Part 15 (1/2)

[BH] ”Would not the design have looked better, to us, on the plate than on the print? On the plate, the reins would be in the left hand; and the whole ht? The two different forms that the radiance takes would syht, would they not?”

[BI] Strutt, pp 97-8, ed 1801

[BJ] Explained as ”a game still played by the shepherds, cowkeepers,”

etc, in the midland counties

[BK] See Iliad, 20, 145

[Illustration: XI

”Obediente Domino voci hominis”]

APPENDIX

ARTICLE I

NOTES ON THE PRESENT STATE OF ENGRAVING IN ENGLAND

229 I have long deferred the completion of this book, because I had hoped to find tirounds for , and the study of it, since the development of the e of art But I am more and more busied in what I believe to be better work, and can only with extreht

These, in several important particulars, have been curiously enforced on me by the carelessness shown by the picture dealers about the copies from Turner which it has cost Mr Ward and ether to enable ourselves to make ”They are only copies,” say they,--”nobody will look at them”

230 It never seeraving also is 'only a copy,' and a copy done with refusal of color, and with disadvantage ofshade But just because this utterly inferior copy can be reduplicated, and introduces a different kind of skill, in another material, people are content to lose all the coinal,--so far as these depend on the chief gift of a _painter_,--color; while they are graduallyto the painter hiraver to radually and subtly prevented fro could never render Further, it continually happens that the very best color-coreat spaces at equal pitch, and the green is as dark as the red, and the blue as the brown; so that the engraver can only distinguish them by lines in different directions, and his plate becoue and dead mass of neutral tint; but a bad and forced piece of color, or a piece of work of the Bolognese school, which is everywhere black in the shadows, and colorless in the lights, will engrave with great ease, and appear spirited and forcible Hence engravers, as a rule, are interested in reproducing the work of the worst schools of painting

Also, the idea that the ht and shade, has prevented theto render works dependent mainly on outline and expression; like the early frescoes, which should indeed have been the objects of their most attentive and continual skill: for outline and expression are entirely within the scope of engraving; and the scripture histories of an aisle of a cloister raved, to perfection, with little iven by ordinary workio, or imitate the texture of a dress by Sir Joshua,--and both, at last, inadequately

231 I will not loseout of the existing system: but will rapidly state what the public should now ask for

1 Exquisitely careful engraved outlines of all re frescoes of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in Italy, with soas may be explanatory of their hts brilliantly relieved The Arundel Society have published soelico,--not, however, paying respect enough to the local colors, but conventionalizing the whole too much into outline

2 Finished s and etching of popular illustrated books have been endlessly mischievous to public taste: they first obtained their power in a general reaction of the public , brought on it by servile persistence in hack work for ignorant publishers The last dregs of it raved for cheap ladies' pocket-books But the woodcut can never, educationally, take the place of serene and acco artists in whoift of delineation prevails over their sense of color, to the production of scholarly, but sive a hitherto unconceived dignity to the character and range of our popular literature

3 Vigorous inally present noble contrasts of light and shade Many Venetian works are n by painters theraved in few lines--(_not_ etched); and with such insistence by dotted work on the iven fro

5 On the other hand, the men whose quiet patience and exquisite e and costly plates, such as that of the Belle Jardiniere de Florence, by M Boucher Desnoyers, should be entirely released fro colored copies, or light drawings, froinal work The same number of hours of labor, applied with the like conscientious skill, would multiply precious likenesses of the real picture, full of subtle veracities which no steel line could approach, and conveying, to thousands, true knowledge and unaffected enjoy; while the finished plate lies uncared for in the portfolio of the virtuoso, serving only, so far as it is seen in the printseller'sby the people, tomust always be dull, and unnatural

232 I have na to study the present qualities and methods of line-work, it is a pleasant and sufficient possession, uniting every variety of texture with great serenity of unforced effect, and exhibiting every possible artifice and achieveed, or of close and open line; artifices for which,--while I itimate, and could not be practiced in a revived school of classic art,--I would fain secure the reader's reverent admiration, under the conditions exacted by the school to which they belong Let him endeavor, with the finest point of pen or pencil he can obtain, to iray background of the water surface; let hiood lens, the way in which the lines of the background are ended in a lance-point as they approach it; the exact equality of depth of shade being restored by inserted dots, which prepare for the transition to the manner of shade adopted in the flesh: then let him endeavor to trace with his own hand soe of the eyelid, or in the rounding of the lip; or if these be too iradate the folds of the hood behind the hair; and he will, I trust, begin to cohtful hich would be within the reach of such an artist, employed with more tractable material on more extended subject

233 If, indeed, the present syste thethe ht be pleaded in defense of its severity

But all these plates are entirely above the means of the lower middle classes, and perhaps not one reader in a hundred can possess himself, for the study I ask of him, even of the plate to which I have just referred What, in the stead of such, he can and does possess, let hi the noble qualities of this conscientious engraving