ABSTRACT
Since the establishment of the training academies in the eighteenth century, the military have taught drawing as a navigation and exploratory tool. At Woolwich, Dartmouth and Great Marlow, gentlemen cadets and sailors were trained to analyse and record landscape and coastline as a means of neutralizing and controlling enemy space. Perhaps surprisingly, the practice is maintained today; the quality of drawing made by field gunners and reconnaissance scouts may lack the artistry of their eighteenth-century forebears, but it has in common the desire to schematize the act of looking, and to reduce drawing and note-taking to the essentials, using basic but tested methods of measuring and calibration by eye and hand.
