Finally we give a quotation from M. Adam Salomon, sculptor and photographer:—
“Each subject should be treated according to its own requirements, its own individualism.... When the artist is interested in his work and believes in his art, it becomes wonderfully plastic, and the materials wonderfully tractable in his hands.”
As practical hints for working cannot be woven into a continuous text, we will give them separately.
Never compete for prizes for “set subjects,” for work of this kind leads to working from preconceived ideas, and therefore to conventionality, false sentiment, and vulgarity.
Remember that the original state of the minds of uneducated men is vulgar, you now know why vulgar and commonplace works please the majority. Therefore, educate your mind, and fight the hydra-headed monster—vulgarity. Seize on any aspect of nature that pleases you and try and interpret it, and ignore—as nature ignores—all childish rules, such as that the lens should work only when the sun shines or when no wind blows.
Æolus is the breath of life of landscape.
The chief merit of most photographs is their diagramatic accuracy, as it is their chief vice.
Avoid the counsels of pseudo-scientific photographers in art matters, as they have avoided the study of art.
If you decide on taking a picture, let nothing stop you, even should you have to stand by your tripod for a day.
Do not climb a mast, or sit on the weathercock of a steeple, to photograph a landscape; remember no one will follow you up there to get your point of sight.
Do not talk of Rembrandt pictures, there was but one Rembrandt. Light your pictures as best you can and call them your own.
Do not call yourself an “artist-photographer” and make “artist-painters” and “artist-sculptors” laugh; call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother.
Remember why nearly all portrait photographs are so unlike the people they represent—because the portrait lens as often used gives false drawing of the planes and false tonality, and then, comes along the retoucher to put on the first part of the uniform, and he is followed by the vignetter and burnisher who complete the disguise.
The amount of a landscape to be included in a picture is far more difficult to determine than the amount of oxidizer or alkali to be used in the developer.
Pay no heed to the average photographer’s remarks upon “flat” and “weak” negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it.
Do not allow bad wood-cutters and second-rate process-mongers to produce libels of your work.
Be broad and simple.
Work hard and have faith in nature’s teachings.
Remember there is one moment in the year when each particular landscape looks at its best, try and secure it at that moment.
Do not put off doing a coveted picture until another year, for next year the scene will look very different. You will never be able twice to get exactly the same thing.
Vulgarity astonishes, produces a sensation; refinement attracts by delicacy and charm and must be sought out. Vulgarity obtrudes itself, refinement is unobtrusive and requires the introduction of education.
Art is not legerdemain; much “instantaneous” work is but jugglery.
Though many painters and sculptors talk glibly of “going in for photography,” you will find that very few of them can ever make a picture by photography; they lack the science, technical knowledge, and above all, the practice. Most people think they can play tennis, shoot, write novels, and photograph as well as any other person—until they try.
Be true to yourself and individuality will show itself in your work.
Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain.
Avoid prettiness—the word looks much like pettiness, and there is but little difference between them.
No one should take up photography who is not content to work hard and study so that he can take pictures for his own eye only. The artist works to record the beauties of nature, the bagman works to please the public, or for filthy lucre, or for metal medals.
At the University of Cambridge, in our student days, it was considered “bad form” to give a testimonial to a tradesman for publication. This is still “bad form;” let the student, therefore, never let his name appear in the advertisement columns of photographic papers beneath a puff of some maker’s plates or some printing papers. “Good wine needs no bush.”
The value of a picture is not proportionate to the trouble and expense it costs to obtain it, but to the poetry that it contains.
Good art only appeals to the highly cultivated at the first glance, but it gradually grows on the uncultivated, or the half cultivated; with bad art the case is otherwise.
Give the life of the model in a portrait, not his bearing towards you during a mauvais quart d’heure.
Do not call reflections—shadows; learn to distinguish between the two.
Always be on the look-out for a graceful movement when you are conversing with a person, thus you will learn.
Keep rigidly within the limits of your art, do not strive for the impossible, and so miss the possible.
Never judge of the merits of a painting or piece of sculpture from reproductions.
Every good work has “quality.”
