Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures. Henry Rankin Poore
Taken with a Wide Angle Lens
Photography Nearing the Pictorial
The Path of the Surf--Photo (Triangles Occuring in the leading line); The Shepherdess--Millet (Composition Exhibiting a Double Exit)
Circular Observation--The Principle; The Slaying of the Unpropitious Messengers (Triangular Composition--Circular Observation)
Huntsman and Hounds (Triangle with Circular Attraction); Portrait of Van der Geest--Van Dyck (A sphere within a Circle)
Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne--Tintoretto (Circle and Radius); Endymion--Watts (The Circle--Vertical Plane)
The Fight Over the Body of Patroclus--Weirls; 1807--Meissonier; Ville d'Avray--Corot; The Circle in Perspective
The Hermit--Gerard Dow (Rectangle in Circle); The Forge of Vulcan--Boucher (Circular Observation by Suppression of Sides and Corners)
Orpheus and Eurydice--Corot (Figures outside the natural line of the picture's composition); The Holy Family--Andrea del Sarto (The circle overbalanced)
The Herder--Jaque
Alone--Jacques Israels (Constructive Synthesis upon the Vertical); The Dance--Carpeaux (The Cross Within the Circle)
Sketches from Landscapes by Henry Ranger; Parity of Horizonatals and Verticals; Crossings of Horizontals by Spot Diversion
Sketch from the Book of Truth--Claude Lorrain (Rectangle Unbalanced); The Beautiful Gate--Raphael (Verticals Destroying Pictorial Unity)
Mother and Child--Orchardson (Horizontals opposed or Covered); Stream in Winter--W. E. Schofield (Verticals and Horizontals vs. Diagonal)
Hogarth's Line of Beauty
Aesthetics of Line; The Altar; Roman Invasion--F. Lamayer (Vertical line in action; dignified, measured, ponderous); The Flock--P. Moran (The horizontal, typifying quietude, repose, calm, solemnity); The curved line: variety, movement; Man with Stone--V. Spitzer (Transitional Line, Cohesion); The Dance--Rubens (The ellipse: line of continuity and unity); Swallows--From the Strand (The diagonal: line of action; speed)
Aesthetics of Line, Continued, Where Line is the motive and Decoration is the Impulse; Winter Landscape--After Photograph (Line of grace, variety, facile sequence); Line Versus Space (The same impulse with angular energy, The line more attractive than the plane); Reconciliation--Glackens (Composition governed by the decorative exterior line); December--After Photograph (Radial lines with strong focalization)
Unity and its Lack; The Lovers--Gussow; The Poulterers--Wallander
Return of Royal Hunting Party--Isabey; The Night Watch--Rembrandt
Departure for the Chase--Cuyp (Background Compromising Original Structure); Repose of the Reapers--L. L'hermite (The Curvilinear Line)
The Decorative and Pictorial Group; Allegory of Spring--Botticelli (Separated concepts expressing separate ideas); Dutch Fisher Folk--F. V. S. (Separated concepts of one idea); The Cossack's Reply--Repin (Unity through a cumulative idea)
Fundamental Forms of Chiaroscuro; Whistler's Portrait of his Mother; Moorland--E. Yon; Charcoal Study--Millet; The Arbor--Ferrier
Fundamental Forms of Chiaroscuro, Continued; Landscape--Geo. Inness; The Kitchen--Whistler; St. Angela--Robt. Reid; An Annam Tiger--Surrand; The Shrine--Orchardson; Monastic Life--F. V. DuMond
A Reversible Effect of Light and Shade (The Same Subject Vertically and Horizontally Presented)
Spots and Masses; Note-book sketches from Rubens, Velasquez, Claude Lorrain and Murillo
Death of Caesar--Gerome; The Travel of the Soul--After Howard Pyle
Bishop Potter
Decorative Evolving the Pictorial; The North River--Prendergast; An Intrusion--Bull; Landscape Arrangement--Guerin
Stable Interior--A. Mauve (A simple picture containing all the principles of composition); Her Last Moorings--From a Photograph
Alice--W.M. Chase (Verticals Diverted); Lady Archibald Campbell--Whistler (Verticals Obliterated); The Crucifixion--Amie Morot (Verticals Opposed)
PART I
“The painter is a compound of a poet and a man of science.”
—Hamerton
“It is working within limits that the artist reveals himself.”
—Goethe.
[pg 11]
CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTORY
This volume is addressed to three classes of readers; to the layman, to the amateur photographer, and to the professional artist. To the latter it speaks more in the temper of the studio discussion than in the spirit didactic. But, emboldened by the friendliness the profession always exhibits toward any serious word in art, the writer is moved to believe that the matters herein discussed may be found worthy of the artist's attention—perhaps of his question. For that reason the tone here and there is argumentative.
The question of balance has never been reduced to a theory or stated as a set of principles which could be sustained by anything more than example, which, as a working basis must require reconstruction with every change of subject. Other forms of construction have been sifted [pg 12] down in a search for the governing principle—a substitution for the “rule and example.”
To the student and the amateur, therefore, it must be said this is not a “how-to-do” book. The number of these is legion, especially in painting, known to all students, wherein the matter is didactic and usually set forth with little or no argument. Such volumes are published because of the great demand and are demanded because the student, in his haste, will not stop for principles, and think it out. He will have a rule for each case; and when his direct question has been answered with a principle, he still inquires, “Well, what shall I do here?”
Why preach the golden rule of harmony as an abstraction, when inharmony is the concrete sin to be destroyed. We reach the former by elimination. Whatever commandments this book contains, therefore, are the shalt nots.
As the problems to the maker of pictures by photography are the same as those of the painter and the especial ambition of the former's art is to be painter-like, separations have been thought unnecessary in the address of the text. It is the best wish of the author that photography, following painting in her essential principles as she does, may prove herself a well met companion along art's highway—seekers together, at arm's length, and in defined limits, of the same goal.
The mention of artists' names has been limited, and a liberal allusion to many works avoided because to multiply them is both confusing and unnecessary.
[pg 13]
To the art lover this book may be found of interest as containing the reasons in picture composition, and through them an aid to critical judgment. We adapt our education from quaint and curious sources. It is the apt correlation of the arts which accounts for the acknowledgment by an English story writer that she got her style from Ruskin's “Principles of Drawing”; and of a landscape painter that to sculpture he owed his discernment of the forest secrets, by daily observing the long lines of statues in the corridor of the Royal Academy; or by the composer of pictures to the composer of music; or by the preacher that suggestions to discourse had come to him through the pictorial processes of the painter.