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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Outdoor Sketching, by Francis Hopkinson Smith
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Outdoor Sketching
+       Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914
+
+
+Author: Francis Hopkinson Smith
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2008  [eBook #27340]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTDOOR SKETCHING***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
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+
+
+
+
+
+OUTDOOR SKETCHING
+
+Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago
+
+The Scammon Lectures, 1914
+
+by
+
+F. HOPKINSON SMITH
+
+With Illustrations by the Author
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London]
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+
+Copyright, 1915, by
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+                       Page
+
+  I. Composition         3
+
+ II. Mass               39
+
+III. Water-Colors       75
+
+ IV. Charcoal          119
+
+
+
+
+Illustrations
+
+
+Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London   _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                      FACING
+                                                       PAGE
+
+Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames                    84
+
+The George and Vulture Inn, London                     136
+
+Diagram of Charcoal Technic                            142
+
+
+
+
+COMPOSITION
+
+
+My chief reason for confining these four talks to the outdoor sketch
+is because I have been an outdoor painter since I was sixteen years of
+age; have never in my whole life painted what is known as a studio
+picture evolved from memory or from my inner consciousness, or from
+any one of my outdoor sketches. My pictures are begun and finished
+often at one sitting, never more than three sittings; and a white
+umbrella and a three-legged stool are the sum of my studio
+appointments.
+
+Another reason is that, outside of this ability to paint rapidly
+out-of-doors, I know so little of the many processes attendant upon
+the art of the painter that both my advice and my criticism would be
+worthless to even the youngest of the painters to-day. Again, I work
+only in two mediums, water-color and charcoal. Oil I have not touched
+for many years, and then only for a short time when a student under
+Swain Gifford (and this, of course, many, many years ago), who taught
+me the use and value of the opaque pigment, which helped me greatly in
+my own use of opaque water-color in connection with transparent color
+and which was my sole reason for seeking the help of his master hand.
+
+A further venture is to kindle in your hearts a greater love for and
+appreciation of what a superbly felt and exactly rendered outdoor
+sketch stands for--a greater respect for its vitality, its life-spark;
+the way it breathes back at you, under a touch made unconsciously,
+because you saw it, recorded it, and then forgot it--best of all
+because you let it alone; my fervent wish being to transmit to you
+some of the enthusiasm that has kept me young all these years of my
+life; something of the joy of the close intimacy I have held with
+nature--the intimacy of two old friends who talk their secrets over
+each with the other; a joy unequalled by any other in my life's
+experience.
+
+There may be those who go a-fishing and enjoy it. The arranging and
+selecting of flies, the jointing of rods, the prospective comfort in
+high water-boots, the creel with the leather strap, every crease in it
+a reminder of some day without care or fret--all this may bring the
+flush to the cheek and the eager kindling of the eye, and a certain
+sort of rest and happiness may come with it; but--they have never gone
+a-sketching! Hauled up on the wet bank in the long grass is your boat,
+with the frayed end of the painter tied around some willow that offers
+a helping root. Within a stone's throw, under a great branching of
+gnarled trees, is a nook where the curious sun, peeping at you
+through the interlaced leaves, will stencil Japanese shadows on your
+white umbrella. Then the trap is unstrapped, the stool opened, the
+easel put up, and you set your palette. The critical eye with which
+you look over your brush case and the care with which you try each
+feather point upon your thumbnail are but an index of your enjoyment.
+
+Now you are ready. You loosen your cravat, hang your coat to some
+rustic peg in the creviced bark of the tree behind, seize a bit of
+charcoal from your bag, sweep your eye around, and dash in a few
+guiding strokes. Above is a changing sky filled with crisp white
+clouds; behind you, the great trunks of the many branched willows; and
+away off, under the hot sun, the yellow-green of the wasted pasture,
+dotted with patches of rock and weeds, and hemmed in by the low hills
+that slope to the curving stream.
+
+It is high noon! There is a stillness in the air that impresses you,
+broken only by the low murmur of the brook behind and the ceaseless
+song of the grasshopper among the weeds in front. A tired bumblebee
+hums past, rolls lazily over a clover blossom at your feet, and has
+his midday lunch. Under the maples near the river's bend stand a group
+of horses, their heads touching. In the brook below are the patient
+cattle, with patches of sunlight gilding and bronzing their backs and
+sides. Every now and then a breath of cool air starts out from some
+shaded retreat, plays around your forehead, and passes on. All nature
+rests. It is her noontime.
+
+But you work on: an enthusiasm has taken possession of you; the paints
+mix too slowly; you use your thumb, smearing and blending with a bit
+of rag--anything for the effect. One moment you are glued to your
+seat, your eyes riveted on your canvas; the next, you are up and
+backing away, taking it in as a whole, then pouncing down upon it
+quickly, belaboring it with your brush. Soon the trees take shape; the
+sky forms become definite; the meadow lies flat and loses itself in
+the fringe of willows.
+
+When all of this begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some
+lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf,
+or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a
+tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins
+that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The
+reaction comes the next day when, in the cold light of your studio,
+you see how far short you have come and how crude and false is your
+best touch compared with the glory of the landscape in your mind and
+heart. But the thrill that it gave you will linger forever!
+
+Or come with me to Constantinople and let us study its palaces and
+mosques, its marvellous stuffs, its romantic history, its
+religions--most profound and impressive--its commerce, industries, and
+customs. Come to revel in color; to sit for hours, following with
+reverent pencil the details of an architecture unrivalled on the
+globe; to watch the sun scale the hills of Scutari and shatter its
+lances against the fairy minarets of Stamboul; to catch the swing and
+plash of the rowers rounding their _caiques_ by the bridge of Galata;
+to wander through bazaar and market, dotting down splashes of robe,
+turban, and sash; to rest for hours in cool tiled mosques, which in
+their very decay are sublime; to study a people whose rags are
+symphonies of color, and whose traditions and records breathe the
+sweetest poems of modern times.
+
+And then, when we have caught our breath, let us wander into any one
+of the patios along the Golden Horn, and feast our eyes on columns of
+verd-antique, supporting arches light as rainbows, framing the patio
+of the Pigeon Mosque, the loveliest of all the patios I know, and let
+us run our eyes around that Moorish square. The sun blazes down on
+glistening marbles; gnarled old cedars twist themselves upward against
+the sky; flocks of pigeons whirl and swoop and fall in showers on
+cornice, roof, and dome; tall minarets like shafts of light shoot up
+into the blue. Scattered over the uneven pavement, patched with strips
+and squares of shadows, lounge groups of priests in bewildering robes
+of mauve, corn-yellow, white, and sea-green; while back beneath the
+cool arches bunches of natives listlessly pursue their several
+avocations.
+
+It is a sight that brings the blood with a rush to one's cheek. That
+swarthy Mussulman at his little square table mending seals; that
+fellow next him selling herbs, sprawled out on the marble floor, too
+lazy to crawl away from the slant of sunshine slipping through the
+ragged awning; that young Turk in frayed and soiled embroidered
+jacket, holding up strings of beads to the priests passing in and
+out--is not this the East, the land of our dreams? And the old public
+scribe with the gray beard and white turban, writing letters, the
+motionless veiled figures squatting around him--is he not Baba
+Mustapha? and the soft-eyed girl whispering into his ear none other
+than Morgiana, fair as the meridian sun?
+
+So, too, in my beloved Venice, where many years ago I camped out by
+the side of a canal--the Rio Giuseppe--all of it, from the red wall,
+where the sailors land, to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is
+ready to topple into the sea.
+
+Not much of a canal--not much of a painting ground, really, to the
+masters who have gone before and are still at work, but a truly
+lovable, lovely, and most enchanting possession to me their humble
+disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and once
+out you are miserable until you get back again. On one bank stretches
+a row of rookeries--a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies
+hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and
+patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the
+whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long
+brick wall of the garden--soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and
+lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which mass and
+sway the great sycamores that Ziem loved, their lower branches
+interwoven with cinnobar cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun
+drips gold.
+
+Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pass--this canal of
+mine; only deep enough to let a wine barge slip through; so narrow you
+must go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola;
+so short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch of its
+water-surface part of everything about it, so clear are the
+reflections; full of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave space--one
+moment in a broad laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from
+behind a cloud, its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next
+swept by flurries of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a
+mirror; then, when aroused by a passing boat, breaking out into
+ribbons of color--swirls of twisted doorways, flags, awnings,
+flower-laden balconies, black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside
+down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters--a
+bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in
+detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole
+scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any
+painter living or dead.
+
+These are some of the joys of the painter whose north light is the
+sky, whose studio door is never shut, and who often works surrounded
+by envious throngs, that treat him with such marked reverence that
+they whisper one to another for fear of disturbing him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now for a few practical hints born of these experiences; and in
+giving them to you, remember that no man is more keenly conscious of
+his limitations than the speaker. My own system of work, all of which
+will be explained to you in subsequent talks, one on water-color and
+the other on charcoal, is, I am aware, peculiar, and has many
+drawbacks and many shortcomings. I make bold to give these to you
+because of my fifty years' experience in outdoor sketching, and
+because in so doing I may encourage some one among you to begin where
+I have left off and do better. The requirements are thoughtful and
+well-studied selection before your brush touches your canvas; a
+correct knowledge of composition; a definite grasp of the problem of
+light and dark, or, in other words, _mass_; a free, sure, and
+untrammelled rapidity of execution; and, last and by no means least, a
+realization of what I shall express in one short compact sentence,
+that _it takes two men to paint an outdoor picture: one to do the work
+and the other to kill him when he has done enough_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before entering on the means and methods through which so early a
+death becomes permissible I shall admit that the personal equation
+will largely assert itself, and that because of it certain allowances
+must be made, or rather certain variations in both grasp and treatment
+will necessarily follow.
+
+While, of course, nature is always the same, never changing and never
+subservient to the whims or perceptive powers of the individual, there
+are painters who will aver that they alone see her correctly and that
+all the world that differs from them is wrong. One man from natural
+defects may see all her greens or reds stronger or weaker than another
+in proportion to the condition of his eye. Another may grasp only her
+varying degrees of gray. One man unduly exaggerates the intensity of
+the dark and the opposing brilliancy of the lights. Another eye--for
+it is largely a question of optics, of optics and temperament--sees
+only the more gentle and sometimes the more subtle gradations of light
+and shade reducing even the blaze of the noonday sun to half-tones.
+Still another, whether by the fault of over-magnifying power or
+long-sightedness, detects an infinity of detail in nature, and is not
+satisfied until each particular blade of grass stands on end like the
+quills of the traditional porcupine, while his brother brush
+strenuously asserts that every detail is really only a question of
+mass, and should be treated as such, and that for all practical
+purposes it is quite immaterial whether a tree can be distinguished
+from a farm-house so long as it is fluffy enough to be indistinct.
+
+These defects, sympathies, tendencies, whatever one may call them,
+only prove the more conclusively that there are many varying standards
+set up by many minds. That which can easily be proved in addition is
+that many a false standard owes its origin as often to a question of
+bad digestion as of bad taste. They also show us that no one man or
+set of men can rightfully lay claim to holding the one key which
+unlocks the mysteries of nature, while insisting that the rules
+governing their use of that key _must_ be adhered to by the rest of
+the world.
+
+There are, however, certain laws which control every pictured
+expression of nature and to which every eye and hand must submit if
+even a semblance of expression is to be sought for. One of them is
+truth. In this all schools concur, each one demanding the truth, or at
+least enough of it to placate their consciences when they add to it a
+sufficient number of lies of their own manufacture to make the subject
+interesting to their special line of constituents. Among these I do
+not class the lunatics who are to-day wandering loose outside of
+charitable asylums especially designed for disordered and impaired
+intellects, and whose frothings I saw at the last Autumn Salon.
+
+But to our text once more, taking up the first requirement; namely,
+selection.
+
+By selection I mean the "cutting out entire" from the great panorama
+spread out before you just that portion which appeals to you and which
+you want to have appeal to your fellow men.
+
+Speaking for myself, I have always held that the most perfect
+reproductions of nature are those which can be _selected_ any day,
+under any condition of light, direct from the several objects
+themselves, without arrangement and fore-shortenings or twistings to
+the right and to the left. Nothing, in fact, seems to me so
+astounding as that any human mind could for an instant suppose that it
+can improve on the work of the Almighty.
+
+If it is a street, and if you wish to express its perspective, and the
+bit of blue sky beyond, with a burst of sunlight illumining the
+corner, the figures crowded against the light, forming a mass in
+themselves, and it interests you at a glance, sit down and study it
+long enough to find out what feature of the landscape impressed you at
+_first sight_. If, as you look, the first impression becomes weakened,
+perhaps it is because the immediate foreground, which at the first
+glance was clear, is now dotted with passers-by, thus obscuring your
+point of interest, or a cloud has passed over the sky, lowering the
+whole tone, or the group of figures across the light has dispersed,
+exposing the ugly right-angled triangle of the flat wall and street
+level instead of the same lines being broken picturesquely with the
+black dots of heads of the crowd itself. In a moment it is no longer a
+composition of the same power that struck you at first. Perhaps while
+you sit and wait the scene again changes, and something infinitely
+more interesting, or the reverse, is evolved from the perspective
+before you. And so it goes on, until this constantly changing
+kaleidoscope repeats itself in its first aspect, until you have fairly
+grasped its meaning and analyzed its component parts. Or until either
+the effect that first delighted you, or the subsequent effect that
+charmed you still more, becomes a fixed fact in your mind. That, then,
+is the picture that you want to paint and that you are to paint
+_exactly as you saw it_. And if you can reproduce it exactly as you
+did see it, ten chances to one it will impress your fellow men. The
+trouble is that when you sit down to paint it you are so often lost in
+its detail that you forget its salient features, and by the time you
+have finished and blocked up the immediate foreground with figures
+that did not exist when you were first thrilled by its beauty, you
+have either painted its least interesting aspect, or you have filled
+that street so full of lies of your own that the policeman on the beat
+could not recognize it.
+
+Of course, while all nature is interesting, there are parts of nature
+more interesting than other parts, and since the skill of man is
+inadequate to produce its more _humble_ effects, if I may so express
+it, the painter should be on the lookout for her _dramatic_ air, in
+order that when she is reproduced she may add that touch to her many
+qualities, thus meeting the painter half-way. Even in the perspective
+of a street, nature, in profound consideration of the devotee under
+his umbrella, often gives him a deeper touch--one wall perhaps in
+sudden brilliant light, while the vista of the street is in gloom made
+by a passing cloud, she constantly calling out to the painter as he
+works: "Watch me now and take me at my best."
+
+Or change this picture for an instant and note, if you please, the
+flight of cloud shadows over a mountain slope or the whirl of a wind
+flurry across a still lake. There are moments in all phenomena like
+these where a great man rising to the occasion can catch them exactly,
+as did Rousseau in the golden glow of the fading light through the
+forest, or Corot in the crisp light of the morning, or Daubigny in the
+low twilight across the sunken marshes where one can almost hear the
+frogs croak.
+
+Selection, then, preceded by the deepest and closest thought as to
+whether the subject is worth painting at all, becomes necessary, the
+student giving himself plenty of time to study it in all its phases;
+time enough to "walk around it," reviewing it at different angles;
+noting the hour at which it is at its best and happiest, seizing upon
+its most telling presentment--and all this before he begins even
+_mentally_ to compose its salient features on the square of his
+canvas. You can turn, if you choose, your camera skyward and focus the
+top of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it is uninteresting,
+or rather unintelligible, until you focus also the church door, and
+the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that winds through the
+quiet graveyard. So a picture can be true and yet very much like a
+slip cut from a newspaper. For some men cut thus into nature,
+haphazard, without care or thought, and produce perhaps a square
+containing an advertisement of a patent churn, a railroad timetable,
+and a fragment of an essay on art. Cut carefully and with selection,
+and you may get a poem which will soothe you like a melody.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As to the value of the laws which govern the perfect composition, it
+is unquestionably true that a correct knowledge of these laws makes
+or unmakes the picture and establishes or ruins the rank of the
+painter. No matter how careful the drawing, how interesting the
+subject, how true the mass, how subtle the gradations of light and
+shade, how perfect the expression of the figures, or how transparent
+the atmosphere of a landscape, a want of this knowledge will defeat
+the result. On the other hand, a good composition--one that "carries,"
+as the term is--one that can be seen across the room, if properly
+composed will instantly excite your interest, even if upon near
+inspection you are shocked by its crudities and faults. "I don't know
+what it is," says a painter, "but it's good all the same."
+
+After your selection has been made, the next thing is to search for
+its centre of interest. When this is found it is equally important to
+weigh carefully the _quality_ of this centre of interest in order to
+determine whether, as has been said, the subject is worth painting at
+all. My own rule is to spend half the time I am devoting to my sketch
+in carefully weighing the subject in its every detail and expression.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many men, I am aware, have endeavored to prove that there are eight or
+ten different forms of composition. My own experience and
+investigation are, of course, limited, but so far I have only been
+able to discover one, namely, the larger mass and the smaller mass:
+the larger mass dominating the centre of interest, which catches your
+eye instantly at first sight of a picture, and the smaller or less
+interesting object which next attracts your eye, and so relieves the
+vision and spares you the monotony of looking at a single object long
+and steadily, thus fatiguing the eye and dissipating the interest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having determined upon the _quality_ of the subject-matter and fixed
+its centre interest in pleasing relation to the whole, the next step
+is to confine yourself to all that _the eyes see at one glance_ and no
+more, or, in other words, that portion of the landscape which you
+could cut out with the scissors of your eye and paste upon your mind.
+That which you can see when your head is kept perfectly still, your
+eye looking straight before you, only seeing so high, so low, and so
+far to the right and left, without a strain. The great sweep of
+vision, a sweep covering a hundred subjects perhaps, is obtained by
+turning the eyes up or down or sideways. But to be true--that is, to
+see one picture at a time--the eye should be fixed like the lens of a
+camera, the limit of the picture being the range of the eye and no
+more. A departure from this rule not only confuses your perspective
+but crowds a number of points of interest into the square of your
+canvas, when there is really only _one_ centre point before you in
+nature; and this one point you must treat as does the electrician in
+a theatre who keeps the lime-light on the star of the play.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another requirement is rapidity of execution. I am not speaking of
+figure-drawing. I can well understand why the model grows tired,
+although the crude lay figure may not, and why the constant workings
+over and again upon the figure subject, the mosaicing (if I may coin a
+word) of the different points of the figure during the different hours
+of the day and the different days of the week deep into the canvas,
+may be necessary.
+
+I am speaking of outdoor, landscape work, for which only four hours,
+at most, either in the morning or in the afternoon, can be utilized.
+In this four hours nature keeps comparatively still long enough for
+you to caress her with your brush, and if you would truly express what
+you see, your work must be finished in that time. I can quite
+understand that to the ordinary student this is a paralyzing
+statement, but let us analyze it together for a moment and I think
+that we shall all see that if it were possible for a human hand to
+obey us as precisely as a human eye detects, the results on the canvas
+would be infinitely more valuable, first, because the sun never stands
+still and the shadows of one hour are not the shadows of the next; and
+second, because this moving of the sun is affecting not only the mass
+but the composition of the picture, one mass of buildings being in
+light at ten o'clock and again in shadow at eleven. It is also
+affecting its local color, the yellow of the afternoon sunlight
+illumining and graying the silver-blue of the shadows, thus weakening
+the force of positive shadows scattered through the composition. Of
+course, to be really exact, there is only one moment in any one of the
+hours of the day in which any one aspect of nature remains the same,
+but since we are all finite we must do the best we can, and four
+hours, in my experience, is all that a man can be sure of.
+
+We have, of course, the next day to continue in, but then the
+landscape has changed. That delicate, transparent, gauzy cloud screen
+that softened the sky light was, under the northwest wind of
+yesterday, a clear, steely gray-blue, and the sun shining through it
+made the sunlight almost white and the shadows a neutral blue; to-day
+the wind is from the south and a great mass of soft summer clouds,
+tea-rose color, drift over the clear azure, each one of which throws
+its reflected light on every object over which they float. The half
+you painted yesterday, therefore, will not match the half you must
+paint to-day, and so if you will persist in working on your same
+canvas you go on making an almanac of your picture, so apparent to an
+expert that he can pick out the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as you
+daily progressed. If you should be fortunate enough to work under
+Italian skies, where sometimes for days together the light is the
+same, the skies being one expanse of soft, opalescent blue, you might
+think under such influence it would be possible for you to perform the
+great almanac trick successfully in your sketch. But how about
+yourself? Are you the same man to-day that you were yesterday? If so,
+perhaps you might also find yourself in exactly the same frame of mind
+that existed when your sketch was half finished. But would you
+guarantee that you would be the same man for a week?
+
+I believe we can maintain this position of the necessity of rapid work
+in out-of-door sketches by looking for a moment at the product of the
+best men of the last century, some of whom I have already mentioned.
+Take Corot, for instance. Corot, as you know, spent almost his entire
+life painting the early light of the morning. An analysis of his
+life's work shows that he must have folded his umbrella and gone home
+before eleven o'clock. My own idea is that many hundreds of his
+canvases, which have since sold at many thousands of francs, were
+perfectly finished in one sitting. This cannot be otherwise when you
+remember that one dealer in Paris claims to have sold two thousand
+Corots. These one-sitting pictures to me express his best work. In the
+larger canvases in which figures are introduced--notably the one first
+owned by the late Mr. Charles A. Dana, of New York, called "Apollo," I
+believe--the treatment of the sky and foreground shows careful
+repainting, and while the mechanical process of the brush, shown by
+the over and under painting, the dragging of opaque color over
+transparent, may produce certain translucencies which the more
+forcible and direct stroke of the brush--one touch and no more--fails
+to give, still the whole composition lacks that intimacy with nature
+which one always feels in the smaller and more rapidly perfected
+canvases.
+
+Note, too, the sketches of Frans Hals and see what power comes from
+the sure touch of a well-directed brush in the hand of a man who used
+it to express his thoughts as other men use chords of music or
+paragraphs in literature. A man who made no false moves, who knew that
+every stroke of his brush must express a perfect sentence and that it
+could never be recalled. Really the work of such a master is like the
+gesture of an actor--if it is right a thrill goes through you, if it
+is wrong it is like that player friend of Hamlet's who sawed the air.
+
+This quality of "the stroke," by the by, if we stop to analyze for a
+moment, is the stroke that comes straight from the heart, tingling up
+the spinal column, down the arm, and straight to the finger-tips. Ole
+Bull had it when his violin echoed a full orchestra; Paderewski has it
+when he rings clearly and sharply some note that vibrates through you
+for hours after; Booth had it when drawing himself up to his full
+height as Cardinal Richelieu he began that famous speech, "Around her
+form I draw the holy circle of our faith"--his upraised finger a
+barrier that an army could not break down; Velasquez, in his
+marvellous picture in the Museum of the Prado in Madrid of "The
+Topers" ("Los Borrachos"); Frans Hals, in almost every canvas that his
+brush touched; and in later years our own John Sargent, in many of his
+portraits, but especially in his direct out-of-door studies, shows it;
+as do scores of others whose sureness of touch and exact knowledge
+have made their names household words where art is loved and genius
+held sacred.
+
+And with this ability to record swiftly and surely there will come a
+certain enthusiasm, fanned to white heat when, some morning, trap in
+hand, you are searching for something to paint, your mind entirely
+filled with a certain object (you propose to paint boats if you
+please, and you have walked around them for minutes trying to get the
+best view and deciding upon the all-important best possible
+composition)--when, turning suddenly, you face a mass of buildings and
+a sweep of river that instantly put to flight every idea concerning
+your first subject, and in a moment a new arrangement is evolved and
+you are working like mad. It is only under this pressure of
+_enthusiasm_ that the best work is produced.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The coming landscape-painter will be a _four-hour man_, of thorough
+knowledge, one who has most intimate and close acquaintance with
+nature, one who can select and then seize the salient features of the
+landscape, at a glance arranging them upon the square of his canvas,
+in other words, composing them, the basis being the most expansive and
+most picturesque grouping of the several details of the subject,
+extracting at the same moment, at the same instant, with one sweep of
+his eye, the whole scheme of local color, and then surely, clearly,
+lovingly, and reverently making it breathe upon his canvas for other
+souls to live by.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And how noble the ambition!
+
+In our present civilization some men are moved to philanthropy, some
+to science, some to be rulers of men. Some men are brimful and running
+over with harmonies that will live forever. Other men's hearts beat in
+unison with the symphonies of the spheres, and Homer and Milton and
+Dante become household words. You seek another expression of the good
+that is in you. You will be painters and sculptors. Color, form, and
+mass are to you what the pen, the sword, and the lute are to those
+others who have gone before, or are now around you. Your mission is as
+distinct as theirs, and it is as imperative that you should fulfil
+it. Paint what you see and as you see it. Nothing more nor less. See
+only the beautiful, and if you cannot reach that content yourself with
+the picturesque. It is a first cousin but once removed.
+
+
+
+
+MASS
+
+
+The difference between composition and mass is that a composition is a
+mere outline of pen or pencil, each object taking its proper place in
+the square of a canvas, while mass is the filling in between these
+outlines either of varied color or in lights or darks, their
+gradations but so many guides to the spectator's eye marking not only
+its perspective, form and atmosphere, but, if skilfully done, telling
+the story of your subject at a glance.
+
+To do this the student must find the lightest light and darkest dark
+in the subject before him and, having found it, adhere to it to the
+end of his work. For as the sun dominates the sky and earth so do its
+rays dominate parts of the whole, making more luminous than the rest
+only one object upon which its light falls. To make this more
+explicit it is only necessary to look at an egg upon a white
+table-cloth. Here is a natural object devoid of local color except in
+reflected lights, and yet you will find that where the round of the
+egg reflects the light the highest light is found, while in the edge
+of the shadow, where the egg turns into the round--between that high
+light and the reflected light from the table-cloth, I mean--is found
+its darkest dark. But only one portion of that shadow, a point as
+large as the point of a pin, is the darkest dark. Everything else is
+gradation, from the highest light to the lowest light, the lowest
+light being almost a shadow; and from its darkest dark to its lightest
+dark the lightest dark again being almost a light.
+
+In landscape art these problems are greatly simplified. The sun is
+always the strongest light, and whatever comes against it, church
+tower, rock, palace, or ship under full sail, is the darkest object.
+In addition to this there is always some one point where the outdoor
+painter can find a lesser supplementary light and near it a lesser
+supplementary dark. Moreover, throughout the rest of the composition
+these same lights and darks are echoed and re-echoed in constantly
+decreasing gradations.
+
+You may apply these same tests everywhere in nature. Even in a gray
+day, when the sun is not so positive a factor in distributing light,
+and the shadows are so subtle that it is difficult to discover them,
+there is always some mass of foliage, the silver sheen from an old
+shingled roof, the glare of a white wall, which marks for the
+composition its lightest light, while a corresponding dark can always
+be found somewhere in the tree-trunks, under the overhanging eaves, or
+in the broken crevices of the masonry.
+
+So it is with every other expression of nature. Even on a Venetian
+lagoon, where the sky and water are apparently one (not really one to
+the quick eye of an expert, the water always being one tone lower than
+the sky--that is, more gray than the overbending sky)--even in this
+lagoon you will find some one portion of the surface lighter than any
+other portion; and in expressing it your eye first and your brush next
+must catch in the opalescent sweep of delicious color under your eye
+its exact quantity of black and white. By black and white I mean, of
+course, that excess or absence of pure color which when translated
+into pure black and white would express the meaning of the
+subject-matter, as one of Raphael Morghen's engravings on steel gives
+you the feeling and color in his masterly rendering of Da Vinci's
+"Last Supper."
+
+In my judgment one of the great landscapes of modern times is the
+picture by the distinguished Dutch painter, Mauve, known as "Changing
+Pasture," which is now owned by Mr. Charles P. Taft, of Cincinnati.
+Here the factor of mass is carried to its utmost limit. Sky one mass;
+flock of sheep another mass; and the foreground, sweeping under the
+sheep and beyond until it is lost in the haze of the distance, another
+mass, or, if one chooses to put it that way, another broad gradation
+of a section of the picture: the highest light being some
+infinitesimal speck in the diaphanous silver sky, the strongest dark
+being found somewhere in the foreground or in the flock of sheep.
+
+By a strict adherence to this law of one supreme light and one supreme
+dark does Mauve's work, as it were, get back from and out of his
+canvas, as from the record of a phonograph into which some soul has
+breathed its own precise purpose and intent.
+
+So, too, does nature often call out to you fixing your attention,
+often shrouding in shadow the unimportant in the landscape, while high
+up above the gloom it holds up to your gaze a white candle of a
+minaret or the bared breast of an Alpine peak reflecting the loving
+look of a tired sunbeam bidding it good-night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To accent the more strongly the value of this dominant light even
+though it be treated in very low gradation, I recall that a year ago
+the art world was startled by the sum received for a medium sized
+picture of some coryphées painted by Degas, now an old man over eighty
+years old--a subject which he always loved and, indeed, which he has
+painted many times. Some thirty years ago, when he was comparatively a
+young man, I saw, at the Bartholdi exhibition in New York, a picture
+by this master of these same coryphées, two figures standing together
+in the flies resting their weary, pink, fishworm legs as they balanced
+themselves with their hands against the wabbling scenery. It was a
+wholly gray picture, and almost in a monotone, and yet the flashes of
+their diamond earrings, no larger than the point of a pin, were
+distinctly visible, holding their place in, if not dominating, the
+whole color scheme.
+
+Again, in that marvellous portrait of Wertheimer, the bric-à-brac
+dealer, if you remember, the eye first catches the strong vermilion
+touch on the lower lip, and then, knowing that a master like Sargent
+would not leave it isolated, one finds, to one's delight and joy, a
+little swipe of red on the tongue of the barely discernible black
+poodle squatting at his feet. Had the red of the dog's tongue
+predominated, we should never have been thrilled and fascinated by one
+of the great portraits of this or any other time.
+
+This is also true in other great portraits--in, for instance, the
+pictures of Rembrandt, Vandyck, and Frans Hals, especially where a
+face is relieved by the addition of a hand and the white of a ruff.
+Somewhere in that warm expanse of the face there can be found a
+pinhead of color, brighter and more dominating than any other brush
+touch on the canvas. It may be the high egg-light in the forehead, or
+the click on the tip of the nose, or a fold of the white ruff; but
+slight as it is and unnoticeable at first, because of it not only does
+the head look round as the egg looks round when relieved by the same
+treatment, but the attention is fixed. Unless this had been preserved,
+the eye would have, perhaps, rested first on the hand, something
+foreign to the painter's intention.
+
+Recalling again the law of the high light and strong dark, and
+referring again to the value of the skilful manipulation of light and
+shade forming the mass thereby expressing the more clearly the meaning
+of a picture, I repeat that, while the eye is always caught by the
+strongest dark against the strongest light, it is next caught by the
+lesser supplementary light and lesser supplementary dark; and then,
+if the painter is skilful enough in the management of the remaining
+lesser lights and darks, the eye will run through the gradations to
+the end, rebounding once more to the greater light and dark, exactly
+in the order intended by the painter; thus unfolding to the spectator
+little by little, quite as a plot of a novel is made clear, the story
+which the painter had in his own mind to tell. This is effected purely
+and entirely by the correct accentuations of the explanatory lights
+and darks. One mistake in the management--that is, the accentuating of
+the third light, if you please, instead of the second--will not only
+confuse the eye of the spectator, but may perhaps give him an entirely
+different impression from what was intended by the painter, just as
+the shifting of a chapter in a novel would confuse a reader; and this,
+if you please, without depending in any way upon either the drawing or
+the color of the accessories.
+
+I can best illustrate this by recalling to your mind that marvellous
+picture of the so-called literary school of England, a picture by Luke
+Fildes known as "The Doctor" and now hanging in the Tate Gallery in
+London, in which the whole sad story is told in logical sequence by
+the artist's consummate handling of the darks and lights in regular
+progression.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You will pardon me, I hope, if I leave the more technical details of
+my subject for a moment that I may discuss with you one of the
+peculiarities of the so-called art-loving public of to-day, notably
+that section which insists that no picture should tell a story of any
+kind.
+
+To my own mind this picture of Luke Fildes reaches high-water mark in
+the school of his time, and yet in watching as I have done the crowds
+who surge through the Tate Galleries and the National Gallery, it is
+an almost every-day occurrence to overhear such contemptuous remarks
+as "Oh, yes, one of those literary fellows," drop from the lips of
+some highbrow who only tolerates Constable because of the influence
+his example and work had on Corot and other men of the Barbizon
+school.
+
+Another section lose their senses over pure brush work.
+
+A story of Whistler--one he told me himself--will illustrate what I
+mean. Jules Stewart's father, a great lover of good pictures and one
+of Fortuny's earliest patrons, had invited Whistler to his house in
+Paris to see his collection, and in the course of the visit drew from
+a hiding-place a small panel of Meissonier's, of a quality so high
+that any dealer in Paris would have given him $30,000 for it.
+
+Whistler would not even glance at it.
+
+Upon Stewart insisting, he adjusted his monocle and said: "Oh, yes,
+very good--_snuff-box style_."
+
+This affectation was to have been expected of Whistler because of his
+aggressive mental attitude toward the work of any man who handled his
+brush differently from his own personal methods, but saner minds may
+think along broader lines.
+
+If they do not, they have short memories. Even in my own experience I
+have watched the rise and fall of men whose technic called from the
+housetops--a call which was heard by the passing throng below, many of
+whom stopped to listen and applaud; for in pictures as in bonnets the
+taste of the public changes almost daily. One has only to review
+several of the schools, both in English and in Continental art, noting
+their dawn of novelty, their sunrise of appreciation, their high noon
+of triumph, their afternoon of neglect, and their night of oblivion,
+to be convinced that the wheel of artistic appreciation is round like
+other wheels--the world, for one--and that its revolutions bring the
+night as surely as they bring the dawn.
+
+Not a hundred years have passed since the broad, sensuous work of
+Turner, big in conception and big in treatment, was followed by the
+more exact painters of the English school, many of whom are still at
+work, notably Leader and Alfred Parsons, both Royal Academicians, and
+of whom some contemporaneous critic insisted that they had counted the
+leaves on their elm-trees fringing the polished water of the Thames.
+They, of course, had only been eclipsed by the broader brushes of more
+recent time, men like Frank Brangwyn and Colin Hunter, who have
+yielded to the pressure of the change in taste, or of whom it would be
+more just to say, have _set_ present taste, so that to-day not only
+the afternoon of night, but the twilight of forgetfulness, is slowly
+and surely casting long shadows over the more realistic men of the
+eighties and nineties.
+
+What will follow this evolution of technic no man can predict. The
+lessons of the past, however, are valuable, and to-day one touch of
+Turner's brush is more sought for than acres of canvases so greatly
+prized twenty years after his death.
+
+And this is not alone confined to the old realistic English school. In
+my own time I have seen Verbeckoeven eclipsed by Van Marcke,
+Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gérôme by Manet, and Sir Frederick Leighton
+by John Sargent--a young David slaying the Goliath of English technic
+with but a wave of his magic brush--and, last and by no means least,
+the great French painter Meissonier by the equally great Spanish
+master Sorolla.
+
+I am tempted to continue, for the success of these men in the fulness
+of the sunlight of their triumph, realists as well as impressionists,
+was wholly due to their understanding of and adherence to the rules of
+selection, composition, and mass which form the basis of these papers,
+and which despite their differences in brush work they all adhered
+to.
+
+In the late half of the preceding century Meissonier received $66,000
+for his "Friedland," a picture which cost him the best part of two
+years to paint, and the expenditure of many thousands of francs,
+notably the expense attendant upon the trampling down of a field of
+growing wheat by a drove of horses that he might study the action and
+the effect the better. Forty years later Sorolla received $20,000 for
+two figures in blazing sunlight which took him but two days to paint,
+the rest of his collection bringing $250,000, the whole exhibit of one
+hundred and odd pictures having been visited by 150,000 persons in
+thirty-two days. And he is still in the full tide of success,
+pre-eminently the greatest master of the out-of-doors of modern times,
+while to-day the work of Meissonier has fallen into such disrepute
+that no owner dares offer one of his canvases at public auction except
+under the keenest necessity. The first master expresses the refinement
+of extreme realism, or rather detailism; the other is a pronounced
+impressionist of the sanest of the open-air school of to-day. How long
+this pendulum will continue to swing no one can tell. Both men are
+great painters in the widest, deepest, and most pronounced sense; both
+men have glorified, ennobled, and enriched their time; and both men
+have reflected credit and honor upon their nation and their school.
+
+Meissonier could not only draw the figure, give it life and action,
+keep it harmonious in color, perfect in its gradations of black and
+white, but he had that marvellous gift of color analysis which
+reproduces for you in a picture the size of the top of a cigar-box
+every tone in the local and reflected light to be found, say, in the
+folds of a cavalier's cloak, the pleats no wider than the point of a
+stub pen.
+
+All this, of course, Sorolla ignores and, I am afraid, knowing the man
+personally as I do, despises. What concerns the great Spaniard is the
+whole composition alive in the blaze of the sunlight, the glare of the
+hot sand and the shimmer of the blue, overarching sky, beating up and
+down and over the figures, and all depicted with a slash of a brush
+almost as wide as your hand. The first picture, the size of a
+tobacco-box, you can hold between thumb and finger and enjoy, amazed
+at the master's knowledge and skill. The other grips you from afar off
+as you enter the gallery and stand startled and astounded before its
+truth and dignity. In the first Meissonier tells you the whole story
+to the very end. In the second Sorolla presents but a series of
+shorthand notes which you yourself can fill in to suit your taste and
+experience both of life and nature.
+
+Whether you prefer one or the other, or neither, is a matter for you
+to decide. You pay your money or you don't, and you can take your
+choice. The future only can tell the story of the revolution of the
+wheel. In the next decade a single Meissonier may be worth its weight
+in sheet gold and layers of Sorollas may be stored in attics awaiting
+some fortunate auction.
+
+What will ensue, the art world over, before the wheel travels its full
+periphery, no man knows. It will not be the hysteria of paint, I feel
+assured, with its dabbers, spotters, and smearers; nor will it be the
+litters of the cub-ists, that new breed of artistic pups, sponsors for
+"The girl coming down-stairs," or "The stairs coming down the girl,"
+or "The coming girl and the down-stairs," it makes no difference
+which, all are equally incoherent and unintelligible; but it will be
+something which, at least, will boast the element of beauty which is
+the one and only excuse for art's existence. I may not live to see
+Meissonier's second dawn and I never want to see Sorolla's eclipse,
+but you may. You have only to remember Turner's second high noon to be
+assured of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And just here it might be well to consider this question of technic,
+especially its value in obtaining the results desired. While it has
+nothing to do with either selection, composition, or mass, it has, I
+claim, much to do with the way a painter expresses himself--his tone
+of voice, his handwriting, his gestures in talking, so to speak--and
+therefore becomes an integral part of my discourse. It may also be of
+service in the striking of a note of compromise, some middle ground
+upon which the extremes may one day meet.
