LEARNING

 

teaching

 

"If I were to run an art school, I should take a tall house, and I should put the model and the beginners in the top-story; and as a student's work improved I should send him down a floor, until at last he would work upon the level of the street, and would have to run up six flights of stairs every time he wanted to look at the model." Edgar Degas, quoted in Boisbaudron, 1911 p.xxxii.

"Among all the intellectual faculties that are brought into play in the study and practice of art, there is none which is of such importance as the memory; and yet, despite its importance, this faculty has, until now, never been the object of special study or of systematic training; and what little cultivation it has received has been most haphazard and left to chance." Lecoq de Boisbaudron, p.3

p.30 "It was agreed that the master and pupils should meet in a most beautiful spot, a sort of natural park. The deep shadows thrown by the trees in full leaf contrasted sharply with the blaze of light with which the open glade was flooded. A pond full of reflections lay at their feet. It was a perfect place, offering endless backgrounds for the human figure, with every possible effect and range of light and shade, exactly satisfying the purpose that I had in view. The models I had hired for the occasion had to walk, run, sit, and stand about in natural attitudes, either naked like the fauns of old, or clothed in draperies of different styles and colours.

...Often we would stop one of them with a shout, and beg him to stay a moment in some chance attitude that had struck us all....

 

p.38 The study of animals demands particularly the employment of the memory. It could be made the opportunity of reducing into the school course a form of work as noble as it is valuable, by turning the animals under observation out loose into the school grounds." Le Coq.