When we leave this section of the "American Drawing-Book," we leave all
that is of practical value to the young artist. The prescription of any
particular mode of execution is always injurious, (if in any degree
effective,) for the reason that the student must not think of execution at
all, but simply what the form is which he wants to draw, and how he can
draw it most plainly and promptly. Decision of execution should always be
the result of complete knowledge of the thing to be drawn; if from any
other source, it will assuredly be only heedless scrawling, bad in
proportion as it is energetic and decided.
The chapter on Perspective is full and well illustrated, and useful to
architectural or mechanical draughtsmen, may-be, but little so to artists.
There are, indeed, no laws of perspective which the careful draughtsman
from Nature need ever apply, for his eye will show him the tendency of
lines and the relative magnitude of bodies quicker than he can find them
by the application of the rules of perspective,--and with much better
result, since all application of science _directly_ to artistic work
endangers its poetic character, and almost invariably gives rise to a
hardness and formalism the reverse of artistic, leading the artist to
depend on what he knows ought to be rather than on what he really sees, a
tendency more to be deprecated than any want of correctness in drawing.
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