+
+To make my point the clearer, let me recall an exhibition in New York,
+held some years ago, when the bonnets were five deep trying to get a
+glimpse of a picture of half a dozen red prelates who were listening
+to a missionary's story. Many of these devotees went into raptures
+over the brass nails in the sofa, and were only disappointed when they
+could not read the monogram on the bishop's ring. Later on, a highly
+cultivated and intelligent American citizen was so entranced that he
+bought the missionary, story and all, for the price of a brown-stone
+front, and carried him away that he might enjoy him forever.
+
+One month later, almost exactly in the same spot hung another picture,
+the subject of which I forget, or it may be that I did not understand
+it or that it had no subject at all. If I remember, it was not like
+anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters
+under the earth. In this respect one could have fallen down and
+worshipped it and escaped the charge of idolatry. With the exception
+of a few stray art critics, delighted at an opportunity for a new
+sensation, it was not surrounded by an idolatrous gathering at all. On
+the contrary, the audience before it reminded me more of Artemas Ward
+and his panorama.
+
+"When I first exhibited this picture in New York," he said, "the
+artists came with lanterns before daybreak to look at it, and then
+they called for the artist, and when he appeared--they threw things at
+him."
+
+For one picture a gentleman gave a brown-stone front; for the other he
+would not have given a single brick, unless he had been sure of
+planting it in the middle of the canvas the first shot. The first was
+Vibert's realistic picture so well known to you. The other was an
+example of the modern French school or what was then known as advanced
+impressionists.
+
+I shall not go into an analysis of the technic of the two painters. I
+refer to them and their brush work here because of the undue value set
+upon the way a thing is done rather than its value after it is done.
+
+Speaking for myself, I must admit that the value of technic has never
+impressed me as have the other and greater qualities in a
+picture--namely, its expression of truth and the message it carries of
+beauty and often tenderness. I have always held that it is of no
+moment to the world at large by what means and methods an artist
+expresses himself; that the world is only concerned as to whether he
+has expressed himself at all; and if so, to what end and extent.
+
+If the artist says to us, "I scumbled in the background solid, using
+bitumen as an undertone, then I dragged over my high lights and
+painted my cool color right into it," it is as meaningless to most of
+us as if another bread-winner had said, "I use a Singer with a
+straight shuttle and No. 60 cotton." What we want to know is whether
+she made the shirt.
+
+Art terms are, however, synonymous with other terms and in this
+connection may be of assistance. To make my purpose clear we will
+suppose that "technic" in art is handwriting. "Composition," the
+arrangement of sentences. "Details," the choice of words. "Drawing,"
+good grammar. "Mass, or light and shade," contrasting expressions
+giving value each to the other. I hold, however, that there is
+something more. The author may write a good hand, spell correctly,
+and have a proper respect for Lindley Murray, but what does he say?
+What idea does he convey? Has he told us anything of human life, of
+human love, of human suffering or joy, or uncovered for us any fresh
+hiding-place of nature and taught us to love it? Or is it only words?
+
+It really matters very little to any of us what the handwriting of an
+author may be, and so it should matter very little how an artist
+touches the canvas.
+
+It is true that a picture containing and expressing an idea the most
+elevated can be painted either in mass or detail, at the pleasure of
+the painter. He may write in the Munich style, or after the manner of
+the Düsseldorf ready writers, or the modern French pothook and hanger,
+or the antiquated Dutch. He can use the English of Chaucer, or
+Shakespeare, or Josh Billings, at his own good pleasure. If he conveys
+an intelligible idea he has accomplished a result the value of which
+is just in proportion to the quality of that idea.
+
+To continue this parallel, it may be said that extreme realism is the
+use of too many words in a sentence and too many sentences in a
+paragraph; extreme impressionism, the use of too few. Neither,
+however, is fundamental, and art can be good, bad, or indifferent
+containing each or combining both.
+
+Realism, or, to express it more clearly, detailism, is the realizing
+of the whole subject-matter or motive of a picture in exact detail.
+Impressionism is the generalizing of the subject-matter as a whole and
+the expression of only its salient features.
+
+The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been
+insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like
+a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle
+and every crack in the blade became apparent.
+
+The more advanced would have insisted on not only the fibre in the
+wood, but the brand on the other side of the blade, had it been
+physically possible to show it.
+
+In absolute contrast to this, there lived a man at Barbizon who
+maintained that a spade was not a spade at all, but merely a mass of
+shadow against a low twilight sky, in the hands of a figure who with
+uncovered head listens reverently; that the spade is merely a symbol
+of labor; that he used it as he would use a word necessary to express
+a sentence, which would be unintelligible without it, and that it was
+perfectly immaterial to him, and should be to the world, whether it
+was a spade or a shovel so long as the soft twilight, and the reverent
+figures wearied with the day's work, and the flat waste of field
+stretching away to the little village spire on the dim horizon line
+told the story of human suffering and patience and toil, as with
+folded hands they listened to the soft cadence of the angelus.
+
+Which of these two methods of expression is correct--Ruskin or Millet?
+Are there any laws which govern, or is it a matter of taste, fancy, or
+feeling? Is it a matter of individuality? If so, which individual by
+his methods tells us the most truths? Let us endeavor to analyze.
+
+I whirl through a mountain gorge and catch a glance through a
+car-window--an impression. In the darkness of the tunnel it remains
+with me. I see the great mass of white cumuli and against them the
+dark cedars, the straggling foot-path and steep cliffs. I am impressed
+with the sweep of the cloud form pressing over and around them. With
+my eyes closed I paint this on my brain, and if I am great enough and
+wide enough and deep enough I can subdue my personality and forget my
+surroundings, and when opportunity offers I can express upon my canvas
+the few salient facts which impressed me and should impress my fellow
+men. If it is the silvery light of the morning, I am Corot; if the
+day is gone and across the cool lagoon I see the ripple amid the tall
+grass catching the fading color of the warm sky, I am Daubigny; if a
+gray mist hangs over the hillside and the patches of snow half melted
+express the warmth and mellowness of the coming spring, I am our own
+Inness.
+
+Perhaps, however, I am not content. I am overburdened with curiosity.
+I say to myself: "What sort of trees, pine or cedar?" I think, pine,
+but I am uneasy lest they should be hemlock. Were the rocks all
+perpendicular, or did not detached bowlders line the path? About the
+clouds, were they not some small cirri beneath the zenith? My memory
+is so bad--and so I stop the train and go back. Just as I expected.
+The trees were spruce and the rocks were grass-grown and full of
+fissures, and so I begin to paint and continue. I get the bark on the
+trees, and the foliage until each particular leaf stands on end, and
+the strata of the cliffs, and the very sand on the path. I crowd into
+my canvas geology, botany, and the laws governing cloud forms.
+
+Being an ordinary mortal, my curiosity, my telescopic eyes, my
+magnifying-glass of vision, my love of truth, my positive conviction
+that it is a spruce and should not be painted as a pine, except
+through rank perjury, all these forces together have undermined my
+impression or, like thorns, have grown up and choked it. Being honest,
+I am ready to confess that before returning to the spot I was in doubt
+about the pine. But I am still ready to affirm that what I have
+labored over is the exact counterfeit and presentment of nature, and
+equally willing to denounce the public for not seeing it as I do. I
+forget that I have been a boor and a vulgarian--that I have been
+invited to a feast and that I have pried into mysteries which my
+goddess would veil from my sight; that I have had the impertinence to
+bring my own personal advice into the discussion; that I have insisted
+that fissures, and leaves, and sand, and infinite detail were
+necessary to this expression of nature's sublimity.
+
+Is it at all strange that the impression which so charmed me as I saw
+it from my car-window has faded? Nature unrolled for me suddenly a
+poem. For symbols she used a great mass of dark, sturdy trees against
+a majestic cloud, a rugged cliff, and a straggling path. I have
+ignored them all and insisted that "truth was mighty and must
+prevail." I am a realist and "paint things as they are." Not so. I am
+an iconoclast and have broken my god and cannot put together the
+pieces. I have sacrificed a divine impression to a human realism.
+
+Suppose, however, that the painter who had this glimpse of nature
+before entering the tunnel was no ordinary man, but a man of steadfast
+mind, of firm convictions, of a sure touch, with an absolute belief
+in nature, and so reverential that he dare not offer even a suggestion
+of his own. He has seen it; he has felt it; it has gone down deep into
+his memory and heart. The cloud, the cliff, the mass, the path--that
+is all. And it is enough. The annoyances of the day, the seductions of
+fresh impressions of newer subjects, the weakness of the flesh do not
+deter him. With a single aim, to the exclusion of all else, and with a
+direct simplicity, he records what he saw, and lo! we have a poem.
+Such a man was Courbet, Corot, Dupré.
+
+But one would say: That may answer for landscape: what about the
+figure-painter? Let us counsel together.
+
+A man only rises to his own level. In art, as in music and literature,
+he only expresses himself. Each selects his own method. The school of
+Meissonier is not content with a few grand truths simply expressed.
+They want a multitude of facts; they must tell the story in their own
+way. They are the Dickens and Walter Scott of art. It is iteration and
+reiteration. My cardinal must not only have red stockings, says
+Vibert, but they must be silk; every detail must be elaborated. Very
+well, what of it? you say. What do you criticise, the drawing? No. The
+color? No. The composition? No. Does the painter express himself?
+Perfectly. What then? Just this. He expresses himself too perfectly.
+At first I am delighted. The story is so well told--the well-fed
+prelates; the half-sneer; the cynical smile; the earnest missionary
+telling his experience. But the next day?--well, he is still telling
+it. By the end of the week the enjoyment is confined to allowing him
+to tell it to a fresh eye, and that eye another's, and watching his
+pleasure. At the end of the year it becomes a part of the decoration
+of the wall. You perhaps feel that the frame needs retouching, and
+that is all the impression it makes upon you, except as would an old
+timepiece with the mainspring gone. The works are exquisite and the
+enamelling charming, but it has been four o'clock for forty years.
+
+In the library, however, hangs an etching which you often look at; in
+fact, you never pass it without noticing it. Two figures, a
+wheelbarrow, a spade, a stretch of country, a spire pencilled against
+a low-tone sky; and yet, somehow, you hear the tolling of the bell and
+the whispered prayer. Ah! but you say this has nothing to do with the
+treatment; it is the subject. One moment. The missionary's story is as
+full of pathos and of human suffering and courage as the "Angelus,"
+and at first as profoundly stirs our sympathy; but, in one, Vibert has
+monopolized the conversation; he has exhausted the subject; he has
+told you everything he knows. Nothing has been omitted; nails,
+monograms, and all; there is nothing left for you to supply--he is not
+so complimentary. But Millet has taken you into his confidence. He
+says: "Come, see what I once saw. Do you ever remember any such couple
+working in the field?" And you immediately, and unconsciously to
+yourself, remember just such a bent back and reverent, uncovered head.
+Where, you cannot tell, for the picture comes to you out of the dim
+lumber-room in your brain where you store your old memories and faint
+impressions of bygone days and sad faces.
+
+But if he added, "See, my peasant wears a woollen jacket trimmed with
+worsted braid," your impression would immediately fade. You might
+remember the jacket, but the braid, never. But for this it would have
+been delightful for you, although unconsciously, to add your own sweet
+memory to the picture.
+
+Another impression choked to death with unnecessary realism.
+
+But be you realist or impressionist, remember that a true work of art
+is that which has pleased _the greatest number of people for the
+longest period of time_; that the love of beauty indicates our highest
+intellectual plane, and that if you will express to your fellow
+sinners burdened with life's cares something of the enthusiasm of your
+own life, and will assist them to see their mother earth through your
+own eyes in constantly increasing beauty--you having by your art, in
+your possession, the key to the cipher, and interpreting and
+translating for them--you will confer upon them one of the greatest
+blessings which fall to their lot on this mundane sphere.
+
+
+
+
+WATER-COLORS
+
+
+Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God
+gives to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make
+everything gray--every rose but the shadow of itself--every tree and
+rock and cloud a monotone of gradation. Instead of that, everything we
+look at, from a violet to an overbending sky, is enriched and
+glorified by millions of color tones as infinite in their gradation as
+the waves of sound and light. Even in the grayest days, when the
+clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is desolate as
+the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite
+gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the
+true painter fill it with joy and beauty.
+
+There are many of us, however, who are not true painters and to whom
+the most exquisite of color schemes are but dull results. Many of us
+walk around our galleries passing the best pictures in silence; others
+ridicule what they cannot understand. Even our own beloved Mark Twain,
+whose heart was always open to the best and warmest of human
+impressions, and who expressed them in every line of his pen, when led
+up to one of Turner's masterpieces, "The Slave Ship," a glory of red,
+yellow, and blue running riot over a sunset sky, the whole reflected
+in a troubled sea, remarked to his companion: "Very wonderful! Seen it
+before. Always reminds me of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a
+plate of tomato soup."
+
+The education of such barbarians belongs to our generation and should
+be taken up by those of us who know or think we do. For true color is
+as great an educator as true music. This knowledge of color harmony,
+this matching and contrasting of different colors, but very few men
+and women possess. When they do, it is generally inherited and thus a
+natural gift. The rest of the world wear blue and purple, or orange
+and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of nature even as
+bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always held
+that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration,
+furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into,
+have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature--that the
+russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues
+of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow;
+the gloom of a forest with its yellow-grays and blue-grays, the
+gray-green moss of the lichens, the brown of the tree-trunks, the
+black and gray hues of the rocks, all these, if carefully studied and
+analyzed and reproduced, would make beautiful anything in the world
+from a bonnet to a château. To illustrate:
+
+Several years ago an intimate friend of mine, a distinguished
+architect of New York, the late Mr. Bruce Price, in designing a number
+of cottages at Tuxedo sought in vain for some color mixture current in
+the paint-shops with which to cover the outside of his buildings. All
+schemes of browns, olive-greens, colonial yellow with white trimmings
+and the reverse, Pompeiian reds, slate-grays, and dull yellows
+resulted in making "spots" of the houses, so that the effect he wished
+to produce, that of the houses being merged into the forest, was lost.
+Mr. Price was not only an architect, but he was an artist as well. He
+had little skill with his brush, but he had that innate good taste,
+with a keen eye to discern the subtle gradations in color, that only
+needed change of occupation to make him a painter. One day, looking at
+a new bare wooden cottage--unpainted as yet--in contrast to a mass of
+foliage in the early autumn before the leaves had begun to turn, in
+which the yellow-grays one often sees predominated, he suddenly
+thought to himself: "The tree-trunks and underbrush do not stand out;
+they are all of one piece, each keeping its place, while my house"--as
+he rather inelegantly but forcibly expressed it--"sticks up like a
+sore thumb." Later, this very clever man made an analysis of the local
+color in these several grays, and his subsequent matching and
+combining of these different tints resulted in the exact tones of the
+forest before him, and when this was completed and the house painted
+you felt should you enter the front door that the leaves must be over
+your head.
+
+Bringing the discussion down to more practical details, really to the
+palettes which we hold in our hands, the question then naturally
+arises as to how best to express true local color, with its varying
+blues, yellows, and reds, and especially its varying grays.
+
+In my own experience I find grays to be the prevailing tones
+everywhere in nature.
+
+I find also that the great masters of modern art, particularly the
+school of 1830, known as the Barbizon school, and represented by such
+men as Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, and Millet, and later by men
+who in some degree represent that school, but to my mind have done
+work equally good--even Monténard and Cazin--that all these masters
+have loved, sought for, and expressed in their work this
+all-prevailing quality, the gray.
+
+A few very simple rules for testing the power, presence, and quality
+of the prevailing gray in nature are so easily learned and so
+convincing in their application that once applied they are never
+forgotten.
+
+Take, for instance, a morning in late spring or early summer, when all
+nature is dressed from tree-top to grass-blade in a suit of vivid
+green. To a tyro with so dangerous a weapon as a color-box, there is
+nothing that will really bring down this game but some explosive
+composed of indigo and Indian yellow, or Prussian blue and light
+cadmium--perhaps the strongest mixture of vivid raw green.
+
+Now, pluck a single leaf from a near-by branch, hold it close to one
+eye, and with this as a guide note the difference in color tones
+between it and the leaves on the tree from which you plucked the leaf
+and which you had believed to be a vivid green. To your surprise, the
+leaf itself, even with the sun shining through it, is many tones lower
+and grayer than the color of the near-by branch as depicted on your
+paper, while the near-by branch, in comparison, pales into a sable
+gray-green, which you could perhaps get with yellow ochre, blue-black,
+and a touch of chrome-yellow.
+
+It does not seem to me that I can better illustrate this quality of
+the gray than by rapidly going over some of the works of George Inness
+lately on exhibition in New York--certainly to me the most marvellous
+examples of the power of a human mind to harmonize the subtle
+colorings of nature. I select Inness not only because he is to me one
+of the great landscape-painters of his day, but because he chooses a
+very wide range of subjects, from early morning to twilight,
+expressing these truthfully, absolutely, perfectly, so far as local
+color is concerned--that is, of course, as I see through either my own
+spectacles or Inness's; but, then, remember, our eyes may need repair.
+When these canvases are analyzed we find in the range of color nothing
+stronger than yellow ochre in yellows, than light red in reds, and,
+with hardly an exception, blue-black for blues. Indeed, his usual
+palette, as does Mauve's and Cazin's, seems to me to be only yellow
+ochre and blue-black, and with these two colors he expresses the
+whole range of the color scheme in nature, with the varying lights of
+day and night, except in depicting sunsets.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the salient features of a landscape have been analyzed and
+recorded in color, the more subtle qualities are to be detected and
+expressed. The most important of these is the time of day. To an
+outdoor painter--an expert examining the work of another expert--the
+hour-hand is written over every square inch of the canvas. He knows
+from the angle of the shadows just how high the sun was in the
+heavens, and he knows, too, from the local color of the shadows
+whether it is a silvery light of the morning, the glare of noontime,
+or the deepening golden glow of the afternoon. In fact, if you will
+think for a moment, the shadow of an overhanging balcony upon a white
+wall is a perfect sun-dial for him, and this test can be indefinitely
+applied to every part of the picture.
+
+The next is the temperature: how hot or how cold it was--what month in
+the year? It is unnecessary for Inness to cover his ground with snow
+to make his picture express a certain degree of cold, neither is it
+necessary for Monténard to fill his Provençal roads with clouds of
+dust to show how hot they are. This is done by the opalescent tones of
+the sky, by the values expressed in reflected lights and in the
+illuminated shadows, so that you feel in looking across one of
+Inness's fields of brown grass just how late is the autumn and just
+how cool it has been, and in looking down one of Monténard's roads you
+realize how useless would be an overcoat.
+
+[Illustration: Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames]
+
+In this connection let me say that all nature is interesting and all
+nature is beautiful, but all nature, as I have said, is not paintable.
+The interior of a railroad station, for instance, is interesting,
+as giving you certain mechanical results, construction, but it is not
+picturesque--that is, paintable--unless one could treat it as Pennell
+does, contrasting the black cars and locomotive with a puff of white
+steam, giving the vistas with the perspective of track, and a centre
+mass of people adding an idea of movement and color.
+
+Above all, the outdoor painter should get the character and feeling of
+the place he portrays on his canvas. If in Spain, his picture must
+look like Spain. The air must be transparent, the architecture
+clean-cut against the azure. If it be Holland, the atmosphere must be
+moist, the air like a veil, and with all this there must be nothing in
+the work that will be mistaken for the smoke-laden air of England.
+Only thus, by this fidelity to the very nature and spirit of a place,
+can the picture be made to express the essence of its life, which is
+really the heart of the whole mystery.
+
+Coming at last to our text, Water-Colors--the art of depicting nature
+on a sheet of white paper by paints diluted with water--it will be
+well to remind you that the art goes back to almost prehistoric times.
+A few weeks ago, in the library of Mr. Jesse Carter, director of the
+American Academy in Rome, I saw one of the earliest water-colors in
+existence. It was painted upon a sheet of slate, and, although some
+thousands of years old, still retained its color and remarkable
+brilliancy. The subject was a group of figures, the centre object
+being a girl of wonderful grace.
+
+The present art of water-color painting, with a sheet of white paper
+as background instead of the permanent stone, is, however, but little
+more than one hundred and fifty years old, and owes its existence
+largely to the men of the English school.
+
+Mr. C. E. Hughes, in his delightful book on "Early English Water
+Color," confined this English school to the men born between the
+years 1720 and 1820.
+
+In this group he places the great Gainsborough, who from 1760 to 1774
+worked "in charcoal and water-color on tinted paper," which he said he
+"loved to dash off of an evening, and which dazzled the fine ladies
+and gentlemen who frequented the select watering-place of Bath," where
+he was then living.
+
+Then came Robert Cozens, the brothers Sanby, Thomas Hearne, Thomas
+Malton, Samuel Scott, and a few others, all known as the
+eighteenth-century painters.
+
+These were succeeded by Thomas Girtin, who was born in 1775 and died
+at twenty-seven years of age; and the great J. M. W. Turner, who first
+saw the light in the same year, and on the day on which all great
+Englishmen should be born--namely, April 23--a day dedicated to St.
+George and the birthday of William Shakespeare.
+
+Girtin and Turner worked together. Girtin, measured by the standard of
+to-day, was an extreme impressionist, leaving behind him sketches
+dashed in with an appearance of freedom which Peter DeWint and David
+Cox might have envied when in after years they were at the height of
+their power. Turner, on the contrary, devoted his time to acquiring
+that triumphant grasp of detail which caused him to be known in his
+earlier life as an extreme realist.
+
+The change in Turner's work--the broader brush--came in his later
+years when oil became his medium of expression, in which, no doubt,
+his ability to note and yet sacrifice all unnecessary detail was a
+potent factor.
+
+A list of Englishmen greatly prized in their day now follows. Such men
+as John Varly, Gilpin, Glover, William Havell (all of whom during some
+part of their careers were members of the first Water Color Society
+formed in England, in 1804, which body still survives in the old
+Water Color Society whose rooms are still open on Pall Mall East) rose
+into prominence, their works finding places both in private and public
+collections.
+
+This society was in turn succeeded by the New Society of Painters in
+Miniature and Water Colors, which came into being in 1807 and went out
+of existence in 1812--a victim, says Hughes, of the condition of
+public apathy which brought about in the same year a reconstruction of
+the older organization under the joint title of the Oil and Water
+Color Society, and which eked out a precarious existence until the
+birth of the association now known as the Royal Institute for Painters
+in Water Colors.
+
+Other names now confront us, among them two men, David Cox and Peter
+DeWint, who in their day were considered masters of the medium. These
+last struck a new note in water-color, or rather a new technic in its
+handling. What Ruskin, the realist, in his "Modern Painters" describes
+as "blottesque" was at that time looked upon by both teachers and
+students as the one and only means by which white paper could be
+properly stained. This method, to quote from a loyal believer in the
+English transparent school, and whose enthusiasm is delightful, was
+the laying on of the color in washes which filled certain definite
+spaces indicated by a pen-and-ink outline.
+
+These washes would indicate, say, a distant tree with a preliminary
+tint and a subsequent elaboration; he would do it all in one process,
+giving his blot an irregular edge and allowing the color to accumulate
+where the shadows required it. His elaborative touches elsewhere were
+of the same nature. They were brush blots as distinct from washes. To
+this, I think, we may attribute on analysis the freedom of handling
+which--though each man has his distinctive method--is characteristic
+of both Cox and DeWint. If we add to these two methods of using the
+brush a third--its manipulation as though it were a pen--we shall have
+all the fluid processes on one or the other of which the beauty of all
+modern water-color drawings depends. A fourth process is rubbing the
+color into the grain of the paper. A fifth--a supplementary one--is
+scratching out. Last is the ignominy of the stipple--the wetting of
+the brush in the mouth, a technic entirely dependent upon the quantity
+of saliva the student can spare for his work. Almost every early wash
+water-color in existence can be classified according to the employment
+in its making of some or all of these means.
+
+In later years, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century,
+we have Copley Fielding; Prout, with his picturesque sepia drawings,
+the detail of his architecture in brown ink; Harding; Bonnington,
+really a great man; Clarkson Stanfield; Rowbotham; David Roberts;
+James Holland; Cattermole, who declined a knighthood and whose
+intimates were Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray; and so on down to the
+men of to-day, who are so well and ably represented in the annual
+exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the present English Water Color
+Societies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As for our own progress in the art, the subject, of course, is too
+well known for long discussion. Our oldest society, the American Water
+Color Society, held its first public exhibition in the National
+Academy of Design in New York in 1867, a date always remembered by me
+with infinite pride and pleasure, for upon the walls of the smallest
+room close up under the roof was hung my first exhibited
+water-color--the only one of my three the hanging committee were good
+enough to accept. Two years later--I am happy to say--in 1869, I was
+elected a member, and I am further happy to say that I am still in
+good standing and in high-hanging, and have so continued from that day
+down to the present time--a trifle of some forty-six years.
+
+As to my compatriots, I can truthfully say that its membership covers
+some of the great water-colorists of our own or any other time, both
+here and abroad--men entirely free to do as they pleased, working in
+anything and all things so long as, to use their own expression, they
+"get there," handling body color, in a veil of silver-gray as an
+overwash or squeezed in chunks from a tube; undertones of charcoal
+gray, overtones of pastel--anything for _quality_.
+
+Their names are legion: the late E. A. Abbey, Walter Palmer, Chase,
+the late Robert Blum, F. S. Church, Cooper, Curran, Eaton, Farrer, the
+two Smillies, Childe Hassam, Keller, Murphy, Nicoll, Potthast, the
+late Henry Smith, etc., etc.
+
+These are but a haphazard choice of the men whose work shows the
+widest ranges in selection, composition, mass, and technic, and who,
+in the world of water-color painting, are masters of the medium.
+
+As to our progenitors, the English water-color school--and I make the
+statement with every respect for their high accomplishments--while I
+believe we are indebted to them for the very existence of the art
+itself, I must say that our own men and art-lovers the world over
+would have been vastly benefited had these Englishmen allowed
+themselves a little more freedom in their methods and not followed so
+blindly the traditions of their past.
+
+That we broke away so early is as much a question of race as of
+training. The last idea that enters the heads of our own men is that
+they want either to paint or to draw like somebody else. They all want
+to paint like themselves, or they do not want to paint at all. They
+are so many art sponges. They go abroad, wander about the Grosvenor
+and the exhibitions, run over to Paris and haunt the Salon and shops,
+and so on to Munich and Berlin, picking up a technical touch here or a
+new idea of grouping or mass or color scheme there, and then, having
+thoroughly absorbed it all, return home and use whatever suits them;
+but a slavish imitation of any one English, French, or German
+master--never; neither do they follow any other brush at home. They do
+not believe in each other sufficiently to pay the highest form of
+flattery--imitation.
+
+Nor do many of them find their subjects abroad--a habit practised
+these many years by your humble speaker, whose only excuse is that he
+_must_ paint, no matter where he is, and that his life in the
+summer-time is dominated by his two children, both exiles, and more
+exactingly still in late years by two little grandboys who have not as
+yet crossed the ocean. No, these young American painters, with hardly
+an exception, find their subjects at home, and they choose wisely.
+
+And just here it can be said that if we are ever to have a school that
+will leave its impress on the art of the world, the task will be the
+easier if our men find their subjects at home--if they will show our
+own people the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of the material that lies
+under their very eyes, and also teach those fellows on the other side
+to respect us, both because we can paint and because we have the
+things to paint from. With a mountain and river scenery unrivalled on
+the globe; with rock-bound coasts breaking the full surge of an ocean;
+with forests of towering trees compared to which in girth and height
+the trees of all other lands are but toothpicks; with plains ending in
+films of blue haze and valleys sparkling with myriads of waterfalls;
+with every type of the human race blended in our own, or distinct as
+are the woodman of Maine and the soft-eyed mulatto of Louisiana; with
+a history filled with traditions most romantic--Aztec, Indian, and
+negro; with women who move like Greek goddesses and children whose
+faces are divine, why go away from home to find something to paint?
+Winslow Homer never did, and that's why his work will live when the
+painters of Egyptian harems, Spanish dancers, and Dutch and Venetian
+boats and palaces are forgotten.
+
+To take a specific example or two, what subject, for instance, is more
+worthy of a great master's brush than Homer's "Undertow," two
+half-drowned young bathers locked in each other's arms, the two
+beachmen dragging them clear of the mighty, blue-green wave curving
+behind them? Here is a subject of almost weekly occurrence on our
+coast. Who ever thought of painting it before? And that marvellous
+picture of "The Cotton Pickers." This, to me, was the first clear
+note Homer had sounded. The "Prisoners to the Front," painted just
+after the war, was a strong, realistic picture, true and forceful in
+color and composition, and, of course, admirable in drawing, but that
+was all. It told its story at once, and having heard it to the end you
+acknowledged its truth and went away content. But "The Cotton Pickers"
+left something more in your mind. The gray dawn of the morning dimly
+lighted up a field of cotton, the negro quarters on the horizon line;
+dotted here and there, bending over the bolls, were groups of negroes,
+singly and in pairs, filling their bags; in the foreground walked two
+young negro girls, the foremost a dark mulatto--the whole story of
+Southern slavery written in every line of her patient, uncomplaining
+face.
+
+This picture alone placed Homer in the first rank of American painters
+of his day, and he has never lost this place, for not only was the
+picture all it should be in composition and mass, but, unlike many of
+Homer's pictures of an earlier period, it was deliciously gray and
+cool in tone. It places him also in the front rank of the painters of
+our time. Jules Breton never gave us anything more pleasing, and never
+anything stronger in drawing, more true to life, or more poetic in
+conception and treatment. I mention Breton because, of the men on the
+other side, he is the only one who affects, so to speak, a similar
+line of subjects. Breton loves his peasants and paints them as if he
+did. Homer loved his subjects entirely in the same spirit. How
+unequally the two men have been rewarded you all know. An all-wise
+American who some years ago offered $40,000 for a Breton at auction
+could not at the time have been induced to give one-tenth of that
+amount for a Homer; and yet, for vigor, truth, sentiment, and
+technic--yes, technic, for this picture was superbly painted--"The
+Cotton Pickers," in my judgment, will outlive the other if the time
+should ever come when picture-buyers think for themselves.
+
+The Englishman, on the other hand, is the hardest man to pull out of a
+groove. What _has been_ is good enough for him, whether in
+architecture, art, politics, or government. Any one who objects, or
+seeks to improve or to point out a new and different way, is
+"anathema." It is hardly more than twenty years ago that John Sargent,
+whose works are often the strongest drawing card in the annual
+exhibitions, was ignored by the jury of the Royal Academy.
+
+"A slap-dash sort of a painter, my dear boy. Most dangerous to allow
+his things to come in. No drawing, you know, no finish--altogether out
+of the question." So spoke a Royal Academician when the question was
+broached.
+
+Whistler never found a vacant spot, no matter how high, where he could
+hang even a 10 x 14.
+
+"A mountebank in paint, my dear sir. Think of giving him a place
+alongside of Sir Frederick Leighton! Impossible! Absolutely
+impossible!" That the Luxembourg exhibited his portrait of his mother,
+and that the art critics of Europe voted it "one of the greatest
+portraits of modern times," made no difference. These Royal wiseacres
+knew better. Some of them still think they know better, a fact easily
+ascertained when you walk through the Exhibition, as I do every
+summer, and have continued to do for the past thirty years.
+
+And this adherence to tradition is not confined entirely to technic--I
+refer now to many of the English painters of to-day--but appears in
+their choice of subjects as well. It is the _subjects_ which have been
+successful--that is, which have been _sold_--that must be painted over
+and over. Anything new is a departure, and a departure from the
+standard in the selection of a subject is as dangerous as a departure
+in the cut of a coat or the color of one's gloves--or was as dangerous
+until Sargent, Abbey, Frank Brangwyn, and men of that ilk smashed the
+current idols and taught men a new religion. A small congregation, it
+is true, but big enough for them to gather together to sing hymns of
+praise and pray for better things.
+
+Let me illustrate what I mean by conforming to the standard. Three
+years ago I was painting near a village, an hour from Paddington--a
+lovely spot on the River Thames. This quaint settlement is one of
+those little, waterside, old-fashioned-inn places, all drooping trees,
+punts, millions of roses, tumble-down cottages, stretches of meadows
+with the silver thread of the Thames glistening in the sunlight. There
+is also a bridge, a wonderful old brick bridge, stepping across on
+three arches, mould-incrusted, blackened by time, masses of green
+rushes clustered about its feet--a most picturesque and lovable
+bridge, known to about everybody who has ever visited that section of
+England.
+
+I had been there for a week, making my headquarters at the White Hart,
+when my attention was attracted to a man across the river--it is quite
+narrow here--a painter, evidently, who seemed to be surrounded by a
+collection of canvases. He went through the same motions every day,
+and then my curiosity got the better of me and I went over to see him.
+
+Spread out on the grass lay eight canvases, all of one size, and each
+one containing a picture of the old brick bridge.
+
+"But why eight all alike?" I asked in astonishment.
+
+"Because I can't sell anything else. I am known as the Sonning Bridge
+painter. I've been at it for twenty years."
+
+It is with this sort of thing, either in the selection of a subject,
+in its treatment, or in its handling, that I have but little sympathy,
+even though the great Ruskin, in speaking of this same English
+water-color school, the one I have catalogued for you, insists that it
+is the only "true school of landscape which has yet existed," an
+appreciation which is followed by the outburst that "from the last
+landscape of Tintoret, if we look for life we will pass at once to the
+first landscape of Turner." It is, of course, only one of Ruskin's
+dictatorial statements, admirable when written, because it was read
+and approved by a class who knew no better and who accepted his words
+as other blind devotees obeyed the Delphic Oracle--statements,
+however, which are rejected by many of to-day who think for themselves
+and who think clearly, having the world's work spread open before them
+from which to judge.
+
+Once in wandering around the Academia of Venice, taking in for the
+fiftieth time Titian's masterpiece, I came across an Englishman who
+had paused in his walk and was adjusting his long-distance
+telescope--a monocle glued just under his left eyebrow. Mistaking my
+red-backed sketch-book for a Baedeker, he said, in an apologetic tone:
+
+"Pardon me--I've left mine at home--but will you be good enough to
+tell me what Mr. Ruskin says about that picture?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That I have personally refused to follow either Mr. Ruskin or the
+example of the men he places on so high a pinnacle--I am now referring
+entirely to their technic--is due to my having painted all my life
+out-of-doors, the best place in which a man can study nature at close
+range. This experience has taught me that weight and solidity are as
+important in the rendering of a natural object as air and perspective,
+and that the _staining of paper with washes of transparent color does
+not and cannot give them_.
+
+Nor can any brilliant light, a crisp, snapping light--a glint of the
+sun's rays, for instance, on the break of the surf, or on the round of
+a glossy leaf, reflecting like a mirror the opaque sky--ever be
+achieved by careful working around the edges of an unwashed speck of
+paper--the transparent man's only means of expressing a high light.
+
+Nor will a single dab of Chinese white produce the effect of it,
+should it be the _only_ dab of opaque white in the composition. The
+result in this case is still worse, for if transparent color has any
+value when uniformly distributed it is in the expression of air and
+perspective. The dab, then, is instantly out of plane, as it comes
+nearer to the eye than the transparent wash about it, and the illusion
+of distance is accordingly lost.
+
+But another and quite a different thing occurs when the opaque color
+_forms part_ of the whole, the two systems blending each with the
+other. To illustrate, my own experience has taught me that in nature
+whatever the sun shines _upon_ is opaque. The façade of a cathedral,
+for instance, facing a sky where the rays of the sun strike it full is
+opaque, while the angles of the architecture, casting shadows large
+and small into which sink the blue reflections of the sky or the
+reflected lights from near-by objects, are invariably transparent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now for my own system and the reasons why I have abandoned all
+other systems. And in giving them to you I want to repeat what I said
+in the beginning of this course, that I do not ask you students to
+follow in my footsteps if your predilections, training, and innate
+consciences lead you to a different view of treatment. Many of you may
+not like my work at all, and you certainly have a large following,
+especially among the younger men and women who have advanced ideas.
+Many of you hold to the opinion that water-color men should stick to
+their trade and not encroach upon the oil painters in their technic.
+And many of you may at heart prefer, nay, even delight in, the broad,
+loose washes of the early English school.
+
+There may be a few of you, however, who have open minds free from
+prejudice and free from the traditions of the past, and who are
+dissatisfied with the want of "virility," if I may so express it,
+shown in pictures painted on white paper, and with successive
+washings, and may accordingly see something in my own methods which
+may encourage you to follow in the path which I have cleared and which
+I humbly trust will lead to infinitely better results than I have so
+far achieved.
+
+And in this you must have the courage of your opinions and be prepared
+for criticisms. Those who are against me are more numerous than those
+who are for me and my methods.
+
+Only last month a distinguished New York daily paper, in reviewing a
+recent exhibition, said:
+
+"There really is nothing left to say about Mr. Smith's water-colors.
+They appear with such unfailing regularity and are always so much the
+same. Nothing in the present collection will surprise those who know
+his work--and who does not? The artist's facility is undiminished, his
+industry untiring, but to look for any fresh inspiration in his work
+or a hint of anything but a conventional vision has long been a vain
+hope."
+
+I should be discouraged if I thought that this was the last word on my
+work. I know better, because I am making a collection of such
+criticisms, showing the rating of our several painters. These summings
+up of mine will be extremely valuable as marking the changing taste of
+the public; for I have never supposed that either ill will or
+downright ignorance formed the basis of current criticism. The critics
+are merely expressing the trend of public opinion. It is not new to
+our age. Diaz, so one story goes, once came stumping (he had lost one
+leg) into Millet's cottage at Barbizon fresh from the Salon. Millet
+had been painting nudes--the most exquisite bits of flesh-painting
+seen for many a day, and as modest as Chabas "September Morn."
+
+"What do they say of my things?" asked Millet.
+
+"That you are still painting naked women," replied Diaz.
+
+Millet was horrified.
+
+"I paint naked women! I never painted one in my life."
+
+Hence "The Angelus" and "The Sowers" and the other masterpieces of
+clothed peasants.
+
+In 1825 Constable writes in answer to a scurrilous attack made on his
+so-called "puerile" efforts:
+
+"Remember the great were not made for me, nor was I for the great. My
+limited and abstractive art is to be found under every hedge and in
+every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth while picking up. My
+art flatters nobody by imitation: it courts nobody by smoothness: it
+tickles nobody by politeness: it is without either fol-de-rol or
+fiddle-de-dee. How can I hope to be popular?"
+
+Ruskin's attack on Whistler is another case in point. A lawsuit
+followed and Whistler recovered one farthing damages, and had the
+effrontery to dangle it under the great critic's nose that same night
+at a reception where they both met, followed by the remark:
+
+"Beat you, old man."
+
+Even Mr. Thackeray went out of his way in his "art notes" to belittle
+and ridicule Sir Thomas Lawrence because he lacked what he called the
+"virility of his progenitors and associates."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now for my own system.
+
+I use a heavy, gray charcoal paper, which is made by Dupré & Company,
+No. 141 Faubourg St. Honoré, Paris, and which costs about ten cents
+per sheet, measuring about 40 x 30 inches each. This paper is evenly
+ribbed but without the intermittent bands seen often in the lighter
+charcoal paper, known as "Michelet," sold everywhere in our own art
+stores. Dupré will send this paper to anybody who applies for it.
