On the
contrary, should the painting be large, the outline had better be
made small, and squared to transfer to the canvass.
In this last preparation of the design, the chief care of the student
will be the grouping, and the correct size and place of each figure;
also the perspective of the architecture and ground plan will now
have to be settled; a task requiring much patient calculation, and
usually proving a source of disgust to the novice not endowed with
much perseverance. But, above all, the quality to be most studied in
this outline design will be the _proportion_ of the whole work.
And with a few remarks on this quality, which might appropriately be
termed "constructive beauty in art," we will close this paper on "the
Design," as belonging more properly to the mechanical than the
intellectual side of art; as being rather the slow growth of
experience than the spontaneous impulse of the artistic temperament.
It is a feature in art rather apt to savor of conventionality to such
as would look on nature as the only school of art, who would consider
it but as the exponent of thought and feeling; while, on the other
hand, we fear it likely to be studied to little effect by such as
receive with indiscriminate and phlegmatic avidity all that is handed
down to them in the shape of experience or time-sanctioned rule.
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