A Child's Guide to Pictures

In our previous talk about color we have laid great stress on the relation of one color to another. We have not thought of red, for example, as beautiful by itself, but as one o...

At the beginning of our talks, you may remember, I told you I should not have much to say about the subjects of pictures. For I wished at the start to make you realise, that wha...

So far in our talk on color we have laid stress on three points: first, that color is light; secondly, that color is affected by light; thirdly, that the painter who is a colori...

It was mentioned in the previous chapter that artists may be divided into two classes: those who are particularly interested in the shape or form of what they see, and those who...

In the previous chapter we discussed balance and repetition as elements of composition. We have now to study another element--that of contrast. This also results from a natural...

We shall frequently hear the words tone, tonal, tonality, applied to pictures. People say, for example, this picture is rich in tone; that has fine tonal qualities; another has...

When we began to speak about composition we continually used the words “line and form.” Gradually, however, as we left the subject of formal composition and talked of naturalist...

We come now to the other arm of the Y, about which we spoke in a previous chapter. Landscape had been used as a background to the figures, until in the Seventeenth Century some...

Here is another example of geometric composition. It is also by Raphael and is painted on one of the walls in the same room that the _Disputá_ decorates. But, while the latter’s...

We have seen in the previous chapters how Raphael built up composition from a simple geometric plan, on the principles of repetition and contrast, rhythmically balanced. Other I...

Now that we have come to an end of our talk upon color, I must say a little about brushwork. I hope to show you that a good painter may use his brush in such a way that there is...

In the preceding chapters we have been studying _formal_, or _conventional_, composition. We have seen how the artists arrange their groups of figures and the position and gestu...

In _The Sower_, by Millet, we found that, though the composition was naturalistic, it was based upon the classic principle of rhythm of line. We shall not discover this principl...

Some of you, I expect, collect photographs of pictures in connection with your history studies. These portraits of the principal characters and pictures, illustrating great even...

We have seen that the characteristic of nature is abundance, while that of art is selection. Now let us note another difference between the two--nature is haphazard, art is arra...

In the previous chapter we talked about beauty, and noted that there were two kinds--beauty in nature and beauty in art. Let us now look a little more closely into this distinct...

When a few pages back I spoke of the _movement_ of the figures I was using the word as artists understand it. They do not mean by it that the figure is represented as moving its...

In the previous chapters we talked about the elements of composition. We found that the composition or arrangement of figures and objects in the picture is designed by artists f...