Line: An Art Study

by Edmund J. Sullivan

Written by a noted illustrator and teacher, this guide introduces the basics of line drawing. British artist Edmund J. Sullivan, who merges the traditional nineteenth-century style of illustration with elements of Art Nouveau, begins by introducing readers to the freehand drawing of abstract lines and advances to the freehand drawing of natural forms, consisting mainly of plane surfaces or single lines.
Subsequent chapters illustrate and discuss representations of the third and fourth dimensions, the picture plane, formal perspective, and the drawing of solid objects, including their depiction in shade and shadow, and their modelling. Additional topics include shadows, reflections, and aerial perspective as well as figure drawing.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Edmund Joseph Sullivan (1869-1933), also known as E. J. Sullivan, was a British book illustrator.

Reviews

[Carly]

~2.5

There are some books that just don’t stand the test of time, and honestly, I think this is one of them.

From the blurb, I expected this book to be right down my alley. A book about the fundamentals of drawing, written by a teacher and illustrator from the early twentieth century, that covers everything from basic perspective to figure drawing? Count me in. Unfortunately, the reality wasn’t such a great fit.

While I wouldn’t recommend this to an aspiring artist, it might be an enjoyable read for an art historian. Sullivan talks quite a lot about contemporary times and practices--often with racial epithets thrown in--and his opinions illustrate the disconnect between generations at that time. For example, he has a section about “War and Art Students” in which he expresses the opinion that the War--that’s the Great War, a.k.a. World War I, where over a third of the British soldiers suffered casualties-- had

“Little effect upon the outlook of the normal student. Those who left their studies and return seem in the main to look upon the war as a hyphen between the serious businesses of life--an interruption of their studies, like, an ill-spent vacation. They have been through hell and appear to have forgotten.”

(Pardon me while I laugh hollowly.) The section on art supplies was basically incomprehensible to me, but someone familiar with antique pens and materials might find it fascinating. While I can’t see myself needing to correctly express heraldry in black and white, it’s certainly interesting to know that such things were still a concern in the 20s. Sullivan also remembered a time when left-handedness was indeed considered sinister, and the left hands of such children were tied behind their backs to teach them to use the right hand.

Possibly my disappointment is due to a mismatch of expectations. I expected an instructional art text, with lots of pretty diagrams and helpful notes, but quite a bit of the book is a treatise on the artist’s beliefs about art. While there are a few pretty diagrams, they’re generally floating disconsolately amidst a wall of text. Considering it is an art book, Line is impressively wordy, and not just in terms of the text-to-illustration ratio. Sullivan writes in a flowery, overblown style that would make Charles Dickens blush. Just trying to distinguish the objects and subjects of the sentences tended to leave me with a headache. A few examples:

“While wishing to insist on a close study of Nature, it is not intended to inculcate a photographic or imitative reproduction of the external facts observed. Equally with Nature, Art and its purposes and its conventions must be taken into account, with the necessity for selection from the mass, the choice of the right means to employ, in order to present the selection when made, and the method of that presentation either simple or complex.”

“He suddenly realized that he was speaking to a generation that had sprung up to whom the names so familiar to him were but names of lives remote--that he was telling of a vanished time which to these youngsters was as ancient as the history of Greece and Rome, out of which he, like a newly-discovered gramophone of the period, had, by the chance touch of a spring, been set going, so that they heard in the present a voice speaking from the past.”

When I managed to disentangle the sentences, I learned quite a lot about Sullivan’s thoughts on good versus bad art, but I didn’t learn all that much about the principles of line.

My favourite sections tended to be those that focused on basic principles, and -- I’m not ashamed to say it-- had illustrations. When the illustrations were present, they tended to be brilliant-- Sullivan drew the same image multiple times in different ways to demonstrate the different techniques. In my favourite section of all, Sullivan drew the same picture multiple times with different types of shading and crosshatching. It was amazing to see how drastically the direction of the shading lines changed the tone of the piece itself.

Overall, if you’re interested in art history and looking for a book that illustrates the clash between generations, then Line might be an enjoyable read. If you’re looking for a book to help you draw better, however, you may want to give this a miss.

~~I received an advanced reader copy of this ebook through Netgalley from the publisher, Dover Publications, in exchange for my (depressingly) honest review.~~

[Tracey]

Long, long ago, in a fantasyland not that far away, I went to art school. I don't do much with that part of my brain any more, but now and then I cherish fond hopes of doing a Victor Frankenstein on whatever talent I had/have (*kzot* "It's alive!!"). Hence my interest in "Line".

What I didn't realize when I requested it, or when I started reading it, was that this was a Dover reprint of a book originally written in 1922. I mean, look at that cover. (The Goodreads description cites it; the Netgalley description did not.) My first clue was – well, the language. Apart from that, which might just have been a stylistic choice, nothing really raised any suspicion that this wasn't a new, slightly pedantic book. My ears figuratively perked up at his discussion of a "new" instrument that sounded interesting. I enjoyed the advice ("Altogether preferable to the stick charcoal is the Siberian compressed charcoal" and "Hard smooth forms are often best expressed by a swift line") and opinion ("if an artist can become pleasurably excited about the handling of a tool, that tool is for the time being the best possible"). I learned that "etching" means "biting", "and refers, not, as is frequently thought, to the use of the needle, but to the use of the acid." And I enjoyed the glimpses of the author's humor: "The present writer once ventured to introduce this definition of the two processes as “biting and scratching” into the draft of an official report; but it never got beyond the draft, being considered too vivid and undignified for an official document.

