printed and published.
But it must not be concluded that our photographic
method of producing pictures is, however,-.n all fours
with the painter's. The rules by which the painter
works will not suffice for the
photographer's guidance,
because their preliminary training is necessarily not the
same. In the painter's education, drawing, anatomy,
perspective and the principles of pictorial composition,

train his eye and hand, inform his mind and establish
principles before he attempts to master the more

mechanical elements of composition, as otherwise he

would find them misleading and confusing. Moreover,
as an old artist and fellow student of mine (Scarlet F.
" All of
Potter, art critic, sculptor and poet) once said :
us, considered as men, are doubtless improved by having

the imagination cultured, the mind refined, and the
moral principles raised and strengthened but all are not ;
by such means better fitted for the discharge of their

professional duties. a hard necessity of civilized
It is
life that the man must be

subordinated to the part he
fills in the great social machine. But we, as artists,
have fortunately one advantage over our fellows, for the
more fully we can develop the individual man, the more
likely are we to excel in art." In the nineteenth century
we recognise the truth of this ; but in the eighteenth, as
" A number of works of
James Barry, R.A., says: great
very limited merit were produced, in which all academical
rules of composition, drawing and chiaro oscuro were
which, notwithstanding, appear only as
strictly observed,
well-executed exercises, and leave the spectator cold,
because they are wanting in the first and most indispen-
sable attributes of works of art, namely, the expressions of
the vivid individual feeling of the artist, which show the
real soul of a work of art." All the fervour which means
power, all the thought which creates ambition and
fully develops the perceptive faculties, come from
intellectual as distinct from technical and mechanical
studies. Because the artists of Greece were highly
cultured, intellectual men (says the great artist above
quoted, in his academy lecture on " and
Design "),
because they were " familiarised to the most subtle and
refined philosophy, and appear to have considered the
"
whole of created nature as elements of study ; we have
"all those masterly works of poetry, painting, and
"
sculpture which have for thousands of years " filled
PRELIMINARY. jo
the mind with astonishment, instruction and pleasure,

and which will ever remain unequalled by those who do
not draw their materials from the same source."
Again
he emphatically repeats, "the superiority of the ancient
Greeks over the moderns arose entirely from moral
causes, and principally from the advantages of their
education."
These remarks are not more applicable to the
highest forms of fine art than they are to the humblest.
They are those of a practised artist who said what he
felt and knew to be true. His words are as applicable
to photography as they are to painting, sculpture and
architecture. True art-work is not the producing of
mere dumb, lifeless outer-seemings, " which are indeed but
seeming!" imitations of hired models, studio accessories
and imperfect presentments of nature's soulful loveliness,"
"
or those " front elevations of men and women which
we call portraits, or those sunless, airless, uninspiring,
uninteresting landscapes we wrongfully call pictures.

These are all, whether photographs or paintings,
mechanical productions.
Many photographers deny this, and half of them do

so as an excuse for working without thinking, with the
hands instead of the mind.There was a time, how well
Iremember it, when, apart from a few photographers
who had commenced their careers as painters, any
attempt to apply to photography even the simplest
principles and rules of art was received with incredulous
smiles, or proudly scorned by those who thought it was
the mission of photography to do away with art and
artists altogether. We know better now, have gone far

in advance of that obstinate ignorance and conceit,
happily. Most photographers will now, I suppose,
acknowledge that at least perspective, composition, and
the relative values of tones in light and shade are studies
as necessary in photographing as in painting. Barry said

of the eighteenth century artists what may be said of
" who leave
certain artist-photographers of to-day,
"
the spectators cold because they are wanting in what
" the real soul of a work of
truly is art," the expression
of individual sentiment and feeling.
And here it will not, I think, be uninteresting or
useless to glance back and see how art and photography
were from the first associated, how art progress in
photography was first advocated, how it was retarded
and misunderstood, and in what way it
began to come
once more to the front, until now, when preparations
really ought to be made for a fresh attack upon
the enemies of artistic photography all along the
line.
In very ancient times Science, Poetry, and Art were

one. All the great inventions and discoveries of our
day had their foreshadowing suggestions in the minds

and imaginations of men who died thousands of years
ago. But in the comparatively recent days of Lord
Bacon, poets, artists and philosophers began to drift
apart. The result is that our man of science is, as a
rule, no longer imaginative. His bent is materialistic,

he deals in solid, square, practical facts, and scorns all
" mere "
conjectures and deductive reasonings. Every-
thing doubtful he tests by the physical senses, everything
that awakens fervid feeling or prompts the play of fancy
he regards suspiciously. The poet and artist, although
still sympathise with each other as
parted, nigh akin,
and do so proudly. But the modern man of science
generally repudiates the connexion more or less scorn-
fully, while those who profess to be scientific without
having fairly won in its glorious domain of
their spurs
strifeand conquest, are in this way usually the most
aggressively and offensively demonstrative.
PRELIMINARY. 15
Centuries before photography became the

practical
art-science it now is, poets dreamed of it and philo-
sophers philosophised over it. The first camera-obscura
was invented for artists, and the first real photograph
ever taken was that of a scientific artist who sought
means for realizing the poetical and artistic dream of a
long past age.

Chemists and opticians, for the most part, first came
into the field as inventorsand improvers of photographic
tools and materials, after the French painter
Daguerre
had perfected his invention, and made it that practical
reality which France so nobly and generously purchased
as a gift for the world, and for which practitioners in
England immediately began to take out and squabble

over patents.
About the middle of the present century when a
large number of trained artists were practising photo-
graphy they sought the aid of opticians and chemists to
improve its pictorial results, and when these new
workers took up the process with enthusiasm as fervid
as their own, and began to experimentalise and investi-
gate, a bond of union was sought, at first by meeting at

each other's studios and private houses, then in con-
nection with the Society of Arts, and lastly, in 1853, by
originating "The Photographic Society of Great Britain

for the promotion of the Art and Science of Photography,
by the interchange of Thought and Experience," a title
curiously suggestive of the sixteenth century Art and
Science Society founded by the inventor of the camera,
Baptista Porta, of Padua.
"We owe men of science our grateful thanks for the
invaluable assistance they rendered photography in all
its and departments, and in like way we owe

sections
them our best thanks for what they have since done,
But when so many of them on the strength of such
l6 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
services assumed a right of dominance in the photo-
graphic societies and journals, as they very soon did,

they began to be aggressive and mischievous. It was
then only too apparent that they neither understood nor

appreciated pictorial art, that they regarded sentiment,
feeling and imagination as matters with which
photography had nothing whatever to do, and artists
as mischievous meddlers, and mere impracticable,
visionary dreamers.
Yet the first President of the first Photographic
Society was Sir Charles Eastlake, who was also
President of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He :;:
accepted office with the idea that students of photo-

graphy would also be art students that the training of
;
a camera student in picture photographing and that of

a student of picture painting would differ mainly in
technical matters and the resulting effects, but that
forming a taste for art excellence and teaching its
principles would be as legitimately the work of the
Photographic Society as it was that of the Royal
Academy. Unluckily this idea found no supporters
amongst scientific photographers they laughed it to
scorn and, consequently, Sir Charles Eastlake, Sir
William Newton, Roger Fenton (its first secretary), and
artists generally soon lost interest in their proceedings.
Sir William Newton was one of photography's

earliest practitioners and experimentalists, and the first
Photographic Society's first Vice-President. He had

*Mr. John Leighton, F.S.A., who was one of the founders of
this society and read one of the first of its papers, contrasting
nature and art in the productions of both painters and photo-
graphers, of which only a brief extract was printed, writing recently
to the editor of The Practical Photographer, said, " In those days the
Photographic Society was artistic. Roger Fenton, the secretary,

being in the first place a painter, and in the second a photo-
grapher," adding, "as artists we were at that period greatly
interested in pictorial effect and binocular photography."
PRELIMINARY.
played a prominent part in the meetings which originated

and was famous as a miniature painter. His was the
it,
first paper read before the first

ordinary meeting. It
was " Upon Photography in an Artistic View, and its
Relation to the Arts." In it he urged that photographs
should be ranked and criticised as pictures, and
be, not
only optically and chemically wonderful, but artistically
beautiful. " The " is itself
camera," said he, by no
means calculated to teach the principles of art,
although
who are already well informed in this respect, .it
to those
may be made the means of considerable advancement."

He then very courteously and carefully pointed out
certain shortcomings in perspective and pictorial effect
in ordinary photographs, which he called upon all
present to unite in attacking, as destructive alike to
truthful representation and pictorial beauty. He referred
with regret to views held by some scientific gentlemen
then present, who asserted that "a photograph should
always remain as it was in the camera," without any
attempt being made to test its truthfulness or give it
artistic merit. Their argument as afterwards openly

stated by one of their number, an amateur photographer,
chemical experimentalist and microscopist, who for some
years edited The British Journal of Photography was
that photography was superior to all art in both its
and " The

truthfulness its beauty. scientific man,"
said he, "does not accept art for art, but art for
science ;
have the representation of
he does not like to
a natural object made so perfectly beautiful that no

one would recognise it."* And most of the scientists
present endorsed his words.
This idea of beauty being artificial, and natural objecfts not

*
beautiful,is a very curious, wide-spread, vulgar blunder, which
writers and thinkers of the highest rank have often endeavoured

to expose.
B
!8 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
Since these remarks were foolishly spoken, great
changes have been wrought. The question, Should

be practised artistically ? has been dis-
photography
cussed over and over again, from all points of view,
and the test of a photograph is now almost invariably
the pictorial one.

As long ago as 1860 I wrote" Photography should
stand as high in the domain of art as it does in that of
science and its professors should consider the principles
;
and theories of learned painters, as legitimate a branch

of study as either optics or chemistry."* Looked at in
an impartial way, and from a common sense point of

view, all work takes rank as high or low, mental or
mechanical, not by virtue of its tools, materials and pro-
cess, butby virtue of elements which the worker puts into
it. Work that never rises to the intellectual standard is
not, and never can be fine art work. Shakespeare himself
could not put into the making of a chair or table what
he put into his poems and plays. But Avork which
affords scope and finds exercise for superior knowledge,
taste and intellectual power, which appeals to the heart
and makes it feel, or to the mind and creates thought
and imagination, whether it be produced
is fine art
through the agency of pigments and brushes, or cameras,

chemicals and lenses.
But the truest test of photography as anart process
is not theoretical ;
it is
practical. In every succeeding
annual exhibition of the Photographic Societies the
number of works having genuine artistic merit and
pictorial beauty has of late increased, and is still slowly
increasing, although for years the dead level of sameness
and mediocrity, so characteristic of stagnation, was
invariably present.
' "
Harmonious Colouring," by A. H. Wall.
PRELIMINARY. IQ
During all the years of dominant scientific govern-

ment in the societies and journals, when opticians saw in
photographs the means of demonstrating optical prin-

ciples and the perfection of their lenses only, and
chemists, merely the results of their chemical experiments
and theories, artists could only speak for themselves at
the exhibitions. But gradually, very gradually, the
original idea of the inventors of the camera and the
daguerreotype, and that of the artist section of the

founders of the first photographic society, has been
reasserting itself. Its growth is, however, not yet free

and unimpeded. Weeds still check its full elevation and
wholesome development. But the soil is being gradually
cleared and made ready for the reception of the good

seed, and the sowers are not wanting. Sentiment, feeling,
and methods of expressing, including pictorial composi-
tion, perspective, and the practical association of the
imaginative with the actual, are all receiving attention.

Nothing but artistic and poetic good can come of
such studies, and so we turn from this backward glance
to look forward, full of hopefulness and ambitious
aspirations.
It is some time since G. A. Story, A.R.A., wrote:
"It appears that there is a sort of rivalry between

photographers and artists, that they, as it were, stand
opposite to each other like two armies in battle array.
They have thrown down the gauntlet, and will soon be
rushing together, but I see no reason why it should not

be to shake hands, for I feel sure they are mutually of
the greatest services to each other. Photography could
not trace the footprints of the beautiful if art did not
leave those footprints in her track, neither could it make
its own pictures so perfect but for the lessons of art, and
the artistic feelings that point the camera."
CHAPTER II.
ON THOUGHT AND OBSERVATION AS THE

FOUNDATIONS OF SUCCESS IN ART.
and shade being the means whereby we

XIGHT
depict surfaces and forms in a photograph, any
carelessness in the exposure of a plate, any differences
in the tones of a print as compared with those of nature,
indicate, in one way or another, untruthfulness. If the
intermediate tones are not true, neither are the shapes

or surfaces, the light or the shade, or the atmosphere.
In iu;my negatives the highest light is always as intense
as it can be, and the deepest shadow always as nearly
as possible black, whether the illuminating con-
ditions were those of brilliant sunlight, soft grey day-
light, a semi-misty sunrise or the solemn glory of a
gorgeous sunset. In each such case the scale of tones

and the gradations of light and shade are false. Again,
in how many photographs do we see the highest light in
a foreground represented by pure white, and the highest
light of some object which should have half-a-mile of
atmosphere between it and us quite as white. Can this
be true tone or perspective ?

in Is it not a discord in
the harmony of natural beauty ? Does not the mere
fact of such a blunder being possible in itself demonstrate
the necessity for photographers to acquire accurate
observation and artistic culture ?
How often, again, do we see the white sunlit sail of
a boat on a lake and the flash of sunlight on the water

both rendered in a photograph by patches of pure empty
white, as if the whiteness of the one and that of the

other had no difference in intensity. Such is mechanical
" to a mechanical
work, and if you put art use," says
"
John Ruskin, you destroy it at once."
It is with the mind that we see, hear and feel, and
by cultivating it we develop and give new power to the
senses with which it is so mysteriously associated. If it
were not so, animals with organs of vision and hearing far
superior to ours, such as we find in the very lowest forms

of creation, would be our intellectual superiors,
knowing
more because they can see and hear with greater
accuracy and perfection. It is here, as elsewhere, not
the tools, but the superior skill and knowledge of the
tool maker and the tool user that give the best results.
In making a departure from the

ordinary course of
I here want to
teaching, impress upon you that although
good materials and perfect apparatus are very important,
the arts of using them are at least no less. For with
even the best of all mechanism, we cannot afford to let
reason rust idly within that other
impenetrable mystery
named brain, which, to speak sooth, has
apparently
about as much to do with
thinking as the eye has with
perceiving.
" " like
Vision," says a popular art teacher, any
other faculty,
requires cultivation. We must see
and perceive truly to depict
clearly forcibly and justly.
For want of this cultivation of
eye and mind, thousands
pass through life without knowing that
they seldom see
a superficies, and never a
solid, except a with itsglobe,
true form. It is because our eyes are
not, therefore,
open, that we see, the mind requires to be furnished
with some means from the exercise of which
the eye is
enabled to judge
accurately of form," etc.
But between the complicated sensation we call
and that of
seeing, obtaining what we call optical or
THOUGHT AND OBSERVATION.
Composition of Wood and Water.

From a Photograph by Prince Bara Thakoor.
THOUGHT AND OBSERVATION. 25
camera images there is indeed very slight relationship,

and this we desire to impress upon students at this early
stage of our progress, that they may have more justly
appreciative, more definite and accurate ideas of the
mission and purposes of pictorial art.
Mr. George Wall, in his very able and deeply
" The Natural History
of Thought,"
interesting book,
" External
says, objects being perceived by means of
impressions on the sensorium depend upon the pro-
ficiency acquired in the use of the organs of sense, and
in the power of the perceptive faculty itself. Hence the
l>;il>y's first ideas of external objects must be of uncertain
character and very weak. For this reason many repeti-

tions and much tentative effort must be required before it
can attain any clear definite ideas. It is doubtful," he

" whether
adds, objects are even recognised as external
until memory and reflection aid the perception," and
" even the
again, as he says, simplest images of vision
are associated with ideas of distance, dimension and
other relations of a purely intellectual character"
The image-conveying lens differs from the idea-
conveying sense in other ways. What a madman sees,
or his nearest kin, a drunkard in the awful grip of D.T.,
may have little or no connection with external objects,

but even a lens has had a glass too much its conse-
if
quent distortions are altogether dependent upon external

objects. With these thoughts in view I think beginners
in art studies will perceive that the cultivation of their
perceptive faculties should be their first business,

whether they are disciples of the palette or the camera.
Put aside then the false notion that the productions of
photography are of necessity truthful and beautiful.
Remember, then, that as drawing is to the painter the
grammar of his art, so accurate perception is to the
photographer the test of his art.

It cannot be too frequently or too emphatically stated
that whatever process it conies from, a work of art is
good or bad, high or low, in exact proportion to the

amount of perceptive and intellectual work with which
it is associated. The combined operations of the
optician, chemist, maker of apparatus and manipulator

should in every way possible be subordinated to the
purpose of the artist. The photographer who sets up

his camera directed by no properly developed perceptive
powers, will not, except at long intervals and by some

lucky chance which he does not appreciate or recognise,
produce a picture. He knows nothing of originality in
conception, selection or execution. Nothing except it
be that vanity which is begotten by ignorance inspires
his ambition or warms him into fervour, and his produc-
tions are just such dull, poor, commonplace things as
Tom, Jack and Harry are producing in countless

thousands all over the country, and selling at prices
which barely suffice to feed and clothe their wives and
familiesand keep a roof above their heads. Paintings
and photographs are alike in this. They are artistic
when mental culture and a knowledge of art principles
govern their creation, they are inartistic when produced
without mental effort or artistic knowledge.
I have quoted Sir William Newton's remarks on
the art status of photography in 1853, from an article
on this subject in a " Quarterly Review " of 1865. Allow
me now to show that what he said, because he
spoke truly, is still in harmonious accordance with what
another able thinker, Sir Howard Grubb,
recently said
at Dublin. " In
the early days of photography," said
he, "a photographer never thought it worth his while to
point his camera to any object that had not some

particular interest connected with it. It might be a
building having historical interest, or architectural
THOUGHT AND OBSERVATION. 27
beauty, or it might be a well-known and favoured land-

scape celebrated far and wide for its beauty the aim, in ;
fact, ofthe photographer at that time was to produce a
representation, or we might say, a portrait of some

particular object which had a special interest in itself ;
but what photographer of that time would have thought

of wasting his plates as it would have been considered
in pointing his camera to those little bits of moor or
fen, or some nameless brook, out of which the modern
photographer has produced his most exquisite pictures.
I say pictures advisedly, because that is just the differ-
ence between the photographs of the present day and

the photographs of the past. The superiority of the later
efforts of photographers depended much more on the
fact that, whereas in former time the photographer's aim
was to produce a representation or a portrait of a par-
ticular scene, that of the modern photographer is to
produce a picture."
This is so fully illustrated in recent photographic
exhibitions that it is difficult to understand why the
literature of photography should not march with the
times, and progress in both theory and practice with the
rapidly increasing number of artist practitioners and the
thousands who, being desirous of doing genuine artistic
work, are now asking for the aid of capable instructors.

It cannot be too frequently or emphatically stated that in
all its best qualities, and however it is produced, a real

picture is the outcome, not of a mechanical process but
of intellectual study. The photographer who sets up a
camera directed by no appreciation of ihe picturesque
and poetical, who is governed by no knowledge of
pictorial arts and its scientific principles, is no more an
artistthan the painter is who, with thought unawakened,
imagination unaffected, and heart untouched, in a like
way puts up his easel, although each may be truly
clever and display great technical knowledge and manual

dexterity.
In saying so much we are saying nothing new, only
something that should be better known or appreciated

amongst those whose words and works betray either
their entire ignorance of such matters or a careless dis-
;
regard. We want you to see those principles which are

the foundation stones of art in all its noblest and loftiest
aims, to build upon them in your practice, to recognise

what you have to avoid, and what you must acquire
before you can produce pictorial photographs whirl) will
do honour to yourself and your art. Ruskin says that in
"
trainingyoung artists we should take care that their
minds receive such training that they shall see and feel
the noblest things," and adds, " of all parts of an artist's
education this is the most neglected." Thought and
observation are indeed the foundation of success in
art, and these must be developed and cultivated
systematically and carefully by self-education; but apart

from this, which is true in a general sense, there are
other things of special value which we shall proceed to
speak of separately.
CHAPTER III.
ON THE IMAGINATION AND ITS CULTIVATION.
The world is full of poetry the air

Is living with its spirit and the waves
;
Dance to the music of its melodies,

And sparkle in its brightness. Earth is veiled
And mantled with its beauty. Percival.
tne cu ^ ture f imagination," says Henry Reed

former
(a professor in the University of
" I mean not such a faculty of the
Pennsylvania),
mind as gives birth to common works of fiction, not
even such as represented in the inadequate analysis
is
that is met with

in the usual systems of metaphysics,
but that creative power which, whether it bear the

name of imagination or no, is an element of every great
mind. I mean that inventive wisdom which brings the
truth to life by the help of its own creative energy in
the souls of mighty artists, whether their art be poetry,

or painting or sculpture."
" Cultivate the
imagination," says G. J. Goschen,
"to introduce you to wider and nobler fields of thought."
And another writer on the same subject, who was
" The imagination
living in 1831, says, is nothing more
than the mental education by which, and by thought
and reading, every student is enabled to exercise some
species of talent, and without which an artist will never
rise beyond the mechanic who does a thing as he is
taught to do it, and who only knows the one way of
doing it, and by one particular process. Such men are

not artists, though they bear the name."
I am somewhat given to quoting men

of acknowledged
and sometimes take great pains to ascertain their

ability,
opinions, as my readers well

know and when their ;
endorsement strengthens my argument or illustrates my

meaning, I do not see why I should not quote them.
The purpose of this chapter may strike some of my
readers as far-fetched and fantastic, for people commonly
regard imagined things as unreal, and therefore altogether
outside the domain of photography. But let us briefly
examine a few positive facts, and follow them up to
their legitimate logical deductions, and the result may
be a change of opinion. " Of all mysteries," says an
author I have already quoted, Mr. George Wall, " none
except the supreme mystery, God himself, is greater or

more inscrutable, or at any time more real and influential
than the faculty of thinking And of all our
mental faculties, imagination is one of the most
mysterious. By its aid we see without eyes, hear
without ears, feel without the mechanism of touch. It
stirs our feelings, creates our thoughts, gives our ideas

and vitality. To appeal to it successfully
force, reality
is work of our greatest thinkers, our most eloquent
the
speakers, our most accomplished artists." Dr. Johnson

in his famous Dictionary says imagination means
" The power of forming ideal pictures, the
power of
representing absent things to ourselves and others."
Well, that is just what both painting, poetry and
photography do. The definition is, however, hardly
comprehensive enough. A faculty which in its opera-
tion links together the
writings of historians, travellers,
poets, dramatists, novelists, etc., etc. (for
they all present
to the mental eye things invisible to the outer in like
eye),
way links together the actor and
painter, sculptor,
photographer, because each in his respective way also
realizes absent
things.
THE IMAGINATION AND ITS CULTIVATION. 3!
Mr. G. J. Goschen (M.P.),

in his admirable and
useful little book called the " Cultivation and Use of

Imagination," says, "Its development by suitable studies
enables us to live, move and think in a world different
from the narrow world surrounding us, to have the
heart as well as the intellect stirred, to have our
sympathies expanded, our source of happiness enlarged,
our means of enjoyment increased in number, our
moral characters improved." If, therefore, photography
can appeal to, and develop imagination, it is doing
noble work. If its pictorial productions can be seen

without feeling, or without awakening interest forcible
enough to act upon the imagination, it is doing ignoble
work.
Your solid, dull, coldly unsympathetic, unemotional

man or woman will neither respond to any appeal
made make any appeal to the
to their imaginations, or
imaginations of other people. More than half the joys

of living are lost to them. How many of them are now
taking photographs in every way like themselves. The
man, Peter, whom Wordsworth depicted as untouched
by nature's beauty, incapable of recognising poetical or
other associations, to whom a primrose by the river's
brim
" A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."
merely a word, a name, and therefore exceedingly unin-

teresting. Yet Peter would probably have taken a very
decent photograph if some one had but shown him how to
use a camera. But because he could neither see nor
appreciate beauty, because Nature's loveliness " did
never melt into his heart," and because " He never
felt the witchery of the soft blue
sky," his photograph
would be simply a photograph, certainly not a picture.
Where does the painter of landscapes differ most

from the mechanical landscape photographer ? Is it
not in choice, selection and treatment of subject ? The

ordinary camera man sees what he wants almost at a
glance, and straightway plants his tripod at the usual

height, elevates his camera and looks to its levelling,
focusses to secure equal sharpness of detail on every
plane, near or distant, and in every object, whether of

dominant or subordinate interest; regulates his exposure
Uses of Foreground Figures.
and development with ideas in no way suggested by

pictorial intentions, imaginative conceptions, or poetical
sentiments. He is in every
way the slave of his tools.
Even the shape and size of his
picture is not suggested
by him or its character, but by the size of his plate and
the opening of his And as he seeks a
mounting cards.
subject, so he exposes his plate, with his heart
untouched,
his
thinking powers inactive and, closing the
;
shutter, he packs his traps and marches away, perfectly

THE IMAGINATION AND ITS CULTIVATION. 33
" take
happy and contented, proud to think that he can
"
a picture and call himself "an artist."
But the artistic or imaginative man, the thinker,
the man of feeling, acts very differently. He sees the
selected view at various times, under differing conditions
of light and atmosphere, carefully determines what shape
and size will be best for it in connection with the
means he has to work with, and all he desires to include
in the view, and also what he desires to exclude. He
Foreground Figures.
tries various points of view : now higher, now lower ;
now to this side, now to that ;

sometimes backward,
sometimes forward ;
his thought all the time busy with
the principles of harmony, variety, contrasts; considering
the value of tones in connection with the coming
exposure and development, and anxious about obtaining

truthfully the expression of air and space, etc. He is
on the alert for bits of intense dark and bits of brilliant
light to give dominance and prominence to the leading
feature, "the Prince of Denmark" in his "Hamlet."

c
He is, in short, on the alert to secure everything which

his active imagination and artistic knowledge teaches
him to value, everything that will help him to convey
desirable ideas forcibly, to awaken in minds and
imaginations associated ideas, perceptions

and memories,
which will deepen the spectator's interest in his work,
and make itmore nobly and usefully attractive.
When the inartistic operator wants a figure, his
assistant or some accidental passer-by serves his
purpose, and is asked just to stand here or there, and
the thing is done. One figure in one place is as good
to him as one in another place, for to him a figure is
merely a figure, as to Peter the primrose was but an

idealess word.
When the artist has the same want, he lets his
mind and imagination go to work. He asks himself
what kind of figure would be most appropriately
suggestive, how it could be made to tell some kind of
story, or best help one already decided upon, or how in
what other way it will help the composition, strengtlu-n

the governing sentiment, or appeal to the imagination
of spectators. He anxiously asks himself whether it
should be in light or in shadow placed here, near the
;
foreground, or there, in the middle distance. If he is a
painter, he
tries experiments before deciding these
questions puts in and rubs out, tries this way, that
:
way, and the other way, just as the artist photographer

would by moving the actual figure and examining effects
on his focussing screen. An admirable example of suit-
able figures suitably used may be seen in a
copy from
Mr. H. P. Robinson's photograph on the opposite page.
Ruskin, the greatest art teacher of our generation,

in his famous "Modern Painters" says, "Only the
commonest general truths of nature impress common
observers," the people who exercise their perceptive
THE IMAGINATION AND ITS CULTIVATION. 37
powers without previously obtained knowledge or active

intellectual power. The casual glance of a careless
looker-on conveys to his mind the fewest possible ideas,
impresses his memory weakly, and awakens neither his

imagination nor sympathetic feelings. He has none of
the artist's deeper insights and more thoughtful
observings, to impress it forcibly upon his mind.