Do not mistake sentimentality for sentiment, and sentiment for poetry.
Spontaneity is the life of a picture.
Continual failure is a road to success—if you have the strength to go on.
The colour of a landscape viewed in the direction of the sun is almost unseen; therefore turn your back on the sun if you wish to see nature’s colouring, and you do!
Do not emulate the producers of photographic Christmas cards and “artistic”(?) opals; they are all worthy of the bagman.
Do not mistake sharpness for truth, and burnish for finish.
The charm of nature lies in her mystery and poetry, but no doubt she is never mysterious to a donkey.
It is not the apparatus that does the work, but the man who wields it.
Say as much as you can, with as little material as you can.
Flatter no man, but spare not generous praise to really good work.
Lash the insincere and petty homunculi who are working for vanity.
Hold up to scorn every coxcomb who paints “artist-photographer” or “artist” on his door, or stamps it on his mounts.
Remember every photograph you publish goes out for better for worse, to raise you up or pull you down; do not be in haste, therefore, to give yourself over to the enemy.
By the envy, lying and slandering of the weak, the ignorant, and the vicious, shall you know you are succeeding, as well as by the sympathy and praise of the just, the generous, and the masters.
When a critic has nothing to tell you save that your pictures are not sharp, be certain he is not very sharp and knows nothing at all about it.
Don’t be led away to photograph bourgeois furnished interiors, they are not worth the silver on the plate for the pleasure they will give when done.
The greater the work the simpler it looks and the easier it seems to do or to imitate, but it is not so.
Photographic pictures may have one merit which no other pictures can ever have, they can be relied upon as historical records.
Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.
People are educated to admire nature through pictures.
Science destroys or builds up, and seeks only for bald truth. Art seeks to give a truthful impression of some beautiful phenomenon or poetic fact, and destroys all that interferes with her purpose.
Topography is the registration of bald facts about a place; it is sometimes confounded with Art.
The artistic faculty develops only with culture. A man may be a Newton and at the same time never get beyond the chromographic stage in art.
Without individuality there can be no individual art, but remember that the value of the individuality depends on the man, for all the poetry is in nature, but different individuals see different amounts of it.
Had Constable listened to rules we might have had “fiddle-brown” trees in our pictures to-day.
Nature is full of surprises and subtleties, which give quality to a work, thus a truthful impression of her is never to be found in any but naturalistic works.
The undeveloped artistic faculty delights in glossy and showy objects and in brightly coloured things. The appreciation of delicate tonality in monochrome or colour is the result of high development. The frugivorous ape loves bright colour, and so does the young person of “culture,” and the negress of the West Indies, but Corot delighted only in true and harmonious colouring.
Nature whispers all her great secrets to the sane in mind, just as she delights in giving her best physical prizes to the sane in body. |Busy insanity.| Nature abhors busy insanity.
Do not be surprised if you find “stolen bits” of your photographs in the works of inferior etchers, aquarellists, and black and white draughtsmen; it pays them to steal, while it does not hurt you, for they cannot steal your “quality.”
Many photographers think they are photographing nature when they are only caricaturing her.
The sun when near the horizon gives longer shadows than when near the zenith.
When writers tell you photography is one thing and art another, find out who they are, and you shall find their opinion on art-matters is contemptible, and it is only their omniscient impudence and fanaticism that allow them to contradict a sculptor like Adam Salomon, and a painter like T. F. Goodall, to say nothing of others.
The shallow public like “clearness,” they like to see the veins in the grass-blade and the scales on the butterfly’s wing, for does it not remind them of the powerful vision of their periscopic ancestors—the Saurians.
When the vulgar herd jape at photography, stand firm and ask them if their long-eared ancestors did not jape at water-colour painting and at etching.
Ask of critics only “fair play.” Much of the criticism of to-day consists in the suppression of the truth of the author and the advocacy of the falsity of the critic. Criticism is as yet in the metaphysical stage, but it will one day become rational and of some worth. Then, critics will not attempt the huge joke of “placing” people in order like a pedagogue, e.g. Matthew Arnold between Gray and Wordsworth, as some wonderful person did not long ago in one of the reviews; but criticism will show us how works of art may serve to illustrate the life-history of different epochs. The huge farce of “placing” criticism will be one of the stock jokes of the twentieth century.
