D COMPOSITION.

Of the system upon which drawing was taught by the Egyptian masters, we
know nothing. They had learned from experience to determine the general
proportions of the body, and the invariable relations of the various parts
one with another; but they never troubled themselves to tabulate those
proportions, or to reduce them to a system. Nothing in what remains to us
of their works justifies the belief that they ever possessed a canon based
upon the length of the human finger or foot. Theirs was a teaching of
routine, and not of theory. Models executed by the master were copied over
and over again by his pupils, till they could reproduce them with absolute
exactness. That they also studied from the life is shown by the facility
with which they seized a likeness, or rendered the characteristics and
movements of different kinds of animals. They made their first attempts
upon slabs of limestone, on drawing boards covered with a coat of red or
white stucco, or on the backs of old manuscripts of no value. New papyrus
was too dear to be spoiled by the scrawls of tyros. Having neither pencil
nor stylus, they made use of the reed, the end of which, when steeped in
water, opened out into small fibres, and made a more or less fine brush
according to the size of the stem. The palette was of thin wood, in shape a
rectangular oblong, with a groove in which to lay the brush at the lower
end. At the upper end were two or more cup-like hollows, each fitted with a
cake of ink; black and red being the colours most in use. A tiny pestle and
mortar for colour-grinding (fig. 160), and a cup of water in which to clip
and wash the brush, completed the apparatus of the student. Palette in
hand, he squatted cross-legged before his copy, and, without any kind of
support for his wrist, endeavoured to reproduce the outline in black. The
master looked over his work when done, and corrected the errors in red ink.

[Illustration: Fig. 160.--Pestle and mortar for grinding colours.]

[Illustration: Fig. 161.--Comic sketch on ostrakon in New York Museum.]

[Illustration: Fig. 162.--Vignette from _The Book of the Dead_, Saite
period]

[Illustration: Fig. 163.--Vignette from _The Book of the Dead_, from
the papyrus of Hunefer.]

The few designs which have come down to us are drawn on pieces of
limestone, and are for the most part in sufficiently bad preservation. The
British Museum possesses two or three subjects in red outline, which may
p