There is an amusing way of discovering how
different seeing is from observing. Ask half-a-dozen
ordinary people to describe something which each has
Original Drawing, Showing Figure Taking the Eye

into ihe Pifture.
seen and each believes he knows perfectly well. They

will be sure to disagree, and in some cases probably to a
very ludicrous, laughter-provoking extent.

This arises from defective or untrained perceptive
powers. We
take care that our boys shall have the
muscles of their bodies carefully developed and exercised,
and boys delight in sports which achieve that
development. But the systematic development of our
intellectual faculties is not regarded aswhat it actually
is :
something of far more serious importance, and
If drawing was understood in its

equally delightful.
full significanceas a necessary branch of education, it
would be universally regarded as of no less importance

than reading and writing. In every phase and stage of
our lives, in all our occupations and amusements, what
is more important than that power of observing
accurately,which gives us so many new pleasures and
saves us from committing so many serious blunders?
everybody looked at what they saw as

If artists do
with the mind's as well as the physical eye we should
have much less self-deception and much more genuine
imaginative power.
I say to every photographer
Therefore, to begin with,
who would be an "Cultivate your perceptive
artist,
powers and the imagination try to observe carefully and

;
thoughtfully everything you see, for by so doing you

develop and strengthen the power of forming ideal
'
'
power of representing absent things

the
'
pictures,'
to yourselves and to others, feelingly, truthfully and
" If the of the artist be
beautifully." imagination
deficient in vigour, and unable to embody a creation
that shall satisfy his understanding and feeling," says
the author of " Dogmas in Art," " or
his reasoning if
be not sound and clear, and his feeling deep and

sustained, he will assuredly not satisfy the demands
of an authorised critic."
In the power of realizing in Nature outward
expressions which appeal most strongly to the imagina-
tion through feelings, the photographer will find his
opportunities. If his own feelings are untouched by

them, his perceptive and imaginative powers are weak,
and his chance of success in awakening sympathetic
and creative ideas in the minds and hearts of others is
very remote and slight.

CHAFER IV.
ABOUT TRUTHFULNESS IN ART.
" True
art can only be learned in one school,
and that school is kept by Nature." Hogarth.
Go, wiser thou ! and in thy scale of sense

Weigh thy opinion against Providence,
Call imperfedion what thou fanciest such ;
Say here God gives too little, there too much." Pope.
will now be as well, perhaps, to say something
practical about .what so many regard as the
imagination's direct opponent, truthfulness. And here

" Cultivation and
again a quotation from Mr. Goschen's
"
Use of the Imagination may help us. He says of
certain wildly fanciful and perfectly unreal works of
"
fictionby modern dreamers that they are lacking in
imagination. The constructive faculty has been archi-
tectural, not pictorial . . . these novelists have
eliminated, discarded, dropped too much ;" in other words
they distort rather than truthfully represent the real.

Several art-critics, have of late as already stated
been vigorously active against the graphic claims of
" too true to
photography, because as they affirm it is
nature," and consequently devoid of imaginative power.
" A. U." writing in a London newspaper about
Thus,
one of last year's photographic exhibitions (the Dudley
One of their "
Gallery), speaking of
its founders, says :
objects,they announce boldly, is to strengthen and

advance the position that photography is making for
itself among graphic arts. There could be no greater
photography may advance and develop

and
absurdity ;
have in store for us surprises and

progress; may it
inventions innumerable but it can never be ranked

;
with the graphic arts. I have more than once pointed

out the distinction between photography, a mechanical
contrivance, and art. But if the men who exhibit here,
rest their claims to critical and public interest upon their
artistic pretensions, they impossible to noticemake it
their work and not ignore their ambition to be what they
are not. To talk of the drawing made by the sun on

the prepared plate is a sad confusion of terms ;
to vaunt
Nature as proof of the artistic possibilities of

fidelity to
the camera is to misunderstand at the outset the very
meaning of art.
'
Nature is usually wrong,' Whistler
says somewhere ;
is it for the camera to set her right ?
A photographer like Mr. George Davison may display

much feeling and discrimination in his selection of views
to be photographed but how can he, dependent as he is
;
upon a machine and not upon himself, develop that

genius for selection which is exactly what makes the
Japanese artist so great ? Count Gloeden's photographs
of the nude are admirable in every way, but who save,
'
perhaps, the
'
Pictorial Photographer would want to
class them with the studies of Degas ? And if Mr.
Hollyer's portraits, as now exemplified by one of Mr.
Walter Crane, are admirable, for that reason are they to
be placed in the same category as an
etching by
Rembrandt ?"
But every painter a Rembrandt ? And is every

is
painter whois not a Rembrandt, no artist ? Answer

these questions and the " A. U.'s "
illogical nature of
argument will at once be visible. If Nature is wrong is
it for the easel to set
her right ? One might imagine in
reading such nonsensical statements that only art could
make nature beautiful. This curious outcry for the
TRUTHFULNESS IN ART. 4!
painter to set Nature right, reminds one of the New

Hollander's barbarous custom of improving Nature by
cutting off the top joint of a ringer. It is in vain for
"A. U." to tell us that he has " more than once pointed
out the distinction between photography, a mechanical
science, and art," when he has only asserted the
Assertions will never prove
existence of that distinction.
that the picture or photograph is of necessity the result
of tools. Who dreams of tracing bad colouring, false
drawing, vulgar treatment and gross ignorance of per-

spective and anatomy to the use of pigments and brushes?
Who that a photograph while expressing
will assert
sympathetically and poetically, Nature's appeal

faithfully,
to hearts and minds is not a work of art, because the
worker used a camera and chemicals instead of paints

and pencils? The mere fact that photographs of the
same scene under the same conditions can be produced
with strikingly dissimilar results shows how little tools
have to do with the matter. Are we to believe that
Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Akenside, Thompson,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and many scores of great poets,
who have found in nature perfect loveliness, may be mis-
taken, and Mr. Whistler may be right in asserting that
" Nature is Is he inevitably right ? It
usually wrong."
may be true that the photographer is more dependent
upon his tools than the painter is, but it has never yet
been said of a landscape photograph that the Hanging
Committee of any exhibition were unable to decide
which was its top and which was its bottom. To
admire something independent of Nature, and
art as
denounce photography as purely mechanical because it

does not improve Nature, is indeed going back to the
crude, raw beginning of the clumsiest criticism. Is there

then no poetry, no romance, nothing that is picture-like
in Nature ? Is there no loveliness in woman, no dignity
ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
42
and forest and river,
in man, no charm in hill dale,
cloud and sky, until they appear upon the painter's

canvas ? Has the flower we pluck from the garden no
in paint ? Is it
beauty compared with its interpretation
" " that as
indeed so good to conclude photography is,
"A. U." says, merely " a mechanical contrivance," and

the photograph ditto ? Are the tools, and the produc-
tions made with them, on the same ignoble level ? Is
" "
fidelity to Nature no proof of the artistic possibilities
of the camera, or the art ability of the painter ? Does

"A. U.'s" "scathing criticism" reduce us to the
the camera's fidelity on a
deplorable necessity of putting
level with that of nearly all the best artists the world
has known ? Ruskin says, " Landscape art, should be

" an exhibi-
a witness to the omnipotence of God," not
tion of the dexterity of man " ;
and he says yet again,
" alteration of the features of Nature has its
every
origin in powerless indolence or blind audacity."
And
" the
again, picture that is painted as a substitute for
Nature had better be burned." Our greatest painters,
poets and philosophers have all agreed with him in say-
" the
ing picture which is looked for as an interpretation
of Nature is invaluable."
" A. U."
It is very much easier for such a painter as
admires to realize his own fantastic and eccentric

imaginings than it is to transcribe the facts of Nature
into the language of art ;
easier to make a doll than it is
to model a life-like statue. But photography's critics,

like doctors, differ widely in their opinions. Tlu Times,
dealing with the Royal Photographic Society's Exhibi-
" of late
tion, said, years the claims of photography," in
the art direction, " have been persistently urged, and as
persistently disputed, and the question does not appear

as yet to have found a satisfactory solution. Photo-
graphers themselves are not unanimous upon the point ;
TRUTHFULNESS IN ART. 43
that is if we may judge from the pronouncements and

writings of some of the most prominent members of the
society, whose exhibition we are now reviewing. To

these there are no possibilities for art in photography.
The Photographic Society is not an artistic but rather a
scientific society."
Another London newspaper, The Standard, said, "it

would be flattery to claim that the ordinary amateur
helps to any appreciable extent the progress of the art

he practises in so mechanical a fashion. But he adds
undeniably to the pleasure of his own idle days, and to
the instruction of his friends at home. Nor,
. . .
afterglancing through the annual exhibition of the

Photographic Society, is it fair to deny the limner, whose
partner is the sun, the credit of greatly improving public
taste. Take, for example, a photograph from its walls,

or, indeed, from the case of any photographer's door,,
and compare it with the efforts of ten or twenty years ago,
and the difference will at once be seen. We do not
refer to the really artistic compositions on view, or to
the exquisite reproductions of cloud and sea effects, but
simply to the and costume of the " sitters."

pose The
glaring victim bolt upright in front of a crimson curtain,
and beside a sham marble pillar, with his forefinger in
a book, after the old portrait painter's conventionalism,
has vanished. For, when the dress and the attitude of
those times appeared in a photograph, the natural result
was that they were aestheticised out of existence."
The Daily Telegraph said of the first-named collection,
"
Advancing by leaps and bounds, the study and science
of photography as reflected by an exhibition of the
Photographic Society of Great Britain, held in Pall Mall,

leaves, apart from the great unsolved problem of
colouring, little to be wished for by admirers of the
beautiful. Rarely has a more attractive show been held,
the high pitch of perfection to which many of the works

are brought giving visitors a first impression that they
gazed upon delicately-finished water-colours or artistic

crayons rather than products of the camera. Every
branch of skilful development receives full representation,
and where so much is delightful and clever, the judges
must have found it a hard task to allot their favours."
A great landscape painter who painted what he saw
and not what he imagined he ought to see, John
Constable, R.A., in the May of 1809, and a letter to his
old friend, " For the last few

John Dunthorne, says :
years I have been running after pictures and seeking

truth at second-hand. I have not endeavoured to
represent Nature with the same elevation of mind with
which I set out, but have rather tried to make my per-
formances look like the works of other men. I am
determined to make no idle visits this summer, nor to
give up time to commonplace people. I shall return

my
to Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to
get a pure and
unaffected manner of representing the scenes that
may
employ me. There is little or nothing in the exhibition
worth looking up to. There is room enough for a natural
painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura,
an attempt to do something beyond the truth. Fashion
always had, and will have, its day but Truth in all ;
things only will last, and it alone will have just claims
on our admiration."
In another letter to another friend he "In the
says :
early ages of the fine arts the productions were more

and sublime, for then the artists,
affecting being without
human exemplars, were forced to have recourse to
Nature."
And, in yet another letter he speaks of " Nature,
the mother of all that is valuable in
poetry, painting or
anything else where an appeal to the soul is required.
The language the only one that is uni-

of the heart is
versal, and as Sterne says, we should disregard all rules

and make our way to the heart as we can."
Fresh testimony to the righteousness of this famous
landscape painter's judgment was shown when some of
his piiflures appeared in the Paris Louvre Gallery, where
they had the place of honour, and convinced many of

the best French pointers that they were all in error
that Nature alone was right, and that a want of fidelity
to Nature was a want of artistic power. "Your pictures,"
said a correspondent, writing to Constable from Paris,
" have
taught them that though your means may not be
fssfiitinlj your end must be to produce an imitation of
Nature, and the next exhibition in Paris will teem with

your imitators."
Another painter, J. D. Harding, in his " Lessons on
Art," enforces this appreciative care, forethought, and
Nature for art's sake by saying " Unless art
delight in :
be studied in conjunction with Nature, a great proportion

of the student's intellect and susceptibility must remain
'in Lethe drowned.' Can it be denied that we are so
constituted as to enjoy nature, and that nature was
intended our enjoyment ?
for If not, why need she be
beautiful ? Wherefore our esteem of and our running

hither and thither to behold her ?"
Let us now change our point of view. A painting
or a photograph may represent what the painter or
photographer saw faithfully enough so far as regards a
few unimportant facts, and yet miss many facts of much
greater importance from a pictorial point of view.
" "
Many," says Mr. G. J. Goschen, many is the
three-volume novel which you can read through from
beginning to end while your mind will not be lit up with
one spark of imagination. Their authors describe
characters precisely similar to the people whom they see
they describe the very clothes

worn by the
every day ;
people whom
they meet every day they describe the ;
very words which may

be addressed to themselves, the
be smiled at themselves they
very smiles which may
;
describe the very love which they hope may be made to
themselves, or to their sisters and then at the end they

;
think they have written a novel Well, that may be!
fiction, but it is not imagination." In like way photo-
graphic views and portraits may be mere outside facts.
Many give dead unchangeable masks instead of living
and move " front eleva-

faces that seem to breathe ;
flat
"
tions as apologies for solidity, depth and space dull ;
uninteresting empty-box facts, instead of complete

truths pregnant with thought and feeling. Just as
certain facts may be used in argument to uphold glaring
falsehoods, and figures made to demonstrate nothing so
forcibly as their own unreliability, so in the imitative
arts mere reported facls and figures are not necessarily
perfect truths. There are such things as inner truths,
to which these outside facts belong. To secure the one
and miss the other is a very poor kind of success. Yet
it contents thousands.
A newspaper report of the murder of Desdemona
by a Moor named Othello could put before you, as in a
photograph, all the outside facts of that horribly tragic
event, but it required a Shakespeare to realize its power-
ful inner truths. The immobile plaster mask of a
beautiful face is a fact entirely, utterly unlike the
original face under the influence of stirring thoughts or

deep feelings. The mask-face is an imperfect, the face a
perfect truth. Earth, air and sky have glorious revela-
tions for the poet painter which the untrained mind can-
not perceive, and the uneducated eye cannot see. A
well photographed but inartistic
landscape gives the
outer forms of things
accurately enough, but it gives
nothing more, it is a mere shell. The newspaper report

is looked at for a minute or two and then thrown aside.
One does not take it up again and again as if it were a
poem to be thought about, or a work of teal art, always

delightful, always suggesting something new, some
fresh beauty, some deeper meaning, or giving us some
additional delight.
The photographer has not, it is true, the power an
possesses in this direction.
artist His tools are different,
he works in a different medium, there is not the same
full scope for his imagination, but he has a far greater
art power than it is
commonly said he has. In some
respects he has advantages which the artist has not.

His colours are not only mixed for him, but are also
suppliedby science. The purely mechanical work
which occupies so large a proportion of the painter's
time, in his case occupies very little time. While the
painter laboriously and thoughtfully perfecting one
is
picture, the photographer can turn out scores. But of

that which is intellectual, that which is higher, greater
and grander as an element of success than all mechanical
and technical conditions put together, the photographer
may command only he will study
a fairly good share, if
his calling in a serious, earnest way, and not lightly as

if its art possibilities were something of subordinate
interest and importance.
One of the earliest things the art student has to
acquire however, not only the knowledge of what he

is,
can do, and should try to do, but the knowledge of what
he cannot do, and what it would only be a waste of
precious time and energy to struggle for. If he thinks,
as some painters do, that he is going to do more than is

done by nature, he will waste his time. He is not
going to create anything natural, but something artificial.

It is the purpose of his art to suggest, not create, not to
make the artificial natural, but to seem natural. He has

a language purely his own, into which he must translate
the truths of nature. He is not a mere transcriber but
an interpreter. Between God's art and man's there is a
vast unbridgable chasm. Nature defies all imitation,
but she invites interpretation, and most lovingly and
generously rewards it. A clever painter knows that just

as nature appeals to the mind through the eye, so must he
appeal to it. It is common and significant enough to
hear photographers in the presence of some great

artistic camera picture asking its producer such
" What " \Yho
questions as you use for it ?"
lens did
made the plate it was taken upon ?" " What exposure
did you give?" "How did you develop it?" and " Whose
paper did you print upon ?" All the enthusiasm of their
admiration does not suffice to make them believe that
itssuperior pictorial excellence and truthfulness are due
to superior artistic knowledge, to accuracy of observa-
tion, judgment in selection, imagination, composition,

feeling or sentiment. They never dream that it is
superior because an intellectual product and not a

it is
mere mechanical production. They remind one of the

old master-painter's scornful reply to the student who
sounding aloud the praises of one of his pictures at last
" What do
asked :
you mix your colours with ?" And
was answered, " With brains, sir."
" The skill and
craft of the will be wasted
artist not
if the vitality of truth, invoked
by the power of genius
and regulated by the judgment be wanted all his work
is then but so much wasted
money, time, labour, skill
and materials."* But mere miscroscopic sharpness in
detail must not be regarded as truthfulness. If art was
a mere question of realistic details, the
photograph
*
The Library of the Fine Arts (1831).
would be superior to the greatest painter's works, and a

police reporter's record more powerfully truthful than a
poet's drama.
In rigid cast-iron-looking landscapes we see but a
sacrifice to outer accuracy and complete detail. The
poetry of sunshine and air, the glories of space, the
breathings of vitality and every retrospective and intro-
spective suggestion of life, originality and emotion are
all sacrificed for these inferior qualities. There are no
resting-places for the birds in their black heavy foliage,
no little cavernous recesses in which the flickering cast-
shadows and merrily dancing sunshine are at play ;
solid-looking masses of black twigs, boughs and leaves

seem as if not only the lightest breeze that blows, but the
strongest blast would fail to make them rustle, quiver

or bend, not a leaf seems movable, not a bough bend-
able. Looking at them one does not seem to hear the
whispering air, or feel the glowing sunshine. In the

fields we do not sniff up perfumes of new-
they depict
mown hay or in their gardens scent the flowers. They
have on their seas and rivers not rising and falling, but
risen or fallen waves petrified into stony immovability.
Their shadows are dead surfaces with very little
flat
transparency and no reflected light or intermediate tones.

They seem all alike, instead of being variably influenced
by changeful conditions. And all this is not because

the photographer's lens, plate and printing frame were
utterly unsuited to the production of such things, but

because the imagination of the operator never realized
them, and he consequently never sought them. If he
had more fully comprehended the meaning of truthful-
ness in art he would not have been so easily or so readily
satisfied.
CHAPTER V.
ON THE EXPRESSION OF SPACE.
we now from truthfulness generally to certain
particular truths, beginning with that called space.

To represent space (which means broadly air) truthfully
is todo that which hitherto few, very few, photographers
have done. It was one of the earliest difficulties to which
artists called attention, and one which until quite recently
photographers persistently overlooked or ignored.

I am taking no new
ground, remember. In Sir
William Newton's paper on " Art-photography," read in
the year 1853, before the Society, he wrote (the italics
were his own) "
Every variety of subject, from xhe
:
most solid and substantial to the most light and airy, are
displayed with that exactitude of delineation which

completely sets at naught the exertions of manual
ingenuity. Still the general tone of nature has yet to be
accomplished by means of photography. Who has not
studied nature so much as to observe how beautifully

she throws her atmospheric veil, detaching each object,
while producing that harmony and union of parts which
the most splendid specimen of photography fails to
realize. Consequently, at present, it is in vain to look
for that true representation of light and shade in
photography which is to be found in a fine work of

art."
This means the truthful representation of atmo-

sphere and perspective with which that of space is, of
course, intimately associated.

Space may here be considered simply as space

without going into all the more complicated considera-
tions introduced by regarding it as air, with all its vast
range of pictorial effects sunlit, sunless, clear, misty,

etc.,etc. It is the business of an artistic landscape
photographer to make that which really is a flat piece of
paper look like space, to make objects that are round or
square, deep or flat, seem so. Up to a certain point the
expression of atmosphere and space are one, but the

principles and rules of art blend so imperceptibly that in
all these chapters webe continually approaching

shall
one subject from different points of view. Before dealing

with aerial perspective in a separate chapter, let us
therefore give some attention to the expressing of space.
If you wish to convey to the minds and imaginations
of men
true ideas of space, distant hills must not rise up
beforethem with sharp, hard edges, nor must the nearest
and most distant details be equally distinct, or as if they
were so many flat, upright screens, set one behind another
in the fashion of a set scene on the stage, instead of
suggesting miles beyond miles of variegated scenery
undergoing gradual changes as it retreats from the eye.
To secure such effects in selecting time, place and hour,
when exposing and when developing, and afterwards
when regulating and controlling the printing, is a
business of real importance, in pursuing which we can
avail ourselves of those modifying and controlling
influences which every experienced and accomplished
artist-photographer now has at his finger ends. In the
illustration on opposite page, everything in the com-
position aids in expressing space and atmosphere, the
lines, the tones of dark and light, the harmonious
blendings and the strong contrasts all serve to carry the
eye as it were to the picture. It is a very suggestive
little work well worth careful study.
THE EXPRESSION OF SPACE. 53
First and foremost in importance let us give atten-

tion to what painters call " Values." If you examine a
finished and carefully executed engraving from the work
of some great landscape painter you will, if artistically
observant, at once recognise the very colours of the

original. This arises from the perfect union of two
contrasting qualities, viz., tone and colour. All colours
have their degrees of lightness or darkness (tones), and
these degrees are continually changing with the changes
of air and illumination. In the grey of a dull day they

are of course not what they are in sunshine. In pure
daylight both the colours and their tones are most
numerous, because it is white, and the tendency of all
coloured light is to blend and render more or less imper-
ceptiblemany gradations of colour-tones. Thus the

rich orange of sunset illumination will convert what
would be blue in white light into a warm grey, and pink
and yellow light have a tendency to amalgamate the
lighter tones, other colour-tones and hues assimilating
or separating from the same causes in like way. If you
want to study this for conviction, in a practical way,

on a screen a diversity of
you may do so by ranging
colours with their tints and tones, throwing upon them
lights and then photographing
them.
differently-coloured
The modern artist terms such effects " values," and
the study he gives to them is usually thorough and care-
ful. The photographer, as a rule, never gives them a
thought. Their effects are particularly useful in ex-
pressing sentiment and feeling, and they are intimately

allied with the study of cloud and sky effects. Of
course, too, they play a most important part in
expressing space.
Where the photographer finds this study more com-
plicated than it is even to the painter is where the
chemical action of colour has to he considered, and that
concentrated intensity of colour for which the condensing
power of his lens is responsible. These brilliant-coloured
images although extremely beautiful on the focussing

screen are very serious obstacles, although not generally
recognised as such by photographic art-students. To

render their works really truthful, however, these
difficulties must be met and in one way or another
conquered. Already photographic opticians, chemists,
experimentalists and inventors, urged on by artist
practitioners are on the scent, and within the last few
years much has been done towards
giving us means and
materials wherewith to combat such difficulties. Colour
screens and the orthochromatic process are perhaps of
these the most important.
Avery clever landscape painter once assured us
that he never truly understood the real meanings of
colour until a commission for a large number of mono-
chrome him the importance of their tones
pictures taught
in suggesting colour to the and in expressing
imagination
the varying conditions of space and
atmosphere. In the
Art Student for July, 1864, we have the remarks of yet

another painter* who said "
Working all along with
:
colours I fancied I had achieved a thorough mastery of

them in their various qualities, modifications and com-
binations, but never dreamt of studying the mono-
I
tones of colours separately, never recognised the necessity

of such effort to acquire any proper understanding of
colour. Consequently when I began to paint with brown
and white only, I was like a lame man deprived of his
crutches."
This relationship of tones and colours being largely
influenced by atmospheric causes, have consequently a
very important bearing on expressing space, and should

therefore receive careful attention in the practice of
landscape photography for the production of pictures.