+
+This paper I wet on _both_ sides and thumb-tack over an oil canvas the
+size of the picture to be painted. It dries tight as a drum, and the
+canvas backing protects it from puncture or other injury.
+
+On this surface I make _a full and complete drawing in charcoal_ of
+the subject before me, not in outline, but in strong darks, jet-black,
+many of them--a finished drawing really, in charcoal, which could be
+signed and framed. This is then "fixed" by a spray of alcohol and gum
+shellac, thrown by means of a common perfume atomizer, the whole
+apparatus costing less than one American dollar.
+
+On this I begin my color scheme in both opaque and transparent color,
+recognizing the "natural facts" already explained to you, that is, the
+skies and high lights being solidly opaque, the shadows being equally
+transparent. This process requires certain modifications to be made in
+the darks of the original drawing. The dense black shadow under the
+eaves of a roof, for instance, are not in nature as black as the
+charcoal, but perhaps a rich, warm brown. If the ground is in
+sunlight, it is a dull, golden yellow and reflects the yellow glow of
+the sand beneath. Or it may be a blue reflection, or even of a reddish
+tone. These hard blacks then must be _glazed_ in such a way as to
+preserve the power of the shadow obtained by means of the under
+charcoal, and yet keep it _transparent_ (all shadows being
+transparent) and at the same time preserve its true and proper tint.
+
+This glaze is done by using the three semi-opaque primary
+pigments--found in every color-box--namely:
+
+Light red,
+
+Cobalt-blue,
+
+Yellow ochre.
+
+These colors, of course, form the basis of all intermediate tones, and
+from them all intermediate tones can be made.
+
+These three colors are at the same time semi-opaque, their opacity
+being just sufficient to tint the hard black of the coal, while never
+clogging or muddying its transparency.
+
+So it is with the millions of other tones in the whole composition,
+when such perfectly transparent colors as brown madder, Indian yellow,
+and indigo are used as a glaze, altering and modifying the undertone
+of charcoal to any desired tint and at the same time preserving the
+all-important thing--its transparency.
+
+In conclusion, let me say that I fully recognize that I am addressing
+students whose training enables them to understand perfectly this
+explanation, and that further instructions are therefore unnecessary.
+
+One thing, however, may be accentuated, and that is the use of plenty
+of clean water. Another is that you should keep your palettes
+separate. For myself, I make use of a common white metallic
+dinner-plate, known as iron-stone china, costing another ten cents,
+for my sky-palette, squeezing the color-tubes in a row around its edge
+and my Chinese white below them on one side toward the bottom. For my
+transparent palette, I use an ordinary moist sixteen-pan color-box,
+being always careful never to blur it with even a brush stroke of body
+color (Chinese white); and for my opaque work, an oval white metal
+palette, with thumb-hole, and indentations around its edge into which
+I squeeze the contents of my moist water-color tubes, my Chinese
+white being heaped up in a little mound near my thumb.
+
+The result may be seen in some of the illustrations accompanying this
+text.
+
+
+
+
+CHARCOAL
+
+
+Before going into the value of charcoal as a medium in the recording
+of the various aspects of nature in black-and-white, it will be wise
+to review the several mediums in general use, namely, etching, pen and
+ink, lithographic crayon, and charcoal gray in connection with Chinese
+white; it will be well, also, to note the various mechanical processes
+in use for the reproductions of these drawings on white paper.
+
+Those of you who have seen the early illustration in _Harper's
+Magazine_ of the late fifties will recall the work of "Porte Crayon"
+(Colonel Strother), drawn on wood by the artist and engraved by such
+men as A. V. S. Anthony and John Sartain. You will also recall how
+some twenty-five years later an effective and marvellous change took
+place in the quality of these reproductions, being by far the most
+unique and rapid in the history of any art of the century. In less
+than ten years, between 1876 and 1886, came this sudden awakening to
+the necessity of better work from the burin, followed by an enormous
+commercial demand for such results, until by common consent the
+American engraver first rivalled and then surpassed the world. If we
+search for the cause we find that, like many other inventions
+developing others of still greater importance, as the telegraph
+developed the telephone, electric light, and the phonograph, this
+marvellous change is due entirely to the discovery and possibility of
+photographing direct from the original upon the boxwood itself,
+producing with an instant's exposure a complete reproduction of the
+original drawing, with all its texture, gradation, and quality, not
+only doing away entirely with the intermediate draftsman, as was the
+case with "Porte Crayon's" work, but obtaining a result impossible to
+the most skilful of the artists on wood of his day.
+
+Another important feature in the discovery was the possibility of
+reducing a drawing to any size required, thus fitting it exactly to
+the necessities of the printed page. Before these discoveries, as you
+well know, from the time of Albert Dürer down to Linton and engravers
+of his school, the original drawing of the painter was redrawn by the
+use of lead-pencil, Chinese white, and India-ink washes upon the wood
+itself, giving as close an imitation as possible of the original. Some
+painters--illustrators, if you please, in those early days--in fact,
+made their original designs direct upon the wood. The effects of light
+and dark were then cut out in lines, curved or otherwise, with
+suitable cross-hatchings, as the necessity of the drawing required, or
+left comparatively untouched.
+
+It is not my purpose to discuss here the different merits of the
+different schools. There are varieties of opinion regarding the
+excellence of the line compared with the technic in the modern school
+of engravers. By the modern school I mean the work of such men as
+Cole, Yuengling, Wolff, French, Smithwick, and others. I refer to them
+that I may accent the stronger the medium which is the subject-matter
+of this talk, namely, charcoal, in the hope that those of you who
+propose to make reproductive illustrations your life-work may be
+tempted to make use of charcoal as a medium through which to express
+your ideas and ideals.
+
+But before embarking on this phase of my subject it may be interesting
+for a moment to go a little deeper into the earlier stages of this
+marvellous change from boxwood to zinc. I remember distinctly the
+beginnings of an organization well known in New York, and perhaps to
+many of you, as the Tile Club, to which organization I can
+conscientiously say as much credit is due for this revival in
+wood-engraving as to any other. Not that good wood-engravers did not
+exist before its time, and not because it contained wood-engravers,
+for the club did not have the name of one among its membership, but as
+containing a group of painters who for the first time in aid of the
+art of wood-engraving in this country lent their names and brushes to
+an illustrated magazine. Up to that time there had been a wide gulf
+existing between the ordinary draftsman on wood and a painter. This
+did not proceed from the prevalence of a certain disease among the
+painters, known at the present time as an "enlarged head," but from
+the fact that no artist accustomed to free-hand drawing and at liberty
+to wander all over his canvas at will would bring himself down to
+working through a magnifying-glass, a necessity, often, in
+transferring a drawing to wood.
+
+With this discovery, however, of making available even the roughest
+drawing, the simplest blot in color or a scratch in charcoal, and
+photographing its exact _textures_ upon a wooden block, the camera
+reducing it in size and thus perfecting it, the artist immediately
+took the place of the draftsman, and at the same time introduced into
+the work an artistic quality, a dash, a vim and spirit entirely
+unknown before.
+
+Three things were needed to utilize this marvellously useful
+discovery: first, a painter of rank; second, an engraver who could
+express the textures and technics of the several artists--that is,
+reproduce the exact values of an original in wash, an original in
+charcoal, or an original in oil; and third, a magazine with sufficient
+capital, taste, and intelligence to reproduce these results upon a
+printed page. We had the painters, and the engravers developed
+rapidly. The third requirement, of taste and intelligence, was found
+in Mr. A. W. Drake, then art director of _Scribner's Monthly_, and,
+after its merging into the _Century_, the distinguished art director
+of the _Century Magazine_.
+
+When the Tile Club was formed in New York it consisted of a group of
+men (I was its scullion for seven years, its entire life, and, being
+thus an honored servant, was familiar with its many affairs) who
+represented at the time the leading spirits of the different schools:
+William M. Chase, Arthur Quartley, Swain Gifford, A. B. Frost, George
+Maynard, Frank D. Millet, Alden Weir, Edwin A. Abbey, Charles S.
+Reinhart, Elihu Vedder, William Gedney Bunce, Stanford White, Augustus
+Saint-Gaudens, and one or two others. The club was limited to eighteen
+members, there being twelve painters and six musicians. If I am not
+very much mistaken, not a single painter of this group had ever drawn
+upon a wooden block, and yet each one of them, as the records of our
+periodicals have shown, was admirably qualified for illustrative work.
+At the time, the illustrations in _Harper's_ and _Scribner's_,
+compared with the illustrations of to-day, reminded one of the early
+primers of the New England schools, with their improbable trees and
+impossible animals.
+
+I remember distinctly the first meeting of the Tile Club, in which the
+subject of drawing for _Scribner's Monthly_ was first mooted, and I do
+not believe I overestimate the importance that the position of the
+club, taken at that time, has had and still has--not as a club, for it
+was dissolved some years back--in the influence its personal art has
+wielded upon the printed pages of the day.
+
+The first magazine article was the account of a trip that we made down
+on Long Island, illustrated by the club, entitled "The Tile Club
+Abroad," each man choosing his own medium--oil, charcoal, water-color,
+etc.; the results of which were published in the then _Scribner's
+Magazine_, and engraved by a group of men who afterward placed the
+art of wood-engraving in America side by side with the best efforts
+ever obtained by the English and German periodicals, and one of whom,
+Yuengling, took the gold medal of excellence both in Paris and Munich.
+
+With this difference in textures, the difference between a drawing in
+charcoal and one made in oil, it became necessary to invent new modes
+of expression with the burin. A simple line which might express the
+round of the cheek or the fulness of the arm, and which would answer
+for the uniform drapery of the old school, would not serve to explain
+the subtle quality of one of Quartley's moonrises or the vigor and
+dash of one of Chase's outdoor figures sketched in oil.
+
+So it came about that in searching to express these new qualities,
+never before seen upon a block, the technic of the new school was
+developed.
+
+The next important result was the creating not only of a new school of
+wood-engraving, but of an entirely distinct department for art
+workers, the school of the illustrator; and so we have Abbey,
+Reinhart, Quartley, and, later, Church, Smedley, Dana Gibson, and
+dozens of others whose names will readily come to your minds and of
+whose careers I have already spoken.
+
+But the burin was too slow, even in the hands of the skilful engraver,
+for the necessities of the hour. It was also too expensive; a drawing
+which a magazine would pay the artist $50 for would often cost $200 to
+engrave in the hands of a master like Yuengling or Cole. Again
+photography was called into use. The "straight process," so called, of
+the phototype printer, reproducing a pen-and-ink line drawing on a
+zinc plate which could be immediately run through a Hoe process, was
+perfected. You all remember, doubtless, an illustrated daily
+published in New York, called _The Daily Graphic_, illustrated by
+this process. This process, however, was only possible where
+pen-and-ink drawing or a very coarse lead-pencil drawing was used in
+making the original, because it was necessary that spaces of white
+should exist between each separate line or mass of black. This
+process, however, utterly failed in all India-ink drawings. Where
+these drawings covered the white of the paper, if ever so delicately,
+the result was a dense black upon the plate.
+
+Then came a race between all the inventors interested in such
+discoveries, both here and abroad--a race to perfect a process which
+would produce from such wash drawings an exact reproduction upon the
+printed page, giving all the gradations of the original and doing away
+not only with the draftsman but with the wood-engraver. To Professor
+Vogel, of Berlin, I believe--although an American, Ives, claims it,
+and some say justly--is due the credit of perfecting what is known as
+the half-tone, or screen process: many others claim that Herr
+Meisenbach first perfected this most important discovery.
+
+As the wash drawing had no lines, and as it is absolutely necessary
+that photo-printing should have lines--that is, clean spaces of black
+between white--these lines were supplied by laying a sheet of plate
+glass over the drawing upon which the lines were cut by a diamond and
+through which the original could be clearly seen. Of course, the light
+falling upon the edges of these several diamond cuttings made little
+points of brilliant white between which the several blacks and whites
+could be seen. This, without going very much further into the
+mechanical details, is the basis of the half-tone process.
+
+While this had its value, it had also its demerits, one of which was
+the total extermination of the American wood-engraver, except for a
+few men like Timothy Cole, whose genius and skill made it possible for
+them, by the excellence of their work, to survive the great difference
+between twenty cents a square inch for transferring on zinc and twenty
+dollars a square inch for engraving on wood.
+
+There are, however, results in the half-tone process which I hold are
+infinitely superior to the work of any wood-engraver of the old
+school. While it is true that there is no really positive rich dark
+for any part of the composition--for, of course, the light specks are
+everywhere, thus lightening and graying the dark--and while we lose by
+such defects the richness of wood-engraving, we also get the exact
+touch of the artist in no more and no less a degree, particularly no
+less. How often have I seen an exquisite drawing of Abbey's or Du
+Maurier's almost ruined by the slipping of the burin the
+one-thousandth part of an inch! How infinitely superior are the
+originals of John Leech's immortal caricatures in _Punch_ to the
+reproductions, all because the shadow line under an eye, or that
+little dot which denotes the difference between amusement and
+curiosity in the expression of a face, has been cut away the
+thousandth part of a hair-line! The processes of the half-tone,
+however, are ever accurate and the reproduction given you is
+exact--with the foregoing restrictions.
+
+Then again, in landscape effects and in some portraits, the uniformity
+of tone, the certainty of every touch being reproduced, the exact
+balancing from dark to light, all result in better work than can be
+done by the ordinary engraver.
+
+And yet, with all the half-tone's advantages, I must admit that
+Yuengling's head of the "Professor" and many of his wood-cuts in an
+illustrated edition of "Sir Launfal," published some years ago, and
+much of the work of such masters as Cole, Wolff, Yuengling, and
+others, stand as monuments for all time to the skill of hands that no
+process will ever excel, for they put into it that something which the
+bath of vitriol will never furnish, a bite of the acid of their own
+genius.
+
+Since these earlier days a new departure has been made, until now
+reproductive processes have been brought to such perfection that there
+is hardly any texture or color scheme that can not be matched. Note,
+if you will, Howard Pyle in color--rich in yellows and reds, with
+black and white spaces as an enrichment. Note also A. I. Keller's
+transparent work in charcoal gray. Note particularly the reproductions
+in the magazines of F. Walter Taylor's drawings in charcoal, in which
+the very texture of the coal is preserved. And, if you will permit me,
+note the half tones of my own charcoal drawings now on exhibition in
+the adjoining gallery. So perfect is the reproduction that one is
+careful not to smudge his fingers in turning the leaves of the
+publication in which they are printed.
+
+This being the case (and the printers must be thanked as well for
+their share in the results), I earnestly hope that some of my brother
+illustrators--the more the merrier--will seriously consider the value
+of charcoal as a medium for illustrative work. There is no subject, I
+assure you, that the sun shines on or its light filters into, or any
+phase of nature, be it rain or storm, fog, snow, or mist, including
+marines, figures, sunrises and sunsets, blazing heat and cool,
+transparent shadows, that cannot be visualized by it.
+
+I hold, too, that by its use qualities can be obtained impossible to
+be found in either etchings, lithographic crayon, wash, or pen and
+ink--especially the velvet of its black.
+
+Charcoal is the unhampered, the free, the personal individual medium.
+No water, no oil, no palette, no squeezing of tubes or wiping of
+tints; no scraping, scumbling, or other dilatory and exasperating
+necessities. Just a piece of coal, the size of a cigarette, held flat
+between the thumb and the forefinger, a sheet of paper, and then "let
+go." Yes, one thing more--care must be taken to have this forefinger
+fastened to a sure, knowing, and fearless hand, worked by an arm which
+plays easily and loosely in a ball-socket set firmly near your
+backbone. To carry out the metaphor, the steam of your enthusiasm,
+kept in working order by the safety-valve of your experience, and
+regulated by the ball-governor of your art knowledge--such as
+composition, drawing, mass, light and dark--is then turned on.
+
+Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never
+arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal
+sketch, covering and containing all a man can see--and he should
+neither record nor explain anything more--is not completely finished
+in two hours it cannot be finished by the same man in two days or two
+years.
+
+For a drawing in charcoal is really a record of a man's temperament.
+It represents pre-eminently the personality of the individual--his
+buoyancy, his perfect health, the quickness of his gestures. All these
+are shown in the way he strikes his canvas--compelling it to talk back
+to him. So also does it record the man's timidity, his want of
+confidence in himself, his fear of spoiling what he has already done,
+forgetting that a nickel will buy him another sheet of paper.
+
+Courage, too, is a component part--not to be afraid to strike hard and
+fast, belaboring the canvas as a pugilist belabors an opponent,
+beating nature into shape.
+
+[Illustration: The George and Vulture Inn, London]
+
+As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke
+goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that
+charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge blow going from the
+spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the
+repoussé around a goblet.
+
+Remember, too, that the fight is all over in two hours--three at the
+outside--the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if
+you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining
+your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark.
+It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and
+darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next
+supplementary light and dark.
+
+Remember, too, that when the fight is over you must not spoil what you
+have done by repetition or finish. _Let it alone._ You may not have
+covered everything you wanted to express, but if you have smashed in
+the salient features, the details will look out at you when you least
+expect it. There are a thousand cross lights and untold mysteries in
+Rembrandt's shadows which his friends failed to see when his canvas
+left his studio. It is the unexpressed which is often most
+interesting. Meissonier tells his story to the end. So do Vibert,
+Rico, and the whole realistic school. Corot gives you a mass of
+foliage, no single leaf expressed, but beneath it lurk great,
+cavernous shadows in which nymphs and satyrs play hide-and-seek.
+
+Remember, also, that just as the blunt end of a bit of charcoal is
+many, many times larger than the point of an etching-needle, so are
+its resources for fine lines and minute dots and scratches just that
+much reduced. It is the flat of the piece of coal that is valuable,
+not its point.
+
+As to what can be done with this piece of coal, I can but repeat,
+_everything_. That there are some subjects better than others, I will
+admit. For me, London, its streets and buildings, come first,
+especially if it be raining; and there is no question that it does
+rain once in a while in London, making the wet streets and sidewalks
+glisten under its silver-gray sky, little rivulets of molten silver
+escaping everywhere. When with these you get a background--and I
+always do--of flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the
+haze and mist of smoke, your delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else
+in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start
+your foreground with, say, a figure, or an umbrella, or a cab,
+expressed in a stroke of jet-black, and the perspective instantly
+fades into grays of steeple, dome, or roof, so delicate and vapory
+that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky. Or
+you stroll into some old church or cathedral, as I did last summer
+when I found myself in that most wonderful of all English
+churches--and I say it deliberately--St. Bartholomew's the Great, over
+in Smithfield.
+
+Other churches have I studied in my wanderings; many and various
+cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques have delighted me. I know the color
+and the value of tapestry and rich hangings; of mosaics, porphyry, and
+verd-antiques; of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of the
+arabesque; but the velvety quality of London soot when applied to the
+rough surfaces of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveliness
+gained by grime and smoke, came to me as a revelation.
+
+This rich black which, like a tropical fungus, grows and spreads
+through St. Bartholomew's interior, hiding under its soft, caressing
+touch the rough angles and insistent edges of the Norman, is what the
+bloom is to the grape, what the dark purpling is to the plum,
+mellowing from sight the brilliancy of the under skin. And there are
+wide coverings of it, too, in this wonderful church, as if some master
+decorator had wielded a great coal and at one sweep of his hand had
+rubbed its glorious black into every crevice, crack, and cranny of
+wall, column, and arch.
+
+Certain it is that no other medium than the one used could give any
+idea of its charm. Neither oil, water-color, nor pastel will transmit
+it--no, nor the dry-point or bitten plate. The soot of centuries, the
+fogs of countless Novembers, the smoke of a thousand firesides were
+the pigments which the Master Painter set upon his palette in the task
+of giving us one exquisitely beautiful interior wholly in
+black-and-white.
+
+So it was in the Temple when I was searching for Mr. Thackeray's
+haunts.
+
+What of alterations, scrapings, patchings up, and fillings in have
+taken place in these various courts and their surroundings, I did not
+trouble myself to find out. Nothing looks new in London after the fogs
+and soot of one winter have wreaked their vengeance upon it. Whether
+the façade is of brick, stone, or stucco depends entirely on the
+thickness of the soot, packed in or scoured clean by winds and rains,
+or whether the surface is ebony or marble, as may be seen in many of
+the statues on Burlington House, where a head, arm, or part of a
+pedestal chair has been kept white by constant douches.
+
+As for me, I was glad that these old haunts of Mr. Thackeray and his
+characters are even blacker to-day than they might have been in his
+time. For the soot and grime become them, and London as well, for that
+matter. A great impressionist, this smoke-smudger and wiper-out of
+detail, this believer in masses and simple surfaces, this destroyer of
+gingerbread ornaments, petty mouldings, and cheap flutings!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now for a few practical data as to my own way of handling the
+coal, which may be of value as coming from one who has profited these
+many years by its infinite possibilities.
+
+[Illustration: Diagram of Charcoal Technic]
+
+The paper is the same I use in my water-colors, a delicate, gray,
+double-thick charcoal paper, laid in parallel ribs, if I may so
+express it, and having sufficient body and tooth to catch and hold the
+faintest touch or the strongest stroke of the coal. The gray of this
+paper serves as the middle tone of the drawing, the different
+gradations of black in the coal giving the darks and the careful use
+of white chalks the high lights.
+
+These gradations are obtained by the use of a few simple processes, by
+which various textures can be given, starting, for instance, from or
+near the foreground, where the grit of the charcoal is used to bring
+the nearer details into clear relief, the several larger gradations
+and textures giving aerial perspectives being produced by a broad
+sweep of the hand, forcing the grit of the coal into the crevices of
+the paper, the result being what I may term the _first_ plane or
+_nearest_ atmospheric value; the house a square away, if you
+please--provided the subject is a street--being the _second_ plane.
+
+Beyond this, farther down the street, is found, it may be, another
+house or other object. Now try your thumb, rubbing your hand-smoothed
+charcoal into a finer and closer mesh: and for the still more
+atmospheric distances down this same street, use next a rag, then a
+buckskin stomp, and last of all a stiff paper stomp, each in turn
+producing a more atmospheric gray as the distances fade--the last, the
+paper stomp, being as soft as a wash of India ink. (See diagram.)
+
+All these you may say are tricks. They are--my own tricks, or rather
+use of the means which lay at my hand, which long experience has
+taught me to employ, and which any one of you will no doubt better in
+your own handling of the coal.
+
+These planes being secured, any light higher than the prevailing
+rubbed-in tone can be wiped out clean to the grain of the paper by a
+piece of ductile rubber. Any darker dark, of course, can be obtained
+by retouching with the coal.
+
+The chalk now comes into play for skies, broad sunlight effects, or
+crisp, sparkling lights. The whole work is then "fixed," as I have
+already explained, by the use of gum shellac and a common perfume
+atomizer.
+
+And with this condensed statement I must bring this my last talk to a
+close, remembering as I do that I have been addressing a body of
+students who are already familiar with one or more mediums, and who,
+with these few spoken memoranda and a finished drawing before them,
+will solve at a glance mysteries baffling to the layman.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
+
+
+FELIX O'DAY.
+
+THE ARM-CHAIR AT THE INN.
+
+KENNEDY SQUARE.
+
+THE TIDES OF BARNEGAT.
+
+THE ROMANCE OF AN OLD-FASHIONED
+GENTLEMAN.
+
+COLONEL CARTER'S CHRISTMAS.
+
+FORTY MINUTES LATE.
+
+THE WOOD FIRE IN No. 3.
+
+THE VEILED LADY.
+
+THE UNDER DOG.
+
+
+IN DICKENS'S LONDON.
+
+
+ENOCH CRANE. A novel planned
+and begun by F. Hopkinson Smith
+and completed by F. Berkeley Smith.
+
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Outdoor Sketching, by Francis Hopkinson Smith</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Outdoor Sketching</p>
+<p>       Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914</p>
+<p>Author: Francis Hopkinson Smith</p>
+<p>Release Date: November 27, 2008  [eBook #27340]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTDOOR SKETCHING***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Juliet Sutherland,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><a name="pic_1" id="pic_1"></a>
+<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="400" height="620" alt="Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London"  />
+<span class="caption">Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London</span>
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>Outdoor Sketching</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>Four Talks Given Before<br />
+The Art Institute of Chicago</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>The Scammon Lectures, 1914</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>F. Hopkinson Smith</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>With Illustrations by<br />
+the Author
+</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>New York</h3>
+<h3>Charles Scribner's Sons</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h5><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1915, <span class="smcap">by</span></h5>
+<h4>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 125px;">
+<img src="images/seal.jpg" width="125" height="139" alt=""  />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="Contents">
+<tr><td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td><td class="tocpg f1">Page</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">I.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#COMPOSITION">Composition</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">II.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#MASS">Mass</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">III.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#WATER-COLORS">Water-Colors</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">IV.</td>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td><a href="#CHARCOAL">Charcoal</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>Illustrations</h2>
+
+
+
+<table summary="Illustrations">
+<tr><td><a href="#pic_1">Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London</a></td><td class="tocpg"><a href="#pic_1"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td><td class="tocpg f1">FACING<br />
+PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#pic_2">Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_84">84</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#pic_3">The George and Vulture Inn, London</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><a href="#pic_4">Diagram of Charcoal Technic</a></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="COMPOSITION" id="COMPOSITION"></a>COMPOSITION</h2>
+
+
+<p>My chief reason for confining these four talks to the outdoor sketch
+is because I have been an outdoor painter since I was sixteen years of
+age; have never in my whole life painted what is known as a studio
+picture evolved from memory or from my inner consciousness, or from
+any one of my outdoor sketches. My pictures are begun and finished
+often at one sitting, never more than three sittings; and a white
+umbrella and a three-legged stool are the sum of my studio
+appointments.</p>
+
+<p>Another reason is that, outside of this ability to paint rapidly
+out-of-doors, I know so little of the many processes attendant upon
+the art of the painter that both my advice and my criticism would be
+worthless to even the youngest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> of the painters to-day. Again, I work
+only in two mediums, water-color and charcoal. Oil I have not touched
+for many years, and then only for a short time when a student under
+Swain Gifford (and this, of course, many, many years ago), who taught
+me the use and value of the opaque pigment, which helped me greatly in
+my own use of opaque water-color in connection with transparent color
+and which was my sole reason for seeking the help of his master hand.</p>
+
+<p>A further venture is to kindle in your hearts a greater love for and
+appreciation of what a superbly felt and exactly rendered outdoor
+sketch stands for&mdash;a greater respect for its vitality, its life-spark;
+the way it breathes back at you, under a touch made unconsciously,
+because you saw it, recorded it, and then forgot it&mdash;best of all
+because you let it alone; my fervent wish being to transmit to you
+some of the enthusiasm that has kept me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> young all these years of my
+life; something of the joy of the close intimacy I have held with
+nature&mdash;the intimacy of two old friends who talk their secrets over
+each with the other; a joy unequalled by any other in my life's
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>There may be those who go a-fishing and enjoy it. The arranging and
+selecting of flies, the jointing of rods, the prospective comfort in
+high water-boots, the creel with the leather strap, every crease in it
+a reminder of some day without care or fret&mdash;all this may bring the
+flush to the cheek and the eager kindling of the eye, and a certain
+sort of rest and happiness may come with it; but&mdash;they have never gone
+a-sketching! Hauled up on the wet bank in the long grass is your boat,
+with the frayed end of the painter tied around some willow that offers
+a helping root. Within a stone's throw, under a great branching of
+gnarled trees, is a nook where the curious sun,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> peeping at you
+through the interlaced leaves, will stencil Japanese shadows on your
+white umbrella. Then the trap is unstrapped, the stool opened, the
+easel put up, and you set your palette. The critical eye with which
+you look over your brush case and the care with which you try each
+feather point upon your thumbnail are but an index of your enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>Now you are ready. You loosen your cravat, hang your coat to some
+rustic peg in the creviced bark of the tree behind, seize a bit of
+charcoal from your bag, sweep your eye around, and dash in a few
+guiding strokes. Above is a changing sky filled with crisp white
+clouds; behind you, the great trunks of the many branched willows; and
+away off, under the hot sun, the yellow-green of the wasted pasture,
+dotted with patches of rock and weeds, and hemmed in by the low hills
+that slope to the curving stream.</p>
+
+<p>It is high noon! There is a stillness in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> air that impresses you,
+broken only by the low murmur of the brook behind and the ceaseless
+song of the grasshopper among the weeds in front. A tired bumblebee
+hums past, rolls lazily over a clover blossom at your feet, and has
+his midday lunch. Under the maples near the river's bend stand a group
+of horses, their heads touching. In the brook below are the patient
+cattle, with patches of sunlight gilding and bronzing their backs and
+sides. Every now and then a breath of cool air starts out from some
+shaded retreat, plays around your forehead, and passes on. All nature
+rests. It is her noontime.</p>
+
+<p>But you work on: an enthusiasm has taken possession of you; the paints
+mix too slowly; you use your thumb, smearing and blending with a bit
+of rag&mdash;anything for the effect. One moment you are glued to your
+seat, your eyes riveted on your canvas; the next, you are up and
+backing away, taking it in as a whole,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> then pouncing down upon it
+quickly, belaboring it with your brush. Soon the trees take shape; the
+sky forms become definite; the meadow lies flat and loses itself in
+the fringe of willows.</p>
+
+<p>When all of this begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some
+lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf,
+or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a
+tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins
+that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The
+reaction comes the next day when, in the cold light of your studio,
+you see how far short you have come and how crude and false is your
+best touch compared with the glory of the landscape in your mind and
+heart. But the thrill that it gave you will linger forever!</p>
+
+<p>Or come with me to Constantinople and let us study its palaces and
+mosques, its marvellous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span> stuffs, its romantic history, its
+religions&mdash;most profound and impressive&mdash;its commerce, industries, and
+customs. Come to revel in color; to sit for hours, following with
+reverent pencil the details of an architecture unrivalled on the
+globe; to watch the sun scale the hills of Scutari and shatter its
+lances against the fairy minarets of Stamboul; to catch the swing and
+plash of the rowers rounding their <i>caiques</i> by the bridge of Galata;
+to wander through bazaar and market, dotting down splashes of robe,
+turban, and sash; to rest for hours in cool tiled mosques, which in
+their very decay are sublime; to study a people whose rags are
+symphonies of color, and whose traditions and records breathe the
+sweetest poems of modern times.</p>
+
+<p>And then, when we have caught our breath, let us wander into any one
+of the patios along the Golden Horn, and feast our eyes on columns of
+verd-antique, supporting arches light<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> as rainbows, framing the patio
+of the Pigeon Mosque, the loveliest of all the patios I know, and let
+us run our eyes around that Moorish square. The sun blazes down on
+glistening marbles; gnarled old cedars twist themselves upward against
+the sky; flocks of pigeons whirl and swoop and fall in showers on
+cornice, roof, and dome; tall minarets like shafts of light shoot up
+into the blue. Scattered over the uneven pavement, patched with strips
+and squares of shadows, lounge groups of priests in bewildering robes
+of mauve, corn-yellow, white, and sea-green; while back beneath the
+cool arches bunches of natives listlessly pursue their several
+avocations.</p>
+
+<p>It is a sight that brings the blood with a rush to one's cheek. That
+swarthy Mussulman at his little square table mending seals; that
+fellow next him selling herbs, sprawled out on the marble floor, too
+lazy to crawl away from the slant of sunshine slipping through the
+ragged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> awning; that young Turk in frayed and soiled embroidered
+jacket, holding up strings of beads to the priests passing in and
+out&mdash;is not this the East, the land of our dreams? And the old public
+scribe with the gray beard and white turban, writing letters, the
+motionless veiled figures squatting around him&mdash;is he not Baba
+Mustapha? and the soft-eyed girl whispering into his ear none other
+than Morgiana, fair as the meridian sun?</p>
+
+<p>So, too, in my beloved Venice, where many years ago I camped out by
+the side of a canal&mdash;the Rio Giuseppe&mdash;all of it, from the red wall,
+where the sailors land, to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is
+ready to topple into the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Not much of a canal&mdash;not much of a painting ground, really, to the
+masters who have gone before and are still at work, but a truly
+lovable, lovely, and most enchanting possession to me their humble
+disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+out you are miserable until you get back again. On one bank stretches
+a row of rookeries&mdash;a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies
+hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and
+patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the
+whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long
+brick wall of the garden&mdash;soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and
+lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which mass and
+sway the great sycamores that Ziem loved, their lower branches
+interwoven with cinnobar cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun
+drips gold.</p>
+
+<p>Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pass&mdash;this canal of
+mine; only deep enough to let a wine barge slip through; so narrow you
+must go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola;
+so short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> of its
+water-surface part of everything about it, so clear are the
+reflections; full of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave space&mdash;one
+moment in a broad laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from
+behind a cloud, its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next
+swept by flurries of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a
+mirror; then, when aroused by a passing boat, breaking out into
+ribbons of color&mdash;swirls of twisted doorways, flags, awnings,
+flower-laden balconies, black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside
+down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters&mdash;a
+bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in
+detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole
+scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any
+painter living or dead.</p>
+
+<p>These are some of the joys of the painter whose north light is the
+sky, whose studio door<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> is never shut, and who often works surrounded
+by envious throngs, that treat him with such marked reverence that
+they whisper one to another for fear of disturbing him.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And now for a few practical hints born of these experiences; and in
+giving them to you, remember that no man is more keenly conscious of
+his limitations than the speaker. My own system of work, all of which
+will be explained to you in subsequent talks, one on water-color and
+the other on charcoal, is, I am aware, peculiar, and has many
+drawbacks and many shortcomings. I make bold to give these to you
+because of my fifty years' experience in outdoor sketching, and
+because in so doing I may encourage some one among you to begin where
+I have left off and do better. The requirements are thoughtful and
+well-studied selection before your brush touches your canvas; a
+correct knowledge of composition; a definite grasp<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span> of the problem of
+light and dark, or, in other words, <i>mass</i>; a free, sure, and
+untrammelled rapidity of execution; and, last and by no means least, a
+realization of what I shall express in one short compact sentence,
+that <i>it takes two men to paint an outdoor picture: one to do the work
+and the other to kill him when he has done enough</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Before entering on the means and methods through which so early a
+death becomes permissible I shall admit that the personal equation
+will largely assert itself, and that because of it certain allowances
+must be made, or rather certain variations in both grasp and treatment
+will necessarily follow.</p>
+
+<p>While, of course, nature is always the same, never changing and never
+subservient to the whims or perceptive powers of the individual, there
+are painters who will aver that they alone see her correctly and that
+all the world that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> differs from them is wrong. One man from natural
+defects may see all her greens or reds stronger or weaker than another
+in proportion to the condition of his eye. Another may grasp only her
+varying degrees of gray. One man unduly exaggerates the intensity of
+the dark and the opposing brilliancy of the lights. Another eye&mdash;for
+it is largely a question of optics, of optics and temperament&mdash;sees
+only the more gentle and sometimes the more subtle gradations of light
+and shade reducing even the blaze of the noonday sun to half-tones.
+Still another, whether by the fault of over-magnifying power or
+long-sightedness, detects an infinity of detail in nature, and is not
+satisfied until each particular blade of grass stands on end like the
+quills of the traditional porcupine, while his brother brush
+strenuously asserts that every detail is really only a question of
+mass, and should be treated as such, and that for all practical
+purposes it is quite immaterial whether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> a tree can be distinguished
+from a farm-house so long as it is fluffy enough to be indistinct.</p>
+
+<p>These defects, sympathies, tendencies, whatever one may call them,
+only prove the more conclusively that there are many varying standards
+set up by many minds. That which can easily be proved in addition is
+that many a false standard owes its origin as often to a question of
+bad digestion as of bad taste. They also show us that no one man or
+set of men can rightfully lay claim to holding the one key which
+unlocks the mysteries of nature, while insisting that the rules
+governing their use of that key <i>must</i> be adhered to by the rest of
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>There are, however, certain laws which control every pictured
+expression of nature and to which every eye and hand must submit if
+even a semblance of expression is to be sought for. One of them is
+truth. In this all schools concur, each one demanding the truth, or at
+least enough of it to placate their consciences<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> when they add to it a
+sufficient number of lies of their own manufacture to make the subject
+interesting to their special line of constituents. Among these I do
+not class the lunatics who are to-day wandering loose outside of
+charitable asylums especially designed for disordered and impaired
+intellects, and whose frothings I saw at the last Autumn Salon.</p>
+
+<p>But to our text once more, taking up the first requirement; namely,
+selection.</p>
+
+<p>By selection I mean the "cutting out entire" from the great panorama
+spread out before you just that portion which appeals to you and which
+you want to have appeal to your fellow men.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking for myself, I have always held that the most perfect
+reproductions of nature are those which can be <i>selected</i> any day,
+under any condition of light, direct from the several objects
+themselves, without arrangement and fore-shortenings or twistings to
+the right and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> the left. Nothing, in fact, seems to me so
+astounding as that any human mind could for an instant suppose that it
+can improve on the work of the Almighty.</p>
+
+<p>If it is a street, and if you wish to express its perspective, and the
+bit of blue sky beyond, with a burst of sunlight illumining the
+corner, the figures crowded against the light, forming a mass in
+themselves, and it interests you at a glance, sit down and study it
+long enough to find out what feature of the landscape impressed you at
+<i>first sight</i>. If, as you look, the first impression becomes weakened,
+perhaps it is because the immediate foreground, which at the first
+glance was clear, is now dotted with passers-by, thus obscuring your
+point of interest, or a cloud has passed over the sky, lowering the
+whole tone, or the group of figures across the light has dispersed,
+exposing the ugly right-angled triangle of the flat wall and street
+level instead of the same lines being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> broken picturesquely with the
+black dots of heads of the crowd itself. In a moment it is no longer a
+composition of the same power that struck you at first. Perhaps while
+you sit and wait the scene again changes, and something infinitely
+more interesting, or the reverse, is evolved from the perspective
+before you. And so it goes on, until this constantly changing
+kaleidoscope repeats itself in its first aspect, until you have fairly
+grasped its meaning and analyzed its component parts. Or until either
+the effect that first delighted you, or the subsequent effect that
+charmed you still more, becomes a fixed fact in your mind. That, then,
+is the picture that you want to paint and that you are to paint
+<i>exactly as you saw it</i>. And if you can reproduce it exactly as you
+did see it, ten chances to one it will impress your fellow men. The
+trouble is that when you sit down to paint it you are so often lost in
+its detail that you forget its salient features, and by the time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> you
+have finished and blocked up the immediate foreground with figures
+that did not exist when you were first thrilled by its beauty, you
+have either painted its least interesting aspect, or you have filled
+that street so full of lies of your own that the policeman on the beat
+could not recognize it.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, while all nature is interesting, there are parts of nature
+more interesting than other parts, and since the skill of man is
+inadequate to produce its more <i>humble</i> effects, if I may so express
+it, the painter should be on the lookout for her <i>dramatic</i> air, in
+order that when she is reproduced she may add that touch to her many
+qualities, thus meeting the painter half-way. Even in the perspective
+of a street, nature, in profound consideration of the devotee under
+his umbrella, often gives him a deeper touch&mdash;one wall perhaps in
+sudden brilliant light, while the vista of the street is in gloom made
+by a passing cloud, she constantly calling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> out to the painter as he
+works: "Watch me now and take me at my best."</p>
+
+<p>Or change this picture for an instant and note, if you please, the
+flight of cloud shadows over a mountain slope or the whirl of a wind
+flurry across a still lake. There are moments in all phenomena like
+these where a great man rising to the occasion can catch them exactly,
+as did Rousseau in the golden glow of the fading light through the
+forest, or Corot in the crisp light of the morning, or Daubigny in the
+low twilight across the sunken marshes where one can almost hear the
+frogs croak.</p>
+
+<p>Selection, then, preceded by the deepest and closest thought as to
+whether the subject is worth painting at all, becomes necessary, the
+student giving himself plenty of time to study it in all its phases;
+time enough to "walk around it," reviewing it at different angles;
+noting the hour at which it is at its best and happiest, seizing upon
+its most telling presentment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>&mdash;and all this before he begins even
+<i>mentally</i> to compose its salient features on the square of his
+canvas. You can turn, if you choose, your camera skyward and focus the
+top of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it is uninteresting,
+or rather unintelligible, until you focus also the church door, and
+the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that winds through the
+quiet graveyard. So a picture can be true and yet very much like a
+slip cut from a newspaper. For some men cut thus into nature,
+haphazard, without care or thought, and produce perhaps a square
+containing an advertisement of a patent churn, a railroad timetable,
+and a fragment of an essay on art. Cut carefully and with selection,
+and you may get a poem which will soothe you like a melody.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As to the value of the laws which govern the perfect composition, it
+is unquestionably true that a correct knowledge of these laws<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> makes
+or unmakes the picture and establishes or ruins the rank of the
+painter. No matter how careful the drawing, how interesting the
+subject, how true the mass, how subtle the gradations of light and
+shade, how perfect the expression of the figures, or how transparent
+the atmosphere of a landscape, a want of this knowledge will defeat
+the result. On the other hand, a good composition&mdash;one that "carries,"
+as the term is&mdash;one that can be seen across the room, if properly
+composed will instantly excite your interest, even if upon near
+inspection you are shocked by its crudities and faults. "I don't know
+what it is," says a painter, "but it's good all the same."</p>
+
+<p>After your selection has been made, the next thing is to search for
+its centre of interest. When this is found it is equally important to
+weigh carefully the <i>quality</i> of this centre of interest in order to
+determine whether, as has been said, the subject is worth painting at
+all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> My own rule is to spend half the time I am devoting to my sketch
+in carefully weighing the subject in its every detail and expression.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Many men, I am aware, have endeavored to prove that there are eight or
+ten different forms of composition. My own experience and
+investigation are, of course, limited, but so far I have only been
+able to discover one, namely, the larger mass and the smaller mass:
+the larger mass dominating the centre of interest, which catches your
+eye instantly at first sight of a picture, and the smaller or less
+interesting object which next attracts your eye, and so relieves the
+vision and spares you the monotony of looking at a single object long
+and steadily, thus fatiguing the eye and dissipating the interest.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Having determined upon the <i>quality</i> of the subject-matter and fixed
+its centre interest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span> in pleasing relation to the whole, the next step
+is to confine yourself to all that <i>the eyes see at one glance</i> and no
+more, or, in other words, that portion of the landscape which you
+could cut out with the scissors of your eye and paste upon your mind.
