Word: draughtsmanship
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Dates: during 1923-1923
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Orpen's principal preoccupations appear to be draughtsmanship and " balance " of composition. Touching the non-graphic arts only in the sculpture of Donatello and Michelangelo and the reliefs of Ghiberti, the book scarcely fulfills its inclusive title. Orpen strives to be religiously impersonal in his praise, but his painter's predilections for Botticelli, Giorgione, Moroni, Lotto, Holbein, Hals, Velasquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Hogarth, Raeburn, Richard Wilson, shine through. Conspicuously omitted from mention is Andrea del Sarto...
...modernist painting, about which both laity and the profession rage, is not painting at all. It is " the art of color " and has developed by a historical accident through the medium of oil, pigment and canvas, to which it bears no essential relation. The true, traditional painting is pictorial draughtsmanship. Its tools are line and mass, black, white and gray. Its function is decoration in public and private buildings. It reached its apex in Rubens (1577-1640), and since then no fundamental advances have been made - merely improvements in method, conquests of technical problems, emotionally impotent. To the great masters...