Breadth

Breadth is a term used by painters and critics to indicate that artistic quality which gives concentration, repose, and harmony of effect to a picture. In a work distinguished by breadth, the individual component parts do not force themselves unduly upon the spectator, the eye is not tempted to wander aimlessly from point to point of the canvas; in such a picture we do not feel inclined to count the several bricks of the artistic structure, but we are led to admire the general proportion and total effect of the building. Breadth of effect is most commonly and readily attained by massing the shadows, and skilfully leading the eye through the half-tones to the brilliant concentration of the highest lights; and of this mode of treatment the portraits and figure-pieces of Rembrandt are typical and unsurpassable examples. The introduction of the triangular spaces of shadow, which appear so frequently in the foreground of Waterloo's etchings, and in the landscape-work of his contemporaries, is a well-known conventional and mechanical device for securing breadth of effect. Breadth, however, may—in the hands of an accomplished painter—be attained more subtly when the greater part of the canvas is kept in full sunshine and the spaces of shadow minimised (instead of the points of light, as in the practice of Rembrandt above referred to); and of this method of attaining breadth the most perfect examples that art has yet presented are the later landscapes of Turner. The term 'breadth of handling,' or 'a broad touch,' is used to express certain characteristics of manipulation, to designate the practice of a painter who works with a full brush, and aims less at minute and searching expression of detail than at truth and beauty of general tone, effect, and relation.