Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... LETTERS TO A YOUNG PROFESSOR SUMMARY OF A METHOD OF TEACHING DRAWING AND PAINTING INTRODUCTION The publication of my last pamphlet, "A Survey of Art Teaching," has caused a number of artists who find themselves in agreement with my ideas to ask me to publish a " Method." They consider that I can do no less, after my severe criticisms of the various methods of teaching actually in use. My judgment of the others, they declare, can only have been formed by comparing them with some method that I think better, and I ought therefore to submit this true method of mine to criticism. The true one! That is far too exclusive a word. There is not, and can never be, only one method. Every sensible teacher should have full liberty to construct his own method, provided always that he bases it upon true principles and rational deductions. My friends, however, insisted. The poorness of contemporary teaching seemed to them to be due to a general ignorance of true principles. If you believe yourself to possess such principles, they argued, it is your duty to make them known, and to spread them abroad. And further, even when your principles are once accepted, you have surely a way of your own of teaching them, which seems to you the best after your long practice and constant experiment. Could you not let that also be put to the test of criticism? I was, I confess, rather scared at the idea, and was disinclined to follow their suggestion, well meant as it was, when there appeared quite another motive for doing so. An old pupil of mine, a young artist of talent,1 who had just been appointed art master of one of our provincial art schools, begged me to help him by recapitulating to him the chief points of my method of teaching. And so I decided to...