This page has been validated.
Pre-Raphaelitism
31
might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking to one of the most distinguished among them, the author of several most valuable works, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in perspective. And in this state of general science our writers for the press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest trees in Mr. Hunt's "Sylvia," and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins' "Convent Thoughts," are out of perspective."[1]
It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful or unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false
- ↑ It was not a little curious, that in the very number of the Art Union which repeated this direct falsehood about the Pre-Raphaelite rejection of "linear perspective" (by the by, the next time J. B. takes upon him to speak of any one connected with the universities, he may as well first ascertain the difference between a graduate and an undergraduate), the second plate given should have been of a picture of Bonington's,—a professional landscape painter, observe,—for the want of aërial perspective in which the Art Union itself was obliged to apologize, and in which the artist has committed nearly as many blunders in linear perspective as there are lines in the picture.