Outdoor Sketching Part 1

Outdoor Sketching.

by Francis Hopkinson Smith.

COMPOSITION

My chief reason for confining these four talks to the outdoor sketch is because I have been an outdoor painter since I was sixteen years of age; have never in my whole life painted what is known as a studio picture evolved from memory or from my inner consciousness, or from any one of my outdoor sketches. My pictures are begun and finished often at one sitting, never more than three sittings; and a white umbrella and a three-legged stool are the sum of my studio appointments.

Another reason is that, outside of this ability to paint rapidly out-of-doors, I know so little of the many processes attendant upon the art of the painter that both my advice and my criticism would be worthless to even the youngest of the painters to-day. Again, I work only in two mediums, water-color and charcoal. Oil I have not touched for many years, and then only for a short time when a student under Swain Gifford (and this, of course, many, many years ago), who taught me the use and value of the opaque pigment, which helped me greatly in my own use of opaque water-color in connection with transparent color and which was my sole reason for seeking the help of his master hand.

A further venture is to kindle in your hearts a greater love for and appreciation of what a superbly felt and exactly rendered outdoor sketch stands for--a greater respect for its vitality, its life-spark; the way it breathes back at you, under a touch made unconsciously, because you saw it, recorded it, and then forgot it--best of all because you let it alone; my fervent wish being to transmit to you some of the enthusiasm that has kept me young all these years of my life; something of the joy of the close intimacy I have held with nature--the intimacy of two old friends who talk their secrets over each with the other; a joy unequalled by any other in my life's experience.

There may be those who go a-fis.h.i.+ng and enjoy it. The arranging and selecting of flies, the jointing of rods, the prospective comfort in high water-boots, the creel with the leather strap, every crease in it a reminder of some day without care or fret--all this may bring the flush to the cheek and the eager kindling of the eye, and a certain sort of rest and happiness may come with it; but--they have never gone a-sketching! Hauled up on the wet bank in the long gra.s.s is your boat, with the frayed end of the painter tied around some willow that offers a helping root. Within a stone's throw, under a great branching of gnarled trees, is a nook where the curious sun, peeping at you through the interlaced leaves, will stencil j.a.panese shadows on your white umbrella. Then the trap is unstrapped, the stool opened, the easel put up, and you set your palette. The critical eye with which you look over your brush case and the care with which you try each feather point upon your thumbnail are but an index of your enjoyment.

Now you are ready. You loosen your cravat, hang your coat to some rustic peg in the creviced bark of the tree behind, seize a bit of charcoal from your bag, sweep your eye around, and dash in a few guiding strokes. Above is a changing sky filled with crisp white clouds; behind you, the great trunks of the many branched willows; and away off, under the hot sun, the yellow-green of the wasted pasture, dotted with patches of rock and weeds, and hemmed in by the low hills that slope to the curving stream.

It is high noon! There is a stillness in the air that impresses you, broken only by the low murmur of the brook behind and the ceaseless song of the gra.s.shopper among the weeds in front. A tired b.u.mblebee hums past, rolls lazily over a clover blossom at your feet, and has his midday lunch. Under the maples near the river's bend stand a group of horses, their heads touching. In the brook below are the patient cattle, with patches of sunlight gilding and bronzing their backs and sides. Every now and then a breath of cool air starts out from some shaded retreat, plays around your forehead, and pa.s.ses on. All nature rests. It is her noontime.

But you work on: an enthusiasm has taken possession of you; the paints mix too slowly; you use your thumb, smearing and blending with a bit of rag--anything for the effect. One moment you are glued to your seat, your eyes riveted on your canvas; the next, you are up and backing away, taking it in as a whole, then pouncing down upon it quickly, belaboring it with your brush. Soon the trees take shape; the sky forms become definite; the meadow lies flat and loses itself in the fringe of willows.

When all of this begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or s.h.i.+mmer of leaf, or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The reaction comes the next day when, in the cold light of your studio, you see how far short you have come and how crude and false is your best touch compared with the glory of the landscape in your mind and heart. But the thrill that it gave you will linger forever!