+That which you can see when your head is kept perfectly still, your
+eye looking straight before you, only seeing so high, so low, and so
+far to the right and left, without a strain. The great sweep of
+vision, a sweep covering a hundred subjects perhaps, is obtained by
+turning the eyes up or down or sideways. But to be true&mdash;that is, to
+see one picture at a time&mdash;the eye should be fixed like the lens of a
+camera, the limit of the picture being the range of the eye and no
+more. A departure from this rule not only confuses your perspective
+but crowds a number of points of interest into the square of your
+canvas, when there is really only <i>one</i> centre point before you in
+nature; and this one point you must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> treat as does the electrician in
+a theatre who keeps the lime-light on the star of the play.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Another requirement is rapidity of execution. I am not speaking of
+figure-drawing. I can well understand why the model grows tired,
+although the crude lay figure may not, and why the constant workings
+over and again upon the figure subject, the mosaicing (if I may coin a
+word) of the different points of the figure during the different hours
+of the day and the different days of the week deep into the canvas,
+may be necessary.</p>
+
+<p>I am speaking of outdoor, landscape work, for which only four hours,
+at most, either in the morning or in the afternoon, can be utilized.
+In this four hours nature keeps comparatively still long enough for
+you to caress her with your brush, and if you would truly express what
+you see, your work must be finished in that time. I can quite
+understand that to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> ordinary student this is a paralyzing
+statement, but let us analyze it together for a moment and I think
+that we shall all see that if it were possible for a human hand to
+obey us as precisely as a human eye detects, the results on the canvas
+would be infinitely more valuable, first, because the sun never stands
+still and the shadows of one hour are not the shadows of the next; and
+second, because this moving of the sun is affecting not only the mass
+but the composition of the picture, one mass of buildings being in
+light at ten o'clock and again in shadow at eleven. It is also
+affecting its local color, the yellow of the afternoon sunlight
+illumining and graying the silver-blue of the shadows, thus weakening
+the force of positive shadows scattered through the composition. Of
+course, to be really exact, there is only one moment in any one of the
+hours of the day in which any one aspect of nature remains the same,
+but since we are all finite we must do the best we can, and four<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+hours, in my experience, is all that a man can be sure of.</p>
+
+<p>We have, of course, the next day to continue in, but then the
+landscape has changed. That delicate, transparent, gauzy cloud screen
+that softened the sky light was, under the northwest wind of
+yesterday, a clear, steely gray-blue, and the sun shining through it
+made the sunlight almost white and the shadows a neutral blue; to-day
+the wind is from the south and a great mass of soft summer clouds,
+tea-rose color, drift over the clear azure, each one of which throws
+its reflected light on every object over which they float. The half
+you painted yesterday, therefore, will not match the half you must
+paint to-day, and so if you will persist in working on your same
+canvas you go on making an almanac of your picture, so apparent to an
+expert that he can pick out the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as you
+daily progressed. If you should be fortunate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> enough to work under
+Italian skies, where sometimes for days together the light is the
+same, the skies being one expanse of soft, opalescent blue, you might
+think under such influence it would be possible for you to perform the
+great almanac trick successfully in your sketch. But how about
+yourself? Are you the same man to-day that you were yesterday? If so,
+perhaps you might also find yourself in exactly the same frame of mind
+that existed when your sketch was half finished. But would you
+guarantee that you would be the same man for a week?</p>
+
+<p>I believe we can maintain this position of the necessity of rapid work
+in out-of-door sketches by looking for a moment at the product of the
+best men of the last century, some of whom I have already mentioned.
+Take Corot, for instance. Corot, as you know, spent almost his entire
+life painting the early light of the morning. An analysis of his
+life's work<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> shows that he must have folded his umbrella and gone home
+before eleven o'clock. My own idea is that many hundreds of his
+canvases, which have since sold at many thousands of francs, were
+perfectly finished in one sitting. This cannot be otherwise when you
+remember that one dealer in Paris claims to have sold two thousand
+Corots. These one-sitting pictures to me express his best work. In the
+larger canvases in which figures are introduced&mdash;notably the one first
+owned by the late Mr. Charles A. Dana, of New York, called "Apollo," I
+believe&mdash;the treatment of the sky and foreground shows careful
+repainting, and while the mechanical process of the brush, shown by
+the over and under painting, the dragging of opaque color over
+transparent, may produce certain translucencies which the more
+forcible and direct stroke of the brush&mdash;one touch and no more&mdash;fails
+to give, still the whole composition lacks that intimacy with nature
+which one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> always feels in the smaller and more rapidly perfected
+canvases.</p>
+
+<p>Note, too, the sketches of Frans Hals and see what power comes from
+the sure touch of a well-directed brush in the hand of a man who used
+it to express his thoughts as other men use chords of music or
+paragraphs in literature. A man who made no false moves, who knew that
+every stroke of his brush must express a perfect sentence and that it
+could never be recalled. Really the work of such a master is like the
+gesture of an actor&mdash;if it is right a thrill goes through you, if it
+is wrong it is like that player friend of Hamlet's who sawed the air.</p>
+
+<p>This quality of "the stroke," by the by, if we stop to analyze for a
+moment, is the stroke that comes straight from the heart, tingling up
+the spinal column, down the arm, and straight to the finger-tips. Ole
+Bull had it when his violin echoed a full orchestra; Paderewski has it
+when he rings clearly and sharply some note that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> vibrates through you
+for hours after; Booth had it when drawing himself up to his full
+height as Cardinal Richelieu he began that famous speech, "Around her
+form I draw the holy circle of our faith"&mdash;his upraised finger a
+barrier that an army could not break down; Velasquez, in his
+marvellous picture in the Museum of the Prado in Madrid of "The
+Topers" ("Los Borrachos"); Frans Hals, in almost every canvas that his
+brush touched; and in later years our own John Sargent, in many of his
+portraits, but especially in his direct out-of-door studies, shows it;
+as do scores of others whose sureness of touch and exact knowledge
+have made their names household words where art is loved and genius
+held sacred.</p>
+
+<p>And with this ability to record swiftly and surely there will come a
+certain enthusiasm, fanned to white heat when, some morning, trap in
+hand, you are searching for something to paint, your mind entirely
+filled with a certain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> object (you propose to paint boats if you
+please, and you have walked around them for minutes trying to get the
+best view and deciding upon the all-important best possible
+composition)&mdash;when, turning suddenly, you face a mass of buildings and
+a sweep of river that instantly put to flight every idea concerning
+your first subject, and in a moment a new arrangement is evolved and
+you are working like mad. It is only under this pressure of
+<i>enthusiasm</i> that the best work is produced.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The coming landscape-painter will be a <i>four-hour man</i>, of thorough
+knowledge, one who has most intimate and close acquaintance with
+nature, one who can select and then seize the salient features of the
+landscape, at a glance arranging them upon the square of his canvas,
+in other words, composing them, the basis being the most expansive and
+most picturesque grouping of the several details of the subject,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+extracting at the same moment, at the same instant, with one sweep of
+his eye, the whole scheme of local color, and then surely, clearly,
+lovingly, and reverently making it breathe upon his canvas for other
+souls to live by.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And how noble the ambition!</p>
+
+<p>In our present civilization some men are moved to philanthropy, some
+to science, some to be rulers of men. Some men are brimful and running
+over with harmonies that will live forever. Other men's hearts beat in
+unison with the symphonies of the spheres, and Homer and Milton and
+Dante become household words. You seek another expression of the good
+that is in you. You will be painters and sculptors. Color, form, and
+mass are to you what the pen, the sword, and the lute are to those
+others who have gone before, or are now around you. Your mission is as
+distinct as theirs, and it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> as imperative that you should fulfil
+it. Paint what you see and as you see it. Nothing more nor less. See
+only the beautiful, and if you cannot reach that content yourself with
+the picturesque. It is a first cousin but once removed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="MASS" id="MASS"></a>MASS</h2>
+
+
+<p>The difference between composition and mass is that a composition is a
+mere outline of pen or pencil, each object taking its proper place in
+the square of a canvas, while mass is the filling in between these
+outlines either of varied color or in lights or darks, their
+gradations but so many guides to the spectator's eye marking not only
+its perspective, form and atmosphere, but, if skilfully done, telling
+the story of your subject at a glance.</p>
+
+<p>To do this the student must find the lightest light and darkest dark
+in the subject before him and, having found it, adhere to it to the
+end of his work. For as the sun dominates the sky and earth so do its
+rays dominate parts of the whole, making more luminous than the rest
+only one object upon which its light falls.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> To make this more
+explicit it is only necessary to look at an egg upon a white
+table-cloth. Here is a natural object devoid of local color except in
+reflected lights, and yet you will find that where the round of the
+egg reflects the light the highest light is found, while in the edge
+of the shadow, where the egg turns into the round&mdash;between that high
+light and the reflected light from the table-cloth, I mean&mdash;is found
+its darkest dark. But only one portion of that shadow, a point as
+large as the point of a pin, is the darkest dark. Everything else is
+gradation, from the highest light to the lowest light, the lowest
+light being almost a shadow; and from its darkest dark to its lightest
+dark the lightest dark again being almost a light.</p>
+
+<p>In landscape art these problems are greatly simplified. The sun is
+always the strongest light, and whatever comes against it, church
+tower, rock, palace, or ship under full sail, is the darkest object.
+In addition to this there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> is always some one point where the outdoor
+painter can find a lesser supplementary light and near it a lesser
+supplementary dark. Moreover, throughout the rest of the composition
+these same lights and darks are echoed and re-echoed in constantly
+decreasing gradations.</p>
+
+<p>You may apply these same tests everywhere in nature. Even in a gray
+day, when the sun is not so positive a factor in distributing light,
+and the shadows are so subtle that it is difficult to discover them,
+there is always some mass of foliage, the silver sheen from an old
+shingled roof, the glare of a white wall, which marks for the
+composition its lightest light, while a corresponding dark can always
+be found somewhere in the tree-trunks, under the overhanging eaves, or
+in the broken crevices of the masonry.</p>
+
+<p>So it is with every other expression of nature. Even on a Venetian
+lagoon, where the sky and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> water are apparently one (not really one to
+the quick eye of an expert, the water always being one tone lower than
+the sky&mdash;that is, more gray than the overbending sky)&mdash;even in this
+lagoon you will find some one portion of the surface lighter than any
+other portion; and in expressing it your eye first and your brush next
+must catch in the opalescent sweep of delicious color under your eye
+its exact quantity of black and white. By black and white I mean, of
+course, that excess or absence of pure color which when translated
+into pure black and white would express the meaning of the
+subject-matter, as one of Raphael Morghen's engravings on steel gives
+you the feeling and color in his masterly rendering of Da Vinci's
+"Last Supper."</p>
+
+<p>In my judgment one of the great landscapes of modern times is the
+picture by the distinguished Dutch painter, Mauve, known as "Changing
+Pasture," which is now owned by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> Mr. Charles P. Taft, of Cincinnati.
+Here the factor of mass is carried to its utmost limit. Sky one mass;
+flock of sheep another mass; and the foreground, sweeping under the
+sheep and beyond until it is lost in the haze of the distance, another
+mass, or, if one chooses to put it that way, another broad gradation
+of a section of the picture: the highest light being some
+infinitesimal speck in the diaphanous silver sky, the strongest dark
+being found somewhere in the foreground or in the flock of sheep.</p>
+
+<p>By a strict adherence to this law of one supreme light and one supreme
+dark does Mauve's work, as it were, get back from and out of his
+canvas, as from the record of a phonograph into which some soul has
+breathed its own precise purpose and intent.</p>
+
+<p>So, too, does nature often call out to you fixing your attention,
+often shrouding in shadow the unimportant in the landscape, while high
+up above the gloom it holds up to your gaze a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> white candle of a
+minaret or the bared breast of an Alpine peak reflecting the loving
+look of a tired sunbeam bidding it good-night.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>To accent the more strongly the value of this dominant light even
+though it be treated in very low gradation, I recall that a year ago
+the art world was startled by the sum received for a medium sized
+picture of some coryph&eacute;es painted by Degas, now an old man over eighty
+years old&mdash;a subject which he always loved and, indeed, which he has
+painted many times. Some thirty years ago, when he was comparatively a
+young man, I saw, at the Bartholdi exhibition in New York, a picture
+by this master of these same coryph&eacute;es, two figures standing together
+in the flies resting their weary, pink, fishworm legs as they balanced
+themselves with their hands against the wabbling scenery. It was a
+wholly gray picture, and almost in a monotone, and yet the flashes of
+their diamond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> earrings, no larger than the point of a pin, were
+distinctly visible, holding their place in, if not dominating, the
+whole color scheme.</p>
+
+<p>Again, in that marvellous portrait of Wertheimer, the bric-&agrave;-brac
+dealer, if you remember, the eye first catches the strong vermilion
+touch on the lower lip, and then, knowing that a master like Sargent
+would not leave it isolated, one finds, to one's delight and joy, a
+little swipe of red on the tongue of the barely discernible black
+poodle squatting at his feet. Had the red of the dog's tongue
+predominated, we should never have been thrilled and fascinated by one
+of the great portraits of this or any other time.</p>
+
+<p>This is also true in other great portraits&mdash;in, for instance, the
+pictures of Rembrandt, Vandyck, and Frans Hals, especially where a
+face is relieved by the addition of a hand and the white of a ruff.
+Somewhere in that warm expanse of the face there can be found a
+pinhead<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span> of color, brighter and more dominating than any other brush
+touch on the canvas. It may be the high egg-light in the forehead, or
+the click on the tip of the nose, or a fold of the white ruff; but
+slight as it is and unnoticeable at first, because of it not only does
+the head look round as the egg looks round when relieved by the same
+treatment, but the attention is fixed. Unless this had been preserved,
+the eye would have, perhaps, rested first on the hand, something
+foreign to the painter's intention.</p>
+
+<p>Recalling again the law of the high light and strong dark, and
+referring again to the value of the skilful manipulation of light and
+shade forming the mass thereby expressing the more clearly the meaning
+of a picture, I repeat that, while the eye is always caught by the
+strongest dark against the strongest light, it is next caught by the
+lesser supplementary light and lesser supplementary dark; and then,
+if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> the painter is skilful enough in the management of the remaining
+lesser lights and darks, the eye will run through the gradations to
+the end, rebounding once more to the greater light and dark, exactly
+in the order intended by the painter; thus unfolding to the spectator
+little by little, quite as a plot of a novel is made clear, the story
+which the painter had in his own mind to tell. This is effected purely
+and entirely by the correct accentuations of the explanatory lights
+and darks. One mistake in the management&mdash;that is, the accentuating of
+the third light, if you please, instead of the second&mdash;will not only
+confuse the eye of the spectator, but may perhaps give him an entirely
+different impression from what was intended by the painter, just as
+the shifting of a chapter in a novel would confuse a reader; and this,
+if you please, without depending in any way upon either the drawing or
+the color of the accessories.</p>
+
+<p>I can best illustrate this by recalling to your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> mind that marvellous
+picture of the so-called literary school of England, a picture by Luke
+Fildes known as "The Doctor" and now hanging in the Tate Gallery in
+London, in which the whole sad story is told in logical sequence by
+the artist's consummate handling of the darks and lights in regular
+progression.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>You will pardon me, I hope, if I leave the more technical details of
+my subject for a moment that I may discuss with you one of the
+peculiarities of the so-called art-loving public of to-day, notably
+that section which insists that no picture should tell a story of any
+kind.</p>
+
+<p>To my own mind this picture of Luke Fildes reaches high-water mark in
+the school of his time, and yet in watching as I have done the crowds
+who surge through the Tate Galleries and the National Gallery, it is
+an almost every-day occurrence to overhear such contemptuous remarks
+as "Oh, yes, one of those literary fellows,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> drop from the lips of
+some highbrow who only tolerates Constable because of the influence
+his example and work had on Corot and other men of the Barbizon
+school.</p>
+
+<p>Another section lose their senses over pure brush work.</p>
+
+<p>A story of Whistler&mdash;one he told me himself&mdash;will illustrate what I
+mean. Jules Stewart's father, a great lover of good pictures and one
+of Fortuny's earliest patrons, had invited Whistler to his house in
+Paris to see his collection, and in the course of the visit drew from
+a hiding-place a small panel of Meissonier's, of a quality so high
+that any dealer in Paris would have given him $30,000 for it.</p>
+
+<p>Whistler would not even glance at it.</p>
+
+<p>Upon Stewart insisting, he adjusted his monocle and said: "Oh, yes,
+very good&mdash;<i>snuff-box style</i>."</p>
+
+<p>This affectation was to have been expected of Whistler because of his
+aggressive mental<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> attitude toward the work of any man who handled his
+brush differently from his own personal methods, but saner minds may
+think along broader lines.</p>
+
+<p>If they do not, they have short memories. Even in my own experience I
+have watched the rise and fall of men whose technic called from the
+housetops&mdash;a call which was heard by the passing throng below, many of
+whom stopped to listen and applaud; for in pictures as in bonnets the
+taste of the public changes almost daily. One has only to review
+several of the schools, both in English and in Continental art, noting
+their dawn of novelty, their sunrise of appreciation, their high noon
+of triumph, their afternoon of neglect, and their night of oblivion,
+to be convinced that the wheel of artistic appreciation is round like
+other wheels&mdash;the world, for one&mdash;and that its revolutions bring the
+night as surely as they bring the dawn.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Not a hundred years have passed since the broad, sensuous work of
+Turner, big in conception and big in treatment, was followed by the
+more exact painters of the English school, many of whom are still at
+work, notably Leader and Alfred Parsons, both Royal Academicians, and
+of whom some contemporaneous critic insisted that they had counted the
+leaves on their elm-trees fringing the polished water of the Thames.
+They, of course, had only been eclipsed by the broader brushes of more
+recent time, men like Frank Brangwyn and Colin Hunter, who have
+yielded to the pressure of the change in taste, or of whom it would be
+more just to say, have <i>set</i> present taste, so that to-day not only
+the afternoon of night, but the twilight of forgetfulness, is slowly
+and surely casting long shadows over the more realistic men of the
+eighties and nineties.</p>
+
+<p>What will follow this evolution of technic no man can predict. The
+lessons of the past,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span> however, are valuable, and to-day one touch of
+Turner's brush is more sought for than acres of canvases so greatly
+prized twenty years after his death.</p>
+
+<p>And this is not alone confined to the old realistic English school. In
+my own time I have seen Verbeckoeven eclipsed by Van Marcke,
+Bouguereau, Cabanel, and G&eacute;r&ocirc;me by Manet, and Sir Frederick Leighton
+by John Sargent&mdash;a young David slaying the Goliath of English technic
+with but a wave of his magic brush&mdash;and, last and by no means least,
+the great French painter Meissonier by the equally great Spanish
+master Sorolla.</p>
+
+<p>I am tempted to continue, for the success of these men in the fulness
+of the sunlight of their triumph, realists as well as impressionists,
+was wholly due to their understanding of and adherence to the rules of
+selection, composition, and mass which form the basis of these papers,
+and which despite their differences in brush work they all adhered
+to.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the late half of the preceding century Meissonier received $66,000
+for his "Friedland," a picture which cost him the best part of two
+years to paint, and the expenditure of many thousands of francs,
+notably the expense attendant upon the trampling down of a field of
+growing wheat by a drove of horses that he might study the action and
+the effect the better. Forty years later Sorolla received $20,000 for
+two figures in blazing sunlight which took him but two days to paint,
+the rest of his collection bringing $250,000, the whole exhibit of one
+hundred and odd pictures having been visited by 150,000 persons in
+thirty-two days. And he is still in the full tide of success,
+pre-eminently the greatest master of the out-of-doors of modern times,
+while to-day the work of Meissonier has fallen into such disrepute
+that no owner dares offer one of his canvases at public auction except
+under the keenest necessity. The first master expresses the refinement
+of extreme realism, or rather detailism; the other is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> pronounced
+impressionist of the sanest of the open-air school of to-day. How long
+this pendulum will continue to swing no one can tell. Both men are
+great painters in the widest, deepest, and most pronounced sense; both
+men have glorified, ennobled, and enriched their time; and both men
+have reflected credit and honor upon their nation and their school.</p>
+
+<p>Meissonier could not only draw the figure, give it life and action,
+keep it harmonious in color, perfect in its gradations of black and
+white, but he had that marvellous gift of color analysis which
+reproduces for you in a picture the size of the top of a cigar-box
+every tone in the local and reflected light to be found, say, in the
+folds of a cavalier's cloak, the pleats no wider than the point of a
+stub pen.</p>
+
+<p>All this, of course, Sorolla ignores and, I am afraid, knowing the man
+personally as I do, despises. What concerns the great Spaniard is the
+whole composition alive in the blaze of the sunlight, the glare of the
+hot sand and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> shimmer of the blue, overarching sky, beating up and
+down and over the figures, and all depicted with a slash of a brush
+almost as wide as your hand. The first picture, the size of a
+tobacco-box, you can hold between thumb and finger and enjoy, amazed
+at the master's knowledge and skill. The other grips you from afar off
+as you enter the gallery and stand startled and astounded before its
+truth and dignity. In the first Meissonier tells you the whole story
+to the very end. In the second Sorolla presents but a series of
+shorthand notes which you yourself can fill in to suit your taste and
+experience both of life and nature.</p>
+
+<p>Whether you prefer one or the other, or neither, is a matter for you
+to decide. You pay your money or you don't, and you can take your
+choice. The future only can tell the story of the revolution of the
+wheel. In the next decade a single Meissonier may be worth its weight
+in sheet gold and layers of Sorollas may be stored in attics awaiting
+some fortunate auction.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What will ensue, the art world over, before the wheel travels its full
+periphery, no man knows. It will not be the hysteria of paint, I feel
+assured, with its dabbers, spotters, and smearers; nor will it be the
+litters of the cub-ists, that new breed of artistic pups, sponsors for
+"The girl coming down-stairs," or "The stairs coming down the girl,"
+or "The coming girl and the down-stairs," it makes no difference
+which, all are equally incoherent and unintelligible; but it will be
+something which, at least, will boast the element of beauty which is
+the one and only excuse for art's existence. I may not live to see
+Meissonier's second dawn and I never want to see Sorolla's eclipse,
+but you may. You have only to remember Turner's second high noon to be
+assured of it.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And just here it might be well to consider this question of technic,
+especially its value in obtaining the results desired. While it has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+nothing to do with either selection, composition, or mass, it has, I
+claim, much to do with the way a painter expresses himself&mdash;his tone
+of voice, his handwriting, his gestures in talking, so to speak&mdash;and
+therefore becomes an integral part of my discourse. It may also be of
+service in the striking of a note of compromise, some middle ground
+upon which the extremes may one day meet.</p>
+
+<p>To make my point the clearer, let me recall an exhibition in New York,
+held some years ago, when the bonnets were five deep trying to get a
+glimpse of a picture of half a dozen red prelates who were listening
+to a missionary's story. Many of these devotees went into raptures
+over the brass nails in the sofa, and were only disappointed when they
+could not read the monogram on the bishop's ring. Later on, a highly
+cultivated and intelligent American citizen was so entranced that he
+bought the missionary, story and all, for the price of a brown-stone
+front, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> carried him away that he might enjoy him forever.</p>
+
+<p>One month later, almost exactly in the same spot hung another picture,
+the subject of which I forget, or it may be that I did not understand
+it or that it had no subject at all. If I remember, it was not like
+anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters
+under the earth. In this respect one could have fallen down and
+worshipped it and escaped the charge of idolatry. With the exception
+of a few stray art critics, delighted at an opportunity for a new
+sensation, it was not surrounded by an idolatrous gathering at all. On
+the contrary, the audience before it reminded me more of Artemas Ward
+and his panorama.</p>
+
+<p>"When I first exhibited this picture in New York," he said, "the
+artists came with lanterns before daybreak to look at it, and then
+they called for the artist, and when he appeared&mdash;they threw things at
+him."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For one picture a gentleman gave a brown-stone front; for the other he
+would not have given a single brick, unless he had been sure of
+planting it in the middle of the canvas the first shot. The first was
+Vibert's realistic picture so well known to you. The other was an
+example of the modern French school or what was then known as advanced
+impressionists.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not go into an analysis of the technic of the two painters. I
+refer to them and their brush work here because of the undue value set
+upon the way a thing is done rather than its value after it is done.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking for myself, I must admit that the value of technic has never
+impressed me as have the other and greater qualities in a
+picture&mdash;namely, its expression of truth and the message it carries of
+beauty and often tenderness. I have always held that it is of no
+moment to the world at large by what means and methods an artist
+expresses himself; that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> the world is only concerned as to whether he
+has expressed himself at all; and if so, to what end and extent.</p>
+
+<p>If the artist says to us, "I scumbled in the background solid, using
+bitumen as an undertone, then I dragged over my high lights and
+painted my cool color right into it," it is as meaningless to most of
+us as if another bread-winner had said, "I use a Singer with a
+straight shuttle and No. 60 cotton." What we want to know is whether
+she made the shirt.</p>
+
+<p>Art terms are, however, synonymous with other terms and in this
+connection may be of assistance. To make my purpose clear we will
+suppose that "technic" in art is handwriting. "Composition," the
+arrangement of sentences. "Details," the choice of words. "Drawing,"
+good grammar. "Mass, or light and shade," contrasting expressions
+giving value each to the other. I hold, however, that there is
+something more. The author may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> write a good hand, spell correctly,
+and have a proper respect for Lindley Murray, but what does he say?
+What idea does he convey? Has he told us anything of human life, of
+human love, of human suffering or joy, or uncovered for us any fresh
+hiding-place of nature and taught us to love it? Or is it only words?</p>
+
+<p>It really matters very little to any of us what the handwriting of an
+author may be, and so it should matter very little how an artist
+touches the canvas.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that a picture containing and expressing an idea the most
+elevated can be painted either in mass or detail, at the pleasure of
+the painter. He may write in the Munich style, or after the manner of
+the D&uuml;sseldorf ready writers, or the modern French pothook and hanger,
+or the antiquated Dutch. He can use the English of Chaucer, or
+Shakespeare, or Josh Billings, at his own good pleasure. If he conveys
+an intelligible idea he has accomplished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> a result the value of which
+is just in proportion to the quality of that idea.</p>
+
+<p>To continue this parallel, it may be said that extreme realism is the
+use of too many words in a sentence and too many sentences in a
+paragraph; extreme impressionism, the use of too few. Neither,
+however, is fundamental, and art can be good, bad, or indifferent
+containing each or combining both.</p>
+
+<p>Realism, or, to express it more clearly, detailism, is the realizing
+of the whole subject-matter or motive of a picture in exact detail.
+Impressionism is the generalizing of the subject-matter as a whole and
+the expression of only its salient features.</p>
+
+<p>The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been
+insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like
+a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle
+and every crack in the blade became apparent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The more advanced would have insisted on not only the fibre in the
+wood, but the brand on the other side of the blade, had it been
+physically possible to show it.</p>
+
+<p>In absolute contrast to this, there lived a man at Barbizon who
+maintained that a spade was not a spade at all, but merely a mass of
+shadow against a low twilight sky, in the hands of a figure who with
+uncovered head listens reverently; that the spade is merely a symbol
+of labor; that he used it as he would use a word necessary to express
+a sentence, which would be unintelligible without it, and that it was
+perfectly immaterial to him, and should be to the world, whether it
+was a spade or a shovel so long as the soft twilight, and the reverent
+figures wearied with the day's work, and the flat waste of field
+stretching away to the little village spire on the dim horizon line
+told the story of human suffering and patience and toil, as with
+folded hands they listened to the soft cadence of the angelus.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Which of these two methods of expression is correct&mdash;Ruskin or Millet?
+Are there any laws which govern, or is it a matter of taste, fancy, or
+feeling? Is it a matter of individuality? If so, which individual by
+his methods tells us the most truths? Let us endeavor to analyze.</p>
+
+<p>I whirl through a mountain gorge and catch a glance through a
+car-window&mdash;an impression. In the darkness of the tunnel it remains
+with me. I see the great mass of white cumuli and against them the
+dark cedars, the straggling foot-path and steep cliffs. I am impressed
+with the sweep of the cloud form pressing over and around them. With
+my eyes closed I paint this on my brain, and if I am great enough and
+wide enough and deep enough I can subdue my personality and forget my
+surroundings, and when opportunity offers I can express upon my canvas
+the few salient facts which impressed me and should impress my fellow
+men. If it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> the silvery light of the morning, I am Corot; if the
+day is gone and across the cool lagoon I see the ripple amid the tall
+grass catching the fading color of the warm sky, I am Daubigny; if a
+gray mist hangs over the hillside and the patches of snow half melted
+express the warmth and mellowness of the coming spring, I am our own
+Inness.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, however, I am not content. I am overburdened with curiosity.
+I say to myself: "What sort of trees, pine or cedar?" I think, pine,
+but I am uneasy lest they should be hemlock. Were the rocks all
+perpendicular, or did not detached bowlders line the path? About the
+clouds, were they not some small cirri beneath the zenith? My memory
+is so bad&mdash;and so I stop the train and go back. Just as I expected.
+The trees were spruce and the rocks were grass-grown and full of
+fissures, and so I begin to paint and continue. I get the bark on the
+trees, and the foliage until each particular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> leaf stands on end, and
+the strata of the cliffs, and the very sand on the path. I crowd into
+my canvas geology, botany, and the laws governing cloud forms.</p>
+
+<p>Being an ordinary mortal, my curiosity, my telescopic eyes, my
+magnifying-glass of vision, my love of truth, my positive conviction
+that it is a spruce and should not be painted as a pine, except
+through rank perjury, all these forces together have undermined my
+impression or, like thorns, have grown up and choked it. Being honest,
+I am ready to confess that before returning to the spot I was in doubt
+about the pine. But I am still ready to affirm that what I have
+labored over is the exact counterfeit and presentment of nature, and
+equally willing to denounce the public for not seeing it as I do. I
+forget that I have been a boor and a vulgarian&mdash;that I have been
+invited to a feast and that I have pried into mysteries which my
+goddess would veil from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> my sight; that I have had the impertinence to
+bring my own personal advice into the discussion; that I have insisted
+that fissures, and leaves, and sand, and infinite detail were
+necessary to this expression of nature's sublimity.</p>
+
+<p>Is it at all strange that the impression which so charmed me as I saw
+it from my car-window has faded? Nature unrolled for me suddenly a
+poem. For symbols she used a great mass of dark, sturdy trees against
+a majestic cloud, a rugged cliff, and a straggling path. I have
+ignored them all and insisted that "truth was mighty and must
+prevail." I am a realist and "paint things as they are." Not so. I am
+an iconoclast and have broken my god and cannot put together the
+pieces. I have sacrificed a divine impression to a human realism.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose, however, that the painter who had this glimpse of nature
+before entering the tunnel was no ordinary man, but a man of steadfast
+mind, of firm convictions, of a sure touch, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span> an absolute belief
+in nature, and so reverential that he dare not offer even a suggestion
+of his own. He has seen it; he has felt it; it has gone down deep into
+his memory and heart. The cloud, the cliff, the mass, the path&mdash;that
+is all. And it is enough. The annoyances of the day, the seductions of
+fresh impressions of newer subjects, the weakness of the flesh do not
+deter him. With a single aim, to the exclusion of all else, and with a
+direct simplicity, he records what he saw, and lo! we have a poem.
+Such a man was Courbet, Corot, Dupr&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>But one would say: That may answer for landscape: what about the
+figure-painter? Let us counsel together.</p>
+
+<p>A man only rises to his own level. In art, as in music and literature,
+he only expresses himself. Each selects his own method. The school of
+Meissonier is not content with a few grand truths simply expressed.
+They want a multitude of facts; they must tell the story in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> their own
+way. They are the Dickens and Walter Scott of art. It is iteration and
+reiteration. My cardinal must not only have red stockings, says
+Vibert, but they must be silk; every detail must be elaborated. Very
+well, what of it? you say. What do you criticise, the drawing? No. The
+color? No. The composition? No. Does the painter express himself?
+Perfectly. What then? Just this. He expresses himself too perfectly.
+At first I am delighted. The story is so well told&mdash;the well-fed
+prelates; the half-sneer; the cynical smile; the earnest missionary
+telling his experience. But the next day?&mdash;well, he is still telling
+it. By the end of the week the enjoyment is confined to allowing him
+to tell it to a fresh eye, and that eye another's, and watching his
+pleasure. At the end of the year it becomes a part of the decoration
+of the wall. You perhaps feel that the frame needs retouching, and
+that is all the impression it makes upon you, except as would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> an old
+timepiece with the mainspring gone. The works are exquisite and the
+enamelling charming, but it has been four o'clock for forty years.</p>
+
+<p>In the library, however, hangs an etching which you often look at; in
+fact, you never pass it without noticing it. Two figures, a
+wheelbarrow, a spade, a stretch of country, a spire pencilled against
+a low-tone sky; and yet, somehow, you hear the tolling of the bell and
+the whispered prayer. Ah! but you say this has nothing to do with the
+treatment; it is the subject. One moment. The missionary's story is as
+full of pathos and of human suffering and courage as the "Angelus,"
+and at first as profoundly stirs our sympathy; but, in one, Vibert has
+monopolized the conversation; he has exhausted the subject; he has
+told you everything he knows. Nothing has been omitted; nails,
+monograms, and all; there is nothing left for you to supply&mdash;he is not
+so complimentary. But Millet has taken you into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> his confidence. He
+says: "Come, see what I once saw. Do you ever remember any such couple
+working in the field?" And you immediately, and unconsciously to
+yourself, remember just such a bent back and reverent, uncovered head.
+Where, you cannot tell, for the picture comes to you out of the dim
+lumber-room in your brain where you store your old memories and faint
+impressions of bygone days and sad faces.</p>
+
+<p>But if he added, "See, my peasant wears a woollen jacket trimmed with
+worsted braid," your impression would immediately fade. You might
+remember the jacket, but the braid, never. But for this it would have
+been delightful for you, although unconsciously, to add your own sweet
+memory to the picture.</p>
+
+<p>Another impression choked to death with unnecessary realism.</p>
+
+<p>But be you realist or impressionist, remember that a true work of art
+is that which has pleased<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> <i>the greatest number of people for the
+longest period of time</i>; that the love of beauty indicates our highest
+intellectual plane, and that if you will express to your fellow
+sinners burdened with life's cares something of the enthusiasm of your
+own life, and will assist them to see their mother earth through your
+own eyes in constantly increasing beauty&mdash;you having by your art, in
+your possession, the key to the cipher, and interpreting and
+translating for them&mdash;you will confer upon them one of the greatest
+blessings which fall to their lot on this mundane sphere.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="WATER-COLORS" id="WATER-COLORS"></a>WATER-COLORS</h2>
+
+
+<p>Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God
+gives to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make
+everything gray&mdash;every rose but the shadow of itself&mdash;every tree and
+rock and cloud a monotone of gradation. Instead of that, everything we
+look at, from a violet to an overbending sky, is enriched and
+glorified by millions of color tones as infinite in their gradation as
+the waves of sound and light. Even in the grayest days, when the
+clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is desolate as
+the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite
+gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the
+true painter fill it with joy and beauty.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are many of us, however, who are not true painters and to whom
+the most exquisite of color schemes are but dull results. Many of us
+walk around our galleries passing the best pictures in silence; others
+ridicule what they cannot understand. Even our own beloved Mark Twain,
+whose heart was always open to the best and warmest of human
+impressions, and who expressed them in every line of his pen, when led
+up to one of Turner's masterpieces, "The Slave Ship," a glory of red,
+yellow, and blue running riot over a sunset sky, the whole reflected
+in a troubled sea, remarked to his companion: "Very wonderful! Seen it
+before. Always reminds me of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a
+plate of tomato soup."</p>
+
+<p>The education of such barbarians belongs to our generation and should
+be taken up by those of us who know or think we do. For true color is
+as great an educator as true music.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> This knowledge of color harmony,
+this matching and contrasting of different colors, but very few men
+and women possess. When they do, it is generally inherited and thus a
+natural gift. The rest of the world wear blue and purple, or orange
+and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of nature even as
+bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always held
+that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration,
+furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into,
+have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature&mdash;that the
+russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues
+of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow;
+the gloom of a forest with its yellow-grays and blue-grays, the
+gray-green moss of the lichens, the brown of the tree-trunks, the
+black and gray hues of the rocks, all these, if carefully studied and
+analyzed and reproduced, would make beautiful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> anything in the world
+from a bonnet to a ch&acirc;teau. To illustrate:</p>
+
+<p>Several years ago an intimate friend of mine, a distinguished
+architect of New York, the late Mr. Bruce Price, in designing a number
+of cottages at Tuxedo sought in vain for some color mixture current in
+the paint-shops with which to cover the outside of his buildings. All
+schemes of browns, olive-greens, colonial yellow with white trimmings
+and the reverse, Pompeiian reds, slate-grays, and dull yellows
+resulted in making "spots" of the houses, so that the effect he wished
+to produce, that of the houses being merged into the forest, was lost.
