Customer Reviews

Landscape Painting

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Apparently, someone took a copy of the original book, which is long out of print, scanned it using OCR software, and made a book out of it. Resultingly, there are chronic spelling errors. The word "motif", for example, is rendered "motive" over and over again. And the reproductions of paintings are awful -- and unnecessarily so, since high quality images of all these pictures were certainly available, and I for one would have been happy to pay twice the price to get them.

Now that I've got all of this off my chest...

If you're interested in landscape painting, I can't imagine a better book than this. Harrison lived to see the French impressionists blossom, and lived to see them re-evaluate their spot and dash system, and eventually discard it. He saw the American painters harvest the best of what the French discovered, and take landscape painting much farther. And he describes every bit of it.

I wish his description of the contemporary American method -- a "warm undertone and a cool overtone" -- were more thorough, and if anybody else ever described this method in detail, I've yet to find it.

But his explanation of refraction, of vibration, and particularly his marvelous chapter on composition, are as good as it gets. Read the book at night, because you'll want to go out into the field when the sun comes up.

I almost didn't buy this book due to the complaints about spelling and grammar as well as awful pictures. However I went ahead and am very pleased. I just received it and have read perhaps 6 or so chapters and found them thought provoking and informative and not at all difficult to read. I did not buy the book for the pictures (if that's what you are after, you will most likely be disappointed). The content is really good stuff and worth reading and re-reading and keeping around.

The guy is genius, this book is packed with good information about what makes a good landscape. A lot of the information gets rehashed by his sucessors, but he has a good succinct way of explaining things.

The negative is there are LOTS of errors in the print. It looks like they must have put an printed edition through a scanner, but didn't bother to proofread it. There lots of letters in words that are just wrong, an 8 for an s, a b for an h, an l for an f, you know the sort of thing scanners get wrong. It is very annoying.

Since the original is long out of print, I suppose we are lucky to have any edition available to us. Too bad they didn't take even a small amount of care in preparing it.

Thanks to forgottenbooks.org for reproducing this wonderful book. His instructions for the use of values and tones in painting the landscape are great. They are phrased differently than the way modern instructors phrase the same concepts. This somehow leads to a better understanding of how to implement these concepts using paint. The book references techniques I had heard of before, but in a way that explains how and why these techniques work, who used them, and their effect. Great book, you have to appreciate it for the information it conveys and not for its visual quality of reproduction. Anyone learning to paint the landscape should read it - up there with Carlson and Payne.

I bought this book on a whim and really wasn't expecting much. However I found the information to be quite good. There are chapters that weren't of much interest to me. like framing a painting and a few others that were outdated (some mediums and paints are no longer relevant for example). The illustrations are worthless as they appear to be photocopies of the original full-value black and white reproductions. The entire book is a facsimile reproduction and the text has been reproduced extremely large so until you get used to it it seems like a second grade reader. But for the price I can overlook such publication errors.

If you are looking to replicate painting in a realist style in the fashion of the last century this may be the book for you.

Good to see this reissued as a book, but before you buy, just be aware that the version of the book published by General Books LLC is very low quality version, put together using OCR scanning and an automated scanning device which can miss complete pages. Typos are frequent and there's no table of contents, also, there was absolutely no editing of the book. This is all stated on the publishers web site (google them and read the details). There are NO illustrations.

As long as you're aware of the quality issues....at least it's available.

This book is everything I expected, first published in 1910, not influenced by much of anything "Modern"; a snapshot view of art as it was at the turn of the twentieth century. So much has been written and published since -- I really wanted an objective and independant opinion -- this is one. A very good read.

I received maybe 75% of the books intended value. The OCR scan and print technology, "without an editor/proof reader", does not capture everything correctly and they are missing all the images. Not only misspelled words with the wrong characters substituted, but the formatting was thrown off as I was lost to what the author was trying to say. Lots of reader effort to get through this reading. The author has some good points to be made -- think I seachout another copy elswhere.

This was recommended by the leader of a workshop I took. It had been out of print, so I was happy that it had been reissued. However, I feel that a number of newer books were more helpful to me than this one was. As a new painter, I feel the need for more definitive guidance. This was a little chatty and vague for me.

Also, these days, most or all pictures are in color. These are all black and white. It shouldn't make a difference, but it does.