Silverpoint

Lineage of Forrest · English · 1819 to 1900

John Ruskin

The eye that drew one capital, one rock, one branch, until it was understood.

Ruskin, the great Victorian critic, was also a draughtsman of ferocious accuracy who believed drawing was a way of seeing rather than a way of making pictures. His studies of Venetian capitals, Abbeville gables, Alpine rocks and single boughs were made to understand the thing, and The Elements of Drawing (1857) is still the most useful book a beginner can read: it begins with a pen and a square inch of shading.

He drew in pencil, pen and wash, usually of a fragment rather than a whole view, and that is the lesson: draw one window of the close, one bay of the abbey, completely, before you attempt the facade. His Modern Painters chapter on the truth of trees is the best thing ever written about branch logic.

Fortresses in Tyrol, near Mals (recto); Castle in Lenzburg (verso), Ruskin, 1839/1900
Art Institute of Chicago

Ruskin, Fortresses in Tyrol, near Mals (recto); Castle in Lenzburg (verso), 1839/1900. Graphite (recto and verso) on buff wove paper.

The Art Institute of Chicago · Gift of Charles Deering McCormick, Brooks McCormick, and the Estate of Roger McCormick

What to steal

  1. 1Draw the fragment. One capital, one bough, one course of stones, all the way to understanding.
  2. 2Shading as a slow, even skin laid with a fine point, never a smudge.
  3. 3Look longer than you draw.

How to look

  • Find the part he finished and the part he abandoned. The finished part is the subject.
  • Count the courses of masonry he actually drew.

Studies 3 guided · 12 plate copies

All 15 →

Works

15 public-domain