+Mr. Price was not only an architect, but he was an artist as well. He
+had little skill with his brush, but he had that innate good taste,
+with a keen eye to discern the subtle gradations in color, that only
+needed change of occupation to make him a painter. One day, looking at
+a new bare wooden cottage&mdash;unpainted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span> as yet&mdash;in contrast to a mass of
+foliage in the early autumn before the leaves had begun to turn, in
+which the yellow-grays one often sees predominated, he suddenly
+thought to himself: "The tree-trunks and underbrush do not stand out;
+they are all of one piece, each keeping its place, while my house"&mdash;as
+he rather inelegantly but forcibly expressed it&mdash;"sticks up like a
+sore thumb." Later, this very clever man made an analysis of the local
+color in these several grays, and his subsequent matching and
+combining of these different tints resulted in the exact tones of the
+forest before him, and when this was completed and the house painted
+you felt should you enter the front door that the leaves must be over
+your head.</p>
+
+<p>Bringing the discussion down to more practical details, really to the
+palettes which we hold in our hands, the question then naturally
+arises as to how best to express true local color,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> with its varying
+blues, yellows, and reds, and especially its varying grays.</p>
+
+<p>In my own experience I find grays to be the prevailing tones
+everywhere in nature.</p>
+
+<p>I find also that the great masters of modern art, particularly the
+school of 1830, known as the Barbizon school, and represented by such
+men as Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, and Millet, and later by men
+who in some degree represent that school, but to my mind have done
+work equally good&mdash;even Mont&eacute;nard and Cazin&mdash;that all these masters
+have loved, sought for, and expressed in their work this
+all-prevailing quality, the gray.</p>
+
+<p>A few very simple rules for testing the power, presence, and quality
+of the prevailing gray in nature are so easily learned and so
+convincing in their application that once applied they are never
+forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for instance, a morning in late spring or early summer, when all
+nature is dressed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span> from tree-top to grass-blade in a suit of vivid
+green. To a tyro with so dangerous a weapon as a color-box, there is
+nothing that will really bring down this game but some explosive
+composed of indigo and Indian yellow, or Prussian blue and light
+cadmium&mdash;perhaps the strongest mixture of vivid raw green.</p>
+
+<p>Now, pluck a single leaf from a near-by branch, hold it close to one
+eye, and with this as a guide note the difference in color tones
+between it and the leaves on the tree from which you plucked the leaf
+and which you had believed to be a vivid green. To your surprise, the
+leaf itself, even with the sun shining through it, is many tones lower
+and grayer than the color of the near-by branch as depicted on your
+paper, while the near-by branch, in comparison, pales into a sable
+gray-green, which you could perhaps get with yellow ochre, blue-black,
+and a touch of chrome-yellow.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It does not seem to me that I can better illustrate this quality of
+the gray than by rapidly going over some of the works of George Inness
+lately on exhibition in New York&mdash;certainly to me the most marvellous
+examples of the power of a human mind to harmonize the subtle
+colorings of nature. I select Inness not only because he is to me one
+of the great landscape-painters of his day, but because he chooses a
+very wide range of subjects, from early morning to twilight,
+expressing these truthfully, absolutely, perfectly, so far as local
+color is concerned&mdash;that is, of course, as I see through either my own
+spectacles or Inness's; but, then, remember, our eyes may need repair.
+When these canvases are analyzed we find in the range of color nothing
+stronger than yellow ochre in yellows, than light red in reds, and,
+with hardly an exception, blue-black for blues. Indeed, his usual
+palette, as does Mauve's and Cazin's, seems to me to be only yellow
+ochre and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> blue-black, and with these two colors he expresses the
+whole range of the color scheme in nature, with the varying lights of
+day and night, except in depicting sunsets.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>After the salient features of a landscape have been analyzed and
+recorded in color, the more subtle qualities are to be detected and
+expressed. The most important of these is the time of day. To an
+outdoor painter&mdash;an expert examining the work of another expert&mdash;the
+hour-hand is written over every square inch of the canvas. He knows
+from the angle of the shadows just how high the sun was in the
+heavens, and he knows, too, from the local color of the shadows
+whether it is a silvery light of the morning, the glare of noontime,
+or the deepening golden glow of the afternoon. In fact, if you will
+think for a moment, the shadow of an overhanging balcony upon a white
+wall is a perfect sun-dial for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> him, and this test can be indefinitely
+applied to every part of the picture.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="pic_2" id="pic_2"></a>
+<img src="images/image_01.jpg" width="600" height="410" alt="Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames"  />
+<span class="caption">Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The next is the temperature: how hot or how cold it was&mdash;what month in
+the year? It is unnecessary for Inness to cover his ground with snow
+to make his picture express a certain degree of cold, neither is it
+necessary for Mont&eacute;nard to fill his Proven&ccedil;al roads with clouds of
+dust to show how hot they are. This is done by the opalescent tones of
+the sky, by the values expressed in reflected lights and in the
+illuminated shadows, so that you feel in looking across one of
+Inness's fields of brown grass just how late is the autumn and just
+how cool it has been, and in looking down one of Mont&eacute;nard's roads you
+realize how useless would be an overcoat.</p>
+
+<p>In this connection let me say that all nature is interesting and all
+nature is beautiful, but all nature, as I have said, is not paintable.
+The interior of a railroad station, for instance, is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>interesting,
+as giving you certain mechanical results, construction, but it is not
+picturesque&mdash;that is, paintable&mdash;unless one could treat it as Pennell
+does, contrasting the black cars and locomotive with a puff of white
+steam, giving the vistas with the perspective of track, and a centre
+mass of people adding an idea of movement and color.</p>
+
+<p>Above all, the outdoor painter should get the character and feeling of
+the place he portrays on his canvas. If in Spain, his picture must
+look like Spain. The air must be transparent, the architecture
+clean-cut against the azure. If it be Holland, the atmosphere must be
+moist, the air like a veil, and with all this there must be nothing in
+the work that will be mistaken for the smoke-laden air of England.
+Only thus, by this fidelity to the very nature and spirit of a place,
+can the picture be made to express the essence of its life, which is
+really the heart of the whole mystery.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Coming at last to our text, Water-Colors&mdash;the art of depicting nature
+on a sheet of white paper by paints diluted with water&mdash;it will be
+well to remind you that the art goes back to almost prehistoric times.
+A few weeks ago, in the library of Mr. Jesse Carter, director of the
+American Academy in Rome, I saw one of the earliest water-colors in
+existence. It was painted upon a sheet of slate, and, although some
+thousands of years old, still retained its color and remarkable
+brilliancy. The subject was a group of figures, the centre object
+being a girl of wonderful grace.</p>
+
+<p>The present art of water-color painting, with a sheet of white paper
+as background instead of the permanent stone, is, however, but little
+more than one hundred and fifty years old, and owes its existence
+largely to the men of the English school.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. C. E. Hughes, in his delightful book on "Early English Water
+Color," confined this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> English school to the men born between the
+years 1720 and 1820.</p>
+
+<p>In this group he places the great Gainsborough, who from 1760 to 1774
+worked "in charcoal and water-color on tinted paper," which he said he
+"loved to dash off of an evening, and which dazzled the fine ladies
+and gentlemen who frequented the select watering-place of Bath," where
+he was then living.</p>
+
+<p>Then came Robert Cozens, the brothers Sanby, Thomas Hearne, Thomas
+Malton, Samuel Scott, and a few others, all known as the
+eighteenth-century painters.</p>
+
+<p>These were succeeded by Thomas Girtin, who was born in 1775 and died
+at twenty-seven years of age; and the great J. M. W. Turner, who first
+saw the light in the same year, and on the day on which all great
+Englishmen should be born&mdash;namely, April 23&mdash;a day dedicated to St.
+George and the birthday of William Shakespeare.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Girtin and Turner worked together. Girtin, measured by the standard of
+to-day, was an extreme impressionist, leaving behind him sketches
+dashed in with an appearance of freedom which Peter DeWint and David
+Cox might have envied when in after years they were at the height of
+their power. Turner, on the contrary, devoted his time to acquiring
+that triumphant grasp of detail which caused him to be known in his
+earlier life as an extreme realist.</p>
+
+<p>The change in Turner's work&mdash;the broader brush&mdash;came in his later
+years when oil became his medium of expression, in which, no doubt,
+his ability to note and yet sacrifice all unnecessary detail was a
+potent factor.</p>
+
+<p>A list of Englishmen greatly prized in their day now follows. Such men
+as John Varly, Gilpin, Glover, William Havell (all of whom during some
+part of their careers were members of the first Water Color Society
+formed in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> England, in 1804, which body still survives in the old
+Water Color Society whose rooms are still open on Pall Mall East) rose
+into prominence, their works finding places both in private and public
+collections.</p>
+
+<p>This society was in turn succeeded by the New Society of Painters in
+Miniature and Water Colors, which came into being in 1807 and went out
+of existence in 1812&mdash;a victim, says Hughes, of the condition of
+public apathy which brought about in the same year a reconstruction of
+the older organization under the joint title of the Oil and Water
+Color Society, and which eked out a precarious existence until the
+birth of the association now known as the Royal Institute for Painters
+in Water Colors.</p>
+
+<p>Other names now confront us, among them two men, David Cox and Peter
+DeWint, who in their day were considered masters of the medium. These
+last struck a new note in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span> water-color, or rather a new technic in its
+handling. What Ruskin, the realist, in his "Modern Painters" describes
+as "blottesque" was at that time looked upon by both teachers and
+students as the one and only means by which white paper could be
+properly stained. This method, to quote from a loyal believer in the
+English transparent school, and whose enthusiasm is delightful, was
+the laying on of the color in washes which filled certain definite
+spaces indicated by a pen-and-ink outline.</p>
+
+<p>These washes would indicate, say, a distant tree with a preliminary
+tint and a subsequent elaboration; he would do it all in one process,
+giving his blot an irregular edge and allowing the color to accumulate
+where the shadows required it. His elaborative touches elsewhere were
+of the same nature. They were brush blots as distinct from washes. To
+this, I think, we may attribute on analysis the freedom of handling
+which&mdash;though each man has his distinctive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span> method&mdash;is characteristic
+of both Cox and DeWint. If we add to these two methods of using the
+brush a third&mdash;its manipulation as though it were a pen&mdash;we shall have
+all the fluid processes on one or the other of which the beauty of all
+modern water-color drawings depends. A fourth process is rubbing the
+color into the grain of the paper. A fifth&mdash;a supplementary one&mdash;is
+scratching out. Last is the ignominy of the stipple&mdash;the wetting of
+the brush in the mouth, a technic entirely dependent upon the quantity
+of saliva the student can spare for his work. Almost every early wash
+water-color in existence can be classified according to the employment
+in its making of some or all of these means.</p>
+
+<p>In later years, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century,
+we have Copley Fielding; Prout, with his picturesque sepia drawings,
+the detail of his architecture in brown ink; Harding; Bonnington,
+really a great man;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> Clarkson Stanfield; Rowbotham; David Roberts;
+James Holland; Cattermole, who declined a knighthood and whose
+intimates were Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray; and so on down to the
+men of to-day, who are so well and ably represented in the annual
+exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the present English Water Color
+Societies.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As for our own progress in the art, the subject, of course, is too
+well known for long discussion. Our oldest society, the American Water
+Color Society, held its first public exhibition in the National
+Academy of Design in New York in 1867, a date always remembered by me
+with infinite pride and pleasure, for upon the walls of the smallest
+room close up under the roof was hung my first exhibited
+water-color&mdash;the only one of my three the hanging committee were good
+enough to accept. Two years later&mdash;I am happy to say&mdash;in 1869, I was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+elected a member, and I am further happy to say that I am still in
+good standing and in high-hanging, and have so continued from that day
+down to the present time&mdash;a trifle of some forty-six years.</p>
+
+<p>As to my compatriots, I can truthfully say that its membership covers
+some of the great water-colorists of our own or any other time, both
+here and abroad&mdash;men entirely free to do as they pleased, working in
+anything and all things so long as, to use their own expression, they
+"get there," handling body color, in a veil of silver-gray as an
+overwash or squeezed in chunks from a tube; undertones of charcoal
+gray, overtones of pastel&mdash;anything for <i>quality</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Their names are legion: the late E. A. Abbey, Walter Palmer, Chase,
+the late Robert Blum, F. S. Church, Cooper, Curran, Eaton, Farrer, the
+two Smillies, Childe Hassam, Keller, Murphy, Nicoll, Potthast, the
+late Henry Smith, etc., etc.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These are but a haphazard choice of the men whose work shows the
+widest ranges in selection, composition, mass, and technic, and who,
+in the world of water-color painting, are masters of the medium.</p>
+
+<p>As to our progenitors, the English water-color school&mdash;and I make the
+statement with every respect for their high accomplishments&mdash;while I
+believe we are indebted to them for the very existence of the art
+itself, I must say that our own men and art-lovers the world over
+would have been vastly benefited had these Englishmen allowed
+themselves a little more freedom in their methods and not followed so
+blindly the traditions of their past.</p>
+
+<p>That we broke away so early is as much a question of race as of
+training. The last idea that enters the heads of our own men is that
+they want either to paint or to draw like somebody else. They all want
+to paint like themselves, or they do not want to paint at all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> They
+are so many art sponges. They go abroad, wander about the Grosvenor
+and the exhibitions, run over to Paris and haunt the Salon and shops,
+and so on to Munich and Berlin, picking up a technical touch here or a
+new idea of grouping or mass or color scheme there, and then, having
+thoroughly absorbed it all, return home and use whatever suits them;
+but a slavish imitation of any one English, French, or German
+master&mdash;never; neither do they follow any other brush at home. They do
+not believe in each other sufficiently to pay the highest form of
+flattery&mdash;imitation.</p>
+
+<p>Nor do many of them find their subjects abroad&mdash;a habit practised
+these many years by your humble speaker, whose only excuse is that he
+<i>must</i> paint, no matter where he is, and that his life in the
+summer-time is dominated by his two children, both exiles, and more
+exactingly still in late years by two little grandboys who have not as
+yet crossed the ocean. No, these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> young American painters, with hardly
+an exception, find their subjects at home, and they choose wisely.</p>
+
+<p>And just here it can be said that if we are ever to have a school that
+will leave its impress on the art of the world, the task will be the
+easier if our men find their subjects at home&mdash;if they will show our
+own people the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of the material that lies
+under their very eyes, and also teach those fellows on the other side
+to respect us, both because we can paint and because we have the
+things to paint from. With a mountain and river scenery unrivalled on
+the globe; with rock-bound coasts breaking the full surge of an ocean;
+with forests of towering trees compared to which in girth and height
+the trees of all other lands are but toothpicks; with plains ending in
+films of blue haze and valleys sparkling with myriads of waterfalls;
+with every type of the human race blended in our own, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> distinct as
+are the woodman of Maine and the soft-eyed mulatto of Louisiana; with
+a history filled with traditions most romantic&mdash;Aztec, Indian, and
+negro; with women who move like Greek goddesses and children whose
+faces are divine, why go away from home to find something to paint?
+Winslow Homer never did, and that's why his work will live when the
+painters of Egyptian harems, Spanish dancers, and Dutch and Venetian
+boats and palaces are forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>To take a specific example or two, what subject, for instance, is more
+worthy of a great master's brush than Homer's "Undertow," two
+half-drowned young bathers locked in each other's arms, the two
+beachmen dragging them clear of the mighty, blue-green wave curving
+behind them? Here is a subject of almost weekly occurrence on our
+coast. Who ever thought of painting it before? And that marvellous
+picture of "The Cotton Pickers." This, to me,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span> was the first clear
+note Homer had sounded. The "Prisoners to the Front," painted just
+after the war, was a strong, realistic picture, true and forceful in
+color and composition, and, of course, admirable in drawing, but that
+was all. It told its story at once, and having heard it to the end you
+acknowledged its truth and went away content. But "The Cotton Pickers"
+left something more in your mind. The gray dawn of the morning dimly
+lighted up a field of cotton, the negro quarters on the horizon line;
+dotted here and there, bending over the bolls, were groups of negroes,
+singly and in pairs, filling their bags; in the foreground walked two
+young negro girls, the foremost a dark mulatto&mdash;the whole story of
+Southern slavery written in every line of her patient, uncomplaining
+face.</p>
+
+<p>This picture alone placed Homer in the first rank of American painters
+of his day, and he has never lost this place, for not only was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+picture all it should be in composition and mass, but, unlike many of
+Homer's pictures of an earlier period, it was deliciously gray and
+cool in tone. It places him also in the front rank of the painters of
+our time. Jules Breton never gave us anything more pleasing, and never
+anything stronger in drawing, more true to life, or more poetic in
+conception and treatment. I mention Breton because, of the men on the
+other side, he is the only one who affects, so to speak, a similar
+line of subjects. Breton loves his peasants and paints them as if he
+did. Homer loved his subjects entirely in the same spirit. How
+unequally the two men have been rewarded you all know. An all-wise
+American who some years ago offered $40,000 for a Breton at auction
+could not at the time have been induced to give one-tenth of that
+amount for a Homer; and yet, for vigor, truth, sentiment, and
+technic&mdash;yes, technic, for this picture was superbly painted&mdash;"The
+Cotton Pickers,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span> in my judgment, will outlive the other if the time
+should ever come when picture-buyers think for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The Englishman, on the other hand, is the hardest man to pull out of a
+groove. What <i>has been</i> is good enough for him, whether in
+architecture, art, politics, or government. Any one who objects, or
+seeks to improve or to point out a new and different way, is
+"anathema." It is hardly more than twenty years ago that John Sargent,
+whose works are often the strongest drawing card in the annual
+exhibitions, was ignored by the jury of the Royal Academy.</p>
+
+<p>"A slap-dash sort of a painter, my dear boy. Most dangerous to allow
+his things to come in. No drawing, you know, no finish&mdash;altogether out
+of the question." So spoke a Royal Academician when the question was
+broached.</p>
+
+<p>Whistler never found a vacant spot, no matter how high, where he could
+hang even a 10 x 14.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A mountebank in paint, my dear sir. Think of giving him a place
+alongside of Sir Frederick Leighton! Impossible! Absolutely
+impossible!" That the Luxembourg exhibited his portrait of his mother,
+and that the art critics of Europe voted it "one of the greatest
+portraits of modern times," made no difference. These Royal wiseacres
+knew better. Some of them still think they know better, a fact easily
+ascertained when you walk through the Exhibition, as I do every
+summer, and have continued to do for the past thirty years.</p>
+
+<p>And this adherence to tradition is not confined entirely to technic&mdash;I
+refer now to many of the English painters of to-day&mdash;but appears in
+their choice of subjects as well. It is the <i>subjects</i> which have been
+successful&mdash;that is, which have been <i>sold</i>&mdash;that must be painted over
+and over. Anything new is a departure, and a departure from the
+standard in the selection of a subject is as dangerous as a departure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+in the cut of a coat or the color of one's gloves&mdash;or was as dangerous
+until Sargent, Abbey, Frank Brangwyn, and men of that ilk smashed the
+current idols and taught men a new religion. A small congregation, it
+is true, but big enough for them to gather together to sing hymns of
+praise and pray for better things.</p>
+
+<p>Let me illustrate what I mean by conforming to the standard. Three
+years ago I was painting near a village, an hour from Paddington&mdash;a
+lovely spot on the River Thames. This quaint settlement is one of
+those little, waterside, old-fashioned-inn places, all drooping trees,
+punts, millions of roses, tumble-down cottages, stretches of meadows
+with the silver thread of the Thames glistening in the sunlight. There
+is also a bridge, a wonderful old brick bridge, stepping across on
+three arches, mould-incrusted, blackened by time, masses of green
+rushes clustered about its feet&mdash;a most picturesque and lovable
+bridge, known<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span> to about everybody who has ever visited that section of
+England.</p>
+
+<p>I had been there for a week, making my headquarters at the White Hart,
+when my attention was attracted to a man across the river&mdash;it is quite
+narrow here&mdash;a painter, evidently, who seemed to be surrounded by a
+collection of canvases. He went through the same motions every day,
+and then my curiosity got the better of me and I went over to see him.</p>
+
+<p>Spread out on the grass lay eight canvases, all of one size, and each
+one containing a picture of the old brick bridge.</p>
+
+<p>"But why eight all alike?" I asked in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I can't sell anything else. I am known as the Sonning Bridge
+painter. I've been at it for twenty years."</p>
+
+<p>It is with this sort of thing, either in the selection of a subject,
+in its treatment, or in its handling, that I have but little sympathy,
+even<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> though the great Ruskin, in speaking of this same English
+water-color school, the one I have catalogued for you, insists that it
+is the only "true school of landscape which has yet existed," an
+appreciation which is followed by the outburst that "from the last
+landscape of Tintoret, if we look for life we will pass at once to the
+first landscape of Turner." It is, of course, only one of Ruskin's
+dictatorial statements, admirable when written, because it was read
+and approved by a class who knew no better and who accepted his words
+as other blind devotees obeyed the Delphic Oracle&mdash;statements,
+however, which are rejected by many of to-day who think for themselves
+and who think clearly, having the world's work spread open before them
+from which to judge.</p>
+
+<p>Once in wandering around the Academia of Venice, taking in for the
+fiftieth time Titian's masterpiece, I came across an Englishman who
+had paused in his walk and was adjusting his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> long-distance
+telescope&mdash;a monocle glued just under his left eyebrow. Mistaking my
+red-backed sketch-book for a Baedeker, he said, in an apologetic tone:</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me&mdash;I've left mine at home&mdash;but will you be good enough to
+tell me what Mr. Ruskin says about that picture?"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That I have personally refused to follow either Mr. Ruskin or the
+example of the men he places on so high a pinnacle&mdash;I am now referring
+entirely to their technic&mdash;is due to my having painted all my life
+out-of-doors, the best place in which a man can study nature at close
+range. This experience has taught me that weight and solidity are as
+important in the rendering of a natural object as air and perspective,
+and that the <i>staining of paper with washes of transparent color does
+not and cannot give them</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Nor can any brilliant light, a crisp, snapping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span> light&mdash;a glint of the
+sun's rays, for instance, on the break of the surf, or on the round of
+a glossy leaf, reflecting like a mirror the opaque sky&mdash;ever be
+achieved by careful working around the edges of an unwashed speck of
+paper&mdash;the transparent man's only means of expressing a high light.</p>
+
+<p>Nor will a single dab of Chinese white produce the effect of it,
+should it be the <i>only</i> dab of opaque white in the composition. The
+result in this case is still worse, for if transparent color has any
+value when uniformly distributed it is in the expression of air and
+perspective. The dab, then, is instantly out of plane, as it comes
+nearer to the eye than the transparent wash about it, and the illusion
+of distance is accordingly lost.</p>
+
+<p>But another and quite a different thing occurs when the opaque color
+<i>forms part</i> of the whole, the two systems blending each with the
+other. To illustrate, my own experience has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> taught me that in nature
+whatever the sun shines <i>upon</i> is opaque. The fa&ccedil;ade of a cathedral,
+for instance, facing a sky where the rays of the sun strike it full is
+opaque, while the angles of the architecture, casting shadows large
+and small into which sink the blue reflections of the sky or the
+reflected lights from near-by objects, are invariably transparent.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And now for my own system and the reasons why I have abandoned all
+other systems. And in giving them to you I want to repeat what I said
+in the beginning of this course, that I do not ask you students to
+follow in my footsteps if your predilections, training, and innate
+consciences lead you to a different view of treatment. Many of you may
+not like my work at all, and you certainly have a large following,
+especially among the younger men and women who have advanced ideas.
+Many of you hold to the opinion that water-color men should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> stick to
+their trade and not encroach upon the oil painters in their technic.
+And many of you may at heart prefer, nay, even delight in, the broad,
+loose washes of the early English school.</p>
+
+<p>There may be a few of you, however, who have open minds free from
+prejudice and free from the traditions of the past, and who are
+dissatisfied with the want of "virility," if I may so express it,
+shown in pictures painted on white paper, and with successive
+washings, and may accordingly see something in my own methods which
+may encourage you to follow in the path which I have cleared and which
+I humbly trust will lead to infinitely better results than I have so
+far achieved.</p>
+
+<p>And in this you must have the courage of your opinions and be prepared
+for criticisms. Those who are against me are more numerous than those
+who are for me and my methods.</p>
+
+<p>Only last month a distinguished New York daily paper, in reviewing a
+recent exhibition, said:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There really is nothing left to say about Mr. Smith's water-colors.
+They appear with such unfailing regularity and are always so much the
+same. Nothing in the present collection will surprise those who know
+his work&mdash;and who does not? The artist's facility is undiminished, his
+industry untiring, but to look for any fresh inspiration in his work
+or a hint of anything but a conventional vision has long been a vain
+hope."</p>
+
+<p>I should be discouraged if I thought that this was the last word on my
+work. I know better, because I am making a collection of such
+criticisms, showing the rating of our several painters. These summings
+up of mine will be extremely valuable as marking the changing taste of
+the public; for I have never supposed that either ill will or
+downright ignorance formed the basis of current criticism. The critics
+are merely expressing the trend of public opinion. It is not new to
+our age. Diaz, so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> one story goes, once came stumping (he had lost one
+leg) into Millet's cottage at Barbizon fresh from the Salon. Millet
+had been painting nudes&mdash;the most exquisite bits of flesh-painting
+seen for many a day, and as modest as Chabas "September Morn."</p>
+
+<p>"What do they say of my things?" asked Millet.</p>
+
+<p>"That you are still painting naked women," replied Diaz.</p>
+
+<p>Millet was horrified.</p>
+
+<p>"I paint naked women! I never painted one in my life."</p>
+
+<p>Hence "The Angelus" and "The Sowers" and the other masterpieces of
+clothed peasants.</p>
+
+<p>In 1825 Constable writes in answer to a scurrilous attack made on his
+so-called "puerile" efforts:</p>
+
+<p>"Remember the great were not made for me, nor was I for the great. My
+limited and abstractive art is to be found under every hedge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span> and in
+every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth while picking up. My
+art flatters nobody by imitation: it courts nobody by smoothness: it
+tickles nobody by politeness: it is without either fol-de-rol or
+fiddle-de-dee. How can I hope to be popular?"</p>
+
+<p>Ruskin's attack on Whistler is another case in point. A lawsuit
+followed and Whistler recovered one farthing damages, and had the
+effrontery to dangle it under the great critic's nose that same night
+at a reception where they both met, followed by the remark:</p>
+
+<p>"Beat you, old man."</p>
+
+<p>Even Mr. Thackeray went out of his way in his "art notes" to belittle
+and ridicule Sir Thomas Lawrence because he lacked what he called the
+"virility of his progenitors and associates."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And now for my own system.</p>
+
+<p>I use a heavy, gray charcoal paper, which is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> made by Dupr&eacute; &amp; Company,
+No. 141 Faubourg St. Honor&eacute;, Paris, and which costs about ten cents
+per sheet, measuring about 40 x 30 inches each. This paper is evenly
+ribbed but without the intermittent bands seen often in the lighter
+charcoal paper, known as "Michelet," sold everywhere in our own art
+stores. Dupr&eacute; will send this paper to anybody who applies for it.</p>
+
+<p>This paper I wet on <i>both</i> sides and thumb-tack over an oil canvas the
+size of the picture to be painted. It dries tight as a drum, and the
+canvas backing protects it from puncture or other injury.</p>
+
+<p>On this surface I make <i>a full and complete drawing in charcoal</i> of
+the subject before me, not in outline, but in strong darks, jet-black,
+many of them&mdash;a finished drawing really, in charcoal, which could be
+signed and framed. This is then "fixed" by a spray of alcohol and gum
+shellac, thrown by means of a common<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> perfume atomizer, the whole
+apparatus costing less than one American dollar.</p>
+
+<p>On this I begin my color scheme in both opaque and transparent color,
+recognizing the "natural facts" already explained to you, that is, the
+skies and high lights being solidly opaque, the shadows being equally
+transparent. This process requires certain modifications to be made in
+the darks of the original drawing. The dense black shadow under the
+eaves of a roof, for instance, are not in nature as black as the
+charcoal, but perhaps a rich, warm brown. If the ground is in
+sunlight, it is a dull, golden yellow and reflects the yellow glow of
+the sand beneath. Or it may be a blue reflection, or even of a reddish
+tone. These hard blacks then must be <i>glazed</i> in such a way as to
+preserve the power of the shadow obtained by means of the under
+charcoal, and yet keep it <i>transparent</i> (all shadows being
+transparent) and at the same time preserve its true and proper tint.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This glaze is done by using the three semi-opaque primary
+pigments&mdash;found in every color-box&mdash;namely:</p>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Light red,</li>
+<li>Cobalt-blue,</li>
+<li>Yellow ochre.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>These colors, of course, form the basis of all intermediate tones, and
+from them all intermediate tones can be made.</p>
+
+<p>These three colors are at the same time semi-opaque, their opacity
+being just sufficient to tint the hard black of the coal, while never
+clogging or muddying its transparency.</p>
+
+<p>So it is with the millions of other tones in the whole composition,
+when such perfectly transparent colors as brown madder, Indian yellow,
+and indigo are used as a glaze, altering and modifying the undertone
+of charcoal to any desired tint and at the same time preserving the
+all-important thing&mdash;its transparency.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, let me say that I fully recognize that I am addressing
+students whose training enables them to understand perfectly this
+explanation, and that further instructions are therefore unnecessary.</p>
+
+<p>One thing, however, may be accentuated, and that is the use of plenty
+of clean water. Another is that you should keep your palettes
+separate. For myself, I make use of a common white metallic
+dinner-plate, known as iron-stone china, costing another ten cents,
+for my sky-palette, squeezing the color-tubes in a row around its edge
+and my Chinese white below them on one side toward the bottom. For my
+transparent palette, I use an ordinary moist sixteen-pan color-box,
+being always careful never to blur it with even a brush stroke of body
+color (Chinese white); and for my opaque work, an oval white metal
+palette, with thumb-hole, and indentations around its edge into which
+I squeeze the contents of my moist water-color<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span> tubes, my Chinese
+white being heaped up in a little mound near my thumb.</p>
+
+<p>The result may be seen in some of the illustrations accompanying this
+text.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHARCOAL" id="CHARCOAL"></a>CHARCOAL</h2>
+
+
+<p>Before going into the value of charcoal as a medium in the recording
+of the various aspects of nature in black-and-white, it will be wise
+to review the several mediums in general use, namely, etching, pen and
+ink, lithographic crayon, and charcoal gray in connection with Chinese
+white; it will be well, also, to note the various mechanical processes
+in use for the reproductions of these drawings on white paper.</p>
+
+<p>Those of you who have seen the early illustration in <i>Harper's
+Magazine</i> of the late fifties will recall the work of "Porte Crayon"
+(Colonel Strother), drawn on wood by the artist and engraved by such
+men as A. V. S. Anthony and John Sartain. You will also recall how
+some twenty-five years later an effective and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> marvellous change took
+place in the quality of these reproductions, being by far the most
+unique and rapid in the history of any art of the century. In less
+than ten years, between 1876 and 1886, came this sudden awakening to
+the necessity of better work from the burin, followed by an enormous
+commercial demand for such results, until by common consent the
+American engraver first rivalled and then surpassed the world. If we
+search for the cause we find that, like many other inventions
+developing others of still greater importance, as the telegraph
+developed the telephone, electric light, and the phonograph, this
+marvellous change is due entirely to the discovery and possibility of
+photographing direct from the original upon the boxwood itself,
+producing with an instant's exposure a complete reproduction of the
+original drawing, with all its texture, gradation, and quality, not
+only doing away entirely with the intermediate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> draftsman, as was the
+case with "Porte Crayon's" work, but obtaining a result impossible to
+the most skilful of the artists on wood of his day.</p>
+
+<p>Another important feature in the discovery was the possibility of
+reducing a drawing to any size required, thus fitting it exactly to
+the necessities of the printed page. Before these discoveries, as you
+well know, from the time of Albert D&uuml;rer down to Linton and engravers
+of his school, the original drawing of the painter was redrawn by the
+use of lead-pencil, Chinese white, and India-ink washes upon the wood
+itself, giving as close an imitation as possible of the original. Some
+painters&mdash;illustrators, if you please, in those early days&mdash;in fact,
+made their original designs direct upon the wood. The effects of light
+and dark were then cut out in lines, curved or otherwise, with
+suitable cross-hatchings, as the necessity of the drawing required, or
+left comparatively untouched.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is not my purpose to discuss here the different merits of the
+different schools. There are varieties of opinion regarding the
+excellence of the line compared with the technic in the modern school
+of engravers. By the modern school I mean the work of such men as
+Cole, Yuengling, Wolff, French, Smithwick, and others. I refer to them
+that I may accent the stronger the medium which is the subject-matter
+of this talk, namely, charcoal, in the hope that those of you who
+propose to make reproductive illustrations your life-work may be
+tempted to make use of charcoal as a medium through which to express
+your ideas and ideals.</p>
+
+<p>But before embarking on this phase of my subject it may be interesting
+for a moment to go a little deeper into the earlier stages of this
+marvellous change from boxwood to zinc. I remember distinctly the
+beginnings of an organization well known in New York, and perhaps to
+many of you, as the Tile Club, to which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> organization I can
+conscientiously say as much credit is due for this revival in
+wood-engraving as to any other. Not that good wood-engravers did not
+exist before its time, and not because it contained wood-engravers,
+for the club did not have the name of one among its membership, but as
+containing a group of painters who for the first time in aid of the
+art of wood-engraving in this country lent their names and brushes to
+an illustrated magazine. Up to that time there had been a wide gulf
+existing between the ordinary draftsman on wood and a painter. This
+did not proceed from the prevalence of a certain disease among the
+painters, known at the present time as an "enlarged head," but from
+the fact that no artist accustomed to free-hand drawing and at liberty
+to wander all over his canvas at will would bring himself down to
+working through a magnifying-glass, a necessity, often, in
+transferring a drawing to wood.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With this discovery, however, of making available even the roughest
+drawing, the simplest blot in color or a scratch in charcoal, and
+photographing its exact <i>textures</i> upon a wooden block, the camera
+reducing it in size and thus perfecting it, the artist immediately
+took the place of the draftsman, and at the same time introduced into
+the work an artistic quality, a dash, a vim and spirit entirely
+unknown before.</p>
+
+<p>Three things were needed to utilize this marvellously useful
+discovery: first, a painter of rank; second, an engraver who could
+express the textures and technics of the several artists&mdash;that is,
+reproduce the exact values of an original in wash, an original in
+charcoal, or an original in oil; and third, a magazine with sufficient
+capital, taste, and intelligence to reproduce these results upon a
+printed page. We had the painters, and the engravers developed
+rapidly. The third requirement, of taste and intelligence, was found
+in Mr. A. W.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span> Drake, then art director of <i>Scribner's Monthly</i>, and,
+after its merging into the <i>Century</i>, the distinguished art director
+of the <i>Century Magazine</i>.</p>
+
+<p>When the Tile Club was formed in New York it consisted of a group of
+men (I was its scullion for seven years, its entire life, and, being
+thus an honored servant, was familiar with its many affairs) who
+represented at the time the leading spirits of the different schools:
+William M. Chase, Arthur Quartley, Swain Gifford, A. B. Frost, George
+Maynard, Frank D. Millet, Alden Weir, Edwin A. Abbey, Charles S.
+Reinhart, Elihu Vedder, William Gedney Bunce, Stanford White, Augustus
+Saint-Gaudens, and one or two others. The club was limited to eighteen
+members, there being twelve painters and six musicians. If I am not
+very much mistaken, not a single painter of this group had ever drawn
+upon a wooden block, and yet each one of them, as the records of our
+periodicals have shown, was admirably qualified for illustrative work.
