Flowers and plants for designers and schools / photographed from nature by Henry Irving, with text and notes by Edward F. Strange.

  • Edward Fairbrother Strange
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Flowers and plants for designers and schools / photographed from nature by Henry Irving, with text and notes by Edward F. Strange. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of ornament devised from plant-form or from anything else, there is one precept always to be borne in mind—to exercise himself constantly, with charcoal, in making rapid, bold, direct studies from the highest form of natural life—the human figure. A faithful observation of its infinite variety of line and subtlety of form and structure is the best and only preparation for the study of Nature in her lower phases. Presuming the designer to have acquired the technique necessary to enable him to specialize in the study of plants and flowers, there yet remains a word to be said as to his methods therein. Of late years, a tendency has been manifest to encourage certain conventions, easy enough to produce, which, to the generous eye of faith appear as the similitudes of flowers and leaves. A blob made with a brush charged with water-colour has a remote resemblance to a petal. Half-a-dozen of them, arranged around a central dot, may be likened unto a flower. And the changing of the colours, or thickening or elongating of the blobs, are under- stood to give the perpetrator the right to call his productions marigolds, daisies, primroses, cornflowers or what not. This process is called brush-work, instead of, as it should be, brush- play. The trick is simple enough ; and its results, to the unin- structed, are plausible and effective if the colour be kept clean. It may have an educational value of some importance to children; but the fallacy lies in its common confusion with nature study, for it is deadly poison to the would-be craftsman. He, if he would thrive, must learn his plant by heart. He must consider the wonderful engineering by which Nature builds it up from root to blossom ; its delicacy of tint; its endless play of line and gradation of contour ; the balance of leaf with leaf, and vein with vein within them; the promise of blossom that the bud holds forth ; “ the symmetry and proper disposition of organs ; ” the perfection of composition shown by a freely-grown and mature plant—each and all of these hold golden truths for -.the designer. They will teach him more about his craft than all the cant of the scholiast and the jargon of the text-books. He works, it is true, with symbols, conventions. There is no realism
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