Or come with me to Constantinople and let us study its palaces and mosques, its marvellous stuffs, its romantic history, its religions--most profound and impressive--its commerce, industries, and customs. Come to revel in color; to sit for hours, following with reverent pencil the details of an architecture unrivalled on the globe; to watch the sun scale the hills of Scutari and shatter its lances against the fairy minarets of Stamboul; to catch the swing and plash of the rowers rounding their _caiques_ by the bridge of Galata; to wander through bazaar and market, dotting down splashes of robe, turban, and sash; to rest for hours in cool tiled mosques, which in their very decay are sublime; to study a people whose rags are symphonies of color, and whose traditions and records breathe the sweetest poems of modern times.

And then, when we have caught our breath, let us wander into any one of the patios along the Golden Horn, and feast our eyes on columns of verd-antique, supporting arches light as rainbows, framing the patio of the Pigeon Mosque, the loveliest of all the patios I know, and let us run our eyes around that Moorish square. The sun blazes down on glistening marbles; gnarled old cedars twist themselves upward against the sky; flocks of pigeons whirl and swoop and fall in showers on cornice, roof, and dome; tall minarets like shafts of light shoot up into the blue. Scattered over the uneven pavement, patched with strips and squares of shadows, lounge groups of priests in bewildering robes of mauve, corn-yellow, white, and sea-green; while back beneath the cool arches bunches of natives listlessly pursue their several avocations.

It is a sight that brings the blood with a rush to one's cheek. That swarthy Mussulman at his little square table mending seals; that fellow next him selling herbs, sprawled out on the marble floor, too lazy to crawl away from the slant of suns.h.i.+ne slipping through the ragged awning; that young Turk in frayed and soiled embroidered jacket, holding up strings of beads to the priests pa.s.sing in and out--is not this the East, the land of our dreams? And the old public scribe with the gray beard and white turban, writing letters, the motionless veiled figures squatting around him--is he not Baba Mustapha? and the soft-eyed girl whispering into his ear none other than Morgiana, fair as the meridian sun?

So, too, in my beloved Venice, where many years ago I camped out by the side of a ca.n.a.l--the Rio Giuseppe--all of it, from the red wall, where the sailors land, to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is ready to topple into the sea.

Not much of a ca.n.a.l--not much of a painting ground, really, to the masters who have gone before and are still at work, but a truly lovable, lovely, and most enchanting possession to me their humble disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and once out you are miserable until you get back again. On one bank stretches a row of rookeries--a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long brick wall of the garden--soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which ma.s.s and sway the great sycamores that Ziem loved, their lower branches interwoven with cinn.o.bar cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun drips gold.

Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pa.s.s--this ca.n.a.l of mine; only deep enough to let a wine barge slip through; so narrow you must go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola; so short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch of its water-surface part of everything about it, so clear are the reflections; full of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave s.p.a.ce--one moment in a broad laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from behind a cloud, its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next swept by flurries of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a mirror; then, when aroused by a pa.s.sing boat, breaking out into ribbons of color--swirls of twisted doorways, flags, awnings, flower-laden balconies, black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters--a bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any painter living or dead.

These are some of the joys of the painter whose north light is the sky, whose studio door is never shut, and who often works surrounded by envious throngs, that treat him with such marked reverence that they whisper one to another for fear of disturbing him.

And now for a few practical hints born of these experiences; and in giving them to you, remember that no man is more keenly conscious of his limitations than the speaker. My own system of work, all of which will be explained to you in subsequent talks, one on water-color and the other on charcoal, is, I am aware, peculiar, and has many drawbacks and many shortcomings. I make bold to give these to you because of my fifty years' experience in outdoor sketching, and because in so doing I may encourage some one among you to begin where I have left off and do better. The requirements are thoughtful and well-studied selection before your brush touches your canvas; a correct knowledge of composition; a definite grasp of the problem of light and dark, or, in other words, _ma.s.s_; a free, sure, and untrammelled rapidity of execution; and, last and by no means least, a realization of what I shall express in one short compact sentence, that _it takes two men to paint an outdoor picture: one to do the work and the other to kill him when he has done enough_.

Before entering on the means and methods through which so early a death becomes permissible I shall admit that the personal equation will largely a.s.sert itself, and that because of it certain allowances must be made, or rather certain variations in both grasp and treatment will necessarily follow.