+At<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> the time, the illustrations in <i>Harper's</i> and <i>Scribner's</i>,
+compared with the illustrations of to-day, reminded one of the early
+primers of the New England schools, with their improbable trees and
+impossible animals.</p>
+
+<p>I remember distinctly the first meeting of the Tile Club, in which the
+subject of drawing for <i>Scribner's Monthly</i> was first mooted, and I do
+not believe I overestimate the importance that the position of the
+club, taken at that time, has had and still has&mdash;not as a club, for it
+was dissolved some years back&mdash;in the influence its personal art has
+wielded upon the printed pages of the day.</p>
+
+<p>The first magazine article was the account of a trip that we made down
+on Long Island, illustrated by the club, entitled "The Tile Club
+Abroad," each man choosing his own medium&mdash;oil, charcoal, water-color,
+etc.; the results of which were published in the then <i>Scribner's
+Magazine</i>, and engraved by a group of men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span> who afterward placed the
+art of wood-engraving in America side by side with the best efforts
+ever obtained by the English and German periodicals, and one of whom,
+Yuengling, took the gold medal of excellence both in Paris and Munich.</p>
+
+<p>With this difference in textures, the difference between a drawing in
+charcoal and one made in oil, it became necessary to invent new modes
+of expression with the burin. A simple line which might express the
+round of the cheek or the fulness of the arm, and which would answer
+for the uniform drapery of the old school, would not serve to explain
+the subtle quality of one of Quartley's moonrises or the vigor and
+dash of one of Chase's outdoor figures sketched in oil.</p>
+
+<p>So it came about that in searching to express these new qualities,
+never before seen upon a block, the technic of the new school was
+developed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The next important result was the creating not only of a new school of
+wood-engraving, but of an entirely distinct department for art
+workers, the school of the illustrator; and so we have Abbey,
+Reinhart, Quartley, and, later, Church, Smedley, Dana Gibson, and
+dozens of others whose names will readily come to your minds and of
+whose careers I have already spoken.</p>
+
+<p>But the burin was too slow, even in the hands of the skilful engraver,
+for the necessities of the hour. It was also too expensive; a drawing
+which a magazine would pay the artist $50 for would often cost $200 to
+engrave in the hands of a master like Yuengling or Cole. Again
+photography was called into use. The "straight process," so called, of
+the phototype printer, reproducing a pen-and-ink line drawing on a
+zinc plate which could be immediately run through a Hoe process, was
+perfected. You all remember, doubtless, an illustrated daily
+published<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span> in New York, called <i>The Daily Graphic</i>, illustrated by
+this process. This process, however, was only possible where
+pen-and-ink drawing or a very coarse lead-pencil drawing was used in
+making the original, because it was necessary that spaces of white
+should exist between each separate line or mass of black. This
+process, however, utterly failed in all India-ink drawings. Where
+these drawings covered the white of the paper, if ever so delicately,
+the result was a dense black upon the plate.</p>
+
+<p>Then came a race between all the inventors interested in such
+discoveries, both here and abroad&mdash;a race to perfect a process which
+would produce from such wash drawings an exact reproduction upon the
+printed page, giving all the gradations of the original and doing away
+not only with the draftsman but with the wood-engraver. To Professor
+Vogel, of Berlin, I believe&mdash;although an American, Ives, claims it,
+and some say justly&mdash;is due<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> the credit of perfecting what is known as
+the half-tone, or screen process: many others claim that Herr
+Meisenbach first perfected this most important discovery.</p>
+
+<p>As the wash drawing had no lines, and as it is absolutely necessary
+that photo-printing should have lines&mdash;that is, clean spaces of black
+between white&mdash;these lines were supplied by laying a sheet of plate
+glass over the drawing upon which the lines were cut by a diamond and
+through which the original could be clearly seen. Of course, the light
+falling upon the edges of these several diamond cuttings made little
+points of brilliant white between which the several blacks and whites
+could be seen. This, without going very much further into the
+mechanical details, is the basis of the half-tone process.</p>
+
+<p>While this had its value, it had also its demerits, one of which was
+the total extermination of the American wood-engraver, except for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> a
+few men like Timothy Cole, whose genius and skill made it possible for
+them, by the excellence of their work, to survive the great difference
+between twenty cents a square inch for transferring on zinc and twenty
+dollars a square inch for engraving on wood.</p>
+
+<p>There are, however, results in the half-tone process which I hold are
+infinitely superior to the work of any wood-engraver of the old
+school. While it is true that there is no really positive rich dark
+for any part of the composition&mdash;for, of course, the light specks are
+everywhere, thus lightening and graying the dark&mdash;and while we lose by
+such defects the richness of wood-engraving, we also get the exact
+touch of the artist in no more and no less a degree, particularly no
+less. How often have I seen an exquisite drawing of Abbey's or Du
+Maurier's almost ruined by the slipping of the burin the
+one-thousandth part of an inch! How infinitely superior are the
+originals of John<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> Leech's immortal caricatures in <i>Punch</i> to the
+reproductions, all because the shadow line under an eye, or that
+little dot which denotes the difference between amusement and
+curiosity in the expression of a face, has been cut away the
+thousandth part of a hair-line! The processes of the half-tone,
+however, are ever accurate and the reproduction given you is
+exact&mdash;with the foregoing restrictions.</p>
+
+<p>Then again, in landscape effects and in some portraits, the uniformity
+of tone, the certainty of every touch being reproduced, the exact
+balancing from dark to light, all result in better work than can be
+done by the ordinary engraver.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, with all the half-tone's advantages, I must admit that
+Yuengling's head of the "Professor" and many of his wood-cuts in an
+illustrated edition of "Sir Launfal," published some years ago, and
+much of the work of such masters as Cole, Wolff, Yuengling, and
+others,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> stand as monuments for all time to the skill of hands that no
+process will ever excel, for they put into it that something which the
+bath of vitriol will never furnish, a bite of the acid of their own
+genius.</p>
+
+<p>Since these earlier days a new departure has been made, until now
+reproductive processes have been brought to such perfection that there
+is hardly any texture or color scheme that can not be matched. Note,
+if you will, Howard Pyle in color&mdash;rich in yellows and reds, with
+black and white spaces as an enrichment. Note also A. I. Keller's
+transparent work in charcoal gray. Note particularly the reproductions
+in the magazines of F. Walter Taylor's drawings in charcoal, in which
+the very texture of the coal is preserved. And, if you will permit me,
+note the half tones of my own charcoal drawings now on exhibition in
+the adjoining gallery. So perfect is the reproduction that one is
+careful not to smudge his fingers in turning the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span> leaves of the
+publication in which they are printed.</p>
+
+<p>This being the case (and the printers must be thanked as well for
+their share in the results), I earnestly hope that some of my brother
+illustrators&mdash;the more the merrier&mdash;will seriously consider the value
+of charcoal as a medium for illustrative work. There is no subject, I
+assure you, that the sun shines on or its light filters into, or any
+phase of nature, be it rain or storm, fog, snow, or mist, including
+marines, figures, sunrises and sunsets, blazing heat and cool,
+transparent shadows, that cannot be visualized by it.</p>
+
+<p>I hold, too, that by its use qualities can be obtained impossible to
+be found in either etchings, lithographic crayon, wash, or pen and
+ink&mdash;especially the velvet of its black.</p>
+
+<p>Charcoal is the unhampered, the free, the personal individual medium.
+No water, no oil, no palette, no squeezing of tubes or wiping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> of
+tints; no scraping, scumbling, or other dilatory and exasperating
+necessities. Just a piece of coal, the size of a cigarette, held flat
+between the thumb and the forefinger, a sheet of paper, and then "let
+go." Yes, one thing more&mdash;care must be taken to have this forefinger
+fastened to a sure, knowing, and fearless hand, worked by an arm which
+plays easily and loosely in a ball-socket set firmly near your
+backbone. To carry out the metaphor, the steam of your enthusiasm,
+kept in working order by the safety-valve of your experience, and
+regulated by the ball-governor of your art knowledge&mdash;such as
+composition, drawing, mass, light and dark&mdash;is then turned on.</p>
+
+<p>Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never
+arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal
+sketch, covering and containing all a man can see&mdash;and he should
+neither record nor explain anything more&mdash;is not completely finished<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
+in two hours it cannot be finished by the same man in two days or two
+years.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="pic_3" id="pic_3"></a>
+<img class="img1" src="images/image_02.jpg" width="600" height="402" alt="The George and Vulture Inn, London"  />
+<span class="caption">The George and Vulture Inn, London</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>For a drawing in charcoal is really a record of a man's temperament.
+It represents pre-eminently the personality of the individual&mdash;his
+buoyancy, his perfect health, the quickness of his gestures. All these
+are shown in the way he strikes his canvas&mdash;compelling it to talk back
+to him. So also does it record the man's timidity, his want of
+confidence in himself, his fear of spoiling what he has already done,
+forgetting that a nickel will buy him another sheet of paper.</p>
+
+<p>Courage, too, is a component part&mdash;not to be afraid to strike hard and
+fast, belaboring the canvas as a pugilist belabors an opponent,
+beating nature into shape.</p>
+
+<p>As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke
+goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that
+charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>blow going from the
+spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the
+repouss&eacute; around a goblet.</p>
+
+<p>Remember, too, that the fight is all over in two hours&mdash;three at the
+outside&mdash;the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if
+you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining
+your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark.
+It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and
+darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next
+supplementary light and dark.</p>
+
+<p>Remember, too, that when the fight is over you must not spoil what you
+have done by repetition or finish. <i>Let it alone.</i> You may not have
+covered everything you wanted to express, but if you have smashed in
+the salient features, the details will look out at you when you least
+expect it. There are a thousand cross lights and untold mysteries in
+Rembrandt's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> shadows which his friends failed to see when his canvas
+left his studio. It is the unexpressed which is often most
+interesting. Meissonier tells his story to the end. So do Vibert,
+Rico, and the whole realistic school. Corot gives you a mass of
+foliage, no single leaf expressed, but beneath it lurk great,
+cavernous shadows in which nymphs and satyrs play hide-and-seek.</p>
+
+<p>Remember, also, that just as the blunt end of a bit of charcoal is
+many, many times larger than the point of an etching-needle, so are
+its resources for fine lines and minute dots and scratches just that
+much reduced. It is the flat of the piece of coal that is valuable,
+not its point.</p>
+
+<p>As to what can be done with this piece of coal, I can but repeat,
+<i>everything</i>. That there are some subjects better than others, I will
+admit. For me, London, its streets and buildings, come first,
+especially if it be raining; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> there is no question that it does
+rain once in a while in London, making the wet streets and sidewalks
+glisten under its silver-gray sky, little rivulets of molten silver
+escaping everywhere. When with these you get a background&mdash;and I
+always do&mdash;of flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the
+haze and mist of smoke, your delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else
+in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start
+your foreground with, say, a figure, or an umbrella, or a cab,
+expressed in a stroke of jet-black, and the perspective instantly
+fades into grays of steeple, dome, or roof, so delicate and vapory
+that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky. Or
+you stroll into some old church or cathedral, as I did last summer
+when I found myself in that most wonderful of all English
+churches&mdash;and I say it deliberately&mdash;St. Bartholomew's the Great, over
+in Smithfield.</p>
+
+<p>Other churches have I studied in my wanderings;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> many and various
+cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques have delighted me. I know the color
+and the value of tapestry and rich hangings; of mosaics, porphyry, and
+verd-antiques; of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of the
+arabesque; but the velvety quality of London soot when applied to the
+rough surfaces of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveliness
+gained by grime and smoke, came to me as a revelation.</p>
+
+<p>This rich black which, like a tropical fungus, grows and spreads
+through St. Bartholomew's interior, hiding under its soft, caressing
+touch the rough angles and insistent edges of the Norman, is what the
+bloom is to the grape, what the dark purpling is to the plum,
+mellowing from sight the brilliancy of the under skin. And there are
+wide coverings of it, too, in this wonderful church, as if some master
+decorator had wielded a great coal and at one sweep of his hand had
+rubbed its glorious black into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> every crevice, crack, and cranny of
+wall, column, and arch.</p>
+
+<p>Certain it is that no other medium than the one used could give any
+idea of its charm. Neither oil, water-color, nor pastel will transmit
+it&mdash;no, nor the dry-point or bitten plate. The soot of centuries, the
+fogs of countless Novembers, the smoke of a thousand firesides were
+the pigments which the Master Painter set upon his palette in the task
+of giving us one exquisitely beautiful interior wholly in
+black-and-white.</p>
+
+<p>So it was in the Temple when I was searching for Mr. Thackeray's
+haunts.</p>
+
+<p>What of alterations, scrapings, patchings up, and fillings in have
+taken place in these various courts and their surroundings, I did not
+trouble myself to find out. Nothing looks new in London after the fogs
+and soot of one winter have wreaked their vengeance upon it. Whether
+the fa&ccedil;ade is of brick, stone, or stucco depends<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> entirely on the
+thickness of the soot, packed in or scoured clean by winds and rains,
+or whether the surface is ebony or marble, as may be seen in many of
+the statues on Burlington House, where a head, arm, or part of a
+pedestal chair has been kept white by constant douches.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><a name="pic_4" id="pic_4"></a>
+<img class="img1" src="images/image_03.jpg" width="500" height="628" alt="Diagram of Charcoal Technic"  /><span class="caption">Diagram of Charcoal Technic</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>As for me, I was glad that these old haunts of Mr. Thackeray and his
+characters are even blacker to-day than they might have been in his
+time. For the soot and grime become them, and London as well, for that
+matter. A great impressionist, this smoke-smudger and wiper-out of
+detail, this believer in masses and simple surfaces, this destroyer of
+gingerbread ornaments, petty mouldings, and cheap flutings!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And now for a few practical data as to my own way of handling the
+coal, which may be of value as coming from one who has profited these
+many years by its infinite possibilities.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The paper is the same I use in my water-colors, a delicate, gray,
+double-thick charcoal paper, laid in parallel ribs, if I may so
+express it, and having sufficient body and tooth to catch and hold the
+faintest touch or the strongest stroke of the coal. The gray of this
+paper serves as the middle tone of the drawing, the different
+gradations of black in the coal giving the darks and the careful use
+of white chalks the high lights.</p>
+
+<p>These gradations are obtained by the use of a few simple processes, by
+which various textures can be given, starting, for instance, from or
+near the foreground, where the grit of the charcoal is used to bring
+the nearer details into clear relief, the several larger gradations
+and textures giving aerial perspectives being produced by a broad
+sweep of the hand, forcing the grit of the coal into the crevices of
+the paper, the result being what I may term the <i>first</i> plane or
+<i>nearest</i> atmospheric value; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span> house a square away, if you
+please&mdash;provided the subject is a street&mdash;being the <i>second</i> plane.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond this, farther down the street, is found, it may be, another
+house or other object. Now try your thumb, rubbing your hand-smoothed
+charcoal into a finer and closer mesh: and for the still more
+atmospheric distances down this same street, use next a rag, then a
+buckskin stomp, and last of all a stiff paper stomp, each in turn
+producing a more atmospheric gray as the distances fade&mdash;the last, the
+paper stomp, being as soft as a wash of India ink. (See diagram.)</p>
+
+<p>All these you may say are tricks. They are&mdash;my own tricks, or rather
+use of the means which lay at my hand, which long experience has
+taught me to employ, and which any one of you will no doubt better in
+your own handling of the coal.</p>
+
+<p>These planes being secured, any light higher than the prevailing
+rubbed-in tone can be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> wiped out clean to the grain of the paper by a
+piece of ductile rubber. Any darker dark, of course, can be obtained
+by retouching with the coal.</p>
+
+<p>The chalk now comes into play for skies, broad sunlight effects, or
+crisp, sparkling lights. The whole work is then "fixed," as I have
+already explained, by the use of gum shellac and a common perfume
+atomizer.</p>
+
+<p>And with this condensed statement I must bring this my last talk to a
+close, remembering as I do that I have been addressing a body of
+students who are already familiar with one or more mediums, and who,
+with these few spoken memoranda and a finished drawing before them,
+will solve at a glance mysteries baffling to the layman.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH</h2>
+
+<ul>
+<li>FELIX O'DAY.</li>
+
+<li>THE ARM-CHAIR AT THE INN.</li>
+
+<li>KENNEDY SQUARE.</li>
+
+<li>THE TIDES OF BARNEGAT.</li>
+
+<li>THE ROMANCE OF AN OLD-FASHIONED<br />
+GENTLEMAN.</li>
+
+<li>COLONEL CARTER'S CHRISTMAS.</li>
+
+<li>FORTY MINUTES LATE.</li>
+
+<li>THE WOOD FIRE IN No. 3.</li>
+
+<li>THE VEILED LADY.</li>
+
+<li>THE UNDER DOG.<br />
+<br /></li>
+
+
+<li>IN DICKENS'S LONDON.<br />
+<br /></li>
+
+<li>ENOCH CRANE. A novel planned<br />
+and begun by F. Hopkinson Smith<br />
+and completed by F. Berkeley Smith.</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+<h3>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTDOOR SKETCHING***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Outdoor Sketching, by Francis Hopkinson Smith
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Outdoor Sketching
+       Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914
+
+
+Author: Francis Hopkinson Smith
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 27, 2008  [eBook #27340]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTDOOR SKETCHING***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 27340-h.htm or 27340-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/7/3/4/27340/27340-h/27340-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/7/3/4/27340/27340-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+OUTDOOR SKETCHING
+
+Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago
+
+The Scammon Lectures, 1914
+
+by
+
+F. HOPKINSON SMITH
+
+With Illustrations by the Author
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London]
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+
+Copyright, 1915, by
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+                       Page
+
+  I. Composition         3
+
+ II. Mass               39
+
+III. Water-Colors       75
+
+ IV. Charcoal          119
+
+
+
+
+Illustrations
+
+
+Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London   _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                      FACING
+                                                       PAGE
+
+Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames                    84
+
+The George and Vulture Inn, London                     136
+
+Diagram of Charcoal Technic                            142
+
+
+
+
+COMPOSITION
+
+
+My chief reason for confining these four talks to the outdoor sketch
+is because I have been an outdoor painter since I was sixteen years of
+age; have never in my whole life painted what is known as a studio
+picture evolved from memory or from my inner consciousness, or from
+any one of my outdoor sketches. My pictures are begun and finished
+often at one sitting, never more than three sittings; and a white
+umbrella and a three-legged stool are the sum of my studio
+appointments.
+
+Another reason is that, outside of this ability to paint rapidly
+out-of-doors, I know so little of the many processes attendant upon
+the art of the painter that both my advice and my criticism would be
+worthless to even the youngest of the painters to-day. Again, I work
+only in two mediums, water-color and charcoal. Oil I have not touched
+for many years, and then only for a short time when a student under
+Swain Gifford (and this, of course, many, many years ago), who taught
+me the use and value of the opaque pigment, which helped me greatly in
+my own use of opaque water-color in connection with transparent color
+and which was my sole reason for seeking the help of his master hand.
+
+A further venture is to kindle in your hearts a greater love for and
+appreciation of what a superbly felt and exactly rendered outdoor
+sketch stands for--a greater respect for its vitality, its life-spark;
+the way it breathes back at you, under a touch made unconsciously,
+because you saw it, recorded it, and then forgot it--best of all
+because you let it alone; my fervent wish being to transmit to you
+some of the enthusiasm that has kept me young all these years of my
+life; something of the joy of the close intimacy I have held with
+nature--the intimacy of two old friends who talk their secrets over
+each with the other; a joy unequalled by any other in my life's
+experience.
+
+There may be those who go a-fishing and enjoy it. The arranging and
+selecting of flies, the jointing of rods, the prospective comfort in
+high water-boots, the creel with the leather strap, every crease in it
+a reminder of some day without care or fret--all this may bring the
+flush to the cheek and the eager kindling of the eye, and a certain
+sort of rest and happiness may come with it; but--they have never gone
+a-sketching! Hauled up on the wet bank in the long grass is your boat,
+with the frayed end of the painter tied around some willow that offers
+a helping root. Within a stone's throw, under a great branching of
+gnarled trees, is a nook where the curious sun, peeping at you
+through the interlaced leaves, will stencil Japanese shadows on your
+white umbrella. Then the trap is unstrapped, the stool opened, the
+easel put up, and you set your palette. The critical eye with which
+you look over your brush case and the care with which you try each
+feather point upon your thumbnail are but an index of your enjoyment.
+
+Now you are ready. You loosen your cravat, hang your coat to some
+rustic peg in the creviced bark of the tree behind, seize a bit of
+charcoal from your bag, sweep your eye around, and dash in a few
+guiding strokes. Above is a changing sky filled with crisp white
+clouds; behind you, the great trunks of the many branched willows; and
+away off, under the hot sun, the yellow-green of the wasted pasture,
+dotted with patches of rock and weeds, and hemmed in by the low hills
+that slope to the curving stream.
+
+It is high noon! There is a stillness in the air that impresses you,
+broken only by the low murmur of the brook behind and the ceaseless
+song of the grasshopper among the weeds in front. A tired bumblebee
+hums past, rolls lazily over a clover blossom at your feet, and has
+his midday lunch. Under the maples near the river's bend stand a group
+of horses, their heads touching. In the brook below are the patient
+cattle, with patches of sunlight gilding and bronzing their backs and
+sides. Every now and then a breath of cool air starts out from some
+shaded retreat, plays around your forehead, and passes on. All nature
+rests. It is her noontime.
+
+But you work on: an enthusiasm has taken possession of you; the paints
+mix too slowly; you use your thumb, smearing and blending with a bit
+of rag--anything for the effect. One moment you are glued to your
+seat, your eyes riveted on your canvas; the next, you are up and
+backing away, taking it in as a whole, then pouncing down upon it
+quickly, belaboring it with your brush. Soon the trees take shape; the
+sky forms become definite; the meadow lies flat and loses itself in
+the fringe of willows.
+
+When all of this begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some
+lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf,
+or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a
+tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins
+that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The
+reaction comes the next day when, in the cold light of your studio,
+you see how far short you have come and how crude and false is your
+best touch compared with the glory of the landscape in your mind and
+heart. But the thrill that it gave you will linger forever!
+
+Or come with me to Constantinople and let us study its palaces and
+mosques, its marvellous stuffs, its romantic history, its
+religions--most profound and impressive--its commerce, industries, and
+customs. Come to revel in color; to sit for hours, following with
+reverent pencil the details of an architecture unrivalled on the
+globe; to watch the sun scale the hills of Scutari and shatter its
+lances against the fairy minarets of Stamboul; to catch the swing and
+plash of the rowers rounding their _caiques_ by the bridge of Galata;
+to wander through bazaar and market, dotting down splashes of robe,
+turban, and sash; to rest for hours in cool tiled mosques, which in
+their very decay are sublime; to study a people whose rags are
+symphonies of color, and whose traditions and records breathe the
+sweetest poems of modern times.
+
+And then, when we have caught our breath, let us wander into any one
+of the patios along the Golden Horn, and feast our eyes on columns of
+verd-antique, supporting arches light as rainbows, framing the patio
+of the Pigeon Mosque, the loveliest of all the patios I know, and let
+us run our eyes around that Moorish square. The sun blazes down on
+glistening marbles; gnarled old cedars twist themselves upward against
+the sky; flocks of pigeons whirl and swoop and fall in showers on
+cornice, roof, and dome; tall minarets like shafts of light shoot up
+into the blue. Scattered over the uneven pavement, patched with strips
+and squares of shadows, lounge groups of priests in bewildering robes
+of mauve, corn-yellow, white, and sea-green; while back beneath the
+cool arches bunches of natives listlessly pursue their several
+avocations.
+
+It is a sight that brings the blood with a rush to one's cheek. That
+swarthy Mussulman at his little square table mending seals; that
+fellow next him selling herbs, sprawled out on the marble floor, too
+lazy to crawl away from the slant of sunshine slipping through the
+ragged awning; that young Turk in frayed and soiled embroidered
+jacket, holding up strings of beads to the priests passing in and
+out--is not this the East, the land of our dreams? And the old public
+scribe with the gray beard and white turban, writing letters, the
+motionless veiled figures squatting around him--is he not Baba
+Mustapha? and the soft-eyed girl whispering into his ear none other
+than Morgiana, fair as the meridian sun?
+
+So, too, in my beloved Venice, where many years ago I camped out by
+the side of a canal--the Rio Giuseppe--all of it, from the red wall,
+where the sailors land, to the lagoon, where the tower of Castello is
+ready to topple into the sea.
+
+Not much of a canal--not much of a painting ground, really, to the
+masters who have gone before and are still at work, but a truly
+lovable, lovely, and most enchanting possession to me their humble
+disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and once
+out you are miserable until you get back again. On one bank stretches
+a row of rookeries--a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies
+hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and
+patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the
+whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long
+brick wall of the garden--soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and
+lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which mass and
+sway the great sycamores that Ziem loved, their lower branches
+interwoven with cinnobar cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun
+drips gold.
+
+Only wide enough for a barca and two gondolas to pass--this canal of
+mine; only deep enough to let a wine barge slip through; so narrow you
+must go all the way back to the lagoon if you would turn your gondola;
+so short you can row through it in five minutes; every inch of its
+water-surface part of everything about it, so clear are the
+reflections; full of moods, whims, and fancies, this wave space--one
+moment in a broad laugh coquetting with a bit of blue sky peeping from
+behind a cloud, its cheeks dimpled with sly undercurrents, the next
+swept by flurries of little winds, soft as the breath of a child on a
+mirror; then, when aroused by a passing boat, breaking out into
+ribbons of color--swirls of twisted doorways, flags, awnings,
+flower-laden balconies, black-shawled Venetian beauties all upside
+down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters--a
+bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in
+detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole
+scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any
+painter living or dead.
+
+These are some of the joys of the painter whose north light is the
+sky, whose studio door is never shut, and who often works surrounded
+by envious throngs, that treat him with such marked reverence that
+they whisper one to another for fear of disturbing him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now for a few practical hints born of these experiences; and in
+giving them to you, remember that no man is more keenly conscious of
+his limitations than the speaker. My own system of work, all of which
+will be explained to you in subsequent talks, one on water-color and
+the other on charcoal, is, I am aware, peculiar, and has many
+drawbacks and many shortcomings. I make bold to give these to you
+because of my fifty years' experience in outdoor sketching, and
+because in so doing I may encourage some one among you to begin where
+I have left off and do better. The requirements are thoughtful and
+well-studied selection before your brush touches your canvas; a
+correct knowledge of composition; a definite grasp of the problem of
+light and dark, or, in other words, _mass_; a free, sure, and
+untrammelled rapidity of execution; and, last and by no means least, a
+realization of what I shall express in one short compact sentence,
+that _it takes two men to paint an outdoor picture: one to do the work
+and the other to kill him when he has done enough_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before entering on the means and methods through which so early a
+death becomes permissible I shall admit that the personal equation
+will largely assert itself, and that because of it certain allowances
+must be made, or rather certain variations in both grasp and treatment
+will necessarily follow.
+
+While, of course, nature is always the same, never changing and never
+subservient to the whims or perceptive powers of the individual, there
+are painters who will aver that they alone see her correctly and that
+all the world that differs from them is wrong. One man from natural
+defects may see all her greens or reds stronger or weaker than another
+in proportion to the condition of his eye. Another may grasp only her
+varying degrees of gray. One man unduly exaggerates the intensity of
+the dark and the opposing brilliancy of the lights. Another eye--for
+it is largely a question of optics, of optics and temperament--sees
+only the more gentle and sometimes the more subtle gradations of light
+and shade reducing even the blaze of the noonday sun to half-tones.
+Still another, whether by the fault of over-magnifying power or
+long-sightedness, detects an infinity of detail in nature, and is not
+satisfied until each particular blade of grass stands on end like the
+quills of the traditional porcupine, while his brother brush
+strenuously asserts that every detail is really only a question of
+mass, and should be treated as such, and that for all practical
+purposes it is quite immaterial whether a tree can be distinguished
+from a farm-house so long as it is fluffy enough to be indistinct.
+
+These defects, sympathies, tendencies, whatever one may call them,
+only prove the more conclusively that there are many varying standards
+set up by many minds. That which can easily be proved in addition is
+that many a false standard owes its origin as often to a question of
+bad digestion as of bad taste. They also show us that no one man or
+set of men can rightfully lay claim to holding the one key which
+unlocks the mysteries of nature, while insisting that the rules
+governing their use of that key _must_ be adhered to by the rest of
+the world.
+
+There are, however, certain laws which control every pictured
+expression of nature and to which every eye and hand must submit if
+even a semblance of expression is to be sought for. One of them is
+truth. In this all schools concur, each one demanding the truth, or at
+least enough of it to placate their consciences when they add to it a
+sufficient number of lies of their own manufacture to make the subject
+interesting to their special line of constituents. Among these I do
+not class the lunatics who are to-day wandering loose outside of
+charitable asylums especially designed for disordered and impaired
+intellects, and whose frothings I saw at the last Autumn Salon.
+
+But to our text once more, taking up the first requirement; namely,
+selection.
+
+By selection I mean the "cutting out entire" from the great panorama
+spread out before you just that portion which appeals to you and which
+you want to have appeal to your fellow men.
+
+Speaking for myself, I have always held that the most perfect
+reproductions of nature are those which can be _selected_ any day,
+under any condition of light, direct from the several objects
+themselves, without arrangement and fore-shortenings or twistings to
+the right and to the left. Nothing, in fact, seems to me so
+astounding as that any human mind could for an instant suppose that it
+can improve on the work of the Almighty.
+
+If it is a street, and if you wish to express its perspective, and the
+bit of blue sky beyond, with a burst of sunlight illumining the
+corner, the figures crowded against the light, forming a mass in
+themselves, and it interests you at a glance, sit down and study it
+long enough to find out what feature of the landscape impressed you at
+_first sight_. If, as you look, the first impression becomes weakened,
+perhaps it is because the immediate foreground, which at the first
+glance was clear, is now dotted with passers-by, thus obscuring your
+point of interest, or a cloud has passed over the sky, lowering the
+whole tone, or the group of figures across the light has dispersed,
+exposing the ugly right-angled triangle of the flat wall and street
+level instead of the same lines being broken picturesquely with the
+black dots of heads of the crowd itself. In a moment it is no longer a
+composition of the same power that struck you at first. Perhaps while
+you sit and wait the scene again changes, and something infinitely
+more interesting, or the reverse, is evolved from the perspective
+before you. And so it goes on, until this constantly changing
+kaleidoscope repeats itself in its first aspect, until you have fairly
+grasped its meaning and analyzed its component parts. Or until either
+the effect that first delighted you, or the subsequent effect that
+charmed you still more, becomes a fixed fact in your mind. That, then,
+is the picture that you want to paint and that you are to paint
+_exactly as you saw it_. And if you can reproduce it exactly as you
+did see it, ten chances to one it will impress your fellow men. The
+trouble is that when you sit down to paint it you are so often lost in
+its detail that you forget its salient features, and by the time you
+have finished and blocked up the immediate foreground with figures
+that did not exist when you were first thrilled by its beauty, you
+have either painted its least interesting aspect, or you have filled
+that street so full of lies of your own that the policeman on the beat
+could not recognize it.
+
+Of course, while all nature is interesting, there are parts of nature
+more interesting than other parts, and since the skill of man is
+inadequate to produce its more _humble_ effects, if I may so express
+it, the painter should be on the lookout for her _dramatic_ air, in
+order that when she is reproduced she may add that touch to her many
+qualities, thus meeting the painter half-way. Even in the perspective
+of a street, nature, in profound consideration of the devotee under
+his umbrella, often gives him a deeper touch--one wall perhaps in
+sudden brilliant light, while the vista of the street is in gloom made
+by a passing cloud, she constantly calling out to the painter as he
+works: "Watch me now and take me at my best."
+
+Or change this picture for an instant and note, if you please, the
+flight of cloud shadows over a mountain slope or the whirl of a wind
+flurry across a still lake. There are moments in all phenomena like
+these where a great man rising to the occasion can catch them exactly,
+as did Rousseau in the golden glow of the fading light through the
+forest, or Corot in the crisp light of the morning, or Daubigny in the
+low twilight across the sunken marshes where one can almost hear the
+frogs croak.
+
+Selection, then, preceded by the deepest and closest thought as to
+whether the subject is worth painting at all, becomes necessary, the
+student giving himself plenty of time to study it in all its phases;
+time enough to "walk around it," reviewing it at different angles;
+noting the hour at which it is at its best and happiest, seizing upon
+its most telling presentment--and all this before he begins even
+_mentally_ to compose its salient features on the square of his
+canvas. You can turn, if you choose, your camera skyward and focus the
+top of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it is uninteresting,
+or rather unintelligible, until you focus also the church door, and
+the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that winds through the
+quiet graveyard. So a picture can be true and yet very much like a
+slip cut from a newspaper. For some men cut thus into nature,
+haphazard, without care or thought, and produce perhaps a square
+containing an advertisement of a patent churn, a railroad timetable,
+and a fragment of an essay on art. Cut carefully and with selection,
+and you may get a poem which will soothe you like a melody.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As to the value of the laws which govern the perfect composition, it
+is unquestionably true that a correct knowledge of these laws makes
+or unmakes the picture and establishes or ruins the rank of the
+painter. No matter how careful the drawing, how interesting the
+subject, how true the mass, how subtle the gradations of light and
+shade, how perfect the expression of the figures, or how transparent
+the atmosphere of a landscape, a want of this knowledge will defeat
+the result. On the other hand, a good composition--one that "carries,"
+as the term is--one that can be seen across the room, if properly
+composed will instantly excite your interest, even if upon near
+inspection you are shocked by its crudities and faults. "I don't know
+what it is," says a painter, "but it's good all the same."
+
+After your selection has been made, the next thing is to search for
+its centre of interest. When this is found it is equally important to
+weigh carefully the _quality_ of this centre of interest in order to
+determine whether, as has been said, the subject is worth painting at
+all. My own rule is to spend half the time I am devoting to my sketch
+in carefully weighing the subject in its every detail and expression.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Many men, I am aware, have endeavored to prove that there are eight or
+ten different forms of composition. My own experience and
+investigation are, of course, limited, but so far I have only been
+able to discover one, namely, the larger mass and the smaller mass:
+the larger mass dominating the centre of interest, which catches your
+eye instantly at first sight of a picture, and the smaller or less
+interesting object which next attracts your eye, and so relieves the
+vision and spares you the monotony of looking at a single object long
+and steadily, thus fatiguing the eye and dissipating the interest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having determined upon the _quality_ of the subject-matter and fixed
+its centre interest in pleasing relation to the whole, the next step
+is to confine yourself to all that _the eyes see at one glance_ and no
+more, or, in other words, that portion of the landscape which you
+could cut out with the scissors of your eye and paste upon your mind.
+That which you can see when your head is kept perfectly still, your
+eye looking straight before you, only seeing so high, so low, and so
+far to the right and left, without a strain. The great sweep of
+vision, a sweep covering a hundred subjects perhaps, is obtained by
+turning the eyes up or down or sideways. But to be true--that is, to
+see one picture at a time--the eye should be fixed like the lens of a
+camera, the limit of the picture being the range of the eye and no
+more. A departure from this rule not only confuses your perspective
+but crowds a number of points of interest into the square of your
+canvas, when there is really only _one_ centre point before you in
+nature; and this one point you must treat as does the electrician in
+a theatre who keeps the lime-light on the star of the play.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another requirement is rapidity of execution. I am not speaking of
+figure-drawing. I can well understand why the model grows tired,
+although the crude lay figure may not, and why the constant workings
+over and again upon the figure subject, the mosaicing (if I may coin a
+word) of the different points of the figure during the different hours
+of the day and the different days of the week deep into the canvas,
+may be necessary.
+
+I am speaking of outdoor, landscape work, for which only four hours,
+at most, either in the morning or in the afternoon, can be utilized.
+In this four hours nature keeps comparatively still long enough for
+you to caress her with your brush, and if you would truly express what
+you see, your work must be finished in that time. I can quite
+understand that to the ordinary student this is a paralyzing
+statement, but let us analyze it together for a moment and I think
+that we shall all see that if it were possible for a human hand to
+obey us as precisely as a human eye detects, the results on the canvas
+would be infinitely more valuable, first, because the sun never stands
+still and the shadows of one hour are not the shadows of the next; and
+second, because this moving of the sun is affecting not only the mass
+but the composition of the picture, one mass of buildings being in
+light at ten o'clock and again in shadow at eleven. It is also
+affecting its local color, the yellow of the afternoon sunlight
+illumining and graying the silver-blue of the shadows, thus weakening
+the force of positive shadows scattered through the composition. Of
+course, to be really exact, there is only one moment in any one of the
+hours of the day in which any one aspect of nature remains the same,
+but since we are all finite we must do the best we can, and four
+hours, in my experience, is all that a man can be sure of.
+
+We have, of course, the next day to continue in, but then the
+landscape has changed. That delicate, transparent, gauzy cloud screen
+that softened the sky light was, under the northwest wind of
+yesterday, a clear, steely gray-blue, and the sun shining through it
+made the sunlight almost white and the shadows a neutral blue; to-day
+the wind is from the south and a great mass of soft summer clouds,
+tea-rose color, drift over the clear azure, each one of which throws
+its reflected light on every object over which they float. The half
+you painted yesterday, therefore, will not match the half you must
+paint to-day, and so if you will persist in working on your same
+canvas you go on making an almanac of your picture, so apparent to an
+expert that he can pick out the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as you
+daily progressed. If you should be fortunate enough to work under
+Italian skies, where sometimes for days together the light is the
+same, the skies being one expanse of soft, opalescent blue, you might
+think under such influence it would be possible for you to perform the
+great almanac trick successfully in your sketch. But how about
+yourself? Are you the same man to-day that you were yesterday? If so,
+perhaps you might also find yourself in exactly the same frame of mind
+that existed when your sketch was half finished. But would you
+guarantee that you would be the same man for a week?
+
+I believe we can maintain this position of the necessity of rapid work
+in out-of-door sketches by looking for a moment at the product of the
+best men of the last century, some of whom I have already mentioned.
+Take Corot, for instance. Corot, as you know, spent almost his entire
+life painting the early light of the morning. An analysis of his
+life's work shows that he must have folded his umbrella and gone home
+before eleven o'clock. My own idea is that many hundreds of his
+canvases, which have since sold at many thousands of francs, were
+perfectly finished in one sitting. This cannot be otherwise when you
+remember that one dealer in Paris claims to have sold two thousand
+Corots. These one-sitting pictures to me express his best work. In the
+larger canvases in which figures are introduced--notably the one first
+owned by the late Mr. Charles A. Dana, of New York, called "Apollo," I
+believe--the treatment of the sky and foreground shows careful
+repainting, and while the mechanical process of the brush, shown by
+the over and under painting, the dragging of opaque color over
+transparent, may produce certain translucencies which the more
+forcible and direct stroke of the brush--one touch and no more--fails
+to give, still the whole composition lacks that intimacy with nature
+which one always feels in the smaller and more rapidly perfected
+canvases.
+
+Note, too, the sketches of Frans Hals and see what power comes from
+the sure touch of a well-directed brush in the hand of a man who used
+it to express his thoughts as other men use chords of music or
+paragraphs in literature. A man who made no false moves, who knew that
+every stroke of his brush must express a perfect sentence and that it
+could never be recalled. Really the work of such a master is like the
+gesture of an actor--if it is right a thrill goes through you, if it
+is wrong it is like that player friend of Hamlet's who sawed the air.
+
+This quality of "the stroke," by the by, if we stop to analyze for a
+moment, is the stroke that comes straight from the heart, tingling up
+the spinal column, down the arm, and straight to the finger-tips. Ole
+Bull had it when his violin echoed a full orchestra; Paderewski has it
+when he rings clearly and sharply some note that vibrates through you
+for hours after; Booth had it when drawing himself up to his full
+height as Cardinal Richelieu he began that famous speech, "Around her
+form I draw the holy circle of our faith"--his upraised finger a
+barrier that an army could not break down; Velasquez, in his
+marvellous picture in the Museum of the Prado in Madrid of "The
+Topers" ("Los Borrachos"); Frans Hals, in almost every canvas that his
+brush touched; and in later years our own John Sargent, in many of his
+portraits, but especially in his direct out-of-door studies, shows it;
+as do scores of others whose sureness of touch and exact knowledge
+have made their names household words where art is loved and genius
+held sacred.
+
+And with this ability to record swiftly and surely there will come a
+certain enthusiasm, fanned to white heat when, some morning, trap in
+hand, you are searching for something to paint, your mind entirely
+filled with a certain object (you propose to paint boats if you
+please, and you have walked around them for minutes trying to get the
+best view and deciding upon the all-important best possible
+composition)--when, turning suddenly, you face a mass of buildings and
+a sweep of river that instantly put to flight every idea concerning
+your first subject, and in a moment a new arrangement is evolved and
+you are working like mad. It is only under this pressure of
+_enthusiasm_ that the best work is produced.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The coming landscape-painter will be a _four-hour man_, of thorough
+knowledge, one who has most intimate and close acquaintance with
+nature, one who can select and then seize the salient features of the
+landscape, at a glance arranging them upon the square of his canvas,
+in other words, composing them, the basis being the most expansive and
+most picturesque grouping of the several details of the subject,
+extracting at the same moment, at the same instant, with one sweep of
+his eye, the whole scheme of local color, and then surely, clearly,
+lovingly, and reverently making it breathe upon his canvas for other
+souls to live by.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And how noble the ambition!