There are also other ways in which the due expression
of space is often missed, and on which passing comment
may here be appropriately made. To some of these we
must next give attention.
The cast shadows of sunlight are beautifully trans-
parent, delicate and tender, although very clearly defined.
Under-exposed or not properly developed in a^negative
they become hard, opaque and too coarsely and severely
outlined. Their natural beauty and softness thus lost
arises from the presence of strongly reflected lights and
constantly differing thicknesses of atmosphere. If these
subtle and varied effects are not secured by exposure,
development and artistic printing, we have misrepresenta-
tion not only of tones or values, and of colours as

indicated by their tones, but also of space. For twenty
or more years we are told that the greatest colourist of
our generation, Turner, could not " colour," and never
would be a colourist because he had " no eye for
colour."
*
Who in 1870 became a clever photographer.
Why ? The cause was his not having then studied

colours in their tones. The paintings he made during
these years were mostly in water-colours and after the
fashion of the old school of water-colour painters, were
drawn and painted from nature in sepia or Indian ink-
before the colours were added in flat washes, and often

in the studio. The effect he thus obtained was rather
that of a coloured print or photograph than what we now
recognise as a finished water-colour picture. But it
always seemed to me that this was a kind of apprentice-
ship period, and that his experience with gradations of

monochrome was the real basis of his glorious after-
triumphs in colour, and in the expressing, with such wonder-
ful force, aiy and space. It taught him the importance
of tones, or what we now call values. What Turner
learned in this way is what the photographer who
just
desires to excel in landscape art must also learn.
Turn to the works of another great landscape
painter, Claude, and you will see how he too studied
values. Go to the National Gallery in London, and look
at his little wafer of time-discoloured once white oil
paint, which even at its purest and newest was black in
comparison with the dazzling brilliancy of the sun it

represents. See how this absurdly dingy little hieroglyph
floods the painted landscape with its glory. This grand
result is not due to the painted sun, and only in part to the
colour. It owes nearly all its power to Claude's know-
ledge and uses of tones and their values. Throughout
allnature, in every changeful season of the year, in every
variation from the brightness of early dawn, until
twilight'sdim obscurity, the tones and expressions of a

landscape are continually altering, and every alteration
is a new study for the artist, a new glory for the
imaginative, each having its own associated ideas and

suggestions.
THE EXPRRSSION OF SPACE. 57
Another element whereby space is expressed in a

is linear
"
picture perspective. Lines," says Henry
Howard, R.A., " link the parts together and lead the eye
agreeably through the picture. They form the melody
of the work, and in all compositions should arise out of
the particular occasion, should be flowing and graceful,
or more direct and abrupt, as may suit the character of
the subject." The quality they thus realize is

intimately
connected with the expressing of space, and this is
Example Expression of Lines.
greatly aided by the fact that all straight lines given by

retiring surfaces run to what draughtsmen call vanishing
points, the position of which indicates the height and
position of the lens or the eye of some human spectator.
But this will,space permits, be more fully and practi-
if
cally dealt with in the following chapter. It is men-
tioned here only to show its connection with the
expression of space with which lines are very intimately

connected. Every line carries the eye of the spectator
into the picture, or away from it, consequently while
playing an important part in pictorial composition, and

60 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPF. PHOTOGRAPHY.
adding to general truthfulness of effect. The illustration

on page 59 will show my meaning. It is a bit of old
Venice, and the perspective lines of the architecture at

once seize the eye of the spectator and convey the
perception of space with great force.
Foregrounds and figures properly introduced and
selected are also very influential elements in expressing
I must deal with presently for they are
space, but these
important enough to have an entire chapter to them-
selves.
It should also be borne in mind that in expressing
space we secure relief in all its varying degrees, bringing

this forward,throwing that back making one feature
dominant, another subordinate, and so on, according to
the requirements of pictorial composition, or the artist's
dominant purpose. But this power conies, as we have
already asserted, from culture not from chance, from
intellectual effort not from mere mechanical practice.
6i
CHAPTER VI.
ON SKIES. CLOUDS. AERIAL PERSPECTIVE AND

ATMOSPHERIC EFFECTS.
TITH ^ nave already pointed out, or suggested, that

^^l every hour of the day has its characteristic
atmospheric and pictorial effects. The air in the sky
above and on the earth beneath is a grand source of
pictorial beauty. With what eloquence John Ruskin

describes the sky as " that part of creation in which
Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more
for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and
teaching him, than in any other of her works. . . .
There is not," he adds, "a moment of any day in our

lives when nature is not producing scene after scene,
picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still
upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most

perfect beauty in that glorious dome, for the good and
delight of all the dwellers on earth. It is the realm of
beauty, beauty raised to the loftiest in order that all may

see."
Its changes are often so subtle, and the differences
come and go so gradually, with such seemingly eccentric
blendings and dissolutions that only the watchful detect

them. Even the slightest changes in these atmospherical
conditions are often of the greatest importance from a
pictorial point of view. Just as distance sometimes makes

harsh, loud noises soft and musical, so the partial
thickening of air, or some chance mistiness, such as we

often note veiling masses of dark shadow under leafy
trees at certain hours, will change masses of dark

shadow in Nature into opaque flat chemically blackened
paper breaking up the harmony of "values" and des-
troying the effect of space and distance.
In like way a
grassy field which photographs too uniformly dark,

rising up like a screen instead of retiring flatly, will
if taken when the dew is on it produce a far more

satisfactory result, the silvery greyness of the moisture
being more aclinic than the rich full green. Again, to
get the flashing effect of sunlight on the burnished
surfaces of lakes or rivers, is a photographic difficulty often
encountered and seldom conquered. But select a spot
where you see water weed of a greenish grey colour
abounding as it often does and that difficulty is generally
overcome. In like way the delicate pink blush and pale
green sometimes seen in the sky at sunset has helped

many a thoughtfully observant photographer in securing
in its full beauty a pictorial sky-effect which might other-
wise have been lost through over-exposure. Colour steals
into air and dissolves out of it with imperceptible
gradations, and like other desirable aerial effects must be

watched and waited for. So every landscape should be
photographed or painted with the knowledge that each
scene in Nature varies in aspect as the cloudland above
it does. Here is a picture from Dante (Carey's trans-
lation) which is in the same way suggestive.

Call to remembrance, reader,if thpu e'er
Hast on a mountain top, been ta'en by cloud,
Through which thou sawest no better than the mole
Doth through opaceous membrane; then, whene'er
The watery vapours began to melt
Into thin air, how faintly the sun's sphere
Seemed wading through them.
"Thelevel marshes and rich meadows of the tertiary,

the rounded swells and short
pastures of the chalk, the
square-built cliffs and cloven dells of the lower limestone,
SKIES, CLOUDS, AERIAL PERSPECTIVE, ETC. 63
the soaring peaks and ridgy precipices of the primaries,

have nothing in common among them, nothing which
is not distinctive and incommunicable," says Ruskin.
And this is peculiarly true of atmospheric effects
" Their clouds are
belonging to them. different," he
" their humours of storm and sunshine are
goes on,
different." In every work of art that is loftily true to its
noblest mission, the grandeur and power of the result is
"
proportioned to the unity of feeling manifested in its
several parts." And clouds, as an old number of Black-
sky and Water Effett with Figures.
wood " Clouds are to the heavens what human

says,
beings are to the earth," and they really are as important
and useful in the stories they tell as human beings are
in landscapes.
The other day I was reading in a photographic

journal a well- written, otherwise thoughtful paper, in
which the writer advised his brothers of the camera to
shirk certain difficulties by confining their picture-
making efforts to scenes without any wide expanses of

distant country. What gems of pictorial effect, what
64 ARTISTIC LANUSCAPK I'lin I < >< , KAI'I V.
I
charms of sunny atmosphere and floating cloud shadows,
what opportunities of catching the rarer beauties of

Nature would be lost to photography if such advice
were generally adopted What compensation would it
!
be to have sharply defined forms and perfect details

when we had sacrified that expression of space, and that
" some-
atmosphere and sky which, as Ruskin said, is
times gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful ;
almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its
tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, surely meant for
the chief teacher of what is immortal in us." "And,

" we never
although," as he adds, attend to it, never
make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with
our animal sensations."
Describing how certain great masters of landscape

painted air and light, he says David Cox gave us " dew-
"
laden air and " soft white clouds melting with their
own motion " that Copley Fielding, " casting
; his whole
soul into space," mingled "light and vapour," "always
with a passion for Nature's freedom burning in his
"
heart that J. D. Harding delighted in revelations
;
of " Nature's own sunshine " " into the

following it ;
crannies of the rocks and along the flanks of the

sloping
"
hills and that Clarkson Stanfield, " concealing
;
nothing and falsifying nothing," modelled " the masses

of the clouds with the
strength of tempest in their every
"
fold ;and Turner painted " with the elements waiting
upon his will, and the night and morning obedient to
his call."
And again, when describing Turner's grand picture

of Venice, he dwells
upon the way in which that wonder-
ful painter reveals a " white flashing fulness of
dazzling
lightwhich the waves drink and the clouds
breathe,
bending and burning in of He of
intensity joy." says
its
sky, "it is visible infinity, liquid, measureless, un-
fathomable, panting and melting through the chasms in

the long fields of snow-white, flaked, slow-moving
vapours, down to the islanded rest of the Enganean
hills." Comparing this dream of Venice glorified by
sunshine and air to the wonderfully photographic-like
picture which lens-aided Canaletti painted of the
saiiu subject, he says of the latter, it is Venice as she
was seen " by the most unfeeling and untaught of man-
kind. The bargeman and bricklayer probably see no
more in Venice than Canaletti gives What
more there is in Venice than brick and stone what there
is of mystery and death and memory and beauty, what
there is to be learned or lamented, to be loved or wept
over, we look for to Canaletti in vain." To all intents
and purposes Canak-tti painted whdt the lens 5-aw, not
what he saw, for he used a camera and painted from its
transparent screen.
Of Stanfield's Venetian painting lie complains in a
like spirit, despite its " Beautiful
acknowledged merits.
as it is, it lacks poetical associations, feeling and senti-
ment." And yet how vastly superior to the best photo-
graph of Venice have come across (the best by-the-bye
I
I saw in Naples) is Stanfield's splendid picture. But

in even this admirable Neapolitan photograph the sky
selected was one in which nothing was suggested more
than it actually represented a literal fact, a kind of
empty box fact, something with nothing in it.
Atmospherical perspective is associated with tones
just as linear perspective belongs to forms, and each is

" It not
equally essential to truthful representation.
" all the numerous effects
only embraces," says Barnard,
of atmosphere denominated by artists the keeping of a
picture, but it is of the greatest importance in all con-

trasts or oppositions of light and shade.* It is therefore
*
See also Chapter XII. on Breadth.
66 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPH V.
the student should be directed to

highly desirable that
the examination and here again careful comparison of
Nature needed." "In
your production with
is . . .
"
the foreground of a picture the colours (in our case
"
their tones) may be supposed to have their true force,
the in this part being brightest and the shadows
lights
darkest. The distance of a hundred yards may be repre-
sented by one veil, a mile by a second, four miles by a
third, and the extreme distance by
a fourth
When by such experiments combined with the study of

open air the student becomes aware
real effects in the
how indispensable it is to represent atmosphere, he

will never rest satisfied until he can imitate the
"
effect in his pictures whether they be paintings of
photographs.
" We destroy," says Ruskin (I can give you on this
subject no words so clear and no authority
forcible,
more weighty), " we destroy," says he, " both Fpace and
size" (proportion) "either by the vacancy which affords
us no measure of space, or the distinctness which gives
us a false one."
Atmospherein shadow and atmosphere in light
contrast each other very powerfully, and with such

wonderful diversities of pictorial effect that only a. watch-
fully observant eye will recognise them either in nature
or on the focussing screen, and he who does not grasp
such creations in his mind
not likely to time exposure
is
and delicately manipulate development with a view to

their representation. How rare, for instance, it is to
find in landscape photography that faint misty effect of
air in strong sunshine which makes objects seen through
it appear as if
delicately and beautifully veiled, while
other objects on the same plane being less strongly
affected, are so distinct that you may trace even their
smaller details.
" The appearance of mist, or whiteness in the blue
of the sky," says Ruskin, " is a circumstance which,
more or less, accompanies sunshine, and which,
supposing the quantity of vapour constant, is greatest in
the brightest sunlight." When there are no clouds in
the sky the whiteness affects the whole sky equally. But
when there are clouds between us and the sun, and the
sun is low, these clouds cast shadows along and through
the mass of suspended vapour with striking effect.
Composition of Shipping and Figures.
Within the shadows, the vapour being transparent and

sky appears of a pale blue. But where the
invisible, the
sunbeams strike the vapour, they become visible in the
form of beams, radiating shafts of light which are most
valuable piclorially, and the constant accompaniments
of a low sun. The denser the mist the more distinct
and sharp-edged will these rays be. When the air is
"
very clear they are vague, flushing, graduated passages
"
of light when the air is very thick they are " keen-
;
edged and decisive in a very high degree."

It is in this direction of atmospheric effect that
artist photographers will encounter at once their most
glorious opportunities and their

most perplexing diffi-
culties, but I see no reason on earth why they should be
despairingly rejected as things impossible of attainment

so long as photographic art remains as vigorously and
hopefully progressive as it now is.
Photographic landscapes are commonly wanting

most in those passages wherein the objects become lost
by softly melting away from sight into air, the result
being nigh akin to that hard, map-like flattening out
of natural objects, which is in most instances due rather
to the producer's want of observation and artistic taste
than to the unavoidable restrictions of the chemico-

optical process and tools. Once more, I
purposely
more do not suppose that picturesque treat-
repeat, once
ment means violence done to the truthfulness of photo-
graphy quite the contrary, its truthfulness is increased
;
in proportion with its pictorial merit. All improvements

of this kind merely obey those necessary principles by
which both art and nature make assemblages of
numerous and varied objects so agreeable to the eye.
And although this due balance of part with part is
largely the result of what we call linear perspective,
by which the quality of the lens and the ability of its user
are equally tested, they are still more largely the result
of that which is more difficult to secure, aerial
perspective.
Without truthfulness in atmospheric representation,
mere linear perspective, dealing with relative magnitudes
and shapes, becomes imperfect and misleading.
itself
Distance by diminishing the size of this or that object,

gives no clue to its absolute size or comparative magni-
tude ; aerial effects, however, suggest at once not only
how far or how near they are, but the extent to which
they are influenced by various conditions of light, etc.
A photo-picture without atmospherical perspective and

its subordinating effects resembles a mere jumble of
meaningless words, confusing both mind and eye.

Leslie, the painter, used to say there was rib high-
minded ambitious work done by the pseudo student,
unless it taught him to see better what he copied in ;
other words, mere hand-work without head-work is sure

to be degenerate and uninteresting. In nothing is this
more clearly seen than it is in landscape photographs.
Atmosphere is the great harmonizing element of a picture,
the chief element of beauty, it is the eye's music*, giving
order and proportion with the pervading tone, high or
low, and consequently the pervading sentiment or feeling.

A rich effe<5l or a simple one may be made to prevail by
its judicious introduction, selection or treatment.
Without atmospheric peculiarities or characteristics
every landscape picture is flat, monotonous and uninter-

esting. The photographer who goes to the study of
nature as an artist or poet does, reverently, with trained
perceptive organs, will find the pleasure and delight of
his work largely increased. Sturm wrote well and truly
when he " The advantages of reason are never more
said,
feltthan when our faculties are employed in meditating
upon the perfection of God displayed in His works."
Many of the old landscape painters show us how
little study of kind existed amongst them
this but ;
modern painters have of late been feeling alive to its

importance, and by comparing the former with the latter,
camera artists may learn useful lessons. In the former's
works, the distance used to be always coldly blue and

the foregrounds invariably aglow with rich warm colour
whatever the hour of the day, time of year or proper
*
This word is used to indicate the appropriateness in propor-
tion, sizeand tones which is consistent with the natural union of
parts to make the whole at once attractive
and beautiful.
yo ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
condition of atmosphere. Obviously this was false and

inartistic.
Not less untruthful are photographers who in a like
the tones which belong to colours, so

way misrepresent
that foreground, middle, and extreme distance are either
too violent in their changes or jumbled all together, and
look like flat screens placed one behind another, rather
than gradually retiring surfaces.

only too well what difficulties there are
I know in
realizing all a thoughtful, observant and imaginative

artist sees in nature, by chemical and optical appliances.
But I also know that these difficulties are not less to the
and that they have from time to time, in various
painter
less triumphantly overcome by
ways, been more or
Anything which has been done demon-
photographers.
strates that it can be done. Not by foolish, ill-disguised
trickery and deception, as so many suggest, but by
thoroughly legitimate, honest, valorous art work.

The greater the power you have in modifying and
is for obtaining the
altering, the greater necessity there
knowledge which gives that power its real value. To

increase artistic possibilities, operators, opticians and
chemists have of late, as our photographic journals
clearly show, been inventing new and valuable appliances,

but the better the tools the greater the cleverness of the
tool-user should be otherwise they are uselsss, perhaps
;
worse than useless. A blunt knife is safer than a sharp

knife in the hands of one who uses it
awkwardly.
Clouds, for instance, which are the results of a little wool
and a masking dodge in the printing are, in this way,

often better than others printed from the most beautiful
cloud negatives. The photographer who prints in a
cloudy sky taken at noon, above a quiet landscape taken
in the morning or evening, commits blunders which are
only the worse for being separately perfectly natural and
SKIES, CLOODS, AERIAL PERSPECTIVE, ETC. yi
truthful. We sse every month in our society meetings,

specimens in which such self-evident necessities of
artisticwork are ignorantly, culpably or carelessly over-
looked. One would think, that the producers of these
landscape photographs and "cloud negatives" regarded
the sky as something altogether unreal and unimportant;
as if clouds indicated by their shapes, densities, heights,
modelling, light and shade, nothing that had any real

meaning. To them they probably have not. They go to
work as clouds never intercepted light, and never cast
if
shadows, never appealed to us in inexhaustible sentiments

of beauty and grandeur never even indicated or gov-
;
erned those rare or common atmospherical conditions

which give every real picture its dominant merit. I have
seen photographs with clouds low above still water in
which they had no reflections, and over which they cast
no shadows. I have seen
really perfect; cloud negatives
made utterly untruthful by mere overprinting, in a way
that could never have satisfied the operator if he had
been observant of nature or the possessor of artistic
knowledge.
Clouds associating themselves with their true mean-
ings in a work of art assume certain distinctive forms.
These are so well known to ordinary well-informed folk
that there are distinctive names for them, as stratus,

nimbus, linear-cirrus, cumoid-cirrus, cumlo-stratus, cu-
mulus, or mottled cirro-stratus, etc., each of these
names expressing conditions by which not only the
clouds but the entire landscape must be affected. How
often in sky and landscape photographs we see these
facts overlooked.
Clouds are however, almost infinite in their variety
of forms, although they are for practical purposes thus
broadly classified and distinguished. Sometimes as cirrus

they appear filmy and transparent as veils of barely per-
ceptible silver threads ;

or as dark, solid-looking, heavy
masses of cumulus, hanging low and near the earth,
when the atmosphere is damp and thick sometimes ;
swept into long parallel streaks by coming storm wind,

sometimes piled up in mountainous forms, or spreading
over the entire sky like a grey curtain. But they are
always eloquent in expression and meaning ;
always in
their silent languages they tell us forcibly their various
influences, all more

or less important for our story- telling
purposes. To use them in separate negatives without
regard 'to their utterances or to so associate their utter-
ances that they flatly contradict one another, is so
palpably, so absurdly wrong, that there should be no

need to say a word about them, and yet the need of
saying something does exist, or this book of mine would
never have been written.
Another objection to the thoughtless use of cloud
negatives is in the fact that the photographer commonly
forgets that when motion is caught (and it is a fruitful

source of the pictorial in art) the forms given by it often
indicate that point fromwhich the wind blows. If the
trees and grasses, weeds and rushes of the landscape
indicate by their curves wind from the west, and the
clouds say it is from the east, artists will smile and the
unkind will jeer at the artistic pretensions of
photo-
graphers generally. Or, if the wind is in the air just
above the landscape, and none in the air below, t la-
blunder will be not less If again, the
conspicuous.
mournful and solemn gloom of the
sky is contrasted
by bright sunny effects in the cheerful landscape and
even this I have seen in more than one
photographic
exhibition the error, you would
fancy, should be suffi-
ciently obvious. Yet

has escaped observation and even
it
been defended when

pointed out, on the ground that it
was artistic to
study brilliant effects of light and shade
without regard to commonplace, ordinary facts. But

how can this accord with the productions of an art the
highest and most valued quality of which has from the
first been its claim to truthfulness ?
A well known landscape painter, J. Barnard, whom

have already quoted, says " All
I opportunities of
:
studying the phenomena of nature should be embraced."

As a general rule in landscapes the hour of the day
should be evident. To assist in showing this, we must
summon to our aid a knowledge of the different con-
formation of clouds, as displayed at various periods of
the day. Thus morning, either before or after sunrise,
will be indicated as much by the form of the clouds as
by their colours, or, if cloudless,by the appearance of

the dawn in the sky, by the summit of the hills alone
being touched with light, or by mists lying in the valley;
mid-day by the direction of the shadows, reflections, or

general expressions of heat, calmness, and repose. In
the evening an exact chronometer is afforded by the
height of the sun above the horizon.
However
the sky-effect may be produced, it should
be accordance with the landscape's character and its
in
most strongly prevailing sentiment or feeling, otherwise

it will destroy the ideas it should create, and weaken
where itshould strengthen.
Calm, peaceful sky-effects blend most harmoniously
with landscape views of a quiet, pastoral description.
Sky and landscape necessarily associating themselves in
nature should therefore do so in a photograph. Under-
printing a sky negative frequently spoils the general
effect, and this is yet another reason why the photo-
grapher should be a close observer of nature, comparing

what he sees with what he produces just as carefully and
conscientiously as if he were wielding pencil and brush
instead of lens and camera. It is excellent practice to
and taking it to the scene

get a print from your negative,
it was taken from, compare the two, noting
carefully
especially the tones and

values of sky and landscape as
expressing aerial effect in the landscape

below and the
sky above. In many cases I am sure the photographer

who did this would go back and print from or develop
his next negative with new and valuable ideas.
The photographer who does nothing of the kind,
but relies entirely upon apparatus, materials and strict
observance of certain mechanical practices, finds common-

place ordinary scenes and effects quite good enough
for him. He does not miss air or space. If the
middle distance comes out more clear and distinct than
the near foreground, he does not see why one object
should modestly retire which staringly advances, or
why one which retires ought to advance, or if they do
one or the other he does not understand what he had or
could have had to do with it. His lens is excellent ;
if
the picture it
gives untrue, the optician is the culprit,
is
if there is a culprit, but says he

" that can't be." If his
photographs do not give light and shade accurately, the

faults must
be, he imagines, in the preparation of his
plates,but " that also is impossible, for he bought them
ready for use of the best maker in the market." For

anything wrong, it is always the tools that are blamable.
But of every success the credit is entirely his own. He
has no real ambition, no artistic aspirations, or he over-
estimates a superficial acquaintance with art, thinking
" The soundest judge of merit known
Is he who justly estimates his own."
Take an engraving of Turner's " Venice," and you

will recognise in it the air and sunlight of which Ruskin
speaks so enthusiastically. Shut out the sky and you will
see sunshine, filling "the blue sea between us with
still
the fulness of its wings," and

troubling "the shadows
of those azure, fathomless depths of crystal mystery, on

which the swiftness of the poised gondola floats double"
by "the quivering of its bright reflections." In it we
perceive, the engraving is a good one, as in the painting,

if
"dream-like and dim, but glorious, unnumbered palaces

lifting their shafts out of the hollow sea pale ranks of
motionless flame their mighty towers sent up to heaven
liketongues of more eager fire, their grey domes looming
out vast and dark like eclipsed worlds, their sculptured
arabesques and purple marbles fading further and fainter,
league beyond league, lost in the light of distance." I

have italicised the word "light," for objects die away
and fade in a full noon-tide blaze of vaporous sunlight,
as often as they do into the misty gloom of sunset.
Tones may range from pensive and solemn to light and
cheerful, through long passages of pearly gradations,
subtle in delicacy and tenderness, and through combina-
tions of strong, rich full dark gradations, but they always
suggest colours under certain conditions of light and air.

