Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures

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About this book

Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures is a handbook for students and lovers of art by H. R. Poore, published in New York and London in 1903. It is dedicated to the author's first teacher, Peter Moran. The preface says students have many aids to decorative art but little on pictorial composition, and that hints on judging pictures were added to help many people come to know pictures.

The text calls composition the science of combination. One passage points to the Renaissance painters for notable examples. Another discusses groups of figures in religious pictures and names works such as the Transfiguration, the Sistine Madonna and the Virgin Enthroned. A further passage quotes W. J. Stillman on the revival of art and touches on Turner and Ruskin and their view of nature.

About the author

Henry Rankin Poore

Henry Rankin Poore worked as an American painter, illustrator, teacher, lecturer, and critic whose books translated studio experience into arguments about visual judgment. The conception of art, issued by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1913 and later revised, asks what art means across periods and schools rather than treating taste as an unexplained instinct.