+
+In our present civilization some men are moved to philanthropy, some
+to science, some to be rulers of men. Some men are brimful and running
+over with harmonies that will live forever. Other men's hearts beat in
+unison with the symphonies of the spheres, and Homer and Milton and
+Dante become household words. You seek another expression of the good
+that is in you. You will be painters and sculptors. Color, form, and
+mass are to you what the pen, the sword, and the lute are to those
+others who have gone before, or are now around you. Your mission is as
+distinct as theirs, and it is as imperative that you should fulfil
+it. Paint what you see and as you see it. Nothing more nor less. See
+only the beautiful, and if you cannot reach that content yourself with
+the picturesque. It is a first cousin but once removed.
+
+
+
+
+MASS
+
+
+The difference between composition and mass is that a composition is a
+mere outline of pen or pencil, each object taking its proper place in
+the square of a canvas, while mass is the filling in between these
+outlines either of varied color or in lights or darks, their
+gradations but so many guides to the spectator's eye marking not only
+its perspective, form and atmosphere, but, if skilfully done, telling
+the story of your subject at a glance.
+
+To do this the student must find the lightest light and darkest dark
+in the subject before him and, having found it, adhere to it to the
+end of his work. For as the sun dominates the sky and earth so do its
+rays dominate parts of the whole, making more luminous than the rest
+only one object upon which its light falls. To make this more
+explicit it is only necessary to look at an egg upon a white
+table-cloth. Here is a natural object devoid of local color except in
+reflected lights, and yet you will find that where the round of the
+egg reflects the light the highest light is found, while in the edge
+of the shadow, where the egg turns into the round--between that high
+light and the reflected light from the table-cloth, I mean--is found
+its darkest dark. But only one portion of that shadow, a point as
+large as the point of a pin, is the darkest dark. Everything else is
+gradation, from the highest light to the lowest light, the lowest
+light being almost a shadow; and from its darkest dark to its lightest
+dark the lightest dark again being almost a light.
+
+In landscape art these problems are greatly simplified. The sun is
+always the strongest light, and whatever comes against it, church
+tower, rock, palace, or ship under full sail, is the darkest object.
+In addition to this there is always some one point where the outdoor
+painter can find a lesser supplementary light and near it a lesser
+supplementary dark. Moreover, throughout the rest of the composition
+these same lights and darks are echoed and re-echoed in constantly
+decreasing gradations.
+
+You may apply these same tests everywhere in nature. Even in a gray
+day, when the sun is not so positive a factor in distributing light,
+and the shadows are so subtle that it is difficult to discover them,
+there is always some mass of foliage, the silver sheen from an old
+shingled roof, the glare of a white wall, which marks for the
+composition its lightest light, while a corresponding dark can always
+be found somewhere in the tree-trunks, under the overhanging eaves, or
+in the broken crevices of the masonry.
+
+So it is with every other expression of nature. Even on a Venetian
+lagoon, where the sky and water are apparently one (not really one to
+the quick eye of an expert, the water always being one tone lower than
+the sky--that is, more gray than the overbending sky)--even in this
+lagoon you will find some one portion of the surface lighter than any
+other portion; and in expressing it your eye first and your brush next
+must catch in the opalescent sweep of delicious color under your eye
+its exact quantity of black and white. By black and white I mean, of
+course, that excess or absence of pure color which when translated
+into pure black and white would express the meaning of the
+subject-matter, as one of Raphael Morghen's engravings on steel gives
+you the feeling and color in his masterly rendering of Da Vinci's
+"Last Supper."
+
+In my judgment one of the great landscapes of modern times is the
+picture by the distinguished Dutch painter, Mauve, known as "Changing
+Pasture," which is now owned by Mr. Charles P. Taft, of Cincinnati.
+Here the factor of mass is carried to its utmost limit. Sky one mass;
+flock of sheep another mass; and the foreground, sweeping under the
+sheep and beyond until it is lost in the haze of the distance, another
+mass, or, if one chooses to put it that way, another broad gradation
+of a section of the picture: the highest light being some
+infinitesimal speck in the diaphanous silver sky, the strongest dark
+being found somewhere in the foreground or in the flock of sheep.
+
+By a strict adherence to this law of one supreme light and one supreme
+dark does Mauve's work, as it were, get back from and out of his
+canvas, as from the record of a phonograph into which some soul has
+breathed its own precise purpose and intent.
+
+So, too, does nature often call out to you fixing your attention,
+often shrouding in shadow the unimportant in the landscape, while high
+up above the gloom it holds up to your gaze a white candle of a
+minaret or the bared breast of an Alpine peak reflecting the loving
+look of a tired sunbeam bidding it good-night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To accent the more strongly the value of this dominant light even
+though it be treated in very low gradation, I recall that a year ago
+the art world was startled by the sum received for a medium sized
+picture of some coryphees painted by Degas, now an old man over eighty
+years old--a subject which he always loved and, indeed, which he has
+painted many times. Some thirty years ago, when he was comparatively a
+young man, I saw, at the Bartholdi exhibition in New York, a picture
+by this master of these same coryphees, two figures standing together
+in the flies resting their weary, pink, fishworm legs as they balanced
+themselves with their hands against the wabbling scenery. It was a
+wholly gray picture, and almost in a monotone, and yet the flashes of
+their diamond earrings, no larger than the point of a pin, were
+distinctly visible, holding their place in, if not dominating, the
+whole color scheme.
+
+Again, in that marvellous portrait of Wertheimer, the bric-a-brac
+dealer, if you remember, the eye first catches the strong vermilion
+touch on the lower lip, and then, knowing that a master like Sargent
+would not leave it isolated, one finds, to one's delight and joy, a
+little swipe of red on the tongue of the barely discernible black
+poodle squatting at his feet. Had the red of the dog's tongue
+predominated, we should never have been thrilled and fascinated by one
+of the great portraits of this or any other time.
+
+This is also true in other great portraits--in, for instance, the
+pictures of Rembrandt, Vandyck, and Frans Hals, especially where a
+face is relieved by the addition of a hand and the white of a ruff.
+Somewhere in that warm expanse of the face there can be found a
+pinhead of color, brighter and more dominating than any other brush
+touch on the canvas. It may be the high egg-light in the forehead, or
+the click on the tip of the nose, or a fold of the white ruff; but
+slight as it is and unnoticeable at first, because of it not only does
+the head look round as the egg looks round when relieved by the same
+treatment, but the attention is fixed. Unless this had been preserved,
+the eye would have, perhaps, rested first on the hand, something
+foreign to the painter's intention.
+
+Recalling again the law of the high light and strong dark, and
+referring again to the value of the skilful manipulation of light and
+shade forming the mass thereby expressing the more clearly the meaning
+of a picture, I repeat that, while the eye is always caught by the
+strongest dark against the strongest light, it is next caught by the
+lesser supplementary light and lesser supplementary dark; and then,
+if the painter is skilful enough in the management of the remaining
+lesser lights and darks, the eye will run through the gradations to
+the end, rebounding once more to the greater light and dark, exactly
+in the order intended by the painter; thus unfolding to the spectator
+little by little, quite as a plot of a novel is made clear, the story
+which the painter had in his own mind to tell. This is effected purely
+and entirely by the correct accentuations of the explanatory lights
+and darks. One mistake in the management--that is, the accentuating of
+the third light, if you please, instead of the second--will not only
+confuse the eye of the spectator, but may perhaps give him an entirely
+different impression from what was intended by the painter, just as
+the shifting of a chapter in a novel would confuse a reader; and this,
+if you please, without depending in any way upon either the drawing or
+the color of the accessories.
+
+I can best illustrate this by recalling to your mind that marvellous
+picture of the so-called literary school of England, a picture by Luke
+Fildes known as "The Doctor" and now hanging in the Tate Gallery in
+London, in which the whole sad story is told in logical sequence by
+the artist's consummate handling of the darks and lights in regular
+progression.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You will pardon me, I hope, if I leave the more technical details of
+my subject for a moment that I may discuss with you one of the
+peculiarities of the so-called art-loving public of to-day, notably
+that section which insists that no picture should tell a story of any
+kind.
+
+To my own mind this picture of Luke Fildes reaches high-water mark in
+the school of his time, and yet in watching as I have done the crowds
+who surge through the Tate Galleries and the National Gallery, it is
+an almost every-day occurrence to overhear such contemptuous remarks
+as "Oh, yes, one of those literary fellows," drop from the lips of
+some highbrow who only tolerates Constable because of the influence
+his example and work had on Corot and other men of the Barbizon
+school.
+
+Another section lose their senses over pure brush work.
+
+A story of Whistler--one he told me himself--will illustrate what I
+mean. Jules Stewart's father, a great lover of good pictures and one
+of Fortuny's earliest patrons, had invited Whistler to his house in
+Paris to see his collection, and in the course of the visit drew from
+a hiding-place a small panel of Meissonier's, of a quality so high
+that any dealer in Paris would have given him $30,000 for it.
+
+Whistler would not even glance at it.
+
+Upon Stewart insisting, he adjusted his monocle and said: "Oh, yes,
+very good--_snuff-box style_."
+
+This affectation was to have been expected of Whistler because of his
+aggressive mental attitude toward the work of any man who handled his
+brush differently from his own personal methods, but saner minds may
+think along broader lines.
+
+If they do not, they have short memories. Even in my own experience I
+have watched the rise and fall of men whose technic called from the
+housetops--a call which was heard by the passing throng below, many of
+whom stopped to listen and applaud; for in pictures as in bonnets the
+taste of the public changes almost daily. One has only to review
+several of the schools, both in English and in Continental art, noting
+their dawn of novelty, their sunrise of appreciation, their high noon
+of triumph, their afternoon of neglect, and their night of oblivion,
+to be convinced that the wheel of artistic appreciation is round like
+other wheels--the world, for one--and that its revolutions bring the
+night as surely as they bring the dawn.
+
+Not a hundred years have passed since the broad, sensuous work of
+Turner, big in conception and big in treatment, was followed by the
+more exact painters of the English school, many of whom are still at
+work, notably Leader and Alfred Parsons, both Royal Academicians, and
+of whom some contemporaneous critic insisted that they had counted the
+leaves on their elm-trees fringing the polished water of the Thames.
+They, of course, had only been eclipsed by the broader brushes of more
+recent time, men like Frank Brangwyn and Colin Hunter, who have
+yielded to the pressure of the change in taste, or of whom it would be
+more just to say, have _set_ present taste, so that to-day not only
+the afternoon of night, but the twilight of forgetfulness, is slowly
+and surely casting long shadows over the more realistic men of the
+eighties and nineties.
+
+What will follow this evolution of technic no man can predict. The
+lessons of the past, however, are valuable, and to-day one touch of
+Turner's brush is more sought for than acres of canvases so greatly
+prized twenty years after his death.
+
+And this is not alone confined to the old realistic English school. In
+my own time I have seen Verbeckoeven eclipsed by Van Marcke,
+Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gerome by Manet, and Sir Frederick Leighton
+by John Sargent--a young David slaying the Goliath of English technic
+with but a wave of his magic brush--and, last and by no means least,
+the great French painter Meissonier by the equally great Spanish
+master Sorolla.
+
+I am tempted to continue, for the success of these men in the fulness
+of the sunlight of their triumph, realists as well as impressionists,
+was wholly due to their understanding of and adherence to the rules of
+selection, composition, and mass which form the basis of these papers,
+and which despite their differences in brush work they all adhered
+to.
+
+In the late half of the preceding century Meissonier received $66,000
+for his "Friedland," a picture which cost him the best part of two
+years to paint, and the expenditure of many thousands of francs,
+notably the expense attendant upon the trampling down of a field of
+growing wheat by a drove of horses that he might study the action and
+the effect the better. Forty years later Sorolla received $20,000 for
+two figures in blazing sunlight which took him but two days to paint,
+the rest of his collection bringing $250,000, the whole exhibit of one
+hundred and odd pictures having been visited by 150,000 persons in
+thirty-two days. And he is still in the full tide of success,
+pre-eminently the greatest master of the out-of-doors of modern times,
+while to-day the work of Meissonier has fallen into such disrepute
+that no owner dares offer one of his canvases at public auction except
+under the keenest necessity. The first master expresses the refinement
+of extreme realism, or rather detailism; the other is a pronounced
+impressionist of the sanest of the open-air school of to-day. How long
+this pendulum will continue to swing no one can tell. Both men are
+great painters in the widest, deepest, and most pronounced sense; both
+men have glorified, ennobled, and enriched their time; and both men
+have reflected credit and honor upon their nation and their school.
+
+Meissonier could not only draw the figure, give it life and action,
+keep it harmonious in color, perfect in its gradations of black and
+white, but he had that marvellous gift of color analysis which
+reproduces for you in a picture the size of the top of a cigar-box
+every tone in the local and reflected light to be found, say, in the
+folds of a cavalier's cloak, the pleats no wider than the point of a
+stub pen.
+
+All this, of course, Sorolla ignores and, I am afraid, knowing the man
+personally as I do, despises. What concerns the great Spaniard is the
+whole composition alive in the blaze of the sunlight, the glare of the
+hot sand and the shimmer of the blue, overarching sky, beating up and
+down and over the figures, and all depicted with a slash of a brush
+almost as wide as your hand. The first picture, the size of a
+tobacco-box, you can hold between thumb and finger and enjoy, amazed
+at the master's knowledge and skill. The other grips you from afar off
+as you enter the gallery and stand startled and astounded before its
+truth and dignity. In the first Meissonier tells you the whole story
+to the very end. In the second Sorolla presents but a series of
+shorthand notes which you yourself can fill in to suit your taste and
+experience both of life and nature.
+
+Whether you prefer one or the other, or neither, is a matter for you
+to decide. You pay your money or you don't, and you can take your
+choice. The future only can tell the story of the revolution of the
+wheel. In the next decade a single Meissonier may be worth its weight
+in sheet gold and layers of Sorollas may be stored in attics awaiting
+some fortunate auction.
+
+What will ensue, the art world over, before the wheel travels its full
+periphery, no man knows. It will not be the hysteria of paint, I feel
+assured, with its dabbers, spotters, and smearers; nor will it be the
+litters of the cub-ists, that new breed of artistic pups, sponsors for
+"The girl coming down-stairs," or "The stairs coming down the girl,"
+or "The coming girl and the down-stairs," it makes no difference
+which, all are equally incoherent and unintelligible; but it will be
+something which, at least, will boast the element of beauty which is
+the one and only excuse for art's existence. I may not live to see
+Meissonier's second dawn and I never want to see Sorolla's eclipse,
+but you may. You have only to remember Turner's second high noon to be
+assured of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And just here it might be well to consider this question of technic,
+especially its value in obtaining the results desired. While it has
+nothing to do with either selection, composition, or mass, it has, I
+claim, much to do with the way a painter expresses himself--his tone
+of voice, his handwriting, his gestures in talking, so to speak--and
+therefore becomes an integral part of my discourse. It may also be of
+service in the striking of a note of compromise, some middle ground
+upon which the extremes may one day meet.
+
+To make my point the clearer, let me recall an exhibition in New York,
+held some years ago, when the bonnets were five deep trying to get a
+glimpse of a picture of half a dozen red prelates who were listening
+to a missionary's story. Many of these devotees went into raptures
+over the brass nails in the sofa, and were only disappointed when they
+could not read the monogram on the bishop's ring. Later on, a highly
+cultivated and intelligent American citizen was so entranced that he
+bought the missionary, story and all, for the price of a brown-stone
+front, and carried him away that he might enjoy him forever.
+
+One month later, almost exactly in the same spot hung another picture,
+the subject of which I forget, or it may be that I did not understand
+it or that it had no subject at all. If I remember, it was not like
+anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters
+under the earth. In this respect one could have fallen down and
+worshipped it and escaped the charge of idolatry. With the exception
+of a few stray art critics, delighted at an opportunity for a new
+sensation, it was not surrounded by an idolatrous gathering at all. On
+the contrary, the audience before it reminded me more of Artemas Ward
+and his panorama.
+
+"When I first exhibited this picture in New York," he said, "the
+artists came with lanterns before daybreak to look at it, and then
+they called for the artist, and when he appeared--they threw things at
+him."
+
+For one picture a gentleman gave a brown-stone front; for the other he
+would not have given a single brick, unless he had been sure of
+planting it in the middle of the canvas the first shot. The first was
+Vibert's realistic picture so well known to you. The other was an
+example of the modern French school or what was then known as advanced
+impressionists.
+
+I shall not go into an analysis of the technic of the two painters. I
+refer to them and their brush work here because of the undue value set
+upon the way a thing is done rather than its value after it is done.
+
+Speaking for myself, I must admit that the value of technic has never
+impressed me as have the other and greater qualities in a
+picture--namely, its expression of truth and the message it carries of
+beauty and often tenderness. I have always held that it is of no
+moment to the world at large by what means and methods an artist
+expresses himself; that the world is only concerned as to whether he
+has expressed himself at all; and if so, to what end and extent.
+
+If the artist says to us, "I scumbled in the background solid, using
+bitumen as an undertone, then I dragged over my high lights and
+painted my cool color right into it," it is as meaningless to most of
+us as if another bread-winner had said, "I use a Singer with a
+straight shuttle and No. 60 cotton." What we want to know is whether
+she made the shirt.
+
+Art terms are, however, synonymous with other terms and in this
+connection may be of assistance. To make my purpose clear we will
+suppose that "technic" in art is handwriting. "Composition," the
+arrangement of sentences. "Details," the choice of words. "Drawing,"
+good grammar. "Mass, or light and shade," contrasting expressions
+giving value each to the other. I hold, however, that there is
+something more. The author may write a good hand, spell correctly,
+and have a proper respect for Lindley Murray, but what does he say?
+What idea does he convey? Has he told us anything of human life, of
+human love, of human suffering or joy, or uncovered for us any fresh
+hiding-place of nature and taught us to love it? Or is it only words?
+
+It really matters very little to any of us what the handwriting of an
+author may be, and so it should matter very little how an artist
+touches the canvas.
+
+It is true that a picture containing and expressing an idea the most
+elevated can be painted either in mass or detail, at the pleasure of
+the painter. He may write in the Munich style, or after the manner of
+the Duesseldorf ready writers, or the modern French pothook and hanger,
+or the antiquated Dutch. He can use the English of Chaucer, or
+Shakespeare, or Josh Billings, at his own good pleasure. If he conveys
+an intelligible idea he has accomplished a result the value of which
+is just in proportion to the quality of that idea.
+
+To continue this parallel, it may be said that extreme realism is the
+use of too many words in a sentence and too many sentences in a
+paragraph; extreme impressionism, the use of too few. Neither,
+however, is fundamental, and art can be good, bad, or indifferent
+containing each or combining both.
+
+Realism, or, to express it more clearly, detailism, is the realizing
+of the whole subject-matter or motive of a picture in exact detail.
+Impressionism is the generalizing of the subject-matter as a whole and
+the expression of only its salient features.
+
+The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been
+insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like
+a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle
+and every crack in the blade became apparent.
+
+The more advanced would have insisted on not only the fibre in the
+wood, but the brand on the other side of the blade, had it been
+physically possible to show it.
+
+In absolute contrast to this, there lived a man at Barbizon who
+maintained that a spade was not a spade at all, but merely a mass of
+shadow against a low twilight sky, in the hands of a figure who with
+uncovered head listens reverently; that the spade is merely a symbol
+of labor; that he used it as he would use a word necessary to express
+a sentence, which would be unintelligible without it, and that it was
+perfectly immaterial to him, and should be to the world, whether it
+was a spade or a shovel so long as the soft twilight, and the reverent
+figures wearied with the day's work, and the flat waste of field
+stretching away to the little village spire on the dim horizon line
+told the story of human suffering and patience and toil, as with
+folded hands they listened to the soft cadence of the angelus.
+
+Which of these two methods of expression is correct--Ruskin or Millet?
+Are there any laws which govern, or is it a matter of taste, fancy, or
+feeling? Is it a matter of individuality? If so, which individual by
+his methods tells us the most truths? Let us endeavor to analyze.
+
+I whirl through a mountain gorge and catch a glance through a
+car-window--an impression. In the darkness of the tunnel it remains
+with me. I see the great mass of white cumuli and against them the
+dark cedars, the straggling foot-path and steep cliffs. I am impressed
+with the sweep of the cloud form pressing over and around them. With
+my eyes closed I paint this on my brain, and if I am great enough and
+wide enough and deep enough I can subdue my personality and forget my
+surroundings, and when opportunity offers I can express upon my canvas
+the few salient facts which impressed me and should impress my fellow
+men. If it is the silvery light of the morning, I am Corot; if the
+day is gone and across the cool lagoon I see the ripple amid the tall
+grass catching the fading color of the warm sky, I am Daubigny; if a
+gray mist hangs over the hillside and the patches of snow half melted
+express the warmth and mellowness of the coming spring, I am our own
+Inness.
+
+Perhaps, however, I am not content. I am overburdened with curiosity.
+I say to myself: "What sort of trees, pine or cedar?" I think, pine,
+but I am uneasy lest they should be hemlock. Were the rocks all
+perpendicular, or did not detached bowlders line the path? About the
+clouds, were they not some small cirri beneath the zenith? My memory
+is so bad--and so I stop the train and go back. Just as I expected.
+The trees were spruce and the rocks were grass-grown and full of
+fissures, and so I begin to paint and continue. I get the bark on the
+trees, and the foliage until each particular leaf stands on end, and
+the strata of the cliffs, and the very sand on the path. I crowd into
+my canvas geology, botany, and the laws governing cloud forms.
+
+Being an ordinary mortal, my curiosity, my telescopic eyes, my
+magnifying-glass of vision, my love of truth, my positive conviction
+that it is a spruce and should not be painted as a pine, except
+through rank perjury, all these forces together have undermined my
+impression or, like thorns, have grown up and choked it. Being honest,
+I am ready to confess that before returning to the spot I was in doubt
+about the pine. But I am still ready to affirm that what I have
+labored over is the exact counterfeit and presentment of nature, and
+equally willing to denounce the public for not seeing it as I do. I
+forget that I have been a boor and a vulgarian--that I have been
+invited to a feast and that I have pried into mysteries which my
+goddess would veil from my sight; that I have had the impertinence to
+bring my own personal advice into the discussion; that I have insisted
+that fissures, and leaves, and sand, and infinite detail were
+necessary to this expression of nature's sublimity.
+
+Is it at all strange that the impression which so charmed me as I saw
+it from my car-window has faded? Nature unrolled for me suddenly a
+poem. For symbols she used a great mass of dark, sturdy trees against
+a majestic cloud, a rugged cliff, and a straggling path. I have
+ignored them all and insisted that "truth was mighty and must
+prevail." I am a realist and "paint things as they are." Not so. I am
+an iconoclast and have broken my god and cannot put together the
+pieces. I have sacrificed a divine impression to a human realism.
+
+Suppose, however, that the painter who had this glimpse of nature
+before entering the tunnel was no ordinary man, but a man of steadfast
+mind, of firm convictions, of a sure touch, with an absolute belief
+in nature, and so reverential that he dare not offer even a suggestion
+of his own. He has seen it; he has felt it; it has gone down deep into
+his memory and heart. The cloud, the cliff, the mass, the path--that
+is all. And it is enough. The annoyances of the day, the seductions of
+fresh impressions of newer subjects, the weakness of the flesh do not
+deter him. With a single aim, to the exclusion of all else, and with a
+direct simplicity, he records what he saw, and lo! we have a poem.
+Such a man was Courbet, Corot, Dupre.
+
+But one would say: That may answer for landscape: what about the
+figure-painter? Let us counsel together.
+
+A man only rises to his own level. In art, as in music and literature,
+he only expresses himself. Each selects his own method. The school of
+Meissonier is not content with a few grand truths simply expressed.
+They want a multitude of facts; they must tell the story in their own
+way. They are the Dickens and Walter Scott of art. It is iteration and
+reiteration. My cardinal must not only have red stockings, says
+Vibert, but they must be silk; every detail must be elaborated. Very
+well, what of it? you say. What do you criticise, the drawing? No. The
+color? No. The composition? No. Does the painter express himself?
+Perfectly. What then? Just this. He expresses himself too perfectly.
+At first I am delighted. The story is so well told--the well-fed
+prelates; the half-sneer; the cynical smile; the earnest missionary
+telling his experience. But the next day?--well, he is still telling
+it. By the end of the week the enjoyment is confined to allowing him
+to tell it to a fresh eye, and that eye another's, and watching his
+pleasure. At the end of the year it becomes a part of the decoration
+of the wall. You perhaps feel that the frame needs retouching, and
+that is all the impression it makes upon you, except as would an old
+timepiece with the mainspring gone. The works are exquisite and the
+enamelling charming, but it has been four o'clock for forty years.
+
+In the library, however, hangs an etching which you often look at; in
+fact, you never pass it without noticing it. Two figures, a
+wheelbarrow, a spade, a stretch of country, a spire pencilled against
+a low-tone sky; and yet, somehow, you hear the tolling of the bell and
+the whispered prayer. Ah! but you say this has nothing to do with the
+treatment; it is the subject. One moment. The missionary's story is as
+full of pathos and of human suffering and courage as the "Angelus,"
+and at first as profoundly stirs our sympathy; but, in one, Vibert has
+monopolized the conversation; he has exhausted the subject; he has
+told you everything he knows. Nothing has been omitted; nails,
+monograms, and all; there is nothing left for you to supply--he is not
+so complimentary. But Millet has taken you into his confidence. He
+says: "Come, see what I once saw. Do you ever remember any such couple
+working in the field?" And you immediately, and unconsciously to
+yourself, remember just such a bent back and reverent, uncovered head.
+Where, you cannot tell, for the picture comes to you out of the dim
+lumber-room in your brain where you store your old memories and faint
+impressions of bygone days and sad faces.
+
+But if he added, "See, my peasant wears a woollen jacket trimmed with
+worsted braid," your impression would immediately fade. You might
+remember the jacket, but the braid, never. But for this it would have
+been delightful for you, although unconsciously, to add your own sweet
+memory to the picture.
+
+Another impression choked to death with unnecessary realism.
+
+But be you realist or impressionist, remember that a true work of art
+is that which has pleased _the greatest number of people for the
+longest period of time_; that the love of beauty indicates our highest
+intellectual plane, and that if you will express to your fellow
+sinners burdened with life's cares something of the enthusiasm of your
+own life, and will assist them to see their mother earth through your
+own eyes in constantly increasing beauty--you having by your art, in
+your possession, the key to the cipher, and interpreting and
+translating for them--you will confer upon them one of the greatest
+blessings which fall to their lot on this mundane sphere.
+
+
+
+
+WATER-COLORS
+
+
+Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God
+gives to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make
+everything gray--every rose but the shadow of itself--every tree and
+rock and cloud a monotone of gradation. Instead of that, everything we
+look at, from a violet to an overbending sky, is enriched and
+glorified by millions of color tones as infinite in their gradation as
+the waves of sound and light. Even in the grayest days, when the
+clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is desolate as
+the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite
+gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the
+true painter fill it with joy and beauty.
+
+There are many of us, however, who are not true painters and to whom
+the most exquisite of color schemes are but dull results. Many of us
+walk around our galleries passing the best pictures in silence; others
+ridicule what they cannot understand. Even our own beloved Mark Twain,
+whose heart was always open to the best and warmest of human
+impressions, and who expressed them in every line of his pen, when led
+up to one of Turner's masterpieces, "The Slave Ship," a glory of red,
+yellow, and blue running riot over a sunset sky, the whole reflected
+in a troubled sea, remarked to his companion: "Very wonderful! Seen it
+before. Always reminds me of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a
+plate of tomato soup."
+
+The education of such barbarians belongs to our generation and should
+be taken up by those of us who know or think we do. For true color is
+as great an educator as true music. This knowledge of color harmony,
+this matching and contrasting of different colors, but very few men
+and women possess. When they do, it is generally inherited and thus a
+natural gift. The rest of the world wear blue and purple, or orange
+and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of nature even as
+bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always held
+that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration,
+furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into,
+have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature--that the
+russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues
+of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow;
+the gloom of a forest with its yellow-grays and blue-grays, the
+gray-green moss of the lichens, the brown of the tree-trunks, the
+black and gray hues of the rocks, all these, if carefully studied and
+analyzed and reproduced, would make beautiful anything in the world
+from a bonnet to a chateau. To illustrate:
+
+Several years ago an intimate friend of mine, a distinguished
+architect of New York, the late Mr. Bruce Price, in designing a number
+of cottages at Tuxedo sought in vain for some color mixture current in
+the paint-shops with which to cover the outside of his buildings. All
+schemes of browns, olive-greens, colonial yellow with white trimmings
+and the reverse, Pompeiian reds, slate-grays, and dull yellows
+resulted in making "spots" of the houses, so that the effect he wished
+to produce, that of the houses being merged into the forest, was lost.
+Mr. Price was not only an architect, but he was an artist as well. He
+had little skill with his brush, but he had that innate good taste,
+with a keen eye to discern the subtle gradations in color, that only
+needed change of occupation to make him a painter. One day, looking at
+a new bare wooden cottage--unpainted as yet--in contrast to a mass of
+foliage in the early autumn before the leaves had begun to turn, in
+which the yellow-grays one often sees predominated, he suddenly
+thought to himself: "The tree-trunks and underbrush do not stand out;
+they are all of one piece, each keeping its place, while my house"--as
+he rather inelegantly but forcibly expressed it--"sticks up like a
+sore thumb." Later, this very clever man made an analysis of the local
+color in these several grays, and his subsequent matching and
+combining of these different tints resulted in the exact tones of the
+forest before him, and when this was completed and the house painted
+you felt should you enter the front door that the leaves must be over
+your head.
+
+Bringing the discussion down to more practical details, really to the
+palettes which we hold in our hands, the question then naturally
+arises as to how best to express true local color, with its varying
+blues, yellows, and reds, and especially its varying grays.
+
+In my own experience I find grays to be the prevailing tones
+everywhere in nature.
+
+I find also that the great masters of modern art, particularly the
+school of 1830, known as the Barbizon school, and represented by such
+men as Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, and Millet, and later by men
+who in some degree represent that school, but to my mind have done
+work equally good--even Montenard and Cazin--that all these masters
+have loved, sought for, and expressed in their work this
+all-prevailing quality, the gray.
+
+A few very simple rules for testing the power, presence, and quality
+of the prevailing gray in nature are so easily learned and so
+convincing in their application that once applied they are never
+forgotten.
+
+Take, for instance, a morning in late spring or early summer, when all
+nature is dressed from tree-top to grass-blade in a suit of vivid
+green. To a tyro with so dangerous a weapon as a color-box, there is
+nothing that will really bring down this game but some explosive
+composed of indigo and Indian yellow, or Prussian blue and light
+cadmium--perhaps the strongest mixture of vivid raw green.
+
+Now, pluck a single leaf from a near-by branch, hold it close to one
+eye, and with this as a guide note the difference in color tones
+between it and the leaves on the tree from which you plucked the leaf
+and which you had believed to be a vivid green. To your surprise, the
+leaf itself, even with the sun shining through it, is many tones lower
+and grayer than the color of the near-by branch as depicted on your
+paper, while the near-by branch, in comparison, pales into a sable
+gray-green, which you could perhaps get with yellow ochre, blue-black,
+and a touch of chrome-yellow.
+
+It does not seem to me that I can better illustrate this quality of
+the gray than by rapidly going over some of the works of George Inness
+lately on exhibition in New York--certainly to me the most marvellous
+examples of the power of a human mind to harmonize the subtle
+colorings of nature. I select Inness not only because he is to me one
+of the great landscape-painters of his day, but because he chooses a
+very wide range of subjects, from early morning to twilight,
+expressing these truthfully, absolutely, perfectly, so far as local
+color is concerned--that is, of course, as I see through either my own
+spectacles or Inness's; but, then, remember, our eyes may need repair.
+When these canvases are analyzed we find in the range of color nothing
+stronger than yellow ochre in yellows, than light red in reds, and,
+with hardly an exception, blue-black for blues. Indeed, his usual
+palette, as does Mauve's and Cazin's, seems to me to be only yellow
+ochre and blue-black, and with these two colors he expresses the
+whole range of the color scheme in nature, with the varying lights of
+day and night, except in depicting sunsets.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the salient features of a landscape have been analyzed and
+recorded in color, the more subtle qualities are to be detected and
+expressed. The most important of these is the time of day. To an
+outdoor painter--an expert examining the work of another expert--the
+hour-hand is written over every square inch of the canvas. He knows
+from the angle of the shadows just how high the sun was in the
+heavens, and he knows, too, from the local color of the shadows
+whether it is a silvery light of the morning, the glare of noontime,
+or the deepening golden glow of the afternoon. In fact, if you will
+think for a moment, the shadow of an overhanging balcony upon a white
+wall is a perfect sun-dial for him, and this test can be indefinitely
+applied to every part of the picture.
+
+The next is the temperature: how hot or how cold it was--what month in
+the year? It is unnecessary for Inness to cover his ground with snow
+to make his picture express a certain degree of cold, neither is it
+necessary for Montenard to fill his Provencal roads with clouds of
+dust to show how hot they are. This is done by the opalescent tones of
+the sky, by the values expressed in reflected lights and in the
+illuminated shadows, so that you feel in looking across one of
+Inness's fields of brown grass just how late is the autumn and just
+how cool it has been, and in looking down one of Montenard's roads you
+realize how useless would be an overcoat.
+
+[Illustration: Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames]
+
+In this connection let me say that all nature is interesting and all
+nature is beautiful, but all nature, as I have said, is not paintable.
+The interior of a railroad station, for instance, is interesting,
+as giving you certain mechanical results, construction, but it is not
+picturesque--that is, paintable--unless one could treat it as Pennell
+does, contrasting the black cars and locomotive with a puff of white
+steam, giving the vistas with the perspective of track, and a centre
+mass of people adding an idea of movement and color.
+
+Above all, the outdoor painter should get the character and feeling of
+the place he portrays on his canvas. If in Spain, his picture must
+look like Spain. The air must be transparent, the architecture
+clean-cut against the azure. If it be Holland, the atmosphere must be
+moist, the air like a veil, and with all this there must be nothing in
+the work that will be mistaken for the smoke-laden air of England.
+Only thus, by this fidelity to the very nature and spirit of a place,
+can the picture be made to express the essence of its life, which is
+really the heart of the whole mystery.
+
+Coming at last to our text, Water-Colors--the art of depicting nature
+on a sheet of white paper by paints diluted with water--it will be
+well to remind you that the art goes back to almost prehistoric times.
+A few weeks ago, in the library of Mr. Jesse Carter, director of the
+American Academy in Rome, I saw one of the earliest water-colors in
+existence. It was painted upon a sheet of slate, and, although some
+thousands of years old, still retained its color and remarkable
+brilliancy. The subject was a group of figures, the centre object
+being a girl of wonderful grace.
+
+The present art of water-color painting, with a sheet of white paper
+as background instead of the permanent stone, is, however, but little
+more than one hundred and fifty years old, and owes its existence
+largely to the men of the English school.
+
+Mr. C. E. Hughes, in his delightful book on "Early English Water
+Color," confined this English school to the men born between the
+years 1720 and 1820.
+
+In this group he places the great Gainsborough, who from 1760 to 1774
+worked "in charcoal and water-color on tinted paper," which he said he
+"loved to dash off of an evening, and which dazzled the fine ladies
+and gentlemen who frequented the select watering-place of Bath," where
+he was then living.
+
+Then came Robert Cozens, the brothers Sanby, Thomas Hearne, Thomas
+Malton, Samuel Scott, and a few others, all known as the
+eighteenth-century painters.
+
+These were succeeded by Thomas Girtin, who was born in 1775 and died
+at twenty-seven years of age; and the great J. M. W. Turner, who first
+saw the light in the same year, and on the day on which all great
+Englishmen should be born--namely, April 23--a day dedicated to St.
+George and the birthday of William Shakespeare.
+
+Girtin and Turner worked together. Girtin, measured by the standard of
+to-day, was an extreme impressionist, leaving behind him sketches
+dashed in with an appearance of freedom which Peter DeWint and David
+Cox might have envied when in after years they were at the height of
+their power. Turner, on the contrary, devoted his time to acquiring
+that triumphant grasp of detail which caused him to be known in his
+earlier life as an extreme realist.
+
+The change in Turner's work--the broader brush--came in his later
+years when oil became his medium of expression, in which, no doubt,
+his ability to note and yet sacrifice all unnecessary detail was a
+potent factor.
+
+A list of Englishmen greatly prized in their day now follows. Such men
+as John Varly, Gilpin, Glover, William Havell (all of whom during some
+part of their careers were members of the first Water Color Society
+formed in England, in 1804, which body still survives in the old
+Water Color Society whose rooms are still open on Pall Mall East) rose
+into prominence, their works finding places both in private and public
+collections.
+
+This society was in turn succeeded by the New Society of Painters in
+Miniature and Water Colors, which came into being in 1807 and went out
+of existence in 1812--a victim, says Hughes, of the condition of
+public apathy which brought about in the same year a reconstruction of
+the older organization under the joint title of the Oil and Water
+Color Society, and which eked out a precarious existence until the
+birth of the association now known as the Royal Institute for Painters
+in Water Colors.
+
+Other names now confront us, among them two men, David Cox and Peter
+DeWint, who in their day were considered masters of the medium. These
+last struck a new note in water-color, or rather a new technic in its
+handling. What Ruskin, the realist, in his "Modern Painters" describes
+as "blottesque" was at that time looked upon by both teachers and
+students as the one and only means by which white paper could be
+properly stained. This method, to quote from a loyal believer in the
+English transparent school, and whose enthusiasm is delightful, was
+the laying on of the color in washes which filled certain definite
+spaces indicated by a pen-and-ink outline.
+
+These washes would indicate, say, a distant tree with a preliminary
+tint and a subsequent elaboration; he would do it all in one process,
+giving his blot an irregular edge and allowing the color to accumulate
+where the shadows required it. His elaborative touches elsewhere were
+of the same nature. They were brush blots as distinct from washes. To
+this, I think, we may attribute on analysis the freedom of handling
+which--though each man has his distinctive method--is characteristic
+of both Cox and DeWint. If we add to these two methods of using the
+brush a third--its manipulation as though it were a pen--we shall have
+all the fluid processes on one or the other of which the beauty of all
+modern water-color drawings depends. A fourth process is rubbing the
+color into the grain of the paper. A fifth--a supplementary one--is
+scratching out. Last is the ignominy of the stipple--the wetting of
+the brush in the mouth, a technic entirely dependent upon the quantity
+of saliva the student can spare for his work. Almost every early wash
+water-color in existence can be classified according to the employment
+in its making of some or all of these means.