While, of course, nature is always the same, never changing and never subservient to the whims or perceptive powers of the individual, there are painters who will aver that they alone see her correctly and that all the world that differs from them is wrong. One man from natural defects may see all her greens or reds stronger or weaker than another in proportion to the condition of his eye. Another may grasp only her varying degrees of gray. One man unduly exaggerates the intensity of the dark and the opposing brilliancy of the lights. Another eye--for it is largely a question of optics, of optics and temperament--sees only the more gentle and sometimes the more subtle gradations of light and shade reducing even the blaze of the noonday sun to half-tones.

Still another, whether by the fault of over-magnifying power or long-sightedness, detects an infinity of detail in nature, and is not satisfied until each particular blade of gra.s.s stands on end like the quills of the traditional porcupine, while his brother brush strenuously a.s.serts that every detail is really only a question of ma.s.s, and should be treated as such, and that for all practical purposes it is quite immaterial whether a tree can be distinguished from a farm-house so long as it is fluffy enough to be indistinct.

These defects, sympathies, tendencies, whatever one may call them, only prove the more conclusively that there are many varying standards set up by many minds. That which can easily be proved in addition is that many a false standard owes its origin as often to a question of bad digestion as of bad taste. They also show us that no one man or set of men can rightfully lay claim to holding the one key which unlocks the mysteries of nature, while insisting that the rules governing their use of that key _must_ be adhered to by the rest of the world.

There are, however, certain laws which control every pictured expression of nature and to which every eye and hand must submit if even a semblance of expression is to be sought for. One of them is truth. In this all schools concur, each one demanding the truth, or at least enough of it to placate their consciences when they add to it a sufficient number of lies of their own manufacture to make the subject interesting to their special line of const.i.tuents. Among these I do not cla.s.s the lunatics who are to-day wandering loose outside of charitable asylums especially designed for disordered and impaired intellects, and whose frothings I saw at the last Autumn Salon.

But to our text once more, taking up the first requirement; namely, selection.

By selection I mean the "cutting out entire" from the great panorama spread out before you just that portion which appeals to you and which you want to have appeal to your fellow men.

Speaking for myself, I have always held that the most perfect reproductions of nature are those which can be _selected_ any day, under any condition of light, direct from the several objects themselves, without arrangement and fore-shortenings or twistings to the right and to the left. Nothing, in fact, seems to me so astounding as that any human mind could for an instant suppose that it can improve on the work of the Almighty.

If it is a street, and if you wish to express its perspective, and the bit of blue sky beyond, with a burst of sunlight illumining the corner, the figures crowded against the light, forming a ma.s.s in themselves, and it interests you at a glance, sit down and study it long enough to find out what feature of the landscape impressed you at _first sight_. If, as you look, the first impression becomes weakened, perhaps it is because the immediate foreground, which at the first glance was clear, is now dotted with pa.s.sers-by, thus obscuring your point of interest, or a cloud has pa.s.sed over the sky, lowering the whole tone, or the group of figures across the light has dispersed, exposing the ugly right-angled triangle of the flat wall and street level instead of the same lines being broken picturesquely with the black dots of heads of the crowd itself. In a moment it is no longer a composition of the same power that struck you at first. Perhaps while you sit and wait the scene again changes, and something infinitely more interesting, or the reverse, is evolved from the perspective before you. And so it goes on, until this constantly changing kaleidoscope repeats itself in its first aspect, until you have fairly grasped its meaning and a.n.a.lyzed its component parts. Or until either the effect that first delighted you, or the subsequent effect that charmed you still more, becomes a fixed fact in your mind. That, then, is the picture that you want to paint and that you are to paint _exactly as you saw it_. And if you can reproduce it exactly as you did see it, ten chances to one it will impress your fellow men. The trouble is that when you sit down to paint it you are so often lost in its detail that you forget its salient features, and by the time you have finished and blocked up the immediate foreground with figures that did not exist when you were first thrilled by its beauty, you have either painted its least interesting aspect, or you have filled that street so full of lies of your own that the policeman on the beat could not recognize it.

Of course, while all nature is interesting, there are parts of nature more interesting than other parts, and since the skill of man is inadequate to produce its more _humble_ effects, if I may so express it, the painter should be on the lookout for her _dramatic_ air, in order that when she is reproduced she may add that touch to her many qualities, thus meeting the painter half-way. Even in the perspective of a street, nature, in profound consideration of the devotee under his umbrella, often gives him a deeper touch--one wall perhaps in sudden brilliant light, while the vista of the street is in gloom made by a pa.s.sing cloud, she constantly calling out to the painter as he works: "Watch me now and take me at my best."

