The Pleasure and Beauty of Visual Form

It is often said that the pleasure of form as contrasted with that of color is an intellectual pleasure arising from the perception of relations (unity in variety, proportion, etc.). In a sense this is true, for, as I hope to show in the course of this essay, the appreciation of form as compared with the enjoyment of color is saturated, so to speak, with the more refined sort of intellectual activity. But the fact that certain varieties of the arts of form, more especially outline drawing, dispense with the pleasure of color, and even with that of light and shade, suggests that the pleasure of visual form includes a sensuous element as well as an intellectual. It will be my special aim in this paper to bring out this somewhat neglected factor in visual gratification, and to indicate, so far as it is possible, its importance among the several factors, which together compose what we call beauty of form.