The text emphasizes the importance of drawing from nature, rather than copying drawings, as a fundamental educational method. Drawing is presented as a complement to language, especially beneficial for developing intellectual understanding. The author proposes that teaching this method from the first lesson can refine observation and understanding skills, distinguishing their teaching from traditional practices.
-- iij --
in which speech is recognized as insufficient and that it would make sensible in a few moments, if it could be aided by Drawing.
For the Deaf-Mutes, students of my father, Drawing, as we conceive it, is a kind of language. What is a compensation for these unfortunate ones should become, for us, happier, a wonderful complement to speech and writing?
Finally, we do not despair of demonstrating, in the course of this work, that Drawing will not only be a special instructional subject, but it will also be a method of teaching, in general, through the intellectual development it will necessarily produce, when a method of Drawing addresses not just the eyes, but also understanding, and chiefly consists in teaching something very important, which, however, few people had thought of, which is learning to see.
THE NECESSITY OF BEGINNING TO DRAW FROM NATURE FROM THE VERY FIRST LESSON.
Based on what has been previously stated, the real goal, the actual and serious use of Drawing, is to draw from nature, we establish here, in principle and in fact, through reasoning and experience, that the most prompt and reliable method, we might almost say the true and unique way to achieve the desired result, is to not start drawing in any other way than by training the student, from the first lesson, to reproduce the image of any object they will draw from nature. It is necessary that, from the beginning, the student gets used to not conceive Drawing other than after nature.
When you make a child draw from a drawing, ask them if they understand how that copy of nature they just copied was made. Giving students drawings to copy at the beginning somehow distorts their reason and sight. How many students have thus been condemned to never have a correct and accurate idea of Drawing!
Our starting point, as we can see, will have to establish a great difference between our method and the most generally accepted practices in Drawing teaching. It is also on this characteristic difference that we base our hope to produce a useful work.
The opinion we have already expressed regarding this fundamental point, in the Treatise on Simplified Perspective*, will receive some developments in this second work.
* Treatise on Simplified Perspective (preliminary), dedicated to S. A. R. Mademoiselle; preface, page vi.