Educ HARVARD COLLE SEP 1 1906 LIBRARY GE Miss E. W. Withey Copyright, 1903, by Frank Aborn IT is by fine examples and the intelligent execution of drawings of them that the taste for art is most surely cultivated. As the understanding broadens, exercise in design and emotional expression becomes practicable and effective. When drawings are made by a hit-or-miss process they can only be caricatures tending to demoralize taste rather than to cultivate it, and exercise in design is impracticable and ineffective. The plan for instruction in drawing outlined in these pages aims to indicate methods of successfully bringing about those changes in the understanding of what is required, and in the ordinary methods of procedure which make for skill, and also to make the teaching of drawing a prime factor in true art education, by fostering that prime factor of art, appreciation of excellence. This system is not experimental. It contains nothing untried or unproved, nothing unpractical, ineffective, unessential. It is believed to be the first real system of instruction in drawing. It has all the essentials of a system, viz.: A definite beginning and progress by orderly stages to a definite ending; provides specific means for establishing intelligence preparatory to execution; prescribes a definite and practical method of effectually utilizing observation and illustration, two potent coördinate agencies in understanding and execution; grades the conditions or forms of subject-matter presentation according to the obviousness of the means and requirements of execution incidental to each condition; and eliminates the element of chance by specific and adequate operations. September, 1903. YSTEMATIC instruction in drawing is a simple matter. Its salient features and the practicable expedients essential to carrying it on may be comprehensively explained in a very limited space. A drawing can never be anything but an arrangement of lines. The arrangement of lines constituting a drawing can never be anything but a copy of another arrangement of lines which constitutes its subject. The arrangement of lines which constitutes the real subject of a drawing can never be anything but an image in the mind. The image which constitutes the real subject of a drawing can never be wholly original, but is derived more or less from something else, which it is sometimes like and sometimes unlike. It may be derived from another drawing or print, in which case the image which is the real subject of the drawing will be a facsimile of that from which it is derived; it may be derived from an object, in which case it may be no more like that from which it is derived than a straight line is like a circle; or it may be a pure invention, in which case it will be derived from many different things and be a facsimile of no one of them. But whatever the image which is the real subject of a drawing may be derived from, or whether it is in any respect like that from which it is derived, makes no difference; the real subject of a drawing can, under any |