Some are allied to passages of the utmost brilliancy and
intensity, stealing out of and melting into it almost imper-
ceptibly. Others take short, swift, rapid strokes into or

out of sunshine, into or out of profound gloom. And
sometimes a single landscape combines both these con-
ditions in picturesque and striking contrast, but they are
always controlled by cloud and sky, light and air. A
dark cloud scudding across a summer sky will give us
such effects on distant hill sides, or ranges of woody
mountains, or along a wide expanse of lake or shoreless

ocean, and very beautiful they are. Gay, sad, solemn,
or picturesque, brilliantly forcible or modestly subordinate,
these tones are all alike governed by the dominating
influences of the ever-changing atmosphere.
I have in my eye just now the shop- windows of two
photographers. In one I see the most mechanically

photographic of photographs. They

have no natural
gradation of tones, no real separations

of distances,
nothing to suggest atmosphere or the assimilating or

dominating character of the light by which they were
" taken " no beauty of thought or feeling. Distinctness
of detail and uniformity of general effect without any
other idea pervades them in every part. The focusser
"
evidently strove to secure an equality of " sharpness as
the loftiest aim of his art. The developer strove to
intensify his high-lights and preserve his shadows trans-
parent, destroying depth, space and perspective, to get

surface effects only, ignoring the most delicate as well
as the strongest tones with all their subtle intermediates,
exposing and developing without a thought beyond, over

or tinder printing, mechanically and uniformly, without
giving the slightest connection to the accurate repre-

sentation of atmosphere or light. The spaces where
skies should have been are nothing but flat, meaning-
lesspatches of grey and white, or bare blank spaces of
pure white paper.
In the other photographer's windows most of the
pictures are from the same subjects, yet how different !
Life, light, space and motion are seen in them. The

skies are real skies, changes wrought by atmosphere are
all more or less faithfully indicated, everything is not
equally strong in detail, the gradations are not almost

everywhere alike. It seems to me that here is the work
of one who saw his subject at various limes and under
differing conditions, studied it before he chose it, and
then exposed his plate with a clear conception of what he
wanted. He probably took two negatives in rapid
succession, one of the winding river, church and trees,
with distant hills, and another of the sky, because the light
on clouds, their grouping and cast shadows are all in
harmonious accord with the lights, shadows and atmo-
spheric effects in the landscape beneath them. The

clouds have solidity and variety of forms and differing
densities, suggesting air instead of accidentally stained
paper. They receive light and throw shadows in pro-

portion to their position and densities, they are near and
distant, they belong to both earth below and sky above.
Colour is suggested in the tones of these productions, as
motion, sunlight, heat and wind are. We see the wind
in the rushes, depth in the water, space in the
atmosphere, birds in the trees, human pleasure and
peaceful enjoyment, a spot to rest in, a spot to fish in, a
spot to go a-dreaming in in short, a picture as well as a
photograph. And all these things come from faithfully

representing sunlight and air, in other words, from that
" we never make the
sky which, as Ruskin says, subject
of a thought but as it has to do with our animal sensa-
tions, but lookupon all which bears witness to the inten-
tion of the Supreme that we are to receive more from the
covering vault than the light and dew which we share

with the weed and the worm, but as a succession of
meaningless or monotonous accidents too common and
too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness or a
" Who
glance of admiration." As he says: among the whole
chattering crowd can tell of the forms and the precipices
of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the
horizon at noon yesterday ? Who saw the narrow sun-
beam that came out of the south and smote upon their
summits until they melted and mouldered away in a dust
of blue rain ? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds
when the sunlight left them last night and the west wind
"
blew them before it like withered leaves ? I wish one
could truthfully say that many photographers have seen
and recorded these glorious sky pictures, catching their
meanings and bringing to their expression in art, every
power that its language commands. But I think we can

yg ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
truthfully say that of

late years quite enough has been
seen in the way of cloud and sky-photographs to inspire
the artistic future of their
producers with faith
their in
art.
The vapour and sunshine effects already alluded to

" "
as giving those great fan-like radiating shafts of light
are those which test not only the photographer's technical
and knowledge but his manipulative dexterity

artistic
also,being often so exceedingly subtle

and delicate as to
be easily destroyed in the processes of exposing, develop-
ing and printing.
And this brings to mind a photograph I once
exhibited and commented upon to illustrate a paper
which I read before the South London Society of many
It was a large and wonderfully beautiful
years ago.
its sky gave us these radiating
photograph, but while
rays at their sharpest and brightest, indicating a dense
quantity of vapour in the atmosphere, the distant
hills
of the landscape associated with it showed that it was

taken when the sun was high, and the atmosphere
exceptionally free from mist or vapour of any kind.
No
one who had studied nature and knew anything of aerial
effects could have perpetrated such a blunder, yet not
one of the half a hundred or so of photographers present

detected the blunder before I pointed it out, and received
for so doing neither thanks nor compliments. Our
president (a scientific man of some rank, and a clergy-
man whom we all very truly loved and respected) said
in the kindest way possible that such a mistake, if a
mistake it might be called, was a mere spot on the sun
which only increased the beauty and interest of such a
very charming production, a sentiment which was
received with applause. I endured the reproof patiently
enough, although it was certainly discouraging, and

not being "convinced against my will" was "of the
same opinion Mr. Hammerton, in his " Life of

still."
Turner," speaking of that artist's famous picture of

Kilchurn Castle, painted in 1801, remarked: "I know
the topography of the place quite thoroughly, with that
minuteness which is only possible to a resident who
takes the keenest interest in the neighbourhood where
he lives and makes landscape painting his main occupa-
tion." And then he pointed out that Turner's point of
view was one at which the castle he represented must
have been invisible ;
that he put sailing boats where,
because of the violent gusts of wind commonly
encountered, no sails could have been used, because he
wanted something to cut the base line of his mountain,
and so throw the mountain further back. He made the
castle, not the picturesque ruin overgrown with ivy it
really is, but, for some unaccountable reason, a clumsy,

ugly, square block of masonry unbroken by anything in
the way of vegetable growth. He represented a peakless

mountain sloping upward gradually by one rising
abruptly to a peak at a height enormously greater. The
falsehood was unnecessary, and the picture would have
been better if it had been truthful ;
still it is a picture of
remarkable power and beauty, and moreover one in
which the sky effect gives these radiating lines of light,
and vaporous atmosphere of which I have spoken.
this
But the air through which we see the wild rugged
mountain and grim old fortress, the lake, the low-lying

clouds, cliffs, hills and boats, is one and the same all
over the picture. Turner never perpetrated such a

blunder as that which was pointed out to the South
Londoners. His untruths were told of the least, not
the most important aspects of Nature.
" The real motive of Turner's
picture," says
" was not Kilchurn, but the play of clouds
Hammerton,
about the crest of a Highland mountain which mountain
signified little. The mountain is any mountain you

please, the castle is you please. The clouds
any castle
play about the granite peak, a shower falling here from

their trailing fringes, a sunbeam flashing there on the
toppling silvery billows which are their ever-changing

summits, a level wreath of white vapour clinging in the
shelter of the peak itself, great volumes rolling and
surging in the abyss of the deep corrie, and on the steep

stony sides of the mountains the purple shadows fall vast
and swift, veiling each of them its hundred acres of
desolation. Who thinks of man's works when he
witnesses the majesty of the storms on the everlasting
mountains?" Still the fact remains, Turner called his
picture what it was not, and however grand his triumph
and however true his dealings with air and sunshine his
art was to that extent untruthful. I have quoted our
best art critics to have their authority on my side and
thus win your confidence. But it must be borne in
mind that they speak of painting only. Tims in all his
suggestions, Ruskin has colour in view, and some one

may urge that what he advocates is therefore altogether
beyond the photographer's reach. But those who make

such objection overlook a fact I have already mentioned.
If thephotograph does not give colour it suggests it,
forevery colour has its tone. Critics of works in black
and white know this so well that they use and rightly
"
use the word " colour to indicate combinations of
tones; one monochrome us is "full of
picture they tell
colour,'" and of another they say " there is no colony in

it," meaning that the tones do or do not convey to our
mind's eye the colours of Nature.
A very old acquaintance and fellow-worker of mine,
Valentine Blanchard, pointed out in The Practical Photo-
grapher of July, 1892, other blunders made in producing
skies inartistically. He said, " frequently the camera is
SKIES, CLOUDS, AERIAL PERSPECTIVE, ETC. 8l
pointed upward in the cloud negatives,

working for
probably to avoid some tree, or

house, or telegraph post,
and in consequence the clouds too nearly overhead are
taken, and these same clouds are printed into extensive
landscapes," (with of course quite another horizon line)
" and
thus, instead of a glorious perspective of clouds
gradually receding, until in the extreme distance they

lose form and melt away, a mass of clouds appears far
too large for the subject, and too strongly denned, and,
therefore, completely wanting in aerial perspective. If
the camera is in a horizontal position when the scene is

taken, and is afterwards pointed up at an angle of forty-
fivedegrees to take the clouds, what can result but such
an abnormal effect as I have described." I shall con-
clude this chapter with another quotation from the same
practical authority. When dealing with controversial

matters one likes to be well supported.
" Whenever that is to say, whenever
possible
there are clouds suitable to the subject it is well to
take two negatives, one of the landscape and one of the
clouds. In the first the full exposure, so as to secure
proper detail in foreground, should be given whilst in ;
the second the most rapid of snap-shots will be sufficient

to secure detail in even the most delicate clouds. When
the latter negative is developed of course a proper
combination of these two negatives will produce a
perfectly harmonious result, particularly if the right
effect has been patiently waited for. It sometimes
happens that the combination of cloud and landscape is
most striking in such a case blaze away with all the
;
enthusiasm that such a subject demands, but as a rule

the patient worker is the one who gets the greatest reward
for his labour."
I will also venture to extract from The Practical

Photographer, of July ist, 1894, some very sound practical
hints by another widely recognised authority, who

says :
" The artist tones down and harmonizes what are

really violent contrasts, when measured by volumes of
light ;
while the sensitive film has no such selective
power, but must receive the varying volumes of light in

their full intensity, so that when the initial action of the
is completed
light (termed by photographers, exposure)
by the developer, the result is in such cases above

referred to, violent contrast, leaving an impression on
the mind quite opposed to that which it received from
the view itself, where all was harmony."
" The kind of views
admittedly which photography
does most justice to are seascapes and sky effects where
there is but little contrast, and where, owing to the
volume of light, motion and life can be obtained with
rapid exposures. The question, then, for consideration
is, can we by any known process modify either the
exposure or the development, so as to bring about the
desired harmony, or can it be obtained in any other way ?
Some skilled photographers recommend that two nega-
tives should be taken of every strongly contrasted view,
the one to be exposed for the foreground and shadow,
the other for the distance and sky,
presumably the
middle distance can be printed from whichever of the
two best harmonizes. Of course, making two negatives
means loss of time and extra trouble, but to the earnest
photographer this should not prove a hindrance. The
second mode of remedying the defect is in the
develop-
ment. The
writer well remembers reading some years
since a paper by Captain Abney describing how he
developed an Alpine scene, in which figures and shadows
were in the foreground, and snow-peaked mountains in
the distance. The modus
operandi writing from memory
consisted of exposing for the foreground, thereby
SKIES, CLOUDS, AKRIAL PERSPECTIVE, ETC. 83
greatly over-exposing for the distance ; afterwards

modifying the development by using a minimum of
pyro, until all the detail was out, and then bringing up
the density by further addition of pyro. The writer can
only remark on this, that if such be practicable, then the
wonder is that so few follow on the lines given, and
that so many harshly black and white productions are
to be seen."
" The third means of obtaining is one that
harmony
perhaps but few photographers have given any thought
to, but to the writer it appears a possible one, that is,
by investing the camera itself with a certain amount of

selective power. Clearly such is not possible with the
ordinary camera, where the entire view is made at one

operation, and all parts receive practically the same
exposure. But accepting the eye as our guide, let us
suppose that a photograph can be taken with a revolving
camera, the light acting on the sensitive film through a
narrow vertical slit ;
then we should have an approxi-
mation to the action of the eye, and a certain selective
power inthe apparatus, not nearly to the same extent as
in ordinary vision, where the image is built up, spot by
spot, but still far more than we have at present. The
image would be formed line by line, and it would be in
the power of the operator, not to open or close the
diaphragm, but to alter the duration of the exposure,

and so bring about a similar result."
Another excellent practical suggestion which could
be utilised effectually in seeking passing brilliant sky
and cloud was made in The Practical Photographer
effects
for July, 1895. I* was that f a camera in which the
simultaneous action of twin lenses would enable the

operator to watch the image on his focussing screen and
make the exposure, without the slightest delay, directly
the effect he desired to secure appeared. For as the
writer says many beautiful picftures are lost and many
plates by the few seconds delay caused by

spoiled
removing the focussing glass and putting the dark slide
in its place. In the same article the writer (Mr. Harold
Baker) gives another admirable hint which, as it has also

a practical bearing on this subject, I repeat. It was
originallygiven by Captain Abney who tells us that a
lens exposed to a bright light for some minutes while the

focussing going on, absorbs sufficient of the light to
is
produce a kind of phosphoresence sufficient to fog an

extremely sensitive plate. By focussing with one lens
and exposing with another this very possible danger
would be escaped. But to return to Nature and artistic
selection. The power which strong sunlight has of blotting
out detail and softening and blending relative parts should
be looked for and studied with a view to reproduction in
the camera and negative. This power is sometimes
very curiously exercised for instance, cast shadows

;
which in half-light are strongly marked are sometimes

in very brilliantly lighted passages of the middle distance
quite extinguished ;
moreover they are sometimes trace-
able on the focussing screen when they are quite unseen
by the human eye. This should be borne in mind.
Again, partial hazy atmospheric effects, and effects

of vapour, rain and mist, are often most picturesque and
poetically suggestive in a landscape, although few photo-
graphers dare encounter the technical difficulties they
present. Some of the most charming landscape
paintings I can remember represented misty evening
effects, when was low, and ghostly grey veils
the light
floating upwards from and valley assumed strange

river
mystically suggestive images. And some photographers

I have seen followed
closely in their wake and got
quite marvellous examples of what may be accomplished
pictorially by the proper choice and management of a
lens, the time of exposure, the method of development

and certain dexterous schemes for regulating and con-
trolling development and printing. P. G. Hammerton,
comparing one of Gustave le Grey's marine photographs

with Holman Hunt's lovely little picture called " Fair-
light Downs Sunlight on the Sea," says, "the blaze of
light upon the sea is given in the photograph with
perfect fidelity but in order to get this and the light on

;
the edges of the clouds all else has been sacrificed ;
the shaded sides of the clouds, in nature of a dazzling
grey, brighter than white paper, are positively black in

the photograph, and the pale splendour of the sunlit sea,
except where it flashes light, is heavy and impenetrable

darkness. Towards the sides of the photograph the dis-
tinctionbetween sea and sky is wholly lost in one
uniform shade of dark-brown, extending from top to
bottom without any indication of a horizon
The crowning falsity is the sun itself, which is darker
than the surrounding clouds, being simply a grey wafer
on a white ground." Turning from the photographer's
to the painter's work, he speaks of "the sunlight itself,
in its broad, white glare on the water under the sun, and
its gradual scattering into glitter to the right hand and
the left;
in its long lines in the distance, divided by the
shadows of clouds ;
in its restless flashings on the crests
of the little waves far away, it is as true, or truer, than the
photograph ;
but here all comparison ends, because there
is no longer in the photograph anything to be compared

with the picture. Where the photograph is simply
dark-brown, the picture is full of the most delicate
gradations and the sweetest play of tone. Where the
glitter is not, we have still the sunlit beauty of the fair
sea, which is indeed better and more precious even than

the glitter itself, just as the fairness of a beautiful woman
is better than the glitter and flash of her diamonds.
And there is a hot haze in the blending distance

miles away, and there is a sultriness in the accumulated
clouds which shall light up the sea at night with
another and more terrible splendour. All these other
facts Hunt could get into his picture because painting '
is a great intellectual art an art of compensation and

;
compromise and contrast, an art capable of moderation

and subject to mastery.' And all these other facts
Gustave le Grey could not get into his photograph,
because photography is not a fine art, but an art science,
narrow in its range, emphatic in assertion, telling one
truth for ten falsehoods, but telling always distinctly the

one truth that it would be able to perceive."
The fallacy of this will be easily seen. Hammerton

takes, in the first place, the production of a perfect
master in art, and compares it as an artistic production with
the work of one who would never have asserted that he
was the equal of Holman Hunt. He puts a comparatively
new producing process, full of difficulties and drawbacks,
and one passing through infantine stages of experi-
still
ment and discovery, in contrast with a very old one,

which has been the outgrowth of centuries of progressive
practice. He forgets that productions of the very art
which he glorifies so proudly, and which Holman Hunt
practised, could be produced vastly inferior to Gustave le
Grey's photograph. Look at the great difference there is

between photographs of light, air and perspective pro-
duced now, and those produced in 1872, and then tell me
if that alone is not sufficient to demonstrate the lofty
possibilities of their producer's art-science, when it is
cultivated as "an art of compensation and compromise

and contrast, an art capable of moderation, and subject
to mastery." This will come when photography is
practised as a fine art, not as a mere amusement or as
an uninteresting mechanical when in the
operation ;
superior works of great artists, photographers find in-

spiration, not despair.
But let us go back to the defects complained of in
Le Grey's picture as compared with Hunt's. I think
you may see that they chiefly resolve themselves into a
want of aerial perspective, or, in other words, a want of
light and air. A well-known artist (Mr. A. Liebert),
" One of the greatest
referring to this subject, says :
difficulties of the landscape photographer is the pro-

duction of skies ;
instead of uniform whiteness producing
a monotony which deprives the landscape of its aerial
or natural perspective when all the delicate tones
;
produced by distance and the reflection of the clouds

disappear, and the image thus loses a great part of its
artistic value."
In a cheap and not particularly comprehensive little

work on aerial perspective, written by a professor of per-
spective, Wyke "The great object of

Bayliss, he says,
aerial perspective is to enable the painter to give his work
that effect of light and shade and colour, which in nature
is accomplished by the various objects of which the scene
to be represented is composed." In securing any or

all of these, aerial perspective may certainly be useful.
More or less air between your camera and too prominent
objects, will very often make wonderful alterations in
the general pictorial effect. Something is aggres- that
sive and impudently bold, distracting the eye from where
you desire it to be attracted, may in this way be made
quiet and inoffensive. The full rich variety of tones and
forms which have so much to do with beauty may be in
likeway secured. Selecting one kind of aerial effect in
preference to another, may give due dominance to the
heroic part of your composition, and by mere contrast
render objects that were in dangerous rivalry sub-
ordinate.
The amount of space which should be between the

landscape painter and the base line of his proposed fore-
ground is generally estimated at fourteen feet, to secure
a transcript having forty-five degrees, and bring within
the top and bottom of it any object not of greater height
than sixteen feet, whatever the picture's size may be.
But photographing, this law will be affected by the

in
lens used and the character and kind of foreground

desired. Photographs may however be cut, and any-
thing undesirable in immediate foregrounds may there-
fore be very easily removed by reducing the size or shape
of the photograph.
Another consideration connected with aerial effect
to be observed by the student in selecting time, place

and scene, is the radiation of light at different hours and
conditions from various surfaces. These sometimes
generate very picturesque aerial effects of which you
may often successfully avail yourself.
J. B. Pyne, writing on our present subject, says that

an painting of a tree without having the
artist finishing his
before him " not so much

original might easily spoil it,
for want of knowledge and power over the local character
of the object itself as from a want of those modifications
of local character which result from the presence of a
strong light and its phenomena, radiation and
different
reflection, and the distinction of those parts under partial,

and those under perfect obscuration." A tree, for
instance, seen in sunlight, although the foliage of both

sides be equal in density will not seem so. On the
lighted side the small twigs will be invisible and the
next larger branches will be almost so ; indeed, on this
side all its forms will appear somewhat diffused and
hazy. But on the darker side every branch, twig and
reveal itself with beautiful precision against the
leaf, will
the sky. " But
bring this shadowed part of the tree by
change of position against a brilliant sunlit cloud, or let

the sun be seen shining through it, and the dazzling
radiations will make it as uncertain in its outlines, and
blot out its details of stem, twig and branch." Such

radiations are sometimes modified by aerial perspective.
Some landscape etchings by Rubens suggest that he
must have particularly admired such aerial effects.
Always then remember, as R. A. Leslie said in the
"
early days of photography, that Rocks, trees, moun-
tains, plains, and water are the features of landscape,
but its expressions are from above and it is scarcely
;
metaphorical to say nature smiles, or weeps, and is

tranquil, sad, or disturbed with rage, as the atmosphere
affects her." " And there as Leslie also
yet are," says,
many landscape painters (as there are many more photo-
graphers) who seem "as if
they had never raised their
eyes above the horizon and among the proofs of the
;
indifference of those who interest themselves in art to

the beauty that canopies the earth may be noticed that,
although the composition and light and shade of clouds

are as much within the reach of the photographic art as
any of the other great things of nature, they are her only
beauties it has hitherto entirely neglected. I have seen
but two calotypes of skies, and these, taken by my friend

Mr. Thurston Thompson, prove that it is from no want
of power in the process that skies are not as common in
our photographic exhibitions as any other subjects." If

this was true when Leslie wrote it how much more true
is it now when sky effects of the grandest character are
successfully photographed ?
The greatest landscape painters have been the most

earnest students of light, atmospherical and sky effects.
Turner's transcendent power of expressing aerial
phenomena more than atoned for eccentricities that
would have ruined a lesser man, and Constable spent
In a
entire summers in painting skies from nature.
letter to a friend, dated October, 1821, he says: "I
have done a good deal of skying, for I am determined to
conquer all difficulties, and that amongst the
rest. That
landscape painter who does not make his sky a very
material part of his composition neglects to avail himself
of one of its greatest aids. ... It will be difficult
to name a class in landscape in which the sky is not the

key-note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of
sentiment." That which is true of Turner and Constable
is true of all real art students. In the works of every
truly great landscape artist we find the effects of sky,
clouds, atmosphere, mist and vapour playing prominent

parts.
Again quoting Ruskin (what higher art authority can

one quote?), " We destroy both space and size either by
the vacancy which affords us no measure of space, or by
the distinctness which gives us a false one."
All these brief extracts from the works of practical
eminent authorities will serve to show how important is
the study of air and light to the landscape artist, whether
painter or photographer. On hot sunny days the air is

perceptibly in motion, and all objects seen through it
have their outlines more or less completely blurred and

indistinct where light is strong, although they are clear
and well-defined where shadows fall. This phenomenon
is fullof beauty in nature. Turner often painted it, and
engravings from his works tell us that the appearance it
gives can be preserved in monochrome. I have known
hundreds of photographers who, on one of these hot

days, would only photograph a landscape in its shadowy
passages, because in the sun-lighted passages objects
wouldn't come out as they wanted them, clear, sharp
and distinct. The confounded lens would insist upon
fidelity to nature, and this bothered them. They knew
all about clearness, sharpness and distinctness ;

they
knew nothing about nature's most admirable, poetical
and picturesque effects of light and atmosphere.
One of the great charms of sunlight in this slightly
vaporous condition is a blotting out, or subordinating of

those too prominent yet pretty details which in
photographs so often attract the eye from things of far
greater importance. The dominant value of our best art
exhibitions rests in the fact that, as a rule, they do not
only show us what we may attempt and what we should

avoid, but above all what we may achieve. So with all
the fine arts, example is better than precept, and thus

" in the sister "
art, poetry (says a modern painter),
" the
perusal of the immortal writings of the mighty
dead has kindled in many a soul a flame which had else
been unlit," so that a just appreciation of principles
which have governed the works of great masters is
extended " the facilities which are now afforded all
by
classes for seeing and studying them." The office of the
most earnest instructor is simply that of advocating what

they practised.
"
Nature's sweet care to all her children just,
With richer treasures and an ampler state
Endows at large whatever happy man
Will deign to use them."
Akenside.
CHAPTER VII.
ON WATER AS AN ELEMENT OF PICTORIAL

EFFECT.
K great Italian artist, Leonardo da Vinci, when

advocating the habit of studying nature at all
times, said that a painter should never be without his
tablets on which to jot down suggestive, useful facts.
The advice he gave painters, photographers may take
with the same certainty of benefitting by it. More
particularly is this a valuable and desirable practice
when water is to be represented, for its expressions
and conditions change with such subtle degrees and
varieties of effect, that its faithful representation is at
all times secured with great difficulty, whether we use
pigments and canvas, or camera and chemicals.
But the opportunities it affords are in like way
numerous. We have the bright, more
or less rapidly
flowing surfaces, its varying degrees of transparency

and depth, the different reflections of earth and air,
and hundreds of accidental circumstances, such as a
ferry boat, a stately swan, cattle drinking, geese
swimming, beds of rushes, water-lilies and weeds, a
boat, boys bathing, the encircling ripples of a fly-
catching fish, happy effects due to a movement of the
camera to the right or left, backwards or forwards,

upwards or downwards, the branches of fallen half-
submerged trees, a fisherman in a punt or on the bank,

the darkening of a reflected hillside, or a passing cloud,
or even a stone thrown in, etc., all may be made
Q4 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
Good examples of the introduction of cattle,

helpful.
boats and be found in the two illustrations
figures will
from engravings after well known painters, on this and
opposite pages.
The most common faults in photographs of water
are: A want of transparency, the utter loss of all but

a mere blank outline in the too strongly-lighted sur-
faces. Patches of meaningless white here and there,

near and far, being the result, giving a spotty, eye-
confusing effect altogether destructive of truth and
pictorial composition. A want of tenderness, trans-

parency, delicacy and flatness shown where the darker
reflections prevail. Sometimes an entire river goes
winding its the landscape without a ripple
way through
or a single reflection, as if it were a piece of white
paper stuck down on the photograph. In this case it

was probably taken in broad, bright, open sunlight,
lamentably over-exposed and developed by some human

machine as unobserving, unsympathetic and un-
imaginative as the camera itself.
WATER. 95
A
grey, quiet day seems the best time for lake and
river scenery, and in many instances such an atmos-
pheric condition will lend itself harmoniously to the
general character. But in all cases the artist should

let the characteristic effect of the actual scene decide its
treatment; in other words, he should not shirk a
difficulty if
by so doing he sacrifices sentiment and
feeling.
Quiet pastoral valley scenery amidst low-lying

hills, fields and meadows having an idly meandering
river for its dominant feature can be helped by securing

everything that is associated with ideas of repose and
tranquility. The lights and shades should blend

tranquilly nothing should be staringly prominent or
;
loud, nothing too energetically active. If you have a
fisherman with companions let none be talking or let

him be lonely and restful, placidly watching his float,
not even throwing a fly. If you choose any other figure,
let it be one with a book under a tree, and if you have
two figures let them be palpably lazy, lingering lovers,

g6 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
if unwilling that even a passing zephyr

whispering as
should catch their ardent words. Allow no noisy,
romping children to appear in such a scene, no
passenger be the acl of shouting for a ferry boat, no

in
sportsman discharging his gun. All these features may

be desirable in other scenes, but here they would be out
of keeping, would destroy a special and desirable senti-
ment. Anything that will indicate that the spot depicted
is an unfrequented one will aid. Let the distant
hills melt tenderly into air; let the flow of the water
suggest murmurings, such as hot, dry, languor

its gentlest
begettingweather brings. Keep the line of the horizon

low, and so on and so on. To enforce this view I may
add that just such an effe(5t as would harmonize with
such a river scene, Ruskin describes in his remarks
upon a drawing of Ulleswater, made probably in 1808,
by Turner.
The great critic says: "The lake is quite calm;
the western hills in grey shadow, the eastern massed in
soft light. Helvellyn rises like a mist between them,
all being mirrored in calm water. Some cows are
standing in the shallow water in front a boat floats ;
motionless about a hundred yards from the shore. . . .
This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening."

