In his book, Beauty and Art, published in 1897 by D. Appleton & Co., New York, Aldam Heaton argues that to begin to appreciate beauty we must study nature:
“Beyond doubt, we have to learn to see. No one ever quite sees a landscape until he has learnt to draw one; no one ever truly sees the beauty of flowers until he has tried to represent them – their exquisite forms and subtle gradations … no one knows the everlasting hills till he has learned something of their geology, of the action of water in their ravines, of the action of ice in bygone ages – of their history in fact.” (p.26)
‘First, let us consider Beauty of Colour. Nature must be our text-book, though we must not for one moment suppose the colouring of Nature, and of Art, can ever be thought of as identical … What we want above all things is temperance … Now, Nature is always temperate … even in the case of the very gayest flowering plant ever seen, a careful examination will reveal the fact that what to the careless observer seems a blaze of a certain tint, is in reality a mass of subtle gradations.” (p.28/29)
“A student of colour soon find out that beauty of colour begins with gradation, that the loveliness of graduated colour is so great that relatively, level colour is not beautiful at all; but he also finds out that there is no such thing as level colour in Nature – natural colour is always in a state of gradation.” (p.29)
“To turn for a moment to Form. As gradation is the condition of beauty in colour, so curvature is the ground for all loveliness in form … Curvature is the groundwork of beauty, but temperance again is the ruling power …One may find a hundred examples from Nature of this strenuously restrained curvature. One thinks of the leaves of holly and herberis as a multitude of exceedingly sharp and quickly rounded curves; but a careful examination shows them to be practically squares, with quite little points added for prickles, and the space between prickle and prickle is very nearly a straight line – very nearly but not quite.” (p.35/36)