By the term “decorative,” we mean the ornamentation of anything constructed for some useful or special purpose as opposed to the ornamentation whose object is to please per se. Thus, though both sculpture and easel pictures are decorative in one sense, they are executed with no consideration or regard for other purposes than to please. As we have before shown, the humblest of the decorative arts may be raised to the dignity of a fine art if an artist takes the work in hand and succeeds, or the work may degenerate into mere craftsman’s work. For decorative purposes, the various methods are modified and adapted to the important considerations of the use and fitness of the object or place decorated. Thus no good artist would paint a finished and studied landscape on a dado, he would paint the scene flat, and colour it in appropriate harmony with surrounding objects, for that is the aim; and a workman not an artist would, of course, painfully elaborate and finish it so that it was neither a decorative work nor a painting in the ordinary sense. |Naturalism in decorative art.| In all good decorative work the same old story of naturalism holds good; all the best decorative work we have seen was suggested by nature, and though, of course, it is beyond the scope of decorative art to “copy nature,” as superficial folk say, yet all patterns and forms and harmonies should be suggested by nature. We have seen harmonies of sea-weed and sand which would have made a beautiful colour scheme for decorative work. The best decorative work has always been suggested by nature; geometrical patterns being taken from crystals, microscopic drawings of vegetable cells, &c.
However, we must omit a general discussion of this interesting subject, for we are here only concerned with its photographic side. We are not aware that this application of decorative art has ever received much attention; and when we mention transparencies and enamels, we have said all that has been done towards employing photography decoratively. By enamels, of course, is not understood those glossed and raised productions on paper, which by some extraordinary blunder have been erroneously called enamels.
Now the photographer, who studies and hopes to excel at decorative photography, must remember that he must work on the same general principles as he does in producing pictures, that is, he must pay attention, in a broad way, to the tone of the room, to effects of contrast, to harmonies, to the effect of artificial lights and of complementary colours, and above all to naturalism. Thus a delicate landscape must not be enamelled on a tea-cup, for it is obviously false in principle to place a picture on a curved surface. Again, a palmetto leaf must not be burned into the tiles of a fireplace, the two are incongruous and incompatible. Taste and a regard for truth should govern all such work.
We will now briefly enumerate the uses to which photography might be put in decoration.
FOR PANELLING AND FRIEZES.
Much might be done in this direction by an appropriate choice of subject. For panels bits of landscape of strongly marked types, sea pieces, dead game, and plants might be admirably done. By landscapes of strongly marked type, we mean such things as a dead or leafless tree overhanging a pond, a pollarded willow in winter, and like subjects, where the elements are few, the composition simple, and where there are no subtle atmospheric effects. For this work the subject must be expressed with great terseness and directness, for the form is what is required, not subtlety of tone or mystery. A group of dead mallard or teal, or an arrangement of bulrushes and water-lilies, are all suitable and admirable subjects. |Negatives.| Negatives for this class of work should be rather dense, and in some cases they may be as sharply focussed as possible, it being remembered that for form (diagrammatic form) decision is what is required. There are certain subjects, however, which will bear being only just suggested, such as bulrushes, reeds, &c., which are full of character in themselves. These objects should be photographed against flat-tinted backgrounds, the colour chosen being ruled by the colour of the furniture of the room. |Red carbon.| The best method of procedure would be to sensitize the panel and print directly on to it by the platinotype process, or perhaps by some of the carbon processes, red carbon being especially suitable for this work. The Platinotype Company give directions for sensitizing various surfaces, all of which can be obtained from their offices in Southampton Row, High Holborn.
For friezes, beautiful arrangements could be made of suitably draped figures of girls, of athletes, and of animals, the draped figures being in white, taken against a black background. These subjects printed in red carbon would look admirable if properly arranged. Enlargements could be used in these cases, as it does not matter if the original negatives are made microscopically sharp. Various subjects and methods of treatment will suggest themselves to the thoughtful and artistic student.