+
+In later years, especially in the last half of the eighteenth century,
+we have Copley Fielding; Prout, with his picturesque sepia drawings,
+the detail of his architecture in brown ink; Harding; Bonnington,
+really a great man; Clarkson Stanfield; Rowbotham; David Roberts;
+James Holland; Cattermole, who declined a knighthood and whose
+intimates were Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray; and so on down to the
+men of to-day, who are so well and ably represented in the annual
+exhibitions of the Royal Academy and the present English Water Color
+Societies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As for our own progress in the art, the subject, of course, is too
+well known for long discussion. Our oldest society, the American Water
+Color Society, held its first public exhibition in the National
+Academy of Design in New York in 1867, a date always remembered by me
+with infinite pride and pleasure, for upon the walls of the smallest
+room close up under the roof was hung my first exhibited
+water-color--the only one of my three the hanging committee were good
+enough to accept. Two years later--I am happy to say--in 1869, I was
+elected a member, and I am further happy to say that I am still in
+good standing and in high-hanging, and have so continued from that day
+down to the present time--a trifle of some forty-six years.
+
+As to my compatriots, I can truthfully say that its membership covers
+some of the great water-colorists of our own or any other time, both
+here and abroad--men entirely free to do as they pleased, working in
+anything and all things so long as, to use their own expression, they
+"get there," handling body color, in a veil of silver-gray as an
+overwash or squeezed in chunks from a tube; undertones of charcoal
+gray, overtones of pastel--anything for _quality_.
+
+Their names are legion: the late E. A. Abbey, Walter Palmer, Chase,
+the late Robert Blum, F. S. Church, Cooper, Curran, Eaton, Farrer, the
+two Smillies, Childe Hassam, Keller, Murphy, Nicoll, Potthast, the
+late Henry Smith, etc., etc.
+
+These are but a haphazard choice of the men whose work shows the
+widest ranges in selection, composition, mass, and technic, and who,
+in the world of water-color painting, are masters of the medium.
+
+As to our progenitors, the English water-color school--and I make the
+statement with every respect for their high accomplishments--while I
+believe we are indebted to them for the very existence of the art
+itself, I must say that our own men and art-lovers the world over
+would have been vastly benefited had these Englishmen allowed
+themselves a little more freedom in their methods and not followed so
+blindly the traditions of their past.
+
+That we broke away so early is as much a question of race as of
+training. The last idea that enters the heads of our own men is that
+they want either to paint or to draw like somebody else. They all want
+to paint like themselves, or they do not want to paint at all. They
+are so many art sponges. They go abroad, wander about the Grosvenor
+and the exhibitions, run over to Paris and haunt the Salon and shops,
+and so on to Munich and Berlin, picking up a technical touch here or a
+new idea of grouping or mass or color scheme there, and then, having
+thoroughly absorbed it all, return home and use whatever suits them;
+but a slavish imitation of any one English, French, or German
+master--never; neither do they follow any other brush at home. They do
+not believe in each other sufficiently to pay the highest form of
+flattery--imitation.
+
+Nor do many of them find their subjects abroad--a habit practised
+these many years by your humble speaker, whose only excuse is that he
+_must_ paint, no matter where he is, and that his life in the
+summer-time is dominated by his two children, both exiles, and more
+exactingly still in late years by two little grandboys who have not as
+yet crossed the ocean. No, these young American painters, with hardly
+an exception, find their subjects at home, and they choose wisely.
+
+And just here it can be said that if we are ever to have a school that
+will leave its impress on the art of the world, the task will be the
+easier if our men find their subjects at home--if they will show our
+own people the beauty, dignity, and grandeur of the material that lies
+under their very eyes, and also teach those fellows on the other side
+to respect us, both because we can paint and because we have the
+things to paint from. With a mountain and river scenery unrivalled on
+the globe; with rock-bound coasts breaking the full surge of an ocean;
+with forests of towering trees compared to which in girth and height
+the trees of all other lands are but toothpicks; with plains ending in
+films of blue haze and valleys sparkling with myriads of waterfalls;
+with every type of the human race blended in our own, or distinct as
+are the woodman of Maine and the soft-eyed mulatto of Louisiana; with
+a history filled with traditions most romantic--Aztec, Indian, and
+negro; with women who move like Greek goddesses and children whose
+faces are divine, why go away from home to find something to paint?
+Winslow Homer never did, and that's why his work will live when the
+painters of Egyptian harems, Spanish dancers, and Dutch and Venetian
+boats and palaces are forgotten.
+
+To take a specific example or two, what subject, for instance, is more
+worthy of a great master's brush than Homer's "Undertow," two
+half-drowned young bathers locked in each other's arms, the two
+beachmen dragging them clear of the mighty, blue-green wave curving
+behind them? Here is a subject of almost weekly occurrence on our
+coast. Who ever thought of painting it before? And that marvellous
+picture of "The Cotton Pickers." This, to me, was the first clear
+note Homer had sounded. The "Prisoners to the Front," painted just
+after the war, was a strong, realistic picture, true and forceful in
+color and composition, and, of course, admirable in drawing, but that
+was all. It told its story at once, and having heard it to the end you
+acknowledged its truth and went away content. But "The Cotton Pickers"
+left something more in your mind. The gray dawn of the morning dimly
+lighted up a field of cotton, the negro quarters on the horizon line;
+dotted here and there, bending over the bolls, were groups of negroes,
+singly and in pairs, filling their bags; in the foreground walked two
+young negro girls, the foremost a dark mulatto--the whole story of
+Southern slavery written in every line of her patient, uncomplaining
+face.
+
+This picture alone placed Homer in the first rank of American painters
+of his day, and he has never lost this place, for not only was the
+picture all it should be in composition and mass, but, unlike many of
+Homer's pictures of an earlier period, it was deliciously gray and
+cool in tone. It places him also in the front rank of the painters of
+our time. Jules Breton never gave us anything more pleasing, and never
+anything stronger in drawing, more true to life, or more poetic in
+conception and treatment. I mention Breton because, of the men on the
+other side, he is the only one who affects, so to speak, a similar
+line of subjects. Breton loves his peasants and paints them as if he
+did. Homer loved his subjects entirely in the same spirit. How
+unequally the two men have been rewarded you all know. An all-wise
+American who some years ago offered $40,000 for a Breton at auction
+could not at the time have been induced to give one-tenth of that
+amount for a Homer; and yet, for vigor, truth, sentiment, and
+technic--yes, technic, for this picture was superbly painted--"The
+Cotton Pickers," in my judgment, will outlive the other if the time
+should ever come when picture-buyers think for themselves.
+
+The Englishman, on the other hand, is the hardest man to pull out of a
+groove. What _has been_ is good enough for him, whether in
+architecture, art, politics, or government. Any one who objects, or
+seeks to improve or to point out a new and different way, is
+"anathema." It is hardly more than twenty years ago that John Sargent,
+whose works are often the strongest drawing card in the annual
+exhibitions, was ignored by the jury of the Royal Academy.
+
+"A slap-dash sort of a painter, my dear boy. Most dangerous to allow
+his things to come in. No drawing, you know, no finish--altogether out
+of the question." So spoke a Royal Academician when the question was
+broached.
+
+Whistler never found a vacant spot, no matter how high, where he could
+hang even a 10 x 14.
+
+"A mountebank in paint, my dear sir. Think of giving him a place
+alongside of Sir Frederick Leighton! Impossible! Absolutely
+impossible!" That the Luxembourg exhibited his portrait of his mother,
+and that the art critics of Europe voted it "one of the greatest
+portraits of modern times," made no difference. These Royal wiseacres
+knew better. Some of them still think they know better, a fact easily
+ascertained when you walk through the Exhibition, as I do every
+summer, and have continued to do for the past thirty years.
+
+And this adherence to tradition is not confined entirely to technic--I
+refer now to many of the English painters of to-day--but appears in
+their choice of subjects as well. It is the _subjects_ which have been
+successful--that is, which have been _sold_--that must be painted over
+and over. Anything new is a departure, and a departure from the
+standard in the selection of a subject is as dangerous as a departure
+in the cut of a coat or the color of one's gloves--or was as dangerous
+until Sargent, Abbey, Frank Brangwyn, and men of that ilk smashed the
+current idols and taught men a new religion. A small congregation, it
+is true, but big enough for them to gather together to sing hymns of
+praise and pray for better things.
+
+Let me illustrate what I mean by conforming to the standard. Three
+years ago I was painting near a village, an hour from Paddington--a
+lovely spot on the River Thames. This quaint settlement is one of
+those little, waterside, old-fashioned-inn places, all drooping trees,
+punts, millions of roses, tumble-down cottages, stretches of meadows
+with the silver thread of the Thames glistening in the sunlight. There
+is also a bridge, a wonderful old brick bridge, stepping across on
+three arches, mould-incrusted, blackened by time, masses of green
+rushes clustered about its feet--a most picturesque and lovable
+bridge, known to about everybody who has ever visited that section of
+England.
+
+I had been there for a week, making my headquarters at the White Hart,
+when my attention was attracted to a man across the river--it is quite
+narrow here--a painter, evidently, who seemed to be surrounded by a
+collection of canvases. He went through the same motions every day,
+and then my curiosity got the better of me and I went over to see him.
+
+Spread out on the grass lay eight canvases, all of one size, and each
+one containing a picture of the old brick bridge.
+
+"But why eight all alike?" I asked in astonishment.
+
+"Because I can't sell anything else. I am known as the Sonning Bridge
+painter. I've been at it for twenty years."
+
+It is with this sort of thing, either in the selection of a subject,
+in its treatment, or in its handling, that I have but little sympathy,
+even though the great Ruskin, in speaking of this same English
+water-color school, the one I have catalogued for you, insists that it
+is the only "true school of landscape which has yet existed," an
+appreciation which is followed by the outburst that "from the last
+landscape of Tintoret, if we look for life we will pass at once to the
+first landscape of Turner." It is, of course, only one of Ruskin's
+dictatorial statements, admirable when written, because it was read
+and approved by a class who knew no better and who accepted his words
+as other blind devotees obeyed the Delphic Oracle--statements,
+however, which are rejected by many of to-day who think for themselves
+and who think clearly, having the world's work spread open before them
+from which to judge.
+
+Once in wandering around the Academia of Venice, taking in for the
+fiftieth time Titian's masterpiece, I came across an Englishman who
+had paused in his walk and was adjusting his long-distance
+telescope--a monocle glued just under his left eyebrow. Mistaking my
+red-backed sketch-book for a Baedeker, he said, in an apologetic tone:
+
+"Pardon me--I've left mine at home--but will you be good enough to
+tell me what Mr. Ruskin says about that picture?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That I have personally refused to follow either Mr. Ruskin or the
+example of the men he places on so high a pinnacle--I am now referring
+entirely to their technic--is due to my having painted all my life
+out-of-doors, the best place in which a man can study nature at close
+range. This experience has taught me that weight and solidity are as
+important in the rendering of a natural object as air and perspective,
+and that the _staining of paper with washes of transparent color does
+not and cannot give them_.
+
+Nor can any brilliant light, a crisp, snapping light--a glint of the
+sun's rays, for instance, on the break of the surf, or on the round of
+a glossy leaf, reflecting like a mirror the opaque sky--ever be
+achieved by careful working around the edges of an unwashed speck of
+paper--the transparent man's only means of expressing a high light.
+
+Nor will a single dab of Chinese white produce the effect of it,
+should it be the _only_ dab of opaque white in the composition. The
+result in this case is still worse, for if transparent color has any
+value when uniformly distributed it is in the expression of air and
+perspective. The dab, then, is instantly out of plane, as it comes
+nearer to the eye than the transparent wash about it, and the illusion
+of distance is accordingly lost.
+
+But another and quite a different thing occurs when the opaque color
+_forms part_ of the whole, the two systems blending each with the
+other. To illustrate, my own experience has taught me that in nature
+whatever the sun shines _upon_ is opaque. The facade of a cathedral,
+for instance, facing a sky where the rays of the sun strike it full is
+opaque, while the angles of the architecture, casting shadows large
+and small into which sink the blue reflections of the sky or the
+reflected lights from near-by objects, are invariably transparent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now for my own system and the reasons why I have abandoned all
+other systems. And in giving them to you I want to repeat what I said
+in the beginning of this course, that I do not ask you students to
+follow in my footsteps if your predilections, training, and innate
+consciences lead you to a different view of treatment. Many of you may
+not like my work at all, and you certainly have a large following,
+especially among the younger men and women who have advanced ideas.
+Many of you hold to the opinion that water-color men should stick to
+their trade and not encroach upon the oil painters in their technic.
+And many of you may at heart prefer, nay, even delight in, the broad,
+loose washes of the early English school.
+
+There may be a few of you, however, who have open minds free from
+prejudice and free from the traditions of the past, and who are
+dissatisfied with the want of "virility," if I may so express it,
+shown in pictures painted on white paper, and with successive
+washings, and may accordingly see something in my own methods which
+may encourage you to follow in the path which I have cleared and which
+I humbly trust will lead to infinitely better results than I have so
+far achieved.
+
+And in this you must have the courage of your opinions and be prepared
+for criticisms. Those who are against me are more numerous than those
+who are for me and my methods.
+
+Only last month a distinguished New York daily paper, in reviewing a
+recent exhibition, said:
+
+"There really is nothing left to say about Mr. Smith's water-colors.
+They appear with such unfailing regularity and are always so much the
+same. Nothing in the present collection will surprise those who know
+his work--and who does not? The artist's facility is undiminished, his
+industry untiring, but to look for any fresh inspiration in his work
+or a hint of anything but a conventional vision has long been a vain
+hope."
+
+I should be discouraged if I thought that this was the last word on my
+work. I know better, because I am making a collection of such
+criticisms, showing the rating of our several painters. These summings
+up of mine will be extremely valuable as marking the changing taste of
+the public; for I have never supposed that either ill will or
+downright ignorance formed the basis of current criticism. The critics
+are merely expressing the trend of public opinion. It is not new to
+our age. Diaz, so one story goes, once came stumping (he had lost one
+leg) into Millet's cottage at Barbizon fresh from the Salon. Millet
+had been painting nudes--the most exquisite bits of flesh-painting
+seen for many a day, and as modest as Chabas "September Morn."
+
+"What do they say of my things?" asked Millet.
+
+"That you are still painting naked women," replied Diaz.
+
+Millet was horrified.
+
+"I paint naked women! I never painted one in my life."
+
+Hence "The Angelus" and "The Sowers" and the other masterpieces of
+clothed peasants.
+
+In 1825 Constable writes in answer to a scurrilous attack made on his
+so-called "puerile" efforts:
+
+"Remember the great were not made for me, nor was I for the great. My
+limited and abstractive art is to be found under every hedge and in
+every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth while picking up. My
+art flatters nobody by imitation: it courts nobody by smoothness: it
+tickles nobody by politeness: it is without either fol-de-rol or
+fiddle-de-dee. How can I hope to be popular?"
+
+Ruskin's attack on Whistler is another case in point. A lawsuit
+followed and Whistler recovered one farthing damages, and had the
+effrontery to dangle it under the great critic's nose that same night
+at a reception where they both met, followed by the remark:
+
+"Beat you, old man."
+
+Even Mr. Thackeray went out of his way in his "art notes" to belittle
+and ridicule Sir Thomas Lawrence because he lacked what he called the
+"virility of his progenitors and associates."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now for my own system.
+
+I use a heavy, gray charcoal paper, which is made by Dupre & Company,
+No. 141 Faubourg St. Honore, Paris, and which costs about ten cents
+per sheet, measuring about 40 x 30 inches each. This paper is evenly
+ribbed but without the intermittent bands seen often in the lighter
+charcoal paper, known as "Michelet," sold everywhere in our own art
+stores. Dupre will send this paper to anybody who applies for it.
+
+This paper I wet on _both_ sides and thumb-tack over an oil canvas the
+size of the picture to be painted. It dries tight as a drum, and the
+canvas backing protects it from puncture or other injury.
+
+On this surface I make _a full and complete drawing in charcoal_ of
+the subject before me, not in outline, but in strong darks, jet-black,
+many of them--a finished drawing really, in charcoal, which could be
+signed and framed. This is then "fixed" by a spray of alcohol and gum
+shellac, thrown by means of a common perfume atomizer, the whole
+apparatus costing less than one American dollar.
+
+On this I begin my color scheme in both opaque and transparent color,
+recognizing the "natural facts" already explained to you, that is, the
+skies and high lights being solidly opaque, the shadows being equally
+transparent. This process requires certain modifications to be made in
+the darks of the original drawing. The dense black shadow under the
+eaves of a roof, for instance, are not in nature as black as the
+charcoal, but perhaps a rich, warm brown. If the ground is in
+sunlight, it is a dull, golden yellow and reflects the yellow glow of
+the sand beneath. Or it may be a blue reflection, or even of a reddish
+tone. These hard blacks then must be _glazed_ in such a way as to
+preserve the power of the shadow obtained by means of the under
+charcoal, and yet keep it _transparent_ (all shadows being
+transparent) and at the same time preserve its true and proper tint.
+
+This glaze is done by using the three semi-opaque primary
+pigments--found in every color-box--namely:
+
+Light red,
+
+Cobalt-blue,
+
+Yellow ochre.
+
+These colors, of course, form the basis of all intermediate tones, and
+from them all intermediate tones can be made.
+
+These three colors are at the same time semi-opaque, their opacity
+being just sufficient to tint the hard black of the coal, while never
+clogging or muddying its transparency.
+
+So it is with the millions of other tones in the whole composition,
+when such perfectly transparent colors as brown madder, Indian yellow,
+and indigo are used as a glaze, altering and modifying the undertone
+of charcoal to any desired tint and at the same time preserving the
+all-important thing--its transparency.
+
+In conclusion, let me say that I fully recognize that I am addressing
+students whose training enables them to understand perfectly this
+explanation, and that further instructions are therefore unnecessary.
+
+One thing, however, may be accentuated, and that is the use of plenty
+of clean water. Another is that you should keep your palettes
+separate. For myself, I make use of a common white metallic
+dinner-plate, known as iron-stone china, costing another ten cents,
+for my sky-palette, squeezing the color-tubes in a row around its edge
+and my Chinese white below them on one side toward the bottom. For my
+transparent palette, I use an ordinary moist sixteen-pan color-box,
+being always careful never to blur it with even a brush stroke of body
+color (Chinese white); and for my opaque work, an oval white metal
+palette, with thumb-hole, and indentations around its edge into which
+I squeeze the contents of my moist water-color tubes, my Chinese
+white being heaped up in a little mound near my thumb.
+
+The result may be seen in some of the illustrations accompanying this
+text.
+
+
+
+
+CHARCOAL
+
+
+Before going into the value of charcoal as a medium in the recording
+of the various aspects of nature in black-and-white, it will be wise
+to review the several mediums in general use, namely, etching, pen and
+ink, lithographic crayon, and charcoal gray in connection with Chinese
+white; it will be well, also, to note the various mechanical processes
+in use for the reproductions of these drawings on white paper.
+
+Those of you who have seen the early illustration in _Harper's
+Magazine_ of the late fifties will recall the work of "Porte Crayon"
+(Colonel Strother), drawn on wood by the artist and engraved by such
+men as A. V. S. Anthony and John Sartain. You will also recall how
+some twenty-five years later an effective and marvellous change took
+place in the quality of these reproductions, being by far the most
+unique and rapid in the history of any art of the century. In less
+than ten years, between 1876 and 1886, came this sudden awakening to
+the necessity of better work from the burin, followed by an enormous
+commercial demand for such results, until by common consent the
+American engraver first rivalled and then surpassed the world. If we
+search for the cause we find that, like many other inventions
+developing others of still greater importance, as the telegraph
+developed the telephone, electric light, and the phonograph, this
+marvellous change is due entirely to the discovery and possibility of
+photographing direct from the original upon the boxwood itself,
+producing with an instant's exposure a complete reproduction of the
+original drawing, with all its texture, gradation, and quality, not
+only doing away entirely with the intermediate draftsman, as was the
+case with "Porte Crayon's" work, but obtaining a result impossible to
+the most skilful of the artists on wood of his day.
+
+Another important feature in the discovery was the possibility of
+reducing a drawing to any size required, thus fitting it exactly to
+the necessities of the printed page. Before these discoveries, as you
+well know, from the time of Albert Duerer down to Linton and engravers
+of his school, the original drawing of the painter was redrawn by the
+use of lead-pencil, Chinese white, and India-ink washes upon the wood
+itself, giving as close an imitation as possible of the original. Some
+painters--illustrators, if you please, in those early days--in fact,
+made their original designs direct upon the wood. The effects of light
+and dark were then cut out in lines, curved or otherwise, with
+suitable cross-hatchings, as the necessity of the drawing required, or
+left comparatively untouched.
+
+It is not my purpose to discuss here the different merits of the
+different schools. There are varieties of opinion regarding the
+excellence of the line compared with the technic in the modern school
+of engravers. By the modern school I mean the work of such men as
+Cole, Yuengling, Wolff, French, Smithwick, and others. I refer to them
+that I may accent the stronger the medium which is the subject-matter
+of this talk, namely, charcoal, in the hope that those of you who
+propose to make reproductive illustrations your life-work may be
+tempted to make use of charcoal as a medium through which to express
+your ideas and ideals.
+
+But before embarking on this phase of my subject it may be interesting
+for a moment to go a little deeper into the earlier stages of this
+marvellous change from boxwood to zinc. I remember distinctly the
+beginnings of an organization well known in New York, and perhaps to
+many of you, as the Tile Club, to which organization I can
+conscientiously say as much credit is due for this revival in
+wood-engraving as to any other. Not that good wood-engravers did not
+exist before its time, and not because it contained wood-engravers,
+for the club did not have the name of one among its membership, but as
+containing a group of painters who for the first time in aid of the
+art of wood-engraving in this country lent their names and brushes to
+an illustrated magazine. Up to that time there had been a wide gulf
+existing between the ordinary draftsman on wood and a painter. This
+did not proceed from the prevalence of a certain disease among the
+painters, known at the present time as an "enlarged head," but from
+the fact that no artist accustomed to free-hand drawing and at liberty
+to wander all over his canvas at will would bring himself down to
+working through a magnifying-glass, a necessity, often, in
+transferring a drawing to wood.
+
+With this discovery, however, of making available even the roughest
+drawing, the simplest blot in color or a scratch in charcoal, and
+photographing its exact _textures_ upon a wooden block, the camera
+reducing it in size and thus perfecting it, the artist immediately
+took the place of the draftsman, and at the same time introduced into
+the work an artistic quality, a dash, a vim and spirit entirely
+unknown before.
+
+Three things were needed to utilize this marvellously useful
+discovery: first, a painter of rank; second, an engraver who could
+express the textures and technics of the several artists--that is,
+reproduce the exact values of an original in wash, an original in
+charcoal, or an original in oil; and third, a magazine with sufficient
+capital, taste, and intelligence to reproduce these results upon a
+printed page. We had the painters, and the engravers developed
+rapidly. The third requirement, of taste and intelligence, was found
+in Mr. A. W. Drake, then art director of _Scribner's Monthly_, and,
+after its merging into the _Century_, the distinguished art director
+of the _Century Magazine_.
+
+When the Tile Club was formed in New York it consisted of a group of
+men (I was its scullion for seven years, its entire life, and, being
+thus an honored servant, was familiar with its many affairs) who
+represented at the time the leading spirits of the different schools:
+William M. Chase, Arthur Quartley, Swain Gifford, A. B. Frost, George
+Maynard, Frank D. Millet, Alden Weir, Edwin A. Abbey, Charles S.
+Reinhart, Elihu Vedder, William Gedney Bunce, Stanford White, Augustus
+Saint-Gaudens, and one or two others. The club was limited to eighteen
+members, there being twelve painters and six musicians. If I am not
+very much mistaken, not a single painter of this group had ever drawn
+upon a wooden block, and yet each one of them, as the records of our
+periodicals have shown, was admirably qualified for illustrative work.
+At the time, the illustrations in _Harper's_ and _Scribner's_,
+compared with the illustrations of to-day, reminded one of the early
+primers of the New England schools, with their improbable trees and
+impossible animals.
+
+I remember distinctly the first meeting of the Tile Club, in which the
+subject of drawing for _Scribner's Monthly_ was first mooted, and I do
+not believe I overestimate the importance that the position of the
+club, taken at that time, has had and still has--not as a club, for it
+was dissolved some years back--in the influence its personal art has
+wielded upon the printed pages of the day.
+
+The first magazine article was the account of a trip that we made down
+on Long Island, illustrated by the club, entitled "The Tile Club
+Abroad," each man choosing his own medium--oil, charcoal, water-color,
+etc.; the results of which were published in the then _Scribner's
+Magazine_, and engraved by a group of men who afterward placed the
+art of wood-engraving in America side by side with the best efforts
+ever obtained by the English and German periodicals, and one of whom,
+Yuengling, took the gold medal of excellence both in Paris and Munich.
+
+With this difference in textures, the difference between a drawing in
+charcoal and one made in oil, it became necessary to invent new modes
+of expression with the burin. A simple line which might express the
+round of the cheek or the fulness of the arm, and which would answer
+for the uniform drapery of the old school, would not serve to explain
+the subtle quality of one of Quartley's moonrises or the vigor and
+dash of one of Chase's outdoor figures sketched in oil.
+
+So it came about that in searching to express these new qualities,
+never before seen upon a block, the technic of the new school was
+developed.
+
+The next important result was the creating not only of a new school of
+wood-engraving, but of an entirely distinct department for art
+workers, the school of the illustrator; and so we have Abbey,
+Reinhart, Quartley, and, later, Church, Smedley, Dana Gibson, and
+dozens of others whose names will readily come to your minds and of
+whose careers I have already spoken.
+
+But the burin was too slow, even in the hands of the skilful engraver,
+for the necessities of the hour. It was also too expensive; a drawing
+which a magazine would pay the artist $50 for would often cost $200 to
+engrave in the hands of a master like Yuengling or Cole. Again
+photography was called into use. The "straight process," so called, of
+the phototype printer, reproducing a pen-and-ink line drawing on a
+zinc plate which could be immediately run through a Hoe process, was
+perfected. You all remember, doubtless, an illustrated daily
+published in New York, called _The Daily Graphic_, illustrated by
+this process. This process, however, was only possible where
+pen-and-ink drawing or a very coarse lead-pencil drawing was used in
+making the original, because it was necessary that spaces of white
+should exist between each separate line or mass of black. This
+process, however, utterly failed in all India-ink drawings. Where
+these drawings covered the white of the paper, if ever so delicately,
+the result was a dense black upon the plate.
+
+Then came a race between all the inventors interested in such
+discoveries, both here and abroad--a race to perfect a process which
+would produce from such wash drawings an exact reproduction upon the
+printed page, giving all the gradations of the original and doing away
+not only with the draftsman but with the wood-engraver. To Professor
+Vogel, of Berlin, I believe--although an American, Ives, claims it,
+and some say justly--is due the credit of perfecting what is known as
+the half-tone, or screen process: many others claim that Herr
+Meisenbach first perfected this most important discovery.
+
+As the wash drawing had no lines, and as it is absolutely necessary
+that photo-printing should have lines--that is, clean spaces of black
+between white--these lines were supplied by laying a sheet of plate
+glass over the drawing upon which the lines were cut by a diamond and
+through which the original could be clearly seen. Of course, the light
+falling upon the edges of these several diamond cuttings made little
+points of brilliant white between which the several blacks and whites
+could be seen. This, without going very much further into the
+mechanical details, is the basis of the half-tone process.
+
+While this had its value, it had also its demerits, one of which was
+the total extermination of the American wood-engraver, except for a
+few men like Timothy Cole, whose genius and skill made it possible for
+them, by the excellence of their work, to survive the great difference
+between twenty cents a square inch for transferring on zinc and twenty
+dollars a square inch for engraving on wood.
+
+There are, however, results in the half-tone process which I hold are
+infinitely superior to the work of any wood-engraver of the old
+school. While it is true that there is no really positive rich dark
+for any part of the composition--for, of course, the light specks are
+everywhere, thus lightening and graying the dark--and while we lose by
+such defects the richness of wood-engraving, we also get the exact
+touch of the artist in no more and no less a degree, particularly no
+less. How often have I seen an exquisite drawing of Abbey's or Du
+Maurier's almost ruined by the slipping of the burin the
+one-thousandth part of an inch! How infinitely superior are the
+originals of John Leech's immortal caricatures in _Punch_ to the
+reproductions, all because the shadow line under an eye, or that
+little dot which denotes the difference between amusement and
+curiosity in the expression of a face, has been cut away the
+thousandth part of a hair-line! The processes of the half-tone,
+however, are ever accurate and the reproduction given you is
+exact--with the foregoing restrictions.
+
+Then again, in landscape effects and in some portraits, the uniformity
+of tone, the certainty of every touch being reproduced, the exact
+balancing from dark to light, all result in better work than can be
+done by the ordinary engraver.
+
+And yet, with all the half-tone's advantages, I must admit that
+Yuengling's head of the "Professor" and many of his wood-cuts in an
+illustrated edition of "Sir Launfal," published some years ago, and
+much of the work of such masters as Cole, Wolff, Yuengling, and
+others, stand as monuments for all time to the skill of hands that no
+process will ever excel, for they put into it that something which the
+bath of vitriol will never furnish, a bite of the acid of their own
+genius.
+
+Since these earlier days a new departure has been made, until now
+reproductive processes have been brought to such perfection that there
+is hardly any texture or color scheme that can not be matched. Note,
+if you will, Howard Pyle in color--rich in yellows and reds, with
+black and white spaces as an enrichment. Note also A. I. Keller's
+transparent work in charcoal gray. Note particularly the reproductions
+in the magazines of F. Walter Taylor's drawings in charcoal, in which
+the very texture of the coal is preserved. And, if you will permit me,
+note the half tones of my own charcoal drawings now on exhibition in
+the adjoining gallery. So perfect is the reproduction that one is
+careful not to smudge his fingers in turning the leaves of the
+publication in which they are printed.
+
+This being the case (and the printers must be thanked as well for
+their share in the results), I earnestly hope that some of my brother
+illustrators--the more the merrier--will seriously consider the value
+of charcoal as a medium for illustrative work. There is no subject, I
+assure you, that the sun shines on or its light filters into, or any
+phase of nature, be it rain or storm, fog, snow, or mist, including
+marines, figures, sunrises and sunsets, blazing heat and cool,
+transparent shadows, that cannot be visualized by it.
+
+I hold, too, that by its use qualities can be obtained impossible to
+be found in either etchings, lithographic crayon, wash, or pen and
+ink--especially the velvet of its black.
+
+Charcoal is the unhampered, the free, the personal individual medium.
+No water, no oil, no palette, no squeezing of tubes or wiping of
+tints; no scraping, scumbling, or other dilatory and exasperating
+necessities. Just a piece of coal, the size of a cigarette, held flat
+between the thumb and the forefinger, a sheet of paper, and then "let
+go." Yes, one thing more--care must be taken to have this forefinger
+fastened to a sure, knowing, and fearless hand, worked by an arm which
+plays easily and loosely in a ball-socket set firmly near your
+backbone. To carry out the metaphor, the steam of your enthusiasm,
+kept in working order by the safety-valve of your experience, and
+regulated by the ball-governor of your art knowledge--such as
+composition, drawing, mass, light and dark--is then turned on.
+
+Now you can "let go," and in the fullest sense, or you will never
+arrive. My own experience has taught me that if an outdoor charcoal
+sketch, covering and containing all a man can see--and he should
+neither record nor explain anything more--is not completely finished
+in two hours it cannot be finished by the same man in two days or two
+years.
+
+For a drawing in charcoal is really a record of a man's temperament.
+It represents pre-eminently the personality of the individual--his
+buoyancy, his perfect health, the quickness of his gestures. All these
+are shown in the way he strikes his canvas--compelling it to talk back
+to him. So also does it record the man's timidity, his want of
+confidence in himself, his fear of spoiling what he has already done,
+forgetting that a nickel will buy him another sheet of paper.
+
+Courage, too, is a component part--not to be afraid to strike hard and
+fast, belaboring the canvas as a pugilist belabors an opponent,
+beating nature into shape.
+
+[Illustration: The George and Vulture Inn, London]
+
+As for the potterer and the niggler, the men and women whose stroke
+goes no farther back than their knuckles, I may frankly say that
+charcoal is not for them. The blow is a sledge blow going from the
+spinal column, not the pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the
+repousse around a goblet.
+
+Remember, too, that the fight is all over in two hours--three at the
+outside--the battle really won or lost in the first ten minutes, if
+you only knew it: when you get in your first strokes, really defining
+your composition and planting your big high light and your big dark.
+It is all right after that. You can taper off on the little lights and
+darks, saving your wind, so to speak, sparring for your next
+supplementary light and dark.
+
+Remember, too, that when the fight is over you must not spoil what you
+have done by repetition or finish. _Let it alone._ You may not have
+covered everything you wanted to express, but if you have smashed in
+the salient features, the details will look out at you when you least
+expect it. There are a thousand cross lights and untold mysteries in
+Rembrandt's shadows which his friends failed to see when his canvas
+left his studio. It is the unexpressed which is often most
+interesting. Meissonier tells his story to the end. So do Vibert,
+Rico, and the whole realistic school. Corot gives you a mass of
+foliage, no single leaf expressed, but beneath it lurk great,
+cavernous shadows in which nymphs and satyrs play hide-and-seek.
+
+Remember, also, that just as the blunt end of a bit of charcoal is
+many, many times larger than the point of an etching-needle, so are
+its resources for fine lines and minute dots and scratches just that
+much reduced. It is the flat of the piece of coal that is valuable,
+not its point.
+
+As to what can be done with this piece of coal, I can but repeat,
+_everything_. That there are some subjects better than others, I will
+admit. For me, London, its streets and buildings, come first,
+especially if it be raining; and there is no question that it does
+rain once in a while in London, making the wet streets and sidewalks
+glisten under its silver-gray sky, little rivulets of molten silver
+escaping everywhere. When with these you get a background--and I
+always do--of flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the
+haze and mist of smoke, your delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else
+in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start
+your foreground with, say, a figure, or an umbrella, or a cab,
+expressed in a stroke of jet-black, and the perspective instantly
+fades into grays of steeple, dome, or roof, so delicate and vapory
+that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky. Or
+you stroll into some old church or cathedral, as I did last summer
+when I found myself in that most wonderful of all English
+churches--and I say it deliberately--St. Bartholomew's the Great, over
+in Smithfield.
+
+Other churches have I studied in my wanderings; many and various
+cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques have delighted me. I know the color
+and the value of tapestry and rich hangings; of mosaics, porphyry, and
+verd-antiques; of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of the
+arabesque; but the velvety quality of London soot when applied to the
+rough surfaces of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveliness
+gained by grime and smoke, came to me as a revelation.
+
+This rich black which, like a tropical fungus, grows and spreads
+through St. Bartholomew's interior, hiding under its soft, caressing
+touch the rough angles and insistent edges of the Norman, is what the
+bloom is to the grape, what the dark purpling is to the plum,
+mellowing from sight the brilliancy of the under skin. And there are
+wide coverings of it, too, in this wonderful church, as if some master
+decorator had wielded a great coal and at one sweep of his hand had
+rubbed its glorious black into every crevice, crack, and cranny of
+wall, column, and arch.
+
+Certain it is that no other medium than the one used could give any
+idea of its charm. Neither oil, water-color, nor pastel will transmit
+it--no, nor the dry-point or bitten plate. The soot of centuries, the
+fogs of countless Novembers, the smoke of a thousand firesides were
+the pigments which the Master Painter set upon his palette in the task
+of giving us one exquisitely beautiful interior wholly in
+black-and-white.
+
+So it was in the Temple when I was searching for Mr. Thackeray's
+haunts.
+
+What of alterations, scrapings, patchings up, and fillings in have
+taken place in these various courts and their surroundings, I did not
+trouble myself to find out. Nothing looks new in London after the fogs
+and soot of one winter have wreaked their vengeance upon it. Whether
+the facade is of brick, stone, or stucco depends entirely on the
+thickness of the soot, packed in or scoured clean by winds and rains,
+or whether the surface is ebony or marble, as may be seen in many of
+the statues on Burlington House, where a head, arm, or part of a
+pedestal chair has been kept white by constant douches.
+
+As for me, I was glad that these old haunts of Mr. Thackeray and his
+characters are even blacker to-day than they might have been in his
+time. For the soot and grime become them, and London as well, for that
+matter. A great impressionist, this smoke-smudger and wiper-out of
+detail, this believer in masses and simple surfaces, this destroyer of
+gingerbread ornaments, petty mouldings, and cheap flutings!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now for a few practical data as to my own way of handling the
+coal, which may be of value as coming from one who has profited these
+many years by its infinite possibilities.
+
+[Illustration: Diagram of Charcoal Technic]
+
+The paper is the same I use in my water-colors, a delicate, gray,
+double-thick charcoal paper, laid in parallel ribs, if I may so
+express it, and having sufficient body and tooth to catch and hold the
+faintest touch or the strongest stroke of the coal. The gray of this
+paper serves as the middle tone of the drawing, the different
+gradations of black in the coal giving the darks and the careful use
+of white chalks the high lights.
+
+These gradations are obtained by the use of a few simple processes, by
+which various textures can be given, starting, for instance, from or
+near the foreground, where the grit of the charcoal is used to bring
+the nearer details into clear relief, the several larger gradations
+and textures giving aerial perspectives being produced by a broad
+sweep of the hand, forcing the grit of the coal into the crevices of
+the paper, the result being what I may term the _first_ plane or
+_nearest_ atmospheric value; the house a square away, if you
+please--provided the subject is a street--being the _second_ plane.
+
+Beyond this, farther down the street, is found, it may be, another
+house or other object. Now try your thumb, rubbing your hand-smoothed
+charcoal into a finer and closer mesh: and for the still more
+atmospheric distances down this same street, use next a rag, then a
+buckskin stomp, and last of all a stiff paper stomp, each in turn
+producing a more atmospheric gray as the distances fade--the last, the
+paper stomp, being as soft as a wash of India ink. (See diagram.)
+
+All these you may say are tricks. They are--my own tricks, or rather
+use of the means which lay at my hand, which long experience has
+taught me to employ, and which any one of you will no doubt better in
+your own handling of the coal.
+
+These planes being secured, any light higher than the prevailing
+rubbed-in tone can be wiped out clean to the grain of the paper by a
+piece of ductile rubber. Any darker dark, of course, can be obtained
+by retouching with the coal.
+
+The chalk now comes into play for skies, broad sunlight effects, or
+crisp, sparkling lights. The whole work is then "fixed," as I have
+already explained, by the use of gum shellac and a common perfume
+atomizer.
+
+And with this condensed statement I must bring this my last talk to a
+close, remembering as I do that I have been addressing a body of
+students who are already familiar with one or more mediums, and who,
+with these few spoken memoranda and a finished drawing before them,
+will solve at a glance mysteries baffling to the layman.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
+
+
+FELIX O'DAY.
+
+THE ARM-CHAIR AT THE INN.
+
+KENNEDY SQUARE.
+
+THE TIDES OF BARNEGAT.
+
+THE ROMANCE OF AN OLD-FASHIONED
+GENTLEMAN.
+
+COLONEL CARTER'S CHRISTMAS.
+
+FORTY MINUTES LATE.
+
+THE WOOD FIRE IN No. 3.
+
+THE VEILED LADY.
+
+THE UNDER DOG.
+
+
+IN DICKENS'S LONDON.
+
+
+ENOCH CRANE. A novel planned
+and begun by F. Hopkinson Smith
+and completed by F. Berkeley Smith.
+
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUTDOOR SKETCHING***
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