Drawing Guide; Manual of Instruction in Industrial Drawing, Designed to Accompany Industrial Drawing Series. (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1 ORNAMENTAL ART AMONG DIFFERENT NA- TIONS, AND IN DIFFERENT PERIODS OF CIV- ILIZATION. I. ORNAMENT OF SAVAGE TRIBES. The desire for ornament is universal, and it increases with all people in the ratio of their progress in civilization. Every where it owes its origin to man's ambition to create ?to imitate the works of the Creator. In the tattooing of the human face the savage strives to increase the expression by which he hopes to strike terror on his enemies or rivals, or to create what appears to him a new beauty; and it is often surprising how admirably adapted are the forms and colors he uses to the purposes he has in view. After tattooing usually comes the formation of ornament by painting or stamping patterns on the skins used for clothing, or on woven cloths or braided matting. Then follows the carving of ornaments on their utensils or weapons of war. When the principal island of the Friendly group was first visited, one woman was found to be the designer of all the patterns on cloths, matting, etc., in use there; and for every new one, she received, as a reward, a certain number of yards of cloth. What strikes us especially in most ornamental work of savages, is the adherence to that rule of art which requires a skillful balancing of the masses, whether of form or color, and a judicious correction of the tendency of the eye to run in any one direction, by interposing lines that have an opposite tendency. (See Prop- ix.) Captain Cook, noticing the extent to which decoration was carried by the Islanders of the Pacific and South Seas, speaks of their cloths, their basket-work, their matting, etc., as painted " in such an endless variety of figures that one might suppose they borrowed their patterns from a mercer's shop, in which the most elegant production...