The painter afterwards made a more finished painting
from this very study, but its feeling and expression were
not disturbed. We
have in it, as in the original sketch,
as Ruskin says, "the same hills, the same shadow, the
same boat and the same cows. They have stood in his
mind as they stood on the same spot, for twenty
years." Just that strong impression which in nature
they upon the painter's imagination, they still leave
left
upon the minds and hearts of those who look at them

in his picture.
In this we see how Turner preserved his observations

WATER. 97
for future use, as Da

Vinci said a painter should. The
quiet cattle chewing their meditative cud, with their not
less placid reflections, the tranquil, soft grey shadows
sleeping on the hill-sides, the lazily rising mist and

the boat at rest, all these are what the artist calls
accidents or accessories, and in all of them we recognise
a strengthening of the one leading idea, strongly

emphasizing the main characteristic of the painting.
Everything therein is powerfully suggestive of softness,
gentleness, quietude and solitude. We know how in
other scenes this true poet-painter adopted other ideas.

In one we find all the accidents and accessories speak
of active energetic action, of life and its business aspects;
inanother everything is grand and stately and dignified,
and in yet another everything that speaks of solemn
gloom aids the dominating idea. For such a dominating
idea of some kind or another every picture should have,
as otherwise it is like "the play of Hamlet with the
character of the Prince of Denmark omitted by par-
ticular desire." But in adopting this advice be careful to
do so without overstepping the modesty of nature,
without forgetting that the great aim of all art, poetical,
dramatic or pictorial, is to conceal art.
We have lately had some eccentric doings in the
printing frames. But remember that a bad photograph

willnever be made a good picture by merely printing it
upon a uniformly grained surface, or rough drawing
paper, or paper with a ridiculous regular staring pattern
on it, or paper made to look like canvas, or the
substitution for it of some textile fabric. Yet a paper
which is tinted instead of white, rough instead of smooth,
or which carries a graduating stipple of light into every
part of the photograph, is properly used by no means

objectionable, and may often be very advantageously
used, not, however, always.

As for sea, lake, pond, pool, river or stream, whether

they chatter with musical baby voices in the brook, or run
in silent rivulets lost in the grass to which they give a
fresher green ooze from great reservoir beds of mountain

;
moss or trickle down into the plains to become famous

rivers; the treatment of such subjects should vary in
the artist's work as strikingly as they do in nature. In
all their forms, as in all their phases and diversified
expressions, they delight the poet and the artist's eye and
speak to them each in his own language. The unobser-
vant, unimaginative and unpoetical may be deaf to their
utterances, see nothing of any of these picturesque

features: and what they do not see that they will, of
course, never try to represent.

Mr. Thompson, an old photographic friend of mine,
who photographed water with considerable success,
said in one of his papers, "The weakness of photography
in its representation of water is one upon which painters
have not failed to enlarge . . . the sparkle, the
transparency and beauty of living water is seldom
seen. A dull, opaque lifeless blank of white paper
is but too common a substitute for the representation
of water."*
Water rushing impetuously down a rocky course,
leaping the boulders and foaming between them, or
water dashed headlong down in one vast sheet over the
edge of a precipitous cliff would be quite unlike the

quiet lake or river subject, and would consequently
demand different treatment, such as we find it has
received in the works of great painters.
*
Pidures with a foreground of water should
always be taken
as muchagainst the light as possible, as the shadows have then
a depth and intensity which
go far to equalize the illumination,
and the water is not destroyed
by over-exposure before the rest
of the subjed has its on the sensitive
impressed image plate.
WATER. 99
If we follow the course of a rushing stream, foaming

and swirling, dashing and leaping, in and out and round
about, sharply angular edges of rock,
over jagged
throwing up spray, forming here and there cascades, and
Australian Scenery.
From a drawing
by
Arthur James Wall.
Deep in a Fern-tree
Gully, and
High on a Hill Top
looking
towards the Sea,
Viftoria.
here and there

broadening out into
pools which gleam
out at you with a
ghastly glare from

dark interlacing
boughs and thick
foliage, or disappear
in treacherous masses of swampy moss and mud, in
each case we are impressed by special characteristics in

a special way. Your photographs should convey
the same impression. There we want no traces of
human occupation, no sign of cottage or farm, cattle or
cultivation, but everything suggestive of wild freedom

and impetuous action. Masses of loose stones will
suggest elemental warfare or the torrent's angry fury,

and a few torn-away branches swept down with them
may lend force. Obviously the effects to be watched
and waited for under these conditions are those which
lend force to ideas of gloom and terror, stony barrenness,
and a silence unbroken by any voices but those of
mournful wind and roaring water. Such and similar
scenes the landscape painter finds in the wilder parts of
Cumberland, Cornwall, Devonshire, Yorkshire, West-
moreland and Wales, Ireland and the Scottish High-
lands. They are, like
pastoral solitudes, lonely,

quiet, and solitary. 1 !ut
yet how different !

Sharp,
abruptly broken angles have
taken the place of flowing
lines softly melting one into
the other
strong abrupt
;
contrasting lights are seen

instead of softly mingling
Pencil Sketch. , ,
r
Composition of Trees and Water half-tones, and the deep,
sudden shadows of cavernous
hollows and overhanging precipices have taken the place of
less pronounced chiaro oscnro. Who shall say, when these
picturesque effects are secured in photographs that the
art cannot make others think and feel as
poets and
painters make them think and feel, or that they are not
works of art ? That such photographs can be secured
is now too well known a fact to be honestly disputed.
River subjects and nearly always
are abundant
beautiful. Who that has
wandered along the banks of
the Wye cannot recall a
panorama of changeful river
scenery in which there was a constant diversity of
incident, interest and picluresqueness ? And along the
banks of the Thames from London Bridge to the Nore,
or to Richmond and Windsor,
what a wealth of subject
matter awaits the camera,
changing with almost every
yard of progress. How well,
too, the beauty of Thames

scenery has been recognised
by great painters. What
strange and curious stories
are associated with it. What

phases of human labour and
life, how romantic are its Pencil Sketch.
best known traditions and A Composition of Trees and

Water.
history. Nor should Shake-

speare's river, the "soft flowing Avon," be forgotten.
And
then again the sea. What a world of novelty
and freshness has yet to be harvested in our pictorial
records by cameras, on
waves or shore, by artists
with eyes quick to see
what the trained perceptive
powers teach them to look
for, scenes of storm or calm,
might and majesty. Recall
what Stanfield and J. C.
Hook have done in this
direction, and aim high

even if you hit low. There
Pencil Sketch. is one hint which I will
Composition of Wood and
Water. add, because it comes from
practical experience. When
photographing sea waves, so place the camera that the
angle at which the light reaches it from the waves
conveys it in a softened condition, and the reflections
in the shadowy passages are not sacrificed or lost to
sight. The reflections in this state have greater aclinic
power.
In the late P. G. Hammerton's "Painters' Camp in
"
the Highlands you will find some gloriously suggestive
chapters on the pictorial treatment and characteristics of
water, in which he dwells upon rocky streams, upon

storms on the lochs when the black waves flecked with
white yeast leap five feet high and look higher. Of dim
monotonous grey landscapes, of the rain-squalls that
cover the lakes from shore to shore " with a sharp line of
ghastly grey that advances in all its breadth over the

great black cauldron of waters as fast as charging
cavalry;" of ravine torrents of the wild fierce rush of
;
mountain streams on the hill sides ;

and of days when
" the lake lies stilled to sleep, reflecting every isle and
every tree along the shore, its bright surface dimmed
here and there by faint breezes, that remain each in its
place with singular constancy, as if invisible angels

hovered over the waters and breathed upon them." Of
dark unfathomable calms under the great mountain with
such an expression of peace and repose that looking at it
sleeping so calmly in its deep bed you can hardly believe
that " but yesterday this shining liquid plain was
covered with ten thousand crested waves, and countless
squalls struck it all over like
swooping eagles. It seems
as if this solemn calm had been its condition from the
foundation of the world and would be thus for ever and
for ever."
Describing how he stood upon the Bridge of

Cladich he says (and this passage is full of hints for the
" The water is
photographer) :
very wild and very fierce
and very strong, yet not lawless, for it follows certain
forms with wonderful The rocks under it
fidelity.
WATER. 103
dilate the form of its flowing, and the water steadily

obeys. Yet there appear to be little periodical pulsations
and variations from the law caused by subtle minor
laws. Thus I perceive that a certain jet of spray is
thrown up every quarter of a minute or so at a particular

spot as regularly as the action of a steam engine, and at
certain stateable intervals a wave on the shore rises
three inches higher, then subsides to its own level. In
spite of the rapidity of this flowing torrent there are

parts of nearly at rest except their own ceaseless
it
circling in deep holes

at the side. There are great lumps
of thick yellow yeast in these places whirling round and
round. The colouring of the water is full of fine browns
and yellows, good, tawny, rich colouring with creamy
white at one end of the scale and something like fire
opal at the other." It would perhaps be easier to realise
such a scene as Hammerton
here describes, or parts of
it, with the camera than with the painter's tools and
opportunities, but in either case the task would be one
of no little difficulty.
Again, still speaking of Highland landscape, he tells

us of pictures to be got of the deep brown pools of a
stream at rest, " very deep, very smooth and very quiet ;
pale golden at the shallow side where not an inch of

water covers the smooth pebbles, then darkening as the
water deepens through all the shades of gold and brown
to something darker and more terrible than mere
blackness. Out of this, and all around it, rise grey
rocks."
" this
He says of Highland
scenery generally,
country is a wonderfully great and noble school for land-
scape effect ;" of Glen Urchay, its broad salmon streams
and great curving banks of rich green low-land con-
its
trasting,brown, barren hill sides, and of its waterfalls

that they are " as good as those our landscape painters
bring us from Norway." Of the way in which the water

"
shapes out the rocks he says, Every true painter has an
intense perception of some fragment of natural truth that
nobody else seems to care for, but it is really astonishing

that the exquisite beauty of water sculpture should have
been so little felt by the most celebrated men. Turner
only cared for it occasionally, and never enough to paint
it in full and perfect
detail. Of all our living landscape
painters there only one who seems to enjoy the kind of
is
sculpture which such a stream as the Urchay can

accomplish in innumerable years. Mr. Petitt paints it
faithfully."
In his " Painting from Nature" this same thought-
ful and earnest art-student and lover of Nature recom-
mends lowland France as a field and " on the
says,
banks of the river
Yonne, it is possible to work from
Nature as many days in one year (Scotch weather being
so capriciously unfavourable) as you would get in seven
years in the Highlands."* And the French subjects if

not so grand are infinitely prettier, infinitely easier to
deal with, and I should imagine could be worked up into
more popular pictures.
*Sitting hour after hour

and day after day at the easel in open
one thing, however, and exposing a few plates in the camera
air is
is another.Here again the advantage is on the side of photo-
graphy.
105
CHAPTER VIII.
OF SENTIMENT AND FEELING. CONTRASTS AND

VARIETY, SUBORDINATION. DOMINATION
AND HARMONY.
an American magazine called The Forum (what

American magazines are),
excellent things these
Mr. Harrison speaks of the French school of painting
in our day as a degenerate one. It gives us, he says,
" mere coloured
photographs without grace, pathos, awe,
lifeor invention." They are "as ugly, as crude, as
photographic, as unpleasant as canvas and dull paint can
make them. .
Everything is flat, angular, prosaic."
.
Again he says, "Some hold that art means utter dulness

and strict elimination of every source of interest. A
dirty old woman vacantly staring at a heap of stones ;
a pig wallowing in fetid mud; a dusty highroad between

two blank walls a sandbank under a leaden sky such
;
are the chosen spectacles dear to rising genius." There

is undoubtedly, as he says, an idea largely prevalent
amongst modern artists, English as well as French, that

" art needs no
inspiration, no ideals, no guidance, no
thought, no beauty, no self-control that its sole task is
;
to put on canvas whatever is to be seen." And this, he

adds, "is the broad road that leadeth to destruction."
I don't think I could have found a better text than
this on which to base my present chapter. Suppose,
now a photographer, alive to the necessity of artistic
culture, but ignorant of its principles, seeks to learn by
imitation that broad, well-trodden, smooth and easy
road. He is smitten with the works of modern French
painters of the class Mr. Harrison denounces, mainly

because they aspire to nothing beyond the reach of his
unthinking, unimaginative, faithfully reproductive lens.
The highest qualities such painters aspire to are just
those in which a well-exposed, good negative and a care-
fully printed positive can beat them hollow. The first

dirty old woman the photographer meets will stare
vacantly enough for his purpose, and heaps of stones

can be found by every roadside. He photographs her
as the French artists painted her, simply as she is, and
thinks he can thus produce a work of art because he has
seen just such a painting in a picture gallery. And so
true to life But would Wilkie have done this thing ?
!
Can t you imagine what that old woman would have

become in this hands ? With what tender-heartedness
he would have conceived the story of her outcast loneli-
darned and mended
ness, her footsore weariness, the often
rags no longer mendable, the nearly soleless shoes, and

and in her poor, thin, withered, wrinkled face, a world of
pathetic meaning. The dull eyes so mournfully intro-
spective; the poor, thin, bony limbs, so little like flesh;
the hollow cheeks, the toothless gums, and the stale

crust taken from her bundle for a meal in the
gathering
twilight of fast approaching night. And this would be
a picture, perhaps a poem for are
pictures poetical
when artists are poets. But what would all this mean ?
Feeling and imagination, the seeking for a fit and appro-

priate model, the gathering together of all these story-
telling incidents for the one purpose, that of making not
merely a painting or a photograph but a picture.

Therefore, before beginning a subject think about it
and don't hurry the process. Exhaust every idea that

has a bearing upon it ;
seek inspiration in all works akin
to it in spirit and design let
;
your imagination first
SENTIMENT AND FEELING, ETC. 107
depict it ;
let your feelings imbue it with life and warmth
before you place it in front of your camera, or your
camera in front of it. Put sentiment and feeling into it,
that sentiment and feeling may come out of it into the

hearts and minds of the thousands who will see it. He
who takes up his camera as he would a chisel or a spade
may be an excellent operator, and by some lucky accident

may occasionally produce a prize-winning picture pro- ;
bably because the model or scenery he photographed

could not possibly make anything but a picture. Yet he
is no artist. This, his less fortunate productions or the
bulk of them will suffice to demonstrate.
A dear, dead friend of mine, a photographer and
painter,whose works and memory are still treasured
amongst us, O. G. Rejlander, would think about and talk
and study for a subject months before he produced it
photographically. His photographs, as photographs, are
generally more or less defective, but sentiment and
feeling abound in them, as they did in himself. His love
for a pretty child or a beautiful woman inspired him with
feelings akin tothem poetry and music were in them

the poetry that made him gentle and tender to them, and
the music of his lines and tones, if but that of the eye,
was as subtle in its influences, as varied, as sweet, and
stole as readily into the heart as if it had found admission
by the ear.
Evena graceful line gradually swelling upward into

boldness and curving meltingly down into its lower and
more tender gradations, or a like combinatiun of grad-
uated tints and tones, is fairly representative of
musical notes cunningly combined in a delightful com-
position. And in like way a combination of abrupt
angles may represent louder, sharply contrasting and
more wildly stirring effects akin to other kinds of music.
The feeling in production is the same. The sentiment
of form is associated in effect with that of sound. The

portrait of a graceful
and beautiful woman, the unstudied
the dignity of some venerable
simplicity of a pretty child,
old man, the strength and manliness of the warrior, the
stateliness of royalty, and the solemn dominance of the
ecclesiastic, each subject has its own appropriate senti-
ment and feeling. As the musician expresses them by
his notes so the artist does on his canvas, in his marble,
or with his camera. The music may be that of the eye
or ear, its power the same, and, practically the results

is
are the same. Rejlander used to say that music inspired

some of his best thoughts, and I remember how on one
occasion as wife played a sweet piece of music full
my
of pathetic power, he followed the rise and fall of the
notes by a line that rose and fell in the same low, gliding
way, and in the end shouted with gleeful triumph to see

how forcibly the sentiment and feeling of ear- music
realised that of the eye-music. I believe he afterwards
reproduced those lines in the pose of a charming young

"
girl's figure and the arrangement of her drapery" (as
artists say), and that I made and published a drawing
from it in one of the art magazines.
Landscapes, treated artistically, call for the same

qualities. The rugged and rocky, the wild and woody,
the bright and cheerful, the gloomy and solemn, the
stern and the pensive, all express sentiments and produce
feelings in harmonious relationship with musical expres-
sion. Lines, tones, aerial and light effects, etc., etc.,
may all be regarded as means to this end, because all
have their associated ideas, sentiments and sympathies.
Tones may also be used as harmonizing elements where
they are grouped together without reference to suggestive
meanings, as notes of music are sweet without words.
The loud, stirring strains of a warlike march, and the
soft languishing notes of a love
song, the solemnity of
SENTIMENT AND FEELING, ETC. IOQ
the anthem and the plaintiveness of a mournful ballad,

would be as palpably what they are if they were never
sung or never marched to. So in a picture, tones are
composed to represent certain things, but also to convey
pleasing combinations of pictorial elements that in one

way or another delight the eye only. Artists thus find
in them wonderful additions to their powers.
Years ago I often used to hear photographers talk
about exposing for this or that kind of negative
because they liked their effects. But they were seldom
artistic.They could not as a rule be made to under-
stand that they should really expose for natural effects
only that in one picture masses of strong darks got by

;
short exposure and long development would be fatal to

the sentiment of strongly-diffused light and delicately
tender sun shadows. No matter what the time of day,
month or season chanced to be, their negatives were
always bright and strong, brilliant and forcibly defined.
The test was always the negative's perfectly artificial

density in the high lights and the as perfectly transparent
shadows. They never looked for the subtle gradations
of tones nor remembered how valuable ideas associated
with them were for expressing sentiment and feeling.
They never imagined that what was true and good in
one case could in another be bad and false ;

that when
photographs taken under a wide range of varying natural
conditions were all alike in the tones of their light and
shade, they were necessarily all alike in their falsity to
both art and nature, because wanting as nature never is

in sentiment and feeling. The association of ideas is to
them, perhaps for want of ideas, something of no
I have heard in the lonely silence of
practical value.
the wild Australian bush the screaming cry of a night
bird or some other animal, perhaps a dingo, that made
the blood run cold. And yet it only meant perhaps
HO ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
hunger or thirst, or a signal cry. I knew this ; but the
sound, from its more terrible associations, was none the

less terrible. These things show us how perfectly real
the power of associated ideas is, and what nonsense it is
" A
to ignore their existence. genuine metaphor," says
one of my dear old Shakespearean friends Joseph
Skipsey, the widely-admired Newcastle poet "is always
the outcome of something more than mere fancy, and
may have the deepest significance." In this way a moan,

which is the sign of sorrow, affects the hearer with
sorrow ;
while a groan, or a series of groans, which
arising from anguish strongly affects and oppresses the

hearer, may do so to such an extent as to throw him into
a state of anguish, whether the sound proceeds from a
man who is choking in the gasp of death, or from an old
oak straining under the oppressive grasp of the hurri-
cane. Again, a sweet tone puts us into a sweet disposi-
tion, a state of things identical with that from which it
proceeds, whether from the lips of a beautiful woman or

from the mouth of a sweetly-tuned musical instrument.
For "sounds as well as colours and forms have their mani
fold significations." And the very lines and tones, lights
and shadows of an artistically-composed picture move us
in like ways through like causes. Works of art have
uses beyond the representing of forms and surfaces to
the eye. It is their purpose to convey thoughts, to
awaken ideas, and by increase of wisdom to make nature
at once more understandable, more divinely wonderful,
and more tenderly loveable in the minds and hearts of
all mankind.
There another point of view from which it is

is
desirable we should
consider the present subject, one of
no small importance. It concerns what the artist calls
subordination and domination of parts with reference to
the generaleffect. In the act of observing any natural
SENTIMENT AND FEELING, ETC. Ill
scene or object, whether it be landscape or figure subject,

the mind is simply and absolutely occupied at any given
instant of time by a definite single conception, the effect
not of separately observed parts, but of parts seen in
unity, combined as a whole. DiredUy the eye ceases to

take in the entire view and to be focussed upon any
particular part of it, large or small, instantly the effects

of the parts have gone. For it is impossible to see
objects collectively and separately at the same instant
of time, although owing to the rapidity with which the
observing power of the mind is successively influenced,
this fact is not generally recognised.
From it partly we derive the principle of making

all the elements of a picture subordinate to some general
effect, which is in turn subservient to the artist's domin-

ant idea, that which every part helps or should help to
express. To unite these elements we seek what is

called Harmony, a quality for which contrast and variety
are essential. The word harmony is a word of Greek
derivation, and implies consistency in combination, that

which Ruskin a source of power and grandeur,
calls
uniting sentiment or feeling with propriety and simpli-

city. Priestly spoke of the same idea in poetry when he
wrote " No can be said to be unex-
critically, digression
ceptional that doth not connect equally well at both ends
with the piece to which it is introduced." Hogarth, too,
" Fitness of
says of painting, parts to the design for
which every individual thing is formed, either by art or
nature, is first to be considered." And Henry Howard,

one of his Academy said " To
R.A., in lectures, :
produce an agreeable effect every part must bear a

varied and proportionate relation to all the rest." To
blend variety and contrast so as to produce unity of
effect, sentiment and feeling, is then the end which all
the previous chapters of this series have so far advocated.