We cannot help thinking there is a field for the photographic decoration of tiles. For this purpose, as they are low down and seen close to, tone pictures might be used; but any quality of landscape would not be admissible for this work. Mr. Henderson’s method of enamelling is fully given in the late Baden-Pritchard’s “Studios of Europe.” These tiles would have to be cautiously used.
There is little or nothing to be done in the decoration of windows by photography. Of course, transparencies will immediately suggest themselves, but they, like modern glass painting, are false art. The first requisite of glass painting is that all the light possible shall pass through the pane, and that the colours shall be flat. Modern window-painters overstep the limits of the art, and try to render tone as well, the result being bad artistically and bad decoratively, as utility is affected. Glass transparencies and opals are, to our mind, worthless for decorative purposes, and should not be encouraged.
M. Lafon de Camarsac was the first to apply photography to porcelain work, in the year 1854. He worked with colours and produced some marvellous results, applying gold, silver, and various pigments in this way. His method was used for producing enamels for jewellery, but, of course, such things could be utilized in decorative work. But to produce pictures on tea-cups, saucers, brooches, &c., seems to us, against all principles of truth. We think that with great care and taste this class of work might be artistically utilized in decorative art, but none but an artist must attempt it. So we shall give Poitevin’s method.
A positive on glass is obtained, and a glass plate is coated with gum sensitized with bi-chromate of potash. The positive is then placed in contact with the prepared plate and exposed to the light, the result being invisible as in carbon printing. A very fine hair sieve is now taken, and dry powdered charcoal is sifted over the coated plate, and it will be found that the charcoal adheres to the parts acted upon by light. Thus is produced a delicate portrait in as perfect tone as the original. This portrait is temporarily secured by brushing it over with collodion. The collodion film has now to be separated by delicate knives, and it brings away with it the charcoal picture. This film is next placed on a white enamelled copper plate, which plates are bought ready prepared, and a fixing paste (that used by ceramic painters being employed) is spread with a brush over the enamel. This paste combines with the charcoal image. All is now ready for placing in the enamelling furnace, when vitrification takes place, and all the organic bodies are destroyed, the vitrified charcoal image alone remaining. We think that with taste even china services might be decorated by means of photography. At any rate there is a wide field for any one with taste and feeling.
We do not know whether or not photography has been applied to the manufacture of either of these materials, but there is wide scope for it. It must be remembered, however, that definite patterns are obtrusive and undesirable. A rather monotonous geometrical pattern is required, the suggestion, however, coming from nature. Thus a good pattern could be obtained from a transverse section of a rose-bud, or from various seed-cases, such as those of the convolvulus and rose. Histological specimens also, and desmids and diatoms, all suggest beautiful and varied forms of geometrical patterns. This has often occurred to us when examining the wonderfully varied and beautiful forms of the diatom family. It would, it seems to us, be very easy with multiplying backs to get large numbers of a form on one plate, and then to reproduce them by cheap photo-mechanical means, and though we have never yet heard of photographic wall-papers, yet there is no reason why they should not be manufactured, if made artistically.
For hangings these same patterns might be woven in or even printed directly upon the materials, by the platinotype process. The company who brought forward that process keep prepared nainsook, why not other materials? For small things, such as d'Oyleys, an endless and pleasing variety might be introduced.
In short, photography can and should be made amenable to the principles of decorative art, and employed legitimately in thousands of ways; but the student must never forget that he must rigidly and resolutely keep within the bounds of his art, which bounds we have briefly indicated here. Common sense, taste, and study are his best safe-guards. In all attempts, however, let him go to nature for his suggestions; she, if he be humble and patient, will not be less lavish to him than to the painter. So we find ourselves at the end of this chapter, and our considerations on photography as applied to decorative art lead us to conclude that the form in which it is at present chiefly applied, i.e. transparencies, is false in principle, and therefore undesirable. We felt this long before we studied art at all, and although we made many opals and transparencies at one time, we soon gave them up as vanity and foolishness. Those, however, who with training and artistic feeling care to explore the undeveloped fields above indicated, will be sure to find many new treasures.