Pure drawing, however, whether it represent a dramatic event or a knee-joint, has a content that cannot be expressed by words, and is not necessarily directed towards literary expression. Just as a fragment of good sculpture pleases the connoisseur without any reference either to the whole original or to its spiritual significance, fine drawing can appeal to the lover of nature independently of indirect considerations.
What is the content of pure drawing? It is held by some that drawing or monochrome can suggest colour, and many people, some consciously, others unconsciously, attempt to represent in drawings the colours of figures and landscape. It seems a strange aberration to argue that by different intensities of the one colour various other colours can be suggested: it would not be more unreasonable to maintain that E flat and F could be suggested by striking the note G with varying strength. Now the draughtsman employs various intensities of his monochrome as light and shade by which to give roundness to his forms. But if on the same drawing he uses the same means in his attempt to express colour, a conflict would be at once set up between that which makes for form and that which would make for colour, and the result would generally be a confusion. Again, let one attempt to give red hair to a monochrome drawing of a man, and if the red be plain and unmistakable to all who are not the artist's accomplices, then the artist has succeeded; otherwise it is bootless to treat of colour and colour values (which of course must depend upon the existence of colour) in monochrome. Apart from theory, if we examine the drawings, etchings and monochromes of great artists, where do we find them attempting to give colour or colour values? The hundreds of costume studies by Rembrandt might have been done from white plaster models, and there are only a few exceptions where a man has, for instance, a black hat or cloak. But in these few instances the "colour" tone is applied with such discretion that the true representation of the form is scarcely, perhaps only theoretically, impaired: they certainly have gained nothing in colour value because no specific colour is manifest in them. In Rembrandt's, Claude's or Turner's drawings of landscapes the formation of the country, the architecture, &c., is expressed by line, light and shade, and enhanced by shadows cast from clouds and trees. If, in the drawings of masters, we should find objects darker or lighter than their position in the light would warrant, they have value (perhaps not quite a legitimate one) for balancing the composition as a flat pattern. They were never intended to suggest colour, nor do they. Yet, in spite of the failure to succeed, and contrary to logical argument and the practice of great draughtsmen, the student of most of the schools of Europe and America still persists in doing the hair dark, and, by attempting to give colour values to the clothes, breaks up the consistency of the whole. For the same reason that the sculptor uses uniformly coloured material in order that the natural light and shade may have full opportunity of making his forms manifest to the spectator, the draughtsman confines himself to giving light and shade only. If a monochrome has "colour tones," the effect is similar to that produced by a draped statue made out of variously coloured marbles--an inartistic jumble.