[f. FORE- pref. + GROUND.]
1. That part of a view which is in front and nearest the observer; esp. as represented in a picture.
1695. Dryden, trans. Du Fresnoy’s Art of Painting, 167. All agree that white can subsist on the fore-ground of the Picture, and there be us’d without mixture.
1799. G. Smith, Laboratory, I. 353. Such as lie nearer the fore-ground you are to imitate according to nature.
1834. Medwin, Angler in Wales, II. 19. Scarcely a ripple broke against the base of the desolate crag—a fit foreground to the still more desolate prospect that the land presented.
1841. W. Spalding, Italy & It. Isl., II. 401. The admirable Massacre of the Innocents, a simple composition, in which two ruffians terrify a group of females and children, one of whom, a mother in the foreground, seated beside her two dead infants, and with clasped hands looking up to heaven, is expressive beyond any thing else that the artist ever painted.
b. fig. The most conspicuous or prominent position.
1816. Bentham, Chrestomathia, 347. Of the desirable property,—which on this occasion stands as the principal object, and occupies the fore-ground,—all-comprehensiveness, having for its synonym, as already explained, the word exhaustiveness, is the name.
1833. Macaulay, Ess., Walpole’s Lett. to Mann (1854), 264/2. He was content to be merely a commentator, to keep in the background, and to leave the foreground to the author whom he had undertaken to illustrate.
1873. Symonds, Grk. Poets, v. 127. For a certain space of time, the Æolians occupied the very foreground of Greek literature, and blazed out with a brilliance of lyrical splendor that has never been surpassed.
2. The ground in front of an object, rare–1.
1858. J. Martineau, Stud. Chr., 133–4. The high-priest … touched, with finger dipped in blood, the sacred lid (the Mercy-seat) and foreground of the Ark.
3. attrib.
1827. Steuart, Planter’s G. (1828), 362. Several groups of fine foreground Trees with extensive tops were already formed, and had attracted the notice of the scientific and the curious.
1887. Ruskin, Præterita, II. v. 165. I made two foreground studies in colour, of considerable beauty.
