Photography has already exercised no inconsiderable influence upon art :
it is next to be the turn of Stereoscopy, if we put faith in the author of a rather remarkable pamphlet just published.* The gentleman in question, Mr. Lone, who professes to be a lawyer's clerk,—disguising, we imagine, his real name and quality,—entertains the idea that pictorial art must be assimilated to the effects of the stereoscope, and that the means for accomplishing this end would be to draw and paint with both hands. With this process, art is to be a new thing, and the artist a new man. Mr. Lone does not profess to announce in what precise manner the two hands are to be brought into play ; but he says—" One artist has put the matter to the proof, and with good approximative effects, and in so doing, has suggested a bimanual method which I had never thought of. This method consists in holding the brush or pencil with both hands at once, and not in employing, as I had conceived, two pencils." —Now we happen to have seen the artist adverted to at work, (in the sketchiest of manners, certainly,) and did not perceive that the result approximated to stereoscopic effect ; nor, indeed, do we see how that process, where both hands draw the same line simultaneously, can, in any proper sense be said to be the production of "one picture proceeding from right to left, married to another picture proceeding from left to right." Yet how otherwise the principle is to be carried out, short of painting two separate pictures of the same subject, and looking at them through a stereoscopic instrument, we are as much at a loss to see as Mr. Lone himself. And, after all, supposing the thing achieved, we think lie overvalues its importance. Increased truth of relief, solidity, and re- lative dimension, would make a picture more illusive, but in no sense that we can perceive greater, when effected by means purely mechanical ; although it would undoubtedly be an advance which, _as in the case of perspective, once discovered, cannot be neglected. 31r. Lone writes in the exalts style of a man dominated by a pet idea ; but there is original and ingenious suggestion in his pamphlet, which, with dry caustic touches here and there, commends it as a readable exposition of a cu- rious speculation. A letter from a friend to the author, printed at the end of the pamphlet, points out Mr. Wallis's Academy picture of the dead Chatterton as eminently stereoscopic in its truth.
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