Sameness and monotony would soon result from the
absence of variety and contrast. Contrasting senti-

ments, thoughts and images would he powerless, un-
governed by some dominant quality. A very suggestive
illustration of contrasting elements in combination,
which will help to make my meaning more clear, is
"
found in the following lines, from Thompson's "Season :
" The cottage hind

Hangs o'er the enlivening blaze, and, fateful, there
Recounts his simple frolics. Much he talks,
And much he laughs, nor recks the storm that blows
Without, and rattles on his humble roof."
Here depicted with the greatest simplicity we have cold

and darkness contrasting the warmth and light the ;
fierce, angry storm without, and quiet peace and safe
shelter within ;
the moaning, melancholy, shivering
winter wind, and merry laughter; the suggested thought
of outcasts cowering in the blast, and the jocund stories
of the cheerful fireside group. Each contrast is perfectly
harmonized by the dominant idea. The previous lines
of this poem are also very suggestive.
In music, as in poetry and painting, the same
principle developed, contrasting notes forming parts
is
of harmonious combinations.
"
Painting," wrote Simonides, "is but mute poesy ;
and poetry, speaking painting," and form and colour in

painting, he might well have added, are but music and
" The brook at
poetry combined. my feet," said N. P.
" from its birth in
Willis, the hills till it rested in the
meadow's lap, tripped down like a mountain maid with
a song unsullied by one harsh note." Such a brook in
a picture should be as
suggestive.
In architecturethe same principles are found.
What would the effect of a building be if deprived of its
contrasting lines and forms or of their variety ? Take a

SENTIMENT AND FEELING, ETC. 113
flat-faced, monotonous brick house of the worst modern

type, a thing all angles of one kind, with square holes
each exactly like the other set in straight rows for
windows, a door always in one or the other of two

places. Is this a thing of beauty ? And if not, why
not ? Is it not because it lacks contrast and variety ?
These are governing effects whatever be

principles
the method or manner of their production. Rules vary,
and there is no exact way in which they should be
adopted and carried out. It is not the way of doing this

or that but the result which makes the landscape picture
artistic or inartistic, and the success is obtained rather
by the adoption of principles than by slavishly obeying

laws and regulations laid down by other practitioners for
their individual guidance. We may see in two pictures
by two artists a certain aspect of nature painted under
precisely the same conditions, and each a triumph. But
assuredly they will differ in matters of detail, each will
leave upon his work the stamp of his own individuality.
In just the same way two men may copy in writing a
piece of poetry, but their handwritings will not therefore

be exactly alike. Photographs too often imitate both
words and handwriting, expressing no individuality to
distinguish one man'swork from another's.
CHAPTER IX.
PICTORIAL COMPOSITION.
IE word composition, pictorially applied, embraces

almost everything that belongs to artistic design.
It is a word of wide application with many elements,
and has its foundations on principles as soundly scientific
as those which belong to the construction of a building,

a piece of music, a play or a poem. It is, however, a
word which is frequently wrongly understood. It does
not imply, as some too hasty reasoners often conclude it

does, the separating and recombining of fragments not
naturally associated. This was one of the earliest
mistakes made by photographers. And hence we had

all kinds of incongruities, a confusion of conflicting
factsand ideas, a frittering away of good effects, and
a medley of selected things that harmonized neither
with themselves nor with any one dominant artistic
purpose.
Then again, there are others who imagine it to be a
word of technical meaning and mechanical application, a
very simple affair indeed. With them to put a large jug
between two little some cottage dame would
ones, as
intuitively arrange them on her chimney shelf, is to

compose. With others composition is a scattering of
numerous accessories around some central object,
merely because they are in themselves pretty, and, it

may be, interesting, whereas they only distract the
observer's attention and confuse his sight. They do
not compose, they decompose a picture.
Il6 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
How often, looking at some combinations of trees,

rivers and mountains, or some figures accidentally
or sculptor will exclaim, "how
grouped, the painter
gloriouslythey compose!" This is because he under-
stands what composition is. It is not, again, as some
purely fanciful, the result of neither reasoning

suppose,
nor observation, for it comes only from both. Neither
dexterous manipulations, nor skilful focussing, nor
careful development will secure composition in the
works of one ignorant of artistic principles, although
each will aid composition. The shifting of a camera
stand a few yards to the right or left, backward or
forward; the raising of it or depressing it; the presence
of a few apparently most unimportant accessories intro-
duced by sheer accident all these things may make
or mar the composition according as you do or do not
recognise their influences. It all rests with yourself.
The eye sees no more than brings with it the power

it
to see. That little cat at court who recognised neither

the signs of power, grandeur, nor dignity, but had a
quick eye for

"The little mouse under the chair,"
was as blind to splendour as a photographer inartistically

trained is to the finest specimen of composition in
landscape or figures. He too sees only the little mouse

he wants to catch. The painter might as logically
expecT: to do without composition by inventing some
medium of rare value for his pigments, or some par-
ticularlygood colours, as the photographer may by
chemical and optical studies unaided
by artistic study.
The best advice the best artist can
give the beginner in
art is to examine the works of the best masters critically
and then go to nature and look for what
they saw.
Look and think. Think and look. "Practice," said
Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is justly called purblind, for
PICTORIAL COMPOSITION. 117
practice that is tolerable in its way is not totally blind,

an imperceptible theory which grows out of, and
accompanies, and directs it, is never wanting to a
sedulous practice; but this goes a little way with the
painter himself, and is utterly inexplicable to others. To

become a great proficient, an artist ought to see clearly
enough to enable him to point out to others the principles
m i
Specimen of Pictorial C> niposition. From an Kngraving.
on which he works, otherwise he will be conventional,

and what is worse, he will be uncertain." Composition
is no mere adventitious thing adopted to bestow
factitious graces and artificial charms, it is a part and
parcel of imitative art, essential to successful and

truthful representation. The phenomena of nature
defies re-creation ;
we can at the best but feebly imitate,
and to aid our efforts every power available is an

Il8 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
absolute necessity. He who has such powers in the
greatest abundance is the greatest artist.
The works of many eminent old masters in art are

rather illustrations of what we should avoid in composi-
tion than what we should apply they are so fantastical
;
and eccentric. A green landscape was, for instance, an

abomination in the eyes of certain landscape painters in
the last century. With them it was always autumn,
and a picture without a brown tree in it was regarded as
a glaring example of very bad composition. Now some
of the most delightfully brilliant and cheerful composi-
tions on the walls of our picture exhibitions are composed
in the richest variety of fresh, spring-like sunny greens.
The leading principle in composition is unity unity of
intention or purpose, unity of sentiment or feeling.
Every outline, whether real or indicated by the boundary

of vision, every point of light or dark, all the inter-
mediate tones, and every object the picture embraces,
may concentrate the power and purpose of the artist
into a focus, or weaken and destroy it. All these things
are expressive, each says something to the mind of the
spectator, and your business to make them blend as

it is
alto, bass, tenor and soprano blend in the harmonious
composition of the musician, with, of course, due refer-

ence to the dominant key. If all such things are not
associated with them in the view before your camera,
alter its position so that in one way or another they do
not appear on your focussing screen. In this way you
realise a dominant idea, to which
everything in the
picture is subordinated. A different scale of tones,,
arrangement of shades, masses, points, etc.,
lines, lights,
for a different scene, but for this nothing that does not
belong to its
pervading sentiment, nothing that will not
compose or harmonize therewith and give pictorial
effect.
PICTORIAL COMPOSITION. HO,
Those rules of art which accepted authorities have

laid down guidance are of great value to
for practical
the student. are very suggestive, they simplify

They
practice and economise time and labour. But followed
blindly, with a kind of superstitious faith in their im-
portance, they mislead and are mischievous. The artist-

photographer should always remember that he is working
under conditions and with methods unknown to those who
Specimen of Piftorial Composition. From an Engraving.
founded such rules. His practice, although in aim it is
one with the picture painter's, is yet so distinctly his

own that it becomes a positive necessity to modify and
adapt for his use, rules which were originally formulated

for disciples of a sister art.
It therefore, doubly necessary for the camera

is,
understand not only those rules which should

artist to
govern his practice, but also the principles from which

Otherwise he will be too apt to be slovenly

they spring.
careless, to regard these things as matters
and of slight
of taste, instead of
importance, merely as questions
demonstration.
scientific It is his business to have a
thorough conception of their actual and

relative im-
portance, their capacities, and their various applications.
He should be able to explain how they act, and re-act

one upon another, how they may be blended and how
separated, and even when it is true wisdom to ignore
them altogether. They are not intended to do away

with the necessity of thinking, but to beget thought.
By way of illustrating what I mean, let us turn to
one of the best known and most famous pictures in the

" Last
world, Leonardo da Vinci's Supper." In this
any observer with a knowledge of certain
superficial
which are amongst the oldest, simplest
pictorial rules,
and best known we have, will see how they have been
altogether set aside, and with advantage. If, instead of
beauty, variety, contrast, breadth, and harmonious

Leonardo had sought only ugliness,
relationship of parts,
sameness, monotony, spottiness and conflicting elements
intended to confuse and distract the vision of all
beholders, he could hardly have adopted a more suitable
process of combination. Vet the result is glorious. The
picture has been so often engraved that you are sure to
be familiar with it. If you recall
your mind, you
it to
will know we have in it, first, in the most prominent
position, merely a long straight table, covered with a

white cloth, standing on four conspicuous tressels, all
exactly alike. There is a knot to each end of the cloth,

each the size and shape of the other, and at either end
its decorative border
appears in seven thin straight
upright lines, no more, no less. It (the table) runs
straight from one end of the painting to the other, and
the space left on either side is the same. The ceiling
has square-edged plain beams and joints in abundance,

formally intersecting each other at right angles and
regular distances. Four angular pieces of drapery each
of the same size and shape and equi-distant, hang
straight and without a fold to break the repetition of
their straight-pattern lines made up from the endless
repetition of one simple ornament. At the back of the

room are three angular openings, one large and two
smaller ones, all precisely alike. Little loaves are
arranged in a line along the top of the table, with a straight

row of small drinking cups beyond them, all of one size
and shape. Could you imagine anything more pedanti-
cally formal, more primitively simple ? Can you con-
ceive a composition more wanting in attractiveness or
interest ? It is almost like* a basso relievo. The veriest
tyro in art could point out seeming defects, and show

its
how the simplest and most elementary rules of com-

position had been violated in it by this great and glorious
painter. But suppose this monotony and this want of
interest was Leonardo's conception, and this
part of
apparent primitive simplicity of outlines, forms and

chiaro oscuro were all intentional that the artist deter-
;
mined to concentrate in one focus a marvellously dramatic

story, realising in its fullest intensity the thoughts,
feelings, incidents and characters belonging to it, and
that therefore he thus subordinated every other part of
the picture ; that he ignored these simple elementary
rules and carried out
their principle upward to a grand
development. Look at the picture again and study it

from this point of view. See the Christ, isolated by the
awe and reverence of His worshipping disciples, grandly
simple in pose, God.-like in the calm consciousness of
His approaching agony and shame. He sits with His
full face fronting you, exactly in the centre of the picture
where a well known rule says emphatically the
122 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAl'I I V.
principal figure should never be

and the disciples, divided
into halves, sit six on either side breaking another rule
which has for centuries told us that in every group of
figuressome should have their backs to the spectator.

Yet no more perfect or magnificent example of pictorial
composition was ever conceived. It is a triumph of
Principle. All the rules ever invented could not have
helped Leonardo to anything half as perfect. Breadth

of effect in treatment, and the concealment of subtlety
Specimen of Piaorial Coni{x>sition. From an Engraving.
in design ;
variety of idea ; force of expression ;
contrasts
of pose, action and expression are all here. You never
see those parts of the picture which were intended to be
subordinated by their want of interest and unattractive-
ness. You see only that long straight row of human
figures and faces.
But did Leonardo regard rules scornfully ?
By no
means. Understanding principles he made from them
new rules to suit emergencies. "
Elementary principles,"
as " which have been

Henry Howard, R.A., wrote,
correctly deduced cannot be changed but, happily, the
;
aspects under which nature presents itself to the eye and

sympathies of the painter, are infinitely various, and
leave different impressions on different minds. . . .
The precepts and practice of those great masters, from

whose standard productions our stock of theory is
derived," help us to understand the principles they
approved. If you want to know how' Leonardo esteemed
Specimen of Piftorial Composition. From an Engraving.
rules, there is the book he wrote to tell you, illustrated

" The young
by himself, and published in his lifetime.
student should," as his opening chapters assert, " study

Nature, in order to confirm and fix in his mind the
reason of those precepts, which he has learnt. He must
also bestow some time in viewing the works of various
old masters, to form his eye and judgment, in order that
he may be able to put in practice all he has been taught."
The organ of sight is one of the quickest we have, and
takes in at a single glance an infinite variety of forms ;
notwithstanding which, as I already have affirmed, we

cannot perfectly comprehend more than one at a time.
For example, the reader at one glance over this page
immediately perceives it full of different characters but ;
he cannot at the same moment distinguish each letter,

much less can he comprehend their meaning. He must
consider it word by word and line by line, if he is
desirous of knowing its meaning. In like manner, "if

we wish to ascend to the top of an edifice we must be
content to rise step by step, otherwise we shall never be
able to attain it."
" " the advice
I believe," wrote C. R. Leslie, R.A.,
every master would give to a young pupil, respecting his

conduct and management of light and shadow, would be
what Leonardo da Vinci has actually given, that you
must oppose a dark ground to the light side. If
Leonardo had lived to see the superior splendour and
effectwhich has since been produced by exactly the
contrary conduct, by joining light to light, and shadow
to shadow, though without doubt he would have admired
it, yet, as it
ought not, so, probably, it would not, be the
first rule with which he would have begun his instruc-
tions." Here again we find the principle in antagonism
to the rule. "
Now," says Leslie, in
commenting upon
this, "a very little observation of nature will show
us that in her combinations,
lights with lights and
shades with shades are often united, and as often
opposed."
Sir Joshua Reynolds was a great stickler for the

observance of rules, and sometimes even went so far as
to set up rules in opposition to
pinciples. But in so
doing his success is seldom, if ever, of an encouraging

nature.
Leslie pointed out, in his " Handbook for Young

Painters," another illustration of a rule ignored and a
principle adopted. It was a painting by Watteau in the
possession of Mr. Munro, "in which," as he says, "all

the ordinary rules of contrast are departed from with a
result as charming and as natural as it is novel. Two
pretty little girls, bearing a twin resemblance, seem, from
the difference of their sizes, not to have been twins, and
it was no doubt the object of the painter to show as
distinctly as possible their remarkable likeness to each
other. He therefore placed them side by side, dressed
nearly alike, in attitudes as little varied as possible,

their faces seen directly in front, and with the same light
and shadow. Indeed, all the usual contrasts of compo-
sition, expression,colour and chiaro oscuro are disregarded,
yet the picture has not in any degree that formality that
so often affects to pass itself for simplicity. Here the
simplicity is real, and though Watteau seems not to
have thought of the art or its rules, yet so consummate an

artist was he that this production is not less legitimate
than others of his works, while it is one of the most

original pictures in the world." And he adds, " Watteau
may possibly have been painting these little girls when
members French Academy were excitedly proving
of the
Paul Veronese wrong in throwing a broad shadow over
"
his '
Andromeda,' because the hero of a piece ought,
as a rule, to be always in full light.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, referring in the fourth of his

Academy orations to this famous discussion, points out
that the rule they regarded him as violating was not a
law involving a principle, and said Paul had good reason
for its non-observance.
have selected to illustrate this chapter four
I
engravings after paintings by famous artists, each an

admirable example of composition. Their lines, the
grouping, the lights and darks, and the general breadth

are unmistakeably masterful. Dissect them and you
will find that everything has its relative yet distinct
value in their particular compositions. The lines which
run into the space represented, or up, or at various
angles, all aid the composition. So do the darks in their
relative degrees of depth, size and position. We have

in them contrasts of various kinds, and combinations of
blending elements, all in like way subordinated to the

main purpose. The degrees of interest are also parts of
a whole, not conflicting or detracting one from the other.
1
might, of course, point out the details special to
each, but in thus doing I should only be repeating the
same things, and so I have thought it best to let them
do their work in their own ways. They are all from
paintings by artists of the greatest eminence, each a
known master in the art of pictorial composition.
I2 7
CHAPTER X.
THE COMPOSITION OF OUTLINES, AND THK

POINTS OF VIEW
now let us devote a few additional paragraphs

HND to the subject of lines as elements of composition.
We have already and more than once incidentally
touched upon them from this view-point.
The artist-painter's outlines are veritable lines, but

in his finished paintings they cease to appear as actual
lines and become the boundaries of vision. There are,
as one need hardly say, no outlines in nature, and there
are none in a photograph. But the fact that the sight
travels to and fro, up and down, out of and into a
picture, along these boundaries of vision, makes them
lines in effect, although they are not so in reality. They
may be formed in many ways by a band of light, such
;
as a line of the curves of a river, a wall, hedge-

hills,
rows, posts and rails, a flock of sheep, or a piece of pale

drapery, or an outstretched limb, or trunks and boughs
of trees, or tables, chairs, doors, windows, or many other
things far too many for enumeration. In this way lines
abound in pictures of every kind curved flowing lines,
abrupt angular lines, parallel lines, prominent staring

loud lines, and quiet lines that modestly retire and are
not seen until they are looked for. Artistically used they
are all valuable aids to pictorial composition, or they are
dangerous enemies to it, according as you govern or are

governed by them. You have great power over all such
things, if you only know how to use it. But they have
128 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOf. R.U'H V.
great power too. By repetition, by prominence, by-

dominant tones, and in various other ways they may
spoilyour best effects utterly. Altering their perspective
by concealment of parts, or throwing this or that out of
strong light into deep shadow, may entirely change their

aspect. By sheer dominance of repetition or by their
inextricable confusion and equality of prominence they
will oftenweary and perplex the eye. They can keep it
from recognising the main idea or elements of superior
importance, acting just as harsh, out-of-tune jangling
will when it drowns the most carefully arranged notes of
a subtle musical composition, or as a note out of tune

most finished harmony. In like way the
will spoil the
lines of a buildingmay, through want of composition,

make that ugly which pictorial composition would have
made beautiful. The principle is the same throughout
art in all its varied elements and applications. The uses
of lines are as fairly within the province of the art-
photographer's studies as within those of the sculptor,

painter or decorator. In like way they are valuable.
They help you to give your ideas force, they can be

made to callup feelings and sentiments in harmony with
the general idea and purpose of your production. The
mighty energy and sublime grandeur of Michael Angelo's
figures and groups are splendid illustrations of the value
lineshave in works of art. " The Sistine Chapel," says
H. Howard, R.A., " is an inexhaustible mine of study
for the artist in this
respect. His " Temptation of
Adam and Eve" is (combined with "The Expulsion
from Eden a vigorous and masterly style of compo-
") in
sition, which had never been seen before his time. In
this the concatenation of lines formed by the arms of the
different figures is beautiful." The same able artist and
lecturer on art describes Raffaelle's compositions as
" often so
artless in appearance that
they look as if he
OUTLINES AND POINTS OF VIEW. 1
2Q
had found them in nature, and sketched them on ihe
spot. . . .His 'Deluge' is finely conceived and

treated, the main line of figures crosses the canvas in a
kind of chain." Speaking of that well-known work by
" The
Rubens, in Antwerp Cathedral, Taking Down
from the Cross" (always admired as a piece of scientific
" The lines flow
composition), he says :
diagonally
through the picture from top to bottom, that of the
principal figure being the longest, which is still farther
extended by the linen in which it is wrapped, carried out
by the half figure at top, and combined with the kneeling

Magdalene below. This main serpentine line, which
Michael Angelo's axiom, is supported on one
illustrates
side by the large masses of St. John and the figure
descending the ladder on the other side, smaller

;
portions of figures, finely varied, opposite the central

stream of form, presenting altogether a beautiful example
of concatenation, full of intricacy but simple, and One."
You could away a line from this composition
not take
without weakening it. The eye goes perforce to the
central figure of Christ, as the artist intended it should,
every line from every quarter has here its focus, the eye
cannot escape it. Lines that would have taken your
attention from the central figure are broken with light
and shade, or lost in gloom, while all the more important
lines have full prominence given to them, but each in its
degree. Nearly every great work of art, whether figure

or landscape, will supply forcible illustrations of the
importance of lines as elements of pictorial composition.

I have seen a landscape converted from a dull, flat, un-
interesting map into a deeply interesting picture by

the introduction of a few figures, with one outstretched
arm and pointing finger leading the eye to that part
which was strongly suggestive of thoughts that appealed
most forcibly to the feelings. It was the only way in
which that part of the painter's subject could be made

prominent, and it served
its purpose fully. One light
line,the arm running to a less prominent point, with a
mass of dark to emphasise it, sufficed to make the
striking difference that exists
between a map and a
picture.
One of the best and most practical of all our art
student teachers, one I have already quoted several
Hammerton, has told us that Turner's

times, the late P. G.
early was commenced in an architect's office,

career
where the full value of lines must have been strongly
impressed upon him. For in no landscape painter's
work will you find more instructive examples of powerful
linear composition.
The same author " There is an almost

says :
universal illusion that landscape painting is compara-

tively easy, an illusion which is based upon the truth
that accurate drawing not essential to a landscape
is
painter. There are, however, other qualities than mere

accuracy in good landscape painting, and other diffi-
culties in the representation of nature than a simple
definition of its forms. The greatest difficulty in this
part of art may be expressed in a single word com-
plexity. The complexity of natural
landscape is such
that it cannot be understood, and therefore cannot be
interpreted, without powers both of analysis and of
synthesis, which a young student is not likely to have
acquired. ... In a climate so changeable as that
of England, not only do effects change from hour to
hour, and in distant scenery from minute to minute,

but there is never any probability that if
you go to a
place on three successive days, exactly at the same
moment, you will find your first effect again. Everyone
knows how entirely different a place looks at different
times. ...
To the mature and accomplished artist
this changeahleness of nature is an additional source of

interest."
I have quoted this passage to show you that the camera
man must depend upon intelligent and artistic observa-
tion for his composition, although he has really excellent
opportunities of exercising his practical art knowledge
by actual introduction of elements not supplied by
nature or by any mere chance. But knowing and
seeing are so intimately associated that he only sees
what he ought to see, who knows how to recognise it
when it is visible.
Another famous landscape painter, J. B. Pyne, in

his splendidly practical " Letters
on Landscape," advis-
ing a pupil who was then studying landscape-painting,
" In
says :
addressing yourself to nature it will neces-
sarily more often be upon bended knee than en garde.
She is not to be conquered but by the steadiest devotion,
which becomes the rapid and spontaneous growth of the

pursuit so that there is an equal danger of becoming
;
her faithful though menial slave, as there is the chance,

the glorious chance, of standing erect as her liberal
translator. . . You absolutely must confine your-
.
self at setting out to the study of outline. You must

'
take the term '

outline in its most extended and liberal
sense, not as merely indicative of that manner of drawing

which consists only of surrounding the forms of nature
with a line, but as I have already shown, as indicating
everything that takes possession of the spectator's eye,

and carries it here and there at its own sweet will."
Dwelling from another view-point upon the expressive-
ness of outline, the same writer says " The
rounding :
off of a piece of country, a mountain, for instance
with all its variously-directed faces, its dimples or larger

hollows, its risings and depressings, its bare brows and
wood-matted sides, its ravines, scars and crags, with its
many buttresses and firm seats in the lap of its own

valley, up the sunny miles of which its sides may he
traced is not a thing to be represented as a screen with
a hard edge, and is much more dependent upon
or
judiciously-composed detail than upon either light
shade or colour. To instance one feature out of many,
by way of illustration, take a deep hollow or depression
in the side of a mountain wood. I choose this incident
as its features are composed of objects of one character,

size and form generally. There will, of course, be on
the nearest side of the hollow a point, or rather a limit,
which will form a denned outline against its opposite
side. On
approaching this outline the tree-tops will
gradually become more frequent until they double on
each other, and ultimately become involved in one out-
line with the lower and farther forms, so filling up the
intervals between the next nearest that all indentation
and undulation will be lost, presenting nothing more
than a nearly even line, though not a sharp or well-

defined one; while the nearest trees on the opposite
side will come out in the full integrity of their forms
and dimensions, sudden and distinct." Here we have
just such an illustration of our subject as the photo-
grapher requires, and a better object lesson, so far as
landscape goes in connection with linear composition, it
would be difficult to hit upon. It is moreover a very sug-
gestive passage for the old-fashioned photographic optician
whose sole idea it so commonly is that equality of defini-
tion is the main thing, although it so often results in those
sharp, equally-defined outlines of retiring surfaces which

do not round off the hill tops but bring them out flat and
upright like so many screens, nearest and farthest
objects on their sides being inextricably confused, and
which causes the remotest surface of a widely-extended
plain to differ so little from the portion nearest the
lens as to destroy all the natural effects of space and
atmosphere.
The point of view is, of course, intimately connected
with the angle of view. A landscape photograph should
not embrace a larger field than the human eye takes in
at a glance. In selecting the point of view, we there-
fore decide not only the angle at which outlines and
surfaces will retreat from the eye to the point of sight,
the point exactly opposite the point of view at the
height of the spectator's eye, but we meet a variety of

other considerations of no less value. The mind's percep-
tions are complicated with thoughts and feelings which
they at once affect or create, and the pictorial artist's
business is to bring them into order and concentrate all
his forces with the art of a general arranging his army
for battle. The point of attack is the point of superior
importance in the warrior's case, and the artist in
selecting a point of sight should take care it is not the
point of least pictorial importance. When

the eye of
the spectator rests intuitively upon the artist's point of
sight directly he sees a picture, then the other parts of it

must fall each into its position of relative subordinance.
It would be excellent practice for students if some
talented practical photographer, who is familiar with the
pictorial mystery of his wonderful art as well as its
scientific principles, would take out with him into the

country a band of beginners in artistic landscape
little
photography and setting up the camera for them,

;
now here, now there, now at one height or angle, and

now at another, now with one kind of lens, and then
with a different one, would show them what a very
striking important influence is exercised in a pictorial
and photographic sense by the point of view. Linear
perspective, aerial perspective, breadth, composition,
chiaro oscuro, foreground, middle and extreme distance,
contrast, subordination, harmony, everything that dis-
it more
tinguishes a picture from a diagram depends upon
or less. The dominant beauty of your view on one
occasion is, say, the sky above it. There nature's smile
is sweetest, there her loveliness is perfected, and there
her voice speaks most musically, poetically or feelingly.
In one way or another it is, you think, possible to
photograph this sky. But certain cloud forms must be

entire tohave all it gives you, and if the camera is
always to remain a certain height the horizon rising
with it, as it naturally does, must so elevate the point of
view that you will not get them. In another landscape
it may be that the angle of view gives a point of sight
so awkwardly situated that you have a petty, eye-
confusing, spotty effect, instead of harmoniously blending

tones and half-tones, lighted passages and shadowed,
which another view-point secures by being placed at a
different angle or elevation. Sometimes almost an inch
higher and lower, to this side or that, will make wonder-
ful differences. Chemically also the one view may be
better than another for securing pictorial effect. It is
almost impossible to develop certain negatives so as to

secure the actual aerial effects and give each part its
relative tones and values, because they are scattered and
isolated, or in other and fewer words, when there are no
broad picturesque features in the view selected. In like
the details of a subject are so
uniformly and
way, if
strongly illuminated as to come out with equal distinct-

ness in your negative, you may sometimes that escape
disagreeable inartistic effect by merely lowering the
point of view, and so introducing foreshortening and
other effects, tending to group some of them into masses
and bring out others of most importance
dominantly.
Again, in photographing, say, a mountain lake, how
often we fail because an overpowering brilliant surface of
water radiating light at many angles, becomes a glaring

patch of white paper (utterly unlike its glassy surface) in
the print, through over-exposure and the effort to secure
both deeply shadowed and strongly lighted passages.
Limpid ripples and the delicate reflections of clouds and
sky, mountain woods and precipitous rocks, weeds upon
its margin and plants upon its water play their parts in
close relationship with the point of view. The beautiful

effect ofa far-extending, delicate, wonderfully trans-
parent wealth of shadow is often lost with the varied

reflections, because we tried not to over-expose the
lighted or under-exposed the shadowed passages, when a
change in the position of the camera might have readily
avoided both these difficulties. By elevating the point of
view foreground may be brought into
a desirable
prominence to conceal the too brilliantly lighted surface,

while contrasting and giving delicacy to the shadows
and reflections and securing the beautifully graduated
effects of space and air which we see in nature. A few
yards in advance, a few paces in retreat will sometimes
suffice to give the art-photographer a fair chance of
getting all he requires to convert a poor, weak gathering
together of disagreeing parts into a picturesque har-

monious whole.
Of course, the view-point will not do everything ;
but it will be valuable in assisting you to acquire the
most desirable results.
The often be helped and improved

negative may
for printing byretouching with some transparent
artistic
yellow or Indian ink with a little crimson lake in it, and

these resources may also be wisely remembered, when
considering the point of view. Every possible resource

should be carefully considered with a view to their
variously combined or separated actions, chemically and
pictorially, when selecting from nature's vast abundance.
Too much study cannot be given to the considera-
tions we have
placed before you, but they are rather for
practical experiments with the camera
than theoretical
instruction. Complicated when expressed in words and
hard to explain, they are, nevertheless, comparatively
simple in actual visual experiment. In every art,
practice and experience are indispensable, and this is

more particularly true of photography, an art so young
and so rapidly progressive.
Colour again should step in to receive consideration
when the view-point is being selected, because the tone
representing one colour may constitute a discordant

element chemically, while alterirg the time or view-
point may exclude the difficulty, for colour as well as
form differsunder differing conditions of the light and

air in connection with the view-point. If we can't fight
we must run away. Adopt whichever plan meets your

necessity most effectually, but always let the process be
a result of careful thought. The status of photography
cannot be elevated without intellectual effort ;
even in
such an apparently simple process as selecting a point
of view, there is a great field of
study open in which you
may worthily and profitably labour.
137
CHAPTER XI.
PERSPECTIVE, PHOTOGRAPHICAL AND