Or change this picture for an instant and note, if you please, the flight of cloud shadows over a mountain slope or the whirl of a wind flurry across a still lake. There are moments in all phenomena like these where a great man rising to the occasion can catch them exactly, as did Rousseau in the golden glow of the fading light through the forest, or Corot in the crisp light of the morning, or Daubigny in the low twilight across the sunken marshes where one can almost hear the frogs croak.

Selection, then, preceded by the deepest and closest thought as to whether the subject is worth painting at all, becomes necessary, the student giving himself plenty of time to study it in all its phases; time enough to "walk around it," reviewing it at different angles; noting the hour at which it is at its best and happiest, seizing upon its most telling presentment--and all this before he begins even _mentally_ to compose its salient features on the square of his canvas. You can turn, if you choose, your camera skyward and focus the top of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it is uninteresting, or rather unintelligible, until you focus also the church door, and the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that winds through the quiet graveyard. So a picture can be true and yet very much like a slip cut from a newspaper. For some men cut thus into nature, haphazard, without care or thought, and produce perhaps a square containing an advertis.e.m.e.nt of a patent churn, a railroad timetable, and a fragment of an essay on art. Cut carefully and with selection, and you may get a poem which will soothe you like a melody.

As to the value of the laws which govern the perfect composition, it is unquestionably true that a correct knowledge of these laws makes or unmakes the picture and establishes or ruins the rank of the painter. No matter how careful the drawing, how interesting the subject, how true the ma.s.s, how subtle the gradations of light and shade, how perfect the expression of the figures, or how transparent the atmosphere of a landscape, a want of this knowledge will defeat the result. On the other hand, a good composition--one that "carries,"

as the term is--one that can be seen across the room, if properly composed will instantly excite your interest, even if upon near inspection you are shocked by its crudities and faults. "I don't know what it is," says a painter, "but it's good all the same."

After your selection has been made, the next thing is to search for its centre of interest. When this is found it is equally important to weigh carefully the _quality_ of this centre of interest in order to determine whether, as has been said, the subject is worth painting at all. My own rule is to spend half the time I am devoting to my sketch in carefully weighing the subject in its every detail and expression.

Many men, I am aware, have endeavored to prove that there are eight or ten different forms of composition. My own experience and investigation are, of course, limited, but so far I have only been able to discover one, namely, the larger ma.s.s and the smaller ma.s.s: the larger ma.s.s dominating the centre of interest, which catches your eye instantly at first sight of a picture, and the smaller or less interesting object which next attracts your eye, and so relieves the vision and spares you the monotony of looking at a single object long and steadily, thus fatiguing the eye and dissipating the interest.

Having determined upon the _quality_ of the subject-matter and fixed its centre interest in pleasing relation to the whole, the next step is to confine yourself to all that _the eyes see at one glance_ and no more, or, in other words, that portion of the landscape which you could cut out with the scissors of your eye and paste upon your mind.

That which you can see when your head is kept perfectly still, your eye looking straight before you, only seeing so high, so low, and so far to the right and left, without a strain. The great sweep of vision, a sweep covering a hundred subjects perhaps, is obtained by turning the eyes up or down or sideways. But to be true--that is, to see one picture at a time--the eye should be fixed like the lens of a camera, the limit of the picture being the range of the eye and no more. A departure from this rule not only confuses your perspective but crowds a number of points of interest into the square of your canvas, when there is really only _one_ centre point before you in nature; and this one point you must treat as does the electrician in a theatre who keeps the lime-light on the star of the play.

Another requirement is rapidity of execution. I am not speaking of figure-drawing. I can well understand why the model grows tired, although the crude lay figure may not, and why the constant workings over and again upon the figure subject, the mosaicing (if I may coin a word) of the different points of the figure during the different hours of the day and the different days of the week deep into the canvas, may be necessary.

I am speaking of outdoor, landscape work, for which only four hours, at most, either in the morning or in the afternoon, can be utilized.

