Volltext Seite (XML)
4 THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. [January 2, 1891. economy and medical superstitions of a byegone age. In some cases the M.S. is not readily decipherable, not through any fault in reproduction, which is excellent throughout, but more on account of archaic abbrevia tions and old-fashioned modes of writing particular letters which are strange to the modern eye. But, taking the MS. as a whole, we may say that we frequently receive letters from worthy correspondents who do not write half so plainly as some of the per sons who contributed to this volume. But, although the caligraphy leaves little to be desired, we should not recommend our correspondents to copy the method adopted in this volume for writing formulae ; for there is a little too much of the careless, go-as-you-please, rule-of-thumb business about them. For instance, a formula for development would not be of much use if written in the following vague manner:— “ To Make PUFFE Paste. “ Take a quantety of fine flower, 4 whits of Eggs, a little rose water or other cold water ; mold your paste together, and beat it with your rollin-pin, for ye stiffer yu make it, ye better.” Here, again, is a curious relic of the superstitious medical knowledge of a long past period, an attempt at diagnosis which was no doubt, at one time, com monly put into practice. “How to Know ye K[rxa‘s] Evill. “ Take a ground worme alive and lay him upon ye swelling or sore and cover him with a leafe. Yf it be ye disease, ye worme will change, and turn into earth. Yf it be not, he will remain whole and sound.” This comical idea that a worm would not only turn, but would actually turn into earth, probably had its origin in the observation of worm-casts on the grass, which, taking so closely the form of the creature which made them, might give rise to the suggestion of actual transformation. But earth worms were apparently a favourite remedy for different complaints, for in this book they form one of the component parts in various mixtures of extreme nastiness. For example, there is a remedy « for ache, stitch, or swelling,” which begins thus :— “Take half a peck of earth-worms and putt them into hay to skowre themselves. ” The unfortunate worms, after sufficient scouring in the hay, are stamped small—and the effect of stamping small half a peck of earth-worms is a thing which the imagination does not care to dwell upon—and are then transferred to a quantity of wine, and the mixture is boiled until it is evaporated down to one half. The redeeming point in this precious concoction is that it is intended for external application only. But there are nastier remedies in this book which our fore fathers used to sip, if not with relish, with the firm conviction that good would accrue; and there is little doubt that in many cases their hopes would be realised, for faith in a remedy is half the battle, as every doctor knows. We must congratulate Mr. Weddell in giv ing us a literary treat which is of interest from so many points of view. NOTES ON PORTRAITURE. BY H. 1’. ROBINSON. No. 1. Of all the applications to which many branches of art have been put, that of portraiture is the most ancient, the most universal, and always has been the most popular. Indeed, it may be justly said that for portraiture art was invented. The persistence of its types is wonderful. According to tradition it began with a silhouette, and the same simple art is being revived by American photo graphers. What was the origin of portraiture? The time-worn tradition tells us that its simple rudiments were due to the Greek maiden who traced the outlines of the shadow of her lover on the wall, that she might be reminded of him when he had gone to the wars—a pretty myth that ought to be true. This is said to have happened about 800 b.C. ; yet this must have been a late date in the history of art, for Aristotle ascribes the invention to Euchir, who flourished about 400 years earlier. Other authors give the honour to other names, but all agree that its first appearance was among the Greeks, and that the earlier portraits represented the bare shadow, which was produced by circumscribing the figure with a single line only, and was the art they called Sciagraphia. After wards shading was added to give the appearance of roundness, but, as a quaint old writer puts it, “The advantages it brought to its inventors were so inconsider able that they still found it necessary to write under every individual piece the name of whatever it was designed to represent, lest otherwise the spectators should never be able of themselves to make the discovery.” The date I have mentioned as the time of the beginning of art, a little over three thousand years ago, seems a far- off time, yet art, and probably portraiture, was practised, it is calculated, quite two hundred thousand years earlier. We have direct evidence of the portraiture of pre-historic man in the outlines of extinct animals engraved on mammoth ivory, and discovered in the drift. We will skip a few thousand years, and come down to comparatively modern times. Portraiture has always been the chief purpose of art, at least numerically. In England scarcely any other form of pictorial art was practised until the last cen tury, if we exclude the art of miniature painting, of which we have such splendid examples in Missals and similar books. The English school can boast of the two greatest portraitists that ever lived, Holbein in the reign of Henry VIII., and Van Dyck in the time of Charles I. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the number of portrait painters must have been enormous, yet the names of very few of them have come down to us. We can scarcely go into an old country house without finding a collection of portraits, usually all very bad, and so much alike according to date that you would suppose they represented the ideal of the painter rather than the individual. The conventionality of pose was, it is said, once carried to such an extent that when, in the time of heavy perukes, it was the fashion to carry the hat under the arm, if a sitter insisted on being represented with his hat on his head, he was painted with two hats, one on his head, the other under the arm ; the painter would not give up his favourite pose. I have, however, never met with one of these double-hatted portraits. These family portraits are generally nameless as regards the painter,