But then, all of a sudden, there appeared "the 'n' word", used quite casually. That was a shock. Yup – definitely not a recent release.

If you can get past that, and can settle happily into the rather elaborate writing style, I recommend this highly. It made me chuckle; it made me want to go stock up on Siberian compressed charcoal and go sit in a field somewhere. That I didn't do the latter is my fault. That the author used an unfortunately common-for-the-time derogatory isn't really his.

Received from Netgalley for an honest review - thanks!

[Wayne McCoy]

'Line' by Edmund J. Sullivan is a book written in 1922.

Like most art instruction books written today, this book starts with a chapter on materials, then works into things like abstract lines and arguments about cross-hatching. Dimensional drawing and the idea of drawing solid objects. The last few chapters get more philosophical in nature about the nature of art and even life and death.

It is a book from a previous time, and as such has terms we no longer consider acceptable. In spite of that, I found it an interesting read on the nature of drawing versus being all about technique alone.

I received a review copy of this ebook from Dover Publications and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this ebook.

[fleegan]

So I started reading this art book because I enjoy having both a fiction and nonfiction book going at the same time. I didn't look into the book, just chose it purely by the cover (Surely not, book nerd! Oh, yeah. I'm a sucker for good artwork.)

As I started reading it I thought, "Damn, this guy talks fancy." and as it when on I thought, "Like, real fancy. This guy sounds like he's from 100 years ago."
Then I ran across a racial slur and I was all, "No way! Am I reading a time machine?!" and I went back to the small print at the beginning and saw that, indeed, it was written nearly 100 years ago, and that the publisher regrets some of the more ignorant of language but that they decided to keep it like it was, for I dunno, reasons historical or whatnot.

This book is not an instructional book. I would never recommend this book for how-to-draw purposes. It is more of a philosophical book about lines and art and what makes something beautiful. It was a delight to read! Mostly. There were several racial slurs in it and every time I read one it threw me completely out of the book, and honestly, I think the publisher or whoever could've taken them out or AT LEAST replaced it with the word negro and added an asterisk or something.

So I did enjoy the chapters where the author got real deep into "What's a point?" and "What's a line?" and reading about the different pens at the time was a trip! But my favorite chapter was the one on beauty. It was really thought-provoking and had me thinking if we still have the same perception of beauty today and how universal beauty is. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

If you want a philosophical look at drawing, or enjoy deep thoughts about lines and beauty, or are just an Art Nerd like me, I think you'll get a kick out of this book, IF you can overlook a few ignorant words.

[Nick Mullins]

This is a book from a different time period. On the one hand, that means that Sullivan references people and ideas that have no meaning in a contemporary context. On the other hand, it also means he has assumptions and uses terms most of us don't use today, including racist ones.

With that caveat out of the way, Sullivan makes a lot of helpful observations about line work. He comes from an earlier era of pen-and-ink and so the style he supports is not as popular anymore. But many of his observations are helpful to anyone working with line.

Still, I think the book could be a lot more succinct and there are concepts about line that he doesn't touch on. To be fair, that may be due to his time period as well. He is writing before concepts like the Gestalt principles.

Overall, I was hoping for more from this book, but it has a lot of great nuggets. But you have to dig for them and ignore some out-of-date attitudes.

[Lailatun Nadhirah]

Menarik. Asas pembelajaran garisan, cross-hatching dan stroke. Boleh guna ilmu untuk screen tone juga

[Daniel]

This review originally published in Looking For a Good Book. Rated 3.5 of 5

This book got off to a very slow start for me. Initially I wondered what sort of artist with OCD might find this book enjoyable? It reads like a technical manual. But I stuck with it and found quite a few gems of wisdom within the pages.

The book is a much older book, probably from the turn of the century (19th to 20th). At one point the author, Edmund J. Sullivan, mentions:

I remember about 1890 making a drawing in which the endeavor was to represent all that came within the field of vision at a given moment.

1890? Yes, this book is that old, and there is much within to remind the reader that we are reading something historical here. First, there's the often now-inappropriate racial slurs. The terms Sullivan uses may have been acceptable, or even common, a hundred years ago, but today, the 'N' word is to be avoided. This bodes for a little editing of these older books.

Next, some of the topics Sullivan discusses no longer seem relevant, or at least it strikes this reader as surprising that the issues would be discussed. For instance, are there really people who question cross-hatching?

The question is often asked whether cross-hatching should be employed in drawing or not, as though there were virtue or the opposite in the mere employment of it regardless of all considerations of how and when and where.

And what would artists like Terry Redlin or Charles Wysocki, or any other artist who provides a lot detail in the work think of Sullivan's comment:

Over-emphasis on detail detracts from the large simplicity of the whole, and should be carefully guarded against.

Which is not to say Sullivan is 'wrong,' but some artists have done quite well with detail.

The further I got into the book the more I appreciated Sullivan's philosophic look at line art.

The purpose of a work of art will dictate which point of view the artist should adopt – whether stress should be laid upon the type or upon the individual.

A drawing rightly begun starts with the points and lines of the most vital significance; so that no matter how little time may be given to it, or what interruption may prevent its carrying to the intended may prevent its carrying to the intended conclusion, nothing can rob it of this vitality, arising from the artist’s energy of mind as well as from the character of the object.

This isn't precisely a how-to manual. It is, as the sub-title states, a study. it is a philosophic look at the art of the line, as used in art, and it's a beautiful book, providing you can over-look the century-old style of writing and the very incorrect racial references. This is highly recommended for those interested in art.

Looking for a good book? Line: An Art Study, shows signs of age, but is a beautiful look at the importance of 'line' in art.
I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.