PICTORIAL.
ON close connection with composition and the picture's

\J view-point, as already stated, is the consideration of
and aerial perspective. Messrs. Sutton & Dawson's
linear
well-known " Dictionary .of Photography" says: "The
rules of perspective merely relate to the cutting of
pyramids by a plane, and are purely geometrical, not

any way to the structure of the eye, or the
referring in
image formed upon the retina, or the rules of optics."
"
Perspective is," they also say, "nothing more than a
very simple problem in solid geometry, and it is marvellous
to find that so little is known of it by artists."
How littlegeometry has to do with pictorial per-

spective is readily seen in what architects call Geometri-
cal Elevation, which, according to " Nuttall's Dictionary
of Scientific Terms," is "a design for any part of a
building drawn according to the rules of geometry as
opposed to perspective or natural elevation." (The italics are
the author's.) The term being derived from the Greek
is also suggestive, for in that language it meant simply
the art of measuring. It embraces the measurement of
dimensions, lines, planes or surfaces, the contents of

solid bodies and the functions of circles, in associa-
tion with trigonometry, tetragonometry, polygonometry,
cyclometry, etc., or, to speak more understandably and

unscientifically, angles and triangles, squares, many-sided
forms, spheres, discs, etc. Geometry existed in its
138 ARTISTIC LANDSCAl'K PHO'I OGKAIM I V.
and Jaby-
elementary form in the days of the Chaldeans
1
is of comparatively
lonians, but pictorial perspective
modern origin.* The ordinary artist does not pretend to
deal with the scientist's invisible, non-understandable
" breadth nor
lines, or points" that have neither length,
thickness. And however far his imagination may or
may not go in this matter, his business is simply the

truthfuland effective representation of visible objects.
His points and lines have length, breadth and thickness,
and are not practical impossibilities invented to define
with
by signs what words alone cannot convey, dealing
demonstration.
things which are incapable of visible
They are not in his way, although they are so useful
geometrically. The representation of forms on a plane

surface, as they are conveyed through the eye and by the
perceiving organs, is to him, as it is to the artist photo-
grapher, the chief purpose of perspective.
An old friend of mine, now, alas, departed, like so
many dear old friends, in a volume which does not bear
his name, for he was a bookmaker's hack, a publisher's
" dark more " the
horse," denned perspective clearly as
art which enables us by fixed rules to represent truly on
a plane surface that which appears to the sight in every
variety of form and distance, and which is done by
imaginary lines traversing such plane, and arranging the
shape and position of every object with regard to the
point of sight determined upon." This at once explains
the extent to which geometry and perspective are allied
in pictorial representation. In a like way geometry is
allied to arithmetic, as in what is called geometrical
progression (i, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32), for instance.

The owner of a good rectilinear lens with its
diaphragms and a sufficient knowledge of the rules of
*Pidtorial perspective was unknown until about the middle of

the fifteenth century.
I'EKSPECTIVi;. 139
perspective to enablehim to compare what he sees with

the naked eye with what the lens sees, ought to be able
to secure fairly accurate pictures, perspectively true and
natural. He would in that case, probably, also come to
the conclusion that focussing is a more important part
of a photographer's work than he had previously thought
it was, and that the only way in which a large photo-
graph should be obtained, should be by enlarging from a
small negative, and making a free after use of his scissors.
It is true that by reducing the angle of vision the variety
and extent of country represented in the photograph
would be diminished, but the effect generally would be
far less closely allied to optics and geometry, and far
more closely allied to perspective and pictorial art.

" All
improvements in composition," said C. K.
" from the
Leslie, R.A., in one of his lectures, infancy of
painting to its full maturity are the result of the gradual
discovery of the principles by which nature makes an
assemblage of objects agreeable to the eye, those of per-
spective being amongst the most important." In further
support of Leslie's view, Mr. Nuttall's view, Charles

Martell's and my own, I
may quote the words of Mr.
Chapman Jones, a well-known scientific authority, who

deals with the subject from a more purely optical point
of view. He says, " The perspective of a picture as
produced by any ordinary non-distorting photographic
objective is correct when proper care is taken to keep
the sensitive plate perpendicular, and will appear to be
correct when viewed from a point having the same
had during the ex-
relation to the picture that the lens
posure but the picture will not appear exactly true to

;
nature when looked at from any other point. The same

limitation extends to pictures of every sort that represent
solid objects." In taking a photograph he says, "the
lens should be opposite the centre of the plate, so far as
the possibility of moving it in a horizontal direction is
concerned, unless there is a point of interest so strongly

marked that it causes the attention to be concentrated
upon it, when the lens may, with advantage perhaps, be
brought opposite, or nearly opposite the centre of

interest." Here science is not set up in depreciative
opposition to art, but the two are allowed to be naturally
allied, the one as the strong helper of the other, and both
as blending harmoniously for the production of genuine
pictorial effect. In point of fact, as I shall presently

endeavour to show more clearly, what we have to seek
a compromise between what the lens sees
artistically, is
and what the eye sees, for the two are not, as so many
suppose, one, even in principle.
With eyes duly trained to see accurately, or more
strictly speaking, to perceive accurately, a good knowledge
of perspective will be quickly attained, and with it a
desire to produce photographs more true, not so much to
the actual facts of nature as to nature made visible by
the eye to the mind, in other words, to the sense of sight.
"
Stripped of its geometrical and mathematical
"
intricacies," says Burnet,* perspective will be found a
very simple matter, and easy of comprehension, being
nothing more than representing the various objects
subject to the laws which regulate their appearance in
nature." The photographer may commence itsstudy
by the aid of his lenses and camera, the artist with his
pencil or brush, and both will find mastery of its
principles and their applications, a source of pictorial

power. To the landscape painter it is what anatomy is
to the figure painter,
discipline, training, knowledge and
power. Even to the portrait photographer it is not less
important.
* See his "
Art Essays," published at the office of The Practical
Photographer.
PERSPECTIVE. 141
Place your tripod stand before a landscape view

with buildings or retiring planes, and then watch the
different aspects they assume as you alter the aperture
and shift the focus from one plane to another. Then
compare what you have seen under the cloth to what,
standing where the camera stood, you see with the naked
eye. You will at once note, if
you have studied per-
spective, certain differences, more or less strikingly
apparent, and understand how the drawing of a com-
may be perfectly accurate, although it may at

petent artist
the same time be quite unlike a photograph taken at the
same hour and under the same conditions of atmospheric
light with a lens not stopped down and from precisely
the same spot. You will know, moreover, why they are
not alike why in one picture the different planes of
;
distance and outlines of forms are relatively incorrect ;
and why, the other, they take their places naturally,

in
expressing space and forms truthfully. It is largely the
space between the objects and the lens, and the lens and
the focussing screen, which gives accurate perspective,
that is to say, pictorial perspective, as opposed to
geometrical, scientific or purely optical perspective.

The photographic artist of to-day focusses not to get
either the most perfect chemical or geometrical focus, but
to secure the natural, pictorial perspective. His prede-
cessors had very little or no choice in the matter. Their
cameras had one which the optical focus
set distance at
on the screen was as they said " sharpest," which sharp-

ness was spread over every part of one plane, instead of
extending in due and natural proportions to various
retiring planes. In that way photographs were either
geometrical diagrams flattened out of all truthful re-

semblance to nature, in order that they might illustrate
the optician's knowledge of optical and geometrical
science, or they were otherwise imperfect through
142 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPH V.
distortion resulting from refraction. Straight lines were

converted into curves, and the upper and lower surfaces
of buildings made to appear disproportionately small or
large, and consequently nearer to the eye than their

centres were, etc. So in portraiture, the feet and hands
were made disproportionately large, and even the ears
and sides of a fate thrown out of correct proportion for
want of true perspective effect, and that too with lenses
which opticians called perfect instruments giving
geometrically-perfect perspective.
Another point which will illustrate my subject is
found in the fact that images thrown upon the wall of a

darkened room by light entering through a small circular
aperture will give a view in which the perspective will
not be geometrically or optically focussed on any one
plane only, and with microscopical sharpness, but will

be perspectively and piiftorially accurate, giving space
and atmospherical effects with truthful forms and proper
relative proportions. This is significant.
have already referred to the differences there are
I
between what the one great glass eye of a camera

reveals, and what our two small eye-lenses make visible ;
and that these can be demonstrated by the rules of

pictorial perspective successively applied to drawings
and photographs. But such differences are not more
numerous, nor greater in kind, than those which may be
readily enough discovered in the works of the most
talented and experienced painters, representing the same
view. For instance, recall what I have quoted Mr.
Hammerton's remarks on Turner's " Ben Cruachan,"
and upon another painting of the same view by Tripp.
Each of these was artistic and picturesque, but each
was utterly unlike the other. The Turner was grand
and glorious with effects of atmosphere and light, with
mountainous forms of gigantic size and precipitous
I'KKSl'I-CTIVI..
143
steepness. The Tripp was rugged and romantic

wild,
too, but without any such astounding exaggeration and
flights of the imagination. In contrast Mr. Hammerton
gave a purely topographical sketch made to show what

the real view looke \ like and how unlike it was to both
Turner's sketch and Mr. Tripp's, in making which as
Mr. Hammerton says, " Turner was just as much an
author of fiction as a poet in words, or a novelist." Of
" He has been careful to
Tripp's picture he says, preserve
what seemed to him all the more important truths of
local character. As I wander in Mr. Tripp's distance

up Glen Strae, I remember
many a real wandering in
and
that region, feel grateful to the artist for enabling
me to live past days over again."
Fifty lenses of the same kind, used in one way, and
placed one after another in this spot before the same

view would all give strikingly similar pictures if photo-
graphed under ordinary good conditions. Equally well
developed and printed from, each of fifty negatives thus
taken would give fifty prints so much alike that you
could barely tell one from another. There would have
been even less likeness as a perspective illustration
between Mr. Hammerton's topographical view, than

there was between it and Tripp's more artistic picture,
or between it and Turner's more wildly romantic and
imaginative effects. The one would rouse wonder and
delight, would excite by its passionate outburst of
grandeur and marvellous realism the other would carry

your memory back to a spot you admired and loved,
touching your feelings with sweet and tender recollec-
tions, arousing quieter and less powerful thoughts,
whereas the tamely accurate topographical or the
flattened and distorted photographical view would leave
your imagination dormant, your feelings untouched.
You would say calmly and "
coldly Yes, very true, I've
been there, suppose it's like the spot, but somewhow it
isnot particularly interesting." Pictorial truth pictorial
qualities are not dependent upon

absolute accuracy of
any kind, local or other, although it is entirely the result

of the greaterand grander, or the more powerfully
expressive truths of nature. And therefore I have been
anxious while writing these chapters on Landscape
Photography to impress upon students that they should

use even linear perspective, a thing of mere mechanical
measurement and accurate ruling from point to point, as
subordinate to their search for effects of chiaro oscnro,
composition, breadth, and the truths of sun and air.
The ordinary factologist or materialist receives on

evidence with such blind faith as he gives to that of the
senses. What he can see, touch, hear, taste, smell, are
the foundations of his false, dogmatically narrow creed.
If he happens to be a photographer of the mechanical
type, and you talk to him about perspective, he turns a

deaf ear to you. He regards human eyes and the opti-
cian's cameras as if they were perfectly similar instru-
ments. Exactly as the healthy eye sees, so, in his belief,
his camera sees.
But he is wrong. The eye combines in certain degrees

the different offices of telescope, microscope and camera.
The latter is a camera pure and simple. When we look at a
landscape our eyes are continually ,
alt hough unconsciously,
changing their focus, and the picture ultimately conveyed
to the perceptive faculty which is a mental, not a
mechanical faculty is, in fact, not one but a succession
of pictures. You are not cognisant of the fact, but
before you actually perceive any view the focus of your
eye has been separately adjusted to horizon, sky and

clouds, far distance, middle distance and foreground.
This fact and the degree of rapidity with which these
adjustments are made, has its practical demonstration in
PERSPECTIVE. 145
that well-known optical toy, the zoetrope, or thaumatrope,

in which a series of many different figures, by rapidly
rotating, appear as one figure. Yet each is a distinct
impression and requires its due exposure, so to speak.

Therefore, even the ordinary conjurer, by his compara-
tively clumsy expedient of manual dexterity can easily
deceive the sharpest eye. But he would not succeed in
thus deceiving a photographic lens, which catches the
one impression and that only, and, of course, does so in
very much less time. Yet, up to a certain point although

there is visual, there is no mental perception. But that
point reached, these varied adjustments combine to affect
the mind with one absolute, entire perception ;
which we
calla glance, or view.
To imitate this process photographically, we should
require a series of optical impressions in combination as
one. But, even supposing this were possible, we should
even then be farther than ever from attaining pictorial
perfection, for, although we should have a view in which
the geometrical perspective was complete, the details of
each object near and far would give us even the most
minute details, details invisible to the naked eye, for
" "
every part of the picture would be equally and micro-
scopically sharp. Aerial perspective would therefore be
altogether falsified. The eye, consequently, is not

identical in principle with the camera.
Again a landscape photograph, examined through a

microscope, shows how wonderfully perfect even its most
minute details are. A landscape painting has no such
quality. It was the painter's business to represent what
he saw, not what was actually before him; visible effect,
not invisible influences by which it was produced.
It is, therefore, certain that in the act of observing,
the mind is at any given fraction of a second affected

and occupied by one definite conscious perception, the
result of a combination of unconscious impressions.

This is true, also, in another way, to which I have
referred briefly in some previous chapters. If you direct
your attention to any part of a view, near or distant, or

to any object say, a tree
in it instantly you have lost
the specific effect of the whole, and the tree only is seen,
and as a whole in itself, not as a part of the view. In
like way, if you fix your attention upon the bark of the
tree, or a bough of it,or one of its leaves, each of these
immediately becomes a whole, to the exclusion of all

the other parts. As your mind reverts to the general
scene, all these details merge into one general effect ;
details no longer obtrude themselves as dominating

factors. Now, the artist aims to represent the entire
view as it affects his mind, or as he perceives it, not as
an optical imstrument sees it. But the photographer,
unless he, too, is an artist, aims to get what he calls
sharpness in the details, and as this can only be obtained

by sacrificing breadth, pictorial truth, and aerial and
linear perspective, he cheerfully and contentedly, although
unconsciously, destroys them all at one fell swoop.
It is his work that misleads art critics, who know
nothing of the power a photographer has to modify such
conditions, and causes them to denounce and ridicule
photographic art claims altogether. Truth-loving artists

do not, however, as some now-a-days suppose, overlook
the value of details, or in any degree depreciate their
importance. They simply regard them as elements in

the production of general effects.
They do not make
them unduly prominent, but neither do they clumsily
seek to realise the impossible, that wonderful and in-
definite minuteness of nature, which
only the microscope
can fully realise.
"
Why has not a man a microscopic eye ?
For this good reason, man is not a fly."
PERSPECTIVE. I4y
Again, look at the question from another suggestive

view-point. A good architectural perspective representa-
tion any edifice gives the minutest detail of the
of
ornamental mouldings and decorations that it is possible
for mechanical skill to delineate, not for the sake of
pictorial effect, but to serve technical purposes. Yet,

the architect scrupulously careful to give also their
is
exact relative proportions, and if the dimensions of his

drawing are not sufficiently large to permit this exactness
of detail and proportion, he necessarily omits them. So
in a landscape picture, as it is impossible to represent
leaves and grass and similar natural objects with accurate
details in due proportion to the scale of the entire scene,
they are made subordinate to the general effect by being

indicated rather than represented.
But the inartistic photographer, falsely estimating
the importance of these minute details, concentrates the
whole power of his lens upon their representation, and
thus sacrifices relative proportions altogether, violating
the rules of both linear and aerial perspective. As it is
clearly an impossibility to represent leaves, blades of
grass, small herbage anil other minute objects, with their

details distinctly visible, at the same time, in due pro-
portion to the scale of the whole scene, such so-called

exact truthfulness is productive only of unnatural results.
The more conspicuous this kind of blunder is, the less
truthful and interesting, and the less pictorial will be
the general effect.
Nor is it any way out of this difficulty to throw the
entire picture altogether out of focus assome do for
this really only makes bad worse, for it means distortion
by unduly enlarging, as well
increases the great evil
as confusedly blurring forms and outlines. The only
thing to be done is to so distribute the focus that,
while proportion or perspective is secured, detail is
not rendered unnaturally obtrusive in any part of our
productions.
There is yet another view of this question. The
images conveyed by the eye are very small and of
one size, yet they do not appear small or of one
size. Men, women, children are seemingly what we
call life-size, as we seem to see them in nature ;
a bush
and a tree, a mole-hill and a mountain, have each their
relative sizes. But when we see them on the focussing
screen of a camera, or in a photograph, it is not so. It
is, images of nature undergo

therefore, obvious that the
in some mysterious way a kind of mental enlarging
process before they are mentally perceived. And in
connection with this I firmly believe that the only real
way of so photographing as to get anything like natural

pictorial effect is to take very small and most carefully
focussed negatives, on a glass made specially for them,
with a view to some superior method of enlarging, of
which we have already promising signs. I was struck
with this the other day when
a small negative was used
for reproducing a life-size copy of a bust of Shakespeare,
in the Memorial Library, Stratford-on-Avon that known

as the terra-cotta, or Devonshire bust everyone who
saw regarded it as wonderful.
this I was also struck in
the same way with the reality of aerial perspective
apparent in some landscapes exhibited at the Salon, in

Piccadilly, last year. They, too, were enlargements
from very small negatives. Proportions, details, breadth,
space, linear perspective, and aerial were all superior to
anything to be found in photographs from larger
negatives.
Mr. C. W. Cooke, comparing the eye with the
"
The human eye is, in fact, a little cam-
camera, says :
era, which, by means of lenses and optical contrivances

(identical in principle with, but far more perfect than,
PERSPECTIVE. 149
those employed in a photographic instrument) forms upon

a sensitive film an image of objects to which it may be
directed. The sensitive film (corresponding to the
prepared collodion of the photographer) consists of a
membrane at the back of the eyeball, traversed by a
system of nerve-filaments of extraordinary delicacy and
sensitiveness, so interlaced as to form a network,which
is in consequence called the retina. Upon this net-work of
nervous matter is thrown, by means of a lens, a minute
inverted image of whatever the eye is directed to, and the
phenomena of sight may be defined as the reading of the
telegraphic message which the retina transmits
through the optic nerve to the brain, descriptive of the

image that is falling upon it. But, while this message
is, in a healthy state of the eye, always correctly inter-
preted by the brain, the proverbial statement that 'seeing

is believing' has., like every other rule, its exceptions."
In connection with this statement, it is curious to
remember although the eye sees the images inverted,
that,
we are not conscious of their being so.
Another view of our subject demanding consideration

is found in the concentration of colours and the intensifi-
cation of light and shade perceptible in camera images,

as compared with those of the eye. As these mean
intensified chemical action on the prepared plates, it is
obvious that degrees of contrast are thereby intensified,
and that a mere photograph is not true in its relative
proportions or scale of light and shade. This, again,
enforces the lesson I have in view, that of endeavouring
to represent nature as the eye sees it, rather than as it is
when conveyed to the eye by some optical instrument.
Here the processes of exposing, printing and developing,
call for they are conducted
modifications in practice. If
blindly and ignorantly by operators as mechanical as

their tools, perspective and pictorial truths will be
conspicuous by absence. If the good work is done by

students of nature and art, who are thoroughly in earnest,
we shall have photographic work steadily becoming
higher in its meanings, deeper in feeling, and wider in
its influences, work in which the difficulties I have been

writing about in this and the preceding chapters, have
been met and conquered by intellectual superiority.
I have been told recently that my tendency in
writing for photographers is to aim so high that ordinary
practitioners cannot follow me. Artists will smile at
this, for have not as yet advanced beyond what every

I
art knows to be mere elementary study, the

student
lesson every beginner is supposed to have mastered
before more weighty and abstruse matters receive atten-
tion. The photographer who turns with dismav from
such simple matters has little chance of either advancing
himself or his art in the estimation of critical observers.
CHAPTER XII.
BREADTH OF EFFECT.
critics and writers upon pictorial art have made

HRTus very familiar with such terms as breadth of
effect, broad effects, broad treatment, etc., etc., but
the different ways in which these words are applied,
and the numerous qualities with which they are
associated in practice would hardly be understood
without some preliminary study. My main purpose

throughout these chapters has been that of extending
the views of photographic art students from mere rules
and their technical methods of application to the more
impoitant principles to which such rules owe their
existence, and without pretending to deal with them
exhaustively illustrate their practical applications and

expansibility. \Ve now turn our attention to what is
known as breadth or breadth of effect.
What this really means is not easily explained,
because it means so much. All that I have written
about lines, tones, perspective, accidental incidents,
transitory natural effects, the phenomena of clouds,

sunlight and atmosphere, etc., bear upon it in one way
or another, and in degrees varying in their importance.
The landscape have already quoted, J. B.
painter I
" Nomenclature of Pictorial
Pyne, in his Art," says,
" Breadth in
painting is a term which denotes largeness,
space, vastness. Its operation is not limited by a small
canvas or extended a large one.
in Finish does not
preclude or negligence secure it. It very seldom

accompanies mere outline, though some few and limited

Its greatest promoters are
subjects in outline admit it.
colour and chiaro oscuro (lights and darks), in which, when

under consummate management, it revels in full power
and grandeur." This definition is that of a landscape
painter. The photographer will see at once that it

limits his means of securing breadth to light and shade
only, although, in fact, there are many other promoters
available, as further consideration of what has been
already advanced will, I hope, suffice to demonstrate.