In this four hours nature keeps comparatively still long enough for you to caress her with your brush, and if you would truly express what you see, your work must be finished in that time. I can quite understand that to the ordinary student this is a paralyzing statement, but let us a.n.a.lyze it together for a moment and I think that we shall all see that if it were possible for a human hand to obey us as precisely as a human eye detects, the results on the canvas would be infinitely more valuable, first, because the sun never stands still and the shadows of one hour are not the shadows of the next; and second, because this moving of the sun is affecting not only the ma.s.s but the composition of the picture, one ma.s.s of buildings being in light at ten o'clock and again in shadow at eleven. It is also affecting its local color, the yellow of the afternoon sunlight illumining and graying the silver-blue of the shadows, thus weakening the force of positive shadows scattered through the composition. Of course, to be really exact, there is only one moment in any one of the hours of the day in which any one aspect of nature remains the same, but since we are all finite we must do the best we can, and four hours, in my experience, is all that a man can be sure of.

We have, of course, the next day to continue in, but then the landscape has changed. That delicate, transparent, gauzy cloud screen that softened the sky light was, under the northwest wind of yesterday, a clear, steely gray-blue, and the sun s.h.i.+ning through it made the sunlight almost white and the shadows a neutral blue; to-day the wind is from the south and a great ma.s.s of soft summer clouds, tea-rose color, drift over the clear azure, each one of which throws its reflected light on every object over which they float. The half you painted yesterday, therefore, will not match the half you must paint to-day, and so if you will persist in working on your same canvas you go on making an almanac of your picture, so apparent to an expert that he can pick out the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as you daily progressed. If you should be fortunate enough to work under Italian skies, where sometimes for days together the light is the same, the skies being one expanse of soft, opalescent blue, you might think under such influence it would be possible for you to perform the great almanac trick successfully in your sketch. But how about yourself? Are you the same man to-day that you were yesterday? If so, perhaps you might also find yourself in exactly the same frame of mind that existed when your sketch was half finished. But would you guarantee that you would be the same man for a week?

I believe we can maintain this position of the necessity of rapid work in out-of-door sketches by looking for a moment at the product of the best men of the last century, some of whom I have already mentioned.

Take Corot, for instance. Corot, as you know, spent almost his entire life painting the early light of the morning. An a.n.a.lysis of his life's work shows that he must have folded his umbrella and gone home before eleven o'clock. My own idea is that many hundreds of his canvases, which have since sold at many thousands of francs, were perfectly finished in one sitting. This cannot be otherwise when you remember that one dealer in Paris claims to have sold two thousand Corots. These one-sitting pictures to me express his best work. In the larger canvases in which figures are introduced--notably the one first owned by the late Mr. Charles A. Dana, of New York, called "Apollo," I believe--the treatment of the sky and foreground shows careful repainting, and while the mechanical process of the brush, shown by the over and under painting, the dragging of opaque color over transparent, may produce certain translucencies which the more forcible and direct stroke of the brush--one touch and no more--fails to give, still the whole composition lacks that intimacy with nature which one always feels in the smaller and more rapidly perfected canvases.

Note, too, the sketches of Frans Hals and see what power comes from the sure touch of a well-directed brush in the hand of a man who used it to express his thoughts as other men use chords of music or paragraphs in literature. A man who made no false moves, who knew that every stroke of his brush must express a perfect sentence and that it could never be recalled. Really the work of such a master is like the gesture of an actor--if it is right a thrill goes through you, if it is wrong it is like that player friend of Hamlet's who sawed the air.

This quality of "the stroke," by the by, if we stop to a.n.a.lyze for a moment, is the stroke that comes straight from the heart, tingling up the spinal column, down the arm, and straight to the finger-tips. Ole Bull had it when his violin echoed a full orchestra; Paderewski has it when he rings clearly and sharply some note that vibrates through you for hours after; Booth had it when drawing himself up to his full height as Cardinal Richelieu he began that famous speech, "Around her form I draw the holy circle of our faith"--his upraised finger a barrier that an army could not break down; Velasquez, in his marvellous picture in the Museum of the Prado in Madrid of "The Topers" ("Los Borrachos"); Frans Hals, in almost every canvas that his brush touched; and in later years our own John Sargent, in many of his portraits, but especially in his direct out-of-door studies, shows it; as do scores of others whose sureness of touch and exact knowledge have made their names household words where art is loved and genius held sacred.