In fact, all I have said and urged you to study leads up
to this crowning quality of a fine picture.
If breadth means anything it certainly means the
harmonious relationship of every part with the whole, a

concentration of every available power to strengthen a
given purpose. To this end the means we have had

under notice all lead onward. The best composition,
whether simple or complicated, is that which attains the
most perfect unity, embracing outlines, chiaro oscuro,
variety of incidents, subordination of interests and
attractiveness, etc., etc., all with reference to some
leading purpose, whether it be of a technical or mental
sentimental or mere automatic character.
If there is any part of a picture that is in any way
incongruous, if this or that episode takes a dominance
that belongs to the entire incident, if the portrait is over-
powered by background or accessories, if in a figure
group that figure which should be least conspicuous is
most prominent, if spots of light or dark, or
strong
staring lines lead the eye now here, now there, to this
or that in succession, instead of
fixing the spectator's
attention upon the work as a whole, there will be a
want of breadth, the great dominant purpose, the
thought, being sacrificed to things which are of inferior
consequence.
BREADTH OF EFFECT. 153
But let us turn to some other practical and reliable

artists, who support this view, authorities every one,
and note what they have to say.
In the " Memoirs of William Collins, R.A.," by
the late Wilkie Collins, his son, we read, "Nothing in
Mr. Collins's pictures more thoroughly testified to his
study of nature, and his observations of the principles
of the old masters, than the broad
significant disposition
of light and shade which they present to the
eye, and
which produces in them much of the vigour of effect
they may possess when seen from a distance. Neither

their darks or lights appear, when thus viewed, as
isolated, ungraceful patches, but assume, on the con-
trary, the appearance of a varied, harmonious whole,

one shadow leading smoothly on to the next, and one
light echoed at intervals by another. As a test of the
power and correctness of his chiaro oscuro, let any of his
pictures, with the exception of his earliest and immature
efforts, be looked at under a dim light, when none of
their individual qualities of form and colour can be
it will be found that the general

plainly discerned, and
disposition of light and shade
which is then alone visible
in them, never assumes a disagreeably scattered or
disjointed aspect, but preserves a grace

and balance, a
vastness and harmony, in its vague shapes, which
attract the eye even absence of any definite object
in the
that it can observe. In those cases where his pictures

" The
are not within reach, any of the prints from
Fisherman's Departure," "Rustic Hospitality," "Fetch-
" The "
ing the Doclor," Stray Kitten," or Feeding the
Rabbits," will be found to produce, although in an
inferior degree, the same result. As regards the value
of this test of the correctness and feeling of an artist's
chiaro oscuro, its propriety must be apparent to any one
who has observed the remarkable coherence and
harmony of light and shade on natural objects, when
they are fading in the tw light, and who consider that
all art is excellent or faulty, in proportion as it gains or
loses on being referred directly to nature."
And this reminds us of the great power an artist-
photographer has the printing process, of toning down

in
too prominent lights, and lightening too prominent

darks, deepening a little here by prolonged exposure,
or giving a desirable retiring quality there by shortening
none of which he would dare to do if preliminary study
it,
had not shown him when, where and how to do this,

that or the other.
Chiaro oscuro is in itself a subject so complicated and

so intimately associated with diversities of forms and
methods of expression that shall not attempt to deal
I
with it more fully than have already done, but its

I
literature is very comprehensive, and in very few

works of a practical character on
painting will it be
found not to be fairly, if in none of them
exhaustively
treated.
BUF.ADTH OF KI-FKCT. 155
There is a danger to which it is desirable to call

attention seeking breadth.
in The subordination of
parts to the whole must not be carried so far as to
destroy all sense of variety, a quality of which I have
spoken as desirable. To preserve the one without
sacrificing the other is indeed one of the artist's
difficulties in seeking breadth.
Another rule which associates itself with our
present subject has also been dealt with separately.
If the masses of parts are so equal as to produce
monotony, that monotony will dominantly assert itself

and be destructive of breadth. The famous painter,
James Barry, addressing the Royal Academy students
" With
on this subject said, respect to the conduct
necessary to be pursued obtaining this advantageous
in
distribution of lights and darks in a picture, it has been
observed, with good discernment, that the constant

maxim of those great artists (Giorgione, Titian ?
Correggio, Rubens and others, great successors of Da

Vinci) was to dispose all their light and dark objects
after such a manner as would best contribute to their
being seen with the greatest possible advantage and

ease; that to end they arranged them in
attain this
half lights, darks and half
groups and masses of lights,
darks and reflexes. Of these lights and darks one was
principal, the rest subordinate, and all generally co-
operated to produce a totality

and entireness in the
work. The principal light was generally so disposed as
to give the greatest lustre to that part where the action
and the personages were of the greatest consequence,

and where, accordingly, it was most proper to arrest
the attention of the spectator. How far this light

should extend depended upon the previous arrangement
of the objects, and the discreet and sentimental accom-
modation of it to the nature of the subject ;
but it is
observable that by extending it too far, its comparative

value is proportionately lessened. . . This principal
light should as it were occupy only its own sphere, and
not be repeated, yet not be without its satellites or
dependants. Revivifications and echoes of it, subordinate

in magnitude or force or both, should notwithstanding,
by an artful concatenation, be disturbed to the circum-

stances of secondary importance in the other parts."
The principles here advocated may be variously
applied, although Barry's definitions are those of a
figure painter. He
goes on to point out great works
illustrative of such rules by figure painters amongst the
he says bears upon landscape also.

old masters, but all
Dwelling by the way upon the great care a painter

should devote to the intermediate tones and shades.
" It he says, "principally owing to the judicious and
is,"
happy management of the middle tints that these fierce
opposite extremes of light and dark are brought to

" It is
co-operate and harmonise," and judiciously adds,
not necessary that the middle tints should always
intervene between every light and dark ;
on the contrary,
the and propriety of certain parts absolutely

eclat, spirit
require their being detached boldly from the light by the

sole and immediate opposition of vigorous shadows or
other dark tints." This is but another enforcement of
my idea of always governing the application of rules by

the science of principles. In other words, of never
working without thinking.

Turn to another R. A. lecturer on pictorial art,
who of " Of
John Opie, Correggio, says,
writing
chiaro oscnro on the grandest scale, as it extends to the
regulation of the whole of a work, he was certainly

the inventor. Antecedently to him no painter had
attempted, or even imagined, the magic effect of this
principle [breadth] which is strikingly predominant in
,
all that remains of Correggio, from his widely extended
cupolas to the smallest of his oil paintings ;

its sway
was uncontrollable ; parts were lightened, extended,
curtailed, obscured or buried in the deepest shade, in
compliance with its dictates ;
and whatever interfered
(even correctness of form, propriety of action, and
158 ARTISTIC LAXDSCAI'K PHOTOGKAI'I I V.
characteristic attitude) was occasionally sacrificed. . . .
Entranced, overcome by pleasing sensation, the spectator

is often compelled to forget incorrectness of drawing and
deficiency of expression and character."
Opie wrote before we had pictures taken by photo-
graphy, and at a time when the importance of truthful
and perfect accuracy was not properly appreciated, as

I tried to show in a former chapter. The lesson con-
veyed by Correggio's sacrificing so much for attaining

breadth is not the less useful here, because it shows
that even so philosophical a thinker and so accomplished
a painter regarded breadth as the crowning excellence
of his works. Opie and most of his best known contem-
poraries often sacrificed to rules qualities by no means
inconsistent with the principles such rules wore invented
to enforce, as Constable practically demonstrated.
I
might easily refer to Fuzeli, Sir Joshua Reynolds
and many other great artists, ancient and modern, who
have written on this subject, and show how each con-
tributes to our knowledge of breadth, explaining its
power and expansiveness as a principle, and the diversity

of conclusions which have been arrived at without
any
real contradictions or inconsistencies, but 1 have perhaps
already said enough to impress my pupils with a sense of
its importance, and must now prepare to say good-bye.
The three examples which illustrate this chapter
blend figures,architecture, sky and water into one
harmonious whole very charmingly and serve well to
show how the best effects in this way are obtained when
accidental combinations exclude both very light and
very dark extremes. In nature such happy results are
not uncommon, but the
exaggerations of vulgar photo-
graphs too often destroy them through under-exposure or
insufficient development, the
operator believing that this
bold exaggeration, which is destructive of both variety
and breadth, gives what he calls "brilliancy," that is,
a staring out of violently contrasting patches. A point

of light as focus rendered prominent by the close
proximity of the focus of strongest dark is something

altogether unlike this. In the one we have separated
prominent patches, in the other we have gradations and
unity, one part leading up to another for producing
some general effect. In the one the effect is natural and
harmonious and beautiful, in the other it is discordant,
and ugly.
artificial
There are numerous ways in which landscape

painters achieve this result, but they are ways in all
which nature herself acts. For instance, clouds will

often, by the way in which they overshadow the entire
field of view, cause all violent contrasts to at once
disappear often a little patient waiting and watching
;
will be all that is required to catch some stray gleam
of light that falls behind, say a group of trees, or cattle

or cottages in deep shadow, and so create a focus which
at once secures breadth and effect. Again, other always-
changing cast shadows may create this desirable quality,

that of a mountain for instance, or that of a forest on
the slope of a hill, or that of some tall rocky sandstone
cliff toning down and simple unity, the rugged
into quiet
and crevices, the isolated bushes and
projections, holes
weeds, and broken piled-up fragments, etc., each of
which might otherwise assert itself too strongly for the
entire combination, confusing the sight and destroying
breadth of effect. Your inartistic photographer never
recognises the value of subordination or breadth, his
chief aim being that of rendering every object and all
their details equally conspicuous, or as he says " sharp."

Of course, all this thought and care means the
expenditure of time and effort. But what is even the
longest time a photographer is likely to occupy in
l6o ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
with that which a

producing his picture compared
G. Barnard says whilst he was yet a
painter requires !
tyro he was engaged in company with Stanfield and

other artists in taking a sketch of the East Cliff at
Hastings. He had completed his study in three hours,

but Stanfield's occupied seven hours. And this sketch
was in itself but a preliminary study for a finished work.
Moreover, every study conducted earnestly, in a true
with due appreciation of both art and
artistic spirit,
nature, leaves you the better and stronger for your next
effort, whereas work unduly hurried is sure to be more
Or less slovenly work.
There is also another advantage. Armitage, in one
of his lectures on painting, delivered before the students
of the Royal Academy, said art progress depended not
upon the efforts of individual teachers, but upon the
individual exertion of every member of the profession
from the president down to the probationer. "Let us
" do our best to
all," said he, produce careful, honest,
and original work and I have no doubt of the result."
Echoing these words, which are as applicable to photo-
graphy and photographers as they were to the R.A.
" have
president and probationers, I too believe we need
no doubt of the result" that follows "careful, honest
and original work."
Still, from the first,with steady pace pursue

The winding maze of artby Nature's clue ;
For all her toils, antique or modern, tend

But as a means to Nature, art's true end.
Nature the objed of your search alone
!
In paintings prize, and estimate in stone.
Led by her light alone, in elder time

Immortal Genius ran his course sublime
From Glory's summit snatch'd the brightest crown,
And rifled all the regions of renown.
Sir Martin Archer Shee, A.R.
l62 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPH V.
Figures in Keeping with a

Cottage Exterior.
From a Drawing.
i6 3
CHAPTER XIII.
FIGURES AND FOREGROUNDS.
K power a photographer has in the introducing

of figures ofmen and beasts or other movable
objects into his landscape, may be exercised in a vast
variety of ways and with many purposes: for example, to

blot out some undesirable feature break up a mass or;
line which is antagonistic to the general effect, ;

supply
Example of Figures judiciously used in aid of the Composition.

From an Engraving.
here a focus of dark, or there one of light ;

carry the
observer's eye into the picture to express space lead ;
it to the chief point of interest tell some particular

;
story which lends itself to the picture's chief purpose

givesome human interest to a village street or a town
view, or some suggestion of wild life in a wild spot;
make a foreground where otherwise no foreground could
be secured introduce some aspect of domestic doing
;
toemphasize cottage life, or the life of a country gentle-

man's old manor-house, castle or mansion to secure ;
breadth, contrast, harmony, etc., etc. The illustrations

given with this chapter are all suggestive of work to
i6 4 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
Examples of Figures
judiciously used in aid of the Composition.
From Engravings.
FIGURES AND FOREGROUNDS.
Examples of Figures judiciously used in aid of the Composition.

From Engravings.
i66 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
be done of this kind, as are, indeed, most of those already
given in which figures

are seen.
It may sometimes be found desirable to fill up a
spot which is too staiingly conspicuous, and without
other kind importance to justify its being so

of
prominent, and can be done perhaps easily enough

this
by moving a bush, the trunk of a felled tree, some

broken or displaced boughs, transplanted weeds, a pile
Examples of Figures judiciously used in aid of the Composition.

From Engravings.
of fragments from rocks and boulders thrown together

in some naturally suggestive way, and so on and so on.
The ingenuity of the artist will readily help him in such
matters, and these mere hints will suffice.
FIGURE'S AND FOREGROUNDS. i6 7
Use
Figures Securing Balance in the Composition.
A Simple Effective Foreground.

l68 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
Figures and Landscape. From an old painting.
A Foreground Effeft. From a Lithograph.

i6 9
CHAPTER XIV.
<;<>(>!> HINTS FROM <;OOD AUTHORITIES

OLD AND NEW.
" In all picture compositions the thought should

take the first place, and all else be regarded as the
language which is to give it expression." 0. G. Re/lander,

A rtist and Photograplur.
" Tell
your story, describe your scene, express your
sentiments, or display your learning in words, but do
not attempt to do so in a language with which you have
made yourself imperfectly acquainted." C. K. Leslie,
R.A.
" Nature can

only suggest what stimulates the poet
to the conception of a whole ; and the poet must have
the capacity to be so' stimulated." Joseph Skipsey, the
Miner-Poet.
" not at the success of

It is all surprising that
eminent artists should tempt many who are altogether
unqualified to practise art if it only tempted them to its
study it would be well for them." Dogmas on Art.
"
Things more excellent than every image are
expressed through images." Jamblichus.
" the choice of a and

Upon proper judicious
distance meaning intervening between
the distance
the spectator's position and that point on the ground
1 70 ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY.
directly him, where the picture that he is

in front of
about to take ought properly to

commence the beauty
of the artist's work will in a great
measure depend.
Thomas Rowbotham, Landscape fainter.
" The young student should in the first place

of perspective to enable him to give
acquire a knowledge
its proper dimensions, after which it is
every object
requisite that he
be under the care of an able master.
Next he must nature in order to confirm
study
and fix in his mind the reason of those precepts which he
has learnt." Leonardo da Vinci.
"With a short focus lens it is impossible to obtain

so
any true foreshortening, and every photographer gets
accustomed to this false perspective that he accepts
without a thought of objection effects that would drive
an artist wild. . . . The man who studies art after
learning the science of photography is handicapped, he

is apt to be misled by scientific and optical limitation,
and to accept the result of those limitations as truths."
G. Hanmey Croughton, Photographer.
"Ought not sound criticism to look to results only,

and to disregard the means employed, and the precise
amount of difficulty overcome in producing them ? I
think that a careful study of the work of painters, so far

as composition is concerned, will show that pictorially
the photographer may justly claim far more latitude
in the choice of subject and the way of representing it
than many fancy themselves entitled to, and a result of
realizing this fact and acting upon it, would introduce a
greater variety in the work produced by camera and

lens a result to be devoutly wished." Rev. T. Perkins,
in the Amateur Photographer.
GOOD HINTS. iyi
"Sky some sort or another, the photo-

effects of
graphic beginner must have in his pictures if he is to

represent, in ever so poor a degree, anvil: ing of the spirit
of a scene." Rev. A. H. Blake, M..1., Photographer.
" 1'lace
any number of artists or amateurs before a
given subject, and the sketch or painting or photograph
of each will not show so much what the limitation
of material was, as it will be an expression of the
perception of each." Horace Markley, Photographer, in

flu" Art
Interchange.
"
Not a few photographers have the idea that the
laws of composition are formulae whereby pictures can
be made. This is no more the case than the laws of
syntax and prosody are receipts for making poetry. If
pictures were made like puddings, by receipt, there

would be no art required." TJic Amateur Photographer.
" The student at first feel disheartened at his

may
ill success in the imitation of nature, but whatever he
does in obedience to her precepts will be infinitely
superior to anything which he himself could conceive.
. . . All standard rules are useless without constant
study in the school of nature." /. W. Carmichael,

Marine Painter.
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:
Dark Slides The Camera in the Field Portraits Groups Flash-

light Photography Instantaneous
Photography Developing,
Fixing. Intensifying and Reducing Plates Over and Under-
exposure Tentative Development Various kinds of Developers
Defects and Remedies Printing on Gelatine-Chloride Paper On
Ready Sensitized Albumenized Paper By the Platinotype Process
By the Kallitype Process and the Carbon Process and on
Bromide Paper Varnishing Negatives Trimming and Mounting
Prints Vignetting Printing-in Skies Soft Prints from Ordinary
Negatives Orthochromatic or Isochromatic Plates Trans-
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I. PRACTICAL HINTS ON COMPOSITION. Contents: Composition
Angular Composition Circular Composition.
II. PRACTICAL HINTS ON LIGHT AND SHADE. Seven full-page
plates,with descriptive letterpress, given in this essay.
III. THE EDUCATION OF THE EYE. Contents: Measurement
Form Perspedive Lines Diminution Angles Circles
Aerial Perspedive.
130 illustrations, including examples by Cuyp, Rubens, Potter.

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Synopsis of Chapters Introdudion Imitation The Study of
:
Nature The Use of Nature Some Points of a Pidure Seledion

and Suppression Composition Expression in Landscape
Idealism, Realism and Impressionism Limitations. The Nude
False Purity The Question of Focus Models -Foregrounds
The Sky The Sea Rural Subjeds Lessons from Birket Foster
Winter Photography Individuality Conclusion.
PERCY LUND & CO., LTD.,

The Country Press, Bradford; and
Memorial Hall, Ludgate Circus, E.G.
The Lund Library
of Photography.
In Two-Shilling Volumes, net.
Cloth bound. A series of text-books devoted to the

branches and applications of photography. Plain wording
and explicit teaching is aimed at as far as possible.
The Stereoscope and Stereoscopic Photography.

Translated from the French of F. DROUIN by MATTHEW
SURFACE. Principal Contents Binocular Vision The Perception
:
of Relief Various Forms of Stereoscopes Applications of Stereo-

scope Stereoscopic Photography Stereoscopic Negatives
Stereoscopic Prints, etc. 180 pages. More than 100 illustrations.
"The information given as to the various forms of stereoscopes is very
complete. The book is well illustrated by numerous diagrams and process
blocks." Amateur Photographer.
Photographic Lenses: How to Choose and How

to Use.
By JOHN A. HODGES. An elementary and Practical Guide to
the selection and use of Photographic Objectives. Contents Optical :
Principles Definition of Terms Various Defects in Lenses The

Diaphragm or Stop, and its Functions Single Lenses Upon the
Properties and Use of Single Lenses The Rapid Rectilinear, or
Non-Distorting Doublet Other Forms of the Doublet, including
Wide- Angle Lenses Portrait and Universal Lenses New Types
of Lenses, Constructed of Jena Glass On certain Obsolete Lenses
Upon the Choice of a Lens The Care of Lenses Upon Focus-
sing Upon Angle of View Distortion and its avoidance by the:
Use of the Swing Back Combination Lenses, Casket Lenses, and

the Use of Back Combinations How to Test a Lens Lenses of
Foreign Construction On Purchasing Second-hand Lenses
Dallmeyer's Tele-photographic Lenses. 148 pages and 36 original
illustrations, including eight half-tone engravings.
Photography for Artists.

By HECTOR MACLEAN. Contents: The Extent to which
Photography used by Artists Concerning Various Kinds of
is
Artists' StudiesThe Right to Copy Artists' Studies Photographic
Reproductions of Works of Art Some Photographic Falsities
The Photographic Misrepresentation of Tones Falsifications in
Photographic Printing Some Reasons why Artists should Use a
Camera The Choice and Use of Apparatus, etc., suitable for Artists
Indoor Photography; Models, Sitters, Copying Pictures On the
Reprodudion of Pidures Illustrations for Photographic Repro-
ductionCondensed List of Photographs for Artists List of Refer-
ence Books. 152 pages, with an appendix consisting of 16 pages
illustrations, besides 19 diagrams and illustrations in the text.
"
A temperately written, useful little manual this." The Studio.
"
It should be a book of real
praftical value to all those who look upon
photography not jealously as a rival, but as an honourable ally, in whom artists
of all sorts may find a
trustworthy and helpful friend."-r& Sttuiio.
The Lund Library
Continued.
of PllOtOgraphy
The Half-Tone Process.
By JULIUS VERFASSER. A Practical Manual of Photo-
Engraving in Half- Tone on Zinc and Copper. Second edition :
revised and in great part re-written. Contents What is Half-Tone ?

:
The Studio and its Fittings The Camera The Screen The
Dark-room The Printing-room The Etching-Room The
Mounting Room Negative Making Failures and Remedies in
Negative Making Printing from the Negative The Etching
Mounting and Proving. 172 pages and 75 illustrations, with
four supplement illustrations in half-tone by the author.
"
This clear and concise demonstration of half-tone process, as evolved by
Mr. Verfasser, is sufficient, in our opinion, to give any ordinary intelligent person
a very good notion of the general principle involved. Invention.
Half-Tone on the American Basis.

From the personal experience of WILHELM CRONENBERG.
Translated by WILLIAM GAMBLE. Chapters on Photo-Engraving
in America Apparatus for Negative Making The Negative
Stripping and Reversing the Negative The Printing Process
Etching Finishing Work Engraving Vignettes. 56 illustrations
in the text, and twelve supplementary on art paper at end of book.
164 pages.
"
The work strikes us as being especially valuable on account of the fulness
with which it treats of the
apparatus employed in which respect it has the
advantage of other books on Half-Tone that we have read." Britiih Journal of
Photography.
Plates and Papers: How Made and Used.

By Dr. H. C. STIEFEL Giving instructions how to make
Albumen, Gelatine, Collodion, Platinum, Carbon and other Papers,
and how to Print, Tone, Develop and Fix the Pidlures upon them,
based upon practical experience in the factory and studio.
Contents The Dark Room Dry Plates Developing Dry Plates
:
Paramidophenol, Rodinal, Metol, Eikonogen, Amidol, etc. Fixing

Orthochromatic Dry Plates The "Gelatine" Hardness Paper
Albumen Albumen Paper Sensitizing Albumen Paper Collo-
dion Sensitized Collodion Emulsion Preparing Collodion Paper
Coating Collodion Paper by Machinery Printing, Toning and
Fixing Gelatine Gelatine Sensitized Paper Coating Paper with
Gelatine Emulsion Coating Gelatine Paper by Machinery
Printing and Toning Gelatine Papers Combined Baths Develop-
ing Prints upon Printing-out Paper Mounting Plain Matt Surface
Paper Matt Surface Collodion and Gelatine Papers Blue Prints
(Cyanotype) Platinum Paper Kallitype Paper Bromide Paper
Developing Bromide Paper Diazotype, or Primuline Process
Bichromate of Potassium Printing Process Chromatype Process
Carbon Tissue. 200 pages, with several illustrations.
PERCY LUND &> CO., LTD.,

The Country Press, Bradford; and
Memorial Hall, Litigate Circus, E.G.
Devoted to
Photography,
Artistic and
Scientific.
Price Threepence.
Devoted to the subjeds of photography,

artistic and scientific, photographic processes, and
the utility of photography in connection with other
arts and sciences. The latest discoveries and advances are recorded
in its pages. The leading writers of our times contribute to its
columns, and the past few numbers have contained articles by the
following :
COL STEWART. JULIUS VKRFASSKR.

H. P. ROBINSON. H. J. L J M
GEO. E. THOMPSON. ARTHUR BURCIIKTT.
A. H. WALL. E. MACDOWEL COSORAVI-:.
GAMBIER BOLTON. M.D.
ANDREW YOUNG. GEO. G. ROCKWOOD.
HECTOR MACLEAN. HAROLD BAKER.
REV. T. PERKINS. SIR W. M. CONWAY.
Etc., etc.
Descriptive Biographies.
A series of Descriptive Biographies of some of our leading
photographers has been continued at frequent intervals for some
time past. Among others the following have been interviewed and
their work described
:
H. P. ROBINSON. ARTHUR RESTON.

J. PATTISON GIBSON. F. BOISSONNAS.
ALFRED WERNKR. ADAM DISTON.
GEO. E. THOMPSON. DRINKWATER BUTT.
ANDREW YOUNG. J CRAIG ANNAN.
JOHN AND ROBERT TERRAS. W. PARRY.
The Notes
are a prominent feature, and comprise various items of interest
coming under the heads of Under the Sun, Editorial Focus,
Practical Work, Novelties and Business Items, Literature,
Photographs of the Month, etc. From a pidorial point of view
The Practical Photographer takes a high position. There are varied
Frontispieces or Supplement Illustrations every month, in half-tone,
or other processes, besides many pictures in the text. In this line,
indeed, the magazine leaves behind many higher-priced publi-
cations. It is largely supported by professional and scientific
photographers in all parts of the world, and many practical men are
regular contributors to its columns.
PERCY LUND >

CO., LTD.,
The Country Press, Bradford ;
and Memorial Hall, Ludgate Circus, E.G.
"
4
If
^t

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What are some of the topics covered in the book?

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What are some of the processes involved in photographic printing?

What are some of the processes involved in photographic printing?

r

'ERCY LUND & CO., LTD., THE COUNTRY PRESS, BRADFORD

AND MEMORIAL HALL, LONTON, EC.

COUNTRY I'RKSS, BRADFORD

ON THOUGHT AND OBSERVATION AS THE FOUNDATIONS OF

ON THE IMAGINATION AND ITS CULTIVATION ...... 29

ON WATER AS AN ELEMENT OF PICTORIAL EFFECT .. .-93

E art possibilities of photography, although fairly

pigments and brushes is all a painter requires to produce

In the following chapters I address beginners in art,

who, although they may be accomplished photographers,

am addressing not only advanced students but also the

is a steadily widening field for photographic

pretensions. But, unfortunately, it is so easy for anyone

get it developed, that a vast quantity of the poorest

photographers to take rank with artists, simply ludicrous.

possibility of producing photographic pictures (but only

refusing to listen to argument or

microscopically minute detail and from distortion, free

however uninteresting and commonplace its subject and

either the principles of art or the power and capabilities

Again there are those who understand art but not

photography. An amusing illustration will be found in

that exceedingly valuable and interesting work, the late

which faults due to common blunders of manipulation

character of all photographs. It would have been as just

rapidly increasing number of professional photographers

enter into competition with professional operators on the

by year, and photography to rise with it in public

Hopeful signs for the future of pictorial photo-

graphy exist in new fields of activity.

manufacturing of fiddles, etc.

And, side by side with these wholesome changes,

of papers written by artists for artists at the meetings

lectures and papers have always been most permanently

perspective and the principles of pictorial composition,

principles before he attempts to master the more

mechanical elements of composition, as otherwise he

us, considered as men, are doubtless improved by having

by such means better fitted for the discharge of their

life that the man must be

the mind with astonishment, instruction and pleasure,

uninteresting landscapes we wrongfully call pictures.

Many photographers deny this, and half of them do

artists altogether. We know better now, have gone far

as necessary in photographing as in painting. Barry said

In very ancient times Science, Poetry, and Art were

day had their foreshadowing suggestions in the minds

apart. The result is that our man of science is, as a

rule, no longer imaginative. His bent is materialistic,

Centuries before photography became the

long past age.

England immediately began to take out and squabble

gate, a bond of union was sought, at first by meeting at

originating "The Photographic Society of Great Britain